Caballe

This is it. This is the reason one might throw off all hope of a sensible profession and give ones life to music, because in these sounds there is all that life is, love and life and death. Why do we love the opera? Because it enters into our souls and opens up a space we did not know existed.

This is an honest outburst over Montserrat Caballe's video biography. For some of us the peak experience has not been Verdi or Puccini or even Cecilia Bartoli--it has been bel canto. Great bel canto, which we are not getting much of these days, is the best.

And in all of the opera performances and films I have seen was there ever anything like the film here of "Casta diva" gloriously and calmly sung outdoors, in the dark with mysterious dim lighting and the white robes of the worshipers swirling in the wind?

There is a section showing Caballe singing a duet from Rossini's Semiramide with Marilyn Horne. I wonder if there is a film of this somewhere. (The answer is yes--from the bel canto society.) I saw them perform this opera together in San Francisco. I sat next to a woman who was madly in love with Caballe as I was with Horne at that time, and we “Oohed” and “Aahed” our way through the opera together, gasping in counterpoint. It was magnificent.

Then Herb Caen called her “monster fat” in the Chronicle, and she never returned. Now I really must get out of the house more.
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How to...

How to become a great opera singer:

1. Arrange to be supremely gifted.

2. Arrange for your parents to love opera and expose you to lots of music while you are still a child so that when you grow up you will know instinctively how to phrase.

3. Find a teacher who understands technique, and understands that the same technique must serve all manner of music, and understands that it stands always in the service of expression.

4. Arrange to train quietly in the shadows until you reach maturity.

5. Arrange to get a nice job when you're ready in one of the German towns for two or three years (“Germany is the musical center of Europe,” Caballe) where you will receive professional coaching and experience.

6. Arrange to have friends and family to surround you and love you.

7. Arrange to burst suddenly on the scene from out of nowhere.

Written after watching the film about Montserrat Caballe. Yes, Sarah, you are right. It’s perfect.

Ruslan and Lyudmila

This video of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila is a joy. In an interview with Valery Gergiev at the end I learned that Anna Netrebko was a mere 23 at the time, infancy in singer’s years. She was chosen for her voice, for her youth and for her beauty.

I learned also that the production was a reproduction of a production from 1892. I particularly like the way this looks—very much like a fairy tale.

I saw this live in San Francisco in 1995, also with Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko, and with the same production.  We were thrilled and loved Anna instantly.

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Opera in English

At this address is a nice article about opera in English. My recent visit to the Washington National Opera featured an act translated into English which worked well. Placido Domingo performed his aria untranslated, and this serves to point out the main reason for not doing it: the people you are hiring to do the opera, assuming you are talking about the top rung of singers, know the opera in its original language and aren't about to learn it in yours. So do you do without them?

The second problem is that singers are often not understandable in any language so the advantages of translating the text are often lost. It is still recommended to show the supertitles.

I would think the advantages of translation would apply most to comedy so your eyes would stay on the performers and comic business would not be lost. Just a thought.

What do you think?

Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi

[bc] Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, they were popular entertainers, yes?

You can't actually lump them together. If this were a quiz show, which one would not belong? The answer is Bach.

Handel was quite popular in his London corner of the world, though the vogue for Italian opera eventually faded. Or perhaps it was his style of opera the English had lost interest in. Pergolesi had come on the scene, after all, and life had gone on.

Bach was a small man in a small corner of the world, insignificant, overshadowed by his children, first made truly famous by Felix Mendelssohn in the 1820's.

Haydn was a medium level celebrity, I suppose, in his obscure Esterhazy country home. He entertained his master's guests and published in Vienna, but was not allowed to leave town until the next generation came to power. When his new master/owner was no longer interested in his music, he was allowed to travel and become popular, again in London, of all places.

Mozart made his living off of music without selling his soul to a master as Haydn and his own father did. His father thought this was all a catastrophe and that Wolfgang was making a terrible mistake. To earn your living from the public means you must adopt a popular perspective. Mozart was multi-talented and could sell his skills in a variety of ways--as a composer, as a pianist, as a violinist, as a teacher of piano, as a teacher of composition....

By Beethoven this style of living off the public was no longer thought shocking. He was a notorious madman found sleeping in the snow and ridiculed by Goethe. In short Beethoven was a true celebrity.

Verdi was popular on a different scale entirely. He is virtually, though not literally, considered the father of his country.

The phenomenon of celebrity grew with the passage of time. But I think, bc, this wasn't what you wanted me to write about. Hummel, Paganini and Liszt were much bigger celebrities than your list, but the music they were writing and performing was in the same basic popular style as that of their now more highly regarded colleagues. The split between pop and classical did not exist.

Wagner singled out other composers for systematic ridicule, it's true, and placed himself on an incredibly high pedestal, but in general the writing and performing of kitsch for public consumption was just considered a necessity, not an indication of inferiority.

It is a great tragedy that Leonard Bernstein was made to feel that the music he wrote for Broadway was not good enough, that he had to abandon it for "serious" works. The only thing that will revive the popularity of contemporary opera is for composers to get together and decide that it's ok if the general public actually likes your music. If, perish the thought, someone should actually exit the theater humming one of your tunes....

Pardon me. I have started to rant.

Daphne

I went to Kennedy Center last night, my first time on a week night. I stayed awake on the drive home by eating chocolate covered espresso beans, which probably explains why I am writing at four in the morning.

I ate in the very nice café. It was a beautiful evening, so I went strolling on the outside decks that surround the building, patios with very nice willow trees and fountains and a view of the Patomac. There seemed to be something resembling a dance company at work among the concert goers. They all seemed to be wearing red and black to make them look like they went together. There was a saxophone player dressed in jeans, a black jacket and red all stars who improvised. There was a woman in a black tutu who did ballet moves, more or less. The others were all in ordinary black and red clothes with soft shoes. One of them would be standing around and then suddenly form into an odd shape on the ground. I wanted to do it too, but my outfit was green and brown. I thought I could suddenly fall onto the pavement and writhe around, but maybe they would just call an ambulance.

I went to see Renée Fleming do Richard Strauss' Daphne with the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne. WDR stands for Westdeutschen Rundfunks, west German broadcasting. The piece was performed as though it were one of Strauss' tone poems with incidental singing, which means that the singers were either bellowing away (Apollo) or drowned out (Daphne). A little toning down would have gone a long way. Opera orchestras are used to this, but a regular symphony has to be told to cool it. Strauss was doing his part, thinning the orchestration when necessary, but they weren't helping enough.

This is the Ovid Metamorphosis with a character added to make it a love triangle. Daphne (sung by Renée) has a mortal suitor, Leukippos (sung by Roberto Sacca, a singer who has not managed to open up his voice) whom Apollo (sung by Jon Frederic West, a true Heldentenor) kills in a rage. It is difficult to imagine this staged, but perhaps it isn't intended to be.

I have heard Renée Fleming in a variety of venues--Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Opera, Zellerbach--and have not experienced her in this situation before. The part is clearly ideal for her voice, and the music from 1937 is very beautiful, though not progressed beyond Rosenkavalier, certainly. The hall has a cavernous look and the seating is cramped. There was a burst of applause for Anna Larsson, a contralto who sang Daphne's mother.

The work was conducted by Semyon Bychkov who conducted in his shirt sleeves. There was not sufficient love for me. It deserved greater passion.

Annotated bc

From my email:

B, was just reading some random review in the New Yorker by young Alex Ross and wonder if he's a critic you follow?

You had a good point about Dr. Atomic, when you wrote something along the lines--BC's interpretation--that opera isn't really good as documentary; why in my view "Dead Man" [Dead Man Walking by composer Jake Heggie and playwright Terrence McNally] was "better" than "Harvey Milk." [Harvey Milk, Libretto by Michael Korie, music by Stewart Wallace.]

[Dr. B--I think there is a failure to write for the ages. Perhaps it is what Gertrude says, that we simply know too much about the day to day world we live in and imagine our immediate political events to have some kind of universal appeal. I'm dubious at best. From a theatrical point of view "Dead Man" was excellent. The presence of the name Terrence McNally, a real playwright, is undoubtedly not a coincidence here. Operas are first plays.]

And another thing: your friend's question why "they" don't write music like they used to--hummable, I guess is meant....I'd argue that "they" in fact do that, and constantly. But the music is commercial and pop: movie music, TV music, music behind advertising, advertising jingles, &c. Maybe it's a subject for you to explore & blog on: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, they were popular entertainers, yes?...somewhere in the late 19th century/early 20th, that European, through-composed music tradition, let's say, and dance-popular-theater musics [and I mean the plural] diverged, and one became "high art," and having become "high art"...well, y'know...you get Second Vienna School [Schoenberg, Berg, Webern]and that really academic tradition...and Philip Glass....some composers, especially in America, tried to do both or bridge the gap--Gershwin with "Rhapsody in Blue" and his piano concerto and of course P&B [Porgy and Bess] which yielded at least one "pop" tune vehicle; Bernstein--after all, West Side is a singspiel, yes?, and it also is tuneful to the teeth and Maria is a perfectly decent pop ballad...

[Dr B--where to begin? Classical music was its most advanced and truly modern in the 1920's and has steadily reversed field ever since. What's going on nowadays is a kind of stylistic potpourri where they imagine it's all about technique. I remember being taught counterpoint as though its rules applied in any context instead of the middle Renaissance one it actually applied to. West Side Story is a Singspiel. Haha! We keep saying it's an opera so, yes, it's a Singspiel in English, with spoken dialog and lower class characters, like Fidelio.]

Suddenly he diverges: last Tuesday I was at a jam session where the leader called "Some Other Time," and played it gorgeously ["Some Other Time" Composer: Leonard Bernstein]

....and both of them had reputation problems, partly as a result.
(Anyway, it's an idea for you to explore....)
Tell me though your thoughts on Ross.

Oh, and I'd add that "L'Amour de Loin" [L’amour de loin Music by Kaija Saariaho and Libretto (in French) by Amin Maalouf] is maybe better'n all of 'em. Not that I'd want to defend that statement at any length. But it's more in the tradition of, oh, Masked Ball or Don Carlo than Dr. A is...

bc

[Dr B--challenging, n'est pas?]

Opera Now

I found a copy of Opera Now at my neighborhood Borders, a British magazine I had not seen before. The September/October issue contains a number of interesting things:

It has an excellent appreciation of the life and career of Victoria de los Angeles, one of the truly great singers. I'm apparently not the only one who thought her French singing was marvelous, though the article does not mention her Faust. She was a kind of genius, I guess, a person in tune with music to its very depths. I especially liked the description of her one and only master class where she played the accompaniments for all the students. Her taste and musicality is unsurpassed.

They review Cecilia's Cleopatra, panning the production, calling it kitsch. My requirement is that the production explain what's going on, and I felt this one did that. In situ these operas didn't have productions and weren't really intended for what we are trying to do with them. One singer stood on one side and the other on the other. If there were three, one stood in the center. They dressed like fancy versions of people in the audience, and the set was the same for every opera. It was about singing. Only the rescue machinery like the flying Amor in Poppea distinguished it from a concert.

Pamela Rosenberg came to San Francisco from Stuttgart, and the two companies exchange productions. Evidently Busoni's Doktor Faust has been presented there in the production from San Francisco. The magazine also found it incoherent.

There's a nice article about John Adams in anticipation of Doctor Atomic. There is a sentence with the words "there was no need for theatrical dialog." If you want to call it an oratorio, I'm ok with that, just don't try to trick me into thinking it's an opera.

This is a European perspective with a very lively tone. I like it. Predicting the death of opera may be premature. Opera seems alive and well to me.

Renée Fleming's Handel

When I went to see Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall last spring I remember being most heavily impressed by her Handel group, and then Paul left his comment that her Handel recording was definitely in the NOT BORING category, I decided I had to check it out.

In this album she is clearly very into this music and never lets the expression flag. For curiosity you can compare her "Lascia ch'io pianga" with Cecilia's version of the same thing. Renée is much more straight forward but less emotional. I had no idea this was such a pop tune. If you want to be completely fanatical, compare this performance to Sarah Brightman or Charlotte Church.

This is vocally stunning and very beautiful. Renée has her own muse who is guiding her voice throughout this album.
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Stein on the Atom Bomb

Gertrude Stein, "Reflections on the Atomic Bomb" (1946)

They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interedted and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.


Gertrude Stein, 1946