Opera III

THE INTEGRATION OF THE ARTS

on designing sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago’s upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

Serlio's Tragic Stage

The stage buildings for it [Tragedy] should be those of characters of high rank, because disastrous love affairs, unforeseen events and violent and gruesome deaths (as far as one reads in ancient tragedies, not to mention modern ones) always occur in the houses of noblemen, Dukes, great Princes or even Kings. Therefore (as I said) in scenery of this sort there should only be buildings that have a certain nobility,…

Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Volume I, Books I-V, trans. V. Hart and P. Hicks, Yale, 1996, Book II, p.88

Opera was the ne plus ultra of the Baroque integration of the arts, and the development of opera sets across the seventeenth century was closely linked to developments in architecture and painting. While architects designed sets based on sixteenth-century techniques of perspective, they were also developing real spaces that deployed the illusionism of the theater; ancient versions of these perspectival sets had been described briefly in the Roman architect Vitruvius’ treatise, and were later codified graphically in Sebastiano Serlio’s Renaissance treatise. For Serlio each set—Tragic, Comic, or Satiric—represented the essential character of each type of drama. Tying words to images had been Roman as well: Horace had aphorized ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry), which painters used to lay claim to the status of poets in paint. This fluid relationship between words and images was paralleled by the contemporary concern for integrating words and music; if the vox humana was the paradigm of instrumental music, words were made more meaningful and affective by being set to music. So poets painted in words, and music was the expressive vehicle for conveying as much the sense as the beauty of the words. As music reached new heights of expressive potential it became natural to think of it as even the primary conveyor of meaning:

I have been more sensibly, fervently, and zealously captivated, and drawn into divine raptures and contemplations, by those unexpressible rhetorical, uncontroulable perswasions, and instructions of musick’s divine language, than ever yet I have been, by the best verbal rhetorick.

–Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument, London, 1676, p.118 cited in H. James Jensen, The Muses’ Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976p.69-70

The idea that images could metaphorically convey the worlds of words and ideas made the visual arts poetic and rhetorical. Seventeenth-century paintings, rooted in this Renaissance outlook, were illusionistic, affecting, and narrative; the great debate of the period was only on whether painting was more like epic poetry (big gestures, lots of figures) or tragedy (focused action and fewer figures). Charpentier’s sojourn in Rome and Italy no doubt made him alive to this articulate visual word.

Charles Le Brun's Expressions

The seventeenth century set great store by the power of images to convey specific messages; character could be read in the gestures of a hand and the expressions of a face; Louis XIV’s Director of the Arts, Charles Le Brun, had in fact provided artists a catalogue of characteristic expressions. The settings of paintings and operas themselves were understood to be articulate, structuring and informing the painted or performed plot; Charpentier would have been too late in Rome to know Poussin (he died in 1665), but that artist’s calculated landscapes influenced his compatriot and Poussin’s brother-in–law Gaspard Dughet, whose frescoed landscapes find echoes here; the influential Salvator Rosa also has something to do with the rocky underworld. But since imagery was also static, it had to convey multiple moments in the story—hinting at what came before and what was to come after. For us then each set, although distinct in character, also links to the other, bridging the disparate worlds of the drama’s two acts—hopefully not unlike Charpentier’s articulate music.

Detail of the Underworld Set, Orphèe

PS: Pastiche: Good thing or bad thing?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/9032518/The-Enchanted-Island-Metropolitan-Opera-Live-in-HD-review.html

Opera II

on designing sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago’s upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

 If the classical visual artist sometimes feels out of step with the world, it’s good to remember the world is complex, and there are many strands of Beauty being woven while the thread is being unraveled elsewhere. Craig Trompeter, Ellen Hargis and the rest of the Haymarket Opera company are proof of the talent and energy in the Early Music world, and their wonderfully counter-cultural project of staging Baroque operas in Chicago has afforded me the privilege of providing the sets—something, it is worth remembering, architects and artists once did as a matter of course, but do so rarely today.

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We know Piranesi as a printmaker, but he signed many of his prints Architetto (or Architetto Veneziano, or Venetus Architectus), and his earliest perspectival compositions may have been made for the stage; one wonders about the plays or operas he had in mind for his Carceri, or Prisons. The architect who transformed Torino in the eighteenth century, Filippo Juvarra, spent his first years in Rome after winning the Accademia di San Luca’s Concorso Clementino designing the theater and stage sets for Cardinal Ottoboni (patron also of Handel, Scarlatti, Corelli, Vivaldi and Caldara). Louis-Jean Desprez was an architect and painter who designed many spectacular sets for Sweden’s Drottningholm Theater (if he was little rewarded for it in the end). The painter of ruins Hubert Robert also designed gardens inspired by his paintings, but it is less well known that he designed the interiors of a theater at Versailles.

In the seicento the English diarist John Evelyn wrote of Bernini that he “gave a public opera wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre." It is often said that Pietro da Cortona’s figures borrow poses from the stage, but it is just as true that performers of the time borrowed expressions and gestures from paintings and sculptures; Cortona, not coincidentally, designed the entry to the theater at the Palazzo Barberini. The fourth great seicento Roman architect, Carlo Rainaldi, was also a very accomplished musical composer in the spirit of Carissimi.

Why this excursus down Mnemosyne lane? Because in a time when there is precious little art left in architecture, a well-rounded architect can, as architect/artists once did, find challenging, rewarding things to do outside of mainstream practice. If the modern classical architect might be inclined to make everything—table, coffee pot, spoon—look like a miniature building, his or her Renaissance and Baroque predecessor (who was likely a painter or sculptor as well) was versatile enough (grazie a disegno) to invent solutions to disparate things according to their natures. Sebastiano Serlio’s architectonic Tragic and Comic Stages were accompanied by the oft-forgotten woodland Satyric Stage; Serlio, it should be remembered, trained under the painter/architect Peruzzi. It should also be noted that architects in the past, vis-à-vis their modern counterparts, actually designed relatively few buildings, although these were often more time-consuming, and vastly more substantial, than the modern building enterprise today. They spent the rest of their time engaged in a host of cultural activities, for which Evelyn’s Bernini is the paradigm. As for painters, maybe nowhere else today is the pastoral landscape, or perspectival colonnade, or Salvator Rosa-esque grotto as acceptable as on the stage.

Is this artist/architect ideal a reasonable expectation, or even aspiration, today? The answer might be, will there be any culture left without it? Competent buildings, despite their recent dearth, are still fairly easy to accomplish. Great buildings, instead, are rarer breeds, and an artist/architect who dreams of great things in a mediocre age must perforce direct her or his energies to accomplishing something of greatness, even if it can’t be bricks and mortar. That work might remain on paper, but it might also manifest itself in ephemera, or on canvas, or in models. And on the stage.

Opera I

Emulating Artists’ Lives

Emulation isn’t just about style or maniera, but also about looking to artists of the past for the kinds of things they engaged in, emulating their careers as much as their art, learning from how they juggled and interwove disparate disciplines. Disegno—meaning both drawing and design—was the thing that allowed painters to become architects, architects to design figurative buildings, and everyone to collaborate in that greatest of all collaborative exercises: opera.

As I’ve said previously, there is seemingly little space for real classicism in the visual arts today; but in the Early Music world there are legions of wonderfully accomplished performers and impresarios who are making beautiful music live again. I’m thrilled to be working with some of those people, the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago, on designing sets for their upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

As we develop the sets I'll say more about periaktoi, illusion, and narrative scenography.....