Hop on Board the Nutcracker Train by Kathryn Bumpass

If it's December, it must be time for The Nutcracker Ballet, an enduring seasonal favorite. For the third year in a row, the Opera San Luis Obispo Grand Orchestra will be in the pit at performances in both San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, under the direction of Maestro Brian Asher Alhadeff, Artistic Director of OperaSLO.

The Nutcracker train starts from the Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly campus, with performances on Saturday, December 13, at 2:00pm and 7:00pm, and on Sunday, December 14 at 2pm. In a continuation of area performing arts collaboration, the Civic Ballet of San Luis Obispo will star in a production with the Orchestra, and the Morro Bay High School chorus.

Our arts train travels south to Santa Barbara, where the State Street Ballet joins with the OperaSLO Grand Orchestra for Nutcracker performances at the Granada Theater on Saturday, December 20 at 2:00pm and 7:30pm, and on Sunday at 2:00pm. For tickets to the San Luis Obispo performances, go online to OperaSLO or call the Cal Poly ticket office at 805-756-4849.

The composer of the music for Nutcracker, Peter Illich Tchaikovksy, is well known, but the author of the story for this beloved ballet is less so. ETA Hoffmann was author of the Tales of Hoffmann, made famous in the opera by Offenbach. Among his other tales was the story of "The Nutcracker and the King of Mice," which is the basis of the ballet, and his most famous.

Hoffmann was a multi-talented man: a highly regarded legal officer, an artist, an opera conductor and manager, a composer, and best known today as author of a large body of fantastical short stories, luminous musical writings, music criticism, and a strange novel (The Life and Opinions of Murr the Tomcat).

THE MET LIVE IN HD

Three HD operas will be broadcast in January 2015. The first, Wagner's grand comedy Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, will be shown Sunday, January 11, at 2pm at the Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly Campus. Tickets can be purchased online at OperaSLO or by calling 805-756-4849.

The Master Singers were performers, composers and preservers of a tradition of German song dating back to as early as the 1300s. Their art reached a peak in the 1500s, when the most famous member of their guild, Hans Sachs, lived.

Sachs is the hero of Wagner's opera, an artist who values both tradition and creativity. He champions the art of young Walther von Stolzing, whose songs breathe a new air into the Meistersinger tradition, and whose novelties earn the ridicule of the other Master Singers, especially Beckmesser, the stern "marker" who takes note of any mistakes in the approved rules of poetry and song composition.

Walther is a somewhat romantic figure whose art springs from the heart, and who at first neither knows nor appreciates the system of rules that has preserved the Master Singers' "holy German art" of song. He submits himself to Sachs' tutelage, though, out of a desire to compete in a song contest, the winner of which will be permitted to marry the beautiful Eva, with whom Walther has fallen in love. In the end, he composes the beautiful Prize Song which wins the contest and the respect of the Master Singers, and unites him with Eva.

As outlined above, the story of Die Meistersinger is conventional, but with Wagner, we have to expect many layers of meaning under the surface. For one thing, Die Meistersinger is an unambiguously nationalist opera.

Nationalism and national aspirations were powerful movements in 19th century Europe, and Wagner saw "holy German art," whether traditional German song or his own Germanic "total art work" as a way of unifying people and society. One scholar, Stephen McClatchie, sees Meistersinger as representative of Wagner's ideal of "construct[ing] a nation and a people united by art." Such thoughts were exquisitely in tune with their context: Not long after Meistersinger's first performance in 1868, what is now Germany emerged as a nation-state after Prussian military victories in 1870 and 1871.

Probably it was this nationalist quality that led Hitler to regard Meistersinger as his favorite opera. Others have seen a red streak of anti-Semitism running through the opera, especially in the treatment of Beckmesser. Let us not squirm in the face of the reality: Wagner was indeed a notorious anti-Semite. His essay Das Judentum in Musik (Judaism in Music) was first published in 1850 and in a revised and enlarged version in 1869.

It was a vicious attack on Jews and likely stems from Wagner's failure to achieve success as an opera composer in Paris during the 1840s. For this failure, and without cause, he blamed Jews, mostly notably Giacomo Meyerbeer, the leading composer of French grand opera at that time. After the Paris experience, Wagner became a self-consciously German composer, rejecting the world of French and Italian opera, and a virulent anti-Semite.

It would be fair to say that most of the humor in Die Meistersinger, Wagner's only mature comedy, is at Beckmesser's expense. And without doubt Beckmesser is meant to represent Wagner's severe critics in Vienna, most prominent among them, Eduard Hanslick, who was Jewish. Thomas Grey, one of today's leading Wagner scholars, however, finds nothing particularly "Jewish" in Wagner's characterization of Beckmesser. He is cast, simply, as a rigid, narrow-minded critic, hostile to creativity.

With Wagner, probably more than any other major figure in Western European art music, we are confronted by the question of how or whether to judge the art by the character of the artist. Should we judge Die Meistersinger by Wagner's least attractive, indeed most repugnant, personality traits? Then we would never want to perform it. Should we judge it as an isolated phenomenon, without any reference to its creator or context? Then we can never understand it as an expression of culture.

Nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics made a strong connection between the condition of the artist and his or her work, but at the same time attributed to the work of art a transcendent quality. Perhaps most of us are closet Romantics, and continue to appreciate the work of inspired but flawed artists.

January's two other HD operas will be discussed in next month's column.

This season's Met Live in HD series will begin locally on Saturday, March 18, 9:55am, with Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. All performances will be held at the Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly campus. Tickets are $27 each, which includes parking, and may be purchased online at Pac Slo.org, or by calling 805-756-4849.  Read More