TALES OF LOHR: "LA TRAVIATA" AT PITTSBURGH OPERA
Or, How You Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Verdi; plus, "This Week in Warhol" spends some time on the "Couch"
Among the forms of artistic media that could be regarded as generally mainstream, opera seems to be among those towards which the unfamiliar potential consumer seems to exercise the most skepticism. I of course understand someone attending an opera and not really responding to its synthesis of orchestral music and classical-style vocal performance. The Broadway-style musical is already too much of a suspension-of-disbelief leap for some folks, and opera asks you to accept a similar dramatic-presentation premise without the buffer of spoken dialogue. Add to this the fact that the emotional tone of much grand opera is pitched to the often literal rafters, and some people simply find the end result too much to take. Which is fine. My philosophy of arts consumption has always been that no form of enjoyment should be considered compulsory. But I have to admit that I do hesitate when someone who’s never actually been to an opera still says “oh, I don’t think I would like that.” After all, most people do respond to beautiful music, powerful singing, visual pageantry, and storytelling with strong emotional payoffs, and most operas, particularly among the time-tested classic repertoire, offer all four of these things in spades.
Please understand that I do not make these pronouncements from a presumed position as any sort of operatic aficionado. I saw my first opera in 2013, when I was already 35 years of age, and after slightly more than a decade, I can still count the number of operas I’ve seen live on two hands. And this is only true since this past Saturday, when I finally made it to finger number six thanks to the Pittsburgh Opera’s opening-night presentation of Giuseppe Verdi’s legendary 1853 romantic tragedy La Traviata. The first two operas I ever attended were Philip Glass’ monumental avant-garde classic Einstein on the Beach and Jake Heggie’s rather recent-vintage adaptation of my beloved Moby-Dick. For a long time now, I’ve believed that this pair of operas represented a potentially ideal way for the opera-curious to ease themselves into a previously unexplored aesthetic form. Both of them are performed almost entirely in English, save for a brief Moby-Dick prologue sung in Polynesian, by Queequeg the harpooneer. Einstein on the Beach dispenses with one of the opera neophyte’s most frequent principal concerns, “What if I can’t follow the story?,” by having no real plot to speak of, and Moby-Dick is built around a narrative I already knew extremely well, having read the book three times prior to seeing this show. Before last night, I would have said providing oneself with these sorts of viewership training wheels is the ideal way to help gauge whether or not opera is something that’s potentially to your taste.
Now, my suggestion to the virgin operagoer will be simply this: See La Traviata. If the whole thing leaves you cold, I’m pretty sure opera is not gonna be your thing. This work, at least as I experienced it this Saturday, performed by a massively gifted cast abetted by conductor Antony Walker and stage director Kristine McIntyre, is like a Platonic ideal of the classic grand opera. It’s opulent, elegant, romantic, and touching. Verdi’s score sweeps along with a pristine purity and emotional directness guaranteed to move the stoniest spirit. The arias and duets that fill this score are soaring paeans to passion, heartbreak, and regret. The story, borrowed from a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, is a fairly standard-for-opera stew of instantaneously overwhelming love, tragic misunderstanding, soul-smashing sacrifice, turn-on-a-dime emotional reversals, and a heroine whose beauty and romantic yearning is only matched by her propensity for wasting disease. (There’s a reason the popular “Opera Spoilers” T-shirt includes a list of a dozen opera titles, including La Traviata, all followed by the same reveal: “SHE DIES.”) Pittsburgh Opera general director Christopher Hahn even conceded the hoary nature of the plot in his opening-night remarks. But he also spoke of seeing the opera, his own first, while growing up in a town on the tip of southern Africa, and of how his inability to follow the story did nothing to prevent him from falling in love with the music, the voices, and the entire experience. Such is the primal power of La Traviata at its very frequent greatest.
Soprano Vuvu Mpofu, who makes her Pittsburgh Opera debut with this production, is, by way of charming coincidence, from the same African town in which Hahn grew up. As Violetta Valéry, a Parisian courtesan whose embrace of the pleasure-driven life masks her ever-increasing physical frailty, Mpofu delivers what is, for these admittedly still relatively untested ears, the finest operatic soprano voice I’ve yet experienced live. She prances with trilling grace through Violetta’s hedonistic interludes; she caresses her ardent love-declaration passages with stirring beauty and conviction; and she also does a powerful job of acting the vocals, which not every operatic performer always flawlessly manages. She makes us appreciate not just the beauty of her own instrument, but also the laughing-through-tears heedlessness of Violetta’s early scenes and the hushed, desperate tones of her later moments, trapped in the clutches of her disease. Tenor Duke Kim, also making his Pittsburgh Opera debut, is a fine match for Mpofu as Alfredo, the earnest young nobleman caught between his genuine love for Violetta and his duty to the aristocratic class to which he is beholden. His voice pairs sublimely with Mpofu’s during their duets, bringing a genuine sense of romantic and erotic chemistry also sometimes scarce in operatic love matches. But he is equally dynamic during the second act, when his fury at Violetta’s seeming betrayal causes him to fatally humiliate her in public, and he’s even a skillful enough actor to sell Alfredo’s thoughtless shift from blind passion to equally insensate hatred when Violetta’s sacrificial forsaking of him becomes clear.
This production’s third Pittsburgh-debuting performer, baritone Michael Chioldi as Alfredo’s regal father Giorgio, has arguably the most difficult acting task of the three principals, as Giorgio balances equal parts Violetta-gaslighting this-is-for-your-own-good abuses, genuine care and concern for both his children (the all-too-sadly-still-relevant stigma of Violetta’s history as a sex worker jeopardizes the marriage plans of Alfredo’s sister), and almost helpless fealty to the aristocratic dictates of his times. Chioldi juggles all this masterfully, with a tricky performance that never steps wrong. Other standouts of the supporting cast and ensemble include mezzo-soprano Leah Heater (whose work I enjoyed last November in the Pittsburgh production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman) as Violetta’s genuinely carefree galpal Flora; baritone Brandon Bell, suitably officious as a covetous Baron with his own designs on Violetta; and soprano Julia Swan Laird, a stalwart presence as Violetta's maidservant Annina. The company, blessed with the pleasure of scenes mainly consisting of dinners, parties, and revelry, respond with aptly exultant, smoothly celebratory vocal ensembles.
The production surrounding these thrilling performers breaks no new ground, but doesn’t need to, with such gorgeous music and inspired vocalizations to carry the day. Under Walker’s ever-capable baton, the Pittsburgh Opera orchestra mightily delivers on all the promise of Verdi’s score, whether swelling with the open-hearted power of true love found, trembling with the wounded pride and crestfallen misery of Violetta’s downfall, or descending to a tremulous solo oboe as the full emotional heft of what has befallen the characters sinks into them and us. Glenn Avery Breed’s costumes are sumptuous yet never overly showy, and Peter Dean Beck’s set design serves the drama well, while still getting to show off a little decadence with the red-streaming sizzle of Flora’s scandalous second-act party.
I can imagine that some contemporary viewers, new to both opera and its customary narrative conventions, might be put off by the regressive nature of some of La Traviata’s thematic conclusions. Many of the doomed heroines of grand opera, like Violetta, seem stricken far too young with ailments that could potentially be read as karmic judgments against lifestyles that the more conservative figures of their era (like Verdi himself, who some regarded during his lifetime as a bit of a reactionary) might have thought deserving of punishment, even by death. But from a purely artistic perspective, I can simply view it thus: Violetta wastes away and dies because she is a grand opera heroine, and that is what they do. Besides, nobody goes to a decadent, delectable seven-course feast for the storyline, and La Traviata, as presented by the Pittsburgh Opera, is a feast indeed, visually, musically, and emotionally. See it, in this production or whenever it comes to your town. Who knows? You just might be walking around an opera fan in waiting, and this is a sure-fire way to find out.
The Pittsburgh Opera performs La Traviata tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m.; Friday night at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., all at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Pittsburgh. For more information and to order tickets, visit the Pittsburgh Opera’s website.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
MARCH 19, 1965
For the first of three consecutive nights, St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, a progressive Episcopal institution housed in the second-oldest church building in Manhattan, hosts a screening of an excerpt from Couch, a shape-shifting omnibus-excerpts film shot the previous year by Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory.
The film’s titular furniture piece, which has since entered the pantheon of Factory legend, is acquired as a cast-off, spotted on the curb outside the YMCA across the street from the building that houses the Factory loft. Attracted to the couch’s curved construction and plush maroon velvet cushioning, Warhol and Factory caretaker Billy Linich simply cross the street and roll the discarded sofa over into their building’s elevator. Once it is ensconced in its new position in the studio, this couch becomes a focal point of superstar socializing and relaxation, frequently featuring in candid and posed Factory photos and showing up as set dressing in several noteworthy films shot at the studio, including the fascinating long-form portrait feature Henry Geldzahler and, perhaps inevitably, the film that bears its name.
Couch shares certain loose similarities with the earlier Warhol omnibus serial work Kiss, in that it focuses on various shifting combinations of individuals whose activities all center on or around the couch. But unlike Kiss, which finds each of its focal pairs locked in precisely the activity the title mandates, Couch offers a good bit more variety in both the number of people featured in its reels and the range of behavior they are permitted to get up to. Some of the reels, like the first, feature poet / filmmaker Piero Heliczer and principal Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga simply lounging on the sofa, sleepily contemplating one another. Others feature trios or quartets rather than pairs, some smoking, drinking, and engaging in low-stakes hang-outs. A motorcycle, powered down and slanted on its kickstand, makes a few prominent appearances, as does a banana, Warhol’s favored phallic film stand-in of the period. And for a few reels, Warhol dispenses with the erotic intermediary objects and simply gets down to fairly explicit business. Early Warhol superstar and fellow filmmaker Naomi Levine appears nude, and in several later-shot reels, Malanga and actor / raconteur Ondine engage in some enthusiastic sex play, abetted by Linich friend and Factory hanger-on “Binghamton Birdie.” Malanga also joins a threesome with Kiss actor Rufus Collins and Heliczer’s wife Kate, one of the obscure Warhol film reels that includes unsimulated sexual acts.
The St. Marks screening features only the Heliczer / Malanga duo reel, which constitutes the opening of the finally assembled 13-reel presentation eventually screened for the public for the first time in 1966. In total, Warhol shoots about 40 100’ rolls of film in his production of Couch; among those not included in the final project are reels featuring Warhol associate David Whitney (he performs a striptease in one of these), actress Nancy Fish, and dancer Kenneth King. The original Warhol-assembled 13-reel Couch is preserved in 1998 by the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art on the Andy Warhol Film Project.
Today, the inaugural Heliczer / Malanga reel of Couch plays on a loop from a video screen in the entrance space of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum during regular business hours. Also in the entrance space, in tribute to the original, long-since-destroyed piece, is a replica of the Factory’s celebrated crimson couch. Positioned beneath a blow-up of a famous Warhol-on-couch portrait, it has become a popular photo spot for visiting tourists and art lovers, as well as celebrities, artists, and musicians visiting the museum during their time in the Steel City.
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