La Traviata: Director's Talk Video

In this exciting new video, we meet La Traviata Director Mark Streshinsky, who introduces us to the oustanding cast from this popular Verdi opera. We also get a behind-the-scenes look into the rehearsals as the singers prepare for this upcoming opera.

To view more videos or to learn more about Seattle Opera's upcoming production of La Traviata, visit the Seattle Opera website.

La Traviata Prep Week - What's That?

Today, Seattle Opera's Michael Janney joins the blog. Michael works in the Production Department as the Assistant Stage Manager, and here he shares what it's like to catch his breath between the Ring and the upcoming production of La Traviata. He didn't have much time to savor though...prep week is over now as all the Traviata singers have arrived and are already in rehearsals!
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For the Seattle Opera stage management staff, prep week is the calm before the storm or the overture before the curtain rises. It’s time that’s reserved for preparing for the artists’ arrivals and the myriad of other activities which will become too tedious or too irrelevant to demand our attention once the busy rehearsal process begins. Among other things, the vast scope of activities includes: archiving the previous performance, answering long ignored emails, cleaning and straightening the office and rehearsal hall, measuring ground plans and putting down spike tape to help recreate the set for the performers, receiving rehearsal costume items, putting timings in our scores, organizing our personal paperwork, pre-creating running lists for the crew, creating contact sheets, preparing welcome packets for the visiting artists, restocking green room supplies, and finalizing budgets.

Although it may sound like a lot of work, the prep week is equally important as a time to disconnect from the previous performance and get in the right mind set for a new show. One of the most appreciated aspects of working at Seattle Opera is that every two months you start with a clean slate as a new production rolls in with a new director and different performers. In this case the show we are letting go of is the Ring. While the Ring was all around a delightful and enriching project, there’s something refreshing about washing ourselves free of its all-encompassing, larger-than-life presence with the return of a standard size and familiar production, La Traviata. This is the time we use to retune our brains to the larger picture and reconnect with our old friends who have been busy at work in the offices upstairs.

On a personal note, there is one more point of interest in prep week. Once rehearsals begin, any day the stage management staff manages to leave the rehearsal hall before 10:30pm is considered a good day. During prep week we work normal business hours, usually from 9 – 5. That means it’s our remaining chance to get out and enjoy the beautiful September evenings Seattle has to offer. And, when we’re lucky, the occasional late Friday afternoon happy hour.

Speight's Corner: La Traviata

Watch the latest episode of Speight's Corner, as Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins and La Traviata Conductor Brian Garman discuss the music and artists of this upcoming Verdi opera.

To learn more about the upcoming production of La Traviata, visit the Seattle Opera website.

La Traviata Behind-The-Scenes: Costumes

Watch this excited and informative behind-the-scenes video, as Costume Shop Manager Susan Davis showcases some of the beautiful costumes that will be worn in Seattle Opera's upcoming production of La Traviata.

To learn more about the upcoming production of La Traviata, visit the Seattle Opera website.

2009/10 Young Artists Announced

Seattle Opera has named the ten artists who will be participating in the 2009/10 Young Artists Program. The singers, selected from over 640 applicants, are: Erik Anstine, Jenni Bank, Megan Hart, Michael Krzankowski, Maya Lahyani, Alex Mansoori, Eric Neuville, Vira Slywotzky, Marcy Stonikas, and Bray Wilkins. Biographies of the singers are available here.

This fall, the Young Artists will present an abridged version of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall on November 20. Additional venues will be announced at a later date. During the winter they will participate in German art song recitals—a new addition to this year’s program—and work with students in the Opera Goes to School program to present Siegfried and the Ring of Fire at local elementary schools.

In the spring, they will present a fully staged production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center. Tickets for the spring and fall productions will be available through an online pre-sale starting September 12, and through phone and in-person sales beginning September 14. Learn more about the Young Artists Program.

"Confessions" Final Video World Premiere & Release Party!

The project we've been working on all summer long is ready to make its stage debut at an exclusive release party! As you've seen here on the blog, over the past three months we've been chronicling the experiences of opera newbie 20-year-old Cassidy Quinn Brettler as she was immersed in the creation of the Ring cycle. What is opera like to a newcomer? Can an opera neophyte really enjoy the monumental Ring? Learn the answers to these questions, come with your own questions for an open Q&A session with Cassidy and the video's director, see some of the opera costumes featured in the video, and hear a brief live opera performance from one of Seattle Opera's Young Artists - all at the final cut world premiere of "Confessions of a First-time Operagoer!"



If you've been following the project, please join us at the release party. Or if you know an opera neophyte yourself, we'd love to have you send the invitation along so that they can catch a glimpse of what Seattle Opera is all about!

Saturday, September 26
TWO SCREENING TIMES: 7:00 AND 8:30 pm
Central Cinema
Located at 21st Avenue and Union Street
Light refreshments provided.

TWO WAYS TO RSVP:
1. Call the Ticket Office at 206.389.7676
2. Online (if you have an account with us already)

Space is limited - RSVP TODAY!

HOW TO RSVP ONLINE:
1. Login to your account (again, you must already have an account with us for the event to appear when you login)
2. On your Account Overview page, scroll down to My Invitations
3. Select which screening time to attend (please choose only one time to allow more space for others)

Want to catch up with Cassidy's summer adventures?
Read Cassidy's blog posts
Watch "Confessions" episodes online

What’s Green about the RING?

Wagner’s Ring is an open work, meaning it can be interpreted as many times, and in as many ways, as there are people to interpret it. Over the last hundred years, the two most popular and influential approaches to interpreting the Ring have been political (i.e. Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, or Chereau’s 1976 Bayreuth production) and psychological (i.e. Donington’s Wagner’s Ring and Its Symbols, or Wieland Wagner’s 1951 Bayreuth production). The current Seattle production has been described as a “Green” Ring, although as Guest Blogger Jonathan Caves pointed out last week, that’s not really a concept, and the production certainly isn’t trying to convince anyone to recycle, or any such polemic. The only goal publicly announced by Seattle’s Ring team-—director Stephen Wadsworth, set designer Thomas Lynch, costume designer Martin Pakledinaz, and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski—-was to put onstage what Wagner had in mind, that is, mountain and forest environments in a temperate climate. Speight Jenkins was the one who pointed out that most contemporary Rings, with their focus on politics or psychology, were ignoring the central role nature already plays in the operas. Jenkins knew his core audience of Seattleites would respond to a Ring where nature was front and center.

I’ve always been amazed by how people come to Seattle, one of the world’s great cities, in order to leave it. The urban attractions of the city are many; but the attractions of the neighboring wilderness—-of Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, the Olympic Peninsula and the Cascade Mountain Range, of the San Juan Islands, Lake Washington and Puget Sound—-preoccupy most of us who love this area. Whether you prefer rock climbing, backpacking, skiing, kayaking, scuba diving, white-water rafting, whale watching, igloo-building, or simply hiking, camping, and lying on the beach, Seattle is a haven for all who love the outdoors. And even if you prefer to hang out in a bookstore drinking coffee and working on your laptop, you can’t miss the sublime spectacle of Seattle’s environment.

That’s not to say that we’re all organic-granola-eating, fleece-recycled-from-soda-can-wearing tree-huggers. The current physical layout of the city is a testament to the enormous impact man can have on the natural world: chopping down forests, razing hills, digging canals, filling in tidal flats, polluting lakes and rivers and then trying to clean them up. Sure, we’ve got plenty of environmentalists here nowadays (witness our recent civic slogan of “Metronatural”); but the city was built by capitalists eager to make a buck, and that impulse doesn’t really fade with time. In Seattle there was, is, and probably will always be a complicated relationship between respecting the environment and respecting the human ingenuity which must forever alter the environment.

Similarly, in Wagner’s Ring I for one perceive a complicated relationship between the environment (or characters representing the environment) and the characters who manipulate that environment. I don’t think it’s as simple as Nature = Good, therefore Characters Who Change Nature = Bad. It seems to me that Wagner presents us with a world where active human characters must draw their power from nature, by definition. My evidence? They all do it, and all of them to ash trees, to make the parallel even more clear. Wotan got his spear by destroying the World Ash, before Das Rheingold begins; that scene, that rape of nature and strange bargain between self-castrating rapist (Wotan, who rips out his own eye) and three female guardians of nature (the Norns) gets replayed, when Das Rheingold begins, when Alberich gets his ring by renouncing love and stealing their gold from the three Rhine daughters. The tune Alberich sings as he rips the gold from their river is sung again in Die Walküre when Siegmund rips his sword free from another ash tree, one which Sieglinde later sees destroyed, in a prophetic vision. And as their son Siegfried reforges that shattered sword, in the opera Siegfried, he sings a song all about going out into the forest, chopping down a—-you guessed it—-ash tree, and burning it in his furnace so the sword can live again. Are we to applaud (or censure) Wotan, Alberich, Siegmund, or Siegfried for their various actions, all different versions of the same action? I don’t think the opera takes a position either way; I think Wagner is saying, “For good or ill, this is what men do to nature.”

It’s much easier on our human brains when it’s obvious who’s good and who’s bad. But the Ring, like nature itself, is not easy on our human brains. In the nineteenth century, Romantic artists like Wagner tended to turn to sublime nature for the pathetic fallacy, the image of raw, powerful nature artistically representing raw, powerful human emotion; for example, Die Walküre opens with a physical storm, which (it turns out) is also raging inside the tormented Siegmund. But Wagner went far beyond that pathetic fallacy in the Ring; nature is an entity unto itself, not just a projection of the human world. And Wagner’s nature, in the Ring, like nature in the real world, like the monumental sets of the Seattle production, can be sublimely indifferent to human concerns, completely free from human values and emotions. So understanding the complex relationship between humans and environment is not a simple act of judgment, i.e. this is good, that is bad. Finding wisdom on this question also calls for careful perception, inspired reason, and mysterious intuition.

For those who seek what is Green about the Ring, I would urge you to pay attention to repetitive patterns. Like the elements of nature itself, everything in the Ring returns again and and again, transformed. In our ‘Green’ Ring production, the scenic locations themselves return, transformed. In the cast list, the same voices, the same singers, return again and again, all week long, sometimes as old characters reappear but more often transformed into new characters. Wagner started the tradition of double-casting the highest Rhine daughter as the Forest Bird, or asking the Fasolt to sing Hunding also, and it’s not really a question of economy (more performances = more money for each singer). When Wagner reuses a certain voice type, he wants to connect the characters. Fasolt and Hunding are both uncouth brutes eager to trap a lyric soprano in marriage; Woglinde and the Forest Bird even sing the same pentatonic tune. Wagner uses voices and characters, like the famous leitmotifs in his musical score, to stand for the mythic principles, what he called “mythic motives,” that were his core subject. And the web of his musical score consists of repetitive patterns on the grandest possible scale, Wagner’s ever-transforming, ever-evolving system of dreamlike musical imagery.

I look forward, someday, to a more thorough ‘Green’ interpretation of the Ring, one which (like Shaw’s or Donington’s) goes through, scene by scene and character by character, and tries to sort it all out. Here are four starter questions I would ask anyone who wants to get cracking on such an interpretation:

1) Why should we care whether the gold is taken from the river? If there’s a problem, aren’t the Rhine daughters themselves to blame, because of their cruelty and stupidity? And how is their river, as it appears in Götterdämmerung, an undesirable or diminished place?

2) Why does Erda decide to enter, at the end of Das Rheingold? What does she care whether Wotan and the gods die then, or three operas later? And while we’re on Erda-—who, by the way, is no Mother Nature (Freia and Froh are the fertility gods, in this world)—-what do she and her Norns think and feel about what happens in this story? And why did Wagner leave their attitude so obscure?

3) Why does Wotan as the Wanderer—-a character who has theoretically come to terms with his own mortality, learned some Green wisdom, and accepted his place in the universe—-lose his temper and try to block Siegfried’s path with his spear?

4) If Loge’s deepest desire is to burn up Valhalla, destroying Wotan and all the gods (and the Gibichung castle and kingdom while he’s at it), then why was he so persistently—albeit ineffectively—advocating for the Rhine daughters way back in Das Rheingold? How can technology personified care about the natural order?

I’m happy to pose such questions. But don’t anybody look to me for answers! Instead, I’m going to take Hagen’s advice, “Zurück vom Ring!” (Get away from the Ring!) I celebrated the end of the cycle, the other day, with a yummy cobbler made from blackberries collected as we kayaked through the Arboretum. Although they’re everywhere around here, by the end of August, blackberries aren’t native, so by some impossibly Green standard I’m probably impure. (Don't tell Richard Wagner.) But they sure were tasty.