Vissi d'arte

"Great music is an inexhaustible source..."

2012-01-06T11:19:00.004-05:00

This week Opera Roanoke and St John's Episcopal Church are co-producing Gian Carlo Menotti's beloved holiday opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors. Our distinguished guest conductor was a long-time colleague of the composer, the first maestro del coro of the Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, and a founding artistic director of the Spoleto Festival USA.

Joseph Flummerfelt is the greatest teacher I've known. I am one among hundreds of his graduate conducting students, applying his tutelage in a vocation of making music and meaning.

One of the most distinguished of these colleagues is the conductor Donald Nally, and it is his recent book Conversations with Joseph Flummerfelt (Scarecrow Press, 2010) from which most of the following quotes come. I cannot overstate my gratitude to my friend and colleague for the labor of love his book is.

It is difficult for me to believe 15 years have already passed since I graduated from Westminster Choir College and embarked on a multifaceted musical career in which I've had the privilege of teaching at three universities, conducting amateur choirs of all shapes and sizes, a professional chamber choir, in addition to singing on recital, concert and opera stages across the USA and Europe. It is as the general and artistic director of a small regional opera company in Virginia I invited my mentor to guest conduct a work dear to both of us.

We have reminisced about many of the memorable experiences from my days at Westminster, which included frequent collaborations with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony, annual visits to Spoleto (USA), tours to Taiwan and South Korea, and an appearance at the Colmar Festival in northern France.

One of my most cherished memories was the performance of Stravinsky's Mass which Joe conducted with the Moscow Virtuosi at the 1996 Colmar Festival. It was in one of those amazing medieval cathedrals which remind us how deeply rooted is the European cultural heritage to which we are great-great-great-grandnieces & nephews. Joe describes the essence of Stravinsky's style (and his affinity for it) in Donald's book:

Stravinsky's ear for sonority, his voicing, his economy of means, his structural clarity - are all qualities that attract me.

I recall Joe sharing experiences from one of his primary teachers, Nadia Boulanger, who said Stravinsky's Mass "must be like it's carved out of stone." Thus, as Joe repeated to us constantly while working on this masterpiece of musical economy, this music is "very direct, very objective." And as is characteristic of this master teacher, he went one step further, one layer deeper beneath the surface to get at the root, the true essence of whatever the particular "it" is:

The objectivity of his setting of the Mass contributes to its universality.

And there is an example of true wisdom. It is born of the synthesis of experience & aptitude, intelligence & insight, and it possesses the courage necessary to remain open enough to probe the depths of our human condition and ask the questions that guide us along the path of the examined, authentic life. This is the essence of what Joe taught me, anyway.

An ambitious over-achiever, one of my goals was to leave my graduate studies with a "perfect" 4.0 GPA. I was crushed when I received a B+ in my second graduate conducting course with Dr Flummerfelt. Believing I was always well-prepared and more than carried my own weight in class, I mustered up the gumption to ask "the greatest choral conductor in the world" (Bernstein's superlative for Flummerfelt) why his personal graduate assistant received "only" a B+?!?

"I don't think you went deep enough, Scott. Consider this a challenge to go deeper beneath the surface."

I have been probing those depths with more attention than I knew I had in the intervening years. Joe also warned us how we are inclined to be our own worst enemies because we block our inherent creativity by getting in our own way. "Get out of the way!" he barked to all of us when our over-conducting crowded out the real voices of Bach, Brahms or Britten.

We mistake surface perfection for substantial depth, focusing on technical details at the expense of the subterranean essentials. I may have replaced being "stuck" on the surface of "getting it right" with being stuck in the deep swamp of what it really means. But like following the "road less traveled" or entering the dark woods which Dante articulated (around the same time that old French cathedral was literally carved out of stone) the only journey worth taking is the inward one towards authenticity.

Joe often speaks of "the gift of connection," which he identifies with "the source." It is a connection to this unnameable "divine" source which inspires musical monuments like Bach's B Minor Mass, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and the Requiem settings of Mozart, Brahms & Verdi (to name just a precious few). This connection "allows the music of a great composer to enrich our human understanding and to help quench our spiritual thirst."

Maestro Flummerfelt is a great teacher of humanity, and in his enlarging view of what it is to be human is a key to his music-making. Earlier this week we spoke of the fundamental craving our species ever has for the authentic, the real, the genuine. As he observed to Maestro Nally, "the world is desperate for connection, and yet often goes after it in all sorts of misbegotten ways."

The heart of Nally's book and the essence of Dr Flummerfelt's teaching of conducting concerns the "crossing," the nexus or the center where meaning is experienced. This is an intersection of horizontal and vertical, cognitive and intuitive, linear or ontological time (chronos) and psychological time (kairos). This dialectic is variously symbolized as Yin and Yang and understood as Classical and Romantic or intellectual and affective. Finding the balance where form and content coexist in perfect harmony can be exasperatingly elusive.

Joe demonstrates this cognitive / intuitive dialectic with a telling juxtaposition. On one side is the classical enlightenment of Cartesian logic's "I think, therefore I am" with Pascal's more affective "the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know."

In the classroom and in rehearsal, Joe repeatedly exhorted us to "be in the moment." This axiom is at the heart of nearly all of the world's religions (and is front & center in much Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism). It is increasingly elusive in our technologically-driven world. Being "connected" via "social media" does not an authentic life make. Again, we mistake surface for substance too easily, and as our Anglican friends remind us, we "lose the plot." Technology (the horizontal) "has gotten so fast that we can't experience the vertical."

Most of us seem to be caught up in an ever-accelerating horizontal existence. We become diverted from being in the moment, by living in the past or in the future, thus not experiencing the full reality of each passing moment.

Art is one of the primary means we have of experiencing the vertical and connecting to that source. The stillness of being truly centered, and thus really open, is at the heart of "experiencing the full reality" of the moments of our lives.

Is it any wonder focusing, grounding or centering the breath is also at the core of meditation practice?

Joe taught us to really breathe - not just the necessary "inspiration" of inhalation - but to really open, release, let go, get out of the way and allow the moment to just happen.

Breath, in the fullest sense of the word, becomes a kind of vertical intersecting of this horizontal, historical continuum. So my belief that being fully alive, fully connected to a multidimensional embrace of life, happens at that crossing.

I had the privilege of experiencing that crossing with Joseph Flummerfelt on many occasions, and I am humbled and grateful he agreed to conduct Amahl in Roanoke this week. The singers have had a wonderful week working with him, and the orchestra responded beautifully to his leadership last night in our combined rehearsal.

"Music is a moral / ethical force that ministers to humanity." And Joseph Flummerfelt is a true minister sharing his prodigious gift. "Great music is an inexhaustible source." Thank you for sharing both yourself and this inexhaustible gift of great music, dearest Joe.

"Out & About" with Amahl, and a note from the guest conductor

2012-01-02T12:00:00.003-05:00

Today's Roanoke Times featured the following "Out & About" article on our
upcoming production of Amahl & the Night Visitors, Friday Jan 6
at 6 pm at St John's Episcopal Church:

www.roanoke.com/extra/wb/302950

I posted my program note yesterday; below is a note from
our eminent guest conductor, Joseph Flummerfelt about his
work with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti.

A note from the guest conductor:

I am old enough to remember the world premiere of Amahl and the Night Visitors. I was only a freshman in high school, but its touching story and beautiful melodies left a lasting impression on me, and it is these qualities which cause it to continue to be the most performed work in the operatic genre. As a young teenager, little could I have imagined how intertwined my professional life would be with its composer.

That began forty years ago, when Menotti invited me to bring my choir to be a part of the world-renowned festival he founded in Spoleto, Italy. In 1977 Menotti founded its sister festival, Spoleto USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Westminster Choir, which I directed, continued to work with him in both festivals until 1994. Spoleto USA continues to thrive, and last summer I conducted Menotti’s one-act tragedy, The Medium, which the festival presented to honor the centennial of his birth.

Although the many years of collaboration with Gian Carlo included the Westminster Choir being the chorus for the festival operas, which included not only his own works, but many other operas he directed, Amahl was not among them because of its seasonal content. So it was a special joy when Scott Williamson called, offering me the opportunity to conduct this work, which I had loved for so many years, but only as a member of the audience.

That this performance is taking place in Roanoke is, in a certain way, also related to my long association with Menotti. During the Seventies, at the festival in Italy, I became a friend of the composer Samuel Barber, who had been Gian Carlo’s partner for many years. Barber loved the Westminster Choir, and when he became ill with cancer, he asked me to conduct the choir at his funeral when that time would come. A few years later, I received a phone call from Menotti saying that the end was near. The service would be in Barber’s hometown of Chester, Pennsylvania, but unfortunately the Choir was just about to leave for its spring tour. Providentially, on the day of the funeral, the choir had a free day in Roanoke, and I was able to fly back for the service.

That was in 1980, which, I believe, is the last time I was in this city. So being able to return to Roanoke so many years later, and to be a part of this production brings back a flood of memories about the man who gave us this beautiful work, and with whom I had the honor to work for so many years.

--Joseph Flummerfelt

A note on Amahl & the Night Visitors

2012-01-01T20:45:00.002-05:00

I hope you will join Opera Roanoke Friday, January 6 at 6 pm for a FREE concert production of Menotti's beloved holiday opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors. This is a joint production with our host, St John's Episcopal Church as part of their series of free concerts in downtown Roanoke, "Music on the Corner." Below is a short note I wrote for the program.

A note from the Artistic Director on Amahl and the Night Visitors

Gian Carlo Menotti had already composed five operas when Amahl and the Night Visitors aired on NBC on Christmas Eve in 1951, the first opera written for TV. His first opera premiered in 1937 at the Curtis Institute (where he and his companion, Samuel Barber had both studied). Amelia Goes to the Ball went on to the Metropolitan Opera the following season. His next opera was The Old Maid and the Thief (1939), the first written for radio. Two early dramas, The Medium (1946) and The Consul (1950) are among his most acclaimed works and enjoyed successes on Broadway. Indeed, the latter earned Menotti his first New York Drama Critics Award and Pulitzer Prize.

With Amahl, Menotti revealed one of the most enduring – and endearing – qualities of his voice. It was the first of 6 children’s operas he wrote. From the opera’s opening scene our sympathies lie with Amahl because this spirited boy with the gift of imagination so inspired his composer. And the immediacy with which Amahl touches its listeners is indeed inspired. Like the music, the story Menotti devised (he wrote his own librettos) is deceptively simple, its surface familiar enough to belie how intricately shaped and masterfully crafted it is. The summary of the plot provided by his publisher consists of one sentence.

The story concerns the crippled shepherd boy Amahl, who offers his crutch as a present to the Christ child, is healed, and joins the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem.

The summary is specific in ways Menotti’s libretto is not. While the opera fits ideally in a church setting, the work does not explicitly name “the Child” as Christ. Neither is Bethlehem mentioned by name. Among Menotti’s finest passages of music is the hymn sung by the three kings and Amahl’s mother in the middle of the work. Melchior rhetorically inquires, “Have you seen a Child the color of wheat, the color of dawn?” The Mother, “as though to herself” names her own child in response. It is one of the most poignant expressions of maternal love in the theater, and is central to the opera’s dramatic fulcrum two scenes later when the destitute mother acts in desperation to steal some of the king’s gold. After Amahl’s touching defense of his mother (“Don’t you dare, ugly man, hurt my mother!”) the opera’s lyrical opening theme returns heralding the work’s denouement. Across the taut span of this three-quarter of an hour opera, Menotti balances melodic grace that lingers in the memory with rhythmic vitality that propels the drama forward. He is a master of compositional craftsmanship with the keen dramatic instincts of a gifted storyteller.

Our presentation of Amahl and the Night Visitors places the music front and center in the beautiful, historic nave of St John’s Episcopal Church. Rather than set this production in the Christmas “pageant” genre (with gilded Magi, sheep-skinned shepherds and the like), we have chosen an “Our Town” setting to bring this wonderful story to life, here and now.

Listening to Paintings with the TMA Docents

2011-12-02T11:24:00.004-05:00

Listening to Paintings: Soundsuits, Photos, Portraits & Landscapes
Taubman Museum of Art

Below are quotes & notes comprising the outline for the "Listening to Paintings" program I shared with the Docents of the TMA November 30. Starting with an untitled abstract watercolor by John Cage (Series I, No. 5, from 1988), I shared the following poem. We then used a chance operation to determine which song from the program I would sing first, and then commenced a tour of the galleries, during which we discussed ideas of perspective, connections between music and art, artists and society and any other thread we might unspool in the wonderfully labyrinthine world of the "meaning" of art...

from Communication by John Cage:

What if I ask thirty-two questions? / What if I stop asking now and then?
Will that make things clear? /Is communication something made clear?
What is communication?
Music, what does it communicate?
Is a truck passing by music?
If I can see it, do I have to hear it too?
If I don’t hear it, does it still communicate?
If while I see it I can’t hear it, but hear something else, say an egg-beater, because I’m inside looking out, does the truck communicate or the egg-beater, which communicates?
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?
Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?
People aren’t sounds, are they?
Is there such a thing as silence?
Even if I get away from people, do I still have to listen to something?

Zen proverb: Form is emptiness / emptiness is form

Questions for Today: What do we see / hear?
Artist places the viewer via perspective / looking out / in, etc…
Composer positions us as listeners by painting musical perspective…
Are we active or passive? Do we enter the work or (simply / merely) observe it?
Are we subject or object, viewer / listener or participant?

Philosophy & Art: Dialectics – Thesis / Antithesis = Synthesis
Ordinary / Everyday / Terrestrial / Rational / Normal are TRANSFORMED -
Extraordinary / Visionary / Fantastic / Magical / Excessive / Virtuosic…

(this transformation may be most obvious in the operatic "soundsuits" of Nick Cave...)

The dialectic is not as clearly delineated in contemporary / modern art –
lines, styles, boundaries, categories are blurred, mingled, irrelevant or fused…

Art can mean anything that appears or occurs in an art context

and

Duchamp proved the boundaries of art are dizzyingly ambiguous; he didn’t question their existence, and thereby grounded his ironies.
(P. Schjeldal, New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2011)

And we will return to Marcel Duchamp, courtesy of John Cage...

Shadow and Light:
I would know my shadow and my light,
so shall I at last be whole
from A Child of Our Time, by Michael Tippett

Roanoke Times Photo - / Video Journalism:
Dedicated to the Dream...MLK Jr Bridge
Steal Away is background song for this example of video journalism – the same African-American spiritual is tellingly used in Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, anti-fascist oratorio composed by an engaged British artist imprisoned as Conscientious Objector in WWII – “shadow and light” quote above forms the core of this work and the composer’s life as an “against the grain” artist – a gay pacifist who wrestled with big questions…

Roanoke Times Photographs:
Girl in Window, Residents in Manor
Portraits and Land- / City- scapes –
from the "Old Masters" (where genres like Portraits & Landscapes were distinct) to modern masters like Hopper where genres merge & categories blur -
(do portraits & landscapes merge in Romantic period?)
modern artists like de Kooning rotating the canvas while painting;
further blurring distinctions, categories, genres and perspective...

Britten Folksong: I wonder as I wander
Appalachian folk song from John Jacob Niles

arranged by a colleague and friend of Tippett’s, fellow gay pacifist composer Benjamin Britten, whose dozens of folksongs were written for his companion and collaborative partner, the tenor Peter Pears. If Britten & Pears did not invent the 20th century art song recital, they helped make it the creative, poly-stylistic dialogue –like a multi-artist exhibition – it can be…

American Gallery:
Rockwell: Framed (1946)
ironic, tongue-in-cheek humor; playful; painting within a painting,

art about art…

cf: Gerhard Richter, whose Shadow Painting of a frame casting a shadow - plays with “fictions of illusionistic space” by the very “facts of oil on canvas”
[From MCA Chicago’s current exhibit on minimalism,
The Language of Less (Then and Now)]

Ralph Albert Blakelock: Solitude
miniature impressionist nocturnal landscape –
is the focal point a lone figure
or is the central tree fantastically anthropomorphic?

what is the lone animal in the foreground - an elk, an antlered deer?
recalling the expressionist & surrealist (blurred genres, anyone?)
Franz Marc's question “Is there a more mysterious idea than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of animals?”

Britten Folksong: At the mid hour of night – hauntingly beautiful nocturne…ambiguous perspective - who is the subject? object?

Leiber Handbags & Pillboxes:
Exquisite miniatures, ornate & “exotic” like ancient classical or Asian artifacts: marriage of “high” art & the functional “crafts” of artisan…

continuum of ornate / complex to simple / minimalist (Bauhaus, et al)

Musical miniatures & Romantic fragments – "perfect as a hedgehog" (Schlegel)
round and blurred around the edges
concept of Synecdoche (one part standing for the whole & vice versa...)

Goethe / Schubert Wandrers Nachtlied

Synecdoche & minimalism & fragments AND “maximum” works like Nick Cave’s…

Opera & Installations (Soundsuits): Multi - / Interdisciplinary –
to freely blur the lines b/w genres [quotes in italics from TMA guide]

Nick Cave: to surrender to transformation
such abandon (=opera singing!)= newness

something textural and visceral / union of form & content
evokes (visceral) response / emotion

ordinary to extraordinary
power of the fantastic in everyday life…

from a poem I love and have shared with opera patrons:

An image of articulateness is what it is:
Isn’t this how we’ve always longed to talk?
Words as they fall are monotone and bloodless
But they yearn to take the risk these noises take.

What dancing is to the slightly spastic way
Most of us teeter through our bodily life
Are these measured cries to the clumsy things we say,
In the heart’s duresses, on the heart’s behalf.

(from "About Opera" – William Meredith)

3 Types of Soundsuits: Bogeymen, Celestial Spirits and the Tree of Life
as “pure” art: color fields / like bands of Ab. Ex. paint
as costume (how operatic!), sculpture & installation
metaphors & symbols / talismans & totems

Tondo = mandala, horoscope, constellation & allegory (from ancient decorative and religious art to surrealism)

Ready-mades & found-art objects = folk songs, hymn tunes ("ready-made" songs...)

Cave the dancer – heritage from Martha Graham to her students:
Cunningham & Alvin Ailey –
(Abacus & Button Soundsuit reminds me of Cunningham & Cage
and their I Ching inspired chance operations...)

Read: Martha Graham’s letter to Agnes de Mille:
There is a vitality, a life force
A quickening that is translated through you into action
And because there is only one of you in all of time
That expression is unique...
If you block it it will never exist and be lost...

Masquerade, Cultural Remix and Empowerment – Artist & Identity -
Coexisting / Overlapping in concentric spheres -
Theatre / Ritual; Social / Political; Liberation (art & life…)

The “engaged artist” confronting the abyss – facing the void - faces choices:
retreat, capitulate, jump
(the high mental illness / suicide rate among artists is sobering)
Or respond – from Britten & Tippett to Cage & Cave – with affirming creativity…

All art - by the very nature of its existence - is affirmative...
(paraphrasing the so-called avant-garde writer Donald Barthelme)

Dada=subversive play / Fluxus=“happening” (performance art) play
Chance=freedom & anarchy=liberation from hierarchy or constraints of form

The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence
(Ravel on the alleged levity of his Tombeau – an homage to the Baroque composer Couperin)

In conclusion, sing John Cage:
from 36 Mesostics Re & Not Re Marcel Duchamp

you Must
hAng
youR paintings on the walls.
"i Can't stand to look
at thEm."
that's why you must hang them on the waLls.
...
the telegraM
cAme.
i Read it.
death we expeCt,
but all wE get
is Life.

(from M: Writings '67-'72 by John Cage)

Il Trovatore: Symmetry & Polarity

2011-09-29T13:22:00.005-04:00

[What follows is a critical or academic essay on Il Trovatore. Readers unfamiliar with the opera and its plot can find summaries online at sites like metopera.org. "Production notebook" entries are below this one, discussing some of the aspects of our new production.]

Il Trovatore: Symmetry & Polarity

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (Goya)

I have borrowed Pierluigi Petrobelli’s epigram from his illuminating essay on Il Trovatore collected in Music in the Theatre: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers (Princeton, 1994).

Like many devotees of Verdi’s melodramatic middle-period masterpiece, I am in love with Trovatore for the searing power of its music, and the archetypal force of its quartet of principal characters. If its characters appear at times monstrous, if its bizarre plot blurs the boundaries of the reasonable, so be it. Verdi’s music always trumps. It is grounded in the sure-footed technique of a master and it is visionary as any dream.

Julian Budden’s The Operas of Verdi (Volume 2; Clarendon, 1978, 1992) is generous with excerpts from Verdi’s letters and full of prose vivid and apt as its musical subject. Trovatore charred the landscape of 19th century musical theatre, leaving it “burned up in the white-hot heat of a dramatic force Italian Opera had not yet known.” Here was a work “without parallel in the whole operatic literature – a late flowering of the Italian romantic tradition possible only to one who had seen beyond it.”

Budden says Verdi’s impressive oak of an opera is “melodrama purged of all inessentials.” The most successful of Verdi’s works at the time, it was a work that fit its time even as its anachronisms challenged trends and critics. “The nineteenth century was an age of moral confidence and certainty which found its ideals mirrored in an opera in which no one hesitates for one moment as to what action he or she should take.” Regardless of the implications of that claim, such mirroring resonance may be part of the reason it has returned with a vengeance over the last 50 years. It is worth noting two great singers of the 20th century, the Italian tenor Franco Corelli and the African-American soprano Leontyne Price both made their Met debuts in Il Trovatore – debuts which were greeted with a 42-minute standing ovation in 1961. Is such a curtain call still imaginable?

Trovatore is a romantic melodrama and contemporary classic at once. Its force is elemental for its directness. It contains some of the most beloved arias and ensembles of its prolific composer’s career. The “Anvil” and “Soldier” choruses are among Verdi’s most famous. And Trovatore is his most pilloried. If imitation is the highest form of flattery then Trovatore is the most favored opera in the Verdi cannon. Parody is always - at some level - a form of envy.

And Trovatore was a target for parody, from the “barrel-organ” & “organ-grinder” labels affixed by critics to those popular choruses and the farcical plot device of the baby-swap “stolen” by Gilbert & Sullivan. The Marx Brothers’ classic film, A Night at the Opera depends upon the broad-side-of-the-barn-sized target of Il Trovatore. From their hilariously seamless insertion of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” into the opera’s Introduzione to the mad-cap up-staging of the tenor’s heroic aria near the climax of the opera (and the film), the Marx Brothers have as much fun as any of the comics & critics in the century following the opera’s 1853 premiere.

Yet its staying power is synonymous with Verdi’s, whose “secret…lies as deep as Wagner’s, and is much less obvious.” Speaking of Verdi’s “Opus Ultimum” Falstaff, the musicologist Alfred Einstein uses the supremely intelligent comedy of Verdi’s twilight to assert “the master who could create such an opera did not write Trovatore as mere hand organ music.”

Il Trovatore is a keen example of sharply etched musical architecture. Impressive in stature, the score is a bold union of form and content. Its four parts create a symmetry whose “structure…helps to concentrate the emotional fire” (Budden) of its four principal characters, and the two interlocking triangles of relationships at its molten core. Four principals and four acts. Two lovers at the common angle of two triangles anything but equilateral. Mirroring symmetries. Polar extremes. A bold palette. Here is the palette our design team chose for our new production:

Other Verdi characters are genuinely Shakespearean for their complex and sympathetic humanity. And like the Bard, Verdi creates villains as interesting and engaging as his protagonists. Iago is vital and central as Otello. Yet Azucena, Leonora, Manrico and Di Luna are more classically Greek than Shakespearean. They are archetypes, neither Shakespearean nor Verismo.

And the classical parallels begin at the beginning. Rather than a narrative prologue to introduce the drama a la Greek chorus, Verdi (dispensing with an overture to cut immediately to action) assigns the narrative to a supporting principal figure. The Captain of the Count’s guard, Ferrando narrates the melodramatic back-story, functioning as a choral prologue with the chorus of soldiers as his audience.

That back-story concerns machinations worthy of Greek tragedy. At a recent chorus rehearsal I described the revenge drama’s bizarre plot. Here’s the Met summary of the opening:

Ferrando, captain of the guard, keeps his men awake by telling them of a Gypsy woman burned at the stake years ago for bewitching Di Luna's younger brother. The Gypsy's daughter sought vengeance by kidnapping the child and, so the story goes, burning him at the very stake where her mother died.

We know Azucena murdered her own child by mistake, and consequently raised her enemy’s son as her own (Manrico). Manrico is torn between love for his (supposed) mother Azucena and his beloved Leonora. Leonora is torn between her secret love for Manrico and duty (to faith and family). Azucena is torn between love of her adopted son and the desire to avenge her mother’s execution. The mistaken identities, blurred boundaries and complex relationships - fraught with tension and ambiguity – are worthy of the moniker "Oedipal." One of my adult choristers commented on that parallel immediately. If that doesn’t help us unbend the twisted storylines, the Greek plays, equally full of melodramatic fantasy, are also the original psychological dramas. Our focus on special effects, the graphic (though not gratuitous) external details often obscure the inner truths and deeper meanings of our dramas (on stage & screen). As the director Peter Sellars observes, our audiences might comment on the “how” or “what” of Oedipus poking out his eyes; the ancient Greeks would plumb beneath the surface to ask “why?”

I’m not sure if Petrobelli had a particular canvas in mind in including the Goya epigram above, but I recall the famously disturbing one by the visionary Spanish painter depicting the mythical horror scene of Saturn Devouring his Son. I think of Trovatore, and I ask myself "why?"

Before we return to Trovatore, please allow another classical digression. The names Agamemnon & Aegisthus should be familiar from the Trojan War, and opera lovers will recognize them as characters from Glück and Strauss. In the latter’s Elektra, the title character’s brother Orestes returns from exile to avenge their father Agamemnon, murdered at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. Euripides and his fellow Greek tragedians were our first psychiatrists, and these plays, poems and stories chronicle (among other things) dysfunction. One of the principal reasons the Greeks wrote trilogies was to trace a set of “issues” through three generations of a family. And this family sure had their share.

The enemies Agamemnon and Aegisthus were the respective offspring of a prototypical pair of brothers-as-enemies, Atreus & Thyestes. Like the Biblical Jacob deceiving Esau out of his birthright, the Greek brothers fought over a “golden lamb, talisman of sovereignty” of their father, Pelops (himself both victim and perpetrator in the cruel games of fate played by the gods). Roberto Calasso, in his marvelous panorama of the Greek myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony says Atreus and Thyestes were “both afflicted by the curse of their father, Pelops, which echoed and renewed the curses…[beginning with] Zeus on Tantalus.”

Fighting over a talisman (which can be any coveted prize, title or trophy - and may be a person) Atreus murders Thyestes' children and feeds them to him. And this is just one extreme in a terrible and fascinating tale of obsession and revenge off the charts.

After this gruesome episode of infanticide & cannibalism, Calasso notes “from this point on the vendetta loses all touch with psychology, becomes pure virtuosity, traces out arabesques…” Tracing back to Il Trovatore, we find pure virtuosity in spades, and vendettas all around.

Vendetta is one of those great cognate words appearing often in Verdi and requiring no supertitle to be understood. In a gripping duet near the conclusion of Trovatore, Leonora invokes the name of God for mercy from the Count – who is about to execute her lover Manrico - his mortal enemy and (unbeknownst to both) brother. With exceptional baritonal vehemence, Di Luna replies E’ sol vendetta mio Nume (“My only God is vengeance”). The pith in that phrase epitomizes Trovatore’s undiluted strength at its purest.

Every scene in Trovatore is compact. The concentration of material and the musical (and dramatic) compression focuses the power of the music’s impact. Its nearly relentless perpetual motion sets the few moments of repose in even sharper relief, heightening the sheer beauty of the lyrical cavatinas of Leonora and Manrico. The playwright and opera connoisseur George Bernard Shaw praised the opera’s “tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigour and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity.”

These qualities should be kept in mind when listening to the popular choruses so easily dismissed as over-simple kitsch. Polarities imply extremes. And theatrical extremes– from the archetypal characters to the over-the-top melodrama – require extremely effective solutions where form and content meet in drama.

The so-called “barrel organ” music is an example of extreme directness and forthright simplicity whose functionality is as perfectly suited to the personae and setting as every other element in this elementally powerful opera. Like soldiers playing games, horsing around or singing a popular song together before the storm of battle, such moments in the opera are a release valve – if only for a minute – of the incredible musical and dramatic tension which makes Il Trovatore one of the most gripping operas ever composed.

Production Notebook: Verdi Forever

2011-09-18T12:43:00.005-04:00

Last weekend, as Amy and I were moving into a new apartment in our building, I came across a magazine I’d saved. It was the first issue of the New Yorker to go to press after 9/11. Art Spiegelman’s cover design was simply entitled “9/11/01.” It appeared to be a monochromatic black color field. Upon closer examination the towers are revealed as etched shadows. The back page featured a haunting poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski called “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” The middle of the 21-line poem features a memorable sextet, apparently timeless and ever relevant:

You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

I paused in the unpacking last Sunday to return to that commemorative issue and re-read one of the only pieces in its pages seemingly unconnected to 9/11. The music critic Alex Ross had written an essay, Verdi’s Grip: Why the Shakespeare of grand opera resists radical stagings. It reminded me why Ross is one of my favorite writers on music.

The occasion for Ross was the centennial of Verdi’s death, and from a cross-section of the 400-some anniversary productions of his operas in 2001, he notes “Verdi seems to have lost little of the mass appeal that brought forth hundreds of thousands of mourners on the day of his funeral.” Almost all of whom joined the great Italian maestro Arturo Toscanini in singing – by heart, of course – “Va, pensiero” (the chorus of Hebrew slaves) from Verdi’s third opera and first success, Nabucco.

Ross goes on to observe “The Verdi year has supplied two major bits of information: first, that the audience for opera in America is steadily growing, and, second, that many of the directors who now dominate the opera scene do not know what they are doing.” Opera Roanoke audiences are in luck, for we have neither the interest nor resources to bring such directorial ineptitude here.

Verdi doesn’t need updating; nor do his musical dramas require literal faithfulness to the jot and tittle of period-specific minutiae. Ross aptly compares Verdi to Shakespeare, both of whose works “thrilled both the groundlings and the connoisseurs.” He also makes an interesting comparison to Alfred Hitchcock, another auteur with wide audience appeal. Verdi was a shrewd businessman who quipped “the box office is the proper thermometer of success.” While that axiom does not hold true in our pop-culture dominated world, it does remind us how precarious the balance between popular and critical success is. Verdi may be one of the last artists in classical music to achieve it during his lifetime. But that’s another story…

Il Trovatore is a crash-course in Verdi hallmarks, from his “raging sincerity” which heightens the emotional pitch to the breaking point and “a preference for action over theory” which moves even the thickest of his plots compellingly along. Ross says the sometimes difficult to define appeal of Italian opera has “something to do with the activation of primal feelings.” And “only in live performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it catch fire.” The melodramatic excess eventually became the stuff of cliché (as Mike Allen summarizes my take on Trovatore’s insane plot in the Roanoke Times Fall arts preview). Yet “Verdi’s beloved maledictions, vendettas and forces of destiny actually add plausibility rather than take it away; they make the violent actions of operatic singing seem like a natural reaction under the circumstances.”

Indeed they do, which is why Verdi is considered by many (myself included) to be the single greatest composer of opera in the genre. With all due respect to Mozart, Wagner and Puccini (the next candidates in line), Viva Verdi!

I wrote briefly last week about our production concept and design for next month’s Il Trovatore. Like site-specific Shakespeare, Verdi’s settings are secondary to the primary drama of those “primal” human emotions. Even in the most fantastic and supernatural of plots (from The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale to Macbeth) “the play is the thing” because the characters make it so.

We could transplant Trovatore from medieval Spain to the American Civil War, and the gypsy Azucena could be a mother to a band of escaped slaves and freedom fighters. Or the gypsies could be southern rebels fighting so-called northern aggression. Or like many a piece of Regietheater (Director’s Theater, affectionately known as Eurotrash), we could fill Trovatore with non-sequitirs intended as abstract expressions of a cryptic hermeneutics which would make Verdi roll over in his grave and prompt our audience to head for the bar. Instead, we’re setting Trovatore in a stylized middle ground intended to frame its archetypal characters and situations. We do not wish to burden them with the impossibility of historical verisimilitude nor the forced relevance of an avant-garde “interpretation.”

So why do we come back to the same stories, adventures, sequels, series and cycles? If there are no original tales left to tell, why do we continue to stare at the TV, sit transfixed in front of the movie screen and return to the theatre season after season? These stories are sustenance and stimulation, entertainment and exultation. Verdi’s music is full of the penetrating insight into humanity that “zooms in on a person’s soul.” His characters sing the way we long to express ourselves. If any of them are stereotypes, they "are richly detailed ones."

This week’s New Yorker is dedicated to the anniversary of 9/11 and the cover honors the towers’ absence from the urban landscape by reflecting their presence, imagined and remembered, upon the water. Ana Juan’s cover design also pays homage to Art Spiegelman’s from 10 years ago. I don’t know whether Linda Pastan’s poem “Edward Hopper, Untitled” is intended to mirror Zagajewski’s, but both brought Verdi’s universality to mind.

Pastan’s poem describes “an empty theatre: seats / shrouded in white / like rows of headstones; the curtain about to rise / (or has it fallen?) on a scene of transcendental / silence.”

The untitled Hopper painting she evokes could be any theatre or setting where silence speaks volumes, as it always does when we take time enough to listen. Pastan writes “this is quintessential Hopper - / cliché of loneliness / transformed…” Cliché and stereotype become so only from overuse and abuse, ignorance and thoughtlessness. It takes a Verdi or a Hopper to transform the canvas with color, sing memory to life and remind us why we need “to praise the mutilated world” in the first place.

Production Notebook: Designing Trovatore

2011-09-09T12:26:00.005-04:00

It was a Verdi family tradition to plant a tree for each new opera the master composed. Il Trovatore is the central opera of three which helped define his career and solidify his reputation as the leading Italian opera composer of the 19th century. Rigoletto and La Traviata surround Il Trovatore and appeared in relatively quick succession between 1851 and 1853. The trees Verdi planted for this operatic triumvirate were a sycamore, an oak and a weeping willow. Our director of operations, Jenny Preece-Thompson won yesterday's office opera quiz by matching the tree to the opera. The weeping willow fits the beloved heroine of La Traviata. Connecting Rigoletto's stubbornness to the sycamore left the solid, enduring oak for Trovatore.

I just returned from a meeting with our designer, Jimmy Ray Ward who (along with his wife, Laurie) has designed the set for our upcoming production of Il Trovatore. Jimmy and I met at the beginning of the summer to discuss my concept for this oak of an opera. Verdi's music for Trovatore is as passionate and engaging as any of his two dozen-plus operas. The four principal characters are archetypes with 3D music to match. Their passions are mythic as Greek tragedy and their humanity as universal as Shakespearean drama (even if the melodramatic strangeness of their actions obscures some of those parallels).

Though I did not have the oak in mind, I did want a set which reflected the boldness of the fundamental passions of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, sacrifice and revenge. I was drawn by the parallels and the ambiguous tensions between the different "worlds" of the drama. A castle with a dungeon resembles the convent, a soldier camp could also be the gypsy camp. Seen from a distance, a sword stuck in the ground may look like a cross in a cemetery.

So Jimmy Ray and Laurie designed the set accordingly and we discussed their sketches. Now their designs are being built by Joey Neighbors and Rob Bessolo (our technical director and the production manager at "our" theatre in the Jefferson Center). Here's an example of one of the "worlds" Jimmy and Laurie designed:

We met today to discuss the colors the set will be painted, the textures which will help define the surfaces and bring our imagined dramatic worlds to apparent life. The oak-like stature of the opera is reflected in the height of the flats which form the walls. The parallels, mirror-images, tensions & reversals of the story are reflected in the design. This melodramatic story is a prototype for today's action movies, love triangles & / or revenge dramas. Trovatore features separated-at-birth brothers who are now adult mortal enemies in love with the same woman who is herself torn between love and duty. And we haven't mentioned the mad gypsy mother at the heart of the story, whose revelation at the opera's climax prefigures the "shocking ending" we love in our mysteries, thrillers & dramas (no matter how predictable or familiar they may be). Here is the sketch for the setting of that fateful final scene:

As work on the opening production of our 2011-2012 season, "Troubadours & Gypsies" progresses, I will return with more "behind the scenes" reports. Il Trovatore runs for two performances Oct 14 & 16. Visit operaroanoke.org for tickets.

Celebrating Summer with the BBC Proms

2011-08-03T12:50:00.009-04:00

How do I love summer? Let me count listening to the BBC Proms as one of the primary ways. The Proms is the largest classical musical festival in the world, and is named after the "Promenade Concerts" begun in the late 19th century (from Shakespeare's day forward, Britain has had a cult-like love affair with the foot of the stage - it is quite a vantage point for an audience member).

The Proms runs from mid July to early September and features the gamut of classical music. Long associated with the pioneering conductor Henry Wood (pictured below), the Proms continues his tradition of eclectic, innovative programming. He championed "premieres of no fewer than 716 works by 356 composers" during his 5 decade tenure from 1889 to 1944. An astounding and inspiring record. And a provocative one, given the historic period under consideration. What will our record show, I wonder?

You can read more about these daily concerts featuring some of the greatest musicians and ensembles from around the world online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms

Better yet, you can listen to every Prom live from the BBC site (GMT is 5 hours ahead of EST, so the 7:30 pm start times mean 2:30 pm matinees for East coast listeners). Each concert is archived for a week, which enables voracious listeners like myself to catch up on missed programmes, listen again to new (& / or unfamiliar) works, and spend time with old favorites.

On my mental shortlist of archived programs, I plan to listen to Prom 21, which features Strauss's great tone poem (based on Lord Byron's poem) Don Juan, Walton's Violin Concerto played by Midori, and Prokofiev's great cantata from his score for Eisenstein's epic Russian film, Alexander Nevsky. That Prom features the City of Birmingham SO led by their dynamic young conductor, Andris Nelsons.

I want to listen again to last Sunday's "Choral Prom" featuring Rachmaninov. Gianandrea Noseda - an Italian conductor with major posts in Britain and Russia (and one of the MET conductors our own Steven White has assisted and covered) led the BBC Philharmonic in a program that culminated in Rachmaninov's favorite among his own works, the 1915 cantata The Bells.

This musical "poem" for chorus, soloists & orchestra is a colorful series of 4 symphonic-inspired movements evoking the four types of bells in Edgar Allen Poe's "tintinabulation" of a poem. The "Silver bells" of winter, the "Golden bells" of marriage, the brass bells of "loud alarum" and the "Iron bells" not only inspire metaphoric associations and fantasies, but parallel the mythic "Ages of Humanity." (And that easily missed echo is an important interpretive consideration where Poe- and poetry in general - is concerned, those mythic resonances that help us moderns restore continuity across history and culture. Alas, a vast & vital topic, but I digress...)

Let's get back to that shortlist of archived concerts (all of which include the insightful commentary of the BBC journalists and the enlightening, entertaining intermission features). At the top is Prom 23: Liszt's great Dante Symphony (also featuring Noseda and the BBC Phil, joined by the women of the CBSO Chorus).

I just listened to one of 12 different concerts the BBC SO is giving this summer (there are 74 different Proms concerts in all), led by the brilliant composer and conductor Oliver Knussen. One of Benjamin Britten's young protege's, Ollie is a force of nature (my summers as a Britten-Pears young artist in Aldeburgh and Snape were among the greatest experiences of my life, not least because of the opportunities to work - or at least rub elbows - with the likes of Knussen, Sir Charles Mackerras, Elisabeth Soderstrom and among many others, Robert Tear).

He led an eclectic program of 20th-century music starting with two short tone poems by the swiss composer Arthur Honegger. Pacific 231 might be the greatest piece of classical music inspired by the railroad (and that could inspire another essay or program - songs, poems, tales & stories inspired by train travel...and a great topic in a rail town such as Roanoke, no?)

The concert featured a beautiful and typically evocative work of Britten's teacher Frank Bridge, one of the impressionist - minded composers under the Proms' 2011 programming umbrella focusing on French music and its influences. The concert concluded with the prototypical work of musical impressionism, Debussy's set of 3 symphonic sketches of the sea, La Mer.

Knussen prefaced it with the Proms premiere of a fascinating work by the Italian composer Niccolo Castiglioni. Inverno in-ver ("Winter, in truth" would be one translation of the title's play on words). This wild, often witty series of short musical poems on winter evokes Vivaldi & the Venetian baroque, Alpine landscapes and the Winterreise's of romantic artists of many ages. The final movement is a play on words and a nose-thumbing to the enforced dissonance that paralyzed so much academic, abstract music in the post-WWII generation of modern composers - of which Castiglioni (1932-1996) was one.

Its epigrammatic title is Il rumore non fa bene. Il bene non fa rumore ("Noise does no good. Good makes no noise"). This inspired 20-minute fantasia reminded me of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and the aforementioned Rachmaninov setting of Poe. Castiglioni's 11 miniatures inspired many associations, including - but not limited to - the particular sound-world formed from the fascinating blend of Northern European intellectualism with the sensual lyricism of the Mediterranean world, like the North Sea meeting the warm Adriatic Sun, or Apollo joining Dionysus...

This weekend the two season-long celebration of Gustav Mahler continues with performances of his beloved 2nd Symphony (the "Resurrection") on Friday with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. One of the bright young stars of British music, Edward Gardner leads the busy BBC SO & the BBC Singers in the next Proms "Choral Sunday" featuring Mahler's rarely heard early cantata, Das Klagende Lied (The Song of Lament).

Two elemental works by a musical colossus. Speaking of the elements, I think one sometimes can fight fire with fire. I can't imagine a better way to beat the summer's heat than with the white-hot variety that is felt & experienced through great live music.

W & L Alumni College: The Romantic Era

2011-07-12T15:17:00.008-04:00

Last week I had the honor and privilege of being a guest professor for the Washington & Lee University Alumni College. It was W & L that brought me to the region (I was associate director of choral & vocal activities from 1996-1999). Being in Lexington offered me the opportunity to join the Opera Roanoke family in 1998 as a guest artist and member of the (then freelance) conducting staff. Some of my most cherished professional friendships are with members of the Lexington musical community, both on the W & L faculty and in one of Virginia's most beautiful and historically significant "main street" towns. So Lexington is a place I've always considered another "home."

An aesthetic and metaphysical "home" for me has always been the Romantic period. And it was this beloved and fascinating period following the birth of the Enlightenment and our nation's independence (the rebirth of democracy, as it were) that was the topic of the W & L Alumni College last week. The interdisciplinary prism was "Chopin, Liszt and the Romantic Era" and I was grateful to teach alongside long-time W & L scholars (and distinguished artists in their own rights) Tim Gaylard (piano, musicology) and Pam Simpson (art history and incidentally, the first tenured female faculty at W & L...)

The relevance of the Romantic era's signature characteristics of innovation, boldness of vision, freedom of spirit, and exceptional evocation of the artistic paradigms of "the beautiful" and "the sublime" (to cite but two such concepts) was brought home to us in Lexington by the death of the great American, ex-pat artist Cy Twombly, who died in Rome July 5. Pam has written articles about Twombly's work, and spoke eloquently about his legacy.

The swimming pool at W & L is named after Cy Twombly, the elder, a famed W & L coach. Cy Twombly, the younger is its most distinguished artistic "alum," even if he attended for only a single year. Twombly considered Lexington one of his homes and continued to return to it. The University is proud to claim him, even if many Lexingtonians still fail to appreciate his art. This ambivalence extends beyond Virginia. In regard to his mixed critical acclaim, The NY Times obit mentions the ironically-entitled article "No, Your Kid Could Not Do This, and other reflections on Cy Twombly."

I was asked to share some about my lecturing on German Romantic philosophy, painting and poetry, respectively. It was a heady pleasure for me to return to my role as a college teacher and play professor for a week! I have posted some thoughts, quotes and poetic thinking on my companion "musings" blog (linked on this site in the right column) with some images of the great German Romantic Landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich. Another post below it features musings on Romantic poetry and philosophy, and the dynamic relationship between the artist and society across the ages.

If every artist has a bias, agenda or "plays favorites" I stand guilty as charged of being a romantic. (In a gesture of romantic irony & synchronicity, an earlier essay at said blog features a piece I wrote on Cy Twombly and the late Romantic, early-modern German poet Rilke, another long-time personal favorite "romantic" artist from a discipline outside music...)

Below is the title for my third & final lecture - recital on the poet and critic Heinrich Heine and the subject of Romantic Irony, with live performances of excerpts from Schumann's Dichterliebe. Further notes and quotes elaborating upon the topic follow.

Lovers, Poets & Madmen:
Romantic Irony in Heine & Schumann’s Dichterliebe

Scott Williamson, tenor
General & Artistic Director, Opera Roanoke
Timothy Gaylard, piano
Professor of Music, Washington & Lee University

*******NOTES & QUOTES on ROMANTIC IRONY

ROMANTIC IRONY: A non-violent (confrontation?) disruption of normality

Irony – a humorous (or arresting) tension or disconnect between appearance and reality,
between expectation / result,
revelation / fact or truth;
assumption, belief / fiction…

Almost every bit of intelligence – involving wit is ironic (as opposed to farcical?)

The ironic may be farcical, and a farce may be ironic, and they may be mutually exclusive…

Hegel, et al (Eagleton's "Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic") We live forward tragically, but think back comically.

Tragic art for Hegel is supremely affirmative.

Spirit restores its own unity through negation. Via negativa in philosophy.

Looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. (Hegel)

*Looking at the dark shadowy side of myth, using Procne and Philomela as oracular guides…

Philomela / Nightingale myth
as romantic symbol illustrates, illumines & enlightens
romantic project (telos or goal)
of unity, integration; assimilation & reconciliation of dichotomy, duality, dialectic.

*****MORE NOTES & QUOTES...

Thoughts on Romantic Irony / Philosophy / Poetry
With Heine and Hesse (et al...) as guides...

From the Nobel Prize winning, anti-fascist German author - is it ironic to note the prize winners usually are anti- something?!? Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (Holt, 1927, 1990).

Steppenwolf is a classic and beloved Bildungsroman (Romantic "Education" novel centered around the adventures of its heroic or "anti-hero" narrator).

The title character of Hesse's novel is a Doppelgänger or Jekyll & Hdye figure: one part bohemian, artistic, eccentric, unkempt, misfit, anti-establishment "mad-man,." And one part the Wolf's alter-ego Harry Haller, a respected bourgeois professor and professional, proper, educated, polite, an all-around upstanding citizen.

Steppenwolf differentiates Hesse's "shape-shifter" subject and literally refers to the wild and savage Siberian "wolf of the steppes."

While the specificity of Hesse's choice of title reflects a layer of meaning in interpreting Harry Haller, the archetypal nature of Hesse's creation connects to many mythological traditions.

From heroic savages like Hercules or Samson, mad poets and prophets from John the Baptist to John Clare, the rough wolf-like man is an archetypal character whose mythology has resonance for the dynamics between artist and society today. That always exciting, often volatile dialectic is at the heart of the creative flowering known as the Romantic Era. It inspired Hesse 100 years later, and it inspires us today, another 90 years on...

from Steppenwolf:

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self…And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security.

…break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves…say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key…

you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul…

We Immortals do not like things to be taken seriously, we like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time [says the Goethe / Mozart character].

A veil between me and the outer world seemed to be torn aside, a barrier fallen.

Man is the narrow & perilous bridge between nature and spirit…

Look at an animal…all of them are right. They’re never an embarrassment…They always know what to do and how to behave. They don’t flatter and they don’t intrude. They don’t pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.

The war against death…is always a beautiful, noble and wonderful and glorious thing, and so, it follows is the war against war. But it is always helpless and quixotic too.

There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness!

Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education…[It depends] on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable.

You have a dimension too many…whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours…

You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time…

Let the sense of this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. Just listen…listen without either pathos or mockery…Listen well. You have need of it [Mozart].

And whoever wants more and has got it in him – the heroic and the beautiful and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints – is a fool and a Don Quixote.

******FURTHER NOTES & QUOTES...

Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature. Ironic, mordant, trenchant wit. Unruly. Uncensored. Uncontained. Sarcasmos exemplified.

Referring to the technique & style – acquiring discipline called the work ethic, the philosopher, like every artist is using science to practice art. “In philosophy, nothing is given by revelations; and so above all a philosopher is bound to be an unbeliever.”

Like all poetry, mythology and scripture, philosophy should be taken with a grain of interpretative, contextual salt. The figurative always goes deeper than the literal. Reading between the lines, locating and situating artist and audience, subject and object, de-coding texts are all tools in the shed of romantic reading, listening and understanding.

The following statement is not intended to be taken literally, but is an example of irony, mordant, self-deprecating wit that shames his adversaries, critics &/or opponents while pulling the rug out from under their unsuspecting feet.

Now, there are two reasons why my philosophy is so hated by the gentlemen of the ‘philosophical trade.’ The first is that my works ruin the public’s taste for empty tissues of phrases, for meaningless word accumulations that are piled on top of one another. For hollow, superficial, and slowly tormenting twaddle, for Christian dogmatics appearing in the disguise of the most wearisome metaphysics, for the lowest and most systematized philistinism representing ethics…

He exposes the emperor’s clothes on the “gentlemen of the trade” in the power struggles that plague every category of human relationship.

One of the acknowledged greats in the philosophical canon stoops to describe his philistine opposites’ “numerous company whose ingenious members, coram popule, bow and scrape to each other on all sides.”

Is that rude? Spiteful? Unprofessional? Or disturbingly honest. Unsettling. Wry. Subversive. Dangerous. Artistic…

“The Spirit of the Age” as noted elsewhere, was one of unrest, upheaval and widespread change. Whether the romantic era brings to mind ‘The Lake School’ of Wordsworth & Coleridge, the Weimar of Goethe & Schiller (and later Nietzsche) the so-called ‘Satanic School’ of Byron and Shelley. The “founding classic of the feminist movement” that Mary Wollstonecraft entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman...(the wife of Shelley was also the author of that Romantic Gothic classic, Frankenstein. Also known as, The Modern Prometheus. Also always connecting to myth...)

All agreed “great spirits now on earth are sojourning” (Keats).

They “demonstrated and exemplified” (Coleridge) how “an electric life burns” (Shelley).

They were wary, suspicious and in an age of turbulent political tides, sometimes circumspect with sharing their “secrets:” “tell no one; only the wise…” (Goethe).

HERE ENDETH THIS INSTALLMENT OF NOTES & QUOTES...

Listening to Paintings at the Taubman Museum

2011-06-30T08:19:00.005-04:00

Last Saturday I presented the first of what I hope will become an ongoing series at the Taubman Museum of Art. Below is the outline of "Listening to Paintings," listing the canvases from the Contemporary and American galleries and the songs I paired with them to sing (a cappella).

I have not fleshed out here the live commentary I provided connecting the paintings & folksongs. I make no claims as an art critic. My selection of paintings and songs was the result of the subjective intuition of an art amateur and a professional musician. I am interested in hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, or what / how / why art "means" something.

I believe threading together as many of the varied strands one can access in the fabric of aesthetic experience is one of the surest ways into what art is and how / what / why it means. I asked the audience the rhetorical question, "do I appreciate landscape paintings more because of my love for nature, or do I love nature more because I appreciate art?"

This venture is a tad philosophical. Allow at least another digression. The romantic poet Novalis wrote "the world must become Romanticized." He may have had in mind something like what this program attempts. And his poetic philosophy fits our venture:

When I confer upon the commonplace a higher meaning, upon the ordinary an enigmatic experience, I romanticize it. The operation is reversed for the higher, unknown, mystical, infinite.

Listening to Paintings in the Contemporary and American Galleries at the Taubman

“If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist” (John Dewey)

Art & music speaking the same language / essential lyricism, ideal beauty, the sublime…

shared vocabulary: color, light, chiaroscuro, chromatic, harmony, line, form, texture, composition

Part I: Contemporary Gallery
1. Dorothy Gillespie: “Changing Seasons,”
Robert Stuart: “Shadowlands” & “Resplendent Light”
with “The Ash Grove” (British Isles / Benjamin Britten, arr. )

*tone / timbre – color / as narrative; form fitting & shaping content…
*abstract expressionism and subjectivity in interpretation...

“The inevitable self-movement of a poem or drama is compatible with any amount of prior labor provided the results of that labor emerge in complete fusion with an emotion that is fresh. Keats speaks poetically of the way in which artistic expression is reached when he tells of the 'innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling, delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty.'" (from Art As Experience, by John Dewey)

2. Janet Niewald: “Wave I / Ocean Isle,”
Sally Bowring: “A Quiet Afternoon” and Jake Berthot: "Untitled"
with “O Waly, Waly” (Water is Wide, Gift of Love; British Isles / Britten)

*associations / lists / references as interpretive guides: water=flood, oasis, storm, life…

3. John Cage: “Untitled II” and Carlyon: “missaid 3 (for John Cage)”
with “36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp” (John Cage)

*dada / chance / Zen – East / provocateur / shaman - guru

“John Cage’s 4’33” is one of the most misunderstood pieces of music ever written and yet, at times, one of the avant-garde’s best understood as well. Many presume that the piece’s purpose was deliberate provocation, an attempt to insult, or get a reaction from, the audience. For others, though, it was a logical turning point to which other musical developments had inevitably led, and from which new ones would spring. For many, it was a kind of artistic prayer, a bit of Zen performance theater that opened the ears and allowed one to hear the world anew. To Cage it seemed, at least from what he wrote about it, to have been an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music. It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”
(from No Such Thing as Silence by Kyle Gann)

4. Paul Ryan: “Camp Under the Moon” and “From the Lake”
with “The Boatmen’s Dance” (Old American Songs / Copland, arr.) and
“The Last Rose of Summer” (Moore’s Irish Melodies / Britten)

*types of artistic “play:” with color / line / rhythm (=dance) / form itself…
Summer as fertile creative ground: play, escape, nostalgia, stages-of-life, et al...

Part II: American Gallery
5. Dewing: “The Rose” and John Singer Sargent: “Norah”
with “The Salley Gardens” (British Isles / Yeats / Britten)
and “She’s Like the Swallow” (Britten)

*tabula rasa for the artist & the audience – subjectivity & interpretation
in great portraits, divas and other characters...

6. Steichen: “Midnight Strollers” and Frieseke: “Nursery”
with “At the Mid Hour of Night” (Irish / Britten) and
“Long Time Ago” (Old American / Copland)

*romanticism, impressionism & the nocturne…

7. Durand: “Catskills with Round Top"
and Thomas Hart Benton: “Cotton Pickers”
with “At the River” (Copland)

*romantic landscapes and lyrical modernism

Watch this space for future programs. Arias, duets and dramatic "scenas" from the operatic repertoire would make for an exciting take on this idea. As would any number of "themed" programs (art & songs for: 1. the seasons; 2. nocturnes & lullabies; 3. love & relationships; 4. portraits & autobiography; etc...)

Ultimately, all talk about art is secondary and subservient to actually experiencing it. So visit the Taubman and look at the paintings (listen to them too). Come to the Opera and the Symphony, listen (and look at!) the music.

All that talk about art and music can become vague & cryptic anyway, so here's another intentionally provocative (characteristically light-touched) "piece" from John Cage to keep us musing with a smile.

Postscript:
from Silence
John Cage

III Communication

NICHI NICHI KORE KO NICHI: EVERY DAY IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY
What if I ask thirty-two questions?
What if I stop asking now and then?
Will that make things clear?
Is communication something made clear?
What is communication?
Music, what does it communicate?
Is a truck passing by music?
If I can see it, do I have to hear it too?
If I don’t hear it, does it still communicate?
If while I see it I can’t hear it, but hear something else, say an egg-beater, because I’m
inside looking out, does the truck communicate or the egg-beater, which communicates?
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck
passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?
Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?
People aren’t sounds, are they?
Is there such a thing as silence?
Even if I get away from people, do I still have to listen to something?

Season Finale: Serenade to Orpheus

2011-05-03T14:33:00.003-04:00

Below are my program notes for Opera Roanoke's season finale concert, Mother's Day Serenade. I hope you will join Maestro Steven White, celebrated soprano Elizabeth Futral, RSO principal horn Wally Easter, composer Ricky Ian Gordon and the rest of our musical team for a concert of beautiful vocal music, May 8 at 2:30 pm.

Serenade to Orpheus

The Serenade is a quintessential example of music existing for its own sake. The serenade may also be a nocturne, a lullaby or a rhapsody; it is a “song without words” (Lieder ohne Worte) when the voice is absent. When the voice sings the song the serenade is, it reminds us why the serenade is synonymous with music’s primary gift, the gift of melody. Harmony and rhythm may be melody’s equal partners in this triumvirate, but where she exists complete-unto-her-self, her brothers’ individuality cannot mask their interdependence. We remember music’s tunes, and for good reason. Song is what first inspired us to music, and melody is what keeps us coming back to this endless vault of artistic treasure.

The ultimate and original musical myth is that of Orpheus. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice inspired some of the very first essays in the operatic genre. And from the 18th century on, Orpheus has been synonymous with the musician’s muse. As the Serenade is pure music, song at its most essential, the Orpheus legend is music’s “creation myth,” the story of music’s “intelligent design.” As Prometheus brought the power of fire to humanity, Orpheus bestowed an equally powerful gift. Song is the gift to move hearts, change lives and, if not alter the course of history, at least affect it. Simply put, the Orpheus story is about the impossible-to-quantify power of music.

The opening works on this Mother’s Day Serenade program are songs without words for strings. The Rachmaninoff Vocalise is one of the most beloved examples of a wordless serenade for voice. Vocalise is a literal “song without words” to showcase the sheer beauty, facility and power of the human voice. Dvořák’s Serenade is indebted to Mozart (whose most popular instrumental work, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik translates more accurately as A Little Serenade than A Little Night Music). The opening movement sets the lyrical tone of this beloved five-movement suite for strings. Elgar’s “Adagio for string orchestra” Sospiri (originally called Soupir d’amour, “sigh of love”) is one of the most achingly beautiful slow movements in all of music.

Benjamin Britten was one of the most prolific composers of vocal music in history. His Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is one of the masterpiece song-cycles in the repertoire. He is widely regarded as the greatest British composer after Henry Purcell, and the best song and opera composer in the English language. Britten was one of music’s true prodigies (in the line of Mozart and Mendelssohn). A modern polymath, Britten was equally distinguished as conductor, concert pianist & accompanist, visionary impresario and successful producer. He founded an opera company, and one of Europe’s most innovative annual festivals in Aldeburgh. With his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s legacy includes one of the finest training grounds for young musicians in the world. His output includes a dozen operas, songs in a half-dozen different languages setting a veritable compendium of “who’s who” in European poetry. Britten’s Serenade is one of the finest examples of the song-cycle as poetic “anthology.” Rather than a multi-movement work unified by a single poetic source (as Britten did for sets of Auden, Rimbaud, Michelangelo and Donne poetry), the Serenade charts a nocturnal progression from the gloaming of dusk to the “dead” of night using a varied chorus of poetic voices.

One of the distinguishing marks of Britten’s Serenade is the masterful counterpoint between the tenor voice and solo horn in duet. It is a compliment to Ricky Ian Gordon’s gifts that his Orpheus and Euridice is favorably compared to Britten’s Serenade. In his hour-long work of musical theater, Euridice is played by a soprano, and Orpheus is voiced in “songs without words” by the clarinet. The composer’s notes on his work illuminate the creative process and open a window of understanding to an artistic soul.

Hidden somewhere in my subconscious, an old obsession with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth was boiling to the surface. When I was little, one of the foreign films that one of my three sisters took me to was the beautiful Black Orpheus with Bruno Melo and Marpessa Dawn. What could I really have understood in that story?

Marcel Camus’ 1959 classic film is a (literally) brilliant retelling of the Orpheus myth set in the Carnaval of Rio di Janiero. Orpheus is the prototypical musician. He is the “original” troubadour, the first performing artist. When his beloved Eurydice is fatally bitten by a serpent, Orpheus “with his lute” charms even the lord of the underworld, Pluto (or Hades). He wins her life, only to lose her a second time when he turns back in doubt to see if she really is there. It is a story as haunting as it is resonant with meaning. Gordon’s modern-day Orpheus was inspired by the love and loss experienced by its composer. He continues his account of the work’s genesis:

But something lingered. Because one night, at four in the morning, I rose from sleep, went to the dining-room table, and wrote the entire text. It seemed I suddenly had a deep identification with Orpheus; only my Euridice was not bitten by a snake, but robbed slowly by an incurable virus. Somehow, in my mind’s eye and ear, I saw Todd as “Orpheus” playing his “pipe” instead of a lute or a lyre. Euridice (I changed the “y” to an “I”) was both herself and the storyteller; the notes were his and the pianist’s, and the words were hers.

Opera Roanoke’s presentation of Orpheus and Euridice is the first East Coast performance of the version for string orchestra. The composer describes the Lincoln Center premiere upon which the current version is based.

This [chamber] version of the piece was given its world premiere with the soprano Elizabeth Futral, Todd Palmer on clarinet, and pianist Melvin Chen, as well as Doug Varone’s dance company, on October 5, 2005, as part of the Lincoln Center New Visions, American Songbook, and Great Performers series. In his review, in New York Magazine, Peter G. Davis wrote, “Both Gordon’s text and music are couched in an accessible idiom of disarming lyrical directness, a cleverly disguised faux naivete that always resolves dissonant situations with grace and a sure sense of dramatic effect—the mark of a born theater composer.”

The mark of all the great theater composers on this program begins with and returns to song. Whether nocturne, vocalise, “song without words” or chamber opera, these serenades sing the power of music itself. It is our privilege to share this music with you.

Serving genius...with love: Carlo Maria Giulini

2011-03-31T20:08:00.006-04:00

The great Italian Maestro, Carlo Maria Giulini (1914-2005) was trained as a violist, and among other things, spent nine months in a Rome tunnel hiding from fascists near the end of WWII. These two facts reveal "everything you needed to know about him as a conductor" according to the critic Mark Sved (quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from Thomas Saler's recent biography of Giulini, Serving Genius. Illinois, 2010).

He began his professional conducting career in 1944, making his debut with a score he learned by candlelight during that perilous hibernation. Brahms' 4th symphony was the centerpiece of the first orchestral concert held in newly liberated Rome. An unlikely choice, a symphony more autumnal than triumphant, it was a fitting one for an unconventional maestro who would be known as a "man of principles and ideals, a philosopher and a poet who happens to like music."

Giulini himself remarked about his unique debut, saying Brahms "took possession of me with the most irresistible prepotenza. I directed with all the emotional charge that could come to me at that particular moment."

Giulini's recorded legacy documents an extraordinary musician who was referred to as a mystic and saint as often as a maestro. His finely wrought, deeply affecting performances of Brahms, Dvorak, Mahler, Bruckner, Schubert and Verdi (to name many of the core composers in his predominantly Austro-Italian repertoire) have possessed me with an irresistible force for the twenty years I've been listening to classical music.

Indeed, the first opera recording I owned was a cassette tape of highlights of Giulini's famed London production of Verdi's Don Carlo. That 1970 set (featuring Domingo, Milnes, Caballe, Verrett & Raimondi) began my love affair with what has remained my single favorite opera; the remastered CD is a "must-have" benchmark.

Placido has spoken of Giulini's uncanny ability to embody the music he conducted. In reference to the Verdi Requiem (another signature interpretation), Domingo said "he simply became the music to an almost frightening degree."

Domingo touches on a quality that distinguishes CMG's interpretations. In the words of a Chicago critic, Giulini has "sensitivity, imagination, and skill, and that extra, enkindling thing, the Promethean gift of fire."

His interpretations were borne out of a genuine love and respect for both the music and the musicians making it. Spending time around Giulini "can reawaken an almost forgotten sense of idealism and restore at least a part of one's faith," remarked another prominent critic.

Spending time reading about Giulini's life while listening to the music he brought beautifully, vividly to life is a reminder of the power contained even in a recording. And therein lies a paradox, for the power of great music cannot be contained. Giulini's music-making is red-blooded, visceral and fully human, awaking the senses and touching the heart. It is also searching, spiritual, mystical music for the soul. It resonates across the spectrum of emotions and is rooted in the fundamental core of humanity: love. The title of Saler's book refers to the conductor's calling. Its epigraph is a quote typical of this most self-effacing of "mega-star" maestros:

When you study a piece, the genius is there on the page, and I am here;
I must serve that genius--and serve with love.

"At once the most masculine and least macho of musicians" is another apt description of a master of balance, able to maintain the tightrope coordination "between thrilling fire and dynamism, and tranquil beauty and repose." That balance of polarities and the dynamic tension inherent in opposing them is as difficult to describe as it is to achieve. Saler discusses one aspect of this achievement in the tension between forward motion (horizontal rhythm) and the "retention" of tone quality (the timbre or color in vertical harmony). "There remained a pervasive sense of horizontal motion, with the music pushing through a thick and variably dense web of resistance, thus incrementally building an arc of tension over an entire movement and performance."

The cumulative effect of that "arc of tension" is a central factor in the effectiveness of any large work, whether it be a play, novel, symphony or opera. Sustaining--and then releasing--that tension is one of the impossible-to-teach challenges facing the creative artist either composing or interpreting the work.

I have three of Giulini's versions of the Verdi Requiem (another "desert-island" work). They all have his signature interpretive stamps: rich sonorities (especially in inner voices), committed, dramatic performances from choir, soli & orchestra, and the balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian alluded to above. All three recordings maintain the dynamic arc in different ways. The classic 1964 EMI set is another benchmark, and the obvious first choice. A recent BBC "Legends" live set from the same period is more viscerally exciting, though less polished--and with less distinguished soloists--than its studio counterpart. A 1989 DG recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is often dismissed (like many of Bernstein's late recordings) as being too lugubrious. It is notably "slower" than its predecessors, but no less dramatically paced. The attention to detail is astounding (Giulini was 75) and Gramophone magazine described it as "the most spiritual, reverential, and perhaps visionary yet to appear."

Those same qualities were sometimes found in excess by critics who accused Giulini of romanticizing every piece he conducted. In our era of historical "authenticity" and "period performance," Giulini's interpretations of Bach, Mozart & even Beethoven veer wide from the "early music" schools of interpretation. Saler relays an anecdote that caused the maestro to grin widely even as he told it. He relates a story about Paul Hindemith conducting Bach with a German orchestra aiming for historical "accuracy." Insisting they came "from the direct Bach tradition" they refused to comply with Hindemith's request for "a more beautiful sound and sonority." Giulini quoted Hindemith's reply: "But I don't know how, with no vibrato, Bach could have so many sons." Arguments about period performance style and practices aside, the final arbiter of merit for many of us is simply whether or not the performance was effective, accomplished, and moving. Attention to details of style and "authenticity" result in polished "authentic" performances that remain lifeless if not animated with attention to details of content & intent. Isn't all art essentially romantic?

Giulini paid attention to details of style and substance. That attention was honed in the conductor's nine months of silent hiding, studying Brahms by candlelight. Bernard Jacobson quotes Giulini's wonderful description of the elements that combine to give a composer and a work a distinct "physiognomy."

"At a given moment what we hear is the line that leads the composition. But this is the physiognomy of a face--the nose, the mouth, the eyes. Then there is something which is very important, and that is what is inside this. And this interior body, with the bones and the nerves and the blood--this is really something that I should say in Brahms...needs to be absolutely a part of the physiognomy of the line."

Giulini not only describes the process engagingly, but brings it dynamically to life. Jacobson goes on to remark the "interior body" is one of the reasons why listening to familiar works under Giulini's baton is like "hearing a piece for the first time." And participating in the raw power of viscerally engaging music--that is at once spiritually vital and "mystically intent"--connects one to that nexus where transcendence is experienced and meaning is lived.

Giulini's music-making manifests this nexus--the Apollonian intellect sparked by attention to details (technique, balance, nuance, voicing, texture, etc). The "physiognomy" of the "interior body" is balanced and enlivened with the Dionysian passion of "Promethean fire." (I invoke Nietzsche's polarity in the classical sense of Dionysian physicality, sensuality & emotional openness, not the pejorative Dionysus of decadent excess).

Giulini was not as "famous" as the "Dionysian" Bernstein or "Apollonian" Karajan. And he would have deflected attention drawn to such a comparison. "I think people should listen to the music. Opinions and details about the interpreters are not so important." Agreed. But CMG is in a class almost entirely his own. And it is a class we all need to attend.

In response to a question (in a BBC radio interview) about his repertoire of "grand, noble and spiritual" works and the existence of a moral force in music, he replied unequivocally. "Absolutely...Music gives to life one great thing: hope. If we don't have hope, what we can do?"

That is an important and distinguishing detail about the man and his approach to music. "Music must have a spiritual quality. It is absolute necessity for humanity. Man needs love."

One of the few prestigious offers of public recognition he did not refuse was from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Europe's "musical hall of fame," based in Vienna). He was one of only three living members in the society at the time of his induction in 1978. Karajan and Böhm were the other living heirs to Beethoven, Brahms and their immortal kin. Instead of speechifying, Giulini said "I am at the service of music. There is really nothing else to say."

Butterfly and the Sea...

2011-03-11T12:10:00.011-05:00

Joseph Campbell delivered a series of lectures on mythology to the Cooper Union (for the Advancement of Science and Art) in New York City between 1958 and 1971. A dozen of these characteristically illuminating discourses are collected in the book Myths to Live By (Penguin, 1972, 1993).

I have had it on hand with other "reference" books in preparation for our production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Though Puccini's operas do not appear to be close relatives of myth (like those of Monteverdi, Glück and Strauss), his archetypal characters resonate with the force and depth of ancient Greece.

The central chapters in Campbell's book are called "The Separation of East and West," "The Confrontation of East and West in Religion," "The Inspiration of Oriental Art" and "Zen."

Following the posts below, I have been making notes and musing over an essay on the imagery of the sea in Madama Butterfly. In "The Importance of Rites" (from 1964), Campbell relates the structure and form of ritual to mythology, and its galvanizing force on communities that enact such rites. Campbell cites the "life-amplifying service of ritual" in the Japanese tea ceremony, and compares it to the exquisite Japanese garden "where nature and art have been brought together in a common statement harmonizing and epitomizing both."

After citing olympic-style athletic events (like track meets) he quotes Oswald Spengler's definition of "culture" as society "in form." His next example of "the high service of ritual to a society" is the "solemn state occasion" that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He mentions the necessity for a "compensatory rite to re-establish the sense of solidarity of the nation."

I know many of the members of the vibrant Japanese community in Roanoke are eagerly anticipating our production of Madama Butterfly, and are planning to greet the opening night audience in our lobby, dressed in traditional costume.

Victor Hugo's proverb, "music expresses that which cannot be said, and cannot be suppressed," reverberates today. I wrestle with the idea of even attempting to articulate thoughts about Butterfly and the sea in the wake of so devastating a natural disaster as the Tsunami that has ravaged Japan. I believe we can draw strength from Campbell and the "great cloud of witnesses" who have written, composed and created works that evoke--and activate--the deepest source of our human emotions. This body of creativity speaks to our shared humanity and connects us around the globe and across the centuries.

Campbell mentions the symbolism of the funeral rites for JFK, from the seven horses and the military groom to the "riderless saddle" with "stirrups reversed." He cites the "mythology of the seven spheres and of the soul's journey."

When we consider the sea as an archetypal image of the soul and the unconscious, a metaphor for the immensity of the deep and the void, a symbol for god and death, we are connecting to the power of myth to give form and structure to experience.

As Butterfly's friends first appear on the crest of a Nagasaki hill, they sing (in impressionist harmonies redolent of the ocean) "Ah! So much sky! So much sea!" As Butterfly emerges from behind her friends, they turn and sing to her (in lines lost in the wash of sound in one of opera's most beloved entrance scenes):

"Before you cross the threshold,
turn and look, turn and look
at those things dear to you,
look at this expanse of sky,
all these flowers, all that sea!"

The posts below are "about" some of the nature imagery in the opera, and reasons it remains popular and relevant. The eminent conductor, Joseph Flummerfelt has said the great composers give us the "gift of connection." The proverbial "spark of the divine" connects the artist to inspiration, who in turn "translates" the spark into the creative work, which is itself a gift. This connectivity extends across and between works and peoples. As Campbell writes, "these symbolic overtones--unheard by outward ears, perhaps, yet recognized within by all--" connect us to a/the source. Though Puccini did not expound on the role of mythology as a fount of inspiration, his fondness for the (nature) poet, Pascoli (referenced below) is an important clue in understanding why Puccini's music resonates with elemental power.

In the famous love duet that ends Act I, Butterfly contrasts the diminutive, modest tastes of her people to the immensity of the sea.

"We are a people accustomed
To little things,
Humble and quiet,
To a tenderness
Gentle, yet wide as the sky,
Deep as the rolling sea."

Puccini was criticized for a "soft" (ie: feminine) affection for his heroines and his "piccole cose" (little things). And his "sugary music" (musica zuccherata) awakens emotional openness--with all its vulnerability--vividly and directly. The gushing lyric beauty of his "heart on sleeve" voice has been copied and imitated ever since, but never surpassed.

Butterfly compares her hope to a "wisp of smoke rising over the horizon of the sea" as she awaits Pinkerton's return. When Sharpless confronts her with the possibility Pinkerton may never return, she becomes faint, and foreshadows her tragic undoing. She quickly recovers her composure and sings, "It's nothing. I thought I was going to die, but it soon passes, like the clouds pass over the sea."

Pinkerton's ship (the Abraham Lincoln--another name Campbell invokes in "The Importance of Rites") appears in the harbor, revivifying Butterfly and auguring the beloved "flower duet" she sings with her confidante. As they pick flowers to prepare a ritualistic hero's welcome, Suzuki reminds Butterfly

"So often you came to these bushes
to gaze far away, in tears
over the wide and empty sea."

Butterfly responds with poetry that resonates across historical time and cultural space:

"The long-awaited one has come,
nothing more shall I ask of the sea;
I gave tears to the soil,
its flowers it now gives to me!"

From the narratives of the great flood (common to all creation myths) to Homer and beyond, the sea courses with a through-line of connective energy that mirrors all facets of life on earth. It inspired much of what is arguably Puccini's most perfect opera.

James Joyce said the Greek dramas epitomized the central function of art, which is to inspire/provoke the fundamental human emotions: pity and terror (or, love and fear). That catharsis, regardless of type, distinction or quality, opens us to "unfathomed wonder" (Campbell) and connects us to the deep feeling of emotion which is our shared humanity.

Butterfly's birds & flowers...

2011-03-06T12:18:00.007-05:00

Madama Butterfly is rare among operas for having a libretto that surpasses its original sources. Verdi's operatic versions of Shakespeare dramas are unequivocal masterpieces (and the libretti--operatic "scripts" or "screenplays"--Arrigo Boito wrote for Otello and Falstaff are brilliant). Verdi's Shakespeare adaptations co-exist with the Bard's plays, but they do not surpass Shakespeare's originals.

Puccini's librettists, Giacosa and Illica based their libretto on David Belasco's play, Madam Butterfly. Belasco based his play on a short story by John Luther Long. Belasco was known as the "Bishop of Broadway" for his innovative stagecraft (advanced lighting techniques and "special effects"). For Belasco, the play was not necessarily the thing, but the spark to fire the imagination for a spectacular production.

Giacosa and Illica's libretto, however, is brilliant. With Puccini, this "Trinity" of collaborators produced three of opera's most beloved masterpieces, La Boheme, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. And while no one loves a Puccini opera for its words ("it's the music, stupid!"), there are layers of the intricate onion of Butterfly's libretto worth peeling.

I want to consider two such layers. One is a through-line of nature references, with a concentration on birds and flowers. Puccini wrote "If you want to understand my music, you have to understand Pascoli." Giovanni Pascoli was a Tuscan nature poet. In addition to being the composer's colleague, Pacoli was a fellow Lucchesi (analogous to a "Roanoker; " regional pride is as marked in Italy as in the USA).

Nature images abound in Puccini's operas, and they infuse Madama Butterfly from start to finish. Each of the five principal characters reference flowers as metaphor, symbol &/or sign. Butterfly's maid, Suzuki speaks with flowery chatter when first introduced to Lt. Pinkerton. The marriage broker, Goro compares his bevy of Geisha girls to a "garland of fresh flowers" as he tries to sell one to the US Consul, Sharpless. One of the most famous musical excerpts from the score is the "flower duet" Butterfly and Suzuki sing in Act II. The opulence of that music mirrors the excess of the imagery of (literal) showers of flowers flooding the spring with vibrant color and fragrant perfume.

Such imagery also resonates with tragedy. The flower's fragility, and the blossom's inherent transience heighten the tragic drama of Madama Butterfly. Pinkerton's brief closing romanza is a "farewell to a little flower" (Addio, fiorito asil). That his remorse--however belated--is sincere is underscored by his aside in the elegiac trio he sings with Sharpless and Suzuki. "How bitter is the perfume of this flower..."

Sharpless, the messenger (and reluctant prophet of the unfolding tragedy), delivers one of the more ironic instances of floral imagery when he attempts to read Butterfly a letter from the "husband" who has abandoned her. Pinkerton asks him to "find that beautiful flower of a girl" (and break the news to her gently).

The "love duet" that closes Act I is one of Puccini's most beloved scenes. It also features poetry that foreshadows the tragedy with irony worthy of Greek drama. Near the close of the duet's first section, Butterfly expresses her fears, and Pinkerton dismisses them with the words "love won't kill you." Later in the scene, she worries she will be caught, pinned and encased like a real butterfly. Pinkerton retorts, "there's a little truth in that, but it's so you won't get away..."

That this unsettling exchange is set to ravishing music underscores the tension in great drama, and is one of the reasons opera wields such power.

There was another kind of tension when Butterfly first opened in 1904. That premiere at La Scala was one of the most notorious opening night disaster's in the history of the theatre (and if time permits, I'll write a bit about that fiasco). Besides incorporating Japanese melodies into his Italian opera, Puccini aimed for verisimilitude with other musical details. Japanese bells and chimes are called for, as are bird whistles, all intended to evoke atmosphere (or "local color").

One of Puccini's biographers wrote about the crowd's reaction to those bird whistles (in the orchestral Intermezzo, before the last scene). Their unexpected appearance evoked a "deafening variety of cackling and animal cries" from the already vociferous opening night audience. The din was so great "La Scala became a lunatic aviary."

Not quite the impression Puccini had in mind by evoking the dawn with sounds from nature.

“I am writing birdsong, so beautiful!” Pascoli wrote in 1903 (while Puccini was composing Butterfly). The birdsong Puccini writes in the beginning of Act II is colorful and witty. Pinkerton promised Butterfly he'd return when the Robins come "home" to nest. When Butterfly asks Sharpless (in the aforementioned "letter" scene) when the Robins nest in America, a comic exchange occurs:

SH: "I don't know, I've never studied ornithology."
MB: "Orni...?"
SH: ...thology."

This scene is full of such witticisms pointed up by Illica's clever rhyme scheme. In this same scene, Goro tries to peddle Butterfly to a rich prince, Yamadori. Butterfly's control here belies attempts to oversimplify her as a one-dimensional naif. As the eminent songwriter Stephen Sondheim points out, speaking in rhyme is a sign of a character's cultivated intelligence. Butterfly is alternately lampooning and sarcastic, and in command of an intricate ensemble situation. She mimes an American courtroom scene with perfect comic timing, stumping Sharpless in the process. Puccini's use of musical parody (a slow "English" waltz, reminiscent of operetta) is another fragrant layer of significance.

Like the variations on the flower theme, the wit of these internal scenes heightens the drama, turning the screws as this heart-breakingly beautiful opera unfolds.

Why Madama Butterfly Matters...

2011-03-02T09:15:00.002-05:00

Below is a short "preview" appearing in the current City magazine. Opera Roanoke's stellar cast and production team are currently in rehearsal for our March 18 & 20 performances of Puccini's masterpiece, Madama Butterfly. Over the next couple weeks I will share more about the opera and Opera Roanoke's fully-staged production of it.

WHY MADAMA BUTTERFLY MATTERS…

One summer night in 1900 London, a 41-year-old Italian, who spoke no English, went to see a new (English) play. This man, who preferred the country to the city, who loved his hunting rifles, who would soon become obsessed with racing cars, was the greatest opera composer alive. The play that inspired Giacomo Puccini that night became the most popular opera in the world, Madama Butterfly.

Madama Butterfly is an archetypal story that is both a relationship drama (a tragic love story) and a cultural one. The “east-meets-west” dynamic has always been vibrant. Consider the word “oriental.” In that single word (noun, adjective, stereotype) is an almost electric current that reminds us how powerful language can be. It also reminds us how important context & perspective are, and how volatile signs & symbols can be (“oriental” carries different meanings today than in Puccini’s time, for example).

Without getting too far afield, a (sensitive) word like “oriental” has enough of a spark to remind us that east-west “relationships” are still charged with energy and dramatic possibility. This potential for drama, emotional depth and catharsis is one of the reasons the Butterfly story is timeless. That this story, with the staying power of mythology and folklore, is best known as an opera tells us something significant about Puccini’s genius. It also opens a window on opera’s unique ability to evoke the entire range of human emotions, from the beautiful to the terrifying. Opera pinpoints these emotions with the concentrated focus of music (wedded to drama, theater and stagecraft) and brings them to life with one-of-a-kind power.

On the surface, Butterfly is a tragedy of lost love. A young Geisha marries a US Naval lieutenant, who leaves her (never having intended to stay), and only returns three years later, his American wife in tow, to claim his and Ms Butterfly’s child. She responds in the only way she knows how (in order to preserve her sacred, family honor): she takes her own life.

This classic, cross-cultural, wartime love story has currency from the ancient world to today, from Homer (Iliad) to Rodgers & Hammerstein (South Pacific). The opera’s abiding appeal resides with Puccini’s heroine, a complex, three-dimensional young woman whose apparent predestined fate never fails to move us. We love Butterfly because our hearts break with--and for—hers. She is an archetypal grieving mother (a variation on the Stabat Mater of Christian iconography). She is at once a self-determining tragic character, a sacrificial victim and a martyr.

And we have one of the world’s most gifted interpreters of Puccini’s heroine for our March production. Yunah Lee has made Butterfly her “signature role.” Opera companies around the world vie for the privilege of presenting Ms Lee’s “commanding and touching performance” consistently praised for “revealing the highs and lows of Madame Butterfly’s emotions.”

Hearing the drama and seeing the music of a great opera come to life before your senses is an experience unlike any other. Opera shares traits with musical theater, the world of “classical” music, and the soundtracks that accompany our movies and TV shows. One of the qualities that make a work of art “great” is its ability to transcend the limitations imposed by the specifics (of setting, situation, etc) to aim for the universal.

You don’t need to know anything about Nagasaki, the US Navy, Italian opera or Japanese tea ceremonies to “get” Madama Butterfly. Opera is special, but you don’t have to be a specialist to appreciate or enjoy it. Just get a ticket, bring a friend, and spend a couple hours with one of the world’s greatest musical stories. Come hear and see for yourself why Madama Butterfly is the most popular opera in the United States.

It's Iphy: Brush up Euripides

2011-02-22T20:26:00.007-05:00

Iphy is opera-speak for Christoph Willibald Gluck's classical opera, Iphigenie en Tauride. Gluck (1714-1787) based the 6th of his 7 French operas on the Euripides drama, Iphigenia in Tauris (the title alone is a link to the previous entry, Nixon in China: another opera that connects history, mythology & journeys to distant places).

I won't try and unwind that thread from Ariadne's proverbial spool any further. Iphigenie en Tauride is the next Met "Live in HD" broadcast, Saturday at 1 pm, hosted by Virginia Western Community College (more info is online at both of our websites).

Gluck's operatic adaptation from Greek mythology was composed in 1779. It had a profound influence on the 23 year old Mozart (echoes of Iphy recur throughout the Magic Flute). A generation or two later, the young Hector Berlioz would cite Iphigenie en Tauride as a formative influence on his decision to pursue a life in music. Gluck features prominently in Berlioz's important book on orchestration (a textbook still in use by composition teachers).

Gluck is noted for the "beautiful simplicity" of his elegant music and is most remembered for the "reforms" he brought to 18th-century opera. He bucked conventions and broke operatic rules he thought impeded the drama. These included the baroque convention of the da capo aria (one where the opening section was repeated, ostensibly to highlight a singer's virtuosity with embellishments and ornamentation).

One of the reasons Gluck is not as well known today as the opera composers on either side of him (Handel and Mozart) is simply because his arias are more thoroughly embedded into the texture of his operas. Like Wagner, late Puccini and Strauss, the "songs" in these operas are not easily excerpted. Is it surprising that Gluck's most famous opera, Orfeo ed Euridice contains his single most famous aria, Orpheus' lament for his lost love, Che faro senza Euridice?

In addition to restoring a sense of dramatic continuity using "through-composed" arias (and recitatives that emerge and recede organically from the musical texture), Gluck was a master orchestrator. He was one of the first composers to use the orchestra as a real character in the drama. His colorful use of percussion instruments (cymbals were still new in European music at this point in time) began a trend whose popularity hasn't waned. Gluck also linked the dramatic effects of his orchestration to the emotional states of his characters.

Iphigenie opens with "calm sea & prosperous voyage" music (deceptively calm music which always heralds a great tempest). The storm music raging around this island of the Black Sea is mirrored in Iphigenie's heart as she recalls her fate. "Brush up Euripides" refers to the mythological backstory. Iphigenia was sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon to curry favor for the Greeks in the Trojan war. Euripides saves Iphigenia from death at the port of Aulis with a deus ex machina intervention from the goddess Diana (who whisks Iphy away to Tauris).

Another important chapter of the backstory concerns Iphigenia's brother, Orestes, who has avenged their father Agamemnon's death. Agamemnon (who sacrificed his daughter) was killed by his wife, Clytamnestra. Oreste kills his mother to avenge his father.That Iphigenie en Tauride ends with Oreste and Iphigenie happily reunited is but one of Euripides most potent examples of dramatic irony.

Gluck underscores the kinship of Iphigenie and Oreste with musical symbolism. The storm music that appears with Iphigenie at the opening of the opera recurs in another guise later. The furies interrupt a moment of Oreste's calm by demanding vengeance for the murder of his mother. The furies (or Eumenides) drive Oreste almost to madness in a scene with pitch-perfect music. (In another labyrinthine thread, the Eumenides both refers to the furies and an Aeschylus drama that connects to Elektra, Strauss's opera named after another sibling in this family.)

Iphigenie en Tauride is a compact opera (just under two hours of music) featuring a pivotal triangle of characters. One relationship hinges on the long-lost sibling's reunion; the other is one of genuine fraternal love between best friends. Both Oreste and Pylade would rather lay down their own life in order to save the other. The music they sing to that effect--especially (the tenor) Pylade's aria--is classic Gluck, noble and sincere, an elegant example of "beautiful simplicity."

Many opera fans will be attending this broadcast expressly to see and hear the great Placido Domingo. Maestro Domingo has been portraying the (lyric) baritone role of Oreste for several seasons now. The great trio of principals is complemented by beloved American artists. The mezzo soprano Susan Graham sings the title character, and Oreste's companion, Pylade is essayed by Paul Groves (one of my favorite tenors). Patrick Summers conducts, and Roanoke's own Steven White has been behind the scenes aiding the musical preparation as an assistant conductor.

Berlioz described the "sleepless nights" Gluck's music caused his excitable soul. He claimed Iphigenie left him "possessed by an ecstasy." Come see and hear for yourself Saturday.

(And if you read this in time, I'll be talking about Iphigenie at the Virginia Western Natural Science Center this Wednesday at noon, in the next of our ongoing lunchtime opera chats).

Adams & Sellars & Nixon in China

2011-02-09T10:01:00.004-05:00

Below are some quotes from recent articles about John Adams' opera Nixon in China, and the Peter Sellars production that is having its belated Met debut (24 years after it premiered to widespread acclaim and notoriety). Check it out this weekend Live in HD from the Met at Virginia Western Community College.

At the bottom is (my personalized) shorthand outline on Adams' musical style, with a brief listening guide to Nixon.

Articles & features about Nixon in China on the Met website: metopera.org

Nixon in China tells of the groundbreaking visit of U.S. President Richard Nixon to Communist China in February 1972, during which he met with Party Chairman Mao Zedong (spelled Tse-tung in the opera) and other Chinese leaders, flinging wide the long-closed doors between the U.S. and China. This event inspired Adams to write his first opera: “part epic, part satire, part a parody of political posturing, and part serious examination of historical, philosophical, and even gender issues,” as he described it. [Met Educator Guides]

The Myth of History (from Adams & Sellars):
What made the project perfect?
JA As Americans, we’re obsessed with our president because that person embodies our national psyche, both the dark side—our paranoia and our tendency to abuse power—but also our idealism and our curiously American optimism…

People have forgotten what a shock it was to see Nixon and Mao together, shaking hands and chatting it up. After all, China was supposed to be the dark evil empire—I remember how the Cold War image of Mao was burned into our consciousness here in the U.S. So Nixon’s trip quickly became a kind of mythological moment—I think of it as a clash of ideologies.

Why do you object to people labeling Nixon a “CNN opera”? 
PS I really want to emphasize that it’s exactly the opposite. CNN is fast-breaking, with instant reactions, and of course the rush to judgment. Opera is about a long view. What opera offers is poetry, is music. Alice Goodman has taken these historical events and transformed them not into headlines, which reduce and simplify, but into poetry, which expands and complexifies [sic].

on the distinctive vocal writing for each character:
JA It seemed obvious that Nixon’s music would be white, big band music from the ’30s and early ’40s, which is, of course, when Dick and Pat fell in love. Pat is the complete antipode of Chiang Ch’ing. I wanted her to be not just a shrieking coloratura, but also someone who in the opera’s final act can reveal her private fantasies, her erotic desires, and even a certain tragic awareness. Nixon himself is a sort of Simon Boccanegra—a self-doubting, lyrical, at times self-pitying melancholy baritone. Mao is the Mao of the huge posters and Great Leap Forward. I cast him as a heldentenor. [cf: Mozart & Wagner parallels…]

Political Spouses: A Study in Contrasts between Two Characters
JA Both wives of politicians, they represented the yin and the yang of the two alternatives to living with someone immersed in power and political manipulation. Pat was…the quintessence of ‘family values,’ a woman who stood by her man (preferably a foot or two in the background), embraced his causes and wore a gracious if stoic smile through a long career…. Chiang Ch’ing began her career as a movie actress and only later enlisted in the Party and…ultimately became the power behind his throne, the mind and force behind that hideous experiment in social engineering, the Cultural Revolution.

Madame Mao: I am the wife of Mai Tse-tung 
Who raised the weak above the strong
When I appear the people hang 
Upon my words, and for his sake 
Whose wreaths are heavy round my neck
I speak according to the book.

Adams (and others) on Adams:
--1947 (Worcester, Mass); Harvard; twice Schoenberg’s “grandson:” studied with Leon Kirchner, then disciple of John Cage;
moved to SF Bay area in 70’s [East Coast/West Coast] “2nd gen. minimalist” BUT w/ “non-modernist expressivity;”
polymath of styles & inspirations (pan-Euro, -Mid/Far-East; poetry & philo/religion; myth/history/dreams…)
YET North American through & through; a "melting pot" of styles/influences:
*Americana style of Ives/Copland
*American Experimental/fringe school (also includes Ives) embodied in "loner"/"outsider" artists from Thoreau to Cage
*Minimalist style; a "less is more" aesthetic full of vibrant energy/pulse, musical Dada "thumbing of the nose at the establishment..."

“My operas have dealt on deep psychological levels with our American mythology…” and finding “mythic potential of contemporary icons.”

“I’m not interested in lecturing my audience….what appeals to me is their power as archetypes, their ability to summon up in a few choice symbols the collective psyche of our time”

“You use poetry, you use music, you use gesture to radiate out from that span…”

“One of the glories of opera is its capacity to show us, from without and within, the process of characters coming to terms with experience beyond their control. Through the intensity of all its components, opera makes this process…vivid.” [TM on Dr A]

Peter Sellars on Adams/Nixon/Opera:

“The odd thing is, it takes poetry, music, and dance to give back to our own history its actual dimensionality. What opera can do to history is deepen it and move into its more subtle, nuanced, and mysterious corners” (quoted in Thomas May)

“…music and poetry evoke a set of free associations (a set that can’t be censored)” [Dr Atomic]

“We’re on earth to try to figure out how to cross over. And opera is a quintessential art form of crossing over, which is why I think Nixon was so compelling, and why so many things in the history of opera are about that kind of border crossing of imagination, which is so rich” (Opera News)

[Adams & Glass] both represented a break-through in opera history—they made opera a living art form again…the resurgence was very profound, in part because what we brought was subject matter. Opera became about something, about figures that our generation could recognize and deal with, b/c we grew up with them…we inherited their political structures & their aspirations.”

Adams music is like “multi-paneled altarpieces that you cannot possible take in all at once” (re: El Niño)

On the expectation of spectacle [ie “the bomb” in Dr Atomic]:

“The Greeks were not interested in what an exploding eyeball looks like; when Oedipus tears out his eyeballs, they were interested in ‘why would this person tear out his eyes?!?’”

*****

Listening Guide: [big, brassy orchestra, 40’s swing band w/saxophones, etc]

Adams style: Janus-faced; Yin/Yang; manic & melancholy, antic & tragic

“trickster” side of restless, energetic “public” surface (minimalist, “pop”);
serious, lyrical, introspective, poetic/psychological/metaphysical depth…

style=color field paintings/abstract expressionist; (abstract rhythm; expressionist/impressionist harmony/line)
techniques=moto perpetuo, heterophony/layerings, orchestral "jabs" of staccato chords

1. Opening Chorus: “The People are the heroes now”
--minimalist (=Glass); repetitive/obsessive; hypnotic/narcotic/numbing;

2. a. Landing of the Spirit of '76 (orchestra interlude)
--huge orchestral "engine" of sound, energetic pulse, and form that
fits the content (ie: this music sounds like an airplane in flight...)

Premier Chou greets Nixon: “Your flight was smooth, I hope?”
--stylistic/character contrasts (note Nixon’s parody of Americana…)
b. Nixon’s first aria: “News” (repeated 12X!!!);
complex baritone role=Verdi/Wagner

3. Pat’s Act II aria: “This is prophetic”
lyric soprano (=sympathetic heroine; Pamina, Gilda, et al)

4. Madame Mao’s Act II aria: “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung!”
--parody/irony; operatic type: “shrieking coloratura”=Queen of Night

5. The parody-ballet: “The Red Detachment of Women”
“a lurid emblem of the Cultural Revolution” (Mays)
Young as we are / We expect fear / Every year
More of us bow / Beneath the shadow

6. Act III: “the most extended ensemble in all of opera” (PS)
inward action; monologues & conversations;
all reflecting “an increasingly elegiac sense of regret” (Mays);
“nocturnal reverie” (JA);
“musical twilight” (PS)

The third act of Nixon in China is my favorite act of contemporary opera since Benjamin Britten's last essay in the genre (in 1973; he died in '76). Nixon's finale is memorably poignant, and powerful in part because so unexpected (this was the original "CNN Opera"). John Adams is a composer full of surprises. And that is an underrated virtue in the worlds of "art appreciation." We could all use a little newness every now and then: a new spark, a new perspective or stock-taking, a re-newed sense of purpose, or just "a new lease on life." Riffing on a word (like "new") echoes the amplifying capacities inherent in any concentrated form (minimalism being one example). John Adams concentrates his considerate compositional gifts and skills into music that is exceptionally well-crafted, pulsing with energy and coursing with life. It is music full of pleasant, unexpected, (sometimes unsettling but always engaging!) surprises.

Lunch this Wednesday with John Adams, Nixon & Mao!

2011-01-31T19:34:00.003-05:00

I hope many of you will join me for an informal lunch-time discussion on the "modern classic" opera, Nixon in China. John Adams is the most celebrated opera composer alive. This Met premiere of Nixon (Adams' first opera, from 1987) is directed by Peter Sellars. The "maverick director" created the original production for Houston Grand Opera and has been called by Opera News the most "passionate advocate for classical music in the world today."

Adams music is vibrant and colorful, as contemporary as his subjects, yet firmly rooted in the operatic tradition. His stage works frequently elicit comparisons to Mozart, Verdi and Wagner. In the composer's own words, all of his operas "have dealt on deep psychological levels with our American mythology."

I will briefly discuss Adams and his music, and offer selections from some of the composer's operas, including Nixon in China. The informal lunch hour will conclude with a "Q & A" generated discussion.

Virginia Western hosts this week's discussion, and is the new home of exclusive Roanoke presentations of the Metropolitan Opera "Live in HD" broadcasts. More details on this "impromptu" presentation are below; I'll follow up with another piece on Nixon in China next week, in anticipation of the Met premiere of this great contemporary musical drama, LIVE in HD, Feb 12.

Location & other details:
Virginia Western Community College
Natural Science Center
February 2nd
12:00 noon-1 pm
(Bring a lunch; drinks will be provided)

Directions: On Colonial Avenue, turn onto Winding Way beside the Community Arboretum. At the top of the hill, turn left into the parking lot and the Natural Science Center is the first brick building on your left.

Opera Weekend: Jan 22-23

2011-01-20T10:39:00.002-05:00

This weekend music lovers around Roanoke can experience back-to-back treats of the operatic variety. Saturday at 1 pm the next Met "Live in HD" broadcast will play at Va Western Community College
(go to virginiawestern.edu or operaroanoke.org for more info & tickets).

It is my single favorite Puccini opera, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). It was premiered 100 years ago at the Met conducted by the eminent Italian maestro, Arturo Toscanini and starring the great tenor Enrico Caruso.

It is arguably Puccini's greatest score and that is one of the primary reasons it
is a favorite among musicians, critics and opera buffs. When we talk about
"the score" we are referring literally to the entirety of the written music.
(We conduct from the score; the orchestra musicians play from individual parts; the singers use a piano/vocal score that contains their sung roles and a reduction of the orchestral music into a piano part. For those inquiring minds...)

So the score of Fanciulla is one of Puccini's greatest creations. He was struck by the innovations in harmony and orchestration by composers like Debussy (the style of musical impressionism) and incorporated these stylistic advances into his score. You'll hear music that evokes the wind and winter weather seamlessly interwoven with Puccini's signature sweeping melodies. Unlike La Boheme, from which arias are often excerpted, Fanciulla's arias are so integrated into the score they are rarely featured apart from their musical "home."

Like Puccini's most popular opera, Madama Butterfly (coming live in 3D to Roanoke March 18 & 20!), Fanciulla strives for the verisimilitude of "local color" by incorporating bits of folk music indigenous to its setting. Puccini studied Japanese music when composing his tragic masterpiece, and he used American tunes when composing this opera mirroring the American dream (one with a happy ending).

And speaking of the American aspect, its heroine is a gun-toting, Sunday-school-teaching bar owner named Minnie, beloved by a bad-guy-type Sheriff. The love triangle is completed by the lovable outlaw-bandit (tenor), whose life is saved by our heroine. Clint Eastwood, eat your heart out. The original "spaghetti western" is a gourmet delight of an opera, and "the good, the bad and the ugly" never had music so glorious.

If you think you've never heard any of the music of La Fanciulla del West, think again. Unless you've been asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the last 20 years, you have heard the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera one way or another. Its most famous ballads are "borrowed" directly from Puccini's evocative score. Fanciulla opens with "hello" and ends with "good-bye" and the two hours of music in between is some of the most compelling in the repertoire.

But please don't stop with Fanciulla because one of the rising stars of the Met will be here for one day only on Sunday, Jan 23 at 2:30 pm. Soprano Leah Partridge is establishing herself as one of the world's leading young singers, and you can see and hear why this weekend. Leah will be sharing a program of American songs from her soon-to-be released debut CD. Prominent on her program is the music of Ricky Ian Gordon. Ricky's music is the centerpiece of our season finale concert, Mother's Day Serenade, starring Elizabeth Futral. And Ms Partridge is poised to follow in the footsteps of eminent artists like Ms Futral.

This recital promises to be an engaging and inspiring afternoon of great music written by some of our country's most compelling voices. If you like Leonard Bernstein's music for the stage, then you'll love the likes of Ricky Ian Gordon and Jake Heggie. Their songs have been embraced by not only the likes of Elizabeth and Leah, but by other exceptional artists like Renee Fleming, Audra MacDonald and Frederica von Stade.

I hope you all will make it a weekend of opera in Roanoke.

I am away performing Carmina Burana with the Virginia Symphony and JoAnn Falletta this weekend and hate to miss these festivities. In my stead Sunday afternoon, WDBJ's Robin Reed will be your host for Leah Partridge's "Stars in the Star City" recital. I know you'll want to welcome both of them to the Shaftman Performance Hall stage.

Faust: Myth and Music

2011-01-10T22:20:00.004-05:00

Below is an outline and listening guide for a presentation I gave this afternoon to Roanoke's Shakespeare Book Club. It was inspired by Opera Roanoke's October presentation of "Faust and Furious: A Ride with the Devil." It is intended as a journey through the symbols of the Faust legend, the archetypes resonant with it, with parallel applications inspired by one of our great stories.

Faust: Myth and Music

“I am the anti-Faust! Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to un-wrinkle his brow & recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten & my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul” [Salvador Dali]

“Faust embodies (Goethe’s contemporary) Lessing’s famous aphorism that if god had two hands, one representing the truth, the other the search for truth, one must choose the latter” [from Theological writings; quoted in Hollis]

“Faust represents the renaissance appetite to know everything” [Borges: "The Enigma of Shakespeare"]

“A classic [American] tale of reinvention, self-delusion and broken dreams” [a tagline for a theatrical adaptation of The great Gatsby]

“I don’t believe in answers; I believe in vibrant questions…
… the unfinished aspect, the searching, the existential longing…”
[American baritone Thomas Hampson, on playing Busoni’s Dr Faustus]

And the questions Faust raises are as legion as the variations the legend has inspired: “the deal with the devil;” the morality play; an alchemical & metaphysical mystery, a love story, adventure and thriller, the hero/anti-hero epic…

Faust: theme & variations—parallel literature
Blake: The Four Zoas [Urizen=Meph; Marriage of Heaven & Hell]
Dostoyevsky: Demons/Possessed [political allegory on nihilism]
Brothers Grimm: The Devil’s Sooty Brother
[parallels the source for Stravinsky's A Soldier’s Tale]
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Faustian composer & allegory of Germany in the Nazi era; see also Death in Venice for the Doppelgänger/Shadow allegory)
Istvan Szabo’s 1981 film, Mephisto (another Nazi/political allegory)

Other Films:
Humoresque (Joan Crawford as a Mephistophelean soul stealer)
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal;
The Devil and Daniel Webster; Mephisto Waltz;
The Devil's Advocate (Al Pacino) Angel Heart (DeNiro=Louis Cyphre)
Wall Street (Gordon Gekko=Doppelgänger of Faust/Mephisto)

Broadway Musical: Damn Yankees
Pop culture honorable mention: "The Devil went down to Georgia" (Charlie Daniels Band)

“Marlowe’s take on Faust, an archetypal encounter between good and evil and the imperiled human soul, was more greek than Christian." James Hollis points us in the direction of mythology. And continues:

"The function of myth is to initiate the individual &/or the culture into the mysteries of the gods, the world, society & oneself.”

Myth & Tragedy: Hamartia=the tragic flaw or “Wounded vision”
(and the source of hubris)
Ambition/Over-reaching: Phaeton—“your lot is mortal/but what you ask beyond the lot of mortals” (warned by his father Eos/Helios: heaven’s charioteer)
Icarus & Daedalus, the architect of the Cretan Labyrinth who “turned his thinking/toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature” (from Ovid's Metamorphoses; a nod in the direction of Faustian alchemy...)

"Faust is the first modern, full of yearning, which in its excesses becomes ‘faustian.’ Stepping free of metaphysical supports or constraints, he becomes responsible for his soul’s meaning."
[Hollis: Tracking the Gods, The Place of Myth in Modern Life]

In “stepping free” he most closely resembles the bad-boy Titan of mythology, Prometheus: bestower of the divine gifts of fire and the arts (whose “shadow” or symbolic “sister” is Pandora…)

Faust is the promethean man; Prometheus the faustian titan;
The adjectives ascribed to their names are interchangeable…

As myth then, the Faust legend embodies classic archetypes;
identifying them enables us to amplify these types as symbols;
one of the primary means through which our experience with these stories resonates with meaning…

Archetypes:
Faust=Prometheus; tragic hero; Renaissance man
(and "Everyman?" good question...)

Mephisto=Lucifer (fallen angel); the shadow; “dark side;” the great "negator:"
“The spirit of evil is fear, negation” (Carl Jung)

Helen/MargueriteGretchen=Anima/Soul; The virgin; Guardian Angel

Martin Bidney’s study Blake and Goethe posits “Authentic life consists of creative tension between contraries” and it is in the 19th century Romantic period where the Faust legend proliferates; this tension is amplified by writers like Blake & Goethe. “The spirit of Negation can be transcended, transformed by the spirit of imaginative mediation.” Whether that mediator is Helen of Troy or God, these romantic “modern books of Job” continue the dialectic tension in the quest for proverbial meaning & authenticity.

The Faustian Pact is its own archetype and its energy still animates ancient stories and the modern imagination—whether a bargain with god or a "deal with the devil," the Pact informs Biblical stories and myths:
The sacrificial pact with God: Jephthah, Idomoneo (an early Mozart masterpiece); Admetus & Alcestis (an opera by Glück)

The mythological (“heroic”) quest is tripartite: Departure/Initiation/Return

From Homer and Virgil to Dante the mythopoeic journey charts a singular course—with countless variations. Joseph Campbell describes a “call to adventure,” a departure, an embarkation…

This is followed by a series of episodes, trials & adventures that initiate, challenge & change the protagonist, and like Ulysses’ Odyssey, each chapter is a tale all its own…

The return finds the Hero changed--bringing back the “boon” of a golden fleece, an awakened princess, a treasure, a pearl of great price-- to the betterment of society. And just as a “hero” can refuse the call (or like Rip Van Winkle, slumber away the years) the return can end in failure, tragedy or death…

Faust: A musical journey
Tartini: Devil’s Trill sonata
(one of the earliest examples of the "devil in music")
Liszt: Mephisto Waltz (a classic example of the "dance with the devil")
Schumann: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust
Stravinsky: A Soldier’s tale; The Rake’s Progress
Britten: Death in Venice
(the baritone portrays multiple manifestations of the "shadow" figure)
Extra Credit: Wagner’s entire life & work IS Faust incarnate…

Campbell likens myth to dream (echoing, mirroring, amplifying Jung):
“The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist…”

Ferruccio Busoni would agree. His Doktor Faustus opens with a spoken prologue by the poet, evoking the “magic mirror” of the stage:

“Such plays of unreality require
the help of Music, for she stands remote
from all that’s common; she can wake desire
that’s bodiless; in air her voices float…”

Departure:
Busoni’s dark, dense opera (unfinished at his death in 1924) is closer to Marlowe in spirit (though Busoni based the libretto on Goethe; Gretchen/Marg. does not appear but Helen of Troy does, as the Duchess of Parma…)

Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele opens with a "Prologue in Heaven" that parallels the celestial conversation between God and Satan in the book of Job and evokes the music of the spheres...

Franz Schubert set poems from Goethe’s Faust,
but the Goethe setting for today’s journey is his titanic song, Prometheus
(and if a qualifier were appended to this song, it would be Prometheus Defiant)

The Pact: Stravinsky wastes no time in introducing his devil and sealing the deal in The Rake’s Progress. Like Gounod's Faust this opera cuts to the chase...

Initiation/Adventure: or “A Date with the Devil!” &/or ‘Eros & Thanatos’

Marguerite/Gretchen/Helen:
“O thou art fairer than the evening air
clad in the beauty of a thousand stars” [among Marlowe's most ravishing couplets...]

Witches Sabbath/Walpurgis Night/Ride with the Devil/To Hell & Back...
Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss" is frighteningly evocative...

Apparition/Vision/Dream: Busoni’s "Traum der jugend" (Faust's paradox: “unknowable/unattainable/unfulfilled…”)

The return: Redemption/Damnation (Gounod: Meph: "Jugée!" Angels: "Sauvée!")

*Gounod’s final trio & apotheosis; (AND Liszt & mahler: Faust II)
*Stravinsky’s “hero” Tom Rakewell, after being cursed by the hellbound villain Nick Shadow, calls for Venus (and Achilles, Persephone and co, from the Asylum)
*Britten evokes Faust’s death in a humanist elegy after WWII based on Edith Sitwell's haunting poetry
[Canticle III: Still falls the Rain:
..."O I'll leape up to my God/who pulls me doune/see, see where Christ's blood/streams in the firmament...]
*Busoni’s curtain falls with Mephisto (the tenor) as the Night-watchman who "finds" Faust’s body and flatly declares
“this man has met with some misfortune.”

Busoni gives the last word to the poet in his Epilogue to Doktor Faustus:
So many metals cast into the fire
does my alloy contain sufficient gold?
if so, then seek it out for your own hoard;
the poet’s travail is his sole reward.
still unexhausted all the symbols wait
that in this work are hidden and concealed…
let each take what he finds appropriate;
the seed is sown, others may reap the field.
So rising on the shoulders of the past,
the soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.

The penultimate line recalls the end of Gatsby:
"we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."
And the last line is aspirational as the end of Goethe's Faust II, where
“the eternal feminine/leads us onward."

With the ravishing apotheosis of Mahler's 8th, the "Symphony of a Thousand" the journey is accomplished.

For reference:
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno (trans. R. Pinsky, FSG, 1996).
Bidney, Martin. Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination
(Univ. of Missouri, 1988).
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999).
Boyle, Nicolas. Goethe: The Poet and His Age, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1992).
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen, 1949).
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (Penguin, 1955, 1960)
Hollis, James. Tracking the Gods:
The place of myth in Modern life (Inner city, 1995)
Homer. The Odyssey (Trans. R. Fagles, Viking, 1996).
Kerenyi, C. The gods of The Greeks (Thames & Hudson, 1951).
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus (Everyman, Knopf, 1947, 1992).
Ovid. Metamorphoses (Trans. R. Humphries, Indiana, 1955).

Faust on CD/DVD
Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust (LSO Live, Colin Davis).
Boito: Mefistofele (Decca, De Fabritis; DVD: Kultur, Ramey).
Busoni: Doktor Faustus (DG, Leitner; DVD: Arthaus, Hampson)
Gouno: Faust (EMI, Pretre; DVD: DG, Binder)

Other Faustian scores:
Britten: Canticles (CD: Naxos, Langridge; Decca, Pears)
Death in Venice (CD: Chandos; DVD: Kultur, Tear)
Liszt: Faust Symphony (CD: DG, Bernstein; Decca, Solti)
Mahler: Symphony no. 8 (CD: Decca, Solti; DVD: DG, Bernstein)
Schubert: Prometheus (CD: BBC, Britten/Fischer-Dieskau)
Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (CD: Decca, Chailly; Met, Levine)

Lists & Notebooks

2010-12-18T11:26:00.004-05:00

I am jotting down lists for a talk next month to Roanoke's Shakespeare book club on Faust: "Myth and Music."

'Tis the season for lists. Shopping lists, gift lists, wish lists and more. Umberto Eco's fascinatingly quirky monograph, The Infinity of Lists is open on the kitchen table to an excerpt from the Walpurgisnacht scene from Goethe's Faust (I am not planning on replicating Mephistopheles's bewitched recipe, for the record).

The Walpurgisnacht scene is one entry in my notebook of archetypal "journeys to the abyss." Christ's descent into hell another. Also Ulysses's and Orpheus's journeys to the underworld. And Dante's trip with Virgil in the Divine Comedy. One might add a trip to any shopping mall in the US the weekend before Christmas. And so on.

My obsession with mythology can now add James Hollis's Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life to this year's top-ten list of favorite books.

He quotes Paul Tillich's observation that "the greatest sin of modernism was not evil…but rather the barren triviality that preoccupies us" (Inner City Books, 1995). Which recalls another apt quote from another list.

This one from the pragmatic critic and philosopher, John Dewey. "The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum...submission to convention" (Art as Experience, 1934. Perigree edition 2005).

I can see the mountains from my apartment in Roanoke, the sea from our bay-side home in Norfolk. Nature is the origin of the aesthetic and an antidote to humdrum convention. Selah.

My list of favorite Italian films would start with several by Michelangelo Antonioni. That list would be ordered by preference for his muse, the mysterious and unpredictable Monica Vitti. Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) is at the top of the list. Among other concerns, it centers on the balance between technology and nature. The poetry of modernity. I'd never seen nuclear reactors as man-made volcanos but that is exactly what they resemble in the opening sequence of this visually stunning film (Antonioni's first in color).

It can be viewed as a series of modern art tableaus. Urban landscapes. Toxic beauty (the yellow smoke and sulfuric wetlands embody such oxymoronic tension). Though I don't think the film would make a great opera, it provokes thought on the tense relationship between tradition and progress. Which brings to mind the shifting landscape of classical music in the US, from concert programming to opera production.

But I digress. That tangent was inspired by a quote from Signorina Vitti as she looks dreamily out on the water (I listed it in my notebook, just above John Dewey's).

"It's never still...never, never...I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land."

One of the most interesting perspectives on what's happening on land is from an airplane window. I love sitting by the window on a partly cloudy day and glimpsing the curvilinear form of the city-scape as it comes into view upon descent. To trace the arc of a bending road that mirrors a river's curves is to marvel at the beauty of technology and the marriage of the aesthetic and pragmatic. One could expand the list of metaphors thus inspired, from the winding paths of life to the body's curves to "Spoon River" and beyond...

I don't know if that counts as an example of Dewey's aim to "restore continuity" between the experience of everyday life and the aesthetic. But living in a place where that continuity is conscious helps. The list of cities with an admirable commitment to public art might start with Chicago. Within a few blocks of one another are sprawling and fanciful sculptures by Calder, Miro and Picasso, with Chagall's panoramic mural of the Four Seasons in between.

The four seasons reminds one of the quaternity of elements, the stages of humankind, the four corners of the square and the squaring of the circle. The mythopoeic fourfold and the unity forged through diversity.

(There I go again, poeticizing lists, listing metaphors, randomly mythologizing).

One answer to the question "what does one do on one's first saturday off since the summer?" is to make such lists. To "discern the movement of soul" (Hollis) and follow Dr Jung's advice to relate to the infinite in the quest for the "authentic life" of meaning.

'Tis the season to give thanks and celebrate the mysterious beauty of life. To borrow a wonderful metaphor from my colleague, Jim Gates, let us give presence more than presents. Let us count the ways life is rich with meaning. The list is not important. It is the act itself.

In Flanders Fields with Don Carlo

2010-12-08T17:19:00.006-05:00

One of the world's most beloved war-time poems is John McCrae's In Flanders Fields. Its haunting, lyrical voice comes directly from the front of the so-called "Great War" (the British term for what we know as World War One).

In flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

I believe one of the reasons we love tragic art (even if we'd be embarrassed to admit it) is because it touches our emotions so directly we are affected--we are moved--before the experience registers as a powerful affect (thus giving us the opportunity to disavow such affected responses. "Plausible deniability," right?)

I would never deny my deep affection and abiding love for Verdi's Don Carlo. Its historical epoch (the 16th c. reign of Spain's King Philip II) is centuries removed from WWI and even further from us. But one of the functions of pieces like In Flanders Fields is that it not only speaks for its own time, but like all great tragedy, it speaks for all time.

I adopt such an idealist tone, of course, to betray my sympathies with the title character and his freedom-fighter friend, Rodrigo, the Marquis of Posa. Like all great stories, Don Carlo is full of human characters in dynamic relationships--with one another, with the state/church/society, and also with destiny (fate) and history.

Don Carlo is arguably more Shakespearean than Verdi's settings of the Bard. Based on a play by Friedrich "Ode to Joy" Schiller, Don Carlo deals with the complex relationships of six leading characters set against the historical backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. This produces great tension across the spectrum of relationships, resulting in engaging drama. The Inquisition also conveniently provides the composer with an "excuse" for an elaborate, ballet-like demonstration of operatic "pomp and circumstance" in the auto-da-fe scene (a celebration crowned with the burning of heretics).

So Don Carlo has grand operatic spectacle on an epic scale with characters Shakespearean in dimension. The score is a paradigm of compositional virtue where motivic unity is concerned. That's a fancy way of saying it's "closely argued." Another way of saying it's "tight." One doesn't have to recognize "motivic unity" as such to hear or "get" Don Carlo. It is a cult favorite of opera (and Verdi) lovers because of its great cast of characters and the sheer beauty of their music. It casts its own special shadow full of deep-hued tones. It is beloved for the unusual aura of the deep voices in its cast (1 baritone & 3 basses).

The aforementioned Rodrigo is one of the great Verdi baritone roles (which makes it one of the great baritone roles)! His death scene near the opera's close is one of the most beautifully crafted and moving moments of any male singer in opera. King Philip should be an easy-to-loathe villain--a tyrant who selfishly steals his son's fiancee (via political deal) and rules by oppressive force. He has one of the greatest monologues in opera when he sings of the unrequited love of his wife.

The second stanza of In Flanders Fields identifies the chorus singing voice to the poem:

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Don Carlo is full of voices in dialogue and contains some of Verdi's greatest ensemble pieces. The second act alone contains not one but three major duets: the popular "friendship" duet between Don Carlo (T) and Rodrigo (B); a classic "lost love" duet between Carlo and Elisabetta, the prima donna. The act ends with one of the great baritone & bass duets in the repertoire. "Restate" (Stay) is also a chillingly relevant piece of theater in the form of a political conversation.

The new Met production is right on by allowing these voices to resonate. The next "Live in HD broadcast" is a co-production with London's Royal Opera House (Covent Garden). The eminent british director Nicholas Hytner tells the story in bold strokes underscored by great fields of primary color: red, black, and white.

In Great Britain, Armistice Day (what we celebrate as Veterans Day) is marked with near ubiquitous red poppy lapel pins. The scene from Act II mentioned above features poppies strewn about the stage; an entire field of poppies is the "background" to both the "lost love" duet & the great political duet that follows. The symbolism of those bright red poppies would not only have registered palpably with the London audience; it would do what symbolism is supposed to do: it would provoke (inspire) thought & reflection.

And Don Carlo has much to inspire & provoke. In addition to the spectral timbre of its sound world, its epic length contributes to its powerful cumulative effect. All grand opera is intended to pack such a wallop to the senses. That we have an-aesthetized those senses through (some of) the trappings of modernism should give us pause enough to invest the several hours required for such a mutually rewarding endeavor as an afternoon spent with Don Carlo.

"There he goes again being an utopian idealist.
Silly tenor.
Next he'll be quoting poetry!" In point of fact, he shall.

The last stanza of In Flanders Fields reminds us why we need (tragic) art to begin, why Shakespeare and Verdi--poetry and music--help us feel more alive by helping us be more fully human.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I shall not break faith with Don Carlo as it has generously shared its wealth with me since I started my love affair with it, as an idealistic undergraduate at James Madison University some years ago. Of the 6 productions I've viewed, this new one is my favorite. But I love Don Carlo from his opening aria to Elisabetta's grand scena nearly 4 hours later regardless. Though I loathe the despicable villain, the Grand Inquisitor gets my attention and holds it every second he's on stage (his duet with the King following Philip's great monologue is a coup upon a coup)! Verdi wrote greater tragedies (Otello) and grander epics (Aida), but Don Carlo has a special power that seems to emanate from the mysterious tomb of Charles V of its source. Beware. It just might become your favorite opera, too...

Let us recount our dreams...

2010-11-18T12:38:00.002-05:00

[I posted the following on my Musings blog, and it references earlier posts there. But the opera that prompted this musing is one I want our audiences to experience in a future season...]

The third act of Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream embodies the cliché "from the sublime to the ridiculous." The act opens in a fairy-land evoked by shimmering violins in three-part divisi playing in their upper register. It is among the most beautiful music its composer wrote.

The Fairy King, Oberon undoes the spell he cast on the Fairy Queen, Tytania. She awakens to a recapitulation of the violins' theme that swells in sensual crescendo with the entire orchestra, complemented by cascading harp glissandi. It's a wonderful moment in an act of musical theater that is full of felicities and surprises.

Upon waking her first lines are:

My Oberon! what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamor'd of an ass.

By my troth, thou wast! For Oberon hath played a trick on the fair Fairy Queen (with the timeless theatrical device of the love potion) which made Tytania fall for the first thing she laid eyes upon. To her shame and the audience's delight, she espied the lovably boorish weaver, Bottom. They would qualify for opera's most unlikely couple were Bottom NOT turned by fairy-magic into the form of a donkey. But an ass he is. Or was.

Britten has been rightly praised for the ingenious ways he evokes the differing worlds of Shakespeare's fairy tale (for kids of all ages). The Fairy land is differentiated from the lyrical but earth-bound music for the pairs of Athenian lovers (themselves victims of love potions and spells). The human realm of the Athenian nobles is marked from the world of the simple "mechanicals," the rustic men who form a rankly amateur theater troupe in their off hours. It is appropriate that Shakespeare's prototypes for the dry, slapstick brand of British humour (en vogue through Monty Python) should be given music that parodies parallel operatic stereotypes.

But when I saw the engaging and thoroughly entertaining production of Britten's opera recently in Chicago, I was surrounded by opera loving philistines who neither responded to the double entendre of puns like Tytania's or the ridiculousness of the rustics "play within the play." There were a small handful of subscribers in the upper balcony who laughed out loud--a good production of the play AND the opera IS laugh-out-loud funny. But more people either walked out or audibly voiced their incomprehension at the slapstick antics and raw wit.

To cite one ridiculously funny instance among many, the play "Pyramus and Thisby" features the classical amateur "ham" actor (Bottom) as the hero Pyramus. His beloved Thisby is played by the awkward young man, Flute in drag. They meet on either side of a wall (which is played to hilarious effect by a fellow rustic, Snout) and try to kiss through a chink in said wall. The kiss does not go well and "Thisby" cries in "her" strained tenor "I kiss the wall's hole/not your lips at all!" That's funny. And funnier in a good production. Which this was.

The humorlessness of hardened, "serious" music lovers did not diminish my enjoyment. But it is a reminder of how difficult communication can be and how vital it is for the human channels to stay open. As others have corroborated, a culture that loses its sense of wonder, mystery OR its sense of humor is in trouble.

I think we are even more uncomfortable with raw, in-your-face emotion than we are with bawdy humor. "We" being polite, educated, middle class (mostly white) "culture." Consumers of "serious" music and "high" art.

In one of Alex Ross's recent New Yorker reviews he writes penetratingly about the reception of Leonard Bernstein's serious music. He quotes Bernstein's description of Britten's music as "gears that are grinding and not quite meshing." Ross says Bernstein "might better have been describing his own work."

I think both men--who had an interesting, episodic relationship from Bernstein's conducting of Britten's first opera, Peter Grimes in 1946 through Britten's death in 1976--have been misunderstood. Ross goes on to describe the musical language of Bernstein's opera, A Quiet Place. Before noting that at its premiere it was "criticized as a hodgepodge--nearly every Bernstein score was criticized as a hodgepodge," Ross makes one of those observations that reminds me why he's one of my favorite critics.

"It's as if he [Bernstein] were healing the twentieth century's stylistic divides, with Romanticism as the meeting ground; at several crucial points, the orchestra enters a beautifully ominous space that might be described as Cold War Mahler."

That "hodgepodge" style and the bridging of stylistic distances was something Lenny and Benjie both did quite well, even if they were much criticized for it. Their music is unfashionably conservative from the avant-garde's perspective. The "grinding gears" (which now amount to very mild dissonance--film scores can be much more grating) have been wrongly associated with "ugly" modernism. This still puts off many listeners (those for whom "I know what I like" usually translates to "I like what I know"). I think both factors contribute to the checkered reception history of both composers' works. But I think something else is in play. Their music is emotional and romantic and direct. And such openness makes all kinds of (western) people uncomfortable.

I couldn't choose which evocative world of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream I like best. The metaphysical realm of the fairies is wonderful (and has more of Britten's infectiously charming music for children). I love the bel canto opera parodies in the finale's play within the play (they were a wink in the direction of La Stupenda, Joan Sutherland, who'd recently sung in Britten's Gloriana to great acclaim). And the music the Athenian lovers sing upon waking from their dream (which gives this rambling ditty its title) is ravishingly beautiful.

In a recent dream I had I looked up at the night sky and the stars lit up like night-lights, like bright white dots in a pointillistic Seurat canvas, shown in relief against a background of pitch. I have no idea what that image represents, but it was cool.

I'm reading a wonderful book of art criticism, Caspar David Friedrich: And the Subject of Landscape (Joseph Leo Kerner. Reaktion, 1990, 2009). Kerner takes some time to connect the threads of early 19th-century German culture, the birthplace of the "Romantic." I was reminded of a recent post below on "fragments and hedgehogs" (which may well become the title of the book I want to turn this all into) as I read quotes from the visionary romantic poet, Novalis:

"The world must become Romanticized. That way one finds again the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative potentializing."

Jawohl! Restoring some of the balance our rational, goal-oriented, technology-driven western world has misplaced would involve realizing more of our affective (and metaphysical) potential and might just restore some of the lost "original meaning."

Kerner hasn't referred (yet) to Jung or John Dewey, and his book predates Iain McGilchrist's efforts to give the right brain its due (all referenced in posts below) but the "meaningful coincidence" of synchronicity is there when we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

And like beholding more of the stars, even this reception requires effort. Just a couple of pages after the Bernstein review in the same (Nov 15) New Yorker, John Lahr reviews a new production of Tony Kushner's groundbreaking epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on American Themes. He quotes a note Kushner had written the cast of the opening night run in LA in 1992:

"And how else should an angel land on earth but with utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain...and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst."

Yes it is. I love Tony Kushner. I love his bold, audacious vision, his passion and the range of raw emotions his characters evoke and the all-too-human states they embody. He is a modern-day prophet and poet and the scope of his imagination lives up to such titles. In another example of critical excellence, Lahr writes about "one of the most thrilling of Kushner's verbal arabesques--[in which] Harper has a vision of repair for the ozone layer, whose hole has obsessed her doom-filled days:"

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

What souls! "What visions have I seen!" I feel like Walt Whitman yawping an open-throated affirmation of life itself. Or like Lenny: "And it was good, brother, and it was goddam good!"**

As the Athenian lovers wake up from their disturbed visions, they sing in chorus,

Why then we are awake; let's go,
And by the way let us recount our dreams.

Let us wake up and connect the dots of our lives into lyrical canvasses that mend the tears by recounting dreams. Why shouldn't we?

(**The quotation comes from Bernstein's Mass, another theater work involving parody & satire, not to be confused with blasphemy &/or gratuitous profanity)

7 Reasons to Hear Richard Zeller Nov 7

2010-11-04T20:26:00.007-04:00

Opera Roanoke is celebrating National Opera Week with an "opera unplugged" recital November 7 featuring "one of America's foremost baritones," Richard Zeller.

We've been offering promotions in honor of the celebration all week, and we'll be giving away tickets at our "free-for-all" booth outside Center in the Square at the Historic Roanoke City Market Friday from 11-1.

Since inquiring minds want to know what this recital thing is and what to expect, I offer the following annotated list.

7. A Sunday matinee of live music is one of the best ways to add some variety to a fall season of game-days. Add some cultural spice to your weekend ahead of the holiday shopping rush. Give yourself a gift. Feed your senses and your soul by spending 90 minutes with Richard Zeller Sunday.

6. The songs Richard will be singing are ravishingly beautiful. The pop ballads that have been crooned in showers and cars for generations owe their provenance to the 19th century Romantic "art song." And you don't have to understand German, French or Russian to appreciate how gorgeous the songs of Schumann, Brahms, Duparc and Rachmaninoff are. Their meaning will be obvious through Richard's performance. And the basic human emotions of longing, love and loss have never been set to more ravishing music.

Schumann's bicentennial is this year, but we don't need an excuse to program the music of this romantic who was a prototype of the tortured artistic genius. Besides being one of the great composers after Schumann, Brahms was one of music history's most talented babysitters, looking after the Schumann children while he cut his teeth as a composer.

Duparc left us only a handful of songs, but what exquisite miniatures they are. If a single song can be a self-contained world unto itself, Duparc's are a perfect example. And if you've never heard a great Russian song, then Rachmaninoff's are worth the recital alone. The beautifully haunting lyricism that perfumes the music we associate with the "Russian soul" is embodied in these songs.

5. The arias (that is, "songs" extracted from operas, not to be confused with the stand-alone "art" songs) Richard is offering feature music that will put a smile on the faces of all: young & old, opera buff and newcomer. The Toreador Aria from Carmen is one of the most beloved tunes in the world, and if you don't recognize the title you will recognize the tune (and want to hum along)! This great aria--full of life and spirit--is a prime example of why opera is not the distant, remote, inaccessible art some still think it is.

4. The standards from the Broadway stage are American classics. Some Enchanted Evening is one of the most popular songs of all time, and if you've never heard a voice like Richard's sing this music --burnished, resonant, full-bodied (and un-amplified)--then you have never heard it the way it was intended to be sung. As familiar a song as it is, I cherish the chance to hear a singer like Richard sing it.

3. And speaking of American classics, Richard is including a wonderful slice of "Americana" in a set of songs by Robert MacGimsey. "Sweet little Jesus Boy" is a classic of the American folk song tradition. One would be forgiven for thinking it was the product of the African American spiritual tradition. In fact, its composer was a caucasian man who studied and worked with black artists and paid tribute to his apprenticeship by adopting his teachers' style.

2. If you've been to a recital by a great classical singer like Richard, you know what a special experience it is. Words like "magical," "transcendent" and "powerful" are but a few of the adjectives to describe this concert featuring one voice accompanied by a single piano. The "opera unplugged" moniker is an apt one. Whatever you call it, recitals like this are a special occasion; we are fortunate to have them here at Opera Roanoke every season.

1. The single best reason to come on Sunday is Richard Zeller himself. Richard's voice is a mirror of his person--warm, rich, strong and full of character. When a great singer like Richard opens his throat to sing the listener is offered a window into his soul. The opportunity to enter into the world of an opera singer through the solo recital is a singular experience.

To be invited & lured into this realm heightens the magic of the experience while rendering its expressiveness even truer to life. Why else do we call such voices "larger than life?!" To be captivated & entranced by such resonant tones emanating from a singer only a few feet away is thrilling. If you've ever been impressed by a singer on a show like "America's Got Talent" then you're in for a treat. America has talent indeed, and a supreme example of it will be in Roanoke for one day only November 7 at 2:30 pm on the Shaftman Performance Hall Stage at the Jefferson Center in downtown Roanoke. I hope you will be there too.

www.operaroanoke.org

Celebrate NOW with Opera Roanoke

2010-11-02T11:11:00.002-04:00

It's National Opera Week: Celebrate NOW with Opera Roanoke! Click on the link below to read about daily ticket specials. Share this with your friends on Blogger, FB, Twitter and join us for an "opera unplugged" recital with one of the greatest voices in the country, Met opera baritone, Richard Zeller. I'll write more on his program later.

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Celebrate-NOW-with-Opera-Roanoke.html?soid=1102184341655&aid=M-KYVuHtVVA

The Soul of Russia: Boris Godunov

2010-10-28T10:23:00.008-04:00

In the middle of the 19th-century, shifting political winds and rapidly changing regimes were accompanied by tides of nationalism across Europe. The arts manifest such currents through various means (achieving a variety of ends). Opera has been a primary artistic vehicle for such historical representations. Though this may not be an obvious conclusion to draw today, Opera was a populist art form until the 20th century. But that is another essay. One example should suffice. Not only the operas but the name of Verdi became a literal acronym for Italy's nascent movement of independence (Viva Emanuele, Re d' Italia).

In Russia, a circle of largely self-taught composers based in St Petersburg represented the Russian soul in music and were dubbed "The Mighty Handful." Borodin, Cui, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky effectively launched the "Petersburg School" that inspired Russian composers from Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov to Prokofiev and Stravinsky to Shostakovich.

According to the writer Solomon Volkov, the music of the so-called Petersburg school is characterized by "brilliant orchestration, exotic harmony, emotional 'wavelike' development of material a la Tchaikovsky and dramatic 'Dostoyevskian' contrasts a la Mussorgsky."

The last description is central for understanding the masterpiece of Russian opera Boris Godunov is. The Mighty Handful (or Russian Five) were interested in bringing a dose of realism to the palette of musical drama and looked to Dostoyevsky as much as any Russian writer.

Boris is based on a drama of Alexander Pushkin (the source of Tchaikovsky's most famous operas Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, among other seminal Russian musical dramas). Mussorgsky's style more closely aligns with Dostoyevsky's expressionist realism than Pushkin's lyrical romanticism. One of the novelist's specialties was the confessional monologue (the tortured conscious of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment). The composer adapts this technique and the title character has dramatic solo scenes rather than traditional arias. This "cross breeding" of music and prose happened parallel to Wagner's through-composed style of music dramas. Without Boris Godunov the operatic masterpieces of composers disparate as Debussy (Pelleas et Melisande) and Shostakovich (Lady McBeth of Mtsensk) would not be what they are.

Like Pelleas, Boris is a "slow burn" of a piece. Over three hours of music, much of it dark-hued and brooding, brings to life a tale wrought with woe. The received wisdom on Boris is that the opera has two protagonists: the title character and the Russian people. This duality works on a number of musical and dramatic levels and palpably affects those who yield to the power of this great opera.

Synopses are widely available so I will share a few examples from the opera and the new Met production available now thanks to the "Live in HD" broadcasts. The work is framed by huge ensemble tapestries that voice the people's discontent. That these scenes mirror and parallel one another is more than a formal nicety. The director of the Met production, Stephen Wadsworth (whose 11th hour ascension to that role is itself operatic) says "the opera is about history repeating itself." This is nowhere more apparent than in the scenes of "regime change" that open and close the opera. "The tragedy of history," as the Met's Season Book quotes the director, "[is] that we always forget its lessons and make the same mistakes."

If Boris is an epic political-historical drama on one level, it is a family-character drama on another. The opening scenes of the opera are great choral tapestries (lovers of Russian choral music can luxuriate in the timbre of the Met chorus which has never sounded better). The 100-voice chorus heralds the "coronation scene" where Boris accepts the Tsar's crown. Rather than the expected "pomp and circumstance" of a victory speech, his first words are "my soul is sad." Until his death in Act IV-in one of the most moving scenes for a character on any stage-Boris is haunted by his great crime. Like a tragic Shakespearean king, ambition led Boris to have the rightful heir to the crown murdered (years before the opera opens). Boris' confessional monologues throughout the opera underscore the duality of his shame and regret and his futile attempts to purge his guilt by ruling as peacefully and benevolently as he can. The intimacy of the scenes between Boris and his two children (perfectly cast in the Met production) strengthen our ties to this tortured soul and help define Boris as a fully drawn, three-dimensional tragic hero. The Met has the Boris of the present generation in the great German bass, Rene Pape. In the 15 years I have been avidly following Pape's rock-star like ascension on the world's operatic stage, he has never been more engaging than in this compelling production.

Space does not allow for the various versions, revisions and posthumous attempts to "correct" Mussorgsky's opera. Again, synopses of these facts are widely available. The composer's original 1869 version lacked a female lead and was uniformly rejected. Mussorgsky's revised 1874 version added an act set in Poland to kill several operatic birds with one stone. The "Pretender" Grigory (a heretic monk who assumes the identity of the murdered heir to the crown) flees to Poland and romances the princess Marina (the opera's prima donna is a mezzo soprano). The scheming Jesuit priest Rangoni uses this relationship in his attempts to place the Pretender on the throne and with the help of the imminent (Polish Catholic) Tsarina convert Russia to the mother church (the composer's contempt for institutions did not stop at the academy).

The so-called Polish Act thus gives Boris Godunov a prima donna, a love story, ballet music (a la Polonaise) and the grist of sub-plot intrigue. The ardent singing of the Latvian tenor Alexanders Antonenko (Grigory) and the oily, pitch-perfect characterization bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin brought to the Jesuit Rangoni sustained my attention during an act I usually skip at home. Whether the Polish Act enhances or detracts from the work as a whole is in the eye (and ear) of the beholder.

It does lengthen an already long "song." But time plays a central role in Boris, metaphorically speaking.

T.S. Eliot famously wrote near the end of his musical poems, The Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
(from "Burnt Norton")

One of the recurring motifs in the score is the sound of tolling bells. At the start of the coronation scene pealing chimes are punctuated by the brass with the most notorious of intervals, the tritone (an augmented 4th or diminished 5th). Known as "the devil in music" this unstable interval has been both sign and symbol since it was so termed in the medieval period. In the opera's context the portentous tolling of the bells represents time as progressive and cyclical. The tolling bells also illuminate the protagonist's diminishing grasp on reality (like Lucia, Boris disintegrates from hallucinations to death).

When the bell struck at the death of Boris, nearly 4 hours into the evening, I was not the only one in my circle of friends at the Met Monday night who wept.

And if Boris were a more conventional opera (the Polish act notwithstanding), it would end with the title character's death. But the aforementioned crowd scene which mirrors the opening is essential to Boris as a whole. The "unredeemable" quality of time is present in the mob that tortures and kills the figures it earlier feted.

Though not unique to Mussorgsky the "Holy Fool" (or "village idiot," the simpleton or yurodivy, in Russian) is a secondary-and central-character in the drama. From Shakespeare's fools and jesters to Beckett's tramps, these outcasts are prophetic voices of insight, wisdom and truth (with a capital T).

In the Met production, a larger-than-life-sized book haunts the scenes like a specter (into which the aged monk, Pimen writes his chronicle of history, ending with a chapter on Boris' crime). The yurodivy's first appearance in Act IV ends with a pivotal confrontation with Boris. In one of the most haunting moments in an evening that has lingered in my consciousness for days, the Holy Fool lies down in the book and folds one of its pages over his battered body like a blanket.

Mussorgsky identified with the Holy Fool in his own life. His friends referred to him as a yurodivy. The lament with which the entire ensemble opens the opera is assigned at the end to the lonely prophetic voice, poignant, "eternally present" and ultimately tragic as this great opera:

Flow, flow bitter tears.
Weep, weep, Christian souls!
Darkness darker than night.
Weep, weep, Russian people,
Hungry people!

[Boris Godunov is broadcast in Roanoke October 30 at 1 pm at Virginia Western Community College. For more information visit vwcc.edu or operaroanoke.org. Save the date for Opera Roanoke's next "Opera Unplugged" recital, November 7. Hear Met opera baritone Richard Zeller sing songs of Rachmaninov and much more! 540-982-2742]

Faust & Furious: A Ride with the Devil!

2010-10-13T19:08:00.007-04:00

I began this morning at the (for me) ungodly hour of 5 am on WDBJ 7's Morning show. You should be able to cut and paste the following link into a new window (I'm not a savvy enough blogger to know how to disguise these codes): http://www.wdbj7.com/videobeta/b190987a-f873-45f7-8121-519ce3b69566/News/Opera-Roanoke-presents-Faust-and-Furious

In between our spots discussing Opera Roanoke's season opening concert, Faust and Furious: A Ride with the Devil! we heard updates on the rescue of the Chilean miners. Tag-lines like "hear Heaven and Hell battle it out before your very ears" assumed an uncanny resonance as the story unfolded before the rapt attention of the world.

This reverberation was underscored when I returned to my office mid-morning (following a visit to a local middle school to talk about opera in general and Faust in particular). One of the Roanoke Symphony Chorus members had left a thoughtful message and shared this quote from the 2nd miner to be rescued, Mario Sepulveda:

"I was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won."

She noted the proximity of the miner's metaphor to the Faust story the chorus has been rehearsing in preparation for our gala-style concert October 16.

Faust is the most famous work of literature in the German language, and one of those tales that can truly be called immortal. None of the middle schoolers raised their hands when I asked them if they'd heard of Faust, but most of them acknowledged familiarity with the Charlie Daniels' Band song, "The Devil went down to Georgia."

The Faustian Pact or Bargain is synonymous with moral &/or ethical compromise made for material gain. "The devil made you do it," "selling your soul" and "giving the devil his due" are just a few catch phrases for the Faustian arrangement which forfeits the soul for temporal satisfaction.

So everyone knows who Faust is. Many may be unfamiliar with Goethe's Faust or the Doctor Faustus of Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Mann (an allegory for Germany itself in the Nazi era). But Faust has inspired movies from The Devil and Daniel Webster to The Devil's Advocate to Angel Heart (with Robert DeNiro playing the devil with the subtle name of Louis Cyphre). Gordon Gekko in Wall Street can be viewed as a "Doppelgänger" character of Faust and Mephistopheles.

A recent article on a theatrical adaptation of Fitzgerald's great jazz-age novel, The Great Gatsby, described it as "a classic American tale of reinvention, self-delusion and broken dreams." That's an apt description of Faust, who reinvents himself with a little supernatural assistance from Satan to revel in youth and sensual pleasure.

On October 16, Opera Roanoke will present excerpts from the three most famous operatic adaptations of Goethe: Gounod's Faust, Boito's Mefistofele, and Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust. Some of the music will be familiar to nearly everyone, as Gounod's lyrical melodies, rapturous duets and ensembles earned him the title "the composer of love." And even music which may be unknown to many, like Boito's evocation of the "music of the spheres" in his "Prologue in Heaven" to Mefistofele has the ring of familiarity because of its elemental quality.

The image of heaven and hell in conflict evoked by Mr Sepulveda also reverberates back to the Biblical book of Job. Boito mirrors the introduction to Job by pitting the voices of heaven (the chorus) against Satan (a bass solo, sung by Opera Roanoke favorite Jeff Tucker) over the question of Faust (both Faust and Marguerite are sung by Roanoke audience favorites. Tenor Dinyar Vania and soprano Barbara Shirvis complete our all-star cast of archetypal characters).

During the breaks this morning between the TV interviews, we commented on the story of the miners and the rumor that a movie of the saga was already in the works. I couldn't help but leap to the question of what kind of music would partner the story. The live and unedited coverage needed no soundtrack other than the sounds of human voices and applause. When soundtracks are called for, they work best when using the styles and techniques of musical drama. In opera, music IS the soundtrack that evokes the entire range of emotions, relationships and conflicts that shape human life from cradle to grave and intimate towards the beyond.

Ultimately, Faust is a tale of redemption. Gounod and Boito reinforce this with endings that are nothing short of ecstatic apotheoses. Berlioz stays true to his title (the Damnation of Faust) and literally goes to hell and back. He serves up an example of musical onomatopoeia in his "Pandemonium" that will take your breath away. You may not have time to catch it again before Gounod and Boito enact transcendence itself with some of the most rapturous music ever written. All three composers have enlivened an immortal tale with music of engaging vitality worthy of this complex existence we call the human condition.

The Met's Live in HD: Das Rheingold preview

2010-10-06T12:37:00.003-04:00

I wrote a preview of the Opera Roanoke season and the Met Live in HD broadcasts last week, and now that I've seen Das Rheingold for myself, I'll write a bit about what audience members can expect when they attend the broadcast in Roanoke at Virginia Western on Oct 10. I will start with a brief "listener's guide" and then offer a brief review of the performance and production.

(For a detailed synopsis, you can go to the Met website or any number of other online sources).

The opening of Das Rheingold is pure genius. It represents the Rhine river in a long unfolding over one basic chord (E-flat, a key associated with the the divine in Bach and the heroic in Beethoven). As the Met playbill puts it "there is nothing in all of opera like this miraculous beginning." Wagner's description of its origin may be apocryphal, but is nonetheless colorful as the music itself.

"I awoke from my half-sleep in terror, feeling as though the waves were now rushing high above my head...I quickly understood the very essence of my own nature: the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within."

And from that "stream of life" a 2 1/2 hour "prologue" in four seamless scenes emerges from the depths of the Rhine and ascends to Valhalla, the castle of the gods.

Out of the these watery origins emerge three Rhine Maidens, mermaids who guard the opera's eponymous subject, the gold of the Rhine. Space does not allow for the volume that could be written on Wagner's use of leitmotiven ("leading motives"). Risking oversimplification, consider these motives as aural clues. Musical signs and symbols. Character traits manifest through music. The Rhine Maidens effervescence (and their dangerous coyness) is reflected in the music they sing and the orchestrations that accompany them. The lord of the Nibelungs, Alberich, is characterized by dark and brooding music before he sings a note. Listen for the subtle but significant shift in tone in the lower strings that heralds Alberich's appearance. Listening to Wagner is like reading with your ears. And one of the measures of a good stage production--of any opera in any style--is how it complements and partners the music. I think this new production is a resounding success in that regard.

Each of the scenes in Das Rheingold has a pivotal dramatic point. In the first scene it comes when Alberich renounces love and steals the gold. Like so much of Wagner, the drama is writ large in the music, allowing the ear to trace the narrative.

One of many felicities of this opera is the musical arch Wagner traces between the scenes. These orchestral interludes function on two levels by serving the musical drama and facilitating the changes of scene. The transition into the second scene introduces us to Wotan, lord of the gods and his wife Fricka in music of noble breadth (richly scored wind and brass orchestrations) that informs us through the ears who these characters are.

The second scene pivots around Wotan's contract (one of several areas over which he presides) with the giants who have built the castle, Valhalla. After the marital dialogue that allows us to literally listen in on two complex people in a complicated relationship, we hear the drama accelerate. Freia enters in music out of the romantic German tradition of sturm und drang ("storm and stress"), pursued by the twin giants, coming to collect her as wages for their labor.

The second scene introduces us to the gods and giants and the scheming demigod Loge, lord of fire. This mercurial character (the adjective is literal) has music that hums and buzzes and busies about like the intriguer Loge is. Whenever his music sounds in the trilling upper voices of the orchestra, you know something is afoot.

The second interlude descends into the nether regions of the Nibelheim and the music shifts accordingly into the arrestingly industrial sound of 18 anvils pounding away behind the scenes of Alberich's sweatshop. The confrontation between Wotan, Loge and Alberich results in Alberich's capture. When Alberich proves his powers of sorcery by turning into a giant snake, the music reveals the source of virtually every film score written since. You can hear when trouble is eminent and/or when these characters are up to no good! One fleeting moment of humor is orchestrated near the end of this scene when Loge tricks Alberich into transforming himself into a small toad. Listen for the "ribbit" in the clarinets, and do not accuse Wagner of lacking any sense of humor!

The final scene pivots on Alberich's curse of the magic ring he is forced to relinquish to Wotan. As in Tolkien's famous epic, the ensuing drama unfolds around a ring cursed for its power. That curse comes in the first section of the final scene, and it is the last we hear of Alberich for some time. Another character who appears infrequently--but is always pivotal--has one of the best entrances in all of opera. Erda emerges from beneath the earth's surface to warn Wotan of the ring's evil power. The curse is fulfilled for the first time just minutes later when the giants fight over the ring Wotan has reluctantly given them. You could close your eyes and hear exactly when, where and how Fafner kills his twin brother Fasolt over the ring.

After all this grim drama, some supernatural wonder is called for, and Wagner delivers with short "arias" for the brothers of thunder and lightning, Donner and Froh. Donner's hammer clears away the clouds and Froh builds a magic rainbow bridge to carry the gods into their new castle of a home, Valhalla. Even if you've never seen or heard Das Rheingold, this music should sound familiar, like an old friend whose acquaintance we know even if we can't place its origins. The triumphal ascent into the castle completes the musical arch begun in the Rhine in the richest "prologue" to opera's greatest epic.

The big news of the Met's new production is Robert Lepage's 21st century production involving a 45-ton set dubbed "the machine" with interactive technology that responds to the singers' movements and voices. It's simply brilliant. And a beautiful example of technology in the service of art.

The video projections on the set work on multivalent levels like the music. The machine's transformation from scene to scene mirrors the music. It is a beautiful use of space and design. It is a "unit set" (that is, one primary set piece that serves every scene, varied through lights and props) for the 21st century that only a multi-million dollar production could support.

Watching the machine transform from the deep-hued water of the Rhine (in the prelude) to a virtual shell-bed upon which the Rhine Maidens play (in the first scene) was thrilling. As was each of its transitions throughout the evening. The Met and the NY Times have videos and photo galleries linked (and we have linked some of those on the Opera Roanoke Facebook page). The move to and from Nibelheim was the most dramatic and was literally a sight to behold. The lighting was perfect. The range of gold, copper and bronze (burnished with chiaroscuro shadings) to depict Alberich's realm evoked both the gold's lustrous allure and the uncomfortable darkness of slaves' quarters.

The visual claustrophobia of Nibelheim was relieved by the brilliant laser-light rainbows at the conclusion. It is one of the most visually striking productions I've seen. And it was innovative without being indulgent. It was also traditional and faithful to Wagner. It was servant and collaborator to and with the score.

And how well was the score served! For starters and closers, Wagner couldn't have a better collaborator than James Levine. I bravoed when he first appeared in the pit; the ovation that greeted his arrival was worthy of the stature of one of the most treasured maestros in operatic history.

And the Met has assembled a cast to deliver the goods. From supporting roles like the Rhine maidens (who are alluring vocally and visually) to the key players of Wotan and Alberich, this is a well-sung Rheingold. Eric Owens was the best sounding "bad guy" I've heard in the often thankless role of Alberich. I heard singing that would make him a formidable Wotan. The star of the Met's new cycle is the great Welsh bass-baritone, Bryn Terfel, and he lived up to his hype (the Met's expensive PR campaign features life-size posters on bus stops with Terfel's Wotan and the tagline "mingle with the gods"). Stephanie Blythe was Terfel's partner, and her rich mezzo is as compelling as any singer in her class. Patricia Bardon's Erda was memorably sung, and other supporting roles like Dwayne Croft's Donner and Adam Diegel's Froh commanded attention with their ardent vocalism. I was particularly happy to hear Adam's Met debut, as we shared a memorable fall together in Tulsa several seasons ago. It is always a thrill to share a friend's success.

More than any other opera composer, Wagner rises or falls with the orchestra and conductor recreating his musical dramas. The Met Orchestra's playing under Maestro Levine was simply superb. They sounded magnificent--incisive and finely etched in executing the motivic details and beautifully shaped in the sweeping grandeur of Wagner's vision. I was thrilled and cannot wait for Die Walküre next spring!

Get your Met in HD tickets online from Opera Roanoke or Virginia Western Community College, or at the door Sunday, October 10 at 1 pm.

The New Season(s)

2010-09-30T19:29:00.007-04:00

I am eagerly anticipating the start of the opera season here in Roanoke, and over the next two weeks I will write more about the two events that loom largest on our horizon:

1. The Met "Live in HD Broadcasts" open in Roanoke at Virginia Western Community College on Oct 10 with the "live in HD" movie broadcast of Das Rheingold, the first installment in the much touted new production of Wagner's Ring cycle.

2. Opera Roanoke's curtain raiser, Faust & Furious: A Ride with the Devil! follows on October 16 at Shaftman Performance Hall.

The digital revolution that has changed the music world (in every genre) underscores the unique thrill of the live concert experience. While the convenience of mp3's makes music more accessible than ever, there is simply no substitute for the "real thing" itself. We are fortunate to live in an age with both.

I love having at my fingertips (via my laptop or ipod) thousands of "songs" from my favorite operas. I have playlists for my favorite composers beginning with John Adams and ending after Wagner. A new discovery for me this summer was satellite radio (a feature of my GM hybrid) and my dial is set to Sirius XM 79, where I listen to live Met recordings from their 75-plus years of archival recordings. Though not the same as being there, it is the next best thing. I'll take it.

In the Met's monthly magazine, Opera News, the current issue features an article by Brian Kellow provocatively called "The Crowd Snores." http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2010/10/Features/The_Crowd_Snores.html

Kellow recalls those halcyon days before text-messaging, when audiences were focused on the performance and not their blackberries. Passionate intermission discussions featured partisans of rival divas rather than the latest fantasy football results (disclosure: I have a blackberry and text; I know very little about fantasy sports teams).

As I write this, a Met broadcast from 1979 is playing of Massenet's great opera Werther (not to be confused with the gold-wrapped candy, Goethe's "hero" is pronounced "VerTARE"). A young Kathleen Battle is in a supporting cast led by Alfredo Kraus and Regine Crespin. Werther is the first Massenet opera Steven and I want to bring to Roanoke audiences. If you know the opera, you know why it gets our vote. Stay tuned.

A recent broadcast featured the debuts of two of the great stars of their--and any--day. Franco Corelli and Leontyne Price both debuted in a 1961 production of Verdi's Il Trovatore. The ovation that greeted their curtain call lasted 42 minutes. Think about that for a moment. Also featured in that thrilling performance was a young Canadian soprano about to make her breakthrough, Teresa Stratas, and the great American mezzo, Irene Dalis (a name familiar to Opera Roanoke for her work here with our company's founders).

Sirius XM radio broadcasts live from the Met several times a week during the regular season. It plays "encore" performances during the summer. Our own Steven White's performance of La Traviata was broadcast in August. I know I wasn't the only listener with chills up my spine and tears in my eyes when I heard Steven's name announced at that curtain call!

The Met manages to sell several thousand tickets a night for most of its season. All of those Traviata performances were sellouts. I hope all of Opera Roanoke's supporters will help ensure a rousing ovation and a full house for Maestro White, the RSO, and the 200 other performers joining him for our season opening concert, Faust and Furious: A Ride with the Devil!

I will be the Master of Ceremonies for this most spectacular concert in Opera Roanoke's 35 year history. I am looking forward to the highlights from all three versions of the Faust legend represented in our operatic concert suites on October 16. In particular, I can't wait to hear:

*Boito's awesome evocation of heaven itself in the Prologue to Mefistofele;

*Berlioz's wild and literally crazy version of all hell breaking loose in the onomatopoeic "Pandemonium!"

*The transcendent hymn that closes Gounod's grand opera, Faust.

But before that "save the date or be damned" concert on October 16, the Met is coming to Roanoke, live and in high def. Before the Met comes to Roanoke, Amy and I will be making a quick trip to NYC to see the new Rheingold production in person.

On the Met's homepage (http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/) there is a link to a photo gallery of the new Rheingold, including a short video that illustrates why I am describing this new production as Lord of the Rings meets Cirque-de-Soleil. The latter is literally true, as the French-Canadian production team includes Cirque designers.

Other imminent highlights of the Met season (also coming in the HD broadcasts) are two of the grandest operas in the repertoire. THE embodiment of the Russian spirit is Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, featuring the operatic bass (who most closely resembles a rock star), Rene Pape.

Later this fall comes Verdi's epic masterpiece, Don Carlo. Both operas feature new productions. In the opera world, this is newsworthy as a star quarterback debuting in a new jersey in the NFL (both are ridiculously expensive).

I had the privilege of standing in the front row of a chorus behind the great Italian basso, Ferrucio Furlanetto, who will sing Verdi's version of the real life King Philip of Spain in Don Carlo.

Before Mussorgsky's and Verdi's great basso characters come to the Met, Amy and I will hear Thomas Hampson's portrayal of Verdi's Macbeth in a new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago (LOC).

Albert Camus wrote that the tragic hero "denies the order that strikes him down, and the divine order strikes because it is denied." This dramatic tension is present in great operas of every epoch. One of the grandest of operatic tragedies is Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the centerpiece of Opera Roanoke's season. The most popular opera in the US is also featured by Washington National Opera and Virginia Opera, both of whose productions run concurrently with ours.

Roanoke is the only place to hear Yunah Lee, THE Madama Butterfly of today. The same issue of Opera News I referenced above reviewed Central City's production from this past summer:

"The big appeal of this Butterfly was the presence of the Korean-American soprano Yunah Lee, who has made the opera's wronged title character her signature role. Lee handled the not inconsiderable vocal demands of the role with aplomb but also did a superb job of conveying Butterfly's shifting, contradictory feelings that are so beautifully evoked by Puccini's score--eroticism, innocence and guilt."

Opera is the stuff of life and as we say at Opera Roanoke, it's "life with a melody." But it is more than great tunes. Opera comes with incomparable harmony, is live in 3D and engages all of the senses. Our tagline this season is HEAR the drama, SEE the music, BELIEVE it's Opera Roanoke.

I hope to see you at the opera(s) soon.

"Why Opera?" (My Address to CITS Annual Dinner)

2010-09-19T20:05:00.004-04:00

Below is the text of the keynote address I offered the attendees of the Center in the Square (CITS) Annual Dinner Sept 16, upon the request of some inquiring minds. I should say it's the text upon which my speech was based, since I didn't stick literally to the "script."

(I will return soon with an article or two about the upcoming MET HD broadcasts, and Opera Roanoke's season opener, Faust & Furious).

Thank you, Steven. I can't begin to express the depth of my gratitude for not only this opportunity and all those you've afforded me, but for one of the most important friendships in my life. Roanoke is incredibly fortunate to have you and Elizabeth in our midst. I also want to thank Jim (Sears) and George (Cartledge), all the CITS staff, the volunteers, and everyone involved in the capital campaign. It is a sign of your visionary leadership and commitment that you have mounted such a successful campaign in this climate. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes. Writing on the eve of WWII, C.S. Lewis observed:

"If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun."

Why Opera and why Opera Roanoke? I will try to answer both in about 7.’

We are about to begin our 35th Season: Hear, See, Believe:
Hear the Drama; See the Music; Believe it’s Opera Roanoke.

The experience of opera itself is one of the WHY’S. Looking for inspiration where other answers go, I turned to one of my heroes, Clint Eastwood. There are many days when I look in the mirror and ask "Well, punk; do you feel lucky?" And the answer most days is yes. Seriously, I was inspired by Clint's recent film Invictus, where Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) inspires the captain of the (mostly) white rugby team (played by Matt Damon) with the question HOW?

“How do we inspire ourselves to greatness, when nothing less will do?
How do we inspire everyone around us? It is by using the work of others…"

So, I'm going to follow that advice and use the words of others to describe our opera season...

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work… Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

The Chicago Architect, Daniel Burnham, writing at the turn of the 20th century, could have been talking about our Opening concert, Faust and Furious, A Ride with the Devil. Mo. White will lead more performers than ever assembled on the Shaftman Hall stage in bringing an immortal tale to life. Joining three world-class, internationally-fêted stars will be the RSO & RSOC, my professional chorus, the Virginia Chorale, the Liberty University Chorale and our own Roanoke College Children's Chorus. 300 performers in a concert like you've never heard!

And if you don't recall that Goethe was the Shakespeaere of Germany, don't worry. If you need to "brush up your Goethe," fear not. Like all opera, it’s about love & death. Eros & Thanatos. Served with a twist. In this case, Satan. So save the date or be damned. You don’t have to sell your soul, just buy a ticket. Even if the Devil makes you do it, be there!

Opera is “larger than life”—it is so emotionally direct; it “takes the basic human emotions, pinpoints them, and magnifies them” (Bernstein), unfurling them towards you in the most splendid way imaginable! We don’t call it GRAND opera for nothing! The sheer range of expression in Opera is unsurpassable—and the means—the raw power of the naked human voice is like nothing else. The poet William Meredith puts it this way, in “About Opera:”

An image of articulateness is what it is:
Isn’t this how we’ve always longed to talk?

But it’s not GRAND in the exclusive sense, that it requires a special degree or indoctrination in order to GET it. The person sitting next to you doesn’t speak Italian either. But you both speak “human.” Opera was always meant to be a popular art, and a social one. And long before it was PC or necessitated by recessions, opera has always been the most collaborative, the most inclusive art form we have: music, word, drama, design, dance, & stagecraft & on…

Opera is the “total work of art” and makes for the grandest of experiences. And that grand, one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life world is at the heart of our season in a fully staged production of Madama Butterfly. Puccini’s masterpiece is the most popular opera in the US. If you’ve seen a great production, you know why. If you haven’t, you have two chances right here: March 18 & 20. And you can help guarantee our future as we consider the "how," "what" and "where:" join our matching-gift production fund campaign to ensure staged productions return to stay.

Our Season offers a rich variety of offerings. In between Faust & Mme Butterfly we get Intimate & personal with our Stars in the Star City Recitals. Think of these concerts as Opera Unplugged. One singer. One pianist. Nothing between his soul and your ears. Nothing between her voice and your experience.

This weekend, our colleagues in the Kandinsky Trio open their season at Roanoke College. I can’t wait to sit among the audience, forget about the rest of the world for a few blessed moments, and be transfixed by the power of Elizabeth Futral’s singing in the inimitable setting of the recital. Elizabeth will be gracing us with her beautiful voice and arresting stage presence in our Season finale, Mother's Day Serenade. Whenever I watch a great artist like Elizabeth, I feel the magic of the vicarious experience—those moments where we lose (or at least forget!) our selves and experience something other, something special, something extra-ordinary! Whether it’s attending the theater, looking at a painting, watching a film, reading a book—the vicarious experience is central to our existence. Why opera? Why NOT is the tougher question.

In Invictus, Mandela also says: we must all exceed our own expectations...

CITS is doing just that with its visionary campaign. And we at Opera Roanoke are thrilled to be a part of it, excited by the possibilities for collaboration, innovation, and rejuvenation. Among our new ventures this year are the MET HD broadcasts, hosted by Virginia Western Community College, and through their generous sponsorship, benefitting Opera Roanoke. These live, High Def movie broadcasts are a perfect entrée into the wonderful world of live opera. We are continuing our Sempre Libera program. That’s Italian for “always free” and it describes our ticket policy for students: always free. Just call us. We are launching an Apprentice program for local and regional college & university students this year. That’s the "why" and "where" for right now. And our future?

Looking ahead I envision an Opera Company that features a festival season with varied offerings of full productions in repertory, collaborating with not only our current partners like Center, the RSO & the Jeff Center, but our museums and galleries, the Ballet and MMT, and local businesses. This Opera Festival would help turn Roanoke into the tourist destination it could be, and build on the vibrant cultural center, that thanks to friends like you, it already is. Leonard Bernstein’s description of what makes opera great also applies to cities like ours:

Any great work of art is great because it creates a special world of its own. It revises and readapts time and space. And the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world; the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air…when we come out it, we are enriched and ennobled.

This is YOUR Opera Company. The great American conductor (and "father" of choral music in the US), Robert Shaw, speaking to his newly formed Collegiate Chorale in NYC, said:

This choir no longer belongs to one man. It belongs to each of us, everyone.
And what it does or fails to do from now on is your credit or your fault…
You don’t join the Collegiate Chorale. You believe it.

I will see you at the Opera. Thank you very much.

Postscript: below are the most famous couplets from the poem, Invictus. Below that is the excerpt Mandela actually read to the Rugby captain to inspire the team.

from Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul...

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who strives valiantly; who errs… because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt, April, 1910)

Arts Education: Against Ignorance

2010-09-09T17:45:00.003-04:00

The following arrived in my inbox today from Opera America:

National Arts in Education Week, September 12-18, 2010
On July 26, the House of Representatives passed a resolution designating the second week of September National Arts in Education Week. Introduced by Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA), the Congressional Resolution declares, "Arts education, comprising a rich array of disciplines including dance, music, theater, media arts, literature, design and visual arts, is a core academic subject and an essential element of a complete and balanced education for all students."

How telling that so essential a topic as arts education has been completely ignored as the nation focuses on a prospective act of base ignorance, the so-called "International Burn-a-Koran Day" scheduled for September 11 by an ignorant pastor and his misguided flock of 50 in Gainesville, FL.

One article I saw earlier today had the best advice I've seen yet:

"The best way to respond to Quran burnings is Quran readings, recitations, teaching, learning, sharing, living the best of the principles found therein," said Zaheer Ali, a New York Muslim leader and doctoral student at Columbia University. The pastor in question, Terry Jones, would make an excellent candidate for Ali's assignment, since he admitted having "no experience with it [The Quran] whatsoever."

One month ago I posted an essay called "An Ideal of International Harmony" and it referenced conductors like Georg Solti's and Daniel Barenboim's efforts to bring together ensembles of international personnel to embody just such an ideal.

Consciousness and conscience have been much on mind and in my heart this summer. While I try never to use this platform as a political forum, nor even veer towards the polemic, I do think we--as artists and fundamentally, human beings--should be more bold in affirming our common humanity and speaking, singing, playing & acting against ignorance.

I have also been referencing disparate voices that have been on my reading list this summer, and as is my wont, trying my best to weave them together with common threads. I believe one of my primary roles as an artistic director is to be an educator. And not just to middle, high school, and university students. The E.M. Foster epigram, "only connect" motivates me to fill in gaps in my own education. Gaps in our heads lead to holes in our hearts. Ignorance is the enemy of empathy. When coupled with fear & fueled by prejudice, ignorance leads to atrocities like the Inquisition and the Holocaust. The multi-layered textures of art are an antidote to ignorance. They are a rich source of tradition & learning, inspiration & innovation, and are a great place to start filling in those gaps of consciousness and conscience.

One of the compliments I treasure most is when someone remarks on the thoughtfulness of my programming. One of the Chorale's critics wrote last fall "if any area organization takes its education mission seriously, it is the Virginia Chorale." He was not referring to our Young Singers Project. He was referencing an eclectic program that combined familiar and unfamiliar repertoire, and juxtaposed Renaissance madrigals with a modern Shakespeare setting by Dominick Argento dedicated to the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Another recent addition to my summer reading list is a new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Its subtitle is "Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy." Bonhoeffer was executed for his role in the Stauffenberg "Die Walküre" plot to assassinate Hitler (the story was made into a recent film starring Tom Cruise, Valkyrie).

The book's chapters feature epigrams from Bonhoeffer's incisive writings and quotes worth remembering:

"When books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too."

That quote by the German, Jewish-born poet Heinrich Heine mirrors Sigmund Freud's chilling observation (following a 1933 "cleansing" of "un-German" books): "Only our books? In earlier times they would have burned us with them."

One of the most famous poems of conscience is quoted in Eric Metaxas' biography. It comes from a colleague of Bonhoeffer's, who made the tragic mistake of giving Hitler an early benefit of the doubt.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew.
And then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak for me.
--Martin Niemöller

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has just ended, and the Jewish High Holy Days have just begun. I listened to my favorite Chanticleer recording earlier in honor of the interconnectedness of the three central Abrahamic faiths (that would be Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in order of seniority). And on Earth, Peace features movements representing all three. The Turkish-American composer Kamran Ince contributed "Gloria (Everywhere)" which opens with a wonderfully fragrant image from the 13th century Sufist poet Rumi (who lived in what is now Afghanistan):

everywhere
the aroma of God
begins to arrive

The heart of the 12' movement sings an interfaith message of international harmony:

Moslems and Christians and Jews
raising their hands to the sky
their chanting voice in unison
begin to arrive

Later on the poet offers an antidote to ignorance all sides of today's bitterly divided world should heed:

if your eyes are marred
with petty visions
wash them with tears
your teardrops are healers
as they begin to arrive
(from Fountain of Fire, Rumitrans. by Nader Khalili,
Burning Gate Press, 1994, and CalEarth, 1996)

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgenstein's most famous aphorism creates a wide berth of application. Those who have not read the Quran and have not had conversations with Muslims have no business speaking about the subject, whether it be a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan or Islam itself.

"Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it," said the founder of modern political conservatism, Edmund Burke. One of the best op-ed pieces I've read during this xenophobic summer comes from The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman. "Where has all the love gone?" was reprinted in Sunday's Virginian-Pilot. He quotes at length comments "in the best American tradition" of considerable insight & intelligence, from a source that might surprise quite a few readers. They come from a 2007 ceremony at the Islamic Center in Washington:

"We come to express our appreciation for a faith that has enriched civilization for centuries. We come in celebration of America's diversity of faith and our unity as free people. And we hold in our hearts the ancient wisdom of the great Muslim poet Rumi: 'The lamps are different, but the light is the same.'" (George W. Bush)

The Chorale and Opera Roanoke are preparing to open their 2010-2011 seasons in October. The Chorale is performing music written by another victim of Hitler's Third Reich, the Lutheran composer, Hugo Distler. Opera Roanoke is opening with a gala-style concert based on three different versions of Goethe's Faust legend. Goethe is to German literature what Shakespeare is to English. A paradigm of the lifelong learner, Goethe began studying Arabic in his 60's, to learn more about Islamic art and culture. Daniel Barenboim's orchestra of middle-eastern musicians is named after Goethe's cross-cultural collection of poetry, The West-Eastern Divan.

Neither program is built or centered on interfaith dialogue, consciousness or tolerance. But music has a special power. It won't stop violence nor cure ignorance. But it shines a light into the hearts of those who open to it. A light lit, to borrow from the Quran, "within a crystal of star-like brilliance."

The ancient Chinese proverb, "it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness" is eminently good advice, for activists, artists and human beings of all parties, creeds, and affiliations.

Fragments & Hedgehogs...

2010-09-06T17:53:00.005-04:00

In Guy Maddin's quirky 2003 film, The Saddest Music in the World, Isabella Rossellini holds a contest (to award the movie's title) in order to save her struggling Winnipeg brewery. I recently received a review copy of a book that anoints Barber's Adagio for Strings for the crown, entitled, The Saddest Music Ever Written.

The saddest music written in the western world is found in the death-haunted song cycles of Franz Schubert, and in his two Wilhelm Müller cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, in particular. If there is music more painfully hollow than the close of the latter set, than I can't wait to be so devastated by it.

Schubert's great cycles affected every song writer who followed him, and that influence continues to be felt--not only in classical music but in the worlds of jazz, pop, dance & theater. The composer most obviously in Schubert's debt was Robert Schumann. Even when finished, the miniature form of the art-song leans toward the fragmentary, and Schumann relished this fact in his great song-cycle, Dichterliebe. The opening song famously begins in the middle of a phrase, and ends with an unresolved cadence echoing its ambiguous beginning.

What is it about the romantic fragment? Charles Rosen's book, The Romantic Generation (based on his Norton lectures at Harvard) devotes nearly a third of its 700 pages to two chapters: "Fragments" and "Mountains and Song Cycles." Musicians know his more famous The Classical Style, which is rightly one of the ur-texts on the period of Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven.

Slowly sip the following sentence (about Schubert's Schöne Müllerin) to understand why I love this book so:

"The time of this song cycle is that of Romantic landscape: not the successive events of narrative but a succession of images, of lyrical reflections which reveal the traces of the past and future within the present."

Speaking of images, he simply lists the resonances of one of the cycle's primary symbols, the color green: "green is the color of hope, the color of the fading ribbon with which the poet hangs his lute upon the wall, the traditional color of the huntsman's [rival of the poet/composer] costume, the color of cypress, of rosemary, the color of the grass that will grow upon the poet's grave. Fluctuations of meaning replace narrative: they stand duty for action."

"Fluctuations of meaning" describe one aspect of the open-endedness of fragments, symbols and images. Fragments, aphorisms & epigrams, memory & dreams, relics & ruins--each and every one may be independent, sufficient unto itself.

Like water's inexorable need to stream--its restless coursing for a path in & through which to flow--is our human desire for space, room to breathe, and literal and figurative openness.

Rosen quotes the Romantic poet (under-appreciated in the English speaking world) Friedrich Schlegel on our subject:

"A fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself and separate from the universe like a hedgehog."

As I imply above, the fragment satisfies one of our needs for openness: to not have everything explained, every punchline spelled out. But if the hedgehog reference is opaque:

"The hedgehog (unlike the porcupine, which shoots its quills) is an amiable creature which rolls itself into a ball when alarmed. Its form is well defined and yet blurred at the edges. This spherical shape, organic and ideally geometrical, suited Romantic thought: above all, the image projects beyond itself in a provocative way."

And isn't that what we want from any "image" (or work of art)--to project "beyond itself" and provoke/evoke/invoke thought, feeling, response, release &/or relief?

We are stimulated when the familiar is made strange and the strange made familiar (to borrow from another under-appreciated romantic, Novalis).

Barber's Adagio is itself fragmentary in that it is the central movement of a three-movement string quartet. Many fans of this piece are unaware of both its origin and the vivacious music Barber wrote to encapsulate it. That it can be taken out of context and so beloved is but one sign of its value.

Another fragmentary torso (see Rilke's great sonnet, "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," referenced often in my essays and program notes) is Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony. The visionary Adagio he left behind would have been the opening movement of another epic symphonic canvas. The last of his own works he heard performed was his 8th Symphony. His song-cycle symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (his 9th entry in the symphonic genre) his 9th symphony and his unfinished 10th form a valedictory--if fragmented--triptych of posthumously received masterpieces.

In the literary world, a similar phenomenon is still occurring with the posthumous publications (in English, especially) of the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño.

I am a promiscuous reader. One version of purgatory would limit me to only one book at a time (not being able to read would be hell). In addition to a half-dozen or so open books at any given time are a number of magazines and journals I look forward to receiving regularly. My favorite section of Harper's magazine is the "Readings" section near the front. I finally opened August's issue to find an excerpt from a Bolaño "story," "Literature + Illness = Illness" from yet another posthumously published collection (he died in 2003 from liver failure at age 50).

Bolaño's fame in the English-speaking world materialized like a brilliant star in the sky we hadn't noticed. Never mind that the source of its light was extinguished. The Savage Detectives, 2666, and Nazi Literature in the Americas (novels of 700, 1,200, and 200 pages, respectively) form the triptych on which this wildly ambitious writer's fame took shape in the US beginning in 2007.

Bolaño's output during the last years of his short life is astonishing. He only began writing fiction (poetry preceded it) in his last decade. As a result, each new volume that appears is eagerly anticipated by nerdy bibliophiles like myself. Bolaño was a bibliophile himself who also lived pretty hard during his fifty years. His work, like that of many an artist, has the patina of autobiography. He lived hard and worked feverishly. The line between working one's self to death and partying one's self to death must be as gray as his diseased liver was before it--and life--failed him. Equally gray is the line between autobiography and invention in his stories.

In the recent Harper's excerpt, "The Writer is Gravely Ill," death haunts the paragraphs as it does Schubert's syphilis-tinged songs. The narrator is in hospital and is suffering from liver disease. His "story" leaps from a thin narrative thread to references ranging from French poetry to German philosophy to sexual appetite and travel, ending with the narrator's--and author's--favorite modernist, Kafka. Bolaño's wit is as unpredictable and various as the Borgesian (and Kafka-esque) layers of reference that fill his tales with a deliciously dense polyphony.

Novalis said "fragments of this kind are literary seeds...if only a few were to sprout!" In tales like Bolaño's, they have--and whether or not helped by the tragic irony of posthumous "fame"--they continue to.

Who knows if Bolaño's life may be the stuff of great theater or opera (his passionate voice certainly sings with verismo fervor). His brief life's work is sprouting with meanings, beautifully provocative as a hedgehog.

Notebooks

2010-08-29T19:39:00.002-04:00

One of many books open on a shelf or table or stand is The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks by the poet Charles Simic. Wry, epigrammatic, and breezily swinging between the worlds of poetry and prose, a (slightly longer than) typical entry reads:

"My ideal is Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, a catalog of many varieties of mopiness human beings are subject to, everything from the gloom caused by the evils of the world to the kind caused by lovers' squabbles. Burton, who is one of the great stylists in the language, wrote the book to relieve his own low spirits. The result is the most cheerful book on general unhappiness we have."

We could adopt that last statement to describe many a melancholy-tinged opera: the most beautiful music ever heard--as the soundtrack to a tragedy!

Yet isn't that oxymoronic irony precisely WHY we venerate tragedy? (And isn't "oxymoronic" as fun to say as it is to write? Right? But we were writing about tragedy & art...). The beautiful AND the tragic: pain and suffering made meaningful through the transformative power of art? If that is not exactly it, then maybe it's the opportunity art affords in both vicarious experience and (as close as we can come to) objective observation. Through the tragedy given life via art I can better comprehend the political machinations that end in regicide, and more fully empathize with the all-too-human protagonist while experiencing the vicarious thrill of winning the battle/seducing my lover/defeating my adversary.

I mentioned Camus recently, and his collection of Lyrical and Critical Essays has been in the mix. He ends a notebook-like piece on travel, "The Sea Close by" with this operatic image:

"I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened at the heart of a royal happiness."

The opera quiz question from that quote: in which opera might Albert Camus feel most at home? I'd vote for The Flying Dutchman. Bluebeard's Castle could also apply, as we can easily leap from the pirate's "high seas" of freedom to the threat of land-locked prison.

Back in real life, the dedicatee of Arvo Pärt's 4th Symphony, Los Angeles, is a Russian political prisoner, A. Khodorkovsky. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the symphony is also concerned with guardian angels, whose presence the composer does not question. When asked what "idea" was behind the "guardian angel" subtitle, the 75 year-old composer (whose voice is mellifluous as his placid music) would have none of it. "What idea?!? There is no idea. It is reality. They are all around us. If more people could realize this..."

I heard the UK premiere at the BBC Proms (online). The quote above is from an interview with the composer, the one below is from the online program notes.

Pärt wrote of the symphony as "an expression of great respect for a man who has found moral triumph and personal tragedy. The tragic tone of the symphony is not a lament for Khodorkovsky, but a bow to the great power of the human spirit and human dignity."

Now there's a great description of the role of the tragic in art. Pärt's music traces an arc through it's three-movement structure, maintaining an undercurrent of calm (characteristic of his "holy minimalist" style). This stoic foundation generates material that unfolds and unfurls before returning to the still center. It is music for the soul.

In addition to Pärt's 75th birthday, it is the 250th of the soulful (and woefully neglected) composer Luigi Cherubini (I omitted Cherubini from a recent post about 2010 celebrations). Cherubini wrote one of the great tragic operas of the period in Medea. It was one of Maria Callas' most famous portrayals, but has since fallen out of fashion. Brahms had three portraits in his studio: Bach, Beethoven, and Cherubini. Beethoven thought Cherubini was the greatest composer of his (and their) day. Cherubini is buried a few feet away from his much more famous younger friend (whose bicentennial is also 2010), Chopin.

Ah, memory. And our relationship to it and history. Chopin has no need of an anniversary to be played or appreciated, and Cherubini can't get a notice even with a milestone occasion.

Before I do my part to correct that imbalance by playing my Callas recording of Medea (with a young Renata Scotto as the Seconda donna), I will share a few lines of a favorite poem by William Meredith.

The central line of "About Opera" is one answer to the question of why we respond so enthusiastically to this unnatural, excessive, melodramatic, implausibly over-the-top art form:

"Isn't this how we've always longed to talk?"

He closes with a wonderful quatrain that is both endearingly awkward and pitch-perfect in metaphor:

"What dancing is to the slightly spastic way
Most of us teeter through our bodily life
Are these measured cries to the clumsy things we say,
In the heart's duresses, on the heart's behalf."

(from Effort At Speech: New and Selected Poems, William Meredith. Triquarterly, 1997).

The most wonderful time of the year...

2010-08-25T09:43:00.014-04:00

I am not going to write about carols nor the Holidays. It is the time of year when Artistic Directors of all shapes and sizes write and edit their new Fall season program books. In my case, this means typing out the programs themselves (the real fun is in choosing them) and writing program notes (rewarding in itself, to write about one's loves).

And for the two organizations at whose helm I stand, I also draft, revise & revise again an opening letter--a welcome and hello, a pitch & manifesto.

C.S. Lewis, writing on the eve of WWII, inspires me every time I consider:

"If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun."

One of my jobs is to motivate and inspire community members to participate in arts organizations like the Chorale and Opera Roanoke. I used to take the tack the critic, Virgil Thompson dubbed the "music appreciation" racket: This stuff is good for you; it makes you smarter, more urbane, more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan AND cultured, etc, etc. It's healthful.

That approach, though valid on at least one level, can be condescending and moralistic. Though I still quote music's ameliorating effects on individuals and communities when writing grants and talking to corporations (music students score higher in other academic areas, choristers are more likely to volunteer & vote and are therefore, statistically speaking, better citizens!) I try to appeal directly to the heart when it comes down to it, because that's where this music touches me.

Donald Barthelme wrote, "one of the properties of language is its ability to generate sentences that have never been heard before." Music shares the same ability to generate combinations of sounds that have never been heard before in exactly the same harmony. We could ponder that metaphor alone for some time: the always individual & unique character of harmony in music.

Pause to consider the multiple resonances of the word "harmony." Not only "harmonious," and mellifluous adjectives (like those to describe music) are conjured, but so are harmony's opposites: discord, dissonance. From "harmonious marriage" to "political discord" a range of stimuli and responses appear in our consciousness and resonate in our bodies. With music, we can consider both the intellectual & philosophical resonances and thus better appreciate the idea of "harmony." We can also reflexively respond--pierced to the heart or punched in the gut--to the visceral power of the music. Harmony affects us in many ways. This is just one possible example of how an "artistic" experience comes to be.

Music is also special for offering participants the opportunity to hear something new--something different, something special--with every hearing. This truth resonates on two levels. While a painting may offer the viewer new insight with every viewing, only the live arts (like music and theater) offer the same along with what I will term "reception multiplicity." The opportunity to receive stimuli on more than one level, in more than one way. The painting changes the viewer, the viewer does not affect the painting. The music affects the listener, AND the listener affects the music. Because every live performance is unique, the audience-performer(s) dynamic becomes a factor in that equation.

If that seems academic and/or esoteric, here's another inspiring quote about creativity, inspiration, dreams & plans:

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

The 19th century Chicago architect, Daniel Burnham said that. I know it courtesy of my friend, the architect Steve Wright, one of the best board members I've ever known. Steve always knows exactly what quote to share with me or which question to ask in order to bring me back to artistic center. Sometimes, even we preachers of the "gospel of the arts" need our own dose.

The Grandaddy of arts preachers was Robert Shaw, the father of American choral music in the 20th century, the conductor who put the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on the map, and one of the best advocates for the arts we've had in speech and print.

He was fond of saying "falling in love requires three things: being in the right place at the right time for long enough time. Beethoven is not loved if Beethoven is not met. We have to play/sing/listen to Beethoven to meet him and fall in love with him."

And music is oh-so-worth the time! Lawrence Kramer has written a wonderful book of arts "sermons" with the rather bald title, Why Classical Music Still Matters (I wrote a "Musings" blog last August, called "Bearing the Music of the Heart" for those enquiring minds who want to read more about the book). He speaks of how

"This music provides as much insight as it invites; thinking about it gives me a means of pondering big questions of culture, history, identity, desire and meaning...The music stimulates my imagination and my speculative energies while it sharpens my senses and quickens my sense of experience."

That resonates with me. I'd bet it would with most professionals musicians & musicologists who, if forced to admit, still crave the (multiple leveled!) euphoric joy created by the experience of making music.

Kramer puts the message another way: "Don't deprive yourself of this pleasure, this astonishment, this conception!"

The great British symphonist Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to his colleague, the great Finnish symphonist, Jean Sibelius, "You have lit a candle in the world of music that will never go out."

One of the reasons these candles are inextinguishable is because "great" art transcends the specific & temporary to resonate with the universal and timeless. How else can we account for the fact that at any given moment in history, somewhere in the world, someone is performing Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's 9th symphony, and any number of other monuments to the history of western music, one of the richest traditions any civilization has ever had. Period.

Conductors have been saying for generations that every one [both conductor & generation] must find/create their own Beethoven 9th symphony--the "Ode to Brotherhood &/or Freedom, Triumph, Peace, Glastnost, etc..." (depending on your generation).

“Classical music offers both an antidote to the distractions of the world and the adaptations required to negotiate them…It will invite you to hear meanings it can have only if you can hear them, yet it will give you access to meanings you had no inkling of before you heard the music.”

That means, along with pop-culture (entertainment like TV & movies), classical music can be a means of escape. It is entertainment as it stimulates our senses. And (and here's one avenue where it often parts ways with "mere" entertainment) it transcends the mundane to create meaning, impart substance and provide significance.

“Music teaches the value of a moment by giving that moment value,” wrote the poet, Anna Kamienska.

For all the reasons we've noted above, Norman Rockefeller wrote that philanthropy was "not a duty but a privilege."

Our audiences should feel the same way about attending our concerts and operas.

Why Mahler 7

2010-08-15T19:05:00.005-04:00

I am often asked by musician colleagues why my email name is "mahlerseven." No one questions the composer half of the name, but why Mahler seven? One answer is that Mahler 3, 5 & 9 were unavailable. Another is that it's my favorite number. The real truth is that I am a champion of the unsung underdogs (in everything but sports, where I like the Yankees, Lakers, and Roger Federer).

Mahler's 7th is the least appreciated and most misunderstood of the composer's 10-odd essays in the genre. The more I chewed on that, the more I relished my choice.

It is a particularly good time for Mahler's 7th Symphony, AKA: The Song of the Night. I have recently referred to the daily broadcasts of the BBC Proms, and in this sesquicentennial celebration of Mahler's birth (2011 is also the centennial of his death) the Proms have already offered Mahler 8, 3, 4, 5, & this past week, 7. (You can listen online for two more days to Ingo Metzmacher's interpretation of the enigmatic symphony played by the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin--NOT to be confused with the Berlin Philharmonic, which appears in a September Prom under Sir Simon Rattle to play Mahler 1 and Beethoven 4).

The Proms broadcast was inspiring--WHRO & Performance Today listeners may have caught Fred Childs' frequent mentioning of the novel fact the "prommers" clap whenever they please. If a final cadence--regardless of where in a work it appears--so inspires them, there is a burst of spontaneous applause. The 20+ minute opening movement of Mahler 7 ends with a rousing march, and elicited such applause. So did the middle Scherzo, and of course, the rousing Rondo-Finale. I enjoyed the performance, notwithstanding the inconsistency of the playing.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my BBC Music magazine waiting for me in my VB mailbox the night after listening to the Proms broadcast on my laptop in Roanoke. The "disc of the month" was none other than a live recording of Mahler 7, featuring the BBC Philharmonic, led by Gianandrea Noseda. The cover touted the "high-octane performance," which not only lived up to that moniker but surpassed it.

Mahler's 7th is the last of his middle-period triptych of "pure" symphonies (each of his first 4 featured voices &/or wordless settings of songs). The 5th & 6th symphonies are paradigms of the genre, and rank among the most popular and critically acclaimed works by any symphonic composer. Beethoven was hero or nemesis--or both--to every symphonist who followed him. As one of the first great conductors in western music, Mahler also tackled Beethoven as an interpreter. This dual relationship to Beethoven had the effect of raising the stakes for Mahler the composer.

Mahler's 6th is the most classically balanced of his symphonies (though it is Brucknerian in scope and length at 80'). It is in the minority of his symphonies comprised of the standard 4 movements. The 7th superficially resembles the 5th in construction--it is a five movement structure with a rondo-finale following an adagietto fourth movement which follows a central scherzo. Both symphonies also feature striking & imposing--though very different--opening movements.

The subtitle, "Song of the Night" has stuck with the 7th because Mahler labeled the 2nd & 4th movements "Nachtmusik" (Nocturne or Serenade). These nocturnes are scored for unusual consorts of instruments in chamber music textures, and one hears why composers ever since are so taken with Mahler the orchestrator--here was a composer "tone-painting" with new brush-strokes. Along with Richard Strauss, Mahler invigorated orchestration to bring new color to a familiar palette. If you're unfamiliar with this sui generis symphony, start anywhere and just listen: each movement is its own unique sound world. It's no wonder the piece has been so misunderstood. Innovation so often is.

Noseda's performance, after an initial couple hearings, ranks alongside my favorite interpretations. In no particular order they are: Abbado's (2nd) recording with the Berlin Phil, Bernstein's (3rd) recording with the NYPO, and Boulez's with Cleveland (all three are on the DG label). Making the shortlist are David Zinman's new super-audio-DSD recording with the Tonhalle (Zurich) and Rattle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

A great interpretation of this symphony must strike an Apollonian and Dionysian balance between the odd symmetry of the form (the five movements offer more contrast than continuity), the unusual scoring, and the architectural pacing required to get the massive opening movement off the ground. Since so many details beg for attention, the balance between highlighting felicities of orchestration, motivic gestures & poetic evocations must not supplant pacing the arc of the whole (for comparison, I have recordings that vary in length from 62' to 80' with every variation between).

It meets one of my criteria for being a great work--versus merely very good--because new details appear with every listening. All of the interpretations I mentioned strike that balance of eliciting crystalline clarity of detail while not micro-managing a detour from the forward thrust of the symphonic canvas. Mahler's music--like Beethoven's--has an inexorable drive, regardless of the tempo. That might be the best comparison between the two great composer's very dissimilar 7th symphonies. Each movement is literally propelled by forward-moving rhythm.

The opening motive of the symphony is, in fact, a rhythmic one. Said by the composer to represent a "rowing" motion, it conjures the romantic image of a boat on a lake at night. Once that poetic world is entered, the nocturnal associations accumulate quickly.

One of my favorite moments in ALL of Mahler comes 2/3's of the way through the opening movement (the "Golden Mean," the "Vanishing Point"--ah, the potency of numbers...). The full orchestra slowly unites around the principal themes, and swells like a great wave about to crest and crash. It yields just before the climax, as if in mid-air, to lull back to the rowing calm of the opening.

Speaking of numbers, I have always loved the number 7. But that's as original as being a Yankees fan (though I hope a source of less contempt). Given the near-universal status of 7 as a special or "lucky" number, its mystical and spiritual qualities make it symbolic. It is the latter resonance with which I identify. I came across a droll quote by the writer Terry Eagleton that parses one of the distinctions between religion and spirituality:

"There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible."

Mahler's symphonies document his struggle as a thrice-outcast artist: "a Bohemian [Czech] in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew throughout the world."

He predicted his symphonies--most of which were misunderstood &/or maligned during his lifetime--would not become popular for 50 years. Bernstein helped usher in the "Mahler Boom" in the 60's and it has only crescendoed since.

Among other reasons to add Mahler 7 to your favorites:

*The eerie colors & qualities of the 2nd and 3rd movements. If the opening Langsam is a grand romantic nocturne, the first true nocturne (Nachtmusik I) is otherworldly. The Scherzo is literally shady. Schattenhaft (shadowy) is the marvelously ambiguous stylistic directive.

*The mandolin solo in the 4th movement (Nachtmusik II). Sing the opening violin theme--it's nothing but a simple descending diatonic scale, and yet it's magical.

*The timpani flourish that heralds the Rondo-Finale--it contains all three of music's building blocks in one swift motive: rhythm, melody, and harmony. That's not your average writing for the kettledrums!

*The ebullient, eccentric, infectious & irreverent Rondo-Finale as a whole (Mahler mocks everyone from Lehar to Wagner to himself). I am reminded why I love this composer--and music itself--every time I listen.

"An ideal of international harmony..."

2010-08-08T13:30:00.003-04:00

Last week (on my "Musings" blog) I wrote about musical birthdays & ended with a reference to the daily BBC Proms broadcasts available online (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes).

Earlier this spring I wrote a series of essays on Greek myths, with Prometheus figuring chief among them (see April's "Musings" posts).

I began the year writing about the polymath Daniel Barenboim--conductor, pianist, author & cultural ambassador. Speaking of his youth orchestra comprised of Jews, Muslims & Christians from all regions of the middle east, Barenboim wrote that music is

"unable to bring about peace. It can, however, create the conditions for understanding without which it is impossible even to speak of peace. It has the potential to awaken the curiosity of each individual to listen to the narrative of the other and to inspire the courage necessary to hear what one would prefer to block out."

Yesterday, one of the features of the Virginian Pilot was an engaging profile of the new president of Regent University, Carlos Campo. One of the points of focus was Carlos' activism in the area of immigration reform. He is part of a conservative movement--in dialogue with the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi--that advocates enrolling illegal immigrants in education and service programs as a path to citizenship. This sensible, middle-ground platform (Campos eschews the extremes of amnesty and deportation) is an example of the dialogue Barenboim advocates.

The 65th "anniversary" of the bombing of Hiroshima was observed this week. The main headline of today's New York Times reads "Across Nation, Mosques Meet Opposition."

I led off a recent post here on a new Civil War-era musical work with a reference to the current debate about states rights (vis-a-vis immigration reform in Arizona). I admired Carlos' transparency in his Pilot interview. He clearly stated the immigration issue was "personal" (he is Latino) and is not related to his work as President of Regent.

I may be blurring those lines here, but let me offer the caveat that my opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the Virginia Chorale or Opera Roanoke, members of either organization, their directors, trustees, and/or patrons.

As usual, I am merely attempting to connect a few dots.

Currently playing on my recently downloaded bbc iplayer is a broadcast from earlier this week of two Mahler symphonies (no.'s 4 & 5) played by the World Orchestra for Peace. Founded in 1995 by the late Hungarian maestro, Sir Georg Solti, this venerable ensemble is made up of musicians from 70 orchestras representing 40 countries. Every player is a principal from the likes of the MET, Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, Warsaw, Chicago & the Concertgebouw orchestras. And they sound like it.

I am not a partisan of the Russian oligarch maestro, Valery Gergiev, but I put aside my bias while listening to him lead the (literally) central symphonies of my favorite composer. The finale of the 5th--my favorite symphony, period--was so inspired I literally burst into tears at its frenetic and thrilling close. But then again, I have the genes that make such emotional responses to stimuli not only possible but regular. I'm curious to know if anyone else responds in a similar fashion. The andante (3rd movement) of the 4th and the famous adagietto (4th movement) of the 5th also provoke emotional responses. As do the opening and closing movements of Mahler's 3rd, 7th & 9th symphonies, the choral finales of the 2nd & 8th, the slow movement of the 6th, and the single greatest solo vocal movement in Western orchestral music, the closing Abschied of Das Lied von der Erde.

You have four days left to listen to this broadcast online (all of the Proms are broadcast live, GMT. They remain online for one week for archival listening).

"What does Prometheus mean to man today?" asks Albert Camus at the head of his lyrical essay "Prometheus in the Underworld." The French-Algerian Nobel prize winner first came to my attention as a teen, when I discovered my favorite British alternative band, the Cure, had based their song "Killing an Arab" on Camus' first novel, The Stranger.

I believe we would have more productive dialogue in our country--about immigration reform and, among other things, Islam--if more people were taught to read (and to listen) intelligently.

One of the reasons we commemorate horrific anniversaries like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is to be reminded the difficult lessons of history are forgotten if they are not actively remembered. This is one of the themes imbedded in Camus' novels and non-fiction. History and justice are blind. They both depend upon human beings for vision. This is not as simple as it sounds.

Camus cynically notes "Prometheus was the hero who loved men enough to give them fire and liberty, technology and art. Today, mankind needs and cares only for technology."

I do not completely share this view, though it's truth resonates with my experience. I posted a link on my Facebook profile to a study of artists in U.S. society called "Investing in Creativity." In one statistic of jarring disconnect, a near unanimous majority of respondents acknowledged having been deeply moved or inspired by artistic experience. Though 96% of folks claimed to highly value art, only 27% felt artists themselves contributed much good to society.

Camus observes that "myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them flesh." Prometheus returns in contemporary life whenever the Solti's and Barenboim's of the world act on their vision. Every creative act is an affirmation of life. That affirmation may not be as harmonious as a Mahler symphony, and it may be seen or heard only once. As Solti's widow, Valerie notes about the "sound" of their orchestra,

"every ensemble is remarkable. Music is wonderful. It never fails you."

The UN recognized the contributions by the World Orchestra for Peace in its ability to create "cultural diversity and dialogue" and help establish a "culture of peace."

In creating his utopian, eminently impractical orchestra, Solti asked--and aspired towards--"what could be achieved with an ideal of international harmony."

The arts can't bring peace. But they create spaces where human beings of all varieties can listen. That's something.

A preview of "Rappahannock County"

2010-07-30T09:51:00.011-04:00

"We're merely protecting
State's rights.
State's rights
Have been attacked."

One would be forgiven for thinking that quote is from a state Attorney General in 2010 challenging the Federal government's actions to halt Arizona's controversial immigration law.

They are actually the first lines of the third song in the triptych that opens Ricky Ian Gordon's and Mark Campbell's "theatrical song cycle" based on the Civil War, Rappahannock County.

I have been in Norfolk all week attending workshop rehearsals that culminated in a preview performance last night at Virginia Opera's Harrison Opera House. The program describes the project:

"In conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, a new musical work by composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Mark Campbell will have its world premiere performance beginning April 12, 2011, the same day the Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in 1861."

After its premiere, it will travel to the other co-producing centers of the project:

"Rappahannock County will premiere during the 15th Annual Virginia Arts Festival...in the Harrison Opera House in Norfolk, Virginia, from April 12-17, 2011. These shows will be followed by performances in Richmond at the Modlin Center, September 9-16, and at the Texas Performing Arts in Austin, September 18-25."

The piece is more than merely a "theatrical song cycle" and combines elements of musical theater and opera.

"Rappahannock County is a fictional song cycle inspired by diaries, letters, and personal accounts during the period of the Civil War and explores the war's impact, from secession to defeat, on a community of Virginians--black and white, rich and poor, soldiers, nurses, widows, and survivors. The production is a multimedia event, enhanced by projections of Civil War photographs, illustrations, documents, and other moving visuals, and features five principal singers performing more than 30 roles, backed by an ensemble of 15 musicians."

The five singers offered affecting and nuanced portrayals of 14 of the 21 songs in the well-received preview performance (all the more impressive for the scant three days of rehearsals the artists had to assimilate Ricky's new songs).

I have written on my "Musings" blog about the unique joy of commissioning and premiering new works. This week was another reminder why everyone invested in music should participate--at whatever level possible--in such generative processes.

One of the exciting aspects of this process is the tabula rasa starting point for such premieres. The "blank slate" is a universal given before any premiere (for example, if a recording exists of the work it's an mp3 file the composer has generated from his computer). The 5 singers, 2 pianists and the conductor, Rob Fisher, had some time to prepare their scores in advance, but met for the first time just the day before the first workshop with the creative team.

I enjoyed the first read-through of the score as much as the preview performance. Not only are the artists bringing this music literally to life before its creators, the authors are experiencing the live totality of their work for the first time. The electricity of the creative process is palpable, underscoring the fact that music exists to be sung, played, heard and experienced. As the poet Anna Kamienska wrote, "music teaches the value of a moment by giving that moment value."

The vibrancy of the process is all the more charged when you have Ricky Ian Gordon bouncing, dancing, and demonstrating along for the singers what he heard in his head while writing his songs. Both Ricky and Mark repeatedly stressed the vignette-like scenes they were creating to tell stories through snapshots of real people. Rather than a grand operatic "Gone with the Wind" narrative, the solos and small ensembles give us miniatures: landscapes, portraits, and character sketches. Ricky mentioned his affinity with Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, and the analogy is apt. Most of the songs are monologues, and the authors deftly alternate between ironic satire and profound emotion (ie: comedy & tragedy) in presenting what has the cumulative effect of being both entertaining and engaging, provocative and moving.

The gifted young director, Kevin Newbury demonstrated how less can be more when it comes to stagecraft. Using a handful of props, a table, and a pair of crates, the "set" changed from pulpit to plantation to hospital ward to embalming table to raft and more.

The "Seccession" triptych opens with a preacher intoning Bible verses claiming slavery to be "Sanctified by God." The aforementioned "States Rights" bookends the twisted "logic" of "A Noble Institution." As happens throughout the work, the music changes as quickly as the perspective. The stentorian tenor, Dan Snyder, shifts from the polemic of "State's Rights" to the vulnerable human voice of the abolitionist, Clement Davis, in "Farewell, Old Dominion." In one of many lines laden with layers of meaning, Dan's character sings

"I don't own slaves,/Won't own slaves,/I'm a teacher--/Reading, ABCs, division."

The final "subject" lingers after the phrase ends, haunting as a specter.

In another arresting transition, the elegaic "Farewell" segues into the song of the young slave boy, Reuben Lark. "Being Small" is a showcase for the gifted young baritone, Charles Jason Freeman, who had the audience in the palm of his hand before he sang a note. Reuben, an illiterate 11 year old, eavesdrops on the owners of a plantation as the "Master" reads the headlines aloud. After repeating those headlines to his "friends and kin" he ends the jaunting song with double-edged wit:

"And one thing I/have learned from this:/'Bout ignorance,/It sure ain't bliss."

The pointed irony and satire drives another pair of songs and is a reminder the Greek root of the wood sarcasm, sarcasmos literally means "to tear the flesh off."

You get the sense that mezzo Margaret Thompson would like to do just that to her "enemies" in "I listen." The song is a colorful character study of a Southern peddler who sells pies to the Union soldiers and then reports to a Rebel spy. This jaunty tune has echoes of ragtime and Tin Pan Alley, and Thompson's portrayal of Violet Fitzsimmons is a cousin of Mrs Lovett (Sweeney Todd), mischievous, more than a little devious and endearing at the same time.

Mr Freeman has another show-stealing number in "Bound to Be" in which the sarcasm hits so close to home the line between genuine and uncomfortable laughter is obliterated. Campbell's rhythmic verse is matched by Gordon's tuneful music as Joe Harris sings "When we get to that promised land,/Old Abe himself will shake our hand./And all them folks they gonna cheer,/"Gee we glad to have you Niggrahs here."

His contempt reaches a pitch with "The Emancipitation Proclamation...Makes it so us folks will never again be put upon./(And it's worth as much as the paper that it's scribbled on.)"

And Campbell's lyrics turn from biting punchline to sobering revelation:

"Ain't no more whips and auction blocks.
No chains, no cuffs, no reins, no stocks.
But those won't leave the human race,
They'll just take on a different face."

And one of the most provocative stanzas in this timely evocation of American history closes with

"So we'll be equal by and by,
When hens have teeth and pigs can fly,
Or when them devils all repent...
Or the day they name me President!"

The other African American characters are exceptionally portrayed by soprano Aundi Marie Moore. She has two of the most affecting ballads in the show, the elegaic "All I Ever Known" and the haunting lullaby to her dead infant, "Hallie-Ann." She and Freeman sing the eponymous song which depicts--in words and music--the "temp'ramental" waters of the Rappahannock. Gordon's music--in the complex meter of 10/8--vividly evokes the unpredictable surge of the current and the acute anxiety of the escaping slaves.

"Rappahannock" first appears following another vivid character sketch, "Making Maps." By being particular (to person & place), art performs the unique feat of transcending specificity with universal resonance. The rich-voiced baritone, Mark Walters essays the Cartographer, Jed Hotchkiss in one of the most poignant songs in the score. As elsewhere, Gordon's rippling accompaniments evoke the varied and beautiful Virginia landscape, atop which Walters sings of Jed's rendering of "fine maps" from his God-given skill. "The yielding valleys, the verdant forests,/the crystalline rivers, the wind-sculpted ridges," are transformed before the actor's--and the audience's--eyes as the cartographer realizes his maps are being used "not to orient a man,/But parcel to a plan/For spoiling valleys, for torching forests,..."

Listening to "Making Maps" last night I was struck by a parallel situation in the novel (and film) The English Patient, in which the archeologists realize their life's work in the North African deserts has become a pawn in the machinations of WWII. In my notebook during the first workshop rehearsal this past Monday, I jotted down the words "gorgeous, sweeping, and poignant" after Mark's rendition of "Making Maps."

Those words could be applied to the whole of Rappahannock County, whose current is made more engaging by the satires and asides that enliven and vary the song-cycle's flow.

Thanks to the Virginia Arts Festival, Virginia Opera, the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin for pioneering this project. And kudos to Ricky Ian Gordon and Mark Campbell for creating an original piece of musical theater that transcends boundaries and engages a central chapter in our history with a resonant and original voice. The cast & production team offered an impressive look at what promises to be an important and vital new work of American music for the stage.

I know I'll be there next April. I hope Rappahannock County will make the rounds around the Commonwealth during these Sesquicentennial commemorations.

Evening Stars: Siepi & Rolfe Johnson

2010-07-28T10:49:00.005-04:00

Last week I paid tribute to the pioneering conductor (and teacher) Sir Charles Mackerras. One week after Sir Charles died, the English tenor, Anthony Rolfe Johnson died, aged 69, after a protracted struggle with Alzheimer's disease. At the beginning of the month the dashing Italian bass, Cesare Siepi died, aged 87.

Siepi was a classic basso cantate (literally "singing" bass, as opposed to a "talking" bass. Actually, it's a category to distinguish one from a comic or "character" bass). Born in Milan, Siepi helped usher in the golden age of opera at the Met under impresario Rudolf Bing in 1950. He sang over 500 performances of 17 roles in his 23-year career at the Met, but was particularly noted for two of the Primo Basso roles in the repertory: the title character in Mozart's Don Giovanni, and King Philip in Verdi's grand masterpiece, Don Carlo.

In addition to finding an apartment in Roanoke and dividing our belongings into two residences, my new position with Opera Roanoke required new transportation (I had been driving a 10-year old fixer-upper with 250K miles--not a good candidate for cross-Commonwealth commuting). We found one of the last new Saturn's in Virginia, an Aura Hybrid whose perks include XM Radio. My dial has been tuned to Sirius XM 79, which is the Met's digital radio station. If you are an opera lover and spend copious amounts of time listening to the radio, I heartily recommend it (Opera Roanoke fans should take note that our own Steven White's Met debut conducting Angela Gheorghiu and Thomas Hampson in La Traviata will be encored Friday night, August 27, at 8 pm. You can sign up for a free online trial at sirius.com).

Both the 1950 Met Don Carlo (with Jussi Bjorling, Jerome Hines & Robert Merrill) and a 1973 Don Giovanni paid tribute to Siepi's artistry during the two weeks following his death in Atlanta (where he'd lived for two decades).

His Don Giovanni is available in a recent Decca "Heritage Masters" re-release (the complete 3-CD set for the price of 1). His elegant, beautifully sung interpretation is perfectly balanced by Josef Krips and the Vienna Philharmonic in this remastered classic from 1955 that features Lisa Della Casa, Fernando Corena and a young Walter Berry.

Siepi made his met debut at age 27. Anthony Rolfe Johnson began his career as a farmer in Sussex and did not begin pursuing musical studies until he was 30. A contemporary of the late Philip Langridge (see my "Musings" blog for a tribute to Langridge, who died in March), Rolfe Johnson was one of a handful of tenors who inherited the mantle of the classic "English Tenor" from Benjamin Britten's partner, Peter Pears.

Pears defined a style of singing in English noted for its refinement and purity, expressiveness & nuance. Detractors of this English style criticize a perceived "preciousness" of interpretation and unevenness of technique. The Italianate style of homogenizing the voice throughout the range--so that breaks and shifts of register are imperceivable to the listener--is cited as the ideal. I happen to like both "schools" of singing, and find they both have their place.

Ironically, Rolfe Johnson's Met debut came when he replaced none other than Luciano Pavarotti in the title role of (Sir Charles Mackerras' favorite) Mozart Opera, Idomeneo.

The classic English tenors--from Pears to Rolfe Johnson to those in their prime today (John Mark Ainsley, Ian Bostridge, and Mark Padmore)--typically specialize in the music of the Baroque & Classical periods, skip over the Bel Canto 19th century and attend to Britten and the company of the 20th century.

Rolfe Johnson's legacy is preserved in a number of recordings from all of these corners of the repertory. I first became acquainted with his colorful voice and highly expressive interpretations in the operas of Monteverdi and Passions of Bach in great recordings by the period instrument specialist John Eliot Gardiner. With Eliot Gardiner, he also recorded some of Mozart's great characters, like Idomeneo and the title role of La Clemenza di Tito. Rolfe Johnson was also a noted lieder singer, and recorded landmark recital disks with Graham Johnson. His interpretations of Britten's leading tenor roles rank alongside Philip Langridge's as benchmarks that rival (and in some cases, surpass) the creator of those roles, Peter Pears.

I wrote briefly of my experience in 2002 at the Britten-Pears school in my tribute to Sir Charles Mackerras. My first visit to Aldeburgh was scheduled for the late summer of 1996, where I was to study English song with Anthony Rolfe Johnson. My first teaching position, as Associate Director of Choral & Vocal Activities at Washington & Lee University, came after I'd been accepted into the Britten-Pears course. As the start of my first semester in Lexington conflicted with the workshop in Aldeburgh, I withdrew from it to take up my teaching post. While I regret having missed the chance to work with Rolfe Johnson, my brief tenure at W & L led to my association with Opera Roanoke, from which post I'm now writing this tribute.

Rolfe Johnson's recording of Schubert's underperformed Mayrhofer setting, Abendstern, makes his recital disc on the Hyperion Schubert Song Edition a must-have. The poem is beautiful on it's own, and an eloquent metaphor for the frequently solitary, "road less traveled" path taken by the artist:

Abendstern (Evening Star)

Why do you linger alone in the sky,
O beautiful star? You are so mild;
why does the sparkling crowd
of your brothers shun your sight?
"I am the star of true love,
and they keep far away from Love."

So you should go to them,
if you are love; do not delay!
Who could then withstand you,
you sweet but stubborn light?
"I sow, but see no shoot,
and so I remain here, mournful and still."

Artists like Cesare Siepi and Anthony Rolfe Johnson have sown beautiful shoots of music through their singing. The "sparkling crowd" of their interpretations live on in the memory and the recorded legacies of two distinct & distinguished singers.

Remembering Sir Charles Mackerras

2010-07-18T16:49:00.000-04:00

I am packing up half of my belongings this weekend to move to an apartment in downtown Roanoke. Amy and I will keep a place in Norfolk/Va Beach as well. Deciding which opera scores stay in Hampton Roads and which ones go to Roanoke is only easy when we have two copies of the same edition.

Packing up scores reminds me of one of the exceptions that proves the rule about valuing possessions and material things. When we moved from Indiana to Virginia in the summer of 2008, three boxes of ceramic figurines that weren't ours arrived with our belongings. Three boxes of my scores and art monographs never made it. We trust the figurines made it to their rightful owners after we made inquiries. I have no idea where my books & music landed. Two of those scores were of Janacek's operas, Jenufa and Katya Kabanova.

They both carried inscriptions from Elisabeth Söderström and Sir Charles Mackerras, with whom I had the pleasure and privilege of working in 2002 at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (then known as the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Study).

To use the cliche "pleasure and privilege" baldly understates the truth of that statement. Sir Charles, who died July 14 (aged 84), was a paradigm of a Maestro. The masters I have been lucky enough to encounter thus far in my life have at least two traits in common: an unswerving commitment to the art they champion and uncompromising standards for its execution (performance). Joseph Flummerfelt, Kurt Masur, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, and the late Richard Hickox are all eminent examples. Among others, one closer to home is Steven White.

The obituaries of Mackerras I have read online--from Musical America to British papers like the Guardian, Observer and Financial Times--have stressed the wealth and breadth of his accomplishments. In addition to championing Mozart and his operas (and 18th century performance practice), Mackerras almost single-handedly brought Czech opera to western Europe and the US. His pioneering leadership of the operas of Dvorak, and in particular, Leos Janacek changed the landscape of our understanding of this rich field of the repertoire.

He was also a great teacher, embodying that balance between intense commitment to the material and exacting standards where preparation and performance are concerned. In this respect, "old school" is never out of style.

Janacek's operas were the subject of the intensive two-week workshop (& concert) in my above-mentioned experience with Sir Charles and Ms Söderström (who died last fall, aged 82). To say they were the best duo on the planet for such a project is another understatement. They earned multiple awards for their landmark recordings of Janacek operas in the 1970's, which remain benchmarks.

Listening to those recordings, one is struck by that rare experience of revelation which inspires the questions "why haven't I heard this before?" and "why isn't this piece done more often?"

Jenufa and Katya Kabanova (along with The Cunning Little Vixen) are the most performed of Janacek's operas. Just this past season, the Met presented their first production of his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Imagine waiting 80 years to hear Turandot or Capriccio. Unfathomable.

Janacek was a contemporary of Puccini and Strauss, and one hears this in his music. Writing about Puccini in an earlier post, I compared the conversational style of La Fanciulla del West to Janacek. As these composers progressed and embraced (the less alienating) aspects of modern music (like impressionism) the lines demarcating the set pieces of 19th century opera disappeared. Verdi decried Puccini's "symphonic style," which was indebted to Wagner (and the sensuous harmonies of French opera that shaped Debussy and musical impressionism--but that's another essay). We can have Verdi, Puccini AND Wagner (and Strauss & Janacek, for that matter).

Like Strauss, Janacek's scores are rich with orchestral color. Melody abounds, but it is also shaped by speech rhythms. The result is an eclectic style that blends elements of folk music with late-romantic lushness, refracted through the lens of early 20th century modernism. Katya Kabanova is my personal favorite. Katya's first act monologue and the love duet between Katya and Boris are among the most ravishing stretches of music in the repertoire. The same could be said for the final scene of Jenufa, another great entry point for opera lovers uninitiated in Janacek's art.

Jenufa was written around the time of Butterfly, and Katya is a contemporary of Fanciulla (and Rosenkavalier). Turandot has been a staple since Puccini left it unfinished at his death in 1924. Janacek completed From the House of the Dead just before his death in 1928.

It took 81 years to reach the Met, in a production originally conducted by Pierre Boulez, one of the lions of modernism famous for scorning the "antiquated" emotionalism of the generation of pre-atonal composers like Mahler and Strauss (and Puccini & Janacek). One of the reasons Janacek is not more of an operatic staple with regional companies has to do with the chicken-and-egg dichotomy hinted at above. The "why haven't I heard it" and "why isn't it done more" questions are closely related. One of many ironies in our field is that what is too reactionary (Janacek) for one camp (Boulez) is too progressive for another. Ignorance is what the opposing sides of this coin have in common.

It has taken visionaries like Mackerras to champion the Janacek's of the world where the Puccini's and Strauss's have needed none. There's room enough at this table for everyone. Thank you, Sir Charles.

The beauty of problems: Hamlet and Barthelme

2010-07-05T13:22:00.000-04:00

[I wrote this following a performance of Hamlet at Washington National Opera in May, and like the entry below, it originally appeared on my "Musings" blog.]

"Problems are a comfort." So says my author-of-the-moment, Donald Barthelme, in the best piece I've read on the subject of writing itself. It is the eponymous piece in his collection of essays and interviews, Not-Knowing (Counterpoint, 1997).

I have been referring to Barthelme of late, and at the end of March wrote about the operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Blasphemetries").

"Problematic" is one of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Thomas' Hamlet (see the entry mentioned above for more on the opera itself).

A problem for the character is good for the actor, observes the director Declan Donellan. He uses Shakespeare's Juliet as a case study in his essential book on acting, The Actor and the Target.

Problems focus our minds. The concentration required for problem-solving does not allow for self-consciousness and is an effective antidote to self-absorption. This dynamic--not dissimilar to the balance of neurosis and intellect described by William James--goes some way in explaining why creative types thrive under pressure.

Two of the country's major opera houses have recently presented new productions of the Ambroise Thomas adaptation of Shakespeare's neurotic hero, Hamlet. Both tackle many of its problems directly, and find different solutions. The MET production (shared with several European companies) is character driven. The Washington National Opera (WNO) presentation is driven by the production. Both make the case that "problematic" works must be led by compelling performances. Both deliver.

The WNO production is one of the best modern productions I've seen. The boy-wonder Thaddeus Strassberger has designed a brilliant unit set (that is, one set that remains in place throughout the evening--a cost & space-saving device, and a solution to a frequent problem of economics and expediency where the most expensive of art forms is concerned).

The set is a "plinth" of a building--a hollowed-out coliseum or castle--where all the action occurs. The setting is a cold-war era country in the brittle throes of a totalitarian revolution. The issue of "updating" is literally thrust upon the audience as the chorus storms into the house for the opening scene. A Stalin-like statue is toppled as the usurping king Claudius enters, giving a power salute to the intoxicated, aisle-cramming chorus. Glaring lights and a shower of propaganda (leaflets dropped from a fly above) bombard the still unsuspecting audience, seconding the motion this production will not be your mother's Hamlet.

Suffering from a "loss of problems" Barthelme quotes Wittgenstein's condemnation of much modern philosophy as being "immeasurably shallow and trivial." The same verdict could be pronounced on many a Regietheater ("Director's Theatre") production (AKA: "Eurotrash." For the record, I am an apologist for both this opera and many a Eurotrash production). But I don't need to promote Strassberger's cause/case, as he is garnering acclaim around the world for his intelligent, imaginative and artistically integruous productions of standard and unfamiliar fare. And you can still see for yourself as the WNO production runs through June 4.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
(from 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens)

And I do not know which cast to prefer when comparing the MET and WNO productions. Both quartets were outstanding. If Simon Keenlyside (MET) is an unparalleled Hamlet, Michael Chioldi held his own and helped carry the WNO production. James Morris (MET) and Sam Ramey both demonstrated what presence is in a seasoned performer in very different but no-less engaging portrayals of Claudius. Jennifer Larmore (MET) and Elizabeth Bishop brought compelling dimension to Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude. The real standout in the WNO cast is the Ophélie, Elizabeth Futral (FEW-trull, for the record). I needn't qualify my bias as a close friend and long-time assistant to her husband, Steven White. Opera lovers in Roanoke and around the world know that Elizabeth's artistry speaks for itself. She began rehearsals on two days notice for a role she'd never sung. At opening night three weeks later you would have thought she'd been performing this daunting role for years.

The opera's most perplexing problem is the end of Ophelie's mad scene. Musically, a dénouement is called for following the heroine's unhinging in a life-sapping cadenza. In the most famous operatic mad scene, Donizetti solves the problem dramatically. Following the famous cadenza Lucia shares with the flute, her brother Enrico enters, which gives the composer (and librettist) a narrative segue into a cabaletta-like coda to the extended scene. After spending herself in the fireworks of "Spargi d'amaro pianto" Lucia dies. Cut.

Ophelie's codetta occurs after her death. Hm. The most glaring unsolved problem in the MET production is this scene. Strassberger has a solution which he sets up with exquisite care. He is aided in his plan by Futral's prodigious dramatic gifts as an actor. A broken mirror becomes a knife in her hands. Will she slit her wrist before she gets to the river bank? (The stage's raked platform is draped with a flowing cloth that is both set and prop: another example of creative innovation.)

Following the vocal drama of her cadenza, she plunges backward off the end of the elevated platform into the "river." As the curtain falls, the spellbound audience awaits the final musical punctuation to her scene. She has "drowned" herself. Will she sing from offstage? The curtain transforms into a scrim of broken shards reflecting the light like a panel of shattered stained glass. The "panels" remain suspended as the curtain parts to reveal Ophelie in the middle of the river, 20 feet above the stage, in an impressionistic cloud (effectively disguising the device which holds the gravity-defying body of the diva).

It was the most striking coup de theâtre I've ever seen, and a masterstroke of a solution to the problem of staging Ophelie's "post-mortem" aria.

A colleague who is covering the role of Horatio described the opera's "slow burn" which for him only begins to smolder with the mad scene. The set pieces are few and far between which means the traditional "arias" are integrated into the rich fabric of the score. This sublimation of recognizable "numbers" contributes to the work's density (and makes it problematically "slow" for some). Shakespeare's original is a wordy, heady play whose wit cannot best its tragic core. The opera's balance of low-voice principals underscore the dark hues. Though the prima donna Soprano is one of the great heroines in 19th century grand opera, her suicide-achieved quietus is a primary example of music's unique ability to represent tragic irony (or romanticize tragedy).

It is a difficult piece. So back to Barthelme: "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art."

Ambroise Thomas has left a difficult but not impenetrable problem of an opera that requires the right balance of intellect, artistry and will to recreate it effectively.

Barthelme concludes his essay in praise of the difficulties which require such creative solutions. "The problems...enforce complexity." We don't spend too much time with work that does not engage our imaginations or stimulate our senses. Predictability "exhausts our patience." The kinetic energy of life drives art, which "cannot remain in one place."

"A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past is a necessary precondition."

And even with the most difficult, dense or dark works, "art's project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world."

Thank God for problems like Hamlet and Barthelme.

Technique, Style & Soul: Notes on "interpretation"

2010-07-05T13:15:00.000-04:00

What makes a great performance so? Perhaps it is as "simple" as achieving balance across a continuum that includes three essential elements: technique, style, and soul.

Technique being the perfect-as-possible execution of all the constituent elements involved. Attention to details. Facility.

Style being less "fixed" than technique, more difficult to measure, yet quantifiable. Fluency. Flow. Communication. Intelligibility. Authenticity.

Soul resisting description. The viscera that connects technique and style and adds mystery. Heart. Guts. Difficult to define. Even more difficult to mistake or miss.

The eminent conductor Riccardo Muti is a wizard of technical accomplishment and stylistic fluency. His Verdi performances--from Nabucco & Attila to the Requiem & Don Carlo--are a diamond-sharp study in why attention to detail is paramount.

The articulation of the brass instruments in his La Scala Requiem recording--the trumpets in "Dies Irae" and the trombones in "Sanctus"--is electrifying. Hair-raisingly precise, played with stylistic, Italianate flair. Which is exactly why it is so thrilling to hear.

Details lesser mortals overlook emerge as illuminations of their creator's genius in hands like Muti's. "Repetitive" accompaniment figures reveal their true colors, and in a tension-ratcheting scene like the Filippo-Posa duet (Don Carlo), "predictable" 8th note patterns in the strings sound like a chest-pounding heart beat or ticking bomb. Both interpretations fit the situation.
Go "figure..."

Muti puts the move in movendo. This is not speed or facility for its own sake. The aforementioned "Sanctus" from Verdi's Requiem is unbelievable for the passage-work of not only the brass, but the other 200 hundred musicians of the orchestra and chorus. Six-winged celestial seraphim should make such ear-opening sounds.

As a member of the Westminster Symphonic Choir performing with the venerable Philadelphia Orchestra, I missed working with Muti by just a season. Perche?!?

I still remember a dream I had during my first semester of graduate school. Muti had returned to campus, and was treated like a demigod. He was dressed like an eastern mystic in a flowing robe (in the dream it was a yellow sundress). The entire campus community followed him around like disciples. I can still picture his wide-brimmed summer hat.

The handful of recordings from those years in Philadelphia are benchmarks. The Berlioz, Brahms and Scriabin symphonies, the verismo operas (even if his Tosca is unevenly cast, Giuseppe Giacomini's inimitable Cavaradossi covers a multitude of alleged missteps).

"They are growing tired of my sugary-sweet dramas" complained Puccini, sometime between Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

Let 'em eat cake, Giacomo.

One of Donald Barthelme's voices takes a swipe at his critics by imitating one and complaining of a literary movement gone "a little sweet." It is described--with typical tongue-in-cheek acidity-- as "the wine of life turning into Gatorade."

Alas, some of Puccini's imitators did just that, and we are left with Il Divo and other phantoms where operas used to be.

In the same piece, Barthelme (one of the most successful writers of fiction in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th c.) drops the fictional ruse and addresses the critics of modernism directly. Without calling them vampires, he calls them on the carpet of their deconstructionism for the life they suck out of new literature with academic analysis. "A tyranny of great expectations obtains, a rage for final explanations." Such "interpretations" rob art of much of its essential mystery. "Tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery."

That is the open-ended, inclusive, room-for-interpretation space art--and the human beings who make it--requires. The place where technique and style mingle with soul to emerge in the work as a greater whole and so move us.

When interpreters like Muti flesh out essential details and offer committed, impassioned, informed interpretations, we are left breathless because they have (been) so inspired.

Travel Journal: Puccini e la sua Lucca

2010-07-04T17:22:00.000-04:00

[I've been writing a blog for the two years I've been directing the Virginia Chorale. Now that I am also General and Artistic Director of Opera Roanoke, I will write about operatic subjects here. Below is one of several travel essays inspired by a recent recital tour Amy and I gave in the Mediterranean].

"Men die and governments change but the songs of La Boheme will live forever" according to Thomas Edison, in a letter the great inventor sent to Puccini in 1920.

That letter is on display in the composer's home, Villa Museo Puccini in Torre del Lago. The Puccini museum also houses two of his most cherished possessions: “After the piano, my favorite instrument is the hunting rifle."

One of said hunting rifles is over 7 feet tall, and looks more like a cannon. It is a fascinating Villa.

Puccini's granddaughter, Simonetta, hawkishly presides over Villa Puccini, and was busying about the house and grounds during our visit there. The Association of the the Friends of the Homes of Giacomo Puccini ends its application letter with a lofty (if awkwardly translated) appeal:

"The Association is a cultural enterprise of great value, the sponsorship of which infers attention to sensitivity and spirituality, to the improvement of the world, and to the importance of the quality of human life on the part of the sponsor."

I think I'm going to adapt and use that for a pitch. It also appeals to vanity: "sponsorship is an investment in one's own image."

We were hurried through the house, but were allowed to linger in the garage, which features wheels from one of Puccini's motor cars, but more importantly for the enterprise, the gift shop. I left with a Puccini pencil and eraser, and a Madama Butterfly notepad. I have felt more inspired ever since.

In all seriousness, if the Puccini house was not inspiring enough, our lunch and recital in neighboring Lucca were even more so. Puccini was a homeboy. When he left Lucca to study in Milan, he asked his mother to send him some of Lucca's signature olive oil, which is less fruity and more pungent (with strong notes of pepper) than what we expect in our E.V.O.O.

In one of her engaging talks during the voyage, Frances Mays (author of Under the Tuscan Sun) reminded us that one of the keys to Italian cooking is the olive oil. In addition to the immediacy of its freshness, it is used generously. An Italian home cook runs through a large bottle in a couple of weeks, which just happens to correspond with the oil's shelf life.

After a delicious four-course lunch (bruschetta, pasta, veal & dessert), the group walked around the beautiful town, enclosed within a wall the Lucchese never needed. Robert Frost's observation that "good fences make good neighbors" could be applied to the centuries-old rivalry between Lucca and Pisa. "Mending Wall" describes a relationship that covers as many sins as it prevents.

“A sin against art” is how one critic decribed Puccini’s second opera, Edgar. We skipped the first three and started with La Boheme in our recital in the church where the composer was baptized and later played the organ, San Giovanni.

After excerpts from Tosca & La Rondine and a detour to his cousins and nephews (Mascagni, Menotti & Barber, respectively), I closed the concert with the composer's ultimate aria, "Nessun Dorma." Amy said she'd never heard me sing better. I've certainly never experienced a more rousing ovation following a performance.

I was asked by several listeners if and how it was inspiring to sing Puccini in not only his home town, but his home church (which is also an archeological museum, and another example of the fascinating stylistic tensions in architecture and indeed, much art).

The singleness of the occasion was certainly part of the reason why. But it was the accompanying focus and concentration that made the difference. We always aim to serve the composer through the performance of his music, and in that regard we artists are indeed public servants. The specificity of that intent was simply more concrete singing a beloved composer's music in such a sacred (literally and figuratively) space. Home to a festival that performs Puccini "in his Lucca" (the title of this essay) 365 days a year, there were life-size posters of the composer behind the piano and at the back of the 150-or-so seats in the church. If one needed a better target to sing to, I can't imagine it.

Puccini's "sugary music" (his own words) has always had its detractors. Tosca was drubbed a "shabby little shocker." Even his peers could be derogatory. Shostakovich (somewhat of a shabby shocker himself) said Puccini “wrote marvelous operas, but dreadful music."

I wonder if the critics had simply had their fill of Puccini's desserts by the time he wrote La Fanciulla del West (which turns 100 this year). This favorite among his musician followers (like me) shows an evolution in his style. The score is even more fully integrated (which is why so few numbers are extracted from it). The influence of French impressionism and the sophisticated palette of orchestral tone poems are both present. The infectious melodies are in abundance, and their influence continues to be felt. The seamlessness with which the libretto is set reminds me of Janacek, where the inflections of speech rhythms are pitch perfect. In short, it is among its composer's most ravishing and accomplished scores. Which in the case of a great opera composer like Puccini, is no small feat.

Our day began and ended in the gorgeous Italian Riviera port of Lerici, in the aptly named "Bay of Poets." Byron lived there and Shelley died there. The romantic spirit that fed their lyrical genius inspired Puccini, and everyone within earshot on June 6.