Class 12: 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 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 . 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

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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

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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. We then turn to another Palladio building, the Basilica in the Vicenza main square. Leporello, Giovanni’s servant, is pacing outside while Giovanni is supposedly within, seducing the patrician Donna Anna. But he flees with her in hot pursuit and, when challenged by her father the Commendatore, eventually kills him.

19. Mozart: Don Giovanni (Losey), opening number _10:33_ 20. — still from the above

So what does the setting add? I like the intricate galleries and staircases. I like the obviously urban setting. And I especially like the cobbled street in the rain at the end. Does it add any greater intimacy? I can’t say that it does—but I would also question whether intimacy was what Losey wanted. So far from the charismatic charmer that you usually see, this Giovanni, Ruggero Raimondi, the Boris in the Zulawski film, is presented as aloof, cold, almost ugly. [And Ruggero could certainly do the charm, as I know from having assisted in his first Giovanni only a couple of years before.]

I’ll show you one more scene from the Losey film, this time Giovanni’s last. After a number of other adventures, he has challenged the Commendatore’s statue to dine with him that night; and here, at his midnight dinner, the statue shows up. After a very brief clip from the opening of the scene to show the lavishness of the setting, I shall cut to the statue scene itself. And when he goes to Hell, he is back in the Murano glassworks of the overture! The young servant in black has been present throughout the production, as a mute and inscrutable commentator.

21. Mozart: Don Giovanni (Losey), Act II finale, Commendatore _10:41_ 22. — still from the above

What do you think? How does the setting work here? Physically, nothing much happens in that scene, but the music is Mozart at his most intense, and Raimondi’s performance is equally so. And it was a fine idea of Losey’s not to have the statue actually speak. The more normal solution is to dress the singer in bronze or stone make-up; it works onstage, but film would be a different matter.

23. Juan and the Commissioner, from Kaper Holten’s Juan (2010)

Kasper Bech Holten, who directed that Copenhagen Ring we saw in Class 7, made a movie in 2010 called simply Juan. It was based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and used the music, heavily cut, sung in a frankly rather bad English translation by its star, Christopher Maltman. The title character is an artist, who makes large canvases of his various conquests, which are also recorded by his assistant Lep on his videocam. In Holten’s hands, the story is turned into a film noir, with Juan a wanted man pursued by the police, and increasingly the victim of his own desperation. I wish I could play the opening, which begins with Juan meeting the Donna Anna character at a performance of—wait for it—Don Giovanni, and being accepted quite willingly into her bed. But she changes when she realizes it is no more than a one-night stand, and then her father, the city commissioner of police, comes in.

At the end of the opera, there is no banquet, no glamor at all, merely a police chase in fast cars. But mentally, Juan is back in his deserted studio, awaiting the accusations of his own alter ego, his

— 4 — conscience. Cross-cutting between two such different scenes, one imaginary, the other real, would be next to impossible on the stage and would break up the trio of the three voices. But it works magnificently on film—even if the result may end up more Holten than Mozart!

24. Holten/Mozart: Juan, closing sequence _10:51_ 25. Title slide 2 (still from the above)

C. Written for the Screen

26. Amahl and the Night Visitors and Owen Wingrave

Of course there have been operas actually written for television, but they tend to be ephemeral, since television itself is such an in-the-moment medium. Though the earliest of them, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors from 1951, has indeed lasted. This is largely because of its music and its Christmas subject, but also because there is nothing specifically televisual about it; it works just fine on a stage or even in a church. Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave of 1971, however, was a comparative failure, partly because his use of television was not very imaginative, and partly because its theme of pacifism had nothing like the passion that Britten poured into his earlier War Requiem. Here is a very brief clip from the original television production directed by Colin Graham. The protagonist Owen, the pacifist scion of an old military family, is confronting the portraits of his ancestors. The camera is used for ghost-story effects that would be hard to achieve onstage, but not impossible. It just looks dusty and old-fashioned.

27. Britten: Owen Wingrave, original production, Owen’s “Peace” _11:08_ 28. Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper

So why do I even bother showing you something that was a comparative failure? Because the composer- librettist team of Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper were no fools. They had already achieved a masterpiece in their 1954 adaptation of another Henry James story, The Turn of the Screw. They may have had only a modest success with this later one, but they could learn, and their collaboration in Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice, yielded another masterpiece. But not a normal one.

In the realistic tradition of opera, inherited from the 19th century, physical settings are used to magnify the action and increase the drama; their reality is important, as we shall see shortly in Puccini’s Tosca. But there is another use of setting, increasingly common in the 20th century, and that is to reflect the inner landscape of the characters. Thomas Mann knew this in choosing Venice as the setting for his 1912 novella, which follows celebrated German author Gustav von Aschenbach to the city, and traces his growing obsession with a strikingly beautiful Polish boy staying at the same hotel. Aschenbach stays on too late, and succumbs to the cholera epidemic that the city is trying to hush up.

29. Death in Venice title

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Britten and Piper could not have written Death in Venice had they been thinking in terms of trditional theater; it required the fluidity of a film. For it consists of a number of very short scenes blending rapidly into one another, many of which take up only a small part of the stage: a man in a graveyard, a man in a gondola, a man in a barber’s chair. And always out there, there is the Venetian lagoon, shimmering, beckoning, stifling. The premiere at Covent Garden in 1974 was directed by a choreographer, Sir Frederick Ashton; dance is an intrinsically more fluid medium, but the result was a curious hybrid that did not win immediate acclaim. If it has succeeded in more modern productions (one of which we shall see), it is only because stage techniques too have moved closer to film. But, to my

30. Filming Death in Venice (1981)

But the 1981 film by Tony Palmer was a revelation. First, as you may recall from my “Vagaries of Love” course, because it so beautifully captures this atmosphere. Here, first, is a very short clip showing Aschenbach in the gondola that is taking him to his hotel. As you watch, ask yourself what the images actually do, in relation to Aschenbach’s words.

31. Britten: Death in Venice (Palmer film), gondola scene _11:16_ 32. — still from the above

What did you think? Aschenbach is looking forward to Venice reviving and stimulating him, yet the tortuous trip through these narrow and decaying canals seems to send a more sinister message. As will become apparent when the Gondolier refuses to take him where he asks, and rows him to the Lido instead. The Gondolier, incidentally, is one of a number of roles for the same singer (originally John Shirley-Quirk, a colleague of mine at Peabody) all showing aspects of Death.

33. Britten: Death in Venice (ENO, Warner), opening picture

I want to turn now to an actual stage production for comparison. This is the opening picture in the 2013 production by Deborah Warner for the English National Opera. As you see, it is another of those stagings that could not have been conceived without the example of video. The struggling author is lost in the limbo of his own written words, while the setting is separately projected in the background. As we shall discover, he is in a Munich graveyard. There he encounters a mysterious Traveler (the first of the many Shirley-Quirk roles) who tells him of marvels to unfold if he should journey to the South. In her production, Deborah Warner has made the Traveler a youngish man—he might be Aschenbach’s alter ego—and the singer is just the voice he hears in his own mind.

34. Britten: Death in Venice (ENO, Warner), graveyard scene _11:20_ 35. — still from the above

Whether real or not, the physical presence of that sinister figure singing in Aschenbach’s ear, even embracing him, is a powerful stage device. Let’s look at how Tony Palmer handles the same scene on film. He uses a cut version of the score, so I have time to continue into the first moments of the following scene, when Aschenbach is on the boat from Croatia to Venice and encounters a grotesque aging dandy, another Shirley-Quirk role, here sung by the man himself.

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36. Britten: Death in Venice (Palmer film), graveyard scene _11:28_ 37. — still from the above

What is the film doing here? The second scene is entirely realistic, but the first eschews that kind of reality at all, choosing to depict the imagery of the Traveler’s words, not the man himself. It seems that both Palmer and Warner have the same idea—that this is an auditory hallucination only, not a person of flesh and blood—but they have very different means open to them for showing it. Despite its real settings, the Palmer film looks not for reality, but for poetry.

E. A Puccini Postlude

38. The Settings of Tosca

Finally, three Giacomo Puccini films that virtually span the gamut, from laudable fidelity to lunatic fringe. First, the 1992 Tosca by the director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, who films each scene in the actual location and exact time of day specified in the score. Puccini was extraordinarily precise as to the settings of his operas. Each of the three acts of Tosca takes place in a specific locale in Rome: a major church, the offices of the police chief, and the prison where the hero is put before a firing squad. But I can only show you one, so I have chosen the end of Act I, which takes place in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Valle. Scarpia, the police chief, plans a dual assault Floria Tosca and her lover Mario Cavaradossi, using one to entrap the other, even while the crowd gathers for a celebratory Te Deum. You will recognize the Scarpia as the Don Giovanni of Joseph Losey’s film, Ruggero Raimondi. The Tosca is the American Catherine Malfitano.

39. Puccini: Tosca, Act I finale _11:36_ 40. — still from the above

What do you think this brings that you don’t get in a stage performance? One of the things I like about it is the way Scarpia can walk steadily towards the camera, while always being in your face. I also love the idea of carrying the ceremony out to the church steps, which avoids the cul-de-sac quality of having everything stop at the main altar, as you must on the stage. The film also enables the soloist to be in close proximity to the ensemble without ever being subordinate to them.

41. Angel Blue and Catherine Malfitano in Christophe Honoré’s Tosca (Aix, 2019)

Now a brand new Tosca production, from Aix-en-Provence last summer, that you’re probably going to hate. I would never claim it is the “right” way to stage the piece, but equally I am compelled to include it: in this course, because it just about as far out there as you can imagine; and in this class, because it represents a distinct use of the camera and video as an element in the staging itself, both for throwing live action up on the screen—much as Frank Castorf did in his Rheingold and William Kentridge did in his recent Met Wozzeck—and, as we shall see, to incorporate archival footage.

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42. The set and video set-up in Christophe Honoré’s Tosca

The concept of director Christoph Honoré is that a company is rehearsing a Tosca production starring the young soprano Angel Blue (whom we saw recently as Bess at the Met). But it so happens that a great Tosca from a former age—Catherine Malfitano of the Griffi film—is living in town, so they bring the entire cast round to her villa to be coached by her. All this is filmed by a crew from the local television station, and their live shots are projected on two enormous screens above the stage. We pick it up just before Tosca’s iconic aria “Vissi d’arte.” Scarpia has presented Tosca with a choice: her body or Cavaradossi’s life. Meanwhile, Malfitano is toying with a stud she has hired for sex, but ultimately rejects him. As the aria begins, the screens fill with films of great divas of the past, Malfitano herself, Raina Kabaivanska, but first and most notably Maria Callas in a red dress. Later on, Malfitano will present Angel Blue with the same dress, like a talisman passed through the generations from one diva to another. Honoré’s point, presumably, is about the ephemeral nature of operatic stardom, and how quickly it passes.

43. Puccini: Tosca, Act II excerpt (Aix-en-Provence 2019) _11:43_ 44. Ken Russell and Turandot

Finally, as a treat, something that does not qualify as an actual opera production at all, but is wonderful nonetheless. In 1987, a Scottish producer named Don Boyd issued an anthology film called ARIA, in which ten celebrated directors were asked to make short films, each based on an opera aria or other selection. None of them are productions, per se; they are more the equivalent of MTV music videos made for pop songs. But some of them are wildly inventive. Here is British director Ken Russell, working with a passage from Puccini’s Turandot (1924), ending with the celebrated aria “Nessun dorma.” That is all you need to know. From the very beginning, the movie is clearly “operatic” in its exoticism. But Russell leaves it to you to figure out what is going on….

45. ARIA movie (1987): Turandot segment (Ken Russell) _11:51_ 46. Title slide 3 (still from the above)

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