Museum Mondays

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as Cynthia the Moon Goddess

Mary Cosway

Tate Britain, London

July, 2024

 

Also Playing

Ildiko Komlosi as the Nurse

Die Frau ohne Schatten, 2013; Vladimir Jurowski conducting

Photo: Ken Howard, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera

A side note to my earlier post about Die Frau ohne Schatten: I looked up Harold C. Schonberg's 1966 NY Times review of the first Met performances. (They weren't the first U.S. performances, an honor taken by San Francisco Opera.)

The review is quite a lot of fun. He calls the finale "vulgar" and remarks with some amusement about the staging effects, which showed off the stage elevator in the new Met. (The current production does as well.)

If you're a Times subscriber, you can see the review here: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/.../1966/10/03/issue.html

BUT, regardless, what I most want to call out is the shows that were running on Broadway at the same time that Frau opened. They included:

• Tandy and Cronyn in Albee's "A Delicate Balance."
• Ethel Merman in a new version of Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun"
• "Barefoot in the Park," directed by Mike Nichols
• Lauren Bacall in "Cactus Flower"
• Arlene Francis, Walter Pidgeon, and others in "Dinner at Eight"
• Fiddler on the Roof," with Herschel Bernardi, dir. Jerome Robbins
• Mimi Hines in "Funny Girl"
• Ginger Rogers in "Hello, Dolly!"
• Barbara Bel Geddes and Gene Wilder in "Luv," directed by Mike Nichols
• Angela Lansbury in "Mame" ("The new smash hit musical")
• "Man of La Mancha"
• Gwen Verdon in "Sweet Charity"
• Barbara Harris, Larry Blyden, and Alan Alda in "The Apple Tree," a new musical directed by Mike Nichols
• Eddie Bracken and Mike Kellin in "The Odd Couple," directed by Mike Nichols.
• Lee Remick in "Wait Until Dark"

Mike Nichols had FOUR SHOWS running simultaneously.

 

SF Opera Tells Us a Couple of Useful Things

 

War Memorial Opera House

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

San Francisco Opera sent a patron email this afternoon that conveys some useful information!

• The Monkey Kind, by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang, premiers in November, 2025. We knew it was in the 2025-26 season, but not exactly when.
• You can buy tickets for it on February 4, 2025, which must mean that the season announcement is that day. It's a Tuesday, which is when the last I-don't-know-how-many season announcements have gone out. It's a bit later than the third-week-of-January standard SFO held to for many years, but earlier than this year's late February announcement. (Believe me, I have spent most of this year wondering whether that delay was owing to shows being cancelled or postponed, singer contracts bought out or amended, etc.)
• They've got a nice mug for sale and maybe I'll buy one.

Opera 2024

Here's a list of all of the operas I saw in 2024, posted now rather than on December 31 because I won't be seeing any operas between now and the end of the year. (I have already ruled out an East Coast trip for Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met.) I mean....Gurrelieder doesn't count, right? I'll be basking in its glory at the LA Phil in a couple of weeks. An asterisk indicates that the opera was new to me. 

• Bulrusher, West Edge Opera*
• Jacqueline, West Edge Opera*
• The Finch Opera, Opera Parallèle*
• Balls, Opera Parallèle*
• Fellow Travelers, Opera Parallèle*
• The Righteous, Santa Fe Opera* (world premiere)
• The Magic Flute, San Francisco Opera, Opera San José
• Don Giovanni, Merola Opera, Santa Fe Opera
• The Abduction from the Seraglio, Festival Napa Valley
• Cosi fan tutte, Royal Opera, SFCM
• Innocence, San Francisco Opera* (U.S. premiere)
• Partenope, San Francisco Opera
• Der Rosenkavalier, Santa Fe Opera
• L'elisir d'Amore, Santa Fe Opera
• The Daughter of the Regiment, Livermore Valley Opera
• Tristan und Isolde, San Francisco Opera
• The Handmaid's Tale, San Francisco Opera* (West Coast premiere)
• Carmen, San Francisco Opera
• Un ballo in maschera, San Francisco Opera
• Bluebeard's Castle, San Francisco Symphony
• Erwartung, San Francisco Symphony
• The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pocket Opera*
• Florencia en el Amazonas, Opera San José*
• Dido and Aneaes, Festival Opera
• La voix humaine, Festival Opera
• La Bohème, Opera San Jose
• La Flora, Ars Minerva* (U.S. and modern premiere)

Does Pierrot Lunaire count? It's dramatic but not like Erwartung. I saw it twice this year and had never seen it before.

Babies. Babies! BABIES!

Die Frau ohne Schatten

San Francisco Opera

June, 2023

Johan Reuter (Barak) and Nina Stemme (Dyer's Wife)

Photo: Cory Weaver, Courtesy of San Francisco Opera

The Metropolitan Opera has revived the late Herbert Wernicke's production of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's monumental Die Frau ohne Schatten, giving me an opportunity to get up on a soapbox that's been waiting for me for roughly 18 months, since San Francisco Opera's magnificent staging of the same opera.

Back then, I had a couple of friends telling me, oh no, it's not about babies! They're just a metaphor! Look beyond the words of the libretto!

I'm here to tell you, they were wrong. There was a moment when I pointed out to one of them that the Spirit Messenger makes it quite clear with his first words, which happen to be the second speech in the opera, that Keikobad, the Empress's father, is monitoring her fertility, and he told me he'd never noticed that:

Not our master, not Keikobad but his messenger! Eleven of them have sought you out, a new one with each waning moon. The twelfth moon is down: the twelfth messenger stands before you.

That is, there's been a monthly visit from one of Keikobad's messengers. They're checking to see whether the Empress is pregnant.

I went through the libretto last year and compiled a list of references to babies and fertility in the libretto. Here it is, including the reference above:

1. Keikobad is monitoring the Empress’s fertility, as the Spirit Messenger says in Act 1.

2. Keikobad threatens to turn the Emperor to stone unless she obtains a shadow, though it’s hard to see what he has to do with the Empress’s lack of a shadow. Is it because they really like all of the sex they’re having?

3. The nurse says in Act 1 “He has not loosened the knot of your heart, no unborn babe stirs in your womb.”

4. Barak to the Dyer’s Wife: “If you give me children to cluster round the dishes each evening, I’ll see that none of them gets up hungry. I’ll applaud their appetites, and give thanks in my heart that it falls to me to fill their stomachs." (Touches her gently.) "When will you give me the children to feed?”

5. Dyer’s Wife to Barak: “Two-and-a-half years I’ve been your wife– and you have garnered no fruit from me and have not made a mother of me.”

6. Barak: “I don’t reproach you, my heart is content, and I will be patient and wait for the precious children which will come.”

7. The Nurse of the Dyer’s Wife: “Alas! And she is to bear his children, and waste her life here in obscurity!”

8. The Nurse and the Dyer’s Wife: “Have you wept tears of blood because you have borne no children yet to that block? Quickly, quickly, Do you yearn for them in your heart, night and day? Do you long for a troop of little dyers to trample through you into the world? Is your body to turn into a high road, your slim grace to be compacted under their feet? Are your breasts to droop and their glory to wither so soon?” WIFE “My soul has grown weary of motherhood before even tasting it. I live here in this house, and that man shall not come near me!”

9. Nurse: “Putting away motherhood for ever and aye from your body! And dismissing with that gesture of contempt the importunate babes that will not be born!”

10. CHILDREN’S VOICES through the fish: “Mother, mother, let us come home! The door is bolted, we can’t get in, it’s dark and we’re frightened! Mother, oh, alas!”

11. “.....Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door! Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door!”

12. Dyer’s wife, Act 2: ”I put away from my body the children as yet unborn, and my womb will not bear fruit to you or to any other man, for I have given myself to the winds and the night air, and am at home here and elsewhere, and as a sign of that I have sold my shadow: and the buyers are willing, and the price is glorious and its like will not be found!”

13. The Brothers: “She has sold it and prevented the unborn children coming from her body!”

14. Dyer’s wife, Act 3: “Placed in your care, so as to attend to you, serve, love and bow to you: see you! breathe you, live you! And give you children, best of men!”

15. Voices of Unborn Children, Act 3: (above, from the dome) "Listen, we will say: 'Father!' Listen, we will cry: 'Mother!' Come up here! No, come down here! All the steps lead to us!”

16. EMPEROR: “Those are unborn children, rushing down into life on the red wings of morning and coming to us, who were nearly lost; These strong ones hasten down to us, like starlight. You overcame yourself. Now heavenly messengers release the father and the children— the children yet unborn! They have discovered us, and come hastening down! (steps down from the bottom step”

17. Voices of Unborn Children, to the Wife: “Mother, your shadow! Look, how beautiful! Look at your husband crossing over to you!”

18. EMPRESS AND BARAK’S WIFE "Both casting shadows as we were chosen to do, both of us steeled in the flames of trial. Close to the threshold of death, to being murdered in order to murder, but now blessed with children, and we shall be mothers!" EMPEROR AND BARAK "Both casting shadows as they were chosen to do, both of them steeled in the flames of trial, but now blessed with children and chosen to be mothers!" (A curtain falls, concealing the four figures and the landscape from sight) VOICES OF THE UNBORN CHILDREN "Father, nothing more threatens you, look, Mother, that terror is already dispelled, that led you both astray. Was there ever a feast at which we were not secretly always the guests, and also the hosts! Brothers! Friends!"

The above doesn’t include Barak almost killing the Wife when he thinks that she has sold her shadow or the way that Keikobad blackmails the Empress into seeking a shadow by threatening to turn the Emperor to stone. 

It's really beyond me how you can read the above (not to mention seeing the opera) and not conclude that yes, this opera is, front and center, about having children, and how having children is necessary for women to be fully human.

These points didn't evade Joshua Kosman, who got up on his soapbox about Frau in July, 2022, a year prior to the SFO production, and they're not evading Zachary Woolfe, who reviewed the opera in the NY Times this week ("You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go."). I'm going to slightly argue with Woolfe's description of Barak as kindly. The text suggests that his Wife is basically a slave, that she's someone he paid for.

Nobody is denying that one of the central points of this opera is the Empress's transformation as she realizes that she cannot take the shadow from the Dyer's Wife, one of the great moments in all opera, but neither are they denying the opera's focus on fertility and babies. And Joshua Kosman was clear about how this opera lands at a moment when the right wing in the United States has not only gotten Roe v. Wade struck down, it is openly discussing restricting access to contraception, doing away with no-fault divorce, and so on. If somehow this isn't pretty clear to you after reading the above excerpts, well, read them a few more times.