A production of Kurt Weill's Street Scene

ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS      CLASSES:  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]  [7]  [8]

Scroll down through the images below. and you might think that this course will all be in muted greys. You would be wrong about that—the classes will be full of color—but there is a reason why I chose those photographs. Dr. Johnson famously defined opera as “an exotic and irrational entertainment”—that is, an escapist art form with no connection to the life of his day, or any other. One purpose of this course is to prove otherwise. So I picked images that were modern and realistic rather than period pretties. My point is that these operas at least either engage with real-life issues directly, or can be staged by contemporary directors to do so.

There will be color galore in the actual productions. But also in the vibrant gallery of characters that people these operas. As a stage director and trainer of young singers for over 50 years, I have devoted a career to proving Dr. Johnson wrong. Even those operas that do not address real-life issues directly come to life when sensitive singers fill out the fictional characters to create people whose emotions we recognize as our own. Such singers have two tools: their own humanity, and their understanding of the music. Their humanity is what gives the characters real feelings; the music is how they share them. Yes opera is artificial, but music is its essence, not a barrier. Whether produced by voices on the stage or instruments in the pit, music transmits emotion. We needn't analyze it; we simply feel. I belive that opera can reach the heart more directly than any other form of theater.

The even-numbered classes in the course will each focus on one or at most two operas where the characters are emotionally exposed, and look how great interpreters bring them to life. The others will consider some real-life issues that have concerned opera composers or directors, drawing examples from several sources. All classes will contain up to 45 minutes of performance in good videos with English titles; whether well-known or more obscure, all will be worth hearing for their own sake. [Also note that while there may seem to be some overlaps with my other courses in the Baltimore area this year, I have taken care to keep them separate; even when the same opera is included in two courses, they will involve different scenes in different productions.]

The descriptions below give a general idea of each class, but I am keeping my options open while I work on them; the images may not match the productions I ultimately show, and I may mention more operas than I can address in detail. Once each class is ready, the RESOURCES tab under its image will turn BLUE, directing you to a specific page for that week, with a printable handout and often other information as well. rb.

September 17
The Dyer's shop setting in Die Frau ohne Schatten in St. Petersburg	RESOURCES

1. What is Reality in Opera?

We start with an experiment using the scene above, watching it first as a silent dramatic vignette, then seeing what happens when we add Richard Strauss's expressive music. There will be further interactive experiments with operatic arias and ensembles. How can good acting and sensitive directing use the introduction to a Mozart aria to reveal something deep about the character? What happens when a figure in an obviously concocted plot suddenly breaks through convention in a passion of intense and dangerous feeling? Can an opera composed for a renaissance court be brought to life for modern audiences? Why should an opera about an event years in the past spark protests outside the Met, led by the Mayor of New York himself? The exercises in this class will challenge your expectations, and show what a complex—and interesting—medium opera can be.

September 24
A railroad station setting for Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House, London	RESOURCES

2. Mozart's Devious Humanity

The featured opera today is Mozart's Così fan tutte (roughly "All Women Do It"). It is about two soldiers who take on a bet that if they go away and return in disguise, they will each be able to seduce the other one's fiancée. On one level, it is little more than a locker-room joke about how women are intrinsically fickle. But treat the four characters as real human beings (as Mozart does), and encourage the performers to take them seriously, and you end up with a painfully true comedy from which the men emerge as compromised as the women, making it almost impossible to bring it to a balanced ending.

October 1
Fidelio at the Royal Opera House, London	RESOURCES

3. Through Prison Bars

The opera repertoire includes two masterpieces set in prisons: Beethoven's Fidelio (1814) and Janacek's From the House of the Dead (1928). The setting may be grim, but both operas are about the resilience of the human spirit, resistance to political oppression, and the desire for freedom. As a result, both offer an experience in the theater that is gruelling but ultimately uplifting. I don't know if can show excerpts from both, but I am determined to make this a similarly uplifting experience in the classroom as well.

October 8
The Calixto Bieto production of Carmen at the English National Opera	RESOURCES

4. Extravagance Eschewed

My earlier remark about monochrome and color applies especially here: a still from one of the most colorful and popular operas of all time, Bizet's Carmen (1875), showing merely a broken-down car on a stretch of wasteland at night? I might equally have chosen a shot of Puccini's La bohème (1896, inset), with little more than a wooden chair and old stove in an attic studio. If possible, I will show excerpts from both productions, by Calixto Bieto and Barrie Kosky respectively, to show that by stripping away the extravagant trappings that have accrued around both operas, the directors transfer the interest back to the singers, who in these particular cases handle it magnificently.

October 22
Davide Livermore's production of Verdi's Attila at La Scala	RESOURCES

5. In Time of War

Silent Night, the Pulitzer-Prizewinning opera by my former Peabody colleague Kevin Puts, is about the unofficial Christmas truce during the First World War, when soldiers came out of their trenches on both sides and sang carols; we will hear the moving finale to Act One. But an opera need not have a battlefield subject for a director to choose a wartime setting as a way to focus the audience's appreciation. We will see this in comic form with Kenneth Branagh's film of Mozart's Magic Flute (1791), and more seriously in Davide Livermore's La Scala setting of Verdi's Attila (1846) in a bombed-out city.

October 29
A modern production of Werther (not the one shown in class)	RESOURCES

6. In the Wrong Marriage

Massenet's Goethe opera Werther (1892) is so quintessentially Romantic that it was impossible for me to find a obviously modern production; the one I show in class will be a lot more in period than this. But its third act is the perfect example of the exposed emotions I referred to earlier. Charlotte has fallen in love with the poet Werther, but in obedience with her mother's dying wish, has married a more conventional husband instead. Framed by three successive mezzo-soprano arias, the act shows her anguish as she reads Werther's letters, confesses to her younger sister, and finally rejects the young poet, even as she fears it will drive him to suicide.

November 5
A scene from Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the Met	RESOURCES

7. Street Politics

Despite the fanciful elements, the picture above comes from an entirely serious treatment of the early days of Mahatma Gandhi as a labor organizer in South Africa, in the opera Satyagraha by Philip Glass. Several twentieth-century operas have undertaken the subject of political protest, coupled with a sharp and often satirical treatment of working-class life. Among these are The Threepenny Opera (1927), Mahagonny (1929), and Street Scene (1946) by Kurt Weill, and The Cradle Will Rock (1936) by Marc Blitzstein. We can't sample all of them, but there is no way I could do a course on Opera and Real Life without mentioning this aspect of the genre.

November 12
A scene from Il tabarro at the Royal Opera House, London	RESOURCES

8. Murder Afloat

We end with the last half-hour of an opera which pushes its three soloists to emotional extremes that end in violent death. In this, it is similar to the Werther scene described above, but the milieux could hardly be more different. Instead of middle-class comfort, Giorgetta, the heroine of Puccini's Il tabarro ("The Cloak," 1918) lives in the cramped cabin of a working barge on the Seine, owned by her older husband, Michele. Her plans to escape to the arms of the younger deckhand Luigi lead inexorably to murder. I must admit to regarding this as sheer melodrama, until I was assigned to direct it 50 years ago with a cast of unusually sympathetic singers, and realized that if we treated all three characters as fully-rounded human beings it would lead to a surprisingly even distribution of sympathy, and heartbreaking drama. It is thus a perfect summary of the main themes of the course.

 
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