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.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Friday, December 2, 2011
Listening to Paintings with the TMA Docents
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)
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)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Il Trovatore: Symmetry & Polarity
[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.
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.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Production Notebook: Verdi Forever
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.
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.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Production Notebook: Designing Trovatore
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Celebrating Summer with the BBC Proms
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
W & L Alumni College: The Romantic Era
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...
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...
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