Buddha, painting, art and life

Last posting I wrote how the Washington National Opera production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” was magnificent in its sound, but outrageous in its visual staging. And before that I wrote how the recording of the live performance in Berlin of the Herbert von Karajan production of “Lucia” with Maria Callas in the title role was sublime.

I’ve done a little research and found that I was correct in recalling that von Karajan was the stage director as well as the conductor of that 1955 production. I discovered that while he conducted the music brilliantly, as the stage director he was trying, like the director of our WNO production, to be “avant-garde” and sensational in his visual effects.

Nicola Benois, the renowned set designer, refused to work with him once he learned of von Karajan’s concept for staging the opera. And Maria Callas, so out of this world in her singing, detested von Karajan’s staging.

Von Karajan used back projections for the sets, and for Lucia’s Mad Scene, he had Callas stand in a spotlight engulfed by darkness. I guess he wanted to highlight the beauty of her singing, and to hell with story, to hell with realism! At the start of her mad solo you can hear the footsteps of the chorus as they back away from center stage, so that Callas stands alone in the single light.

Folks who were there said her gestures were also most moving: she raised, lowered, halted her arms in their billowing sleeves to accentuate the drama, the explosion and retraction of feeling.

Something else in this Callas performance was peculiar to her. She dispensed with the dagger that Lucia traditionally is still holding in her hand when she enters after stabbing her new unwanted husband to death. And there’s no trace of blood on her garments.

Callas believed that supplying evidence of the violence in the story detracted from the purity of the music. So she stood there, dagger-less, singing sublimely in a performance that several connoisseurs have deemed the absolute peak of her career.

All the blood that stage directors heap on nowadays, all the additional violence, is unnecessary.

Directors always want to ADD, as though the original opera is somehow wanting. Mary Zimmerman, director of the current New York Metropolitan Opera’s “Lucia” (you can find it on You Tube) brings in the ghost of a murdered fiancée from bygone years which Lucia has seen and sings about before meeting her lover Edgardo by a rustic fountain.

This additional “silent character” wanders in briefly (we’re never told why!) at the start of the next scene, in which Lucia’s brother Enrico bullies her into marrying the wealthy Arturo by showing her a forged letter where Edgardo supposedly writes of a new love.

Mary Zimmerman, who loves magic and fairy tales, created an utterly enchanting production of Shakespeare’s play “Pericles” at the Shakespeare Theatre here: so sometimes her ideas “work.” In each country Pericles visited on his travels, the royal family wore a different color clothes. And the reunion of Pericles with his long-lost daughter Marina was most moving, truly miraculous.

In the Met’s “Lucia,” Zimmerman has Lucia come on for Edgardo’s death scene as yet another ghost, dressed in her bridal gown. This ghost of Lucia lies down next to Edgardo and helps him plunge his dagger into his breast, then kisses him as he dies.

The poor hero, rendered incapable of killing himself by himself! In our WNO production which came from the ENO in London, bad brother Enrico walked into the last scene carrying the dead body of Lucia which he propped on a chair. (Imagine! And neither of them are supposed to be in this scene!) Enrico then placed a pistol on the ground where Edgardo couldn’t miss it, and after the fatal shot broke Edgardo’s neck to make sure he was truly dead.

But I suppose a final assisted suicide is kinder to the tenor and to the beautiful Last Act arias that Donizetti wrote for him, than the performances of “Lucia” in the late nineteenth century where famed soprano Adelina Patti insisted that the final scene where Edgardo kills himself be entirely CUT. The opera had to end with HER Mad Scene, not with HIS death!

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