Sharp commentary with Champagne
ARTS Behind the cancans and parties, Vancouver Opera’s The Merry Widow has deeper meaning
On one level, Frank Lehár’s The Merry Widow is as light and bubbly as the Champagne that flows throughout the show. It’s filled with dance numbers, from waltzes to cancans, as the elite in fin-de-siècle Paris attend grand balls and garden parties. There’s even one scene where the title character hosts an elaborate celebration that recreates famous Art Nouveau hot spot Maxim’s in her home.
But veteran Canadian director Kelly Robinson, who was last in town to stage Vancouver Opera’s Evita, wants to shade in all the other levels of meaning in the 1861 comic operetta—from its many views on love to its political and social satire. And he’s assembled a top-flight operatic cast to do so.
“It’s a human comedy, and without really fine actors, we start to lose the finesse with which the characters negotiate their needs—that’s when those layers are really brought out,” Robinson says at VO’S headquarters in East Vancouver.
He’s just taken a break from rehearsing with Sasha Djihanian and John Tessier, who play the married Valencienne and Camille de Rosillon. Their characters flirt throughout the first act, and sparkling German songs about love have been echoing through the building.
“We find out later that they really haven’t done anything except engage in wordplay. They’re two people who are in love with the idea of love,” Robinson explains. “What’s most important is they find the best possible way to say it and to feel it, and they’re not so interested in the details.
“So they’re a kind of foil for the
The Merry Widow
main couple,” he adds, referring to Hanna Glawari, the “Merry Widow”, and Count Danilo Danilovitch, whom she’s pursuing. “And they’re as superficial about their love as the main pair are serious about it.”
In the operetta, Hanna (Italiancanadian soprano Lucia Cesaroni) has a huge inheritance from her late husband and has headed to Paris. There, she wants to reconnect with Danilo (tenor John Cudia), whom she was blocked from marrying years before. But Danilo refuses to marry her for her money now.
“Danilo and Hanna rarely get into the discussion of love because it’s something they actually know about each other and they don’t have to talk about it,” Robinson offers. “There are obstacles in the way, but they’re mature; they’re grown-up.”
Neither of them is either willing or able to state what he or she really feels, and the entire operetta plays with that duality. “This play is really about people saying things and meaning other things, which was very much a thing of high status in Viennese society, that sense of wordplay. And that’s part of the delight of this,” points out Robinson.
Amid all this, Lehár and his Viennese librettists, Viktor Léon and Leo Stein, take several shots at the politics stewing in the pre–first World War Austro-hungarian Empire, when the Habsburgs were at their height and spending on their Balkan territories was causing a commotion. (In the show, Hanna hails from a small Balkan state called Pontevedro—not coincidentally sounding like Montevideo— whose embassy in Paris is conspiring to keep her wealth in that country.)
“I think that’s the joy of operetta: when you treat it as a serious art form,” Robinson says. “You can enjoy it purely as a kind of pop music, in which we listen to some lovely tunes, drink some Champagne, and laugh appropriately. Or you can find the way the piece satirizes the ruling class, the wealthy, and the hypocrisy in politics and society.”
Don’t overlook the fact, he adds, that this is an operetta far before its time, with a strong, central female who wants to determine her own fate.
“The other layer is the gender politics,” the director elaborates. “You’ve got this woman with the resources of her wits and resources in wealth. How does she move through the minefield of society in order to get what she wants?”
In rehearsal, the director is focusing on that story—on what would happen, he says, if a woman inherited this wealth and tried to reconnect with an aristocrat she hadn’t been allowed to marry earlier in her life. Amid all the glittering music and swirling dancing you’ll see on the Queen Elizabeth stage, he wants you to see human beings—albeit ones from a very glamorous, mannered period, long, long ago.
And that’s why Robinson considers operetta to be, as he puts it, the ultimate “tonic for our times”. “That’s what operetta says: set aside your life, imagine this world, and come on in and live with us for a while in fin-de-siècle Paris,” he says.
Classical- and contemporarymusic lovers are not starved for choice this fall, but there’s little doubt that Vancouver New Music has staged a remarkable programming coup: its annual festival, this year titled Quartetti, has engaged the services of seven different string quartets, all of them strong proponents of the new and the unusual. Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini, for instance, will offer composer Cassandra Miller’s About Bach. New York City’s JACK Quartet will present John Zorn’s The Alchemist. Italy’s Quartetto Maurice will present works for string quartet and electronics. But the newest of all this new music will be played by Vancouver’s own Black Dog String Quartet; it’ll be handed to them just two weeks before showtime.
And it’ll be written by teenagers. The new works, which Black Dog will premiere over Quartetti’s threenight run, will be the product of the Indigenous Youth String Quartet Project, led by Navajo composer Raven Chacon, whose pieces Double Weaving and The Journey of the Horizontal People will also be performed.
“I’ve been doing this project for about 14 years, and what’s usually the case is that I only have a limited amount of time with these students,” Chacon tells the Straight in a Skype interview from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home. “And a lot of times this is happening through the school year, which puts even more of a limit on how much we can meet, because we don’t want to disrupt their schoolwork. So it’s a very intensive course.… I’ll teach some bits of music theory or western musical history, but even more important will be a discussion about their own tribal music, how familiar they are with that.”
Chacon adds that, in Vancouver, the Black Dog quartet will be on hand to demonstrate the various tones that can be drawn from violin, viola, and cello. Since many of his students won’t have had formal musical training, he’ll also teach the use of graphic notation to indicate sounds that aren’t part of the classical-music canon—which he illustrates by singing, with a wide vibrato, an excerpt from a Navajo chant. And he’ll ask the youths to think about what their music is intended to convey.
“For a lot of young people,” he says, “that might be a narrative or a story from their home, and a lot of times it is specifically a piece about a place. They might say it’s about the city, or it’s about the forest, or out here it’s the desert, which is so quiet. So you think of things. You say, ‘Okay, what happens in this place? Is there a lot of noise? Are there animals? Is there wind?’ All of these elements, natural or unnatural, that the student might encounter— that’s a strategy to get them thinking about what their piece might mean, or the world that it takes place in.”
This intuitive combination of the familiar and the abstract is a strategy Chacon himself sometimes employs, notably in The Journey of the Horizontal People, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2016. It’s rich in dry, rattling, desertlike noises produced by a variety of unconventional bowing techniques, but it’s also a futurist take on the Navajo creation stories Chacon grew up with. And, as can happen in creation stories, it also incorporates an element of disorientation; the score leads the players into a wilderness of sonic options, and then offers them a path back out again— with a woman finding the way.
“Within a lot of these [Navajo] stories, what you see is women emerging as the leaders and guiding the people, the different clans, to where they ended up in contemporary times,” Chacon explains. “And the reason I call this a future creation story is because these things are ongoing. We’re still in migration, as humans. We’re still in an evolving state, and so this is a piece I wanted to write to talk about all of us people in the 21st century.”