The Trouble With Tosca

If one's answer to the question "What's in a name?" is anything other than "nothing", one is probably best served by not having the name Bondy in New York Cty right now. This year one such unfortunate has managed to get himself fired from a top City job; that would be "Joel" Bondy, who is at least unofficially accumulating much of the blame for what has become known as the CityTime scandal. But my concern right now is with another Bondy, the almost equally maligned Luc, who last year offered us a new Met production of Tosca, the Puccini opera that has managed to stay in the forefront of the repertoire in spite of its rather dubious dramatic premise.

Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops. 

Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.

No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.

But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.

What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.

But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.

The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.

Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder -  in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.

Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.

So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.

In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.

Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.

Parrot Catches Butterfly

Not that I haven't been out and about or anything, but my last post was 3/3, and this was supposed to be a biweekly blog at least. On 3/14 I was busy working on a review of the Met Opera's production of Die Meistersinger, which you shall have, by and by, though I realize it's tacky to retro-blog. (Hey, I started a piece on the world championship chess match before I even started this blog, and I'm still looking for an excuse to post that one!) Maybe I'll get you some notes on the Edward Scissorhands production at BAM, which stands for Brooklyn Academy of Music (not a kick in the gut from Batman).

Anyway, the interruption was mainly courtesy of the IRS, which treated me to an audit right before I had to do my 2006 taxes. FYI, if you happen by mistake not to report the sale of thousands of dollars of mutual funds which netted you roughly $7.00 in profits, the IRS will bill you for taxes on the entire amount of the sale - on the reasonable assumption that you paid less than a penny for the entire lot. Well, I sent them some documentation; let's see if they're any smarter than the NYC Department of FInance, which has so far taken a year and a half to consider the documentation I sent them showing that they are billing me for a ticket on a rental car which I had already returned. Am I just a magnet for this stuff, or does it happen to everyone?

The rest of my time was eaten by my divorce case, about which the less said the better. Then again, I'll say this at least. You may have heard about Judge Garson, the Brooklyn divorce court judge who was just convicted of taking bribes to fix cases. You might wonder, how could he get away with that for so long, wouldn't someone recognize that his decisions are totally biased and prejudicial? The answer is that none of his decisions stand out as being especially bizarre in the context of the arbitrary, demeaning and irrational nature of the entire divorce system in this country (and New York State, which has a particularly medieval set of laws, rulings and assumptions). One of my former co-workers was a victim of Judge Garson; it took him 15 years to get a divorce from a woman who (according to him) was committed to mental institutions, destroyed his software business (took a magnet to all the disks) and scratched up his new car, among other things. No matter - I've spoken to people who took six, ten, twelve years to get a divorce, and didn't have Judge Garson. He fit right in: arbitrary, unfair decisions based on fallacious reasoning. Shouldn't he get a promotion to the Court of Appeals instead of a jail sentence?

Well, I'd better segue quickly into my topic, before I write a book on how the courts deal with family relations. Luckily, segueing (ha!) ain't hard to do, as you know if you've ever seen Puccini's ever popular Madame Butterfly, as I did Friday night at the NYC Opera. The opera is based on the story of Mr. Pinkerton, an American sailor in Japan who obtains a 15-year-old Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San, from a marriage broker, and then leaves her for three years to go to back to America, where he marries an American woman. The subtle but crucial premise of the dramatic action is that abandonment in Japan is divorce; which does the work of making it legal for the opera's antihero, Mr. Pinkerton, to marry another woman, and also puts in perspective the faithfulness of Cio-Cio-San, who refuses to take another husband or believe that her American lover has left her. Owl, who shall henceforth be referred to as Fragrance of Verbena (one of Pinkerton's pet names for his Japanese wife) had more than a little sympathy with the betrayed lover; Parrot had to convince Owl that not all Americans are Pinkertons. (Fragrance of Verbena's Mom had already warned her not to get involved with an American Monk parrot, or she would be deceived; little did I know that my potential future Chinese owl-in-law was an Italian opera buff!) Well, there are plenty of dramas which explore the theme of substituting pretense or imagination for reality; it usually doesn't work out too well, though it tends to be in the nature of who we are.

Another theme here is the fundamental lack of understanding between cultures; Pinkerton clearly thinks it is just in the nature of Japanese society that he can break a contract without consequences; and though he finds this odd, he is happy to utilize it to further his own life goals, which clearly include from the outset marrying an American woman when he gets back to the U.S. He is just thrilled that he can, for instance, break his lease on the house he rents for himself and Cio-Cio-San, as well as walk out on her when he is ready. But as it turns out, Japanese culture depends on trust, something he does not understand much about, and when he returns and finds out the damage he has done, he is mortified and suggests that his own life is ruined too. Nevertheless, one thing he tries to do is make good on his obligation to the 3-year-old son he now finds out he has. Unfortunately, his way of doing this is to take the son away from the mother who can't really support him; a gut-wrenching transition that goes quite badly here - as it does, for example, in Citizen Kane, but not in the ludicrously underplayed scene in The Pursuit of Happiness - and results in the suicide of Cio-Cio-San. For while the father acts responsibly in the limited way he can, the mother makes the much more difficult decision to assist the son's departure by removing herself from the scene, so he will not regret having to leave her. And this, it seems, is the ultimate thing that Pinkerton does not understand about Japanese culture - that it is better to die with honorable intentions than to live in dishonor, having been abandoned by a husband and failed to provide for one's son. Thus the opacity of the norms and morals of another culture leads to demise on both sides.

It is not without some irony that the cultural disparity is played out in part by Cio-Cio-San's rejection by her uncle, a Buddhist priest, who condemns and essentially excommunicates her for rejecting her own religion and culture. What a depressing lesson for our own situation today, where the sense of an irreconcilable clash between Western and Eastern (in this case Islamic) culture is upon us all. Utlimately, methinks this is overblown a bit. Fragrance of Verbena grew up in a city of moderate size some 10,000 miles away from here, in a nation that practically defines the idea of "difference" when it comes to culture and history. But Fragrance of Verbena's main difference from American women, as far as I can tell, is in the way she pronounces "Louis Vuitton", "Cartier", and "BMW" (did someone say "Maclaren"? Sshhhhhh.....) and the place where she would prefer to have her house with the two-car garage (Bay Ridge vs. Park Slope, maybe). Or to put it another (perhaps more palatable) way - fundamentally, everyone wants a life that is satisfying and social relations that involve mutual repsect. Pinkerton did not fail to understand that he was violating someone's trust by marrying under false pretenses; he was even informed of this by his friend Sharpless, the American consul. It is an idea built into Western marriage contracts and practically every other contract; the difference is only in having a legal superstructure to enforce it. For her part, Cio-Cio-San had every right by Japanese custom to take another husband, but refused to recognize the reality of her situation. Ultimately, it was not culture clash that was to blame, but the failure of the parties to make choices based on inferences that were easily available to them. Well, easily? Perhaps not. Negotiating the waters of cultural difference can be challenging, but what I am suggesting is that there is no real opacity, except the opacity of one's own stubbornness. Ideological difference is real, but for the most part it is rooted in things we all know about one another. Anyone with an inkling of the history of the Middle East should understand, for example, that the forcible overthrow of one religious power center, and its replacement by a competing one, is going to solve no problems whatsoever, but will certainly create more grist for the fundamentalist mill. From Ireland to Israel to India to Iraq, it is not some opaque and incomprehensible difference of culture that underlies the trouble we see; it is a more basic lack of respect and equality of opportunity that one side fears from the other, usually not without some justification. Madame Butterfly suggests that cultural identity is important, but it also suggests that the real problem is a lack of will to follow the system one's own culture provides for recognizing the difference between right and wrong, reality and fantasy. "Islam is a religion of peace", someone was recently quoted as saying in the Times. So be it; and I assume this applies to both the Sunni and Shi'ite interpretations. For more than four centuries, Western systems of international law have recognized the difference between just war and war of aggression, between legitimate intervention and violations of national sovereignty. So there is the basis for international peace, and cultural opacity is a flimsy excuse for not being able to achieve it.

The role of Cio-Cio-San was sung by the impressive Shu-Ying Li, who not only provided a convincing account of the vocal challenges but offered a compelling character portrait of the innocent but dignified Japanese bride. Christopher Jackson's Benjamin Pinkerton was strong enough as a carrier of melodies, but it is hard to imagine a less moving dramatic performance. One could hardly believe that this is a man in the grip of love (at the beginning) or despair (in the final act). I admit that from the front of the fourth ring, without opera glasses, it was a little difficult to make out facial expressions. But this is not a film with close-ups after all; stage acting should not depend on that. There was little difficulty in recognizing the nuanced movements of Matthew Surapine as the marriage broker Goro, or Mme Butterfly's delicate movements (even if they perhaps drew more on the Beijing Opera tradition than Japanese culture, not to mention Puccini, Giacosa or Belasco). Jackson's awkwardness with the dramatic aspects stood out to me and detracted from the overall production. Neverthteless, from a musical point of view it was superb, with some of the arias being carried off with piercing intensity. One quartet (I guess - I believe there were at least four vocal lines going on) in Act III was particularly beautiful. The orchestra received a well-deserved burst of applause when they stood at the command of the capable conductor, Atsushi Yamada.

But the real discovery, to me, in the production, was the voice of Keri Alkema, who played the devoted maid Suzuki. Though the part is relatively small, from her first note to her last I had the impression of being in the presence of a truly exceptional mezzo, with a tone rich and strong enough to practically dominate any scene in which she appeared. I hear Wagner or Strauss... almost too much for Puccinin. As far as I can tell from the program notes, she has mostly performed with the Chautauqua Opera. Any chance of a move to the Big Apple, Ms. Alkema? I mean, nothing against upstate, I know they have the oldest continuously operating opera company in the U.S. (or something like that) but I would really like to hear that voice in a lead role some time.

Well, Parrot just spied a bright red bird darting from a Brooklyn tree and is off in hot pursuit. Just a friend, Fragrance of Verbena... oh, you don't believe me? Betrayed as Mom predicted by a cynical American! Well, you can change her name but she's still as wise as an Owl. Anyway, what's a scarlet tanager doing in Brooklyn? Must have been my imagination... which I should not mistake for reality. At least while I'm awake.