AN IMPROBABLE WAGNER COMIC OPERA
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—For this early opera, if you generously award 1.5 stars to Richard Wagner, you have to give at least four stars to Pocket Opera for its spanking-fresh semi-staged production.
San Francisco‘s smallest opera troupe brought off an animated, sparkling show with Wagner’s “No Love Allowed” (Das Liebesverbot), an early production before Wagner became Wagner. Instead of the usual stab at German mythology and grim machinations, here we get a pseudo-Italian frivolity sounding like Donizetti, featuring an assignation-with-wife plot derived from both Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” and Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”
But at least Wagner proved here he could also do light comedy and flirtatious liaisons with an irreverent touch, long before his “accursed Ring” visions spoiled the Harmony of the Spheres after years of work. Here it’s all about extracting the heroine Isabella from a convent, fixing up the rapacious and corrupt ruler Friedrich with his own disguised wife, and ending up with the nun Isabella’s hook-up with boyfriend Luzio (WHAT??) in an improbable ending that somehow got by the censors of the day.
If it was hard to follow, blame a German opera with an Italian setting and plot, heard here in Donald Pippin’s jaunty English translation bristling with rhyming couplets. For veteran Wagnerians, it was a jaunty revelation indeed—the only recognizable mature-Wagner musical phrase this day came in a short rising motif high up the scale, to recur revived and amplified in “Parsifal” 46 years later.
By making deep cuts in the score, Music Director Jonathan Khuner trimmed the score to a fast-paced two-acter running under three hours, playing a double role as conductor and hard-pressed pianist. Despite all the animated music, the work is rarely performed, as it calls for an unwieldy total of 11 solo singers, including two tenors and two sopranos entrusted with solo and ensemble duties. The ensemble finales are masterful.
Credit Nicolas Garcia, stage director as well as Pocket’s general director, for a mad-cap animated cast looking more like operetta than opera veterans. The immediate audience impact was clear despite the semi-staged format, given all the saucy wenches and love-starved males living it up in a Sicilian Carnival with festive costumes. It’s so uninhibited that the starchy (German) leadership wants it all banned. Therein lies the plot.
High-quality singers, most of them local, were engaged, with soprano Leslie Sandefur (Isabella) and tenor Michael Dailey (Luzio) at the helm. Also in focal parts as the enforcers were baritone Michael Grammer (Brighella) and bass-baritone Spencer Dodd (Friedrich).
Running in three Bay Area cities, Pocket Opera productions remaining include Offenbach’s operetta “Grand Duchess of Gerolstein” and Verdi’s “La Traviata” through July 24. All part of the amazing legacy of long-lived and mercurial founder Donald Pippin, who in addition to his piano-playing and dry tongue-in-cheek annotation, had left us nearly 100 stage works in his English translation. Among his deft one-liners was one on the prolific composer Gaetano Donizetti: “He was depressed. Two weeks had gone by, and he hadn’t written a single opera.” Pippin was turned down for so many production grants that he set up his Elsewhere Foundation for fund-raising, after his rejection slips would suggest “trying elsewhere.”
I’m proud to say that I coined the term “pocket opera” in discussing Pippin’s modest and nameless concert-version operation circa 1975 in a long-gone North Beach café, when writing for the Oakland Tribune. He was getting rolling with his baby, still the area’s most portable opera company accompanied by the “Pocket Philharmonic,” with never more than a dozen instrumentalists. The opera that night had been Donizetti’s “Rita,” yet another rarity.
WAGNER’S ‘NO LOVE ALLOWED,” in English, semi-staged, by Pocket Opera. Closing May 29 at the Mountain View Center for the Arts. For Pocket info: (415) 972-8934, or go online: www.pocketopera.org.
