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by Barbara Monk Feldman, directed by Christopher Alden

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

October 20, 23, 25, 28, November 5 & 7

Pyramus: “Between vision and my feet – blank gap”

The Canadian Opera Company has just presented the world premiere of Pyramus and Thisbe by Barbara Monk Feldman.  This is an important occasion for many reasons.  First, it is the first Canadian opera the COC has mounted on its main stage since The Golden Ass by Randolph Peters back in 1999.  Second, it is the first world premiere the company has staged at the Four Seasons Centre.  And third, Pyramus and Thisbe is also the first opera by a female Canadian composer that the COC has ever presented.  Monk Feldman’s opera is preceded by two pieces by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) – the “Lamento d’Arianna”, the sole remaining music from the composer’s lost opera Arianna from 1608, and Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, a narrative scena from 1624.  Musically, the evening is extraordinarily beautiful.  Dramatically, Monk Feldman’s nearly static opera is abstract in the extreme and not clarified by the direction.

Paul Steinberg’s set and Terese Wadden’s costumes provide a unified design for the three works.  The set consists of a long, shallow platform and back wall placed off-centre on an absolutely empty stage.  The back wall of the set is painted in large blocks of colour reminiscent of paintings by Mark Rothko.  Most notably, two squares of colour – one square half yellow and half light green and one dark blue-green – are separated by a rectangle of blood red.  The painting thus expresses abstractly the separation of Pyramus and Thisbe by a wall as well as their eventual union in death. 

After the “Lamento” the set glides gradually stage right.  After Combattimento its moves farther stage right.  During Pyramus and Thisbe it continues to glide until less than a third of it is showing behind the proscenium providing a view of the vast emptiness of the stage.  What director Christopher Alden means by this is unclear.  If the passing of the set is meant to signify the passing of time, why does the set not disappear entirely?  

Alden apparently identifies the set with the world and the area in front and around it with the void.  Thus during the “Lamento”, Krisztina Szabó as Arianna is seated near but not on the set as is Owen McCausland, who would take on the role of the narrator Testo in Combattimento.  Only Phillip Addis as the silent Theseus is seated on the set.  Arianna is thus exiled from the world itself while the narrator may speak of the world of Combattimento but is not part of it.  When Addis and Szabó become Tancredi and Clorinda both interacted on the set, and when as Pyramus and Thisbe they committed suicide, they both jump off the set onto the stage, i.e. into the void, where hey lie until they rise again as spirits just before the piece ends. 

For Pyramus and Thisbe the mixed chorus stands or sits on stage in the same dark-coloured 1960s-style outfits as the two main characters.  The title characters are barefoot, but Testo and the chorus initially are not.  During the course of his narrative Alden has Testo take off his shoes to reveal bare feet.  During the course of Monk Feldman’s opera he has the chorus do the same.  Again what exactly this means is unclear.  Are we to think that Testo comes to identify with the vulnerability of Tancredi and Clorinda and that later the chorus does also with Pyramus and Thisbe? 

Szabó’s performance of the “Lamento” is exquisite.  Her voice has even more lustre and richness than usual and her word-pointing is impeccable.  In the context of the other works, Arianna’s fear of being left to be eaten by savage beasts links her forwards to Thisbe.  McCausland is an admirable Testo in Combattimento.  Alden may have encouraged McCausland to go too far in having Testo become so emotionally involved in his own narrative as to become incapacitated, but McCausland’s clear, unwavering tenor is ideal for Monteverdi’s taut sound world.  Addis and Szabó have very little to sing as Tancredi and Clorinda, but display their dramatic skill in miming a tightly choreographed modern battle of the sexes vaguely following the outlines of Testo’s narrative.  For both Monteverdi pieces, Johannes Debus conducts a small section of the orchestra from the harpsichord.

Barbara Monk Feldman was once the student of famed American composer Morton Feldman (1926-87) and married him shortly before he died.  She published Pyramus and Thisbe, her only opera, in 2010.  Her note in the score states: “There is little or no drama: this opera is about the subtlety of the unconscious which substitutes for the wall in Ovid’s original, uniting as it separates the two lovers”.  Not only is there a deliberate lack of drama but Monk Feldman has constructed her libretto of works related only the the most attenuated manner to the story.  The first part uses a portion of William Faulkner’s story “The Long Summer” (1940); the second a portion in English translation from The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross (1542-91); and the third in German from one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (1923).

The opera begins when Pyramus already believes that Thisbe is dead because, in the source text, he has found her scarf covered in blood.  The action then moves backward in time to Thisbe’s confrontation with the lion.  In Monk Feldman, contrary to Ovid, both lovers having confronted death move on to live and love.  Alden’s approach was to present the action as a type of ritual, but with no text as in Combattimento to guide us as to what was occurring, it was completely unclear through the work’s forty minutes what was happening or why. 

There is a scarf – originally Arianna headscarf, then Clorinda’s – but it is not covered in blood.  Pyramus, contrary to Ovid, does not stab himself but rather makes a noose from the scarf and prepares to hang himself before he is stopped by Thisbe.  Monk Feldman thus does not show us Pyramus’ suicide based on the assumption Thisbe is dead, nor Thisbe’s suicide based on finding Pyramus dead.  Indeed, Thisbe and the chorus call out to Pyramus, “Don’t sacrifice yourself, be yourself!”      

Even if one knew the story from Ovid or from the comic play-with-a-play in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there was no way to interpret the meaning of the onstage action.  The first reason is that Monk Feldman has completely changed the story from a tragedy of errors as in Romeo and Juliet to a tale of mutual love as self-actualization.  The second is that the texts she has chosen do not fully communicate either the original story or her re-invention of it.

Monk Feldman’s musical idiom is minimalist rather in the line of Arvo Pärt.  Throughout the work, various instruments sound the notes of a chord in sequence.  Those notes are then passed on to other instruments sustaining the same chord until the chord dies out and another one begins.  The interest lies in the forming and reforming of the chords and their gradual changing of timbres.  The tempo remains slow and unchanging throughout.   

In reality, the opera is primarily a choral work, with the soloists’ lines often blending into one of the notes of the chords forming in the orchestra.  This makes the soloists’ music similar to liturgical chant with most words sung over a range of only one or two notes with little variation in volume.  It is a pity that Addis, unlike Szabó as Arianna or McCausland as Testo, does not have a solo piece.  Then he could have shown off his powerful, dark baritone to greater effect.  Though Monk Feldman labels the work an opera, it likely would be much more successful as a choral concert piece.  Then listeners would be free to associate the sounds and words with whatever they evoke in them, rather than a particular story that Monk Feldman has so drastically reinterpreted.

Monk Feldman’s music itself is imbued with an ethereal beauty and calmness, but it does, as she notes, have “little or no drama.”  Torn between telling the Pyramus and Thisbe story clearly or presenting Monk Feldman’s abstract revision of it clearly, Alden succeeds in doing neither.  Monk Feldman’s notion is that Pyramus and Thisbe continue to live.  Alden depicts them committing a double suicide.  In the end, the strict narrative of Combattimento turns out to be the most emotionally and intellectually involving of the three works since there is at least a link between the music, the words and the onstage action.  The audience greeted the singers especially, Debus and the composer with appreciative applause but remained seated. 

There are Canadian operas that have seen success elsewhere such as John Estacio’s Filumena (2003) and Frobisher (2007) or Victor Davies’ Transit of Venus (2007) that have never been seen in Toronto.  There is also a very large number of Canadian operas that have seen only one production, or none. While it is great that the COC has finally presented the company’s first mainstage Canadian opera in sixteen years, one has to wonder why COC General Director Alexander Neef chose to grant this honour to such a deliberately undramatic work as Pyramus and Thisbe and, running at only 40 minutes without the two Monteverdis, provide such short measure when there are so many underperformed one-act operas that could be paired with it.                               

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.

Photos: (from top) Owen McCausland (in coat), Phillip Addis (on chair) as Pyramus and Krisztina Szabó (in light blue) as Thisbe with the COC Chorus; Phillip Addis as Tancredi and Krisztina Szabó as Clorinda; Krisztina Szabó as Thisbe, Phillip Addis as Pyramus and Owen McCausland with the COC Chorus. ©2015 Michael Cooper.