Jazz

In the article in Opera News about Renée Fleming's jazz album, Haunted Heart, were references to Jane Monheit and Jamie Cullum. So I bought all three. As BC has already pointed out, I am far from being a jazz authority. I like Ella. I like it to swing. (More of this thread ...)

Jane Monheit definitely swings. She even says that her performances owe to Ella Fitzgerald. She scats a lot. I'm trained. I can spell it right now. She is singing classic songs from thirties movies in Taking a Chance on Love, and for my ears, my admittedly old-fashioned ears it's pretty hot. Her style is pretty white, but we won't hold it against her. She's sexier than Doris Day, but very natural. You definitely feel that this is her real voice. There's a bit of a southern accent. This is very fun. All you old fogies should definitely try it. And some of you younger ones, too.


Her "Over the Rainbow" is dreamy and full of longing.

Renée's album, Haunted Heart, does not swing. Would I ever choose to listen to this lounge lizard music? Can you successfully get your brain to forget that it's Renée Fleming? And where did that throaty sound come from?

Renée has the chops for this kind of music. She is all the way into this style, understands it completely and has the confidence to get free with it. She doesn't scat much. My complaints are usually focused on the fact that American singers can only get free with American music. I am looking for freedom of expression in classical music, too. The main thing you learn from listening to crossover recordings is how much is missing in their classical work.

Then we got to Mahler's "Liebst du um Schoenheit", a song that lies very deep in my heart. Why do I have to be in a crossover album to hear it done with all this emotion? Dammit! This is the song exactly as it should be sung, a glorious poem, gloriously set, gloriously sung.


The selection of songs is odd. There's something from Wozzeck, for god's sake. Even with lounge lizard music, I think I might have liked more consistency of style.

Jamie Cullum is a guy. The name doesn't give it away and neither does the picture on the album cover. He's cool.
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A day in the life

While I was working in Ulm, my life was completely absorbed in the theater. I would get up in the morning and get Chris ready for school—he went to the German public schools the whole time we were there.

Then I would drive my Volkswagen beetle downtown and park it in the lot behind the new white theater. Ulm has a very nice modern theater with good facilities for the staff, courtesy of allied bombing in WWII. On the way in I would check the Spielplan pasted on the glass to see if my name appeared. I did both solo and chorus, and would need to read both the names of the operas and operettas, and also the cast lists to see if it said “Baker” or “Femar”, the other mezzo I was usually cast with. I was cheaper, so usually it was me. "Guten Morgen, Frau Baker," the Pfortner would greet. On the wall inside was the rehearsal and coaching schedule.

I had breakfast in the kantina every day: coffee and a ham sandwich.

The working day started around 10:00, and a lot of different things might be going on. Every morning the ballet did a workout in the ballet room. If there were no stage rehearsals, the chorus would rehearse in the chorus room.

I learned the German theater vocabulary:

Sitzprobe—this is a rehearsal with the orchestra, but without movement. This terminology shows up in American theaters.

Buehneprobe—this is a stage rehearsal which might involve piano only, but would have movement.

Hauptprobe—the main rehearsal before the performance, with orchestra, costumes, lights, alles.

Requisite—props. Also a line from Fledermaus where it means the same thing.

I was fascinated to find that left and right are the opposite of left and right in American theaters. In America left and right are as you stand on the stage. The director will say “exit stage left.” In a German theater left and right are as seen by the director sitting in the middle of the audience. If he says go left, he means your right.

In addition to rehearsing with the chorus, when I was preparing a role, I would be scheduled for sessions with the coaching staff, in my case both the musical and the language coaching staff. My German pronunciation, trained in America, was not felt to be up to German theater standards. I remember in Pique Dame, where I sang Pauline, I was supposed to sing the word “Fuesschen” (little feet). Ach! Bisschen I could manage, but Fuesschen completely eluded me. It came out like shush, which is totally wrong.

I had a piano at home and would try to get as far as I could on my own, but they were fully prepared to do the whole job of preparing me for a role had this been necessary. Coaching is good.

I was not allowed to say anything on the stage. Toward the end of my time there I was allowed to speak the words “O wie schoen!” This was a great honor.

If the chorus was not needed, we sat around in the kantina for endless hours drinking. Knitting was done. Skat was played. This is where I learned to speak German. Social status required that I sit with the chorus. Orchestra members sat with other orchestra members. Soloists sat with each other. I know that the San Francisco opera doesn’t allow alcohol backstage, but the Ulmer Theater kantina dispensed beer and wine. There were two refrigerators—one set to exactly the right temperature for white wine, and the other to the perfect temperature for beer.

You could have lunch in the theater kantina, but it was necessary to order it at breakfast time. These lunches were very nice, but I had a child and would go home to eat with him. After we were finished rehearsing, I would go shopping. At the time that I lived in Ulm there were no supermarkets. The closest thing to an American style supermarket was in the basement of one of the department stores downtown. I know when I go to Zurich there is a store called the coop near the train station that is exactly like an American store.

German school was mainly in the morning. Chris would come home with stories of what his teacher, Herr Butzenhart, had said that day. Herr Butzenhart was full of sage advice and wise sayings.

After lunch I would take a nap. It is a wonderful thing to take a nap every day. Life is somehow different. I learned there is an optimum length of nap—45 minutes. If you sleep for any longer, you don’t quite wake back up again. 45 minutes leaves you refreshed and ready to start again.

I liked to walk around in Ulm in the afternoon. There is a wonderful old town, and of course the Ulmer Munster, a famous church in the center of town. Ulm is on the Danube with beautiful paths along the river.

I didn’t work every evening. Christmas was the only holiday, but the opera shared its space with an acting theater with its own performers. We were required to appear on performance days by no later than 7:30, as I recall. I went to my assigned seat in the chorus dressing room and put my clothes in my locker. I sat between a mezzo from Austria who did very fine mother in Hansel and Gretel and a German soprano called Mariechen. Dolores sat at the end of the row. There were staff to sort out the costumes and help you change into them. There were different staff to put on your makeup and any wigs you might be wearing. There were lots of wigs, and your hair had to fit under them. Then there was more sitting around and more drinking. Lots of drinking. I know I never drank so much as then, and I definitely lost weight. You could also have dinner while waiting--hot dogs and potato salad.

We would sit and wait for the voice on the intercom: “Die Damen und Herren des Chores.” The stage manager had this cue marked in his score.

In the night after the performances were over sometimes there were parties in the kantina. I remember that Ursula had a large party for her 30th birthday. A few times very late in the night I would get very drunk, and I would smoke. Cigarettes and cigars. I found that I preferred cigars. I never have hangovers, but the taste of cigarettes lingers for a long time.

Sometimes Chris would come. He loved Fledermaus and went to several performances of that. It was a life, a better life than working for Bechtel. There, I said it. I am part of the staff of the hated Bechtel Corporation, builder of nuclear power plants and buyer of South American water systems. So why did I leave Germany? I couldn’t honestly say. I hadn’t finished my dissertation and taken my final oral exams, so I needed to finish that. And after that, who knows? Who knows why life plays out the way it does. My path was not leading to glory. I think of them often, always with love.

Why I am spoiled for all other singers

My cable is still out, so I was watching the Rossini bicentennial celebration concert from 1992. Chris Merrit and Rockwell Blake put on some pretty spectacular Rossini tenor work.

I have always loved Marilyn Horne. She sang, quite beautifully, "Mura felice" from La Donna del Lago and "Di tanti palpiti" from Tancredi. Four years before that a 22 year old Cecilia Bartoli recorded these same two arias. She is at her most mezzo on that recording and does repertoire on the low end of her range. She does Isabella's arias, for instance.

Marilyn is creating an achievement, and Cecilia is creating a song. Cecilia has always the problem that she started out at the top, above the top, really, producing recordings at a phenomenally young age that are simply miracles of phrasing and beauty. Her own personal rubato is present in every note.

I love you, Marilyn, but you can't compete. With Cecilia you simply forget how difficult this all is. It's just beautiful singing.

Italian Tenors

I forgot to pay my cable bill, so I am researching the contents of all the video tapes I have around the house.

Here is an extremely interesting film called “Pavarotti and the Italian Tenor.” I would have to say I have probably never seen this before, but everything I thought is now confirmed. All music is of a time and place, and Luciano’s place is Modena. In the film he is shown singing with the Modena Rossini chorus, both as a young man and at the time the film was made.

I have been worrying about Italy. Is the tradition of Italian music carrying forward into the present and future? Are young people joining the Rossini choir in Modena?

Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, Tito Schipa and Giuseppe di Stefano are Luciano’s models, and films of each were shown. Pavarotti father and son quarrelled: the father preferred Gigli, but Luciano liked di Stefano. Luciano Pavarotti does not read music and often learns pieces by listening to these singers perform them. He is as far into being an Italian tenor as it is possible to get. There are films of a very young Luciano. Astounding.

This is where music comes from.

For Sarah

It’s been eleven years. I went quite mad over Cecilia Bartoli over the course of the hour it took to watch her early publicity video filmed in Venice.

I went to the library and looked up everything I could find about her. I read the New York Times on microfiche in the Berkeley city library. I still have the pictures I took from it for 10 cents apiece. I became addicted to Arie Antiche until I started to be annoyed by the fact that I always knew what came next. My cd player would play them in random order. Wonderful! There was an awesome freshness to her interpretations that I simply could not resist.

I started traveling to Italy and studying Italian art. I went on the Piero della Francesca Trail and looked into buying an apartment in Rome.

Then I found out from watching the live Cecilia how completely non-traditional her technique was. As the years have passed, she has changed and I have become more accustomed to how she sings, but at the time….

Madness took over. I started writing to her. Obsessively. I still do, actually, about twice a week, but I stopped mailing them some years ago. I mailed one a couple of years ago after I had been to a psychic. This psychic is excellent if you ever want her email address. She said there was no hostility.

I am Cecilia’s stalker, I suppose. I see myself as a much too conservative old nerd, but nevertheless, she sees me coming and arranges something. Her eyes flash and her back straightens. She and I are about the same size, but she always seems much taller. No one believes this.

Lately I have decided that perhaps I should try harder to actually say something instead of standing there looking like a fool. So I said “you are my favorite.” Flash! Great. That’s the best I could come up with. I know from reading the forum that other people think of questions to ask her. Not me.

Right now I am regretting that I didn’t go to London to see Turco. Maybe there will be a video.

French opera

For a wonderful immersion in French opera listen to Rolando Villazon's Gounod Massenet Arias album. We have been needing this man. Such sensitivity to Romantic opera is very rare, and his gorgeous dark voice must be heard to be believed. He is the man for today. I have been seriously considering looking for something of his to see. I think I missed the best bet--the Romeo et Juliette that was done in LA. Maybe there will be a film.

P.S.

I was listening again to Villazon's French arias album. I was thinking about his protestations about French style and how you weren't allowed to do portamento the way you could with the Italians. See article on tools. Well, we are pleased to say he does not do exactly what he preaches. There is plenty of scooping and sliding to satisfy even me. It would be terrible to think the French were intent on being completely boring. What a wonderful album. I loved it just as much this time.
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Questions

Things people are worrying about___

Is opera a museum work? This is a fun argument and requires a pretty European look at things. If the answer is yes, then shouldn’t it be a MOMA instead of an old masters gallery? The lack of new works in the repertoire is seen as the fault of the managers and boards of the opera institutions around the world. “Force people to listen to new works whether they want to or not!” seems to be the manifesto. Ticket sales don’t even come into the argument. In America we have Broadway to provide alternatives to opera houses and symphony halls. So in a very timely way Opera News has an article about….

Is the American Musical dead?

Look, guys, the state of the musical arts basically went to hell in the twentieth century. The large institutions went on as though the nineteenth century had never ended while the heart went completely out of any new classical repertoire that came on the scene. Here’s a question for you?

How come we bragged so much about how superior capitalism was while Shastakovich went right on writing stuff that was significantly more interesting than anything produced in capitalist countries?

Because, you see, it all has to do with money. Ipod is saving Apple. Everybody likes the idea of buying music one song at a time for $1 or so. The number of people who want to buy a whole $20 cd is much lower. What if I don’t like it? So a $30 ticket to the symphony is going to appeal to how many people? And what if I don’t like it? And we haven’t even gotten to the $100 opera ticket.

Technology and the marketing of music to the mass public have changed everything. I hate to say this, but capitalism has won, and capitalism is Mariah Carey, not opera.

Whither Opera?

Opera Houses Under Fire
a manifesto for a living lyric drama



By Lukas Pairon

BRUSSELS, 17 April 2001

I can't help commenting on this. There's only one thing keeping people from forming opera companies around contemporary operas--and that is the operas themselves. If people honestly wanted more of these operas, they would be getting them now. Concentrate on coming up with operas anyone would want to hear more than once, or even once for that matter, and then we can come up with venues for them.

What’s wrong with modern music

The book about music and the brain is spending a lot of pages to get at some basic ideas. The movement of perception from right brain (feeling) to left brain (idea) in professional musicians is huge.

There are three things
1. The natural characteristics of sound—what is usually called acoustics
2. The natural characteristics of us, how we hear, how we perceive the sounds we hear, how we organize them in our brains, all things designed to support survival, not entertainment
3. The building up of expectation over time—learning

Education is a kind of fourth thing, but this fourth thing has only to do with the process of composition, not the cultural idea of music. Basically the problem is that our composers know too much. They are carefully trained to know all about serialism and every other cute trick someone has dreamed up over the centuries. To curtail this conversation to its shortest possible length, they know a very great deal more than they have any actual use for.

The most successful composers of the past took the idiom they were born into and manipulated it to their own ends. Wagner took the new ideas of modulation he was hearing all around him and organized them into a seething, writhing morass. Bach took the tricks of the fugue invented by others and carried these to new heights of expression and complexity. Both of these very different composers are just writing variations on the compositional style common to their own era. It is item 3, the building up of expectation over time, that makes this all possible. They owe a huge debt to those who preceded them, because it is they who created the context of expectation. A Bach that appears out of thin air is completely useless as well as completely impossible.

These modern composers with amazing skills are lacking one essential feature: a context of expectation. We never know what to expect. I know that Messiaen had a whole theory of composition that he based his pieces on. I don’t need to know what this is to realize that his theories allow him to build up a context of expectation for me the listener. My brain knows what he’s doing without understanding his theories and is able to derive pleasure from it.

Gross generalization number one: theories of composition are for composers. In the precise second that the listener needs to know about them, the sounds in question have ceased to be music. Our brains make up their own solutions, and do not require the assistance of theoreticians.

The music of today lacks an overriding cultural style. Our music is absolutely all over the place, so society is not being particularly helpful to people wanting to write music.

I’m going to put in a little Vivaldi, some Brubeck, here and there a little tango. You actually hear composers saying things like this. Spend a lot more of your time concentrating on the context of expectation you are creating for the listener and lots less on impressing us with how much you know and how well you write.

Which reminds me of my Imbrie story. There is a composer named Andrew Imbrie, and when I was in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus we were assigned to sing one of his pieces. Every week, sometimes two or three times a week, we would come and take out his piece, and every rehearsal there would not be three notes that sounded familiar. It was always a new piece each time we rehearsed it, and this went on for weeks. He seemed completely successful at eliminating expectation and probably would not understand if I told him this was a bad thing.

Create in me an expectation. Society is not providing you with a context, so that means you have to create one. The context and the expectation are one. Help me anticipate where you are going, because it is my anticipation that creates the music.

Gross generalization number two: it is the listener and the process of listening that makes it music. Not you.

In Doctor Tischler's history classes we were taught that tonality was the invention of the Italian composer Archangelo Corelli. Up until then strong harmonic direction existed mainly only at the cadence points and in between things went in pretty much any direction. Tonality meant that this sense of harmonic pull permeated the entire composition. This was a powerful concept that then swept the musical world and became the primary interest of composers for 200 years.

The attraction of tonality is that it provides a context for anticipation. We love the sensation of being pulled along. Pop still includes this feature, but the fascination of tonality to the exclusion of virtually all else is gone. Serious composers today seem offended by the idea that someone would easily organize their materials into understandable structures. Confusion seems to be the objective.

Many of the most attractive composers now belong to the school called minimalism. They have decided to pare it all down and try again. Maybe too much complexity is just boring. Glass is the most extreme, but Pärt is definitely a minimalist. So is Górecki. Less is definitely more.

Footnote: Corelli created the reality of tonality, not the theory--that came much later.

Singing

Why will nothing else do? Why singing and nothing else at all? Because it's the most right brained of all art. We, the educated ones, have been trained to pick over every detail of the performance and critique each tiny bit. What we want is for the filter of left brain to be crossed successfully so we can go directly to ecstasy. We want to be thrilled as nothing else can thrill.

Those of us who love the opera worry what will become of it. It is an institution that celebrates a time now passed. Vanessa and The Ghosts of Versailles will never replace Tosca and Die Meistersinger.

I am very pleased to recommend to you some new singers: Rolando Villazon, Anna Netrebko and Salvatore Licitra can help you forget the singers of the past, or at least they can help you miss them less. Cecilia is so uniquely herself that there is no one she will help you forget. If there are no new operas, at least there are new singers to sing the old ones.