May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Don Carlo and the Abuse of Power By Krithika Varagur Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, El Greco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Don Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of The Hours – the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi’s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season. Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlo imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition. Read More
May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Emma Bovary at the Opera By Ann Manov Lucie de Lammermoore. Victor Coindre, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My first memory of opera is Bugs Bunny or maybe The Pink Panther Show: those Saturday-morning cartoons where the fat lady sings and shatters a glass. Much later I began to date a man who had been to hundreds of opera performances (a fact I found not only shocking but literally unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to almost one a month. The one I’ve enjoyed the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a town in the depressed Rust Belt. I had already read about Lucia: it’s the opera that inspires Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (again, and more dramatically). And yet I didn’t know anything about its plot, because Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to connect Emma to her younger self, the pretty country girl who had had bigger dreams than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. At the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive thoughts,” uncapturable thoughts, incomprehensible thoughts. What’s coming over her is fantasy. Nabokov said about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “bad reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place”: above all, in the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, kept from the man she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding night in a crazed delirium and herself dies. But to read Madame Bovary as purely reprobative seems to me cold to the point of insanity; as Flaubert said, of course, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We are all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in search of a character, and who can blame or even fail to admire Emma: so moved by art that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of love, and die. Read More
May 12, 2023 On Music Faust and the Risk of Desire By Adam Kirsch Faust and Mephistopheles. Painting by Anton Kaulbach, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, where the classical and opera section was an afterthought. When I compare it to the contemporary infinity of Spotify, however, the limited selection now seems a kind of blessing: with so little to choose from, it was impossible to feel overwhelmed. It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and quickly became a worldwide hit, especially in the U.S., where it was chosen to inaugurate the newly founded Metropolitan Opera in 1883. But in time, Faust’s blockbuster status made it a byword for middlebrow entertainment, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera today. When Edith Wharton set the first chapter of The Age of Innocence at a performance of Faust, it was a way of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage point of 1920. For instance, Wharton pokes fun at the fact that the opera, originally written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Americans were used to hearing in the opera house at the time. Read More
May 11, 2023 A Letter from the Editor A Spring Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. Sometimes, on the campus of the university where I work, a visiting writer will explain to a captive audience how great poems—more often than not his own—get written. These explanations often sound a bit mystical, occasionally even mystifying. So I was amused to read the opening lines of Dobby Gibson’s tongue-in-cheek “Small Craft Talk,” a poem our readers discovered in a box of paper slush, and which you’ll find in our Spring issue: In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music is the kind of thing poets like to say Before you know it, Gibson’s takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, “more truly and more strange”: as if you’re hearing the song of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself by becoming more like another self Read More
May 11, 2023 On Music Americans Abroad By Andrew Martin Richard and Pat Nixon in China, 1972. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. By the time I saw Nixon in China during its 2011 run at the Metropolitan Opera, it had become a classic, if not an entirely undisputed one. It had made it to the Met, at least, with its composer, John Adams, conducting, and James Maddalena, who originated the role of Nixon in the 1987 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, back at it, now nearly the age Nixon was when he made the trip. A friend of mine, with theatrical élan, bought out a box for a group of us and encouraged formal dress, as if we were in a nineteenth-century novel. He showed up in a tux. I don’t remember my outfit, but I’d be surprised, knowing myself, if I managed anything more presentable than a mildly rumpled off-the-rack suit. At the time, I was working as an assistant to a magazine editor who regularly attended the opera, in full formal dress, with a pair of its major donors, fitting in an elaborate meal on the Grand Tier during intermission. My handling of his invitations gave me a surprising proprietary sense about the place. I didn’t feel that I belonged, of course, but at least I had a narrow help’s-eye-view of its workings. In the upper deck, and even in our box, my friends and I had the sense of superiority that comes from being broke and artistic among the rich and, presumably, untalented. Not that I had any major insight into the opera at the time, this one specifically or the art form more generally. I’d sat in the cheap seats on a few occasions, trying to rouse myself awake for the end of Tristan und Isolde, once, with a Wagner-loving girlfriend. I’d even stood in the back row of the orchestra for Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, feeling obligated as a Dostoyevsky loyalist to bear witness. (All I remember is a general brownness and a grim, monochromatic score. It was, after all, a Czech opera about a Russian prison camp.) I did, however, have an abiding interest, bordering on mania, in the pathos of conservative politics, and only a person who has lost interest in the world could fail to be interested in Richard Nixon. The friend who had arranged this outing was, among other things, a news junkie and former Republican, and his relationship to the former president was characterized, like the opera’s relationship to its subject, by a complicated mix of irony and enthusiasm. Dramatic renderings of Nixon tend toward the sweaty and profane (as in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor) or the broadly comic (Philip Roth’s novel Our Gang, or the 1999 film Dick, starring a young Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, an overlooked gem surely due for reappraisal). But Adams’s monumental, hypnotically Glassian score and Alice Goodman’s dense postmodern libretto invest Nixon with a weird if inarticulate dignity that he rarely displayed in life. The striving and paranoia are tamped down, replaced with yearning naïveté and statesmanship. Read More
May 11, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Michael Bazzett on “Autobiography of a Poet” By Michael Bazzett For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Michael Bazzett’s “Autobiography of a Poet” appears in our Spring issue, no. 243. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? It was a phrase. I was sitting in my backyard, with a legal pad and a few books, including Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance and After Ikkyu by Jim Harrison, which contains the line “I was born a baby, / what are these hundred suits of clothes I’m wearing?” I was thinking about dislocation and baby-logic, and object permanence, and the idea of first encountering something through a sense other than sight. Hearing a bird before you see it, for instance. Or how a visual stimulus like a leaf-shadow fluttering in the wind moves on the wall above a crib. In my baby-mind, I imagine that light-flicker as something animate, moving of its own accord. When does a baby stop engaging with stimuli as pure image or pure sound and begin to imagine what caused it? I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be able to reexperience the dreams we dream in utero, or in the first months of life before language, before we consciously encounter words and narrative structure. How would they be ordered? Where would the images come from? Do we bring anything with us from the other side? Are there things already written into us? Read More