Opera reviews do not usually carry spoiler warnings. Rather, they usually begin with a detailed, sometimes exhausting, detailed description of every invented detail. So this is not the exception. Ludomir Rozicki’s Eros and Psyche might just be another 19th century classic rewrite, just another tearjerker femme fatale movie, but it’s so much more than that.
Psyche dreams of being carried away by love. We feel that these Arcadian maidens who occupy a green room to make up for a performance are almost imprisoned so they can beautify themselves. Psyche is in love, perhaps obsessed with a man, who visits her every night. She reveals to a friend that she has been seeing someone. Eros reappears and offers eternal love, but only on his terms. He has somehow managed to hide his identity, if not his intentions, until Blaks, the caretaker, inadvertently shines a light on Eros’s face and then all hell breaks loose. Eros dooms Psyche to an eternal life of constant wandering and disappointment, a life in which Blaks will regularly reappear to deny her fulfillment. It is a judgment pronounced by Perseus, who announces exile and eternal wandering as he hands out a passport and tickets to both Psyche and Blaks. As Psyche begins to learn of her fate, we realize we shouldn’t blame the messenger.
Her first subsequent port of call is a party, perhaps a drunken orgy, in ancient Rome, a Rome that is, of course, not ancient to her. A couple of Greeks at the meeting lament what the Romans have done to their culture, a culture inherited from their own people, including Psyche. She appears, but she is obviously out of place, from another culture and time, and everyone makes fun of her, especially the women, who ridicule her appearance. She is branded as crazy and Blaks, who here is a prefect, apparently in charge of her, condemns her.
We moved to Spain during the Inquisition. Psyche embraces Christ crucified on the cross. There is sexuality in his obsession with the figure. He enters a convent, but still yearns for a life outside the convent. The other nuns do not trust her. She talks about her need for sunshine and fresh air, but she is warned against having ambitions. She must do as she is told, because asking questions is sinful here. There will be a visit from the abbot, a man who recently sentenced a nun to be burned at the stake. Psyche is thus warned. Her attitudes are described to the abbot, who condemns her. Blaks, of course, is the abbot, wielding power more easily than he shows faith. Eros appears, we think about saving her, but all he offers is an easy chant.
Our heroine’s next port of call is revolutionary France. She works while the men drink. We learn that it was Psyche who led the taking of the Bastille in the name of freedom. She turns down an offer of marriage because she prefers to serve the people. She wants to lead the commune into battle. She is too radical to be revolutionary. She insists on principles and is on the wrong side of politics. She guesses who could be the pragmatic leader who condemns her beliefs.
A final scene is in a bar or nightclub, where psyche dances to entertain the drinkers, who are all men. Blaks, here called the Baron, is the owner of the club and the main exploiter of the women who work for him. The women lure the men to the bar, they drink, and the baron, not the women, makes money. Psyche regrets her role, but the Baron says it’s all her fault. He laughs at the love offers and says that he wants to be independent. But, having achieved her release, he finds that he cannot cope with her.
Eros appears, perhaps to save the day. Psyche is still in love, but now also exhausted. Eros reveals that he has an alter ego by the name of Thanatos, the personification of death, and thus Psyche learns that she is doomed. Her response is to set fire to what is left of her life, a life that she has now rejected. However, Eros-Thanatos has the last word by presenting Psyche with a sports car that has already crashed. He invites her to sit behind her wheel and then paints her with her own blood to show that the end has finally come.
Eros and Psyche was released in 1917 and Rozycki’s style is not dissimilar to Symanowski’s, but there is also Richard Strauss, along with not a little Debussy. Many of the short phrases are also reminiscent of Janacek, though usually without biting. Given the date of the opera, we’d expect Psyche, while she’s still a femme fatale, to be at least a bit progressive. She certainly is not a Violetta or a Mimi, in the sense that she is not a mother victimized by bad luck, illness or circumstance. She is closer to a butterfly, but she does not accept her fate meekly and without protest. In classical terms, we may have a Salome or Elektra here, but these were anti-heroines who probably deserved what happened to them. Tosca got into politics that went wrong. One gets the feeling that Psyche would have relished the opportunity, but she never showed up.
Three other theatrically destroyed women of the time come to mind, Judith, Katya and Elena. Judith’s plight in Bartok’s Castle of Bartok parallels Psyche’s here. Judith can only know Bluebeard by probing the psychological spaces of her mind. He resents this, but allows her to continue, knowing that once she gets to know him, he will have taken her over. Similarly, Psyche is punished because he gets to know Eros, which reduces her control over her, a control he must reaffirm by damning her. Bartok-Balasz’s character, however, is more modern than Psyche, despite the existence of castles and visions. Only when Judith understands Bluebeard’s mindset does he have to punish her, because only then does she become a threat to him. She is eternally mummified alongside the wives that preceded her.
Janacek’s Katya Kabova is a step back into the 19th century by virtue of originally being an Ostrovsky creation, but her achievement of the finality of death raises some modern questions. In general, Ostrovsky’s nineteenth-century provincial dramas eliminate the heroines from it, but it is societies rather than individuals that are at fault. When oppression and hypocrisy are cultural and structural, it is difficult for any individual to oppose them. But here it is these attitudes that make female existence a tragedy. Yes, Katya takes her own life, but it is another woman, her own mother-in-law, who asks the community to witness how justice is done and not to shed tears for a woman who has sought her fate . The music, in fact, ends without tragedy or anger, but with a question mark. Elena Makropoulos presents a different challenge. In many ways, she is in control. Like Psyche, she has lived, or at least she claims to have, through many ages, she has filled many roles and led a number of different lives. However, her original destiny, like Psyche’s, was imposed on her by a man, in Elena’s case, her father. Like Psyche, Elena has become cynical about the men’s motives and despises her abilities. Crucially, however, when Elena is offered the opportunity to regain control of her eternal existence, she turns it down, preferring death to repeating the same old things. Psyche was never offered control and her achievement was never within her grasp. But Psyche believes that she managed to free herself from the oppression in the end, although she was unable to cope with it. This makes her a more modern figure.
So to a modern audience, Psyche can’t just be a classic beauty who crosses paths with a god. And in the production of the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, she is not. Each of the stages is transformed into a movie set. Scene one is a giant green room, populated by women who clearly want to be stars. It is not clear if Eros operated a casting couch, but the probability is high. From the green room of scene one, Psyche plays her role in each of the other four scenes, each of which is intended to be part of a feature film that she stars in. When Blaks repeatedly thwarts her activities and condemns her, the two become almost stereotypical femme fatales and callous male power. If we ask whether it has to be this way, we have to answer that it was a male god in the first place who insisted that she should be this way.
In the end, Psyche has had enough and burns the world that has exploited her. It should be a final act of self-destructive defiance, but even then god and men reassert control of her. A car accident is staged and she is painted in blood. The car itself is part of the trappings of stardom she has sought, and thus Psyche potentially becomes a tabloid headline, likely moralizing about a life of debauchery or excess. The psyche thus becomes a modern victim. She is a Marilyn Monroe ruined by fame, or maybe a Jayne Mansfield, the epitome of femininity exploited by male voyeurs.
Thanks to the Internet and Opera Vision we can all see this production from Warsaw and thus draw our own conclusions. Streamed via smart TV or perhaps better in the case of Opera Vision via laptop and cable, the opera even comes with subtitles for anyone who doesn’t understand all of the original Polish. Joanna Freszel as Psyche delivers an impressive performance, is up to the task, and combines the confidence, ambition, and assertiveness of a modern woman with the naivety and vulnerability of anyone she might fall in love with. Mikolaj Zalasinski as Blaks is brilliant at using his power, though he never seems worthy of his reach, which is exactly what Psyche’s character must be thinking. He also makes the role anti-intellectual, thus underlining the contrast between the use of power and any knowledge of its consequences.
The great power of opera, apart from its visually stunning use of multimedia, is its ability to reinterpret itself. Here, the Warsaw opera combines action, words and music with a small film, perhaps the same film that is being made on stage as we watch it. It is a fable that becomes real, and convincingly so. It is suggestive and ironic at the same time and a shining example of the creative vision of its production team, especially director Barbara Wysocka. And the music, by the way, is incredibly colorful.
Opera tends to be dominated by repetition from a fairly limited repertoire. Audiences often seem more interested in asserting their social class through their theater attendance rather than understanding the challenges of making sense of a play, especially if that sense is modern. Audiences tend to like what they know rather than knowing what they like. But when it works, and this Polish National Opera production certainly does, opera blends theater and music with the visual arts in a way no other experience can. As a genre, it is populated by a host of long-forgotten and barely performed works, nearly all of which can be reinterpreted by committed artists to speak to, reflect on, and challenge our own times. Rozycki’s Eros and Psyche is a prime example of the possibilities, especially as realized in this Warsaw production. Through Opera Vision it is available to everyone. Try not to miss it and then see what you think
