Le Grand Macabre tightly weaves together everything from the lush harmonies of Wagner and Strauss to the dissonant, floating lines that recall his earliest influence, Bela Bartok, to a post-modern panoply of noises ranging from tuned car horns to the beeps of 1980s-era video games.
Introducing Gyorgy Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre to New York was meant to be the jewel in the crown of the first season programmed by Alan Gilbert, who became the Philharmonic's new artistic director this past September. When his appointment was announced by the orchestra, it was immediately clear that the conductor would continue to champion new music and contemporary composers, an intention signaled by his appointment of Magnus Lindberg as composer-in-residence and the establishment of a successful new-music series called "Contact!" Ligeti, who was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania and later became an Austrian citizen, was no stranger to the far-out; it's no accident that it was his music that was incorporated not just most famously in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. Le Grand Macabre is a mad, feverish phantasm of an opera. It's an absurdist work long on satire and ribald humor; its score tightly weaves together everything from the lush harmonies of Wagner and Strauss to the dissonant, floating lines that recall his earliest influence, Bela Bartok, to a post-modern panoply of noises ranging from tuned car horns to the beeps of 1980s-era video games.
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Ligeti and Michael Meschke co-wrote the original libretto in German, with the intention that the text be translated into the primary language of the audience at hand (so, therefore, the premiere was given in Swedish). Here, the racy libretto was sung in English, without supertitles; unfortunately, much of the meaning flew by incomprehensibly, given the density of the score and Avery Fisher's still poor acoustics. However, the outre costumes by Catherine Zuber and the other, richly layered visual elements of puppetry and video projection, designed and directed by Doug Fitch, made the meaning clear enough in an endearing mix of comedy, darkness, and a strange but vivid beauty. |
What has taken so long for the US to come to this work? First premiered in Stockholm in 1978 (with substantial revisions made in 1996 before its premiere at the Salzburg Festival), the only previous staged American performances were at the San Francisco Opera in 2004. As Gilbert himself has pointed out, this opera has easily become one of the most popular new operas of the past sixty years in Europe--why has the US shied away from it?
Of course, one of the biggest questions surrounding this performance was whether or not a modern opera could attract a New York audience, given the New York Philharmonic subscribers' general and well-documented conservatism. (Indeed, the orchestra acknowledged that subscription sales accounted for only about a third of their recipts for the three performances.) Ultimately, however, Le Grand Macabre attracted sell-out crowds for all three nights, bringing to Avery Fisher Hall an audience that easily ranged from a great number of hipsters in their late teens and early twenties up through a more seasoned crowd. It was nothing short of a coup for Gilbert, and the thunderous applause that greeted him at the opera's conclusion confirmed that New York is, at last, ready for him.
Photos by Chris Lee
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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