At the Getty Center: Illuminating German Art and Opera

The Getty Center really outdid itself today. I've been a regular there for years now, and today's event was easily one the most special they've ever put on. Illuminating German Art and Opera was a daylong affair of lectures, gallery tours, and singing that tied together LA Opera's current production of Wagner's Ring Cycle with a Getty exhibition called German and Central European Manuscript Illumination. I knew this exhibition was there and had been planning to see it, as I spent years studying German language and culture and have visited that country a couple times. I'm glad I waited. Who said procrastination doesn't pay off?

So the way today worked was, we had three lectures in the morning going from around ten o'clock to twelve-thirty. Then we broke for lunch. They provided us with these huge boxed lunches that came as part of our registration fee, which was awesome. And then in the afternoon we toured not only the manuscript exhibition, but a couple of their permanent installations as well. And finally we were shepherded back to the lecture hall to cap off the afternoon with these two opera singers, one a tenor, the other a soprano, taking turns performing excerpts from various operas and religious pieces. Pretty cool, huh?

Around nine-thirty they opened up the lobby outside the lecture hall, on the Getty's ground floor, where we had to register and get the little Getty sticker for our shirt. They had vats of free coffee, which was a godsend. And then around ten we headed in. Clare Kunny, the Getty's Manager of Public Education and Teaching, came up for a few minutes just to give us a spiel about what the day would be about as well as to plug some of the Getty's upcoming events. And then she introduced the first speaker.

History and Myth: Richard Wagner and the German Middle Ages - 10:15-10:45

A German woman in her late twenties or so named Henrike Manuwald delivered this lecture. Here's a little something about Henrike from the program. She recently got her doctorate in art history and German literature from Cologne University and is a violin fellow at Trinity College, London. Right now she's interning in the Getty Center's Department of Manuscripts. When that's done, she'll move back to Germany for an assistant professorship at Freiburg University's Medieval German literature department. That's pretty cool 'cause Freiburg's one of those cities literally smack in the middle of Germany's (in)famous Black Forest. You've heard of Black Forest cake, right? There you go. It's this ginormous hunk of woods in southwestern Germany. It's where a lot of those Brothers Grimm fairy tales take place. Awesome. One of my travel dreams is to get there someday. You can set up home base in Freiburg and do your exploring from there. Okay I'm digressing. Anyway, that's Frau Doctor Manuwald.

Now for her lecture. The first thing she did was put into context composer Richard Wagner's interest in the Middle Ages. That is to say, a lot of people in Wagner's time (mid nineteenth century) were interested in Medieval history. To them it was like the good old days, emphasis on good, because in Wagner's time the days were anything but. A bloody revolution was going on.

One thing I didn't know until this lecture was that Wagner was a Communist. Karl Marx, also German, had recently written his Manifesto, and to disgruntled Germans, intellectuals and factor workers alike, it was just the thing. Times were tough. Morale was in the shitter. Wagner and others turned to the Middle Ages for escape. They liked reading about it because it seemed back then the German-speaking peoples had a more solid sense of identity. Of course it's ironic as hell that Wagner, or anyone else, would think the Germans had a good sense of identity back then. I mean maybe they did relative to Wagner's time, but at least Wagner lived long enough to see the Germans united into one single nation of Germany, for the first time ever, in 1871. During the Middle Ages the Germans were split up into many different independent principalities, duchies, and so forth. And don't even get me started on the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which fractured Central Europe into no less than three hundred fifty independent states. Can you imagine? On a chunk of land the size of Montana.

Well anyway, whatever the reality of Medieval Germany was, to Wagner and his mates it seemed like those were better days. The revolution of the late 1840s and early 1850s was downright awful. Many people fled for good, lots of them heading to the States. This happened simultaneous with the Irish exodus during that little island's potato famine. Only the Germans matched the Irish in terms of mass numbers of people flooding Yankee shores.

This German flight was a body blow to their sense of identity. Another hit to their identity was the fact that, at this time, everything was about France. French was the official language of court. Paris was THE place to be. And while Napoleon was long gone, the memories of his ripping shit up in Central Europe was still fresh on everyone's mind. He'd humiliated them.

Henrike didn't talk too much about the Ring Cycle per se. Her main thing was about the manuscript exhibition and how what the illuminations depicted sort of reflected what was on Wagner's mind when he began working on the Ring Cycle in 1848 at the age of thirty-five. Some of the manuscripts are religious in nature. Henrike emphasized that Wagner wasn't Christian by any means of the stretch, but he did hark back to the time those illuminations were made because of his romantic associations of the Middle Ages and, again, his sense that Germans had a stronger identity back then. This may explain why his Ring operas are so Romantic and emotional and expressive and dramatic the same way the manuscript illuminations are. Of course, operas in general should be all of those things, but Wagner excelled at them. And his Ring Cycle is all about German identity. They're four of the most German operas you'll ever see.

Originally the hero of the Ring Cycle was supposed to be Friedrich I (Barbarossa), the Holy Roman Emperor from the twelfth century. But the trouble there is, well, Barbarossa was a real person, and that could limit your story. Wagner had already decided he'd use German and Old Norse mythologies, especially the Nibelungenlied, as fodder for his libretti. That could've made having a real-life historical figure as the protagonist kind of tricky. Ultimately he decided his hero, like the rest of the Cycle, should be fiction. Thus was born that krazy kat Siegfried.

Using a slide show depicting some of the manuscripts from the exhibition, Henrike went into the backstory of the whole illumination deal. The exhibition covers a good seven hundred years or so, from circa 800 to 1500. Most of the Middle Ages, in other words. And she made sure we understood that, in this instance, illumination is sort of synonymous with illustration. But these aren't illustrations we would think of today, like in comic books and what have you. These manuscripts were done up much fancier than that, and maybe that's why we use the word illumination instead of illustration. Seriously, take a look at some of the photos in this post.

So how did the illumination trend get started? Apparently it was our boy Charlemagne, the man who put Europe on the map. You don't understand, Europe was nothing before this guy came around. I'm sure you've heard of Charlemagne before. Dude's name is practically synonymous with great Medieval rulers. But do you know how much the guy did? He pretty much united all of Western and Central Europe together. And then he brought over the arts and culture from Rome. Charlemagne helped set up what came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted about a thousand years, all the way until that little squirt Napoleon showed up and brought it down.

Charlemagne was crowned in 768, when he was in his mid twenties. By 800, when he was made emperor, he'd done all of his unifying and so on. His realm was vast and cultured. He declared Northern Europe to be the new Rome, as Henrike put it. The year 800 is also when he brought manuscript illumination to his part of the world. Yes, illumination was expensive, but who cared if you were Charlemagne?

Illumination quickly became all the rage. Henrike talked about how sometimes they'd drape veils over the illuminations for dramatic effect. While we might not consider them too dramatic today, Henrike couldn't stress enough about how, at the time, illuminations were seen to be bursting with drama, both in what they depicted and how they were revered.

The way Henrike explained it, Charlemagne started this trend with the monks. Weren't they the ones who also shepherded beer to the mainstream? Gotta love the monks. Anyway, Henrike explained that the monks in Charlemagne's realm, mainly present-day France and Germany, would sit huddled in their monasteries toiling away on these things. The oldest illuminated manuscripts we know of were thanks to them. They'd produce them for those who could afford the stiff price tag, mainly the ruling classes and high-ranking ecclesiastics. And they'd make some for themselves too. Why not? They excelled at it. These early manuscripts are mostly liturgical books. They're so beautiful you don't know if you should read them or just stare slack-jawed at them.

For a while monks were pretty much the only kats who did this stuff. By around 1300 or so, though, the practice had been taken up by secular artists and artisans who earned good money doing it. It's no coincidence that it was around this same time that the Holy Roman Empire started having a social stratum we would call the middle class. Before this, society basically had two strata, and the gulf between them was quite wide, if you know what I mean. Folks in this new middle class could also afford commissioning illuminations.

The Getty exhibition featured twenty-four pieces, most of them illuminated manuscripts, but also some paintings and an illuminated printed book. Henrike talked about these works in terms of being Carolingian or Ottonian. Carolingian meant it was made during Charlemagne's time. Ottonian refers to King Otto, who was basically the first official Holy Roman Emperor. He came around a good century after Charlemagne kicked off. And while Otto lived for most of the tenth century, he only ruled for about the last ten years of his life, his fifties and early sixties. Still, like Charlemagne, Otto was big enough on arts and culture that ten years was enough to foster his own little mini-Renaissance.

Ottonian doesn't just refer to Otto himself. When Henrike talked about Ottonian rulers, she basically meant the whole succession of rulers who took over the realm after Charlemagne's clan died out. Charlemagne himself had done a lot of work for the Ottonian emperors. You see, in kickstarting the illuminated manuscript trend, Charlemagne gave himself an excuse to build tons of book-making centers. I suppose in modern-day parlance these would be publishing houses. Sure, the monks would do the work, but then their galley prints, if you will, would have to be bound and made presentable and all that stuff. So by the time King Otto I and his successors came along, these book centers were practically dotting the realm.

One type of book Henrike talked about, which turned out to be a good medium for illuminations, was the missal. Know what a missal is? If you're not Catholic, you probably wouldn't. A missal's basically a little book for worshippers to use at Mass. In a nutshell. They came about circa 1100 or thereabouts. One of the illuminations in this exhibition, which Henrike showed us in her slideshow, was from the Stammheim Missal. It's considered a masterpiece of German Romanesque art (Romanesque means it's based on art from ancient Roman times, are you keeping up?). The Stammheim was created by monks of the Benedictine monastery of Saint Michael of Hildesheim. And that's Mike right there, patron saint of the monastery where this was made. He's apparently battling evil in the form of a dragon and a few demons or so. Cool, huh?

In the thirteenth century or so, the Romanesque style gave way to good ol' Gothic, which was concerned less with geometric shapes like the Roman one and more with the human form and human movement. I guess Gothic just meant more realistic.

And then in the fifteenth century lots of stuff happened. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. Books became cheap. The kinds of books being illuminated spanned a broader range commensurate with the growing demand for books written in the vernacular instead of just Latin, the official language of the church. You had books still being made with gold and precious materials on parchment, as well as less expensive books written on paper and illuminated with a handful of inexpensive colors without any gold or silver. Another slide Henrike showed us from the exhibition showed a hand-written Bible that they think was made by a cleric at Corpus Christi, an Augustinian monastery. And apparently the cleric was doing it for the Cologne Cathedral. It's the kind of Bible we take for granted today, with two columns of text per page, but that was a big deal back then. Herr Gutenberg didn't invent the two-column style, but he was the first to design and print books with movable type. And then other innovative souls took it from there.

Also in the fifteenth century we start seeing another thing we take for granted today: The big city as a hub of art and culture. In Medieval Europe we're talking about cities like Cologne, as well as Prague and Vienna, which at the time were considered more like towns. Isn't that funny? But it's partly because of their becoming artistic hotbeds that they grew into large urban centers. That and the fact that they became centers of power. Prague was where the rulers of Bohemia held court, for instance.

And so the fifteenth century saw a perfect storm of events that brought an end to manuscript illumination: The emergence of cities that doubled as artistic centers, cheaper ways to make books, a huge increase in secular text production (still in Latin, just not about anything Biblical), and a growing demand from the masses for books, religious and secular, written in languages other than Latin. So by 1500 or so, not much illumination was being done. I mean it was still being done, but it was such a painstaking process that it couldn't keep up with the huge demand for books. So most books, if they were illustrated at all, were done so with pen and ink and some paint.

Okay, well, that about does it for Henrike's bit. Are you drowning in academia yet? You have to admit it's pretty fascinating stuff. Anyway, time for the next lecture...

Politics, Religion, and Identity in The Ring - 10:45-11:30

The big, bearded, bespectacled guy who gave this lecture, Mitchell Morris, frequently gives talks at Opera League seminars. He's a professor at UCLA's Musicology Department. According to this program, he's written and spoken on a "plethora of topics," including nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, gender and sexuality in music, American popular song, problems of musical ethics, and the songs of humpback whales. Ah yes, humpback whales. I remember him talking about that briefly at this one Opera League seminar last November. Actually he didn't talk about it at all. He gave a lecture on The Magic Flute. Damn, you know? I hope one of these times he can actually dive in just a little bit about what it means to study whale singing.

He kicked off the lecture with the whole identity thing. For a long time in Europe, your identity was synonymous with your religion. Mitchell cited four main religions here: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and one more I can't think of. I think Hasidic. As Henrike said, though, over time and as books became more popular, people became more interested in reading stuff written in their own language, not Latin. People's identities became less about how they worshipped and more about the language they spoke. This became all the more important for the German-speaking peoples. As I said above, there was no Germany til 1871. And when the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, the Germans were split up into over three hundred different realms. The only thing they had in common was that they spoke German.

By the time Wagner started doing his thing, he was hardly unique in trumping up nationalism in the way he drew upon the German language and Germanic myths which, by the way, weren't all that familiar to Westerners due to the emphasis on Greek and Roman classics. Pretty much all European countries were establishing and trumpeting their identity through their languages and their stories and their myths and fairy tales. Italy and Russia are two good examples. Mitchell talked about how in St. Petersburg, the people got fed up with Italian opera and wanted to see more home-grown stuff.

Speaking of languages, he reiterated what Henrike said in her lecture: French was in. Mitchell referred to Paris as Hollywood, New York, and Chicago all rolled up into one. That's where Wagner went when he was first starting out. He relocated to Paris and tried to make it as a composer. You think it worked? Uh, no. If you need further proof that even geniuses fail, here you go. Wagner's attempt to make the big time in the City of Lights was a categorical failure. Although to be fair, dude didn't really try that hard. He went there when he was twenty-seven or so, and went back to Germany the following year. The only bright spot in this disappointment came during the ride back in the horse buggy. At one point they passed the ruins of this castle. When Wagner saw it, he felt the first seeds of inspiration for the opera Tannhäuser, which he finished about five years later.

Soon after that he started working on the Ring Cycle. Little did Wagner know, of course, that it would take him close to forever. It didn't take him all that long to wrap up all four libretti. He polished those off by 1852 or so, just before he turned forty. He started work on the scores and made it to the end of act two of the third one, Siegfried, when he decided it was all shit and none of it would work.

And so Wagner quit the Ring. Obviously he came back to it. It just took him a dozen years to do so. In the meantime, his life was action packed. His Communist beliefs got him in trouble with the government. Financially he was a deadbeat. Check this out. He was literally exiled from his homeland. He didn't miss a beat, though. He settled in Switzerland and churned out other stuff.

Finally King Ludwig II of Bavaria saved the day. Today Bavaria is one of the sixteen states that make up Germany. It's the southern-most one. Back then it was its own independent kingdom, and at the time of Wagner's exile, Ludwig II was in charge. Ludwig II is the guy who had the famous awesome castle that was the inspiration for Disney's Sleeping Beauty. He summoned Wagner to Bavaria, paid off all his debts, and generally made sure Wagner didn't have any extracurricular drama getting in the way of his compositions. Eventually Wagner resumed work on the Ring.

Mitchell explained that the Ring wasn't based on any one source, but was sort of a hybrid adaptation of a few sources. One, of course, was Nordic mythology. You've heard of Thor, right? God of thunder and all that? He was part of this, as were Wotan (god of gods) and Wotan's wife Freia (goddess of joy), from which we get the word Friday. Thor gives us Thursday, by the way. As mentioned in Henrike's lecture, he also used the Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs). This is kind of like Germany's answer to Beowulf. It's an epic poem written a very long time ago by an unknown author or authors. Scholars guesstimate it was written circa 1200 or so. The poem, in turn, draws upon various sources, among them ancient Germanic myths. We're talking pre-Christian. And apparently some of it's based on actual events and people from the fifth and sixth centuries. Obviously the dragon can't be among that. Indeed, the gist of the poem's plot is about this guy Siegfried who's famous for having killed dragons. He serves the court of Burgundy (part of present-day France). After he's murdered, his wife Kriemhild swears revenge. Something like that.

Another source was the Völsunga saga from Iceland. It's not a poem, but a big book of prose. You can't call it a novel. It was written during the 1200s, long before novels came about. It's a doorstopper of epic prose storytelling. The plot revolves around the decline and fall of the great Volsung family. This is where we have characters named Sigurd and Brynhild, clear inspirations for the Ring characters Sigmund and Brünnhilde. The Völsunga also chronicles the downfall of those same Burgundians who killed Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied. Indeed, the Nibelungenlied was partly based on this, only it condensed and streamlined it into a poem set mostly in court.

Confused yet? There's more! Perhaps the most obvious inspiration for the Ring was none other than the Bible. The Ring Cycle doesn't exactly shout out Jesus, but Wagner clearly does draw on certain amounts of Christian myth. Mitchell explained that it would make sense if you think about how Christianity is all about equality. As a Communist, Wagner would be attracted to that idea: No rich or poor, we're all the same.

Mitchell played some excerpts from a couple Wagner operas: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Die Walküre (part two of the Ring Cycle). The song he played from the latter was from a scene early on where Siegmund (Siegfried's father) wonders where he came from and who his father was. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention one more Ring source: Wagner's own life. He didn't know much about his father either.

To conclude the lecture, Mitchell showed us a couple photographs of the interior of Ludwig II's awesome Disney-inspiring castle. One was the huge master bedroom and, even more awesome, the throne room! Damn, I wish I knew where he got those so I could include them in this post. Words don't do them justice so I won't even try to describe them.

Okay. After this we took a ten-minute breather before the last morning lecture.

A Conversation with James Conlon - 11:40-12:25

No fancy title for this lecture. It was LA Opera Music Director James Conlon taking the podium and chatting about Wagner and the Ring. Maestro Conlon only just took the helm at LA Opera three years ago, starting with the 2006-07 season, and already he's had quite the impact. For a start, he's got that Recovered Voices project, whereby he picks an opera by a composer who was censured, suppressed, or murdered by the Nazis during WWII, and has it performed in the spring, toward the end of the season. This project is the result of a long-time passion of his. Among the many accolades he's racked up in his thirty-year career is the Crystal Globe Award from the Anti-Defamation League for championing the works of composers silenced by the Nazis.

Another big accomplishment is the fact that he's gotten LA Opera to tackle the entire Ring Cycle, something this company's never done before. Maestro's a huge Wagner fan. I remember him saying at the Ring Cycle preview a couple months ago that one of his requirements for taking the LA Opera job was that Placido Domingo, LA Opera's top dawg, let him do the Ring in its entirety.

The first thing he talked about was Wagner the person. For starters, he was absolutely impossible to be around. His ego was the size of Walhalla. He had mistresses galore. As Mitchell pointed out earlier, he never paid his bills. And speaking of paying, he was always whining that more patrons didn't pay him for his musical talents. Wagner was also a bold-faced anti-Semite. "There's no way to get around that," Maestro said.

But here's the rub: Wagner's talent was immense. Sure, he was an egotistical bastard, but the musical world, then and now, has never suffered a dearth of such folks. What made Wagner stand out was that he actually had the talent to back it up. Maestro couldn't emphasize enough the impact Wagner had on both the musical and dramatic arts. As with his anti-Semitism, there's no way to get around that. Even his enemies and critics at the time couldn't deny the impact he had. When Los Angeles puts on the city-wide Ring Festival in the summer of 2010, pretty much the whole city's going to grind to a halt because so many companies are participating. Maestro said that Wagner would not only not be fazed by such an honor, he'd probably wonder what took L.A. so long to get around to it.

The theory underlying Wagner's approach to music is what the Germans call Gesamtkunstwerk. This means literally "complete artwork." Wagner wanted to take all of the arts--music, drama, poetry, lyricism, you name it--and combine them all into a single form. The Ancient Greeks did this all the time before these art forms split up and went their separate aesthetic ways, at Rome and beyond. Indeed, the arts as we know them today can probably be traced back to Rome. "Everything was invented in Italy," Maestro said, only semi-jokingly. So Wagner was a classical purist in a certain sense. Very retro. Do you know Bayreuth? It's a town in Bavaria where Wagner established his annual Ring Cycle festival, which continues to this day. See, the way Wagner saw it, the Ring Cycle was a Gesamtkunstwerk, and there did not exist a theater on Earth suitable enough to accommodate it. The Ancient Greeks did their thing in temples. So what Wagner built in Bayreuth was his own personal Greek temple. Did I mention his ego? Oh yeah, well, here you have perhaps the most potent manifestation of it I can think of. Wagner's creating a festival in Bayreuth was likewise based on the Ancient Greek model. Every year in Athens they'd have a theatrical festival at the temple where everyone would get together and participate as a community. In so doing they'd be acknowledging and celebrating their belief system while watching it dramatized by actors and singers.

Wagner was an anti-Semite, but he wasn't a Nazi. Maestro felt obligated to point this out because many people assume he was based on Hitler's being a huge Wagner fan. Problem with that accusation is, when Hitler was born in 1889, Wagner had already been dead six years. Also, as I've mentioned several times in this post, Wagner was an unabashed Communist. You can't be a Commie and a National Socialist at the same time. The two are diametrically opposed on the political spectrum.

Not all of the Nazis were Wagner fans either. Maestro talked about how Hitler first discovered Wagner at a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Hitler fell in love with it, and from there discovered the Ring Cycle. He'd bring his top cronies with him to Bayreuth to try to stir up their interest. But get this: They'd always fall asleep! Hitler would of course get furious and scream and shout his little comb-over blue, but no dice. It's funny how Hitler saw the Ring Cycle as being all about German dominance and glory. For starters, as Mitchell pointed out, the Germanic stuff was in turn adapted from Icelandic stuff. Further, while Wagner did want to write a very German piece at a time when Germans lacked a solid sense of identity, the primary theme of the Ring Cycle is, in fact, love. This is where we see shades of the Bible. Specifically, it's about the redemptive power of love. We get this hammered home in the first fifteen minutes of the first Ring opera, Das Rheingold, and the rest of the Cycle dramatizes the playing out of this theme.

That explains the twins in the second Ring opera, Die Walküre. You know about that? Well, the first part of the opera is how this man and woman fall in love with each other. And then bam! Just like Luke and Leia in Star Wars, they find out that they're twins. Only, whereas that nipped Luke and Leia's fling in the bud, it doesn't with these two. Siegmund and Sieglinde have sex and give birth to the Ring's tragic hero, and the third Ring opera's title character, Siegfried. Gross, huh? Amazingly, Siegfried isn't born with an extra limb or a tail or anything. So how can the audience get past the twins-having-sex issue? We can't judge the twins, Maestro said. Again, Wagner's whole thing was about the power of love, and that when love takes its purist form, you just go with it. And speaking of Christian themes, humping twins also ties in with this idea of the forbidden apple. We all want to have something that we can't, whether it be for legal or moral reasons. The twins were Wagner's way of tapping into that.

Maestro reiterated what Mitchell was saying about Wagner inserting elements of his own life into his work. The whole thing about Siegfried not knowing the identity of his father is but one example. You've also got the fact that Wotan, the god of gods, sleeps around a lot. Well, Wagner slept around a lot too. How fitting that he'd cast himself, so to speak, as the god of gods. Wagner's views toward women also made it into his work. Even without the anti-Semitism, he would still be politically incorrect today because of his misogyny. He always felt the woman should live in service to her man, that she should sacrifice herself for him if necessary. And so we have no shortage of female characters in Wagnerian operas who don't fare so well. You've got Elisabeth in Tannhäuser. Then there's Senta from Der fliegende Holländer, who literally chucks herself into the sea at the end. She tells the Dutchman that she'll love him until she dies, and then she kills herself, which makes her his salvation or something. Convenient, huh? And let us not forget good ol' Brünnhilde. Poor thing.

Guided Gallery Tours - 1:15-2:15

Okay that does it for the morning lectures. Whew! Lots of stuff, I know. The luncheon hour couldn't have arrived sooner. What better way to digest all this knowledge than by digesting some free grub? It was an overcast day today (damn you, marine layer!), but that's all right. I grabbed my boxed lunch and went up to the main concourse amidst all the exhibition halls and found a table by the fountains.

After lunch, at 1:15, it was time for the trio of guided gallery tours. They had three different tours set up for us: The Illuminated Manuscript one as well as two others focusing on works in the permanent collection. To that end, we were split into three color-coded groups. I was in the peach group (don't ask), meaning I had to get one of these headsets with peach tape on it so I could hear the tour guides no matter how far away they were. I have to admit those headsets were neat. I'd never taken a gallery tour this way, but even subdivided, these groups were big. If you were stuck in the back, it'd be tough to hear what the guide was saying without the headset.

The first tour guide for the peach group was this cute Russian gal named Zhenya Gershman. Zhenya's an artist herself. She scored an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena back in '01 and has been doing lots of her own work since, getting it exhibited, winning some awards and so on. She's got a site (zhenyagershman.com). According to it, she's been moonlighting at the Getty since '06.

Zhenya took us to the North Pavilion, where the Getty houses its Medieval and Renaissance art. She led us upstairs to a room showcasing work from 1300 to 1400. This room contains the single oldest painting in the Getty's entire collection: "Madonna and Child" by Master of St. Cecilia. The artist who painted it remains unknown. Master of St. Cecilia is the agreed-upon moniker in the meantime. The painting is dated to 1290-1295. Apparently the fact that the Virgin is holding baby Christ's hand was a big deal at the time. While Mary does look kind of stoic, her holding the kid's hand and cradling him to her breast is supposed to show how intimate and loving and emotional she was. This kind of very human depiction was new at the time, Zhenya said, but it eventually caught on, of course. As for the whole stoic thing, that was normal. Zhenya said it was a trend in the so-called icon tradition of the Byzantine Empire. Whatever that means.

The other painting she talked about was from 1330: "Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul" by Bernardo Daddi. This is a three-panel painting, what they call a triptych. The whole idea behind this painting, Zhenya said, was drama. If you close the triptych (no, the Getty doesn't allow that, or any touching for that matter), you supposedly get a boring sort of brown color. And then when you open it, you get these three holy figures on a resplendent golden backdrop. Yes, Signore Daddi did that on purpose for dramatic effect, Zhenya said. And how about the book the Virgin is holding? Zhenya pointed out that a bunch of paintings in this room show people holding books. But wait, these paintings are from the fourteenth century, a time when most people couldn't read. What gives? Well, according to Zhenya, books at the time represented truth, something to aspire to. Higher knowledge, if you will.

One interesting piece of backstory she shared had to do with the Christ baby. Apparently, long after Daddi finished this, someone went in and painted a little Christ baby near the bottom, under Mary's outstretched hand. No, you don't see it here because the Getty removed it. And apparently it was a piece of cake to do. Zhenya said they basically took a wet Q-tip and dabbed Christ with it. He came right off "like a sticker," she said.

Zhenya passed us off to Henrike, the German gal who gave this morning's first lecture. She took us through the Illuminated Manuscript exhibition downstairs. The problem here was that the manuscripts were in this tiny dark room. The dark part I understand because too much light will damage the paper over time. And I suppose the tiny part would normally be fine if I were seeing this by myself. As a huge group, though, it was slow going. When you walk in, you turn left and work your way around clockwise. The pieces were arranged chronologically.

I felt bad for Henrike. She'd given her huge lecture, she'd already had one group, and by the time we showed up, we were running behind schedule. So the poor frau really had to rush through it. She tried to do it chronologically, but the fact is that I didn't get to see every single piece.

I do remember her pointing out that the pages of these books were made out of parchment, which comes from sheep's skin. Not until the fifteenth century did paper come into play, along with moveable type. Henrike also pointed out how a lot of these books used gold in their illuminations. Unlike the gold ring from the Ring Cycle, which represents corruption, the gold here represents purity. Not surprising when you consider that a lot of this stuff was made in a religious context.

Speaking of gold, Henrike gave a spiel for the last piece in the exhibition, a gold-background painting from the 1500s. "The Crucifixion" was painted by a chap called Altdorfer, Albrecht Altdorfer, circa 1520. Henrike explained that Herr Altdorfer was one of the leading painters of his day in Bavaria, in a region called the Danube River Valley. Albrecht didn't do illuminations, but he did work a lot on parchment, and his style was reminiscent of illuminations. The gold background is sort of a dual nod both to Medieval painting traditions as well as to illumination. The gold here looks like it's a pair of scrolled pages. As best we could considering the crowd, we followed Henrike's suggestion to view "The Crucifixion" from different angles to experience the panel as pages of an open book.

Okay that does it for the manuscript illumination exhibition. A bit anti-climactic, but I got the gist of it. Really, some of these books, like the missals, are tiny, so it's just as well I didn't get to stare at them too long lest I strain my eyes.

The third and final gallery tour was back upstairs in this one room dealing with Northern European art during the Middle Ages. Our guide here was this gal named Keri Jhaveri. I recognized her from last June when she took me and a few others on a guided gallery tour of the August Sander photography exhibition. You can read about that in this very blog. Just check out the posts from June 2008.

Keri's got a unique style as a guide. What she does is, she'll lead us to a particular painting, she'll stare at it for a long moment as the rest of us do (maybe because she knows that's the first thing we're going to do), then she'll turn to us, point out one or two things, then go back to staring at it some more before asking us for our impressions. It's a more organic way of learning, I suppose. I like how she allows for silence so we can observe and think about the art for ourselves.

The first painting she talked about was a 1526 piece called "A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion" by Lucas Cranach the Elder. This one was a real doosie, perfect fodder for a guide like Keri who wants her pupils to ponder what they look at, for this one offered a lot. First, what's with the lion? Lucas Cranach was a German, and the backdrop here is of a particular place in Germany. Problem is, Germany doesn't have any lions. Europe doesn't have lions for that matter. So where'd Mr. Faun get the lion from? Could the lion, king of the jungle, represent royalty? Well, that would be kind of risky, showing royalty being slain by a wild animal. Lucas was court painter of Frederick the Wise of Saxony in Wittenberg. At the same time, though, and as the Getty site points out, Lucas was a good pal of Martin Luther's. And Martin Luther, of course, was the queen mother trouble maker of his day. Look at all the stuff Lucas did for him. From the Getty site: Lucas "supervised the printing of Luther's propaganda pamphlets; designed woodcuts for Luther's translation of the New Testament; painted altarpieces for Lutheran churches; and painted, engraved, and made woodcut portraits of Protestant Reformers and princes." Keri said it's almost like looking at two paintings. You've got two perspectives here. One is the wild side of man while simultaneously showing man as civilized and trying to tame the wilds of nature. Maybe. Doesn't it suck that we can't just go back and ask Lucas what he was thinking?

The other painting Keri showed was "An Allegory of Passion" by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536. I'd actually heard of Hans 'cause I watch that Showtime show The Tudors, about Henry VIII. A German artist originally from Augsburg and trained in Basel, Switzerland, Hans settled in London in his thirties where he scored the plummest gig ever as the--not one of the, THE--court painter for Henry VIII. And he was also the official fashion designer. One of the many things he had to do was go around Europe and paint marriage candidates for Henry. He got to meet a lot of hot royal chicks and have them sit for him. Cool, huh? He had this gig until he died in his mid forties.

As for "An Allegory of Passion," Keri stated flat out that it's a mystery to her. For starters, the frame is shaped like a diamond. This wasn't a trend at all at any time during Hans's day, and no one since has been able to figure out his reasoning behind that stylistic choice. Was it meant as a box cover or portrait cover? If so, it'd be one of the most unique covers ever. There was no convention for this type of painting. As with a lot of Hans's work, this was most likely a commission, suggested by the very specific countenance of the rider. But who commissioned it? Who is that rider, in other words? Again, no one knows. Along the bottom is an Italian phrase that translates to "And so desire carries me along." It's a quote from Petrarch's Canzoniere. One of my fellow attendees said this painting would make a great beer logo. I agree.

Religion and Mythology in Music - 2:15-3:30

Okay! And finally, for the last bit of culture, we all headed back to the lecture hall to take in some great tunes. The woman in charge of this bit was a pianist named Catherine Miller. A native Californian, Cath works as pianist and prompter for LA Opera and serves as artistic consultant for the Pasadena Opera Guild. She works gigs as an operatic vocal coach, piano teacher, and organist. Besides graduating from both USC and Julliard, the showoff also scored a Fulbright to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.

Cath was the accompanist for the two singers performing today. First you had tenor Robert MacNeil, big bald guy in his forties or so, decked out in a crisp suit for the occasion. Robert is a regular on the LA Opera stage, most recently starring in their productions of Tannhäuser, Der Rosenkavalier, Il Trovatore, Fidelio, La Boheme, as well as last September's production of Il Trittico, which I took my mom to. It was the opening night of the 2008-09 season. Quite a night. I saw Don Johnson and Martin Short, although not together.

The other singer was a soprano named Kathleen Roland. The program says she's an active soloist in both opera and orchestral music and has sung at a ton of festivals, among them the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Britten-Pears Institute in England, and the Tanglewood Music Festival. She's also done stuff with the Pacific Serenades, the Southwest Chamber Music Society, the L.A. Jewish Symphony, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and, last but never ever least, the LA Phil. Not to be outdone in academia, either, Kathleen holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in vocal performance. Like Cath, she went to SC and scored a Fulbright. Her day job is teaching at Scripps College in Claremont. That's cool, I work with a few Scripps alums.

Here's the list of songs they performed. Cath explained that they cover four major musical eras: Baroque, Romantic, Classical, and Contemporary. At the same time, though, they all have religious connotations. There was a time when music and religion were bound so closely together it was hard to have one without the other. One prime example she cited was Bach. Dude had nineteen kids and was only able to support them through his organ gig at the local church.

Okay without further ado...

"Waft her angles through the skies"

From Jeptha by George Handel (1685-1759)

Sung by Robert

"Farewell, Ye Limpid Springs"

Also from Jeptha

Sung by Kathleen

"Then, then shall the righteous shine forth"

From Elijah by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47)

Sung by Robert

In introducing it, Cath pointed out that 2009 is Felix Mendelsson's bicentennial. I'm glad she did 'cause I had no idea, the program notwithstanding.

"The Crucifixion" and "St. Ita's Vision"

From The Hermit Songs by Samuel Barber (1910-81)

Sung by Kathleen

These are the only songs from today's selection that represent Contemporary.

"Auf ein altes Bild" by Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)

Sung by Kathleen

"Nun bin ich dein" and "Nun wandre Maria" by Hugo Wolf

Sung by Robert

"Dich, teure Halle"

From Tannhäuser by Wagner (1813-83)

Sung by Kathleen

"Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond" and "Du Bist der Lenz"

From Die Walküre by Wagner

Both are duets for tenor and soprano.

These beautiful songs were a great way to end a very culturally fulfilling day. And those two duets were a great teaser for LA Opera's production of Die Walküre coming next month. There's a form in my program that lets me order tickets for 20% off. Considering I always get orchestra ring seats, normally a hundred bucks or so, I'll definitely be taking advantage.

That about does it for Illuminating German Art and Opera. Interesting way to spend a Saturday, huh?