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Conflicted sexuality in a work rescued from obscurity and the Nazis by L.A. Opera

By Ed Rampell

There is a stereotype many have that “high” culture, such as William Shakespeare and opera, deals with refined “classical” subject matter, as distinct from what critic Pauline Kael called the “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” obsessions of pop culture, especially movies. But those who make this distinction forget that in Elizabethan England, Shakespearean dramas were largely performed for the masses. Hamlet, in fact, is a ghost story about murder most foul, incest, suicide and is as much a revenge tale as any film noir picture.

The same is true of opera. For instance, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto is, among other things, about a hunchbacked jester who apparently has incestuous desires for his sexy daughter, Gilda (perhaps not coincidentally also the name of a sexy 1946 Rita Hayworth movie and character). Austrian composer Franz Schreker’s The Stigmatized is another case in point, a work of “high” art that is mostly about the “baser” passions.

The current production of The Stigmatized is the opera’s U.S. premiere and part of L.A. Opera’s “Recovered Voices” series, which, according to press notes, is “a multi-season initiative to revive the works of composers whose lives and careers were cut short by the Nazi regime.” (Perhaps this is a sort of compensation and penance for the company’s spending so much time, money and energy on presenting The Ring cycle by Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, widely believed to be an ardent anti-Semite.) Schreker’s saucy work, set in 16th century Genoa, was originally presented in Germany in 1918, and can be viewed as being part of the edgy postwar culture of the Weimar Republic that included sexually charged works in various cabaret acts and by playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, this so-called “degenerate art” was banned due to its blatant sexuality. It didn’t help that Schreker was half-Jewish. To make matters worse, Schreker’s lead character in The Stigmatized, Alviano Salvago (tenor Robert Brubaker) is hunchbacked and crippled, and with their “Master Race” delusions, Dr. Mengele and his cohorts despised the misshapen (unlike Schreker, who also wrote The Dwarf, which L.A. Opera mounted in 2008). In any case, Salvago is also a fabulously wealthy nobleman who has created an island utopia called, after Greek mythology, “Elysium,” which he has altruistically decided to donate to the people of Genoa.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished. It turns out that Salvago’s elite “friends” have been using Elysium’s grotto (holy Hefner and the Playboy Mansion!) to stage orgies at. These ignoble nobles have been abducting Genoa’s most beautiful women to participate in their sex-capades, and Salvago’s plan to donate their happy hunting ground to the city threatens this sexual cabal’s revels, so they conspire to thwart him. With “friends” like these…

Salvago, who is full of sexual angst largely due to his deformity, begins a romance with Carlotta Nardi (soprano Anja Kampe), the daughter of the mayor, Lodovico Nardi (bass-baritone Wolfgang Schone). In the words of another famous musician, Carlotta is “a hunk-a hunk-a burning love,” and she, too, is torn between her affection for Salvago and lust for the dashing Count Tamare (baritone Martin Gantner).

Carlotta is an artist who strives to be a sort of portrait painter of the soul. Her quest to give form on canvas to the true inner self reminded me of the 1981 Barbra Streisand movie, All Night Long, wherein Gene Hackman’s character invents a mirror that shows people exactly how they are (instead of the image being reversed).

The Stigmatized raises the question of presenting sexual aesthetics onstage. An L.A. Times article about the opera prior to its debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion contended that: “L.A. Opera's staging will contain explicit sexual situations and is intended for mature audiences only. Director Ian Judge said the production will evoke the ‘rank smell of bad sex’ for the orgy scenes.” Really? Most of the revels consisted of performers romping around a circular revolving stage in tophats, cloaks, suits, long dresses and the like. There is one nude scene per se with an actress who has sex with a partially clad male. But overall the orgies were pretty chaste and, for the record, did not have foul aromas.

As I have written many times before, in the past artists fought and suffered for the freedom to depict sex, nudity and other taboo topics in the arts, and it’s disappointing when today’s talents, who now possess those hard fought for rights, don’t use them. Having said that, to be fair L.A. Opera’s 2008 production of The Fly did feature the full frontal nudity of bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch as scientist Seth Brundle, partially clad women and lots more sex than the 1986 film version, which was likewise directed by David Cronenberg. So it is strange that, like its character, this production of The Stigmatized seems sexually conflicted.

Schreker’s music, ably conducted by James Conlon, is sonorous, if not exactly toe-tapping. But what really stands out is this show’s visuals. Sets are almost characters in their own right in many L.A. Opera productions –- the mad scientist’s lair in The Fly, the prison in Tosca, a piazza in Carmen or The Barber of Seville. There is not so much a set design as much as a projection design in The Stigmatized, imaginatively projected onto a scrim and overseen by award-winning Broadway veteran Wendall Harrington, who’s work includes what may be the first rock opera, The Who’s Tommy. The images include a reference to Hieronymos Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, although for some reason the 16th century Dutch painter’s orgiastic images are not projected, while his edenic landscapes are, to suggest Elysium. Nevertheless, in lieu of sets per se, the projected imagery enhanced this production of The Stigmatized with a cinematic verve and flavor. Which seems appropriate, as so-called “high” and “low” art meet and mingle in The Stigmatized.

The Stigmatized runs at L.A. Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., on Thursday, April 22 and Saturday, April 24 at 7:30 pm. For more info: 213/972-8001; http://www.laopera.com./

A scene from the L.A. Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata

Bye bye Verdi

By Ed Rampell

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is based on the same Alexandre Dumas novel about a doomed paramour that the 1936 Greta Garbo classic Camille is also derived from. Because of Verdi’s music, the operatic version is less maudlin than George Cukor’s movie adaptation, although both are highly melodramatic.

La Traviata’s first act is enlivened by some lovely fast paced music, with lyrics espousing insouciance and gaiety. Act I takes place in 1847 at the Parisian home of courtesan Violetta Valery, who was played by Marina Poplaskaya at the premiere (coloratura soprano Elizabeth Futral takes over the role June 10-21). The music paints a transcendent vision of a hedonistic lifestyle, especially as Russian soprano Poplaskaya angelically hits the high notes. After flirtations and protestations of true love, Violetta and Alfredo Germont (played by Italian tenor Massimo Giordano from opening night through May 30, to be replaced by Alexey Dolgov June 3-21) decide to embark on a passionate affair.

But after the couple moves to Violetta’s country home, their idyll of love does not last long -- as it often has a nasty habit of doing, fate intervenes. The second scene in Act II takes place at the party of another courtesan, Flora (mezzo-soprano Margaret Thompson), in what seems to be a bordello. This is scenery and costume designer Giovanni Agostinucci’s only La Traviata set that sparkles. For many L.A. Opera aficionados the sets can be co-stars, and the rest of sets are ho-hum. They lack the flair and verve displayed in recent L.A. Opera productions, such as the cathedral and fortress sets in Tosca, the nightclub and plaza in Carmen, the laboratory in The Fly, etc.

During Flora’s party masqueraders garbed as gypsies and matadors perform lively, enchanting dances in the brothel. But as the tale of star-crossed lovers unfolds, the story, Verdi’s music and Francesco Maria Piave’s Italian libretto become increasingly depressing. Poplaskaya excels as the lady of the camellias expires, but the deathbed routine is a bit too much. To tell the truth, in our day and age of endless war and economic collapse, it’s hard to have much empathy for these self-involved characters obsessed with their own petty lives and affairs, and with little else. La Traviata ends in 1848, the year Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto and revolution swept Europe, but -- with the possible exception of the snobbery and moralizing of Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont (Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber, May 21-June 6 and baritone Stephen Powell, June 10-21) --one would never know it from this opera. (Who knows -- maybe Europe’s proletariat and peasantry revolted in 1848 to get rid of self-indulgent people like those depicted in La Traviata?)

Relating to the story's bourgeois fripperies today is increasingly difficult to do while Rome burns, and this opera seems oddly out of place with our life and times. Even Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with its themes of destiny, warfare, greed and power struggles, and which L.A. Opera is in the process of presenting, seems more apropos, even though this saga based on Aryan mythology is set eons before La Traviata takes place. Not long ago L.A. Opera presented Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which also has courtesan characters and wherein the male lead is tried for the high crime of not having any money. Somehow, this seems to be the type of relevant work opera needs more of during our present hard times.

La Traviata is being performed at L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. For more info: 213/972-8001; www.laopera.com..

THEATER REVIEW: RIGOLETTO

THEATER REVIEW: THE STIGMATIZED

THEATER REVIEW: LA TRAVIATA