men are poor things
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein (libretto), Virgil Thomson (composer), Louisa
Proske (director) The Mother of Us All / 2020 [TV live-production]
Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s significant 1947 opera, The
Mother of Us All—performed in collaboration of The Julliard School, The New
York Philharmonic, and MetLiveArts on live-television the other night from the
Charles Engelhard Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—was one of the great
events of 2020, and a particularly needed tonic in these difficult times of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, Thomson’s score,
buried as it was, as The New York Times critic Zachery Wolfe put it,
“far-off under the Branch Bank facade, sounded less snappy than they should.”
Stein’s lyrics, however, sung vitally by soprano Felica Moore, did come alive,
and were the center of this work.
Fortunately, Stein’s
pastiche of language grows even stronger in this production. This is not only a
work about the great ur-feminist Anthony, who helped women get the opportunity
to vote, but is a story about all those, past and present, who were
disenfranchised, women, blacks, the poor, and just those hadn’t the opportunity
of expressing themselves in the democratic process, as well as people who
helped that governance to come into being, such as Daniel Webster, John Quincy
Adams, and even Lillian Russell.
Anthony, in this work,
becomes a symbol of agreeable but endless insistence on the rights of all those
who cannot speak up for themselves. With violins, violas, trumpets, piano, and
drums, she sings out as a lesbian (whose partner expresses much of her lover’s
history, demanding that Anthony speak out more loudly than agreeably) for the
causes in which she believes.
Susan B., however,
realizes that despite her constant rejections to be represented by the ballot,
that “they listen to me, they always listen to me.” Or as Susan
herself realizes, that despite that men “are so selfish,” that they are also
“such poor things,” and that “men are gullible, they listen to me.”
In a strange way, the
power with which Susan courted her male and female audiences through her
agreeable and polite behavior she knew, all the while, “she was right because
she was right.”
As reviewer Kurt Gottschalk expressed it,
quoting from Stein’s lyrics: “They [men] fear women. They fear each other. They
fear their neighbor. They fear other countries. And then they hearten
themselves in their fear by crowding together and following each other.” I
can’t imagine a better expression of the Trump reign.
Language is at the heart of this
marvelous opera. As the noted orator Daniel Webster (William Socolof), in
Stein’s and Thomson’s opera expresses the pit of identity, an issue of which
Stein, who proclaimed that we simply repeat ourselves, was always interested:
My father’s
name
The pit he
digged a pit.
My name
cannot be any other.
He digged a
pit he digged it for his brother.
Digging a pit was what all the men in
Susan’s life did, and even after, when women had gained the vote, they choose
to cancel the ballots by destroying the ballot boxes. The battle rages still
today not only on sexual lines, but regarding partisan politics. The mother of
us all has still not yet helped to heal us alas.
I need to add that in 2000, Felix
Bernstein played a child in the New York Opera production with Lauren Flanigan,
and he would return from his rehearsals and sing out long passages from the
opera so beautifully that I nearly cried. I think that during this time Felix
and I truly bonded. I was terribly moved by his singing, and particularly of
Stein. His young voice more completely characterized Stein’s Anthony B. than
any soprano might.
Los
Angeles, April 14, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2020).
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