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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
January 14, 2018
Anton Bruckner, according to legend, once, at the end of a performance of Wagner's Ring cycle, turned to his companions and asked "why did they burn the woman at the end"?
For Bruckner, the music was all-important; the action on stage merely a distraction.
I am with Anton on this: for me, the main problem with opera is that the — frequently beautiful — music is continually being interrupted by a bunch of people on the stage who will not stop singing.
Clearly, then, I am not necessarily the best person to review Sunday's world premiere of Michael Finnissy's Undivine Comedy.
However, there is nobody else, so faut de mieux, this will have to suffice. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
I suppose.
The opera's libretto is derived from Zygmunt Krasińsky's 1833 play Nie-Boska Komedia — household names, both — and its protagonists are Dante Alighieri, Beatrice and Virgil.
Beatrice was the woman Dante fell in love with, literally at first sight, when he was eight years old and she nine; he only met her a further three times and she died at the age of twenty-four. She was the inspiration for La Vita Nuova and also acted as one of Dante's guides in parts of The Divine Comedy (the latter part of the Purgatorio and all of the Paradiso). The Roman poet Virgil is his guide through the Inferno and first part of the Purgatorio.
In the opera (but not in actuality) Dante and Beatrice marry and have a son, she accuses him of neglecting her for his poetry; Virgil urges Dante to return to is wife and child (I must have missed their separation) but she ends her days in an asylum, after which, again I must have missed it, Figlio the son ("figlio" is the Italian for "son", you'd have thought one of history's greatest poets might have had a little more imagination when it came to naming his offspring) goes blind and henceforth appears wearing (completely anachronistically, of course) dark glasses.
Confusing as this may seem, when you combine it with faux newsreaders seated at a desk, offstage singing being transmitted on a TV screen and, later, projected onto the wall, while being in counterpoint with an electronic reproduction of itself, the whole mise-en-scène became positively mind-boggling.
That projector was also used to project images from the French Republican Calendar, whose months are now mainly known in the shape of a recipe (Lobster Thermidor) and a tract by Karl Marx ("The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon", source of the famous "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce" quote), while the narrator read from another political rant, this one by that well-known member of the National Convention, Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade.
Singers Helen Pridmore and Richard Morris were both excellent, although surtitles would have been a bonus, as Finnissy's angular vocal lines made some of the libretto very difficult to catch. Furthermore the lights were too dim to read the synopsis of the plot given in the programme, so that unless one had memorised it before hand, it became even more difficult to follow.
Speaker Keenan Mittag-Degala also made the most of what I suspect may be a rather thankless part: variously assuming the rôles of Virgil, the priest who marries Dante and Beatrice, a newsreader (all three did this) and others — I think there may have been a marriage-guidance counsellor in the mix too.
But what of the music?
Ah, now that was an entirely different kettle of fish.
Somehow I had never previously, insofar as I can ascertain, heard a single note of Finnissy's music . After this, I am eager to hear more.
Despite using an ensemble of just eight musicians, the music never sounded small-scale and Finnissy combined the various textures superbly.
But what particularly impressed me was the way he incorporated the stiles of other composers into his musical palette.
Unlike previous pieces such as Frederic Rzewski's The People United or the third movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, Finnissy is not inviting the audience to "spot the quote" — and, although the Berio is entirely sui generis, it still arguably contains an element of this — nor is he using others' styles as a variation technique, as did Rzewski.
It seemed to me, rather, that where other composers would illuminate the drama using different keys, rhythms, or instrumental combinations, Finnissy, while still utilising those elements, also uses those other styles as part of his dramatic commentary.
Thus, at various parts of the drama, could be heard music that summoned up Bach, Beethoven (the late quartets), Stravinsky (The Rite and L'Histoire), Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and Ligeti. And I'm sure there must have been others that I missed.
But Finnissy's greatest achievement in this regard, is that none of these quotations (I gather, although I cannot claim to have caught it, that there was a direct quote from Beethoven's Op.131 quartet) or stylistic allusions seem imposed on the music, but to grow organically from it. This is surely (post-?)post-modernism with a vengeance.
It has by now become a truism to say that Bill Linwood and his players gave a rivetting performance of the music and this was no exception.
But as an overall experience I left feeling rather like a character in a feeble joke:
First audience member: So, what do you think that was
about?
Second audience member: I have absolutely no idea.
First audience member: But it made you think, didn't it?
Second audience member: Yes, it made me think that I have
absolutely no idea what it was about.
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