‘Macabre’ receives a grand reception

Who’s afraid of “Le Grand Macabre”? Well, let’s see now, how many opera companies are there in America?

Maybe Gyorgy Ligeti’s 1978 opera has got a scary character or two, maybe there’s sex (vanilla and otherwise), maybe the music is full of outrageous parody, but that has hardly prevented dozens of productions throughout Europe over the past quarter of a century. This irreverent spectacle of rampaging Death in a post-apocalyptic world simply won’t die. There have been two recordings. A brilliant production at the Salzburg Festival in 1996 directed by Peter Sellars and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with the score newly revised by the composer, all but assured the future of the opera.

Still, until San Francisco Opera at long last presented the U.S. premiere of “Le Grand Macabre” on Friday night in the War Memorial Opera House, the work (partly conceived when the Hungarian composer taught at Stanford in the early ‘70s) had terrified our impresarios.

We were told that it was too grotesque, too avant-garde, too sophisticated, too wicked, too difficult, too explicit for American audiences. Who would come?

San Francisco answered that question quite interestingly Friday night. All kinds of people came! Many dressed elaborately for Halloween, giving the company’s costume designers a run for their money. Despite any number of creative ghouls, my favorite couple was a Butterfly and Pinkerton -- both in drag.

Who else? A contingent of about a hundred devotees of the annual back-to-nature Burning Man festival. And, of course, all the regulars. With a little prudent publicity and a famous work that you previously had to go to Europe to see, the company has its own sensation on its hands.

With the Sellars production tied up by the Royal Opera in London (though the company has yet to mount it), San Francisco chose a recent production from the Royal Danish Opera directed by that company’s young artistic director, Kasper Bech Holten. It’s silly and takes its inspiration from comic books.

The silliness is, perhaps, a natural response to a farcical libretto, by the composer and Michael Meschke, based on a fantastical play by Michel de Ghelderode. In a realm known as Breughelland, Death, here called Nekrotzar, rises from his tomb. He interrupts the continual coupling of the lovers Amanda and Amando (who find his abandoned tomb a good place to get away from it all). He makes a wacky wino, Piet the Pot, his Sancho Panza. He attacks the dominatrix wife of a cross-dressing astrologer, Astradamors. He attempts to take over the kingdom of a gluttonous boy-prince, Go-Go.

Turns out, though, Death is a drunk too and screws up the whole business of destroying the world. The lovers get the last word. Sex, unrelenting, conquers all.

It’s possible to take this seriously, or at least semiseriously, as Sellars dared to do. It’s also possible, if less remarkable, to go the other direction, as Holten and his Danish colleague, designer Steffen Aarfing, did, and treat the whole thing as a postmodern screwball comedy.

Nekrotzar here is a villain out of Marvel Comics. He wears an apron that says “DEAD END.” He has a brushy Sellars haircut (was the reference intentional?). The sex scenes are treated as dumb comedy. Amanda and Amando, both roles taken by women (for the sensuality of the voices), wear what look like form-fitting bandages, their figures undisguised.

Three Stooges-style slapstick goes on ceaselessly. The sets evoke comic book panels, and the worst idea is the occasional lowering of bubbles telling us what the characters are thinking. Still, the political satire is funny, especially a foulmouthed debate between two of Prince Go-Go’s ministers that turns into an acid parody of the current presidential campaign.

But Friday one could also forget all that and just listen. San Francisco Opera has taken Ligeti’s madcap but wildly inventive score very, very seriously. The writing for orchestra is astounding, beginning with a toccata for taxi horns, and it contains the full gamut of avant-garde instrumental possibilities. Conductor Michael Broder was the evening’s hero.

And despite all the ludicrous touches, there were nonetheless riveting performances, beginning with Willard White’s authentically authoritarian Nekrotzar and Graham Clark’s woozy Piet the Pot. The business between the riding-crop-wielding Mescalina (Susanne Resmark) and the submissive Astradamors (Clive Bayley) was, so to speak, heavy-handed. But the debate between the White and Black politicians (John Duykers and Joshua Bloom) was downright Chaplinesque. Countertenor Gerald Thompson properly dished out Prince Go-Go’s piercing high notes, while the lovers (Sara Fulton and Anne-Sophie Dupers) added much luscious vocal cream.

The company will be losing its general manager, Pamela Rosenberg, after another season because it has not fully supported her in producing precisely this kind of work, because she has dared to renew opera, bring in new audiences and make opera mean something to the city. San Francisco can sometimes act like a very stupid Breughelland.