Some reflections on auteur opera in San Francisco: The Rake's Progress and Parsifal by Thomas May
As
North America's second largest opera company, San Francisco Opera is indisputably
a major player in the vibrant West Coast arts scene. It attracts not only
a passionate local audience but far-traveling musical pilgrims eager to
experience the latest Ring Cycle or a star-studded world premiere (1998's
A Streetcar Named Desire, for example). Each June the air becomes particularly
charged--perhaps in synergy with the San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks
festival, right across the street, which is developing into an annual tradition--when
the Opera's season draws to a close. 
This summer
offered a triptych of operas--a stretto of masterpieces from each of the
last three centuries--all sharing an existentialist obsession with the human
plight as well as with the possibility of some kind of redemption: Don Giovanni,
Parsifal, and The Rake's Progress. While the Giovanni (codirected by Lotfi
Mansouri and Graziella Sciutti, a production which I wasn't able to catch)
seemed to be essentially tradition bound--at least according to the largely
negative press it received--the latter two offered striking examples of
the power and clout of concept opera, that is, productions with a dominant
imprint from the director and/or designer (think Patrice Chéreau, Peter
Sellars, even the now-legendary "new Bayreuth" of Wieland Wagner, for some
of the most famous exemplars--or infamous, depending on your point of view).
For
this revival, Hockney's original stage director John Cox returned, adding
a veneer of stylized stage movement onto the basic Hockney concept: vivid,
emphatically two-dimensional cutouts featuring neo-Hogarthian cross-hatchings.
The cartoonish cast of the whole concept sparkles with wit, like Stravinsky's
score--but it also serves to highlight the sense of artifice and self-referentiality
that progresses through Rake. This "progress of a rake" that Nick Shadow
so knowingly observes is, in fact, observed to some degree by Tom Rakewell
himself, and the path from the opera's opening Eden (hint of Candide)
to its sad Bedlam follows a pattern that is made precisely of drawing
attention to patterns, both in operatic tradition and in the inner world
of the human psyche.
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