Today's Stories

July 26 / 27, 2008

Joseph Nevins
Death as a Way of Life on the Borderlands

July 25, 2008

Harvey Wasserman
NRC: New Nukes Not Ready for Prime Time

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Facts About Israel?

Alan Farago
Where's the Outrage?

Paul D'Amato
The Arrest of Radovan Karadzic and the Selective Prosecution of War Crimes

Gary Leupp
War With Iran? State Dept. Realists vs. Cheney's Ultras

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Eyes Wide Shut in India

Mike Whitney
Obama Dazzles Old Europe, While McCain Cries, "No Mas!"

Paul Krassner
Inside Camp Mogul

Mike Roselle
All Hail Nero!

Website of the Day
Pressing Starbucks

July 24, 2008

Greg Moses
Who Killed Azem Hajdari?

Andy Worthington
Folly and Injustice: Salim Hamdan's Guantanamo Trial

James Bovard
Daniel Ellsberg's Lessons for Our Time

Joe Bageant
Life in the Post-Political Age

George Wuerthner
Boondoggle in the Fields

DC Larson
Shutting Out Ralph Nader

William Willers
The Forest Products Industry in Public Education

David Macaray
On the Prospects for a SAG Strike

Website of the Day
Pacifica Radio Archive of 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

July 23, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
An Air Force in Free Fall

Paul Craig Roberts
The Mother of All Messes

Ralph Nader
Pavlov's America

Mike Whitney
Visualizing Dow 6,000

Susie Day
Senator Sicko: Jesse Helms and the Theatre of the Depraved

Website of the Day
"A Kinder and Gentler Machine-Gun Hand..."

July 22, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Ten Years On, Bolivarian Revolution at Crossroads

Patrick Cockburn
Boost for Obama Over Iraq Withdrawal

Soldz, Olson, Reisner Arrigo and Welch
Torture After Dark

Moshe Adler
Everyone Must Share, Not Just Charlie Rangel

Martha Rosenberg
Protecting Bones from Drugs that Protect Bones

Dan Bacher
Bechtel and the Big Dig

Harvey Wasserman
Is Gore Inching Toward Solartopia?

Anthony Papa
A Slugger's Drug Redemption

Binoy Kampmark
Mad Over Benedict

Website of the Day
Hiroshima: A-Bombed Objects

July 21, 2008

Ishmael Reed
Remnick's Latest Blunder

Mike Whitney
The Democrats are the Real Problem

Andy Worthington
Dictatorial Powers Upheld: the Meaning of the Al-Marri Decision

Scott Pellegrino
Should "Meet the Press" Desegregate?

John Ross
McCain Crosses the Border, Gets No Satisfaction

Robert Weitzel
Blowback Through the Looking Glass

Mike Stark
I was Spied on by the Maryland Police

Website of the Day
Pinky Solves the Illegal Immigration Crisis

July 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
It's a Dull Race

Jeffrey St. Clair
How to Beat a Mining Company: Why a Gold Goliath Threw in the Towel

Dave Lindorff
I Was a Victim of the TSA

Saul Landau
Obits for Opposites: Carlin and Helms

Ron Jacobs
Why Afghanistan is Not the Good War

Uri Avnery
Different Planet:the Israel / Hezbollah Prisoner Swap

Neve Gordon
The Untold Story of Ni'lin

Roane Carey
Dr. Benny and Mr. Morris

Robert Fantina
Ashcroft, Torture and the U. S.

Christopher Brauchli
The General Lied

Fred Gardner
Cannabinoid Researchers Won’t Take the High Road

David Macaray
Labor Unions and the Courts

Richard L. Hutto
The Ecology of Severely Burned Forests

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Mother's Milk of Politics Turns Sour

Ronnie Cummins
Netroots Nation or Nation of Sheep?

David Yearsley
Opera and Globalization

Alison McKenna
A Close Call for Medicare

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight Ascends

Poets' Basement
Ko Un

Website of the Day
What If Edward Said Had Told This Joke?

July 18, 2008

Corey D. B. Walker
A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?

Mike Whitney
Swan Song for Fanny Mae

Robert Bryce
Iran Rising

Mike Roselle
Ed's Chicken: Fighting King Coal in Appalachia

Bouthaina Shaaban
U. S. to Mandela: Happy 90th and You're No Longer a Terrorist

Eve Spangler
The Deaths of Children

Website of the Day
Lowbagger Needs Your Help

July 17, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Airport Gestapo

James G. Abourezk
Big Oil's Raid on the Great Plains

Ralph Nader
D. C. Socialists Save Crashing Capitalists

Allan J. Lichtman
Conservative Denial

Andy Worthington"Screwed Up" and"Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo

Ronnie Cummins
Move Over MoveOn

July 16, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Star Whores: How John McCain Doomed Mt. Graham

Paul Craig Roberts
War Crimes Paradox

Conn Hallinan
To the Edge in the Middle East

Dave Lindorff
Torture for Torturers?

William S. Lind
Running the Narrows in Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Sweepstakes Politics

Website of the Day
History of Iraqi Art

July 15, 2008

Michael Hudson
Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is Bad Economic Policy

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Missile Tests

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr's Militia May Live to Fight Another Day

John Ross
Crunchtime for Mexico's Oil

Howard Lisnoff
When Torture Was Practiced on U. S. Soil

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

Trish Schuh
Talking to Iran's Only Jewish Member of Parliament: an Interview with Morris Motamed

Patrick Cockburn
Immunity in Iraq

Mike Whitney
Betancourt Unbound

Alan Farago
Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

Seth Sandronsky
Taxing U. S. Stocks and Bonds

Phyllis Pollack
Stones Paint It Black

Website of the Day
Our Pal in Butte, Jackie Corr, RIP

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be"Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U. S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N. D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on"Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

Weekend Edition
July 26 / 27, 2008

The Musical Patriot

Sodomy, Snuff Scenes and the Berlin Opera

By DAVID YEARSLEY

To go to the opera in Berlin is to develop an acute sense for the tonalities of provocation.  On the one hand the massive and often brutal interpretative interventions that mark so many operatic stagings here demonstrate the vibrancy of the city’s culture of musical theatre. On the other hand, it becomes easy to confuse the inflammatory with the everyday. One risks becoming inured to novelty and excess.

The point was brought home to me a few yeas ago when I went to a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Komische Opera, directed by Peter Konwitschny, one of the bad boys of what the Germans called Regietheater or Director’s theater, meaning that the directorial hand is so intrusive that he (or, rarely, she) becomes a character, indeed the main character, in the work.

The novelties of Konwitschny’s Don Giovanni production, still in the repertory of the Komische Oper (the next run will be in June and July of 2009) are too many and too diabolical to enumerate here. Suffice it to say that the lurid imagination of Konwitschny rendered the ball scene at the end of Act I as an all-out Sadist orgy, with Leporello getting sodomized by Masetto.

Berlin is also a city where kids often come to the opera. At the start of the ensuing intermission a boy of about ten years old sitting in the row in front of me queried his mother on the same-sex grapplings just enacted on stage.  This prompted an honest and not unspecific answer from his mother. Thus are some of the youths of Berlin instructed in the sexual smorgasbord on offer in their infamously permissive city. Looking for a way to break the ice on the birds and bees (and bees and bees) talk you were supposed to have with your kid before the onset of puberty?  Go to the opera in Berlin.

But these antics were not what caused the main uproar surrounding this Don Giovanni. Sex in all its forms is old hat on the Berlin opera stage. Most offensive to those critics committed to a transcendent vision of Mozart’s timeless masterpieces was that Konwitschny scuttled the finale a dozen bars from the end so the piece never came to a cadence but instead fragmented, the shard of first violin trailing upward into disoolution and then grating silence. This operatic version of coitus interruptus left more than few in the audience frustrated.

The elderly woman sitting to my right, who more than likely had been a season subscriber to the Komische Opera for several decades extending back to the house’s socialist days when it was still in East Berlin only a couple of blocks of the Berlin Wall, turned to me and remarked lackadaisically, as if stating a fact rather than an opinion: “That was an odd Don Giovanni.”

It’s not as if native Germans have a monopoly on this kind of thing in their capital city. A couple of evenings later I returned to the Komische Oper and saw Catalan director Calixto Bieito’s production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail which moved the action from a Turkish harem to a sex shop, with naked prostitutes arrayed in booths to either side of the theatre even as audience members found their seats before the performance began.

Having just disported himself as Leporello in Don Giovanni, baritone Jens Larsen, one of the stalwarts in the Komische Opera, appeared as Osmin and made his entrance on a revolving stage, stark naked taking a real shower.  Although treating the musical text with reverence, the production otherwise transgressed far beyond the aforementioned Konwitschny’s borders of outrage. Having just been brutally beaten, the heroine Konstanze sings her show aria, “Marten aller Arten,” while Osmin forces a dayglo-wigged prostitute to give him a blow job.  Once pleasured Osmin than completes his gratification by pinioning the hooker and knifing her to death in a startingly realistic demonstration of stagecraft gore.

The production ended with a bloodbath even more extreme than that of Same Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch.

Bieito’s 2004 production did not lack for publicity. One knew in advance what one was getting into, buying the tickets.  It was therefore a bit surprising that within twenty minutes of the performance I attended shouts of outrage came spilling over from the first balcony. The main objection was: ”I want Mozart not this crap.” A spirited colloquy then erupted between opposing factions, before the usher escorted the malcontents from the house.

That is another strength of opera culture in Berlin: the audience often involves itself in the commentary if not also in the action, a fluid set of relationships Montesquieu so brilliantly parodied in his Persian Letters, where Eastern visitors to the theatre in Paris are not sure where the play ends and the audience begins and even, whether the spectacle continues beyond the doors of playhouse.  All the worlds a stage, and in Berlin this stage tips and teeters and rarely allows for the complacency of connoisseurship and diva worship which some claim as the main pleasures of opera going.

Even the generally less adventurous Staatsoper staged the auto de fé at the end of Verdi’s Don Carlo with the Inquisition’s naked, bloodied, and bound victims being hoisted up on stage by their feet.  Photographs of this grim tableau were seen in newspapers across German, and gave even those who’d never been to the opera a peek into the depravities that can be seen and heard there. In contrast to the Puritanical jeremiads against the federal funding of such excesses that one would inevitably get in the United States, I didn’t read any grumblings about the huge subsides enjoyed by the Staatsoper, though perhaps the German tabloids tried to whip up some massed displeasure.

Berlin boasts three world-class opera houses and three IKEA superstores, an astounding density on both fronts.  Berliners redo their kitchens as nonchalantly as they demolish and renovate classics of the operatic repertory. Wherease the IKEAS are a response to the buoyant consumerism, the operatic abundance is a relic of the Cold War cultural competition of a divided Berlin.
 
Since German reunification, economic shock therapy has not closed any of the opera houses, though Berlin’s finances continue to be in critical condition, and the cultural life-support of the federal government continues to be crucial in sustaining such opulence.  No form of high cultural endeavor is more expensive or has bankrupted more princes and entrepreneurs than opera.

Comfortably located in the upscale district of Charlottenburg, the Deutsche Oper would likely be the first to fall victim to retrenchment.  It is a therefore a pleasant surprise to return to Berlin and find the house still in full operation.

The Deutsche Oper also allows ample opportunity for directorial grandstanding.  I think back fondly to my first trip to the opera in Berlin and to this modernist box of early 1960s vintage for a 2003 production of Mozart’s Idomeneo. Director Hans Neuenfels was already infamous for the leather and chains he introduced into his Salzburg festival production of Così Fan Tutte. For his Duetsch Oper Idomeneo in Berlin, Neuenfels added a scene after the final curtain in which King Idomeneo removed the four severed heads of the prophets and gods Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Poseidon (only Poseidon is found in the original libretto) from a bag, after previously having stripped them down to their underwear and humiliated them like the Emperor in his new clothes. This Big Statement was meant to dramatize the emergence of truly modern man, finally released from his bondage to organized religion
. 
There were boos and whistles from the audience and some calls by Germany’s leading Islamic clerics for solidarity in the name of monotheism against such desecrations. Many politicians came to see the controversial production, and weighed in variously for religious tolerance and artistic freedom. But no demonstrators appeared in front of the opera house. In 2006 in the wake of the furor over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the Deutsche Oper did for a time remove the production from its repertory. When it was reinstated soon thereafter operagoers were subjected to electronic screening and a heavy police presence.  Montesquieu would have been amused by the blurring of theater and so-called reality.

With this tempest only recently bottled up and tossed back into the stormy seas from which Idomeneo himself had been saved by the Gods he then decapitated, I returned to the Duetsche Oper two weeks again, that is, to the place of my introduction to German Regietheater for a production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

If ever there were a piece in need of a radical re-interpretation it is this one, with its condescending view of black life and its libretto marred by unconvincing, not to say demeaning, pidgin written by the white southerner Dubose Heyward.

But instead of a full-on assault on what Duke Ellington decried as the piece’s “lampblack Negroisms” the Sunday evening audience was treated to a conventional, untroubled, and unchallenging staging.  In the first place, this non-interventionist attitude could be chalked up to the fact that it was not a Deutsche Oper production at all, but that of the touring Capetown Opera.  Reflecting these origins, the production transposes the action from Catfish Row in Jim Crow Charlestown to a South African township during the racist crackdown of the 1970s. This transposition is suggested by the returning miners and looming wrecking ball that crashes into a corner of the set as the curtain rises.

But otherwise the production leaves untouched the errors of the libretto, its characters, and story.  Are there any sympathetic, fully human characters in the piece? The protagonist, Porgy, is a pathetic cripple who asserts himself as a would-be man through rage and murder.  The object of his distorted obsessions is a loose woman who all-too-easily strays from her flagrantly provisional sojourn in a morally grounded community when the pusher Sportin’ Life blows a bit of his Happy Dust her way.  The only confrontration with the humiliating diction of the bogus Charlestown black dialect was purely inadvertent. In the U. S., productions of Porgy provide supertitles for the arcane and unconvincing language of the libretto; one is therefore subjected not only to hearing but having to read phrases like: “I ain’t care who you takes up with while I’s away.” All such local color was effaced with surgicial precision by the clinical grammar of the Deutsche Oper titles.

It struck me as somewhat ironic, then, that the cast of this wonderful all-black company would deliver such a naive staging of the piece.  That the evening satisfied fully as entertainment made this dissonance still louder.  The seductions of Gershwin’s songs, most famously Summertime, can only temporarily assuage such disquiet.  The churning, unsettling modernism of the recitatives and transitions might be read by a more adventurous, and charitable, critic to suggest the brutality of Jim Crow.  But even such nimble hermeneutics, could not change the fact that the piece is far more successful as music than as theatre.  This explains, too, why individual numbers excerpted from the whole have a staying power  in American culture that the opera will never attain.

Ellington unkindly complained that Gershwin’s music “borrowed from everyone from Liszt to Dickie Wells’ kazoo.” But I think that is unfair to the scope and nuance of Gershwin’s achievement in the score and is more a reaction to the racial/cultural politics of the age than it is a considered view of the music itself.

The Cape Town Opera is the only one of South Africa’s four opera companies to survive after the end of Apartheid.  The only other opera company in Africa is in Cairo. The survival of the Cape Town company continues against a stiff headwind of indifference, not say enmity, towards forms of European culture in the New South Africa. Because of a lack of funding and sometimes tenuous ticket sales at home, European tours such this one to Berlin and then on to Oslo, are crucial to the company’s  financial viability.

The enduring existence of the company is largely due to the efforts of the Italian immigrant, Angelo  Gobbato, since 1989 director of opera for the Cape Performing Arts Board and the director of this Porgy and Bess.  In various interviews in the German papers, which were full of articles about the tenacious opera company at the southern tip of Africa, Gobbato attributes the success of Capetown’s operatic enterprise to the rich pool of talent in South Africa, where singing is still a vital part of cultural life, and which is, he claims, quickly disappearing from the European landscape.  Two names among the many worthy of mention here attest to the truth of his faith in indigenous voices. Xolel Sixaba (Porgy), whose rich and resonant baritone carried, sometimes mournfully sometimes ecstatically even to the last row of the cavernous hall, could sing on any stage in the world.  Tsakane Valentien Maswanganyi’s agile, but edgy, soprano and chiseled beauty got every once of lust, addiction, and hope out of the role and music of Bess. After such a display of singing in a major opera center by these cast members and many others one fears a mining of South Africa vocal talent to quench the operatic thirsts of audiences in Europe, where the nurturing of young voices becomes rare and rare. The operatic voices of the stars of the future will bear the mark “Made in Africa.” Whether opera will survive there, too, remains to be seen, though one fears that course of opera and globalization will be an all-too-predictable one.

Indeed, as we left the hall after this memorable if flawed evening, we heard jubilant choral singing of Africa music coming from the dressing rooms at the back of the opera house. The cast had not yet sung enough that evening. Sadly, the house had been only about half full, but the audience had leapt to its feet in a rare German display of heartfelt and immediate enthusiasm.  Hearing these joined voices carry into the indifferent, chestnut-lined side streets of Charlottenburg after the exertions of a three-hour opera, one could almost imagine the wellspring of South African song is inexhaustible.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omni. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu 

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