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| IN SEARCH OF THE ESSENCE OF THE CONFLICT | |
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"I, the free Son of the Ether, will lead you into far-distant galaxies, and you shall be Mistress of the World, my beloved forever!"
Today, anyone declaring his love in this manner would be considered a nut-case, a speed-freak, a cocaine addict, or at worst a deranged - albeit highly intelligent - serial killer with literary inclinations (Hannibal Lecter, in short). A shame really, for if some suitor offered me the prospect of being Mistress of the World for a day at least, it would certainly grab my attention, and considering the state of the world, I might even give the proposal some serious thought. It just goes to show you how contrary to popular assumptions, our 21st century horizons have shrunk compared to the boundless vistas of previous centuries. These exalted words are uttered, in fact, by the Demon, central character of Mikhail Lermontov's immensely popular poem of the same name, and Anton Rubinstein's equally popular, in its genre, opera based on Lermontov's work. Both Demons - Lermontov's and Rubinstein's - made their apparitions in the 19th century (respectively 1841 and 1871), that fertile breeding ground for the Sturm und Drang ethos which today we call the Romantic era. Back then, not only did characters in books and on stage speak this way, but real people too. A case in point from our own Latvian history serves as not only anecdotal evidence. Aspazija, in her autobiography, recounts the story of her first true love - a Russian officer named Kucevalov. The affair was passionate, and the half-Russian, half-Tartar officer was "very developed", which in this case meant a penchant for citing poetry, singing Russian romances, and a close acquaintance with the classics of Russian literature - Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol et al. "He wasn't the one who called me Aspazija. He named me Tamara, after the well-known poem by Lermontov. He was always reciting this poem, which I also like very much, and still today I can hear: V glubokoi tesnine Darjala, Gde roetsa Terek vo mgle Starinnaja bashna stojala Cherneja, na chornoi gore. V toi bashne visokoi i tesnoi Carica Tamara zhila, Prekrasna kak angel nebesnij Kak demon - kovarna i zla.![i] Tamara/Aspazija's rapture was short-lived however, as she was soon to find her dashing officer in that timeless and most banal of compromising positions - in bed with another woman. Aspazija breaks off the engagement, much to the despair of Kucevalov, who in his anguish seizes the occasion to show his "developed" side, again citing the appropriate line from the pertinent Russian poem/opera, this time Pushkin-Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin: "And happiness was so near, so near..."[ii] The Latvian National Opera's new production of Rubinstein's "The Demon" also features a Russian officer, although this military man invokes not so much the image of the dashing, passionate Kucevalov, as the spectre of the sadistic Lecter. If in his 1997 Bregenzer Festspiele incarnation of the Demon, bass-baritone Egils Siliņš strode, strutted and flew about the stage showing off not only a well-developed pair of vocal cords, but also a well-toned and burnished nude torso, then in the recent LNO production Egils Siliņš' Demon was put in a straightjacket - both literally and figuratively. No doubt there are those who are turned on by military types exuding an aura of perversity; it's just that the wholesome Tamara, grieving the death of her handsome fiancé Prince Sinodal, doesn't seem to be a likely devotee of this sort of frisson. Difficult, really, to understand what Tamara sees in the guy. This lack of a palpable motivation for Tamara's fatal attraction to the Demon is but one small example of a larger problem in this recent LNO production of Rubinstein's "The Demon". Andrejs Žagars and his production team have removed the underlying bedrock upon which the sense and substance of this archetypal Romantic era piece is built, and superimposed upon it a structure that is at odds with the gist of the opera and of the poem. This disregard for the sense of the piece is not a question of Georgian girls with stylized or non-stylized headdresses, or even of a Demon in strictured uniform or nude with muscles rippling. The entire opera could be staged on a Tahitian island, or a Texas fitness center - as opposed to a Georgian valley, as long as, as Egils Siliņš says in the interview in this issue, as long as "the idea is conveyed in its essence". The December 2003 LNO production of "The Demon" does not convey the idea of the piece - neither Rubinstein's nor Lermontov's - in its essence. What is the essence of this idea, and why is it not conveyed? The essence of the idea at the center of "The Demon" is the same as the essence of the idea that is at the center of the Romantic movement, a movement which was a major turning point in the history of human thought, civilisation and behaviour in Europe. Isaiah Berlin goes so far as to deem the Romantic movement "the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time", a revolution causing a "shift in consciousness" that "cracked the backbone of European thought".[iii] This long backbone, stretching from Plato through the Renaissance and Reformation up to the 18th century has as its marrow the belief that virtue is knowledge. The belief that all tragedy and evil are due to ignorance and error, and that if men were knowledgeable enough, if only they knew the right answers, they would not err, and there would be no tragedy, no evil. For centuries, the European mind supposed that questions such as "what are values?", "what are rights?", "what is the best way for a man to live?", "what is justice?", "what is a benevolent power?", "what is love?" could be answered in the same way, with the same precision as factual questions of the sort "how long did the reign of Charlemagne last?", "is the book of Job part of the Old or New Testament?", "what is the alchemic formula for gold?". I myself may not know the answer to the question, but I know where to look for the answer, and I do not doubt that the question is answerable in principle and that there is somebody or something out there that does know the right answer. At the beginning of the 18th century we are still in a world of clear authorities, of calm certitudes, of faith in universal truths, in universal canons of art, of a firm conviction that goodness is always rewarded and evil punished, and that all human activity is meant to result in finally getting things right in a visible, discernible way. It is the age of the esprit des philosophes, the age of reason and enlightenment. In the name of rival claims to this absolute knowledge, wars are fought and fierce conflicts played out. Indeed, precisely because this world outlook presupposes that different values cannot be in conflict with each other, competing claims to the truth engender conflict. In a world where it cannot be conceived that truthful answers to the questions "should I be just?" and "should I be merciful?" might be incompatible, one strives to impose a harmonious order there where messy incongruities loom. By the end of the 19th century however, a revolution in mentalities has occured; for the Romantic mind there is only one certainty, the certainty that there is an eternal conflict that cannot be resolved, but that the struggle to resolve it must continue. The romantic movement challenged the belief that answers to questions concerning values could a priori be answered at all, and as a corollary disputed the notion of an ultimate compatibility of values. For the Romantic mind, values are made, not found. Man creates his own values, transforms himself and his milieu. If up until the early 18th century a human being was judged by whether what he believed was true or false, then for the Romantics, what one believed mattered less then how one believed it. Integrity, idealism, a readiness to sacrifice for principles, an admiration for energy, enthusiasm, strife and desire - this is the temper of the Romantic mind. The intent is more important than the effect, motives more important than consequences, sincerity, as opposed to orthodoxy, was the noble goal of the times: "Classicism provided a fixed greatness: the king was great whether he did anything or not. Romanticism could only admire an active greatness; it even admired failure if greatness had been shown".[iv] Isaiah Berlin presents an illustrative example of this monumental shift in consciousness. Suppose you were travelling in Europe in the 1820's he says, and suppose that in France you met the avant-garde circle associated with Victor Hugo, that in Germany you spoke with those who had visited with Madame de Staël or with the Schlegel brothers or Tieck, or with other persons connected with the romantic movement, suppose that in England - or in Italy or in France for that matter - you spoke with someone who had been influenced by Byron, suppose that you had spoken to all of these persons. You would find that the values that they held in high regard were the following: dedication to some ideal to which it is worth sacrificing oneself, integrity, sincerity. They were not primarily interested in finding their place in society, in knowledge, in loyalty to the republic or king. They were interested in fighting for their beliefs to the bitter end. The notion of idealism, the notion that a man is ready to sacrifice a great deal for his convictions, who is not prepared to sell out - this attitude was relatively new. Now suppose, Berlin goes on, that in the 16th century you were chatting with a Catholic involved in the religious wars that wreaked havoc on the European continent in that century: "Oh yes, the Protestants are wrong, their beliefs are false, but one has to give them credit for their integrity, they are so sincere and die so splendidly for the cause, that one cannot deny them a grudging admiration for this moral dignity". Such a sentiment would have been incomprehensible, asserts Berlin. A true Catholic would have believed that anyone who put themselves at the service of a false faith was simply a dangerous man.[v] In the Romantic world, each individual, each entity (state, people, religion) lives by its own vision, and the question of whether this vision is correct or not is no longer of primary importance. What matters is that you do not betray your vision, that you believe in your belief for its own sake, and, as an idealist, are ready to prove the sincerity of your motive by death, if necessary. The positive upshot of this Romantic mindset is the realization that there is no guarantee that values of different individuals or nations - these divergent, highly idiosyncratic visions - will necessarily concur. They will not necessarily concur between different individuals, nor within the same individual. To romanticism we owe the idea that there are many values, that they are incompatible, resulting in the notion of plurality and the understanding that perfect solutions were not out there to be found. As Isaiah Berlin concludes, the romantic movement made clear to us the existence of a plurality of values "by driving wedges into the notion of the classical idea, of the single answer to all questions".[vi] In the political and social realms, the Romantics bequeathed to us the modern ethical principles of tolerance, liberalism and compromise. In the artistic realm, the Romantics bequeathed to us the idea of the freedom of the artist. The downside of the Romantic mindset appears when the ideal of the untrammelled freedom of the individual artist is applied in the political realm and manifests itself as the unbridled fanaticism of an ego-driven leader. In a simplistic, but nonetheless illustrative parallel, the political counterpart of the latter-day Beethoven is Napolean; of Wagner - Hitler. It is not surprising to note that Communist regimes and thinkers as a rule have had an acute allergy to romanticism in any of its manifestations, ostensibly for the reasons mentioned as its downside, but most probably for the liberal tradition that it spawned. Of the two models - the new model featuring the primacy of motive, self-realization and vital drives, and the old model featuring the primacy of science, knowledge and rational happiness - neither is perfect, and today in the 21st century we continue to hesitate when forced to choose between the two. The morality of motive and the morality of consequence - "we shift uneasily from one foot to another, from motive to consequence, from estimate of character to estimate of achievement".[vii] Lermontov's poem "The Demon" and to a great extent Rubinstein's opera "The Demon" are pure products of this Romantic mindset. "The Demon" exhibits many of the outward trappings of the typical Romantic work - a penchant for folkloric elements, a glorification of the primeval forces of nature, love between human and supernatural beings - and its two central characters, the Demon and Tamara, are both archetypal Romantic heroes. The Demon and Tamara both are torn by conflicting emotions, by irreconcilable drives and desires. If Tamara begins the opera in a state of classical tranquillity - "I suffer no torments, they are unknown to me"[viii] - then very soon, upon encountering the Demon she switches gears and declares: "Father, father my soul is in torment... my mind is all confused." To alleviate the pain of her tormented romantic soul, Tamara envisages the classical panacea: "Send me to a holy nunnery!"[ix] From the very beginning the Demon declares that he is "full of boundless willpower", that he desires "freedom and passion, not peace... I want unrest and strife".[x] His natural state of turmoil is compounded by his encounter with Tamara: "(your image)... has long brought unrest to my thoughts... If only you could understand my sadness, the conflict of my instincts and wishes."[xi] The conflict raging within the Demon's and Tamara's souls is not just a simple battle between good and evil. It is a conflict between several seemingly irreconcilable things: divine and sensual love, the individual and society, the human and the otherworldly, pride and humility, reason and passion. In the romantic tradition neither Tamara nor the Demon resolve these conflicts, but they are both imbued with a tragic grandeur for having made a noble, passionate effort to get to the bottom of the matter. Their motives were admirable, whatever the consequences. There is very little that is messy or conflictual in the new LNO production of "The Demon". Horses and corpses have been banished from the stage, if not from the libretto, and visually we are presented with perfectly symmetrical and harmonious tableaux vivants, or semi-vivants. Semi-vivants, as the singers seem to have been given strict instructions as to just how far they can move which hand and when, resulting in some pretty, stylized movements, but little real emotion. The conflict, if there is any to be found in this production, has been posited in early 18th century Enlightenment terms: there is the Demon, who is evil, and the Angel, who is good. All of the other characters will end up either in the Kingdom of Good or the Kingdom of Evil depending on the right or wrong choices that they make. This sort of a construction works for an Enlightenment era piece such as "The Magic Flute", where we truly do have two more or less clearly delineated kingdoms of evil (Monostatos, the Queen of the Night) and good (Sarastro, the Priests) and characters on a quest to find a universal key somewhere "out there", rather than within themselves. This construction does not work for a piece that is all about motives, not consequences, which is about the struggle and torment within, not about choosing the right or wrong path to Kingdom X or Y. By portraying the Demon as a unidimensional evil spirit, by choosing to ignore the human, sensual and virtuous aspects of the Demon's character, one dimishes the role, flattens the intrigue of the opera, and removes the basic message of the piece. In Tamara's case the result is the same; by portraying her as putty between the hands of the Demon and the Angel, with no will of her own, as a being who is not torn between the equally attractive options of sensual love and divine love, one loses interest in her predicament and in the opera itself. And besides, the torn, conflictual nature of the Demon's romantic era character is clearly indicated by Lermontov in his poem: To nebil ada duh uzhasnij, Porochnij muchenik - o net! On bil pohozh na vecher jasnij: Ni den ni noch,- ni mrak ni svet[xii] There is nothing inherently wrong with visually setting this Romantic era piece within a perfectly classical, symmetrical form. But the form cannot be allowed to become an end in itself, or worse, to substitute for the substance of the piece - which remains the inner conflict, the torn motivations of the Demon and Tamara. As it is, for a piece that is all about motive rather than consequences, it is difficult to understand, or to care to understand what motivates any of the characters in this production, starting with, as already mentioned, the issue of what is it - what could it possibly be - that Tamara finds so attractive in this straightjacketed Demon? Director Andrejs Žagars has not been reticent in expressing his admiration for Robert Wilson's minimalist aesthetics, and indirectly acknowledges his regard for the well-known international director's techniques in this LNO production of "The Demon". Robert Wilson was a sculptor before he became a director, and Andrejs Žagars was an actor and fashion show producer before he became a director, and for both men, their visual bias is evident. This talent for visualizing and composing attractive scenes is an important advantage for a successful director. As any asset however, when carried to an extreme, it can become a detriment. Some respected opera critics have become quite vehement about Robert Wilson lately, going so far as to say that the "emperor has no clothes", affirming that his appeal is based on "herd instinct", and calling him a "phoney cult director".[xiii] The reason for all this vitriol? "Wilson could not have survived so long without the support of continental fashionistas... See one of his operas and you have seen them all. He does not engage with the piece or explore its inner workings. All he does is superimpose the same set of aesthetic layers."[xiv] Had Andrejs Žagars and his production team taken but a little of the Sturm und Drang activity that took place offstage in the many months leading up to the premiere of "The Demon" (at least three changes of design concept and design teams, the last only three months before the premiere) and channeled that sense of conflict and irreconcilable differences onstage, the essence - and perhaps even more - of the piece would have been preserved. Instead, in true pre-romantic style, in the finale or "apotheosis" of the opera, the Angel reads us the moral lesson to be learned from the preceding events (no more uncertainty allowed). Doubt and contradiction are very bad things the Angel teaches us, thus ending this piece on a surprisingly non-romantic note. Lermontov's poem does not end in this moralizing tone, and Rubinstein's addition, which is at odds with the gist of the rest of the piece, may have been added for reasons of censorship, as those with the political power to determine what was or was not produced on stages within the Russian Empire tended to prefer situations where the individual looked towards other omniscient beings for answers, rather than within himself. It is indicative that the LNO production team latches on to this one bit of evident sermonizing and milks it for all it is worth. Against the background of an elegiac F major string accompaniment the snow begins to fall. Ten days before Christmas, Hallmark card and clear plastic shake-m'-up snow-toy associations are inevitable. No elfs, thank God, but from the balcony the Angel (counter-tenor Sergei Jeger) sweetly, oh-so sweetly sings. Offstage, the choir of heavenly angels chimes in: "There can be no forgiveness for your haughty spirit!". The snow silently falls, the Angel sings. It is a very pretty picture, verging on kitsch, and I, damned soul that I am, cannot suppress a giggle. But maybe the contradiction was intended? [i] Aspazija, Kopoti raksti, Vol. VI (Riga, 1988), p. 303. [ii] Ibid., p. 304. [iii] As quoted in Lilian R. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective (London and New York, 1969), p. 27. [iv] Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern (New York, 1961), p. 93. [v] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Princeton, New Jersey, 1999), pp. 8-9. [vi] Ibid., p. 147. [vii] Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality. Studies in Ideas and their History (New York, 1997), p. 193. [viii] Anton Rubinstein, The Demon (Koch International, Edition Bregenzer Festspiele, 1998), p. 82. [ix] Ibid., pp. 109-111. [x] Ibid., p. 77. [xi] Ibid., pp. 119-120. [xii] M.J.Lermontov. Sobranije sochinenij v 4 tomah. Vol. II (Moscow, 1969), p. 424. [xiii] Andrew Clark, "Aida - Covent Garden", Financial Times, 10 November 2003. [xiv] Ibid. | |
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