Liszt

Franz Liszt was a man who found his gimmick. There were other piano prodigies before him, like Hummel and Liszt's teacher Czerny, but none created the frenzy that followed Liszt in his youth. In 1847, toward the end of the period covered in The Romantic Generation, he stopped touring and settled down to a regular job in Weimar.

And what was his gimmick? He could take common popular pieces of the era, such as operas, and decorate and transform them with dazzling, almost impossible ornamentation. This was his wow factor. You can imagine the audiences going mad over this. This gimmick required him to dazzle while continuing to remind the audience of the original material. He was more fabulous than three tenors all in one.

In the Transcendental Etudes he applied this fabulous ornamentation technique, a technique that was based entirely in the art of improvisation, to his own youthful etude compositions. He could do it with anything any time he wanted. Eventually he could not resist it and applied it to everything his eyes fell on. Occasionally he would write one of his improvisations down and call it a composition. He was completely undeterred by crassness or bad taste.

Charles Rosen does not manage to say anything this straight forward. He is a pianist and writes like a pianist talks. I remember them. They were the only people who sat during their coffee breaks and obsessed over the minutia of piano technique. I have in all my life never heard two singers get together and do this. Except maybe tenors talking about their cover technique.

When played by a pianist of sufficient technique, it is fun to listen to Liszt's piano pieces. I have personally never heard such a pianist. Usually you feel that it would be fun if only.... It would have been interesting to hear Rachmaninov play Liszt. [My friend Jean says that indeed, it was.]

Rosen is trying to assess Liszt in the way he would (and does) assess Chopin and cannot. Liszt did not have the fabulous originality and compositional creativity of Chopin, but Liszt had something else that I wish Rosen would talk a lot more about. Liszt is the creator of the orchestral tone poem, the bridge to Wagner.

Liszt is monumental for his influence, for his desire to create large forms only tenuously related to the sonata form, for his success in tweaking the imagination of another more gifted in actually composing.

Lustig

Two great comics together. I don't know what that thing is she's holding.

Announcer asks Ustinov if he makes automobile noises. He says he needs to know what kind of car it is, and Cecilia puts in that she now drives a cinque cento, a comically small Italian car. And off they go. Ustinov says that first you must know if the battery is good.

Tannhäuser

Conductor Donald Runnicles
Production: Paul Brown

Venus Petra Lang
Tannhäuser Peter Seiffert
Landgraf Hermann Eric Halfvarson
Walther von der Vogelweide Stefan Margita
Wolfram von Eschinbach: James Rutherford
Elisabeth Petra Maria Schnitzer

I went to see Tannhäuser at the San Francisco Opera yesterday afternoon. I sat in the front row of the balcony right by one of the new projection screens that hang down from the ceiling up there. I found that I looked at it and ignored the stage far below. I am pondering if this is a good thing. It was quite nice to watch the conductor during the overture.

I think it is primarily the religious kitsch that has always bothered me about Wagner. My favorites have always been Walküre and Meistersinger--one is myth and the other isn't religious at all. The kitschiest by far are Tannhäuser and Parsifal. I guess I have grown up enough to laugh at a world view that includes both the virgin Mary and the goddess Venus.

Tannhäuser, or Heinrich as he is called here, has achieved the ultimate fantasy and is having an affair with the goddess Venus. All this endless love making is starting to get on his nerves, and he wants to go back to his ordinary life.

Both of his women, Venus and Elisabeth, like him for his singing. k d lang once said that she became a singer because it was a great way to get laid. This may explain why the devoted Elisabeth, beautifully sung by Petra Maria Schnitzer, ignores the available Wolfram for the better singer Heinrich.

Wagner was an intuitive dramatist who recognized when the story required a musical gesture. He provides a beautiful male chorus for the returning penitents. The most beautiful musical gesture comes when Elisabeth has died (in this production she is strangled by Wolfram after she begs him to kill her) and Wolfram sings the beautiful aria "O du mein holder Abendstern," sung magnificently here by James Rutherford. He knew where to put an aria and he knew how to write one. "Evening star, greet an angel who now passes by." It is one of the great moments in opera.

I'm not sure Heinrich is worth saving, but the saintly Elisabeth intercedes on high, and he is saved. Perhaps God also likes a good singer.

The production was also filled with theatrical gestures. The single set is a large room (box set) with large windows along both sides and a dirt floor with a tree growing in the middle. The first theatrical gesture came when Heinrich, Peter Seiffert, first tells Venus, Petra Lang, he wishes to leave her. They are immediately surrounded by a ring of fire.

My problems with religious kitsch and the woman as angel/whore plot were very successfully overcome by the wonderful and restrained conducting of Donald Runnicles and the uniformly high quality of the singing. It was a treat.

Following

And who are these people I am supposed to be following?




Measha Brueggergosman whose Deutsche Grammophon recording is now out. Notice how her dress hides her feet.


Erin Wall who has a web site "coming soon" here. Sorry, that's hurricane Erin. Meanwhile, hear her on MySpace.


Tracie Luck who appeared recently in New York in Margaret Garner.


Jonas Kaufmann who can be seen here. He just won the award from Gramophone magazine for best vocal album for a Strauss Lieder recording. I'll have to look into this. He's just been signed by Decca.


Vivica Genaux seen here as Jackie Kennedy in Semele. It's the pillbox hat that gives it away, the one in the assassination photos. Doing it in pink would have been bad taste.

That's a few anyway. This is not an official list.

Belated award

I try not to get bogged down in gender bias, so at this time there is a new, though belated, nominee for sexiest in drag: Jean-Paul Fouchécourt as Platée. It is surely his subtlety and Frenchness that made this entire opera work.

Sexiest in Drag

I was looking for pictures of Vesselina Kasarova and found these lovely ones. The sexiest in drag category definitely needs her. Behind her is Anja Harteros.

This is Alcina.


And this is Orphée et Eurydice.

News

So much for my opinion. Apparently the understudy in Chicago was hot. According to Playbill: "Another Star Is Born: Elaine Alvarez, Gheorghiu's Understudy, Triumphs in Chicago Bohème" Here is her MySpace page with singing.

Now that would actually be a good reason to fire Angela. What if the person who actually shows up for the rehearsals turns out to be fabulous? Perhaps I should add Elaine Alvarez to my list of people I follow. One does love a fairy tale ending.

If she is serious about her career, she needs to go immediately and have herself photographed. Find a photographer who specializes in sexy photos, and get him to shoot you. This advice applies to everyone. Only the biggest stars have enough sexy pictures to go around, and often even they don't. The usual "I am a serious opera singer" shot that looks like it came from your high school annual simply will not do any more.

Advice

From a comment on YouTube attached to Victoria's performance of "Mi chiamano Mimi":

"Elisabeth Schwarzkopf wrote, when she saw [Victoria] de los Angeles debut at Covent Garden as Mimi in 1950, that she cried, because of de los Angeles perfection in the part and because she realised she would never reach such levels in the role and withdrew it from her repertoire."

Elisabeth achieved immortality by carefully selecting the roles she portrayed. She focused on those roles in which she achieved perfection, those roles in which she was the greatest of her era, and it was not many.

I think this is a useful model only for those who aspire to greatness, as she certainly did. Know thyself.

Pictures

See lots of pics of Netrebko here.


And how about this? Concerto for Coloratura Soprano (op. 82, 1943) by Glière. It's absolutely peachy.

Interlude

In the chapter called Formal Interlude Charles Rosen discusses harmony and phrase lengths. The writing in The Romantic Generation is very dense all the way through. The large number of examples makes it go a little faster.

I keep wishing the examples included some of the analysis bars from Emotion and Meaning in Music. This would make them easier to understand. You must do your own analyzing.

Tonality arose in the Baroque as a superimposition onto counterpoint. Counterpoint didn't change--just the chords added harmonic significance to the traditional voice leading. The chords changed about every beat or so and were an added feature rather than a new perspective.

In the Classical period it was noticed that changing the chords a lot less often made tonality the principle organizing idea. It's a case of less is more. Fewer chords that change less often means stronger key centers. Changing to another key became a big event. Rosen points out that the main modulations of Mozart and Beethoven are to the dominant, subdominant and relative major keys. If you don't know what this means, you are definitely not ready to read this book.

The Romantics start modulating to the mediant and submediant. Instead of modulating to keys that are a fourth or fifth away, they often modulate to keys that are a major or minor third up (mediant) or a major or minor third down (submediant). There are lots of examples. They are bored with constantly strengthening the key centers with tonic and dominant and drift off into weakening them with less powerful key schemes.

Then he worries over the four bar phrase for a while. He praises the regular phrase, saying it helps group material into larger units. Irregular phrases distract you from the larger picture.

I find that I am happy reading this material when I am somewhat familiar with the examples. I don't have a piano. He is now setting off into three large chapters on Chopin. We'll see.