Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg -- Performance Review The Magic Flute -- Performance Review Steve Jobs -- Film Review
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
San
Francisco Opera Performance
November
27, 2015
You have to be pretty sturdy to sit through this
monstrosity. It started around 6pm and I
did not step back out into the chilly San Francisco night until a shade before
midnight. It wore me out. And it was not just the length, it was the
content. This opera is overkill raised
to several exponents. There is not
enough dramatic content in this opera to sustain interest for six overbearing hours. Probably eighty percent of it could be cut
with no great loss. Someone should try
to do an abridged version of this. It
might sell better.
The idea is very simple and one that I liked. A woman is offered as a prize to the winner
of a singing contest. There is some
intrigue surrounding the judging; there are several rivals competing for the
girl, and there is the issue of how much the girl's vote should count in
determining the winner, as well as rules about how the song should be written
and what its qualities should be. In the
end, the winner turns out to be the girl's first choice and he also happens to
compose the best song. So it is a very
straightforward, uncomplicated plot that resolves in a positive,
uncontroversial ending. You don't need
six hours to play that out.
The idea of offering a woman as a prize in an arts
competition strikes me as being ahead of its time and one that we might
consider incorporating into modern music competitions. I wonder how much it would change outcomes
and whether it might inspire more young guys to take up musical
instruments? I'm not sure forcing the
winning couple to get married is a good idea, but the idea of offering an
attractive girl as a reward for male achievement is something missing from our
culture. Sex is not an officially
sanctioned reward for anything in our
society, and it is a great deprivation to both women and men. When a woman is offered as a prize for
achievement it affirms the woman's value and desirability to men. Having men compete for the woman underlines
this desirability and inspires the men to put forth their best effort. It also opens the door to all sorts of
corruption and rivalry among the men as the opera illustrates, but this could
be mitigated by offering multiple "prizes" and having numerous
winners. The point is that offering sex
as a reward inspires men toward high achievement and elevates the value of
women, both in the eyes of men and in society.
But in modern society we do not do this.
The Islamic State does this, and it is one of the reasons for their
success in attracting young males to fight for them. Our refusal to use sex as a reward system removes
a major motivation and director of male behavior. Meistersinger
illustrates the value of this to men, to women, and to the community.
The other insight to be gleaned from this opera is that
women love to fuck singers. Any rock and
roll star can attest to this. Why they
prefer singers to philosophers I have no idea, but it is undoubtedly true. If you want to get girls, become a popular
singer. Wagner was definitely on to
something way back in the mid-nineteenth century.
The music is a saving grace of this opera. The orchestrations are superb, and if you
like operatic singing -- which I don't -- there is a lot of it, particularly
from male singers. The overture to the
third act is strikingly somber and beautiful.
This opera has a rather provincial quality to it, taking
place in Nürnberg
during a local religious festival.
Religious aspects of the culture are featured right from the very
beginning. The opera opens with a church
service in progress. Hymns are being
sung that promote the Christian faith, and Walther, the lead character, is
waiting in the lobby to meet Eva after the service. Favorable references to Christian practices
and ideas appear throughout the opera, and purging these religious overtones from
the opera would be an improvement and make the opera feel less archaic.
The third act is exceedingly long. It takes place in Hans Sachs living room and
is a series of tedious, mostly abstract, discussions with very little action of
any kind. I was getting sleepy during
the long first scene of the third act.
It was very hard to stay interested in it. Scene Two of the third act was much more
colorful and lively. There is some
elaborate choreography that is interesting, but it also went on too long. I can't imagine who would like this except
people who are real enthusiasts of operatic music, or perhaps German history
and culture. It is very germanic and
very dated, except for the idea of officially sanctioning sex as a prize and a motivator
for male achievement. I don't see much
in it for a contemporary American audience.
This opera was a memorable performance, but for the wrong reasons.
The Magic Flute
San
Francisco Opera Performance
November
17, 2015
This opera is strange.
It is a confused, convoluted pastiche of kitch and nonsense that doesn't
really reach a culmination. It just ends
rather nonchalantly. It is really two
operas. The first act and the second act
are very distinct and have little to do with each other except that they use
the same characters. Other than the
characters, there is not a great deal of continuity in the story line between
the first and the second acts. The
concept of the opera seems to change between acts. The first act opens with Tamino being pursued
by colorful dragons which are slain by three maidens who fall for the young
Tamino. It is never explained who the
dragons are or why they are chasing Tamino.
They simply drop out of the story all together. Nothing is made of the interest the three
maidens show in the young Tamino either.
The three maidens who rescue Tamino are apparently recruiting him for
the Queen of the Night who needs him to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the
clutches of the evil Sarastro. So the
first act seems to be setting up a rescue chase after a damsel in distress being
held against her will in the power of an evil villain, Sarastro.
But the villain turns out to be not so bad. He is the head of a mumbo jumbo cult whose
purpose seems to be to validate masculinity through trial and hardship. He evolves into a fatherly figure who
dispenses wisdom and serves as a model of goodness, as well as a repudiation of
the Queen of the Night. The second act gives
up this rescue quest of the kidnapped damsel all together, seems to renounce
the queen's construction of the situation, namely Sarastro being an evil
villain and Pamina his prisoner, and the opera becomes two parallel quests for
masculine validation. On the one hand
Tamino's charge is to endure various trials that test his character, virtue,
honesty, and self discipline. Sex is
presented as a reward for accomplishment and virtuous character. The other side is masculinity equated with
sensuality, sex, having children, and a rather carefree, immature, irresponsible
spirit represented by Papageno.
Monogamous marriage is idealized, at least on Tamino's side. Papageno seems to favor monogamy with exceptions
that are accepted with good spirit. The
program says this opera is supposed to be ribald and salacious. But there was nothing ribald about this
performance. It was rather
sanitized. It was in English, and I
wondered how much of the original was expunged to make this palatable to a
straight laced American audience. The Queen
of the Night (Albina Shagimuratova) is not regal or nocturnal. She does sing some very difficult arias that
the audience responded to with well deserved enthusiasm. The Magic Flute does not perform any magic
and only plays an incidental role in the opera.
From the libretto we see that the Magic Flute
will confer great power upon
you, to transform the sorrows of mankind; the mourner will become merry, the
bachelor a lover. . . . A flute like this is worth more than gold or
crowns, for by its power will human joy and contentment be increased.
But it does not accomplish this. Perhaps it reflects the fact that Mozart
supposedly did not care much for the flute as a musical instrument. If that is true, it makes sense that it does
not pan out as a transformative force for the sorrows of mankind. This whole opera is not very well thought
out.
The performance by the San Francisco Opera was excellent in
every respect that I could discern.
There was one feature of the staging that I objected to and that was the
way they used color as a backdrop for
every change, every aria, every nuance of the opera was accompanied by a change
in the color scheme on projection screens that formed the set. It created a kind of emotional subtitling of
the entire opera. It was as if they
didn't think we could get it just from the music, just from the dialog, just
from the body language and plot. They wanted
to visually impose on us how we
should regard what we were seeing with the changing colors and patterns on the
screens. I found it oppressive and
annoying. The background should not
upstage the opera. In this case the
background screens, often in bright primary colors and linear patterns that
continually changed and evolved, became so assertive that they competed with
the opera itself. Actually, maybe we didn't even need the
opera. They could have just shown us the
light show on the screens accompanied by the orchestral music. That might have worked better than the opera
and cost less to produce.
All together this opera was not satisfying, but not due to
any failing in the performance, but rather, in its failed vision and
construction. It is just a poor concept
and badly put together. Mozart's
strength was in music composition, rather than dramatic and philosophical conceptualization.
Steve Jobs
Directed
by Danny Boyle
This is an excellent portrayal of an extremely paranoid
personality and the destruction that such a person can cause. It is so much better than the recent film Steve Jobs:
The Man in the Machine, which attempted to elevate Steve Jobs into a
mythological figure of dazzling achievements, which I reviewed here. This film accentuates his character, which was extremely
unattractive and fraught with destructiveness toward those closest to him. Paranoid people are very uncomfortable with
intimacy, tenderness, affection, warmth, and goodwill. They need antagonism, rivalry, and hostility,
and thus every personal relationship becomes converted into one of predominant
animosity despite the best efforts and the goodwill of those involved with such
a person who try to show them genuine love and support. The film captures this very well. One of the most poignant moments of the film
was when his young daughter spontaneously hugged him. Jobs did not hug her back, and later refused
to pay her college tuition. Steve Jobs
could not love and he could not give, but he could make concessions when
pressured. He understood power and
coercion -- that's how computers operate -- and those were the terms under
which you had to deal with him. He
terminated all of the philanthropic programs at Apple. He alienated every person who tried to love
him and engage him on a level of genuine friendship. He simply did not believe in it. It goes back to his upbringing, which the
film did not explore in any great depth, but to its credit, brought up several
times through the character of John Sculley, the CEO who eventually led the
revolt which fired Steve Jobs from Apple.
Steve Jobs was given up for adoption by his birth parents,
and his mother as the film reports "refused to love him" during the
first year of his life. This fateful
misfortune shaped his destiny in his human relations. Children who are not loved in their earliest
encounter with life develop the impression that the world is a hostile place
and that love is a dangerous illusion.
It becomes the foundation of their character and shapes every
relationship they enter into. Think of
J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin,
Kim Jong Un, Mao Tse Dong, Anthony Comstock, James Jesus Angleton, Leo Tolstoy, and many others whose
personalities are organized around a core delusion of being beset by a world
full of enemies, and in response they wreak enormous destruction on those
around them and the world at large. It
begins at birth in these people and it is an formidable deficit to
overcome.
Jobs was a grandiose person who needed the spotlight, who
needed acclaim, who needed subservience in his minions and needed the world to
revolve around him. Anything outside of
his closed world was the enemy. Jobs need for control was paramount, and it is
perfectly understandable that he would gravitate to computers, which are the
ultimate control machines. He carried it
to the extent that Apple products became
a closed proprietary system that were incompatible with anything else in the
computer industry. The machines could
only be opened with specialty tools to prevent people from modifying them and
adapting them to their own needs and desires.
This held Apple back and resulted in some spectacular commercial
failures, and, incidentally, is the reason why I, to this day, have never
bought an Apple product. I knew
instinctively, long ago, that Apple was a police state and I didn't want
anything to do with it. This film
validates that perception, and reveals that
it was much worse and far more thoroughgoing than I ever imagined. Jobs did not like to be dependent on anyone,
emotionally or in any other way, -- very much in the paranoid style -- and this
explains his repeated rebuffs of Steve Wozniak's efforts to get him to publicly
acknowledge the achievements of the team that created the Apple II computer,
which was the company's sole success in its early years.
The film ends in 1998 with the launch of the iMac well
before Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. There is a tentative reconciliation with his
daughter, Lisa, implied. Much has been
undoubtedly left out and there is inevitably significant simplification. However, I think this film captures much of
the truth in Steve Jobs' character and his relations with those closest to
him. It is an effective counterweight to
a lot of the idealizing and sanitizing and myth creation that tends to be
promoted about Jobs in the mainstream media.
This film is a much more worthy presentation of Steve Jobs than anything
else I have seen so far.