I was eager to see this, because Purcell. I was incredibly skeptical of it, because Peter Sellars. But I decided that if I was gonna, I might as well do it before my Medici account expires so at least it'll be free. Hard to argue with that.
So yes, this one's going to be a little complicated. The Indian Queen was originally a play by John Dryden, first performed in 1664. Thirty years later, Purcell was commissioned to add music to make it into a semi-opera, with a libretto by Dryden himself. But of course, and alas, Purcell died before he could complete the work, and his less-famous brother Daniel finished it.
Well, as I think I've noted before, semi-operas are problematic for most modern producers, who want the music but aren't much interested in the non-musical text. The only semi-opera you're likely to see that's "authentic" in that sense is Jonathan Kent's fantastic staging of Purcell's Fairy-Queen. Any other semi-opera you'll see--which really just means this and Purcell's King Arthur; nothing by any other composer--is gonna have its guts ripped out, the non-musical elements replaced with...well, something different, according to the producer's obscure whims. That's...not necessarily a bad thing, is it? We could still have fun. Well, maybe. But it also presents a perhaps overwhelming temptation for a producer to use the text to make some sort of hamfisted "point" that has zero to do with the original work. Which would be...bad. Hypothetically.
The original play really isn't about colonialism. It takes place prior to the Spanish invasion and involves only Meso-American characters, and it's at least somewhat about Restoration politics. of course, ideology doesn't have to be overt, but I think it would be pushing a point to see this as really being "about" indigenous Americans. But Sellars' version sure is! Here, the entire play is stripped away and replaced with monologues, all recited by one woman, from a novel by Rosario Aguilar, a Nicaraguan writer. It is indeed about the Spanish invasion, from the perspective of several women, mainly a princess who gets involved with a Spanish commander and her daughter.
You may have detected one problem here already: it's true that the music in semi-opera is only somewhat related to the spoken text, but it's not unrelated. Dryden's libretto includes specific American names; it's obvious that the two are more closely intertwined than they were in The Fairy-Queen. So...how does this work here? Fairly incoherently, I would say.
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the new story, such as it is. There's a lot of steamy Harlequin-Romance stuff that doesn't really seem apropos of anything. Some might say it verges on the tasteless. It certainly doesn't present any kind of interesting message, if that was the goal, which it clearly was. The production would clearly have to carry a lot of weight here, but as expected from Sellars, this could best be described as...cryptic. A lot of dancers making dopey facial expressions, people in modern-dress...it's very hard to tell who if anyone a lot of the singers are supposed to be. Or care.
According to Sellars, people who didn't like this “don’t understand that a work like this is about trying to complete a journey together through difficult issues and history.” I don't think that's notably true, Pete. We have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to do. The problems are A) What the hell does this have to do with Henry Purcell; and B) you did a shit job of it. Sorry. I know you would welcome that kind of hostility, épater la bourgeoisie and all that, but while I don't like the production, to me, the bigger problem is that it's just really fucking boring. At three and a quarter hours, this feels absolutely interminable. I spaced out so hard for significant portions of it.
Of course, there's Purcell's music. There is that! And, of course, Purcell is great, even if maybe I didn't find this score quite as striking as his other work I've heard. He actually completed less than an hour of music, and Sellars, having high-handedly decided that Daniel Purcell's completion was bad, replaced it with more, unrelated Purcell music. How does this relate to the text? It doesn't, really. It just makes things more incoherent. I have no basis to judge the relative badness of D. Purcell's tunes, but I am disinclined to take Sellars' word for it.
Honestly, I'm starting to kind of feel like I hate Peter Sellars and his stupid-looking hair (seriously, google him, he looks like the guy from Eraserhead). If he wants to work with living composers like John Adams and Kaija Saariaho, okay, do what you want. I'll allow that his libretto for Doctor Atomic is...fine. But come on, man. I've actually had the thought lately that maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Regietheater. I mean, we're talking about old texts in the public domain, so why shouldn't current artists repurpose them to do new and interesting things? Well, there's the practical problem that when you have a text, superimposing completely new meanings onto it generally just makes it incoherent. But the ethical issue, I think, is you pretending that your work somehow "is" the original opera. If Sellars wants to make The Peter Sellars Anticolonialist Power Hour ft. Henry Purcell, I wouldn't object. But he would never do that. Why not? Because nobody would ever fund it, and if for some reason they did, nobody would want to see it. Laying bare a dirty little secret here: nobody cares about opera directors that much. You guys ain't that important! As a defense of Regietheater, some people say, oh, well, opera's a dying artform! We need to shake it up to engage The Kidz! I am unaware of any statistics suggesting that Regietheater has that effect, but that's what they say. But no! People like operas! They're sometimes willing to endure indignities inflicted on them, but that's all! Nobody would give one single solitary shit about your work if not for the composers' names.
Anyway. Not a fan, as you might conceivably have gathered. Purcell deserves a lot better than this, and so do colonial studies.
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