Divamensch
THURS AUG 14
We slept until about 7:30am. We thought we’d go downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast but even though the hours on the door said they were open every day at 7:30am they weren’t open that day. There was a bank holiday the next day (the Assumption of Mary) so maybe they were getting a jump start on that.
I did a search on my phone for breakfast places nearby and we walked to a place called Miss Simit a short walk away. We didn’t know it was a Turkish restaurant but we were very happy about that. The guy working there spoke a fair amount of English and was very friendly and helpful. We asked what was in the breakfast for two. We didn’t understand everything he said but the things we understood we liked so we went for it.
We asked for coffee, water, and orange juice. He motioned over to the corner, we assumed that was where we would get the coffee and/or water and/or orange juice. We walked over there to find a large apparatus with pots on the top and spigots in the front. Some random old Turkish dude talked a mile a minute in German, explaining and demonstrating how to use it. You take one of the small glasses and pour the stuff from the pot and then dilute it with the hot water from the spigot. I did this and it worked, the old dude was pleased. Scott said, “I’d rather have milk than water.” I said, in German, “Do you have milk?” The old dude was somewhere in the intersection between amused and insulted and said, quite loudly, still in German but now with hand gestures, that you would never use milk, it would be bad for your digestion (he rubbed his belly to convey that). It turns out this wasn’t coffee, this was Turkish tea. We took our teas to the table, added sugar, and it was fine. Our server came over with the coffee, water, and orange juice and we were even happier. He also brought a basket of bread and (would you believe) two pretzels.
And then WHOA, here comes our personal buffet on a cart:
• Eggs cooked in paprika
• Spicy sliced sausage cooked in olive oil with sliced red pepper
• Sliced salami
• Feta cheese
• Swiss cheese
• String cheese
• Sliced cucumber
• Sliced tomato
• Sliced oranges
• Black and green olives
• Spiced butter
• Spiced tomato spread
• Honey, butter, and jam
It took him a while to place all of this on the table. I said to him in German, “This isn’t a breakfast for two, this is a breakfast for four!” He was tickled by that. I think we ate about two thirds of it. The highlights were the spiced sausage, the tomato spread, and especially the honey - - it was the most delicious honey I’ve had in my life, so flavorful, completely unlike the honey you get in an American supermarket.
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Scott and I covered the waterfront in our breakfast conversation. He told me quite a lot about his work with the gay archive at UW-Madison, that was fascinating. I’d heard him talk about this before but never in such detail. I told a few stories about Edith Head, that was the best I could do.
We stopped at a supermarket on our way home. A cute young man was working the register and immediately pegged us as English speakers.
HIM: Hallo, where are you from?
ME: We’re from the United States.
[pause]
ME: Where are you from? Are you from Salzburg?
HIM: No I am from Serbia.
ME: Oh.
[pause]
HIM: You invaded us.
ME: Yes, I’m very sorry about that.
HIM: I am joking! [laughs]
ME: [laughs]
HIM: Yes, you invaded us.
[pause]
HIM: You invaded us. I forgive you.
ME: That’s very kind.
HIM: Thank you, bye bye.
Scott said, as soon as we left the store, “We all carry our history with us.”
About a month before, when we were planning the trip, Scott suggested we go to a performance by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre. I said Hell Yes and he bought us tickets for a 35-minute show that gave an overview of their history plus excerpts from *The Magic Flute* and *The Sound of Music.* It’s the Salzburg marionettes that you see in the movie of *The Sound of Music* in the “Lonely Goatherd” number.
They used the 1964 recording of *Flute* with Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Phil, with Evelyn Lear, Roberta Peters, Fritz Wunderlich, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The staging was darling and the marionettes were delightful. The audience was probably about one third children under 10 and the show was clearly built with them in mind. They went nutty for the scene in which Tamino plays his magic flute and all sorts of animals come out of the forest to hear him. The lion tried to bite the head off the flamingo, which the flamingo did not appreciate. That sort of thing. I was bothered that the flamingo was taller than the elephant.
The excerpts from *The Sound of Music* was more cutesie-poo, not to my taste. I was curious to hear that they used a number of recordings - - the 1988 studio album with Frederica Von Stade, Håkan Hagegård, and Eileen Farrell, a more contemporary recording with a current-state-of-Broadway-style singer playing Maria (not to my taste), but interestingly enough, not the original cast recording with Mary Martin or the movie soundtrack with Julie Andrews. I bet they either charge too much or just gave a flat Nein.
We only had time for a quick dinner so we went to a grab and go fish place we had passed a few times. Scott had a fried fish sandwich and I had a smoked salmon and egg salad sandwich. Both super delicious.
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Our show that night (and Saturday night) was at the Grosses Festspielhaus, right next to the House For Mozart and the Felsenreitschule (where our show was the next night). Our friend David had prepared us for the width of the stage - - I looked it up online the next day, it’s about 100 feet wide. The Met's stage, by comparison, is 54 feet wide. And does not seem small! The stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus looked like it was happening in Cinemascope, you could park an aircraft carrier on that stage.
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Before we get to the opera itself, I want to share these cute pix that Scott took of people in the audience:
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The show that night was Verdi’s *Macbeth.* ​​Scott had seen two previous productions, I had seen three, but neither of us were prepared for the quality of the show, both the opera itself and the performances and production. It was Verdi’s tenth opera, written when he was 34 - - it’s classified as “early Verdi” but it doesn’t sound like early anything, he is 100% in command of the form, what he wants to convey, and the overall architecture of what makes an opera a success. Though, thank you, Wikipedia, for informing me that while it was premiered in 1847, the version we hear is the revised version he made for the Paris premiere in 1865, after he had written *Rigoletto,* *Trovatore,* *Traviata,* *Ballo,* *Forza,* etc. It would be fun to see a before and after.
The highlight of the evening and highlight of the score was the scene after the Macbeths have killed the king, early in the opera. In this production it was staged as the king’s funeral procession. A long section of it is a cappella, starting just with the five or six principal singers, eventually adding the chorus, eventually adding the full orchestra. The construction of this scene is genius, even with the quiet start you can tell that it’s going to build to something grand and thrilling. That progression is a wonder to behold and for a couple of dyed-in-the-wool opera queens like me and Scott, there’s nothing more exciting than hearing a good soprano hollering full cry over a chorus and orchestra.
The orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic. I’m sure I’d heard them in concert at some point (probably at Carnegie Hall) but to hear them playing an opera on their home turf (well, their second home), it was a dream come true. The conductor was Philippe Jordan and he really knew how to deliver the goods, he knew what he was doing. The previous performances of *Macbeth* I had heard were fun nights at the theatre with some standout moments - - in comparison, this was a first class outing of an operatic masterpiece. And the chorus! They sang gloriously and while I know it’s not all about size, neither of us had heard such a large opera chorus. They were sitting on bleachers in one scene and Scott went to the trouble of counting how many singers there were - - 104! I doubt I’ll ever again hear an opera chorus with such a full, rich sound, they made a big impact.
Scott said this when we stepped out at intermission: “It really should be called *Lady Macbeth.*” Yes sir! A performance lives or dies by the soprano singing the Lady and I imagine productions are planned around a particular singer being interested and available. I felt like I was getting part of the package in the previous three productions I saw. Catherine Malfitano (Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1999) and Nadja Michael (Met Opera, 2012) both acted up a storm and did their best vocally. They got through it, not always pretty to hear but exciting and driven by the drama. Anna Netrebko (Met, 2019) sang like a dream all night long - - not really a musically specific or detailed performance but golden vocalism. She was a total sex bomb and loaded with charisma but didn’t communicate what I would call a carefully thought-out dramatic arc.
Soprano Asmik Grigorian was the whole package. Her vocal and dramatic performance all came from the same place, it was all of a piece, as the English would say. I get the feeling this is the only way she knows how to do it, she’s just wired that way. I’d been reading about her since her Salzburg breakout as Salome in 2018. She made her Met debut as Madama Butterfly in 2024. That was broadcast on TV and I was shocked at how beautiful her voice was - - a singer doing parts like Salome, Lady Macbeth (which she first did in Salzburg in 2023), and Prokofiev’s *The Gambler* (Salzburg 2024) doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful singing but she was the real deal. I was excited to see she was singing Lady M at Salzburg this summer and have already booked my tickets to hear her in *Eugene Onegin* at the Met this coming spring.
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​Here she is singing her entrance aria in our Salzburg production:
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Here she is taking her bow at the end of the performance. She's bent completely at the waist - - a friend said, "Did she drop something on the floor?"
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Vladislav Sulimsky was Macbeth and talk about gorgeous singing. Non stop all night long, every time he opened his mouth. He sings a steady diet of Verdi and Russian roles. I hope to hear him again, he was every bit the equal of Grigorian (though the part itself doesn’t have so much variety of expression).
Charles Castronovo had the juicy supporting tenor part of Macduff. He has a long aria with chorus late in the show and yes, he had an unfair advantage with that dynamite chorus singing backup for him, but he hit the ball out of the park. He has an innately Italian sound and a delightfully old school Italian tenor mode of singing. I think he thinks he’s the second coming of Franco Corelli - - and maybe he is! It verged on camp for me, it was bordering on too gooey and overblown, playing to the balcony. It was the staging and yes, the utter seriousness of the music that kept him in line. I’m not sure I’ll rush to hear him again but if he happens to be singing with other people I like I’m not going to AVOID him.
The director was Krzystof Warlikowski and all I can say is Wow. Maybe the decisions he made didn’t always make sense but they always came from the same point of view and they all served the drama. The aura of creepy menace started in the first scene when Macbeth is meeting with the witches and they make their prophecies that he will be king. Warlikowski had the female chorus slide onto the stage from the side in a box set piece decorated to look like an anonymous party room for hire: shag carpet, grey wallpaper, boring chairs. The women were costumed in somewhat fancy clothes, all of them wearing sunglasses and yellow plastic armbands that had a code somewhat reminiscent of a biohazard warning. This was all maybe off-putting but not, as I said, creepy or menacing. That touch was given by the little girls in the chorus who wore battered 19th century china doll masks and wigs placed with the hairline at the top of the skull. They were the descendants of the Village of the Damned and they will be haunting my nightmares for a while.
Scott asked me to take a picture of the first act curtain. Spooky.
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The little boys in the chorus appeared in Macbeth’s second act scene with the witches. They were all wearing the same ugly rust-brown suit and they all had the same oversized head. Scott told me that the heads were modeled after the actor playing Banco, who had been murdered in a previous scene. They all walked the same way, bent at the waist, lurching forward, hands folded behind the back. Their deportment had a whiff of Nixon to my eye, an entirely valid choice in this case. Their greatest moment was at the end of this scene. The dining table from the banquet in the previous act was onstage with a plate at each place. I had to use my opera glasses to see what was on the plate and a chill went down my spine when I saw that each plate had a naked plastic baby doll on it. The Mini Nixons sat down at one point and, with great relish, tore the heads and limbs off the dolls. Lesson #17 in the European Opera Director’s Handbook: How To Take Something Creepy and Make It SUPER Creepy.
Warlikowski didn’t just excel at creating strong stage images, he also handled the big scale drama in a thoughtful and probing way. He did particularly strong work in conveying the symbiotic relationship of the Macbeths. They were a <<folie à deux.>> I can think of three moments that communicated this: first, in the banquet scene near the end of the first half, when they finally sat down to eat, after Macbeth had been hallucinating and freaking everybody out, Lady Macbeth forced him to sit down and she took his large white napkin and tucked it under his shirt collar. So infantilizing!
Second, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene is usually staged as a solo scene for her with the two supporting singers on the side commenting on the action. It’s implied that Lady M dies offstage. She sings to Macbeth at the end of this aria, which generally supports our belief that she’s bat sh-t crazy. Well, in this production Macbeth was still onstage, sitting in a wheelchair, mostly out of it. She went over to him and sang the “Andiam, Macbetto”s directly to him. It was touching and sad. She slumped down onto the floor at the end. I think we all assumed she was dead.
But she wasn’t! This was the third moment. Macbeth pulled himself together and rallied his troops to fight the incoming marauders, the dudes disguising themselves with bits of shrubbery (not staged that way in this case). The leaders of the coup put the Macbeths center stage (Macbeth in his wheelchair, Lady M in a folding chair), tied them up with an extension cord, and the whole chorus closed in on them as the curtain came down. It reminded me of the Ceausescus, how they were publicly humiliated when they were murdered.
The audience went nutso, of course. The Salzburgers love to applaud and the people onstage don’t seem to be in any hurry for it to stop. I wouldn’t say they milk the applause but they definitely have their hands on the udders. I don’t like this, I think it’s annoying and cheap.
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