Opera Australia returns to Melbourne for a short season of three operas – one German, two Italian, all notable for their gory finales.

The season opened on 14 November with Moffatt Oxenbould’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which has been entertaining us since 1998. Done well, Puccini’s ‘orientalist’ masterwork is riveting. The orchestration alone is worth the price of the ticket. Done badly, it can be interminable. The première – at La Scala, in 1904 – was a famous fiasco, a rare failure for the wizard of Italian opera.

Happily, this was an outstanding performance, one that got better and better all night, culminating in scenes of great drama and pathos. Conductor Giovanni Reggioli drew sure, subtle sounds from Orchestra Victoria. Oxenbould’s stately but dramatic conception holds up well. The courtly semaphore-like Japanese gestures are ubiquitous at first, but this settles down, allowing us to concentrate on the many dramas of fifteen-year-old Cio-Cio-San, perhaps the composer’s most poignant creation, along with Liù in Turandot. Barry Ryan, our Sharpless, the US Consul who must do Pinkerton’s dirty work, is outstanding. Young local James Egglestone plays the American cad. It is a light, high, accurate voice, and he hits all the notes, possibly waning slightly in the arduous love duet, but returning to the stage in outstanding voice an hour later (or should we say three years later?), when Pinkerton, accompanied by the American wife he always craved, acknowledges his many imperfections in the great trio and in his doleful aria ‘Addio, fiorito asil’.

James Egglestone and Hiromi Omura in Madama Butterfly
(photograph by Jeff Busby)

Sian Pendry, as Butterfly’s constant servant Suzuki, makes much of this noble rôle, and acts affectingly. But this is Hiromi Omura’s night, and this must be one of the finest Butterflys we have seen in years. Quite an actress, she remains in character all night, negotiating with ease the heroine’s marked transformation in outlook and temperament, from clueless virgin to undeceived suicide. The fantasy scene that opens Act Three could easily come unstuck in lesser hands, but here Omura is at her most actorly and compelling. 'Un bel di' could hardly be sung better. It is not a huge voice, but Omura copes with Puccini’s surges. Only the moving farewell to her infant son (a remarkably well-behaved little actor) is sung light-voiced, but it is no less affecting for that. Really, it is an awesome assumption of a truly great and truly difficult rôle.

Hiromi Omura as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Nothing, it seems, happens in Scotland except cloudage and mariticide. Opera Australia’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor (first presented in Sydney a few weeks ago) is remarkably sombre. A series of huge panels, covered in dark clouds, rise, fall, and tilt, providing a kind of bleak architecture for this latest rendition of Donizetti’s most famous opera.

John Doyle’s direction is sober, static, subdued. The sizeable chorus, deployed by Doyle, behaves like a frosty Presbyterian army. They enter in rows, interweave methodically, handle props as if their moral reputations depend upon it, and largely eschew expression. The wedding celebrations at Ravenswood Castle are quite joyless, despite the rousing music. D’immenso giubilo, indeed! When Lucia, having murdered her unwanted spouse, enlivens the occasion with her sanguinary fancies, the chorus remains rigid, emotionless, barely responding to Donizetti’s flitting freak. Still, the chorus sings forcefully and impressively throughout.

The vast stage is radically bare. This would suit Wagner, but I’m not sure about Donizetti’s busy, peopled opera. When two chairs are (theatrically) introduced in the third scene of Act One, it feels more portentous than the Second Coming. Later there is a long nuptial table on which the hysterical Lucia relives her gory consummation.

Lucia, of course, always dominates this opera, notwithstanding the excellence of Donizetti’s writing for male voices in this his forty-fifth opera (first performed in Naples in 1835). Famous as the long and elaborate mad scene is, Lucia has some superlative music in her earlier scenes, notably ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and the jubilant cabaletta ‘Quando, rapita in estasi’ in the first scene, and a small, exquisite cavatina during her demoralised scene with Raimondo.

Emma Matthews as Lucia – girlish, sanguine, wide-eyed, a victim who smiles too much for her own good – is (understandably) cautious at first, and the high notes feel a little effortful, though always accurate. For the first act it is a winsome performance, not terribly original.

The mad scene is quite different. Here Matthews comes alive – comes alive to die. There is nothing glamorous about opera these days. Twitching and mad-eyed, the bare-footed Lucia shuffles on stage, her plain white nightgown covered in blood (with the usual modish menstrual additions). Here the orchestra plays every bit as well as it did during Butterfly – which augurs well for next year’s Ring Cycle. The addition of a glass harmonica-like electronic keyboard (the harmonica was Donizetti’s original choice, but Benjamin Franklin’s invention) during the mad scene is inspired. It is such a weird, luring, other-wordly sound – perfect for this long, abject, infinitely melodious scene. Matthews – eschewing grandiose effects and shuffling round the stage like a demented murderess in Prime Suspect – takes it slowly and imaginatively. She responds brilliantly to the companionable flute. Rightly, she brings down the house with the cabaletta ‘Spargi d’amaro pianto’.

Emma Matthews in Lucia di Lammermoor (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The men are equally fine. The expressive-faced Giorgio Caoduro (Lucia’s venal brother Enrico) doesn’t waste any time and kicks off the night with a spirited aria. Aldo Di Toro, as Lucia’s hapless lover, Edgardo, is a conventional actor, but he sings his difficult music with great feeling, assurance and brio. If Opera Australia is ever going to give us another I Puritani, they need look no further than Matthews and Di Toro.

For some reason the director has chosen cut the Wolf’s Crag scene – a regrettable choice, since the music in this tempestuous contest between Enrico and Edgardo is lively and the available baritone and tenor would have savoured it. Why shorten an entertaining night at the theatre?

The youthful David Parkin, as Lucia’s chaplain Raimondo, brought impressive sympathy and accuracy to the rôle of Raimondo, Lucia’s often aghast chaplain.

(photograph by Jeff Busby)

In one of the many paradoxes of bel canto opera, Lucia’s mad scene doesn’t close the opera. It is Edgardo, on being told of Lucia’s mad descent, who ends it with two arias, during the second of which he manages to stab himself much more neatly than Lucy of Lammermoor could manage. As the curtain descended – or rather, as the big cloudy panels folded on the latest victim – our boisterous conductor, Guillaume Tourniare, lost control of his baton, which went sailing over the pit – a fitting flourish.

Unfortunately, New York and the Met call and I will miss Cheryl Barker (who sang so beautifully in the Sydney production of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt in July) in Strauss’s coruscating Salome, which opens on 1 December.

Opera Australia is performing in the State Theatre at the Arts Centre Melbourne. Madama Butterfly runs until 14 December 2012 and Lucia di Lammermoor until 15 December 2012. Salome opens on 1 December and runs until 15 December 2012.

Bricks, knowledge, gravity

‘I just read a history of bricks.’

We learn about the ways our teachers have influenced us over many years. As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, I took every class taught by Professor Peter Steele SJ. More than a decade after I first sat in his office, and only days after his death, I recall a statement he made almost as an aside during one lecture. The class was on travel writing. Not the popular genre, where narratives of Tuscan revelations or adventures on the trans-Siberian railway abound, but a more ragtag bundle of texts: The Odyssey, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and, a particular favourite of Steele’s, Gulliver’s Travels. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Jonathan Swift, a fellow priest with an appetite for the world’s many wonders.

The reading list for Steele’s class was already an odd selection, but his casual statement in class that he had been reading about bricks revealed a world of reading that lay before me. A lover of fiction and poetry, I had devoted almost all my reading to these genres, dipping liberally into the literary essay along the way. But here was a radically different suggestion: a history of bricks; essentially a history of the buildings we construct that are meant to last. I thought of the different character of homes made of red brick, and those made of yellow brick. I pondered again the Yellow Brick Road of Oz. Later, when reading of Timbuktu’s mud architecture, and when visiting adobe pueblo sites in the American Southwest, I thought again of this history of bricks. How like the Peter Steele I came to know over a number of years to understand the world from the perspective of the materials with which we build it. In various library catalogues, I have looked up the subject of bricks, and a number of books have come up. I have often wondered which volume he read, and am sorry I never asked him. I am grateful, however, that he introduced me to the work of, among many others, Mandeville. The weird account of this knight’s travels eastward into an increasingly wild and unrecognisable medieval world is one I have returned to often, both in imagination and on the page.

Another text Steele revealed to me was the poem ‘Matthew XXV: 30’ by Jorge Luis Borges. He often brought a poem to class, projecting it on a transparency, and talked us through the reasons why the poem impressed him. Borges’ poem ends with the following lines:

… In vain have oceans been squandered on you,
in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

These final four lines, he said, never failed to humble him, to haunt him – and they have come to have the same place in my own life. I read those lines and reflect that every poem I have written fails, somewhere – is still not the poem; will probably never be that poem. Yet when I read last year’s Best Australian Poems, I was struck by Steele’s poem ‘The Knowledge’. In its gentle gathering of worldly phenomena and its almost serenely contemplative mood, I felt that this poem distilled so much of what I loved about him as a poet. I read it and thought: ‘He has written the poem’ – that is, the poem that, for me, most simply represented his poetic voice and concerns. Ever questioning that knowledge which was his life’s quest, the poem ends ‘No end of wisdom: but what does a frog / in a well know of the waiting ocean?’ The ocean had not been squandered. I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I admired the poem.

I remember, too, the day he told me of his diagnosis, now several years ago. It was before I moved to the United States to study at Georgetown, a move I may not have made if I had not been Steele’s student. I already knew he was sick, and wanted to see how he was feeling. When I arrived at Newman College he was waiting outside the gates. In a nearby café he told me frankly and clinically of how his illness had been discovered.

As ever, he was interested in talk of other things. I told him that Susan Stewart’s book Columbarium, which I had just read, contained four words that were new to me. Looking them up, I was pleased that Stewart had – of course – used them correctly, and thus taught me, better than the dictionary, how they should be used. This seemed to amuse him. We spoke of Elizabeth Bishop, and I said casually, ‘Bless her heart.’ He paused, and then with both amusement and gravity, then finally his priestly gentleness, agreed, ‘Yes. Bless her heart.’ I told him that I had recently taken up trapeze lessons. He told me, ‘I often think of you as gravity defying.’

Remembering that last statement, and a number of other things he told me over the years, I feel that, perhaps, I have not defied gravity enough; nonetheless, I like to think that Peter would be pleased to see how my interests have broadened and broadened over time, and that each time I deviate from the literature area of a bookstore or library to another set of shelves – science, history, theology, philosophy – it is not a little because of him. I am certain I am just one of the many students to whom Peter Steele delivered a much richer vision of the world.

Kate Middleton’s first collection Fire Season was published by Giramondo in 2009, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She holds an MA in literature from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. From 2011–12 she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet.

Below we reproduce Peter Steele’s late poem ‘Maze’, which appeared in our June 2012 issue:

Maze

Birds are amazing, newspapers, stoves, friends.
James Richardson

But wait, there’s more – as when the hummingbird
flies backwards for the hell of it, or
the odd flamingo’s pinkened up by snacking
on blue-green algae. Aeschylus, potted
by a dropped tortoise, was one unlucky Greek –
from the same stable as Melvin Purvis,
who pioneered belching on national radio.

Were you an ant you’d start the day by stretching,
and, at a pinch, have a big yawn;
were you a cricket you’d listen through the slits
of your eager forelegs: were you, alas,
a white shark, you’d never take sick but always
be hungry: and if a caterpillar,
you’d boast to the end a couple of thousand muscles.

The ermine in white is the weasel in brown, and the chow
the only dog with a black tongue:
mice were sacred to Apollo: a camel-hair
may be a squirrel’s tail: the mosquito’s
wings are thrashing a thousand times a second.
If you look for the only crying creature –
or laughing come to that – consult a mirror

and find, your mind bested by wonder, your eyes
lit up again at the starry torch,
rue and its makings, something of jubilee,
the shot-silk of the hours. Better,
as the man said, to keep on dreaming small,
than see given to dissipation
the friends, the stoves, the newspapers, the birds.

Peter Steele

Patrick McCaughey and Peter Steele at the Fricke Museum

 There is, understandably, much umbrage and anxiety in Canberra following Fairfax’s decision to remove its literary editor at the Canberra Times and to rely exclusively on literary reviews and commentaries emanating from Fairfax’s two main broadsheets, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – broadsheets that will themselves become tabloids next year, presumably with less literary and cultural content. Australian Book Review regrets this decision, and hopes it will be reconsidered. The Canberra Times has long carried some of the most distinctive and extensive books pages in the country. It seems extraordinary that such a wealthy city – a major university city – a national capital even – cannot support its own bespoke literary pages and must, like some outpost, rely on the word from Melbourne or Sydney. Variety of opinion and sensibility in such a deplorably concentrated media environment as ours is surely worth defending. Without it there will be many victims: writers, readers, critics, booksellers, publishers, etc. We support the campaign to overturn this unfortunate and philistine economy.

Below we carry an open letter from many of those involved in this campaign. We will update it regularly as more names are added, and we welcome readers’ comments.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

Dear Editor,

We, the undersigned, wish to draw to national attention the implication of the upcoming Fairfax consolidation of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times book sections. This has the potential to reduce significantly the content of the three separate sections in terms of both the number of books covered and reviewers. The same review would appear in all three outlets. This will particularly impact on the Canberra Times, currently one of the best book review sections in the country, if, as seems likely, most of the reviews in future will be sourced from ‘Fairfax Central’.

This consolidation will considerably reduce divergent voice and opinion on both fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books in Australia. While Fairfax has indicated that some ‘local content’ will still be included, there is no doubt that many authors and their books will no longer be reviewed. Unlike the United Kingdom and America, where there are numerous publications, Australia is not well served by alternative national literary outlets, Australian Book Review being an honourable exception.

Canberra has the highest book purchasing and reading per head of population in the country, so it seems counter-productive that a search of the Canberra Times book section already only brings up reviews sourced from Sydney and Melbourne. We recognise the challenges confronting the newspaper industry, but we also want to emphasise that the digital era provides opportunities which are currently not being recognised in local content, advertising, and bookshop sales.

We would argue that the reading publics of Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney are sufficiently different that online literary diversity should be promoted by Fairfax, rather than the opposite trend. The lack of public dialogue within the Fairfax papers on this issue to date, despite numerous submissions, is also a matter of regret, especially given the need for public debate is so often espoused by those organs.

 Jaki Arthur, Joel Becker, Carmel Bird, Alison Broinowski, David Brooks, Sally Burdon, Alexa Burnell, John Byron, Tracey Cheetham, John Clanchy, Paul Cliff, Kirstin Corcoran, Sara Dowse, Suzanne Edgar, Christine Farmer, Heath Farnsworth, Jane Finemore, Ian Fraser, Brendan Fredericks, Irma Gold, Alan Gould, James Grieve, Janet Grundy, Robert Grundy, Marion Halligan, Paul Hetherington, Chris von Hinckeldey, Claudia Hyles, Subhash Jaireth, Brian Johns, John Kerin, Cora Kipling, Kathy Kituai, Alisa Krasnostein, Elizabeth Lawson, Lesley Lebkowicz, Caroline Le Couteur, Charlie Massy, Andrew McDonald, Debbie McInnes, Patti Miller, Jennifer Moran, Ann Moyal, Kerrie Nelson, Hoang Nguyen, Susan Nicholls, Jane Novak, Benython Oldfield, Kate O’Reilly, Frank O’Shea, Moya Pacey, Geoff Page, Andy Palmer, Bettina Richter, Andrew Schuller, David Skinner, Melinda Smith, Linda Spinaze, Peter Stanley, Colin Steele, Jen Stokes, Dallas Stow, Faye Sutherland, Peter Tinslay, Bethia Thomas, Leon Trainor, June Verrier, Kaaron Warren, Judith White, Robert Willson, Belinda Weaver, and Cameron Woodhead

As we broaden our team of contributors and extend our non-Victorian content, we are currently focusing on Queensland, with good results and some excellent new contacts. We expect this quota to increase markedly in coming months. In mid-July I will be spending a few days in Brisbane, spreading the word about the magazine and recruiting new contributors. I’ll be taking part in a few events at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Writers Centre.

On Thursday, 19 July I will take part in an event at the Queensland Writers Centre – ‘an intimate evening of wine, cheese and chats’. I very much look forward to meeting Brisbane’s pool of talented and emerging writers. My aim will be to give them practical information about how they can engage with ABR and the best way to do so.

Date Thursday 19July

Time 6:00–7:30 pm

Where Queensland Writers Centre, Level 2, State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, Cultural Centre, South Brisbane 4101

RSVP This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

As ever, I welcome approaches from seasoned reviewers or from those who want to chance their arm in a critical sense. All you have to do is send me an email outlining your experience and interests (authors, genres, etc.) and sending me one or two examples of your work. My email address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

From time to time I chat to Sky Kirkham on the excellent 4ZzZ Book Club, our subject being literary news and recent developments and offerings at ABR. Here is a podcast of our latest conversation (courtesy of 4ZzZ Book Club). Click the Play button to stream the podcast, or click the link ('peter_rose_interview.mp3') to download it.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review