THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 29
Matthew Aucoin
1
WAG N E R FILES
ENDURANCETEST
F
ew operas are as mountainous as
Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg.” The rarely performed work,
rich with sonic booming and spitty glot-
tal fricatives, has a running time of al-
most six hours. It ends with a troubling
flared-nostril paean to the purity of Ger-
man art. One of its more deadly lyrics
addresses the shoemaking trade with
the aperçu “Cobbling certainly has its
share of problems.” Wagner’s only com-
edy is, in a word, impossible.
Cue the composer Matthew Aucoin,
who recently attended the Metropoli-
tan Opera’s production of “Die Meister-
singer.” Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice,” a re-
telling of the Greek myth from Eury-
dice’s perspective, based on a play by Sarah
Ruhl, made him, at twenty-nine, the
youngest composer to have a Met début
since the twenty-seven-year-old Gian
Carlo Menotti, in 1938. Aucoin is also
the author of the upcoming book “The
people remembered a particularly dread-
ful crab curry.
The six tenants, who were among the
last in residence, concluded that the vibe
at Aubergine had become less commu-
nal in recent years. Most of them seemed
ready, if not quite eager, to move on. “None
of us were the keepers or creators of this,”
Brodsky said. “If this is the end, it was a
wonderful gift.”
Not everyone was going peacefully.
One tenant, who had holed up in a bed-
room during the tour, has refused to
leave the building, choosing to wait out
the eviction moratorium alone.
But it looked as if the end were near.
Upstairs, in the eccentrically shaped, sub-
divided bedrooms, books had been emp-
tied from shelves, leaving their outlines
in the dust. In the basement, a forlorn
puppet theatre sat in a corner. “Does any-
body want this?” Brodsky asked. “I think
I found it on the street, like, twelve years
ago.” The group decided that the puppets
should stay, a housewarming gift for the
next inhabitants, whoever they may be.
—Ian Volner
Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera,” a
celebration of the genre’s inherent chal-
lenges and its carnivalesque excesses.
At the Met, a correspondent asked
Aucoin to rate “Die Meistersinger” on
a scale of impossibility. “I’d give it a nine,”
Aucoin said. He wore a long-sleeved
black T-shirt, black jeans, and lots of
stubble. “It’s a feat of stamina, probably
more for the string players than for any-
one else—they almost never stop.” Au-
coin is known for his own kind of en-
durance training: prior to spending four
years as the Los Angeles Opera’s art-
ist-in-residence and starting his own
opera company, he got his graduate di-
ploma in music composition at Juilliard
while working as an assistant conduc-
tor at the Met.
Once Aucoin had hunkered down
in an orchestra seat for “Die Meister-
singer”’s first act, he cautioned, “There’s
a kind of opium haze that sets in with
Wagner. If I end up keeling over into
your shoulder, be warned.” Eighty-five
minutes of keelinglessness later, during
the first intermission, Aucoin said, “One
down, two to go. We’re still at the base
of the mountain.” He added, “I’m find-
ing that one part of my brain is regis-
tering, Well, that’s a terrible line. But
most of me is kind of hooked. It’s that
narcotic quality I mentioned. And that’s
opera’s ‘thing’: Can you overcome the
skepticism that remains present in one
part of your brain?”
Aucoin finds impossibility to be a
constant in the history of opera. “The
art form’s first practitioners, in seven-
teenth-century Italy,” he writes in his
book, “strove to re-create the effect of
ancient Greek drama, which of course
they had never heard, and which no one
can be sure was sung in the first place.”
Or consider the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice, the subject of Aucoin’s own
opera: Orpheus’s singing is so beautiful
that animals and rocks dance in its pres-
ence. No pressure, dude.
When the “Die Meistersinger” cur-
tain rose for Act II, revealing nine me-
dieval half-timber buildings, Aucoin
whispered, “This set looks like an Ad-
vent calendar.” For the duration of the
second act, he remained sentient and un-
slumped; at its conclusion, he reported,
“I’m holding up pretty well.” He con-
fessed that he and his husband, Clay
Zeller-Townson, a bassoonist who spe-
cializes in Baroque music, had attended
this very same production of “Die Meis-
tersinger” two weeks earlier, and, at Zeller-
Townson’s urging, had walked out after
the first act. “As soon as my husband re-
alized that the blond hero is a stand-in
for Wagner the rule-breaking innovator,
he was, like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m done, I can-
not watch Wagner perform this mastur-
batory act for six hours.’”
Aucoin took the opportunity, during
the two-hour-long Act III, to whisper
premonitory commentary: “Here comes
the uncomfortable German national-
ism”; “Here’s where it sounds like the
chorus is telling us to fuck off.” (In the
latter case, more than two hundred sing-
ers—all in peasant dress, some of them
holding bouquets—encourage the world
to wake up: Wach auf !) Additional gems
of the third act include the lyrics “Hun-
gersnot! Hungersnot!” and the line, in
translation, that all Wagner listeners
have secretly longed to utter: “Hear now
of the thunder that bespelled me.” Be-
fore the final scene of Act III, the cur-
tain came down, and the orchestra kicked
into some interlude music; Aucoin ad-
opted the flat tone of a nineteen-thir-
ties telephone operator as he muttered,
“Hold, please.”
When it was over, Aucoin cheered and
applauded heartily during the curtain
calls, but he remained seated until the
female star, the soprano Lise Davidsen,
took a solo bow, whereupon he jumped
to his feet. “Not gonna argue with that,”
he said. “Also, we get to stand at last.”
—Henry Alford
