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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: study: the dumbing-down of US science textbooks > And yet myth-making and myth-following seems to be at the heart of all > systems. Seems to be what that much cherished social cohesion is all > about. > > So, how do we construct a quality control approach for myths. Or is there a > "best by.." date, after which its best to fund more for the myth-makers. > > Arthur Cordell The problem of myths in writing is the same problem that allowed that Greek could be understood in English translation. The issue was not literary but dramatic. The holistic experience of a Greek play, or its stepchild the opera, is so overwhelming that they let the original disappear from literary education before the 20th century. From an environment of plenty it is often easy to let the most important things disappear out of a belief in efficiency. In the program to the Makropolos Case (see accompanying article) there is an ad that says: "Chinese To Become #1 Web Language by 2007" with the subtext (Now it gets interesting.) We are about to discover that the beginning of dumbness was the silly economic belief that performances of great myths archived on a disc was the same as experiencing the performance holistically on the live stage. And that listening to Caruso on a lousy recording was as good as hearing Cortis live and much cheaper. To keep the quality high you need a great number of people to choose from. That is why Cortis was not Caruso but is phenomenol by today's standards. Gatekeepers are much more effective when they have a lot to chose from. I saw this production last night and found it riveting. Silja, a very fine artist in her seventies, and an artist that has shown the value of healthy technique, musical intelligence, life's experiences and a long history performing great works of art makes the point cogently that this could never, never be captured in a mass produced product. One simple device will make the point. For the entire production the stage moved. So slowly that you could not see but feel it. It became the march of time, the inevitability of fate. Above the stage was an object that slowly revealed itself to be a grand piano hanging upside down. The outright fear of such an immensity hanging in the air was awesome. Slowly the grand piano moved as the stage never stopped changing inexorably. In the end, when the soprano had chosen not to take the elixer that continued her 300 year old life, three hundred black sheets of paper floated down from the piano to cover the lifeless form of Emilia Marty. Explorations of life, death and immortality are common in the movies as well as on TV and the CD market from hip-hop to classical. But nothing can match the live collaboration of a great artist and ensemble with a first rate graphic and technological mind met by great conducting with the whole production under the hand of a master director. It is so obvious that it is disorienting at first to enter that world. It is also obvious that the movies, television and the CD market are their own world as well, and that none of the four are really in competition. They are all art forms and any society that is mature enough to ask the immortal questions will concern itself with all four rather than with one substituting for the other. The following article is about the hoped for future of artistic work. Real work rather than adolescent reality played by children. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] February 9, 2001 NYTimes 'Makropulos Case': Tough Life Lessons From Anja Silja By PAUL GRIFFITHS Opera connoisseurs may debate the merits of beautiful voices, but for people who believe in opera as theater, as characters in vocal action, the German soprano Anja Silja has to count among the supreme performers. What she does, she does fiercely. Starting on Sunday, New York audiences have a chance to see her onstage - which is where she belongs, by right and determination - in one of her great roles: Emilia Marty in Janacek's "Makropulos Case," which she sings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a fine production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff originally mounted six years ago at Glyndebourne. Talking last weekend in an interview at her Brooklyn hotel, Ms. Silja immediately let slip a clue about what makes her special. The subject was Turandot in Puccini's opera - one of the parts she sang during her first years as a performer, in the late 1950's, when she was covering pretty much the entire soprano repertory. It was, she said, "never one of my favorite roles because it's all singing and then what else do you do?" "Singing is not only singing," she went on. "Singing is my profession, but acting is my passion." For her, the difference is absolute. This is not a question of using acting skills - presence, movement, gesture - to supplement the voice. The voice is paramount, but it has to be the voice of a character, not the voice of some abstract notion of beauty. Anyone who has heard and seen Ms. Silja in the theater will be unlikely to forget her voice in action. There remains something raw, wild about it. It is a voice scalding with intensity, the intensity of a character in a situation so extreme that only singing - the musicalization of a yelp or a wince or a war cry - will do. "I think what really is interesting in opera," Ms. Silja said, "is to act and portray the characters - to put it in the voice, of course, but not in the way that is done in many recordings, which is why they are so boring. They may be beautifully sung, perfectly sung, but the characters are talking about hate and love, and you don't hear any difference." She chose the example of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and showed that what really concerns her is not opera on record but opera in the theater. "Wagner wrote that Isolde is a child who plays with a sword and wants to get her will," she said. "This is childish behavior and has nothing to do with great love. Only very young people can fulfill that idea, and therefore it is so terribly wrong to have real grown-ups - and more than grown- ups - onstage." Talking about Wagner led to the subject of her professional and personal connection with Wieland Wagner, the composer's grandson and visionary stage director. They met in 1960, when she was engaged to sing in "The Flying Dutchman" in his production at the Wagnerian citadel of Bayreuth. It was during the run that their liaison began, "with some reluctant feelings on his side," she said, "because I was so much younger and it was a big sensation then." From the next year until his death in 1967, they lived together. "Kind of. We traveled so much. We did over 30 productions together in that short time: `Fidelio,' `Salome,' `Elektra,' `Lulu,' `Wozzeck,' `Otello' " and so on, plus the summers of Wagner at Bayreuth. Their professional association, she said, was destined: "It was what he was searching for, and what I could give him." Quite unlike the Wagnerian Valkyrie stereotype, Ms. Silja was tall and slender, and had the natural movement of a young tree in a storm. She gave Wieland vibrancy and urgency, and he gave her, she said, her life as a performer. "Whatever I do, until now, every day, I do in his memory," she added. "Whatever movements I make onstage, I always think: What would he do, what would he think?" Wieland also gave her access to more powerful roles. "The whole coloratura repertory I never liked," she recalled. "Like Konstanze, in Mozart's `Abduction.' What can you do? She's constantly sad. If I want to be sad onstage, which I like to be, then it has to be very dramatic." After Wieland's death, her life changed. "I fulfilled my contract with Bayreuth the following year, and then I gave up Wagner totally. And then only in 1990, in Robert Wilson's production of `Lohengrin,' I sang Ortrud, which I'd never done with Wieland, so I wasn't occupied with my memory. I loved that production, which was tailor-made for me. "Wieland never wanted to repeat things, and he would have hated the thought of his productions' being continued over many years. I tried, of course, in the first emotional reaction to go on with his production of `Salome,' but that was certainly a mistake. He had changed already so much, and he would have changed, so one cannot talk about a Wieland Wagner style, only about a certain period in his work. At the time of his death he was starting to think about Mozart much more." There remains the legend and, for Ms. Silja, the inspiration. "He never let anybody photograph his productions. Nothing exists. Which is good in a way." She also said she had no regrets that more of her own work was not recorded. "The important thing is to see the voice, and not only to hear it," she said. "To be just a singer would be very boring." Seeing her voice in "The Makropulos Case," audiences will see Emilia Marty, a woman who, thanks to a potion, has lived through more than three centuries and become exhausted by experiences. Ms. Silja sings the role in the original Czech and is not concerned about singing words she does not understand exactly. "I think the singing, the score, is the language," she explained. "If you are able to feel what that language means, then you are also able to understand the human being you are portraying. You don't have to understand the text word by word. Even with Wagner, the text is so complicated. You know the words, of course, but in the moment you're singing them, they're absolutely meaningless." Talking about performance, Ms. Silja stressed the importance of the director. "During rehearsals, both the stage director and the conductor are important. But during a performance, the conductor is more focused on the orchestra, while you still have to do what the stage director had in mind - if they're good. I'm not talking about the average ones: I just ignore them, or I try to survive, and I think, as I say, about how Wieland would do it, or maybe Ruth Berghaus, whom I highly admired, or some others I really like." She talked about working with Berghaus, who came from the Bertolt Brecht tradition, on Berlioz's "Trojans" at Frankfurt in 1986. "I think `The Trojans' was the most interesting production I've ever done," she said. "Ruth Berghaus was a very outstanding personality: one cannot explain somebody so exceptional. But to give an example, during the duet with Chorebus - where we say goodbye to each other and he goes to the war and I see already what will happen - we had no physical contact at all. This is very modern nowadays, but that was the beginning. I had to lie down and wipe my hand on the floor in a pool of water while he was singing. I was doing this all the time in rehearsal, and I found it terribly stupid. It didn't make any sense, in my opinion. "But after three weeks, all of a sudden I saw in that utter nonsense the meaning she had in mind, which was absolutely the meaning of the scene. We had to do what we were forced to do. It had such power and sense, and I could carry that to the public. It was such a strong feeling of loneliness. Finally, for the first time, I understood what loneliness really means. I was just concentrated on one spot, and there was just no possibility of getting together anymore in life. This is absolutely the end. That was really a key experience in theater." By this point Ms. Silja was conveying the uncanny sense that some of her essential life experiences were theatrical experiences, that she had developed not only as a performer but as a person through the roles she had portrayed. "In my youth," she said, "I sang all those girls who are just unself- conscious and do something - like Senta, who is just obsessed with the idea of saving the Flying Dutchman, no matter who he is, how he looks and what he says. She is absolutely obsessed with an idea, and you cannot call that love. Isolde is also obsessed with hate. So I had no consciousness about what I was doing. Slowly I became more conscious of destiny and loneliness and unfulfillment. "With 'Otello' it started, but then Wieland died and we never came to the roles that were more advanced in their awareness. Then I met Ruth Berghaus, and that gave me a different repertory and a new view on life. Then I had my children, and I didn't sing so much: I had my own life and my own experiences." All of that goes into "The Makropulos Case." "I've been singing this opera for 30 years," she pointed out, "and first I had no idea about the real tragedy of that figure. I thought you just put something wonderful on your shoulders and you look chic and it's a bit like `The Merry Widow.' Now I understand that there's nothing glamorous in this character. Now I know what it is to have no roots in life because you have survived everybody. She is a real tragic figure from the moment she comes onstage, and figures like that cannot only sing beautiful music. Only at the end, when she finally admits what she went through, the melody starts." The Glyndebourne Festival production of Janacek's opera "The Makropulos Case" will be presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m. It will be sung in Czech with English surtitles. Tickets: $30 to $95. Sunday's performance also features a gala dinner and a dessert reception with the company. Information: (718) 636-4100. Gala ticket information: (718) 636-4182. |
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