Opera echoes from rocks and ruins in Israel
From Masada to the Old City, grand performances are staged in spectacular settings
When Eitan Campbell, the director of Israel’s Masada National Park, first came to work at the promontory in 1972, he was taken by a small etching of a sailboat on one of the fortress’s ancient stone walls.
Perhaps it was a bored Herodian soldier, sitting atop the mountain in the hot sun of 30 BC, who spied the vessel afloat in the nearby Dead Sea and painted its likeness to pass the time.
There had been far greater treasures uncovered atop this flat limestone monolith, where a band of Jewish rebels in AD 73 made a spectacular suicide pact and earned a place in the annals of Jewish lore. When excavation teams first came upon Masada in the 1960s, they found multicoloured frescoes from Herod’s thermal baths, crumbling storehouses still packed with grains and seeds, and ostraca (pottery shards) of every size and shade imaginable.
But that image of a sailboat captivated Campbell.
Decades later, when the Israeli Opera asked him to help pinpoint a location for an ambitious new summer festival, he found it by standing in the same spot as that soldier had and peering east.
For one week each year, visitors to Masada National Park who stand where that ancient soldier did, can see something else remarkable in the distance: an amphitheatre on the Dead Sea’s western bank, constructed to host the gustiest opera festival in the Middle East.
Each June, amid the whipping winds of the Judean Desert, the Israeli Opera builds a miniature village of dressing rooms, portable toilets and a 7,600-seat outdoor stage, all at the mountain’s feet. Curtain is held until 9 p.m., when the night sky has turned inky black and Masada, majestic in the backdrop, can be lit from below. Philharmonic performances, a one-night-only event with an Israeli rock star and mini-operas at area hotels, are added to the mix, as is a sister festival later in the year, in Acre, a northern Israeli city, the roots of which go back to the Bronze Age.
“We have stones here that are 3,000 years old,” said Hanna Munitz, the director of the Israeli Opera. “It’s a shame not to use them.” Munitz wanted to mount a summer opera festival in the Jewish state that would rival those of Salzburg and Verona. But Israel’s opera tradition is young, and its performance halls modest. So, in a bid to be competitive, she decided to tap the nation’s best resource: its history.
“Tourists come to Israel for a lot of reasons, but not for culture,” Munitz said. “It’s not that we don’t have culture on a high level here. But they will go to Vienna or Verona for opera. We are now trying to be part of the best opera festivals in the world, so that people who love opera will go from one place to another. And Israel will be one of those places.”
About 30,000 visitors attended the festival last year, injecting 80 million shekels ($25 million) into the Israeli economy, according to the tourism ministry. Most of them were Israeli, but a sliver (3,000 to 5,000) were foreigners who travelled to Israel for the festival. It is this target audience that the opera has set its sights on. The ministry of tourism has thrown in its support, allocating, this year, half a million U.S. dollars and sponsoring a marketing campaign in Europe, Russia and the U.S.
The centrepiece of the 2015 Israel Opera Festival will be four productions of Tosca, Puccini’s fiery melodrama, at Masada on June 4, 6, 11 and 13. On June 5 and 12, the same site will feature Carl Orff’s bawdy medieval cantata Carmina Burana, staged alongside a pyrotechnic light show, which will send colours cascading down the mountain.
Two weeks later, the action moves to Jerusalem, to the ancient Sultan’s Pool beneath the ramparts of the Old City. On June 24 and 25, visitors will take in L’Elisir d’Amore, Donizetti’s slapstick tale of a peasant in love with a rich girl, from an arena built alongside a 2,000-year-old reservoir.
Last year, Masada played host to La Traviata. Staged amid a semi-ruined Paris, the set featured a stump of the Eiffel Tower, a crashed chandelier and a tilted, psychedelic version of Moulin Rouge’s windmill.
With a mountain such as Masada looming in the background, the evening needs to be grand. So, before festival-goers even reached their seats, they strolled through a mock Parisian avenue dotted with bistros and patisseries and lit by hundreds of gracefully arched street lights.
“They built this festival out of nothing,” said Daniel Oren, the Israeliborn conductor who serves as musical director for the Israeli Opera and who handled the baton for La Traviata. “All of us artists, we are in tents in the desert, eating together, the choir, the stagehands, the orchestra, the singers.
“The atmosphere is like a kibbutz,” he said. “It’s really emotional.”
A week after the close of the pro- ductions at Masada, I took the train from Tel Aviv to Acre, a creaking coastal city where fishermen cast their lines from a crusader-era port. Here, inside the sweeping stone arches of what was once the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, the Israeli Opera Festival has a second stage, which opened in 2014.
Inside the walls of the city’s Crusader Courtyard, which, like Masada, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, the opera staged Don Giovanni. (The festival’s Acre epilogue has been pushed to September this year, with performances of Le Nozze di Figaro as well as Mozart events geared toward children, scheduled for Sept. 10 to 12.)
The production was smaller, tighter in scale and more closely fitted to its surroundings. Acre has a sizable Muslim population, and a few minutes into Act I, as the commendatore lies in his own blood and Leporello and Giovanni contemplate a getaway, the muezzin of the mosque just behind the courtyard began his evening call to prayer.
The conductor Daniel Cohen, the 31-year-old Israeli virtuoso who serves as a Gustavo Dudamel fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cut the music. The players on stage froze. The audience, unsure of how to react, tittered with laughter and then just listened.
As the call to prayer concluded, they applauded as if they had just heard an aria.
Cohen snapped his baton, and the action resumed.
“Don Giovanni is a courtyard opera,” Cohen said. “It’s all happening in the backyards of houses and in courtyards, entrances and alleys. So in a way, doing it here, it feels very real. This place has a lovely balance between being a grand spectacle, but also an intimate environment.”
There are no gilded ceilings here, no velvet seats. This is opera open to the elements, defying both sandstorms and humidity to make it to the stage. It comes each year and lights up the old stones, planting a new tradition amid the ruins.