Despite Dido's anger being misplaced, its effects are nonetheless real, and those who suffer are not the nobles who have created the situation but Dido's subjects and the later citizens of Rome. Her hatred is corrosive: we see it, in the opera's climax, transforming not only Dido but her freedom-loving people as well. The lightness of the daily Carthage we first see, with diverse groups presenting suggestions for its improvement, has turned to the wartime darkness of a temple cult where all are forced into a unanimous hatred of an invisible enemy. Better the war you can win whatever the domestic cost, she might say (today, of course, the war is waged for the domestic cost) than continue the true struggles that need to be fought.
Maria Bjornson's majestic sets cover the sky with metal spikes. Almost like spokes of a wheel, they turn the stage of the Met into the inside of the famous perisphere of the 1939 World's Fair. Intentionally or not, this visual context creates a brooding sense of connected doom throughout the production, suggesting that the world - whether New York or Troy or Carthage - is all skewered by the same sky. A single eye in the spokes behind the action dilates and constricts throughout the show as the characters enjoy more or less freedom, but the sky never clears.
Simple, and violent actions are espoused by Dido and Cassandra -- but there are no simple answers in Les Troyens. The action of the opera is global and eternal, which means that despite our Cassandran foreknowledge and despair, there is little we can do. Our identification with Cassandra and then Dido are confounded by death and unjust rage. Our hopes for Troy, Carthage and possibly Rome are all dashed, even while we admire them. Even from far beyond the grave, it seems that the French are capable of confounding the American desire to turn everything into a black and white issue.
Maybe that, ultimately, is the contemporary lesson of Les Troyens: That there are no simple lessons, and that the production of complicated human art is the appropriate initial response to political powerlessness - certainly more appropriate than cursing posterity. Simplifying everything to the rhetoric of right and wrong is fantastically dangerous, whether it is played out in the corporate media of a nominal democracy or in the heavily policed street-speeches of a demagoguery. Richard Rorty has long suggested that such reductive political rhetoric cannot capture the quixotic dilemma of the human condition as well as the aesthetic ambivalence of a work such as Les Troyens. In art,
as in life, there are no perfect heroes and villains;
only imperfect people singing to make everything clear.
Hating the French for the right reasons
March, 2003
Anxiety on the national mall
January, 2003
According to 8 Mile, hip hop is about class, not race
December, 2002
How to be Spike Lee instead of another Clocker
October, 2002
The Art of the Press Conference
September, 2002
What's the difference between laughing with art and laughing at it?
June, 2002
CBS's packaging of the '9/11' documentary reveals exactly what America
fails to understand about Sept. 11.
April, 2002
Readings and Misreadings
Zeek live, March 20 at Makor
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Michael Shurkin
the reason for
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Hal Sirowitz
constriction
Jay Michaelson
war and not-peace
Dan Friedman
Only Shelter
Bryn Canner
miracles
Abraham Mezrich
josh goes to prague
Josh Ring
saddies
David Stromberg
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