ACCIACCATURA
(It.), a .crushing' (implying violent pressure; dissonant note of short duration struck at the same time as the chord it decorates.
From 'ACCIACCATURA' , the place at audiobritain for moitherings and musings about music generally:
FAMILY IN CROSSROADS KILLING TRAGEDY
So, this arrogant rich trust fund kid in his canary-yellow Lamborghini with the pedal to the metal gets cut up by some old farts in a rustheap at a crossroads. In an outburst of road rage he gets out and puts the boot in to the survivors of the crash so there aren’t any any longer.
Well, he had influential parents (adoptive, of course, that’s why they gave him the wheels, bit of guilt there for never really getting his dodgy ankles fixed properly when he was a baby and we know what that sort of thing can do to the psyche) and even better, in another country, passes the geek test at the Sphinxplex and fast-tracks it to head up one of the biggest new tech startups around. So who cares about some plebs who got killed at a crossroads years back? He’s moved on.
This is, of course, not a tragedy, however inevitably the local paper headlined the gruesome pic of the bodies by the plebmobile all those years ago. It is just downright commonplace sordid. And there’s not much more you can make of it, really. Hope, maybe, if you knew the victims, that little shit, now grown into a big shot, will get his comeuppance one day, but schadenfreude’s only for the underpriveleged and the under-millionaire bracket, these days, and for what we’re really talking about here, it hasn’t even been invented yet.
This is where my problems with The Thebans begin. And I think that’s why the audience at the Colisseum was mildly puzzled and the applause for the opera (but not the orchestra, which was superb) was barely a degree or two above lukewarm. Not only, according to a friend of mine who saw it a week before I did, on the night I went either.
Greek tragedy is tricky, theatrically. What action there might be on stage is clutttered up by an apparently static chorus which tends to get in the way. It doesn’t need to. But in this production, by and large, it was pretty immobile. Well, I suppose if the population is struck down with a kind of ancient Greek bird flu, it would be fairly listless. But having them all lying around all over the stage restricts the scope of the main figures in the tragedy, so Oedipus and Jocasta become themselves inactive puppets of fate.
It does not have to be so, but it’s alienating. (One has to beware Freud: that is meant in the simple sense of the word, not the Brechtian.) Where was the horror that makes Oedipus Rex a tragedy?
It should lie in the realization that not only have you been casually ignoring a crime for years and happily enjoying the results of it, you’ve got four grown up kids out of it, and on top of all that, in a fit of thoughtless arrogance, you’ve impetuously condemned yourself, thinking somehow you were immune and it would only be someone—anyone, who cares?—who you’d make suffer, because, well, you had the power to do it, didn’t you?
The horror is not in the inevitability of fate, but that actions have consequences. But what the libretto of The Thebans does is simply lay out a timeline which ends in the suicide of one and the self-mutilation of another. Well, the bastard deserved it, you might say; but that’s Schadenfreude, not tragedy. It’s not a very satisfying, or profound, or complete, emotion, either in theatre or opera. And it certainly isn’t cathartic as it’s supposed to be.
So why was Antigone also so linear? And, one might suggest, rather unimaginative? Signifying tyranny by dressing it in black with jackboots is a little overdone, is it not? And where was the real dilemma that makes Antigone’s death a tragic event? She was forced to choose between self and state.
A universal moral dilemma, surely. How do you decide between selfishness (or truth to yourself) and selflessness (or subservience to the state)? Under what circumstances do you abrogate the law unto yourself? And what sacrifices are you prepared to make in the course of your reasoning? Especially when the whole thing is complicated by two love-relationships: with your brother and your lover? And how do you reconcile the moral ‘rightness’ of your action with the moral ‘wrongness’ of what leads you to it?
Antigone’s brother, lest we forget, had led a revolt. It may have been against a tyranny; but it was a legally constituted tyranny and a prosperous state. We have not dissimilar dilemmas present not so much further away than Athens and much closer in time than the 20th July 1944 when people wore jackboots instead of keffiyehs.
In The Thebans, there was virtually none of that. Antigone, told not to bury her brother, heaves him off a parapet, a bit like the last act of Tosca, and goes off to hang herself; on which her affianced falls on his sword. And the tyrant cries because he has lost his son. Bad man gets just deserts. Saddaam gets dragged out of a dirty hole and hanged; Ghaddafi gets dragged out of a jeep and beaten to death; Bin Laden picturesquely assassinated to a Ride of the Valkyiries soundtrack blasting from helicopters and dumped in some anonymous bit of sea.
In the last part, Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus appears to be playing the last act of Lear on a blasted heath which I imagine is supposed to intimate something of The Waste Land, David Piper’s blasted trees of No Man’s Land (100th anniversary, is it not?) and a hint of the Garden of Gethsemane. And Oedipus is the arrogant bastard still, playing what we’d now call the victim card. And so, making sure he’s going to be remembered by threats to the neighbouring city and curses on his sons, he dies. Or, you might say, gets wasted.
This is Schadenfreude. And those are merely events, not the operations of fate; nor are they tragedies.
The Thebans I would argue, is not an opera; it’s really an oratorio in a staged performance. Nor, I think, is the music really operatic. It is, and this has perhaps over-seduced some, if not many, of the critics, in places spectacular and lushly orchestrated and clever.
But, to be entirely dispassionate, it is really a soundtrack to what is on stage, not so far removed as Wagner from Vietnam. And would I really be the only one to have heard a few Brittenisms in it? If there’s ever a concert performance I’ll go and hear it, all the same.
I’m not doing down ENO here, or contemporary opera. I thought Benjamin’s Written on Skin at Covent Garden brilliant and utterly absorbing. But The Thebans is very far from having that dramatic coincidence of music and drama. Maybe I shouldn’t have seen Elektra not long before . . .
The Thebans at ENO, November 2014
So, this arrogant rich trust fund kid in his canary-yellow Lamborghini with the pedal to the metal gets cut up by some old farts in a rustheap at a crossroads. In an outburst of road rage he gets out and puts the boot in to the survivors of the crash so there aren’t any any longer.
Well, he had influential parents (adoptive, of course, that’s why they gave him the wheels, bit of guilt there for never really getting his dodgy ankles fixed properly when he was a baby and we know what that sort of thing can do to the psyche) and even better, in another country, passes the geek test at the Sphinxplex and fast-tracks it to head up one of the biggest new tech startups around. So who cares about some plebs who got killed at a crossroads years back? He’s moved on.
This is, of course, not a tragedy, however inevitably the local paper headlined the gruesome pic of the bodies by the plebmobile all those years ago. It is just downright commonplace sordid. And there’s not much more you can make of it, really. Hope, maybe, if you knew the victims, that little shit, now grown into a big shot, will get his comeuppance one day, but schadenfreude’s only for the underpriveleged and the under-millionaire bracket, these days, and for what we’re really talking about here, it hasn’t even been invented yet.
This is where my problems with The Thebans begin. And I think that’s why the audience at the Colisseum was mildly puzzled and the applause for the opera (but not the orchestra, which was superb) was barely a degree or two above lukewarm. Not only, according to a friend of mine who saw it a week before I did, on the night I went either.
Greek tragedy is tricky, theatrically. What action there might be on stage is clutttered up by an apparently static chorus which tends to get in the way. It doesn’t need to. But in this production, by and large, it was pretty immobile. Well, I suppose if the population is struck down with a kind of ancient Greek bird flu, it would be fairly listless. But having them all lying around all over the stage restricts the scope of the main figures in the tragedy, so Oedipus and Jocasta become themselves inactive puppets of fate.
It does not have to be so, but it’s alienating. (One has to beware Freud: that is meant in the simple sense of the word, not the Brechtian.) Where was the horror that makes Oedipus Rex a tragedy?
It should lie in the realization that not only have you been casually ignoring a crime for years and happily enjoying the results of it, you’ve got four grown up kids out of it, and on top of all that, in a fit of thoughtless arrogance, you’ve impetuously condemned yourself, thinking somehow you were immune and it would only be someone—anyone, who cares?—who you’d make suffer, because, well, you had the power to do it, didn’t you?
The horror is not in the inevitability of fate, but that actions have consequences. But what the libretto of The Thebans does is simply lay out a timeline which ends in the suicide of one and the self-mutilation of another. Well, the bastard deserved it, you might say; but that’s Schadenfreude, not tragedy. It’s not a very satisfying, or profound, or complete, emotion, either in theatre or opera. And it certainly isn’t cathartic as it’s supposed to be.
So why was Antigone also so linear? And, one might suggest, rather unimaginative? Signifying tyranny by dressing it in black with jackboots is a little overdone, is it not? And where was the real dilemma that makes Antigone’s death a tragic event? She was forced to choose between self and state.
A universal moral dilemma, surely. How do you decide between selfishness (or truth to yourself) and selflessness (or subservience to the state)? Under what circumstances do you abrogate the law unto yourself? And what sacrifices are you prepared to make in the course of your reasoning? Especially when the whole thing is complicated by two love-relationships: with your brother and your lover? And how do you reconcile the moral ‘rightness’ of your action with the moral ‘wrongness’ of what leads you to it?
Antigone’s brother, lest we forget, had led a revolt. It may have been against a tyranny; but it was a legally constituted tyranny and a prosperous state. We have not dissimilar dilemmas present not so much further away than Athens and much closer in time than the 20th July 1944 when people wore jackboots instead of keffiyehs.
In The Thebans, there was virtually none of that. Antigone, told not to bury her brother, heaves him off a parapet, a bit like the last act of Tosca, and goes off to hang herself; on which her affianced falls on his sword. And the tyrant cries because he has lost his son. Bad man gets just deserts. Saddaam gets dragged out of a dirty hole and hanged; Ghaddafi gets dragged out of a jeep and beaten to death; Bin Laden picturesquely assassinated to a Ride of the Valkyiries soundtrack blasting from helicopters and dumped in some anonymous bit of sea.
In the last part, Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus appears to be playing the last act of Lear on a blasted heath which I imagine is supposed to intimate something of The Waste Land, David Piper’s blasted trees of No Man’s Land (100th anniversary, is it not?) and a hint of the Garden of Gethsemane. And Oedipus is the arrogant bastard still, playing what we’d now call the victim card. And so, making sure he’s going to be remembered by threats to the neighbouring city and curses on his sons, he dies. Or, you might say, gets wasted.
This is Schadenfreude. And those are merely events, not the operations of fate; nor are they tragedies.
The Thebans I would argue, is not an opera; it’s really an oratorio in a staged performance. Nor, I think, is the music really operatic. It is, and this has perhaps over-seduced some, if not many, of the critics, in places spectacular and lushly orchestrated and clever.
But, to be entirely dispassionate, it is really a soundtrack to what is on stage, not so far removed as Wagner from Vietnam. And would I really be the only one to have heard a few Brittenisms in it? If there’s ever a concert performance I’ll go and hear it, all the same.
I’m not doing down ENO here, or contemporary opera. I thought Benjamin’s Written on Skin at Covent Garden brilliant and utterly absorbing. But The Thebans is very far from having that dramatic coincidence of music and drama. Maybe I shouldn’t have seen Elektra not long before . . .
The Thebans at ENO, November 2014
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