Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

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The Musical Patriot

Puritans in Seattle

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Last weekend on the digital pages of CounterPunch your humble Musical Patriot waded into the tepid waters of Burt Bacharach criticism, unaware that the beach behind him was as thickly peopled as the Côte d’Azur in sweltering August.  I never suspected that I’d be so closely and contentiously scrutinized in my musicological Speedo.

Undaunted by the decidedly mixed reaction to the body of my criticism as it paraded a lengthy—many claimed fulsome—panegyric to Burt Bacharach at Eighty, I resolutely don my skimpy kit again this fine morning and dash headlong through the crowds and into the waves of a far more volatile sea: Italian opera. 

* * *

What I love most about going to the opera in the North in the Spring is the achingly poignant light of late day that welcomes the audience to the theatre before the performance, and lingers bittersweetly through the first intermission, before reluctantly receding in the dying twilight of the second.  After the final curtain calls are over the audience leaves the opera house into the darkness of night. The shadings of a human lifetime are thus compressed into the interstices of three-and-a-half hours of staged song. This mysterious and moving cooperation between art and nature can attain perfection only above the 45th parallel in May or June. There can be few more rewarding collaborations between day and night, theatre and life, than Aida in Stockholm a week before Midsummer: Ramades and Aida are sealed in their darkened vault, and the last glimmer of light slips below the southern horizon outside. The theater’s great doors then release the audience into that same filtered darkness.

Bellini’s I Puritani (The Puritans) is not a tragedy, though it should have been. A Romeo and Juliet story set in Cromwell’s England, the opera’s wildly opportunistic happy end careens in a hair’s breath in advance of the final curtain. And Seattle, where the opera just concluded its run over these first two weeks of May, is not Stockholm, though its so-called urban planners could have learned a few lessons from the way the Swedish capital has integrated its meandering waterways into the cityscape over the span of several centuries. For a city set between two urban lakes and a vast inland sea, Seattle has foolishly denied its venues of high culture the benefit of its greatest natural assets: the encircling mountains and the water.

Compare that to the quayside placement of the opera house in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. Nearby moorings for yachts encourage the city’s Saab magnates and lesser courtiers of Scandinavian affluence to sail in, much as earlier aristocrats advertised their status by arriving at the theatre in gilded carriages. Views from the foyer carry the eye to the archipelago of low rocky islands stretching towards the North Sea.. The ponderous behemoth that is the new opera house in Denmark is similarly built on the harbor.  Stockholm’s venerable house, completed in the last year of the 19th-century century, abuts a snaking fiord and affords views across the water to the Old City and the Royal Palace.

Seattle’s opera house was finished in 1961 for the World’s Fair’s that bestowed on the city its architectural icon, the Space Needle.  In 2002 the building was gutted and the steel skeleton used for the “new” opera house. Gone is the bleak concrete façade of my youth in favor of the obligatory glass and steel that echo the aesthetics of corporate architecture, and therefore corporate sponsorship. The decorative plush of the asymmetrical lobby, the curvaceous bars of nude wood and mirrors all evoke the 1960s as seen through the lens of post-modern retro, as if the whole rebuilding exercise had been enacted only to return the opera house to a youthful version of itself in 1961. The phenomenon is as rampant in Seattle as it is everywhere else. In the Arts & Crafts enclave of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, which rises up directly to the north of the opera house, Starbucks’ moms gut their 1960s kitchens so as to recreate the “bungaloo” feel of the 1920s but with the necessary updates of industrial-grade stoves, granite countertops, and big screen HD television. Nostalgia is the national pastime. And the more money you have, the more fun it is to renovate the past.

With the makeover, the opera house was renamed the McCaw Center in tribute to the $20 million gift from a band of brothers who made their billions in the cellular phone boom. Do the sources of this patronage explain why no general announcement was made before the overture began about turning off these plaguing devices? I suspect so. In opera above all arts one doesn’t bite the hand that feeds, even if that hand forgets to turn off the flipping cell phone. 

Over the course of the evening, more than a few cell phones sang in irksome duet with the onstage music. As usual I adopted a historical perspective in the hope of quelling my rising frustration. I reminded myself that before Wagner consecrated the cult of theatrical silence, opera audiences enjoyed unrestrained conversation, ate diner, played cards, and engaged in various acts of ad hoc lechery. The mind trembles at the thought of what the unruly theatre would have been like if those raucous 18th-century audiences had had cell-phones.

Speaking of nostalgia, in Seattle the singers wore costumes designed by Peter Hall for the 1976 Metropolitan production of the opera. I Puritani was the short-lived Bellini’s last opera, premiering in Paris in 1835, the year of the composer’s death. Hall’s costumes are a pastiche of 1830s and 1640s styles, forsaking the all-black of the Puritans for dark purples and greens meant to evoke the lushness of Bellini’s bel canto.

The production’s single set is of the Puritans fortress, depicted from inside the keep—a menace of steep staircases and high platforms. While the geometry is gothic, the materials are arch-modern, right down to the corrugated, non-slip steel stair treads. It’s as if Piranesi had opened a charge account at Home Depot. Like the Seattle opera house itself, the production is a house of mirrors, in which all elements skip blithely down history’s path of infinite regression.

Scampering about the ramparts, the soloists and chorus did their best to project into the long cavernous box of the auditorium, the difficult acoustical configuration made worse by the comfortable, yet highly absorptive, seats. In terms of layout, the Seattle opera house suffers from the same problem that the city as whole does—a slovenly and depressing propensity for the horizontal over the vertical.  Call it seat sprawl, the rows spreading back from the stage like a giant mall parking lot, rather than adopting the older, tiered arrangement, which kept the seats much closer to the stage, even if the view at the top was aerial rather than frontal.

The sprawl of the city is only accelerating, even while Seattle claims to be urgently pursuing its green ideals. A glance through the program book at the far-flung cast reveals that the over-the-knee riding boots worn by these Puritans leave awfully big carbon footprints. No matter, the air in the stratosphere of high culture has always been thin.

To get the best singers you’ve got to import them, and even in the age of globalization that isn’t Dollar Store cheap. The Seattle production’s international array of fine male singers offered assured lyricism, carefully-judged varieties of overacting, and plenty of musical panache. The tenor Arturo, sung by the American Lawrence Brownlee, and the baritone Riccardo, sung by the dashing Pole Mariusz Kwiecien, dueled musically and romantically—the same thing in Italian opera—for the hand Elivira, who loses her mind in the force field of this romantic triangle. The men may be tortured but they are strong, answering to duty over love when they have to. Of course, Arturo is happy as a clam when the plot’s Hail Mary touchdown on the very last play allows him both of these manly pleasures. It is at this point that Elvira is magically restored to her fragile, feminine mental faculties. The opera is devotedly misogynistic, redeemed only by the fact that even Elvira, merely a mental projection of male desire, sings such searching, sad music that her voice alone escapes masculine control. In Seattle the part was given to the French soprano Norah Amsellem.  Trussed up in decidedly non-puritanical, décolletage-boosting corset, her performance didn’t do much for me. Her airy, flitting voice seemed incapable of capturing either the fragmentations of Elvira’s deluded visions or of conveying her ardent desire when the promise of love’s consummation returned her to heated lucidity.

We all know that to go to the opera is to enter the church of suspended disbelief, where one takes on faith the manifest departures from known reality. Reservations about lack of verisimilitude erupted with the birth of genre. First off, human’s do not sing to each other in everyday life.  But opera’s irresistible sensuality swept—and sweeps—aside all such objections, at least for its devotees. Opera is neither for skeptics nor for realists.

In the last half-century or so, skin pigment has been added to the articles of suspended disbelief. The Mississippi-born Leontyne Price made her Met debut in 1961 as Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. As far as I know there weren’t many black Spanish princesses in 15th Zaragoza. The great contralto, Marian Anderson had broken the color barrier at the Met in 1955, eight years after Jack Robinson did so in Major League Baseball.

Yet race is a two-way street even in opera. The Ethiopian princess Aida was given to white women without objection, until Price sang the role in San Francisco in 1957, though she had made her operatic debut earlier that same season in a “white” role in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. The following year Price sang Aida under Herbert von Karajan in Vienna. Without entangling myself in the perpetual debate about Karajan’s Nazi past, suffice it to say that for Price this was the safest and most effective way through the color curtain in Europe, too.  (Price had declined Karajan’s invitation to sing Salome in La Scala the year before.) Price as Aida in the early years after the race barrier’s breach must have been a revelation, forcing audiences to ask themselves why they had been so long denied the pleasure not only of seeing a black woman playing the black princess, but of her voice in any number of other roles white or black. There is something profoundly dispiriting about recalling that the talents of the great actor and singer Paul Robeson were confined to a role written for him as a black man: Joe the Negro in Showboat.

The most adroit exploitation of the apparent dissonance between skin color and operatic role came in the 1995 Los Angeles Opera production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande directed by Peter Sellars. The opera ran during the O. J. Simpson trial, and Sellars set the events of Pélleas in the immediate present, as following the implications of the the Aristotelian unities to their logical conclusion.  King Gollaud, who murders his young wife, was sung by the great black baritone Willard White. A white Bronco was parked on the stage. However controversial the production may have been, I found it to be not only to be a brilliant commentary on O. J. and L. A. and race, but a provocative reflection on race in the theatre as well.  I saw no African-Americans at Pélleas that evening, whereas that seasons’ Porgy and Bess, an opera decried by Duke by Ellington for its “lampblack negroisms,” brought in a large black audience.

Mirroring the ethnic makeup of the city, the Seattle Opera chorus was a veritable rainbow coalition of Roundheads. Singing the part of Enrico, the African-American Brownlee extended this diversity to the principal parts. Brownlee came up through the excellent Seattle opera training program and was the 2006 winner of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award. Past winners include Renee Flemming and Deborah Voigt, as well as John Relyea, who sang the role of the caring and concerned uncle Giorgio in the Seattle I Puritani, and delivered the most compelling performance of the evening.

Brownlee hardly cuts a heroic swath across the stage.  Short and stocky, he seems always on his toes, as if trying desperately to see something just out of sight. Brownlee also leans forward in anticipation, rather than grounding himself as a man of conviction and courage would. But he uses his agile, poised voice with such confidence and conviction that he overcomes these setbacks. 

Costumed in dark purple with golden piping and brocade, white lace collar and cuffs, Brownlee was saddled with an unfortunate wig that cascaded gently to his shoulders.  Try as I might to banish  the taint of race from vision, I couldn’t help but imagine a sun-bleached James Brown having strayed from the Motor City and wandered into the Devonshire moors of the 17th century. I hope that doesn’t sound racist, but it is not always possible to suppress these associations. The comic and absurd always hover in the wings of the opera house.  Brownlee is a good enough singer to overcome the souped-up Puritan hair thing.

Even when it is dwarfed by opera’s opulent, inconsistent scenery and costumes, pure song reigns supreme. Thankfully, in the operatic culture of our time, it is the color of the voice not the color of the skin that matters. Still, the illusions of race will always be complicated by the illusions of the theatre.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu      

 

 

 

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