jwilzewske: family

Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Monday, November 21, 2011

Káťa Kabanová’s Admission-against-Interest: Janáček’s Kabanicha as ‘Cyberbully’

T he avant-garde lies surely in the fact that it does not presuppose the spontaneous social order to which Janáček constantly returns us; it is not addressed to a community but to the individual, who experiences through the music the alienation that reigns in his heart... This is a music which was not derived from the community portrayed in it: it was an attempt to create that community as a musical idea. And that, in part, is why it is so inpsiring... [we] hear in this music the working out of an ideal... an ideal of human community.”
— Roger Scruton, quoted in Whittall, p. 37.

O per erzählt vom Untergang einer jungen Frau, die zum einen an ihrer außerehelichen Liebe und der daraus resultierenden Angst vor Höllenstrafe, zum anderen an der Kälte und Heuchelei der Gesellschaft zerbricht.
[Opera about the downfall of a young woman who under duress confesses her extra-marital love affair—her admission due partly to fear of eternal damnation in Hell, and due also to the alienating hypocrisy of family and society.”
— Wiener Staatsoper program notes.

T he Leoš Janáček opera Káťa Kabanová at the Wien Staatsoper is a beautiful, intimate production. Lots of great “chamber-ensemble-within-orchestra” playing: the textures and dramatic timbre changes and “sectional” orchestrations are so varied!

F or a work that was composed in 1919-21, this has a lot of "contemporary" qualities to it. I had not expected it would resemble ‘Intervention’ or other reality television.

T he lead part (Káťa Kabanová, sung by Janice Watson) was compellingly performed, with a most convincing devolution from admission of infidelity to suicidality.

Janice Watson - Katja
Klaus Florian Vogt - Boris
Deborah Polaski - Kabanicha
Marian Talaba - Tichon
Wolfgang Bankl - Dikoj
Gergely Németi - Kudrjas
Stephanie Houtzeel - Varvara
Marcus Pelz - Kuligin
Alisa Kolosova - Glasa
Donna Ellen - Feklusa
N. N. - Eine Frau

T he intimidating, icy-cold Mother-in-Law-from-Hell (Kabanicha, sung by Deborah Polaski) reminded me of nothing so much as the situation several years ago in the real-life suicide of young Megan Meier subsequent to transgenerational cyberbullying by Mrs. Lori Drew. A tremendous amount of her aggression is projected “virtually,” by putting words in her son's mouth, making him say mean and manipulative things, or making it appear that her feelings and thoughts are really his.

L ike so many contemporary online behaviors, the Ostrovsky story on which this opera is based endorses the value of passion as a medium of truth and authentic identity. When that person—that identity—is persistently reproached, rejected, subordinated, and intimidated, a dark, deep depression sets in. Life seems unworth living. Katja feels lonely, helpless, convinced that nothing will ever change.

A nd Kabanicha the mother-in-law, like so many bullies, has profoundly low self-esteem and is even more unhappy than she makes her victims. She is evil, but more depressed and revealing of the meanness that can come from depression than simply evil per se.

T his is not pre-revolutionary Russian nor Soviet-era cynicism, nor even a criticism of the Church and its punitive tendencies in situations of marital infidelity. If anything, this is a straightforward indictment of dysfunctional family and community culture of 20th-Century modernity… evoked by the Art Deco metropolitan sets.

J anáček’s music is so inflected by the rhythm of the Czech language, whether performed in English or German or other languages. I try to keep up simultaneously, alternating between the English and German, on the small LCD text displays attached to the seatbacks in front of us.

I think that in the music and in the text the opera does not try to explain itself but presents a situation which, on the surface, is very simple. The surface is what is primary. The mystery is already on the surface. In the text and music this is allowed to resonate. For me a work is like peeling an onion. You take a layer off, then another layer, then another and so forth, until you get almost nothing... All my work is choreographed, so I can do initial blocking and choreography with stand-ins and it is notated. This makes it much easier for me to teach the choreography to the singers. Western singers for the most part have no training in movement and dance. This way of working makes it easier for me to show the choreography to the singers.” — Robert Wilson, Prague, 2002 production of Káťa Kabanová.

I n the ending after Katja has hurled herself into the river, we hear the mordent/turn theme played by a trumpet. The river is something like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. The opera ends with a majestic and dignified presentation on choir and orchestra thundering out—and then lights out to black. Wonderful symbolism. Beautiful production, set design, and lighting. Superb singing and acting, and gorgeous orchestra.

L eave it to follow from what you are reading now: a different situation from the present one; a pattern of activity from different from the historical and psychological contexts where your reading is done in the Here and Now... Here and Now, the [opportune] place for engaging other impassioned unions and charged connections amongst us. Imagine a future where you connect like this exclusively, with the greatest fortune and unprecedented speed.].” — Wiener Staatsoper screen.

Monday, February 7, 2011

It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

I long with all my heart to return to my quiet home where I was born and have spent happy days in nature. Nature! Where can I find it here? Everything is so artificial...”
— Robert Schumann, letter from Leipzig to his mother in Zwickau, 24-OCT-1828 [Jugendbriefe, 2e., 2 vols., Clara Schumann, ed.].

M any composers have treated the subject of ‘Heimweh’ (German for homesickness)... Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (Op. 50, No. 1); Robert Schumann; Edvard Grieg; Arnold Schoenberg; Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Johann Kalliwoda, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Max Reger, Mischa Spoliansky, Heinrich Proch, many others. Here in this Tencent QQ video we have it in an industrial marketing film. (Unfortunately, I am not yet able to find out who the performers of the soundtrack music in this video are, and I am not certain of the composition either.)

T he video is, I think, a fine example of how indispensable chamber music is for effective, impactful films, especially ones that address matters of family. Meaning is constituted not simply by its semantic content but also by its sonic content. Thirty years ago we had Roland Barthes’s concept of ‘the grain of the voice’. The effect of women’s voices, mothers in particular, was examined by Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones in their book (link below). ‘Purely sonic’ features of the female voice in "the construction of its non-verbal meanings" involve roles played by (1) the person or people producing the sound, (2) the person or people hearing the produced sound and (3) the acoustical and social contexts in which production and hearing occur. The meaning of sound is co-constituted by performative as well as semantic and textual features.

I n the Tencent QQ video, the mother-son intersubjective acoustic space must be—and is—recovered. That is why this video and its supporting sound track work.

I n the aftermath of the notorious Amy Chua book, this is something of an anti-Tiger Mom video, complete with healing chamber music sound track. Reed-in-the-wind mother is mistreated by ambitious, impatient son who departs for U.S., makes good, feels remorse, gets a clue, starts treating mom better, from 20,000 kilometers away. There is not enough time to show whether son’s earlier irritability and maladjustment to parental implacability are in any way justified, nor whether there are any mitigating conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders. There is not enough time to show whether mom’s despair and hovering are related to ongoing chronic depression or other mitigating conditions.

A ll we see of son is the stage of exasperation and fuming resentment, followed by the stage of loneliness and isolation and regret. All we see of mom is stage of despair, sorrow, followed by stage of ecstasy at learning to use instant messaging and restoration of the relationship. Montemayor and Hanson (1985) reported a parent-adolescent child conflict event rate of 2 conflicts per 3 days, an average of 20 events per month, so maybe the video shows what is entirely within the bounds of ‘normal’. Warm, candid, poignant, gently humorous, it’s a story that has plenty of the cozy intimacy of chamber music in industrial ‘promo’ settings/jingles.

T his music amounts to a shamanic ceremony during which the shaman-surrogate commercial sponsor 腾讯 QQ produces this music and images to appease the spirits both within the family depicted in the story and within the broader community—by extension including you and me.

T he first violin makes three rhapsodic statements, each ending with a pause while the inner strings catch up with their parallel entries. The remainder of the track is comprised of pianissimo phrases on three voices, while the fourth voice carries a confessional folk melody (first and second violins, in turn). Cool, how this works...

12年相伴弹指间心无间.”
— 腾讯 QQ.