The Marquesas

By what stretch of the imagination am I going to write about Polynesian islands today? Atuona Cemetery on Hiva-Oa, one of the Marquises islands, is the final resting place of two important figures in my imagination: Paul Gauguin and, only a few yards away, Jacques Brel. The former lived there from 1895 until his death in 1903, and the latter visited first in 1975 and went there to spend his final months from 1977 to 1978.

A group of articles (Gauguin: le génie du Pacifique, Portrait: un clochard aux Marquises, and Exposition: hissez les couleurs!, all by Jean Pierrard, September 19) featured on the cover of Le Point this week announced the upcoming Gauguin retrospective (Gauguin—Tahiti: l'atelier des tropiques) at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, from October 3, 2003, to January 4, 2004. From there it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it will show from February 29 to June 20. I will try to see it when I am in Paris. One of the Marquises paintings in the show is Contes barbares from 1902, owned by the Museum Folkwang in Essen (image at left).

UPDATE:
Twelve of Gauguin's paintings are online here at Le Nouvel Observateur.

The Jacques Brel story has appeared on the evening news from France 2, and in some form or another in just about every French news publication on the planet (for example, Ludovic Perrin, Jacques Brel au-delà des Marquises, September 23, in Libération). What has developed is a sort of politicized brouhaha (the French term I am translating is "une polémique") over five recorded songs that the legendary Belgian singer made for his final album but that he decided not to include. For 25 years since his death, everyone has respected his dying wishes. Until this year, that is, when those tracks have been made public in a special anniversary collection. The polemic in the French media revolves around the decision by Brel's widow to release the recordings, supposedly for the profits. I am glad to do my part for Mme Brel, as I will certainly be buying the new collection when I am in France. Places had a lot of resonance for Brel (a major Ionarts theme), and his evocations of the crazy spirit of a city like Bruxelles or the windswept plains of Le plat pays, both from 1962, are beautiful tributes to his native Belgium. Still, I think that the lines that end Brel's song Les Marquises, inscribed on the monument on Hiva-Oa shown at right, are among the most touching that he ever wrote, at the moment when he was suffering with terminal cancer:

Veux-tu que je te dise / Gemir n'est pas de mise / Aux Marquises.
You want me to tell you / Groaning [in pain] is not appropriate / In the Marquesas.

INTERVIEW: Wagner in Washington (Part 3 of 6)

The Ionarts exclusive interview with Carol Berger, founder of the Millennium Wagner Opera Company, continues. As you will learn in this installment, I received an invitation to a rehearsal of singers of the Millennium Wagner Opera Company, which I accepted. At the rehearsal which I recently attended, there were three real singers and an accompanist with Ms. Berger, and they worked on portions of Wagner's Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Walküre, as well as one of the Wesendonck-Lieder and one of Strauss's Four Last Songs. It is a privileged position to be at a rehearsal so I will not say much more than to observe that these three singers are talented musicians with voices and training perfectly appropriate for this sort of repertory. It was a delight to hear, and I hope that the company will ultimately have a chance to present the productions it envisions. You can also purchase a CD that features some of the company's singers, through the Millennium Wagner Opera Web site.

Ionarts:
What are the ideas you teach in your vocal studio?

Carol Berger:
The Bayreuth-Theater Wagner Studio came about as part of the process of bringing singers on and rehearsing. What I will do is invite you to come to one of our rehearsals, and you can speak to our singers and find out from them what they think of our work.

Ionarts:
That sounds great.

Carol Berger:
In the United States, Wagner coaching seems superficial. It's about dynamics or understanding leitmotifs. That's not Wagner coaching. That's vocal coaching of Wagner’s music. What we do is role interpretation. I work with singers on Wagnerian roles. I work with troubled singers, singers with vocal problems, singers who are blocked. This is not to say that I replace a vocal coach, because I don't. I have been told that it is myself and two other people in Germany who work this way. What I do is work inside the psychology of the part. I never tell a singer, "Tell me about Isolde, or who Siegfried is." We do a series of exercises in which they literally take on the character. I am not going into much detail, but this brings out a level of passion and intensity that they are not getting elsewhere.

Ionarts:
How would you characterize your role in the company? Will you direct productions?

Carol Berger:
With our coach as my partner we do everything right now. I do initial screening of singer candidates and then we audition the singers. I’m doing all the admin. I’m hoping to acquire several interns from conservatories now that we're into the fall, because I need to offload much of the administrative work. We have a huge mailing list of people. If there is one role that I will always maintain, it is that of the dramaturge, because I understand these characters better than most people do. To make our Wagner productions searing, I have to do the dramaturgy part of it.

Ionarts:
What are some of your company’s past performances?

Carol Berger:
We have not had a major production yet. We are only a year old. When you deal with serious opera people, people in the profession, they understand that you do not create an opera company and immediately start doing productions, unless you are doing some sort of local predictable repertory theater, the old war-horses like La Bohème, Aïda, and La Traviata, and things like that, and you just go out and rent a local theater. That's not what we are. It takes time! It took Wagner almost 12 years.

We have a new vision of Wagner. We've done this from the ground up beginning with a solid business plan. Let me tell you how hard it is to get into this company. I've had approximately a thousand singers send me resumes, send me cassettes or demo CDs, for the purpose of auditioning in the first year. My standards are different. I insist on absolutely perfect German declamation, unique color, professional experience, stage resumes, and absolute commitment to Wagner. We are not a freelancer company: every single one of my singers is under contract. They have to sign a roster agreement, a contract, meaning that they are committed to Millennium. The agreement requires confidentiality about the content of our programs, which is our intellectual property. This is necessary because last year some local adversaries were successful in getting some of our contracts for recital work rescinded. So, unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of running our mouths about our work. Does this contract mean they don't do any other work? No. Most of our singers work with other major opera companies and are under agent management, but they have a direct working relationship with this company that their agents acknowledge and are happy for them to have. In the case where a singer comes to us through an agent introduction, we always need to talk to the singer directly and hear a demo first. Since this is not a gig company, we need to get a feel for their commitment and long-term interest in Wagner. Then we make what accommodations we need to make. The agents that trust their singers and know about their dreams do not stand in their singer’s way.

(To be continued.)

DeLillo goes from France to Germany

My translation of an interview with Don DeLillo from L'Express (see post on September 14) has gotten some attention in the blogosphere. One puzzling reaction was that of Graham Lester (Intellectuals Say the Darnedest Things, September 15) in his blog uncategorical, who took exception to one particular line about life in the U.S. these days, that it "has become difficult not only to protest but even to speak":

Now, perhaps Mr. DeLillo is a genius of rare proportions. There must be some reason why he was being interviewed. But I must tell you that his answer to the question made me laugh out loud.

It seems that this reaction confirms DeLillo's statement, rather than contradicting it. That is, forget about protesting: against what can one protest? Right now merely to utter a question publicly about the "war on terrorism" can put one into an uncomfortable position. Often the reaction to this line of thought (what does the United States need to change about its foreign policy to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world?) is simply condemnation. I think that's what DeLillo meant, not that authors are literally forbidden to speak out but that they fear a reactionary backlash to what they want to say.

UPDATE:
Graham Lester has clarified his reaction to DeLillo's statement (see post on September 22, That Mighty Wind).

Anyway, to keep this post on the arts and not politics (see the Ionarts motto in the upper righthand corner), after leaving France DeLillo will be going to Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Zurich. He has also done another interview, this time with a German reporter (Jede Art von Macht verlangt auch nach ihrer Ausübung, September 22, in Die Welt), which I am not going to translate in full. However, there was one question that I thought was an obvious followup to the French interviewer's question about the action of Cosmopolis taking place in a single day. While that interview missed the chance to ask the question, the German interviewer did not:

Die Welt:
In interviews you have sometimes called reading Joyce's Ulysses one of the shaping experiences of your youth. In Cosmopolis you present a novel that takes place in a single day. Is this a bow before James Joyce?

Don DeLillo:
One of the first people to read the novel told me instantly, "Cosmopolis is Ulysses." I was careful not to make the book a revised version of Joyce's novel. Not that long ago on 47th Street, on which my protagonist drives in Manhattan, there was even a restaurant called Molly Bloom's Pub. Under no circumstances would I have used it in Cosmopolis. On the other hand, in the novel some minor mythological allusions can be found, not least that of Icarus. There is actually something that psychologists call the Icarus complex, which if it can be believed, applies to very powerful men who seek their own destruction.

INTERVIEW: Wagner in Washington (Part 2 of 6)

The Ionarts exclusive interview with Carol Berger, founder of the Millennium Wagner Opera Company, continues:

Ionarts:
Some people approach Wagner negatively because of his personal life and faults, especially his anti-Semitism. Is it fair to consider Wagner's personal faults in one’s estimation of his music?

Carol Berger:
I'm very glad you asked me about that. Wagner's anti-Semitism is a big sorrow to me. That being said, I would really appreciate it if all the sanctimonious people feeling so insulted by Wagner's anti-Semitism would turn with equal zeal on Brahms and Chopin. Wagner wrote some things that were pretty unfortunate and that don't make me feel very good about him inside, but Brahms and Chopin took their feelings on the road. They literally went after musicians, Chopin in Poland and Brahms in Vienna, and they intentionally got Jewish musicians thrown out of work. I remind you that the conductor who premiered Parsifal was Hermann Levi, a Jew. Wagner said to him, "You are my Parsifal conductor." Rabid anti-Semitism was prevalent in the time that Wagner lived in Europe. When Jewish musicians needed a recommendation, or they needed a couch to sleep on, when they had been thrown out of a job because of that anti-Semitism, they went to Maestro Wagner, and he helped them. So, for all the hot air that Wagner blew on paper, Wagner hired these musicians, he gave them work.

The creative world owes Wagner a huge debt, and it's far larger than this one grievous fault. Wagner codified, in a system culminating with Parsifal, the message of fellow-suffering, the message of connecting enlightenment and redemption to the concept of activist fellow-suffering. For that alone, we owe Wagner everything because he stated this in word and music. If anything is going to save us from blowing ourselves up in this world, it's only going to be if we begin to feel the pain of other people. What Wagner says in Parsifal, and this is the difference between the characters of Parsifal and Gurnemanz in the opera, is that it’s not good enough to say you feel bad for someone. You have to do something about it, to help that person. Only the pure fool, who is everyone, who experiences the pain and suffering of someone else and does something about it, only that person becomes enlightened. That is a far more important and enduring message to the world than anything else that he ever vented. It’s a spiritual message, a Buddhist message, a Christian message. People tend to run away from this message, because it's not about "I-me-myself," it’s about the "thou." It's the Zen idea of abandoning oneself for the other, and that is misunderstood by a lot of selfish opera people. So what Wagner wrote is despicable, but in the end his gift to the world is profoundly important.

Ionarts:
Who are the people involved in the Millennium Wagner Opera Company other than yourself?

Carol Berger:
We have a roster of singers: 16 or 17 prima artists, and a list of secondary singers who form the core of the company. I have a conductor based in Atlanta, and I am having conversations at this time with a young Italian conductor from New York. I work very closely with Thomas Pertel, who is the company's accompanist and répétiteur. He is also the company vocal coach, and a Wagnerian singer himself. He and I work together with every single singer. I trust Thomas with this company more than anyone. Another person who takes an interest is William Smith, President of the Wagner Society of America, based in Chicago. That society has a healthy curiosity and respect for our effort. Individuals on the board of the Wagner Society of Northern California have been privately encouraging as well. And of course our Wagner friends in Germany take a keen interest and keep an observant if not low-profile watch on our development, as well as our trials and tribulations. After all, one of the mandates of Wagner Societies in general as tax-exempt organizations should be to be supportive of the performance of Wagner. But within the rank and file membership of Wagner Societies across the U.S., we have many active supporters.

One important way that we have changed the way an opera company is run is to redefine the relationship between company and supporter or friend. It has been very painful and difficult to build this company from scratch. We had no "sugar daddy." This company is not the brainchild of some rich person who wanted to sponsor an opera company and throws some money at it. That often happens with new companies. The Millennium Wagner Opera Company came about a different way. As its founder, after years in opera production and as a musicologist and lecturer, I found that the opportunities to see really fine Wagnerian psychodrama in the U.S. were too limited. So for us, being a friend or supporter is not a function of dollars. Our supporters and friends are people who have stood by us and helped us to persevere, who said, "Keep doing what you are doing. We believe in you." Maybe they don't have much money, but it's the emotional and spiritual support they give us that make them our friends. It is truly a Wagnerian adversity, because when I read about what Wagner himself went through, all the naysayers, the saboteurs, the fight to have his work staged, even to build Bayreuth, I recognize in what he went through a lot of what we are going through. Certain Wagner organizations in this country have positioned themselves as obstacles rather than natural allies with a common cause. Isn't that bizarre? No matter how we have reached out, tried to make friends, let them get to know us, even offered performance samplers, they seem hell bent on stamping us out like a naughty brush fire! It's sad to say, but look if you look at Wagner's detractors, you see that a bit of history repeats itself.

(To be continued.)

INTERVIEW: Wagner in Washington (Part 1 of 6)

A month ago now, I wrote a post (Wagner Festival in Washington?, August 19) about a possible new Wagner company or festival here in Washington, which I learned about from an article by Jochen Breiholz (Wagner-Wahn im Internet, August 19) in Die Welt. At the end of my post, I said that I was contacting the Millennium Wagner Opera Company to find out when they were performing and what they envisioned for their productions. I said I would write again if I learned anything, and so here I am. Thus follows the the first part of the Ionarts exclusive interview with Carol Berger, the founder of the Millennium Wagner Opera Company. It will be published here in six installments, which may not necessarily appear consecutively.

Ionarts:
Why did you name your project the Millennium Opera Project? What is the significance of "millennium"?

Carol Berger:
"Millennium" really was not meant to have a special implication. I suppose you could say that, with the new millennium, we are trying to do something new. And that is a direct reference to something that Richard Wagner told his son, Siegfried: "Go do something new." And what I say about Millennium is that we don’t do something new just for news' sake, to be leaders, or to be eccentric. We do it because we are trying to expose the inner psychodrama, the spiritual drama that exists within Wagner's works. So I suppose it means "Wagner for the new millennium."

Ionarts:
What is the difference between the Millennium Wagner Company and the Millennium Wagner Project?

Carol Berger:
The Opera Company is a subset of its parent, the Millennium Wagner Project. This is very different from most opera companies like the Lyric Opera or the Metropolitan. They have a larger entity, which is a performing entity, an opera company, and within the Opera Company they have a subset, such as the Metropolitan Opera Guild or an education department. Those departments within the Opera Company do things such as education, lectures, community outreach, and fundraising, but everything is subservient to the performing entity, which is the Opera Company. The reason that I have structured the Millennium Wagner Opera Company in the exact opposite way of the standard set by these opera companies today, by having the opera company become a subset of the Project, has to do with something I believe spiritually about Wagner. It has to do with the message of Parsifal, because I believe that Parsifal was Wagner's culminating statement on everything he had been building toward in all of his music dramas, what he called "fellow feeling" or "shared suffering," this concept of Mitleid. "Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor" is the message of Parsifal, which means through the experience of sharing the suffering of others and doing something about it, we become enlightened. That is the subtext of all of our work. That is what Parsifal does: he does something about it; he heals Amfortas. Only then can a pure fool, who is any man and who is every man, become enlightened.

That is what I think is Wagner's primary message to the world, that people need to be sensitized to the suffering in the world and to go out and help people. Not to feel sorry for them: Mitleid is not pity or compassion, it is really shared suffering (literally "pain-with or with-suffering"—ed.). If you read his late essays, especially the volume of essays called Religion and Art, you see that Wagner is involved in antivivisection societies, animal rights, the whole notion of suffering in the world. If Wagner were alive today, I believe he would be an activist in many social, economic, and environmental causes. So I have structured the performance company, the opera company, under the rubric of the Project because the Millennium Wagner Project, the outreach project, is the community outreach piece that does programs for the poor, the sick, the aged, the people I call sidelined in life, the ones you don't usually see sitting in the seat next to you in an opera house, the disabled, the mentally handicapped, the vision-impaired. That is our larger cause, because in the end I am not looking for an egotistic product in which this is all about performance. My belief is that the greater purpose of Wagnerians in life is a spiritual purpose, an active selflessness, to go out and help people. That's why tickets to the Festspiele in Bayreuth are shockingly low compared to their imitators in the major opera houses of the U.S. Our program of community outreach through the arts is the umbrella organization, and the Millennium Wagner Opera Company, a fully professional performing company, is a subset of that larger mission. It is this new structure that I insisted on, for which I had to fight with my incorporating partners to establish. I think we are larger than just getting on stage and getting applause. That sets us apart. It also makes us vulnerable to criticism, because most of the world is very self-centered. Most people in the world of opera, frankly, are very self-centered. We are trying to be spiritual people in this field.

Ionarts:
What will be different about your productions of Wagner?

Carol Berger:
Our production work is similar to the Stanislavski method, which I studied for many years. That is the acting perspective. I also bring a lot of movement, because of my background as a dancer. All of my singers do a lot of physical movement in rehearsal. Thirdly, we do tremendous amounts of bonding to the characters. Rehearsals are very similar to psychoanalytical sessions. It's very intense, and it will produce a dramatically charged performance. Nothing is kitsch in our productions; it's all pretty deadly serious.

Ionarts:
It seems that you envision a more traditional interpretation than what has been attempted sometimes in recent years. I take it you will not be presenting Der Ring with laser guns?

Carol Berger:
It's not that it’s traditional. It's more abstract, in a particular sense of that word, what comes to your mind when you think of Greek drama. This was Wagner's basis for what he created, even in his plans for the Bayreuth theater, which was based on a Greek amphitheater. If you think of the way that Greek dramas are staged, there is minimalist use of light, costumes, and props. I don't think traditional is the right word. I think shifting the time period in a Wagner production can be good, if it comes out of the psychology of the work. We are exposing the bond between the inner psychology of the characters and the inner psychology of the person sitting in the audience.

(To be continued.)

European Patrimony Days

You may recall my discussion of the concept of a national patrimony and Prosper Mérimée's role in creating one in France (see post on August 6). Well, if you happen to be in France this weekend, take advantage of the annual Journées européennes du patrimoine (September 20 and 21), during which buildings and other treasures not normally open to visitors are often open and free of charge. Le Monde has put together a Sélection de sites "journées du patrimoine", with links to Internet resources put together for the event. (Here is a sampling of other coverage of the event in the French press.) One interesting detail this year is the action of French archeologists, who have joined forces with the intermittents du spectacle (see post on July 30) in the belief that their future employment may be endangered. No word yet if strikes from these groups will threaten any of the events this weekend.

The Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives Nationales, and the Sénat are all hosting tours on which you can see areas normally closed to the public. For this year, the 20th anniversary of the founding of this event and the 200th anniversary of Mérimée's birth, the theme is "Spiritual Patrimony," which is a fascinating choice, I think. This does not mean that all the monuments on the program this year are sacred buildings. In a perhaps not unrelated story, however, the church that Le Corbusier designed for the town of Firminy-Vert (see Le Corbusier's drawing at left) will finally be completed, as reported by Emmanuel de Roux (Le chantier de l'église de Firminy redémarre, September 19) in Le Monde. As it turns out, Le Corbusier made a lot of designs for Firminy, only of one which was the unusual church (see the plans and documents related to his work in Firminy). According to the French Ministry of Culture, "Firminy is today the most important European site for the work of this architect." As you can see in Le Corbusier's drawing, the church will resemble somewhat another type of structure you see occasionally in the French countryside, a nuclear cooling tower.

Finally, for mentions of Ionarts, thanks to Byzantium's Shores (on September 15), Travelers Diagram (on September 17), and Maud Newton (on September 18). The translation of the interview with DeLillo from L'Express (see post on September 14) has been quoted out there in the blogosphere. Problems at Blogger the past couple days may have given some readers trouble trying to find it. Sorry about that. I also apologize if you are not seeing the Ionarts banner above: trying to get that fixed.

Waiting out Isabel

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes must be prescient because he managed to be away from Washington this week. As you probably know, I am writing from the midst of Hurricane Isabel today (check out the awesome satellite photograph in this BBC article, Hurricane Isabel: Your Experiences). It swept in around noon and is supposed to do its worst this evening. So I've been looking out at the wind lashing the trees with sheets of rain and thinking about the theme of violent nature in art. If you want to see an interesting selection of paintings on this theme, take a look at the online exhibit Painting the Weather, featuring 100 paintings from 50 museums around Great Britain, put together by the National Gallery, London, and kept online by the BBC. Ando Hiroshige's depiction of rain pelting people crossing a bridge (image at right) shows that nasty weather can indeed be beautiful.

One of the nice things about being a teacher is getting to stay home when the students do, for snow days and, much less frequently, hurricane days. We had no school today and it seems highly unlikely we will have school again tomorrow. So far, the District of Columbia has not floated away and, if I survive to post tomorrow, then you will know that things turned out all right. Since I am able to post this, you can tell that we have not yet lost power, although that may change. Even if it does, we have a piano, a flute, copious amounts of sheet music, and candlelight. That's right, none of the elements of a classic Schubertiade-like Musikabend require electricity. I think the first piece should be Chopin's Raindrop Prelude.

A City's Life: London

As readers may know from my obsession with Paris, I find the artistic lives of cities, real and imagined, interesting. Now I have been reading reviews of Peter Ackroyd's book London: The Biography. The book has recently been translated into French, which is why I got on this thread, from the review (Ici Londres, un Anglais parle aux Français, September 11) by Christophe Mercier in Le Figaro. See also the materials related to the book as covered on WBUR's show The Connection; the review by Chris Hall, Growing Capital, in Spike magazine; the review in the New York Review of Books; and the review by Patrick McGrath, A City Much Like Hell, in the New York Times. You can also read the book's first chapter.

I can't quote from it here (see the very strict copyright notice at the bottom of the excerpt), but I can say that the first chapter drew me in. Ackroyd describes the city's prehistory, places where one can see evidence that London was once underneath the ocean. Into that scientific narrative he weaves quotations from writers observing sealike qualities of the city of London, and the effect is quite beautiful. As Christophe Mercier observed in his review, "The image we have of London comes most often from writers." The list of writers Ackroyd covers, Mercier notes, includes obvious British choices (Pepys, Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Conrad, Martin Amis) but also French authors (Hugo, Dumas, Féval, Vallès, and Céline). I don't have any idea how much Ackroyd comments on art about London, but works by Turner, Monet, and Canaletto (see image at left) are only the start of the list. I'll be looking for a second-hand copy of the book (now on Amazon for about $10) at some point.

Ackroyd has continued on the theme of London in his new book The Clerkenwell Tales (reviewed recently by Phil Baker, London Calling, August 16, in The Guardian, and not yet available in the U.S., I think).