Why is opera so often afflicted by an acute fear that contemporary audiences cannot be stirred without the inclusion of distracting and irrelevant stagecraft that hangs about the performance like scaffolding around an ancient, yet intact temple? This question was going through my head Wednesday night as I sat in the cold, malodorous Moore Theater, witnessing the Seattle premier of South African artist William Kentridge’s production of Monteverdi’s
The Return of Ulysses. The occasion also marked the debut of Seattle’s new baroque-centric professional opera company, Pacific Operaworks, under the seasoned musical direction of Stephen Stubbs. Despite the mostly uniform excellence of the singers and orchestra, the two key elements of the production – Kentridge’s animated, sketched backdrop and the near life-sized puppets that depict the story’s
dramatis personae – prove to be little more than an elaborate distraction that serves only to diminish the music’s profound intimacy and grandeur.
Claudio Monteverdi, the composer considered by many to have both established the genre of opera and pioneered the style we call baroque, wrote
Ulysses in 1641, near the end of his life. Along with his earlier
L’Orfeo and subsequent
Coronation of Poppea, the work was largely forgotten over the next three centuries as opera evolved and orchestras expanded. Only in recent decades have they seen a revival, as audiences discovered in them a vitality and restraint that seemed to suit the times.
The story of Ulysses’ homecoming, taken by librettist Giacomo Badoaro from the last part of Homer’s
Odyssey, may be the most potent and familiar in the Western cultural-literary canon. The tale of the aging warrior’s reunion with his wife and son after long being given up for dead is so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness that almost any telling is likely to leave audiences rapt with attention. But Monteverdi’s opera is an emotionally nuanced masterpiece that leads the listener through Ulysses’ many trials and epiphanies, as well as those of Penelope, Telemachus and others. Rarely have text and music been joined together as perfectly as they are in this opera.
The orchestra and singers were extraordinary, but this should have come as no surprise. The Pacific Operaworks has brought together our key local yet world-renown early music personalities. Musical director and lutenist Stephen Stubbs directed opera productions throughout Europe and the United States for decades before returning to Seattle, Ulysses-like, to establish the company. Margriet Tindemans (viola da gamba), Ingrid Matthews (baroque violin), David Morris (cello and lirone) are all major figures who have performed, directed, and taught early and baroque music throughout the globe. The singers, led by the young Ross Hauck as Ulysses, succeeded at conveying all the drama and emotion of Monteverdi’s composition. Laura Pudwell (Penelope) and Jason McStoots (Zeus) were particularly impressive.
The production itself, which debuted at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1998, is directed by South African artist William Kentridge and features an alternate cast of puppets created by the Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town, South Africa. It is easy to imagine Kentridge, or any major artist, wanting to direct an opera of his own and he has made an excellent choice in selecting Ulysses. But what he and his puppeteer associates have done is turn a magnificent, masterfully performed work into a hopeless muddle.
The singers, the true performers of the production, are obscured by their gaunt puppet avatars, which look as though they were molded from cold, unsalted butter. While they do possess a peculiar life-like quality, they are simply unable to convey human emotion when the occasion calls for it. When Eumaeus wanders across briskly the countryside with his shepherd’s crook we are able to suspend our disbelief watching the grasses blow behind him in the wind. And when Ulysses passes through Kentridge’s animated cypresses, which recede in the distance as he approaches his estate, we feel some semblance of life kick in. But during the significant moments of recognition between husband and wife or father and son, a numbing stasis takes hold.
Kentridge’s accompanying animation, while often fascinating and sumptuously rendered, seldom connects with the production and only when functioning in a more literal capacity. While it might have had more power in different context, alongside Monteverdi it becomes a kind of ambient and irrelevant visual noise. When standing alone, as his works at the
Henry Art Gallery are at present, Kentridge’s animation is complex and arresting. But here, functioning as a visual backdrop to Monteverdi’s opera, it fails to keep up or even matter. And finally, the idea behind his decision to place the ailing Ulysses at a Johannesburg hospital (and on a table center stage) – so integral to his reworking of the story - remains unexplored in the production.
Is Kentridge’s vanity - his belief that he could appropriate Monteverdi’s work so easily with his clumsy, elaborate stagecraft – the problem? Or did he, fearing the opera could not sufficiently excite a contemporary audience without his embellishments, simply decide to gild the lily?
Watching William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants production of the opera on DVD the week before the opening, I found myself mesmerized for three hours by the singers and their dramatic performances, so full of wit, sorrow, joy and uncertainty. Seeing their counterparts at the Moore last Wednesday hidden behind expressionless puppets and physically overshadowed by the giant, frequently disengaging projection screen behind them, I wondered what Kentridge was thinking.
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