Charlie Kaufman’s Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts takes its title from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”: “How blissful is the innocent vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Everlasting sunshine of the spotless thoughts! Every pray’r accepted, every want resigned.” That quote got here to thoughts as I made my manner again into the town after seeing Bohuslav Martinů’s Julietta at Bard’s SummerScape pageant. Kaufman’s good movie makes the case for the significance of painful recollections, even these we’d lengthy to neglect, to our very humanity, whereas interrogating the character of reminiscence itself. Julietta asks related questions and, like Kaufman however lengthy earlier than him, locates its inquiry within the surreal.
In quest of a woman whose voice he heard three years earlier, Michel returns to the seaside setting of his encounter, solely to seek out that the townspeople have misplaced their recollections and now dwell in an everlasting current. The townspeople vary from goofy to sinister—there’s a city commissioner who describes the “echo machines” that exist on each nook of the road, a fortune teller who predicts the previous, a person promoting recollections to anybody prepared to pay—and all of them solely befuddle poor Michel. The city can not bear in mind, so the townspeople place a excessive worth on any recollections they’ll latch on to; Michel is briefly topped Captain of the City (earlier than everybody forgets once more) by advantage of being the one particular person in a position to recall a childhood toy. The viewers oohs and ahhhs rapturously on the reminiscence, as whether it is their very own. Regardless of his mounting confusion, Michel ultimately finds his Juliette—although by the point he reaches her, it’s onerous to inform whether or not she is a figment of his creativeness—solely to lose her once more.
Julietta is many issues: an instance of surrealism in music, a compelling psychodrama that’s each humorous and shifting and a prescient critique of the logics of fascism. Two years after its premiere in 1938, Martinů would flee the USA after being blacklisted by the Nazis. It has a picaresque plot, one piled with small incidents and encounters with colourful characters, however whereas the opera could also be filled with comedic interludes, at its coronary heart are critical questions in regards to the nature of actuality, reminiscence and the social constructions of energy.
Martinů’s rating is a marvel; wide-ranging in its textures and timbres, shot by means of with lyricism, and with a fragile stability of wit and sympathy. Julietta’s prolonged tonal type retains all the heady plushness of the Romantic whereas embracing the jagged readability and twisty juxtapositions of modernism; it’s not folksy within the least, however the accordion theme that recurs all through introduces a touch of the favored, whereas an early passage recollects a theme from Rhapsody in Blue. Particularly within the fingers of conductor Leon Botstein, the music is endlessly various; from the humorous full-orchestra bombast that attends a number of the townspeople to the wistful tune that Juliette sings with a solo piano for accompaniment, Julietta’s musical world is as colourful and shocking as a Dorothea Tanning portray.
As is typical for Summerscape, this opera was introduced semi-staged, easily directed by Marco Nisticò. John Horzen’s projection and video design was each putting and intelligent, offering the mandatory visible element in crafting this surreal world. A very good contact: the setting for the city first seems as a line drawing, solely to be slowly stuffed in as we meet increasingly of the unusual townsfolk.
Regardless of the opera’s size, which ran nearly 4 hours with two intermissions, this was a fascinating efficiency each visually and dramatically. A formidable ensemble solid reappeared in numerous roles, with particularly good turns by Rodell Rosel, whose brash character tenor contrasted properly with Aaron Blake’s softer edges as Michel, mezzo-soprano Isabelle Kosempa who appeared as a vaguely sinister little boy amongst different roles, mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann as over-dramatic hen vendor and glamorous fortune teller and bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who gave an particularly sympathetic efficiency as a blind beggar within the third act.
Blake, who sang the function of Michel on the Carnegie Corridor live performance efficiency of Julietta in 2019, returns to it right here with nice power. With a buttery, supple tenor sound, he has each the dramatic potential and the vocal stamina for this function; he sounded remarkably contemporary, even because the efficiency approached the four-hour mark, and his last mad scene was particularly gripping. As Juliette, Erin Petrocelli had a strong, candy soprano with a tinge of melancholy to it that grew brighter and extra pointed as her character turned extra irritating and elusive. Although she confirmed extra indicators of fatigue by the top, she was a high quality match for Blake.
Each singers have been at their greatest within the opera’s central scene, which pits two realities in opposition to each other to disastrous impact. Once we first meet Michel, he looks like the fantasist within the couple. In spite of everything, he returns to this place looking for a girl he barely is aware of. However when outmatched by Juliette’s personal penchant for fantasy, Michel comes aside. As she gleefully retailers the cart of a reminiscence vendor, Juliette holds up images, a veil and a bracelet, inserting herself and Michel into these mementos, insisting that the 2 had traveled to Spain and seemingly hallucinating a whole relationship that by no means occurred. When Michel provides her his personal love story—listening to her voice, returning to seek out her—she finds it much less attention-grabbing than the one on the market, and she or he flees when he refuses to hitch her false reminiscing. Distraught past logic, he fires a gun after her. We by no means know if the bullet hit, and when he returns to city, nobody remembers Juliette in any respect.
Martinů’s opera attracts a high quality line between reminiscence and nostalgia; whereas reminiscence is untrustworthy, nostalgia is reminiscence untethered from actuality, a commodified and free-floating emotion that’s ripe for manipulation. A spotless thoughts is one that’s simply written on, simply stuffed with recollections that aren’t yours or maybe by no means occurred.
Because the opera progresses, Michel slowly begins to acquiesce to the false logic of this world, his protests fading in favor of telling his personal fairly lies. In the long run, he embraces that very same false logic, refusing to get up to a world with out Juliette and going mad within the course of. As a satire of the nostalgic obsessions of fascism—the place the imagined previous is each commodified and fetishized whereas its topics are condemned to an inefficient everlasting current—Julietta may hardly be timelier, each for 1938 and for our present world.
Extra in performing arts
