Salonen’s Symphony of Disgust

Last Sunday, I attended a very interesting program at Davies Symphony Hall. It was a groundbreaking collaboration with Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, as well as the performance of a rarely done operatic monologue by Arnold Schoenberg.  Here’s a spoiler: they were successful in that they did happen, not because they should have happened.

Alonzo King took Maurice Ravel’s Ma Mere I’Oye or Mother Goose and directed his dancers to move.  The music played behind them, and they did their dancing.  But there seemed to be no correspondence between the sounds that were coming from the musician’s instruments and the movements the dancers were making with their bodies.  It was as if all the dancers were deaf.

Composers are not choreographers and choreographers are not composers. They’re two different art forms that must come together in a ballet.  With most ballets these days, the music comes first.  For example, Mrs. Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the SF Ballet, couldn’t consult with Tchaikovsky about her company’s thrilling recent production of Swan Lake – for obvious reasons.  Likewise, given that he died in 1937, Mr. Ravel was unavailable to advise Mr. King about the look and feel Ravel intended when he expanded a little piano piece for four hands, into this a five movement ballet.

This is unfortunate because King’s choreography did not seem to respect the music at all.  The music evokes gentle and soothing turn of the century nurseries, where little boys in sailor suits and girls in white lace dresses play on rocking horses or sail boats in a pond.  (I’m thinking Mary Poppins here.)  These dancers were dancing as if in the future. Their movements were jerky and abrupt and had no turn of the century grace that the music evoked.

The choreography was so bad and so out of sync with the music that I began to think that the dancers were moving just for the sake of moving.  It was as if they had gotten bored with all the standard movements dancers do and were just doing whatever.  (Then I thought how wonderful it must be to be a dancer and have your occupation be to move like that all the time.  It must be so freeing.)  Fine if you’re in a studio, not fine if people are paying to watch you move.

In the program, King admits, “I’m not trying to recreate the Mother Goose fairy tales.”  If that is the case, why in the hell did you choose this music?  Instead, he wanted to “unearth the deeper allegorical truths that are so large they’ve had to be shrunk into stories” and illustrate those with dance.

Well, Mr. King, your choreography failed to do that.  Furthermore, I am currently unable to see how a dancer is even capable of “unearthing deeper allegorical truths” of any kind when they don’t speak, or, quite frankly, when their movements have no correspondence with the music behind them.

Furthermore, Mr. King, my sense is that you are incapable of paying tribute in dance to the beautiful music of Ravel.  You’ve lived and worked in a postmodern meaninglessness too long.  You wouldn’t know what to do if you had to direct your dancers to conform to something.  Instead they just do (or seem to do) what they want, regardless.

Supposing that your choreography “unearths deeper allegorical truths” is just fancy smoke and mirrors which cover up the fact that your choreography means nothing.  If your choreography is any indication, you don’t know what these deeper allegorical truths are, wouldn’t be able to articulate them in words, and probably haven’t even thought about them in the first place. 

In saying this in the program, you absolve yourself of having to do the work of making meaning with your dancers.  The abstract nature of your “deeper allegorical truths,” as well as the fact that you never mention what these truths are, or that the dance itself does not illustrate or demonstrate these truths, indicates that they are just words that sound good and relieve you of the responsibility of actually making meaningful art.

At least that seems to be the case from this performance.

*****

*****

Act II of this program was not an improvement on Act I.

The performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung, with the operatic monologue sung by the very capable Mary Elizabeth Williams, was a flawless and meticulous performance of some of the worst music ever written.  Reinterpreted by Peter Sellars as a comment on prison brutality, it made for an absolutely painful afternoon.  

I read Peter Sellars’ biography in the program.  MacArthur Genius, Erasmus Prize, Professorship at UCLA.  Certainly his other work warrants such accolades.   But this?  

According to the notes in the program, Schoenberg and Pappenheim placed the woman in the forest, searching and longing for her lover.  Sellars puts her in a prison?  And he superimposes a terrible twist to the plot: this prisoner has died as a result of violence in the prison!

There is nothing in Schoenberg’s music or Pappenheim’s libretto that indicates anything about this.  What on Earth is Sellars thinking?  He’s taken something that could be moving – a midnight journey through a forest, and turned it into a completely inappropriate and out of place comment on prison brutality.

It’s no wonder the libretto, as translated by Williams, made no sense.  The Woman says nothing about why her lover was in prison, or how she felt that he was in prison.  It is clear she suspects that he had an affair – but how unusual is that?  Not very.

The point of good art would be that it puts chaos in order.  Erwartung is essentially the glorification of chaotic hysteria which, in itself, does not make for an enjoyable afternoon at the symphony.

Mary Elizabeth Williams herself in her essay about the piece says that it is not performed much.  It’s no wonder.  The piece is too conceptual. By Schoenberg’s own admission, the point of this piece is to allow dissonance to be heard on its own.  In Jenny Judge’s commentary, she says that the piece is not written in a key which means that the “dissonances do not just fail to resolve, they are impossible to resolve.”  In other words, this is not music – this is exquisitely conscientious, and expensively produced, noise.

Good art adds order to chaos. Good art is not chaos – which is what this is.  That was Schoenberg’s intent.  Perhaps this was an interesting enterprise in 1904 when the piece was written. I can see from his point of view – given the aesthetically beautiful turn of the century world that he was living in, he might have longed for something atonal and dissonant.  Or, perhaps his life was so civilized that he lived exclusively in his mind.  He was no longer in touch with the world around him.  He wrote this piece as a purely intellectual exercise – not for aesthetic pleasure.  In which case its contemplation should be the content of seminars in music conservatories, not the centerpiece of an afternoon’s program at one of the world’s finest symphonies.

When I was walking into Davies, a musician was outside handing out yellow pieces of paper.  She said that the Board of Governors of the SF Symphony is clipping Esa-Pekka Salonen’s wings by cutting his budget for works like what I was about to see.  So after all the fanfare of moving him to San Francisco, he was threatening to leave.

Now that I saw the kind of programming Salonen has in mind, I am siding confidently with the Governors.  If this is what we can expect from Salonen’s leadership, let him throw his temper tantrum and move back to some European capital where pessimism is a way of life.

This production ran at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco from June 7 – June 9, 2024.

Photos by San Francisco Symphony

John Henry Martin is a Napa-based writer who covered theater and arts for the Napa Valley Register from 2018 to 2021.