under no circumstances should you ask me about...

It is something of a landmark occasion when your Erstwhile Area of Inquiry ventures into your morning commute to the Borg Cube via a mention in The Writer's Almanac, but hey, it's the 21st century, and it's the guy's 258th birthday. So for that, here's your Random Don Carlos Trailer of the Week, courtesy of Epik Hotel

Don Karlos - Teaser from Epik Hotel on Vimeo.

Schiller Time

The Special Envoy asked this week about the difference between work time and what she termed "Schiller time" -- by which she means the difference between wage slavery and the stuff one is really supposed to be doing. The stuff, that is, with meaning.

But since the internet loves brevity and youtube videos may stand in for discourse these days, I suppose the response is a bit this



Before the experts weigh in, yes, this is not a particularly canon (in the nerdy superhero flick sense of that term) bit of the opera. Schiller's Elisabeth de Valois has been dropped at the Spanish court alone, an isolated person in a play of isolated people, so she doesn't have the luxury of bidding farewell to a homie, only to one of the people she refers to in weaker moments as her jailers. All the more impressive, in a way, that the prisoner stands up for the prison guard, the servant of an authoritarian narrative whom Authority has just ruthlessly decontextualized. If the libretto of the opera loses a bit in the change, Verdi makes up for it in that final chorus. It's the punctuation of Elisabetta's vocal line and its final three note descent that turns them from onlookers to witnesses. Say what you will about the man as a composer, when it came to adapting canon works for the opera stage, his musical shorthand was second to none.

Meantime, after a lengthy hiatus, here's your Random Don Carlos Trailer of the Week, courtesy of Salzburger Landestheater, wherein the salient metaphor appears to be ice cubes.

adventures in intertextuality, or "Ti guarda dal A. Mitchell Palmer..."

The Story of the Woman's Party proofing vignette, wherein Sara Bard Field goes all Marquis of Posa on Woodrow Wilson:

"...as we look over the long backward trail through which we have sought our political liberty, we are asking, how long, how long, must this struggle go on?

Mr. President, to the nation more than to women themselves is this waste of maternal force significant. In industry, such a waste of money and strength would not be permitted. The modern trend is all towards efficiency. Why is such waste permitted in the making of a nation?

Sometimes I think it must be very hard to be a President, in respect to his contacts with people, as well as in the grave business he must perform. The exclusiveness necessary to a great dignitary holds him away from the democracy of communion necessary to full understanding of what the people are really thinking and desiring...."



footnote: A. Mitchell Palmer

your random Don Karlos trailer for the week

I would totally go see this one



Previous episode here

Your random Don Carlos Playmobile synopsis of the week

Everything you need to know (in German, but never mind), plus the Duke of Alba's Netherlands-conquering sartorial ensemble and the most awesome Grand Inquisitor ever




Previous episode here

old skool diversions

DtO reminds us on Twitter today that there is good stuff to be had on francetv's Culturebox. Among the points of interest for Old Skoolers is a production from La Fenice of Stiffelio, Verdi's (at the time) failed experiment in bringing ambivalence -- Breaking: Accused Soprano Actually Guilty! -- to the 19th century opera stage. Written between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto, with a libretto by Piave, it suffered a complicated fate, and more or less disappeared for the next hundred and forty years. It had its Met premiere in 1993.

I haven't seen all of this video yet. At first glance, production-wise, it doesn't appear all that interested in challenging performance conventions -- nothing says "Verdi opera" like a long wooden conference table with books strewn across it -- but since for this opera there really aren't any performance conventions, it's not much of a crime to cleave to the standard, at least while the focus is on the score. The key thing is, unlike other works from this period of Verdi's career, this one hasn't had decades of performance history with every great singer under the sun, so, if you'll forgive the baseball metaphor, it has yet to pitch a perfect game. Which makes every production worth a listen in...for anyone into this kind of thing.

addendum: and while you're there, if you are one of those people, and if your French is pretty good, you have a little time yet to check out the source material for the aforementioned Luisa Miller.

and a bit with a dog: Jane Eyre, NTLive encore

If you’re familiar with the novel, Bristol Old Vic’s stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, in its planed-down, single-night National Theatre version, is a fairly effective representation as representations go. Director Sally Cookson’s staging makes excellent use of minimal resources: a unit set with ramp, platform, and ladders; sundry props; a small cast who mostly rotate characters (all except Jane and Bertha); and a smaller band (piano, percussion, double bass, miscellaneous other things) that supplies a beautifully atmospheric soundscape for events to unfold against.

And it’s an impressive job, given that much of it emerged from the actors improvising on a framework of scenes, anchored by Charlotte Brontë’s written dialogue for key moments. So we get most of the really iconic exchanges intact, along with a few deft shortcuts. (We also get a few extras, among them Rochester, having been thrown from his horse, employing the language most of us would use nowadays under similar circumstances.)

Perhaps the most effective addition is an expanded role for Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall, voice of gold), an almost continual presence in the form of a woman in a red dress, singing a vocal line that weaves in and out of the action, through trad song, popular song (an anachronistic but fitting Mad About the Boy), and elsewhere, as she drifts through the scenes of other people’s lives and occasionally lights a match. Because she is always there, and because of what she sings, it draws a heavier line of relationship between her and Jane than the book affords.

Also of note: Jane’s portable psychological chorus, which coalesces from the cast at Jane’s moments of uncertainty, agree or disagree with her and each other, and pay attention to things she can’t be seen to be paying attention to.

Also, evil Mr. Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards) reincarnating as Pilot the dog is a bit of inspired leveling-up.



Now for the quibbling. C’mon, you knew there would be some.

Madeleine Worrall’s Jane and Felix Hayes’s Rochester are good but ultimately a bit samey. Worrall in particular, whose character has the longest distance to travel both mentally and physically, plays a Jane who exists on a knife edge, the same at Gateshead and Lowood as at Thornfield, and it shows in her face all the time, like she’s ready to explode any second. But the character that Brontë wrote, by the time she gets to Thornfield, has mastered inscrutability, the end result of years of abuse and privation and endurance being a dense carapace of equanimity. It may be she’s ready to explode at any second, but we shouldn’t be able to tell, and neither, necessarily, should she.

Likewise Felix Hayes’s Rochester is all bluster, which makes him a bit predictable after a while, in a shouty monolithic kind of way. It’s the kind of Rochester that equates physically dangerous with interesting, when what should be interesting (and dangerous) about him is his unpredictability.

Not surprisingly, it’s the Moor House episode that suffers the most from cuts. For one thing, we lose a Rivers sister. The result of this is we get one sister, Diana (Simone Saunders, also Bessie and Blanche Ingram), devoid of background and thus existing only to be cardboard cheerleader to brother St John (Laura Elphinstone, also Helen Burns, Grace Poole, and Adele), rather than two sisters working in the governess trade, spending vacation back at the old homestead, and reading scurrilous German literature to each other when St Bro is not at home. (I know that few people on Planet Anglo get why this is funny, or the point Brontë was ostensibly trying to make with it, but it’s the undercurrent that keeps us out of the shallows, people.)

Beyond that, enough additional material is cut – what St John is giving up to go to India, for instance -- that we don’t really get much sense of why Jane would entertain St John’s proposal for more than a split nanosecond, or (disembodied voices notwithstanding) how the heat of those personal crises would propel her back to Thornfield.

Once she is back there, amid the broken wooden frames and with black ash falling all around, things get very thumbnail, to the point where I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the story would quite understand what had happened. But at the end of three and a half hours, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to finish things off with a few broad brush strokes, and they do it, ending where they began, with a certain calligraphic elegance.

"Oh really, Mansfield, you've had nine today..."

Not a Don Carlos trailer -- we seem to have run out of good ones for the moment -- but I'm sure you've been missing them, so here's a short film while we wait for another. Karlos and Elisabeth discussing their non-relationship in the tub (it's a theme!), with cigarettes, some vomit, and a locust.



Previous episode (Bechtolf v Bieito) way back here.

double header

Your random #tbt Don K(C)arlos trailers of the week, now with 2x Schillerian crunchiness!

I know you've really all been waiting for the one with Sven-Eric Bechtolf as Philip II, so regie-tastic it killed my disc drive*:



and, this week only, bonus Bieito! More potted plants!!**



*why yes, it is on DVD.

**We assume this has to do with that whole sowing for Eternity/reaping Death Marquis von Posa groovethang...

Previous episode here.

starch and a halfpipe

Proving that Robert Wilson productions are perhaps best left to Robert Wilson, your random #tbt Don Karlos trailer for the week, courtesy of Hessisches Landestheater Marburg



Previous episode here.

plastic sheeting keeps the blood in Brabant

Your random #tbt Don Karlos trailer for the week, courtesy of Theater Augenschein:

Goth chick Eboli; The Duke of Alba is all about the leather; bathtubs and plastic babies - it's a theme; and starring John Williams as the Grand Inquisitor!



Previous episode here.

your theory is as good as mine

Your random #tbt Don Carlos trailer of the week, courtesy of Theater Basel.



Strobes! Potted plants! Duck Dynasty beards! Hanging babies and grenades!...Actually this could be the best one yet.

Previous episode here

Indiana Jones & the Paris Opera Basement

Andrew Porter has died at the age of 86. Obituaries here and here. Some of us of A Certain Age™ may remember skipping the cartoons and going straight to his reviews in The New Yorker (he was Alex Ross's predecessor there). We may also remember his intermission lectures on the Met Opera broadcasts, back when they did that kind of thing. For an opera-obsessed teenager, he was a big part of the cultural landscape. For a kid trying to learn how to write, his was the voice of accessible scholarship. (Not that any of those skills were ever acquired, of course, but it was a level to which one could aspire.) 

His singing translation of the Ring, picked up for Wagner class in freshman year, is still here, thumbed through often times enough that it is now held together by rubber bands. Notes in the margins contain corrections -- it does take a certain amount of geeky attitude to be a teenage Wagnerite -- but not without recognizing the translator's mas ninja skills in getting the lines to match up with the beats, and the words to match up with the leitmotifs (yikes), all without the English side gnarling up into some ungodly, unsingable mass. 

Most of all, though, every time we talk about a five act Don Carlo -- or Don Carlos -- which we do a lot here in our corner of the blogosphere, we're talking about his work. We're talking about him in the basement of the Paris Opera, prising apart pages that hadn't been seen since Verdi himself was in the room with them, and reconstructing a score from parts rejected not because they weren't any good, but because the demands of mass transit are immovable. 

That story will be in every obituary of Andrew Porter, because it was the centerpiece of a career more eventful than most. This was evident two summers ago, at Caramoor's Verdi in Paris Day. After a lengthy roundtable discussion in a hot stone courtyard on a 96° afternoon, he was still charmingly open to being button-holed by people as enthusiastic as he still clearly was about the complex history of this opera. I joined the klaatsch half way through, and it isn’t exaggerating to say that his eyes were filled with the memory of it, and he spoke about it as if he were there right then, in the Paris Opera archives, old volumes in hand, and not standing in the shade of a tree near a portable water cooler in the hinterlands of Westchester.

Then, because my mas ninja skill is in ending conversations before they’ve begun, I asked him a question he couldn't answer. Ten points to Gryffindor!

Do not allow this man into your discourse...or your country.

frames of a revolutionary

Your random #tbt Don Karlos trailer for the week, courtesy of Staatstheater Mainz



Previous episodes here and here.

mmmm, tasty shoes

Your random #tbt Don Carlos trailer for the week, courtesy of Schauspielhaus Graz



Why we totally want to get in the Wayback Machine and go see this:

Elisabeth and Posa moving past the Nicely Domestic Mutual Esteem thing and into Things You Can't Do in the Opera Because They Cut Those Scenes territory.

Carl's Gryffindor scarf. My dark intertextual heart is laughing its suffix off.

Wednesday Morning Posting from the Ministry of Irresponsible Caffeine Consumption

It's at times like these you realize just how many Don Karlos trailers there are on Youtube

another smoking gun

From Daniel Deronda, one of those rare but crucial Schiller references that make geek life worth living:

"...But you know her, Mirah -- you can always say something descriptive. What do you think of Mrs. Grandcourt?"
     "I think she is like the Princess of Eboli in Don Carlos," said Mirah, with a quick intensity. She was pursuing an association in her own mind not intelligible to her hearers -- an association with a certain actress as well as the part she represented.
     "Your comparison is a riddle for me, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling.


Yeah, that pretty much sums up every conversation I ever had with a VicLit professor.

William Weaver

Translationista has a remembrance of William Weaver, translator, journalist, and opera scholar, who died yesterday, age 90. I was at a couple of those "just us chickens" suppers in his first year at Bard, where I had the joy and terror of showing him my translation of Schiller's King's Study scene in among the Heinrich Böll I was messing with at the time. His pencil was very light on the page. He was a great teacher and a lovely man.

was heisst hier alles: Verdi's Don Carlos @ Caramoor 7.20.13

As presented at Caramoor as part of its Verdi in Paris program, Don Carlos was the proof of a thesis:

Resolved: The opera is better in its original French than in any iteration of its Italian translation.

By curtain time this argument had been proposed and well-supported in the afternoon's sessions of discussion, lecture and performance, more on which later. But it could be summed up by conductor Will Crutchfield's point that, contrary to popular assumption, there never was an Italian-language libretto for which Verdi wrote music (except for one scene Ghislanzoni contributed for the 1871 Naples version, later discarded).

Even the four act version, with the Fontainebleau scene excised, was originally written to a French libretto, and that was the version given last Saturday night. Indeed, unlike, say, the Chatelet recording, with its patchwork of earlier drafts, there was nothing in this semi-staged concert performance that would be unfamiliar to anyone well-versed in the now-standard four act version, except the libretto.

For all that afternoon's discussion of the finer points of relationship between text and score, the performance itself was, in terms of the drama, fairly standard. This wasn't unexpected, given how seldom any performance of this opera escapes the carapace of mannerisms that tend to cleave to it (and to Verdi performance in general), even in full productions with reasonable stage rehearsal time. But if there wasn't much earth-shatteringly revelatory on the vocal front, either, then at least its standard was a very high standard.

Caramoor's marketing hook for this performance was mezzo Jennifer Larmore's first Eboli, and she did in fact turn out to be the standout. I tend to associate her with baroque opera, and she brought to the coloratura passages in the Veil Song a Handelian's understanding of how to make a lot of rapid ornamentation signify. Also, she's a good actress. If her voice isn't quite the rock-solid (read monolithic) instrument we often hear in the role these days, her Eboli was multi-dimensional and interesting, and she would bring a lot to a fully-staged production, o opera house casting people.

Everybody else turned in solid performances. James Valenti went wide on a few exposed notes, and his Carlos is a bit textbook, but he filled the space of that role better than many. He did, in the final scene, have a way of gazing off into the distance like a Constructivist model beholding a bright future full of Five Year Plans, but never mind, they all do that. Jennifer Check's Elisabeth was a little reedy toward the beginning but warmed up nicely. I rather liked how she got all up in Philip's grill in the King's Study confrontation, and my hastily scribbled note for the final scene says "JCheck has this in the bag. ttly." Not the most eloquent phrase, I admit, but 'twas true.

Christophoros Stamboglis stands up well in a crowded field of Philips who are mostly Ferruccio Furlanetto right now.  He has a lush bass well-suited to Verdi, and his performance was nicely balanced if a fairly traditional interpretation. His Elle ne m'aime pas was beautifully nuanced. He's gone on record now for being in favor of the French libretto, so hopefully he'll have many more opportunities to prove Maestro Crutchfield's point.

Stephen Powell has a respectable baritone, sometimes water, sometimes wood, and did a creditable job with Posa, but didn't bowl me over. Mikhail Svetlov has an appropriately sinewy thousand-year-old Grand Inquisitor voice, but couldn't quite be still enough to represent the Rock of the Church. Nor was he helped by wearing a white jacket / black pocket handkerchief to contrast with Le Roi Philippe's  black / white ensemble. I get the point, but it sort of inadvertently said "Call me Cardinal Vegas."

Maestro Crutchfield, finally, leading the Orchestra of St Luke's, made some keen-edged interpretive choices that popped out the score a little here and there, and kept things from lagging in the way they can under less skilled (or interested) but probably higher-paid batons. Man knows how to shape some Verdi sound, and St Luke's gave him a lot to work with.


Stay tuned for our next installment, which will probably have something to do with this:

pitchers & catchers

So while we're rifling through stacks of virtual papers trying to find the George Eliot money quote on Don Carlos the play (and like most things encountered in graduate lit classes, it may have been only a dream), this might be a good time to point out that the next free Met webcast is Don Carlo the opera, this Friday at 7pm Eastern, at the usual place.  (That's the opener with Vargas, Frittoli, Smirnova, Hvorostovsky, Furlanetto, Halfvarson, and Maazel on the mound in the pit, for anyone keeping a scorecard.)