THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 27, 1997 TAG: 9701250057
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CRAIG SHAPIRO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 154 lines
WHAT BECOMES an icon most? That really doesn't concern director Lillian Garrett-Groag. Her ``Julius Caesar,'' the first Baroque opera produced by Virginia Opera, is not designed to humanize the great Roman emperor.
Caesar was larger than life, a legend. So was Cleopatra. To play history's most intriguing lovers as anything less would deflate the story. Worse, it would betray the intentions of composer George Frideric Handel.
``It's very difficult to get a performer to play unsympathetically. We want to be liked up there,'' said Garrett-Groag, an accomplished stage actress. ``There's been an epidemic of niceness, and I think it comes from television.
``We all want to be cozy and adorable, and these people are so enormous, and they're involved in such great doings, that to tame them, to domesticate them, would be like bringing a tiger into your house and wanting him to behave like a pussycat.
``If you do that, you have something quite uninteresting and rather ludicrous on stage.''
Baroque operas - ``Caesar'' was first produced Feb. 20, 1724, at the King's Theatre in London - never bothered with the mundane trials of everyday people. ``Naturalism,'' what the Italians call verismo, didn't develop until the 19th century.
Consider Puccini's ``La boheme'' (1896). In the opening scene, Rodolpho and his roommates are shivering in their tiny apartment. When Rodolpho touches Mimi's hand, he is startled because it is so cold. Thus begins the tender aria, ``Che gelida manina.''
In the opening scene of ``Julius Caesar,'' which begins its run Friday, the hero enters at the head of an invading army and, within minutes, is presented with the ``spoils,'' something so violent and grotesque it sets the tone for the entire evening. Egypt and Rome are scarred by civil war. There is a beheading, attempted rape and multiple murders. Cleopatra is chained and thrown into a dungeon.
Caesar, shiver?
Garrett-Groag, who directed last season's ``Die Fledermaus'' and ``The Flying Dutchman'' (the company's first Wagnerian opera), told her principals at their first rehearsal that the audience should realize right away that this is a ``crisis situation.''
``The difficulty in producing material like this,'' she said, ``is how do you make such formal presentational material appealing to an audience and accessible to an audience - and make sure at the same time that there's some dramatic thrust through it.
``This opera is about the occupation of a country. It's about two civil wars, the total destruction of everyone else and the setting up of a puppet monarch under the aegis of Rome. There are certainly points of contact.''
But they aren't necessarily what gives ``Julius Caesar'' its dramatic thrust, she added. That comes from distance. Contemporary audiences are seeing the opera, with all its uninformed prejudices about the mysterious ``East,'' as Handel and his librettist, Nicola Francesco Haym, presented it to their audiences more than 2 1/2 centuries ago.
There is also the timing of ``Julius Caesar.'' By the end of the 18th century, history would record the American and French revolutions and the fall of South America. Garrett-Groag, a native of Argentina, feels certain that Handel and Haym were making a comment.
``Whenever they went into pre-Christian subjects, they had something in mind. Usually, it was political criticism,'' she said. ``So I cannot believe that they did not have in mind some very acerbic comments . . . about power. Pre-Christian times were safe ground for them. `We're not talking about the king. We're talking about these pagans.'
``We can never forget that we are looking at the piece with 20th century eyes. I get very cranky when reviewers knock down a performance because it is updated or has a modern point of view. It has to have modern point of view.
``This is who we are, and if it does not apply to us right here, right now, it shouldn't be produced.''
In no way does that mean ``Julius Caesar'' will be wrapped up neatly. Three weeks ago, at that first rehearsal, Garrett-Groag talked at length about the motivation of the characters, particularly Cleopatra's feelings for Caesar.
Was she using him, or did she come to love him? The director couldn't say then, and hasn't reached any conclusions now. She hopes audiences leave the Harrison Opera House asking the same thing.
``I think every good piece of work - theater, books, anything - presents great questions and does not try to answer them,'' she said. ``The moment you have an answer there is didacticism and you usually have a lesser piece of work.
``I want the audience to be as befuddled as Caesar is. I want the audience to see her through Caesar's eyes. The stakes are too high for it to be just puppy love.''
Julius Caesar,'' demands, as do all Baroque operas, what Garrett-Groag describes as ``a certain presentational habit of performance.''
That doesn't mean the cast is planted stiffly on stage while someone belts out an aria, even though Baroque arias differ in form and function from those in more familiar works.
``You do have a kind of formal design in terms of the arias,'' said general director Peter Mark, ``but you also have something our audiences will be familiar with if they know Bach and Handel. I like to think of `Julius Caesar' as the `Messiah' with sex and violence and full scenery and costumes.
``The music is serene and graceful in an extraordinary way. Here, Handel has applied himself to the drama and excitement of opera with full stagecraft and confrontational music. So it's particularly thrilling.''
Recitative is used to propel the story, but it stops cold while the character's emotional reaction is plumbed in the aria. That is done in two parts; the first verbatim, as put down by the composer, and the second in which the singer ornaments, much like a jazz vocalist improvises, with trills, scales and runs.
While designed to show off the voice, ``ornamentation'' developed in part because of the circumstances under which opera was presented in the 1700s.
House lights were never dimmed. (That didn't happen until Wagner came along.) Members of the audience, some seated in loges on stage, played cards and conversed constantly, stopping only for the big numbers by the big-name singers. Repetition became a necessity.
About those big-name singers. The stars of the 18th century were castrati, men who had been surgically castrated in their youth, and they were more popular than today's Three Tenors combined.
``He was the Madonna of the day,'' Mark said. ``He was not only the heroic, barrel-chested male, he was the romantic idol. People associated the sound of that penetrating upper range and the power of the man with the most heroic and virile sound you can have.''
Mark laughed and said, ``Virginia Opera has asked me to do a lot over the years, but I didn't think I could get away with this kind of surgery for the authenticity of the performance.''
Undoubtedly. Instead, ``Julius Caesar'' features three countertenors in leading roles, including that of Caesar. ``They are as contrasting in sound as a Wagnerian soprano and a lyric soprano would be,'' Mark said.
David Sabella, a 1995 winner of the Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition, is taking a leave from the hit Broadway revival of ``Chicago'' to make his local debut in the title role. Sujung Kim, who made her American opera debut in Norfolk last season as Gilda in ``Rigoletto,'' and starred in this season's opening production of ``Lucia di Lammermoor,'' sings Cleopatra.
Casting countertenors, who could most closely approximate the sound of the castrato, followed a renewed interest in Baroque operas that began in the 1950s and '60s. Until the 1970s, women, among them Janet Baker and Marilyn Horne, were cast in the male roles.
How will countertenors play in Norfolk?
Mark is confident that opera audiences, cultivated for 22 seasons now, are open to new experiences.
``The reason we go back and reread the Constitution and Declaration of Independence,'' he said, ``is not only to identify with the content, which could be put into our modern vernacular, but to understand the elegance of the style of a period that was lost in the way people related to one another.
``I think one of the most informative and enduring things about the arts is it forces us to come to terms with some of the assumptions we have that we think are universal. Situations are universal and our feelings are universal, but the actual manners and mores of a civilization, and what they accept as inviolable . . . I don't think that's hard for people to understand and may be a very interesting thing to experience firsthand.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
The Virginian-Pilot
David Sabella and Sujung Kim portray famed lovers Caesar and
Cleopatra in the Virginia Opera staging of "Juliua Caesat." The
opera opens Friday at the Harrision Opera House.
General director Peter Mark and director Lilliam Garrett-Groag on
the set of "Caesar."