PROJECTS
Reviews
Modern Progress
Visionary Canadian director Robert Lepage, whose production of The Rake’s Progress plays this month at San Francisco Opera, talks to ADAM WASSERMAN about setting Stravinsky’s neoclassical masterpiece in the Hollywood the émigré composer called home.
At first, it seems an unlikely challenge for a director as fluent in the theatrical applications of new technologies as Robert Lepage to take on an operatic work inspired by the painstaking engravings fashioned by the artist William Hogarth in Eighteenth Century London. But for the Québécois Lepage — whose work has ranged from award-winning stagings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to his own The Dragons’ Trilogy to Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ — the medium and message remain just two distinct facets of a larger dramatic gestalt.
This month, his TV-era production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress arrives in San Francisco having already received acclaim in Brussels and Lyon. For inspiration, the multidisciplinary director looked back to Stravinsky’s own tale of immigration to a strange new city, the Hollywood of the 1940s and ‘50s, in an era with a seeming abundance of idle hearts and hands and minds.
OPERA NEWS: I’m curious what it was about this opera in particular that enticed you to work on a new production.
ROBERT LEPAGE: Well, actually, The Rake’s Progress is one of Stravinsky’s crazier pieces. I think it’s his first and only English-language opera and libretto. What was really interesting as a North American was that it’s very, very American what he did — in the sense that he wrote it in the days when he was living in LA, and he was fascinated by the invention of television. He really fancied the idea of writing an opera for television, because he thought TV was going to save the world — a bit like that bread machine in The Rake’s Progress. He thought that it was only going to bring good and democracy and all that. Of course, he died before he could do any of that. So we’ve tried to take that reality and then to figure out what kind of life he was leading in L.A. and Hollywood during the early television years in that part of the world. We said, “Well, what if Rake’s Progress — which was written more or less in that time — was about that? About Hollywood, and about television” So, I don’t know ... there’s something that kind of resonated really true in that. We explored that era and what it became. But it’s still very much of a Baroque-borrowed style and I’ve always been very fascinated by that, too.
ON: I know that you’ve often looked to new technologies as a means of accomplishing things on stage that perhaps haven’t been done before. How have you envisioned the mise en scène for this production?
RP: Well, because of this whole film-themed approach, we had a good excuse to create imagery that would be more filmic and more integrated with the live action. So there are a lot of high-definition interactive images that are projected on the background. It’s a very free, open space. It’s a raked — no puns intended — space with some traps and things and a lot of surprises, but it’s mainly like a big cinemascopic landscape. There’s a very thin but very wide screen at the back where you see the type of landscape you would see in American films of the fifties and sixties. So we play a lot with that and there is some interaction with the live performers. But it’s not obsessed with technology. The technology doesn’t give a show on its own. It’s not even groundbreaking technology necessarily. It’s not the main character like in other shows. I think the technology holds its place, but it’s only this fascination that Stravinsky had for the full cinematic construction of storytelling that allowed us to bring a bit of this technology in.
ON: Stravinsky himself was originally inspired by these incredibly intricate engravings by William Hogarth. Were those images influential to you at all?
RP: Absolutely. Our first intuition, when we started to develop the production, was to go back to these engravings and try to understand what they were about — the whole Hogarth mystique. That was quite interesting as he was a controversial character. So we dove into that whole aesthetic and felt that this had been done many times before — that we didn’t really have anything new to say about Hogarth or with Hogarth. But there was still something very political and moral about these engravings, and we felt, ‘Well, how do we translate that into our context?’ We discovered and realized finally that a lot of American films, post-war American cinema, were very much about morals and the idealization of a certain lifestyle. So it kind of fitted in with the Hogarth engravings that were about giving examples of how to live your life — what’s good for you and what’s bad, how it’s good to drink beer and it’s bad to drink gin. I remember this one set of engravings that was called “Beer Street and Gin Lane.” The people who drank beer were social people and happy people and encouraged the economy, but the people who drank gin would lose their teeth and their children.
What’s really interesting is what Stravinsky did with this. While he was respectful of, let’s say, the progression of the Rake, and the succession of scenes, he wasn’t very respectful of the details. With Hogarth it was all about details — you could spend complete days just looking at the details of these engravings. But Stravinsky transforms the old lady that Rakewell marries into Baba the Turk. Stravinsky was very much into his own era, into modern-day America. Actually, I think he saw the Hogarth engravings at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. So he himself did a kind of transposition of that into his own modern-day new-American ideals.
ON: The sensibility of the story is one of the archetypal youth led astray by corrupting forces. It’s certainly a relevant trope when put in the context of the culture of Hollywood.
RP: Of course, it’s not just about Hollywood, it’s also about many other things. Kazushi Ono conducted the performances of the opera at La Monnaie, in Brussels — it was his first opera in the English language — and he showed me how there are some really odd moments where the character sings things in a very non-English way. You think ‘Oh, so it’s Stravinsky’s clumsiness with the English language — he didn’t know how to deal with the English prosody.’ But actually, he did, and those moments that I’ve heard that sound kind of clumsy are actually references to Gregorian chants, to some religious chants. Kazushi really pointed out to me some very specific places in the score where he disguised — within this parody of a Baroque opera — religious music in there. If somebody has an ear for them, they’re there. You can hear them.
ON: There seems to be a greater tolerance for relocating and reimagining the settings of modern operas than similar Regietheater approaches to the classics. Still, were you at all weary of the directorial cliché of changing an opera’s intended place and time?
RP: I hope people in America more than in Europe will appreciate this. We did a lot of our research on Hollywood — it seems like an easy concept that we slapped on, but it’s not at all. What I hope people appreciate is that Hollywood’s music — themes for Westerns, or for films like Giant, or televion comedies like My Three Sons or Bewitched — was directly inspired by people like Stravinsky. All of these composers that immigrated after the war or during the war to America had a huge influence. So there was a lot of ... maybe not Cyrillic music, but you’d have all this new sound that came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. People like Berg, and Schoenberg, and all of these composers were experimenting with form and it ended up in things like the music theme to Batman. That’s what I hope people will recognize in America — that’s certainly what excited us. Most of the creative team is from Québec and we were all brought up on these sitcoms and these kooky American series, and it was clear that — even in something like Bugs Bunny — there was a very strong influence that came from that school of thought. When you slap that music onto, let’s say, a certain scene in the show when they are in a saloon, in a fake saloon, or in Las Vegas-type environment, it fits! It really fits. It belongs there because you can hear how these guys found their way into the larger American culture. There is something about his music that is very cinematic anyway, and was obviously in tune with that.
ON: Ever since its inception, this opera has been quite polarizing with audiences coming to terms with its neoclassicist tendencies. Do you have opinions about the music and how it applies to the staging?
RP: There are all sorts of theories about that. I think that what happened to Stravinsky is a bit like what happened to Picasso towards the end of his life. There’s a moment where what you do is groundbreaking, but you have never really been in touch with the ground. So for what is then the second part of your life as an artist, suddenly you revisit the classics — like all these choreographers who have gone off and done avant-garde dance for twenty years and then go back to pointe. That’s what happened here, I think. Musically, Stravinsky felt he had the freedom and the maturity and the weight to actually do that, and revisit a Mozartean style of recitatives and do these things, but do it with a lot of irony and quite a lot of knowledge of what he was doing.
I don’t think that Stravinsky was very serious about Baroque opera, but he certainly was interested in the Jazzy feel that he imparted. I swear this is true ... there are moments, there are places in the opera, where you’ll hear a Mozart set of bars followed by something that sounds out of the Taxi Driver soundtrack. This kind of jazzy, bluesy thing that comes out in the last scene, in the asylum — in the bedlam scene and certainly in the very last bars that Rakewell sings when he goes mad — it’s total 1950ish New York experimental, jazz and blues. It’s quite amazing. If the harpsichord and if some of these instruments didn’t remind you that you were hearing a Baroque pastiche, you would think that you are in some kind of 1950’s New York club. So, for me, it didn’t feel right to have people in period costumes and having all the irregular affects.
ON: Stravinsky famously said that constraints, such as the formalist, Baroque allusions heard here, actually sharpened one’s precision of execution. He thought that it really made him a better composer to work within these frameworks and structures. Similarly, I know that you feel that you have more latitude as a director in staging opera.
RP: Oh, completely. I’m not too good with the classics when I do theater. I’m good at doing new works with a group of actors and we do stuff. When I’m caught, when my vanity pushes me to accept some Shakespeare or some Chekhov or some whatever, in a big prestigious theater house, I am kind of caught, because I spend the first week sitting around a table trying to figure out what those words mean, and what the subtext is.
In opera, it’s so fantastic because you walk in and the music contains all the subtext, all the emotional motivations of the piece, the coup de theatre, the psychology, the frictions between what it is that the character is saying and what it is that he is actually thinking of — it’s all in the music. So you just listen to the music that is there, and you serve the music, or you use the music to say even more complex ideas. There is something extremely disciplined when you do opera because the music is always tough — it’s a marathon, it’s a physically challenging thing for a lot of singers, it’s tough on all sorts of levels. But if it’s a good opera, the music guides you through the whole thing — it tells you what to do and when to do. If you have a good ear for that, it’s very freeing. You know, you have the impression that you are being guided in your directions and always find your mark. I find that very exciting. It’s really challenging, but you are starting at plus ten, not at minus ten, as it can be in classical theater.
Frank Lloyd Wright said that architecture was the great mother art. He was wrong, opera is. Architecture doesn’t contain music or opera. But opera contains architecture, opera contains theater, choreography, acting, literature — it’s all there. So what’s great about doing opera for a director that comes from the theater is that you feel that you can count on different things. Of course, the music is what is at the center — the voice of the singers is what is at the center of all this. But you can still rely on so many different systems to tell a story. If the idea doesn’t flow just by listening to the music, or the words, or the attempts of the acting by the performer, you can at rely on visual ideas, on architectural ideas, on choreography. There is so much space for so many things to help you convey what it is that you are trying to convey. That’s very freeing.
Copyright © OPERA NEWS 2007
