Architecture and Mozart: A Sublime Glyndebourne Moment

That's the thing about art, you never know when the moment of epiphany will strike.  It has a way of catching you when you least expect.  And then it is something.

It wasn't until yesterday that I finally came across the production of Mozart/Da Ponte's Le Nozze di Figaro that opened the new theater at Glyndebourne back in 1994, but it's one of the most enthralling opera performances I've ever encountered.

With Bernard Haitink in the pit, and singers like a young Renee Fleming as the Countess, Andreas Schmidt as the Count, and a boyishly handsome Gerald Finley as Figaro, it's beautifully sung and, under Derek Bailey's direction, skillfully acted.  Too often in opera, you get the sense that the singers are just going the motion of establishing characters, but here the acting is natural and unforced.  Rather than a series of disconnected moments within long periods of just standing and singing, here the performers register what appears to be a continuous stream of thought and emotion.  Beyond the beautiful music, you get the sense that something is really at stake dramatically.  Truth be told, I've fallen hopelessly in love with Alison Hagley and her radiant Susanna.

The production, on the surface, could be classified as conservative.  It's not updated - sets and costumes are of the period indicated in the libretto - but it's absolutely modern in its clarity of expression.  There is no clutter.  The sets, by John Gunter, are simple, representational and flexible.  The conclusion of the opera is set in a blue night forest consisting entirely of black shafts bent like the columns of a Koolhaas/Balmond interior (or, alternatively, you could think of them as lingering hair follicles on a balding skull.)(Or not.)

The sequence that took my breath away, however, was the brief transition between scenes in the third act, which you can view at about the 38:00 minute mark in the video below.  (I'm betting it'll convince you to buy the DVD.)


The great march - one of my favorite bits of Mozart -  begins to play, the stage empties except for the seriously conflicted countess and count as they prepare to greet their guests for a double wedding.

As they take their seats, the back wall, consisting of tall bookbases, splits apart and retreats into the wings, revealing an abstracted facade centered by a classical tripartite portico of three tall, arched openings, covered in screens.

The lighting suddenly cuts to a minimum, cast forward from the back of the stage.

Everything is now in silhouette. Louvers in the arches form a kind of scrim, a play on transparency, a symbol of the storyline's multiple deceptions. From the inside, servant girls walk to each of the outer arches, bow to their masters, and turn to open the set of louvers, revealing a second set of louvers, which they also open.  From the outside, Figaro himself then opens the central louver, at the head of the line of guests as they enter in measured step to the beat of the music, towards shadows cast against a stage floor etched with a grid of thin red diagonal lines, on which count and countess sit in their chairs like points of a triangle.  A play within a play is about to begin.  Confounding their intentions, the players and those they play to are about to become one.

Before and after, the very human characters of this production, principals and extras alike, create a world of conflict, confusion and desire, but in this brief scene, they move with stately formality through a setting of Miesian geometric perfection, softened within the benedicting ether of Mozart's wondrous music, and, for a moment, the abject human condition is elevated into sublime ritual.

The silhouettes emerge into the light to be revealed again as flesh.  The players disperse from  formation.  The action resumes, back into a comedy of bitter pain and desperate longing, on its way to ultimate reconciliation in deepest emotion.

Sunday Reading: Eileen Gray's E.1027 house regained, The Reinvention of Rahm, a Conservative debunks the GOP, and the sound of real leadership, from FDR

Interesting reads this weekend:

Financial Times architecture critic Edward Heathcote has the story of Eileen Gray's 1925 E.1027 house, the modernist landmark that predated Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye by several years.  Uninvited, Le Corbu painted a series of murals on the lower murals, built a hostel on the hill above it, and finally washed up on the beach below after drowning in 1965.  Long abandoned, E.1027 is being lovingly restored by an organization called Friends of E.1027, and is scheduled to re-open next year.

Elsewhere, Shirley Anthrop has an interview with former CSO Music Director Bernard Haitink, who will return to Chicago this fall with performances of the Mahler 4th and Haydn's Creation.

Chris Buck © Business Week

The new Business Week includes Devin Leonard's The Reinvention of Rahm Emanuel, an update on the convoluted tale of The Saving of Group Zero, and a story on Spam's Long March in China that is, for a change, about not Internet skulduggery, but canned meat.

Over at the Sun-Times, conservative pundit David Frum cuts the floor out from under the GOP lunatic fringe with Obama has made a bad economy worse? Really? How?, which concludes . . .

Gov. Rick Perry on Friday urged us to believe that the economy is gripped by the worst slump since the Great Depression because Obama spoke disrespectfully of the owners of private jets. To which I can only say: Really? That’s the indictment?

In The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew in What Were They Thinking? dissects the Debt Ceiling Deal, while on its blog, Ronald Dworkin reminds us what real leadership is with a quote from a FDR campaign speech from 1936.

David Levine © New York Review of Books

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

As Dworkin notes, Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.

Special bonus, from Wikipedia, is this chart of the national debt as a percentage of GDP under every U.S. President since 1945.  Surprise, surprise, until Obama, the ratio fell under every Democratic president, Dwight Eisenhower and the first term of Richard Nixon.  It's increased under every Republican President since, big time.  Ronald Reagan (+9.3 and 11%), George H.W. Bush (+13.0%), and George W. Bush (7.1 and 20.7%) all grew the debt to GDP ratio a higher rate than Obama (9.0%).  It was Dick Cheney who famously declared "deficits don't matter."

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