In Pursuit of the French Connection: Carlo Goldoni & Friends

David Begelman

If you imagine that French toast, Edith Piaf, vintage wines or haute cuisine are the most important products of that country across the Atlantic, think again. There’s more to it than that. If you could go back in time and ask Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, they’d agree wholeheartedly that France meant something more to America—much more.

 France was, after all, the country that originated new ideas about human rights that found their way into our Constitution. They were celebrated by figures like Montesquieu in “Spirit of the Laws.” The Frenchman propounded novel ideas about government that were to put vestiges of the older feudal system to a deserved rest. Among them was the abolition of slavery, the preservation of civil liberties, and the notion that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government should enjoy separate, but balanced jurisdictions. Sound familiar?

Newer thinking about human rights germinated in the eighteenth century, often dubbed “The Age of Reason” or “Age of Enlightenment.” The transition to them was not without cost. Bloody revolutions in France and colonial America were fought over issues inherent in the new philosophy. Ours took a turn for the better while France’s took one for the worse: the Reign of Terror. During it, heads rolled in what Charles Dickens once described as “The worst of times.”

French originators could have learned a thing or two from their American pupils.

The French Connection affected more than just political philosophy. Its influence colored areas of cultural interest you’d think were far afield from it, like theater.

Newer ideas in French theater coincided with the rise of the middle class, and a more democratic sensibility. Denis Diderot, a scientific, as well as theatrical theorist, inveighed against the drama of his day. He felt it had become too remote from the lives of ordinary people.

Yale Repertory Theatre’s newest production, “The Servant of Two Masters” was authored by Carlo Goldoni, an Italian who, like Thomas Jefferson, looked to France for fresh ideas. A prolific playwright, he was jaded on the formulaic structure of Italian drama, including the improvisational, yet conventional character of Commedia dell’Arte.

Commedia was a theatrical form involving “slapstick” humor, and a cast of stock characters like Arlecchino, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Inamorato, and others. Goldoni was a past master of the genre, as the current terrific Yale Rep production attests. It has you belly laughing yourself silly.

In Goldoni’s play, the lowly Truffaldino contrives to serve two separate masters. But the underbelly of his duplicity is a social reality: he is starving. By doubling his employment, he increases his wages, thereby ensuring a full stomach.

 Goldoni emigrated to—where else?—France, where he came under the influence of the renowned Molière. This French playwright put a more realistic, yet somber, spin on drama that nonetheless bore traces of the Commedia in his work. Goldoni followed suit, becoming more sympathetic to a theater that mirrored the plight of the common person—an eighteenth century idea that was later to culminate in realism on stage. 

Subsequently, Beaumarchais, who started out as a watchmaker, authored plays that later found their way into operas by Mozart (“The Marriage of Figaro”) and Rossini (“The Barber of Seville”). He was vilified for depicting the follies of a stratified society in plays so revolutionary, public performances of them were banned. Imbued with a spirit of freedom, he financed shipping supplies of ammunition to American colonialists!

So the winds of change in the Age of Enlightenment fanned the unrest of common folk who became increasingly aware of something better than their lowly lot in life.

Goodbye to feudal ways, and the lopsided apportionment of rights. Hello to their universality, especially in America where the Founding Fathers picked up the French ball and ran with it. Lucky us.

 

 

Julie Taymor’s The Magic Flute at the Met

 

David Begelman

 

            It’s only a personal opinion, but to me opera is a sore thumb of theater. The reason is simple: much of it is marginally watchable. If you had the dough for tickets at any large opera house you’d be doing yourself a favor to keep your eyes studiously closed through many performances there. What you’d eyeball when they are open is usually an ungainly, overproduced, lumbering pachyderm of a show curiously out of whack with the beauty of the music. The effect is hardly softened by the movement of people on and off stage with as much subtlety as a surge in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Talk about overpopulated casts. When Verdi composed the sonorous Va pensiero, sung by a chorus of Hebrew slaves in his opera Nabucco, he didn’t mean all the slaves in Babylon.         

Opera is also a study in paradox. Over the years, its acting talent has improved immeasurably, while voices get more mediocre. Tenors are notorious in this regard. The acting abilities of those with glorious voices like Gigli, Melchior, Tucker, and Bjoerling were little more than laughable. Same goes for sopranos, yet who today sings like Tebaldi, Flagstad, Steber, Caballe, or Schwarzkopf? (Exceptions to the rule in yesteryear were largely confined to the darker voices: Chaliapin, Pinza, Gobbi, Tibbett, Siepi.) The acting talents of today’s performers are clearly superior to stars of the forties and fifties, yet quite a notch below them in vocal artistry.

Vocal ability is one thing; production values quite another.  In a moment of weakness I recently went to see Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Met, to hear the young Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Flores. I had to flee Lincoln Center after the first intermission because I forgot to close my eyes, forfeiting the pleasure of his second act aria.

            There is a change in the air, however, and artistic directors like James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera are cottoning on to innovations in direction and production design that bring something more substantial to the music to replace tiresome, stodgy traditions. Wagnerian productions recently have capitalized on highlighting musical values through  minimalist production design, while yet another route to a similar goal is modernization or updating, as in Peter Sellars’ productions. His Cosi Fan Tutti of Mozart was set, of all places, in a diner. Yet it worked.

Purists will undoubtedly be alarmed over newer directions. They are forever bemoaning “taking liberties” with opera, yet hardly blink an eye when innovation  embraces their way of seeing things. They are actually undercover cherry pickers who maintain their own tastes are in every instance ordained by eternal artistic verities. For example, the final B-flat in Verdi’s aria Celeste Aida invariably lacks the diminuendo from full voice the composer clearly specified in the original score. (Arturo Toscanini once hurled his baton at the tenor Ramon Vinay, calling him a “pig” for omitting the diminuendo on the final note.)  And Meyerbeer’s aria O Paradiso! is rarely rendered in the original French. Where is indignation of purists about these effronts to originalism? On the other hand, what is their revered tradition but a revolution that is long in the tooth? So traditionalists would do best to hunker down and white knuckle it through an inevitable future of newfangled artifice. It is a future that will be itself repealed when the time is ripe.

To make their baptism of fire a bit more acceptable, I invite the codgers to see the Met’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It is delightful from overture to curtain calls, precisely because its attractiveness, aside from its incomparable music, is its stunning visual impact—thanks to Julie Taymor. For out of towners apprehensive about high parking fees, fender benders, or muggings on sojourns to Lincoln Center in the Big Apple, The Magic Flute is available on PBS television, and you can catch it there. But catch it you must if only to see how production values can be creatively brought in line with the majestic music they adorn.

The Met’s new production of Mozart’s most fanciful opera has a fetching English libretto by J. D. McClatchy and an abbreviated score with a digestible running time of 100 minutes, down from the 3 hours of Die Zauberflöte in German. The voices are in as good a form as can be expected, with a terrific rendition of the Queen of the Night’s gorgeous aria by the soprano Erika Miklósa. All performers, but especially Nathan Gunn as Papageno, do extra gymnastic duty in a production that calls upon physical abilities extending far beyond the vocal. Rene Pape as a commanding Sarastro, presides with his sturdy basso over the goings on at his Temple, while Matthew Polenzani and Ying Huang as the harassed lovers Tamino and Pamina take on all comers in their wish for unification.

There is not enough to say about Julie Taymor’s contribution to the production. One critic has called it dazzling, and he is hardly exaggerating. The Tony Award winning director of The Lion King has fashioned a trompe l’oeil combining her unique talents as director with collaborators Michael Curry as co-designer of puppets, George Tspyin, lighting designer Donald Holder, and choreographer Mark Dendy. The final product is breathtaking. One senses an oriental influence in the design of the production, and shades of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballets under the spell of Mikhail Fokine and Leon Bakst—especially Petrouchka—come to mind, as do the innovations of Cirque de Soleil and Momix. Far from copycatting, it is more likely that all these theater innovations have common sources of inspiration in the Far East.

Especially noteworthy under Ms. Taymor’s direction is the imaginative design of vertical space. Here, there is more ingenuity than there was in erecting an impossibly tall sphinx for a production of Aida, or an inordinately high gangplank to accommodate the wanderings of the ghost captain in The Flying Dutchman.

This new mounting of The Magic Flute might best serve as model of opera for children. The delight in experiencing Julie Taymor’s deft use of masks, stilts, scrims, puppets, flying serpents, and hovering bears would be for them a delectable treat while we broker in Mozart as part of the package deal. Why not start the young on the best music opera has to offer with those enticements that are sure to capture their attention? So the lesson is that there are some operas during which it is not only safe, but invigorating, for young and old to open their eyes.

Performances of The Magic Flute are aired periodically on PBS television. They were sold out at the Met when performed on stage.