Unforgettable

The first time you see any great opera is memorable, I think. It's like coming into Paris or Stonehenge or the Andes for the first time. No matter how often you return, how much you feel your love or admiration deepen, you can only experience that initial reaction once.

And sometimes, not often, it makes a story worth telling. Andy Ross, an Oakland-based literary agent, told me, "I'm the perfect Wagnerite." He's seen Wagner's operas countless times, and that includes five complete Ring Cycles. But his favorite production of any Wagner opera was his first. "It was Die Walkure at the Met in 1966 or '67," he says. "My uncle gave me a ticket. It turned out I was in the front row, center, about eight feet from the conductor, Herbert von Karajan. All the Wagnerites were offering to pay me for my seat. I found out why when someone told me that the elderly woman sitting next to me was Madame Maria Jeritza, the greatest Sieglinde of the 1920s [pictured above in her prime]. She whispered along with the role and was very impressed with the production."

Sieglinde is a big, expressive role: She must convey resignation and fear (of her husband, Hunding), dawning hope and love (for Siegmund, that opera's hero), strength and fortitude as she learns she carries Siegmund's child and must carry on without him. It's so moving to picture the aged soprano, so many years after the spotlight dimmed, singing in a whisper with Regine Crespin, one of the reigning sopranos of her era. Many consider Crespin the greatest French Wagnerian soprano of the century. The other outstanding Wagnerian sopranos were from Scandinavia--like Birgit Nilsson, whom Andy saw as Brunnhilde--Germany, Austria, or the U.S.

No wonder Andy never forgot his first Die Walkure. What I want to know is, what is the difference between a Wagnerian and a Wagnerite?

Background music: Regine Crespin as Sieglinde.

Super Days and Nights

It strikes me that being a supernumerary in a small role can be the best job at the opera. You're not just a face in the crowd, but you're not the scene's focus, and of course, you don't have to sing. In his five roles so far with San Francisco Opera, Christopher Smith (see end of August 31 post) has had a super career.

He had "a great role" in the June 2009 production of Puccini's Tosca, for instance. The opera's villain is Baron Scarpia, the corrupt chief of police of Rome, and the entire second act takes place in his quarters, as Scarpia tries to learn the whereabouts of an escaped political prisoner; has Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, tortured offstage; and attempts to seduce Tosca in exchange for Cavaradossi's life. Christopher was one of Scarpia's six henchmen: "My job was to look mean in the background." (Though he doesn't look so mean above, in the foreground, right).

And then, toward the end of Act III, he was in the firing squad for the "mock" execution.

That summer, Christopher also played a policeman in a rare staging of George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess (not to be confused with the movie). The seven performances sold out, and "there was so much excitement with that opera, onstage and in the audience." I can vouch for that. The hum and buzz continued after the curtain dropped and we we left the opera house: The staging, acting, singing, and dancing were stellar. I want to mention that the director was Francesca Zambello, because she is directing next summer's Ring Cycle as well.

Oh, and Christopher may well be performing in at least one of the four operas, reprising his roles in Die Walkure, the opera that started all the excitement--I mean my excitement--this past summer. (See July 22 post.)

By the way, from now on when you click on a link to an opera--here, it's Tosca, Porgy and Bess, and Die Walkure--you'll open onto a YouTube clip from a performance. So: music!

I Second That Emotion

I took a walk with my friend Kelly Powers the other day, and as usual, we talked about books: what we've read lately, what we recommend, what we've thrown across the room. This time, we discussed the act of reading itself, and what a welcome refuge it can be. In that sense, all engrossing reading is "escapist," and hurray for that. Coincidentally, I had just finished Let the Great World Spin, which won last year's National Book Award for fiction, and had even typed up the quote below, in which a character from my escapist novel describes her own great refuge: opera.

Colum McCann's beautiful novel takes us into the worlds of several vastly different people in 1974 New York. One of them is Gloria, who lives in a god-awful housing project in the South Bronx (across from where several other female characters ply their trade), mourning the loss of her three sons, in Vietnam. It eased my heart, toward the end, to read how she had found respite, over the years, from such stress and pain. She doesn't need an orchestra seat, or even to be in the opera house, she tells us. All she needs is the balm of a resplendent voice:

"Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound. I took to listening on the radio every Sunday and spent whatever extra grief money the government gave me on tickets to the Metropolitan. I felt like I had a room full of voices. The music pouring out over the Bronx. I sometimes turned the stereo so loud the neighbors complained. I bought earphones. Huge ones that covered half my head. I wouldn't even look at myself in the mirror. But there was a medicine in it."

Yes, and there are years accumulated in a sound. I hope you've been playing these "selected scenes" from the 2007 Madama Butterfly (see August 25 post) as you've been reading this.

Word of the Day: Supernumerary

Those of you who don't think opera overlaps with popular culture have not been watching Mad Men. Or am I the only one who remembers a conversation Don Draper had in an elegant restaurant in the first of this season's episodes, when he was on a blind date with a young woman who told him she was a supernumerary at the Met? She explained that her task was to help fill the stage. "I do a lot of mock drinking," she told him. "I've been a wench, a courtesan, part of a harem.... I love the costumes and the music." In other words, she's part of a crowd and doesn't sing.

When she asked if he'd ever been to the opera, he said, "Only for business, so I've never enjoyed it." (So Don Draper: does he enjoy anything?) She invited him to a performance, of course, saying although they don't get paid, "they give the supers tickets."

At San Francisco Opera, the supers do get paid, a bit: $6 for each "out-of-house," or staging, rehearsal; $11 for every onstage dress rehearsal and performance. For Aida, the season opener, the supers will attend about ten staging rehearsals and five onstage rehearsals, and they'll be in 12 performances. That means the 19 men and 14 women who fit the costumes (that's how supers are usually selected) will earn about $250 each, plus two tickets to the final dress rehearsals for any operas they are in.

Aida is surely one of the operas that gave rise to the more colloquial name for supernumeraries, which is: spear carriers. (The local supers' newsletter is at spearheadnews.com.) You always see plenty of exotic-looking spear carriers in Aida's famous processional scene, with its stirring music and more or less Egyptian-style costumes. British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes created the sets and costumes for this "eye-popping production," from Houston Grand Opera. Just scroll back and look at the photo.

Christopher Smith, a super I met at the Werther casting call (see August 17 post), will be the one in the jackel-head, or Anubis, costume. He tells me supers usually get to wear two costumes per opera. For Aida, he says, he's "mostly in miniskirts and body paint"--not all that different from what he wore a few years ago in his first SFO production, Mozart's Idomeneo. In other words, "I feel mostly nekkid." (He's from Kentucky, and every once in a while exhibits a bit of a twang that sounds like the characters' in the FX channel's Justified.) But that's OK, because at least in the processional scene, "we come in real quick and we're off." Costume change!

Butterfly Tears

When I tell non-aficionados that I'm blogging about the Ring Cycle, opera, and the other arts, they rarely say, "Oh, I don't like opera." More often, they reply, "Ooh, opera is so expensive." Well, yes--and no. There are certainly other ways to see a production than paying for an orchestra seat.

You can buy a cheaper seat or a standing-room ticket; in San Francisco, you can even see a simulcast at the ballpark! Sometimes you can catch an HD-filmed production at a movie house that has good sound, like my little neighborhood theater in Larkspur, the Lark. Occasionally, you can watch a filmed production on TV. For instance, if you live in the Bay Area, public television station KQED recently showed several productions from San Francisco Opera, including the Madama Butterfly that my friend Sandy Cutler and I saw in San Francisco in 2007. If you've never seen an opera, this is an excellent way to begin: stretched out, feet propped on the ottoman, instead of sitting upright with a hard-back seat in front of you; table with popcorn and beer (or cheese, fresh sourdough, and wine, or whatever) at hand. Plus, you can stretch when it's not intermission.

Madama Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini, is one of the most engaging and accessible operas, both musically and narratively, you'll ever see. (And it's not Wagner: about three hours long.) Set in imperial Japan, it is the story of a young geisha who falls in love with the callous Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, whom she weds in a sham ceremony. (She doesn't hear Pinkerton toasting to the "real American wife" he will marry someday.) When he sails back to the States, she is already pregnant, and planning to wait for him until he comes back "un bel di."

She's given up her religion and family for Pinkerton and now lives in poverty with her little son and her servant, Suzuki. Pinkerton never writes until just before he finally shows up again--three years later--bringing with him an American wife. Needless to say, the story does not end well for poor Butterfly.

This season, San Francisco Opera is presenting a new-to-us production with Svetla Vassileva and Daniela Dessi as Cio-Cio-San, or Butterfly. Sandy and I saw Patricia Racette in her "incendiary performance" as Butterfly and Zheng Cao as the faithful Suzuki. They both had me in tears...but then, with this opera, I always weep: It doesn't matter who is singing about that fine day when Pinkerton will return, or picks up her father's dagger at the end.

I'm not the only one like this, either. Dana Gioia, whom I mentioned earlier, once wrote something like, "We go to the opera to cry." At intermission, I handed Sandy a bunch of napkins, saying, "You are going to cry, for sure." Oddly enough, she did not. But for some of us, the never-failing equation is Emotional scene + gorgeous, mournful music = tears.

Body Double

The other night, I went to a rare casting call in San Francisco Opera's ballet studio, a mostly bare room with a scruffy wood floor, two tables and some chairs along one long wall, a mirror covering the opposite wall. Just a handful of men showed up, but then, the call was pretty specific: for someone who looked similar to Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas (5'10", dark hair preferred; no singing, dancing, or speaking required) to appear in a couple of scenes toward the end of Jules Massenet's Werther, the season's second opera.

A few glam head shots of Vargas were taped to the mirror, and the ten or so contenders lined up next to them, like a police lineup on the wrong side of the one-way window. In their jeans and khakis, T-shirts and pullovers, they looked--OK, not like criminals, but as if they were on the stage crew, or maybe had stopped by to pick someone up. Not one had a vibe that said "actor."

Once director Francisco Negrin had culled the obvious non-Vargas types (the shortish African American man, the too-tall and the older, plus-size gray-haired men, the bald man), he asked the four remaining to walk toward him a couple of times. (Have you ever noticed how normal normal people look when they walk?) Then he asked two of them to lie on the floor on their backs and, when the other two approached and took their places, to get up and move away like a spirit departing the body. "Can you show me something more interesting now, give me some emotion?"

Eventually, he selected two men. But just after almost everyone had left the studio, Luis Javier Hernandez, who works in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, showed up: slim, dark-eyed; he even speaks Spanish. When he did his leaving-the-body moves, he rose and moved backward rather quickly, stumbled, and almost fell; but he regained his balance and continued out. A good recovery or good acting? "It was planned," he told Negrin. Either way, he'll be onstage with Vargas in September, too.

You Put Your Lips Together and...

One of the many things Wagner is known for is the length of his operas: A typical opera will last well over four hours; his longest is more than five. By comparison, Puccini's La Boheme is a bit more than two hours, and Verdi's Aida, less than two and a half; Beethoven's Symphony no. 9, his longest, is a little over an hour. The four operas in the Ring cycle run a total of 18 hours. If it's a good performance, of course, the time flies by when you're sitting in the audience. But what if you're in the orchestra pit?

I went to the opera house lately to discuss this with William Klingelhoffer, whose name is a Wagnerian mouthful in itself (though far be it for me to titter over a multisyllabic German surname). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. For the Ring, Wagner demands eight French horns--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a large section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos. And the first horn in a Ring orchestra is like a Tim Lincecum with his repertoire of pitches. Over the course of these operas, the French horn evokes the river Rhine, a rainbow after a storm, the interior life of a hero, a blast on the hero's horn bold and brassy enough to wake a dragon.

Of course, a ball player sits in the dugout from time to time, while a horn player has little respite when performing Wagner. The horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "It takes physical strength to sit there and blow a French horn for three or four hours. You have to be sure you're doing your aerobic exercises." (Bill says he tries to walk for an hour each day; one of his favorite walks is up 300 steps to Grand View Park, just east of 19th Avenue in San Francisco's Sunset district, and back down again. Oy.)

"And you have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You want to make sure what you're playing is exciting, but you can't get excited yourself. You have to remember that you need something in reserve for three hours from now. I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes just by itself. That's longer than a whole concert the symphony performs."

In this small town, San Francisco Symphony performs just across the street from the opera house, and Bill's wife, Jill Brindel, plays cello with that orchestra. "They're wimps over there," Bill says with pride and a good-natured laugh. "We're playing Wagner."