Opera Wednesday

Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters had some serious star power. The late Peters, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut at the age of 20, was vivacious, cute, perky - and enormously talented. Merrill could do it all, from high opera to "Autumn Leaves" with Victor Borge, to singing the national anthem for his beloved New York Yankees. Together, they made for a dynamic duo both on- and off-stage (they were briefly married in the early 50s), and were fixtures on popular television, appearing often with stars such as Sullivan and Carson. Ah, those were the days.

Here they are singing "Dite alla giovine... Morrò!" from Verdi's La traviata. It's wonderful to see the delight the two of them have sharing the music and sharing each other.

Opera Thursday: the return of the wanderer

The aria "Cara amata regina" from Monteverdi's 1639 opera ll Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland), one of the first modern operas. Janet Perry and Peter Keller are the singers; the early music specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt is the conductor.

Opera Wednesday

Have you ever noticed how so many of opera's greatest hits contain no vocal music at all, just instrumental? Here's a prime example of one of the most well-known and loved of such pieces, the meditation scene from Massenet's Thaïs. Odds are if you've heard any classical music at all, you've probably heard this in a concert, and not even realized it was from an opera. Here's one such performance from the violinist Sarah Chang.

Opera Wednesday: Ring those bells

Roberta Peters, who made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera at age 20, remains to this day one of the most enduring and most loved of American sopranos. She was also a big hit on television, appearing a record 65 times on the Ed Sullivan Show. Well, why not? She not only had the beauty for television, she had a killer voice as well. If anyone could bring opera to the masses, Roberta Peters could.

In what looks to be a television broadcast dated September 29, 1952, Peters sings the Bell Song from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé. It's a treat.

Opera Wednesday

Tis the season, and as a writer at Opera News pointed out some time ago, there is very little opera connected with Christmas other than Amahl and the Night Visitors. The Metropolitan Opera, for instance, seems to rotate an abridged English version of Mozart's The Magic Flute with Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel, and while each of these has some very pleasant music, they're more of "family" operas, the kind of thing you do for the week between Christmas and New Year's, than anything that's truly seasonal.

So why not turn to Rimsky-Korsakov and his 1895 opera Christmas Eve? Maybe the story isn't about Christmas per se, but it does take place on Christmas Eve, and there's snow! It also has some lovely music, as demonstrated in this suite drawn from the opera. It's conducted by Ernest Ansermet, with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, in this recording from 1956.

Opera Wednesday

Last month I showcased Gian Carlo Menotti's one-act opera The Telephone, and later in December we'll look at a different version of his famed Amahl and the Night Visitors, but this week it's one of his last, and most bizarre, efforts - the opera Help. Help, the Globolinks! Fortunately, it's subtitled. Eh; give it a try!

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Opera Wednesday

I don't know if there's any quantifiable evidence on it, but I'd suspect that no American composer's music is more associated with Thanksgiving than Aaron Copland, a great example of which is his Shaker-inspired piece "Simple Gifts."

Just for the occasion, here's a performance of that piece from a concert celebrating the centennial of Carnegie Hall, sung by the great Marilyn Horne and backed up by James Levine and the New York Philharmonic.

Opera Wednesday

Long-time readers know my high regard for Parsifal, Wagner's final opera and my favorite opera, period. When it came time, many years ago, to purchase a CD recording of Parsifal, the choice was obvious: any recording conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch. Knappertsbusch (1888-1965) was arguably the greatest interpreter of Wagnerian opera; The New York Times referred to him as "unmatched" when it came to the composer's works, and the 1962 recording, which is what I purchased, is topped perhaps only by his 1951 version. Either one sets the definitive standard as to how to listen to Parsifal.

In this clip, we see Knappertsbusch in a rare television appearance from 1963, conducting Act I of Wagner's Die Walküre, the second opera in the Ring Cycle. We're all more familiar with the "Ride of the Valkyries." the opening of Act III (if you're not sure, think back to the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now), but I'd forgotten how striking, how dynamic and hard-driving, the overture to that opera is. Here it is, with Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Opera Wednesday

If you've read this blog for any great length of time, you'll know that Gian Carlo Menotti is one of my favorite composers. Here's his whimsical opera buffa The Telephone, as done for Austrian television in 1968. What you're seeing here is not an excerpt, but pretty much the entire opera - I say "pretty much" because this runs a little less than 18 minutes, whereas the opera normally plays to about 26 minutes or so. While there might have been some cuts, this is still the essence of the story.

Though Menotti wrote the opera in English, you'll see it here in German, without subtitles. Despite that, I'm confident you're going to be able to figure it out fairly quickly. It has to do with a young man, Ben, who has something very important to tell his girlfriend, Lucy. Getting her attention, though, is something else...

The singers are Anja Silja and Eberhard Waechter, with Wolfgang Rennert conducting the orchestra of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.

Opera Wednesday

From Mozart's magnificent* opera Don Giovanni, here's the great Ferruccio Furlanetto as the Don's sidekick Leporello, reciting the names from the Don's little black book (which isn't so little).  It's "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" – "My dear lady, this is the catalogue". The performance is at the Metropolitan Opera; the conductor is James Levine

*Magnificent except for the ensemble ending, that is. I've always complained that after someone is dragged down to Hell, anything that follows is an anti-climax. Up to the early 20th Century, this scene was almost always omitted (the opera was written in 1787) - I don't know why producers think it needs to be done today. Oh well.

Opera Wednesday

It's one of our favorites here, and I don't think I ever get tired of seeing it - the spectacular Act Two of Puccini's Tosca, featuring Maria Callas as Tosca and Tito Gobbi as Baron Scarpia, from Covent Garden in London. This was a special performance of Act Two, staged for ITV and broadcast in February, 1964. The television audience was twice that of the Winter Olympics on BBC.

Opera Wednesday

Patter songs - what the always-reliable Wikipedia describes as " moderately fast to very fast tempo with a rapid succession of rhythmic patterns in which each syllable of text corresponds to one note" - are a wonderful feature of comic opera. It's almost impossible to listen to one and not smile, even if you don't understand what's being said. In fact, when it comes to your enjoyment, the translation really doesn't matter. If you don't believe me, listen to the famous "A un dottor della mia sorte" from Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), written by the master of patter, Rossini, and performed by a master of patter, John del Carlo. He's singing here with Joyce DiDonato.

Opera Wednesday

I've mentioned in this space before that Verdi, unlike Mozart (for example) really knows how to end an opera, and one of the most exciting climactic scenes comes from Rigoletto, in which the bitter court jester Rigoletto finds out that his plans for revenge have gone awry - the contract he put out on his boss the Duke has backfired, resulting in the death of his daughter, whom he was trying to save from that very Duke.

Here's that final scene, with two of the very best: Diana Damrau and Zeljko Lucic, with the Dresden State Opera, conducted by Fabio Luici.

Opera Wednesday

From March 6, 1955, the great soprano Lily Pons is the Mystery Guest on What's My Line?

Opera Wednesday

Short and sweet - Maria Callas (above) and Tito Gobbi perform the spectacular finale to Act 2 of Tosca in a special television broadcast from the Royal Opera House in London. This never gets old.

Opera Wednesday: JFK, the opera

DANIELA MACK AND MATTHEW WORTH AS JACKIE AND JACK IN FORT WORTH OPERA'S JFK.

It seems an unlikely proposition, an opera called JFK, and even after one ascertained that it was not a musical version of the Oliver Stone movie, that it was in fact set in Fort Worth, Texas on the last night of John F. Kennedy's life, it was still a bit hard to envision. But now it can be told, that the world premiere of JFK by the Fort Worth Opera justifies every risk taken, every doubt overcome.

From the outset of this modern composition, a mixture of the melodic and the atonal which was occasionally harsh and jarring but never crossed the line into Schoenbergian territory, the listener knows things will not end well. It's not just because we know the ending, either - as Jacqueline Kennedy (a suburb Daniela Mack) stands before a window staring into the Fort Worth night while her husband soaks his ailing back in the bathtub, as midnight passes into the beginning of John Kennedy's last day on earth, there is a sense of grim oppressiveness combined with a wistfulness, a looking back that becomes almost a valedictory on a life that was better than some but often fell short.

Jackie is burdened with Jack's excruciating back pain, for which she routinely gives him shots of morphine; torn by the death a little over three months before of infant son Patrick after just two days of life; haunted also by the additional memories of a miscarriage in 1957 and the birth of a stillborn daughter, Arabella, in 1956. So powerful are the nightmares caused by these memories, she occasionally has to resort to morphine herself in order to achieve a dreamless sleep.

For John (baritone Matthew Worth), too, there is unease under the dashing surface. His medical problems, certainly (including the adrenal disorder Addison’s disease, ulcers, colitis, and allergies), but also the memory of a favorite sister, Rosemary, who underwent a lobotomy in 1941, and the knowledge that his father favors older brother Joe, the Kennedy destined for politics until his death in World War II. In JFK's dreams he is taken first to the moon with Rosemary (the Sea of Serenity), where he is harangued by a belligerent Khrushchev and his Red Army minions; then to Cape Cod, where the memories of the moonlight cause him to relive his initial meeting and subsequent courtship of Jackie, and finally a comedic confrontation with Lyndon Johnson and his posse of rhinestone-laden camp followers, with Jack constantly having to caution LBJ not to withdraw his "Jumbo."

All the while, the Kennedys are ministered to by two outsiders: a chambermaid (Talise Trevigne) and Secret Service agent (Sean Panikkar) who simultaneously serve two additional roles: first, that of  Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, the couple who shared the box with Abraham and Mary Lincoln the night of his assassination; and second, as The Spinner and The Alloter, two of the three Greek Fates. The Spinner, it is explained, unspools the metaphorical thread of life, while The Alloter measures out the length of that thread. The third Fate, The Cutter, is the one who cuts the thread at the end of life. The Cutter is unseen in the opera; he awaits in Dallas.

In Act Two, as John speaks before a crowd gathered outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Jackie is brought face-to-face with her future self, Jackie Onassis (Katharine Goeldner), who helps the young Jackie dress in her iconic pink suit and hat. Together with the maid, the three women sing a poignant trio as Mrs. Onassis assures Mrs. Kennedy that her husband will love her "every day" of the rest of his life, not adding that this life has only hours to go. It, along with the love duet sung by the young Jack and Jackie, are the show-stoppers of the opera, the two pieces that triggered spontaneous and long applause from the audience.

While Jackie leaves with the luggage, Jack slips into his familiar grey suit and, musing on how much his wife has sacrificed for him and how unworthy he is, he sings of how lucky a man he is, before he joins her for the short trip to Dallas. If there is any truth to the theory that the two Kennedys were growing closer, that fatherhood combined with the tragic death of Patrick had caused JFK to strive to become a better husband, it likely came about in much this way.

The opera is far from perfect, as is the case with most premieres. The scene with LBJ, for example, is very broad, to the point that the audience is encouraged to laugh perhaps more heartily than the material justifies. Johnson was, clearly, a larger-than-life character; the attempts by men in Kennedy's administration to marginalize him, and the dual insecurity of the two men (LBJ by his desire to be loved, JFK by Johnson's suggestion that the younger man is too inexperienced to be president) deserves a bit more gravitas than is given.

The triple roles played by Ms. Trevigne and Mr. Panikkar are also overly complicated. Without the pre-opera talk from the director, it would have been virtually impossible to link the two to the characters of Harris and Rathbone, and the tangential connections made to Lincoln's assassination are not only tenuous but unnecessary, cluttering up an already-crowded storyline. For those of us accustomed to stories of angels assuming human form on earth, the idea of the Fates assuming the identities of a heretofore unknown maid and Secret Service agent are plausible enough; adding another layer is not.

The use of the Fates, though, I found to be highly effective, for in the end the story of John F. Kennedy is a tragedy of its own. The assassination itself is never depicted on stage; instead, the Fates, having sent their charges to meet their destiny, watch on a television set while a grainy copy of the Zapruder film plays on the set's backdrop. The fateful moment, when the gunshots of Lee Harvey Oswald - The Cutter - fatally strike the president's head, is hidden from the audience by a piece of furniture; the reaction of the Fates as they see the unseen drama on TV, tell the story eloquently.

Thaddeus Strassberger's set design is by turns garish, sinister and intimate, and the occasional use of rear projection images, especially during the Jack/Jackie duet, is striking. And we can't really end without a shout-out to the Fort Worth Symphony, conducted by Steve Osgood. The musicians performed a new and often challenging piece of music quite capably, and the long ovation that greeted them prior to the start of the final act was fully justified.

David Little and Royce Vavrek, responsible for the music and libretto respectively, blend the ongoing narrative and the numerous flashbacks well, though it's likely that continued performances will result in a more polished presentation. Musically, the opera reminded me a great deal of John Adams' Nixon in China, in that it combines lovely melodies with harder, bolder modern sounds. In addition, both operas eschew for the most part the classical structure of arias and duets, instead choosing to present the dialogue in what essentially amounts to an extended recitative.

Ultimately, whether or not you agreed with John Kennedy's politics, whether or not you saw Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as one of the world's most glamorous women (and the sympathetic portraits given here would encourage you to do both), this is really about of a young couple who rose to the top but never had the opportunity to enjoy the quiet moments that life presents in the subsequent years, when all is said and done and days are spent reminiscing while sitting in rocking chairs enjoying the late summer sun. The sinister sense of foreboding presented at the beginning is fully delivered by the end. That we're unable to prevent it from happening has frustrated artists to no end over the years (see: King, Stephen, for example), but that very inevitability, augmented as it is by our knowledge of the assassination's aftermath, is what compounds the tragedy.

One of the objectives of JFK, Little and Vavrek explained, is to remind us that the iconic figures of American history are also mortals, human beings with human lives. Flawed though it may be, their effort presents this in a very moving, powerful way. The story of John F. Kennedy is, as I said, a tragedy, and there is no better vehicle to present tragedy than that of opera. If it failed in every other respect - and, believe me, it doesn't - it would have earned its place in the opera world from that alone.

Opera Wednesday: The death of Butterfly

The way an opera ends is as important as the way it begins. Verdi got this, and his operas often ended with a dramatic crescendo; Mozart, for all his genius, did not, as the anticlimactic conclusion of Don Giovanni proves. Puccini got it as well; as the conclusion of Madama Butterfly proves. When the shattered and despondent Butterfly takes her own life, it packs an emotional wallop. If you need more evidence, listen to the immortal Maria Callas in this unforgettable performance. The recording is from 1957, with the great Herbert Von Karajan conducting.

Opera Thursday: The bohemians

That's the literal translation (or at least close enough) of the title of Puccini's famed opera La bohème, which was first performed this week in 1896. The story, as is so often the case, is fairly idiotic, but Puccini's music, as is so often the case - well, if the story bothers you, you can always close your eyes and listen.

This rendition of selections from the opera looks to have been from a television broadcast of 1956, though I can't find a quick description. It features two of the greats of 20th Century opera, Renalta Tebaldi and Jussi Bjorling. Is anything else necessary?

Opera Wednesday: The sacredness of life

There are a few operas that, in an oblique way, make reference to contemporary issues even though they were written decades, or centuries, ago.  One such example is Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the magnificent 1919 opera written by Richard Strauss, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.  The crux of the story centers around an Emperor and Empress who are unable to conceive; this is symbolized by the fact that she is without a shadow. The King of the Spirit World decrees that unless she gains a shadow before the end of the twelfth moon, "she will be reclaimed by her father and the Emperor will turn to stone."

As the story progresses, a scheme unfolds to obtain the shadow by stealing it from a peasant woman, thus depriving this woman of motherhood.  The peasant woman is urged to "sell her expectations of motherhood, dissolve her marriage [to a husband who desires children] and pursue a life of individual self-fulfillment."  As this article indicates, the notes accompanying productions of this opera generally relate the moral of the story as being "one person's happiness cannot be bought at the price of another's," yet it is clear that a major component of the story - and its moral - concerns the ability of a woman to conceive, the glories of motherhood, and the existence of the souls of unborn children

[Spoiler alert!] The opera concludes happily, odd enough for an opera; the Empress decides to reject the stolen shadow ("I will not rob humanity from someone else"), the peasant woman's shadow is returned to her, and for her act of generosity, the Empress too receives a shadow.  Both couples  - the Emperor and Empress and the peasant couple - sing of their joy and humanity, and praise their unborn children.  On occasion, the chorus assumes the guise of unborn children, making the analogy even stronger.

Ten or so years ago, the Los Angeles Times, one of the worst newspapers in the United States, committed a hilarious error by changing a review of the opera, which the critic had described as "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean," replacing the term "pro-life" with "anti-abortion." One hardly knows where to begin with this comedy of errors; the mindless policy in the paper's style sheet, which apparently dictates that all references to pro-life should be changed to emphasize the negative; the blatant inaccuracy of the edit, since the abortion message in Frau is inferred when transposed to today's times and there is in fact no discussion whatsoever of abortion in the libretto; or the idea that being pro-life should be assumed to refer to abortion only and exclusively. You can read more about it here.  Idiots.

The point is, Die Frau ohne Schatten does not deal with abortion directly; it deals with the sacredness of human life and the importance of being open to its creation.  And while it is not an anti-abortion screed, as some might think, is explains one of the fundamental reasons why the sacredness of human life is important and why, among other reasons, abortion is wrong.

Anyway, enough with the politics.  Regardless of what you think, there is glorious music in this opera, which in the video below is provided by the famed Sir. Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic.  You can get other videos that include subtitles, through which the power of the story becomes even more apparent, but you won't find many guided by better than Solti.

Opera Thursday: The musical that belongs in the opera house

NINO CASTELNUOVO AND CATHERINE DENEUVE IN THE MOVIE THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

A trend over the past few years has brought increasing numbers of musicals to the opera house.  I'm not talking about a road show performance or anything like that; after all, plenty of non-operatic entertainers perform in opera houses.  What I'm talking about is the inclusion in the regular opera season of musicals that in no way fall under the general category of "opera": Show Boat, Passions, The King and I, and other Broadway standards are among the works that have seen significant stage time at various world opera houses.  “The vast majority of musicals are not appropriate to opera companies, but there are a small number of titles that are enhanced by the skill and scale of an opera house,” said Anthony Freud, general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago. “I see it as an inherent part of our output. I don’t see doing ‘The Sound of Music’ with any less professionalism than in doing ‘La Traviata.”’  The Lyric is one of the major promoters of this trend, staging Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, Carousel, The King and I and South Pacific over a five-season period, but lest you think this a strictly American move, European companies are doing it as well: the Volksoper in Vienna has added Guys & Dolls and Kiss Me, Kate, while musicals such as Miss Saigon and Sunday in the Park with George have featured at other European houses.

In the interview with the late Jon Vickers to which I linked a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned how one of the main differences between opera and musical comedy is that "entertainment, for the most part, deals with the superficialities of life, and works usually become extremely dated because they relate to a certain society and a certain framework that has developed in a certain society."  Musical comedy, in Vickers' opinion, qualifies as "entertainment," and "If opera degenerates into entertainment, I would far sooner go and watch a good production of My Fair Lady or Brigadoon because I think it's much better entertainment than opera is."  In other words, you have to be very careful mixing the two genres, and Vickers felt that a true American opera would never develop out of the Broadway musical.

This is all appropriate, because in today's AV Club there's an example of the one musical that I think might be the exception to the rule, the piece that I'd have no trouble staging in the opera house: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, written by Michel Legrand and brought to the cinema by Jacques Denny.  I'll let you read A.A. Dowd's article to get the full flavor of Umbrellas, but two things have always stood out in my mind as justifications for staging this as an opera: its true-to-life subject matter recalls the verismo school of opera, and there is no spoken dialog - everything is sung as "a series of recitative song conversations."  To my mind, that alone puts it far ahead of the My Fair Ladys and Guys & Dolls's of the world.*

*You're probably wondering where that leaves something like singspiel; well, to tell you the truth, I think both The Merry Widow and Die Zauberflöte would profit from having their significant amounts of dialog converted to recitative.  As for Carmen, I've always preferred the version in which recitative replaced spoken dialog.  But then, that's just me.

I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg included in the occasional opera season, but not often enough.  You've heard me complain frequently about the habit of commissioning new operas (many of which are never heard from again after their initial productions) when there are plenty of underperformed ones lying around; the same goes here.  If you've got The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, why bother with The Sound of Music?  This is not to criticize the great musicals which the American theater has given us, merely to point out there's a place for everything, and the opera stage is not the place for most of them.  No, the bigger question is this: am I making an exception for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or is that where it belonged all along?

You may not think you recognize any of it's music, but I'll bet you do: here's the justifiably famous theme, "I Will Wait for You."