Being There

by David Malouf

  Of course, they would have experienced something else again if they had had their opera night in Melbourne, say, with Manon Lescaut or Jenufa. The time of year would have been different – the Opera goes to Melbourne in the spring and autumn – but the play between audience and opera would also have been different. The same company in a different city is a different company.

  I tell this story for two reasons. One is because we do not always see what is most ‘Australian’ about us, especially as outsiders see it, and because some people think of opera as too ‘European’ to show off the qualities, both of performance and response, that make us uniquely ourselves. This last was why my German friends were so delighted. Here we were doing the European thing as no European would do it.

  As for the opera itself – who could have predicted that at the end of the twentieth century it would be this particular art that has made the crossover and become the most popular of all the high arts. It is opera that keeps the classical record companies afloat, opera that has produced the phenomenon of the Three Tenors and the big heroic aria that says ‘football’ to kids all over the world who have never heard of opera and will never see one.

  And Australian opera?

  One of the things we do with an inherited culture is defy the limits of time and place by reinventing it as our own. That opera was originally an Italian art did not prevent the Germans and the Russians from making their own version of it (the fact that rugby is an English game does not mean the French do not play it their own way). It’s a matter of style, not content. Opera Australia is more than just the name of a company.

  Of course opera, as everyone knows, is expensive. It is the most artificial, the most technically complex product of the culture we live in. Consider the centuries of experiment it has taken to produce each of the instruments – strings, brass, woodwind – that make up the modern orchestra, or what it has meant to turn an organ of speech into an instrument that can produce the extraordinary sounds that go into a Rossini aria.

  Or how this odd artform has evolved so that music and drama, in consort, can present us with the whole range of human experience – violence, affection, jealousy, pathos, madness, wonder. And what a business, to bring all of these elements together on a stage, in front of an audience, and get the whole mechanism moving.

  The curtain goes up as if by magic: a whole world is revealed. There may be a single soprano on stage, but there are already sixty or more musicians in the pit, and out of sight somewhere an army of mechanics, lighting technicians, scene-shifters, dressers, not to speak of the chorus and the other soloists waiting to come on. And beyond that again, the director, the set and costume designers, the skilled craftsmen who have made the sets, sewn the costumes, produced the wigs, the jewellery, the props. Then there are the technical and artistic directors who have brought all these people together, the marketers who have sold the tickets, and the front and back of house people who run the venues. With opera, what you see, as if by magic, is not what you get.

  We expect a great city these days to provide all the amenities of culture as well as convenience, and this has its practical use if we need to find one. A place with a sophisticated cultural life might have sophisticated things to sell.

  An orchestra, an opera company (not just an opera house) are as essential as a railway or telephone system, as highways, museums, stadiums, entertainment centres – the great mix from which we are free to choose whatever interests us, whatever we can make use of.

  The important thing is that they should all be there, so that on a summer night in Sydney, 100,000 people can settle on the grass and hear their own company perform Traviata or Butterfly and experience what it is that has kept these works alive, and make contact with aspects of themselves that might otherwise have gone unrecognised because unexpressed. It is hard to put a price on such a thing.

  Sydney Morning Herald, 1989

  NABUCCO

  IN SYDNEY LAST MONTH Barrie Kosky’s production of Verdi’s Nabucco was booed by a section of its first night audience. A unique occurrence at the Australian Opera but one that Kosky took in good part as an extension of the ‘playful’ side of the evening’s events.

  The complaint against the production was twofold. First, that its theatrical effects were distracting and for this reason did not show proper respect for the music; secondly, that its imagery was too personal, too eclectic, too fashionably contemporary in its appeal to what the critic of The Australian called ‘the MTV set’. All this is in itself interesting and will bear examination, but I want to use Kosky’s production as well to raise a more general question: how, in a culture where virtually everything that has ever been written is now part of the repertory, are we to deal with works of the past that, for all our desire to see them, contain elements that we cannot, without a good dose of historical adjustment, take seriously? This is not a problem of course for those who take everything seriously because it is ‘opera’, or those who, for the same reason, take nothing seriously; but the rest of us will want to discriminate, and will not always agree about what in a work still speaks to us – as almost everything does, for example, in the four great operas of Mozart – and what, if we are to experience it with any sort of freshness, we will need, sometimes playfully, to translate. The only rule is that we should try, so far as possible, to be true to the spirit of the original, especially when to stick to the letter would be a dance of death – and this is not a problem only in opera. If I choose opera on this occasion it is because Nabucco offers such a ready case, and because opera, unlikely as that might have seemed even twenty years ago, is once more, at the end of the century, a ‘popular’ entertainment. More people in Sydney this year will see and be tested by Nabucco than are likely to read, say, Mary Barton or even Dombey and Son, not to speak of Byron’s Sardanapalus or The Idylls of the King.

  Nabucco is early Verdi, his third attempt at opera after one minor success and a dismal failure. It is the work in which he found himself.

  The libretto by Temistocle Solera derives from a French play of 1836 and had previously appeared at La Scala in the form of a ballet. It was offered to Verdi after Nicolai, the future composer of The Merry Wives of Windsor, had refused it, on the grounds that it was nothing but ‘rage, invective, bloodshed and murder’.

  Solera seems to have based his version of the Babylonian story on the ballet, which would explain some of the short-hand confusions of the plot, and like most adaptors added something of his own, the lamentations of the Hebrew chorus and four quotations from The Book of Jeremiah, which do not appear among the words to be set but stand, in the printed libretto, at the head of each scene – indications of a seriousness that the main action, which comes straight out of popular melodrama and nineteenth-century historical fantasy, the penny-plain and tuppence-coloured world of Pollock’s children’s theatre, hardly aspires to.

  These additions, as it turned out, were crucial. Few as they are, they shifted the focus of the work. Away from the lurid stuff of ‘Babylon’ – deranged kings and vengeful princesses, the ‘rage, invective, bloodshed and murder’ that was all Nicolai saw there – to the less dramatic (it might seem) but nobler matter of a nation in exile; the idea of nationhood preserved in the breast of a people divided and oppressed but sustained by a strong sense of destiny and the image of home.

  What is always interesting is what it is in a work that connects with the artist’s own person; what he sees there that ignites the flame.

  Verdi has given us his own account of what happened when he returned home after being offered the commission:

  I threw the manuscript on the table, almost violently … The roll of paper opened out, and almost without my knowing quite how, I found myself staring at the page in front of me and my eyes fell on the line: ‘Va pensiero sull’ ali dorati’.

  The rest, of course, is history, or rather, as Verdi presents it, Fate; the meeting of a great artist with the emotion that will at last wake his muse and speak to him in his own true voi
ce – which is also, in this case, the voice of the people.

  Verdi is for the most part impressively unreliable about the facts of his career. No less than Wagner he turned his life into myth, and when the facts did not fit he changed them. But if what he tells us of his first encounter with Nabucco is disputable as fact, it is true to something more important; to what he felt, after half a lifetime, was the beginning of his involvement with the work, and its place in his career.

  ‘Va pensiero’, from its very first note, spoke eloquently from the crowd to the crowd, but it had spoken first to Verdi himself, revealing that strain in him that would evoke vast popular appeal but was also most subjective and original in him. Halfway through the writing of Nabucco he asked Solera to replace a duet for Ismaele, the Hebrew jeune premier, and the good princess Fenena (surely the feeblest pair of lovers in the whole of opera) with a second scene for the Hebrew slaves and Zaccaria’s aria foretelling the fall of Babylon. Solera’s ‘indication’ had been acted upon. The work took a further step away from the barbaric goings-on at the Babylonian court towards the more public and political interest of the Hebrews – or rather, as Verdi knew quite well, of another nation, closer to home, that was also enslaved and in exile in its own divided and humiliated self.

  That ‘Va pensiero’ is true Verdi, one of those ‘ardent, blazing melodies’ that took him straight to the heart of his gift, no one surely would doubt. But what of the rest?

  Thirteen years later in 1853, with Traviata and Rigoletto behind him, but also the first version of Macbeth, Verdi confesses:

  Today I would refuse subjects of the kind of Nabucco, Foscari etc. They harp on one chord, elevated, if you like, but monotonous … I prefer Shakespeare to all other dramatists, the Greeks not excepted.

  What he wanted now, he tells us, was ‘powerful situations, variety, brio, pathos’.

  Where he found them for the time being was not in Shakespeare himself but in Shakespeare’s romantic followers, Schiller in Germany (I Masnadieri, Louisa Miller, Don Carlos) and Hugo in France (Ernani, Rigoletto); but it is clear what he means. Shakespeare becomes a code word for characters torn by internal conflict, often between public responsibility and private desire, and an inwardness that can be expressed in music that is subjective in its appeal; not declamatory but explorative; not the elaboration of a single emotion in vocal display that directs attention to the performer, and by extension to the composer, but a music of self-analysis that makes performance an expression of the singer’s own subjectivity, and leads us so deep into a character’s life that only when the spell is broken do we recall who it is, composer and performer, that has made all this available to us.

  In Nabucco that sort of subjectivity exists strongly in ‘Va pensiero’ and colours all the music of the Hebrews, even when it is not of the same high quality; but the music elsewhere is in an earlier and, in the light of what is to come, un-Verdian mode.

  Abigaille is a ‘wicked sister’, the Whore of Babylon as she figures in popular mythology, her vocal high-jinks the freakish equivalent of her unnatural nature. She is a powerful creation but of a purely theatrical kind that has no place in later Verdi. Her operatic antecedents are the Queen of the Night and, say, Semiramide – she is still under the influence of what Andrew Porter calls the Code Rossini. Her modern equivalent is Lulu, an association worth suggesting because Abigaille has something of the serpent about her but also of the sawdust and tinsel world of the circus, where Solera worked for a time before he became a ‘poet’. Circus – along with waxworks, picture-books, pantomime and costume melodrama – is yet another element of the nineteenth-century theatrical world from which Nabucco springs.

  The point is that neither Abigaille nor Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), for all their energy, are yet truly Verdian characters in the sense that Rigoletto is, or the Macbeths, or Phillip II, and the gap between Abigaille and Lady Macbeth, for whom she might be seen as an early study, is a fair indication of how far Verdi has still to go.

  I say all this to suggest that ‘seriousness’ might not be at stake here, and that what might be more appropriate is a form of playfulness that recognises the extravagance, the lurid silliness of much of the main action of Nabucco, while recognising that it has, despite all that, a sinister quality that sets it somewhere between nightmare and the cruelty of farce.

  One wonders how seriously the original audience took it. There must have been a good many among them, readers of Leopardi and I Promessi Sposi, who knew that these Babylonian carryings-on were nonsense, but were happy to take them, playfully, as fun; rather as serious literary people, in the thirties and forties, took a Hollywood movie.

  Nabucco is not, to use Verdi’s term, Shakespeare. It is closer, theatrically, to a Steve Reeves movie or Rhonda Fleming in Serpent of the Nile (not even Cecil B. will do here).

  As for the music, we listen to that surely with a double ear; hearing in it grand hints of what is to come but finding a great deal of it fustian; and we know this because we have the best of Verdi himself to judge it against. The Shakespearean equivalent would be Titus Andronicus.

  So how, without denying the naïve pleasure of the thing, is a contemporary director to mount a production of Nabucco that takes full account of what is at once moving, silly, banal and sinister in it, and at the same time provide a context where the music can shift between glittering display and the expression of a noble lyricism? How does Kosky do it?

  My guess is that Kosky was invited to do Nabucco, after his spectacular success with The Golem, because of the Jewish material, and that he accepted for the same reason, but only so that he could, as it were, subvert our expectations.

  After its original triumph – it was presented a record fifty-seven times in its first season at La Scala – Nabucco went unplayed for more than a century, re-entering the international repertory only in the early 1950s. Since then it has been mounted more often than any other of Verdi’s early operas, perhaps because its subject, the persecution of the Jews under a mad king, gives it a contemporary relevance that is hard to find in Atilla or I lombardi. A line like ‘Morte agli Ebrei’, innocent enough in Verdi’s day, had a different colour after the war, sounding right off the streets, since the words for Hebrew and Jew in Italian are one.

  But most productions that took this line were at best opportunistic and at worst ridiculous. Verdi’s interest in Jews was minimal. What moved him and his audience was the extent to which Hebrews here could be read as Italians. Persecution is too lightly presented in Nabucco, the forms of evil we see are too melodramatic and conventional, to do justice to our own murderous century. Nothing could be more inept than a chorus of Babylonian soldiers, bearded and in skirts and sandals, goose-stepping to one of Verdi’s jauntiest tunes. We do well to consider such alternatives when we criticise Kosky for betraying the seriousness of Verdi’s music and yearn fondly for more ‘traditional’ productions.

  There is nothing specific about Kosky’s Hebrews, and he makes less than most directors of what little Solera’s text and Verdi’s music can be made to yield of recent history. The scenes he shows us, brutal as they are, of people being rounded up and shoved down a slide into a chamber of brightly-lit mirrors, constitute a nightmare view of such horrors; history transformed in the light of dreams, and the more disturbing because the victims, entirely pathetic in their vulnerability, belong to no recognisable group, and because the event can be fitted to no specific place or time.

  Peter Corrigan’s bare-chested tormentors wear black trousers, a necklace of sparklers, Tyrolean hats decorated with stuffed birds of prey, and are neither Babylonian butchers nor Einsatzgruppen. Filled with menace of an inhuman, almost mechanical kind, they have about them some of the chill glamour of the torturer as he appears (admittedly under the influence of Nazism) in action comics and S & M magazines. There is a flat, two-dimensional quality about these ‘Babylonians’, especially when, as Nabucco’s army, we see them drawn up in lines, their forester suits eerily covered with outsized locu
sts, like a row of mannequins from a pop-up book or cut-outs for a cardboard theatre. When they emerge – but their heads only – from a pattern of trapdoors, the stage looks like a page from some early twentieth-century dream manual or book of magic.

  The image the production returns to again and again is of the world as a mind-theatre, in which the whole of history takes place simultaneously; so that Zaccaria’s vision of the Fall of Babylon, the bodies of eight bejewelled thugs, strung up half-naked from a raftered ceiling, suggests at once a sex-club torture chamber (theatre of cruelty) and the garage in the Piazza Loreto where Mussolini and his henchmen, after the fall of the Republic of Salò, were exhibited to the Milanese crowd.

  The point is that the images Kosky chooses are not related by the logic of a shared narrative or situation but by the associative logic of dreams – that is, the last thing he is interested in is political allegory – and are disturbing because we recognise their power, their rightness, without quite knowing what they ‘mean’. And as in dreams they may be drawn from anywhere. Anywhere that feeling has visited in such a way that ordinary objects and events have acquired the mysterious glow of an undeclared significance; have been transformed in the light of a personal, though not necessarily private, anxiety.

  Tribal myth, movies, action comics, nursery horrors, video games – all are there to be drawn upon to embody either the deeper elements, or the garish spectacle and cheap thrills, of the original text. Even Solera’s quotations from the Book of Jeremiah make it on to the stage at last. As individual words, fragments of a hopeful prophecy, they are hauled up from underground like a cache of secret weapons, and handed about among the members of the chorus – stones of a fallen temple which the audience, with its long view of history, can put together, though the Hebrews, who are in the midst of things, cannot. This is a very different, and more evocative representation of the fall of the temple, and of diaspora, than is illustrated in the naïve bit of nineteenth-century scene-painting that stands behind it, and might be taken as an example of how Kosky looks within the nineteenth-century elements of the work to see what else might be there, then presents both. Nothing could be more personal to Kosky, or more theatrical, than the opening image of an undersized, white-suited schoolboy bearing an outsize placard saying ‘Behold’, which turns out to be not a bullying instruction to the audience but the opening of an as yet undisclosed prophecy.