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Die Tote Stadt

2008 October 2 at 4:14 PM (2008, feminism, opera)

[From last night; forgot to finish and post it.]

Ugh. I just got back from the SFO production of Die Tote Stadt and my ears are still ringing. I had high hopes for the show, since Lucas Meacham was singing Frank/Fritz, and he’s one of the best baritones I’ve ever heard live, both clear and lush. I was looking forward to seeing him again and to seeing Torsten Kerl (Paul) and Emily Magee (Marietta) – I hadn’t seen or heard them before, but I’ve liked a lot of the singers I’ve seen at SFO.  They do a great job of bringing in not just the already-famous superstars, such as Gheorghiu and Dessay, but lesser-known, excellent singers, such as Misha Didyk and Gerard Powers.

Well, Kerl and Magee might’ve been brilliant, but it was hard to tell, because they and the orchestra performed at one volume the entire night: fortissimo.  It was so loud that I wanted ear plugs, and if there was any subtlety or nuance in the libretto, the volume stomped all over it. I think that Kerl and Magee are good, but their voices lacked any distinctive timbre or characteristics that would make them unique and instantly recognizable. They were able to sing over the blasting orchestra, however, which certainly took some skill and physical stamina. The orchestration felt like this: (Mahler + Puccini) x (Turnage’s volume)*

On the plus side, Meacham’s “Tanzlied” was brilliant: pure, tender, lush, clear, and strange. That whole scene in Act II is bizarre and the Surrealist staging that SFO used (created for the 2004 Salzburg Festival) made everything, well, strange, and Meacham’s singing and acting reflected the tender sentiments of “Tanzlied” but also reflected the utter weirdness of the dream and the entire opera. Katharine Tier (Brigitta), was also great; she had a quiet, understated presence that fit the role of maid to an obsessed mourner and although she had only a few lines at the beginning, I really liked her voice. She was the Third Lady in the Magic Flute and Suzy in La Rondine last year, and although those were bit parts, I remember noticing and liking her then, too.

I didn’t like the staging much. It was overblown and ridiculously over the top, with floating images of Marie’s portrait; the dance troupe appearing in white costumes reminiscent of GHOSTS!! and SCARY CLOWNS!! (hackneyed, much?); and the separate room blew the whole “it was just a dream” surreal aspect by making it literal and removing any sense of uncertainty over the shifting boundaries between reality and thought. SFO’s productions are usually staged in an elaborate, tech-heavy fashion even when they’re minimalist (Ariodante) or conceptual and spare (The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Die Zauberflote), and while most of the time that works, occasionally it’s just much too much, spectacle for its own sake. I thought this was true of both the Rake’s Progress last year and with Die Tote Stadt – enough with the tilting floor! Enough with the moving screens! Enough with skewed ceiling panel that hangs down at a weird, disjointed angle! I’m sure it represented something, but hell if I can figure out what.

The acting wasn’t so great, either. Die Tote Stadt isn’t an inherently uninteresting story, and I think it would make a better play than an opera (in fact, it was a book, then a play, then someone translated the play into German and Korngold turned it into an opera). The reason for that is that psychological dramas about a person living in the past and dwelling in a shrine to a dead spouse and finding someone that resembles the dead spouse and having a dream about being seduced and then killing the doppelganger and then finding out it was all a dream and a sign to move on and deciding to leave the house of the dead and move somewhere else because the dead will never actually come back to life require extremely skilled, nuanced acting to convincingly portray the psychological currents and the tensions between the characters. It’s a character-driven story and that requires actors capable of showing that characterization both in their singing and in their acting. While Kerl and Magee might ordinarily have been able to show that nuance through their singing, the volume at which they and the orchestra were performing overrode any attempts at shading. Their acting was either wooden (Kerl) or overdone (Magee and the dance troupe in Act II) and lacked the chemistry necessary for a gripping, convincing performance. It’s not impossible to be a great singer and a great actor; the production of La Rondine last year was fabulous because the cast were great singers and they were also good actors, at ease in their bodies and their characterizations. Natalie Dessay was phenomenal as Lucia last season and although the mad scene is one that lends itself to over the top, ridiculous melodrama (she goes mad and kills her husband at their wedding, then staggers around in a bloodstained bridal gown and sings that she can hear the sweet voice of her true love, much to the horror of the guests at the wedding banquet), she blew it out of the water in a show of virtuosity that was both emotionally and musically heartwrenching. Acting and singing, together. Sadly, hard to do when you’re constantly at fff.

Joshua Kosman, the SF Chronicle’s music critic, also had this point to add (SF Chron):

The opera offers a nod to the weird and rather unsavory 19th century tradition that sees female sexuality as the irresistible path to damnation and death. In his unsuccessful struggle to resist Marietta’s erotic allure, Paul joins the ranks of his tenor forebears from such operas as “Carmen,” “Samson and Delilah” and (more or less) “Parsifal.”

The grim joke is that Paul – in his prudishness, his mania and his grief – completely misconstrues Marietta’s mission. Her sexual power is there to lure him back to life, away from the fatal precipice on which he’s perched; in one of the opera’s most extraordinary stretches of music, she opposes her own quasi-religious commitment to pleasure against his death-steeped cult of the past.

But Decker turns this point around, fitting Marietta out with a spectral white nightie and ghastly bald wig and transforming her energy into shrieky agitation. Instead of a revivifying spirit, Marietta becomes a succubus – justifying not only Paul’s insanity but also the entire operatic tradition of woman as bloodsucker.

That nuance completely slipped past me. I think the show would’ve been much more interesting if it had interpreted the work that way; as it is, the over the top, obvious melodrama of the interpretation and staging was of a piece with the over the top volume of the orchestra and singing.

* Either Gaffigan or Shwartz called The Asteroids the “loudest piece ever performed in Davies [Symphony Hall].”

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