I unfortunately have little patience for educators/administrators/mentors who take their roles to a maternal (or paternal) extreme, treating students and other younger people on their watch as they would children.  Descriptive copy about the WTOC and my role often includes the “nurture” word, and although it’s strictly true, it makes me a little queasy.  What we do, when we are at our best, is create environments in which people can flourish.  It’s less about tending to them than it is about managing the noise around them.

Nevertheless, the mother in me comes screaming out with every new opera we undertake.  Each one starts from just a glimmer and then rushes headlong from infancy to independence.  And when it takes the stage, completely full-grown and out of my hands, I allow myself probably too much parental pride.  It’s mixed in with full knowledge of the unfinished business, warts, and other imperfections that are always part of art and part of life.  But the pride is born of seeing how far we can go in a short time, and how we can all make an amazing whole that is so much bigger that the sum of our individual parts.

My two first children of summer 2010 couldn’t have been more dissimilar.  And as parents will tell you (and it’s true, but hard to believe), I loved them absolutely equally.

Zaide was the dark, complicated child.  Brooding, intellectual, troubled, but not without hope and humor.  She won the imaginations of many and troubled the hearts of a few.  Her focus was a bit more honed than her brother’s, as her singers were fewer in number (9), and I was far less distracted during her development.  (Isn’t it always that way with the first child?)  She was a rebel, but her intentions were so clear and her motivations so laudable that it was easy to forgive her anything.  I was proud of her unswerving nature and her belief in the universality of love and the power of music.

Turco was the sunny middle child.  Dressed in bright primary colors and always looking for new ways to please.  Full of incredibly endless energy, always with a new silly joke to tell. Far busier than his sister, with 19 singers on his stage, he often left me breathless. He didn’t get as much single-minded devotion, as other demands competed for my attention as he was coming into focus.  But he didn’t seem to mind, taking wings as effortlessly as anyone could imagine.  People sometimes thought he wasn’t serious enough, but I adored how he could take our troubles away every time he was in the room.

The third child has yet to be born, but the due date is upon us, and we’ll learn more about him or her quite soon.  I have a feeling s/he will be a marvelous mixture of the first two.

The analogy may already be tired, but I’ll take it one more step, offering up these images of Zaide and Turco - for no mother worth her salt passes up an opportunity to show off some photos.

Each of our four Zaide audiences chose their own ending to Mozart’s unfinished opera.

By the Numbers

For the statisticians out there, overall voter turnout was 90%.  And of the three available endings, audiences chose:

• ENLIGHTENMENT (simple, happy ending) won twice and received 35% of the total vote over all performances.
• FINALITY (tragic ending) won once and received 34% of the total vote over all performances.
• DISCOVERY (“complicated” ending) won once and received 31% of the total vote over all performances.

Audience Psychology?

It seems that the weekend audiences preferred happy endings with their opera.  The opening night crowd was more adventurous than the others.  And the Tuesday night audience (who fought their way here through a nasty rush hour and sold-out traffic for the Harry Connick show down the road) -well, let’s just say they were a little more bloodthirsty.

The Takeaway

There are many real things here to be learned about audience engagement, but I don’t really know what they all are.  Suffice to say that this little experiment bore far more fruit than we ever expected when we backed into it.

Thanks to all who came along for the ride. with a special shout-out to Club 66 at Wolf Trap, members of which attended the closing night show with young professionals from Washington National Opera’s Generation O.

News of Zaide Goes Global!

Thanks to some great media coverage of Zaide, for which we’re very grateful, word of our production has spread across the globe with reports (so far) coming out of  Sweden, France, and England!

We debate the usual differences of opinion over setting the opera in a time and place outside of the 18th century.  Then I listen to personal and heartfelt responses to the violence that we’ve chosen to embrace in this story.  And I find myself in an unaccustomed and somewhat surprisingly position as I defend and clarify our choice.

I am an unlikely poster child for sanctioning violence in the theatre, for I am as lily-livered as they come.  I can’t watch scary movies, and I am an enthusiastic reader who studiously avoids any literature that graphically describes the horror of war.  Do I cringe every night when I’m thrust into the inhuman environment of this Zaide?  You’d better believe it.

Left to my own devices, I would probably choose an artistic and emotional life that is skewed completely toward beauty.  I don’t easily embrace any art that seeks to amplify and detail the darker aspects of our human condition. Too often I don’t want to be reminded that evil exists.  But when producing an opera with a story that doesn’t flinch when it approaches the subjects of slavery, death, and anger, it felt like a betrayal to soft-pedal the difficult parts.

“Tiger!  Sharpen your claws and rejoice in your stolen prey.
Kill us both and suck the warm blood of innocence.
Rip the heart out of my body and satisfy your rage.” (Zaide)

A reverential approach might limit this opera to colorful harem pants, an escape by ladder, and a Sultan with a  fez.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But it’s tough to reconcile that picture with the vividness of the text, and it’s hard to look deep inside the soul of this intensely personal music of Mozart’s and not take it to heart.

“The proud lion roars with a terrible voice
He throws his shattered chains to the earth in rage.
All who oppose him are destroyed by his deadly beatings…
When someone angers me, I have weapons that demand blood.” (Sultan Soliman)

As we moved toward being brutally honest with the violent content of the story, at the same time we chose not to allow this violence play itself out in the original Middle Eastern setting of the libretto.  The frightening spectre of falling into slavery and imprisonment in the Middle East meant something different in the 18th century than it does today, and there’s no way to raise the stakes without simultaneously raising unrelated political and cultural issues.

So here we are, in the middle of important conversations about the nature of theatre, the vibrancy of opera, and the always-amazing diversity of opinion.  I’m non-confrontational by nature, but these days I embrace raw controversy.  Because the opposite is unquestioning acceptance, and more than anything else, I want people to care.  Disagree if you will, and by all means, tell me about it.

Zaide is the first step in our summer journey.  Its raw emotion will be followed in short order by the laughter embedded in Rossini’s Turk in Italy, then by the shimmering magic of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Thanks for riding along with us.

4 shows, starting tomorrow night.  Sunday 6/13 is sold out, but some tickets are available for tomorrow’s opening night, and for Tuesday 6/15 and Saturday 6/19.

Gallery of dress rehearsal photos coming shortly.

Wolf Trap Lets Audience Choose Ending to Mozart’s Unfinished Opera

The Washington Post previews our new production of Zaide, which opens our 2010 summer season this weekend! Click Here.

“Remember, this is the curse of being alive: Every man has his own pain.  Let us sing, let us laugh, for no one can change this.”

The Serenity Prayer was so much a part of coming of age in the 60’s and 70’s that it now runs the risk of being considered trite.  Fact is, I come back to it again and again, and I wish never to underestimate its power.

The chorus near the beginning of Zaide lasts less than a minute, but it lays bare the “accept the things I cannot change” part of the prayer.  The music Mozart wrote to carry these words is a little perfunctory, rather cheery, in D major, with bouncy articulation and rhythm.  Was he serious, or was the cheeriness of the setting a warning that things are not as they seem?

There’s a naïve hopefulness in this music that is somehow touching.  (It doesn’t help that two phrases from this chorus are identical to the refrain of the Christmas carol “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The latter was written two decades after Mozart died, and I’m sure the resemblance is completely random, but it plays games with my mind.  Argh.)  This tiny musical moment is a kaleidoscope of bravado, irony, hope, determination, and desperation.

I’m usually not hot on the way historians project the situations and emotions from works of art back onto their creators, but it’s really tempting to apply just a little of that approach to this situation.  In spite of the fact that Mozart was an amazing prodigy, and that he put in his requisite 10,000 hours by the time he was in his teens, the adult transition he faced in his early 20’s – right around the time of the composition of Zaide – is achingly familiar.

The young Mozart was wildly successful by many standards.  But he and his gifted-musician-and-mentor father were stuck in what was then a provincial, small-town situation.  He, like many young adults, wanted more, and was being thwarted at every turn.  The Archbishop wouldn’t give his father a leave of absence to travel with his son in a search for a career boost in a larger city.  So the young Mozart set out across Europe with his mother.  All of his attempts in work and love led to failure, and his mother died suddenly while they were in Paris.  At the age of 21 he was forced back home, because the Archbishop said that if he didn’t return, he would also fire his father.

It is against the background of this failed attempt at independence that Mozart wrote Zaide.  Did he echo his own sense of frustration in these two young people?  Is, as some scholars believe, “Gomatz” a near anagram of “Mozart?”  (He actually used “Romatz” to sign some of his letters from this period.)  Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the yearning for freedom that pervades this opera is something that is bred into all of us, and Mozart had the gift to remind us of it.

“Be brave, my heart, and try your luck! Create a better future for yourself. You must not lose heart! Through brave daring, the weak often strike back at the strong.” (Allazim, in Zaide)

Postscript:  Mozart did get out, of course.  Two years later, the Archbishop forced his hand, and the composer took the plunge and quit.

Backstage Buzz: The Zaide Edition

Our summer series of artist panel discussions kicks off Tuesday, June 8 at 1:00 pm.  Hana Park (Zaide), Michael Sumuel (Osmin), Mattie Ullrich (Costume Designer) and James Marvel (Director) sit down to talk about their journey in bringing this compelling Mozart drama to the stage.

Backstage Buzz artist panels are free events at The Center for Education at Wolf Trap, but reservation is required.  Write to ryant@wolftrap.org

Amid the dehumanizing and frightening world of her captivity, Zaide sees Gomatz, and her immediate love for him gives her new hope.  When Gomatz finds her, he is instantly drawn to her, and the two young people find love in the unlikeliest of places.

They enlist the help of a sympathetic and brave overseer, and all three escape.  Unfortunately, they are recaptured and face death upon their return.  Only then is it discovered (and this eventuality is incorporated into some of the ending choices* for our production) that the three are actually family.  Blood relatives.

Although a taboo subject in our culture, incest isn’t exactly unknown in theatre and myth.  Opera has its Siegmund and Sieglinde, and mythology has an endless parade of brothers, sisters, husbands and wives.  Is this plot twist in Zaide too much to take?  Too far-fetched?  Too creepy-crawly?

Mistaken identities and sudden family discoveries are common in opera (think about Mozart’s Figaro learning that Marcellina and Bartolo are his parents) – almost so much that the moment of discovery near the end of Zaide is a dangerous one in the theatre.  Will nervous laughter greet the revelation, no matter how it’s delivered?  Are we really meant to believe that this is possible?  And even if it is, does the 21^st-century American “eww” factor kick in so quickly that we can’t get past it?

I’m hardly qualified to delve into this topic, but I am left with one overriding gut reaction to seeing this story played out again and again in rehearsal.  If Zaide and Gomatz are siblings separated in childhood, is it so surprising that upon seeing one another in captivity, they would make an immediate and palpable connection?  And that as young adults/teenagers, they would immediately translate that connection into romantic love?  Family is a complicated thing, and love is a spectrum.  What these two young people would do with this knowledge if they were to escape from slavery is unknown and somewhat unfathomable.

Mozart stopped writing at the point where this dilemma would’ve been addressed.  We’ll never know if he meant to tackle it or sidestep it.  One of the endings we’ve chosen to offer for Zaide allows the family a brief chance to grapple with it before the curtain falls.  If you take this journey with us and are in the theatre when that ending is chosen, you’ll probably wrestle with it longer than that.

*On June 11, 13, 15 & 19, each Zaide audience will have the chance to choose from among three possible endings for this fascinating but unfinished Mozart opera.

As I’ve learned in these few weeks of studying and preparing Zaide, punishment was once primarily corporal – of the body. Then it became temporal – separating offenders from the rest of the world for longer periods of time depending on the severity of the crime. Then punishment expanded into the psychological.  Our hero Gomatz, as quoted above, feels such desperation that he craves physical punishment in order to silence the terror in his mind.

We’ve just added a “mature content advisory” to our description of Zaide.  It was a complicated decision, for in comparison to the violent images in much of our culture – both in entertainment and in hard news – our performances are not extreme.  But some people come to the opera expected all-gentility-all-the-time, and there are moments in Zaide that are designed to make us uncomfortable.

Art has the ability to comfort, and it’s this attribute that speaks to us most potently.  We turn to music often in our hours of need for solace, calm, and perspective, and that is certainly not wrong.  But we shouldn’t forget that art amplifies and intensifies every aspect of our human experience, and sometimes that means that it opens our eyes to things that challenge us.

There’s a love story at the heart of this opera.  Actually, a few different kinds of love stories.  And the urgency of the deep connections that these characters make to one another can only be understood if we have context.  In this case, that context includes the harsh and sometimes brutal reality of the captivity that is these characters’ lives.  It includes punishment in all its guises, and these performances of Zaide struggle to help us understand how difficult yet essential it is that human affection thrive in such an environment.  Only when we travel with Zaide, Gomatz and Allazim to the soul-crushing reality of their lives do we realize the power and potency of the beauty in the depths of their souls.

We know that Mozart yearned to write a serious German opera at the time he was working on Zaide.  Perhaps one of the reasons he abandoned it is that the new German Singspiel theater aesthetic was tooled for comedy, and the ways in which he’d have to adjust and finish this opera were at odds with the reason he started it.  We’ll never know.  But we’ve chosen to take it at face value and create a theatrical environment that is cold, frightening, and confusing.  So that when the music soars, it takes our breath away to be reminded that beauty can prevail in such a place.