Across most of its four-hundred-year history, opera has been predominantly an urban pursuit. It flourished in Italian cities—Florence, Mantua, Venice, Naples—then was exported to the rest of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and on to much of the world since. If the tech-potentates of the present age unexpectedly develop a taste for sung drama, it might even find footing on Mars.
While the great opera houses were established in urban centers, musically inclined monarchs also built their own theaters away from the hustle and bustle of their capitals: at Versailles, then far from Paris; at Caserta, a pleasant remove from Naples; in Potsdam, the better part of a day’s carriage ride from Berlin.
Across the 20th century, opera open to the paying public came to estates like Glyndebourne and Garsington set in the English countryside. Picnicking during the intermission on the spreading lawns of a stately mansion can elevate even the crassest arriviste to cultivated aristocrat, at least for an afternoon.
To remain viable, bucolically sited theaters demand that the distance between town and country shrink. The rural operatic retreat should, depending on traffic, be reachable within an hour or four by horseless carriage.
The Glimmerglass Festival takes place each summer in an opera house at the upper end of Otsego Lake in central New York State. It is twenty miles north of Cooperstown (home to the Baseball Hall of Fame) and, in light traffic, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan. The company just marked its 50th anniversary with a gala weekend of three operas (The Rake’s Progress; Tosca; The House on Mango Street) and a musical (Sunday in the Park with George).
A dozen years after Glimmerglass Opera got its start in the Cooperstown High School in 1975, it built its current theater up the lake. Except for the wood of the portico that offered outdoor protection from a spectacular downpour that let loose just as the intermission began during Tosca on Sunday afternoon, the building’s cladding is metal, its construction and beige color cleverly simulating the weathered board-and-batten barns of the area’s agrarian architectural past. The towering fly loft that houses the scenery flats could as well be a hayloft rising from a series of peaked metal roofs and crowned by a venting cupola that alludes to those same classic barns. Yet the auditorium, which seats about 900, feels like an intimate space that was indeed designed carefully for opera.
The terrace in front of the theater gives way to a lawn that slopes down to a pond over which willows happily weep. These grounds evoke both English landscape parks of the 18th century and the Otsego pastureland that the acreage once was.
Launched half a century ago, the seemingly quixotic initiative of mounting operas Upstate has proven expansively enduring. The current Glimmerglass Festival Artistic & General Director is a polymath Brit named Robert Ainsley who’s not only a dynamic and devoted impresario, but also a gifted keyboardist and conductor. Ainsley took rightful pride in announcing before each of the weekend’s performances that the fiftieth anniversary capital campaign had surpassed its initial goal of five million dollars and is now approaching the new mark of $7,500,000. Whether done in town or out of it, opera is not cheap.
To get to the post-pastoral Glimmerglass opera house (the west side of Lake Otsego has more golf courses than working farms), we did not drive north from New York City, like many had for the operatic weekend, nor from Albany on the Hudson River an hour to the east.
We came from Ithaca two hours to the west, in the geographic center of the state. We took country roads for the entire two-and-a-half-hour journey, passing not a single big box store nor even a McDonalds. No distribution, fulfillment or data centers marred the landscape. Unlike the well-funded and durably constructed Alice Busch Theater at Glimmerglass, we passed by many wooden barns that had collapsed, their silos now abandoned to stand lone sentry as the vines encircle them. Woodlands have reclaimed the fields, but for a few large dairies supplying milk to Ciobani Greek Yogurt whose headquarters are still in Norwich, an hour west of Glimmerglass, but soon to move from this Upstate city of 7,000 down to Manhattan.
On our way to the operatic weekend we crossed just one Interstate (I-81 joining Syracuse and Binghamton) as it slammed through the town of Marathon. On the overpass, I glanced north to see the freeway cut through the Valley of the Tioughnioga and into the lush hills stretching to the horizon. I thought of W. H. Auden’s Et in Arcadia Ego:
I well might think myself
A humanist,
Could I manage not to see
How the autobahn
Thwarts the landscape
In godless Roman arrogance.
Themes of Nature and alienation from it crisscrossed the weekend’s four carefully chosen works, cannily curated by Ainsley and his team to elicit myriad echoes and interconnections between them. Auden, in collaboration with his partner Chester Kallmann, supplied the libretto set by Igor Stravinsky for The Rake’s Progress. Inspired by the series of narrative paintings by William Hogarth of the same name, The Rake’s Progress smartly draws on 18th-century musical forms that resonate with the pictures even while affirming and challenging the modernity of listeners. In the ferment of Stravinsky’s musical imagination these historical elements become active ingredients stirred by his vast technical range and theatrical virtuosity, unique talent for pathos and comedy, and an ingenuity and eloquence enlivened by a penchant for the absurd. The resulting operatic creation is both admiring of the past and unabashedly proud of its present—which sounds to me like another way of saying that The Rake’s Progress is timeless, a classic in any epoch. The Glimmerglass production was as fresh and cutting, entertaining and uplifting, cynical and morally astute as it must have been under the baton of Stravinsky himself at its premiere in 1951 in Venice, that urban island crucible of opera.
The sung story follows young Tom Rakewell, played at Glimmerglass by the vocally and physically fit Adrian Kramer, who engaged the role with precision and panache across a broad dramatic arc leading from guilelessly gung-ho to melancholy and madness. We first meet Tom dressed in casual tennis club whites, temporally transplanted from the country estate of the original libretto to an artist’s studio where he paints big abstract canvases. These directorial and design decisions of Eric Sean Fogel’s staging drew on the animating energy of art to move us across time and space and through changing states of mind and emotion.
Lured to the debauched city by the Mephistophelian pleasure broker Nick Shadow, sung with diabolical suavity by the Ukrainian-born American baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, Tom leaves behind not only the countryside but its romantic embodiment—his betrothed, Ann Trulove. Lydia Grindatto sang the part of the long-(but-not-forever)-suffering woman with a forthright purity that refused to lapse into passivity. Instead, she proved herself a renewable source of empowerment that in turn generated rapturous applause from the sold-out theater. That reception came after her high C that was the last note sung in Act II, yet the ovation seemed as much if not more for the moving fragility of her preceding Cabaletta, its steadfast major contours and expectant octave leaps darkened fleetingly by portentous minor shadows, as at the end of that number’s opening phrase: “… Love cannot falter, cannot desert.”
But Tom has deserted Ann for the city’s degenerate charms. But he soon sickens of London’s numbing, salacious sameness. At the start of the second of the opera’s three acts he asks himself in sharp-edged F-sharp Major, insolent and unforgiving, “Is it for this I left the country?” Having forsaken the true love of Trulove, Tom beds and weds, at Shadow’s urging, Baba the Turk, a Bearded Lady circus performer who attracts princely patrons and collects admirers and objets d’art as unlikely and alluring as she is. Through curly black bristles, Deborah Nansteel sang Baba’s music with nonchalant superiority, then an unexpected tenderness, and, finally, a mocking comic verve with which she warned the ladies that “all men are mad.”
When, in the third act, the infernal bill comes due from Shadow, Tom prays to be taken back by Ann and be allowed to return to the upscale rustic life he had so foolishly left behind. The walls of the Glimmerglass theater can be rolled open to let the afternoon light in through scrim-like screens. These panels had just closed out the landscape and light when Tom, facing his imminent doom, sang “O let the wild hills cover me” in undulating G-major arpeggios echoed by the pastoral flutes and bleating clarinets that so often evoke the rural idyll in this devastating, delightful opera.
The Rake’s Progress is about the selling of a soul, but also the depredations of capital that are driven by the same godless arrogance decried by Auden in Et in Arcadia Ego. Before Tom asks to be buried by the greening countryside, the opera stages an Art sale presided over by Sellem the Auctioneer. That part was handled with a harrowing, yet hilarious mix of professionalism and effrontery by tenor Kellan Dunlap. The man with the gavel pontificates on the “balance in nature,” then brings his greedy hammer down on a figurine of a Great Auk, once the most populous bird of the North Atlantic hunted ruthlessly to extinction a century before Auden and Kallmann wrote their libretto. Stage Director Fogel did at least double duty, acting also as the production’s choreographer for the fabulous bacchanales of tuxedoed, garter-belted libertines, antic marches of jaded auction-feverers, and blithe choruses of “Roaring Boys and Whores.” Fogel even got the long-gone seabird to glide through space on the video projection above and behind the human folly on stage.
In the ironical undoing of the Stravinsky/Auden melodrama in the opera’s finale, the Garden of Eden gets a shout-out not long after one for the Elysian Fields. Does Nature endure to redeem its human despoilers and self-mutilators, or are all these musico-poetic paeans and games nothing more than theatrical conceits, vapid entertainments and distractions? Stravinsky’s archly irreverent closing chorus, with its final peal of laughing orchestral scales, suggests to me that flippancy is an essential weapon in confronting what is and will be lost.
At dinner after the Saturday afternoon show, Joseph Colaneri, who had just conducted the performance and who has been the Glimmerglass music director since 2013, told me that The Rake’s Progress was among his five favorite operas. Colaneri had shepherded the Glimmerglass orchestra in the pit and the robust cast of singers on the stage through the devilishly demanding musical topography of Stravinsky’s score with virtuosic precision, winning enthusiasm, and commanding expertise. Enjoying the freedom won through his comprehensive knowledge of the music, Colaneri seemed to be discovering each scene and sonority anew, thrilled as he went.
After dinner we strolled back to the theater from the pavilion, a smaller but no less barn-like outbuilding, for Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. This musical from 1984 confronts the artistic and personal demands of Art—of depicting nature as well as people, even when they are trussed up in 19th-century stays and corsets, bustles, collars and cuffs. With minimal means, Director Ethan Heard and Set Designer John Conklin conjured the island in the River Seine of Georges Seurat’s most famous painting with a raked rectangle of variegated green. When depicting Seurat’s emerging visual style, Sondheim’s music becomes pointillistic, as when, early on, an electric harpsichord dabs at repeated eighth notes which are then complemented by different hues from the piano, winds, percussion. Above them on stage Seurat intermittently adds two-note melodic brush strokes with his voice: “More red … more blue …”
As the painter, John Riddle got his voice to project an obsessive, workaholic worry banished only occasionally by bright lines of soaring melody that might have been anticipating the deferred redemption of Art. Back in his studio, represented by that same rectangular patch of stage, Seurat works on his magnum opus, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Brush in hand, he looks through the empty frame directly at the audience, which regards him from the back of the painting. The movements of Seurat’s body and voice invite us to imagine what the artist sees in his mind and then commits to the invisible canvas.
The musical’s first act takes place at the close of the 19th century and near the end of Seurat’s short life. His mother (a wonderfully crotchety Luretta Bybee) complains of a tree now missing tree from the park and of the new factories rising beyond the opposite bank of the river, a prelude to the crescendo of urbanizing transformation to come. The second act then transports us forwards a century and across the Atlantic to America, where we meet Seurat’s great-grandson (also sung by Riddle, the beard now downsized to a suspect moustache just as the S was shaved off the chin of his character’s name). American George is a one-trick installation artist. Fearful of failure, he churns out his trademark Chromolumes. These are hokey constructions of synesthetic color and light—electrified, industrialized, de-natured. Instead of painting en plein air, this George gladhands in air-conditioned art galleries suffused with the strains of smarmy cocktail piano, beset by buyers, critics and self-doubt. When George visits the island where his now-illustrious forbear had pursued his painterly vision, the sylvan scenery behind has become a mass of high-rises. Only a skeletal snag remains, perhaps the ghost of the tree whose disappearance was lamented by Seurat’s mother a century before. To one side of the green patch now paved over, its trunk dangled as if from invisible gallows.
The weekend had begun in a similarly blighted, yet vivid urban landscape with the world premiere of The House on Mango Street, its tapestry of stories drawn from the best-selling novel (also of 1984) by Sandra Cisneros. She co-wrote the libretto along with the stylistically agile and engaging composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel. As teenage novelist-in the-making Esperanza, Mikaela Bennett sang with both a youthful sincerity and a wisdom beyond her character’s years. As her name suggest, Esperanza hopes to escape the suffocatingly close quarters of her neighborhood. “I don’t ever want to come from here,” she admits, even as she takes it all in, notes it all down. Bermel’s music ranges resourcefully and successfully across styles, many of them born elsewhere, especially the Mexican-American borderlands, though the multicultural soundscape is imbued with texture and color by Gospel elements, Hip Hop, and European Art Music. Amidst the sometimes oppressive constrictions of her surroundings, Esperanza yearns for the green of a lawn, for spaces that can only be found outside the inner city. Art in the form of people-inspired fiction and music becomes both a celebration of place and a virtual escape from it.
The weekend concluded on Sunday afternoon with Puccini’s Tosca, thrilling to the point of terror, beautiful to the brink of otherworldly. Stage director Louisa Proske updated the action from the turn of the 19th century to somewhere in the 20th in the Eternal City turned eternal nightmare. On the wall of Fascist boss Scarpia’s headquarters, a map evokes not Rome’s grandeur but the oppressor’s regime of surveillance, control, incarceration, and death.
The biggest stars of the weekend came out that stormy, sunny afternoon. Maestro Colaneri was back in the pit and not a beat less commanding than he had been the day before. Greer Grimsley’s Scarpia was clad in a cheerless gray suit over a pressed white shirt pleading to be bloodied. The sexual-predator-and-police-state-murderer-in-chief’s voice searched out menacing shades of darkness that made his character complex and threatening. Grimsley was compelling in every sense of the word—an evil, oppressive, unyielding force. Michelle Bradley’s Tosca was gowned in coruscating gold sequins so resplendent she often donned sunglasses. Her voice shone too, minted from Nature and perfected, paradoxically, by Art.
From amongst the urban hellscape and its unseen torture chambers nearby, Tosca and her lover, Cavaradossi—yet another painter, this one voiced by the luminous, urgent palette of tenor, Yongzhao Yu—plan to meet in a wild thicket beyond a canefield “that winds along through meadows.” That rural refuge from urban terror would never be revisited by the pair. Their tragedy was rendered all the more painful by the performances that proved that is nothing more Natural than the singing voice, even when as artfully trained as those of Bradley, Yu, Grimsley and so many others assembled from around the world for the Glimmerglass summer.
Across rural route 80 from the theater, in the terraced parking lot of gravel rows divided by banks of mown grass, the audience cars peered patiently through their headlight opera glasses at the human action staged before them: the groups in their finery carrying picnic hampers, program booklets, and the occasional parasol-cum-umbrella; the golf carts ferrying those in need of assistance to box office or the pre-concert lecture in the pavilion; the dramatic tempest timed perfectly to treat the automotive audience to a cooling comic intermezzo; Director Ainsley thanking the departing and sending them safely on their way as the sun made its final curtain call.
Our battered Subaru joined vehicles from around the region, Canada and across the United States as they filed out. Some were destined for nearby clapboard cottages or (air)BnBs, lakeside inns or rooms in Cooperstown. Others were starting back to the big city, for the time being, still far away.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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