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A Communication to Wagner's Friends

There have been innumerable cases of Ring fever far more severe than mine. According to his obituary, my old pal Sherwin Sloan took in Wagner's four-part Nibelung epic 90 times between 1975 and his death in 2010. Even so, I have been thinking about the cycle for longer than the quarter century it took Richard Wagner to write it. The list of Ring productions I have witnessed in the theater ranges from Achim Freyer's to Francesca Zambello's. Adding video, my tally comes to at least a dozen (some seen more than once), plus segments of at least five more. I cannot even guess how many more interpretations of the work I know from audio recordings alone.

I have written about the Ring on many occasions, but there is always more to say, if not always a suitable context in which to say it. And so, as my early contribution to the impending bicentennial of Wagner's birth in 2013, I have decided to send out one thought a day on Twitter throughout 2012. Please join me @Ring366. (It's leap year, recall.)

Occasional entries will link to illustrative materials or catalogue references, but most will not. While I have no quarrel with those for whom the tweet merely supersedes the telegram, I like to think of it as its own art form in little, aspiring to the condition of aphorism, akin to the sonnet or haiku. The overarching intention is allusive rather than rigorous, kaleidoscopic rather than encyclopedic. We'll begin at the beginning (think E-flat major), but then we'll hop around.

Here's entry #1. "Nymphs spurn satyr, apocalypse ensues. Morph Afternoon of a Faun into Dawn of a Troll, and what do you get? Das Rheingold, Scene 1." Alas, the Twitter feed has your for you, and because of a technical glitch, the same text was posted twice. Nobody's perfect.

By  |  Sun, January 1, 2012 6:39 PM  |  Permalink

Eye on Dance at 30: Le temps retrouvé

A likely highlight of this year's Dance on Camera bash at Lincoln Center (January 27-31) will be the screening on January 28 at 6:15 p.m., a triple bill of shorts culminating in a new documentary on the ceaselessly mutating dance-athletics collective Pilobolus, often imitated yet still sui generis on the eve of its 40^th birthday. By way of setup, the docket also includes an interview from 1987, when Moses Pendleton and Jonathan Wolken, two of the troupe's cofounders, sat down after a five-year rift for a segment of the long-running talk show Eye on Dance. In an alignment of the planets that is rarer than it ought to be, Celia Ipiotis, creator and host of the series, will present the film. And in celebration of Eye on Dance in the year of its 30^th anniversary, a 23-minute loop of highlights will be running continuously in the lobby of the Walter Reade Theater for the duration of the Dance on Camera festival, with Celia on hand at scheduled times to speak and take questions.

As creatures of the Information Age, we dwell in a cultural limbo between imaginary omniscience and real amnesia. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, as dinosaurs may recall, New York reigned as the uncontested dance capital of the world. Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Arthur Mitchell, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and Tommy Tune all lived and worked there, producing dazzlements and inspiring performers who, in their multifarious ways, were second to none. From Harlem to Brooklyn by way of Lincoln Center, City Center, Broadway, and downtown hot spots like Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen, the profusion of ballet, ballroom, modern, and yet-to-be-named was unending. No season was complete without residencies by a défilé of the flagship ensembles from London, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Sydney. The Royal Ballet, it was said, danced better at Lincoln Center than at home at Covent Garden. It was probably true. There were worlds elsewhere; there always are. Yet to be seen in New York was to be seen indeed. Overnight critics spread the buzz daily. In The New Yorker, Arlene Croce elevated the weekly dance review to an art form.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Fri, December 30, 2011 2:00 AM  |  Permalink

Hit and Run: The Master Class as Reality Show

The Salzburg Festival's Young Singers Project goes into its fourth edition this summer. As usual, about ten hand-picked artists from around the world will be reporting for several weeks of boot camp in the many disciplines that make up the kit of the singing actor. They will attend rehearsals of mainstage productions, often as covers for the marquee names. For a grand finale, they will appear in concert during the final week of the festival, presumably all set to wow the assembled talent scouts, professional and amateur. But as always their true trial by fire is apt to take the form of public master classes in the cavernous auditorium of the university.

Having followed the master classes for a while, I ask myself what real purpose they serve. From the public's point of view, the entertaining ones tend to profit the students little, while those that do profit the students are apt to lack sparks.

Salzburg being Salzburg, the Young Singers Project attracts a dazzling guest faculty; unsurprisingly, the events are packed. In my experience, the young singers vary considerably in star potential but never fail to display world-class sportsmanship.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Mon, July 18, 2011 3:00 PM  |  Permalink

Flashback: Terfel's Busy Day (1997)

As fans of A Prairie Home Companion are well aware, Garrison Keillor likes to take his show on the road. In the late afternoon of December 6, 1997, the rising Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel was Keillor's guest on a live broadcast from Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, just hours before performing the title role in Mendelssohn's Elijah with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. My editor at the Leisure & Arts page of The Wall Street Journal thought this day in Bryn's life would make good copy, and I tagged along. But for some reason, the resulting manuscript wound up forgotten in an electronic file, not to resurface until a few weeks ago when I started work on a current profile for The New York Times. From writerly superstition, I gave the long-lost material no more than a quick glance at the time. But when the Times story was safely to bed, I looked again. And apart from distressingly similar descriptions of Wagner's Wotan ("one-eyed, two-faced" in one case, "two-faced, one-eyed" in the other), the unpublished piece told a story I thought might still please and interest Bryn's myriad admirers. So here it is, as originally submitted.

Few maps show the village in North Wales where Bryn Terfel was born thirty-two years ago. There's a church and a shop and four or five houses, and out in the countryside the sheep farm of his parents, who bear the great Welsh name of Jones. His mother and father have been singing in rival choruses all his life. In singing competitions and the national eisteddfod, recognition of their boy's gifts in the vocal line came early. Back then, he stepped up to the plate with classical songs and cerdd dant , native Welsh lyrics performed to the accompaniment of a harp. (He also did a dead-on impression of Elvis.) Later came polishing at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and today no star in the classical firmament blazes brighter. His Welsh fan club follows him to the far corners of the earth. Shortly they will be packing their bags for Sydney, Australia, where Mr. Terfel has signed on for Verdi's Falstaff, whose huge doublet he will have to stuff considerably but whose zest for life writ large mirrors his own.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Mon, April 18, 2011 8:00 AM  |  Permalink

Pedantries/Pleasantries: Zeffiretti/Zeffirelli

My essay "Zeffirelliana," originally published in the current coffee-table book Franco Zeffirelli: Complete Works (Abrams), included an aside about the master's unusual if not unique surname. The story so far: After the death of Zeffirelli's mother, a cousin is said to have claimed that the deceased had wanted to call her boy Zeffiretti--little zephyrs, or breezes--after a line from a favorite aria in Mozart's Così fan tutte. Supposedly a clerk forgot to cross the T's, and the rest is history.

If only it were true. As I have pointed out, the word zeffiretti does not occur in Così fan tutte at all, let alone in an aria. Così does feature, in a duet, the word aurette, which means exactly the same thing, but that is no help at all. The word we need is found right at the top of an aria from Mozart's early masterpiece Idomeneo ("Zeffiretti lusinghieri," meaning, freely translated, "Gentle breezes, who will tell me what I want to hear"). But that is not much help either. Though standard repertory today, in 1923, when Zeffirelli was born, Idomeneo was known only to specialists. It's not eintirely impossible that Zeffirelli's mother had come across the aria in concert, but the odds say no.

Here's another somewhat less unlikely source: Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Not that Figaro was a great favorite of Italians at that time, either. Three decades later, when Renata Tebaldi sang the Figaro Countess (in what the irascible Arturo Toscanini described, in another context, as "truly the voice of an angel), Figaro was still a rarity. Still, the delicious duet "Sull' aria." sung by two sopranos plotting an amorous intrigue, is one that might stick in an astute lady's ear. The word we are looking for occurs here in the singular--zeffiretto--but what of that? Nothing's perfect.

By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sun, January 9, 2011 8:47 AM  |  Permalink

Footnote: The Braunfels St. Joan onstage

My recent New York Times article on the growing interest in the music Walter Braunfels made reference to the belated theatrical premiere of the work at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2008, which is tentatively scheduled for release on an Arthaus DVD in the fall. Worth noting: The production is by Christoph Schlingensief, the beloved German enfant terrible, who died last year of lung cancer at the age 49. His multimedia extravaganza, set on a revolving stage in more or less perpetual motion, fuses video, live action and outsider-style installation art in a hypnotic tapestry that against all expectation serves the supposedly arch-conservative Braunfels extremely well.

By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sun, January 9, 2011 7:40 AM  |  Permalink

Soul of Salzburg: A Milestone for Riccardo Muti

Riccardo Muti's concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic invariably stand out as red-letter dates on the calendar of the Salzburg Festival, so in a sense his epic performance of Sergei Prokofiev's film score for Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible on August 17 was merely business as usual. But as his 200th Salzburg appearance, the occasion called for more than bouquets, cheers, and the obligatory standing ovation. Sure enough, the festival brass trooped onstage en bloc to join the massed forces of the orchestra and the Chorus of the Vienna State Opera in the applause. The deluxe roster of soloists—the Russian opera singers Olga Borodina and Ildar Abdrazakov as well as the French superstar Gérard Depardieu, appropriately larger than life in declaiming the speeches of the ferocious hero—likewise joined the general adulation. And for a touch of pageantry, a banner scrolled down from the flies, inscribed with a text that began "Thank you, Riccardo." The "signatories" included not only the institutions represented by personnel on the stage but also every composer whose music he has conducted in Salzburg, from Haydn to Varèse and beyond.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sat, August 21, 2010 3:00 PM  |  Permalink

A Star Is Born: In the Wings with David Afkham, winner of the first Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award

His demeanor is unassuming, but his hands are Mephistophelean: long, gaunt, electric. His frame is lithe, like a dancer's, and the elasticity of his movements shows gracefully in the long Nehru coat he chose for his 11 a.m. debut concert at the Salzburg Festival yesterday. On the podium he seems far taller than he is.

David Afkham, 27, is the first winner of the purportedly noncompetitive Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award, open to applicants from 21 to 35 years of age. By the November 2010 deadline, no fewer than 81 rising maestros had been heard from, among them 16 women. Skeptical as I was and remain about the agenda and the selection process,there is no denying that this first time out the blue-ribbon jury has done an exemplary job.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sun, August 15, 2010 5:00 AM  |  Permalink

Deep Waters in Salzburg: First Impressions of Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos

Ideally, one would attend the world premiere of a demanding new opera in a state of clairvoyant attention, but acts of Gods take their toll—we are speaking of weather delays, and the domino effect of subsequent missed connections—and allowances must be made. At that, Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos, subtitled Scenes and Dithyrambs, and categorized by the composer as an "opera fantasy" may have fared better under suboptimal receptive conditions than a conventionally narrative work might have done. The material as gleaned from the libretto left plenty of room for bewilderment under the best of circumstances.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Tue, July 27, 2010 7:00 PM  |  Permalink

Fear of Flying: Amelia Takes Wing in Seattle

An American pilot is lost in action in Vietnam. Thirty years later his daughter, still unstrung with grief, is expecting her first child. Close to term, she dreams gloomy dreams of Icarus, the boy who perished because he flew too close to the sun. Overhead, unseen by the distraught mother-to-be, hovers an indomitable spirit coyly called the Flier, patently none other than the legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Our pilot's daughter—Earhart's namesake—is married to an engineer who develops top-secret aircraft, probably bombers.

Does this sound more like a piece of installation art than the blueprint for thrilling drama? Yes, I thought so. Daron Aric Hagen's studied, achingly sincere Amelia, commissioned by the Seattle Opera, is written two acts, each about one hour in length, each in three scenes. Act 1 is nonlinear with a vengeance. Locations, moments in time, and levels of reality collide in vintage Cubist fashion. Many good, decent people emote in a broad flow of rueful sentiment. Stoicism and compassion are the order of the day. In addition to the adult Amelia, we see her dewy-eyed childhood self, Young Amelia. Shortly before intermission, a flashback to her father's capture and interrogation at the hands of the North Vietnamese jolts events briefly to life. For the rest, the first act unfolds like a church service, in a single, solemn largo that inspires a dutiful attention, if little excitement.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Mon, May 24, 2010 10:45 AM  |  Permalink