Back to Nature with San Francisco Choral Artists

 

The San Francisco Choral Artists vocalists with Artistic Director Magen Solomon front and center

The full title of the final program of the season to be presented by San Francisco Choral Artists was Birds & Bees & Dirty Knees: A Garden Tribute. This was structured into a series of six “episodes” reflecting on that title:

1. Venturing Outside
2. Spring!
3. Evening/Night
4. On the Water
5. In the Woods
6. With the Birds

The program consisted of 21 pieces. These included world premiere performances by Composer in-Residence Eric Tuan (a five-movement suite entitled Tule Lake Sketches), Composer Not-in-Residence  Balázs Kecskés D. (“Éjszaka,” which is Hungarian for “night”),  New Voices Project competition winner Jonathan Mitchell (“The Homing Bee”), and “old friend” Wayne Eastwood (“To Make a Prairie”).

All this may strike the reader as intimidating quantity. However, the program breezed by without an intermission for a total duration of about 90 minutes. Much of that impression was probably due to the skill with which Artistic Director Magen Solomon arranged all of those pieces. Each selection contrasted with its predecessor, producing a freshness of encounters that flowed by without ever leaving any sense of (as Winston Churchill put it) “one damned thing after another!”

Mind you, my responses to this flow varied from one piece to the next. The fact is that, where text is concerned, I have cultivated a strong belief that both words and music should honor not only clarity of semantics but also the expressiveness of rhetoric. Granting that this is a relatively high bar, I can acknowledge that there were definitely composers on the program that did not honor my belief! Rather than single them out, however, I would prefer to dwell on the episodes that particularly satisfied.

One of these was the oldest work on the program, “El Grillo” (the cricket), a frottola by Josquin des Prez. Josquin tends to be known best as a composer of sacred music with particular attention to Mass settings. However, he had a secular side represented by an engaging diversity of polyphonic chansons. I wrote about these contrasting sides back in September of 2021 after harmonia mundi marked the 500th anniversary of his death with the release of a three-CD set entitled The Renaissance Master: Sacred music and Chansons. Those willing to consult the Wikipedia page for “El Grillo” will discover any number of ways to have fun with this little gem.

On the more recent side I was particularly struck by Conrad Susa’s “Landscape II.” This was a setting of Will Kirkland’s translation of a text by Federico García Lorca. It consists of only six sentences, but each is rich in semantic expressiveness. Susa seems to have grasped the full semantic spectrum of the text and reflected it in the music he composed.

Readers probably also know that I cannot get enough of the music of Johannes Brahms. I remember some of his choral works from my high school days, but it was only after Deutsche Grammophon released a collection of his complete choral works that I began to get hooked. Yesterday afternoon’s selection was “Es geht ein Wehen” (a sighing breeze), a setting of a text by Paul Heyse, rich in dark dispositions all collected into only two stanzas. That gem would have been “worth the price of admission” (with a nod to P. T. Barnum) for the entire afternoon!

Cappella SF Records the Music of Conrad Susa and David Conte

The chamber choir Cappella SF, conducted by Ragnar Bohlin, made its recording debut in July of 2015 with a “Christmas in July” release entitled Light of Gold: Cappella SF Christmas. However, by the time this recording was released, Cappella SF had already completed a recording session in January of 2014 in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), engineered by David Bowles’ Swineshead Productions. This session was arranged to memorialize Conrad Susa, formerly Chair of the SFCM Composition Department, who had died in November of 2013. The resulting recordings combined two of Susa’s choral song cycles with works by the current Chair, David Conte, who has acknowledged Susa as a teacher, even through he had earned his degrees at Bowling Green State University and Cornell University.

In February of 2015, Cappella SF returned to the SFCM Concert Hall to perform these works in a concert that Conte arranged to honor Susa’s memory. This past June Delos Productions released the album based on those 2104 sessions under the title Facing West, which is also the title of one of the songs. I offered the backstory for this recording because I had been at the 2015 memorial concert. It was, a bit to my embarrassment, my “first contact” with the choral writing of Susa (and, unless I am mistaken in my timing, also Conte). One advantage of the concert experience was that Conte provided some introductory remarks in which he recalled how much he had learned about setting text from Susa.

One can definitely appreciate Susa’s skill in this matter from his two selections on Facing West. The respective authors are James Joyce (six of the poems from Chamber Music, Joyce’s first published book) and Federico García Lorca (translated into English by Will Kirkland). In the former case Susa’s understanding of Joyce goes beyond grasping both the semantics and the style of each poem. The work is truly a “cycle,” in that those six poems unfold a single narrative. In his own notes, reproduced in the accompanying booklet, Susa called this a “miniature drama,” which he outlined. The songs are performed with piano accompaniment (provided by Keisuke Nakagoshi), which fulfills the narrative requirement of setting while the chorus accounts for the unfolding of the action itself.

The other Susa selection, Landscapes and Silly Songs, provides a sharp contrast to his approach to Joyce. Susa composed this in 1987 and revised it in 2010. It is not so much a cycle as a study in contrasts. The two “Landscape” poems are the first and fourth of a set of five; and they demonstrate how musical expressiveness is often more a matter of connotation, rather than denotation. Each of the remaining three songs takes its own approach to playfulness. “Silly Song” is the last of the three. It is structured as a dialog between mother and child that will be familiar to anyone who knows the darker Germanic folk poetry collected in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the youth’s magic horn), one of Gustav Mahler’s favorite text sources. In contrast to Mahler, however, all five of these songs are sung a cappella, basically allowing the full weight of understanding to rest upon how the words themselves are heard.

The two major Conte selections both involve the texts of Walt Whitman, A Whitman Triptych (a cappella settings of three poems) and Invocation and Dance (two excerpts from “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” accompanied by four-hand piano, Nakagoshi and Kevin Korth, and percussion, Artie Storch and Stan Muncy). The “panels” of Conte’s triptych were composed at different times for different occasions; and each involves an extract from a longer source. The title of the album is taken from the final “panel,” a poem whose full title is “Facing West From California;” but, as Conte observes in the booklet notes, Whitman himself never visited California. That particular song was composed for the International Orange Chorale in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge (after which that ensemble is named). The triptych as a whole amounts to a musical effort to capture Whitman’s explicitly overt sense of self without trying to overwhelm the listener with excessive grandiloquence. Invocation and Dance, on the other hand, almost has a sense of ritual celebration (due, at least in part, to the influence of the percussion parts), an energetic rhetoric that brings the entire album to an exhilarating conclusion.

At the other end of the album, the opening selection is “The Composer,” Conte’s setting of a poem by John Stirling Walker. The text is an imaginative attempt to capture the mind of a composer at work. Conte’s booklet note observes that the composer Walker had in mind was Ludwig van Beethoven. Most would agree that vocal music was never Beethoven’s strong suit, so it was not difficult for Conte to see through the Beethoven influence to a broader perspective of creativity. The text is almost a philosophical hypothesis, but Conte skillfully turns it into a musical experience through which the attentive listener may apprehend not only what Walker was trying to say but also how he was wrestling with the underlying ideas.

Merola presents Conrad Susa’s Synthesis of Two Views of Fairy Tales

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Merola Opera Program presented the first of two performances of the first of the two full-length productions it has been preparing. The opera was Transformations, which its composer, Conrad Susa, described as “An Entertainment in 2 Acts.” The title is that of Anne Sexton’s 1971 book of seventeen “poem-stores,” each of which retells one of the Grimm fairy tales from Sexton’s highly individual point of view. Sexton worked closely with Susa on the libretto, which consists of ten of the poem-stories, five in each of the opera’s two acts.

Sexton became a popular poet during the Sixties and received particular attention in conjunction with the rising feminist movement. To appropriate a popular trope from that period, she could write poems to “tell it like it is.” She also sustained many swings into manic and depressive episodes, as well as attempts at suicide. She was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was a patient at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1973. (She had taught poetry there in 1968.) She committed suicide through the carbon monoxide emissions of her own car in a closed garage on October 4, 1974.

Each of the poem-stories in Transformations beings with a prologue in which Sexton establishes her personal position with respect to the story. This approach to presenting a context before unfolding the plot was maintained in the libretto for Susa’s opera. In both book and opera the result amounts to a story about storytelling, rather than just a latter-day reflection on old stories with folk origins.

In that last sentence I started to type “contemporary” before changing it to “latter-day.” The greatest shortcoming of the opera’s libretto today is that it has lost much of the contemporary verve that made Sexton’s texts so compelling when she published them. (The opera had its world premiere on May 5, 1973, when that verve was still strong.) Today Sexton has become a far more distant figure, and the sharp edges of her rhetoric have been eroded by the many ways in which the world has changed over the course of some 40 years. There are still passages that can get under your skin; but there are also throw-away phrases that lead one to wonder if she was trying to channel Woody Allen.

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize how effective Susa was in setting those words to music. While the supertitles certainly helped one negotiate some of Sexton’s more convoluted phrases, Susa clearly understood how to make sure that the vocalist would be able to manage the delivery of those phrases. This is an opera that places all of the vocalists in the best possible light, turning them all into storytellers drawing the audience into their series of fantasy worlds. Sexton’s poems may now have many dated qualities, but they also have virtues that rise above the flat prose of ABC’s Once Upon a Time. Those are the sorts of virtues that make an opera worth singing in the first place.

Fortunately, the vocalists were engagingly abetted by Director Roy Rallo, working with two imaginative scenic designs, each one multipurpose for a single act, by Marsha Ginsberg. The perspective of the storyteller was further enhanced by having only eight vocalists changing roles as each story unfolded. (Only a fraction of those roles were included in the program, but all one needed to know about the characters could be gleaned simply by observing Rallo’s staging. Those interested in how all of the many roles were divided among the vocal lines can consult the Wikipedia page for this opera.) Then there was the skeletal instrumentation that required only eight performers and amounted to the sort of combo one might have encountered back when the phrase “progressive jazz” was popular. Conductor Neal Goren elicited a spontaneity from this band that fit into the storytelling personae of the vocalists like a well-tailored glove.

As a result, while the narrative qualities of the libretto may have worn a bit with time, the music still packed a mighty punch. The vocal demands were frequently imposing but were never beyond the scope of the participating Merolini. Yet this was clearly a group effort in which no one vocalist every rose very high above the others. Indeed, the reduced resources both on stage and in the pit almost suggested that this would have managed well as street theatre, were there not so many subtleties in the score so capably managed by Goren and all who followed him.

Making New Acquaintances (again)

What I enjoy about going to the Opera Workshop Scene Recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is the opportunity to make the acquaintance of little-known material, much of which is unlikely to get very much public exposure, particularly in the current economic conditions. I first appreciated this opportunity about a year ago, when the program concluded with Samuel Barber's A Hand of Bridge. Since the entire opera is nine minutes long and is basically a "chamber work," it is perfect for these Workshop settings (and was performed again last night), even if it is far too modest for the demands of the more general opera-going public. The other "asset" is the opportunity to hear the work of Conrad Susa (which may have something to do with his Faculty position at the Conservatory). Last spring he was represented by a scene from The Dangerous Liaisons, leaving me filled with curiosity about seeing the opera in its entirety. However, if this excerpt left me a bit disoriented with respect to the overall narrative line, last night Susa was represented by a scene from an opera whose scenes are more naturally detached. The opera is Transformations; and it is based on Anne Sexton's 1971 retelling of fairy tales from a more contemporary (and feminist) perspective than one can get from the Brothers Grimm. I had seen Sexton's text adapted for the stage (I think by Salome Jens) during my time in Southern California. The line I most remember turned out to be the basis for the scene presented last night:

A woman who loves a woman is forever young.

This was conceived as a trio for female voices in a spirit that clearly reflects on the final scene of Der Rosenkavalier while looking firmly at those questions of twentieth-century feminine identity that so occupied Sexton. Granted, I may have been biased by the fact that, before the Workshop began, I had been finishing Deborah Eisenberg's New York Review piece on the recently-published journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag, covering the years from 1947 through 1963, during which Sontag began to come to terms with her own sexuality; but Sexton's text holds up quite well on its own, without requiring the likes of Sontag for context. According to Byron Adams' Grove Music Online entry, Transformations "is one of the most widely performed American operas;" so when will I get a chance to see it in its entirety in San Francisco?

I should also mention the inclusion of scenes from two operas that I have seen but far from often enough. On the serious side there was the scene from Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia that precedes the arrival of Tarquinius. Comedy was represented by the opening scene from Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Francis Poulenc with a deft English translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s text for the libretto. Having Thérèse sung by the same soprano who had sung the Queen of the Night on Sunday only added to the humor, since both of these women are dealing with male domination, albeit in radically different ways! Similarly, the decision to set a scene from Cosi fan Tutte in Beverly Hills demonstrated that the imaginative performances at these Workshops rely as much on the staging as on the skill of the student voices.

THE LITTLE PRINCE as Opera

I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I went over to Berkeley yesterday afternoon to see Rachel Portman's opera, The Little Prince, with a libretto by Nicholas Wright adopted from the short novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, produced by the San Francisco Opera and presented under the auspices of Cal Performances. The original text (supplemented by the author's own illustrations) is such a magical piece of storytelling, so unlike just about any storytelling one encounters in the United States, that the very thought of adapting it for stage performance, with or without music, struck me as a perilous undertaking. On the other hand in the context of my recent remarks about the "technique of disclosure" demonstrated by Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons (which presented equally daunting prospects for operatic interpretation), there are many ways in which one can read de Saint-Exupéry's text as a narrative of self-disclosure; and this appears to be precisely the reading that Portman, Wright, and director Francesca Zambello had in mind.

In the resulting strategy the greatest fidelity was to the author's illustrations, which came alive on the stage in ways that I could not have imagined. I was just leafing through my copy of the book, marveling at the dual relationship that has now been established: What I saw on the stage reminded me of what I had read many years ago, and now what I see on the pages of the book I had read remind me of what I had seen on the stage. Next in fidelity would be the overall structure of the narrative, including the fact that this is a first-person account, although the narrator is now addressing a group of children in pajamas, telling a bedtime story, rather than writing for a reader he cannot see. Then it was necessary to preserve the role of the prelude, which introduced the author as a bad artist. This seems like an apology for the crude style of the illustrations in the book until the act of drawing starts to figure in the plot. I suppose about the only criticism I might have about the adaptation is that it is a bit too faithful, taking over two hours to deliver an effect that might have been presented in about half the time.

However, that last observation takes me onto the turf of what this opera is not. That reduced time scale happens to be the approximate duration of L'Enfant et les sortilèges, a one-act opera by Maurice Ravel that may be the best example of what the publicity material for The Little Prince insisted on calling a "kid-friendly" opera. With a libretto by Colette, Ravel's little opera is an easily-grasped story of a bad boy converted to goodness by the harsh but beneficent forces of nature. It demands a rich conception of images from a time (1925) when special effects were realized as suggestions for the imagination rather than explicitly rendered; and it has enjoyed productions that leave viewers of all ages wide-eyed with amazement and wonder. It is hard to avoid memories of L'Enfant et les sortilèges encroaching on The Little Prince, but the two operas do not deserve to be pitted against each other.

This is important because Portman's compositional language is not particularly "deep" and therefore does not deserve to be compared with Ravel's. In terms of approaching any "grandeur" in "grand opera," it falls far short of other more recent works that have made such an approach, particularly Stephen Sondheim's score for Sweeny Todd. This is not a matter of sophistication, since Sam Shepard also made this approach with The Tooth of Crime, Operation Sidewinder, and The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife, all of which can hold their own against the nineteenth-century warhorses. The problem is one of predictability, at least for those familiar with the operatic repertoire. Portman does not take risks with her score (not that Felix Mendelssohn did in just about anything he wrote). This contrasts with the oddball approaches she has taken with some of her film scores; so it may be that she toned down the risks (without falling back on a repertoire of familiar folk songs, as Engelbert Humperdinck did in Hänsel und Gretel) to hold the attention of young audiences.

Nevertheless, there remains the question over whether or not an opera based on a fantasy-meditation written in 1943 can hold the attention of contemporary audiences of any age. I am not going to fall into the usual trap of trying to second-guess what kids think about these days; but Saint-Exupéry's narrative, at least as it was conceived in this opera, may now be read by adults in a new context, which is that of Pan's Labyrinth. From one point of view, this tale told by a pilot of crashing in the middle of the Sahara before the modern age of sophisticated communication hardware is the story of a man facing the prospect of his own death; and, like the young Ofelia, he does that by lapsing into a world of fantasy with a highly-developed sense of its own logic. Since this pilot is now narrating to all of us, he does not make the "crossing from reality" that Ofelia does; but The Little Prince both comes into "our reality" and then departs from it along a path not that different from Ofelia's.

One final point is that, if a performing ensemble is determined to present an offering as "kid-friendly," then it helps a lot of have kids participating. Thus, there is an extent to which audiences of all ages find ways to identify with The Little Prince, whether with the Prince himself, the pilot, his "audience," which then becomes a context-setting "Greek chorus," or any of the stereotyped agents. This is a far more extended approach than that taken by Hänsel und Gretel; but, from our current perspective of music history, any new work will have to go a long way to top Noye's Fludde, Benjamin Britten's setting of the Chester Miracle Play, which comes closer than any other work I know in involving performers of all ages (including the audience that is expected to participate in singing the hymns). I had the good fortune to see a thoroughly captivating production of this one-act opera while I was living in Singapore, and have been seeking to reproduce that experience ever since!

An Afterthought about THE DANGEROUS LIAISONS (the opera)

I have the good fortune to have a member of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra as a neighbor in my condominium complex. I realized that, because my knowledge of Conrad Susa's opera, The Dangerous Liaisons, was so limited, I had the opportunity to talk to someone who had performed in its premiere. Unfortunately, her only memory was that every rehearsal involved working on changes to the score that had been used at the preceding rehearsal. This is not particularly new in the normative practices in preparing an opera production, particularly when the production is a premiere. Readers may recall that I made it a point to see Philip Glass' Appomattox a second time at its final performance, since I was not sure if the production had "converged" the first time I saw it. Bearing in mind that we were talking about memories close to fifteen years old, my neighbor could not recall if The Dangerous Liaisons had ever converged during its run in San Francisco. In this respect, however, that Wikipedia stub for Susa was helpful, since it indicated that he had worked on revising the opera between 1996 and 1997!

There are any number of stories about what happens when creative artists are subjected to the sorts of deadlines that are so essential to just about any other line of work. The best one is captured in The Internet Movie Database on the Memorable quotes page for The Agony and the Ecstasy:

[repeated exchange]
Pope Julius II: When will you make an end?
Michelangelo: When I am finished!

(It's no fun without that "repeated exchange" preface!) Closer to my own experience, Elliott Carter was teaching at MIT at the time when Jacob Lateiner was preparing the first performance of his piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The work had been commissioned by the Ford Foundation, and Carter reveled in telling us how aggravating it was to have the Ford Foundation keep calling him in exactly the same way that Julius pestered Michelangelo. For me it threw a whole new light on just how beneficent these "beneficent organizations" could be!

Then there was the world premiere of Robin Holloway's fourth Concerto for Orchestra, which the San Francisco Symphony had scheduled as the first half of a program whose second half consisted of Christian Tetzlaff performing Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The Holloway concerto turned out to be based on Piers Plowman and ended up as a massive piece of work that came close to requiring a full evening for performance. Needless to say, the San Francisco Symphony staff was not going to "uninvite" Tetzlaff (who is extremely popular here); so Michael Tilson Thomas had to explain to us why we would be hearing an abridged version of Holloway's new work.

These are all stories about how "art as a calling" can knock heads with "art presentation as a business;" and, as we can learn from Pope Julius, those heads were knocking long before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. My guess is that those heads will never stop knocking. If you want to be a creative artist, you have to accept that a sore head comes with the territory. Susa was fortunate to be able to work on revising his score. I am hoping that Holloway will be fortunate enough that we in San Francisco will hear his Concerto for Orchestra in its entirety sooner or later. It's not a perfect world, but it is the one in which we must live!

Acquaintances Old and New

It is a bit disconcerting to begin a month like May with two posts on the theme of the arrogance of power in the public sector; so it is probably good for my spirits that the end-of-term events at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music are continuing in full force. Since my program for the Opera Theatre production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto included a list of Vocal Department performances, I decided to shift from chamber music and check out last night's Opera Workshop. This consisted of eleven scenes, each directed with minimal staging and costuming and piano accompaniment. I was struck by how many of those scenes were familiar, as a result of my opera-going experience; but I was equally struck by how the non-familiar ones appealed to my ongoing sense of curiosity.

Most interesting is that I finally had a chance to hear an extended excerpt from The Dangerous Liaisons by Conrad Susa (who happens to be Chair of the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory). Unfortunately, I was not in San Francisco when this work was premiered in September of 1994 by the San Francisco Opera; and, equally unfortunately, the Wikipedia "community of musicologists" seems far less thorough in accounting for living composers than they are with those of more distant centuries. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia stub for Susa includes the tidbit that his composition teachers at Julliard "included William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti and, so he says, P. D. Q. Bach." As I understand the history, "P. D. Q. Bach" was "born" out of Peter Schickele's efforts to inject a bit of humor into the Julliard traditions of both composition and performance. These attracted enough attention that he was able to escalate them from "internal" Julliard events to public ones, which eventually provided him with a touring schedule that he probably had never anticipated.

Whether or not Susa was involved with any of those "internal" events certainly does not bear on his treatment of Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. More relevant is that the opera seems to have emerged after Christopher Hampton had adapted it for the stage (and then reconceived for film director Stephen Frears). It also postdates the Milos Forman film, Valmont, with a script adapted from Laclos by Jean-Claude Carrière.

I was in Los Angeles when a production of Hampton's play went on tour and enjoyed his conception for the stage far more than either of those two films. I felt that Hampton had found the right way to keep the staging focused on the narrative line without unduly compromising the epistolary structure of the novel. This, then, was the personal context I brought to my first exposure to the approach that Susa had taken in conjunction with his librettist, Philip Littell. Here, again, Wikipedia provided only a stub; but fortunately the stub provided a breakdown of the scenes in each of the opera's two acts. From this I could assume that what I saw at last night's Workshop was the opening scene of the opera. I find this important because, unless I am mistaken, both the play and the films provide us with a fair amount of background on the primary protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, background that emerges from the initial letters of the novel. Susa and Littell, on the other hand, drop us in medias res, allowing the protagonists to reveal their characters (and, for that matter, establish themselves as protagonists) in a highly charged (and populated) social gathering.

Having discovered this information only this morning, I find myself in a position of "retrospective evaluation" of the performance I saw last night. Because I did not know where the scene fit into the overall conception of the opera, I found it a bit muddled; and I felt that there was not enough subtlety in the way in which the characters communicated. Looking back on it now as a scene that establishes first impressions, I have a better understanding of why the characters' behaviors were more overt than they had been in the previous versions I had seen; and I can appreciate that the approach that Susa and Littell took can work in an operatic setting, even if it departed significantly from adaptations for other media. The result is that I am now far more curious about seeing this opera in its entirety than I was after my initial exposure to the scene.

Having gone on at length about a "new acquaintance," I would like to conclude with a few remarks about an old one. The Susa excerpt was followed by the opening scene of the "opera portion" of Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss. This was conceived as an "appendix" to Molière's play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which, among other things, is a satirical look at the correlation between the rise of a bourgeois class and the rise of mediocrity in the arts. The "opera" is preceded by a Prologue, which may best be described as an operatic depiction of Murphy's Law. Everything imaginable goes wrong; and the opera that is being rehearsed becomes mashed-up (yes, in the contemporary sense of that phrase) with the low humor of a commedia dell'arte troupe. Furthermore, it is clear that everyone involved in this affair was obtained at cut-rate prices, thus reinforcing Molière's original point about mediocrity.

There are a variety of ways in which this can be staged. My personal preference tends towards beginning in a total morass of incompetence from which, by the end of the opera, something authentically sublime emerges. This provides opportunities for the opera seria characters to "play on the same turf" as the "official" comedians. This is particularly the case in that opening scene, which is a trio for Nyade, Dryade, and Echo. In the first place the very fact that Echo does little more than repeat means that she can be portrayed as the dimmest bulb in this particular Christmas tree. However, this particular staging conceived of all of them as being not particularly bright, going through "classical" motions with only the vaguest sense of what they were doing (but all staged with the same intricacy as the Marx Brothers at their zaniest). All this then takes place while they are singing some of the most luscious music ever written for three female voices. Thus, going back to the overall plan, we begin in the realm of the ridiculous; but we are already receiving cues of the sublime that will shortly come.

This brings us to why I wanted to single out these two particular scenes. Both are fundamentally revelatory. They feed the viewer's need to anticipate what will be coming next. In Dangerous Liaisons it is a transition from seemingly vapid parlor talk to the foolish circumstances under which one of the protagonists will die. In Ariadne the transition is from laughable mediocrity to a reminder that the best of art can elevate, whatever the surrounding context may be. Any evening that can present us with both of those transitions back-to-back is transcendent in its own special way.