San Francisco Classical Voice

FEATURE

Laughing with Ligeti in the Face of Fear

October 26, 2004

By Janos Gereben

Music director Michael Boder says when he came to the loudest part of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at a rehearsal a few days ago, the orchestra failed to produce the ffffffffff the score calls for. After calling attention repeatedly to "10 F's," and complaining that "you're not loud enough," Boder finally said: "play it as a weapon of mass destruction." The orchestra did, successfully, and the musicians laughed: "So that's where the WMD went!"

In a Herbst Theater panel discussion last week about the San Francisco Opera's upcoming US stage premiere of Macabre, talk constantly returned to the timeliness and relevance of the 1978 work, to be presented here beginning on October 29 in its 1997 Copenhagen revision.

The work's "message," the panelists and SFO artistic administrator Brad Trexell, the moderator, kept repeating, is not to give in to fear, not even the fear of death, but laugh in its face and live fully. As the opera's finale says: "For life grants most to those who give / And who gives love shall loving live. / When one does this, then time and tide / stand still: now and for evermore. / Fear not to die, good people all . . ."

In the panel discussion, there were references to the color code of terror alerts, the destruction of Sarajevo (with its impact on the revised opera), the scene in the work where "politicians call each other names while the world is about to come to an end." The stage director, Royal Danish Theater artistic director Kasper Bech Holten, spoke movingly of the 2001 Copenhagen premiere, scheduled just days after 9/11. "We were stunned and grieving, and considered canceling the performance," Holten said, but then focused on the fact that the composer, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor, wrote this savage and defiant comedy in face of his experiences, and a cancelation "would have been betraying him and his admonition not to be afraid."

The decision was made even more difficult by the fact that Steffen Aarfing's stage design (completed months before 9/11) included two tall towers damaged by bombs. The design, Aarfing said in Herbst Theater, is based "on a new way of making cartoons, inspired by European — especially Belgian — comic books, and by the Japanese comics' emphasis on hardware and violence."

Boder, who will conduct the work here, spoke about the "complicated score . . . sounds you never heard in an opera house before . . . a large percussion group, with car horns, paper bags" and Ligeti's reference to a tonal section as "this terrible music." The participating singers — Graham Clark (Piet), Willard White (Nekrotzar), Caroline Stein (Venus/Gepopo), and Susanne Resmark (Mescalina) — were unanimous in complaining about the difficulty of the music (White: "organized madness"), and in praising the work, speaking of their excitement and delight in participating. Several of the cast already completed rehearsals in London three years ago when Covent Garden canceled Macabre there just before the premiere.

Boder spoke of the opera's "weird sounds" in terms of "period-specific music." Verdi, Boder said, wanted to write an opera about Lear, but couldn't — and it took another century before Aribert Reimann did — because Verdi's age "didn't have music for naked brutality." Ligeti's "grotesque comedy about death" requires that kind of musical setting. "All the scraps of history are in the music," Trexell said, but not obviously, quoting Ligeti about "rubbing paté into the carpet, so nobody would notice." While the meaning of that was not entirely clear, Boder's recommendation was, of Ligeti's Requiem for "great choral music," against the choral shouting of Macabre. Holten described the music as "Tom & Jerry . . . fun . . . but with great depth."

Clark challenged the Herbst audience to "attend the opera without fear," saying that the "country that gave birth to jazz and Broadway" and many other manifestations of musical unorthodoxy, should welcome the opportunity to be "baffled, bewildered and bemused." The stage director spoke of encountering "Macabre" in terms of traveling to an "exotic country . . . say Thailand . . . where everything is different at first, but it all ends up as a wonderful experience."

Clark, who said he has to scream loudly and at a very high pitch, praised "this terrific piece of high energy," and said that "humor is a damn sight more difficult to do than death." White, who spoke of "having to sing falsetto in fff," disagreed with Clark, saying that "I still don't know how to play Death." Anyone who witnessed White's marathon heroics in the San Francisco as St. Francois has no doubt that he will handle Nekrotzar's death rattle just fine. For information about the San Francisco production, see www.sfopera.com.