Anna Netrebko as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in 2014 at the Salzburg Festival, where she first achieved international acclaim. Photograph by Christian Michelides.
In Bernard Taper’s biography of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, he describes a moment of deprivation during the Russian Revolution that haunts me still: A horse drops dead in the street, and the starving populace rushes out to carve it up.
Historically, the Russian people have careened from one kind of oppression to another, from the czars to the Soviets, whose empire Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reconstitute with his brutal siege of Ukraine.
Read MoreYears ago, I had a dream job with Gannett Inc. as senior cultural writer. One of my beats was to cover the big arts stories of the day and so it was that I found myself on one occasion interviewing Richard Cragun the American-born star of the Stuttgart Ballet and one of the finest male dancers of the 20th century.
In those days, Gannett recycled our stories in its many publications, and my Cragun piece found its way into one of the tabloids overseen by a favorite editor who was fond of the Daily News and New York Post. It was with some sheepishness then that I handed the publicist a copy of the publication with the words “Ballet Hunk” in the headlines. I needn’t have worried. He was thrilled.
I covered most of the great “ballet hunks” of the 20th and early-21st centuries ...
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Bruce Jenner’s transition to womanhood and the profile of transgendered model Andreja Pejić in May Vogue have got me thinking about the transgendered nature of art.
Consider Thomas Hardy – whose “Far From the Madding Crowd” has been made into a new film starring Carey Mulligan, the sensual Matthias Schoenaerts and the estimable Michael Sheen. For him to create some of fiction’s greatest romantic heroines, and heroes, he had to understand a woman’s mind and heart as well as that of a man. For George Balanchine to create some of ballet’s finest works, he had to know a woman’s body as intimately as a man’s.
Art has also long been preoccupied with hermaphroditism – the condition of having the physical attributes of both sexes. In ancient Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus – son of Hermes, the messenger god, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty – was a beautiful youth beloved by the water nymph Salmacis, who embraced him against his will in her pool and prayed that the two would become one. ...
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“I hate looksism,” I told my friends the other night at dinner, though truth be told, I’m as guilty of it as the next person.
I was reminded of this while reading an article in the May 24 edition of The New York Times’ Arts section titled, “What Matters More, the Singer’s Shape, or Her Sound?”, in which critics Anthony Tommasini and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim spoke with reporter Michael Cooper about the brouhaha over Tara Erraught’s appearance – emphasis on the word “appearance” – as Octavian in the Glyndebourne music festival’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”
For the uninitiated, “Der Rosenkavalier” is an easy-on–the-eyes-and -ears opera about an older woman learning to let go of her young lover. (It has a justly famous waltz that makes gorgeous use of sequential phrases, played by the orchestra’s string section, which George Balanchine used to cap off his glittering ballet “Vienna Waltzes.”)
The older woman, called the Marschallin, is one of those glamorous soprano roles, sung by the likes of Renee Fleming. At Glyndebourne, it was filled fetchingly by Kate Royal. The lover, Octavian, is a pants role in which a mezzo has to pretend to be a handsome youth. Erraught, who apparently sang gloriously, is a woman with a classic pear shape, which neither lends itself to pants nor suggests slim-hipped James Deans. And the (male) critics let her have it, signaling out her “puppy fat.”
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s analysis got to the heart of the problem for those critics...
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