Thais

Thais is an opera by the French composer Jules Massenet premiered at the Opera Garnier in 1894.  I saw the Minnesota Opera Company's version in St. Paul on May 19, 2018 with Kelly Kaduce, born and bred south of Mankato, in the title role.  The soprano part is formidable -- it's got lots of whoops and derisive laughter and is pitched in a shrieking dog-whistle register.  So far as I am able to ascertain, Kaduce sang beautifully in a full and vibrant voice and can't be blamed for some of the upper stratospheric howls that emerged from her mouth -- she was simply discharging her duty to the score.  The libretto is loathsome and, in the era of "Me Too", a disturbing museum piece embalming innumerable gender and sex stereotypes.  The Minnesota Opera presented the thing, more or less, intact, even emphasizing, I suppose, elements of the book that are now profoundly politically incorrect.  There are a few good moments in the show, but, on the whole, it's so despicable that the opera needs to be, either, presented ironically (and I'm not sure that this would work) or as a concert piece with its good bits surgically extracted and put on display independent of the toxic matrix in which they are embedded.  Any production of a late 19th century opera involving sex and lust will be an invitation to all sorts of amusing faux pas.  Thais is full of laughably idiotic stuff -- the problem is that the opera is simply too long and it's very slender, improbable plot is immensely padded. 

Although called Thais (and based on Anatole French's novel of the same name), the opera should be called "Athanael," after the censorious monk who drives the action.  Most of the show takes place, more or less, in the nasty recesses of his mind.  (Athanael is an over-the-top character -- a monster of repression and the archetypal lascivious and sadistic Monk of the Gothic imagination.)  Athanael is a fourth century cenobitic monk -- every account of the opera ever written uses the gaudy and exotic word "cenobitic", a term sometimes even spelled "coenobitic" and signifying that he lives in a religious community as opposed to "eremitic monks" who are, as the name implies, hermits.  The words "cenobitic" or "cenobite" are flowery, decadent, and connote the world of Flaubert's Salamanbo or Temptation of Saint Anthony -- it's part of the specious glamor where French aestheticism merges with Roman Catholicism, an aspect of the worlds of Huysman and Aubrey Beardsley.  Athanael who wears a black hair shirt and looks like a wild-eyed John the Baptist once lusted after Thais, a famous courtesan in Alexandria.  Athanael conceives the plan of converting the high-class call girl, who is also a devotee and worshiper of Venus.  He leaves his cenobitic community (there I've used the word again) near Thebes and goes to the flesh-pot of Alexandria.  There he meets Thais who is enjoying one week of fidelity with his old school buddy Nicias -- Nicias is squandering his assets to purchase Thais' services.  Athanael confronts Thais and demands that she converts to Christianity.  After spending the night in anxious meditation -- hence the famous show-stopper, a tune called "Meditation" from Thais -- she converts lock, stock, and barrel.  Athenael drags her across the desert to another cenobite community Albine, the home of the White Nuns.  Thais takes her religious conversion seriously and does penance to the point that she "has destroyed her body", the vessel of her sin.  Athenael lusts after her and decides that he would like  to convert her back to being a courtesan, at least, if he can be her sole customer.  He rushes to where she is dying, sings an apologetic and demented aria, then, gets a duet with her before one of her signature super-sonic high notes kills her dead.

This is not much of a story and it's sexist on all levels.  Thais doesn't seem to have much agency -- she just does what the fanatical Athenael (a cenobitic monk) demands from her.  Much of the action consists of Athenael's fantasies of Thais standing like a half-naked idol among heaps of writhing dancers in nude body stockings.  The Zenon Dance Company provides the shapely naked people -- probably about eight of them who cavort lasciviously, and grotesquely, in a number of scenes.  In the first scene, the cenobitic monks parade around, marching in tight circles under a house-sized Byzantine style crucifix showing Christ, like a dancer, writhing on his gilded cross.  Alexandria is represented by a huge flat showing golden drapery and various gold pilasters.  Thais is sitting astride Nicias' crotch when the cenobite, Athanael, appears -- it's a somewhat embarrassing moment for all three, Nicias, Thais, and the hair-shirted gloomy Athanael.  Periodically red roses fall from the golden sky.  In Act II, Thais seems to be squatting on a huge mattress made from crème brule in a golden pan -- I have no idea what that object was supposed to represent.  She broods upon the inevitable loss of her beauty and, then, the famous meditation is played -- five or six naked men dance around her.  For some reason, the naked men persuade her to become a cenobitic nun.  There follows a big party scene that seems completely out-of-place and is supposed to represent the decadence of Alexandria -- there are serpent dancers,  acrobats, stilt-walkers, and lots of discretely simulated copulation as well as weird choral numbers in which the actors slap their chests and make hieroglyphic gestures with their arms and hands.  It's completely idiotic and it goes on and on and on -- there's no dramatic point for the spectacle since Thais has already decided to leave all this stuff behind.  Athanael smashes Thais' little idol of winged Eros and we see the couple next standing near an eight foot pile of glistening slag -- it's supposed to represent silver or quick-silver (mercury) I suppose.  Thais' feet are bleeding, much to the erotic delectation of Athanael, and he hastens from where she has swooned to get her a glass of water.  Bringing the glass of water to her, Thais revives enough to say that Athanael should drink the water first -- it never occurs to her, or the librettist, I suppose, that Athanael has come from the fountain itself and, no doubt, drank as much as he wanted in that place.  We next see Athanael in his cenobitic community -- he has a fantasy of Thais standing atop naked bodies and, then, coming forth across the stage to straddle him, taking the same pose in which he discovered her with Nicias in Alexandria.  The naked people get a short interlude in which they adopt postures like Francis Bacon's sodomite nudes -- at one point, a guy stands on a pedestal of buttocks.  Athanael finds Thais resting uncomfortably on what looks like her granite sarcophagus -- the White Sisters are all lying on the ground.  He embraces her under the huge crucifix which here tilts forward like a menacing B-52.  At this point, light should pour up from the earth, immanent light, the light that comes out of darkness, a carnal fleshy pink light to suffuse the crucifix -- but, no such luck, instead the crucifix remains in darkness, although drizzling down rose petals which here read as the blood of Christ while the two lovers emit some high-pitched notes while Thais succumbs. 

The detestable thing about the opera is its hypocrisy.  The thing has its cake and eats it too -- the show is designed to highlight sexual orgies and naked people, that is, giving us all the pleasures of the flesh that the libretto supposedly rejects in favor of a cloying, sickly sweet and deathly piety.  Kelly Kaduce is not naturally limber and she steps over the men that she has to straddle and simulate humping as if she were stepping over a particularly nasty pile of dog shit -- she doesn't move like a seductress and is about six inches too short for the part:  it's hard to pick her out in the mobs of three-some and foursomes in the Alexandrian orgies.  Athanael's piety, of course, is a fearsome combination of repressed lust and envy -- he destroys Thais' little statue of eros when he learns Nicias gave it to her.  It's a dream role for an actor like Michael Shannon.  France's novel was bitter and anti-clerical.  But Massenet's opera is a bourgeois entertainment and he contrives to have it both ways:  maximum sexual suggestiveness with maximum piety.  A famous story about the premiere in Paris is telling:  Massenet wrote the courtesan part for a celebrated singer from Sacramento, California with whom he was reputed to be having an affair -- the woman was renowned for her beauty and her voice (she was oddly enough the daughter of a Justice on the California Supreme Court.)  At the end of Act One, during her first appearance, she suffered a "wardrobe malfunction" and performed a couple of arias topless -- the show must go on and it was whispered that she had engineered the malfunction to show off her peerless bosom.