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Preludio
Vorspiel
Prelude
All around the city is resting. The lit-up lane becomes silent,
And, adorned with torches, the wagons rush off and away.
…But the playing of strings sounds from gardens afar. Perhaps
Lovers are playing, or a lonely man thinks of far friends and his youth.
…Now the shadowy image of our Earth, the Moon, comes too, secretively,
And the Night, in sorrow and majesty, rises over the mountain peaks.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), “Brod und Wein” / “Bread and Wine” (1801), I
O
pening night, 8 November 2003. The streetlights flicker on as I drive through the quiet Saturday downtown. I park the Odyssey in the nearly empty deck a block from the hall. Call time for auxiliary chorus is 6 p.m. At the stage door qusadfi
I want at this point to insert myself into this narrative… I was myself attempting an artistic career… But I was also attempting a philosophical career.… I lost interest in doing art and pretty much stopped. From that point on I was single-mindedly a philosopher…”
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (1997)
I show my pass, sign in, and go up to the fifth floor. After finishing my mocha I put on the loose, collarless off-white tunic-shirt, the beige-blue coarse linen jacket and baggy pants, and then the formless knitted cap. Makeup takes only ten minutes, since it’s not the full-body pore-penetrating brown I wore for Aïda, but just white-face, with black Chou-En-Lai eyebrows, exaggerated slanted eyes, and crimson lips.
Another ten minutes for dinner, lips stretched away from my prepackaged upscale grocery-case sushi, which is labeled “Full Moon Combo.” Bathroom. Brush teeth – careful of the lips. I read a few pages of whatever – perhaps Danto again about the end of art (or is it just the end of art history?), or maybe the Roy Chapman Andrews biography with its dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert and its decapitations in post-Imperial China. Then I check some lines and cues. Chorus warm-up is at seven. After that we have ten minutes to straighten costumes, drop off our backstage sandals, and remind each other to remove eyeglasses and watches.
We take our places. I am a late-middle-aged minor-league American professor of German, made over in a Western image of an ancient Chinese urban nobody. Very soon I will sing, in Italian, to an audience of 3000 people. I will barely see them, not because I am so near-sighted, but because of the footlights.
Even to me it is a ridiculous picture and an outrageous purpose. Yet for now Turandot is the focus of my existence, and for months it has been my object all sublime:
It seduces my calendar, plays on my emotions, and deliciously dominates my identity. I keep a journal.
It gives me an assignment: re-examine my education, my profession, my career, my culture. I write a new sort of “term paper,” about coming to terms.
It insists on dialog with whatever I read and experience. Despite its sheer musical beauty, it refuses to serve me as an escape from alarums of war and thoughts about the clash of civilizations.
Bill canta. Bel canto. Cantus belli.

I
Al sorger della luna
Beim Mondesaufgang
At moonrise
The bloodthirsty crowd walloped the score with wonderful intensity, whether addressing the severed head of the moon or demanding the next suitor’s life. They moved as well as 80 people can when called to strike tableaux of fear, loathing and celebration.
The Oregonian, 10 November 2003
The palace guards yank the canary-yellow curtains from their easy-release “kabuki” hooks and trail them upstage and off right past me. The assistant stage manager barks “Platforms go!” and gives an “Over the top!” wave; a capable martinette is she. Our team of four auxiliary choristers comprises three near-retirement Ph.D.’s and one beefy young music-major tenor. We have twelve measures – a scant thirty seconds – to muscle the wheeled, fourteen-foot high black-pipe tower platform from offstage left to twenty feet onstage and eight downstage, butt its front solidly against the Mandarin’s stationary platform further downstage, and mate its side to the stairstep-platform that another team has been rolling out beside us.
Unobtrusively I trip the wheel-locks that immobilize our platform, Jim (day job: chemistry professor) covertly checks my work, and we the oppressed masses of Imperial Peking mill around. The stage director has told us how to behave: “asymmetric postures, body low-centered, feet constantly moving, paranoid – and always in the right place.” He reminds me of a slender ••Dom DeLillo, who had a similar job in my favorite movie, Blazing Saddles.
The Mandarin had been placed on his even higher platform before the curtain rose. From the staging rehearsals he is fairly accustomed to odd bumps from below. In eighteen measures, or forty-five seconds, his terse baritone declares the law: suitors of the Princess Turandot who fail to solve her three riddles shall die by the executioner’s ax. With a forte and then a mezzo-forte “Ah!” we help move the action from the background realm of law to the foreground scenes of love and death in ancient Peking, Italian style.
Now the Mandarin announces that the latest failed suitor, the Prince of Persia, shall be beheaded at moonrise. Eight measures, twenty seconds. Crazed by the prospect of another execution to feed our twisted passions and distract us from our socio-economic misery (we’re depraved on account of we’re deprived), we try to storm the palace and rouse Pu-Tin-Pao, the executioner. Guards with staves beat us back. Twenty-four measures, forty seconds – the tempo has increased. I take refuge and can catch some breath, kneeling with head down right behind my home platform.
The Unknown Prince discovers his refugee father, tells him to be quiet, and then – he is a tenor with the blessing of Pavarotti, the PR stuff says – pretty loudly marks his vocal territory. Liù modestly hints at her love for him, laying the basis for her strong showing against the Turandot diva. The chorus sees the executioner and his servants coming with the grindstone and the ax, double-bitted, and each half-moon blade the size of a large pizza plate. Both are fashioned of Styrofoam, but, thanks to the stage director’s reminder in rehearsals, they are carefully borne as though they were dreadfully massive. Up from our passive grovel we burst, yelling “Turn the grindstone, oil it, grind it, let the blade flash, spurt fire and blood.” “Flash” and “spurt” can rhyme in Italian – “guizzi, sprizzi” –, and the sibilants make the close-packed words somewhat comical, but I didn’t think about that at the time, because they’re also difficult to sing that way.
Two teams of five hustle-hobble up the towers to add spatial height to the ruckus below. To get to my place I adopt an emaciated version of the distorted posture and hunched gait of a generic horror-movie Igor. The stairs are railless, the platforms fortunately are not. We beg the moon to rise, signaling the start of the execution. It does rise, though it does so behind us. For dramatic effect we are facing the audience and appear to be peering 180 degrees in the wrong direction. The stage director solves that incongruity late in rehearsals by having us stare not into the distant horizon but rather at our upraised hands, with our palms turned toward us, where they catch the red light coming from behind us. We then turn slowly to face the bloody phony moon projected on the screens at the back of the stage.
That moon having risen, we again turn, even more slowly, to face forward and, those of us on the platform, down. The youthful Prince of Persia, bound is marched out to be condemned. He is dressed in white, with long hair and neat beard. In rehearsal some grinningly addressed him as “Jesus,” The chorus, marveling at his beauty, grace and courage, does an emotional flip-flop and begs for clemency, in vain of course. With my arms outstretched under a rail, and with upraised hands, palms toward myself, as we have been reminded more than once to hold them, I think I am very effectively posed, and also well placed, where what I call my “claque” – my family and friends – can pick me out, despite the anonymous costuming, makeup, and cap. I am careful to shout “la grazia” (“mercy”), rather than “grazie” (“Thanks!”), a word that I have used far oftener in Italian.
Most of the time I can surreptitiously manage to see the blurred arm of the conductor, indicating the beat, though of course we can’t appear to be looking at him. Because of the effect of distance on sound over the expanse of an operative stage, that arm must be followed visually by all hundred-plus performers, the pit orchestra, and – connected by closed-circuit TV – the backstage banda of a dozen extra brass players whose job is to add those luxuriant accents that simply must be there.
A night in the opera has begun. Yet another production of Turandot, the last of the Italian Grand Operas, is in full swing, In aesthetic terms, its mission is to give us royalty, empire, mystery, violence, infinite love, and whatever other emotions can be summoned up to help peel off the superego, let the id bluster and posture, and free the libido to engorge and throb. Outside, by an amazing coincidence that ordinarily occurs only within operas, the full moon, just emerged from a total eclipse, rises in the east above Mt. Hood and the Willamette River – right where we had been facing when our backs were to the phony moon.
The show can go on. It must. C

Wagner is the Puccini of music.
Ashbrook / Morton
“To write a mighty book, you must have a mighty theme,” declared Melville. So he wrote a whale of a book about a whale of a whale. I used to believe that a grand opera needed a grand overture. Aïda has one, as of course do Meistersinger, Freischütz, Don Giovanni, and Guillaume Tell with its “Lone Ranger” jingle, living on now as a cell-phone ring-tone. Some overtures outlive their operas, for example the gem that introduces Rossini’s La gazza ladra (“The Thieving Magpie?” – really now!). Musicologists state that Turandot, though, has no overture. They are wrong. Overtures, like legs, need only be long enough to accomplish their purpose. Turandot gives us a whale of an overture, though Melville would call it the “duodecimo” or miniature version of its genus.
The orchestra smites its triple-forte, andante sostenuto, quasi-oriental five-note motif, then repeats the motif, just single-forte, a minor third higher. Eerie through their accentuated monotony, a few measures of eighth-notes on the first and third beats – triple-forte, mezzoforte, fading to piano, help bring out the xylophone and the gong. In just 12 bars, or half a minute – 6 bars or a bare 15 seconds – before the curtain rises, the same again before the Mandarin sings, Puccini takes us away from Western tonalities, creates a military-imperial atmosphere, and evokes unnamed fears. Then, with three clear but understated strokes of the gong, which will be repeated at the climactic end of the scene with massive and increasing volume, we are told plainly that music, not logic, not character, not words, not even plot, and much less ideology, will dictate the course of Turandot and should govern our emotional and aesthetic experience of it. The “overture” takes less time than a reasonably thoughtful person needs to read this description, which is much shorter than the scholarly one finds in a university library.
Puccini’s handwritten scores are notorious for their near-indecipherability. Deciphered and printed, the full orchestral score of Turandot is still challenging, but now for its tower of instrument clefs, often with inserted short clefs for incidental instruments. Even aside from its exotic flavor, Puccini’s instrumentation probably out-Wagners Wagner, in its variety, if not in its sheer number of performers. Here we need the names in the original language of the score, to suggest the wild cultural oscillation that is taking place. Besides the usual pit orchestra, there are the somewhat unusual controfagotto (contrabass bassoon) and trombone contrabasso. The percussion section bears listing in full, but from here on we can dispense with the English equivalents; the Italian is clear enough, it is beautiful to the ears, of course, and the invasion of German also entered English long ago: timpani, triangolo, tamburo, gran cassa, piatti, tam tam, glockenspiel, xilofono, xilofono basso, campane tubolari, and gongs cinesi (the last consisting, in the Portland Opera 2003 production, of a dozen or so of such housed in a special extension of the pit). Rounding out the east-west ensemble are celeste, 2 arpe, and organo, wedged into the pit somewhere. And the off-stage banda (opera groupies never say just “band” or “auxiliary orchestra”) lists 2 saxofoni contralti, 6 trombe, 3 tromboni, trombono basso, gong grave, and the tamburo di legno used to suggest the wood blocks that signal act and scene divisions in oriental drama. A colleague whose specialty is Japanese theater confirmed to me that Puccini’s wood-block rhythm just before the Mandarin speaks is an accurate replication of a standard kabuki phrase.
Puccini will recombine his instruments in a range of musical atmospheres that extends from the harmonic Western to the exotic Eastern, by way of atonalism and what at one point sounds very like a ••foxtrot in a smoky Weimar-era Berlin cabaret. Or you might be reminded of the hodge-podge of instruments and cultures and languages that takes over the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, during the spaghetti feed on the ocean-steamer deck, before the Marx Brothers depart the deck to take over an entire opera.
“Popolo di Pekino…” The Mandarin declares the law of the riddles, and it is – take your pick – a bizarre or else a fairy-tale law and world. Since the opera would soon be finished, not just beginning, if someone had already solved the riddles or were going to solve them soon, everyone knows, after all of thirty measures, or about seventy-five seconds, pretty much what’s going to happen in the next couple of hours. Another ten measures, or twenty-five seconds, suffice to announce the upcoming execution of the latest failed aspirant, the Prince of Persia. Then the crazed crowd can start filling the stage with rage and fear, the audience and critics with shock and awe. 3

I subscribe to a narrative of the history of modern art in which pop plays the philosophically central role. In my narrative, pop marked the end of the great narrative of Western art by bringing to self-consciousness the philosophical truth of art. That it was a most unlikely messenger of philosophical depth is something I readily acknowledge. … I must say I was stunned.
Danto, 122-3
Filled with the day’s joys the people go home to rest,
And, well satisfied, a cagey head weighs profit and loss at home.
The busy market stands empty of grapes and flowers,
And takes a rest from the works of the hand.
“Brod und Wein,” I
I
n our country and time, when you stage an Italian opera that is set in a Western caricature of Imperial China, where heads are lopped off by an executioner whose name, Pu-Tin-Pao, sounds like the featured chicken dish in a Chinese restaurant; where there is a trio of characters called Ping, Pang, and Pong, where the male lead conquers the fearsome princess diva much the same way that Rhett ravishes Scarlett, you are on a fast track either into culture-war territory, or else into what theater people call a “romp” – an entertaining trifle.
If, for an American production of that Italian opera you hire, as our local opera company did, a Chinese tenor to sing, in Italian, the role of a disguised barbarian prince among the Chinese Imperialist oppressors, you’ve got some cultural paradoxes and some nested-box identity puzzles. Add two African-American soloists, one of them playing the father of the Chinese tenor who, remember now, is singing in Italian and is cast as a non-Chinese, and the other singing, as her first lines, again in Italian, “I’m nothing, just a slave,” and you’ve got either a PC-minefield or else some genuine multiculturalism. Top – or bottom – it off with the an American professor of German singing some more Italian in the chorus, and you’ve got comic relief.
If, then, the professor has long since departed official literary scholarship for language teaching, where people still believe in meaning and communication, and is thus somewhat behind the times in his aesthetics, and so he chooses for some of his summer reading, in the hammock and at rehearsals, the philosopher-cum-art critic Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997), then you’ve got one very confused and hard-thinking singing professor or professing singer. The puzzled skewing of his own eyebrows will be exaggerated by the ones painted over and above them. After all, Turandot is not just the Mikado. But then again, neither is the Mikado.
The professor-singer will try to fathom why art, or even just the history of art, can be over, while art still seems to go on, at least in the world of music and in literature, if not some or all of the visual arts (which are, after all, not his responsibility, but rather Danto’s). He will puzzle why our Here and Now are so special, or so unfortunate, as to be the time and place for the history of art to end. He will wonder indeed why supposedly educated people find in that same Here and Now, in Western civilization (and thus in themselves), history’s most horrible racists and imperialists, just as he, much younger, agonized about why he himself was so special, or else so especially bad, before he realized that he wasn’t – at least not in the way he understood it then.
In his casual reading and in his mind as he experiences Turandot, besides of course periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, and Harper’s (the last of which he soon after dropped after its editor developed ideological insanity / its editor’s mental state appeared to progress from mere megalomania to paranoid megalomania in early 2003), are Peter Gay’s Schnitzler’s Century, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization (only slightly prolix, considering, its near-thousand pages), Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Civilizations, Frederick Turner’s In the Land of the Temple Caves (such an effective counterweight to Danto!), Page Stegner’s so very PC Winning the Wild West, Noble Cunningham’s The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Frans de Waal’s The Ape and the Sushi Master, Francine Prose’s The Lives of the Muses, Angus Calder’s Revolutionary Empire, Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (uncomfortably close to the mark and yet also reassuring to him), Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, Shelley Wachsmann’s The Sea of Galilee Boat (not for anything about opera, but because he builds canoes), David Quammen’s Wild Thoughts about Wild Places (same reason), one of Bernard Lewis’s books about the Middle East, Thomas Friedman’s Longitudes and Attitudes (same subject as Lewis’s, and on everyone’s mind, then and now).
But the summer fare is not all light reading. Once again the professor will try to get through Walter Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. This time, he thinks, he will be more motivated, since he is now a producer of software and electronic books, though in an environment where publishers still are sure how to make the switch. But once again he fails with Benjamin, as he has also failed with Wittgenstein and practically the whole Frankfurt School. That may or, much likelier, may not be to his lifelong shame and regret. His life keeps getting shorter as it gets longer, and so the Turandots become ever more important than the Schools, Frankfurt or otherwise.
History, ideology and what Danto has to suggest about Western Civilization; his other casual summer reading; the pain and anger that come from a career defeat; and also what goes on around him in the real world of terrorists, war in Iraq, the Quarrel of the Sexual Orientations, the attempt to redefine families, and, once the fall quarter begins, in that other make-believe world of faculty senates – all this will force him away from his refuges in his hammock and the opera house to wonder how Turandot and Danto (such a euphonious duel!), the end of Italian Grand Opera and the end of art history, relate to each other and to American society and Western Civilization, which seems to be surviving its much-rumored death and some wicked hatchet-job cultural executioners, even after the Marxes and the Fukuyamas have repeatedly declared the end of history itself – and lived to tell the tale, collect the kudos, and – the modern end-declarers at least – rake in the royalties.
The professor and the human being will yearn for August 4, the first rehearsal of the Turandot chorus. In the meantime, he will now and then feel like a duodecimo version of that aristocratic, noble, erudite, ambitious, frustrated, muddled, yet supremely perceptive Professor Henry Adams. Late in life he confronted the big modern world and, in his autobiography, pictured himself “lying there with his historical neck broken, like a chicken.” Adams, whose wife committed suicide (of which the autobiography makes no mention), confronted la morte in his culture and his life, though not nearly so heroically and melodiously as the Chinese tenor on the stage where the professor rages and cowers, relishing the anonymity and the outlet for negative emotions.
Offstage, the professor has taken the first real steps toward retiring. When those who love him find him in his hammock that summer, he will wryly call it, referring to events in Iraq, his spider hole. Or he will half-joke that he is merely molting, irritably shedding a layer, implicitly to emerge with new plumage; but his mind will quickly hear how similar that word is to “mold” and “moldering.” At other times, though, the professor’s life and his response to his culture and his opera will be filled with Amor, which is where we find la vita – if we can just solve all the riddles.
Some months after Turandot the professor changes his mind about retiring, for reasons then unclear to him. But that is to happen later. The summer and fall of 2003 have been granted him by fate and fortune for song in his (let us say) maturer time of life. It is a moment so beautiful he will not let it go.
It ain’t over until it’s over, not even when the fat lady does sing, as she most assuredly did during those nights at the opera. Even now it’s still not over. Almost painfully, as it indeed was in the confined space of the rehearsal studio, her voice still resounds in the professor’s head at night. On stage in his mind, and elsewhere in the world of the present and in the past as he knows it from his earnest readings and limited personal experience, the mobs surge about the palaces and the armies battle by night.  U