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Class 12: Opera Through the Lens

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Class 12: Opera Through the Lens Class 12: Opera through the Lens A. Brief Beginning with Boris 1. Title Slide 1 (Mozart portraits) Most of this first hour will be about Mozart, but some general points first. I would guess that most of the operas we see nowadays, and certainly everything I have shown in this class, has been mediated through the eye of the camera. What does this mean? I want you to go back and watch again a two- minute clip from last week’s Moses und Aron, the episode of the crippled woman healed by the Golden Calf, and ask yourself: what does the camera give us that we would not see in the theater? 2. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron, healing of the crippled woman _10:01_ 3. — still from the above So what does the camera give us? Close-ups, obviously, and different angles. You see the action from the auditorium, from overhead, and even apparently from the stage itself. You focus first on the face of the stricken woman, but then tellingly on that extraordinary thing she does with her feet. And—which is extremely important in a modern-dress production with no obvious make-up—you see the chorus as individuals, mostly young people with their own personal investment in the story. But the power of the camera also has another consequence. Everything we have seen in this course has been an interpretation of an interpretation, dependent upon the decisions of the video director. I could probably fill half a class with examples of the subtle differences such choices can make, but with limited time, I have to work in broader strokes. Specifically, we shall look at what the camera does, how it affects our perception of the work, and even—increasingly—how opera is produced onstage, or conceived in the composer’s mind. 4. Boris Godunov and the Coronation Scene To establish something of the range of the territory, let’s start with two very short clips from the Coronation Scene in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. I have chosen the first, from the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg in 1990, even though it is pretty Lo-D, because it is exactly the kind of thing that we are used to: switching between several cameras, in long-shots and close-ups, but never giving anything that could not be seen by someone in the audience, with or without opera glasses. I chose it also to compare with a second clip of the same scene, this time by the film director Andrzej Zulawski, who uses his camera in a totally different way. Let’s watch and discuss. 5. Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, Coronation Scene, Mariinsky 1990 _10:08_ 6. Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, Coronation Scene, film 1989 7. — stills from the above — 1 — What did you think? We would hope for better definition than the first one; the video merely reminds you of the excitement you would feel in the theater; you have to scale it up in your mind. But the prowling camera of the Zulawski film, despite or maybe because of its claustrophobic quality, generates a visceral excitement of quite a different kind. Although those are stage props and costumes, it is of course filmed in a studio; no paying audience would tolerate the cameramen wandering all over the stage like that! What Zulawski does is break the convention that pretty much holds for filmed or live- streamed productions, that although the camera may move around the auditorium, all its angles, all its shots, full-stage or close-up, represent the viewpoint of someone in the audience. It is a kind of summation of the total audience experience. B. Various Views of Mozart 8. The Magic Flute (Bergman), opening scene In the rest of the hour, I am going to use a couple of operas by Mozart, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, to show some of the range of what it possible. You remember the Ingmar Bergman movie of The Magic Flute that I showed in Class 3? This also claims to reproduce the experience of opera in the theater—in this case, the 18th-century theater at Drottningholm—but does it continue that way? Here is a scene from Act II for us to discuss. Tamino and Papageno are going through their first trial, the test of silence. But the Three Ladies are determined to get them to break it, whether by terrifying or seducing them: 9. Mozart: The Magic Flute (Bergman), Act II quintet _10:14_ 10. — still from the above So what are the things that make this clearly a film? Most obviously, the cutting to Sarastro and his elders around the table at the end. Or showing the Three Ladies at one point upside down. But more generally, the way almost everything is shown in medium shot, with the frame of the camera, not the stage scenery, controlling when a character enters or leaves the picture. [It is a bit like Stephen Colbert in his monologues handing his imaginary props to someone off-screen, or walking in and out of the picture while the camera remains fixed.] 11. William Kentridge: designs for The Magic Flute Here is almost the opposite situation: the production of The Magic Flute that South African artist William Kentridge created at La Scala in 2012. As you see, he also has the concept of a traditional theater with painted scenery and footlights, but he achieves it in quite different ways. This is his version of the scene from the first-act finale when Papageno plays his bells to save him and Pamina from the evil Monostatos. Kentridge, incidentally, treats the whole opera in terms of his own ancestors, the Victorian era explorers who colonized and exploited the African continent. 12. Mozart: The Magic Flute (Kentridge), “Schnelle Füße” _10:19_ 13. — still from the above — 2 — Why do I even include this in a class on opera through the lens? As far as the camera is concerned, it remains somewhere in the orchestra, zooming in and out but otherwise not moving much. This is La Scala’s equivalent of the Met Live-in-HD, and the aesthetic is the same. But what the camera lens is recording is also what the lens in the theater is projecting. Despite the effects of scenery flying in and out, this is all achieved by an animation of Kentridge’s drawings, projected onto a relatively simple set. I showed it because it represents an approach to opera production that we have encountered only in the present century. Instead of making a video that looks as close as possible to what you would experience in the theater, Kentridge and others like him give you a theater production that looks as close as possible to watching a video! 14. The Magic Flute (Branagh), scene from the overture And now for something completely different again: Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 film of the opera. It is set, as you see, in a vaguely World War One context. I will show you an actual war scene in a moment; this is a shot from the overture, showing not only William Owen’s “monstrous cannons” but also a military band surrealistically marching into battle with violins tucked under their chins. Let’s see what happens in the opening scene of the opera. Tamino, of course, is a gallant young officer; the Three Ladies who save him are surreal versions of Red Cross nurses: 15. Mozart: The Magic Flute (Branagh), opening number _10:24_ 16. — still from the above So how do we classify this? It is obviously a film, with no pretense of a theater stage. The set is an apparently limitless battlefield, with the camera roaming everywhere, cutting quickly between viewpoints and even between locales. There are pure cinema tricks, like the spinning crane shot towards the end. Yet, although not confined to a stage, this is not a real environment either; it is not opera filmed on location. This is a constructed set, every bit as designed as if it had been painted scenery in a theater. Branagh, though first and foremost a man of the theater, leaves the stage behind here, because he wants to do something that would only be possible given both the flexibility and the scale of film. 17. The closing scene of Don Giovanni in the Losey and Holten productions I’m now going to show two versions of Don Giovanni, both made of film, but with utterly different aesthetics. For some reason, there was a spate of movies released in theaters from the mid-seventies to early nineties that featured lavish productions of operas filmed on location. Franco Zeffirelli did a Traviata, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle did a Rigoletto, Francesco Rosi did a Carmen, and there was a Tosca filmed at the actual times and places that I will sample in the second hour. I don’t quite know why we don’t see these so much any more; I suspect it is because the Live-in-HD phenomenon gives a similar satisfaction, while addressing the perennial problem of how to match image to sound. 18. Palladio buildings in Vicenza One of the most acclaimed of these was the Don Giovanni made by Joseph Losey in 1979. He had the idea of transferring the action to Vicenza in Italy, and to feature the architecture of Andrea Palladio (1508–80). Don Giovanni, in this version, lives outside town in the famous Villa Rotonda. In the overture, — 3 — however, he is seen visiting nearby Venice, ending at the glassworks on the island of Murano; I’ll pick it up for the last few bars.
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