Placing the Timeless Vermeer in the Chaos of His Time

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Placing the Timeless Vermeer in the Chaos of His Time
By ALAN RIDING
NYT, 0.7.9

AMSTERDAM -- I F any old master exudes a singular detachment from
the world, both this one and the next, surely it is Vermeer: not
for him were great tableaus inspired by the Bible or Greek
mythology, or portraits of monarchs or emperors, or even oils of
the powerful Dutch burghers of his day. Rather, to judge by his 30
or so surviving paintings, Vermeer preferred to express his
fascination with color and light in domestic scenes of
extraordinary intimacy, with at most a letter, being read or
written, suggesting a world beyond the window.

In other words, it would take a mighty dose of imagination to turn
Johannes Vermeer into the stuff of dramatic opera.

Peter Greenaway, the experimental British movie director, and Louis
Andriessen, the Minimalist Dutch composer, have taken up the
challenge. Focusing on two weeks in May 1672 when Vermeer made a
rare trip away from his home in Delft to The Hague, they surmise
that he was kept abreast of family news by letters from his wife,
mother-in-law and model. They also presume that, while in The
Hague, he sensed the crisis gripping the Dutch Republic as it
prepared to breach the country's dikes to hold off invasion by
France. By confronting Vermeer's domestic tranquility with the
turbulence of his times, then, Mr. Greenaway and Mr. Andriessen
found something to work with.

The resulting 100-minute opera, "Writing to Vermeer," first
presented by the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam's Muziektheater in
December, will have its American premiere at the New York State
Theater on Tuesday when it opens Lincoln Center Festival 2000. The
festival, now in its fifth year, will offer 108 performances of 29
musical, theatrical, dance and other events through July 30,
including three additional performances of "Writing to Vermeer" on
July 13, 14 and 15. A separate program, Peter Greenaway on Screen,
is also showing a handful of his best-known movies, including "The
Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," through Wednesday at
Makor on West 67th Street.

The new opera, which might be called a work for music, screen and
water, is above all a feast for the eyes, no novelty perhaps for
Mr. Greenaway, whose recent movies include such visual fantasies as
"Prospero's Books," "The Pillow Book" and "8 1/2 Women." Indeed, in
1994, in his first operatic collaboration with Mr. Andriessen,
"Rosa: A Horse Drama" (renamed "Rosa: The Death of a Composer" in a
recent recording released by Nonesuch Records), Mr. Greenaway
concocted an equally bizarre stage-and-screen spectacle around the
story of a composer of music for Westerns who falls in love with
his horse.

"Writing to Vermeer," which was generally well received by Dutch
and other European critics, also began with a visual inspiration,
specifically when Mr. Greenaway, known for his fascination with the
17th century, visited the Vermeer retrospective in The Hague in
1996. Once again intrigued by the beguiling and timeless mood of
the paintings, he came up with the idea for a musical stage work
built around 18 fictional letters -- six from each of the women in
the artist's life -- sent to Vermeer during his brief absence from
home, a work initially conceived as "an opera without drama," a
chamber piece on the same scale as the paintings.

"I then suggested that it might be possible to make the piece more
large-scale while still retaining a sense of intimacy," Mr.
Andriessen, 61, explained in the production's program notes. "We
could provide 'windows' that break into the domesticity and
serenity of Vermeer's home life and thus allow the viewer to see
what was really going on in the world at the time."

F OR the Dutch, at least, 1672 was a tumultuous year. A century of
prosperity had enabled the United Provinces, as the Dutch republic
was then known, to shake off Spanish rule and emerge as an
international naval and trading power. But the republic's elder
statesman, Johan de Witt, and his brother, Cornelius, had just been
lynched by a mob in The Hague for trying to negotiate peace with
the French invaders.

And if the breaching of the dikes seemed like a military stroke of
genius, it brought on economic disaster. For many historians, 1672
marked the end of the Dutch Golden Age.

To add still more drama, the opera uses large screens, placed
behind and at times on the stage, to remind viewers of traumatic
moments from earlier years, notably the crash of the speculative
tulip market, the gunpowder explosion that destroyed a good part of
Delft and religious riots in many Dutch cities. Just as the
"windows" bring in a world far more disturbing than anything that
the painter chose to record, the staging and music of "Writing to
Vermeer" provide the drama absent in the libretto.

Mr. Greenaway's fascination with blood, apparent in "Rosa: A Horse
Drama" and its grisly abattoir scenes, now leads him to cover
performers with the blood of the De Witt brothers. Saskia Boddeke,
who directed the production with Mr. Greenaway and did much of the
actual staging, in turn displays a typical Dutch interest in water
and dikes: she places the sloping stage above a pool of water,
water runs down the stage and it also buckets down from above.

There are more domestic liquids, too: the ink of the letters to
Vermeer (they frequently appear on screen as they are being
written); the varnish accidentally drunk by one of Vermeer's 10
children; and the milk poured by a kitchen maid in a momentary
tableau vivant of "The Milkmaid," one of Vermeer's most loved
paintings (and naturally, many of the costumes designed by Emi Wada
that also mirror Vermeer oils). Put differently, a lot of visual
distraction is cooked up onstage.

As in Amsterdam, Catherina Bolnes, Vermeer's doting wife, will be
sung in New York by Susan Narucki; Maria Thins, his mother-in-law,
by Susan Bickley; and Saskia de Vries, his model, by Barbara
Hannigan. The Asko and Schönberg Ensembles, two Dutch contemporary
music groups, will be conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw, himself chief
conductor of the Schönberg Ensemble.

The libretto, written in English and presented in New York with
English supertitles, is divided into six scenes (without
intermission) and comprises nothing more than the six letters sung
by each of the three soprano leads, along with a few asides by two
children onstage and a six-woman chorus in the orchestra pit. No
male voices are heard and Vermeer himself replies to none of the
letters.

The letters, chatty in tone, offer news, gossip and loving doses of
nostalgia for the absent painter. The biggest development is
perhaps word that Saskia (herself a character invented by Mr.
Greenaway) has been summoned home by her father, who wants to see
her married, so her letters are sent from Dordrecht. Writing from
Delft, Catherina jokes saucily about Saskia's "kissable lips" ("And
I know you have thought the same"), but also reports with alarm
that "Cornelia has swallowed varnish." Maria, Vermeer's
mother-in-law, flirts and flatters ("You see, no sooner you are
away than we want you back").

With images of familiar Vermeer paintings appearing on screens, the
letters also include such pointed references to Vermeer the artist
as: "The way you narrow your eyes when you stare so hard into the
light" (Catherina) and "You paint us all writing so often -- we get
into the habit and cannot stop" (Maria) and "I sit here in the
sunlight from the window" (Saskia).

"The letters have been conceived to infer the possibility of a
supposed domestic idyll," Mr. Greenaway writes in the program. "In
the later Vermeers, from the evidence of the paintings to be used
in the opera, the women sit and talk, play music, weigh pearls, try
on a pearly necklace, pour milk, crochet lace, write and read
letters. They are treated with dignity. There is no adverse
critical perspective, no attempt to sexually objectify the women,
no attempt to titillate the women for the male gaze."

To the central trio of women, Ms. Boddeke has added a dozen more,
both to people the stage and to respond as a choreographic ensemble
to the disturbing news reaching the household. More puzzlingly, she
has also created three versions of Catherina, Maria and Saskia, all
dressed alike, although only one of each sings. But since all the
singers wear hidden head-microphones, the result is that the
audience cannot always identify which character is actually singing
on a crowded stage.

"It wasn't my idea," Mr. Andriessen said, "and I don't really like
it. But Saskia wanted to have the singers running around the stage,
so you needed the head mikes. It also made it easier to integrate
the pre-recorded music."

Mr. Andriessen has incorporated excerpts of electronic music
composed and prerecorded by Michael van der Aa to symbolize moments
when the real world disrupts the "domestic idyll." While
Stravinskian undertones typical of Mr. Andriessen's work often
surface, his own score for "Writing to Vermeer" is also full of
conscious references to other composers: he said he borrowed some
musical structures from John Cage's "Six Melodies" for violin and
piano and his "Sixteen Dances" and he adopted some melodies from a
work by the 17th-century Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.

There are also hidden influences. "Although I do not think it is
audibly perceptible from the music," Mr. Andriessen said, "I did
often think about Ravel when I was writing this opera. He is the
best example if you are striving to dress simple ideas in a
beautiful and refined way. But by far the most important motivation
for writing the music in the way I did was my love for Vermeer's
paintings. That is what it is all about, and -- if you do your very
best -- then perhaps you can succeed in creating something, albeit
an approximation, that is just as beautiful as the paintings."

Yet, no doubt frustratingly for Mr. Andriessen, critical reaction
to "Writing to Vermeer" to date has tended to depend on whether the
reviewer loves or hates Mr. Greenaway's work. Just as Mr.
Greenaway's movies provoke sharply contradictory responses, the
opera drew sharp criticism from some European critics, notably
Andrew Clark of The Financial Times of London, who complained about
"voices disembodied by amplification."

"On top of that," he wrote, "Greenaway can't resist illustrating
every line of text with repetitive film footage and choreographic
routines, all thrown together in a sprawling jumble. There's no
sense of individual character, no development from one scene to the
next. What 'Writing to Vermeer' amounts to is a very expensive and
very tedious charade."

Still, Dutch newspaper critics did single out Mr. Andriessen's
"tender and quite lyrical music," as Erik Voermans put it in
Parool. In general, they also praised the production, with Kasper
Jansen in NRC Handelsblad speaking of its "extraordinarily
beautiful and occasional images of old Dutch life." Roland DeBeer,
in Volkskrant, described the music as "masterful" but noted that
"for spectators without a diploma in art history, it was hard to
identify all the various characters as they danced, sat down, read
and wrote, hunted around, blew out candles and played the
harpsichord."

And for some British critics, everything seemed quite perfect.

"Greenaway creates continuous magic on the operatic stage," Adrian
Mourby wrote in The Independent of London. And in The Guardian,
Andrew Clements, who loved "Rosa: A Horse Drama," considered the
new opera "a far more substantial achievement." And he added: "What
is most impressive is the perfect integration of all the elements
in the work: how Greenaway has been able to carry over so much of
his cinematic technique into his stage pictures; how Andriessen's
music fleshes out the characterizations; and how everything is
superbly realized in the theater."

The result is to throw light, albeit speculative light, on the
mysterious figure of Vermeer.

From his paintings, it is hard to get a sense of the man, yet here
he is brought to life by the women who knew and loved him. There is
no social or political reference in his work, yet this opera argues
persuasively that he painted his "domestic idylls" as a response to
agitated times. In fact, in the end, he does not have to appear
onstage: he is ever present anyway.

[Peter T. Daniels]

And I thought the Randian trampler on others' rights had seen the error
of his or her ways.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@worldnet.att.net