A very improbable segue: Sushi and Lucio Silla

It's definitely worth your while to check out this series of posts about sushi, though not if you're at all hungry. Noriko Takiguchi told me quite a bit I didn't know. I never had an inkling, for instance, that sushi as we know it began as a sort of fast food:

Soy sauce became available in large quantities only in the Edo era, and people found how delicious it was to eat sashimi with soy sauce. Wasabi also began to be grown around the region in Edo era. And fish was abundant in Tokyo Bay. Yohei put all these elements together to make one-bite snack which was served at a stand. It became quickly popular and many more sushi stands were seen along many streets in Edo.

I'd also never heard that it's considered ideal to dip the fish side in the soy sauce, not the rice. Can't wait to try!

I had rather suspected that rolls are largely an American contribution, even the ones which fall well short of the absurdity of Santa Fe rolls with green chile. That tendency to add more and more ingredients to a dish, in ever stranger combinations, strikes me as very American, seeking always novelty before perfection. We've done it with pizza as well.

These things certainly don't always fall from high to lowbrow, though, in Japan or America. Takiguchi comments on the phenomenon:

However, low or popular culture can creep up to become high culture. Think of kabuki, a traditional Japanese all-male theater which also started in Edo era (17–mid 19 century). The name kabuki comes from a word "kabuku" which describes a state not standing straight up but leaning. People called it so, because kabuki actors were regarded as transients and outside of a normal way of life. It was no high culture. When people went to see a kabuki play, they would eat their box meal during the play, talk with a friend about which actor has what mistress, etc., and yell at the stage if they liked or did not like the acting or the story. So, it was a very noisy atmosphere.

But now, going to see a kabuki play is a formal thing to do in Japanese cultural life. If you are sitting closer to the stage, you would wear something nice, and all the people have to be quiet and appreciate what is going on on the stage.

The same "trading up" applies to sushi, which, after almost two hundred years of time passing, has gained much respect.

As in kabuki, so in opera. Now many opera snobs will probably tell you that the whole art form has fallen to pitiful depths in our time, with space-barbarian costumes and worse things infesting stages, catering to tastes better suited to the Vegas strip. On the surface, maybe they're right. But if we look a little deeper into opera history, we will find that expectations for the genre have come up and up and up over the last couple centuries, and are now almost impossibly high. Lack of understanding of this development largely accounts, I think, for majority of the audience being disappointingly underwhelmed by Lucio Silla last Friday.

Lucio Silla was not written to be highbrow, capital A Art. It was written to make money by entertaining crowds of aristocracy, who could mostly be trusted to be vapid, musically simple and far more fascinated by the intrigues and amours in the seats than by those on the stage. Mozart's Mitridate was first performed in a hall with an adjoining casino. For most of the audience, attending an opera was probably more like going to a football game or playing The Big Lebowski in the background at a party. It was a chance to be social, flirt, yell at lousy tenors, cheer the hottie sopranos. Composers mostly wrote works to accomodate these conditions, attention-grabbing, flashy, easy to grasp in the short term, not requiring close attention in the long term. Singers played the game too, sopranos twittering, male sopranos twittering back, tossing in higher notes or harder runs, even substituting whole arias to draw more attention. Really, it's a marvel that so many great works ever got written in such circumstances.

(If you want to get a good idea what it was like, read Berlioz' Evenings with the Orchestra and hear him lament the philistinism of audiences, the claques dedicated to bolstering some careers while ruining others, the fact that poor tortured romantics were never at peace to enrapture themselves fully. Or watch Farinelli, if you can ignore the filthy-minded plot, and see the excellent reproductions of Baroque performance styles and stage machinery.)

Things really began to change in the 19th Century. Berlioz' writings offered pleas for audiences to take works seriously and open themselves to the transcendence of art. But it was good old Richard Wagner, music's greatest villian, who really started raising standards. Turning off the lights so audiences have nothing to watch but the stage is a Wagnerian innovation. As much as the world demonizes old Richard, everyone now subscribes to his view that high Art is to be viewed in rapt silence, with utmost concentration, the goal being to open one's soul completely to unmediated manipulation and mystical experience.

So I really can't blame the Santa Fe audience. People don't go to operas now for the reasons they once went to Lucio Silla. Three acts of bravura coloratura and surreal stage antics were just not what they thought they signed up for.

At any rate, they better not have been walking out after Act II because of the singers. The cast was awesome! I myself had come with some trepidation, since three acts of coloratura performed by singers unequal to the task would make for a very long evening indeed. But my fears were quite needless. Michael Maniaci, the male soprano (yes, full soprano, right to the top, goatee and all), was bold, confident, delightful to listen to. Susan Graham and Celena Shafer were unceasingly excellent; and Gregory Kunde, the tenor and the lowest voice in the cast, sang with real vigour and focus even through 16-year-old Mozart's nastier passages. The least experienced cast member, Anna Christy, held her own as well, not one bad note, only needing a fuller sense of engagement with her music.

The staging was odd, to be sure, but I don't think I'd have anything better to suggest for such an opera. The costumes were outrageous and quite entertaining, sort of perversions of 18th Century French dress, hoops skirts about seven feet wide on the x-axis for the ladies. The male characters' hoop skirts probably didn't exceed a yard. There were four male dancers, really excellent, with perfect control of their bodies, whose job was to make things surreal, symbolic, and often a little scary with their pantomimes. Some pretty far out props made contributions as well. Though there were some definite misses, there was plenty that worked. Silla (Kunde) stabbed an upholstered chair in his pissed-off aria, which had the good grace to spurt blood in acknowledgement of an emperor's wrath. The empty-headed Celia (Christy) sang a long aria about the impending delights of marriage, as the silent Giunia (Shafer), whose impending marriage was not so delightful, was crushed to the floor by long-stemmed roses plucked from the stage and heaped upon her by the dancers. And Giunia sang her ten-minute show stopper while being forcibly and unpleasantly dressed for involuntary matrimony in the hideous hoop skirt.

Anyway, don't misunderstand me: I'm very glad we've embraced some high standards for our experience of performance art. I quite like sinking into operas and movies in the dark, without excitable boys throwing things at the stage or fighting duels in the back. But it's a delight that sushi can be a fun, casual meal in America, and it's a delight to see an opera where I can hear flashy singing, raise an eyebrow at the spectacle, kiss my sweetheart and neglect the plot. I have nothing to complain about.

Next up: Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar.

Update: Thanks to Charles T. Downey for a good, fair review, with pictures!

Left to right: Giunia, Silla, Celia.