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Rockwell Matters

April 14, 2008

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Bertolt Brecht loved to castigate “culinary” culture-lovers, those sated bourgeois aesthetical gourmands who nibble at the arts as if they were a meal. For him, art should be sterner stuff: a call to action, a stimulus for reflection, a manifesto for political change. That said, I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time not only consuming culture but planning my forthcoming cultural meals.

Recently I was plotting out my summer – American Ballet Theater, the Lincoln Center Festival, Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Bard and beyond. This year I think I’ll go to Glimmerglass, in part lured by the rare opportunity to see Wagner’s early “Das Liebesverbot,” which preceded “Rienzi,” which preceded “The Flying Dutchman.”
 
“Das Liebesverbot,” or “The Ban on Love,” is part of one of those conceptual Glimmerglass seasons, this one loosely linked to Shakespeare. Michael MacLeod, the new general and artistic director up there, seems to like themes: last year he had four operas about Orpheus and Euridice.
 
Wagner’s opera takes off from “Measure for Measure.” The others this summer will be Bellini’s “I Capuleti ed i Montecchi,” Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” (which is not really based on Shakespeare at all), and Cole Porter’s “Taming of the Shrew”–inspired “Kiss Me, Kate.” All are to be presented on what is billed as an “Elizabethan-style set,” which may get tiresome but which should save even more money than a dreaded “unit set” does in a single opera.
 
Thematic programming has become ubiquitous of late, rather like kudzu. I was excited by the idea when I ran the Lincoln Center Festival, but now I’m not so sure. Having a theme that links disparate artworks can lead to lively introductory lectures and panel discussions, but how much will the Glimmerglass programming, say, really tell us about Shakespeare, or how much will Cole Porter tell us about Wagner?
 
For me, thematic musical programs based on musical connections make the most sense. The contextualization of a featured composer among his contemporaries at the annual Bard Music Festival is almost always stimulating, as it surely will be this summer with Prokofiev and his world. The juxtaposition of Bellini and Wagner at Glimmerglass might be more piquant if it paired, say, “La Sonnambula” with “Lohengrin.” Wagner admired Bellini’s long, liquid vocal lines, and nowhere is that admiration more evident than in “Lohengrin,” which has always been the most popular Wagner opera in Italy.
 
But like everything in theater, be it weird productions or counter-intuitive casting or bizarre combinations of repertory, you can’t really tell if a linked grouping will work until you experience it. Maybe Glimmerglass’s will make for a spectacular season. The upstate lakeside setting and the operas and their potential performances already promise much.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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