Sentimental gestures are no excuse for stupidity.
During the second intermission at the matinee performance of Guillaume Tell (William Tell) at the Metropolitan Opera on October 29, a man was seen spreading white powder into the orchestra pit. Panic ensued. No one in these terror-jumpy times would assume it was talc or a gift offering of cocaine for musicians flagging during an afternoon biorhythm lag, so there went the rest of the afternoon performance, and the evening one too, while an investigation was made.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an anthrax scare—indeed, the anthrax attacks after 9/11 have dropped down the memory hole as a freak anomaly—and this episode fit the bill. But under forensic examination, the powdery substance turned out to be funeral ashes. The phantom powderer turned out to be an opera buff from Texas who has made a promise to his late friend—his “opera mentor”—to sprinkle his cremations in opera houses across the country. As it happens, I know of a tale or two of opera/ballet/music fans fulfilling the wishes of a late friend and furtively scattering his ashes (or a portion of them) in one of the little patches of greenery that dot Lincoln Center. This is an unobtrusive, if dodgy, way to honor the dead: it neither disrupts performances and spoils the experience of theater-goers who have coughed up a considerable sum for tickets nor brings counter-terrorism units racing uptown.
It also makes Taoist sense, respecting the natural order. Returning ashes to earth or far out at sea subsumes the departed one into the enduring Whole and completes the circle. Ashes dumped into an orchestra pit with no one the wiser will likely just end up in the belly of a vacuum cleaner, joining the dust bunnies in limbo. Such a humdrum way to go.
As it happens, I was at the Met last week and if the performance I was attending had been truncated by some misguided mourner dunking human dust, the top of my head would have shot upward like a sewer lid in Vesuvian ire. For it was my first Wagner opera, and that is a holy occasion, not to be trifled with by tourists bearing urns. The opera was Tristan und Isolde, which lasts five hours (including intermissions), a heroic undertaking and endurance test for its lead singers—Stuart Skelton (Tristan) and Nina Stemme (Isolde)—and a test of fortitude and dedication for those of us whose posteriors are unused to the epic mode and who are possessed of minds that tend to “drift off.” My attention only wandered off here and there into the patchy outskirts of daydreaminess before returning home like Lassie and attending to the spectacle before me. I’ve done the same at Tarkovsky movies, as I’m sure you have too, comrade.
Mariusz Trelinski’s production was a dark, ponderous, looming, neo-German Expressionist affair that created its own visual spell as Wagner’s music made with the rolling ocean waves of longing and melancholy with death at the helm. “Shadowy, chilly, and industrial, the updated production had each act beginning with a sonar screen projected onto a scrim that also offered a periscope-like view of a modern ship making its way through engulfing storm waves,” wrote David Patrick Stearns in his review for WQXR’s “Operavore,” and the sweeping hand of the sonar was a beautiful, hypnotic device, a fond reminder of such great submarine films as Run Silent, Run Deep, though perhaps Met audiences are less enamored of that genre as I am. Also recurring was a projection of a sun in eclipse: the black sun of occult power. I have quibbles about the costuming, but I believe in keeping my quibbles to myself, just let ’em rattle around in my pocket. The point is that opera, unlike my beloved ballet, is a big-stakes, long-ball enterprise, even in these economically straitened times: even when something doesn‘t totally work, when a chunk here and there pokes out of the wall, the wingspan of what’s possible is stretched, the dome of the imagination lifted.
And, it pains me to admit, but the audience at the opera is more interesting than the audience at the ballet, more animated and embosomed with passion, if I may be so bold. I must attend more opera to test out this “theory.” I realize that opera and ballet hardly seem uppermost on the eve of an election that is the most portentous and momentous event since the caveman split the atom, but without the arts we might as well just forget transcendence and hand everything over to the Borg. Millions of Americans have already done that and probably most of them will be voting for Donald Trump.
