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.