(excerpt)
Often those are small ideas, such as one he recalls watching director Charlie Chaplin work out in 1966 while filming "A Countess From Hong Kong" with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.
For a particular scene, Chaplin looked again and again through the camera: "It was all about two heads and the distance between them. Too close and their eyes cross. Too far and there's no contact."
As it happens, though, such decisions can be crucial to the success of "Der Rosenkavalier," Richard Strauss' fifth opera, composed to a libretto by Austrian playwright and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and first performed in 1911. It's a blend of humor and pathos, a comedy of manners and mores that also chronicles more serious undercurrents, including the social upheaval that resulted when the 18th century Viennese bourgeoisie crept into the realm of the aristocracy. And its themes are personified in one character — the Marschallin, or field marshal's wife — a woman who laments the loss of her youth but wisely reckons that her young lover will move on.
"I admit to finding my main focus here rather than with the music," says Schell. "But of course the two are intertwined. Strauss could not have written it without Hofmannsthal. After Da Ponte" — the author of Mozart's best-loved operas — "no one ever wrote such beautiful librettos."
Much consternation surrounded "Rosenkavalier's" premiere in Dresden, Germany; many revised versions followed. At one point, the great theater artist Max Reinhardt was called in for directorial doctoring. Hofmannsthal even made a silent film of the opera in 1925, "just to preserve its authenticity from bad productions," says Schell. "It contained his exact work and his corrections."
Schell's collaborators are conductor Kent Nagano and artist Gottfried Helnwein, whose décors mingle contemporary elements — there's an office chair on rollers that the oafish Baron Ochs uses to skitter around in — with the Baroque and Rococo earmarks of the era in which the opera is set, the reign of Maria Theresa.
Even before the opening, however, this collaboration has created something of a stir. Helnwein's eye-catching poster features a close-up of two gorgeous bare-shouldered women just barely kissing — which, technically, captures the opening love scene between the Marschallin and the young nobleman she's involved with, Octavian, who in time-honored "trouser" fashion is played by a mezzo-soprano.
"I was trying to get to the work's essence," says Helnwein, now an Angeleno relocated from Vienna. "Two beautiful young people in a tender, magical love scene."
But the photo illustration also suggests "lipstick lesbians" — not exactly what Strauss and Hofmannsthal had in mind.
"Well, for one thing," says Schell, "these are our times. 'The L Word,' for instance, is shown all over Europe. For another, you cannot keep the present off the stage." He points to a German "Hamlet" he directed and starred in just after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination and says the production was a reflection of that tragedy.
As for the larger issue — gender impersonation as an operatic conceit — Schell maintains it all started with Shakespeare: "It was thrilling and titillating for his partially homosexual audience to see men playing all the great female roles: Juliet, Desdemona, etc. They became the big stars of the day."
And, he says, the merging of sexual identities is just what Hofmannsthal had in mind, "the game-playing that goes on in love and lust."
Besides, "we all have a little of both, female and male." Here he remembers the punch line that concludes Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot," when Joe E. Brown discovers that his bride-to-be, Jack Lemmon, is a man: "Well, nobody's perfect."
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'Der Rosenkavalier'
Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 6 p.m. May 29; 7 p.m. June 1, 8, 11 and 16; 2 p.m. June 4 and 19
Price: $25 to $190
Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.losangelesopera.com<252>
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