Deborah Voigt is one of my favorite voices, purely because the intense brightness and sharp, ringing edge in her voice give me hope that one day I, too, will be able to fill out my overly bright voice into something half as beautiful as the perfect, shiny sphere of power that is Voigt’s tone. I think that this bright edge is exactly the reason that this woman seems so miraculously immune to the ever present temptation to scream over Wagner’s pounding and over-sized orchestra. She just doesn’t ever have to worry about being heard, and as a result, Wagner sounds more lyrical and beautiful and less athletic than it often does when performed by lesser humans.
Also, does anyone have a more perfect face for the stage?
Note: This post addresses the opera in general, not only the MET’s recent production, although that is what prompted me to write. This video of the excessively talented Mariusz Kwiecien is just for reference.
I love this opera. Its absolutely top five for me. This music is absolutely the type that seeps into your bones and stays with you for days to come. Here, Tchaikovsky is, somehow, simultaneously the best parts of Wagner and Puccini– driving, anxious and dense while also heart-meltingly lyrical, melodic, and something unnameable which I will just call ‘gooey’. When I saw the MET’s new production on October 5th, it affected me in a way that has taken me the time since then to fully process. The conclusion that I have come to is that I hate and disagree with the standard interpretation of this opera. I really do. I know I have no authority to challenge such a thing, but I’m going to anyway.
I think that Onegin being portrayed as an arrogant Don Juan ruins the whole thing. I think that if at the end, we are proud of Tatiana for growing the hell up and rejecting Onegin, who has finally gotten what he deserves, then the cast has failed. Although this is a perfectly valid interpretation of the libretto, I do not see it as a reasonable interpretation of the music. Here is my proposal for what I believe would make for a much more interesting and profound production of some of the most beautiful music ever written:
Tatiana and Onegin are actually very alike. They are both very inward and introverted people, and it affects how people perceive them and interact with them. When they meet, they BOTH experience the kind of honest love-at-first-sight that can only happen in opera. What screws this up isn’t the fact that Onegin is older and wiser and kind of a jerk, but the fact that they are both afraid of the exact same thing, but deal with it in different ways. They are both afraid of getting older and finding themselves trapped in a monotonous routine (I believe this is supported by the duet that begins the opera between the two older women in the show, talking about their boring routine and the monotony of old age). The difference between Onegin and Tatiana lies in the fact that they both plan on escaping this trap in opposite ways. Onegin believes he must travel, be worldly, and not settle down in order to avoid this fate. As Tatiana is a woman approaching the age of being married off, this really isn’t an option for her. She believes that if she manages to marry someone she is actually in love with, her future will not become unbearably monotonous, but she might instead be able to enjoy domestic life. I believe that Tatiana is actually the wiser one of the two. She isn’t a little girl experiencing her first crush, she is a woman overwhelmed by some very real feelings. Onegin has the same, equally real feelings, but doesn’t know how to deal with them. Wouldn’t the opera be more interesting if we were really rooting for them, instead of feeling embarrassed for poor Tatiana? I think that if, in the scene where Onegin rejects Tatiana’s letter, he was motivated by fear and self-loathing (he loves her but doesn’t think he is a good enough person to be the kind of person she deserves, or something like that), but still made it clear that he sincerely loved her, it would change the entire opera.
I think that if this happened, then when we got to the end (where ideally Onegin would be sincere and respectful, instead of grabbing all over Tatiana even when she is singing “niet” at the top of her lungs repeatedly [seriously all I want is to like, or at least feel sorry for, Onegin, and this bit makes it completely impossible…]) we would feel a confused an anxiety-inducing combination of wanting them to just kiss already, feeling bad about ourselves for trying to justify adultery, feeling bad for Onegin’s horrible blunders and ridiculously unfortunate timing, and feeling sorry for that nice man we met in the previous scene, who sincerely cares about Tatiana and is obviously the safe choice, but now we really want her to run off with Onegin because we have been waiting for him to come to his senses the entire opera, dammit! That would be infinitely more exciting, and infinitely more appropriate to the driving, pulse-raising music that Tchaikovsky has written here. Instead of feeling like Tatiana had triumphed over the evil Onegin (even though I wouldn’t call the music at this point ‘triumphant’ by any stretch), we would go home with questions about right and wrong, imagining what would have happened if she HAD chosen to run off with Onegin, wondering what the right choice really was for her. Some might say that’s not a satisfying ending, and I would agree, but I believe the best endings are the kind that make you think, the kind that disturb you, not the kind that tie every loose end. If art was always ‘satisfying’ then we would just call it decoration.
Someone let me direct this baby.
Dawn Upshaw possesses the ideal voice for this piece. It is light, free, agile, and really very
simply pretty. Her voice flows along with a very relaxed sort of urgency; she is all forward motion. She sings with an unaffected, unadorned, easy going, plainly human production that is very befitting of the child speaker’s character, and later in the piece is able to pull the most striking tone of sorrow into her voice, fitting the anxiety and confusion spoken of in the middle section of the piece.
Her high range can be stunning- light, fluid, saturated, delicate- but it is not terribly consistent. I thing that she sometimes tries to begin very high notes smaller and quieter that she is actually capable of, and so the beginning of the note ends up coming out straight and breathy, and though she tries to blossom, she has set herself up rather poorly and it just doesn’t work our nearly as well as it could.
Although I wouldn’t say that she is my end all be all favorite Tosca (I’m a sucker for Callas, and Price could never ever seem overrated to me) there are a few things about this performance that really just captivate me. I think she is one of the few singers active today that really uses colors. She understands that parts of this aria require a sorrowful, weeping quality, and though it may not result in the most perfectly balanced and agreeable sound (it is still very beautiful, but objectively it is a little too narrow and loses a bit of its warmth, but it gets the point across, and we have the entire rest of the opera to hear her perfect, balanced, consistent singing, anyway) but it makes the aria that much more human, and the audience is able to really understand what she is feeling. This is evident at 2:00 until about 2:15.
I also love that she colors other parts of the aria with a nostalgic sort of hope, letting us see a bit of the happy future she had planned for herself that is now majorly in jeopardy. At 1:09 we see her unfold herself a bit off the couch and look up (this goes perfectly with the music, she has done a really lovely job of putting a spotlight on Puccini’s most genius moments) and her voice takes on a happy, bright, sighing quality and though she doesn’t exactly smile, she looks so in love with whatever she is envisioning. It makes us want a happy ending so badly! Seeing a glimpse of the happiness she has lost makes the end of the opera that much more heartbreaking.
I love the way she takes her cues from the music, and the way her voice, face, and body are all equally involved in her acting.
Beautiful, natural, honest, organic. Everything I want to hear from a Tosca!
Opera Organic 