Opera Blooms in Brooklyn

By Otto Friedrich

Terrible are the humiliations that Shakespeare inflicts on the aging Sir John Falstaff. Stuffed into a hamper of dirty laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors and soared into space, a paunchy carouser suddenly transformed into a kind of pagan god of pleasure.

That was the most remarkable of the many striking effects in German director Peter Stein's production of Falstaff, with which the celebrated Welsh National Opera was making its American debut. But the applause that swept the amiably musty BAM theater was not just for Stein. Nor just for Donald Maxwell's passionate performance as Sir John. Nor even just for the smiling Princess of Wales, Princess Di herself, who appeared in a glowing white satin dress for the black-tie benefit. Also to be applauded and celebrated was the start of a new kind of opera season in a place where opera has been something of a rarity.

BAM intends to present each year a limited season of varied and offbeat repertory, using its midsize (2,000 seats) theater as well as the more intimate (900 seats) Majestic a few blocks away. BAM officials like to boast that their house has actually been staging opera since 1861, more than two decades before the mighty Metropolitan Opera was born. But in fact the whole place nearly died during the 1950s. Its revival in recent years has depended heavily on presentations of theater and dance, along with stagings of operas by contemporary composers like Philip Glass and John Adams, in its annual Next Wave Festival of avant-garde work. But BAM is now convinced (perhaps by the conventionality of many productions at the Met and even at the New York City Opera) that there are further new ways to be tried.

"There is so much interesting opera that could and should play in a theater of 2,000 seats instead of 4,000," says BAM opera artistic director Matthew Epstein. "The visual and musical values are different than in a bigger house, and now the gigantism of the '70s is turning around. These are troubled times for the bigger houses in Paris, London, Vienna. Some of the most exciting work today is being done in smaller theaters like Cardiff or Brussels. There is less emphasis on superstars and more on ensemble."

Cardiff, of course, is where the new Falstaff was born (last September), after the Welsh National Opera spent years courting Stein, who made his reputation at Berlin's famous Schaubuhne theater. Stein saw Falstaff as an intensely personal drama, clearly sexual and even slightly sadistic. "Hold your paunch, celebrate it," he instructed Maxwell at one point during rehearsals. "For Falstaff, it is not grossness, it is greatness, virility." Bearing out Epstein's point, the modest dimensions of the BAM theater enabled Stein to stage Verdi's last masterpiece as a kind of chamber work, with the stage action fast-moving and intricately choreographed. The closeness of the proceedings also gives added prominence to Richard Armstrong's intense and hard-driving conducting of what is perhaps Verdi's most complex orchestral score.

BAM officials plan not only to acquire productions from Europe and from such U.S. opera companies as St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco but also to create new stagings of their own -- and starting in 1991, to collaborate on experimental productions with the Met. Planned for the first Met-BAM season: Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and a new Adams opera based on the Achille Lauro hijacking.

For the rest of this season, though, BAM already has two very unusual projects in the works. The first, at the Majestic in March, is the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, a small-scale early draft of their corrosive parable, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The eccentric director Peter Sellars has eccentrically decided to combine this with the same singers performing eight Bach choral works. But the piece de resistance, which just finished two weeks of performances in Paris and is due in Brooklyn in May, is a 313-year-old opera that almost nobody had heard of for the past couple of centuries. It is Atys by Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to King Louis XIV, and it is a marvel.

This baroque gem might have remained under its layers of dust indefinitely except that 1987 marked the 300th anniversary of Lully's death (of an infection that started after he accidentally stabbed himself in the foot with the cane he was using to conduct his music). The anniversary-loving French authorities decided to join with those in Lully's native Italy to finance a hearing for the man who is considered the virtual inventor of French opera.

That idea led to the cherubic figure of William Christie, 44, a transplanted American with a passion for neglected composers like Lully. With degrees from $ both Harvard and Yale, Christie went to France nearly two decades ago to be a harpsichordist (he had been a student of Ralph Kirkpatrick), then founded a flourishing chamber ensemble called Les Arts Florissants, then became the first American professor at the Paris Conservatoire.

Faced with the challenge of how to celebrate Lully, Christie took the librettos of more than a dozen of the composer's tragedies lyriques to a house in the country, read through them all and decided that the most exciting one was Atys. Based on Ovid, the drama by Philippe Quinault concerns the return to earth by Cybele, a fertility goddess, for the wedding of King Celenus. The goddess has fallen in love with the king's friend Atys, only to find that Atys is secretly in love with the prospective bride, so she vengefully drives Atys mad. In his madness, he kills the bride, then recovers, sees what he has done, and kills himself. Though this is acted out by antique gods and lords (all costumed in the capes and wigs of the Louis XIV era), Christie found "the theatrical effect so strong that an Eskimo could understand what's happening." As for Lully's elegantly stately music, Christie considers it "wrenchingly beautiful."

And so it is, particularly when performed by the young musicians of Les Arts Florissants, who play Baroque trills on their lutes and viols with all the enthusiasm that Gunther Schuller's student band used to bring to Scott Joplin's rags. No less important is BAM President Harvey Lichtenstein's recollection of a performance he attended in France: "I watched Christie conducting in the pit, and the smile never left his face once."

Lichtenstein's plans are ambitious, and the big problem, as always with opera, is money. Falstaff and Atys each cost nearly $1 million for four performances. But Lichtenstein is a master fund raiser who has increased BAM's budget more than 15-fold (to some $11 million this season) during his two decades in charge. Says he, with a grin: "I am very confident."

With reporting by Nancy Newman/Brooklyn