Tuesday

June 10, 2014

Walked the Andressa and bought a ticket to Der Rosenklavier. Have been largely abed since, exhausted and, frankly, comfortable half asleep in the cool of my room.

Stopped twice for drinks on the way to the opera. Stopped where they had mist coming from fans dropping on the diners. The Budapest opera is small but exquisite, all intricate and marmoreal, lined with portraits of people who, expect for Liszt, I’ve never heard of. Hungarian culture turns out to be foreign to me, more foreign, in some way, than Istanbul, for I knew its history. And the language! In Austria I knew enough, or could figure enough out from similarities and cognates, to get by. Here there are no cognates. I’ve figured out that utca is street and Ferenc is Francis, but beyond that, nil. Written, Hungarian looks like the Black Speech from Tolkien, though spoken it is soft, sweet, and rather secret, as though everyone were ever being intimate.

I had read the Rosenkavalier synopsis before going, and it sounded like a mighty thin story line to hang three hours upon. A TV show could do it in twenty minutes. But I realized soon that my aesthetic sense was gong to need adjustment. I’ve always admired Strauss, without having heard him in such a large dose. It’s all atmosphere, isn’t it? There are no arias; the changes in tone or energy are few and brief, all a sadly smiling elegy to lost youth, and reconciliation to the truth that time forges ahead. But on so many levels– in the life of the Marschallin, in the life of the self-indulging pig-of-an-aristocrat Ochs, and in the life of the whole Imperial idea which is itself another character, implied and dominating, like the Empress herself.  Class divisions are seen as real and immortal, the assumptions of rank unquestioned. Even Octavius and Sophie are about to be swept away, for he is a count and she longs to be a countess, or at least her family longs for that for here. It was 1911. In eight years what will be left? Maybe Octavius and Sophie ended up running a honeymoon B&B up in the Alps. I hope so. Never again will there be merry and wise authority like that of the Marschallin, who can make things go right simply by entering a room. I loved it. It was beautiful. I bought a ticket for tomorrow night’s Elektra.

The joke played on the Baron perplexes me. I don’t know upon which petard he was actually hoist. It looked like he was going to be exposed for a cad and an adulterer, but then he falls prey to his creditors. Either is fine, but I didn’t see how one crossed over into the other. I guess the Count is generally (maybe always, thinking of the tessatura) played by a woman, but that creeped me out a little. A girl pretending to be a girl really isn’t that funny. A blustering nincompoop making love to a girl because he thinks she’s a girl– well, really, again, not that funny. Was it in the original story? The tale goes back to Tristan and Isolde, doesn’t it, the woman falling in love with the messenger of love. Very lovely. I kept picturing myself as an all-day Rosenkavalier, bring silver roses to maiden after maiden in walled gardens, watching them blush and their eyes grow distant.

Did I respect it as theater? In a way yes. But Late Romantic and Post Romantic music never saw itself as the servant of anything else, not of words or of plot, so the lovely unfolding of Strauss’s musical ideas required the same thing to be said ten or twenty times, and for there to be a great host of gesticulating supernumeraries upstage sustaining states of agitation far longer than is natural. There is nothing more taxing than to “act” the operatic or balletic chorus. All measures of naturalness or plausibility fly out the wings.

Hearing it now as I type.

Interesting stroll home. The moon, almost full, was rising over the Danube. I was stopped by two prostitutes who wanted to know if I wanted to get a late drink before returning to my wife. They reminded me of something from Bosch, very old, skinny women (maybe as old as I) done up and shellacked to look like girls. They were actually kind of sweet. Then the man on the next block who hugged me and said that I should go get some “Power Pussy” at the strip club for which he worked. The two titty bars I know (already) in Budapest are right n the street, integrated with everything else. I used the wife the girls had invented for me and begged off. “Have you. . . men?” was on the tip of my tongue, but some good angel turned me and sent me home like a good boy. The man said, “Discretion, my friend. You don’t have to tell nobody nothing.” That has, in fact, been my motto in ewigkeit.