Notes on a Visit, Part 1

[pameladean]

I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. No, that's not really true. I have a cold. The vacation, which I had right here at home with a visiting Eric as my excuse, was quite fine and relaxing, consisting almost entirely of highlights, except for when the malign conjunction of evil commercial software and the teacher-credential program at SFSU colluded to cause trouble. We even made some lemonade out of that, however. How do you like them mixed metaphors?

I met Eric at the airport on Friday evening. We collected a rental car, having decided that the complexities of negotiating the use of the household Saturn with David and Lydy during a week when David was constantly rushing off to the Post Office to mail delicate stuff that he had sold on eBay, and Lydy was doing job interviews and working for local friends, were more than we wanted to deal with. Then we braved the wilds of St. Paul (all right, downtown) and had dinner at Sakura. As I'd hoped, the downstairs was all full of noisy people, so they put us upstairs where it was quiet, and we had a good conversation catching up on Eric's extremely busy and complicated week. Then we came safely home, said hello to David and Lydy, and got reacquainted.

Saturday was the first day that the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden was open for the season. We didn't expect to see anything actually blooming, and in fact did not. But the day was a glorious early spring day, and the structure of the leafless garden was beautifully revealed. We could not take our usual route, which involves parking in the free lot by Wirth Lake, crossing Glenwood Avenue, and taking the path through the marshy end of the lake, because it was all flooded. We did enjoy seeing the water flowing right across Glenwood Avenue like the seasonal streams that Eric had pointed out to me on California roads. We walked around the swamp instead, hearing some wild high gull-like cries that turned out, according to a combination of observation and checking with Sibley, to have come from a parcel of wood ducks placidly paddling in the marsh.

We came home, got cleaned up, and went to dinner at El Meson with David, Lydy (I suppose that should be dd_b and lydy), mrissa, and markgritter. It was a merry meeting. Then we went along to the gigantic church at Franklin and Nicollet to see the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company do "Princess Ida."

This was said in the publicity we got to be a parody of Tennyson's "The Princess," which I did try to read in the week before the production, but bounced painfully off of. I am haplessly fond of Tennyson and foolishly tolerant of his many faults, but the verse itself just made me want to laugh. In some sense I also bounched off of the performance, though for different reasons. I liked individual bits of it quite a lot, having become fond of the company generally. But from the overture, which struck me as far less varied than most G&S overtures, to the generally static nature of the production ("They should be dancing more," said Lydy, which was in fact correct) to the nasty parody of women's education, the basic nature of it displeased me. I suspect, and in fact really, having seen, for example, "Patience," I know, that G&S would parody any academy or field of study just as ruthlessly if they felt like it, but I couldn't get into the spirit of the thing. The moment when Hildebrand's soldiers came into the women's college and trampled all the books as they passed was quite creepy and horrible, and while that may have been intended, I didn't feel that the production dealt well with the tensions it was invoking. I did like the people performing both Hilarion and Ida quite a lot. Hilarion's mild and sympathetic nature, however, made the overarching theme even worse. He tells Ida near the end that women are too delicate for her intellectual experiments and that she should try the grosser clay of men instead. In a soft romantic pleading voice, with the most affecting expression. *spit* I think perhaps they did the best they could with uneven and basically objectdionable material, but I ended up dissatisfied both with the original material and with the performance of it. The first scene set in the women's academy, however, was, as Eric said, worth all the rest put together.

We had an entertaining discussion of it all in the car on the way home, though.

To be continued.

P.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Princess Ida is easy to bounce off; the Gilbert&Sullivan society at Nottingham put it on with substantial rewrites as something much closer to Ida - Warrior Princess, and I went to a few rehearsals before deciding that these were attitudes music about which I had no wish to sing; it's not a piece that it obviously makes sense to put on at a co-ed university, unless you have a genius-grade rewriter to reverse the direction of the poked fun - and the rewriter at Nottingham was in no way worthy to sharpen William Gilbert's pencils, let alone to mutilate his libretto.

[pameladean]

Yes indeed, I'm glad that this production did not attempt revision. I'm glad to have seen it once, as an interesting historical curiosity; I'm only sorry that I haven't greater confidence that the attitudes it espouses are completely dead. I keep seeing their zombified forms lurching across the American landscape.

P.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Yes, both "The Princess" and "Princess Ida" make me wince for years. However, I think "The Princess" has some beautiful songs in it, set off as such. "Tears, Idle Tears" is from "The Princess".

But the politics? Feh.

[tamago.livejournal.com]

"Princess Ida" is one of the G&S canon that I find needs a delicate touch. I've never seen a mediocre production of "Ida", they're generally atrocious, occasionally sublime. It can be done very well, but it takes a certain dexterity.

I do adore the song "The World is But a Broken Toy" Ida sings with the three men in the last act. It is the most beautiful song about clinical depression I've ever heard.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Well, I have mixed feelings about this one. The criticisms of men made in the women's academy have bite, and the women's only real mistake is trying to beat Hildebrand at unmechanized warfare, which is purely a matter of strength and experience. (The "where will the next generation come from?" bit is best seen as just another absurdly deflationary Gilbert pseudo-logical ending like the endings of Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, and Ruddigore.) Nor do the men all get the better of it at war, either: if Ida's soldiers are afraid, they have reason to be, while her brothers are hypocritical posturing cowards. (The scene where they doff their armor to prepare for battle is my favorite of the opera.)

But I suspect the real reason the opening academy scene was your favorite is because of the stunning musical quality of song after song: the whole middle of the act is justly known as "Sullivan's string of pearls."

[pameladean]

I'd say their main mistake is to completely fail one another, a failure of loyalty and solidarity. Ida even says that women have failed her so she must turn to men. Not that this does her any good, which bolsters your point, but I found those scenes profoundly distasteful, and they seemed somehow larger than their container. I think that the production was attempting somewhat clumsily to point up the meanness of men and war, and didn't realize how bad they were making everybody else look.

I did enjoy the armor-doffing a lot, particularly the moment when they forgot what their greaves were called. That was so goofy that it just tickled me. Not that this makes it novel in the annals of G&S, naturally.

I am lamentably musically ignorant, so I must ask, is the musical quality of the rest of the opera substantially below not just the string of pearls but also that of something like "The Mikado" or "Patience"? I couldn't tell if it was the music or the performers or the direction, but aside from that opening academy bit, something just seemed off.

P.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

All Gilbert characters look bad. He's ruthless to everybody. He was a world-class grouch, who gets away with it because he's also funny and painstakingly (il)logical.

If Ida is disappointed by her soldiers, so are the Fairy Queen by her fairies and Katisha by both Nanki-Poo and Ko-Ko. But the specifically feminist overtones are not as strong as in Princess Ida. What's best is to try to avoid thinking of Gilbert's characters as real people at all. They're just comic puppets who strut the stage for an hour. Empathizing with them is like empathizing with Sylvester or Wile E. Coyote: it makes a tragedy out of what is meant to be farce.

Sullivan's music for Princess Ida is very well-crafted but the bulk of it is less inspired than its predecessor and successor, yes. (Though the "string of pearls" is shamefully neglected, and comes as a surprise to almost everyone who hears it.) But if it sounded "off", that might be the performance. Most G&S companies are amateurs, and this can show.