Yes, Truly Macabre

Gyorgy Ligeti’s opera “Le Grand Macabre” is a masterpiece of the grotesque. It is the magnum opus of a blindingly brilliant postwar composer who endured hot and cold war in his native Hungary (which he fled in 1956 for the West), a composer, now 74, who has spent much of his life only too aware of the threat of world apocalypse.

Conceived in 1965, completed in 1978, and now revised for a new production by the Salzburg Festival, “Le Grand Macabre” is the depiction of a mad, mad, mad, mad world. One young couple is locked in copulation from beginning to end. An older couple engages in tired sadomasochism. Ligeti opens the opera with a short toccata for a dozen auto horns. A fantastical figure of death sweeps through the landscape threatening world destruction. And that landscape, by the way, is called Breughelland.

The new production in Salzburg has created something of a small scandal. Not because this is too wild a work for so exalted a festival. On the contrary, Ligeti’s reputation has never been higher, especially in the German-speaking world. There are any number of monographs on Ligeti in the bookshops and his “Le Grand Macabre” has been much produced in Europe. There is a recording of a live performance from Vienna in 1987 available on Wergo. Even the sex hardly seems a problem. The conservative press here casually reproduces photos from the new Salzburg production that include nudity, photos American newspapers and newsmagazines wouldn’t dare print.

No, the scandal is that the production was turned over to Los Angeles’ illustrious operatic team of Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and they have dared to take the opera seriously. They have dared to make burlesque characters flesh and blood. They have dared to be simple and direct. They have dared to find in farce the fragility of our world. And, most significantly, they have dared to expose the sheer luminous beauty that exists in this music.

Indeed the scandal seems more absurd than the opera itself. The audience at the performance Wednesday was sophisticated--conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, violinist Gidon Kremer and Lincoln Center Festival director John Rockwell were all sighted at the Grosses Festspielhaus. There was a lone boo and much applause. Salonen was greeted with reverberating foot stamping.

Mainly, the fires of controversy have been fanned by an outwardly hostile Austrian press (along with the conservative contingent in the European press) hostile to the new modern look of the Salzburg Festival. The negative reviews accused Sellars’ production, which opened at the end of July and has a further performance next week, of missing the humor in the libretto, which is based on the 1934 play by Michel de Ghelderode and made more Dada-istically ludicrous by the composer and his co-librettist Michael Meschke. (For this production, the text has been translated from German to English for Salzburg.)

And now Ligeti, who at first publicly proclaimed himself happy with the interpretation, has turned against the festival, threatening to sue for misrepresentation. The reason for the composer’s about-face is the subject of much late-night coffeehouse speculation and gossip.

In point of fact, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about. Some complain that Ligeti’s opera, in which world destruction appears to be an empty threat, has been wrongly politicized by Sellars. They charge that he inappropriately has begun the opera in the wake of nuclear catastrophe. Indeed, Sellars peppers the program with images of destruction, whether from medieval manuscripts or Chernobyl. And he reminded the audience in a pre-performance talk of the latest massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

But George Tsypin’s set, a magnificent wide-screen landscape of looming lightbulbs and television picture tubes--gorgeously lit by James F. Ingalls--could also be interpreted as merely a science-fiction transformation of Breughel’s ancient machines.

The humanizing of Ligeti’s loopy characters is Sellars’ only liberty. For instance, in the libretto, the third of the opera’s four scenes involves the warning of Prince Go-Go of impending doom by Gepopo, the chief of police, who enters on roller skates. To enforce the lunacy, Ligeti wrote the prince for countertenor (Derek Lee Ragin) and Gepopo for soprano (Sibylle Ehlert).

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In Sellars’ version, Gepopo instead is more telling as the first victim of the apocalypse, wheeled in on a hospital gurney, nude and bloodied. And one of the moments of great excitement in the performance is the spilling of remarkable coloratura roulades by Ehlert all the while on her back (the German soprano will, incidentally, be making her American debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Ligeti’s Requiem this season).

The production is not without humor or lightness. The machine of destruction is bizarre enough, with horse skull and gas mask. Mescalina (Jard van Nes) and her husband Astradamors, the court astronomer (Frode Olsen)--the S&M; couple--are not as comic-book kinky as Ligeti’s libretto has them, but they are all the more amusing for their seemingly average middle-age appearance. Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre, is not so comic however, and it is one more imposing role for Willard White. And if Graham Clark tones down slightly the slapstick as the drunk Piet the Pot, that adds a touching vulnerability to the opera.

In his synopsis, Sellars politicizes the opera differently than Ligeti had, but the new ending that the composer supplied gave the director his direction. Originally, Ligeti had treated the apocalypse as a big joke, Nekrotzar is either inept or a fraud. Nobody dies, and everyone lives on newly appreciative of their world.

In the new ending, death seems a stronger presence. Sellars turns this all into a Day of Judgment and a re-birthing of the Earth for a new generation. There is a New Age-y feel to the choral processions, but there is also a sense of genuine grandeur when the chorus (from the Vienna State Opera) dressed in beautiful blue by Dunya Ramicova, sings from the house exits.

Ligeti’s score for the opera is, if anything, wilder than the drama. It has everything--a panoply of orchestral colors, those complex interlocking rhythmic structures for which the composer is well-known, some of the most utterly sensual writing for orchestra, singers and chorus to be found anywhere. There is also sheer nuttiness, from the car horns to distortions of Baroque music and Beethoven’s “Eroica.”

The orchestra is the Philharmonia, the London orchestra with which Salonen is currently recording the complete works of Ligeti for Sony, and the playing was as stellar as the singing, Salonen in fabulous command.

Never has the threat of the end of the world sounded so inviting. And that may be, for some, exactly where the problem lies.