vilaine fille

World AIDS Day

December 1 is World AIDS Day.

The triumphalist narratives about AIDS being a manageable condition and the wonders of AndroGel are of no comfort to those in the U.S. facing the disease without health insurance, or to the tens of millions in the developing world who are infected. Worldwide, women represent nearly half of those living with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., people under 25 account for half of new AIDS cases. Of new infections in the U.S., at least half involve black people. Roughly 75% of women with AIDS in the U.S. were infected through heterosexual intercourse.

There is a grim story about AIDS in Africa in today's New York Times.

If you do the holiday consumismo thing, you can buy gifts whose proceeds help people with AIDS from Project Angel Food and God's Love We Deliver.

I support three AIDS-related organizations that assisted friends of mine: AIDS Action Committee (Boston), Housing Works, and God's Love We Deliver. Why not sign up to give an automatic monthly contribution of, say, $18 or $36? (The number 18 stands for chai or life.) Here's a list of AIDS organizations in New York; feel free to mention others in the comments field.

Old Nick

Forceful rant by Mel Gilles, via Deride and Conquer and Free Will Astrology. She draws a parallel between the current U.S. regime and those who abuse their spouses and family members.

Here's an excerpt:

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don't do this by responding to [abusers'] demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don't do this by going catatonic and resigned…. You stand tall, with 56 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it's better than the abuse.

The scenario resonates powerfully for any survivor of abuse. But is it a workable paradigm for political action? Where, exactly, is "out the door"? How do you "start a new life" when the bad guys are bent on circumscribing even our most intimate choices? And am I the only one who finds the "kids and gays and minorities [sic]" bit more than a touch paternalistic?

Alas, that I am a cold-blooded Machiavellian:

Ma, sendo l'intento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi è parso più conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa. E molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principati che non si sono mai visti né conosciuti essere in vero; perché elli è tanto discosto da come si vive a come si doverrebbe vivere, che colui che lascia quello che si fa per quello che si doverrebbe fare, impara più tosto la ruina che la perservazione sua: perché uno uomo che voglia fare in tutte le parte professione di buono, conviene rovini infra tanti che non sono buoni.

(For a vile English translation, see the second paragraph of Chapter XV in the Harvard Classics edition.) Here's my first holiday gift suggestion: a copy of The Prince for all the whining, dejected liberals you know.

Yo semite

Yo semite, too, and I've got the t-shirt to prove it.

The best of company and a heavenly salmon feast (apparently very Unthanksgiving—who knew?) took the sting out of having a humiliating error inadvertently edited into one of my recent articles. How come my non-media friends understand that this is devastating when you're trying to build up cred and land a full-time writing gig, while one editor (not the one in question, who is a peach) brands me "petulant" for not wishing to foist garbage upon readers and have my reputation destroyed?

My Newsday review of OONY's La fanciulla del West came out okay. I have never heard the band play more beautifully, and the performance was overwhelming in its sweep and bittersweet glow. Check out the more diva-centric reports from the ladies at trrill and the folks on opera-l. The OONY show really stoked me for NYCO's Fanciulla, already one of my 2005 hot tickets given the company's stunning success with Il trittico in 2002. Oh, and don't miss the magnificent essay on Fanciulla by Kathleen Watt.

Interesting how a staged Fanciulla tends to provoke titters with the pistols, garter, and dripping blood, where this concert performance was all about that dark, voluptuous, and oh-so-plaintive score. (Yikes, I'm starting to sound like the prudes that Jonas Barish taught me to despise.)

Our sources tell us that the Met will bring back Fanciulla with Andrea Gruber and Salvatore Licitra. Sounds good—Licitra has come a long way since his lumpen début CD—but in light of Millo's triumph as Minnie, we would be thrilled to see her alongside, say, Pepito Cura and Carlo Guelfi. No idea what Pepito sounds like these days, though he would look yummy in chaps:

Guelfi, too, has the physique du rôle along with a beefy voice and a first-rate snarl. And after all those years of Morris's barking and crooning and Leiferkus's Boris-and-Natasha babble, Guelfi's Iago earlier this season sounded like the freakin' first coming. (Remember, yo semite: I'm still waiting for moshiach to show.) Conductor: Chailly or Conlon?

Why not here?

KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of demonstrators massed under falling snow for a third day in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday to support liberal opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who says he was cheated of victory in Sunday's poll.

Have we here in the States been supersized and outfoxed into drivelling passivity?

G-d bless the folks in Ukraine, who actually seem to deserve a democratic government.

Happy Thanksgiving

To all those celebrating Thanksgiving, have a happy and healthy one!

vilaine fille will be giving thanks in particular for the kindness of the folks at trrill and The Rest is Noise who linked to her lowly site. Un immense merci du fond du cœur !

Du fond du cœur… Au fond du temple saint. (I do the drugs *because* they make stuff like that look witty.) In a few months, New York City Opera will present Bizet's bewitching orientalist fantasy Les Pêcheurs de perles. Here's something for which everyone can thank me: the big duet as recorded in 1912 by the sublime Edmond Clément and Marcel Journet. Update: MP3 no longer available. Remember to visit vilaine fille early and often!

Listen carefully, kiddies, and remember: this is what we mean by comme il faut. Clément is vilaine fille's second-favorite tenor, after Tito Schipa. She warmly recommends the Romophone sets of Clément's Odéon, Victor and Pathé recordings.

(A risky thought experiment: imagining this duet sung by Juan Diego Flórez and Russell Braun. vilaine fille tried it and fainted from bliss.)

On a more serious note, please remember that December 1 is World AIDS Day, sometimes observed as the Day With(out) Art. vilaine fille plans to make AIDS awareness the theme of her December 1 post, and she encourages her friends in cyberspace to do the same.

Callas Forever

So, Franco Zeffirelli's Callas Forever. (If you haven't seen it, there's a synopsis at the official website.)

I marched off to the cinema cocksure that I would hate the film, and much to my surprise I did not. Don't get me wrong: it's a nice little movie but no masterpiece, and it has some dreadful elements (the Larry-Michael plot, for example). Some folks were offended by the inevitable gay-knight-in-shining-armor thing (only we truly loved her! waah!), but by now I'm largely inured to all that. Maybe my generally positive reaction was just a happy upshot of low expectations.

Or maybe not. First of all, Fanny Ardant and Joan Plowright: who does not adore them does not deserve to live. I loved Ardant in the "Un bel dì" sequence. Yes, it's obvious: Butterfly clings to the deluded hope that Pinkerton will return; the Callas character nourishes similar hopes for her voice and career, perhaps also thinks of her dead and faithless lover Onassis. It's very movingly played, and for most of the scene, Ardant draws on just the kind of contained, essential gestures that Callas likely would have used. (Many people think of Callas, incorrectly, as a scenery-chewer.) Ardant's work is all the more impressive given the mere wisps of documentation we have of Callas as Butterfly: a few stills from her only stage performances (in Chicago, fifty years ago) and a "Chelsea at Eight" telecast of "Un bel dì" that I've not yet seen. (If anyone out there has seen the telecast, I would be grateful to know to what extent Ardant's gestures approximate those of Callas.)

Also interesting is the weird layering of people and events in Callas Forever. Take Jeremy Irons as Larry Kelly. Irons strongly resembles Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed Callas in Medea, her only film, and remained close to her until his ghastly murder. (I see something of Visconti in Irons' brow, too.) Lawrence Kelly, a founder of the Chicago and Dallas opera companies, was a lifelong friend to Callas; and Zeffirelli himself tried to convince Callas to make at least one lip-synched opera film (of Tosca). It's like watching a photographic gel ooze and melt, or becoming wise to the tricks that memory can play while being helpless to stop them. (Unless I'm mistaken, the person made up as Onassis in the framed photo that the Callas character handles several times is Zeffirelli himself. What that might suggest… um, let's not go there.)

The confusion between the roles we play and who we "really" are (quaint notion, that) is a mainstay of Callas lore: the woman "Maria" versus the diva "la Callas," etc. Callas Forever is hard to read in this respect, and rightfully so. The Callas character insists that "honesty" was the core of her work; her interlocutor sensibly counters that her doings on stage were make-believe. Echoes of Nino Rota noodle their way through Alessio Vlad's score, and the director of the would-be Carmen film is a Fellini look-alike. Who more obsessively than Fellini explored the slippery boundaries between fact and fantasy, life and art? What exactly is happening when we watch the film Callas Forever, in which a fictional Callas watches a fictional film of a fictional Callas lip-synching to the recorded voice of the "real" Callas, enacting a performance that the "real" Callas never gave?

The time cues in the movie are pointedly indeterminate, contributing to its dreamlike quality. The Clash and the pissing punks of "Bad Dreams" situate us in 1977, but many characters appear in turn-of-the-millennium dress, and Ardant's Dior couture hearkens back to the 1950s and 1960s. Incidentally, there was an uproariously disingenuous quote on this topic from Karl Lagerfeld in the New York Times: "I was very careful not to copy anything that Callas actually wore." Cher Monsieur, pray tell what you're smoking, because I could do with a long, strange trip about now. The wide-brimmed white hat and matching ensemble are echt New Look, and there is a famous photograph of Callas in nearly identical garb alongside Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; the turban-and-suit combo comes from the days of the Onassis-Vergottis trial. (Désolée, Karl, but you can't fool an old fashion whore and vedova callasiana.)

In the end, what won me over is that for all its shortcomings and clichés, Callas Forever does seem to be coming from a place of love—in stark contrast to, say, the derisive and viciously misogynistic Master Class. As the story draws to a close, the Callas character asks Larry not to release the Carmen film. Has she chosen imprisonment in the past, in the glory days of a career that can never return? Or has she refused the living death of miming to the voice of yore in favor of a more vital impermanence? 2,500 years ago, Callas's countryman Heraclitus taught that the essence of life is change: "Everything flows, nothing stands still." Perhaps in choosing evanescence, the Callas character paradoxically gains life. When last we see her face in the film, she is smiling.

Nei cieli bigi

Yesterday I had the great and rare joy of revisiting the Met's Bohème, which I had already reviewed for Newsday.

I have a strange relationship with La bohème. I was so thunderstruck by Stratas and Carreras in the original 1982 run of the Met producton that I've largely avoided the opera since then. I loathe (no hyperbole) the slickness and Mahlerian bloat of Karajan's revered set, and the unrelenting prettiness of Beecham's recording doesn't suit me, either. My favorite recorded Bohèmes? Hands down, the two earliest sets (1917 and 1928), both conducted by Carlo Sabajno. They're scrappily played and sung, but the singers really sound like a bunch of smelly, hungry, disreputable lowlifes, so full of vitality and humor that when death arrives, it's all the more devastating. And, yes, I also went through the obligatory Puccini-hating phase, but with the years, I increasingly have come to admire Puccini's discipline and economy.

Anyway, back to the Met. Anna Netrebko as Musetta: funny, adorable, drop-dead gorgeous. Her singing: eh. I found her voice diminished in volume; most of Act II was a hair flat; and the darling girl just slid through all those pesky grace notes that Puccini wrote but, well, couldn't have intended for her, right? That's one reason why I find Netrebko's "Sempre libera" CD to be such a dog: Bellini (Bellini?) when she can't be bothered to sing a clean run? Quoth Callas at Juilliard:

Could you imagine a violinist or pianist, even a beginner in this conservatory, refusing or unable to perform those written ornaments? He would be thrown out, considered incompetent. With singers, it is no different—whatever they might think.

(See also my Siren Songs from USItalia.)

Frank Lopardo may have a "Dudley-Do-Right timbre" (as a musician friend says), but I have the deepest respect for him. While Marcelo Álvarez as Rodolfo made prettier sounds, Lopardo is much the finer musician and artist. He took the climax of "Che gelida manina" as if he were Carlo Bergonzi: a single, graceful arc, with the end of the phrase lovingly tapered and no less buoyant than the high C (? possibly transposed down). He addressed the aria to Ruth Ann Swenson's Mimì and not to the gallery (fancy that), and spun such a long, dreamy mezza voce on "vi piaccia dir" that people around me gasped with admiration. Other lovely things, just from Act I: the knowing, grateful way he acknowledged Mimì when she reached out with "quelle cose che han nome… poesia!"; his gentle but oh-so-sexy "E al ritorno?" (Primitive hygiene and all, I would have judged his Rodolfo spongeworthy on the spot.)

Ruth Ann Swenson: More the character than at the prima. Vastly more free and conversational in Act I, probably because Lopardo offers so much more to work with; still tending to mewl her way through certain high phrases. Often out of sync with conductor Daniel Oren, who apparently has never heard of rubato. (Dear Met: Next time around, give us Bertrand de Billy, please.) Her death scene was a miracle of half-tints.

As for Peter Mattei, I already raved about him in my Newsday review. Wow. Someone wrote of Callas's Tosca: "Just to watch Miss Callas's hands at work almost recreated the opera." Same thing with Mattei's Marcello: what distress, perplexity, and even empathy his hands conveyed as he listened to Mimì and Rodolfo's complaints in Act III. I tried but could not find a single autopilot moment in Mattei's portrayal. The way he is hunched over and *shivering* as the curtain rises; his shaken fumbling with Mimì's medicine as she lies dying; the cheeky allure (and jaw-dropping vocal finesse) of his banter with Benoît, which lesser artists treat as throwaway lines. (Back to Callas: "Every note has a reason, every phrase has a reason, stage-wise and expression-wise." Yes.)

Too bad the Met seems to have Mattei pegged as a Mozart singer, because I suspect that no one today could touch him as Rodrigue, Onegin, Valentin, Wolfram, Ernesto (Pirata), Enrico (Lucia)… and what a Sharpless he would make, if the company ever decided to do right by Butterfly! (Similar story with the sublime Russell Braun, who has nothing coming up but Silvio in Pagliacci and a reprise of Figaro in Barbiere. Those are good roles, unquestionably requiring top-notch casting, but Braun deserves bigger and better.)

Perhaps New Yorkers can hope for a Mattei Liederabend in the near future, with lots of Sibelius and Robert Schumann and some Tosti, too. (This fellow has a big, warm heart and a real way with Italian music.)

In conclusion, feast your eyes on this shot of Mattei and pal:

Honestly, who can resist a guy who dresses up in fuchsia paillettes? (Not sure on what occasion the photo was taken, because the page from which I pilfered it is in Etruscan.)

24 November update: Add to wish list for either Mattei or Braun Jaufré Rudel in Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin. (When oh when will the disgraziati here in New York get around to producing this opera?) And for Mattei… drumroll… di Luna in Trovatore. (Oh, wait, that would assume that people actually know what Trovatore should sound like. Probably asking too much.)

Crimson in triumph flashes

Harvard 35, Y*le 3, proving yet again that the bulldog down at Y*le has no tail.

Huzzah!

What's opera, doc?

This follows my earlier post on The Rosenbach Company.

I had the good fortune to attend a performance of Mark Mulcahy and Ben Katchor's first collaboration, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, with composer Daniel Felsenfeld, who knows from opera. "A most charming and erudite companion" (to quote my favorite Monty Python episode), Danny enjoyed the show but questioned whether it was really an opera.

For his part, Ben Katchor explained to me, "I call these shows 'music-theater' so as not to scare away people who've had bad experiences with opera and musicals." Ouch.

This may not be what Ben had in mind, but isn't it astonishing that opera is so powerfully associated with social preening, dramatic blankness, and blue-haired irrelevance that it scares people away? Opera is big and bad and dangerous. It tells pulse-quickening tales of incest (Die Walküre), whoring (La traviata), and wanton libido (Don Giovanni, Le Comte Ory); of insanity (Orlando, Lucia), adultery (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, L'incoronazione di Poppea), and sedition (Ernani, Don Carlos); of the deformed (Rigoletto), the despised (La Juive), and the marginalized (Carmen, Otello). It depicts orgies (Samson et Dalila, Moses und Aron, The Fiery Angel); and when we're very, very lucky, it features dancing boys in leather butt-thongs (NYCO's Platée and the Met's 1973 staging of Les Troyens).

I do think that opera is off-putting when it's hewn of its rough edges and "sanitized for your protection," as happens so often at our major houses. Furthermore, I reckon that opera tends to visit extreme places in part because it came into being as an omnivorous art form that sought to go beyond the expressive capacities of plain words. That's one reason it has such a generic name (from the Latin opus, "work," which derives in turn from the Indo-European root op-, "to produce in abundance"). To quote Marco da Gagliano, an early practitioner of the form:

It is the form in which is united every most noble delight: such as the invention and arrangement of the story, judgment, style, sweetness of verse, the art of music, the ensembles of music and instruments, perfection of song, elegance of dance and gesture; and it can also be said that the art of painting, as in the perspectives [i.e. scenery] and the costumes, plays no small part; so that the mind is able to enjoy at one time all the most noble feelings inspired by the most pleasing arts that the human mind has discovered.

(Gosh, think about it. When da Gagliano wrote those words, Bill Shakespeare was grinding out the hits. Caravaggio walked the earth; Giordano Bruno had only recently been reduced to ashes. Philology and ass-f*cking, two of my favorite pursuits, were flourishing. Why was I born too late?)

Anyway, to return to Slug Bearers: "the art of painting" (Katchor's projections); a story and "sweetness of verse" (his book); "the art of music" and "perfection of song" (Mulcahy's score and performance). Slug Bearers is sung through—though Carmen and other opéras comiques are not, and no one seems to care. Why is Katchor and Mulcahy's fetching work not an opera?

What's more, some early theoreticians of opera felt that the "stile rappresentativo"—a speech-like style of singing over a relatively spare accompaniment—was the key component of dramma per musica. Slug Bearers is an intimate, chamber work, and Ben Katchor told me of Mark Mulcahy: "To find someone who could bring out the music of human speech without making it feel tremendously artificial, that's the kind of composer I was gravitating toward." Aha!

One last thought: opera grew out of pastoral, itself a notoriously hard-to-define and capacious art form. Where other kinds of drama were confined to garden-variety mimesis, pastoral could also embrace "la mimesi della realtà invisibile." (Ah, spare me from rustics who don't know their Aristotle.) Consider Kayrol Island: in the words of Ed Park, "a tropical limbo of mutated crocodiles, smokestacks, and lonely brothels," where the blissful and addictive Kayrol Cola flows freely. Smells like a dystopian pastoral (and an opera) to me.

Swooning

The detail from Artemisia Gentileschi's "Esther before Ahasuerus" is à propos de rien. Or because I'm kind of swooning myself (and sniffling, and coughing, and kvetching). Whatever.

I'll be adding to this entry, but for now, c (Sorry, no additions. Recovery from crud took longer than anticipated.) Check out today's post by Kos on how residents of the European Union are doing so much better than Americans "in economic terms, and in notions of freedom, the welfare of its citizens, and in human rights."

Later!