How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  That level of detail is, even in Zimmerman’s direction of the principals, often absent—and when it’s present, it’s misguided. Her approach to directing opera singers can be strangely amateurish; often she simply moves her principals downstage to sing, and then they stand there singing, and that’s it. (She must be a conductor’s dream.) This important director from the “straight” theater showed little concern for using the actors and their bodies (and the spaces between those bodies) to delineate character, to express something about the drama of the plot—or, indeed, the drama of the music. This is a particularly serious failing in early-nineteenth-century Italian melodrama, in which the decisive gesture, always indicated by the score, the arc of an aria, or the strong declamatory force of a piece of recitative, is everything. Recalling the Lucia of Maria Callas, in a 1955 Berlin performance conducted (and largely directed) by Herbert von Karajan, the Italian director Sandro Sequi spoke shrewdly of the importance not of “realism” but of high stylization, the starkly meaningful gesture, for performances of bel canto opera—a stylization that, as classical actresses know well, paradoxically releases, rather than constrains, emotional realism:

  For me, [Callas] was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time human—but a humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime. Realism was foreign to her, and that is why she was the greatest of opera singers. After all, opera is the least realistic of theater forms.

  Years after Callas’s 1955 Berlin Lucia, people remembered the starkly stylized way in which she used just her arms in the mad scene “like the wings of a great eagle, a marvelous bird. When they went up, and she often moved them very slowly, they seemed heavy—not airy like a dancer’s arms, but weighted…. There was a continuous line to her singing and movements, which were really very simple.”

  That Renata Scotto was also an heiress to that high tradition is clear even in the grainy and amateurishly recorded Japanese television performance from 1967. Every line of Donizetti’s music is accompanied by a telling movement, or by an equally telling stillness: this singer may have been small and plump, but she knew how (and was unafraid) to use her body. In her performance, when Lucia reads the (forged) letter meant to convince her of Edgardo’s faithlessness, she crumples a little (and why not? The word used of her at this moment is vacilli, “totter”); when Edgardo prepares to tell her, in Act 1, that he must leave for France and she says Che dici?, “What are you telling me?,” she turns away in a small but vivid movement of quiet pain. Of such small things are memorable performances made.

  No one seems to have explained any of this to Natalie Dessay, whose bride of Lammermoor was, if anything, the greatest example of the curious inertness that characterized the show. Her benumbed, almost anesthetized Lucia was the product of an interpretation that all too clearly had been carefully considered; but it was, too, an interpretation wholly at odds with both Donizetti’s music and Cammarano’s text—with, that is to say, the work’s style.

  I suspect that this failure might, paradoxically, actually have something to do with what the Met is interested in these days: “serious” acting, taking the theater “seriously.” Much has been made of Dessay’s training as a modern stage actress (the playbill informs us that she’ll be appearing in a Thomas Bernhard play in 2010, in Paris). But as admirable as such preparation is, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the operatic stage of nearly two hundred years ago—which is to say, the stage for which Donizetti wrote the music that, whatever your directorial interpretation, still has to be played at every performance of Lucia. Dessay, whose lithe and adorable stage presence is paralleled by a coolly agile voice very much in the French tradition, seems to have worked very hard to create a Lucia at odds with the singer’s own well-known persona. (She was a fun Zerbinetta and a fine, flirty Manon.) Hence her subtle, realistic, traumatized, “psychological” interpretation of Donizetti’s crushed heroine.

  But in bel canto opera, with its post-classical high stylization, the kind of subtleties that Dessay wants to telegraph simply don’t register—they’re at odds with the music. Her Lucia enters in a kind of numbed fog—a nice idea, except for the fact that her music here is filled with foreboding, agitated and anxious in the ghost-story cavatina and, in the cabaletta, tinged with hysteria. So Dessay’s physical demeanor on stage, intended no doubt to convey a bruised psyche, merely came across as indistinct, inexpressive. (When this Lucia reads the forged letter, she shows virtually no physical reaction at all; she could have been reading a Chinese takeout menu. No vacillando here.) The same quality of dissociation characterized the singing, which although technically expert on the part of all three leads (particularly the ferocious Enrico of Mariusz Kwiecien, a role you hope he gets to reprise in a more congenial production), was curiously devoid of any sense of real engagement. This problem was not helped by the conducting of James Levine, who has always seemed indifferent to the bel canto repertoire. The effect of all of this was to muffle rather than amplify the heroine’s tragedy.

  There were, in fact, three gestures in this Lucia that I particularly remembered after the show was over, all of them illuminating in some way the fatal flaws of this production. The first, a cheap and vulgar one, showed the emptiness of the “concepts” that plagued the direction. During the furious duet between Lucia and her brother in the first scene of Act 2—the “you must save me”/“and what of me?” duet—Zimmerman has her Enrico reaching suggestively along Lucia’s leg at one point. This was not only wholly inappropriate to the drama but wholly unnecessary as well: Cammarano’s libretto and Donizetti’s music make Lucia’s victimization amply clear without any need for the now-fashionable invocation of incest. Like so many of the conceits here, this one went nowhere—just another flake of falling snow.

  The second deeply falsified the text. In Act 2, Zimmerman has Lucia, in a Tosca-like moment, sneak a knife off her brother’s desk, apparently in preparation for the mayhem of Act 3. But if Lucia is already premeditating violence in Act 2, the Mad Scene falls apart—it’s not as “mad” as we might think. (It’s Medea.) This gratuitous insertion makes a hash of the libretto’s carefully orchestrated sequence, as each act progresses, from isolated fragility, to desperation, to explosion.

  The third gesture tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the larger misconceptions that lay behind Dessay’s performance, acclaim for which, both in the press and in the audience, reveals a lurking embarrassment about the “high” style typically, and rightly, associated with this kind of opera. During her mad scene—the scene by which any Lucia will inevitably be judged; a scene that Ms. Dessay has said she considers “the easiest part” of this opera to sing—there was a moment when Dessay stood stock still and simply screamed: a real, shivery, horror-movie scream. This is the kind of thing that makes an impression. On the first night I saw the opera, a woman in back of me murmured to her husband, “Now that’s scary.”

  The problem, of course, is that the scariness is already in the text, in the music. We know how hard Donizetti and Cammarano thought about their text, how hard they worked to put their broken heroine’s suffering and dissociation in the music, in the words (or lack of words). That Natalie Dessay and Mary Zimmerman thought that this scene needed the addition of “real” scariness merely reveals the extent to which they neither comprehend nor trust the creators of the work they’re staging. That staging, needless to say, is a hit. Whether it has “interest” is another matter altogether.

  —The New York Review of Books, November 22, 2007

  Not an Ideal Husband

  By now, we have all heard the story. Like so many tragedies, this one begins with a husband and his wife. The husband seems a happy man, preeminent among his contemporaries, affable, well liked, someone whose weaknesses are balanced by a remarkable gift for inspiring affection and loyalty. (His relatives, on the other hand, are thought to be cold and greedy.) The wife, whose fiery inner passions are belied by a conventional exterior—she exults in the small rout
ines of domestic life—is intensely, some might say madly, devoted to him. They have two small children: a boy, a girl.

  Then something goes wrong. Some who have studied this couple say that it is the husband who grotesquely betrays the wife; others, who consider the wife too intense, too disagreeably self-involved, dispute the extent of the husband’s culpability. (As often happens with literary marriages, each has fanatical partisans and just as fanatical detractors—most of whom, it must be said, are literary critics.) What we do know is that directly as a result of her husband’s actions, the wife willingly goes to her death—but not before taking great pains to guarantee the safety of her two children. Most interesting and poignant of all, the knowledge of her impending death inspires the wife to previously unparalleled displays of eloquence: as her final hours approach, she articulates, with thrilling lyricism, what she knows about life, womanhood, marriage, death—and seems, as she does so, to speak for all women. It is only after her death, many feel, that her husband realizes the extent of his loss. She comes back, in a way, to haunt him: a speaking subject no longer, but rather the eerily silent object of her husband’s solicitous, perhaps compensatory, ministrations.

  This is the plot of Euripides’ Alcestis. That it also resembles, uncannily in some respects, the plot of the life of Ted Hughes—whose final, posthumously published work is an adaptation of Euripides’ play—may or may not be a coincidence. Because Hughes’s Alcestis is a liberal adaptation, it cannot, in the end, illuminate this most controversial work of the most controversial of the Greek dramatists. (Scholars still can’t decide whether it’s supposed to be farce or tragedy.) But the choices Hughes makes as a translator and adapter—what he leaves out, what he adds, what he smoothes over—do shed unexpected light on his career, and his life.

  As Ted Hughes neared the end of his life, he devoted himself to translating a number of classical texts: a good chunk of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1997, Racine’s Phèdre in 1998 (performed by the Almeida Theatre Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 1999), and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for a performance in 1999 and published posthumously in that year. Hughes had translated one other classical text: Seneca’s Oedipus, for a 1968 production by the Old Vic starring John Gielgud and Irene Worth. But with the exception of that work, the fit between the translator and the texts was never a comfortable one.

  Hughes made his name as a poet of nature, and excluding the translations (he also translated Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Lorca’s Blood Wedding) and the self-revealing 1997 Birthday Letters, addressed to his late wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, he rarely strayed from the natural world, for which he had extraordinary imaginative sympathy (and which in turn inspired his fascination with Earth-Mother folklore and animistic magic). A glance at his published work reveals the following titles: The Hawk in the Rain, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Flowers and Insects, Wolfwatching, Rain-Charm for the Duchy, Cave Birds, The River. “They are a way of connecting all my deepest feelings together,” Hughes told an interviewer who’d asked why he spoke so often through animals. Yet the poet’s appreciation for—and artistic use of—the life of birds, fish, insect predators, of barnyards and wild landscapes, was anything but sentimental. As Helen Vendler observed in a review of the 1984 collection The River, Hughes, who liked to represent himself “as a man who has seen into the bottomless pit of aggression, death, murder, holocaust, catastrophe,” had taken as his real subject “the moral squalor attending the brute survival instinct.” In Hughes’s best poetry, the natural world, with its dazzling beauties and casual cruelties, served as an ideal vehicle for investigating that dark theme.

  It was a theme for which his tastes in language and diction particularly well suited him. Especially at the beginning of his career, the verse in which Hughes expressed himself was tough, vivid, sinewy, full (as Vendler wrote about The River) of “violent phrases, thick sounds, explosive words,” the better to convey a vision of life according to which an ordinary country bird, say, can bristle with murderous potential. “Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn / More coiled steel than living—a poised / Dark deadly eye…,” goes the violent beginning of “Thrushes,” from the 1960 collection Lupercal, hissing suggestively with alliterative s’s, exploding with menacing t’s and d’s, thick with cackling c’s and k’s. It was, indeed, Hughes’s “virile, deep banging” poems that first entranced the young Plath; she wrote home to her mother about them. (At the end of his career a certain slackness and talkiness tended to replace virile lyric intensity; few of the Birthday Letters poems, for instance, achieve more than a documentary interest. Hughes himself seemed to be aware of this. “I keep writing this and that, but it seems pitifully little for the time I spend pursuing it,” he wrote to his friend Lucas Myers in 1984. “I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of ’63 and ’69 [Plath’s suicide in 1963 and, in 1969, the suicide of Hughes’s companion Assia Wevill, who also killed the couple’s daughter]. I have an idea of these two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself…. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors.”)

  A taste for violence in both theme and diction is undoubtedly what drew the younger Hughes to Seneca’s Oedipus. The rhetorical extravagance of the Stoic philosopher and dramatist’s verse, the sense of language being pushed to its furthest extremes, the famously baroque descriptions of the violence to which the body can be subjected: these have long been acknowledged as characteristic of Seneca’s style. In his introduction to the published version of the Oedipus translation, Hughes (who in works such as his 1977 collection, Gaudete, warned against rejecting the primordial aspect of nature in favor of cold intellectualism) commented on his preference for the “primitive” Senecan treatment of the Oedipus myth over the “fully civilized” Sophoclean version. Seneca’s blood-spattered text afforded Hughes plenty of opportunities to indulge his penchant for the uncivilized, often to great effect: his renderings of Seneca’s dense Latin have an appropriately clotted, claustrophobic feel, and don’t shy away from all the gore. The man who, in a poem called “February 17th,” coolly describes the aftermath of his decapitation of an unborn lamb in utero (“a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups”) was clearly not fazed by incest and self-mutilation. “My blood,” Hughes’s Jocasta says, “…poured on / into him blood from my toes my finger ends / blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids / blood from the roots of my hair…/ flowed into the knot of his bowels…,” etc.

  Hughes’s Seneca was good, strong stuff because in Seneca, as in Hughes’s own work, theme and language are meant to work at the same pitch—the moral squalor was nicely matched by imagistic, prosodic, and linguistic squalor. Hughes was much less successful when, a generation later, he returned to classical texts—especially the dramas. You could certainly make the case that classical tragedy (and its descendants in French drama of Racine’s siècle classique) is about nothing if not the moral squalor that attends the brute survival instinct—not least the audience’s sense of moral squalor, its guilty pleasure in not being at all like the exalted but doomed scapegoat-hero. But it is an error typical of Hughes as a translator to think that you can extract the squalid contents from the highly stylized form and still end up with something that has the power and dreadful majesty of the Oresteia or Phèdre. Commenting on The River, Professor Vendler observed that “Hughes notices in nature what suits his purpose”: the same is true of his approach to the classics.

  It’s not that Hughes’s translations of Racine and Aeschylus can’t convey with great vividness the moral and emotional states of the characters; they can. “I have not drunk this strychnine day after day / As an idle refreshment,” Hughes’s besotted Phèdre tell her stepson, with an appropriately astringent mix of pathos and wryness. His Clytemnestra has “a man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body / Like a polished blade”—lines that Aeschylus never wrote, it’s true, bu
t that convey the poet’s preoccupation particularly with the threateningly androgynous character of his monstrous queen. But what Hughes’s classical translations (and so many others, most notably the very uneven new Penn Greek Drama Series edited by David Slavitt and Palmer Bovie) lack—disastrously—is grandeur. And the grandeur of high tragedy arises from the friction between the unruly passions and actions that are represented (incestuous longings, murderous and suicidal violence—moral squalor, in short) and the highly, if not indeed rigidly, stylized poetic forms that contain them: Racine’s glacially elegant alexandrines, or the insistent iambic trimeters of the Greek dialogue alternating at regular intervals with choral lyrics in elaborate meters. William Christie, the leader of the baroque music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, has spoken of “the high stylization that releases, rather than constrains, emotion”: this is a perfect description of the aesthetics of classical tragedy.

  Hughes—never committed to strict poetic form to begin with, and increasingly given to loose, unrhythmical versification—is suspicious of the formal restraints that characterize the classical. Like so many contemporary translators of the classics, he mistakes artifice for stiffness, and restraint for lack of feeling, and he tries to do away with them. In his Oresteia the diction is more elevated than what you find in some new translations (certainly more so than what you find in David Slavitt’s vulgar Oresteia translation for the Penn Greek Drama series, which has Clytemnestra pouring a “cocktail of vintage evils” and addressing the chorus leader as “mister”); but still Hughes tends too much to tone things down, smooth things out, explain things away.