Opera on DVD

Read here about opera on DVD. I'm all for this trend. DVD's are often cheaper than CD's, and they are much cheaper than actual tickets to the opera.

I thought the Salzburg La Traviata made quite a few points. I had heard the CD, or at least excerpts from it, but it completely failed to prepare me for my emotional reaction to the DVD. The complete performance overwhelmed me as few things ever have. For one thing, it completely brought the music alive for me.

We get to see how different houses and companies conceive opera. In Paris the productions always seem to have sexual interpretations: nude men in Alcina, a bed in every scene of Rusalka.

Zurich seems to be a leader in the filming of opera. Meanwhile, in the USA we are filming very little. Even my neighborhood library has opera on DVD.

Blogging

I am pleased to read that Anna Netrebko has gone ahead with her Austrian citizenship. It is also pleasing to realize that Austria still values music so much that it grants citizenship so easily.

Though I said opera is not a newsreel, I am aware that this is something of a goal for the minimalists. I think stories can come from reality, even present day reality, but I think the story has to stand alone.

My own ideas are evolving. I'm trying to decide what the path forward for opera is, and I feel very concerned that the powerful people in this field are generally misguided when it comes to new operas. Read the Cambridge companion to twentieth-century opera and notice how few of these operas you have actually seen or are ever likely to see.

I'm convinced that the singer plays a much larger role in determining what operas become standard than is ever realized. Golijov writes for Dawn Upshaw. This is a very smooth move. Find a singer you love and write an opera that will make her a star. It will work.

All Time Winner

No one will ever exceed Placido Domingo as the sexiest man on an opera stage. I wouldn't want anyone to think I had forgotten.

Bel Canto

I have thought of a book that would make a great, though controversial, opera: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. It has singing. It has characters. It has relevance.

Rent revisited

A friend is visiting and she hadn’t seen it, so we rented Rent. I consider this the best new opera of the last 15 years. Let’s discuss its relevance.

Rent is based loosely on La Boheme, an opera about the plague of tuberculosis in the artists’ Mecca of fin de ciecle Paris. Rent is about the plague of AIDS in New York City in the 1990's. Rent is about love.

The film comes with an excellent documentary on how Rent became first a musical and then a movie, and includes a wonderful biography of its creator, Jonathan Larson who died of a burst aorta between the dress rehearsal and the opening of the musical. The documentary discusses the arguments between Jonathan and his producers who forced him to rewrite the material until the characters all achieved personalities, identities that we the audience could feel sympathy for, to make this good idea into great theater. Rent is now in its 10th year on Broadway.

I can’t help thinking how much more we would appreciate the career of John Adams if someone would take him similarly in hand. John, it needs to work as theater. It doesn’t. We need people we can care about. There aren’t any.

Nixon in China is his best work. I have always enjoyed its theatrical qualities—the halo of translators that surround Mao’s speech, the coloratura aria “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung," the toasting ceremony, the play within a play—but it is the personal scenes between Richard and Pat that give it meaning.

Next came Death of Klinghoffer which I saw in San Francisco. Is there even a prayer of making this live? The Klinghoffers would have to come alive for us, and they don’t. How can they? He was killed because he was Jewish and existed only as a symbol to the people who killed him. The symbol must become a person. Theater cannot be a newsreel—it cannot acquire its significance from outside sources. Because it meant something to us when we watched it on television doesn’t mean it will mean something as an opera. All the meaning must come from inside the work. Did I say that clearly enough? All the meaning must come from inside the work.

For the opera to work as theater the terrorists must also live. Terrorists who come alive for the audience would not be acceptable politically. Why pick this as the subject for an opera when to succeed can only result in disgust?

El Niño is a nativity, a familiar story with its own emotional associations. It may work as an opera, I don’t know. I tried to watch it on video. I simply couldn’t stand the fragmentation of narrative.

John Adams sets himself impossible tasks. He wants to dramatize stories that don’t revolve around character and personality. For me he has no theatrical sense at all.

Where is the human interest in the creation of the atom bomb? In Doctor Atomic where are the human stories that make me care about this? What does Oppenheimer’s interest in John Donne tell me about his reasons for heading the bomb project, or was this just an ego trip for him, an opportunity to have his name go down in history? Do I cry because a bomb hangs in the air and people dance around under it?

Rent is a far better opera than anything conceived by John Adams. After a lot of prodding Jonathan Larson created characters that live for us. Creating a marvelously comic Henry Kissinger has its appeal, but this is as far as John Adams has come.

Florez

He's still a favorite.

More Pictures

There is some question about the reliability of Google Image searches.

This is Rodney Gilfrey:
This is Nathan Gunn:
Don't you like this picture a lot better?

Research reveals that the standing man is definitely Nathan Gunn, though he only comes up when you ask for Rodney Gilfrey. But then a search for Nathan Gunn brought up this picture:

Relevance

In Opera News for August is an article titled “Is Opera still Relevant?” My immediate reaction is the question, “When was opera ever relevant?” Who said opera was supposed to be relevant?

There’s nothing at all relevant about people standing around singing. Opera is about love, and we who love the opera are there to experience passion, not relevance. In fact, I would even go so far as to say it is the incessant desire for relevance that kills a good many new operas today.

His examples are perfect. In Death of Klinghoffer, Adams is working overtime to be relevant. Ditto the more recent Doctor Atomic. He just leaves out even the tiniest representation of human emotions. With him it’s all relevance. So there should be no surprise that no one wants to revive Klinghoffer.

Verdi was probably the most political of opera composers, but it is the Verdi who writes about human relationships that is “relevant” to our ears and hearts: Rigoletto, La Traviata, Aida, La Forza del Destino, Otello, Falstaff.

I agree that Dead Man Walking was one of the best of the recent efforts, but its place in the world wouldn’t have been improved by trying to preach its relevance. It needs to appeal to everyone, not just to those who are against capital punishment. The opera is great because it is about people, because it is about love. Dead Man brought us passion and tears as few modern operas do.

Opera is to make us laugh and cry, to feel as much passion as each of us is capable. We are trying to make it, or we should be trying to make it more relevant to our hearts, not our politics.

Blogging

I neglected to explain that these pictures are part of the annual sexiest opera singers list. More will follow. Inclusion in the list can often depend on what pictures I am able to locate.


This is supposed to be Rodney Gilfrey, baritone. He is on Cecilia's Don Giovanni video.

These are Anna Netrebko, soprano.

Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

I also rented Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria from my public library. This staging is from the Zurich Opera with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting La Scintilla. There are no horns in this, so we're safe.

This is my best Monteverdi experience to date. (See here and here.) Harnoncourt really keeps it lively and dynamic.

Ulysses has been away at war for ten years, plus more years getting lost around the Mediterranean in a book called the Odyssey, and he is concerned when he at last arrives home again that his wife Penelope has been faithful.

He finds the house full of suitors. The suitors are puppets. Everything else about this production makes sense, but why are the suitors puppets? Maybe this is to soften the fact that Ulysses kills them all. Puppets don't bleed.

I was particularly fond of Ulysses, sung beautifully by Dietrich Henschel, in his disguise as a bum. He had wild white hair like Fidel Castro. Penelope is sung by Vesselina Kasarova. The part is very low and difficult to make effective, but she is very somber and moving. She is especially convincing in the finale where Penelope has difficulty making the transition to happiness.

There are lots of characters, both gods and mortals, and it gets a bit confusing.
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