Fitzcarraldo

Because I rented several operas, Netflix thought I would enjoy Fitzcarraldo, a movie by Werner Herzog.

From an opera devotee point of view the movie begins oddly. Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt, we are asked to believe, have traveled to an obscure area of Brazil in order to perform together in Ernani. Bernhardt mimes her part, extending her arms wildly and going constantly up and down stairs. Someone sitting in the pit actually sings her part. Poor Bernhardt. What a horrible way to remember her. She is portrayed as enormously tall and gaunt--it's obviously played by a man in drag. They speak of her wooden leg. It's true, she continued to perform Camille after her leg was amputated, but in a wheel chair. And it was her voice one would have traveled to hear, not this peculiar mime. If it really happened, I don't want to know.

In the context of the movie she is just a celebrity, someone people would travel to see and pay money for. That's what celebrity is good for, I guess. Our hero, Fitz (Klaus Kinski), has dragged his wife (Claudia Cardinale--her voice provided by the excellent German dubbing industry) down the Amazon to see this performance by Caruso, his idol, and they arrive just in time to see Ernani kill himself.

Fitz is then even more determined to bring opera to his remote part of the jungle. He knows that he would have to be fabulously rich to accomplish this and has already failed to build a railroad and establish a profitable ice business. Now he's ready to try rubber.

The movie is mainly an adventure in the jungle with friendly Indians and plenty of hardship, but the scenes are peppered with Caruso recordings played on the Victrola Fitz takes everywhere with him. The quartet from Rigoletto is a popular favorite. It isn't Fitz, it's Caruso who wins over the natives who then solve all Fitz's problems for him.

It's a great movie about ecstatic love of opera. It ends in triumph with a scene from I Puritani played from the deck of his boat. Fitz is indeed fabulously rich.

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Carmen

While I was in San Francisco to see Doctor Atomic, we rented a silent movie of Carmen starring Geraldine Farrar. What an idea. An opera singer stars in a movie playing a character she would also sing at the opera. Kind of reminds you of Callas' Medea movie.

The plot explained a lot about Carmen that has never made sense. In the movie Carmen is part of the smuggler group from the beginning. They need someone on the inside to get their loot past the police, so Carmen is designated to find a nice policeman to seduce. Doesn't that make it all come clear? It's all quite logical.

Geraldine Farrar is not particularly beautiful in this movie. I'm not sure if it doesn't spoil my illusions about her, but she does project enormous vitality and charisma. Her Carmen is not carelessly arrested--everything she does is completely on purpose. I think I like this Carmen more than I did.

In our trend toward journalism we want to point out that around the time of Caruso's death in 1920 Geraldine Farrar was the prima donna assoluta at the Metropolitan, the only person of either gender ever to have her own private dressing room at the Met.

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Robert Oppenheimer

Was I too rough with Doctor Atomic? I don't think so.

I quoted Gertrude Stein on the atomic bomb because I agree with her perspective. Politically the bomb is a huge issue, but personally it is not interesting.

For Robert Oppenheimer to work as Faust the opera has to be about him. The Faust moment for him came when he agreed to head the Manhattan Project, an event not covered in the opera at all. Over the course of his employment on the project, did he doubt its wisdom or his own role in it? He had US security clearance and would have found himself in trouble if he expressed a lot of reservations. A librettist would need to invent this.

If Robert Oppenheimer experienced no inner conflict around the work he was doing, then he is a poor choice for an opera. A big bomb hanging in the air is not a substitute. This Faust loses his soul and is damned forever.

Alcina

I ordered this video from House of Opera because it promised “lots of nude men all the time.” Well, maybe not all the time. It also promised Renée Fleming singing in Handel’s Alcina at the Paris opera, with Susan Graham as Ruggiero and Natalie Dessay as Morgana. 

After all the fuss over Pamela Rosenberg’s production of Alcina in San Francisco, I wanted to see what honest to god Eurotrash looked like, and I must say they do produce a much purer product. This is much trashier. Pamela had Alcina changing her outfit for every scene, and that was about it. The premise is that Alcina has seduced a long list of men and then enchanted each one, turning them into rocks and trees. In this production they stand, or lie or wander zombie-like around the stage in various stages of undress, from fully clothed to fully unclothed. This is a concept production. They are frozen and unselfconscious in their enchanted state. There is no magic to counter the enchangment--Ruggiero takes a dagger from Alcina and she plunges herself onto it in suicide over her failure to seduce him. When she dies, the magic is gone, so the first thing they do is put all their clothes back on. 

According to Rough Guide, Alcina was intended to provide competition for Farinelli who was performing for a rival company in London that season. I must say Susan Graham makes a very fetching boy toy, and manages some quite good singing as well. Renée sings well, too. She really sinks her teeth into Alcina. 

Oh well. Maybe I’m not really the Eurotrash type. The film appears to be pirated, or “non-television” as HofO describes it. P.S. When I give such a high rating to a HofO DVD, it is for the content, not the quality of the product. The singing is superb and the nude men are also nice.

Gramophone

At last on the twentieth the November issue of The Gramophone reached Maryland. I am now notorious with the staff of Borders. It is full of fabulous pictures of La Bartoli, and Opera proibita is recording of the month. Of course.

DVD of the month is L'amour de loin, the opera video that I went on so long about. For me it worked a wonderful inner tension that was very beautiful. This makes me feel in tune with the universe.

Gerald Finley (Wasn't he Doctor Atomic? Yes. I sort of blew him off--unjustifiably, I would like to add. He sang well and looked good in a fedora, the hat he wore in Doctor Atomic that was popular in the forties. My father wore one.) has released an Ives album. You knew I would get back to this sentence eventually. Ives is one of my personal passions. He even does "General William Booth enters into heaven." I should track this down.

How interesting! Gerald Finley is everywhere. He was also the troubadour in L'Amour de loin. I didn't blow him off there, too, surely? He was lovely.

There is another Ives entry about something called the Universe Symphony, a colossal work that Ives worked on for many years and never completed. It has been completed posthumously and recorded. So Ives didn't actually stop composing--he just got sucked in to this insane project and couldn't get back out. I can relate.

It is simply not possible that there are this many new classical recordings in a single month. Where are they hiding?

Effects of recording

The biggest effect of technology on music, both recorded and live, is the microphone. Classical singers still perform live without them, with maybe possibly sometimes not. I thought I heard the effects of miking recently at the Washington National Opera.

But all recordings are miked. I think in spite of their low sales there must be some significant money in recording. The largest recent classical record seller has been Luciano Pavarotti, closely followed by Cecilia Bartoli. Maybe I’ll have to subscribe to Billboard to find out the true story.

In the nineteenth century orchestras and singers played off each other by continually beefing up. Orchestras got bigger and bigger and singing technique got heavier and heavier. I recall singing in the chorus of a performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, composed around 1900 and notorious for its huge orchestra. I recall looking down into the pit from the side and seeing how close the musicians were to each other. The violins had to play the same bow strokes, which they are supposed to do anyway, of course, or they would poke one another in the eye. It was very cozy. From our seats above the orchestra we could see the soloists’ mouths moving as the only evidence that anyone was singing. The recent performance of Strauss’ Daphne at Kennedy Center was not quite this bad.

There is a movement for Sprechstimme in Gurrelieder, the earliest example, I think, and it was performed to great effect by the great Wagnerian bass-baritone Hans Hotter.

I digress. The point of this story was that Gurrelieder represents the extreme of big orchestras and singers trying to sing big enough to blast over them. This resulted in a vogue for heavy singing which may today be dying out. Witness, for example, the relative weight of our two best sellers: Luciano still retains a heavy technique, but Cecilia does not.

Heavy singing is very risky. A friend sent me a dvd of Pavarotti, Marton and Milnes singing Verdi’s Il Trovatore. All three are Verdi singers. I think his superb technique and the bright color of his voice always allowed Luciano to sing heavy Verdi roles with sufficient legato to avoid any damage to himself. Eva Marton oversang almost everything she did, and completely unnecessarily. She was always the loudest voice on the stage, and still she pushed her voice louder. James Morris, who always sings everything with a superlative legato, is an example to follow.

Sherrill Milnes had already lost it by the time this performance was recorded. You can hear that he cannot control the color on his high notes. For a better example of his Verdi singing see the dvd for Ernani. Shortly after Il Trovatore his voice became raspy and ugly whenever he tried for a heavy tone.

Heavy singing is the hardest kind, the hardest to do, the hardest to find, the hardest to sustain over a long career. Lately we begin to hear lighter and lighter voices taking on these works. We also hear a growing taste for Baroque and modern opera which simply don’t have these heavy vocal requirements. The great stars are recording with a lighter tone—the record producers encourage this—and it inevitably holds over into live performances. The kind of singing we all grew up with may soon be gone forever.

Another blogging on the effects of recording is here.

Tosca's Kiss

"Il bacio di Tosca" is a film about people who have retired from the opera. The building of the building was supervised by Verdi and survived from his royalties for years. Now his works are no longer in copywrite and there are no more royalties to support the inhabitants of Casa Verdi in Milan.

Sara Scuderi is the star of this movie. She sang at La Scala for six years and once did Tosca with Gigli who autographed a photo for her.

There is a scene showing a turntable beginning to play "Vissi d'arte" and it says "Sara Scuderi, soprano." She walks into the room while the record is playing, wearing a black coat with a gray fur collar and jewelry, and holding her cane. She smiles beautifully, looking up and humming along with the music. "Che bella!" she says at the end, and then tells us she feels almost like crying. She has great presence on the screen.

They all sing. Their voices are old and their support muscles are gone, but all the love is still there in their hearts. At the end they sing "O sole mio." I sing too, but I can't remember the words.

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Hoffmann in love

And the opera most about love of all is The Tales of Hoffmann where the subject is love itself, its absurd base in illusion and fantasy, its excess and inevitability, its humiliations and exaltations. Love.

If I could pick any singer to be like, to have her voice and theatrical personality, I think it would be Agnes Baltsa. It would be wonderful to project this much animal magnetism. In this Hoffmann she sings the Venetian courtesan Giuletta who steals Hoffmann's reflection.

Musically it's Antonia's aria, sung by Iliana Cotrubas, I fall for. Hoffmann is the perfect opera and this production from Covent Garden perfectly expresses the feeling of each scene: the devotion to science, the brother, the humble house, the bar. It's only just a bit drab. The brothel scene includes a very nice orgy.

Placido Domingo's Hoffmann is perfectly clueless. To see someone love so foolishly and with such incautious abandon is very comforting.
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Biber

I enjoy enormously this recording of the violin music of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. It sounds like a whole ensemble, doesn’t it? The group is called Romanesca.

Biber is middle Baroque, when they were still having fun with their style. Most fun is a piece called Sonata Representativa where he tries to imitate sounds, somewhat reminiscent of Messiaen. Wait, that can’t be right. It must be the other way around. He’s doing a nightingale, a cuckoo and a quail, for instance. The nightingale somewhat resembles a cadenza that starts slowly. With the cuckoo he puts the call on an inner voice that you have to listen for, like a cantus firmus. The croak of a frog is done with sliding minor seconds. As is the crowing of the cock. Cats slide discordantly and musketeer’s march to bagpipes, of course. Lots of fun.

There is an extended piece for solo violin that builds on a four note minor repeating bass, one of the major building blocks of the middle Baroque, called a Passacaglia. They are edging toward tonality, Biber is much more tonal than Monteverdi, but the quicksand has not yet quite caught them, and they can experiment. Once tonality completely takes hold, you are tonal whether you want to be or not. Schoenberg invented a whole system to avoid the sense of the tonal magnet, and still it sounds tonal a lot of the time.

Middle Baroque is where it’s at.
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Book

I decided years ago that the book I wrote about singing would never see the light of day, but here and there are small things I would like to remember, like this paragraph:

Singing is a wonderful thing. There is nothing at all between you and the music. You can get as close to the music and as passionate about it as you want. You can feel it flowing inside you and caressing your heart as it goes by. You can feel music pulsing through your whole body. You can shape the music and make it fit perfectly into your soul. You can make music a part of yourself.

And this:

To singing, the voice of God.