January 2001 BAMcinematek 2001 Spring Season Andres Serrano, Hooded Warbler II, 2000 BAM Spring Season sponsor: PHILIP MORR I S ~lA6(8Ill COMPANIES INC. Contents • January 2001 Threehundredso mething 8 The Glyndebourne production of Leos Janacek's The Makropulos Case, directed by Nikolaus Lehnoff, comes to BAM. By Tom Sutcliffe Jacobean Mayhem 22 John Webster's bloody The White Devil is staged at BAM by the Sydney Theatre Mike Hoban Company and Gale Edwards. By Bryce Hallett Program 17 Upcoming Events 46 BAMdirectory 54 Robert McFarlane RA 1\/1 CO\/Ar Arti,t Andres Serrano was born in New York City in 1950 and studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969. His artworks have been exhibited in galleries and institutions around the world. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions including "Body and Soul ," a traveling exhibition seen in Norway, Germany, and England, and mid-career retro­ spectives at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Philadelphia and the Groninger Museum/The Netherlands. His photographs have been included in many group shows, with recent exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art/Ridgefield , Connecticut; New Museum of Contemporary Art/New York City; the Serpentine Art Gallery/ London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum/ London. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City. Andres Serrano Hooded Warbler II, 2000 20" x 24" Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York For BAMart information, contact Deborah Bowie at 71B.636.4111 x3BO. 4 Glorified at Glyndebourne, Composers Leos Janacek and Benjamin Britten both tackled stories and ideas that had scarcely been ex­ Nikolaus Lehnoff's production of plored by opera before. While Britten concentrated The Makropulos Case-Leos on the theme of the sexual outsider (drawing on his life experience), Janacek explored the realms of fem­ Janacek's brilliant meditation on inism and religion, driven by his sympathy for those like himself whom life (and the ancient rules of the mortality and morality-comes Church) had cheated of the fundamental experience to BAM. By Tom Sutcliffe of love. The Czech composer's marriage was a wasteland (however much his poor wife wished to sustain it) , and his transfiguration after he met his Anjua Sifja in The Makropulos Case beloved soul mate, Kamila Stosslova, clearly ac­ Photo by Mike Hoban counts for the extraordinary creative flourish of his 8 nary life because it's built from melodic frag­ ments, pulsing with energy, inherently conversa­ tional, capturing those natural forces and compulsions far beyond the power of human be­ ings and animals to control. His taut, expressive musical language endows all his characters with authentic voices. Eternal life is the topic of The Makropulos Case, grappling with the question: Is life worth living forever? Or does the obligatory timescale of exis­ tence lay down the groundwork for our whole va lue system? Karel Capek, who in 1922 wrote the play on which Janacek closely based his opera (with radical alterations of emphasis and tone in the third and last act), was prompted by a scientific theory which has since been shown to be virtually true: that aging is caused genetically by an "auto-intoxicating organism ." The Makropoulos Secret (as the play was called) was translated and published in Boston by Luce & Company in 1925. The American introduction quoted Capek referring to Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, which came out in 1921. "While Bernard Shaw comes to the same conclusion as I do," wrote Capek, "it is in quite the opposite manner. Mr. Shaw believes that it is possible for an ideal community of people to live several hundred years in a sort of paradise. I think that such a condition is neither ideal nor desirable .... Mr. Shaw's play is a classic example of optimism, and my own- a hopeless instance of pessimism .... One turns from bad to higher things: the other Leos Janacek searches for something better and higher in ordinary existence. The one looks for paradise­ final decade-when his most original operas there is not a loftier vision for the human soul­ emerged in rapid succession. The Makropulos the other strives for recompence in life itself. Is Case is one of these, with an enigmatic heroine this pessimism?" at its center. Nikolaus Lehnoff's incarnation of this masterwork comes to BAM for four perfor­ Janacek's music, which combines manic tetchy manceson February 11,13,15, and 17. intensity with floating anxiety about the passage of time, gives a very clear answer to Capek's Heroic women were nothing new in opera, of question. There's infectious romantic nostalgia; course. The realism of Carmen anticipates there are dance rhythms . The score suggests a Janacek's view of the female victim of society's life lived fully, full of tears and joy beside its pro­ intolerance. But Janacek's concern for women is found sense of a mechanism winding down. The not political: He did not write operas to promote opera's third act makes death for the desperately the suffragettes. He is stirred, rather, by the cir­ fatigued Emilia Marty-who, during the course of cumstantial tragedy of ordinariness. He tells the her 337 years of existence assumes the additional truth about how life really was and is, and his identities of Elena Makropulos, Eugenia Montez, music marries perfectly with this theme of ordi- and Ellian MacGregor- a devoutly wished-for 10 Th e Makropulos Case Photo by Mike Hoban consummation, and, in musical terms , both a re­ The title role of The Makropulos Case is a gift for lease and a sort of triumph, paradoxically, of life a mature diva. It cou ld scarcely be better served over the fear of death. than by the still-glamorous Anja Silja. Silja goes back to a previous theatrical era, and was loved Perhaps eclipsed by Janacek's brilliance, the play by the great Wieland Wagner and adored by Otto has not made its way in the English-speaking Klemperer, who, in cidenta ll y, conducted world, despite its containing what H.T. Parker in Janacek's opera in Berlin in 1928. Now in her 1924 called "the high-pitched, the all-pervading, mid 60s, Silja still exudes sensua lity, her fine the virtuosa part of a generation." But writing to legs stretched languorously on a modern couch­ Janacek, Capek called his text "conversational, chair in Lehnoff's Glyndebourne production . A highly unpoetical and garrulous. " A few weeks memorable Lulu in a former incarnation, Silja's earlier, Janacek wrote to his adored Kamila, "They Elena reveals how close a companion Janacek's have been doing Makropulos in Prague. A woman opera is to Berg's later masterpiece. She displays 337 years old , but still young and beautiful. a dazzling wardrobe-trouser suit and trilby; dia­ Would you like to be like that? And you know we mante sunburst headdress and dragonfly panier are happy because we know that we won't live skirt- and makes her entrances with blithe, long. So one has to use every moment, use it stunning authority. properly. It's all rush in our life-and desire. That last is my fate: that beautiful woman of 337 years Her voice, of course, has always been idiosyncrat­ hadn't got a heart any more. That's bad." ic, fed on the elixir of individual vocal style and 12 theatricality. Unlike Elena Marty, there's no evi­ subtle surrealism to suggest the philosophical no­ dence that her extended operatic career depended tions lurking within this work. We see a sweeping on a secret formula buried away in a dusty broad corridor that slopes down to the front of the lawyer's office to which she could return when stage. Art deco entrances face each other from ei­ she required a further lease of vocal life-unless ther side of the stage. At the start the rounded it's her marriage to Christoph von Dohnanyi. back wall is piled high with files. A plum velvet curtain is very slowly drawn across this wall, cov­ Emilia Marty spends most of the opera depend­ ering the past, growing more and more faded. To ing on a written document, but all the other char­ the left a cross-section of wall slowly fills with acters in the opera (youthful trio, ancient trio, and sand, like an hourglass. The audience is bound to trio of servants) rely on fantasy and faith. One notice, in the most extraordinary design aspect of young man , Prus' son Janek, kills himself when all, that the furniture against which each scene is he fails to win the heartless diva for himself. Yet played is very slowly and imperceptibly moving E.M. can still thrill to chance happenings. Just from left to right across the stage as if on a con­ watch how casually Silja tosses aside a little posy veyor belt. Locality is precise yet fluid . handed her, after hugely enjoying the cabaret act performed for her by a long-lost admirer from When you do notice that the furniture is moving, Mexico, the superannuated, half-witted ex-diplo­ it just reinforces what the music has been saying mat, Hauk-Sendorf. about how far human life itself is mechanistic. So the suppressed panic of passing unstoppable Lehnoff's legendary Glyndebourne staging of this time is brilliantly suggested. Assorted piles of lug­ modern fairy story about a long-running inheri­ gage, initialed E.M., magically appear, while tance case is superbly designed by Tobias Ho­ above the stage a grand piano, suspended upside heisel. Really, the designer is Silja's co-star. down, gradually moves downstage during the Outwardly, stage action and costumes are normal , performance.