It's that time of year again, time for a new season of mash-ups of SNLC with the occasional opera series, tied to the Metropolitan Opera HD-casts, originally begun by Demi Moaned. With that in mind, time for the usual start-up question in this mash-up series:
Anyone see the Met HD-cast of Eugene Onegin today?
I have to confess a perhaps insurmountable disadvantage, because I actually did not see this HD-cast today (typical loser, that 3CM). So I'll need the help of anyone here who actually saw it to discuss the HD-cast itself, because I am obviously not qualified to do so. However, there has been sufficient controversy leading up to this production at the Met that I actually have more than enough material to diary about separately from the HD-cast. You may peripherally know about said controversy, as it ties to the homophobic legislation this past June in Russia outlawing "homosexual propaganda" that Vladimir Putin signed. The connection to the Met production is that its conductor and lead soprano are strong supporters of Putin. To add to all this, loads of ironic complications abound regarding other people connected to this production, not least the person most responsible for this production, namely the opera's composer. More below the flip....
First, for those who may not already know, the opera of Eugene Onegin has music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and is based on the classic novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. As a sidebar, if by chance you ever get the opportunity to see the opera, or just want to listen to a recording or watch a video, you should read the novel first. This is because the novel fills in all the missing gaps in the plot of the opera, and you'll need that missing information to fill in the portrait of Onegin.
You can read a synopsis of the opera from the wikipedia entry. Tchaikovsky, as it turned out, was gay, the idiotic attempts by Russia's culture minister Vladimir Medinsky to deny that fact notwithstanding. Even Putin, for all his bigotry, isn't so stupid as to deny the fact of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, as you can read well toward the end of the Guardian article.
But now we get to the connection between Putin and Valery Gergiev, the conducter of the Met's production of Onegin. Gergiev and Putin are big-time pals, with Putin sending lavish financial support Gergiev's way, as Gergiev is director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Just one case of how chummy they are is evident from this:
'Valery Gergiev,, the principal conductor of the London Symphony orchestra and Kremlin loyalist, is asking a question. Gergiev likens Putin to the composer Sergei Prokoviev "who came up with a lot of different productions". (Is this a way of saying Putin should go on and on?) Russia isn't just an oil and gas country but a country rich in poets and writers, Gergiev says. A classic piece of quality toadying, if you ask me.
Putin is clearly delighted by the question. He says he loves St Petersberg, where Gergiev is general and artistic director of the celebrated Mariinsky Theatre. Putin says he will do his best to support Russian culture.
Gergiev is now praising Putin, comparing him to Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. Putin chides Gergiev for stealing artists for his theatre from Moscow's famous Bolshoi. This is all very pally.'
The lead soprano role in the opera is Tatyana, who falls in love with Onegin when he visits her family's estate. Onegin, however, bored by then from his prior life among the "smart set", rebuffs her as naive. (He lives to regret it in Act III, of course. This is opera, after all, but that's the same trajectory as the novel.) In the Met production, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is the Tatyana. Her support of Putin was noted by Alex Ross on his blog
The Rest Is Noise here:
"Gergiev's name appears on a list of 499 celebrity supporters of Putin. According to a Moscow Times piece, the list also includes Anna Netrebko, (pianist} Denis Matsuev, and (violist) Yuri Bashmet."
Russian celebrity denunciation of the homophobic legislation hasn't been widespread, as you can imagine. Thus, using a kind of "guilt by association" argument, gay rights advocates decided to exert public pressure on Putin and Netrebko in advance of the Met production, as reported by Michael Cooper in the
New York Times here, in the form of an
online petition to the Met to "Dedicate 9/23 Opening Gala to support of LGTB people", initiated by Andrew Rudin, where he makes a
rather strong statement about Gergiev and Netrebko in relation to Putin:
"Peter Illyich Tchaikowsky is the beloved composer most widely known to have been homosexual and to have suffered for it in his lifetime. For America's leading opera house to open its season with one of his works, performed by a conductor and a leading soprano who support Putin's recent laws against homosexual people and those who support them dishonors the work of a great artist and his legacy as well as the progress made in our own country to secure equality for all citizens."
BTW, Dave in Northridge diaried about the petition back in August
here. The catch in the petition is that I don't really know that Gergiev and Netrebko have actually spoken out specifically
in favor of the homophobic legislation that Putin signed. To be sure, they are Putin groupies, but that doesn't necessarily translate into specific public statements about the legislation itself. However, Netrebko felt the pressure enough to post on her FB page, as reported in the Cooper article:
"As an artist, it is my great joy to collaborate with all of my wonderful colleagues - regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I have never and will never discriminate against anyone."
When pressed, Gergiev remained silent on this question, by all accounts that I know of. However, in this situation, I actually think that on a personal level, neither Netrebko nor Gergiev is personally homophobic. Even with Gergiev's public silence on the matter, I think his attitude is more of a general artistic dictator than anything, to the effect that "I don't care if you're straight or gay, as long as you do things my way and don't question me". (In other words, I'm not prejudiced; I treat everyone like underlings in a patronizing manner.) If Netrebko or Gergiev were homophobic, they wouldn't want to be associated with several gay people involved in this production, such as:
(a) Mariusz Kwiecen, the Polish baritone who sings Eugene Onegin in this production, is gay.
(b) The production's original director, the English director Deborah Warner, is lesbian. However, Warner had to pull out of the production 6 weeks before opening night, apparently for surgery.
(c) The production's replacement director, the Irish actress Fiona Shaw, who is a long-time collaborator with Warner, is herself lesbian.
You see the multiple ironies abounding in this production, in the biggest sociopolitical picture. You'll also note how long this diary is, and that we haven't even gotten around to discussing the production itself. But wait, there's more, in all the lead-up. Getting back to the art now, it turns out that with this essentially last-minute switch of directors, just barely before opening night, for all practical purposes, Fiona Shaw had other commitments at the same time, per this NYT article from 9/19/13:
"Ms. Shaw had a partly overlapping commitment to direct Britten’s Rape of Lucretia for the Glyndebourne Festival’s fall tour back in England, a project she had no intention of shortchanging.....So after starting rehearsals for Onegin on Aug. 13, Ms. Shaw left New York on Sept. 6. Her only subsequent visit to the city was that recent Friday, Sept. 13, to work on the first and third acts and give notes to the cast before flying back in the evening....
....Ms. Shaw needed to get a lot done in very little time. The down side of her arrangement with the Met was that Ms. Shaw was never able to see the second act — with its grand ball scene and harrowing duel — onstage with the orchestra, not to mention any of the show’s final run-throughs. Nor, as of press time, did she plan to return for opening night."
It would be interesting to know if Shaw returned to NYC and the Met for the HD-cast today. Can anyone confirm this one way or the other?
The reviews for the opening night of this production have been lukewarm at best:
(a) Anthony Tommasini, NYT
(b) Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times
(c) Manuela Hoelterhoff, Bloomberg News
Bernheimer noted that while "the show went on fairly smoothly against the odds", he noted problems in the staging, such as this pithy comment on the great "Letter Scene" of Act I:
"Poor Tatiana writes her fateful letter in a mock-bedroom that lacks a bed."
Given how milquetoast-ish Tommasini can be when he tries to write a word of criticism that actually aims a brickbat, rather than smothering in praise, this overall summation is a bit surprising from him, in terms of its relative bluntness, mentioning the Met's general director, Peter Gelb:
"Mr. Gelb has raised the stakes for every new production at the Met by talking up how essential it is for opera to bring in today’s liveliest and most innovative directors and designers. Some of the productions on his watch have met that standard. Some have been curiously bland, or nothing special. This disappointing Eugene Onegin belongs among the roster of also-rans."
Hoelterhoff didn't pull her punches, very much in the style of Bernheimer at his snarkiest:
"Never has Russia seemed so small and the opera so long."
You might understand now why I didn't go to see this HD-cast. OTOH, maybe it works better on the small screen, even if the illogicalities like the bedroom
sans bed can't be rectified on the small screen. Plus, Kwiecien and Netrebko are very fine opera artists (I've been fortunate to see Kwiecien live, at Santa Fe Opera), so they're worth checking out, even in live Memorex format.
But there was no way for the reviews to avoid talking about the petition and the controversy leading up to this opening night. Protesters showed up at the Met to hand out leaflets outside the hall, but some of them also made themselves heard inside. Per Bernheimer:
"At performance time, protesters were banished to a tiny park across the plaza. Leaflets materialised everywhere. Inside the hall, after the dressy first-nighters intoned the Star-Spangled Banner, voices rang out for five minutes from the upper balconies. The exact words were indistinct. The angry attitudes were not."
Tommasini filled in the gap on the words, as part of his article:
"In addition, a contingent of about three dozen protesters stood near Lincoln Center Plaza on Monday calling for Mr. Gergiev and Ms. Netrebko to speak out against Mr. Putin’s policies. And in the house, just before the start of the opera, activists in the uppermost balcony shouted, 'Putin, end your war on Russian gays' and more. After a couple of minutes, the demonstrators were led out and the opera proceeded without interference."
In fact, as Tommasini noted, there was an insert in the program with a reprint of
an op-ed that Peter Gelb wrote for Bloomberg News about why the Met did not give any sort of dedication in support of gay Russians on opening night. Gelb is obviously trying to walk a fine line, where in trying not to offend anyone overtly, he may not please the hard-liners on either side. However, he does close the op-ed thus:
"Although Russia may officially be in denial about Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, we’re not. The Met is proud to present Russia’s great gay composer. That is a message, in itself."
Gelb also said earlier:
"We respect the right of activists to picket our opening night and we realize that we’ve provided them with a platform to further raise awareness about serious human rights issues abroad."
Being on the side of the protestors, in their statement against Putin, is a no-brainer. However, when it comes to actual disruption of a music performance, there, I draw the line. Even the most righteous political cause doesn't justify interrupting or otherwise disrupting a performance, especially in works as complicated as classical music works are, with so many interlocking parts that require maximum attention from loads and loads of people at once. Before the concert, or after the concert, raise the issues and raise awareness, no worries about that. But not during the music. In fairness, there were no interruptions of the music here (unlike the disruption of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in London 2 years ago, but that's another can of worms, of course).
On the whole question of Netrebko and Gergiev vis a vis Putin, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer had this statement in the one 8/20/13 article by Michael Cooper:
“I myself am not denying the obvious high artistic qualities of Anna Netrebko or Valery Gergiev, but I do feel a certain discomfort observing them offstage. The identification with one’s own country is more than honorable and understandable. Never would I criticize a real patriot nor deny that patriotism is a very natural attitude. We all should be able to love our native country. What makes me feel odd is the way these feelings are presented, the way artists become spokesmen for politicians and those who are in power.”
At the end, Tommasini noted, with respect to the outdoors crowd who watched the opening night performance on jumbo video screens, about the social big picture (no pun intended):
"After the performance the cast appeared on the outdoor balcony overlooking the plaza, where the outdoor audience remained to applause. The protesters were gone. The issues they raised remain."
They do indeed remain.
BTW, on the more artsy side of things, here's a great story from the Italian aristocrat Giacomo Antonini, as recounted in the 2nd volume of David Brown's 4-volume (!) bio of Tchaikovsky, about the status of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Russian opera. Antonini actually cited two great Russian composers who actually didn't like each other, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. Yet they did agree on one thing (sorry for the very long quote, which probably pushes the limits of fair use):
"Living in Paris, I heard Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov for the first time in the winter of 1932-3, sung by Fyodor Shalyapin. By chance the next day I had lunch with Stravinsky in the studio of Vera de Bosset, his future wife and now his widow, who was a friend of my wife. During lunch I expressed by enthusiasm for the way in which Shalyapin had interpreted the role of Boris, and also for Musorgsky's opera. Igor Fyodorovich beamed, smiling at my youthful enthusiasm. He agreed with me entirely about both the performance and the work. But when I said 'I cannot imagine a more Russian opera than Boris Godunov, he at once stopped me and said: 'There, my friend, you are entirely wrong. Our greatest opera composer is undoubtedly Tchaikovsky, and the most Russian opera of all is Eugene Onegin, not only because every young Russian woman has something of Tatyana, and is some way dreams of being a Tatyana, but also because from the beginning to the end the atmosphere is intrinsically Russian.'
"I knew Pushkin's 'novel in verse', as he himself called the work, but had never heard Tchaikovsky's opera. I listened with interest to what Igor Fyodorovich was telling us, but I have to confess that at the same time, knowing his taste for paradox, I was rather sceptical. Tchaikovsky, as an opera composer, was then new to me as he was to many Western Europeans of my generation.
"About a fortnight later, we had dinner with the Prokofievs, who were great friends of ours. I knew from experience that, although Stravinsky and Prokofiev had outwardly good relations and always showed a united Russian front to the French, in private they tended to contradict each other, sometimes in a violent way. Therefore, being curious to know what he thought of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and with youthful facetiousness expecting one of his colourful outbursts, I said to him: 'Now listen, Sergey Sergeyevich, to what Igor Fyodorovich said to me the other day concering Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin.' When I had told him Stravinsky's opinion, to my great surprise Sergey Sergeyevich remained for a long time thoughtful and silent; then he said: 'Well, it is maybe not often the case, but for once I entirely agree with Igor Fyodorovich. Tchaikovsky is certainly our greatest opera composer, and Eugene Onegin is the most intrinsically Russian opera.' He then went on to tell me that not only Tatyana, but also Olga, Onegin, Lensky, and Gremin corresponded completely to the Russian character, each one in his own way. After a rather long and detailed comment on Eugene Onegin, he came back to Boris Godunov and said that Western Europeans in general, and the French in particular, had a wrong conception of the Russian character in literature, as in music; they saw the outwardly colourful side and did not grasp the more profound, intrinsic qualities. As Stravinsky had done, he quoted the French view on Boris Godunov as an example: 'They forget, or do not know that Musorgsky was what we call a "Slavophile", that is to say, a reactionary nationalist, fiercely against Poland and the Catholic church; his sympathy was with the Old Believers, as you can see in Khovanshchina. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was liberal-minded like Pushkin, but nevertheless profoundly Russian.'
"He continued, saying that Eugene Onegin, which reflects this, had therefore a special appeal for Russians, both those of yesterday (meaning before the 1917 Revolution) and those of the present."
Citation: David Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 1874-1878, pp. 218-219 (W.W. Norton & Co., 1983)
I can't top that, and won't even try. With that, you can either:
(a) Comment on the Met HD-cast, if you saw it, or discuss the opera, or:
(b) Observe the usual SNLC protocol (regulars know what it is, and newbies can infer from the tip jar).
Or you can do both. We're flexible here :) . Or some might say wishy-washy.....