A Meditation on Thaïs

In the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria, built by the Greek architect Dinocrates to immortalize the name of Alexander the Great, the city of the library of the Ptolemies with its manuscripts of Plato, Pythagoras, Philo, Origen, Athanasius, and Clement, copies of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and documents signed by Julius Caesar and Octavian, the port city of lavish white sands and Mediterranean seascapes known to Cleopatra and Mark Antony, on the threshold of an evening in the fourth century, a connoisseur of the flesh is ruminating before her mirror on aging and mortality. She is Thaïs, a figure of mythic elegance, a courtesan, yet full of artistic refinements and imbued with elemental candor. In this moment of her only vulnerability, the monk Athanaël intrudes with his violent admonition from the desert. He is terrifying, driven as much by suppressed desire for Thaïs as by zeal to redeem her for eternal life. If renunciation of the world is the portal of eternity, Thaïs is singularly ill disposed. She sustains his initial assault then reacts with derision and ejects him, but he has disturbed the serenity of her opulence. In the lingering awareness of some strange enticement she begins to weaken. The fruit Athanaël has unseasonably harvested slowly intoxicates her.

The opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet dramatizes the climactic irony of Christian asceticism subduing pagan sensuality. After an evening alternating jubilance and bouts of sobbing Thaïs willingly rejects a wealthy suitor in her thrall to become a virgin seeking the bridegroom. She comes out of her house in the darkness to find the monk. Athanaël is asleep, but she wakes him to ask for spiritual guidance. He knows she will now submit to his discipline and says calmly that he will take her to a convent where she will wait for Christ to come and claim her. Then his severity returns. He commands her to set fire to her house and abandon her possessions, an ordeal to which she agrees, but she hesitates at destroying a piece of art that she loves. In rage Athanaël smashes it, and they trudge off into the wild.

The simplistic dichotomy that sets spirit and sensuality in opposition is bleak beyond recognition now among affluent, accommodating Christians, and born-again pagans who do not seriously consider eternal life an inducement to abnegation of the flesh. The irony of Massenet’s opera and the novel by Anatole France on which it is based is that after the pilgrimage through pain that Thaïs undertakes, she dies in ecstatic transcendence, while Athanaël recognizes in despair that he is in love with her. In abjection he regrets having driven her to this end. Modern Christians and secular humanists alike will feel some sympathy with Thaïs in her contemplation of mortality. Athanaël’s primal dilemma is compelling when desire is constrained by guilt or panic about being made into a eunuch for the Kingdom of God. The irony of our time is that Christians have expropriated the opulence of the world, whether the baroque Pentecostalism of televangelists and swinging mega-churches or the elegance of blue-blooded Episcopalian ritual, while California transcendentalists are surrendering themselves for the sake of enlightenment and following their spiritual masters into the Mojave. Everybody seems satisfied with the role reversal, so why revisit a false dichotomy that was history when Massenet set this primal religious drama to music?

Few have followed Jesus far enough along his via dolorosa to fully comprehend what is meant by his injunction, “take up the cross,” his foreboding that “a man’s foes will be those of his own household,” or that enigma for proponents of family values, “No man can come after me who does not hate father, mother, sisters and brothers, his wife, and even his own life.” In Massenet’s time these eschatological sayings evidently informed contemporary culture to an extent that opera houses could mount lavish productions based on them. The composer of the opera Thaïs claimed in his autobiography that the state of his soul was most apparent in his music. Evidently a veteran of the war of sensuality and spirit, Massenet clearly left the imprint of a strong religious impulse on his operas. Yet he had a reputation for womanizing. If he did battle in the conflict of spirit and sense, how was he able to work? Musical craftsmanship of his order of magnitude is not accomplished in a torpor or guilt. In Thaïs Massenet confronts the most severe injunctions of monastic asceticism. Thaïs, Manon, Herodiade, and Le Cid merge musical motifs and theology so convincingly that one might believe that he had either found a path to resolution of monumental spiritual questions or had equally monumental powers of metaphorical abstraction.

Perhaps the convulsion of abstinence, ecstasy, and despair with which the opera ends is one of the justifications we now have for putting limits on spiritual compulsions. Massenet’s music could possibly inform the beneficiaries of the twentieth-century sexual revolution. Having witnessed Athanaël’s despair, students traumatized by sex might hesitate at the impulse to abandon engineering studies or business school for a communal farm. At any stage in life those who are susceptible to extrapolations from the hard sayings of Jesus are more likely to find metaphors for dealing with them in enduring works of art from the past than in cinematic caricatures of religion or the music they are likely to hear in church. Better if we turn to the dramas Massenet set to music. Universally regarded as a fine craftsman of orchestration, he is the composer of twenty six operas, twenty three of which were staged. He had lavish and widely imitated lyrical gifts. The operas were the most performed of his era in the French musical theater, and they have proved their enduring value over most modern composers’ works, which seldom last beyond the fanfare of new productions.

The bourgeois audiences for Massenet’s operas were far removed from the heroic asceticism of desert monasteries. How might a performance of Thaïs at the Paris Opera have affected bourgeois women? According to Massenet’s biographers they were captivated by his music, which became the standard of the repertoire. It takes little imagination to see that many among the Parisiene would have found Thaïs a sympathetic character. She is urbane, cultivated in her tastes, beautiful, and most interesting of all, independent. A modern sex goddess might be the envy of many women, but she is seldom admired for her elegance. Thaïs is characterized as a woman of intelligence and grace as much as voluptuous allure. She entertains the Alexandrian nobility in sumptuous refinement in her own palatial home. She owns artistic masterpieces. Nicias, the only suitor who appears in the opera, is high caste Alexandrian. He has been a friend of the monk Athanaël since their youth and hosts the renunciate in his home. It is Nicias who has the influence to get Athanaël admitted to the home of Thaïs. Nicias has spent a fortune for a week in her company, but she has the power to eject him at will, and she does in order to retreat to a convent with the holy man.

Contemporary literary theorists find oppression of women in Western art and culture, yet here in a bourgeois French opera is a woman of independent means who voluntarily follows erroneous counsel to a conclusion that eviscerates her mentor, himself a spiritual athlete, while she is indestructible. The illogic of renunciation leads to her death, yet even in death Thaïs is indomitable. The husbands and lovers of the Parisiene would have been more the equivalent in property, influence, and character of the suitor, Nicias, than of Thaïs. Like Nicias, bourgeois men would have been willing at times to spend extravagantly on desirable women, but what could they have made of Thaïs? Shouldn’t they have considered her an affront? The opera was not extremely successful in early productions but it survived despite this protagonist of the supposedly oppressed gender. In every phase of her pilgrimage Thaïs embodies innate charm. Her musical motifs are gentile and forthright throughout her transformation from regal courtesan to saint.

Anatole France reportedly commented while working on his novel Thaïs, “I have only two enemies: Christ and chastity.” In the novel the monk Athanaël is characterized in even more rigorous excesses than in the opera. An episode, not used in the opera, has him take refuge from Thaïs on top of a column in a deserted city. The spectacle of him in the ruin becomes a tourist attraction, and the city is rebuilt and flourishes. Masssenet’s librettist, Louis Gallet, transformed the monk of this incident into the austere, tormented, yet impressive, Athanaël. The agony of love sublimated in evangelistic zeal remains in the opera but little of the scorn for him apparent in the book. One can only conjecture that in this contrast, librettist, composer, and box office patrons preferred a treatment of religious asceticism that was cognizant of the fact that in Augustine’s time it was considered the manly embodiment of saintliness. Witnesses to this outrage of renunciation contra indulgence now recognize it as fanaticism.

For as long as human beings have pondered mortality, renunciation of the world for spiritual purity has been one option for dealing with the horizon toward which we continually sail. Believing there is a reality that transcends the world we inhabit has for many inspired a compulsion to gaze so adoringly on the horizon that living in the present world becomes mainly a distraction. Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy provides a theoretical framework for abnegation of the physical world for an immaterial, ideal realm. Christian theologians in fourth century Alexandria fought a never completely successful battle with the hyper spirituality of Greek metaphysics. Physical indulgence as evident in the pagan religious ethos provided a stark contrast to the philosophers’ quest for eternal form underlying nature. In this context a religion that began with John the Baptist and culminated in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus seemed more consonant with the acetic world view than that of the pagan remnant.

The theological resolution that is often neglected is, of course, the doctrine of the Incarnation, in which the eternal transcendent God takes on human flesh and shares time-bound human existence. The Christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries proved just how difficult this is to deal with intellectually. Kierkegaard said it was an insurmountable intellectual problem comparable to the moral atrocity of Abraham offering his son Isaac on the altar. Without trying to disentangle the many threads of this discourse, we will only suggest that the resolution of the dilemma of Athanaël and Thaïs requires a thorough analysis of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Listen to the Thais Meditation.

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Trouble in Tahiti or Wherever You May Be

A friend of mine likes, “good news/bad news” jokes. He asked me once if I knew the good news and bad news about opera. He continued, “the good news about opera is you usually get your money’s worth because operas are incredibly long. And the bad news – operas are incredibly long!”

I thought of him recently, and his joke that does not apply to Leonard Bernstein’s opera, Trouble in Tahiti. This one-act opera’s running time is about 45 minutes. Perhaps for this reason it is seldom performed. Written in 1952, this opera depicts suburbia of the time, “Happily married, sweet little son…up-to-date kitchen, washing machine, colorful bathrooms and Life magazine, and a little white house in Brookline…Suburbia.” Just seven years after the end of the Second World War, funded in part by the GI Bill of Rights, suburbia had become a Garden of Eden for many families. And compared to the recent memories of World War II, the fighting and death abroad, the rationing at home, everyone’s life on hold till the war ended, suburbia certainly was Eden for many an American family.

The Next Theatre Company, Evanston, IL [http://www.nexttheatre.org] figured out an innovative way to bring Trouble in Tahiti to their audience. This opera has become the first act in the world premiere of The American Dream Songbook, described by artistic director Jason Loewith as “our hybrid world premiere music-theatre event.” After the conclusion of Trouble in Tahiti, the audience returns after the intermission for a second act titled, “The American Dream Revue” which consists of five contemporary songs written by Kevin O’Donnell, Michael John LaChiusa, Michael Mahler, Michael Friedman, and Josh Schmidt. Act One, which is Trouble in Tahiti, reveals an inner life of suburbia that doesn’t match its outer image. Act Two, “The American Dream Revue” sings songs of present day American Dreams. It left me wondering if this generation might not have any more luck in finding genuine happiness in their many and varied lifestyles than their parents or grandparents did in suburbia some sixty years ago.

The children and grandchildren of 1950s suburbia have other dreams. Many have repudiated suburban lifestyle, searching for other manifestations of Eden, through diverse careers, gentrified urban

neighborhoods and/or back to the land rural retreats to name just a few. How will these epiphanies of the American Dream look to people in another 50 years? What might our children and grandchildren’s dreams look like in 2058, and how successfully might their dreams take shape? And who will be the composers who capture these dreams in their music?

Music helps us to explore, communicate, and reflect upon each generation’s version of the American Dream. Music also often reminds us that each generation finds different and differing manifestations of their dreams, including the ever elusive American Dream. Leonard Bernstein’s short opera, Trouble in Tahiti does these things exceptional well on its own. Contextualized in The American Dream Songbook, it becomes even more focused for us today who still search for a Garden of Eden in our midst.

The American Dream Songbook runs until March 22, 2008 at the Next Theatre in Evanston, IL.

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Amahl and the Night Visitors Revisited

The 20^th century has produced an incredible array of holiday resources, some pretty bizarre. Remember flocked trees, some orange or lavender? Remember stainless-steel Christmas trees? Then there was a reindeer named Rudolph, who permanently nosed his way into Christmas.

Amid awful manifestations of Christmas are other awe-filled representations of this holiday. My personal favorite is Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” This one-act opera in English was commissioned by NBC in 1951 to be aired over the young technology named television. It is the story of an overnight stay by the Magi at Amahl and his mother’s home as they follow the star toward Christ’s birthplace. These Magi, far from plaster figurines found in many crib scenes, are wonderfully human, delightfully eccentric, and faithfully driven people. Amahl, the young crippled boy, is a bit of a space cadet, a daydreamer. His single-parent mother, exhausted from work, has little enthusiasm for her son’s imaginative thoughts. What a great crew of humanity to birth and berth a messiah.

Back in 1951 television transmission was black and white, and confined to a TV screen in most people’s homes no larger than 14 inches. Such was the venue for my first encounter with “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” It intrigued me then, and now, more than 50 years later, this deceptively simple opera still mesmerizes me.

Menotti’s exploration into the birth of Christ is a great example of midrash, a term less familiar to Christians than to Jews who developed this unique form of storytelling.

Midrashic stories enhance biblical stories, imaginatively filling in blank spaces, expanding on underdeveloped of missing events, or casting them in a contemporary situation or language. Midrash explores biblical stories, not through analysis, but through imagination. Menotti is a master at midrash.

It’s been a while since “Amahl and the Night Visitors” has appeared on television, but live performances of Menotti’s opera happen during the Christmas season. I was fortunate to see the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra’s production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” recently in Skokie, Illinois. This production transformed the black and white, small screen, original TV version into a colorful, full-stage, live performance. Once again, I was transfixed by Menotti’s miraculous music and story.

Trash your memories of flocked and stainless-steel trees. Silence the song about a red-nosed reindeer. Reread Matthew and Luke’s birth of Christ stories. Listen to Menotti’s midrashic Christmas story known as “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Merry Christmas.

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An evening of song with Sylvia McNair

The area where I live has been privileged to have more than its fair share of Sylvia McNair concerts. My wife and I recently got another opportunity to hear her, and I thought I would share my thoughts about the evening.

At a previous concert, Ms. McNair spoke about beginning her undergraduate studies studying violin. But, like many college students, she changed her major. As I recall, she said there were multiple reasons for this, but one was that she found vocal performance to be more highly communicative.

At this stage in her career, she is undergoing another change. Her most recent bio states that she has “segued from opera and oratorio to the Great American Songbook, the music with which she feels most at home.” Again, I’m sure there are multiple reasons for this. For example, after an impressive 2-3 decades of singing professionally, some of the magic from the top of her range and her trademark sense of effortlessness has waned a bit. But, perhaps like her transition in college, her new repertoire seems to allow her to be more highly communicative than that of her classical days.

And she does seem at home in this genre; she puts her heart and soul into it. A few rather pedestrian songs come alive when with her masterful touch, and other well-known (and well-worn) songs sounded fresh and made to be her own. And I believe that her expressiveness, her phrasing, her charisma, her ability to communicate to and connect with the audience, and her ability to sell the texts she is singing are as good as or better than ever. She may at times reach to the audience as a dramatic gesture, but really her whole concert felt like a reaching to the audience — an act of giving.

The concert took place in a chapel, lending a sense of intimacy and also of the sacred. Furthermore, Ms. McNair’s spoken words and sincerity of delivery encouraged the audience to take the songs she sang as personal statements and not just performances. Given that, and given that she had a bout with breast cancer last year, songs like “O God Our Help in Ages Past” and this one seemed to take on some of the greatest meaning:

No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?

This is a strong statement indeed, and many of us would feel blessed indeed if we could make one like it after facing a serious trial.

Ms. McNair also made a case for looking in sacred not just in settings of religious texts like the Prayer of St. Francis, but also in more ordinary texts from Stephen Sondheim and Harold Arlen. This should not be a stretch as it sometimes is for those of us who believe that the God of heaven and earth was found as an infant by sheep herders amidst cattle.

For a few numbers, Ms. McNair invited a college choir to join her. That got me thinking: much of the training of a young artist is spent on technical development. This is reasonable, for without sufficient skill great art cannot be made. But I’m guessing that one strong lesson that many students in the choir will take from that experience is that artistry goes beyond the merely technical. An artist might even allow a little soul to creep into his or her work from time to time. And hopefully those students also would have picked up some of Ms. McNair’s spirit that can’t help but share the joy of life with others, and that can’t keep from singing.

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Symphonic Meditations for 9/11

I came across an informative piece on Aaron Copland, his politics and his music, titled, “Appalachian Autumn” written by Alex Ross in the August 27, 2007 issue of the New Yorker magazine (page 34). This article struck me personally as we approach the sixth anniversary of 9/11.In the days immediately following 9/11, numbed by the endless reportage on television, I turned to two American composers, Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. Their music not only soothed my soul but also helped me reflect deeply on the unique genius of America, and the problematic interpretations of that genius from inside and outside this country. I am forever grateful to these two American composers for assisting me to look more deeply into the significance of life after 9/11.So I was most interested in this Copland article. Copland realized that “a mood of suspicion, ill-will and dread that typifies the Cold War attitude” during his productive years stymied the artist. Yet he managed to create a body of work that continues to help me navigate life in this tender land today. Would Copland be able to create music today in the present atmosphere of suspicion, ill-will and dread that has been generated since 9/11?

I don’t know.

But this I do know: even though Copland is long gone, his sometimes deceptively simple music lives on, and reveals a complex mind who thought deeply about the American experiment. Ross ends his piece, “Copland conjures a perfect American Sunday in which the music of all peoples streams from the open doors of a white-steepled church that does not yet exist.”

Both Copland and Ives weave explicitly spiritual music in their various works. Yet their work is often categorized as secular. Certainly, for me, in the aftermath of 9/11, and now, six years later, their works function as sacred music for me.

What makes sacred music? What makes music sacred? Good questions for sure. Listen to Copland and Ives carefully before trying to answer these questions.

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