VKSP #3: Metamorphose der Melancholie 2005/11/21

I have just boarded a train on its way back to Berlin from Cologne. For the last few hours, I’ve been getting off on unlimited CNN and BBC in the hotel room. TV is so, so nice, but it’s probably good I don’t have one.

A baroque group from Freiburg (not the big one, for whoever would know or care) did two guest performances at the Komische Oper last week/weekend. They needed a light bitch and because, as some of you know, I’ve had just NOTHING to do at the opera since getting back from NYC Nov. 1st, I decided to do it (for a decent chunk of poppy). Part of the deal was going to Cologne for their final performance, at the city’s Philharmonic.

So the concert happened. Well concert. I guess one would call it a dramatic pastiche, with accompanying costumes and dead-guy makeup (that I liked, I liked).

Anyway. It ended. Now, in my experience, when a performance ends, especially if it’s the first or last, everyone gets shitfaced and says and does a whole bunch of shit which is by tradition obliged to be forgotten the next day. Certainly in New York that’s the case. Champagne is daintily sipped over the table, as the prima donna goes down on the hunky-yet-walleyed stagehand just below. Dramaturge becomes DJ. People pass out and almost freeze to death in unheated stairwells. All attendant fingertips smell like cigarettes, pussy, or vomit.

Or at least people dance.

Or have tolerably entertaining conversations, if not outright lively ones. Even the KO represents itself fairly well in this area.

I walked backstage afterwards, expecting champagne and trays of mediocre party food, groups of people kissing air while surreptitiously squeezing buttocks. Private jokes explained to uncomprehending strangers, grandiose compliments paid to completely undeserving performers, tight-necked commiseration between musicians for some section that “totally wasn’t together”.

What I got: a bunch of strangers standing in sedate, unsmiling groups, drinking ear-waxy tasting Cologne beer. The performers were already ducking out the exit doors with short, compact waves to this colleague or that.

Normally a good way to get into a conversation is to find a performer, or a group with an odd number of people. One should then comment specifically on an aspect of the performance, or particular influence it had (in a complimentary sense, it goes without saying). I tried once. Twice. When I flash the choppers, I can usually get it done. I tried yet again. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

I got a series of polite but empty smiles. After a while I grew very earnestly concerned that there might have been a carbon monoxide leak in the backstage of the Philharmonic. It became apparent that many people though I was a straggler from the audience, one of those with no personal connection to any performer, who figures out how to get backstage while an usher’s back is turned.

I have put in about 35 hours with these people over the course of four days.

Shitty beer in hand, I went back to my dressing room, grabbed my belongings, gave my signed contract to the production manager, and headed back to the hotel.

She gave me a huge bouquet. I think it was a table centerpiece earlier in the evening. It was still a really nice one. Smelly like real flowers.

Cologne seems pretty nice, at least in the four blocks surrounding the train station. German postwar architecture is fucking ugly, though. The buildings--looking all like one of those playmate coolers your mom used to give you to take to summer day-camp…but with windows.

I got some shitty take out and watched some movie about the allied persecution of Furtwaengler with Harvey Keitel in it. Dubbed into German.

It was a particularly lonely experience, thankfully very short.

It made me think about other things. If I were to get an offer to work in my same job (house assistant director) in another, maybe better opera house somewhere else in Germany, I’m not sure if I’d do it.

I mean, Berlin is definitely not home. Neither is New York for that matter. Joolz and Tommy helped to settle some connection to the former, and if Abe weren’t in New York—I’d basically just ever be visiting.

And home, home is not home. West Hartford is a place where the general response to what I do for a living generally mentions that unmentionable Andrew Lloyd Webber epic at least once.

Maybe it’s really about people.

Then again, if the Liceo or Covent Garden or San Francisco came a-calling, all bets’d be off.

As for the production in Cologne (and also Berlin), it was middling. Good ideas—even great ones, but clearly directed by a conductor. Very square, missing necessary bits of dramatic and/or visual style.

But seriously, a baroque pastiche? That used to be my sweet thing. I would’ve taken that little animal, broken its neck, twisted it’s shattered spine into a bizarre, unnatural shape, attached the poor, reordered creature to a vintage erector set (with staples and tape), and then used a remote to make it walk around on its own again. Dripping, cruel, and totally unfamiliar. A deliciously macabre toy.