At SummerScape, a Timely ‘Julietta’ Satirizes the Nostalgic Obsessions of Fascism
Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes its title from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, each wish resigned.” That quote came to mind as I made my way back into the city after seeing Bohuslav Martinů’s Julietta at Bard’s SummerScape festival. Kaufman’s brilliant film makes the case for the importance of painful memories, even those we might long to forget, to our very humanity, while interrogating the nature of memory itself. Julietta asks similar questions and, like Kaufman but long before him, locates its inquiry in the surreal.
In search of a girl whose voice he heard three years earlier, Michel returns to the seaside setting of his encounter, only to find that the townspeople have lost their memories and now live in an eternal present. The townspeople range from goofy to sinister—there’s a town commissioner who describes the “echo machines” that exist on every corner of the street, a fortune teller who predicts the past, a man selling memories to anyone willing to pay—and all of them only befuddle poor Michel. The town cannot remember, so the townspeople place a high value on any memories they can latch on to; Michel is briefly crowned Captain of the Town (before everyone forgets again) by virtue of being the only person able to recall a childhood toy. The audience oohs and ahhhs rapturously at the memory, as if it is their own. Despite his mounting confusion, Michel eventually finds his Juliette—though by the time he reaches her, it’s hard to tell whether she is a figment of his imagination—only to lose her again.
Julietta is many things: an example of surrealism in music, a compelling psychodrama that is both humorous and moving and a prescient critique of the logics of fascism. Two years after its premiere in 1938, Martinů would flee the United States after being blacklisted by the Nazis. It has a picaresque plot, one piled with small incidents and encounters with colorful characters, but while the opera may be full of comedic interludes, at its heart are serious questions about the nature of reality, memory and the social structures of power.
Martinů’s score is a marvel; wide-ranging in its textures and timbres, shot through with lyricism, and with a delicate balance of wit and sympathy. Julietta’s extended tonal style retains all of the heady plushness of the Romantic while embracing the jagged clarity and twisty juxtapositions of modernism; it’s not folksy in the least, but the accordion theme that recurs throughout introduces a hint of the popular, while an early passage recalls a theme from Rhapsody in Blue. Especially in the hands of conductor Leon Botstein, the music is endlessly varied; from the humorous full-orchestra bombast that attends some of the townspeople to the wistful tune that Juliette sings with a solo piano for accompaniment, Julietta’s musical world is as colorful and surprising as a Dorothea Tanning painting.
As is typical for Summerscape, this opera was presented semi-staged, smoothly directed by Marco Nisticò. John Horzen’s projection and video design was both striking and clever, providing the necessary visual component in crafting this surreal world. A particularly nice touch: the setting for the town first appears as a line drawing, only to be slowly filled in as we meet more and more of the strange townsfolk.
Despite the opera’s length, which ran almost four hours with two intermissions, this was an engaging performance both visually and dramatically. An impressive ensemble cast reappeared in various roles, with especially good turns by Rodell Rosel, whose brash character tenor contrasted nicely with Aaron Blake’s softer edges as Michel, mezzo-soprano Isabelle Kosempa who appeared as a vaguely sinister little boy amongst other roles, mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann as over-dramatic bird seller and glamorous fortune teller and bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who gave an especially sympathetic performance as a blind beggar in the third act.
Blake, who sang the role of Michel at the Carnegie Hall concert performance of Julietta in 2019, returns to it here with great energy. With a buttery, supple tenor sound, he has both the dramatic ability and the vocal stamina for this role; he sounded remarkably fresh, even as the performance approached the four-hour mark, and his final mad scene was especially gripping. As Juliette, Erin Petrocelli had a robust, sweet soprano with a tinge of melancholy to it that grew brighter and more pointed as her character became more frustrating and elusive. Though she showed more signs of fatigue by the end, she was a fine match for Blake.
Both singers were at their best in the opera’s central scene, which pits two realities against one another to disastrous effect. When we first meet Michel, he seems like the fantasist in the couple. After all, he returns to this place in search of a woman he barely knows. But when outmatched by Juliette’s own penchant for fantasy, Michel comes apart. As she gleefully shops the cart of a memory seller, Juliette holds up photographs, a veil and a bracelet, inserting herself and Michel into these mementos, insisting that the two had traveled to Spain and seemingly hallucinating an entire relationship that never took place. When Michel gives her his own love story—hearing her voice, returning to find her—she finds it less interesting than the one for sale, and she flees when he refuses to join her false reminiscing. Distraught beyond logic, he fires a gun after her. We never know if the bullet hit, and when he returns to town, no one remembers Juliette at all.
Martinů’s opera draws a fine line between memory and nostalgia; while memory is untrustworthy, nostalgia is memory untethered from reality, a commodified and free-floating emotion that is ripe for manipulation. A spotless mind is one that is easily written on, easily filled with memories that aren’t yours or perhaps never happened.
As the opera progresses, Michel slowly begins to acquiesce to the false logic of this world, his protests fading in favor of telling his own pretty lies. In the end, he embraces that same false logic, refusing to wake up to a world without Juliette and going mad in the process. As a satire of the nostalgic obsessions of fascism—where the imagined past is both commodified and fetishized while its subjects are condemned to an inefficient eternal present—Julietta could hardly be timelier, both for 1938 and for our current world.
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