Cyrano in San Francisco

I was probably one of just a few people at the performance at the San Francisco Opera of Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac who had seen the opera before.  In London Roxane was sung by Sondra Radvanovsky, and this time it was Ainhoa Arteta who was fine, but did not manage the complete vocal ease in the role that Sondra achieved.  Roxane is a tough part vocally.

It was a completely different production from the one in London.

Apparently Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a real person whose life was fictionalized by Edmond Rostand.  It is the fictional Cyrano that we know, the one whose nose is considered not merely large but ugly, even grotesque.  Will it spoil the story if I say the real Cyrano was apparently a homosexual?  This cannot possibly be relevant.

What is relevant?  I liked Placido Domingo much more this time around.  The opera is very romantic and Domingo successfully portrayed Cyrano's passion for Roxane.  He sang well, moved well and found the necessary emotions when he needed them.  It was all very beautiful.  Alfano gets a bad rap.

About Turandot

According to Concert Opera Boston:

"A question that has followed Turandot around for decades concerns the proper pronunciation of the title character’s name. The name Turandot apparently is derived from the Persian “Turandokht,” meaning “daughter of Turan,” Turan being a region of what was then Persia, later called Turkestan. The name Turandokht and the fact that Gozzi’s play was entitled Turandotte imply that the final t should be pronounced. However, according to Rosa Raisa, who created the title role, Puccini pronounced it without the final t." The stuff you read.

There's lots of information on the internet about the ending of Turandot.

From the Metropolitan Opera is this:

"Alfano was given a year to write Turandot’s final act, as Toscanini wanted the piece to premiere on the anniversary of Puccini’s death. Alfano hastily completed what he could, using Puccini’s drafts and incorporating his own style when the drafts were unclear or when no music existed at all. Alfano heard the complete orchestrations of the first two acts just twenty days before his own draft was due; there simply was no time for him to completely familiarize himself with Puccini’s orchestral intentions for the work.

"Alfano’s final act was famously rejected by Toscanini, who cut large parts of his work. At the 1926 premiere of Turandot at La Scala, Toscanini conducted the opera until the moment of Liù’s death, then set down his baton and announced, “Here is where the opera ends, because at this point the Maestro died.” Although Toscanini and others did later conduct most of Alfano’s ending, it was not until 1982 that the piece was performed in its entirety. The complete version has since become quite popular."

Apparently we normally hear the shortened version composed by Alfano and severely cut by Toscanini.

I am researching all this because I had such a different take on the opera from the performance in the simulcast than I have ever had before, and because I realize the part that was different for me was the parts composed by Alfano. Was I hearing something different, or was the performance just that different?

Footnote:

I asked the Met and received this answer: "The short of it is that Alfano was forced to edit and cut his original ending by Puccini's publisher, Tito Ricordi, and conductor Arturo Toscanini. This second version became the standard and is the one performed at the Met and virtually everywhere else."

What this means is that my reaction was to the performance.

Everything is on YouTube, including a recording of Alfano's original ending.





The lengthy footnote on the film includes this interesting paragraph:

Puccini died without completing Turandot. He left behind 36 pages of sketches on 23 sheets for the end of Turandot, together with instructions that Riccardo Zandonai should finish the opera. Puccini's son Tonio objected, and eventually Franco Alfano was chosen to flesh out the sketches. Alfano was chosen because his opera "La leggenda di Sakùntala" resembled Turandot in its setting and heavy orchestration.

Wikipedia

Compare this entry from Wikipedia about Alfano's opera with what I said:

Sakùntala is a three act opera composed by Franco Alfano, first performed as La leggenda di Sakùntala at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 10 December 1921. The full score and orchestral materials were believed to have been destroyed when an allied bomb damaged the archives of Alfano's publisher Ricordi during World War II. Alfano reconstructed the opera, and it was performed at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome on 9 January 1952 as Sakùntala. During preparations for a revival in Rome in April, 2006, a copy of the original 1921 score was discovered in the Ricordi archives, and the opera was performed for the first time in its original form in modern times under its original title.

Alfano, who wrote his own libretto, based his opera on Kalidasa's 5th-century BC drama Abhignānashākuntala.

Critically regarded as Alfano's best work, though seldom staged in recent years, Sakùntala was performed seven times for Italian radio between its premiere and 1979. These broadcasts featured such sopranos as Magda Olivero, Anna de Cavalieri, and Celestina Casapietra in the title role. The opera was also revived at the Wexford Opera Festival in 1982.

Dr B: The story is quite interesting. So it's considered Alfano's best work. Hmmm. I think I liked Cyrano better.

Blogging

Of the things I have written lately, the most fun were the things about Franco Alfano.

I wandered accidentally into a rare performance of his La Leggenda di Sakùntala in Rome. I compared the opera to parts of Puccini's Turandot, specifically the section before "Nessun dorma." I am still wondering if there is anything to this. Did Alfano write this, too? How influential was his friendship with Puccini toward the end of Puccini's life? How much did he know about Puccini's plans for Turandot? It sounds like a research project.

Then I found that Berio had recomposed the end of Turandot, undoing Alfano's work, and wrote a defense of Alfano.

In that piece I compared Alfano's vocal writing in Sakùntala with Wagner. It turns out that Alfano studied in Germany. In the first decades after the turn of the century the musical world was in a turmoil much like the turmoil that followed the death of Beethoven. What is one to do with the symphony after Beethoven? What is one to do with the opera after Wagner?

Far from being the art work of the future, post-Wagnerian opera did not follow in Wagner's footsteps. No one could do the same thing. Perhaps no one wanted to do what Wagner was doing. Hansel and Gretel is generally agreed to be the closest thing to a Wagnerian opera, and it can hardly be considered Wagnerian, can it? The only thing everyone agreed on was the death of any kind of recitative. And maybe subdivisions into arias. I maintain the opinion that they were generally faking this. Even Wagner knew that what he was writing was an aria even though the music didn't clearly cadence. Perhaps all agreed to eschew cadences except at the act ends.

It is interesting to me that Alfano felt obligated to study composition in Germany. Perhaps this more than any other factor marks the reason for the end of Italian opera. For end it did. Did you know Berio writes operas? No really. Did you? That Italians would feel a need to imitate Germans is disturbing. Alfano returned from Germany with a post-romantic, sentimental marching band sort of technique, the sort of thing that histories of music like to pretend never happened.

Then I reviewed Cyrano de Bergerac at the Royal Opera. Surprisingly, it's in French. It is much more a real opera than Sakùntala but still cannot escape the Humperdinckization of opera.

Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac is such a great play that it cannot help but make a pretty good opera. The libretto, in French, follows the play closely. Between 1921 when he composed La Leggenda di Sakùntala and 1936 for Cyrano Franco Alfano seems to have pulled himself together a bit. He used humming chorus only in the battle scene, for instance, where it serves a relevant dramatic function, instead of every time a little extra emotion is wanted. The scene where Cyrano serenades Roxane, sung by Sondra Radvanovsky, who thinks it is Christian and allows him into her bedroom while Cyrano stays below is actually very moving.

But he still has no idea of how to write an aria, and there are lots of opportunities. The sword fight poem in act I is an outstanding example of an opportunity missed. There is even a refrain where a catchy tune would go well. The words indicate a planned and eventually achieved execution of his opponent precisely at the end of the poem. This was completely flubbed both musically and dramatically. The whole idea is that Cyrano must stab his opponent precisely as he pronounces the last word of the poem--not pat him on the butt with his sword as happened here. I don't think you can stage Cyrano while pretending that people don't actually die in the sword fights.

This is exactly the same production and stars as the presentation at the Metropolitan Opera. I assume it was revived for Domingo.

And now I am going to do the unthinkable. Placido Domingo is one of those stars people travel the world to see. I sat next to one of his fans at the Royal Opera House on Thursday. She could not remember how many times she had seen him. He, the greatest singing actor possibly ever, is still beautiful in his soul, and occasional flashes of his genius still come to us. He executed his choreographed sword fights with acceptable grace.

Placido Domingo would never have become famous as a baritone--that part of his voice is just not that interesting--and yet he forces us to listen to page after page of music more suitable for a baritone because he cannot keep up the energy necessary to be a tenor in such a large role. Mr. Domingo, you have set the standard for all to follow, but perhaps it's time.

Conversation at the opera

At Franco Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac at the Royal Opera, the woman on my left was talking to her friend, so I turned to the man on my right and said, "How do you like it?"

He responded, "I've already seen it 10 times. My wife is Roxane [Sondra Radvanovsky]." We talked about his wife. She has an unusual voice. "Some like it, some don't," he said. I commented on how easily she penetrated Alfano's large orchestra, that she didn't seem to be working hard at it. "She isn't," he said. "She has that edge to her voice that cuts through. Birgit Nilsson had it. It's more sought after in men, but valuable in women, too," I said.

I listened some more and decided she has a very distinctive tone which is actually an enormous advantage. "Who had the most distinctive voice, recognizable in only one or two notes? Maria Callas." He said his wife was sometimes compared to her. I said, "She doesn't sound like Maria Callas. She sounds like herself."

We talked about the opera. "It's growing on me," He said. "It sounds like movie music." Then I told him that Alfano had composed music for the movies where he was called Frank. I told my story about seeing La Leggenda di Sakuntala (1921) in Rome. "Alfano definitely improved since then (Cyrano is 1936)," I said.

We decided that in this audience I had seen the most operas by Alfano and he had seen the most performances of Cyrano.

We changed the subject to Domingo. I said the part seemed too low for him. "Every singer has their sweet notes, and this role only gets up into that part of his voice once in a while."

"He wanted it that way," he said. You mean the part has been lowered??!! He said, "My lips are sealed."

Only then did I warn that I have an opera blog. I wished his wife a lot of luck.

Turandot rewritten

A friend tells me that someone has done a new completion of Puccini’s Turandot. Someone, it turns out, is the composer Luciano Berio. Why is it felt necessary to redo Alfano's work?

It could easily be argued that I should have known all about Franco Alfano since he has been in the news lately, but the fact is that the bell simply didn't ring. When I bought the ticket in Rome I was under the impression that this was a new opera, and instead it turned out to be a new production of an old opera. All the information I was able to glean was from the program notes and based on my somewhat primitive Italian. It explained the source of the plot in great detail, and talked about Alfano's work in the movies, where he is called Frank.

When I read articles about this composer and his work on Turandot, I cannot connect what I read to my own experience of performances of both Turandot and Sakùntala. While in a state of almost complete ignorance--though I could remember the approximate date of Puccini's death--I connected Puccini’s Turandot (1924) with Alfano’s La Leggenda di Sakùntala (1921).

Now that I know that Sakùntala preceded Turandot and read the claim that Puccini had orchestrated most of Turandot himself before his death, if I assume these facts are correct, I must conclude that Puccini was influenced by Alfano. For Puccini to write an oriental opera on a mythical theme so soon after Alfano's oriental opera on a mythical theme cannot be a coincidence.

Before I heard Sakùntala I had no idea how much of Turandot was not Puccini. Obviously the arias are. This was Puccini's great gift--the ability to write such deeply personal music for the voice, in particular the soprano and tenor voices. He did not pass this gift to Alfano.

But the sound, the orchestration is very much like Alfano. He was a very talented orchestrator, but much more focused on technique and style than Puccini who never allowed his focus to drift very far from the characters of the opera. Compare with the instrumental parts of Butterfly.

Alfano's vocal writing in Sakùntala seemed closer to Wagner than Puccini. His very heavy orchestra was more Italian than Wagnerian. Wagner likes a lot of thickening in the lower pitches, even going so far as to invent instruments to achieve this effect, which Alfano does not do. Wagner would also never write melodramatic humming chorus into an opera. But the vocal lines of Sakùntala are static with lots of long notes, somewhat reminiscent of Wagner. No melody stayed with me.

I am going to propose an alternative fantasy history: Puccini became acquainted with Alfano’s opera La Leggenda di Sakùntala and was attracted to its oriental subject matter and somewhat more modern neo-Romantic orchestral writing and decided that he would write an oriental opera of his own. He incorporated elements of Alfano’s orchestral style while fully retaining his own style of writing for the voice.

It may even be possible that the Puccini estate knew of this artistic connection and deliberately chose Alfano to complete the score for this reason. If there is this musical connection between the two men, Alfano is the perfect person to complete Turandot.

La Leggenda di Sakùntala

I attended on Friday night a performance at the Rome opera of La Leggenda di Sakùntala by Franco Alfano. I had never heard of this opera but was looking for a new experience. It was the opening performance, and there were a lot of empty seats.

The legend of Sakuntala is of Indian origin. A young woman descended from the gods but brought up by the leader of a Buddhist monastery is encountered by a king out hunting. After a brief seduction, he calls her his wife, gives her a ring and returns to his palace.

In an extremely trivial incident an unidentified person becomes angry and curses Sakuntala. Her father returns home and declares that Sakuntala is pregnant. He urges her to go tell the king, since he must be the father.

Sakuntala confronts the king in his palace, and he tells her that she is mad, that he has never seen her before. Apparently the curse affects him, too. She goes out and throws herself into a nearby river. A miraculous event occurs, she is consumed in fire, but her child is saved to become lord of the world.

This is obviously a perfect plot for an opera. The one that has been made of it is contemporary with Puccini's Turandot, and the music resembles the part of Turandot just before Calaf's aria "Nessun dorma." The difference between the two operas is that Puccini goes on to write a great aria and Alfano can only write a symphony with incidental singing.

The singers in Sakùntala are big voices of the verismo period, large enough to be heard over the huge orchestra with added humming chorus assembled around the sides of the stage. But alas, in opera it is the orchestra that is superfluous. Opera is about singing. It seemed a suitable piece to accompany a movie by Cecil B. DeMille, perhaps even a movie called The Legend of Sakuntala. Of the post-romantic genre I would have to say the music is quite good, but the voices are merely orchestrated into the texture and are not the center of attention they should be in an opera.

I am trying to explain the failure of this opera whose complete performance history since 1921 is included in the program. First in Bologna, once at La Scala, twice in Naples, three times in Rome and only once in Wexford, England, the only production noted outside Italy. The composer apparently transformed it into a symphony in the forties, but even the great Magda Olivera could not save it from obscurity.

The Rome opera did it good service. There was quite a lot of ballet which I thought was well woven into the drama, for a rare change. There was a lot of cute business with long bows without arrows. Before each act a man came out with a stand, followed by an actress who spoke, followed by the same man who took the stand back off the stage. She was not particularly popular. I have not been much to the opera in Italy, and this was my first experience of shouting and booing from the audience. They were telling her to get on with it. I had no idea what she was saying but sat patiently, yet another indication that I am not Italian. The singing was fine, especially Francesca Patane as Sakuntala and Elena Cassian.

Footnote. The resemblance to Turandot is apparently not coincidental--Franco Alfano is the guy who completed Turandot after Puccini's death. I was just doing my usual "what is this like" and hit right on it. Even I am amazed. He is also the composer of Cyrano de Bergerac.