I hope many of you will join me for an informal lunch-time discussion on the "modern classic" opera, Nixon in China. John Adams is the most celebrated opera composer alive. This Met premiere of Nixon (Adams' first opera, from 1987) is directed by Peter Sellars. The "maverick director" created the original production for Houston Grand Opera and has been called by Opera News the most "passionate advocate for classical music in the world today."
Adams music is vibrant and colorful, as contemporary as his subjects, yet firmly rooted in the operatic tradition. His stage works frequently elicit comparisons to Mozart, Verdi and Wagner. In the composer's own words, all of his operas "have dealt on deep psychological levels with our American mythology."
I will briefly discuss Adams and his music, and offer selections from some of the composer's operas, including Nixon in China. The informal lunch hour will conclude with a "Q & A" generated discussion.
Virginia Western hosts this week's discussion, and is the new home of exclusive Roanoke presentations of the Metropolitan Opera "Live in HD" broadcasts. More details on this "impromptu" presentation are below; I'll follow up with another piece on Nixon in China next week, in anticipation of the Met premiere of this great contemporary musical drama, LIVE in HD, Feb 12.
Location & other details:
Virginia Western Community College
Natural Science Center
February 2nd
12:00 noon-1 pm
(Bring a lunch; drinks will be provided)
Directions: On Colonial Avenue, turn onto Winding Way beside the Community Arboretum. At the top of the hill, turn left into the parking lot and the Natural Science Center is the first brick building on your left.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Opera Weekend: Jan 22-23
This weekend music lovers around Roanoke can experience back-to-back treats of the operatic variety. Saturday at 1 pm the next Met "Live in HD" broadcast will play at Va Western Community College
(go to virginiawestern.edu or operaroanoke.org for more info & tickets).
It is my single favorite Puccini opera, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). It was premiered 100 years ago at the Met conducted by the eminent Italian maestro, Arturo Toscanini and starring the great tenor Enrico Caruso.
It is arguably Puccini's greatest score and that is one of the primary reasons it
is a favorite among musicians, critics and opera buffs. When we talk about
"the score" we are referring literally to the entirety of the written music.
(We conduct from the score; the orchestra musicians play from individual parts; the singers use a piano/vocal score that contains their sung roles and a reduction of the orchestral music into a piano part. For those inquiring minds...)
So the score of Fanciulla is one of Puccini's greatest creations. He was struck by the innovations in harmony and orchestration by composers like Debussy (the style of musical impressionism) and incorporated these stylistic advances into his score. You'll hear music that evokes the wind and winter weather seamlessly interwoven with Puccini's signature sweeping melodies. Unlike La Boheme, from which arias are often excerpted, Fanciulla's arias are so integrated into the score they are rarely featured apart from their musical "home."
Like Puccini's most popular opera, Madama Butterfly (coming live in 3D to Roanoke March 18 & 20!), Fanciulla strives for the verisimilitude of "local color" by incorporating bits of folk music indigenous to its setting. Puccini studied Japanese music when composing his tragic masterpiece, and he used American tunes when composing this opera mirroring the American dream (one with a happy ending).
And speaking of the American aspect, its heroine is a gun-toting, Sunday-school-teaching bar owner named Minnie, beloved by a bad-guy-type Sheriff. The love triangle is completed by the lovable outlaw-bandit (tenor), whose life is saved by our heroine. Clint Eastwood, eat your heart out. The original "spaghetti western" is a gourmet delight of an opera, and "the good, the bad and the ugly" never had music so glorious.
If you think you've never heard any of the music of La Fanciulla del West, think again. Unless you've been asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the last 20 years, you have heard the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera one way or another. Its most famous ballads are "borrowed" directly from Puccini's evocative score. Fanciulla opens with "hello" and ends with "good-bye" and the two hours of music in between is some of the most compelling in the repertoire.
But please don't stop with Fanciulla because one of the rising stars of the Met will be here for one day only on Sunday, Jan 23 at 2:30 pm. Soprano Leah Partridge is establishing herself as one of the world's leading young singers, and you can see and hear why this weekend. Leah will be sharing a program of American songs from her soon-to-be released debut CD. Prominent on her program is the music of Ricky Ian Gordon. Ricky's music is the centerpiece of our season finale concert, Mother's Day Serenade, starring Elizabeth Futral. And Ms Partridge is poised to follow in the footsteps of eminent artists like Ms Futral.
This recital promises to be an engaging and inspiring afternoon of great music written by some of our country's most compelling voices. If you like Leonard Bernstein's music for the stage, then you'll love the likes of Ricky Ian Gordon and Jake Heggie. Their songs have been embraced by not only the likes of Elizabeth and Leah, but by other exceptional artists like Renee Fleming, Audra MacDonald and Frederica von Stade.
I hope you all will make it a weekend of opera in Roanoke.
I am away performing Carmina Burana with the Virginia Symphony and JoAnn Falletta this weekend and hate to miss these festivities. In my stead Sunday afternoon, WDBJ's Robin Reed will be your host for Leah Partridge's "Stars in the Star City" recital. I know you'll want to welcome both of them to the Shaftman Performance Hall stage.
(go to virginiawestern.edu or operaroanoke.org for more info & tickets).
It is my single favorite Puccini opera, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). It was premiered 100 years ago at the Met conducted by the eminent Italian maestro, Arturo Toscanini and starring the great tenor Enrico Caruso.
It is arguably Puccini's greatest score and that is one of the primary reasons it
is a favorite among musicians, critics and opera buffs. When we talk about
"the score" we are referring literally to the entirety of the written music.
(We conduct from the score; the orchestra musicians play from individual parts; the singers use a piano/vocal score that contains their sung roles and a reduction of the orchestral music into a piano part. For those inquiring minds...)
So the score of Fanciulla is one of Puccini's greatest creations. He was struck by the innovations in harmony and orchestration by composers like Debussy (the style of musical impressionism) and incorporated these stylistic advances into his score. You'll hear music that evokes the wind and winter weather seamlessly interwoven with Puccini's signature sweeping melodies. Unlike La Boheme, from which arias are often excerpted, Fanciulla's arias are so integrated into the score they are rarely featured apart from their musical "home."
Like Puccini's most popular opera, Madama Butterfly (coming live in 3D to Roanoke March 18 & 20!), Fanciulla strives for the verisimilitude of "local color" by incorporating bits of folk music indigenous to its setting. Puccini studied Japanese music when composing his tragic masterpiece, and he used American tunes when composing this opera mirroring the American dream (one with a happy ending).
And speaking of the American aspect, its heroine is a gun-toting, Sunday-school-teaching bar owner named Minnie, beloved by a bad-guy-type Sheriff. The love triangle is completed by the lovable outlaw-bandit (tenor), whose life is saved by our heroine. Clint Eastwood, eat your heart out. The original "spaghetti western" is a gourmet delight of an opera, and "the good, the bad and the ugly" never had music so glorious.
If you think you've never heard any of the music of La Fanciulla del West, think again. Unless you've been asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the last 20 years, you have heard the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera one way or another. Its most famous ballads are "borrowed" directly from Puccini's evocative score. Fanciulla opens with "hello" and ends with "good-bye" and the two hours of music in between is some of the most compelling in the repertoire.
But please don't stop with Fanciulla because one of the rising stars of the Met will be here for one day only on Sunday, Jan 23 at 2:30 pm. Soprano Leah Partridge is establishing herself as one of the world's leading young singers, and you can see and hear why this weekend. Leah will be sharing a program of American songs from her soon-to-be released debut CD. Prominent on her program is the music of Ricky Ian Gordon. Ricky's music is the centerpiece of our season finale concert, Mother's Day Serenade, starring Elizabeth Futral. And Ms Partridge is poised to follow in the footsteps of eminent artists like Ms Futral.
This recital promises to be an engaging and inspiring afternoon of great music written by some of our country's most compelling voices. If you like Leonard Bernstein's music for the stage, then you'll love the likes of Ricky Ian Gordon and Jake Heggie. Their songs have been embraced by not only the likes of Elizabeth and Leah, but by other exceptional artists like Renee Fleming, Audra MacDonald and Frederica von Stade.
I hope you all will make it a weekend of opera in Roanoke.
I am away performing Carmina Burana with the Virginia Symphony and JoAnn Falletta this weekend and hate to miss these festivities. In my stead Sunday afternoon, WDBJ's Robin Reed will be your host for Leah Partridge's "Stars in the Star City" recital. I know you'll want to welcome both of them to the Shaftman Performance Hall stage.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Faust: Myth and Music
Below is an outline and listening guide for a presentation I gave this afternoon to Roanoke's Shakespeare Book Club. It was inspired by Opera Roanoke's October presentation of "Faust and Furious: A Ride with the Devil." It is intended as a journey through the symbols of the Faust legend, the archetypes resonant with it, with parallel applications inspired by one of our great stories.
Faust: Myth and Music
“I am the anti-Faust! Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to un-wrinkle his brow & recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten & my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul” [Salvador Dali]
“Faust embodies (Goethe’s contemporary) Lessing’s famous aphorism that if god had two hands, one representing the truth, the other the search for truth, one must choose the latter” [from Theological writings; quoted in Hollis]
“Faust represents the renaissance appetite to know everything” [Borges: "The Enigma of Shakespeare"]
“A classic [American] tale of reinvention, self-delusion and broken dreams” [a tagline for a theatrical adaptation of The great Gatsby]
“I don’t believe in answers; I believe in vibrant questions…
… the unfinished aspect, the searching, the existential longing…”
[American baritone Thomas Hampson, on playing Busoni’s Dr Faustus]
And the questions Faust raises are as legion as the variations the legend has inspired: “the deal with the devil;” the morality play; an alchemical & metaphysical mystery, a love story, adventure and thriller, the hero/anti-hero epic…
Faust: theme & variations—parallel literature
Blake: The Four Zoas [Urizen=Meph; Marriage of Heaven & Hell]
Dostoyevsky: Demons/Possessed [political allegory on nihilism]
Brothers Grimm: The Devil’s Sooty Brother
[parallels the source for Stravinsky's A Soldier’s Tale]
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Faustian composer & allegory of Germany in the Nazi era; see also Death in Venice for the Doppelgänger/Shadow allegory)
Istvan Szabo’s 1981 film, Mephisto (another Nazi/political allegory)
Other Films:
Humoresque (Joan Crawford as a Mephistophelean soul stealer)
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal;
The Devil and Daniel Webster; Mephisto Waltz;
The Devil's Advocate (Al Pacino) Angel Heart (DeNiro=Louis Cyphre)
Wall Street (Gordon Gekko=Doppelgänger of Faust/Mephisto)
Broadway Musical: Damn Yankees
Pop culture honorable mention: "The Devil went down to Georgia" (Charlie Daniels Band)
“Marlowe’s take on Faust, an archetypal encounter between good and evil and the imperiled human soul, was more greek than Christian." James Hollis points us in the direction of mythology. And continues:
"The function of myth is to initiate the individual &/or the culture into the mysteries of the gods, the world, society & oneself.”
Myth & Tragedy: Hamartia=the tragic flaw or “Wounded vision”
(and the source of hubris)
Ambition/Over-reaching: Phaeton—“your lot is mortal/but what you ask beyond the lot of mortals” (warned by his father Eos/Helios: heaven’s charioteer)
Icarus & Daedalus, the architect of the Cretan Labyrinth who “turned his thinking/toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature” (from Ovid's Metamorphoses; a nod in the direction of Faustian alchemy...)
"Faust is the first modern, full of yearning, which in its excesses becomes ‘faustian.’ Stepping free of metaphysical supports or constraints, he becomes responsible for his soul’s meaning."
[Hollis: Tracking the Gods, The Place of Myth in Modern Life]
In “stepping free” he most closely resembles the bad-boy Titan of mythology, Prometheus: bestower of the divine gifts of fire and the arts (whose “shadow” or symbolic “sister” is Pandora…)
Faust is the promethean man; Prometheus the faustian titan;
The adjectives ascribed to their names are interchangeable…
As myth then, the Faust legend embodies classic archetypes;
identifying them enables us to amplify these types as symbols;
one of the primary means through which our experience with these stories resonates with meaning…
Archetypes:
Faust=Prometheus; tragic hero; Renaissance man
(and "Everyman?" good question...)
Mephisto=Lucifer (fallen angel); the shadow; “dark side;” the great "negator:"
“The spirit of evil is fear, negation” (Carl Jung)
Helen/MargueriteGretchen=Anima/Soul; The virgin; Guardian Angel
Martin Bidney’s study Blake and Goethe posits “Authentic life consists of creative tension between contraries” and it is in the 19th century Romantic period where the Faust legend proliferates; this tension is amplified by writers like Blake & Goethe. “The spirit of Negation can be transcended, transformed by the spirit of imaginative mediation.” Whether that mediator is Helen of Troy or God, these romantic “modern books of Job” continue the dialectic tension in the quest for proverbial meaning & authenticity.
The Faustian Pact is its own archetype and its energy still animates ancient stories and the modern imagination—whether a bargain with god or a "deal with the devil," the Pact informs Biblical stories and myths:
The sacrificial pact with God: Jephthah, Idomoneo (an early Mozart masterpiece); Admetus & Alcestis (an opera by Glück)
The mythological (“heroic”) quest is tripartite: Departure/Initiation/Return
From Homer and Virgil to Dante the mythopoeic journey charts a singular course—with countless variations. Joseph Campbell describes a “call to adventure,” a departure, an embarkation…
This is followed by a series of episodes, trials & adventures that initiate, challenge & change the protagonist, and like Ulysses’ Odyssey, each chapter is a tale all its own…
The return finds the Hero changed--bringing back the “boon” of a golden fleece, an awakened princess, a treasure, a pearl of great price-- to the betterment of society. And just as a “hero” can refuse the call (or like Rip Van Winkle, slumber away the years) the return can end in failure, tragedy or death…
Faust: A musical journey
Tartini: Devil’s Trill sonata
(one of the earliest examples of the "devil in music")
Liszt: Mephisto Waltz (a classic example of the "dance with the devil")
Schumann: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust
Stravinsky: A Soldier’s tale; The Rake’s Progress
Britten: Death in Venice
(the baritone portrays multiple manifestations of the "shadow" figure)
Extra Credit: Wagner’s entire life & work IS Faust incarnate…
Campbell likens myth to dream (echoing, mirroring, amplifying Jung):
“The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist…”
Ferruccio Busoni would agree. His Doktor Faustus opens with a spoken prologue by the poet, evoking the “magic mirror” of the stage:
“Such plays of unreality require
the help of Music, for she stands remote
from all that’s common; she can wake desire
that’s bodiless; in air her voices float…”
Departure:
Busoni’s dark, dense opera (unfinished at his death in 1924) is closer to Marlowe in spirit (though Busoni based the libretto on Goethe; Gretchen/Marg. does not appear but Helen of Troy does, as the Duchess of Parma…)
Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele opens with a "Prologue in Heaven" that parallels the celestial conversation between God and Satan in the book of Job and evokes the music of the spheres...
Franz Schubert set poems from Goethe’s Faust,
but the Goethe setting for today’s journey is his titanic song, Prometheus
(and if a qualifier were appended to this song, it would be Prometheus Defiant)
The Pact: Stravinsky wastes no time in introducing his devil and sealing the deal in The Rake’s Progress. Like Gounod's Faust this opera cuts to the chase...
Initiation/Adventure: or “A Date with the Devil!” &/or ‘Eros & Thanatos’
Marguerite/Gretchen/Helen:
“O thou art fairer than the evening air
clad in the beauty of a thousand stars” [among Marlowe's most ravishing couplets...]
Witches Sabbath/Walpurgis Night/Ride with the Devil/To Hell & Back...
Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss" is frighteningly evocative...
Apparition/Vision/Dream: Busoni’s "Traum der jugend" (Faust's paradox: “unknowable/unattainable/unfulfilled…”)
The return: Redemption/Damnation (Gounod: Meph: "Jugée!" Angels: "Sauvée!")
*Gounod’s final trio & apotheosis; (AND Liszt & mahler: Faust II)
*Stravinsky’s “hero” Tom Rakewell, after being cursed by the hellbound villain Nick Shadow, calls for Venus (and Achilles, Persephone and co, from the Asylum)
*Britten evokes Faust’s death in a humanist elegy after WWII based on Edith Sitwell's haunting poetry
[Canticle III: Still falls the Rain:
..."O I'll leape up to my God/who pulls me doune/see, see where Christ's blood/streams in the firmament...]
*Busoni’s curtain falls with Mephisto (the tenor) as the Night-watchman who "finds" Faust’s body and flatly declares
“this man has met with some misfortune.”
Busoni gives the last word to the poet in his Epilogue to Doktor Faustus:
So many metals cast into the fire
does my alloy contain sufficient gold?
if so, then seek it out for your own hoard;
the poet’s travail is his sole reward.
still unexhausted all the symbols wait
that in this work are hidden and concealed…
let each take what he finds appropriate;
the seed is sown, others may reap the field.
So rising on the shoulders of the past,
the soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.
The penultimate line recalls the end of Gatsby:
"we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."
And the last line is aspirational as the end of Goethe's Faust II, where
“the eternal feminine/leads us onward."
With the ravishing apotheosis of Mahler's 8th, the "Symphony of a Thousand" the journey is accomplished.
For reference:
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno (trans. R. Pinsky, FSG, 1996).
Bidney, Martin. Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination
(Univ. of Missouri, 1988).
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999).
Boyle, Nicolas. Goethe: The Poet and His Age, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1992).
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen, 1949).
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (Penguin, 1955, 1960)
Hollis, James. Tracking the Gods:
The place of myth in Modern life (Inner city, 1995)
Homer. The Odyssey (Trans. R. Fagles, Viking, 1996).
Kerenyi, C. The gods of The Greeks (Thames & Hudson, 1951).
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus (Everyman, Knopf, 1947, 1992).
Ovid. Metamorphoses (Trans. R. Humphries, Indiana, 1955).
Faust on CD/DVD
Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust (LSO Live, Colin Davis).
Boito: Mefistofele (Decca, De Fabritis; DVD: Kultur, Ramey).
Busoni: Doktor Faustus (DG, Leitner; DVD: Arthaus, Hampson)
Gouno: Faust (EMI, Pretre; DVD: DG, Binder)
Other Faustian scores:
Britten: Canticles (CD: Naxos, Langridge; Decca, Pears)
Death in Venice (CD: Chandos; DVD: Kultur, Tear)
Liszt: Faust Symphony (CD: DG, Bernstein; Decca, Solti)
Mahler: Symphony no. 8 (CD: Decca, Solti; DVD: DG, Bernstein)
Schubert: Prometheus (CD: BBC, Britten/Fischer-Dieskau)
Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (CD: Decca, Chailly; Met, Levine)
Faust: Myth and Music
“I am the anti-Faust! Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to un-wrinkle his brow & recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten & my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul” [Salvador Dali]
“Faust embodies (Goethe’s contemporary) Lessing’s famous aphorism that if god had two hands, one representing the truth, the other the search for truth, one must choose the latter” [from Theological writings; quoted in Hollis]
“Faust represents the renaissance appetite to know everything” [Borges: "The Enigma of Shakespeare"]
“A classic [American] tale of reinvention, self-delusion and broken dreams” [a tagline for a theatrical adaptation of The great Gatsby]
“I don’t believe in answers; I believe in vibrant questions…
… the unfinished aspect, the searching, the existential longing…”
[American baritone Thomas Hampson, on playing Busoni’s Dr Faustus]
And the questions Faust raises are as legion as the variations the legend has inspired: “the deal with the devil;” the morality play; an alchemical & metaphysical mystery, a love story, adventure and thriller, the hero/anti-hero epic…
Faust: theme & variations—parallel literature
Blake: The Four Zoas [Urizen=Meph; Marriage of Heaven & Hell]
Dostoyevsky: Demons/Possessed [political allegory on nihilism]
Brothers Grimm: The Devil’s Sooty Brother
[parallels the source for Stravinsky's A Soldier’s Tale]
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Faustian composer & allegory of Germany in the Nazi era; see also Death in Venice for the Doppelgänger/Shadow allegory)
Istvan Szabo’s 1981 film, Mephisto (another Nazi/political allegory)
Other Films:
Humoresque (Joan Crawford as a Mephistophelean soul stealer)
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal;
The Devil and Daniel Webster; Mephisto Waltz;
The Devil's Advocate (Al Pacino) Angel Heart (DeNiro=Louis Cyphre)
Wall Street (Gordon Gekko=Doppelgänger of Faust/Mephisto)
Broadway Musical: Damn Yankees
Pop culture honorable mention: "The Devil went down to Georgia" (Charlie Daniels Band)
“Marlowe’s take on Faust, an archetypal encounter between good and evil and the imperiled human soul, was more greek than Christian." James Hollis points us in the direction of mythology. And continues:
"The function of myth is to initiate the individual &/or the culture into the mysteries of the gods, the world, society & oneself.”
Myth & Tragedy: Hamartia=the tragic flaw or “Wounded vision”
(and the source of hubris)
Ambition/Over-reaching: Phaeton—“your lot is mortal/but what you ask beyond the lot of mortals” (warned by his father Eos/Helios: heaven’s charioteer)
Icarus & Daedalus, the architect of the Cretan Labyrinth who “turned his thinking/toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature” (from Ovid's Metamorphoses; a nod in the direction of Faustian alchemy...)
"Faust is the first modern, full of yearning, which in its excesses becomes ‘faustian.’ Stepping free of metaphysical supports or constraints, he becomes responsible for his soul’s meaning."
[Hollis: Tracking the Gods, The Place of Myth in Modern Life]
In “stepping free” he most closely resembles the bad-boy Titan of mythology, Prometheus: bestower of the divine gifts of fire and the arts (whose “shadow” or symbolic “sister” is Pandora…)
Faust is the promethean man; Prometheus the faustian titan;
The adjectives ascribed to their names are interchangeable…
As myth then, the Faust legend embodies classic archetypes;
identifying them enables us to amplify these types as symbols;
one of the primary means through which our experience with these stories resonates with meaning…
Archetypes:
Faust=Prometheus; tragic hero; Renaissance man
(and "Everyman?" good question...)
Mephisto=Lucifer (fallen angel); the shadow; “dark side;” the great "negator:"
“The spirit of evil is fear, negation” (Carl Jung)
Helen/MargueriteGretchen=Anima/Soul; The virgin; Guardian Angel
Martin Bidney’s study Blake and Goethe posits “Authentic life consists of creative tension between contraries” and it is in the 19th century Romantic period where the Faust legend proliferates; this tension is amplified by writers like Blake & Goethe. “The spirit of Negation can be transcended, transformed by the spirit of imaginative mediation.” Whether that mediator is Helen of Troy or God, these romantic “modern books of Job” continue the dialectic tension in the quest for proverbial meaning & authenticity.
The Faustian Pact is its own archetype and its energy still animates ancient stories and the modern imagination—whether a bargain with god or a "deal with the devil," the Pact informs Biblical stories and myths:
The sacrificial pact with God: Jephthah, Idomoneo (an early Mozart masterpiece); Admetus & Alcestis (an opera by Glück)
The mythological (“heroic”) quest is tripartite: Departure/Initiation/Return
From Homer and Virgil to Dante the mythopoeic journey charts a singular course—with countless variations. Joseph Campbell describes a “call to adventure,” a departure, an embarkation…
This is followed by a series of episodes, trials & adventures that initiate, challenge & change the protagonist, and like Ulysses’ Odyssey, each chapter is a tale all its own…
The return finds the Hero changed--bringing back the “boon” of a golden fleece, an awakened princess, a treasure, a pearl of great price-- to the betterment of society. And just as a “hero” can refuse the call (or like Rip Van Winkle, slumber away the years) the return can end in failure, tragedy or death…
Faust: A musical journey
Tartini: Devil’s Trill sonata
(one of the earliest examples of the "devil in music")
Liszt: Mephisto Waltz (a classic example of the "dance with the devil")
Schumann: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust
Stravinsky: A Soldier’s tale; The Rake’s Progress
Britten: Death in Venice
(the baritone portrays multiple manifestations of the "shadow" figure)
Extra Credit: Wagner’s entire life & work IS Faust incarnate…
Campbell likens myth to dream (echoing, mirroring, amplifying Jung):
“The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist…”
Ferruccio Busoni would agree. His Doktor Faustus opens with a spoken prologue by the poet, evoking the “magic mirror” of the stage:
“Such plays of unreality require
the help of Music, for she stands remote
from all that’s common; she can wake desire
that’s bodiless; in air her voices float…”
Departure:
Busoni’s dark, dense opera (unfinished at his death in 1924) is closer to Marlowe in spirit (though Busoni based the libretto on Goethe; Gretchen/Marg. does not appear but Helen of Troy does, as the Duchess of Parma…)
Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele opens with a "Prologue in Heaven" that parallels the celestial conversation between God and Satan in the book of Job and evokes the music of the spheres...
Franz Schubert set poems from Goethe’s Faust,
but the Goethe setting for today’s journey is his titanic song, Prometheus
(and if a qualifier were appended to this song, it would be Prometheus Defiant)
The Pact: Stravinsky wastes no time in introducing his devil and sealing the deal in The Rake’s Progress. Like Gounod's Faust this opera cuts to the chase...
Initiation/Adventure: or “A Date with the Devil!” &/or ‘Eros & Thanatos’
Marguerite/Gretchen/Helen:
“O thou art fairer than the evening air
clad in the beauty of a thousand stars” [among Marlowe's most ravishing couplets...]
Witches Sabbath/Walpurgis Night/Ride with the Devil/To Hell & Back...
Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss" is frighteningly evocative...
Apparition/Vision/Dream: Busoni’s "Traum der jugend" (Faust's paradox: “unknowable/unattainable/unfulfilled…”)
The return: Redemption/Damnation (Gounod: Meph: "Jugée!" Angels: "Sauvée!")
*Gounod’s final trio & apotheosis; (AND Liszt & mahler: Faust II)
*Stravinsky’s “hero” Tom Rakewell, after being cursed by the hellbound villain Nick Shadow, calls for Venus (and Achilles, Persephone and co, from the Asylum)
*Britten evokes Faust’s death in a humanist elegy after WWII based on Edith Sitwell's haunting poetry
[Canticle III: Still falls the Rain:
..."O I'll leape up to my God/who pulls me doune/see, see where Christ's blood/streams in the firmament...]
*Busoni’s curtain falls with Mephisto (the tenor) as the Night-watchman who "finds" Faust’s body and flatly declares
“this man has met with some misfortune.”
Busoni gives the last word to the poet in his Epilogue to Doktor Faustus:
So many metals cast into the fire
does my alloy contain sufficient gold?
if so, then seek it out for your own hoard;
the poet’s travail is his sole reward.
still unexhausted all the symbols wait
that in this work are hidden and concealed…
let each take what he finds appropriate;
the seed is sown, others may reap the field.
So rising on the shoulders of the past,
the soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.
The penultimate line recalls the end of Gatsby:
"we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."
And the last line is aspirational as the end of Goethe's Faust II, where
“the eternal feminine/leads us onward."
With the ravishing apotheosis of Mahler's 8th, the "Symphony of a Thousand" the journey is accomplished.
For reference:
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno (trans. R. Pinsky, FSG, 1996).
Bidney, Martin. Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination
(Univ. of Missouri, 1988).
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999).
Boyle, Nicolas. Goethe: The Poet and His Age, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1992).
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen, 1949).
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (Penguin, 1955, 1960)
Hollis, James. Tracking the Gods:
The place of myth in Modern life (Inner city, 1995)
Homer. The Odyssey (Trans. R. Fagles, Viking, 1996).
Kerenyi, C. The gods of The Greeks (Thames & Hudson, 1951).
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus (Everyman, Knopf, 1947, 1992).
Ovid. Metamorphoses (Trans. R. Humphries, Indiana, 1955).
Faust on CD/DVD
Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust (LSO Live, Colin Davis).
Boito: Mefistofele (Decca, De Fabritis; DVD: Kultur, Ramey).
Busoni: Doktor Faustus (DG, Leitner; DVD: Arthaus, Hampson)
Gouno: Faust (EMI, Pretre; DVD: DG, Binder)
Other Faustian scores:
Britten: Canticles (CD: Naxos, Langridge; Decca, Pears)
Death in Venice (CD: Chandos; DVD: Kultur, Tear)
Liszt: Faust Symphony (CD: DG, Bernstein; Decca, Solti)
Mahler: Symphony no. 8 (CD: Decca, Solti; DVD: DG, Bernstein)
Schubert: Prometheus (CD: BBC, Britten/Fischer-Dieskau)
Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (CD: Decca, Chailly; Met, Levine)
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Lists & Notebooks
I am jotting down lists for a talk next month to Roanoke's Shakespeare book club on Faust: "Myth and Music."
'Tis the season for lists. Shopping lists, gift lists, wish lists and more. Umberto Eco's fascinatingly quirky monograph, The Infinity of Lists is open on the kitchen table to an excerpt from the Walpurgisnacht scene from Goethe's Faust (I am not planning on replicating Mephistopheles's bewitched recipe, for the record).
The Walpurgisnacht scene is one entry in my notebook of archetypal "journeys to the abyss." Christ's descent into hell another. Also Ulysses's and Orpheus's journeys to the underworld. And Dante's trip with Virgil in the Divine Comedy. One might add a trip to any shopping mall in the US the weekend before Christmas. And so on.
My obsession with mythology can now add James Hollis's Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life to this year's top-ten list of favorite books.
He quotes Paul Tillich's observation that "the greatest sin of modernism was not evil…but rather the barren triviality that preoccupies us" (Inner City Books, 1995). Which recalls another apt quote from another list.
This one from the pragmatic critic and philosopher, John Dewey. "The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum...submission to convention" (Art as Experience, 1934. Perigree edition 2005).
I can see the mountains from my apartment in Roanoke, the sea from our bay-side home in Norfolk. Nature is the origin of the aesthetic and an antidote to humdrum convention. Selah.
My list of favorite Italian films would start with several by Michelangelo Antonioni. That list would be ordered by preference for his muse, the mysterious and unpredictable Monica Vitti. Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) is at the top of the list. Among other concerns, it centers on the balance between technology and nature. The poetry of modernity. I'd never seen nuclear reactors as man-made volcanos but that is exactly what they resemble in the opening sequence of this visually stunning film (Antonioni's first in color).
It can be viewed as a series of modern art tableaus. Urban landscapes. Toxic beauty (the yellow smoke and sulfuric wetlands embody such oxymoronic tension). Though I don't think the film would make a great opera, it provokes thought on the tense relationship between tradition and progress. Which brings to mind the shifting landscape of classical music in the US, from concert programming to opera production.
But I digress. That tangent was inspired by a quote from Signorina Vitti as she looks dreamily out on the water (I listed it in my notebook, just above John Dewey's).
"It's never still...never, never...I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land."
One of the most interesting perspectives on what's happening on land is from an airplane window. I love sitting by the window on a partly cloudy day and glimpsing the curvilinear form of the city-scape as it comes into view upon descent. To trace the arc of a bending road that mirrors a river's curves is to marvel at the beauty of technology and the marriage of the aesthetic and pragmatic. One could expand the list of metaphors thus inspired, from the winding paths of life to the body's curves to "Spoon River" and beyond...
I don't know if that counts as an example of Dewey's aim to "restore continuity" between the experience of everyday life and the aesthetic. But living in a place where that continuity is conscious helps. The list of cities with an admirable commitment to public art might start with Chicago. Within a few blocks of one another are sprawling and fanciful sculptures by Calder, Miro and Picasso, with Chagall's panoramic mural of the Four Seasons in between.
The four seasons reminds one of the quaternity of elements, the stages of humankind, the four corners of the square and the squaring of the circle. The mythopoeic fourfold and the unity forged through diversity.
(There I go again, poeticizing lists, listing metaphors, randomly mythologizing).
One answer to the question "what does one do on one's first saturday off since the summer?" is to make such lists. To "discern the movement of soul" (Hollis) and follow Dr Jung's advice to relate to the infinite in the quest for the "authentic life" of meaning.
'Tis the season to give thanks and celebrate the mysterious beauty of life. To borrow a wonderful metaphor from my colleague, Jim Gates, let us give presence more than presents. Let us count the ways life is rich with meaning. The list is not important. It is the act itself.
'Tis the season for lists. Shopping lists, gift lists, wish lists and more. Umberto Eco's fascinatingly quirky monograph, The Infinity of Lists is open on the kitchen table to an excerpt from the Walpurgisnacht scene from Goethe's Faust (I am not planning on replicating Mephistopheles's bewitched recipe, for the record).
The Walpurgisnacht scene is one entry in my notebook of archetypal "journeys to the abyss." Christ's descent into hell another. Also Ulysses's and Orpheus's journeys to the underworld. And Dante's trip with Virgil in the Divine Comedy. One might add a trip to any shopping mall in the US the weekend before Christmas. And so on.
My obsession with mythology can now add James Hollis's Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life to this year's top-ten list of favorite books.
He quotes Paul Tillich's observation that "the greatest sin of modernism was not evil…but rather the barren triviality that preoccupies us" (Inner City Books, 1995). Which recalls another apt quote from another list.
This one from the pragmatic critic and philosopher, John Dewey. "The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum...submission to convention" (Art as Experience, 1934. Perigree edition 2005).
I can see the mountains from my apartment in Roanoke, the sea from our bay-side home in Norfolk. Nature is the origin of the aesthetic and an antidote to humdrum convention. Selah.
My list of favorite Italian films would start with several by Michelangelo Antonioni. That list would be ordered by preference for his muse, the mysterious and unpredictable Monica Vitti. Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) is at the top of the list. Among other concerns, it centers on the balance between technology and nature. The poetry of modernity. I'd never seen nuclear reactors as man-made volcanos but that is exactly what they resemble in the opening sequence of this visually stunning film (Antonioni's first in color).
It can be viewed as a series of modern art tableaus. Urban landscapes. Toxic beauty (the yellow smoke and sulfuric wetlands embody such oxymoronic tension). Though I don't think the film would make a great opera, it provokes thought on the tense relationship between tradition and progress. Which brings to mind the shifting landscape of classical music in the US, from concert programming to opera production.
But I digress. That tangent was inspired by a quote from Signorina Vitti as she looks dreamily out on the water (I listed it in my notebook, just above John Dewey's).
"It's never still...never, never...I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land."
One of the most interesting perspectives on what's happening on land is from an airplane window. I love sitting by the window on a partly cloudy day and glimpsing the curvilinear form of the city-scape as it comes into view upon descent. To trace the arc of a bending road that mirrors a river's curves is to marvel at the beauty of technology and the marriage of the aesthetic and pragmatic. One could expand the list of metaphors thus inspired, from the winding paths of life to the body's curves to "Spoon River" and beyond...
I don't know if that counts as an example of Dewey's aim to "restore continuity" between the experience of everyday life and the aesthetic. But living in a place where that continuity is conscious helps. The list of cities with an admirable commitment to public art might start with Chicago. Within a few blocks of one another are sprawling and fanciful sculptures by Calder, Miro and Picasso, with Chagall's panoramic mural of the Four Seasons in between.
The four seasons reminds one of the quaternity of elements, the stages of humankind, the four corners of the square and the squaring of the circle. The mythopoeic fourfold and the unity forged through diversity.
(There I go again, poeticizing lists, listing metaphors, randomly mythologizing).
One answer to the question "what does one do on one's first saturday off since the summer?" is to make such lists. To "discern the movement of soul" (Hollis) and follow Dr Jung's advice to relate to the infinite in the quest for the "authentic life" of meaning.
'Tis the season to give thanks and celebrate the mysterious beauty of life. To borrow a wonderful metaphor from my colleague, Jim Gates, let us give presence more than presents. Let us count the ways life is rich with meaning. The list is not important. It is the act itself.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
In Flanders Fields with Don Carlo
One of the world's most beloved war-time poems is John McCrae's In Flanders Fields. Its haunting, lyrical voice comes directly from the front of the so-called "Great War" (the British term for what we know as World War One).
In flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
I believe one of the reasons we love tragic art (even if we'd be embarrassed to admit it) is because it touches our emotions so directly we are affected--we are moved--before the experience registers as a powerful affect (thus giving us the opportunity to disavow such affected responses. "Plausible deniability," right?)
I would never deny my deep affection and abiding love for Verdi's Don Carlo. Its historical epoch (the 16th c. reign of Spain's King Philip II) is centuries removed from WWI and even further from us. But one of the functions of pieces like In Flanders Fields is that it not only speaks for its own time, but like all great tragedy, it speaks for all time.
I adopt such an idealist tone, of course, to betray my sympathies with the title character and his freedom-fighter friend, Rodrigo, the Marquis of Posa. Like all great stories, Don Carlo is full of human characters in dynamic relationships--with one another, with the state/church/society, and also with destiny (fate) and history.
Don Carlo is arguably more Shakespearean than Verdi's settings of the Bard. Based on a play by Friedrich "Ode to Joy" Schiller, Don Carlo deals with the complex relationships of six leading characters set against the historical backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. This produces great tension across the spectrum of relationships, resulting in engaging drama. The Inquisition also conveniently provides the composer with an "excuse" for an elaborate, ballet-like demonstration of operatic "pomp and circumstance" in the auto-da-fe scene (a celebration crowned with the burning of heretics).
So Don Carlo has grand operatic spectacle on an epic scale with characters Shakespearean in dimension. The score is a paradigm of compositional virtue where motivic unity is concerned. That's a fancy way of saying it's "closely argued." Another way of saying it's "tight." One doesn't have to recognize "motivic unity" as such to hear or "get" Don Carlo. It is a cult favorite of opera (and Verdi) lovers because of its great cast of characters and the sheer beauty of their music. It casts its own special shadow full of deep-hued tones. It is beloved for the unusual aura of the deep voices in its cast (1 baritone & 3 basses).
The aforementioned Rodrigo is one of the great Verdi baritone roles (which makes it one of the great baritone roles)! His death scene near the opera's close is one of the most beautifully crafted and moving moments of any male singer in opera. King Philip should be an easy-to-loathe villain--a tyrant who selfishly steals his son's fiancee (via political deal) and rules by oppressive force. He has one of the greatest monologues in opera when he sings of the unrequited love of his wife.
The second stanza of In Flanders Fields identifies the chorus singing voice to the poem:
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Don Carlo is full of voices in dialogue and contains some of Verdi's greatest ensemble pieces. The second act alone contains not one but three major duets: the popular "friendship" duet between Don Carlo (T) and Rodrigo (B); a classic "lost love" duet between Carlo and Elisabetta, the prima donna. The act ends with one of the great baritone & bass duets in the repertoire. "Restate" (Stay) is also a chillingly relevant piece of theater in the form of a political conversation.
The new Met production is right on by allowing these voices to resonate. The next "Live in HD broadcast" is a co-production with London's Royal Opera House (Covent Garden). The eminent british director Nicholas Hytner tells the story in bold strokes underscored by great fields of primary color: red, black, and white.
In Great Britain, Armistice Day (what we celebrate as Veterans Day) is marked with near ubiquitous red poppy lapel pins. The scene from Act II mentioned above features poppies strewn about the stage; an entire field of poppies is the "background" to both the "lost love" duet & the great political duet that follows. The symbolism of those bright red poppies would not only have registered palpably with the London audience; it would do what symbolism is supposed to do: it would provoke (inspire) thought & reflection.
And Don Carlo has much to inspire & provoke. In addition to the spectral timbre of its sound world, its epic length contributes to its powerful cumulative effect. All grand opera is intended to pack such a wallop to the senses. That we have an-aesthetized those senses through (some of) the trappings of modernism should give us pause enough to invest the several hours required for such a mutually rewarding endeavor as an afternoon spent with Don Carlo.
"There he goes again being an utopian idealist.
Silly tenor.
Next he'll be quoting poetry!" In point of fact, he shall.
The last stanza of In Flanders Fields reminds us why we need (tragic) art to begin, why Shakespeare and Verdi--poetry and music--help us feel more alive by helping us be more fully human.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I shall not break faith with Don Carlo as it has generously shared its wealth with me since I started my love affair with it, as an idealistic undergraduate at James Madison University some years ago. Of the 6 productions I've viewed, this new one is my favorite. But I love Don Carlo from his opening aria to Elisabetta's grand scena nearly 4 hours later regardless. Though I loathe the despicable villain, the Grand Inquisitor gets my attention and holds it every second he's on stage (his duet with the King following Philip's great monologue is a coup upon a coup)! Verdi wrote greater tragedies (Otello) and grander epics (Aida), but Don Carlo has a special power that seems to emanate from the mysterious tomb of Charles V of its source. Beware. It just might become your favorite opera, too...
In flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
I believe one of the reasons we love tragic art (even if we'd be embarrassed to admit it) is because it touches our emotions so directly we are affected--we are moved--before the experience registers as a powerful affect (thus giving us the opportunity to disavow such affected responses. "Plausible deniability," right?)
I would never deny my deep affection and abiding love for Verdi's Don Carlo. Its historical epoch (the 16th c. reign of Spain's King Philip II) is centuries removed from WWI and even further from us. But one of the functions of pieces like In Flanders Fields is that it not only speaks for its own time, but like all great tragedy, it speaks for all time.
I adopt such an idealist tone, of course, to betray my sympathies with the title character and his freedom-fighter friend, Rodrigo, the Marquis of Posa. Like all great stories, Don Carlo is full of human characters in dynamic relationships--with one another, with the state/church/society, and also with destiny (fate) and history.
Don Carlo is arguably more Shakespearean than Verdi's settings of the Bard. Based on a play by Friedrich "Ode to Joy" Schiller, Don Carlo deals with the complex relationships of six leading characters set against the historical backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. This produces great tension across the spectrum of relationships, resulting in engaging drama. The Inquisition also conveniently provides the composer with an "excuse" for an elaborate, ballet-like demonstration of operatic "pomp and circumstance" in the auto-da-fe scene (a celebration crowned with the burning of heretics).
So Don Carlo has grand operatic spectacle on an epic scale with characters Shakespearean in dimension. The score is a paradigm of compositional virtue where motivic unity is concerned. That's a fancy way of saying it's "closely argued." Another way of saying it's "tight." One doesn't have to recognize "motivic unity" as such to hear or "get" Don Carlo. It is a cult favorite of opera (and Verdi) lovers because of its great cast of characters and the sheer beauty of their music. It casts its own special shadow full of deep-hued tones. It is beloved for the unusual aura of the deep voices in its cast (1 baritone & 3 basses).
The aforementioned Rodrigo is one of the great Verdi baritone roles (which makes it one of the great baritone roles)! His death scene near the opera's close is one of the most beautifully crafted and moving moments of any male singer in opera. King Philip should be an easy-to-loathe villain--a tyrant who selfishly steals his son's fiancee (via political deal) and rules by oppressive force. He has one of the greatest monologues in opera when he sings of the unrequited love of his wife.
The second stanza of In Flanders Fields identifies the chorus singing voice to the poem:
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Don Carlo is full of voices in dialogue and contains some of Verdi's greatest ensemble pieces. The second act alone contains not one but three major duets: the popular "friendship" duet between Don Carlo (T) and Rodrigo (B); a classic "lost love" duet between Carlo and Elisabetta, the prima donna. The act ends with one of the great baritone & bass duets in the repertoire. "Restate" (Stay) is also a chillingly relevant piece of theater in the form of a political conversation.
The new Met production is right on by allowing these voices to resonate. The next "Live in HD broadcast" is a co-production with London's Royal Opera House (Covent Garden). The eminent british director Nicholas Hytner tells the story in bold strokes underscored by great fields of primary color: red, black, and white.
In Great Britain, Armistice Day (what we celebrate as Veterans Day) is marked with near ubiquitous red poppy lapel pins. The scene from Act II mentioned above features poppies strewn about the stage; an entire field of poppies is the "background" to both the "lost love" duet & the great political duet that follows. The symbolism of those bright red poppies would not only have registered palpably with the London audience; it would do what symbolism is supposed to do: it would provoke (inspire) thought & reflection.
And Don Carlo has much to inspire & provoke. In addition to the spectral timbre of its sound world, its epic length contributes to its powerful cumulative effect. All grand opera is intended to pack such a wallop to the senses. That we have an-aesthetized those senses through (some of) the trappings of modernism should give us pause enough to invest the several hours required for such a mutually rewarding endeavor as an afternoon spent with Don Carlo.
"There he goes again being an utopian idealist.
Silly tenor.
Next he'll be quoting poetry!" In point of fact, he shall.
The last stanza of In Flanders Fields reminds us why we need (tragic) art to begin, why Shakespeare and Verdi--poetry and music--help us feel more alive by helping us be more fully human.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I shall not break faith with Don Carlo as it has generously shared its wealth with me since I started my love affair with it, as an idealistic undergraduate at James Madison University some years ago. Of the 6 productions I've viewed, this new one is my favorite. But I love Don Carlo from his opening aria to Elisabetta's grand scena nearly 4 hours later regardless. Though I loathe the despicable villain, the Grand Inquisitor gets my attention and holds it every second he's on stage (his duet with the King following Philip's great monologue is a coup upon a coup)! Verdi wrote greater tragedies (Otello) and grander epics (Aida), but Don Carlo has a special power that seems to emanate from the mysterious tomb of Charles V of its source. Beware. It just might become your favorite opera, too...
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Let us recount our dreams...
[I posted the following on my Musings blog, and it references earlier posts there. But the opera that prompted this musing is one I want our audiences to experience in a future season...]
The third act of Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream embodies the cliché "from the sublime to the ridiculous." The act opens in a fairy-land evoked by shimmering violins in three-part divisi playing in their upper register. It is among the most beautiful music its composer wrote.
The Fairy King, Oberon undoes the spell he cast on the Fairy Queen, Tytania. She awakens to a recapitulation of the violins' theme that swells in sensual crescendo with the entire orchestra, complemented by cascading harp glissandi. It's a wonderful moment in an act of musical theater that is full of felicities and surprises.
Upon waking her first lines are:
My Oberon! what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamor'd of an ass.
By my troth, thou wast! For Oberon hath played a trick on the fair Fairy Queen (with the timeless theatrical device of the love potion) which made Tytania fall for the first thing she laid eyes upon. To her shame and the audience's delight, she espied the lovably boorish weaver, Bottom. They would qualify for opera's most unlikely couple were Bottom NOT turned by fairy-magic into the form of a donkey. But an ass he is. Or was.
Britten has been rightly praised for the ingenious ways he evokes the differing worlds of Shakespeare's fairy tale (for kids of all ages). The Fairy land is differentiated from the lyrical but earth-bound music for the pairs of Athenian lovers (themselves victims of love potions and spells). The human realm of the Athenian nobles is marked from the world of the simple "mechanicals," the rustic men who form a rankly amateur theater troupe in their off hours. It is appropriate that Shakespeare's prototypes for the dry, slapstick brand of British humour (en vogue through Monty Python) should be given music that parodies parallel operatic stereotypes.
But when I saw the engaging and thoroughly entertaining production of Britten's opera recently in Chicago, I was surrounded by opera loving philistines who neither responded to the double entendre of puns like Tytania's or the ridiculousness of the rustics "play within the play." There were a small handful of subscribers in the upper balcony who laughed out loud--a good production of the play AND the opera IS laugh-out-loud funny. But more people either walked out or audibly voiced their incomprehension at the slapstick antics and raw wit.
To cite one ridiculously funny instance among many, the play "Pyramus and Thisby" features the classical amateur "ham" actor (Bottom) as the hero Pyramus. His beloved Thisby is played by the awkward young man, Flute in drag. They meet on either side of a wall (which is played to hilarious effect by a fellow rustic, Snout) and try to kiss through a chink in said wall. The kiss does not go well and "Thisby" cries in "her" strained tenor "I kiss the wall's hole/not your lips at all!" That's funny. And funnier in a good production. Which this was.
The humorlessness of hardened, "serious" music lovers did not diminish my enjoyment. But it is a reminder of how difficult communication can be and how vital it is for the human channels to stay open. As others have corroborated, a culture that loses its sense of wonder, mystery OR its sense of humor is in trouble.
I think we are even more uncomfortable with raw, in-your-face emotion than we are with bawdy humor. "We" being polite, educated, middle class (mostly white) "culture." Consumers of "serious" music and "high" art.
In one of Alex Ross's recent New Yorker reviews he writes penetratingly about the reception of Leonard Bernstein's serious music. He quotes Bernstein's description of Britten's music as "gears that are grinding and not quite meshing." Ross says Bernstein "might better have been describing his own work."
I think both men--who had an interesting, episodic relationship from Bernstein's conducting of Britten's first opera, Peter Grimes in 1946 through Britten's death in 1976--have been misunderstood. Ross goes on to describe the musical language of Bernstein's opera, A Quiet Place. Before noting that at its premiere it was "criticized as a hodgepodge--nearly every Bernstein score was criticized as a hodgepodge," Ross makes one of those observations that reminds me why he's one of my favorite critics.
"It's as if he [Bernstein] were healing the twentieth century's stylistic divides, with Romanticism as the meeting ground; at several crucial points, the orchestra enters a beautifully ominous space that might be described as Cold War Mahler."
That "hodgepodge" style and the bridging of stylistic distances was something Lenny and Benjie both did quite well, even if they were much criticized for it. Their music is unfashionably conservative from the avant-garde's perspective. The "grinding gears" (which now amount to very mild dissonance--film scores can be much more grating) have been wrongly associated with "ugly" modernism. This still puts off many listeners (those for whom "I know what I like" usually translates to "I like what I know"). I think both factors contribute to the checkered reception history of both composers' works. But I think something else is in play. Their music is emotional and romantic and direct. And such openness makes all kinds of (western) people uncomfortable.
I couldn't choose which evocative world of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream I like best. The metaphysical realm of the fairies is wonderful (and has more of Britten's infectiously charming music for children). I love the bel canto opera parodies in the finale's play within the play (they were a wink in the direction of La Stupenda, Joan Sutherland, who'd recently sung in Britten's Gloriana to great acclaim). And the music the Athenian lovers sing upon waking from their dream (which gives this rambling ditty its title) is ravishingly beautiful.
In a recent dream I had I looked up at the night sky and the stars lit up like night-lights, like bright white dots in a pointillistic Seurat canvas, shown in relief against a background of pitch. I have no idea what that image represents, but it was cool.
I'm reading a wonderful book of art criticism, Caspar David Friedrich: And the Subject of Landscape (Joseph Leo Kerner. Reaktion, 1990, 2009). Kerner takes some time to connect the threads of early 19th-century German culture, the birthplace of the "Romantic." I was reminded of a recent post below on "fragments and hedgehogs" (which may well become the title of the book I want to turn this all into) as I read quotes from the visionary romantic poet, Novalis:
"The world must become Romanticized. That way one finds again the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative potentializing."
Jawohl! Restoring some of the balance our rational, goal-oriented, technology-driven western world has misplaced would involve realizing more of our affective (and metaphysical) potential and might just restore some of the lost "original meaning."
Kerner hasn't referred (yet) to Jung or John Dewey, and his book predates Iain McGilchrist's efforts to give the right brain its due (all referenced in posts below) but the "meaningful coincidence" of synchronicity is there when we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
And like beholding more of the stars, even this reception requires effort. Just a couple of pages after the Bernstein review in the same (Nov 15) New Yorker, John Lahr reviews a new production of Tony Kushner's groundbreaking epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on American Themes. He quotes a note Kushner had written the cast of the opening night run in LA in 1992:
"And how else should an angel land on earth but with utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain...and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst."
Yes it is. I love Tony Kushner. I love his bold, audacious vision, his passion and the range of raw emotions his characters evoke and the all-too-human states they embody. He is a modern-day prophet and poet and the scope of his imagination lives up to such titles. In another example of critical excellence, Lahr writes about "one of the most thrilling of Kushner's verbal arabesques--[in which] Harper has a vision of repair for the ozone layer, whose hole has obsessed her doom-filled days:"
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.
What souls! "What visions have I seen!" I feel like Walt Whitman yawping an open-throated affirmation of life itself. Or like Lenny: "And it was good, brother, and it was goddam good!"**
As the Athenian lovers wake up from their disturbed visions, they sing in chorus,
Why then we are awake; let's go,
And by the way let us recount our dreams.
Let us wake up and connect the dots of our lives into lyrical canvasses that mend the tears by recounting dreams. Why shouldn't we?
(**The quotation comes from Bernstein's Mass, another theater work involving parody & satire, not to be confused with blasphemy &/or gratuitous profanity)
The third act of Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream embodies the cliché "from the sublime to the ridiculous." The act opens in a fairy-land evoked by shimmering violins in three-part divisi playing in their upper register. It is among the most beautiful music its composer wrote.
The Fairy King, Oberon undoes the spell he cast on the Fairy Queen, Tytania. She awakens to a recapitulation of the violins' theme that swells in sensual crescendo with the entire orchestra, complemented by cascading harp glissandi. It's a wonderful moment in an act of musical theater that is full of felicities and surprises.
Upon waking her first lines are:
My Oberon! what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamor'd of an ass.
By my troth, thou wast! For Oberon hath played a trick on the fair Fairy Queen (with the timeless theatrical device of the love potion) which made Tytania fall for the first thing she laid eyes upon. To her shame and the audience's delight, she espied the lovably boorish weaver, Bottom. They would qualify for opera's most unlikely couple were Bottom NOT turned by fairy-magic into the form of a donkey. But an ass he is. Or was.
Britten has been rightly praised for the ingenious ways he evokes the differing worlds of Shakespeare's fairy tale (for kids of all ages). The Fairy land is differentiated from the lyrical but earth-bound music for the pairs of Athenian lovers (themselves victims of love potions and spells). The human realm of the Athenian nobles is marked from the world of the simple "mechanicals," the rustic men who form a rankly amateur theater troupe in their off hours. It is appropriate that Shakespeare's prototypes for the dry, slapstick brand of British humour (en vogue through Monty Python) should be given music that parodies parallel operatic stereotypes.
But when I saw the engaging and thoroughly entertaining production of Britten's opera recently in Chicago, I was surrounded by opera loving philistines who neither responded to the double entendre of puns like Tytania's or the ridiculousness of the rustics "play within the play." There were a small handful of subscribers in the upper balcony who laughed out loud--a good production of the play AND the opera IS laugh-out-loud funny. But more people either walked out or audibly voiced their incomprehension at the slapstick antics and raw wit.
To cite one ridiculously funny instance among many, the play "Pyramus and Thisby" features the classical amateur "ham" actor (Bottom) as the hero Pyramus. His beloved Thisby is played by the awkward young man, Flute in drag. They meet on either side of a wall (which is played to hilarious effect by a fellow rustic, Snout) and try to kiss through a chink in said wall. The kiss does not go well and "Thisby" cries in "her" strained tenor "I kiss the wall's hole/not your lips at all!" That's funny. And funnier in a good production. Which this was.
The humorlessness of hardened, "serious" music lovers did not diminish my enjoyment. But it is a reminder of how difficult communication can be and how vital it is for the human channels to stay open. As others have corroborated, a culture that loses its sense of wonder, mystery OR its sense of humor is in trouble.
I think we are even more uncomfortable with raw, in-your-face emotion than we are with bawdy humor. "We" being polite, educated, middle class (mostly white) "culture." Consumers of "serious" music and "high" art.
In one of Alex Ross's recent New Yorker reviews he writes penetratingly about the reception of Leonard Bernstein's serious music. He quotes Bernstein's description of Britten's music as "gears that are grinding and not quite meshing." Ross says Bernstein "might better have been describing his own work."
I think both men--who had an interesting, episodic relationship from Bernstein's conducting of Britten's first opera, Peter Grimes in 1946 through Britten's death in 1976--have been misunderstood. Ross goes on to describe the musical language of Bernstein's opera, A Quiet Place. Before noting that at its premiere it was "criticized as a hodgepodge--nearly every Bernstein score was criticized as a hodgepodge," Ross makes one of those observations that reminds me why he's one of my favorite critics.
"It's as if he [Bernstein] were healing the twentieth century's stylistic divides, with Romanticism as the meeting ground; at several crucial points, the orchestra enters a beautifully ominous space that might be described as Cold War Mahler."
That "hodgepodge" style and the bridging of stylistic distances was something Lenny and Benjie both did quite well, even if they were much criticized for it. Their music is unfashionably conservative from the avant-garde's perspective. The "grinding gears" (which now amount to very mild dissonance--film scores can be much more grating) have been wrongly associated with "ugly" modernism. This still puts off many listeners (those for whom "I know what I like" usually translates to "I like what I know"). I think both factors contribute to the checkered reception history of both composers' works. But I think something else is in play. Their music is emotional and romantic and direct. And such openness makes all kinds of (western) people uncomfortable.
I couldn't choose which evocative world of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream I like best. The metaphysical realm of the fairies is wonderful (and has more of Britten's infectiously charming music for children). I love the bel canto opera parodies in the finale's play within the play (they were a wink in the direction of La Stupenda, Joan Sutherland, who'd recently sung in Britten's Gloriana to great acclaim). And the music the Athenian lovers sing upon waking from their dream (which gives this rambling ditty its title) is ravishingly beautiful.
In a recent dream I had I looked up at the night sky and the stars lit up like night-lights, like bright white dots in a pointillistic Seurat canvas, shown in relief against a background of pitch. I have no idea what that image represents, but it was cool.
I'm reading a wonderful book of art criticism, Caspar David Friedrich: And the Subject of Landscape (Joseph Leo Kerner. Reaktion, 1990, 2009). Kerner takes some time to connect the threads of early 19th-century German culture, the birthplace of the "Romantic." I was reminded of a recent post below on "fragments and hedgehogs" (which may well become the title of the book I want to turn this all into) as I read quotes from the visionary romantic poet, Novalis:
"The world must become Romanticized. That way one finds again the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative potentializing."
Jawohl! Restoring some of the balance our rational, goal-oriented, technology-driven western world has misplaced would involve realizing more of our affective (and metaphysical) potential and might just restore some of the lost "original meaning."
Kerner hasn't referred (yet) to Jung or John Dewey, and his book predates Iain McGilchrist's efforts to give the right brain its due (all referenced in posts below) but the "meaningful coincidence" of synchronicity is there when we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
And like beholding more of the stars, even this reception requires effort. Just a couple of pages after the Bernstein review in the same (Nov 15) New Yorker, John Lahr reviews a new production of Tony Kushner's groundbreaking epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on American Themes. He quotes a note Kushner had written the cast of the opening night run in LA in 1992:
"And how else should an angel land on earth but with utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain...and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst."
Yes it is. I love Tony Kushner. I love his bold, audacious vision, his passion and the range of raw emotions his characters evoke and the all-too-human states they embody. He is a modern-day prophet and poet and the scope of his imagination lives up to such titles. In another example of critical excellence, Lahr writes about "one of the most thrilling of Kushner's verbal arabesques--[in which] Harper has a vision of repair for the ozone layer, whose hole has obsessed her doom-filled days:"
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.
What souls! "What visions have I seen!" I feel like Walt Whitman yawping an open-throated affirmation of life itself. Or like Lenny: "And it was good, brother, and it was goddam good!"**
As the Athenian lovers wake up from their disturbed visions, they sing in chorus,
Why then we are awake; let's go,
And by the way let us recount our dreams.
Let us wake up and connect the dots of our lives into lyrical canvasses that mend the tears by recounting dreams. Why shouldn't we?
(**The quotation comes from Bernstein's Mass, another theater work involving parody & satire, not to be confused with blasphemy &/or gratuitous profanity)
Thursday, November 4, 2010
7 Reasons to Hear Richard Zeller Nov 7
Opera Roanoke is celebrating National Opera Week with an "opera unplugged" recital November 7 featuring "one of America's foremost baritones," Richard Zeller.
We've been offering promotions in honor of the celebration all week, and we'll be giving away tickets at our "free-for-all" booth outside Center in the Square at the Historic Roanoke City Market Friday from 11-1.
Since inquiring minds want to know what this recital thing is and what to expect, I offer the following annotated list.
7. A Sunday matinee of live music is one of the best ways to add some variety to a fall season of game-days. Add some cultural spice to your weekend ahead of the holiday shopping rush. Give yourself a gift. Feed your senses and your soul by spending 90 minutes with Richard Zeller Sunday.
6. The songs Richard will be singing are ravishingly beautiful. The pop ballads that have been crooned in showers and cars for generations owe their provenance to the 19th century Romantic "art song." And you don't have to understand German, French or Russian to appreciate how gorgeous the songs of Schumann, Brahms, Duparc and Rachmaninoff are. Their meaning will be obvious through Richard's performance. And the basic human emotions of longing, love and loss have never been set to more ravishing music.
Schumann's bicentennial is this year, but we don't need an excuse to program the music of this romantic who was a prototype of the tortured artistic genius. Besides being one of the great composers after Schumann, Brahms was one of music history's most talented babysitters, looking after the Schumann children while he cut his teeth as a composer.
Duparc left us only a handful of songs, but what exquisite miniatures they are. If a single song can be a self-contained world unto itself, Duparc's are a perfect example. And if you've never heard a great Russian song, then Rachmaninoff's are worth the recital alone. The beautifully haunting lyricism that perfumes the music we associate with the "Russian soul" is embodied in these songs.
5. The arias (that is, "songs" extracted from operas, not to be confused with the stand-alone "art" songs) Richard is offering feature music that will put a smile on the faces of all: young & old, opera buff and newcomer. The Toreador Aria from Carmen is one of the most beloved tunes in the world, and if you don't recognize the title you will recognize the tune (and want to hum along)! This great aria--full of life and spirit--is a prime example of why opera is not the distant, remote, inaccessible art some still think it is.
4. The standards from the Broadway stage are American classics. Some Enchanted Evening is one of the most popular songs of all time, and if you've never heard a voice like Richard's sing this music --burnished, resonant, full-bodied (and un-amplified)--then you have never heard it the way it was intended to be sung. As familiar a song as it is, I cherish the chance to hear a singer like Richard sing it.
3. And speaking of American classics, Richard is including a wonderful slice of "Americana" in a set of songs by Robert MacGimsey. "Sweet little Jesus Boy" is a classic of the American folk song tradition. One would be forgiven for thinking it was the product of the African American spiritual tradition. In fact, its composer was a caucasian man who studied and worked with black artists and paid tribute to his apprenticeship by adopting his teachers' style.
2. If you've been to a recital by a great classical singer like Richard, you know what a special experience it is. Words like "magical," "transcendent" and "powerful" are but a few of the adjectives to describe this concert featuring one voice accompanied by a single piano. The "opera unplugged" moniker is an apt one. Whatever you call it, recitals like this are a special occasion; we are fortunate to have them here at Opera Roanoke every season.
1. The single best reason to come on Sunday is Richard Zeller himself. Richard's voice is a mirror of his person--warm, rich, strong and full of character. When a great singer like Richard opens his throat to sing the listener is offered a window into his soul. The opportunity to enter into the world of an opera singer through the solo recital is a singular experience.
To be invited & lured into this realm heightens the magic of the experience while rendering its expressiveness even truer to life. Why else do we call such voices "larger than life?!" To be captivated & entranced by such resonant tones emanating from a singer only a few feet away is thrilling. If you've ever been impressed by a singer on a show like "America's Got Talent" then you're in for a treat. America has talent indeed, and a supreme example of it will be in Roanoke for one day only November 7 at 2:30 pm on the Shaftman Performance Hall Stage at the Jefferson Center in downtown Roanoke. I hope you will be there too.
www.operaroanoke.org
We've been offering promotions in honor of the celebration all week, and we'll be giving away tickets at our "free-for-all" booth outside Center in the Square at the Historic Roanoke City Market Friday from 11-1.
Since inquiring minds want to know what this recital thing is and what to expect, I offer the following annotated list.
7. A Sunday matinee of live music is one of the best ways to add some variety to a fall season of game-days. Add some cultural spice to your weekend ahead of the holiday shopping rush. Give yourself a gift. Feed your senses and your soul by spending 90 minutes with Richard Zeller Sunday.
6. The songs Richard will be singing are ravishingly beautiful. The pop ballads that have been crooned in showers and cars for generations owe their provenance to the 19th century Romantic "art song." And you don't have to understand German, French or Russian to appreciate how gorgeous the songs of Schumann, Brahms, Duparc and Rachmaninoff are. Their meaning will be obvious through Richard's performance. And the basic human emotions of longing, love and loss have never been set to more ravishing music.
Schumann's bicentennial is this year, but we don't need an excuse to program the music of this romantic who was a prototype of the tortured artistic genius. Besides being one of the great composers after Schumann, Brahms was one of music history's most talented babysitters, looking after the Schumann children while he cut his teeth as a composer.
Duparc left us only a handful of songs, but what exquisite miniatures they are. If a single song can be a self-contained world unto itself, Duparc's are a perfect example. And if you've never heard a great Russian song, then Rachmaninoff's are worth the recital alone. The beautifully haunting lyricism that perfumes the music we associate with the "Russian soul" is embodied in these songs.
5. The arias (that is, "songs" extracted from operas, not to be confused with the stand-alone "art" songs) Richard is offering feature music that will put a smile on the faces of all: young & old, opera buff and newcomer. The Toreador Aria from Carmen is one of the most beloved tunes in the world, and if you don't recognize the title you will recognize the tune (and want to hum along)! This great aria--full of life and spirit--is a prime example of why opera is not the distant, remote, inaccessible art some still think it is.
4. The standards from the Broadway stage are American classics. Some Enchanted Evening is one of the most popular songs of all time, and if you've never heard a voice like Richard's sing this music --burnished, resonant, full-bodied (and un-amplified)--then you have never heard it the way it was intended to be sung. As familiar a song as it is, I cherish the chance to hear a singer like Richard sing it.
3. And speaking of American classics, Richard is including a wonderful slice of "Americana" in a set of songs by Robert MacGimsey. "Sweet little Jesus Boy" is a classic of the American folk song tradition. One would be forgiven for thinking it was the product of the African American spiritual tradition. In fact, its composer was a caucasian man who studied and worked with black artists and paid tribute to his apprenticeship by adopting his teachers' style.
2. If you've been to a recital by a great classical singer like Richard, you know what a special experience it is. Words like "magical," "transcendent" and "powerful" are but a few of the adjectives to describe this concert featuring one voice accompanied by a single piano. The "opera unplugged" moniker is an apt one. Whatever you call it, recitals like this are a special occasion; we are fortunate to have them here at Opera Roanoke every season.
1. The single best reason to come on Sunday is Richard Zeller himself. Richard's voice is a mirror of his person--warm, rich, strong and full of character. When a great singer like Richard opens his throat to sing the listener is offered a window into his soul. The opportunity to enter into the world of an opera singer through the solo recital is a singular experience.
To be invited & lured into this realm heightens the magic of the experience while rendering its expressiveness even truer to life. Why else do we call such voices "larger than life?!" To be captivated & entranced by such resonant tones emanating from a singer only a few feet away is thrilling. If you've ever been impressed by a singer on a show like "America's Got Talent" then you're in for a treat. America has talent indeed, and a supreme example of it will be in Roanoke for one day only November 7 at 2:30 pm on the Shaftman Performance Hall Stage at the Jefferson Center in downtown Roanoke. I hope you will be there too.
www.operaroanoke.org
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