The audience at the Blank Performance Hall in Indianola, Iowa has gathered for Karol Szymanoski's opera King Roger. The opera is sung in its original Polish -- indeed, a Polish language advisor has been retained to assist the singers with respect to their pronunciation of words in the libretto written by Szymanowski and Jaroslav Iwaszkiewicz (tell me how that name should be spoken). The audience in attendance is overwhelmingly White -- I saw only a single African-American -- and most of the men and women look very much like the couple in Grant Wood's "American Gothic"; they have lean faces ringed with white hair, a demeanor that suggests both skepticism and suspicion, and they gaze down at the stage with that wary reticence shown in the famous painting -- in fairness to them, at the end of the short opera (only 80 minutes long), I should acknowledge that they are on the feet, crying out with adulation for the singers and applauding the curtain call ecstatically. But there is a disconnect between the staid crowd assembled for the show and the spectacle that they are attending -- the second Act features an orgy with a dozen couples woozily embracing, everyone ending up semi-nude and the handsome hero, playing the role of Roger the King, spends the last Act prancing around in his BVDs, tight underpants through which his penis is pretty clearly visible. What the hell is going on here?
King Roger was first performed in Warsaw in June of 1926. It had three other performances before the War, one by a regional company in Germany, one in Prague, and the last in Palermo, the place where the opera is set. After that, the show was mostly forgotten, although it has been periodically revived in Poland where, of course, the challenges of language are not an issue. I don't believe the show has been mounted by any of this country's leading opera companies although I suspect that the bold revival of the piece (Szymanowski's opus 46) in Iowa will lead to additional performances. (It was performed about a decade ago by the Santa Fe Opera,) The Des Moines summer opera festival is one of the best in the country and noteworthy for its interesting advocacy of modern opera -- I saw Berg's Woyzeck in Indianola several summer's ago and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress last year together with a performance of Wagner's Flying Dutchman. The performance space is intimate, the audience's wildly enthusiastic, and the staging lavish and impressive. You are not likely to see an exotic work like King Roger anywhere else -- the show requires a huge orchestra, world-class singers, and a great deal of uninhibited, partially nude dancing.
King Roger is nominally about Roger II, the so-called Great King of Sicily and Africa who ruled from Palermo between 1130 and 1154. Roger's kingdom was culturally diverse, a syncretic mixture of Norman Frankish culture, Byzantine and Greek influences, aspects of Muslim north Africa (Roger's royal mantle was embroidered with words in Kufic script), all mixed together in a Sicilian stew. I have seen Roger's Norman Palace in Palermo with its famous church -- the church, the Capella Palatina has Fatimid arches and a dome decorated with Byzantine mosaics of the highest quality; the inscriptions on the mosaics are written in Greek supplemented by Islamic calligraphy and the ceiling is studded with stalactite muqarnas characteristic of Islamic mosques. (The set for Act One provides us with a glimpse of this architecture.) It is likely this strange, almost unheard-of, syncretism that attracted Szymanowski to this subject and, it was during a tour of north Africa and the Mediterranean that the composer first began to acknowledge his homosexuality.
The plot of King Roger is vestigial and people have said that the opera is an oratorio or, perhaps, a Mysterium, that is, a religious mystery play. The piece begins with a droning chorale in the Capella Palatina. An altar attended by gilded and winged beings rises from the floor and there are priests and a choir of boys as well as monks and other ecclesiastical figures. Attending the service is King Roger with his bespectacled advisor (an odd touch) Edrissi, derived from a historical figure, Roger's Muslim counselor named Al-drisi. Roger's serpentine wife, Roxana, is with the sovereign. She is dressed in a form-fitting gown that shows off her breasts and slender hips -- the singer is very beautiful in a Jugendstil or vampish Art nouveau manner. People say that a shepherd is rousing the people, declaring that he is the prophet of a God that lives in nature, that smiles on human copulation, and that is embodied in the waves of the sea, the green forests, and the stars. Needless to say, the message is enthusiastically received by the populace as well as Roxana who seems apparently enamored of the new cult. Of course, the priests are vigorously opposed to the new religion that the shepherd is preaching. The shepherd arrives with an ingratiating smile on his lips, blonde and bare-chested. Roger challenges him and, ultimately, summons the man to a trial that night at the royal palace. The second act depicts Roxana singing in praise of the shepherd and his God. The shepherd arrives for his trial. But he isn't condemned but, instead, seems to be the condemner -- a group of 20 people appear in evening clothes (dressed in late 19th century finery); the shepherd organizes an orgy, the formally dressed people wriggling out of their gowns and tuxedos. During the orgy, Roger seizes the shepherd and puts handcuffs on him. Houdini-like the shepherd slips out of the handcuffs which he, then, uses to fetter Roxana so that he can draw her after him in a procession of the half-naked celebrants in the orgy. In the last Act, Roger and Edrisi listen to Roxana singing offstage. The shepherd has vanished. Roger rips off his clothes, stripping down to his underpants. It begins to rain and Roxana appears in the downpour under an umbrella with several dancers. Roger lights a fire which explodes as a frightening display of pyrotechnics on the stage, a big 12-foot pillar of flame -- I didn't know at the time that this was supposed to depict Roger offering a pagan sacrifice at a ruined Greek altar in an old amphitheater where Greek plays were once presented. (There's no clue of this context in the Des Moines production and the effect, although impressive, seemed somewhat gratuitous to me without being grounded in the classical framework depicted in the libretto.) The sun rises. Roger, almost naked, salutes the sun and with rapturous ecstatic music, the opera ends. The story, if it can be so characterized, starts the shepherd praising the new Dionysian God; in the second Act, the shepherd has become the living embodiment of the God that he serves; the Third Act takes place, probably, inside Roger's skull -- the shepherd is gone and Roger seems to take his place as an adherent of the cult.
Although this narrative is devoid of outward events -- most of the action occurs as a psycho-sexual drama in the heart of King Roger -- the oratorio is spectacularly staged. The first act takes place in a highly particularized location, the Capella Palatina in Palermo. At the Blank Theater, the orchestra is assembled in a pit under the middle of the stage, an oblong opening through which we can see the musicians and the glint of their instruments. Above this stage, an incense censer about the size of a tractor tire is suspended on a large rough rope. At the start of the Act, the censer is pulled to the side of the pit and, then, set in pendulum motion, sweeping back and forth like a mighty artifact from a story by Edgar Alan Poe; incense billows out of the colossal censer, fogging the stage which is occupied by a colorful choir of ecclesiastics, priests, and a bishop who gather around the altar that jut up above the stage in the foreground. Above the much floor, decorated with patterned terrazzo tiles, we see individual clerics, each enclosed in transparent separately lit cubes -- the figures look like saints in their niches but they are, in fact, three dimensional and sing with the chorus. It's very spectacular and impressive. Roxana and King Roger enter to church to a solemn chorale -- later we see the bare-chested shepherd. Roxana's gown is such that she seems nude, although her flesh is fully covered.
In the Second Act, we behold a fortress gate from inside a high wall where guards are restlessly marching. The Self defends its prerogatives against the destructive impulses incarnated in the shepherd and his God. Roxana appears at the iron grill of the gate, on its outside in the realm of the shepherd. Later, a procession of portly and corpulent bourgeois enter from the left and gather around the inside of the fortified gate. The shepherd appears wearing a sort of tunic of gold chainliks which encloses his torso like two slices of sandwich cover a piece of meat. The shepherd is naked except for this tunic which is draped over his chest and back -- the sides of his buttocks and legs are completely bare. Dancers enter and an orgy ensues. The fat bourgeoisie wriggle out of their suits and tuxes and the women slip from their evening gowns. Male and female are draped in shifts that scarcely cover them. There is a lot of biceps caressing and hands petting thighs and some of the threesomes start nibbling on each other's shoulders and kissing. (Clearly, the Des Moines Opera Intimacy Coordinator earned her pay with respect to this scene.) Orgies are tough to orchestrate and run the risk of looking ridiculous, a scrum of half-naked people who seem to have forgotten what they supposed to do to consummate their passion -- they writhe and wriggle but decorum keeps them from getting down to business. (You can successfully choreograph an orgy but only if you're Bob Fosse -- see the airline dance "Fly with Me (Airotica)" from All that Jazz). This is less successful in the opera, but it's still startling. The crowd of formerly bourgeois opera-goers on stage has now become a group of Bacchantes who follow the shepherd offstage to sound of tam and tambourine -- leading the procession is Roxana whose hands are fettered by handcuffs.
The Last Act is abstract and modernist. It's before dawn in what seems to be darkness. Roger is alone with his Arab counsellor, Edrisi. Roger tears off his clothes, creeping along the front of stage by an overturned chair that seems to symbolize the topsy-turvy nature of the Kingdom under assault by the great god Dionysius. A rainstorm begins toward the rear of the stage with sheets of water falling from the proscenium. Roxana appears under the downpour an umbrella raised above her head by an attendant -- she looks naked here as well although she is completely covered. With the slave, Roxana appears in procession with two dancers, male and female, who are bathed in the falling water causing their shifts to become, more or less, transparent to their figures, a wet tee-shirt effect. King Roger has stripped to his tight black under pants. The sun represented by a large semicircle of pure white rises slowly and Roger approaches the radiant diagram of light, stands before it, and salutes the dawn. It's unclear what this is supposed to mean and, probably, Szymanowski didn't know himself. The sun is the insignia of Apollo, the god who opposes the riotous excess of Dionysius. So has the naked King, now at the height of his delirium, become an adherent of logic and reason as embodied by the sun? But the orb also seems lunar, and, perhaps, the King is paying obeisance to the moon somehow rising over the empty stage instead of the sun. The ending is confused but radiant with the orchestra producing a wall of sound of the most voluptuous kind in the closing bars of the opera.
The singing was very good, but secondary to the spectacle. The music is frenzied, a mixture of Wagner, Alban Berg, and Richard Strauss. There are no memorable arias and Roxana's songs (there are several of them) are impressive while they last but you can't reconstruct them in your mind. The action on stage is derived from Euripides Bacchae but without the violent and horrific climax to that play. The music appears to me to be very difficult and the performance of the highly poetic and lyrical verse in Polish must have been a great challenge as well. This is a production to be cherished and long-remembered.
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