Books & the Arts. Cory Weaver/Metropolitan O pera Weaver/Metropolitan Cory A scene from ’s , with Ildar Abdrazakov as Prince Igor Song and Dance by Marina Harss n February, the Russian director Dmitri final version” of the opera. It is a jumble of Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Crimea also Tcherniakov produced a new staging of unfinished ideas and marvelous music. comes to mind. Tcherniakov’s Igor is an Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor at the For his reconstruction, Tcherniakov re- antihero for our time. Metropolitan Opera. It was last per- arranged the order of scenes, cut several Borodin’s opera is the story of a Slavic formed there in 1917, sung in Italian. passages—including Glazunov’s overture— prince who goes off to fight a battle against IThe opera, which was left unfinished at and inserted music originally sketched by a “barbaric” non-Christian neighbor, a Tur- the time of the composer’s sudden death Borodin but never before integrated into the kic tribe known as the Polovtsians (or, more while attending a military ball in 1887, is opera, with orchestrations by Pavel Smelkov, often, as the Cumans), led by the cheerfully based on a twelfth-century Slavic epic, The including a major new monologue for Igor. truculent Khan Konchak. By the second Song of Igor’s Campaign, best known by the He also imagined a new, ambivalent end- act—in Tcherniakov’s staging, it’s the second English-speaking world in a translation by ing, set to a passage from the opera-ballet half of the first—Igor has suffered a brutal Vladimir Nabokov. Borodin had left several , a significant departure from the rous- defeat and is being held prisoner in a Polov- plot points unresolved: What happens to ing chorus that had previously closed the tsian encampment. His captor turns out to the young lovers, for example? Other im- opera. It is a bold reappraisal of the work: be a gracious host, offering friendship, rich portant events, including a major battle in what has traditionally been considered an cuisine and the company of wondrous, dark- which Igor suffers defeat and is taken cap- “earnestly nationalist” opera whose over- eyed beauties in return for an alliance. “Like tive, were left to the audience’s imagination. riding message was the “endorsement of two panthers, we would prowl together Because Borodin died before finishing most Russia’s militaristic expansion,” according to [and] feed on the blood of our enemies,” of the orchestrations, they were eventually the musicologist Richard Taruskin, has been he promises. Igor declines the offer, but the provided by two of his friends, the compos- recast as a more complicated piece about Khan seems unperturbed, good-naturedly ers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexan- the internal struggles of an impotent and inviting him to enjoy a brilliant spectacle by der Glazunov. As the musicologists Elena tormented hero, played here by the Russian his side: “Bring the captive girls! Let them and Tatiana Vereschagina note in the Met bass-baritone Ildar Abdrazakov. The first entertain us with their songs and dances!” program, there is no “authorized, definitive image we see in this production is a projec- So begins one of the most famous dance tion of Igor’s face wearing an anxious expres- suites—or divertissements—in opera: the “Po- Marina Harss, a freelance dance writer and trans- sion, followed by the aphorism “To unleash lovtsian Dances,” introduced by a lilting, lator based in New York City, has contributed to a war is the surest way to escape from one’s descending scale on the woodwinds, followed The Nation, The New York Times and The self.” Perhaps Tcherniakov was thinking of by the floating treble voices of women sing- New Yorker. George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War; ing of a land beyond the Caspian Sea, where 28 The Nation. May 12, 2014

“the air is filled with languor,” the roses curves, and their arms move in limp arcs, the action, the dancing almost always fails bloom, and the nightingales sing. Borodin’s their motions imbued with lassitude and to leave much of an afterimage. But when exotic musical idiom in this scene, heavy with longing. The music quickens and a new taken seriously, as in the 2006 Met revival haunting melismas, was partly inspired by melody, filled with skittering chromatic pas- of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, these little jewels musicological sources like Alexandre Chris- sages for the clarinet, rings out. Clutching a can make quite an impact. On that occasion, tianowitsch’s Esquisse historique de la musique bow, a Polovtsian warrior launches into a se- the Met invited a rising star, Christopher arabe; but mostly, it was the product of his ries of spinning jumps, circling the women. A Wheeldon, to create a fantasy ballet set to fanciful imagination. Taruskin has described troop of men advances in waves, like soldiers the “Dance of the Hours,” made famous by the scene’s sinuous melodies as “the supreme in an assault. The orchestral texture thickens a hippo ballet in the animated movie Fan- musical expression of nega,” or “tender las- as more instruments join in and the action tasia. The dancing takes place, as is often situde,” a characteristic of the exotic East becomes frenzied, with the men enacting the case, during a party scene. Wheeldon that “emasculates, enslaves, renders passive,” a kind of war dance, kicking their legs and made a delicious little ballet full of brilliant the embodiment of “S-E-X à la russe.” In launching into barrel turns. Quite suddenly, classical steps, small, quick jumps and spins, short, nineteenth-century Orientalism in all the music becomes bombastic, bolstered by and sophisticated counterpoint between the its shimmering, titillating glory. the percussion and full chorus. “Our Khan ensemble and soloists (“Like the popping of For the opera’s premiere in 1890 at the is glorious, Khan Konchak!” the singers cry a cork,” he described it). It brought down the Mariinsky, the ten or so minutes of chore- out, as the men smack the floor with their house, and Wheeldon’s own dance company, ography that close the act were created by bows and raise their arms in praise. The Morphoses, performed it with success as a Lev Ivanov, deputy ballet master of the Im- women provide a sinuous counterpoint to stand-alone piece. perial Theater School. Ivanov was famously this onslaught of raw masculinity. There it is, But even less substantial dances can cre- musical—among other things, he was re- the essence of Orientalism: sex and violence. ate an enchanting interlude. Mark Dendy’s sponsible for the exquisite lakeside acts of “Of course, the music is a little bit silly,” dance for Monostatos’s minions in Julie Tay- . The suite had considerable suc- the dance historian Lynn Garafola, an expert mor’s 2004 Magic Flute is delightfully silly, cess with audiences and critics, although Iva- on the , quipped recently. What full of gleeful twirling, rope-jumping and nov was hardly mentioned, an omission that was once titillating and exciting can now look acrobatic stunts. Dances have frequently was not unusual at the time. According to decidedly kitsch, like something out of a musi- served as a momentary diversion (hence the one of the company’s régisseurs, “after the act cal extravaganza or historical epic from Holly- name, divertissement) or moment of pure it was not applause, but a veritable ‘roar.’” wood’s golden age. (Indeed, among people of a pleasure. In seventeenth-century court en- certain age, the opening melody is perhaps best tertainments, they provided spectacular in- subsequent version of the dances, based known as the basis for “Stranger in Paradise,” termezzi and festive finales, meant to arouse on Ivanov’s design, has survived. This a pseudo-tropical love duet from the musi- amazement and admiration. “The province staging, created in 1909 by the Rus- cal , set in an exotic garden filled with of ballets was the more inchoate world of sian choreographer Michel Fokine, was parrots, peacocks and tacky Moorish follies le merveilleux,” explains the dance historian first performed as part of an evening of à la Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) One can see how Jennifer Homans in her book Apollo’s An- Aopera and dance presented by Serge Diaghilev’s a serious contemporary opera director, par- gels, an “expansive arena, with its pagan and Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in ticularly one as brainy as Dmitri Tcherniakov, Christian resonances and fascination with Paris. Fokine’s “Polovtsian Dances” became might want to avoid such connotations. “His miracles, magical, and supernatural events.” one of the most popular ballets in Diaghilev’s whole experience growing up was that every- In addition to arias and choruses, a spectacle repertory, performed throughout its twenty- one left after the ‘Polovtsian Dances,’ after the like Antonio Cesti’s Il Pomo d’Oro (1668) in- year history. (After the demise of the company, high point,” the musicologist Simon Morrison, cluded ballets depicting the spirits of the air it was revived by its various successors, includ- a specialist in Russian music, recently told me. and the denizens of the sea. ing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which So “he wanted to tone it down, to de-energize But as opera developed, the dances were performed in the United States throughout the it.” Tcherniakov has done exactly that in his expected to have a deeper connection to the 1940s.) It was the model for a whole series of production by setting the entire “Polovtsian” drama’s themes or action. The final scene in exotic ballets that Diaghilev periodically served act in an enormous field of thigh-high pop- Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys (1676), a “tragédie up to Parisian audiences hungry for the frisson pies—designed, like all the operas he directs, en musique,” is a dance of mourning for the of the magical East. These included Rimsky- by him—with no visible open spaces. The death of its central character. And in Gluck’s Korsakov’s Schehérazade and Le Coq d’Or as well scene occurs behind a scrim, further distanc- Orfeo ed Euridice (1762, revised with addi- as Stravinsky’s Firebird and . ing the audience from the action. Unseen tional dances in 1774), the dances are part In fact, Fokine’s “Polovtsian Dances” still pathways allow the characters to cross the stage of the plot, depicting the world Orpheus en- exist today (an anomaly, since most ballets with care—I saw someone stumble at the dress counters as he enters the realm of the dead in disappear); as recently as 2005, the ballet was rehearsal—but the set makes a ballet in the search of Eurydice. First the Furies block his revived for American Ballet Theatre (ABT) traditional sense impossible. path, then the spirits of the departed dance by Frederic Franklin, who had danced it with to the sound of his lyre. The music for both the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The ballet any operas have built-in ballets—a is sublime. A contemporary of Gluck com- goes more or less like this: a veiled slave girl dance interlude was a requisite for mented that the choreography—by Gasparo in pantaloons and soft slippers enters, fol- a work to be performed at the Paris Angiolini, then ballet master of the Vienna lowed by several comely companions. The Opera in the nineteenth century— court opera house—brought “the dances women’s mincing steps are accompanied by but directors have seldom taken together with the choruses and the action in the lament of a women’s chorus. Their torsos Mmuch care with them. Shoved into a shallow such a way as to provide a magnificent model bend, the better to show off their luxuriant space on the stage or sprinkled like filler into for the future.”

30 The Nation. May 12, 2014

A future that would not materialize: by to me in an e-mail exchange on the subject. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, the nineteenth century, the two art forms Partly, this is due to the specialization of the after Ratmansky took one look at Tchernia- were beginning to pull apart. Italian opera two forms over the course of the nineteenth kov’s poppy field, “amicably it was agreed it tended to dispense with ballets, and though century, and the resulting theatrical require- just wasn’t right for him.” Understandably, the conventions of French grand opera re- ments of each. Singing demands extreme Ratmansky could not imagine setting a ballet quired the inclusion of one, often in the focus and a certain amount of stillness; danc- in narrow passageways that limited the danc- third act, its main purpose was to please ers need space and freedom of movement; ers’ trajectories and blocked the audience’s the wealthy patrons of the Jockey Club, and music (and text) can convey emotion view of their lower bodies. who usually arrived just in time to ogle the without any movement at all. Opera direc- Ratmansky isn’t the only choreographer ballerinas. These ballets had only the most tors usually relegate the dancers to small to have encountered practical difficulties tenuous of connections to the plot. In Verdi’s areas on the stage so they won’t get in the working in opera. For Crystal Pite, who Paris version of Don Carlos, for example, a way of the story—who hasn’t seen a version created the spectacular acrobatic movement scene of treachery that leads to the death of of Eugene Onegin or La Traviata in which the for Robert Lepage’s production of Thomas a major character was followed by a bubbly waltzing couples are crowded into a shallow Adès’s The Tempest at the Met, the medium underwater ballet about the search for a per- area next to a piece of scenery? The opposite feels “like another planet,” with different fect pearl. The music is marvelous—George can also be true when choreographers are priorities and limitations of time and space. Balanchine later used it for his plotless bal- given free rein. In 1914, when the Ballets Increasingly, in contemporary stagings, di- let Ballo della Regina (1978)—but written Russes produced Rimsky-Korsakov’s fantas- rectors expect singers to move, so there is in a much lighter style than the rest of the tical opera Le Coq d’Or, the choreographer the difficulty of working with untrained opera. Like most of the nineteenth-century Fokine had the dancers mime the story while bodies that are simultaneously engaged in opera ballets, it is almost always cut. Last the singers sat offstage. This was not how the extremely taxing job of producing beau- summer, when Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes the composer had imagined it. Mark Morris tiful, unconstricted sounds that will be au- was performed in its full French version, also pushed the singers to the sidelines in his dible in large theaters. “I’m not drawn to it including the ballet music, at the Bel Canto 1989 version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the same way I am to working in theater,” at Caramoor festival, I overheard many pa- using dancers as doubles for their voices. But says Pite, “because by their very nature, ac- trons grousing during intermission about the Morris has also successfully placed singers tors are much more likely to be able to hurl inclusion of such lightweight, frothy fare. and dancers side by side, as in his delightful themselves at things…and to not be precious Yet opera has influenced the evolution 2008 setting of Purcell’s King Arthur for the in the way a singer is or needs to be.” Wheel- of dance. The Giacomo Meyerbeer opera New York City Opera. He is planning to do don faced similar difficulties when working Robert le Diable (1831) included a ballet the same in his upcoming Acis and Galatea, with two different Carmens at the Met. The in the third act for a group of ghostly, which will premiere later this week: “It’s younger, svelter Elina Garanca was eager to depraved nuns who rise up out of their going to be danced throughout,” he told me move, but Olga Borodina, who sang some graves in the night to tempt the hero. last year. “The principal singers are onstage of the performances—gorgeously, I might The ballet created a sensation: its eerie with the dancers…everyone occupies the add—was less willing. “She has a fabulous, atmosphere, enhanced by gas lighting that same world.” In Pina Bausch’s rendition creamy voice,” he recalled, but she “did not emulated “strange and lurid moonlight” of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1975), the look good in my choreography…. Is that my (in Homans’s words), led to the vogue for singers shadow the dancers onstage, with re- fault in the end, or is it the nature of these dances about ethereal female spirits, even- sults that are sometimes touching but other operas?… The interesting question here is tually explored in Romantic ballets like times stilted, both for the singers and the what is more important in opera, the entire and . The choreographer dancers. It is difficult to find an ideal balance. production or one starry voice? As an audi- Filippo Taglioni, who created the nuns’ ence member, I prefer artistic embodiment dance, went on to create the choreography hen the Prince Igor production was in a performance. I find it hard to believe in for La Sylphide; his daughter, Marie, was to first announced, in 2012, the chore- opera if it isn’t complete this way. When it’s become one of the great Romantic-era bal- ographer attached to the project was right, it’s the perfect art form for me. When lerinas, as well as one of the first to dance en Alexei Ratmansky, also Russian and it’s wrong, it’s just plain tedious and some- pointe, a major development in the history a connoisseur and admirer of nine- times laughable.” of the form. Balanchine also noted his debt teenth-centuryW spectacle [see Harss, “Rat- After Ratmansky bowed out of Prince to opera, to which he was exposed in his mansky Takes Manhattan,” September 23, Igor, Tcherniakov proposed Itzik Galili, years as a yeoman opera-ballet choreogra- 2009]. As the former director of the Bolshoi an Israeli-born contemporary dancemaker pher with the Ballets Russes: “From Verdi’s Ballet, and later as a freelance choreographer who has worked extensively in Great Brit- way of dealing with the chorus,” he said, “I and with ABT, he has created clever, subtly ain and the Netherlands, though never in learned how to handle the corps de ballet, the tongue-in-cheek restagings of such over- opera. “I’m not an opera guy,” he told me ensemble, the soloists—how to make the the-top ballet warhorses as and in late January, when he was still developing soloists stand out against the corps de ballet , as well as a witty faux-Egyptian the choreography in a large studio at the and when to give them time to rest.” divertissement for the Met’s Aida. Ratmansky Met. “I’ve never worked on a project before A tension between the two forms re- seemed to be the ideal man for the job: a where I didn’t know in advance what the mains. “There is a utilitarian, condescending truly great choreographer with a contempo- set would look like.” Galili’s choreographic attitude toward dance in the opera/music rary perspective on Russian theatrical history. options were, inevitably, circumscribed. world—or outright ignorance—and you can Dance lovers quivered with anticipation— Literal allusions to the libretto—maidens, find analogous feelings on the other side,” just imagine what he would do with the ersatz warriors, songs of praise—were eliminated. the music critic Alex Ross recently wrote exoticism of the Polovtsians! But according to Instead, thirty or so dancers in pale body May 12, 2014 The Nation. 31 paint and white pajama pants (slips for etry and life. In the second movement Prince Igor includes a similar moment. In the women) appeared from beneath the of Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly, Tcherniakov’s antiheroic conception of the poppies, where they had crouched hidden choreographed by Carolyn Choa, a flock opera, the triumphant ending is replaced by during one of the production’s film projec- of birds—puppets handled by invisible a tentative return to life. The prince’s belea- tions. With the first note of the women’s mimes—give physical expression to Cio- guered countrymen, played by members of chorus—which Tcherniakov had placed in Cio-San’s fluttering thoughts as she awaits the chorus, begin to pick up the fragments twelve boxes within the theater itself—the the return of her American husband, Lieu- of their destroyed civilization, dragging dancers popped up and began undulating tenant Pinkerton. Another example is the and carrying rubble across the stage. The and twisting their torsos, tracing calli- slowly moving clusters, stylized gestures, scene is reminiscent of Roberto Rossellini’s graphic shapes with their arms in the air or and hypnotic swaying of the dancers and images of devastation in Germany Year Zero. touching their hearts, their heads. In the chorus members—indistinguishable from Their movements are accompanied by a faster passages, the dancers jumped over one another—in last year’s Parsifal, also glistening orchestral passage from Mlada the hedges and ran in zig-zagging paths choreographed by Choa. Here, bodies were titled “The River Don Floods.” No one across the stage. When the chorus sang used almost as moving sculptures to com- sings, but there is something deeply stirring “Khan! Khan!”, a few of the dancers formed plement the music and the mood, creating about the sight of these bent bodies moving couples, with the men pushing and pulling a sense of meter and counterpoint in an about the stage, heavy with sadness and his- the women by their necks and long, loose otherwise static, desolate staging. tory. It’s rather like a ballet. n hair. During the finale, the men began jumping more frantically, reaching and kicking until, with the last ringing note, the dancers fell to the ground, once again concealed beneath the flowers. “It is an image of feeling,” Galili explains, of “love and hate, caressing and pushing,” in “a paradise full of joy and sublime optimism.” Says Simon Morrison: “He seemed to be riffing on erotic, exotic stereotypes, making the [scene’s] Garden of Eden quality…a little dirtier, more like soft porn than burlesque.” Pragmatic, functional and entirely unspec- tacular, Galili’s gestural choreography had the advantage of not distracting from the director’s concept of the Polovtsian act as a kind of hallucination conjured by Prince Igor, injured in battle. “The exotic land of the Polovtsians is not a hostile den of bar- barians but rather a quasi-utopian alternate reality, where Igor is able to come to terms with his mistakes and examine his life in a new way,” says the program note. In other Barry M c Call Barry words, it’s not about the Polovtsians; it’s John Banville, alias Benjamin Black about Igor. The dancers’ near-flesh-tone white coloring makes them appear like part of the décor, a kind of tableau vivant. On the The Brand Is My Business two occasions I attended, the response to the dances was subdued, despite the stirring by Sarah Weinman music. More than anything, it seemed like a missed opportunity to me, a moment in he dirty truth about reading books The Black-Eyed Blonde which the powerful dance value of the music when you’re in the publishing busi- A Philip Marlowe Novel. was sacrificed in favor of an overarching idea. ness is that it is impossible to do so By Benjamin Black. The Fokine choreography may have been free of preconceived notions. Before Henry Holt. 290 pp. $27. kitschy, but it was thrilling as movement, we read a single word of prose, we thereby reflecting the ecstatic singing of the judgeT the cover, the title, the jacket copy, this now.” We skim the reviews, analyze the chorus. Here, the sequence was little more and we wager whether our friends were blurbs and dig beneath the coded “market- than a curiosity. compos mentis when they urged us to “read ing plans” to speculate whether the book In some ways, despite such missed op- has a better-than-even chance of selling portunities, the situation of dance in opera Sarah Weinman is the news editor of Publishers more than a token number of copies. is improving. Several recent productions Marketplace, an online information service for the Add a famous literary character to the at the Met have integrated intriguing pas- book industry. She is also the editor of Troubled mix, one with a secure, enduring reputation, sages of nondance movement, infusing the Daughters, Twisted Wives, an anthology of and our prejudices (positive or negative) stage action with a greater sense of po- twentieth-century domestic suspense fiction. grow even stronger. The character comes