St Francis in San Francisco

I'm sure that I wasn't the only New Yorker to book a flight to the west coast when I heard that the new general director of the San Francisco opera, Pamela Rosenberg, had decided to put on a production of Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. I doubt, however, that the opera meant quite as much to any of my fellow pilgrims as it did to me.

Saint François d'Assise – a five-hour extravaganza for a chorus of 150 and an orchestra nearly as big, including 22 woodwinds, 68 strings, and five percussionists – is almost impossible to put on: think Mahler's Eighth doubled. But in celebration of the composer's 80th birthday in 1988, Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra managed to corral the necessary forces for a concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall.

I was 16, without any discernible interest in contemporary classical music, and the plan was that my parents would go to the concert while I was left back home to watch TV or whatever it is that 16-year-olds did back then. But it didn't work out that way: my father couldn't make it, and my mother, in a flash of inspiration, asked if I might want to come along instead.

I still vividly remember that evening, right down to the exact seats we were sat in (on the aisle on the right-hand side) and even where we parked the car. I had no idea at all what I was getting myself into.

Messiaen does the audience no favours at all in the first couple of scenes. "On first hearing, the score of Saint François d'Assise may strike some as a random assemblage of notes bearing no relationship to any music encountered before," says John Palmer in San Francisco's program notes, and that was pretty much the case for me. At the beginning of the opera, there's no brass, very little woodwind: just lush orchestration and Messiaen's inimitable densely-layered textures. My mother, or the program, had told me that the piece was somewhere between an oratorio and an opera, but I'd had precious few encounters with either art form at that point, so that didn't help me too much.

The production was semi-staged, and the singers hadn't memorised five hours' worth of music for the sake of one performance, so they had to carry their parts around with them whenever they moved. And although we in the audience had a copy of the libretto along with a translation, it's hard, on first hearing, to work out exactly what's meant to be going on, plot-wise, just from reading the text. So insofar as a story was told that evening, it was told by the orchestra. And what an orchestra!

As the colours slowly started entering the music, as we started hearing snatches of birdsong or the occasional curtailed crescendo, I found myself being increasingly drawn in to Messiaen's musical world. And then, at the end, came the astonishing, incredible finale: a mind-blowingly loud and joyous starburst which, as Michelle says, clears your sinuses right out. I'd never heard anything like it in my life, and I don't think that many of the other patrons in the Festival Hall that night had, either: they ended up giving Nagano, the LSO and Messiaen the longest and most heartfelt standing ovation I've ever seen.

That evening was the beginning of my education in classical music, and from then on, with my mother's help, I went to as many performances of the likes of Bartók, Shostakovich and Britten as I could. But Messiaen always held a very special place in my heart, and although I knew that his other works would never quite achieve the heights of Saint François d'Assise, I always looked forward to them enormously.

The opera itself, of course, was never put on: far too expensive, and far too obscure. After its premiere in Paris in 1983, there was one production in Salzburg, and that was about it until this year. At one point there were hopes that the great operatic philanthropist Alberto Vilar might underwrite a production at the Met in New York, and to that end Robert Spano and the Brooklyn Philharmonic put on a concert performance of a few scenes, to bring him around. It just so happened that my mother was visiting New York at the time, and I couldn't believe my luck in being able to turn the tables and take her to the very piece that she had taken me to all those years previously. What we heard was just as good as I'd remembered.

And then came the news from San Francisco: the opera company had made the daring decision to hire Pamela Rosenberg from Stuttgart and that, to demonstrate the city's new-found seriousness about opera, she was going to put on Saint François d'Assise in her very first season, in the city named after its hero. There was no way I was missing this.

I'd never been to the San Francisco opera before. It's a beautiful building, and maybe it was just me projecting, but I could feel a buzz of anticipation before the curtain rose. This was the defining opera of the season – it is featured on the company's t-shirts – and the reviews had been terrific. For my part, I felt like a seven-year-old on Christmas Eve. I was nervous, as well, for I had dragged along four friends of mine, none of whom had much experience with opera, or any at all with Messiaen. Would they like it as much as I had, 14 years ago?

As soon as the opera started, the worrying stopped. The acoustic in the San Francisco opera is crystalline, and you could hear all the layers in the music perfectly. This production is a triumph for many people, but above all for Donald Runnicles, San Francisco Opera's long-time music director, and his orchestra. Some of the music, especially in the great sermon to the birds, is almost impossible to conduct, and Messiaen deliberately leaves a lot of its progress to the individual musicians, out of the control of the conductor. I remember back in 1988 watching with awe as Kent Nagano flipped through the enormous score of the piece at a rate of about five or six pages a minute, conducting furiously in 2-3-2/32 time or something equally complex as astonishing birdcalls came flying out of the orchestra at us. Very few conductors would dare attempt it, and it is a great testament to the rapport between Runnicles and his orchestra that he pulled it off with such aplomb.

The production design was less of a triumph, although it was perfectly good. I really didn't need to see the chorus all dressed up in trenchcoats: it's a tired trope, which has nothing to do with what the opera is about. The revolving ramp was ingenious, but it revolved far too much, and far too loudly: for an opera house, San Francisco sure has noisy machinery. (It was particularly noticeable in the final two scenes, when Saint Francis dies; for some reason the revolve just kept on creaking away throughout both of them.)

And there were some peculiar choices, too: why leave Saint Francis stranded above the orchestra pit during his transfiguration? (He's meant to disappear completely, to the point where "only a spot of light remains".) And why bring on the stage hands at the end of the sermon to the birds? But there were ingenious touches, as well, such as the one-winged Angel, whose viol was replaced by the wires holding up the ethereal platform on which (s)he was walking.

Laura Aikin, who played the Angel with a twinkle in her step, was truly magnificent. She has a central role in the production: not only is she the only female soloist, providing our sole relief from the men of the monastery, but she is also visually striking, in bright blue, in stark contrast to the browns and greys of the rest of the production. Her mischievous characterisation was a joy to watch, and, most importantly, gorgeously beautiful to listen to, with a strong, clear soprano voice which penetrated straight to the heart.

Chris Merritt, as the Leper, also has a magnificent voice, as well as the acting chops to really make us feel his suffering and consequential anger at the world. In his scenes with Saint Francis, he more than held his own against Willard White, which is not an easy thing to do.

And then there was Willard White, in the horrendously difficult title role. I saw him a few years ago as Wotan in the Ring cycle at Covent Garden, and this has got to be at least as taxing as anything which Wagner came up with. White's stamina was impressive, as was the clarity of his French, but I would have liked a little more power. (Of course, I know how much I'm asking here, seeing how much he has to sing: I'm not sure anybody would be capable of that.)

In any case, seeing the opera acted out on stage definitely helped a great deal in understanding the action and the sequence of the scenes. And the acting abilities of the cast, White foremost among them, were outstanding. His horror of lepers, his transportation when the Angel plays the music of the invisible, his suffering at the end – all were powerfully conveyed. While the concert performances of this work were primarily musical events, seeing it staged helped to emphasise the spiritual.

The one great disappointment of the San Francisco production was in the grand finale. It might have been that the chorus was slightly smaller than in the concert performances, it might have been that the orchestra was buried in a pit, it might have been the sheer size of the opera house. I think it was mostly the acoustics of the San Francisco Opera: clear, but none too reverberant. Whatever it was, the great chord at the end had neither the emotional impact nor the sheer decibel volume of the concerts I'd seen in London and New York. It ranked maybe 7 out of 10 on the goosebump-meter: impressive, but not mind-blowing.

That said, however, the production was indubitably a triumph. San Francisco has every reason to be very proud of Pamela Rosenberg, and I hope they revive this production in the next few years. (I think every night sold out: San Franciscans certainly embraced it.) Maybe next time I can take my mother, and truly repay the gift she gave me in 1988.

Posted by Felix at 2:47 EST

Comments

Just thought I'd add the first paragraph of Alex Ross's review in the New Yorker:

The artist who strives to create a work of everlasting genius faces many obstacles these days, not least a lack of popular demand. In the end, however, nothing stands in the way of immortality but a lack of mad ambition. Olivier Messiaen's "St. Francis of Assisi," the grandest grand opera since Wagner's "Parsifal," came into being in 1983, during the first Reagan Administration, when Men at Work topped the pop charts. Somehow, it has already acquired a historical aura, as if it were an antiquity whose head and paws are only now emerging from the sand. "St. Francis" may have to wait a century or two before it finds its proper public, but a few brave opera houses are venturing to stage it, and the history books should reward them. The heroic new production at the San Francisco Opera will probably be remembered long after the entire current season at the Met is forgotten.

Posted by: Felix at 11:18 EST, October 28, 2002

The memories come flooding back. Thanks Felix.
Ever since I read your entry I remember with pleasure the concert which affected me similarly as a teenager.
For me it was hearing Bartok's fourth string quartett in Stuttgart. I recall staggering home in a daze. When I bought my first records with Bartok's music, most of my friends labelled it "cat's miows"!

Posted by: Erika at 5:42 EST, December 07, 2002

Unfortunately, I did not get to last autumn's production of St. Francis in San Francisco (despite living in nearby Palo Alto). I do have friends who saw it and were very much impressed; I am just now catching up with the work by listening to the CD as I drive.

I resonate with the role this work has played in the development of your appreciation of the arts. For me, a similar experience was the American premiere in the mid-60's in Boston of Schoenberg's "Moses and Aron". I got to go to a "student matinee" the day before the official premiere, sitting in the front row of the first balcony. I was thoroughly blown away by the visual, aural, emotional and spiritual experience of this opera, which, in its way, is every bit the challenging experience that the Messiaen work is.

Posted by: Joseph Haletky at 20:24 EST, July 30, 2003

Does anyone know how I can get hold of a Libretto in English of this marvelous work?

Posted by: Parkes, Allan at 15:09 EST, August 17, 2004

I wonder if Runnicles will keep his promise and go back to Scotland?

Posted by: Runnicles Go Home at 14:31 EST, November 03, 2004

Joseph: The CD box set (Kent Nagano, Halle Orchestra) has a great inner booklet with the libretto in French, German and English.
This recording turned me on to this work. If anyone hears of this being performed anywhere, please let me know!

Posted by: peter Moore at 8:51 EST, May 31, 2007