Opera reviews usually carry no spoiler
warnings. On the contrary, they usually begin with an exhaustive, sometimes
exhausting blow-by-blow account of every contrived detail of plot. So let this be no
exception. Eros and Psyche by Ludomir Rozicki could be just another nineteenth
century classical rewrite, just another femme fatale tear-jerker, but it is
much more than that.
Psyche dreams of being swept off her feet
by love. We feel that these Arcadian maidens occupying a green room to make up
for a performance are almost imprisoned so that they might beautify themselves.
Psyche is enamoured of, perhaps obsessed with a man, who has taken to visit her
nightly. It´s a good time to pop in!
She reveals to a friend she has been seeing someone. Eros reappears
and offers eternal love, but only on his terms. Somehow he has managed to
conceal his identity, if not his intentions, until Blaks, the caretaker,
inadvertently casts light on Eros’s face and then all hell is let loose. Eros
condemns Psyche to suffer an eternal life of constant wandering and
disappointment, a life in which Blaks will regularly reappear to deny her any
fulfilment. It’s a judgment delivered by Perseus, who announces exile and
eternal wandering as he hands over a passport and tickets for both Psyche and
Blaks. As Psyche embarks upon her fate, we realise we must not blame the
messenger.
Her first subsequent port of call is a
party - perhaps a drunken orgy - in ancient Rome, a Rome that is of course not
ancient for her. A couple of Greeks at the gathering lament what Romans have
done to their culture, a culture inherited from their own people, including
Psyche. She appears, but she is obviously out of place, of a different culture
and time, and she is mocked by everyone, especially by the women, who ridicule
her appearance. They label her mad and Blaks, who here is a Prefect, apparently
in charge, delivers condemnation.
We move on to Spain during the Inquisition.
Psyche embraces Christ crucified on the cross. There is sexuality in her
obsession with the figure. She enters a convent, but still yearns for a life
outside its confines. The other nuns do not trust her. She tells of her need for
the sun and fresh air, but she is warned not to have ambition. She must do as
she is told, because asking questions is sinful, here. There is to be a visit
by the abbot, a man who recently condemned a nun to be burned at the stake.
Psyche is thus warned. Her attitudes are described to the abbot, who condemns
her. Blaks, of course, is the abbot, who wields power more easily than he
exhibits faith. Eros appears, we think to save her, but all he offers is a
facile song.
Our heroine’s next port of call is revolutionary
France. She works while men drink. We learn that it was Psyche who led the
storming of the Bastille in the name of freedom. She rejects an offer of
marriage because she would rather serve the people. She wants to lead the
commune into battle. She is too radical to be a revolutionary. She insists on
principle and finds herself on the wrong side of politics. Guess who might be
the pragmatic leader who condemns her beliefs.
A final scene is in a bar or nightclub,
where psyche dances to entertain the drinkers, who are all men. Blaks, here
called the Baron, is the owner of the club and the principal exploiter of the
women who work for him. The women attract the men to the bar, they drink and
the baron, not the women, makes money. Psyche laments her role, but the baron
says it’s all her own fault. She laughs at offers of love, saying she wants to
be independent. But, having achieved her liberation she finds she can’t cope
with it.
Eros appears, perhaps to save the day.
Psyche is still infatuated, but now also exhausted. Eros reveals he has an
alter ego by the name of Thanatos, the personification of death, and thus
Psyche learns she is doomed. Her response is to torch what remains of her life,
a life that has now rejected her. Eros-Thanatos has the last word, however, by
presenting Psyche with a sports car which has already crashed. He invites her
to sit at the wheel and then paints her with her own blood to show the end has
finally arrived.
Eros and Psyche was premiered in 1917 and
Rozycki’s style is not unlike that of Symanowski, but there is also Richard
Strauss in there, alongside not a little Debussy. Many of the short phrases are
also reminiscent of Janacek, though usually without the bite. Given the opera’s
date, we would expect Psyche, though still femme fatale, to be at least a
little forward looking. She is certainly not a Violetta or Mimi, in that she is
no mere victim of bad luck, disease or circumstance. She is closer to a
Butterfly, but she does not accept her fate meekly and without protest. In classical
terms, we may have here a Salome or Elektra, but these were anti-heroines who
probably deserved what they got. Tosca got mixed up in politics that went
wrong. One has the feeling that Psyche would have relished the opportunity, but
it never arose.
Three other theatrically destroyed women of the
era come to mind, Judith, Katya and Elena. Judith’s plight in Bartok’s
Bluebeard’s Castle parallels Psyche’s here. Judith can only know Bluebeard by
probing the psychological spaces of his mind. He resents this, but allows her to
continue, knowing that once she knows him, he will have taken possession of
her. Similarly, Psyche is punished because she gets to know Eros, thereby
reducing his control over her, a control he must reassert by condemning her.
The Bartok-Balasz character, however, is more modern than Psyche, despite the
existence of castles and visions. It is only when Judith understands the mental
make-up of Bluebeard that he has to punish her, because only then that she
becomes a threat to him. She is eternally mummified alongside the wives who
have preceded her.
Janacek’s Katya Kabova is a step back into
the nineteenth century by virtue of originally having been a creation of
Ostrovsky, but her achievement of a finality of death does ask some modern
questions. Ostrovsky’s nineteenth
century provincial dramas general do away with their heroines, but it is the
societies rather than the individuals that are seen at fault. When oppression
and hypocrisy are cultural and structural, it is hard for any individual to
oppose them. But here it is these attitudes that make female existence a
tragedy. Yes, Katya takes her own life, but it is another woman, her own
mother-in-law, who asks the community to witness the doing of justice and not
to shed tears for a woman who brought her fate on herself. The music, in fact,
ends with neither tragedy nor anger, but with a question mark. Elena
Makropoulos presents a different challenge. In many ways she is in control.
Like Psyche she has lived, or at claims to have done so, in many eras, has
inhabited many roles and has had a string different lives. Her original fate,
however, like Psyche’s, was imposed on her by a man, in Elena’s case her
father. Like Psyche, Elena has become cynical about men’s motives and
dismissive of their capabilities. Crucially, however, when Elena is offered the
opportunity to take back control of her eternal existence, she rejects it,
preferring death to repeating the same old things. Psyche was never offered
control and its attainment was never in her grasp. But Psyche thinks she
achieved a liberation from oppression at the end, though she was unable to cope
with it. This makes her a more modern figure.
So, for a modern audience, Psyche cannot be
merely a classical beauty who crosses a god. And in the production by Warsaw’s
Polish National Opera, she isn’t. Each of the scenarios is transformed into a
film set. Scene one is a giant green room, populated by women who clearly want
to be stars. Whether Eros operated a casting couch is unclear, but the probability
is high. From scene one’s green room, Psyche is cast her role in each of the
other four scenes, each of which is destined to be part of a feature film in
which she stars. When Blaks repeatedly frustrates her activities and condemns
her, the two of them become near stereotypes for femme fatale and callous male
power. If we ask if it has to be this way, we have to answer that it was a male
god in the first instance that insisted it should be so.
By the end, Psyche has had enough and she
torches the world that has exploited her. It ought to be a final act of
self-destructive defiance but the god and men even then reassert their control.
A car crash is organised and she is painted with blood. The car itself part of
the trappings of the stardom she has sought, and thus Psyche potentially
becomes a tabloid press headline, probably moralising about a life of
debauchery or excess. Psyche thus becomes a modern victim. She is a Marilyn
Monroe ruined by fame, or perhaps a Jayne Mansfield, epitome of womanhood
exploited for male voyeurs.
Thanks to the internet and Opera Vision we
can all view this production from Warsaw and thereby draw our own conclusions.
Streamed via a smart TV or perhaps better in the case of Opera Vision via a
laptop and cable, the opera even comes with subtitles for anyone who might not
catch all of the original Polish .
Joanna Freszel as Psyche gives a stunning performance, being vocally up the
task as well as combining the confidence, ambition and assertion of a modern
woman alongside the naivete and vulnerability of anyone who might fall in love.
Mikołaj Zalasiński as Blaks is brilliant at using his power whilst never
really appearing to be worthy of its extent, which is exactly what the
character of Psyche must be thinking. He also makes the role anti-intellectual,
thus stressing the contrast between the use of power and any knowledge of its
consequences.
The broadcast was in 2018 and these days there are only extracts from this production. But they are still excellent.
