How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (12 page)

 

This work ought to have been an ideal vehicle for demonstrating the much-advertised priorities of the “new Met”—the institution that, under the leadership of Peter Gelb, has made a great deal in the press of its commitment to dramatically meaningful productions, directed by eminent people of the legitimate theater. This emphasis, I think, is
part of the larger and very admirable aims of the new general manager to popularize grand opera, to bring it to a new audience: the drama in opera, you're meant to feel, is the element that anyone, even those who aren't (yet) in love with operatic music, could be moved by. The
Lucia
that premièred last month, in a new production by the Tony Award–winning stage director Mary Zimmerman and featuring the appealing French soprano Natalie Dessay (who, the promotion reminds us, started out as an actress and only then segued into singing) is, quite literally, the poster child for this new regime and its ambitious program. At the beginning of the autumn, it was impossible, if you lived in New York City, to wait for a bus without being greeted by the stark image of Ms. Dessay's gamine face, eyes wide with simulated madness, her mascara running, plastered on the side of the bus stop.

All the more strange, then, that this important new production is such a bore. Despite a strong and committed cast and a director who could be counted on to make much of the dramatic aspects of a work whose ravishing music is often considered sufficient cause to perform it, this
Lucia
failed to add up—failed, most egregiously (and most surprisingly) of all, to make anything meaningful or memorable out of what you might not at all gratuitously call the “feminist” element: the very element, you'd think, that should give it particularly contemporary interest.

A big problem here is the direction. You could see why Donizetti's opera, with its elemental Romantic plot and Every-Madwoman heroine, might have appealed to Mary Zimmerman, a writer and director who has always been interested in the possibilities of starkly dramatizing archetypal, even mythic material: the
Odyssey
of Homer, the
Thousand and One Nights
, and Ovid's compendium of erotic disaster stories, the
Metamorphoses
. In staging these works, Zimmerman often has striking “concepts”: her
Metamorphoses
was set in a big, shallow swimming pool; her
Arabian Nights
ended in present-day Baghdad. Still, the problem with concepts is that most great works are too elastic, too polyphonic, to be squeezed into a single notion: just where those impressive-looking concepts get you, intellectually or indeed emotionally, isn't always clear. I loved the idea of putting Ovid under water, not least because Ovid loved it, too:
Metamorphoses
begins with the watery chaos of creation, a perfect medium, you realize, for the corporeal transformations that
follow. But Zimmerman never really made the water mean anything: it was just the stuff in which the actors splashed around as they acted out, fairly conventionally, the various stories.

A lot of the new
Lucia
has the same high-concept feel. There is, to start with, the mise-en-scène, which here has been inexplicably updated from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. (If you squint, you might think you're watching a dramatization of Trollope's
The Eustace Diamonds
—at least as far as the costumes go: Zimmerman hasn't filled the Met's vast stage with much decor, perhaps intending for the airplane-hangar-like stage to dwarf the characters and thereby emphasize their isolation.) Updatings of operas can be controversial, but shouldn't necessarily be so: there is, at the very least, an argument to be made for updating the action of many operas to the time of composition, the moment whose intellectual and cultural climate can explain a great deal about the work itself. This would certainly be the case of
Lucia
, composed during a period of a decade and a half that showed a particular fascination with female madness—the period of the Brontës, of the “madwoman in the attic.” Why Zimmerman should have chosen the late 1870s rather than the 1830s was anybody's guess: it seemed not only against the grain (the end of the nineteenth century, with its bold heroines, jars as a milieu in which to set a pathetic Romantic tragedy) but gratuitous, a decision never explained.

And—worse—never capitalized on, never followed through. We hear again and again in
Lucia
that the girl is still in mourning for her mother; you'd have thought that Zimmerman would make something of this fact, given that few cultures have fetishized grief and mourning as much as the late-Victorian one in which she has chosen to set her production. A Lucia weighted down by the trappings of deep mourning would have presented a striking and psychologically suggestive picture—a visual reminder of the trauma that haunts her from the start. But Zimmerman doesn't excavate the possibilities of her own concept.

A rigorously coherent use of the setting that she's imposed on this
Lucia
would have given resonance to other clever but ultimately unrealized notions. During the great Act 2 sextet, when a furious Edgardo interrupts the wedding between Lucia and the wealthy Arturo and all the major characters sing of their various impressions and reactions at once, Zimmerman “opens out” this usually static moment in a sugges
tive way. As the principals sing, a wedding photographer fusses at them, nudging them into a wedding-day pose—a conceit that nicely communicates the dreadful tension, so common in operatic drama, between the crushing demands of the outside world and the interior turmoil that torments the characters. But like too much else in this staging—not least, an enchantingly pretty fall of snow that's a perfect visual analogue to the descending harp arpeggios that introduce Lucia's first aria (in which she describes seeing the ghost of a girl murdered by her lover's ancestor)—this one is just a “moment” that comes and then, like the photographer's flash at the end of the sextet, goes up in a puff of smoke.

Occasionally, Zimmerman's concepts do serious damage to the carefully constructed meanings of the numbers. In the new production, as Lucia narrates her Gothic tale of ghosts and murdered maidens, the ghost itself, in the form of an all-too-corporeal, white-powdered dancer, flops around the heroine as she sings, and then glides away, writhing and beckoning, before disappearing a bit awkwardly into the fountain. Although this is visually arresting and certainly novel, to make the ghost concrete—to make it real—seems a very serious misapprehension of the meaning of the text here. Cammarano begins with this hysterical narrative of ghosts and visions because he wants, from the start, to underscore the girl's mental fragility (as Callas understood so well). If the ghost is real to
us
, the audience, then our sense of the heroine's delicate emotional state is inevitably diminished—as is, just as inevitably, our sense of the final murderous madness as a culmination, rather than an aberration.

Such novelties, so effortfully contrived (Zimmerman wants us to believe that the images of skeletal tree branches on the show curtain before each act represent “the human vascular system in the brain”), stood in stark contrast to the director's inexplicable abandonment of the actors. Both times I saw this
Lucia
, I found my eyes wandering all over the stage (and sometimes the house) during even the most dramatic moments; there was nothing happening on the stage to hold the attention. Certainly nothing to do with the chorus, in which Zimmerman shows no interest: again and again they simply stood around in big clumps, bizarrely unresponsive to anything that was happening around them. The latter is a particularly serious problem, needless to say, in the Mad Scene. I recently
watched a DVD of a 1967
Lucia
with Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi, filmed in Japan, as well as a couple of performances by Joan Sutherland from the mid-1980s: what struck me was how each of the chorus members seemed to have been directed, to have been given a “character” to play, horrified, appalled, sympathetic, whatever. This is crucial: their reactions to the unfolding tragedy help cue the audience's reactions.

That level of detail is, even in Zimmerman's direction of the principals, often absent—and when it's present, it's misguided. Her approach to directing opera singers can be strangely amateurish; often she simply moves her principals downstage to sing, and then they stand there singing, and that's it. (She must be a conductor's dream.) This important director from the “straight” theater showed little concern for using the actors and their bodies (and the spaces between those bodies) to delineate character, to express something about the drama of the plot—or, indeed, the drama of the music. This is a particularly serious failing in early-nineteenth-century Italian melodrama, in which the decisive gesture, always indicated by the score, the arc of an aria, or the strong declamatory force of a piece of recitative, is everything. Recalling the Lucia of Maria Callas, in a 1955 Berlin performance conducted (and largely directed) by Herbert von Karajan, the Italian director Sandro Sequi spoke shrewdly of the importance not of “realism” but of high stylization, the starkly meaningful gesture, for performances of bel canto opera—a stylization that, as classical actresses know well, paradoxically releases, rather than constrains, emotional realism:

Years after Callas's 1955 Berlin
Lucia
, people remembered the starkly stylized way in which she used just her arms in the mad scene “like the wings of a great eagle, a marvelous bird. When they went up, and she often moved them very slowly, they seemed heavy—not airy like a dancer's arms, but weighted…. There was a continuous line to her singing and movements, which were really very simple.”

That Renata Scotto was also an heiress to that high tradition is clear even in the grainy and amateurishly recorded Japanese television performance from 1967. Every line of Donizetti's music is accompanied by a telling movement, or by an equally telling stillness: this singer may have been small and plump, but she knew how (and was unafraid) to use her body. In her performance, when Lucia reads the (forged) letter meant to convince her of Edgardo's faithlessness, she crumples a little (and why not? The word used of her at this moment is
vacilli
, “totter”); when Edgardo prepares to tell her, in Act 1, that he must leave for France and she says
Che dici?
, “What are you telling me?,” she turns away in a small but vivid movement of quiet pain. Of such small things are memorable performances made.

 

No one seems to have explained any of this to Natalie Dessay, whose bride of Lammermoor was, if anything, the greatest example of the curious inertness that characterized the show. Her benumbed, almost anesthetized Lucia was the product of an interpretation that all too clearly had been carefully considered; but it was, too, an interpretation wholly at odds with both Donizetti's music and Cammarano's text—with, that is to say, the work's style.

I suspect that this failure might, paradoxically, actually have something to do with what the Met is interested in these days: “serious” acting, taking the theater “seriously.” Much has been made of Dessay's training as a modern stage actress (the playbill informs us that she'll be appearing in a Thomas Bernhard play in 2010, in Paris). But as admirable as such preparation is, it doesn't necessarily have much to do with the operatic stage of nearly two hundred years ago—which is to say, the stage for which Donizetti wrote the music that, whatever your directorial interpretation, still has to be played at every performance of
Lucia
. Dessay, whose lithe and adorable stage presence is paralleled by a coolly agile voice very much in the French tradition, seems to have worked very hard to create a Lucia at odds with the singer's own well-known persona. (She was a fun Zerbinetta and a fine, flirty Manon.) Hence her subtle, realistic, traumatized, “psychological” interpretation of Donizetti's crushed heroine.

But in bel canto opera, with its post-classical high stylization, the
kind of subtleties that Dessay wants to telegraph simply don't register—they're at odds with the music. Her Lucia enters in a kind of numbed fog—a nice idea, except for the fact that her music here is filled with foreboding, agitated and anxious in the ghost-story cavatina and, in the cabaletta, tinged with hysteria. So Dessay's physical demeanor on stage, intended no doubt to convey a bruised psyche, merely came across as indistinct, inexpressive. (When this Lucia reads the forged letter, she shows virtually no physical reaction at all; she could have been reading a Chinese takeout menu. No
vacillando
here.) The same quality of dissociation characterized the singing, which although technically expert on the part of all three leads (particularly the ferocious Enrico of Mariusz Kwiecien, a role you hope he gets to reprise in a more congenial production), was curiously devoid of any sense of real engagement. This problem was not helped by the conducting of James Levine, who has always seemed indifferent to the bel canto repertoire. The effect of all of this was to muffle rather than amplify the heroine's tragedy.

There were, in fact, three gestures in this
Lucia
that I particularly remembered after the show was over, all of them illuminating in some way the fatal flaws of this production. The first, a cheap and vulgar one, showed the emptiness of the “concepts” that plagued the direction. During the furious duet between Lucia and her brother in the first scene of Act 2—the “you must save me”/“and what of
me
?” duet—Zimmerman has her Enrico reaching suggestively along Lucia's leg at one point. This was not only wholly inappropriate to the drama but wholly unnecessary as well: Cammarano's libretto and Donizetti's music make Lucia's victimization amply clear without any need for the now-fashionable invocation of incest. Like so many of the conceits here, this one went nowhere—just another flake of falling snow.