Lise—you’ve guessed it—is La Davidsen, the Junoesque (read: six foot two) phenomenon whose deluxe powerhouse soprano and commanding persona have the world’s top lyric stages at her feet. As we can tell from the masked faces of the crew backstage at the Norwegian National Opera, in Oslo, and likewise from the empty auditorium, Eivind Holmboe’s 40-minute video for Einar Films dates to the pandemic; it was shot on November 13, 2021, apparently in a single day.
The program strings together monologues from operas by Richard Strauss, to whose musically rewarding, psychologically complex heroines Davidsen devotes much of her calendar. Here, we meet three of these ladies, each at turning point in her love life. There’s the Marschallin of Der Rosenkavalier, an aristocratic sophisticate on the cusp of losing a frisky boy toy half her age. Then, there’s the heroine of Arabella, handicapping suitors eligible to repair her family’s decayed fortunes. And finally, there’s the eponymous Cretan princess of Ariadne auf Naxos, abandoned on a desert island, longing for death but headed for transfiguration.
At the top of the film, Holmboe’s camera trails Davidsen as she strides through the theater’s long corridors, dressed in an ivory cable-knit sweater, a floor-length muslin skirt of the same shade, and no-nonsense sneakers to match. Only an elfin techie tags along, unregarded, fussing with her dark tresses. Onstage, the conductor Edward Gardner and the orchestra wait in readiness. Without so much as a nod of mutual acknowledgment, the music begins.
Like her peerless Swedish forerunner Birgit Nilsson, Davidsen, now 37, hails not from a world capital but the Scandinavian countryside, which may in part account for the unspoiled authenticity that makes her performances so enthralling. (There’s a resemblance in their faces and carriage, too.) For my money, just hearing and watching Davidsen engage with Strauss’s music and the multifaceted poetry of his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal is reason enough to shut out the world for the duration of the movie.
Holmboe seems not to be so sure. As Davidsen sings, he brings on avatars of the Marschallin, Arabella, and Ariadne, all in full costume and made up to the nines. The alternate Ariadne attracts a spherical drone—Tinker Ball?—that descends on her from midair, blinking its searchlight at her like a floating eye. The ersatz Marschallin wears lead white so thick you just know it will crack, and it does, but that’s not the end of this little horror sequence.
To Holmboe’s credit, the lookalikes are very well cast. You might even wonder (I did, for a while) whether that wasn’t Davidsen phoning in the cameos herself. But no, the ringers are ringers. We see their names in the final credits as they waft in her wake through more of the theater’s empty halls, out into the open air. Davidsen, meanwhile, having done her work, goes a diva’s lonely way, as far beyond our reach as when she first appeared.
Lise is available for streaming on YouTube and the OperaVision Web site
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii