Postcard

Post date: Apr 21, 2014 8:19:13 PM

Just back from San Francisco, where I saw Dominick Argento's opera, Postcard from Morocco, in an excellent production at SFCM. The score blends 12-tone with tonal composition and sends its cast circulating around a train station, singing of matters trivial and complex in an ultimately powerful evocation of life and "Departure." It also examines our fondness for material props. The cast invested the piece with humanity, poignance and humor.

Despite ample quotes from the standard repertoire, Postcard's atonal idiom left some people saying they missed the beauty of traditional opera. Given the expense -- with orchestra, for example, and complex lighting-cues -- who's going to stage it these days, except a nonprofit institution?

Also, some of the piece's value is archival: what was cutting edge in 1971 has now been at least partially absorbed into the mainstream. Quotes from other opera scores sounded like "sampling" in recordings. Singers who directly confronted members of the audience seemed like good cabaret artists.

So, now, I'm wondering: what do we do with the avant garde once it's getting older? When the shock dissipates -- like a spiky hairstyle growing out, bright blue dye fading, body-piercings healing into scars -- and work moves into the mainstream, does it lose value, or gain it? Now that we can "read" the work, can we appreciate it?

It's ironic that avant garde performances increasingly only find a home at traditional institutions, which serve the important mission of keeping them before the public. If modernism set out to blast the establishment, it can seem defanged -- or, worse: tolerated.

On the way out of the theater, someone in the audience turned to a friend and said, "It's not that bad."