Tragic events are everywhere. We see them on our televisions and are bombarded with them on social media. It can become very hard to take.
Billions of people around the world are touched daily by tragedy. I say “touched” because for many of us tragedy is a distant echo or a nearby rumble while, in other cases, it has metaphorically or literally blown down the door and perhaps destroyed the house.
The tragedy that is human cruelty is caused by motivations that the greatest works of art — including opera, theater, film, literature and painting — help us understand in ways that dogma, ideology and analysis cannot. I, for one, seek meaning and clarity in art when the burden of that which is unspeakable and unfathomable becomes too great.
I think the simplest and most meaningful way to describe what is tragic comes when things occur that we do not think of as part of the customary cycles of life and nature. Birth, growth, joy, sadness, illness and death — although they arouse strong emotions — are part of every life and we know to expect them. This knowledge is described in the sacred and secular texts that help inform our vision of our existence.
More jarring than the sadness that comes with inevitable life changes are the stunning jolts we feel when something unexpected happens, whether it is to an individual we may or may not know or on a massive scale as a result of human error or cruelty or due to a natural disaster. These events, because they are unforeseen, can more readily be felt as tragic.
Nature has its own rules that we ignore at our peril. It can be a teacher when we see the recurrent blossoming of the trees or note the return of birds. But nature can also inflict random, unexpected catastrophes in the form of earthquakes, avalanches, floods, tsunamis and other disasters.
What I find tragic is the degree to which certain leaders charged with making things better fail to do so. Some of those in power in politics, religion and business don’t address grinding issues (and their resulting consequences) that often lead to more tragedy. These include unbridled population growth, scarcity of resources (especially potable water), and a resurgent “us vs. them” political and religious ideology that is particularly intransigent. Above all, in my view, is the fact that climate change is real, and its effects will be felt in every aspect of human relations. Francesca Zambello’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, starting April 30 at the Washington National Opera, vividly makes the connection between climate change and tragedy.
Thoughts of tragedy in our world have been on my mind for a while, but they were stunningly crystalized thanks to a work of art. On March 26 I attended a play, Head of Passes, by Tarell Alvin McCraney, brilliantly directed by Tina Landau with superb scenic designs by G.W. Mercier that put in physical form many of the ideas and schisms that occur among the characters in the play. It is a tragedy on a much bigger scale — Greek and Shakespearean — than we see in most contemporary opera and theater. It is extraordinary in that it combines the tragedy caused by human cruelty with the tragedy that can be wrought by nature.
The play, which is running at the Public Theater through April 24, shows inspiration from the Book of Job. I also found resonances from a couple of classic 20th-century tragic plays. As with most dramatic tragedies, Head of Passes has a central character who is compelling to the audience (we root for her) even as we see that she may have serious flaws — tragic flaws — that might lead her to an awful end.
And here is where art works its magic. Thanks to the work of the writer, the production team, and Phylicia Rashad, a supremely gifted actress, we not only witness tragedy but come to understand it in all of its overwhelming complexity. Rashad's work is on the short list of the greatest acting performances I have ever witnessed in a theater. I will only say that her 20-minute soliloquy is as compelling as the greatest operatic mad scene or concert aria.
The power of this experience gave me a new realization about how we can understand the complexity of human suffering in opera, theater, literature and visual arts. What we see on television news is almost never the tragedy itself but the human reaction to a tragedy that has already occurred. In contrast, in opera, theater and film we can sometimes anticipate a tragedy, or if we do not see it coming, we experience it at the very same instant as the characters we are observing. That is what took place for me as I watched Head of Passes.
While McCraney’s Head of Passes is entirely and compellingly original, it made me think of two important plays from the first half of the last century: Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). O’Casey has been much on my mind of late as we approach the centennial on April 24 of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, when many Irish people sought to create a republic independent of Great Britain. Almost 500 people died and some 2,600 were injured. It led to a period of instability and civil war that touched every Irish man and woman.
O’Casey wrote three plays — The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and The Plough and the Stars (1926) — that had the struggles of the Irish people as their context but whose plots were searingly tragic on a personal rather than a mass scale. Every Irish person could recognize in the characters in these plays their own private tragedies of the death of a child, the loss of a home or crushing hopelessness.
The playwright injected a rich vein of humor in his plays. He believed, and I paraphrase, that Irish people treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke. When the characters laugh and the audience laughs too, the effect is to humanize them and make them real rather than symbolic. So, when their tragedy inevitably comes crashing down, we audience members feel it more profoundly.
Fiddler on the Roof, now in a Broadway revival, similarly employs humor as its protagonist Tevye addresses an unresponsive God as his family and traditions disintegrate around him. The next time you see Fiddler, ask yourself if it is more a musical tragedy than a musical comedy.
Mother Courage and Her Children was written and performed during wartime. Like Shelah in Head of Passes, Anna Fierling (Brecht’s title character) has two sons and a daughter. Anna, who faces many tragedies, remains almost cynically pragmatic. This might seem off-putting to audience members today but Brecht used what he termed Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) in which characters distance themselves from emotional engagement with their woes. This is more chilling than heart-warming, but when tragedy arrives we are just as devastated as in the plays by O’Casey and McCraney.
I do not want to reveal much about Head of Passes so as not to spoil the experience for those fortunate enough to see it. Where it differs from the O’Casey and Brecht is that its setting is not in the midst of war but a family affected by drugs, economic racism, secret transgressions and, especially, the overwhelmingly cruel power of nature. A tragedy for our times.
I found this play so extraordinary because it seems to me that there is very little contemporary theater that addresses and depicts tragedy. I don’t know whether it is because tragedy nowadays seems too big or whether the concerns of our times — mass killings whether by humans or the convulsions of nature — are hard to depict in a play. In the times of the Greeks and Shakespeare, tragedy was usually that of an individual and those nearby.
The playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), in his works such as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, had a firm grasp of the tragic dimension in the common man (as opposed to the gods and kings of earlier times) and powerfully demanded that attention must be paid. I have been reflecting on Miller as an inspiration for opera and will address that in a future article.
Film and visual arts differ from theater and opera in that they are, in effect, completed while live performances of classic and contemporary stage works magically take form in front of an audience as the curtain rises and then leave us moved and changed when the curtain comes down. Each performance of an opera or play is unique.
The most devastatingly tragic film I have seen in the last two decades is Dancer in the Dark (2000) by Lars von Trier, starring Björk and Catherine Deneuve. I don’t want to reveal a thing, but I hope you will see it. Italian neorealist cinema of the 1940s and 1950s had a particular sense of tragedy — the tragedy of the ordinary man and woman — in films such as Umberto D; Rome, Open City; The Bicycle Thief; and more. The next time you see La Strada (1954) try to see Pagliacci soon after and you will be amazed how much the filmmaker Federico Fellini drew from the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo.
This comprehension of tragedy can also occur with visual arts if we look at a work for a long time and with serious focus. A famous example is Picasso’s Guernica, about the horrors of war, in Madrid. For me, there is another painting in that city which is similarly powerful but on a more individual scale. Years ago, on my first visit to the Prado museum, I had never heard of the artist Rogier van der Weyden or his The Deposition of Christ from the Cross (ca. 1435). I turned a corner and was frozen in my tracks by this painting. I stood for more than hour in awe of an artist who could use paint and brushes, working in a two-dimensional format, to depict the timeless and always horrible tragedy of a parent whose child has died. This exists in theater (Juno and the Paycock, King Lear) and very often in opera (Cavalleria Rusticana, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto), but the sensation is different when the art form asks us to use only our eyes and not our ears.
Opera, which works simultaneously on musical, literary, visual and profoundly human levels — it is a collective experience among creators, performers and audiences — asks us to use many of our senses and allows us to understand tragedy more thoroughly. In Les Troyens, Cassandra foretells doom as the Trojans make their way from Greece to Carthage and ultimately Rome. Hector Berlioz concluded this massive work in Carthage with Queen Dido killing herself after she realizes that her having gullibly fallen in love with the Trojan Aeneas led to the destruction of her city and its civilized way of life. As in a Greek tragedy, Berlioz’s Dido kills herself in front of her subjects. The music, the stagecraft and, in this case, the unforgettable Tatiana Troyanos elevate this moment to high tragedy.
Opera draws from a vast range of literary sources, including Greek drama and myth; the Old and New Testaments; historical events and narratives of them by the likes of Ovid or Schiller; fables and folk tales from many nations; epic poems (whether Torquato Tasso’s often-used Orlando Furioso or the sagas and eddas that inspired Wagner); contemporary novels (Eugene Onegin; La Dame aux Camélias for La Traviata); plays (Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Le Roi s’amuse for Rigoletto); and stories from contemporary news events (Pagliacci, Nixon in China, Dead Man Walking).
Non-operatic music sometimes has a story that inspires it. Some of these speak of tragedy in literal or non-specific ways. These might include works by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Elgar’s Cello Concerto.
Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra (1939) may strike you as being colorful and folkloric, but it might surprise you that some of its inspiration resembles the tragic elements of Juno and the Paycock, which Rodrigo surely did not know, and Mother Courage and Her Children, which had not yet been written.
Music, which is an exquisite abstraction, can often enable us to experience and understand tragedy. But, in some cases, music can help us not by trying to explain the inexplicable but miraculously helping us overcome it. That is one of the sacred responsibilities of composers and musicians. Leonard Bernstein, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, famously said, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
If the cumulative weight of tragedy in our times has become too great, I invite you to distance yourself from all sources of news for a while. Switch off your devices and anything that will distract you. Play this music for the next 93 minutes and 45 seconds, and allow yourself (to paraphrase Friedrich Rückert) to be lost to the world with which you used to waste so much time.