And so it begins. Today, April 15, marks the beginning of Ring Festival LA. Since 2006 or thereabouts, when LA Opera began preproduction for its first ever mounting of Wagner's Ring Cycle, opera goers and all fans of the performing arts have been waiting for the spring of 2010. Starting today and for the next ten weeks, until June 30, more than 110 cultural institutions across the city and county of Los Angeles will put on events--symposia, performing arts, visual arts, movie series, plays--that examine Wagner and his Ring from different perspectives while collectively celebrating our resident opera company's new milestone.
Make no mistake, staging Wagner's four-opera opus is not for the faint of heart. I think it was either LA Opera's general director (and legendary tenor) Placido Domingo or our music director/chief conductor James Conlon who said that an opera company can't really mature to adulthood until they face up to tackling the Ring Cycle, a piece so demanding, complex, with innumerable moving parts, not to speak of characters, that Wagner himself was convinced there didn't exist on Earth a theater that could pull it off properly. That's why he built the opera house at Bayreuth in the German state of Bavaria. That theater has staged the Ring every single August (except for a few years during World War II) since Wagner finished building it in 1876. That's THE Ring Festival. No, I haven't been, although I've met a few folks at Opera League events who've gone. This one guy, who volunteers for the League as the Comms Manager, went last August and was disillusioned by the very modern spin the Ring was given by its director. Apparently the characters were all teenagers with skateboards or something. This guy was lamenting how opera has become a director's medium, with less emphasis placed on the music. Anyway, perhaps one day I'll go to the Bayreuth Festival just so I can say I went, check it off the bucket list if you will. Speaking of directors spinning their own Ring, our director, German artist Achim Freyer, has most definitely put his personal stamp on LA Opera's Ring. Only, instead of something hokey and modern, he's brought his Ring outside of time. It doesn't really take place in any recognizable real-world setting, and that's given him license to create some of the most beautiful sets and costumes and lighting design I've ever seen on stage. I saw all four of his Rings as they were staged piecemeal, so I'll be going into this Ring knowing what to expect. Terrific stuff.
Anyway, not to get too sidetracked, but I just wanted to make it clear for the non-opera folk in the audience what a big deal it is for an opera company to mount the Ring. As an LA Opera regular for a good ten years now, I have to confess to feeling, well, invested in the company, kind of like a parent. So I have to confess as well to feeling a wee bit of pride that LA Opera, at the relatively young age of twenty-four (practically nascent compared to many east coast and European opera companies), is reckoning with the Ring. This will be a true watershed and no mistake.
As I said above, LA Opera has already staged all four Ring operas piecemeal, going back to early 2009. They did the first two, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, during the second half of the 2008-09 season, spaced apart by several weeks, followed by Siegfried last fall to kick off the 2009-10 season, and just recently the fourth and final installment, the nearly six-hour(!) Götterdämmerung. And now that they're done, LA Opera will stage all four--the entire cycle--three times over this May and June. Cycle 1 will be performed from May 29 to June 6, cycle 2 from June 8-16, and cycle 3 from June 18-26. I've opted for the third cycle. That'll buy me time to experience as much of the Ring Festival as possible since it ends just a few days after I see Götterdämmerung. I may have time to squeeze in one more thing after that, and then that'll be a wrap.
Speaking of Ring Festival LA: With a hundred-plus events going on over ten weeks, obviously it's impossible for me to attend all of them, or even half of them. That may be a given, but believe you me, if I didn't have a job, and money and time weren't factors, I might actually make the effort. As it is, with a job and writing and other hobbies besides--oh yeah, and a life--I've decided on a system of picking one thing a week. There's quite a bit to choose from. At tonight's event, my first Ring Festival event and one of the first overall, they had copies of the Ring Festival guidebook. At about sixty pages, it's got everything going on from now to June 30, all nicely bucketed by category with a calendar index in the back. The categories are Cinema, Conversations and Symposia, Eclectica, Educational, Hospitality, Performing Arts, Theatre, and Visual Arts. As far as how the events were planned on which dates, I can't discern any particular logic to it. With so many organizations participating, it seems they all chose their dates based on when they had room on their own calendars. In other words, you've got all kinds of stuff from all eight categories happening all the time. This is why the calendar index is very handy. Not only does it list the events sequentially by date, but next to each event is a symbol indicating which category that event falls into (e.g. a green CIN box means Cinema, a red C/S box means Conversations and Symposia, a purple EDU box means Educational, and so on). Play your cards right, and you could catch several events from several different categories in a single week. That won't be me, but if I were a trust fund baby... I should say, though, that next month I'm taking off ten days from work when my mom flies out to visit, and already I've got us on the calendar for several Festival things during her stay: A play at the Geffen, an exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art, another exhibit at the Getty Villa, and maybe one or two other things.
This brings me to tonight's event: From Nietzsche to Star Wars: The Wagnerian Power of the Ring. One of the events in the Conversations and Symposia category, it's sponsored by the University of Southern California's Master of Liberal Studies program. The host venue was the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) downtown, just a block or so down Grand Ave. from the opera house, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Here's how the event is described in the Festival guide.
Through his Ring Cycle, Wagner has profoundly influenced the way we think, feel, and imagine the 21st century world. A panel of experts, including USC Master of Liberal Studies program faculty, take on how the Ring themes and symbols have permeated 20th century literature, philosophy, psychology, and even movies and cartoons.
That's a very sweeping summary, eh? Here's what happened in plain English: Six people, including a few from SC's Master of Liberal Studies program, each spent fifteen minutes giving a spiel about the Ring from a particular angle. And honestly, I have no idea why this event's called From Nietzsche to Star Wars. None of the six speakers mentioned either Nietzsche or Star Wars. Well, one of them mentioned Star Wars, but only in a funny way related to the Tony tubes used as swords and spears in the LA Opera version.
I'd been to MOCA before, but it had been a while. In fact, I think the only other time I'd been here was way back in 2003. Man, has it been that long? It was in October 2003 when Disney Hall opened and became the new home for LA Phil (meaning LA Phil and LA Opera no longer had to share the Dorothy Chandler). Timed with Disney Hall's opening was a Frank Gehry exhibit at MOCA (Gehry designed Disney Hall). The exhibit included some of his Disney models and concept sketches as well as models and sketches of other famous stuff he did, like that museum in Bilbao which, like Disney Hall, looks like a shiny alien spaceship. The exhibit also had stuff that was in progress, projects Gehry and his company were just getting started on or were in the thick of. Don't ask me what those were. I'm sort of startled as I write this that Disney Hall's been open six and a half years already. Where the heck have those years gone?
Tonight's event was in the Ahmanson Auditorium. Obviously I'd never been in that part of MOCA, and it's easy to miss if you're only there for an exhibit. You go in and then down the stairs and toward the back of the main building, well away from the exhibit space. In the little lobby outside the auditorium, USC had a bunch of tables set up with various programs and brochures. You had stuff from their Liberal Studies program as well as more general SC stuff. And they also offered a healthy mixture of opera-related brochures. This is where I first saw the official guide for Ring Festival LA. I didn't know they'd be making a guide for it. In my excitement, I grabbed a couple. No, I didn't take any of the SC materials. I'm not ready to go back to school. Plus, I have to admit to being a bit taken aback by the in-your-face nature of SC's presence tonight. It's almost as if the point was less about the Ring and more about SC showing off.
After I grabbed an aisle seat toward the bottom and on the right side, who do I see but Susan Kamei going around to all the folks in the audience to make sure they each had a Master of Liberal Studies brochure. I've only met this woman once before, at an alumni event for the program I was in, Masters of Professional Writing. It was exactly two years ago, April 2008, at the house of an alum in Los Feliz. I sat next to Susan and got to know her a bit. She hadn't been there when I was a student in 1998-99. She seemed pretty nice and took my name and contact info so she could put me on the writing program's mailing list. That's funny because I think since then I've gotten maybe two or three e-mails from them about other alumni events. One time this woman called me and invited me to an alumni event mere days before it happened, almost like I was an afterthought. One thing Susan said that night two years ago was that the writing seminar I took in Prague in June 1999 wasn't legit. Apparently the guy who'd been in charge of the writing program at that time, James Ragan, had done something seriously naughty. Financial fraud or something. The MPW program had just emerged on the other side of some internal turmoil when that alumni event happened. But don't ask me about the exact nature of the turmoil because Susan was pretty tight-lipped about it. I just remember having a bad taste in my mouth after she said that, well, nowadays they have a travel program that's actually legit. Ouch! The Prague trip cost me over a thousand dollars!
Susan's official title is Associate Dean at USC's College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. She's in charge of Advanced and Professional Programs, which means she oversees my old program as well as this Master of Liberal Studies thing and a bunch of other stuff. And damn, according to her bio, this gal's whip smart. She did her undergrad in Russian at UC Irvine and got to study at Leningrad State University, which I assume today is called St. Petersberg State. She followed that up with a law degree at Georgetown and years of experience practicing corporate and real estate law. She was senior veep and district council executive director for the Urban Land Institute. Her first gig at SC was at the Lusk Center for Real Estate and the Master of Real Estate Development program. I'm sure glad I didn't know any of this when I sat next to her at the alumni event two years ago. Jesus, how intimidating. When Susan stopped by my seat tonight to give me a Liberal Studies brochure, she stared at me for an extra beat or two. Look familiar, did I?
Susan only spoke for a couple minutes at the very beginning of the program. She welcomed all of us to the show, gave a quick plug for the MLS program, and introduced the night's moderator, Jim Kincaid, USC English Professor and chair of the MLS program. On paper Jim's a pretty impressive guy as well. He's been at SC since '87. According to the MLS site, he researches "critical theory, American Studies and Queer studies." Before SC, he "taught at Ohio State, Berkeley, and Colorado. Kincaid's earlier work in Victorian literature and culture and in literary theory has yielded to publication in cultural studies, most recently in the history and current cultural practices of eroticizing children and instituting elaborate scapegoating rituals to disguise what we are doing. He regularly teaches classes in criminality/lunacy/perversion, in age studies, in censorship, and in other areas of literary, political, and cultural studies." Wow, huh? One example of a class he teaches is The Culture of Comedy. That makes sense because, while he comes across as very regal on paper, in person he's hilarious. I don't mean that kind of standup comedian type deal, throwing out the zingers. Nah, he's just this goofy ol' coot. Several times over the course of the evening, for example, he asked the audience if anyone knew anything about Twitter, because apparently MOCA wanted to tweet after each lecture. "Does anyone know about this so-called Twitter?" I was rolling on my ass.
Jim plugged this one class the MLS program is offering this summer about the Ring Cycle. I forget the exact schedule. I think it's a two-hour class one or two nights a week for four weeks. I'd probably take it if I had the time. Technically I do have the time. Part of me is seriously considering it. The main obstacle would be the commute. Driving from the Valley to downtown (SC's about a mile or so directly south of the city center) is never fun.
And now for a recap of the fifteen-minute spiels...
Leo Braudy
Jim introduced the first speaker, Leo Braudy. Yes, he's an SC professor. American lit, specifically. From the SC site: "He is among America's leading film critics. Braudy, a frequent finalist for national book awards, teaches Restoration literature and history, American culture after World War Two, popular culture and critical theory, including the histories of visual style and film genres. His work appears in journals such as American Film, Film Quarterly, Genre, Novel, Partisan Review, and Prose Studies, to name a few. His book Jean Renoir: The World of His Films was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's. His most recent book, From Chivalry to Terrorism, was named Best of the Best by the Los Angeles Times and a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times."
Focusing on the Ring in the context of nationalism and romanticism, Leo's lecture was basically a distillation of another Ring Cycle lecture I heard at the Getty Center a year ago March. On a Saturday in March 2009, the Getty Center put on a day-long event called Illuminating German Art and Opera. I blogged about it here if you want to jump back to the March 2009 archive. Anyway, the first lecture that morning was called "History and Myth: Richard Wagner and the German Middle Ages." It was given by this young German woman named Henrike Manuwald. She'd just gotten her doctorate in art history and German lit and was about to head back to Germany to be an assistant prof at Freiburg Unviersity's Medieval German lit department. Henrike's lecture was a full thirty minutes. She covered quite a bit in that time, going all the way back to Charlemagne in the 8th century, and how these monks during his reign started illuminating manuscripts to tell stories passed down from the ages, and then how that practice eventually spread to the secular world circa 1300.
Leo, like Henrike, put the Ring Cycle in the context not only of where Wagner was in his life when he was working on it, but where the German people as a whole were, psychologically speaking. We're talking the 1840s and '50s, a time of bloody revolution in Central Europe. The German people were fractured into several dozen independent states, principalities, and duchies. While that was a vast improvement over the 350 or so independent states two hundred years earlier, it still hurt the German sense of identity. The revolution of the late 1840s and early 1850s didn't help matters at all. Indeed, it was so brutal that many Germans literally fled for their very lives. You've probably heard about all the Irish immigrants who came over during the potato famine, right? That happened around the same time as the German revolution, which is why Ellis Island saw a huge influx of Germans and Irish at the same time.
Not everyone fled, of course. Exhibit A: Wagner. He and his drinking buddies stayed, but they were still pretty bummed out. They, like other German artists and writers and composers of the time, dealt with the harsh present not by physically fleeing their homeland but by mentally fleeing back to the past. Specifically, they fled back to the German Middle Ages. In desperate need to reestablish a sense of German identity, they viewed the Middle Ages as the good old days. The rest of Henrike's lecture went into the whole thing about manuscript illumination as a medium for recounting Germanic tales and myths, the same tales and myths Wagner eventually adapted for his Ring. Leo didn't talk about that at all. Remember, dude only had fifteen minutes. He just wanted to make the point that the Ring Cycle was born out of a rise of German nationalism and romanticism engineered by German artists in response to their morale being in the gutter and their sense of identity being fractured.
Roberto Ignacio Díaz
Roberto is an SC Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature. From usc.edu: "Professor Díaz researches Latin American literary and cultural history with a focus on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written on multilingualism in Spanish American literature and on the prose of Borges. He is presently at work on a book-length study of opera in Latin America."
It makes perfect sense that's he writing a book about opera in Latin America, as that was indeed the focus of his fifteen minutes. According to Roberto, you can't talk about South American opera without mentioning Teatro Colón, the opera house in Buenos Aries. I have to admit I'd never heard of it until tonight, but you see? This is why I love events like this. The Opera League seminars have taught me all kinds of stuff about opera, but they've never covered opera's history in South America. Roberto did a decent job making up for that in a mere quarter hour. I learned, for instance, that Teatro Colón, which in English means Columbus Theatre, is generally considered one of the top five opera venues in the world. It's up there with the Met, La Scala, and Vienna.
Apparently Teatro Colón took something like twenty years to build. Not because it's especially huge or anything, although it is kind of big. Like a lot of opera houses and large theaters, it seats a good couple thousand or so, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was all the drama surrounding its construction. The original architect, some Italian guy, kicked the bucket only two years after he laid the cornerstone. And then get this: His pupil, an up-and-coming Italian architect who took over the project, was friggin' murdered. Obviously their design of Teatro Colón was Italian in style, but I have no idea if that's why the pupil architect was murdered or what, or if it was something more random like a mugging or something. Roberto didn't go into it. Finances, or the lack thereof, caused more headaches and delays. Why, you ask? Because the Italian businessman who was shouldering the bulk of the financing...(wait for it)...died! I shit you not. The three key players overseeing Teatro Colón's construction all died. Roberto also mentioned bickering and infighting among city officials about exactly where in Buenos Aires Teatro Colón should be built. Oy vay.
Eventually they brought in an architect from Belgium to wrap things up. It probably goes without saying that the import of a Belgian to finish what an Italian had started (sounds like the beginning of a joke) is yet another reason Teatro Colón took so long to finish. When the Belgian arrived, he made some changes to the work already done, and then he added new stuff in a French style. So there ya go, an Italian-French hybrid of an opera house. Roberto (I wonder if he's Argentinean himself, he seemed very proud of Teatro Colón) made sure we knew that when the theater finally, at long last, opened for business in 1908, that it opened specifically on May 25. That's Argentina's birthday. No, I didn't know that either. They declared independence from Mexico on May 25, 1810. Golly shucks, if they'd just found more reasons to delay the thing another couple years, they could've opened it on the centennial. I imagine the city was keen to finally reap some economic reward, though, especially after all the bloody mayhem of the previous twenty years.
So anyway, when it opened on Argentina's lucky 98th, they inaugurated it with Verdi's Aida, which I reckon was very suitable given the opera house's significant Italian heritage.
And then, to honor the French portion of Teatro Colón's design, the second opera was Ambroise Thomas's adaptation of Hamlet. All told, Roberto said, Teatro Colón staged no less than seventeen operas that first season. That's incredible. I mean shit, if LA Opera puts on ten operas in a season, that's a lot. That's what they were doing a few years ago, during the twentieth anniversary season of 2005-06. You have to remember that each opera has several performances. You don't just stage an opera one time and move on. Those things cost so much and take so long to prepare. When you stage it, you do so multiple times, five or ten at least, to give folks the chance to see it and give yourself a chance to recoup the costs. LA Opera typically stages each opera at least six times, usually no more than ten. So for a ten-opera season, you're talking about a hundred or so total performances. Now think about Teatro Colón. Seventeen operas is pushing two hundred performances. Of course, this was 1908. Before TV. Before radio. Before movies. Before the Interwebs. Competition for our attention wasn't as intense as it is today.
Suffice it to say Teatro Colón was hot. In no time every name to conjure in the opera world wanted to perform there. According to Roberto, some of this had to do with the acoustics of the place. In plain English, that means how well sound projected. This of course is key if you're a singer. I've heard of some venues that open to great fanfare, they look awesome from outside, the architecture is innovative and all that, but the acoustics are terrible. The orchestra sounds like a racket, the instruments all blending together. The singers' voices echo and all that. Acoustics. Well, Teatro Colón's acoustics are awesome, and this played a role in luring the opera world's crème de la crème. Eventually the theater branched out to ballet.
Now what does all this have to do with the Ring Cycle? Exactly. Obviously Teatro Colón put on the Ring Cycle eventually. As I said above, no other opus marks an opera company's graduation to the big leagues than the Ring. Teatro Colón has performed the Ring regularly throughout the years, most recently in 2003, just before it closed. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The theater closed four years ago for some major renovations. Roberto said they're almost done. In fact, the opera house is due to reopen in about a month, just in time for Argentina's bicentennial.
Hilary Schor
Yet another SC prof, Hilary's a Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, and Law. From the SC site: "Professor Schor studies contemporary fiction, feminist theory, and representations of women in Victorian literature. Her research efforts focus on gender studies, film and popular culture, law and literature, and twentieth century fiction. She is the author of studies of the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, as well as essays on 'character trials,' Victorian spectacle, voice-over narration in novels and film, and Jane Eyre as a victim of sexual harassment. She is currently at work on a study of women, curiosity and the novel, which extends her reach far beyond her grasp, into 17th century poetry, 18th century epistolary fiction, 19th century fairy tales and optical devices, and 20th century time-travel films. In 2006-7 she served as Dean of Undergraduate Programs for the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. She is currently co-director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture, a joint center sponsored by USC College and the Gould School of Law."
As lofty as the above sounds, I have to say Hilary is one of the most down-to-earth professors I've ever seen, with an awesome sense of humor. She was by far the funniest speaker tonight, beating out Jim Kincaid for that title by a wide margin. What added to her shtick was her limp. She had a cast on her lower leg and must've suffered a certain amount of agony standing up there for fifteen minutes, yet it somehow worked.
Her lecture was called "Wagner and the Power of the Daughter." Again, sounds lofty, but as soon as she came up, she admitted flat out that she didn't know the first thing about opera. She'd never really been a fan. Her forte, as spelled out in her bio, is the Victorian novel. Recently she got to see LA Opera's new version of the Ring, all four of them. Rather than talk about the opera in operatic terms and pretend she knows what she's talking about, she approached it in Victorian novel terms. Brünnhilde, in her opinion, is the real hero of the piece, not Siegfried, the third opera's title character who has traditionally been viewed as the Cycle's hero. Hilary knew Siegfried's rep going in and was surprised to find out what an idiot he was.
Funny she should bring this up. Only three months ago (as you'll see on this blog), I attended an Opera League seminar on the Ring. It consisted of three lectures. The first was by Simon Williams, a regular at the seminars. He's an Englishman who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. At this particular seminar his topic was the Ring as an existential drama. And one of the many points he made (and he did cover quite a bit of ground) was that Brünnhilde is, in fact, more heroic than Siegfried. It is she, and not he, who discovers the freedom to do what she wants and make her own choices and not feel so beholden to her divine heritage the way Siegfried does. Actually, it's not that Siegfried's a moron, it's more that he's innocent. Simon touched on that too. You have to remember that Siegfried grew up in isolation in the middle of a huge forest, completely cut off from society, raised by the dwarf Mime (brother of the Ring's arch villain, Alberich), who only "cares" for Siegfried because he knows Siegfried is the only one who can kill Fafner, one of the giants from Das Rheingold who's since turned into a huge dragon and now guards the Ring. By the time Siegfried enters the real world, he's of an adult age, but a very child-like mind.
Hilary said she was surprised Siegfried was ever appropriated by the audience as a hero in the first place. It's not like Wagner's trying to camouflage Siegfried's naïveté. Brünnhilde, meanwhile, is someone we meet in the second opera, so we get a full opera to get to know her before we meet Siegfried in the third one. And seeing's how Die Walküre's something like five hours long, that's a major head start in our favorite Walküre's favor. And indeed, it's during Die Walküre that Brünnhilde learns about love, when she helps the pregnant Sieglinde hide so she can give birth to her baby boy....Siegfried. Awkward, I know, when you consider Brünnhilde and Siegfried are destined to be a couple. No matter. Point being, Brünnhilde has already come a long way, existentially speaking, by the time Siegfried finally grows up and leaves the forest, only to be used like some muscle-bound tool.
As a scholar of Dickens, Austin, and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, Hilary knows her share of strong female characters, and that was the big attraction about the Ring Cycle. Like Victorian novels, the Ring Cycle's setting is one in which men are traditionally the dominant sex. More than that, they carry titles, just as they did in Victorian times. The Victorians had earls, barons, lords, and the like. In the Ring, you've got the god of gods (Wotan), god of fire (Loge), and two giants who build Valhalla. And while the male characters have the symbolically more powerful titles (it's kind of hard to top god of gods), the females are stronger in their moral (i.e. more human) characteristics. Again, let's look at Brünnhilde. In Die Walküre, her dad Wotan tells her to stop bothering Sieglinde and just let the events play out, but Brünnhilde can't help but see common sense, just as the women had to do in Victorian novels. She can't just let a pregnant woman die, so she rescues Sieglinde from her abusive husband Hunding so she can give birth to Siegfried in peace. That's pretty cool. I never realized until tonight the strong parallels between the Ring and Victorian literature.
Hilary, by the way, was the one who mock-mimed swinging one of those Tony tubes like a lightsaber. I can't say I blame her. Those things do look playful, and it was kind of silly how the characters using them on stage are so damned serious. I think Hilary called them phallic symbols or something, which is kind of obvious. Her making fun of the Tony tubes was the closest this entire evening came to the program's title.
John Nuckols
And finally we get our first non-USC speaker of the night. John Nuckols (sounds like knuckles) is one of the top dawgs at LA Opera. He's Vice President of Advancement. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds important. He's been with LA Opera a good while now, going back almost to the company's founding in 1986. You could tell he was the more corporate VP type. Whereas the three professors thus far were very casual (Kincaid looked a wee bit disheveled as well) with a relatively laid back demeanor and sense of humor, ol' John here was decked out in a suit with black hair impeccably coifed and stony professional countenance as clean shaven as marble.
Not only did John look all business, he talked all business. The focus of his lecture was the business side of producing Wagner's Ring Cycle. As was the case above with Leo's lecture, John's sort of overlapped with stuff I've heard at past Opera League seminars. First, he spoke about hiring Achim Freyer back in 2007 or thereabouts. Achim was very reluctant to do it. He retired from the theater so he could focus on what he really wanted to do: Paint. But it's hard to earn a buck painting. Achim was eventually convinced to revive his stage directing career when the right offer came along from Placido Domingo.
John also told us this wasn't the first time LA Opera has tried to mount the Ring. I remember this from one of the past seminars, I think the one this past January. Apparently in 1990 or so, when LA Opera wasn't even five years old, they approached George Lucas's special effects company Industrial Light and Magic to see if they'd be interested in putting on a modern Star Wars-esque version of the Ring. ILM was definitely interested, but they charged way more than LA Opera could afford. They didn't even make it through preproduction before they saw how much it would cost and said forget it. Achim Freyer's Ring is budgeted at $32 million for all four operas. John didn't say exactly how much ILM's Ring would've cost, only that it was much more.
For the rest of the nineties and into the aughts, LA Opera would go back to the Ring table to give the whole thing a fresh look, but each time it just wasn't feasible. One thing I didn't know until the Ring Cycle preview at the Biltmore in January 2009, which I think John mentioned tonight as well, is how much it costs to advertise an opera. Every time LA Opera stages a new opera, they take out an ad in the Calendar section of Sunday's LA Times. They're usually small ads, not even a quarter of a page. Well, guess how much it costs to do that? John didn't give us the dollar amount, but he said that even if the opera sells out, they only break even. See, another thing you have to think about from a business perspective, is that LA Opera is handicapped by its venue, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I forget the exact number of seats it has (it says it on a plaque somewhere on the first level, I think), but it barely adds up to a thousand. I think it's somewhere in the eight to nine hundred range. Certainly that's a healthy number of seats, but for an opera house, that's pretty small. Consider the Met, San Francisco, or Vienna. They're huge. I've been to the Met a couple times and Vienna once. They've got a good two thousand seats or so. And that opera house Roberto talked about in Buenos Aires? Teatro Colón? That seats about twenty-five hundred. So you see, even if LA Opera consistently fills every seat, they will always struggle to be profitable because they spend as much on their productions as those two-thousand-seat venues. Why don't they lower their production budgets, you ask? Because they have to compete. It's paid off for their reputation at least. LA Opera now attracts the top singers in the world. The soprano singing Brünnhilde in our production, Linda Watson, is a big name to conjure. She sang Brünnhilde at last year's Bayreuth. But again, as John says, big names cost big money.
Going back to the history of LA Opera's relationship to the Ring, it sounds like they didn't get serious about it until they hired James Conlon to be the music director and principal conductor in 2006. When they approached him for the job, Maestro Conlon said he'd do it if they let him a) bring the Recovered Voices project he'd started in Paris and Cologne, and b) stage the Ring. He was pretty inflexible about that, apparently. While not as expensive as what the ILM Ring would've cost, $32 mil is still hefty. What made this even riskier was Achim Freyer's plan to give the Ring a very different spin. Those Tony tubes are just the tip of it. From the way certain characters are depicted (the woman singing Fricka in Das Rheingold is physically separated from the huge mannequin that's supposed to be her) to the makeup to the scrim to that little biplane that soars over the stage at the end of Das Rheingold, it's just a very new type of deal that those older folks may not be used to. It's a fine line, catering to your traditional audience while trying to lure fresh blood.
Now here's another rub, John said: As soon as they were waist deep in the preparations, with all the actors signed and Achim moving to a downtown L.A. loft so he could walk to the Dorothy Chandler and all that, just when everything was in motion....the Great Recession kicked in. And whenever the economy sucks, who always takes the big hit? That's right. Arts companies, theater companies, museums, you name it. Orange County's resident opera company, Opera Pacifica, went belly up. And yes, LA Opera very nearly died. But then, John said, they appealed to the LA County Board of Supervisors and were able to secure fourteen million dollars in emergency funding to keep the company alive. There's this one county supervisor in particular, Zev Yaraslovsky, who's always been a champion of downtown L.A.'s Music Center, which includes the Center Theater Group as well as LA Opera and LA Phil. Placido's good friends with him (naturally). I think he even went to Zev's office to make a personal appeal. Things were that dire.
John talked a bit about Bayreuth. Achim Freyer is hardly the first director to play with the Ring's setting. That trend started with none other than Wagner's grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang. It was in the 1950s or thereabouts when they, in that ongoing quest to attract a younger audience, started doing more modern productions at Bayreuth. They ended up opening the floodgates to modernity, which has been sort of a mixed bag of awesome and hokey. It reached a crescendo of sorts, literally, at the 1976 Bayreuth Festival, the centennial. That was the year they got this French guy named Patrice Chéreau to direct. He was only thirty-two at the time, incredibly young for someone to direct something like this (Achim Freyer's in his seventies). Patrice set his production in the Industrial Revolution. The gods and goddesses were white collar workers in business attire. The Rhine River was a hydroelectric dam. At first, the audience was furious. Patrice hung in there, though, and Bayreuth kept performing it over the next few years because the demand grew. At its very last performance in 1980, Patrice Chéreau's Ring got a ninety-minute standing ovation.
John admits LA Opera's Ring, which isn't set in any particular time or place, is a risk, but it's one he believes in. He wanted to be sure to give props to, and make sure we were grateful for the vision of, the late great Edgar Baitzel, LA Opera's Chief Operating Officer who passed away from cancer three years ago at the age of fifty-one. I remember reading an appreciation about him in the LA Opera program soon after his death. It was written by Placido, who seemed pretty distraught. I'd never heard of this guy before then, but Chief Operating Officer is one of those roles where it's like, if they're doing their job right, they're invisible.
By the time he joined LA Opera about ten years ago to take over artistic operations, Edgar was in his mid forties and had already tread quite a career path. He worked at opera companies all over Europe, including major ones like Bavaria (he was a native German) as well as Nice and Bonn. He'd barely gotten settled at LA Opera before they promoted him to artistic director, followed by COO a couple years after that. It was thanks to Edgar, John said, that LA Opera has grown so quickly for such a young company. Remember above in Roberto's section when I said LA Opera's hundred performances in 2005-06 was a lot? Well, Edgar's a big reason we had the money and talent to pull that off. It was thanks to Edgar too, apparently, that we've been attracting all this directorial talent, including Achim, Julie Taymor, David Cronenberg, Maximilian Schell, William Friedkin, and Garry Marshall. Edgar's the one who commissioned Julie Taymor to direct and her husband Elliot Goldenthal to compose that brand new opera Grendel, a take on Beowulf from you-know-who's point of view, to cap off the twentieth anniversary season in the spring of '06. On a side note, I found out just last year in my Temple U. alumni magazine that the guy who played Grendel, a black guy from Philly named Eric Owens, is also a Temple alum. That was a pretty clever opera, I have to admit, how Julie Taymor used people clad head to toe in black spandex so as to be invisible on stage, holding little dolls representing the Danes next to the girth-blessed Eric Owens. And then when the singers playing the Danish came on stage, Julie had this humungous puppet as Grendel, so huge the head was out of sight in the rafters.
Pretty amazing, huh? This guy Edgar engineered all that in such a short amount of time. Since he was instrumental in luring Achim Freyer to the Ring, I guess you could say this production and this festival and everything related to it is an extension of his legacy. John called Edgar a "visionary taken well ahead of his time."
RIP Edgar Baitzel
John Carlos Rowe
Now let's go back to USC one more time with this, the fifth of sixth lectures on this pleasant spring Ring Festival evening. Professor Rowe is officially the Associates Chair in Humanities. He also chairs the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Unofficially, dude writes his professorial ass off. Check it out, right? From usc.edu: "He is the author of Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1976), Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (Columbia University Press, 1997), The Other Henry James (Duke University Press, 1998), Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The New American Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), as well as over 100 scholarly essays and critical reviews. He is the editor of: The Vietnam War and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 1991), New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 'Culture' and the Problem of the Disciplines (Columbia University Press, 1998), Post-Nationalist American Studies (University of California Press, 2000), and Selections from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the New Riverside Editions (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). His current scholarly projects are: Culture and U.S. Imperialism since World War II, The Rediscovery of America: Multicultural Literature and the New Democracy, and Blackwell’s Companion to American Studies."
So anyways, he likes to write. And as you can tell, he really likes Henry James. In fact, guess from which angle he was viewing the Ring Cycle in his fifteen-minute spiel? Yep, the Henry James angle. And he was very specific too. In the early 1870s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, Henry James, an American by birth, did quite a bit of traveling across Europe. Among his favorite stops was Italy. Like any good writer, he wrote what he knew. His stories, while fiction, have an underlying thread of realism fed by his observations on the Continent.
At the age of thirty-one he wrote an Italy-set short story called "Adina." This was well before he wrote the stuff he's known for. The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were still ten years away. And The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl? Fuhgeddaboutit. Dude was in his sixties when he wrote those. So he wasn't really a name yet, although he had published his first novel at this point, Watch and Ward. "Adina" has a plot with more than a few echoes of the Ring Cycle apparently. It's about sixteen thousand words long, which means it dwells in that limbo between long short story and short novel or novella.
"Adina" is about a chap called Angelo, who's got this insatiable appetite for revenge. And he wants revenge because of money lost in a river. Or something like that. A river is involved, that's what I know. In other words, this Angelo guy has a distinct parallel to Alberich. And the river in the story is obviously inspired by the Rhine. And the money's the Ring, etc. You get the idea.
Here's a quote from "Adina": "The days passed by and Angelo's revenge still hung fire.
Scrope never met his fate at a short turning of one of the dusky Roman streets; he came in punctually every evening at eleven o'clock. I wondered whether our brooding friend had already spent the sinister force of a nature formed to be lazily contented. I hoped so, but I was wrong. We had gone to walk one afternoon,----the ladies, Scrope and I,----in the charming Villa Borghese, and, to escape from the rattle of the fashionable world and its distraction, we had wandered away to an unfrequented corner where the old mouldering wall and the slim black cypresses and the untrodden grass made, beneath the splendid Roman sky, the most harmonious of pictures."
After that, the Wagnerian influence becomes downright bold-faced. "Adina" features direct quotes from Tristan und Isolde. You've got verses five through eight here:
Frisch weht der Wind (Fresh blows the wind)
der Heimat zu: (towards home:)
mein irisch Kind, (my Irish kin)
wo weilest du? (where linger you?)
And then later in the story Henry James throws in another Tristan quote, this one from scene three, verse 24, as follows:
Oed' und leer das Meer (Desolate and empty [is] the sea).
Wow, huh? Henry James was an opera fan apparently, and from an age by which today's standards would deem him young. He was about my age when he wrote "Adina." I'm not sure if early thirties was considered as young then as it is today, or if he'd've been as out of place at an Opera League event as I sometimes feel. Anyway, that's a pretty cool piece of minutia from John Carlos, this obscure short story by a famous author. Well done.
While he didn't give it as much weight (he only had fifteen minutes like everyone else, don't forget), John Carlos also talked a bit about another famous writer and that writer's very famous opus: T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. T.S. was thirty-four when he published The Waste Land, about the same age Henry James was when he published "Adina." Only, whereas Henry James was only getting started at that point in his writing life, I'm not sure T.S. Eliot climbed any higher after The Waste Land. I'm hardly a poetry connoisseur, but every time I hear T.S. Eliot's name, I usually hear The Waste Land soon after. He still did okay, though. T.S. lived another forty-some-odd years and wrote very prolifically. And not just poems either. Like many poets since Ancient Greece, T.S. branched out to playwriting. When he was in his sixties, he wrote this one play called The Cocktail Party which scored him a Tony for Best Play. I bet not a lot of people know T.S. Eliot won a Tony for a Broadway play. And get this: He scored two more Tonys in the early eighties, almost twenty years after he died, for two of his poems being used in Cats. Is that wild or what? Again, how many people would associate T.S. Eliot with Cats for Pete's sake? But a lot of people don't know that the whole Cats musical was adapted from a book of poems by T.S. called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He also wrote a ton of nonfiction as well, critical theory type stuff about poetry as well as studies of certain poets, like John Dryden and Dante. Henry James wrote quite a bit too, but T.S. put him to shame. Nonetheless, with such a Godzilla-sized oeuvre, it all comes back to The Waste Land, doesn't it?
John Carlos's point in bringing up The Waste Land was that, in writing it, T.S. Eliot was aiming for the same goal Wagner had with the Ring: Gesamtkunstwerk. There ya go, a nice huge German word for ya. Like a lot of German words, it's actually made up of a few words. Gesamt means "total," Kunst is "art," and Werk is, you guessed it, "work." In composing the Ring Cycle, Wagner wanted to create a piece of art that wasn't just opera, but an amalgam of all the artistic disciplines: Composing music, playing music, poetry, singing, painting (set design), costume making, everything. Wagner wanted his Ring to be the artistic everything. Why? Because that's what the Ancient Greeks did. As practically the inventors of drama, when Greeks put on a play, they didn't just think of it as a play. Their "werks" were a vehicle for the entire spectrum of the arts, all the stuff I mentioned above. Greek plays always had a chorus, the actors wore masks and recited poetry, all that stuff. The Greeks, in other words, churned out Gesamtkunstwerks as a matter of course. Wagner tried to revive that practice with the Ring, and so did T.S. with The Waste Land. I have to confess I've never read The Waste Land. I seem to remember taking a gander at it a while back, seeing if it was something I'd want to invest my precious spare time in, and all I remember was that the text seemed inscrutable. But I was younger then. Maybe I should give it a fairer shake now that I'm older and wiser. As a total artwork, John Carlos said The Waste Land contains a "vast range of culture and literature."
Imogen von Tannenberg
We arrive at the sixth and final spiel of the night: "Wagner and Anti-Semitism" by Imogen von Tannenberg. Yes, as I'm sure you can tell by the name, she's German. But no, she does not teach at USC. Imogen is the director of this place out in Pacific Palisades called Villa Aurora. I've never been there, but it looks beautiful. According to the site, it's an artists residence "to promote and foster German-American cultural exchange and to remember the European exiles that settled in Southern California [e.g. Thomas Mann], Villa Aurora offers a variety of public lectures, screenings and performances.... Our artists-in-residence program and Feuchtwanger Fellowship are at the core of Villa Aurora's activities." Cool, huh? Go to the site when you get a chance, villa-aurora.org. Apparently they've got one in Berlin as well.
They have good reason to talk about German exiles settling in SoCal and naming their fellowship the Feuchtwanger Fellowship. Villa Aurora was the residence of Lion Feuchtwanger. Lion was a German-Jewish writer who wrote novels, plays, and poetry, and became a name to conjure in the literary world during Germany's Weimar era, the twenties, when Lion was in his forties.
One of his major works from that era was this novel called Jud Süß, which literally means Jew Seuss, but which was given the title Power in the English translation. Around the same time, he wrote a play with Bertolt Brecht called The Life of Edward II of England. Brecht was himself a playwright of note (and as a side note, our Ring Cycle director Achim Freyer was a pupil of Brecht's in the mid fifties, during the last two years of Brecht's life). Lion and Bertolt got along famously not only because they both liked to write, but because they were both very left leaning in their politics. Lion wasn't shy about voicing his political views. When the National Socialists--the Nazis--started making a lot of noise in the late twenties, still years before Hitler came to power, Lion didn't waste a minute in speaking out against them. Added to the fact that he was Jewish, the guy was practically putting a bullseye on his back. When Hitler became Reichskanzler in '33, he went after Lion right away. He sent agents to his house, but Lion had thought ahead. He and his wife Marta left Germany, never to return, and settled in France. The Nazi thugs gutted the house, took everything, and eventually Hitler revoked Lion's citizenship and branded him "public enemy number one." The ironic-as-hell thing here is that Hitler's propaganda guy, Joseph Goebbels, had Jud Süß adapted into a movie, albeit with such an anti-Semitic slant you wonder why he bothered.
Lion and Marta, meanwhile, only had seven years to enjoy France. In 1940 the Nazis showed up, and this time Lion didn't get out in time. He was shipped to an internment camp. But get this: He never stopped writing. How awesome is that? Not even a friggin' concentration camp could dampen his creative spirit. He didn't write just anything either. He kept a diary of his time in the camp that was eventually published as a memoir called The Devil in France, in which he continued taking it balls deep to the Nazis. Speaking of balls, this guy obviously had a huge pair. Eventually he escaped the camp with the help of a bunch of people. He and Marta fled to Spain, across Spain and into Portugal, to the tip of the Iberian Peninsula, where a Good Samaritan gave them her ticket so Mr. and Mrs. Feuchtwanger could go to the States together (they already had one ticket booked). Eventually they arrived in L.A. and bought the house now known as Villa Aurora. Lion didn't miss a beat with his writing.
After he died in the late fifties, Marta continued living there on her own for a good while, another thirty years or so. During that time she carried her husband's torch proudly and with grace. Before she passed away in the late eighties, she gave all her husband's stuff, including writings and photos and his entire library, to USC. I was a student at SC in the late nineties and remember the main library on campus, Doheny. Somewhere inside there, SC built a special little library dedicated to all of Lion's stuff, appropriately called the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.
I didn't mean to go into all that backstory about Villa Aurora, but perhaps it's just as well, what with its themes of anti-Semitism and persecution, since that was the topic of Imogen's lecture in the context of the Ring Cycle. Imogen looked the way you would imagine many German and Nordic women to look: Tall and blonde. She sat a few rows in front of me during the first five lectures, and I have to confess to sneaking the occasional glance at her. Mind you, I had no idea she herself was one of tonight's speakers until she got up and took the floor after John Carlos.
Her beauty, however, couldn't stop the disillusionment. Imogen was the least interesting of tonight's speakers. She basically had no personality and delivered her piece in a very cold, mechanical way. That said, her spiel was somewhat interesting. She said that when viewed a certain way, the Ring seems to have undertones of anti-Semitism in the guise of Siegfried. Siegfried has traditionally been viewed as the Cycle's hero. But look more closely--and some of this has come up in past Opera League seminars--and he could be viewed as an authoritarian figure in the way he can kill so easily. The villains of the Ring, brothers Hagen and Alberich, could be viewed as Wagner's projection of Jews. They're money hungry. They want that Ring, and they and their fellow Nibelungen mine for more gold. But here comes the indestructible Siegfried to mess everything up for them. Imogen's point, I guess, was that while we should certainly enjoy the Ring Cycle for the artistic magnum opus it is, we should also be mindful of the man who wrote it, Wagner, an unabashed anti-Semite.
Another thing I didn't like about Imogen was that she didn't talk much during the Q&A. After she was finished, all six speakers came up and took questions. Before anyone from the audience could raise their hand, Hilary Schor didn't waste a minute going after Imogen's positing Siegfried as a hero. Hilary said Siegfried was "an idiot." You can't talk about Siegfried without talking about his innocent naïveté, but I think "idiot" may have been a bit harsh. As I said above, Siegfried grew up in the middle of the woods, miles from civilization. But yeah, Hilary's point was solid, and good for her to spot it, considering the Ring operas, and opera in general, are new to her. Now you think Imogen may have responded to Hilary's point, but she didn't. She just sat there and brooded during the rest of the Q&A. Boooo!
That's a wrap, folks. A pretty interesting evening, examining the endlessly fascinating Ring Cycle from six unique angles. The only thing I'm a bit down on SC about is the way they marketed this, using very recognizable icons like Nietzsche and Star Wars even though, as you can now see, tonight had very little to do with either. No matter, let Ring Festival LA begin!
Make no mistake, staging Wagner's four-opera opus is not for the faint of heart. I think it was either LA Opera's general director (and legendary tenor) Placido Domingo or our music director/chief conductor James Conlon who said that an opera company can't really mature to adulthood until they face up to tackling the Ring Cycle, a piece so demanding, complex, with innumerable moving parts, not to speak of characters, that Wagner himself was convinced there didn't exist on Earth a theater that could pull it off properly. That's why he built the opera house at Bayreuth in the German state of Bavaria. That theater has staged the Ring every single August (except for a few years during World War II) since Wagner finished building it in 1876. That's THE Ring Festival. No, I haven't been, although I've met a few folks at Opera League events who've gone. This one guy, who volunteers for the League as the Comms Manager, went last August and was disillusioned by the very modern spin the Ring was given by its director. Apparently the characters were all teenagers with skateboards or something. This guy was lamenting how opera has become a director's medium, with less emphasis placed on the music. Anyway, perhaps one day I'll go to the Bayreuth Festival just so I can say I went, check it off the bucket list if you will. Speaking of directors spinning their own Ring, our director, German artist Achim Freyer, has most definitely put his personal stamp on LA Opera's Ring. Only, instead of something hokey and modern, he's brought his Ring outside of time. It doesn't really take place in any recognizable real-world setting, and that's given him license to create some of the most beautiful sets and costumes and lighting design I've ever seen on stage. I saw all four of his Rings as they were staged piecemeal, so I'll be going into this Ring knowing what to expect. Terrific stuff.
Anyway, not to get too sidetracked, but I just wanted to make it clear for the non-opera folk in the audience what a big deal it is for an opera company to mount the Ring. As an LA Opera regular for a good ten years now, I have to confess to feeling, well, invested in the company, kind of like a parent. So I have to confess as well to feeling a wee bit of pride that LA Opera, at the relatively young age of twenty-four (practically nascent compared to many east coast and European opera companies), is reckoning with the Ring. This will be a true watershed and no mistake.
As I said above, LA Opera has already staged all four Ring operas piecemeal, going back to early 2009. They did the first two, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, during the second half of the 2008-09 season, spaced apart by several weeks, followed by Siegfried last fall to kick off the 2009-10 season, and just recently the fourth and final installment, the nearly six-hour(!) Götterdämmerung. And now that they're done, LA Opera will stage all four--the entire cycle--three times over this May and June. Cycle 1 will be performed from May 29 to June 6, cycle 2 from June 8-16, and cycle 3 from June 18-26. I've opted for the third cycle. That'll buy me time to experience as much of the Ring Festival as possible since it ends just a few days after I see Götterdämmerung. I may have time to squeeze in one more thing after that, and then that'll be a wrap.
Speaking of Ring Festival LA: With a hundred-plus events going on over ten weeks, obviously it's impossible for me to attend all of them, or even half of them. That may be a given, but believe you me, if I didn't have a job, and money and time weren't factors, I might actually make the effort. As it is, with a job and writing and other hobbies besides--oh yeah, and a life--I've decided on a system of picking one thing a week. There's quite a bit to choose from. At tonight's event, my first Ring Festival event and one of the first overall, they had copies of the Ring Festival guidebook. At about sixty pages, it's got everything going on from now to June 30, all nicely bucketed by category with a calendar index in the back. The categories are Cinema, Conversations and Symposia, Eclectica, Educational, Hospitality, Performing Arts, Theatre, and Visual Arts. As far as how the events were planned on which dates, I can't discern any particular logic to it. With so many organizations participating, it seems they all chose their dates based on when they had room on their own calendars. In other words, you've got all kinds of stuff from all eight categories happening all the time. This is why the calendar index is very handy. Not only does it list the events sequentially by date, but next to each event is a symbol indicating which category that event falls into (e.g. a green CIN box means Cinema, a red C/S box means Conversations and Symposia, a purple EDU box means Educational, and so on). Play your cards right, and you could catch several events from several different categories in a single week. That won't be me, but if I were a trust fund baby... I should say, though, that next month I'm taking off ten days from work when my mom flies out to visit, and already I've got us on the calendar for several Festival things during her stay: A play at the Geffen, an exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art, another exhibit at the Getty Villa, and maybe one or two other things.
This brings me to tonight's event: From Nietzsche to Star Wars: The Wagnerian Power of the Ring. One of the events in the Conversations and Symposia category, it's sponsored by the University of Southern California's Master of Liberal Studies program. The host venue was the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) downtown, just a block or so down Grand Ave. from the opera house, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Here's how the event is described in the Festival guide.
Through his Ring Cycle, Wagner has profoundly influenced the way we think, feel, and imagine the 21st century world. A panel of experts, including USC Master of Liberal Studies program faculty, take on how the Ring themes and symbols have permeated 20th century literature, philosophy, psychology, and even movies and cartoons.
That's a very sweeping summary, eh? Here's what happened in plain English: Six people, including a few from SC's Master of Liberal Studies program, each spent fifteen minutes giving a spiel about the Ring from a particular angle. And honestly, I have no idea why this event's called From Nietzsche to Star Wars. None of the six speakers mentioned either Nietzsche or Star Wars. Well, one of them mentioned Star Wars, but only in a funny way related to the Tony tubes used as swords and spears in the LA Opera version.
I'd been to MOCA before, but it had been a while. In fact, I think the only other time I'd been here was way back in 2003. Man, has it been that long? It was in October 2003 when Disney Hall opened and became the new home for LA Phil (meaning LA Phil and LA Opera no longer had to share the Dorothy Chandler). Timed with Disney Hall's opening was a Frank Gehry exhibit at MOCA (Gehry designed Disney Hall). The exhibit included some of his Disney models and concept sketches as well as models and sketches of other famous stuff he did, like that museum in Bilbao which, like Disney Hall, looks like a shiny alien spaceship. The exhibit also had stuff that was in progress, projects Gehry and his company were just getting started on or were in the thick of. Don't ask me what those were. I'm sort of startled as I write this that Disney Hall's been open six and a half years already. Where the heck have those years gone?
Tonight's event was in the Ahmanson Auditorium. Obviously I'd never been in that part of MOCA, and it's easy to miss if you're only there for an exhibit. You go in and then down the stairs and toward the back of the main building, well away from the exhibit space. In the little lobby outside the auditorium, USC had a bunch of tables set up with various programs and brochures. You had stuff from their Liberal Studies program as well as more general SC stuff. And they also offered a healthy mixture of opera-related brochures. This is where I first saw the official guide for Ring Festival LA. I didn't know they'd be making a guide for it. In my excitement, I grabbed a couple. No, I didn't take any of the SC materials. I'm not ready to go back to school. Plus, I have to admit to being a bit taken aback by the in-your-face nature of SC's presence tonight. It's almost as if the point was less about the Ring and more about SC showing off.
After I grabbed an aisle seat toward the bottom and on the right side, who do I see but Susan Kamei going around to all the folks in the audience to make sure they each had a Master of Liberal Studies brochure. I've only met this woman once before, at an alumni event for the program I was in, Masters of Professional Writing. It was exactly two years ago, April 2008, at the house of an alum in Los Feliz. I sat next to Susan and got to know her a bit. She hadn't been there when I was a student in 1998-99. She seemed pretty nice and took my name and contact info so she could put me on the writing program's mailing list. That's funny because I think since then I've gotten maybe two or three e-mails from them about other alumni events. One time this woman called me and invited me to an alumni event mere days before it happened, almost like I was an afterthought. One thing Susan said that night two years ago was that the writing seminar I took in Prague in June 1999 wasn't legit. Apparently the guy who'd been in charge of the writing program at that time, James Ragan, had done something seriously naughty. Financial fraud or something. The MPW program had just emerged on the other side of some internal turmoil when that alumni event happened. But don't ask me about the exact nature of the turmoil because Susan was pretty tight-lipped about it. I just remember having a bad taste in my mouth after she said that, well, nowadays they have a travel program that's actually legit. Ouch! The Prague trip cost me over a thousand dollars!
Susan's official title is Associate Dean at USC's College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. She's in charge of Advanced and Professional Programs, which means she oversees my old program as well as this Master of Liberal Studies thing and a bunch of other stuff. And damn, according to her bio, this gal's whip smart. She did her undergrad in Russian at UC Irvine and got to study at Leningrad State University, which I assume today is called St. Petersberg State. She followed that up with a law degree at Georgetown and years of experience practicing corporate and real estate law. She was senior veep and district council executive director for the Urban Land Institute. Her first gig at SC was at the Lusk Center for Real Estate and the Master of Real Estate Development program. I'm sure glad I didn't know any of this when I sat next to her at the alumni event two years ago. Jesus, how intimidating. When Susan stopped by my seat tonight to give me a Liberal Studies brochure, she stared at me for an extra beat or two. Look familiar, did I?
Susan only spoke for a couple minutes at the very beginning of the program. She welcomed all of us to the show, gave a quick plug for the MLS program, and introduced the night's moderator, Jim Kincaid, USC English Professor and chair of the MLS program. On paper Jim's a pretty impressive guy as well. He's been at SC since '87. According to the MLS site, he researches "critical theory, American Studies and Queer studies." Before SC, he "taught at Ohio State, Berkeley, and Colorado. Kincaid's earlier work in Victorian literature and culture and in literary theory has yielded to publication in cultural studies, most recently in the history and current cultural practices of eroticizing children and instituting elaborate scapegoating rituals to disguise what we are doing. He regularly teaches classes in criminality/lunacy/perversion, in age studies, in censorship, and in other areas of literary, political, and cultural studies." Wow, huh? One example of a class he teaches is The Culture of Comedy. That makes sense because, while he comes across as very regal on paper, in person he's hilarious. I don't mean that kind of standup comedian type deal, throwing out the zingers. Nah, he's just this goofy ol' coot. Several times over the course of the evening, for example, he asked the audience if anyone knew anything about Twitter, because apparently MOCA wanted to tweet after each lecture. "Does anyone know about this so-called Twitter?" I was rolling on my ass.
Jim plugged this one class the MLS program is offering this summer about the Ring Cycle. I forget the exact schedule. I think it's a two-hour class one or two nights a week for four weeks. I'd probably take it if I had the time. Technically I do have the time. Part of me is seriously considering it. The main obstacle would be the commute. Driving from the Valley to downtown (SC's about a mile or so directly south of the city center) is never fun.
And now for a recap of the fifteen-minute spiels...
Leo Braudy
Jim introduced the first speaker, Leo Braudy. Yes, he's an SC professor. American lit, specifically. From the SC site: "He is among America's leading film critics. Braudy, a frequent finalist for national book awards, teaches Restoration literature and history, American culture after World War Two, popular culture and critical theory, including the histories of visual style and film genres. His work appears in journals such as American Film, Film Quarterly, Genre, Novel, Partisan Review, and Prose Studies, to name a few. His book Jean Renoir: The World of His Films was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's. His most recent book, From Chivalry to Terrorism, was named Best of the Best by the Los Angeles Times and a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times."
Focusing on the Ring in the context of nationalism and romanticism, Leo's lecture was basically a distillation of another Ring Cycle lecture I heard at the Getty Center a year ago March. On a Saturday in March 2009, the Getty Center put on a day-long event called Illuminating German Art and Opera. I blogged about it here if you want to jump back to the March 2009 archive. Anyway, the first lecture that morning was called "History and Myth: Richard Wagner and the German Middle Ages." It was given by this young German woman named Henrike Manuwald. She'd just gotten her doctorate in art history and German lit and was about to head back to Germany to be an assistant prof at Freiburg Unviersity's Medieval German lit department. Henrike's lecture was a full thirty minutes. She covered quite a bit in that time, going all the way back to Charlemagne in the 8th century, and how these monks during his reign started illuminating manuscripts to tell stories passed down from the ages, and then how that practice eventually spread to the secular world circa 1300.
Leo, like Henrike, put the Ring Cycle in the context not only of where Wagner was in his life when he was working on it, but where the German people as a whole were, psychologically speaking. We're talking the 1840s and '50s, a time of bloody revolution in Central Europe. The German people were fractured into several dozen independent states, principalities, and duchies. While that was a vast improvement over the 350 or so independent states two hundred years earlier, it still hurt the German sense of identity. The revolution of the late 1840s and early 1850s didn't help matters at all. Indeed, it was so brutal that many Germans literally fled for their very lives. You've probably heard about all the Irish immigrants who came over during the potato famine, right? That happened around the same time as the German revolution, which is why Ellis Island saw a huge influx of Germans and Irish at the same time.
Not everyone fled, of course. Exhibit A: Wagner. He and his drinking buddies stayed, but they were still pretty bummed out. They, like other German artists and writers and composers of the time, dealt with the harsh present not by physically fleeing their homeland but by mentally fleeing back to the past. Specifically, they fled back to the German Middle Ages. In desperate need to reestablish a sense of German identity, they viewed the Middle Ages as the good old days. The rest of Henrike's lecture went into the whole thing about manuscript illumination as a medium for recounting Germanic tales and myths, the same tales and myths Wagner eventually adapted for his Ring. Leo didn't talk about that at all. Remember, dude only had fifteen minutes. He just wanted to make the point that the Ring Cycle was born out of a rise of German nationalism and romanticism engineered by German artists in response to their morale being in the gutter and their sense of identity being fractured.
Roberto Ignacio Díaz
Roberto is an SC Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature. From usc.edu: "Professor Díaz researches Latin American literary and cultural history with a focus on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written on multilingualism in Spanish American literature and on the prose of Borges. He is presently at work on a book-length study of opera in Latin America."
It makes perfect sense that's he writing a book about opera in Latin America, as that was indeed the focus of his fifteen minutes. According to Roberto, you can't talk about South American opera without mentioning Teatro Colón, the opera house in Buenos Aries. I have to admit I'd never heard of it until tonight, but you see? This is why I love events like this. The Opera League seminars have taught me all kinds of stuff about opera, but they've never covered opera's history in South America. Roberto did a decent job making up for that in a mere quarter hour. I learned, for instance, that Teatro Colón, which in English means Columbus Theatre, is generally considered one of the top five opera venues in the world. It's up there with the Met, La Scala, and Vienna.
Apparently Teatro Colón took something like twenty years to build. Not because it's especially huge or anything, although it is kind of big. Like a lot of opera houses and large theaters, it seats a good couple thousand or so, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was all the drama surrounding its construction. The original architect, some Italian guy, kicked the bucket only two years after he laid the cornerstone. And then get this: His pupil, an up-and-coming Italian architect who took over the project, was friggin' murdered. Obviously their design of Teatro Colón was Italian in style, but I have no idea if that's why the pupil architect was murdered or what, or if it was something more random like a mugging or something. Roberto didn't go into it. Finances, or the lack thereof, caused more headaches and delays. Why, you ask? Because the Italian businessman who was shouldering the bulk of the financing...(wait for it)...died! I shit you not. The three key players overseeing Teatro Colón's construction all died. Roberto also mentioned bickering and infighting among city officials about exactly where in Buenos Aires Teatro Colón should be built. Oy vay.
Eventually they brought in an architect from Belgium to wrap things up. It probably goes without saying that the import of a Belgian to finish what an Italian had started (sounds like the beginning of a joke) is yet another reason Teatro Colón took so long to finish. When the Belgian arrived, he made some changes to the work already done, and then he added new stuff in a French style. So there ya go, an Italian-French hybrid of an opera house. Roberto (I wonder if he's Argentinean himself, he seemed very proud of Teatro Colón) made sure we knew that when the theater finally, at long last, opened for business in 1908, that it opened specifically on May 25. That's Argentina's birthday. No, I didn't know that either. They declared independence from Mexico on May 25, 1810. Golly shucks, if they'd just found more reasons to delay the thing another couple years, they could've opened it on the centennial. I imagine the city was keen to finally reap some economic reward, though, especially after all the bloody mayhem of the previous twenty years.
So anyway, when it opened on Argentina's lucky 98th, they inaugurated it with Verdi's Aida, which I reckon was very suitable given the opera house's significant Italian heritage.
And then, to honor the French portion of Teatro Colón's design, the second opera was Ambroise Thomas's adaptation of Hamlet. All told, Roberto said, Teatro Colón staged no less than seventeen operas that first season. That's incredible. I mean shit, if LA Opera puts on ten operas in a season, that's a lot. That's what they were doing a few years ago, during the twentieth anniversary season of 2005-06. You have to remember that each opera has several performances. You don't just stage an opera one time and move on. Those things cost so much and take so long to prepare. When you stage it, you do so multiple times, five or ten at least, to give folks the chance to see it and give yourself a chance to recoup the costs. LA Opera typically stages each opera at least six times, usually no more than ten. So for a ten-opera season, you're talking about a hundred or so total performances. Now think about Teatro Colón. Seventeen operas is pushing two hundred performances. Of course, this was 1908. Before TV. Before radio. Before movies. Before the Interwebs. Competition for our attention wasn't as intense as it is today.Suffice it to say Teatro Colón was hot. In no time every name to conjure in the opera world wanted to perform there. According to Roberto, some of this had to do with the acoustics of the place. In plain English, that means how well sound projected. This of course is key if you're a singer. I've heard of some venues that open to great fanfare, they look awesome from outside, the architecture is innovative and all that, but the acoustics are terrible. The orchestra sounds like a racket, the instruments all blending together. The singers' voices echo and all that. Acoustics. Well, Teatro Colón's acoustics are awesome, and this played a role in luring the opera world's crème de la crème. Eventually the theater branched out to ballet.
Now what does all this have to do with the Ring Cycle? Exactly. Obviously Teatro Colón put on the Ring Cycle eventually. As I said above, no other opus marks an opera company's graduation to the big leagues than the Ring. Teatro Colón has performed the Ring regularly throughout the years, most recently in 2003, just before it closed. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The theater closed four years ago for some major renovations. Roberto said they're almost done. In fact, the opera house is due to reopen in about a month, just in time for Argentina's bicentennial.
Hilary Schor
Yet another SC prof, Hilary's a Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, and Law. From the SC site: "Professor Schor studies contemporary fiction, feminist theory, and representations of women in Victorian literature. Her research efforts focus on gender studies, film and popular culture, law and literature, and twentieth century fiction. She is the author of studies of the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, as well as essays on 'character trials,' Victorian spectacle, voice-over narration in novels and film, and Jane Eyre as a victim of sexual harassment. She is currently at work on a study of women, curiosity and the novel, which extends her reach far beyond her grasp, into 17th century poetry, 18th century epistolary fiction, 19th century fairy tales and optical devices, and 20th century time-travel films. In 2006-7 she served as Dean of Undergraduate Programs for the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. She is currently co-director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture, a joint center sponsored by USC College and the Gould School of Law."
As lofty as the above sounds, I have to say Hilary is one of the most down-to-earth professors I've ever seen, with an awesome sense of humor. She was by far the funniest speaker tonight, beating out Jim Kincaid for that title by a wide margin. What added to her shtick was her limp. She had a cast on her lower leg and must've suffered a certain amount of agony standing up there for fifteen minutes, yet it somehow worked.
Her lecture was called "Wagner and the Power of the Daughter." Again, sounds lofty, but as soon as she came up, she admitted flat out that she didn't know the first thing about opera. She'd never really been a fan. Her forte, as spelled out in her bio, is the Victorian novel. Recently she got to see LA Opera's new version of the Ring, all four of them. Rather than talk about the opera in operatic terms and pretend she knows what she's talking about, she approached it in Victorian novel terms. Brünnhilde, in her opinion, is the real hero of the piece, not Siegfried, the third opera's title character who has traditionally been viewed as the Cycle's hero. Hilary knew Siegfried's rep going in and was surprised to find out what an idiot he was.
Funny she should bring this up. Only three months ago (as you'll see on this blog), I attended an Opera League seminar on the Ring. It consisted of three lectures. The first was by Simon Williams, a regular at the seminars. He's an Englishman who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. At this particular seminar his topic was the Ring as an existential drama. And one of the many points he made (and he did cover quite a bit of ground) was that Brünnhilde is, in fact, more heroic than Siegfried. It is she, and not he, who discovers the freedom to do what she wants and make her own choices and not feel so beholden to her divine heritage the way Siegfried does. Actually, it's not that Siegfried's a moron, it's more that he's innocent. Simon touched on that too. You have to remember that Siegfried grew up in isolation in the middle of a huge forest, completely cut off from society, raised by the dwarf Mime (brother of the Ring's arch villain, Alberich), who only "cares" for Siegfried because he knows Siegfried is the only one who can kill Fafner, one of the giants from Das Rheingold who's since turned into a huge dragon and now guards the Ring. By the time Siegfried enters the real world, he's of an adult age, but a very child-like mind.
Hilary said she was surprised Siegfried was ever appropriated by the audience as a hero in the first place. It's not like Wagner's trying to camouflage Siegfried's naïveté. Brünnhilde, meanwhile, is someone we meet in the second opera, so we get a full opera to get to know her before we meet Siegfried in the third one. And seeing's how Die Walküre's something like five hours long, that's a major head start in our favorite Walküre's favor. And indeed, it's during Die Walküre that Brünnhilde learns about love, when she helps the pregnant Sieglinde hide so she can give birth to her baby boy....Siegfried. Awkward, I know, when you consider Brünnhilde and Siegfried are destined to be a couple. No matter. Point being, Brünnhilde has already come a long way, existentially speaking, by the time Siegfried finally grows up and leaves the forest, only to be used like some muscle-bound tool.
As a scholar of Dickens, Austin, and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, Hilary knows her share of strong female characters, and that was the big attraction about the Ring Cycle. Like Victorian novels, the Ring Cycle's setting is one in which men are traditionally the dominant sex. More than that, they carry titles, just as they did in Victorian times. The Victorians had earls, barons, lords, and the like. In the Ring, you've got the god of gods (Wotan), god of fire (Loge), and two giants who build Valhalla. And while the male characters have the symbolically more powerful titles (it's kind of hard to top god of gods), the females are stronger in their moral (i.e. more human) characteristics. Again, let's look at Brünnhilde. In Die Walküre, her dad Wotan tells her to stop bothering Sieglinde and just let the events play out, but Brünnhilde can't help but see common sense, just as the women had to do in Victorian novels. She can't just let a pregnant woman die, so she rescues Sieglinde from her abusive husband Hunding so she can give birth to Siegfried in peace. That's pretty cool. I never realized until tonight the strong parallels between the Ring and Victorian literature.
Hilary, by the way, was the one who mock-mimed swinging one of those Tony tubes like a lightsaber. I can't say I blame her. Those things do look playful, and it was kind of silly how the characters using them on stage are so damned serious. I think Hilary called them phallic symbols or something, which is kind of obvious. Her making fun of the Tony tubes was the closest this entire evening came to the program's title.
John Nuckols
And finally we get our first non-USC speaker of the night. John Nuckols (sounds like knuckles) is one of the top dawgs at LA Opera. He's Vice President of Advancement. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds important. He's been with LA Opera a good while now, going back almost to the company's founding in 1986. You could tell he was the more corporate VP type. Whereas the three professors thus far were very casual (Kincaid looked a wee bit disheveled as well) with a relatively laid back demeanor and sense of humor, ol' John here was decked out in a suit with black hair impeccably coifed and stony professional countenance as clean shaven as marble.
Not only did John look all business, he talked all business. The focus of his lecture was the business side of producing Wagner's Ring Cycle. As was the case above with Leo's lecture, John's sort of overlapped with stuff I've heard at past Opera League seminars. First, he spoke about hiring Achim Freyer back in 2007 or thereabouts. Achim was very reluctant to do it. He retired from the theater so he could focus on what he really wanted to do: Paint. But it's hard to earn a buck painting. Achim was eventually convinced to revive his stage directing career when the right offer came along from Placido Domingo.
John also told us this wasn't the first time LA Opera has tried to mount the Ring. I remember this from one of the past seminars, I think the one this past January. Apparently in 1990 or so, when LA Opera wasn't even five years old, they approached George Lucas's special effects company Industrial Light and Magic to see if they'd be interested in putting on a modern Star Wars-esque version of the Ring. ILM was definitely interested, but they charged way more than LA Opera could afford. They didn't even make it through preproduction before they saw how much it would cost and said forget it. Achim Freyer's Ring is budgeted at $32 million for all four operas. John didn't say exactly how much ILM's Ring would've cost, only that it was much more.
For the rest of the nineties and into the aughts, LA Opera would go back to the Ring table to give the whole thing a fresh look, but each time it just wasn't feasible. One thing I didn't know until the Ring Cycle preview at the Biltmore in January 2009, which I think John mentioned tonight as well, is how much it costs to advertise an opera. Every time LA Opera stages a new opera, they take out an ad in the Calendar section of Sunday's LA Times. They're usually small ads, not even a quarter of a page. Well, guess how much it costs to do that? John didn't give us the dollar amount, but he said that even if the opera sells out, they only break even. See, another thing you have to think about from a business perspective, is that LA Opera is handicapped by its venue, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I forget the exact number of seats it has (it says it on a plaque somewhere on the first level, I think), but it barely adds up to a thousand. I think it's somewhere in the eight to nine hundred range. Certainly that's a healthy number of seats, but for an opera house, that's pretty small. Consider the Met, San Francisco, or Vienna. They're huge. I've been to the Met a couple times and Vienna once. They've got a good two thousand seats or so. And that opera house Roberto talked about in Buenos Aires? Teatro Colón? That seats about twenty-five hundred. So you see, even if LA Opera consistently fills every seat, they will always struggle to be profitable because they spend as much on their productions as those two-thousand-seat venues. Why don't they lower their production budgets, you ask? Because they have to compete. It's paid off for their reputation at least. LA Opera now attracts the top singers in the world. The soprano singing Brünnhilde in our production, Linda Watson, is a big name to conjure. She sang Brünnhilde at last year's Bayreuth. But again, as John says, big names cost big money.
Going back to the history of LA Opera's relationship to the Ring, it sounds like they didn't get serious about it until they hired James Conlon to be the music director and principal conductor in 2006. When they approached him for the job, Maestro Conlon said he'd do it if they let him a) bring the Recovered Voices project he'd started in Paris and Cologne, and b) stage the Ring. He was pretty inflexible about that, apparently. While not as expensive as what the ILM Ring would've cost, $32 mil is still hefty. What made this even riskier was Achim Freyer's plan to give the Ring a very different spin. Those Tony tubes are just the tip of it. From the way certain characters are depicted (the woman singing Fricka in Das Rheingold is physically separated from the huge mannequin that's supposed to be her) to the makeup to the scrim to that little biplane that soars over the stage at the end of Das Rheingold, it's just a very new type of deal that those older folks may not be used to. It's a fine line, catering to your traditional audience while trying to lure fresh blood.
Now here's another rub, John said: As soon as they were waist deep in the preparations, with all the actors signed and Achim moving to a downtown L.A. loft so he could walk to the Dorothy Chandler and all that, just when everything was in motion....the Great Recession kicked in. And whenever the economy sucks, who always takes the big hit? That's right. Arts companies, theater companies, museums, you name it. Orange County's resident opera company, Opera Pacifica, went belly up. And yes, LA Opera very nearly died. But then, John said, they appealed to the LA County Board of Supervisors and were able to secure fourteen million dollars in emergency funding to keep the company alive. There's this one county supervisor in particular, Zev Yaraslovsky, who's always been a champion of downtown L.A.'s Music Center, which includes the Center Theater Group as well as LA Opera and LA Phil. Placido's good friends with him (naturally). I think he even went to Zev's office to make a personal appeal. Things were that dire.
John talked a bit about Bayreuth. Achim Freyer is hardly the first director to play with the Ring's setting. That trend started with none other than Wagner's grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang. It was in the 1950s or thereabouts when they, in that ongoing quest to attract a younger audience, started doing more modern productions at Bayreuth. They ended up opening the floodgates to modernity, which has been sort of a mixed bag of awesome and hokey. It reached a crescendo of sorts, literally, at the 1976 Bayreuth Festival, the centennial. That was the year they got this French guy named Patrice Chéreau to direct. He was only thirty-two at the time, incredibly young for someone to direct something like this (Achim Freyer's in his seventies). Patrice set his production in the Industrial Revolution. The gods and goddesses were white collar workers in business attire. The Rhine River was a hydroelectric dam. At first, the audience was furious. Patrice hung in there, though, and Bayreuth kept performing it over the next few years because the demand grew. At its very last performance in 1980, Patrice Chéreau's Ring got a ninety-minute standing ovation.
John admits LA Opera's Ring, which isn't set in any particular time or place, is a risk, but it's one he believes in. He wanted to be sure to give props to, and make sure we were grateful for the vision of, the late great Edgar Baitzel, LA Opera's Chief Operating Officer who passed away from cancer three years ago at the age of fifty-one. I remember reading an appreciation about him in the LA Opera program soon after his death. It was written by Placido, who seemed pretty distraught. I'd never heard of this guy before then, but Chief Operating Officer is one of those roles where it's like, if they're doing their job right, they're invisible.
By the time he joined LA Opera about ten years ago to take over artistic operations, Edgar was in his mid forties and had already tread quite a career path. He worked at opera companies all over Europe, including major ones like Bavaria (he was a native German) as well as Nice and Bonn. He'd barely gotten settled at LA Opera before they promoted him to artistic director, followed by COO a couple years after that. It was thanks to Edgar, John said, that LA Opera has grown so quickly for such a young company. Remember above in Roberto's section when I said LA Opera's hundred performances in 2005-06 was a lot? Well, Edgar's a big reason we had the money and talent to pull that off. It was thanks to Edgar too, apparently, that we've been attracting all this directorial talent, including Achim, Julie Taymor, David Cronenberg, Maximilian Schell, William Friedkin, and Garry Marshall. Edgar's the one who commissioned Julie Taymor to direct and her husband Elliot Goldenthal to compose that brand new opera Grendel, a take on Beowulf from you-know-who's point of view, to cap off the twentieth anniversary season in the spring of '06. On a side note, I found out just last year in my Temple U. alumni magazine that the guy who played Grendel, a black guy from Philly named Eric Owens, is also a Temple alum. That was a pretty clever opera, I have to admit, how Julie Taymor used people clad head to toe in black spandex so as to be invisible on stage, holding little dolls representing the Danes next to the girth-blessed Eric Owens. And then when the singers playing the Danish came on stage, Julie had this humungous puppet as Grendel, so huge the head was out of sight in the rafters.
Pretty amazing, huh? This guy Edgar engineered all that in such a short amount of time. Since he was instrumental in luring Achim Freyer to the Ring, I guess you could say this production and this festival and everything related to it is an extension of his legacy. John called Edgar a "visionary taken well ahead of his time."
RIP Edgar Baitzel
John Carlos Rowe
Now let's go back to USC one more time with this, the fifth of sixth lectures on this pleasant spring Ring Festival evening. Professor Rowe is officially the Associates Chair in Humanities. He also chairs the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Unofficially, dude writes his professorial ass off. Check it out, right? From usc.edu: "He is the author of Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1976), Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (Columbia University Press, 1997), The Other Henry James (Duke University Press, 1998), Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The New American Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), as well as over 100 scholarly essays and critical reviews. He is the editor of: The Vietnam War and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 1991), New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 'Culture' and the Problem of the Disciplines (Columbia University Press, 1998), Post-Nationalist American Studies (University of California Press, 2000), and Selections from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the New Riverside Editions (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). His current scholarly projects are: Culture and U.S. Imperialism since World War II, The Rediscovery of America: Multicultural Literature and the New Democracy, and Blackwell’s Companion to American Studies."
So anyways, he likes to write. And as you can tell, he really likes Henry James. In fact, guess from which angle he was viewing the Ring Cycle in his fifteen-minute spiel? Yep, the Henry James angle. And he was very specific too. In the early 1870s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, Henry James, an American by birth, did quite a bit of traveling across Europe. Among his favorite stops was Italy. Like any good writer, he wrote what he knew. His stories, while fiction, have an underlying thread of realism fed by his observations on the Continent.
At the age of thirty-one he wrote an Italy-set short story called "Adina." This was well before he wrote the stuff he's known for. The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were still ten years away. And The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl? Fuhgeddaboutit. Dude was in his sixties when he wrote those. So he wasn't really a name yet, although he had published his first novel at this point, Watch and Ward. "Adina" has a plot with more than a few echoes of the Ring Cycle apparently. It's about sixteen thousand words long, which means it dwells in that limbo between long short story and short novel or novella.
"Adina" is about a chap called Angelo, who's got this insatiable appetite for revenge. And he wants revenge because of money lost in a river. Or something like that. A river is involved, that's what I know. In other words, this Angelo guy has a distinct parallel to Alberich. And the river in the story is obviously inspired by the Rhine. And the money's the Ring, etc. You get the idea.
Here's a quote from "Adina": "The days passed by and Angelo's revenge still hung fire.
Scrope never met his fate at a short turning of one of the dusky Roman streets; he came in punctually every evening at eleven o'clock. I wondered whether our brooding friend had already spent the sinister force of a nature formed to be lazily contented. I hoped so, but I was wrong. We had gone to walk one afternoon,----the ladies, Scrope and I,----in the charming Villa Borghese, and, to escape from the rattle of the fashionable world and its distraction, we had wandered away to an unfrequented corner where the old mouldering wall and the slim black cypresses and the untrodden grass made, beneath the splendid Roman sky, the most harmonious of pictures."After that, the Wagnerian influence becomes downright bold-faced. "Adina" features direct quotes from Tristan und Isolde. You've got verses five through eight here:
Frisch weht der Wind (Fresh blows the wind)
der Heimat zu: (towards home:)
mein irisch Kind, (my Irish kin)
wo weilest du? (where linger you?)
And then later in the story Henry James throws in another Tristan quote, this one from scene three, verse 24, as follows:
Oed' und leer das Meer (Desolate and empty [is] the sea).
Wow, huh? Henry James was an opera fan apparently, and from an age by which today's standards would deem him young. He was about my age when he wrote "Adina." I'm not sure if early thirties was considered as young then as it is today, or if he'd've been as out of place at an Opera League event as I sometimes feel. Anyway, that's a pretty cool piece of minutia from John Carlos, this obscure short story by a famous author. Well done.
While he didn't give it as much weight (he only had fifteen minutes like everyone else, don't forget), John Carlos also talked a bit about another famous writer and that writer's very famous opus: T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. T.S. was thirty-four when he published The Waste Land, about the same age Henry James was when he published "Adina." Only, whereas Henry James was only getting started at that point in his writing life, I'm not sure T.S. Eliot climbed any higher after The Waste Land. I'm hardly a poetry connoisseur, but every time I hear T.S. Eliot's name, I usually hear The Waste Land soon after. He still did okay, though. T.S. lived another forty-some-odd years and wrote very prolifically. And not just poems either. Like many poets since Ancient Greece, T.S. branched out to playwriting. When he was in his sixties, he wrote this one play called The Cocktail Party which scored him a Tony for Best Play. I bet not a lot of people know T.S. Eliot won a Tony for a Broadway play. And get this: He scored two more Tonys in the early eighties, almost twenty years after he died, for two of his poems being used in Cats. Is that wild or what? Again, how many people would associate T.S. Eliot with Cats for Pete's sake? But a lot of people don't know that the whole Cats musical was adapted from a book of poems by T.S. called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He also wrote a ton of nonfiction as well, critical theory type stuff about poetry as well as studies of certain poets, like John Dryden and Dante. Henry James wrote quite a bit too, but T.S. put him to shame. Nonetheless, with such a Godzilla-sized oeuvre, it all comes back to The Waste Land, doesn't it?
John Carlos's point in bringing up The Waste Land was that, in writing it, T.S. Eliot was aiming for the same goal Wagner had with the Ring: Gesamtkunstwerk. There ya go, a nice huge German word for ya. Like a lot of German words, it's actually made up of a few words. Gesamt means "total," Kunst is "art," and Werk is, you guessed it, "work." In composing the Ring Cycle, Wagner wanted to create a piece of art that wasn't just opera, but an amalgam of all the artistic disciplines: Composing music, playing music, poetry, singing, painting (set design), costume making, everything. Wagner wanted his Ring to be the artistic everything. Why? Because that's what the Ancient Greeks did. As practically the inventors of drama, when Greeks put on a play, they didn't just think of it as a play. Their "werks" were a vehicle for the entire spectrum of the arts, all the stuff I mentioned above. Greek plays always had a chorus, the actors wore masks and recited poetry, all that stuff. The Greeks, in other words, churned out Gesamtkunstwerks as a matter of course. Wagner tried to revive that practice with the Ring, and so did T.S. with The Waste Land. I have to confess I've never read The Waste Land. I seem to remember taking a gander at it a while back, seeing if it was something I'd want to invest my precious spare time in, and all I remember was that the text seemed inscrutable. But I was younger then. Maybe I should give it a fairer shake now that I'm older and wiser. As a total artwork, John Carlos said The Waste Land contains a "vast range of culture and literature."
Imogen von Tannenberg
We arrive at the sixth and final spiel of the night: "Wagner and Anti-Semitism" by Imogen von Tannenberg. Yes, as I'm sure you can tell by the name, she's German. But no, she does not teach at USC. Imogen is the director of this place out in Pacific Palisades called Villa Aurora. I've never been there, but it looks beautiful. According to the site, it's an artists residence "to promote and foster German-American cultural exchange and to remember the European exiles that settled in Southern California [e.g. Thomas Mann], Villa Aurora offers a variety of public lectures, screenings and performances.... Our artists-in-residence program and Feuchtwanger Fellowship are at the core of Villa Aurora's activities." Cool, huh? Go to the site when you get a chance, villa-aurora.org. Apparently they've got one in Berlin as well.
They have good reason to talk about German exiles settling in SoCal and naming their fellowship the Feuchtwanger Fellowship. Villa Aurora was the residence of Lion Feuchtwanger. Lion was a German-Jewish writer who wrote novels, plays, and poetry, and became a name to conjure in the literary world during Germany's Weimar era, the twenties, when Lion was in his forties.
One of his major works from that era was this novel called Jud Süß, which literally means Jew Seuss, but which was given the title Power in the English translation. Around the same time, he wrote a play with Bertolt Brecht called The Life of Edward II of England. Brecht was himself a playwright of note (and as a side note, our Ring Cycle director Achim Freyer was a pupil of Brecht's in the mid fifties, during the last two years of Brecht's life). Lion and Bertolt got along famously not only because they both liked to write, but because they were both very left leaning in their politics. Lion wasn't shy about voicing his political views. When the National Socialists--the Nazis--started making a lot of noise in the late twenties, still years before Hitler came to power, Lion didn't waste a minute in speaking out against them. Added to the fact that he was Jewish, the guy was practically putting a bullseye on his back. When Hitler became Reichskanzler in '33, he went after Lion right away. He sent agents to his house, but Lion had thought ahead. He and his wife Marta left Germany, never to return, and settled in France. The Nazi thugs gutted the house, took everything, and eventually Hitler revoked Lion's citizenship and branded him "public enemy number one." The ironic-as-hell thing here is that Hitler's propaganda guy, Joseph Goebbels, had Jud Süß adapted into a movie, albeit with such an anti-Semitic slant you wonder why he bothered.Lion and Marta, meanwhile, only had seven years to enjoy France. In 1940 the Nazis showed up, and this time Lion didn't get out in time. He was shipped to an internment camp. But get this: He never stopped writing. How awesome is that? Not even a friggin' concentration camp could dampen his creative spirit. He didn't write just anything either. He kept a diary of his time in the camp that was eventually published as a memoir called The Devil in France, in which he continued taking it balls deep to the Nazis. Speaking of balls, this guy obviously had a huge pair. Eventually he escaped the camp with the help of a bunch of people. He and Marta fled to Spain, across Spain and into Portugal, to the tip of the Iberian Peninsula, where a Good Samaritan gave them her ticket so Mr. and Mrs. Feuchtwanger could go to the States together (they already had one ticket booked). Eventually they arrived in L.A. and bought the house now known as Villa Aurora. Lion didn't miss a beat with his writing.
After he died in the late fifties, Marta continued living there on her own for a good while, another thirty years or so. During that time she carried her husband's torch proudly and with grace. Before she passed away in the late eighties, she gave all her husband's stuff, including writings and photos and his entire library, to USC. I was a student at SC in the late nineties and remember the main library on campus, Doheny. Somewhere inside there, SC built a special little library dedicated to all of Lion's stuff, appropriately called the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.
I didn't mean to go into all that backstory about Villa Aurora, but perhaps it's just as well, what with its themes of anti-Semitism and persecution, since that was the topic of Imogen's lecture in the context of the Ring Cycle. Imogen looked the way you would imagine many German and Nordic women to look: Tall and blonde. She sat a few rows in front of me during the first five lectures, and I have to confess to sneaking the occasional glance at her. Mind you, I had no idea she herself was one of tonight's speakers until she got up and took the floor after John Carlos.
Her beauty, however, couldn't stop the disillusionment. Imogen was the least interesting of tonight's speakers. She basically had no personality and delivered her piece in a very cold, mechanical way. That said, her spiel was somewhat interesting. She said that when viewed a certain way, the Ring seems to have undertones of anti-Semitism in the guise of Siegfried. Siegfried has traditionally been viewed as the Cycle's hero. But look more closely--and some of this has come up in past Opera League seminars--and he could be viewed as an authoritarian figure in the way he can kill so easily. The villains of the Ring, brothers Hagen and Alberich, could be viewed as Wagner's projection of Jews. They're money hungry. They want that Ring, and they and their fellow Nibelungen mine for more gold. But here comes the indestructible Siegfried to mess everything up for them. Imogen's point, I guess, was that while we should certainly enjoy the Ring Cycle for the artistic magnum opus it is, we should also be mindful of the man who wrote it, Wagner, an unabashed anti-Semite.
Another thing I didn't like about Imogen was that she didn't talk much during the Q&A. After she was finished, all six speakers came up and took questions. Before anyone from the audience could raise their hand, Hilary Schor didn't waste a minute going after Imogen's positing Siegfried as a hero. Hilary said Siegfried was "an idiot." You can't talk about Siegfried without talking about his innocent naïveté, but I think "idiot" may have been a bit harsh. As I said above, Siegfried grew up in the middle of the woods, miles from civilization. But yeah, Hilary's point was solid, and good for her to spot it, considering the Ring operas, and opera in general, are new to her. Now you think Imogen may have responded to Hilary's point, but she didn't. She just sat there and brooded during the rest of the Q&A. Boooo!
That's a wrap, folks. A pretty interesting evening, examining the endlessly fascinating Ring Cycle from six unique angles. The only thing I'm a bit down on SC about is the way they marketed this, using very recognizable icons like Nietzsche and Star Wars even though, as you can now see, tonight had very little to do with either. No matter, let Ring Festival LA begin!
