Singapore Arts Festival 1999
Tuesday
1st June, 1999
Victoria TheatreOpera Atelier (Canada) Jean-Baptiste LULLY Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Henry PURCELL Dido and AeneasOVERALL NOISE RATING: 2 (Le Bourgeois un-Gentilhomme with Le Bourgeois Hand-phonne.)
The Noise Rating Index is a partially-objective measurement of pager and handphone blasts, 9pm and 10pm watch beeps, coughing-during-the-pianissimo-bits, intra-audience conversation and other mind-bogglingly inept noises emitted in the concert hall during actual performance of music. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 5, in increasing annoyance.
This review has been kindly sponsored by the National Arts Council, Singapore
by Anthony Guneratne
It Was Good (But Was It Opera?)
It was during a heroic hunt for authentic classical drama of a Grecian sort that the humanist literati and courtly dilettantes of the Florentine Camerata stumbled upon opera. We know today that the musical accompaniments and dances they used to "authenticate" the mythological plays of such figures as Ottaviano Rinuccini had not the remotest resemblance to the semi-ritualistic goings on that had taken place at the foot of the Acropolis. However, enlivened with the mellifluous music of Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini and Marco da Gagliano, and soon staged with professional singing-actors and some comely dancers, the new entertainment caught on quickly. Rinuccini might have been chagrined to know that as the result of his mistaken stab at authenticity the institution of the superstar Renaissance court poet was soon to be abolished in favor of the pampered and f阾ed Baroque vocalist.
Thus, an abbreviated, three-act version of Moli閞e's musical comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, staged by the Canadian group Opera Atelier as the classical curtain-raiser for the Singapore Arts Festival of 1999, might have offended Purists (the fundamentalists of the early music world), but did well not to tax the concentration of an audience more used to the elephant-parade version of grand opera favored by travelling companies.
Besides, authentic Baroque performance always implied the drastic revamping of any text for its audience with the intent of saturating the senses in an entertaining, thrilling, or horrifying spectacle. Who really cares that Moli鑢e's authentic English sounded strangely French during a demonstration of the philosophy of vowel sounds? And who but a pedant would dwell on why the well-rehearsed introductory talk by the Atelier's co-founder, Marshall Pynkowski, complete with flowing contemporary Californian garb, ponytail and delivery, received the longest applause of the night?
Had the company presented the concluding "Dance of the Nations", which has never lost it power to offend, we may have experienced the all-too-spectacular horror of what Europeans have always really known the meaning of "multiculturalism" to be. As it was, Opera Atelier presented one of the nastiest (and cleverest) extant pieces of French satire in a readily comprehensible idiom that probably had less to do with Louis XIV's court drama than the folk theatre version of the commedia dell'arte Moli鑢e would have encountered in the years he wandered the provinces. The Atelier did, however, preserve the essential feature of the original performances that endeared them to their patron, one which is now almost never included in performances of Moli鑢e: the extended dance numbers Louis required of all his court spectacles.
Louis's encouragement of what we now accept as a precursor of classical ballet came about in a strange way. Like the Romanian Vlad Dracul and the Russian Ivan the Terrible, he survived a traumatic childhood as a pawn in court intrigues. When Vlad grew up he took to impaling the people he resented, while Ivan favored decapitation. Being French, Louis was subtler and far crueller. Seizing control of all aspects of government, he compelled the more dangerous aristocrats to impoverish themselves with lavish entertainments, during the course of which they were made to dance. When he was feeling especially vindictive, Louis would take to the floor himself and make them watch him dancing. After a particularly flashy performance, in which Louis wore a costume modeled on a golden Aztec sunburst plundered from the Americas by the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, Louis was dubbed the Sun King.
Moli鑢e was incomparably the greatest living satirist in Europe, but it was probably his pirouettes and pratfalls that led Louis to grant him much-needed royal protection. Jean-Baptiste Lully, a Gallicized Italian who dominated the European musical scene for decades, beat the rhythms for the dancers and cavorted in such minor comic roles as the (carefully omitted) "Turkish Mufti" in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Moli鑢e's role, the social climber with pretensions to aristocratic culture, was interpreted in the strictest spirit of broad physical comedy by Derek Boyes. Even so, the loudest laughs of the night went to the hypocritical Philosopher and the foppish Tailor, both played by Gerald Isaac, whose impeccable comic timing would have been just as effective in a television sitcom; indeed, the laughter invited by the absurd belief that clothing, education and manners could turn the aspiring bourgeois into a gentleman proved not at all dissimilar to that of the local television fare which caricatures lower class characters when they fail to live up to the cultural standards attained by the bourgeoisie.
And, as if to confirm that the Purist does not always search in vain for the authentic spectator for his thoroughly authentic spectacle, during the lovely air sung by the Music Student (a fresh-voiced Sandy Simon), accompanied by harrowingly noisy displays of boredom from the Bourgeois, an individual seated a few rows in front of me on the opposite side of the house seized the opportunity to practice some very quiet (and obviously virtuoso) cell-phone technique.
By the Sun King's time royal patronage of the arts was becoming an anachronism elsewhere in Europe. By then opera was already in the hands of the largely mercantile Second Estate for the very reason that like painting and sculpture it constituted a form of cultural capital, a proof of gentility for the price of a canvas or a ticket. When in 1607 Monteverdi completed Orfeo, the first opera to continue to hold the stage, it was intended for a gala celebration at the Gonzaga palace in Mantua. By the closing decades of his long life, Monteverdi was composing similar (slightly smaller-scale) entertainments for a paying Venetian audience at regular, purpose-built theaters.
Meanwhile, the English were practicing becoming a nation of shopkeepers (Napoleon's phrase) by chopping off King Charles I's head and closing the theaters. A quarter of a century passed, and realizing that commerce might prove more effective, they restored the monarchy. Charles II promptly reopened the theaters and encouraged English women, who had previously been unable to act, to engage in thespianism (and worse). Parents even started to send girls to school, thus engendering the peculiar circumstance that while only boys of all ages had acted in the best English dramas, the first known performances of the greatest of early English operas was sung entirely by girls.
Dido and Aeneas, staged by the Atelier as a fully-fledged court spectacle (a procedure justified rather feebly in the error-strewn program), was really the centerpiece of the night, and the Atelier production has deservedly won world-wide acclaim. Unlike Monteverdi's surviving staged works, Henry Purcell's opera displays unity of neither action nor musical inspiration, seeming unable to make up its mind whether it is a Comedy or a Tragedy until the closing scenes (which, however, are so powerful that practically every British mezzo-soprano and contralto of note has had to receive schooling in the proper techniques of stabbing herself in preparation for Dido's final lament).
Above/Left: Henry Purcell.
To their credit, the Atelier have made no attempt to smooth out the rough edges, and have tried instead to recreate the multi faceted spectacle that a court performance would have entailed. The opulence of the costumes, for instance, seemed to excuse such absurdities as sailors setting sail in the ships they wore as hats, and justified the immense relish with which the fiendishly attractive witches (in fiendishly attractive attire) announced that their real reasons for causing such a horrific tragedy is the delight they took in spoiling people's fun.
Although the forces of evil acquitted themselves well in vocal terms, my fun was on occasion spoiled by the heroes. Some of the best singing of the night came from the Belinda (Nathalie Paulin); but Dido (Jean Stilwell) had to reach for the high notes despite acting well with the voice, while Curtis Sullivan sounded rather pallid in the ungrateful role of Aeneas.
To speak of the vocal character of this opera, however, seems almost irrelevant. What strikes audiences most in the Atelier production is the fundamental difference between the Baroque conception of the gesamtkunstwerk, and the later, music-centered Wagnerian one. The most impressive feature of the performance was the precision of gesture, done according to complex musical cues, and as refined and conventionalized as those of Kathakali or Noh. The tableaux vivants, the frieze-like poses assumed by the singing dancers, were rediscovered early in this century by the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky in his own fortuitous (and misguided) search for authentic Greek dance movements.
Nor is it entirely a coincidence that it was a quarrel over performance practice that led to Wagner leaving Paris in a terrible huff over his refusal to insert a dance number into the Second Act of Tannh鋟ser. By this time dancing had turned into a between-the-acts amusement, obligatory in French opera as a means for the new "middle class aristocracy" to display their ballerina mistresses.
Dancing, somehow, seems to have played a rather tragic role in the history of musical drama, and proved fatal even for Moli鑢e and Lully (right, as painted by Pierre Mignard). After a particularly energetic scamper in the title role of La Malade imaginaire, Moli鑢e discovered that maladies could be quite real and collapsed with a fatal aneurism; and while beating time Lully put a heavy baton through his foot, eventually succumbing to gangrene. An even more hideous fate awaited the aristocrats who in satires like Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme made fun of the vulgarity of the merchant class. When the Second Estate in France eventually seized power in the name of the Third Estate, they preferred Ivan the Terrible's direct solution to the problem of the aristocracy to that of the cruelly civilized Louis XIV. In time composers like Francis Poulenc could even commemorate this tragedy in an entirely musical opera of authentically chilling beauty.
Anthony Guneratne has such exquisite taste in dancers, singers, philosophers and clothiers that he is often mistaken for an aristocrat.
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499: 14.6.1999 〢nthony Guneratne
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