what’s love got to do with it?
by Douglas Messerli
Pyrotr Tchaikovsky (composer), Modest Tchaikovsky (libretto, based on a play by Henrik Hertz), Iolanta and Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault), Bluebeard’s Castle, Mariusz Treliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
I originally intended, before actually viewing the two operas presented in the MET’s HD Valentine’s Day broadcast, to discuss these works separately, adding my remarks about the Bartok opera to those I had already made above on the Los Angeles Opera production, and writing about the Tchaikovsky work, never before performed on the Metropolitan Opera stage, within another context. After seeing the pair of short operas, directed by Mariusz Treliński, it became apparent that to do so would be to ignore the carefully constructed and, at times, revelatory links between the two works.
Of course, there is absolutely no reason to imagine that these two very different pieces, written only 20 years apart, need have anything to do with one another, Iolanta representing clearly a work of 19th century that romanticizes love and seeks for its characters’ purification through their orientation to the light, “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. Light is not just God’s first creation, but representative of moral value and comprehension in the Tchaikovsky work.
In Treliński’s version, the young girl’s father, King René (Ilya Bannik) is not just a misguided parent, attempting to protect his beloved daughter from a truth which may, he fears, transform her joyful demeanor into a world of fear and terror, but is a dictatorial figure who pretends wisdom while denying even the concept of it—no one with access to girl is allowed to mention light and vision. Yet at opera’s start, Iolanta has come of age enough to perceive that something is missing from her life, and begins to suffer even though she cannot yet comprehend why she might have any right to do so, particularly since she is lovingly cared for by servants day and night. Eyes, accordingly, have no purpose but for tears, and tears, alas, have become to appear in her eyes without cause. What we begin to perceive is that, even in the closed world in which she has been sheltered, the young blind girl is beginning to comprehend that something is amiss. How can her nurse, for example, know that she is crying without touching her eyes, to spot her fever without putting her hands to her forehead?
The opera’s libretto, however, does hint, moreover, that René’s intentions may not all be a as loving as they are manipulative. Why will he not even reveal that he is the king or that Iolanta has been promised in marriage to Duke Robert (Aleksei Markov)? This beautiful young maiden locked away in her enchanted garden, after all, is not so very different from the forested animals the King keeps on his property to hunt them down and destroy them. And not only is René mistaken in his notions of filial protection, but he has not bothered to discover whether or not the young man to whom she is promised is a suitable husband for her. In fact, Robert, even knowing of the vow to which he has been committed, has been, so to speak, actively playing the field, and has fallen in love with another woman, Mathilda.
Fortunately, his close companion, Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala) has not yet found the perfect woman he is seeking, and which, almost as soon as he has sung of his desires, he discovers in the visage of Iolanta. But even suddenly witnessing everything for which he has been seeking, also reveals his own failures: for him everything is based on sight. Accordingly, just as he begins to reveal to the unknowing girl the importance of light and all that it represents, she, in incomprehension of words, begins to reveal to him that love, wisdom, and knowledge can (and must) be known even in the darkness.
Had Tchaikovsky been a 20th-century composer, he surely would have sought out that second truth more thoroughly, faced as Bartók would soon be, with the bleakness of the already discordant future. But Tchaikovsky and his story, being of another time, pursues instead how to bring the light to his heroine’s life so that she, too, can be blessed just as has her loving knight.
Today, the ridiculousness of the magical cure by the Arab doctor Ibn-Hakia (Elchin Arizov) is apparent, with its mysterious “backstage” melodramatics which, we are told, the young girl bravely endures as she is forced to wear a blindfold to cover eyes that cannot see the light. Chalk it all up to a dramatic revelation of the fact that she is cured, and is now suddenly able, because she has willed it, to share in God’s great and glorious gift, all somewhat campily represented in this opera’s conclusion through the project of white rays emanating in an art- deco-like pattern behind the carefully arranged gathering, for the work’s conclusion, of the chorus and leads.
In fact, even more so than when I saw the great Bartók opera late last year, I could not help but comprehend the work, this time around, as a horrifying, nightmare prediction of World War I and the fascist interventions of the rest of the 20th century. Everything that Bluebeard reveals to Judith will be realized in the century ahead, as the idealist’s life—the dreamer in the moonlight—will be the required sacrificed of mankind.
What these operas do ultimately reveal by their pairing is that while the first may represent a dream of love, the second has actually very little to do with love, but is a tale of the twisted human attraction to the perverse, concerning the awful hypnotic draw of the human species to the heart of darkness.
Los Angeles, February 16, 2015
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2015).
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