Opera and the unreal

We dug out from a big snow yesterday and drove to the mall to watch Simon Bocanegra on the Met HD Live. An unreal experience, or rather one that shapes its own reality. (A little like Avatar, perhaps?)

Unreal: the darkened room, the cushy seats -- we are barely aware of others in nearby seats. These theaters eliminate the outside world, the icy roads, the to-do lists, the constant chatter of reality. And these days, we seem to remember to turn off our cell phones.

Unreal: the live feed on HD. Here we are in Strongsville, Ohio, but the sound and screen are in Manhattan. The New Yorkers we see in the onscreen audience read the synopsis just as we do, chat with their neighbors. Only they're dressed rather better than we are, and they are hundreds of miles away. I know this kind of "live from the White House" occurs on all 625 channels all day on TV, but I don't watch much of that, so this feels a little new. And it's so intense: the large screen, the audience chatter in surround sound, and of course the opera itself take me out of Ohio.

Unreal: the plot. 14th-century Genoa, politics and coups, lost orphan daughters, poisoners and hooded revengers out of an Elizabethan tragedy. Yes, you don't go to the opera for the plot, people say, but even so, it's important. During the opera, I can't keep asking those nagging questions about the reality of what you're seeing: how did the orphan girl end up as the ward of her father's enemy? who just freed the tenor from prison, and why? Even while I know that the plot is absurd -- so absurd that I have to read the synopsis ahead of time, and how unreal is THAT? -- I keep trying to find the real in that unreal web.

Unreal: the backstage. In the Met HD Live, you get to go backstage, before and after each act. The singers have just finished an amazing trio, the curtain comes down, and before you know it you're behind the curtain, watching a sweaty Placido Domingo walking towards you; he takes a hand-held mic and Renee Fleming is talking with him about how you sing Verdi or how you age yourself 25 years between acts (disarmingly sweet: he says it's not hard, he just takes off the young-man makeup and looks his actual age). We see the stage sets being wheeled around on their enormous trolleys, banks of lights already attached to them to shine through the windows with the illusion of Italian sunshine. All that breaking of illusion; the fourth wall is there one minute, and gone the next. And even so, when the opera's on, all that disappears: the fake sunlight is real, just as the absurdly fabricated plot is real.

Unreal: the singing. No, not the usual thought about how people dying of poison don't usually sing their farewells. Rather this: that the singing is so extraordinarily good, so out-of-this-world, that it seems unreal even while it moves me. I'm drawn into the emotions and the situation in ways that realistic drama can never do.

Unreal: the whole gestalt. It takes so much--talent, money, conviction, leisure, work-- to make it happen: top stars, the best-paid orchestra in the world, a scene shop to die for, a master composer. . . . And it takes hours to pull it off. Where in life do we find all these things together, and the time to let it go, at its own pace?

Unreal: the musical score. In one of the between-the-acts interviews, Kiri te Kanawa spoke about her role upcoming in La Fille du Regiment, in a non-singing part. Without the music to time her responses, she said, she was having to improvise, invent her own timing -- as actors do all the time in realistic drama. She was missing that central unreality of opera: the wonderful, strange convention that plot, action, thought, emotion are all governed by a musical score in which time is predetermined.

An afternoon in Strongsville at the Met: as unreal as the Super Bowl, and at the same time much more real than tonight's ritual contest will ever be.

Shelley's Avatars

Avatar, which I finally saw last night, reminds me of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Both are beautiful and flawed, high in inventive imagery and low in organization. We are deluged with a host of gorgeousness, a vitality unparalled, and we come away not quite sure what has just happened.

In Avatar, we get wonderful visions: those night scenes in the forest, with plants glowing and fading; the seeds of the sacred tree that float like jellyfish through the air, pulsing with life; the wild flights on those dragon-beasts, scooping in and out of the hanging mountains or the surf. The premise is that all life is interconnected: a plant is not inert but vital, and it's an act of reverence to delight in the vitality of life, of air, of water.  I love my garden, but I usually fail to notice the life-filled gyrations of the tomatoes or the aspirations of the  raspberries.

Shelley, a foe of established religion, was looking for a way to put reverence back into the world. Sometimes he did it by writing for civil rights - exposing the tyrants of the world (there were plenty then, too) and giving us instead the life of the workers and the common people. He was a democrat almost before that could be imagined. He would have been glad to see the populism of Avatar. He was a pantheist, using his poems to show us how life and spirit intermingle in all kinds of forms. One poem celebrates "The Sensitive Plant," which takes joy in everything around it. Here's a stanza that especially reminds me of the film:

The plumed insects swift and free
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass. . .

He wrote a wonderful poem in the voice of a cloud, not much read anymore but startling in a pre-aviation age. Like Avatar, he is forcing science on us: the cloud appears tangible, but is in fact only vapor; it vanishes; it appears again. It is a process more than a thing: it dissolves and is born again. It is fierce, gentle, cruel and nurturing at once. Here's the ending of the poem; notice how fully the cloud is made into a strange, self-transforming life-form [a "cenotaph" is a memorial that does not contain a body]:

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
  And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
  I change, but I cannot die--
For after the rain, when with never a stain
  The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
  Build up the blue dome of Air--
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
  And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
  I arise, and unbuild it again.--

One last example from Shelley: the end of Prometheus Unbound. It's written as a play, but is entirely unactable. The last act is an apocalypse: life as we know it -- nasty, brutish and short, and dominated by tyrants -- has ended, and the world blends together in a feast of love marked by beautiful sounds, colors, and emotions. If we were ever to act this (and we might, now that we have CGI), it would be something like those night scenes in Avatar:

Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as Darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like Night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight -- the bright Visions
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.

This great, if messy, poet died, sailing in the Mediterranean, when a storm arose out of nowhere and swamped his small sailboat. His body was found days later. He had a volume of Keats' poems in his back pocket. Byron and another friend built a great bonfire and burned it on the Italian beach. Byron saved only Shelley's heart, which was later buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (where Keats too is buried), with the epitaph "Cor cordium" (heart of hearts).

Holmes and homage

I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday. As one who watched the Basil Rathbone films long ago, and read the Conan Doyle stories even longer ago than that, I wondered whether I might object to the liberties this one takes with the iconic fiction of Holmes and Watson. A lot of ink and talk had already been spilled about how unfaithful this film is.

Robert Downey, Jr., doesn't much resemble the Holmes of popular memory, and --oh, dear -- Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) seem to have a thing going for each other, which would have been improbable for Rathbone and his Watson of old (Nigel Bruce).

Who cares? Not I: if I want fidelity, I'll read the stories. Which I may do, again, now. Nothing is so boring to me as a movie that plods piece by piece, scene by scene, through a novel (like the dreary Merchant/Ivory Howards End of some years ago). Some call it "paying homage" to a book to treat it faithfully: I'd say we ought rather to pay bail to get it out of the prison of fidelity.

(WARNING: Spoilers may follow!) This version, directed by the little-known Guy Ritchie, is fortunately free of tasteful homage (in academia, we like the French version of words like this). Rather than trying for fidelity to some consistent view of the past (whether to the original stories, say, or to the settings, habits, and costumes of nineteenth-century London), Ritchie's film shamelessly borrows. It borrows from all over:  shots of St. Paul's cathedral in the smoke, reminiscent of wartime photos, jostle with a boxing match echoing the grittiness of Scorsese's Gangs of New York (featured last night on the Golden Globes); restaurants and interiors have a certain plush Western-brothel-Miss-Kitty look; the scientific apparatus seems to be drawn directly from Branagh's bizarre Frankenstein rather than any effort to echo Victorian actuality.

Robert Downey handcuffed to a bed is more Sade than Sherlock. And, as you can tell from the image even if you haven't seen the movie, it's funny. Just as Downey himself is amused by his own appearance, so is the film.

One example: a big scene involves a shipyard, with the hull of a gigantic ship being built. Holmes and Watson are trying to escape a hammer-wielding seven-foot French-speaking bruiser (why French-speaking? who knows? he's more like a thug from a Bond film--mabye Dr. No?) who knocks out all the poles supporting the ship one by one, and breaks the big chains holding her on land. Why she doesn't fall over, don't ask. In a massive, noisy, exciting scene, she rumbles down the slip into the river. The funniest part is the end of the sequence: we watch a great distance, from inside the shipyard, as this massive hull -- now a tiny model in the center of a CGI river -- settles slowly into the river, tips up its bow, and sinks. It's James Cameron's Titanic, of course, but this time without an orchestra and in the muddy waters of the Thames, and totally unpopulated and without consequence.

The movie's effects, of course, are computer-generated-imagery (CGI). London streets, the House of Lords, an ambassador in flames leaping through a stained-glass window -- they all have the excitement and the curious unreality of CGI effects. As the Batman movies have a hard-edged, armor-like quality to the surfaces of Gotham, this one has a stage-set, scrim-like intangibility to its London. Its settings are not so much gestures to reality or history as allusions to other representations, to theater, art, and film in particular.

And its plot -- though plot is not why you go to see this movie -- acknowledges that appropriation and allusion are at its heart. (Again, spoilers follow!) The plot hangs on (literally, since hanging is central) a Da Vinci code ripoff. Conan Doyle purists rightly scoff at the implausibility and the cheap coat-tail allusion to a twenty-first century potboiler. But the film actually knows what it's doing. The rituals turn out to be a sham, the invention (or rather, appropriation!) of none other than Holmes' arch-rival, Professor Moriarty.

All the hoodoo (crosses and pentagrams and ancient books of curses) has been produced by Moriarty. It's he, the shadowy presence whose face is never seen (and whose name, like Voldemort, is evil itself) who has seen Dan Brown films (how? go figure) and Batman films, and Dracula (the villain of the movie is an English lord who looks strangely like a certain Transylvanian). The evil Moriarty has studied, not old curses, but contemporary culture, and he uses his dastardly knowledge to generate a scenario of world domination. No wonder he's a professor: not a Harvard symbologist like the Tom Hanks character in Da Vinci Code, but maybe an English/Cinema Studies/Cultural Studies professor at a small liberal arts college somewhere in the midwest. Uh oh: worse than that, he has also invented that dreaded device of evil, the TV remote!

Stop the clocks...

We went to the movies Saturday afternoon to watch Der Rosenkavalier on HD Live from the Met in New York. It's a bit like one of those banquets you read about in novels -- four and half hours of very delicious and rich delicacies.

The plot -- like most -- is impossible to recount; the very existence of such a ridiculous plot is just one of the many wonderful artifices that make opera, like good cooking, a cultural activity worthy of writing about. Things don't happen this way in real life, we might well say. And a good thing, too. It's the differences from reality that matter. One of those differences is in the magical way opera has of stopping time: those freeze-time moments when nothing happens while everything (under the surface) sorts and re-sorts itself.

One utterly ridiculous man, Baron Ochs von Lerchenau, is the nominal center; at least, he likes to think he is. It's a great bass part, comic, lyrical, abusive, egotistical. At the end of Act Two, exhausted, he stops chasing the chambermaid and bossing the bourgoisie long enough to have a moment of quiet. An old song pops into his head, and, it being opera, he sings it. "Ohne mich..." -- "without me." It's ego, but sweet, a country-type waltz that is the right place for this bumpkin to be. For a little while, time stops.



Romantic music always stops time when people fall in love. Here (again, the plot is absurd), a young aristocrat, Octavian, presents a young woman, Sophie, a rose on behalf of his boorish cousin Ochs. Never mind why. What matters is: first, Octavian is a boy, but he is sung by a woman, and dresses as a woman twice in the opera; and second, the two fall in love during the presentation of the rose. Here's a concert performance of the scene; at about 2:00, you'll catch what I'm talking about. Notice the beautiful high chords in the orchestra, like stars twinkling on a New Year's night. And the incredibly beautiful high notes of the two women, holding time away...



The opera not only stops time at these key moments, it embeds the stopping of time in the fabric of the story, the characters, and the music. At the real center of the opera --  Baron Ochs only thinks he's the center --  is a beautiful and privileged woman (the Marschallin), for whom time is running out. "You have made me an old woman," she says to her hairdresser; she knows, though, it's not he who has aged her. It is she who most articulates the theme of the opera: while we can make moments of beauty and love, time will always win out.

(In tragedy, we can't get to the end soon enough: death is better than life; but in comedy, the happy endings are often saddened by the difficulty of maintaining equilibrium: "The rain, it raineth every day.")

At the end of Act One, the Marschallin sings, "Time is a strange thing," and recounts to her young lover how sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and goes about the house stopping all the clocks. You'll hear the clocks striking (13 times). . .


Strauss's Vienna in the Rosenkavalier is of the ancien regime, with wigs and lace. But it is also the Vienna of Freud: "If youth knew; if age could."