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The Jewess - a Jewish opera By Philip Kennicott |
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| On Jan. 31, 1936, at New York's Metropolitan Opera, audiences watched an old Jewish man -- called the "Shylock of opera" and inevitably referred to as "vengeful" or "implacable" -- send his adopted daughter to her death in a vat of boiling oil. The character of Rachel, in Fromental Halevy's opera "La Juive," was being punished for the crime of marrying a Christian. Audiences who kept abreast of current events in Europe might have felt a frisson of something all too topical that evening. Less than five months earlier, Nazi Germany had passed the Nuremberg laws, which, among other indignities, made marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal. That performance of "La Juive," the last at the Metropolitan Opera for almost 70 years, was preceded by a matinee of Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," one of the legendary 1930s performances starring Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad that were driving New Yorkers Wagner-crazy. Critics noted that both shows were full and both were enthusiastically received. But many of them knocked "La Juive" for being a bit old-fashioned, and in the end, the opera's detractors won. "Tristan," from the pen of a notoriously anti-Semitic composer, has rarely been absent from the world's opera houses. "La Juive," composed by a Jew and once among the world's most popular operas, began disappearing from every major opera house in the 1930s. When the Vienna State Opera staged a production for the American tenor Neil Shicoff in 1999, the opera was remembered, by most people, only for a couple of its arias. On Thursday, that production, with Shicoff, will be seen at the Met, the 63rd performance of Halevy's opera there, but the first in 67 years. Why did it disappear? Within the insular confines of the opera world the answer is always about opera. "La Juive" -- premiered in 1835 at the Paris Opera -- is a classic French grand opera, a long, sumptuous spectacle with a melodramatic plot and huge musical and dramatic demands. Uncut, its five acts run to five hours, placing extraordinary demands on the singers. The central tenor role, Eleazar, is considered one of the most challenging in the repertoire, demanding a strong, unflagging voice, musical maturity and more acting chops than most opera singers can muster. It was a favorite of Enrico Caruso, and it was as Eleazar that Caruso gave his last stage performance at the Met. So the opera world says "La Juive" disappeared because the taste for this kind of spectacle waned, and because Carusos don't come along every day. "My personal opinion is that it overstayed its welcome," says the Metropolitan Opera's archives director Robert Tuggle. But Shicoff thinks the answer isn't just about operatic taste and a dearth of great singers. Eleazar is a great and demanding role, but not out of all proportion to other tenor roles. And, far from conceding that it is old-fashioned, Shicoff says it is "the most contemporary political opera there is." He also says that it's not just coincidence that it disappeared during the 1930s, when Nazi Germany was far from the only country indulging in anti-Semitism. "The U.S. State Department was notoriously anti-Semitic," he says. This much is definitely true: Whether it was something musical, or political, or a combination of both, there was a rupture in the 1930s that forever changed the meanings of, and the appetite for, this opera. Even though it was written by a Jewish composer, on a Jewish subject, it's a stretch to call "La Juive," or "The Jewess," a Jewish opera. The story, by the industrious and overexposed librettist Eugene Scribe, indulges anti-Semitic stereotypes even as it tells a story ultimately sympathetic to its Jewish characters. Unknown to Rachel, the Jewess, she is actually the daughter of a powerful Catholic cleric, Cardinal Brogni. Eleazar, who has been persecuted by Brogni, is raising Rachel as his daughter and a Jew. In the end, to wreak revenge on Brogni, he allows Rachel -- who has been courted by a Christian prince posing as a Jew -- to go to her death before revealing the secret that would have saved her: She is, in fact, a Christian. Eleazar more than earns his nickname "the Shylock of opera." He is money-hungry, inflexible and willing to put revenge above all else. He works on public holidays, his anvil hammering out shrill sounds in dissonant contrast to the massed voices of the Christian chorus. He is combative and smart, and he throws back in their faces the hypocrisy of his Christian persecutors. Like Shylock, he is not a simple, or easily sympathetic, character. Pick at the threads of this opera and it can be made to seem almost overtly anti-Semitic. Rachel's fate is tragic because she is, in fact, a Christian. Eleazar, though driven to fanatical hatred by others, all but kills his own daughter. And isn't there something a bit creepy about a Jewish composer writing an opera, for a Christian audience, in which boiling Jews in oil becomes entertainment? If this opera had been written in 1945, the best one could say is that it was in dreadful taste. But despite its lurid and even cavalier treatment of anti-Semitism, there's evidence that Jews embraced it sometimes ironically, sometimes seriously, as a Jewish work. In "Remembrance of Things Past," Marcel Proust, whose mother was Jewish, has his narrator's grandfather whistle a tune from the opera every time the boy brings home a Jewish school friend. It's a wink-wink moment, a "you know that I know" that shows how complicated the position of assimilated French Jews was in the late 19th century. And Proust names a prostitute in his novel "Rachel, quand du Seigneur," the title of Eleazar's most famous aria. American critics, in the early 20th century, were also coy about identifying it as a Jewish piece. One called it a "Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes in the hand" and another, lamenting that it was Caruso's last stage performance (on Christmas Eve, no less), noted that he had sung it "in a crucifixion of pain." For decades after Caruso died, "La Juive" was remembered as the opera that martyred the world's favorite tenor. Jewish singers have also embraced it: The great American tenor Richard Tucker desperately wanted to revive it at the Met, but never got the chance; Shicoff, the son of a cantor, wears his father's prayer shawl when he sings the role, a nod to both his father and his heritage. And one more bit of evidence: In the newspapers of 1936, amid the huge articles about gentile high society, were tiny announcements that "La Juive" would be performed as a fundraiser for Hadassah, the American women's Zionist organization, to help raise money to get German Jewish children to the safety of Palestine. After the Second World War, however, with 6 million Jews dead in Europe, there could be no ironic enjoyment of the opera, à la Proust, or simplistic appropriation of it as a Jewish work simply because, amid its moral ambiguities, the Christian character gets his comeuppance. After the Holocaust, one needed opera that was angrier, more sure in its political sentiments, and more trenchant in its condemnations. French grand opera went out of fashion in the 1930s for a variety of reasons, mostly musical. But operas like "La Juive" stayed out of the canon for more than half a century because they were remembered as silly, and the world had no use for their frippery. Shicoff wants to change that, and in the four years since he first performed the role onstage in Vienna, he has gone through a remarkable journey. His first approach to Eleazar, he says, was all about finding the sympathetic core. Then, in the course of making a documentary about his efforts to get "La Juive" revived, he worked with film director Sidney Lumet ("Network," "Serpico"). "He brought out in me the idea that he's a much more fanatical character than I perceived him to be," Shicoff said. That caused Shicoff's entire conception of the role to evolve. He stopped trying to force Eleazar into the box of being a sympathetic Jewish character at heart, and toward seeing him as more fanatical, as a universal character forced by hatred to be hateful. Lumet had been brought in by producer Paula Heil Fisher, who was making the documentary about Shicoff. Her original thought was to film an MTV-style music video of Eleazar's famous aria, "Rachel, quand du Seigneur" ("Rachel, when the Lord's saving grace"), which could be incorporated into the film. And an early plan for that video was to set it in Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp. Shicoff hated the idea, the glib reference to the Holocaust that has become a cliche of contemporary stagecraft. So Lumet came up with a better one. He filmed the aria in an old, decommissioned synagogue in New York, and focused his attention on getting Shicoff to push his characterization to the limits of torment and hatred. Shicoff says he found a "perverse energy" in the character and his relation to the others in the opera. "La Juive" became, for him, not so much a piece about Jews and Christians, but a piece about the damage of irreconcilable hatred everywhere. This appealed to his left-leaning political nature. "If I were to direct this, I would have Eleazar trying to convince Rachel to be a suicide bomber," he says. The Jew becomes the terrorist, and the opera becomes a way into the mind of a person driven, by political circumstances, to choose violence over family, anger over resolution. Suddenly, says Shicoff, the opera became more meaningful, more about today's world, about things like ethnic cleansing, places like Palestine and Iraq, and the dangers of a world that perceives America as imperialistic. With Eleazar freed from the strictures of being a Jew persecuted by Christians, and looking a lot more like a Palestinian angry at Jews, Shicoff was able, he says, to tap into "the logic of people who have grown up in a have-not society." He makes no apologies for whatever controversy such a reading might provoke. "I am a Jew, but I'm also political," he says. "I see this opera as absolutely, totally, political." Not that the production at the Met will make Shicoff's thinking obvious. Director Gunter Kramer has set his production in a bleak, contemporary world. The wild, kinky hair and curled beard that Caruso wore have been banished. Eleazar is a 20th-century man, who prepares for his death by neatly removing and folding his clothes, an unmistakable reference to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The production debuted in Vienna two weeks after the election that saw the right-wing politician Joerg Haider's Freedom Party earn enough votes to become part of a coalition government. The irony was not lost on the Austrians, who, says Shicoff, were wildly enthusiastic about the opera. In New York, he knows that he's performing it, in part, for the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. He relishes the chance. But in his head, "La Juive" has evolved to a new place. It can never be what people remember it as: a melodious trifle in which killing Jews is a backdrop for a standard love story with a melodramatic ending. It is now about the world he lives in, a world filled with violence and hatred, in which there are children so hopeless that they will strap on explosives and kill themselves to kill others. The opera has become what nobody noticed it already was in 1936: a story about political reality with no easy answers. "There's no Hollywood ending," Shicoff says.
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