LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater for the past 10 years, a theater company founded here by deaf actors. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its famous home base, even though he grew up in Southern California.
This week, however, he will be there, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors – along with a choir from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing – will take center stage on Thursday’s opening night, expressively performing the lone opera of a composer with progressive hearing loss while writing a masterpiece after masterpiece . In this “Fidelio” the singers remain in the background.
“Opera itself as an art form has been inaccessible to our world,” 44-year-old Kurs recently said through a sign interpreter. Doof West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas, but had always declined.
But after not performing for nearly two years due to the pandemic—and after watching an energetic Leonard Bernstein band conduct “Fidelio”—Kurs decided on this offer to partner with the Philharmonic and its musical director, Gustavo Dudamel.
The extraordinary nature of the endeavor became apparent when singers and actors gathered for rehearsals last week at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, about 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations – between spoken German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.
For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (vocals and gestures) and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that normally only accommodates an orchestra.
“We create the dance of the double cast,” says Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is played by both a singer and an actor. “We came up with ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we also want to make an opera for a deaf audience. From the first bar of the opera.”
For the actors, who are used to performing in musicals, including “Spring Awakening,” which was part of Deaf West’s repertoire, adapting to a more operatic style was a bit of an adjustment.
“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor who plays Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene in which he took Leonore into the dungeon to kill her husband (men: a singer and an actor). to see the ground sleeping. “I’ve never done anything like this.”
The actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and a language few of them know, so lip-reading isn’t an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the bright, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature to opera singers accustomed to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with characters, the great moments when a singer sends a single note across the room.
“Oh god, it’s stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor who plays Leonore, who disguises himself as a man named Fidelio to get a job at the prison where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held. in hopes of saving him.
“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held for so long,” she said. “It’s hard for me to understand because I don’t hear it. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience understands me and understands why I’m keeping this up, because it’s not natural for the language to hold a sign for that long.”
This production of “Fidelio” kicks off less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Troy Kotsur, who was a member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, the first deaf man to do so. be honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of ‘CODA’. (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview that they had seen the film three times.)
This production is steeped in classical music history, as Beethoven suffered hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I ever admit a weakness in the…” one sense which should be more perfect in me than in others,” wrote the composer and musician in 1802 in a haunted letter to his brothers, which came to be known as the Heiligenstadt-Testament.)
That history intrigued Dudamel when he organized the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how the opera became part of these two worlds – the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.
And it’s what drew Deaf West to this project; the members pondered what Beethoven had to do with writing and conducting, while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.
“Maybe he did it by feeling the vibrations of the music?” said Kurt. “I don’t know the exact process of Beethoven, but there is a similarity with how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in all my life, but I think I understand.”
There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about: The hearing of Beethoven at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to its extensively revised 1814. In 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. In 1818, he began carrying paper pads on which people could write down what they said to him. Although he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.
“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate, because he was wildly creative all his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University who has written extensively about Beethoven. written.
Jan Swafford, a biographer of Beethoven, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “It wouldn’t have lost as much tone as it had lost color,” he said of its creation.
In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production would be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. . After the tour of Europe was cancelled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the famous Los Angeles theater.
Dudamel knows the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the musical director of the Paris Opera. But this week he also leads deaf and hard of hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.
Dudamel told Kurs that he was prepared for this to some extent because of his work on stage, especially as someone conducting orchestras around the world, with players speaking many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain excessively verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)
“In a sense, a conductor has to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You can’t say anything. You can only show them.”
Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir while her husband led it during rehearsal.
The ambitions of this performance will be signaled from the first notes of the overture.
The Venezuelan choir will use choreographies and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture that opens the opera: recently it was wide smiles and hands in the air in a performance of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is very optimistic,” said Arvelo, the director. “In such a dark story, the overture opens with this moment in big tones. We were like: how can we convey this with images?”
During the spoken parts of the opera, the audience hears nothing: the actors communicate the dialogue in sign language, which is translated on surtitles thrown above the stage.
The production lasts three evenings.
“I think it’s going to be a mixed crowd,” said Chad Smith, head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be many LA Phil audiences who will hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works of the canon.”
Smith added that the hope was to also have deaf or hard-of-hearing people in space “perhaps for the first time.”
The experience has proved as powerful for the opera singers as it is for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart of Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he has ever produced. had ever seen.
“People want to see themselves on stage,” he said. “For once in my life I will be someone’s voice and they will be my action. He is my body and my action and my intention and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing public. We are one entity – Rocco. He is as attached to me as I am to him.”