I will tell you, Madam,” said Friar Albert, “but it is a matter of admirable secrecy. ... Mistress Shallow-braine, being swolne big with this wind, like an empty bladder; conceived no small pride at hearing these words. ... Did I not tell you, Father Albert, that my beauty was celestial?”
Lisetta’s just been told, by her confessor, Frate Alberto, that the Angel Gabriel himself is in love with her, in this translation by Shakespeare’s pal John Florio of the second “novel” of the Fourth Night of Boccaccio’s late-medieval collection of stories celebrating laughter, love, and freedom, The Decameron. The upshot is a priest dolled up with feathers to pose as an angel, getting attacked by Lisetta’s relatives, trying to fly out the window of the room where he’s seduced her, and instead falling headlong into the Grand Canal of Venice.
Another, more contemporary result is what’s being called a collaborative live opera, Dieci giorni (or 10 Days), by Bay Area composers Erling Wold, Lisa Scola Prosek, Martha Stoddard, and Davide Verotta, conducted by Stoddard and directed by Jim Cave. The production opens on Sept. 10 for a two-weekend run at Thick House on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill.
10 Days began when Lisa Prosek read a description of the Frate Alberto/Lisetta story. “The scene in that particular story was so fantastical,” Prosek recalled, “I had to suspend all disbelief. I had to do that as an opera. And I couldn’t help thinking of Pasolini’s film of The Decameron, all angels with that gold thing behind their heads. I thought, ‘I could stage that!’”
Prosek spent two years reading Boccaccio. Then she told theater designer and director extraordinaire Jim Cave — who helmed the productions of Prosek’s operas Leonardo’s Notebooks (2006), Belfagor (2007, staged at Thick House), and Trap Door (2008, commissioned by The Lab) — that she was ready to set the opera.
“And Jim called back, and said, ‘No, no — let’s do something more bizarre. Let’s do it as a festival. Get a bunch of people together and do it like Boccaccio ’70 [the Italian omnibus film with episodes by different great directors], but with composers taking the place of film auteurs. Invite them to tell it their own way.’”
“Lisa was interested in doing a little comic opera based on the Frate Alberto story,” director Cave recalled. “It seemed like a nice idea, but lightweight. Then I opened my mouth and said, ‘Let’s get other composers involved. But not for a program of discrete pieces — for an evening that holds together.’”
Cave solicited Erling Wold’s participation, for the two had worked together on the staging of Wold’s The Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil in 1995. Stoddard had collaborated with both Prosek and Cave on previous shows. And Prosek invited Davide “because I thought he’d give the Italian text a good read. The story he does is a precursor of Così fan tutti. His style’s like Luciano Berio’s music; Erling’s got a kind of minimalist idiom. Parts are like choral pieces, others like washes of sound. There are passages of narration. Mine have the relief of high drama. [Prosek’s own music is influenced by Italian bel canto style and madrigals.] Every artist does their own thing, in their own style.”
“For a year, we all met at my apartment,” Prosek said. “Jim gave out assignments — you do this, you do that. When you see all the sections, it’s pretty clear who’s doing what. That’s part of the fun.”
Cave ticked off the main divisions:
Erling was interested in doing a framing device. Everybody else chose little stories. Lisa chose four or five. Martha set the poems in the stories [translated by Prosek] and the Danse Macabre, a motif that’s repeated throughout; she also conducts the orchestra. Erling took on a modern version of a story — five bachelorettes in Vegas. Everybody developed their own libretto. Everybody went away, wrote, and came back. It’s so diverse. Erling’s more contemporary, Davide’s more like classical opera. ... And there’s not only different composers, but different librettists. Davide’s music sets Italian text; we’ll have supertitles. But the rest — most of it — is in English.
Cave recalled concerns he had initially that “all those styles wouldn’t come together. But they’re fitting together beautifully.”
Of the singers — Maria Mikheyenko, Crystal Philippi, William Sauerland, Wayne Wong, and Sascha Joggert — Cave remarked, “Maria’s worked with us before. The rest are new. We just stumbled on most of them. Billy [Sauerland], the countertenor, is a former member of Chanticleer.”
He concluded by saying, “There’s such a range of composers in the Bay Area that it’s mind-boggling. Nice to get everyone working together! And the magic is in the homemade-ness, in the fracturedness. It’s from a book of stories told off-the-cuff. It’s inspired by Boccaccio, but he’s in the background. 10 Days has one foot in the concert world, the other on the stage, in the world of performance.”