Dr. Metablog

Othello/ Otello

I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching -- at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera worshippers as well as the ridiculous plots, the unhandsome singers, the interminable intermissions, the staginess and artifice and the general all-around silliness -- as well as pay through the nose for the privilege of doing so, well then, I'm not always a happy fellow.

I know the sound of Verdi's Otello moderately well, having played the Placido Domingo version often enough for the laser to have bored holes into the cd. Moreover, as it happens, I'm moderately familiar with Shakespeare's play). But I had never seen a performance of Otello until this past Saturday when we betook ourselves and our bagels and our Granny Smiths to the Century Theatre to watch the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD performance. It was, frankly, glorious -- Renee Fleming in the electronic flesh, moving us to tears with the willow song (along with Verdi's bonus, dubious Ave Maria).  

She was superb; so were the orchestra, the costumes, the sets, even the overacting, villainous Iago, who would have twirled his mustachios, if he had had them, and the non-acting, expressionless Othello.

Our "guide," a robust, comfortable mezzo whose name I should know but didn't catch, made the claim that Verdi's Otello improved upon Shakespeare's Othello. A highly dubious claim, I think, but then, I don't know how to measure the value of the grand "Othello music," that Shakespeareans so much admire, against the cellos and the bassoons. Whether for better or worse, however, there's a heck of a lot in Shakespeare's play that didn't make it across the centuries and genres and into Verdi's opera. More than can be said in a paragraph or a blaguepost. 

For starters, Shakespeare created a multi-layered society, not just elaborate sets. His city of Venice has a sense of itself as a successful, orderly, civilized, and advanced community. Into this world strides Othello, not only an outlander but an African and a erotic exotic. Although Venice needs his soldiership, he's still a black man in a racist world who marries a willful patrician lady who prefers him to  the "wealthy curled darlings of the nation." It's an unlikely, perilous match: he's "declined into the vale of years" while she's very very young. He's a soldier who's been around the world; she's the secluded mistress of the house affairs. He's commanding; she's naive. 

Verdi must have loved Othello, although not necessarily for the right reasons. How could a play that ends on a bed, with a climactic murder-suicide, not have excited the instincts of the composer of Aida. Nothing more appropriate for grand opera than Othello and Desdemona -- and yet o so simple a representation compared with Shakespeare's rich figures and complex society.

Imagine a Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is not Jewish, or a King Lear in which Lear is a troubled forty-something and you're well on your way to grasping an Othello in which melanin is replaced with melodrama.    

As a result, even when Verdi brought tears to my eyes, it was because I was seeing through the opera to the play that lies beneath it.

And sometimes I was crying because I so desperately missed the beauties and the profundity that Verdi had not seen fit to include.

A Man and a Woman

I find it utterly fascinating that Romney and Obama, who are so unlike in so many ways and yet both to the best of our knowledge good "family men," are both descended from polygamists. 

Barack's great-grandfather Obama Opiyo had five wives and his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four. Such was the Luo tradition. Barack's father's bigamy was unlawful rather than traditional -- he left what used to be called a "grass widow" behind when he escaped Kenya.

Both of Mitt's great-grandfathers, Miles Romney and Helaman Pratt were polygamists. Miles had four wives and thirty children, Helaman had five wive and who knows how many offspring. Both families fled the U. S. en masse when a divine revelation and the enforcement of the Morrill Act ended polygamy in 1890.

And yet preachers and politicians continue to proclaim that "marriage is between one man and one woman, and always has been, since the time of Adam and Eve." 

It ain't so. Nothing could be more ahistorical or more false. The biblical patriarchs were all polygamists and King Solomon himself, a model of wisdom, we are told, collected an astonishing, exhausting household of 300 wives and 700 concubines. Plural marriage was part of Jewish tradition way into the first millennium. Another Abrahamic religion, Islam, is notably polygynous even as it is furiously anti-polyandrous. Marriages over the world have taken every shape imaginable, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. The idea that marriage is  permanent and unchanging is a canard belied by the immediate and symmetrical family histories of our two candidates. 

Amnesia on Film: Mirage (1965)

I was half-way through this neglected Cold War paranoia-mystery-Hitchcocky black-and-white (and noir all over) amnesia movie when I realized that I was watching a lineal ancestor of the Jason Bourne films. It's all there: the trauma, the amnesia, the shadowy organization determined to eliminate the amnesiac, the assassins, the hair-breadth 'scapes, the chases, the murky plotting.

David Stillwell (note the encouraging onomastic pun in his surname) played by the ever-upright Gregory Peck, has accidentally defenestrated his mentor and has gone into what this film calls "unconscious amnesia." He's got to figure it all out, which he does via Bourneian flashbacks, even while being pursued by a bunch of very bad guys, who fortunately, are most amateurish with their pistols.

There's also a dollop of Bond in the mix: a nuclear secret, a threat to world peace and in addition a possibly helpful, possibly dangerous former mistress. 

And there's Walter Matthau as a shambling amateurish detective. Early Walter Matthau -- taking a few first steps on the road to becoming the real Walter Matthau. 

It was a superior movie during the first mysterious hour, but as the mystery unravelled, it turned into cliche and incoherence. Too bad, because the noir atmosphere was splendidly realized and the shots of 1960s Manhattan a genuine treat. 

Mirage is a political movie, but it's hard to track its politics. Howard Fast, who wrote the novel from which the screenplay is adapted, leaned far left while the director, Edward Dmytryk, leaned right. The film teeter-totters.  

Mirage was remade three years later as Jigsaw, in which an LSD overdose was substituted for amnesia. Jigsaw doesn't seem to be available on Netflix, but I'll look for it. "Unconscious amnesia" apparently mutated, during the hippie years, into "drug amnesia." A new genre

A Splendid Sentence

All that is good and all that is bad about opera is summarized by the following splendid sentence. It comes from a plot summary of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Prepare to savor. 

"At the pre-wedding feast, Adina and Dulcamara entertain the guests with a barcarole."

Is that genius, or what? 

Here's the situation: the plot's a little thin and needs to be padded. Barcaroles were big in the 1840s. By good fortune, Donizetti just happens to have one in his drawer, or perhaps he has been thinking about gondoliers since his last trip to Venice. So let's slip a barcarole in there. 

Moreover, the barcarole is beautiful. Perfectly wonderful and enjoyable. It's as lovely as the excuse for its performance is ridiculous.

That's why we love grand opera -- its inevitable and constant juxtaposition of glorious and absurd. 

Thanks, Metropolitan Opera in HD, for bringing it to our attention. Let's hope for many more afternoons of such transcendent, splendid silliness.

Ah that in real life we could while away our empty hours with barcaroles.