Picture the Rhine as an American River

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       T   O   N   Y

I recently heard Francesca Zambello described as “a superstar among opera directors,” and I wondered what that meant.  For me the experience of opera is like wearing a thick woolen coat inside my grandmother’s overheated apartment, minus the pictures of the pope.  But I was curious enough to accept an invitation to see Zambello’s staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold at the Kennedy Center.  Would a superstar among opera directors finally convince me that opera does not suck?

Here’s what’s going on: Wotan, king of the gods, commissions a big palace (Valhalla) from two giants who demand his sister-in-law Freia as payment.  He agrees to the terms but later reneges on the deal because he likes Freia’s golden apples.  Meanwhile, some troll king has forged a magic ring with gold he stole from some half-naked river nymphs.  He’s using the ring to take over the world, and I don’t know how it goes from there because by this time I’m hunched over in my seat, dead asleep, drooling into my pants.

The story sounds promising, right?  Problem is that soon after the opera begins, they start singing.  And they don’t stop until three-and-half hours later.

I don’t know what it is—I think my brain works too fast for opera.  At one point Wotan asks, “How shall we go to Valhalla?”  It takes him sixteen bars to formulate this simple question, and that’s excluding the annoying little cadence the orchestra always tacks on at the end.  By the time his wife answers, “Lo! A bridge,” my mind has already wandered to Valhalla, hired a gay decorator, and printed the invitations to the housewarming.

Then there’s all the attitude.  The furs and the wallets, the half-dead old ladies thankful they didn’t have to put up with the stimulation of an Italian opera.  When my mother was young, they would gather around the hi-fi every Sunday to listen to the great Caruso.  It was about family.  In this country, opera’s the kind of music that looks at you sideways then suggests you put on a nicer pair of shoes.

Comments

[et alia]

Check out the Boulez/Chéreau Ring on DVD if you have a chance. Chéreau stages it as a conflict between 19th century workers and factory owners, and Boulez's tempi are really fast—unlike so many conductors who want to make Wagner's music sound "as if it were savoring itself" (Adorno's phrase, I think), Boulez remembered that this is supposed to be a drama.

That said, I think the forms of European art music have never really taken root in this country, except as an ornament for the wealthy. They attend concerts because they think they're supposed to. It would be interesting to do a multi-dimensional demographic analysis of the classical music listen audience in America. I suspect that outside of the wealthy, you'll have a lot of aging 1st generation immigrants from the Western European nations.

[et alia]

Fuck. Didn't close that <i> up there. Sorry about that.