what’s love got to do with it?
by Douglas Messerli
Modest
Tchaikovsky (libretto, based on a play by Henrik Hertz), Pyrotr Tchaikovsky
(composer) Iolanta and Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story
by Charles Perreault), Béla
Bartók (music) Bluebeard’s Castle /
performed by the Metropolitan Opera, HD live broadcast, performed on February
14, 2015
I
originally intended, before actually viewing the two opera presented in the
MET’s HD Valentine’s Day broadcast, to discuss these works separately, adding
my remarks about the Bartok opera to those I had already made above on the Los
Angeles Opera production, and writing about the Tchaikovsky work, never before
performed on the Metropolitan Opera stage, within another context. After seeing
the pair of short operas, directed by Mariusz Treliński, it became apparent
that to do so would be to ignore the carefully constructed and, at times,
revelatory links between the two works.
Of course, there is absolutely no reason
to imagine that these two very different pieces, written only 20 years apart,
need have anything to do with one another, Iolanta
representing clearly a work of 19th century that romanticizes
love and seeks for its characters’ purification through their orientation to
the light, “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. Light is not just God’s first
creation, but representative of moral value and comprehension in the
Tchaikovsky work.
In TreliÅ„ski’s version, the young girl’s father,
King René (Ilya Bannik) is not just a misguided parent, attempting to protect
his beloved daughter from a truth which may, he fears, transform her joyful
demeanor into a world of fear and terror, but is a dictatorial figure who
pretends wisdom while denying even the concept of it—no one with access to girl
is allowed to mention light and vision.
Yet at opera’s start, Iolanta has come of age enough to perceive that something
is missing from her life, and begins to suffer even though she cannot yet
comprehend why she might have any right to do so, particularly since she is
lovingly cared from by servants day and night. Eyes, accordingly, have no
purpose but for tears, and tears, alas, have become to appear in her eyes
without cause. What we begin to perceive is that, even in the closed world in
which she has been sheltered, the young blind girl is beginning to comprehend
that something is amiss. How can her nurse, for example, know that she is
crying without touching her eyes, to spot her fever without putting her hands
to her forehead?
The opera’s libretto, however, does hint,
moreover, that René’s intentions may not all be a as loving as they are
manipulative. Why will he not even reveal that he is the king or that Iolanta
has been promised in marriage to Duke Robert (Aleksei Markov)? This beautiful
young maiden locked away in her enchanted garden, after all, is not so very
different from the forested animals the King keeps on his property to hunt them
down and destroy them. And not only is René mistaken in his notions of filial
protection, but he has not bothered to discover whether or not the young man to
whom she is promised is a suitable husband for her. In fact, Robert, even
knowing of the vow to which he has been committed, has been, so to speak,
actively playing the field, and has fallen in love with another woman,
Mathilda.
Fortunately, his close companion,
Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala) has not yet found the perfect woman he is seeking,
and which, almost as soon as he has sung of his desires, he discovers in the
visage of Iolanta. But even suddenly witnessing everything for which he has
been seeking, also reveals his own failures: for him everything is based on
sight. Accordingly, just as he begins to reveal to the unknowing girl the
importance of light and all that it represents, she, in incomprehension of
words, begins to reveal to him that love, wisdom, and knowledge can (and must)
be known even in the darkness.
Had Tchaikovsky been a 20th-century
composer, he surely would have sought out that second truth more thoroughly,
faced as Bartók would soon be, with the bleakness of the already discordant
future. But Tchiakovsky and his story, being of another time, pursues instead
how to bring the light to his heroine’s life so that she, too, can be blessed
just as has her loving knight.
Today, the ridiculousness of the magical
cure by the Arab doctor Ibn-Hakia (Elchin Arizov) is apparent, with its
mysterious “backstage” melodramatics which, we are told, the young girl bravely
endures as she is forced to wear a blindfold to cover eyes that cannot see the
light. Chalk it all up to a dramatic revelation of the fact that she is cured,
and is now suddenly able, because she has
willed it, to share in God’s great and glorious gift, all somewhat campily
represented in this opera’s conclusion through the project of white rays
emanating in an art- deco-like pattern behind the carefully arranged gathering,
for the work’s conclusion, of the chorus and leads.
In
fact, even more so than when I saw the
great Bartók opera late last year, I could not help but comprehend the work,
this time around, as a horrifying, nightmare prediction of World War I and the
fascist interventions of the rest of the 20th century. Everything
that Bluebeard reveals to Judith will be realized in the century ahead, as the
idealist’s life—the dreamer in the moonlight—will be the required sacrificed of
mankind.
What these operas do ultimately reveal by
their pairing is that while the first may represent a dream of love, the second
has actually very little to do with love, but is a tale of the twisted human
attraction to the perverse, concerning the awful hypnotic draw of the human species
to the heart of darkness.
Los
Angeles, February 16, 2015
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