After our initial days in New York we drove to equally cold Boston for a few days with friends.  On our first evening we attended a concert at the New England Conservatory in honor of Giuseppe Verdi.  Many of the performers were students, but some of the singers were professionals.  One poor fellow drove all the way up from New York to sing one aria ("La donna è mobile").  He had the flu and apologized in advance for a bad performance and for not attempting the high note that Verdi didn't write anyway.  Why he made the long drive up to Boston, with the flu, to give a bad performance of an over performed aria, I do not know.  Otherwise, it was an eclectic mix of arias, overtures, one movement of Verdi's one string quartet, something from the Requiem, the triumphal march from Aida played by a badly off-key group of student brass players and the overture to Forza del destino played by a large brass choir so LOUDLY that several seniors with hearing aids left in a state of sonic shock before it was over.  One of the oddities was the ballet music to Otello, the last music Verdi composed for the stage.  It was interesting, but not enough to save the concert, which in the realm of bird metaphors was bird-brained in concept and sometimes in execution.

The next night we attended a concert of stage music by Henry Purcell performed by the venerable Handel and Haydn Society, one of the country's oldest performing groups of classical music.  Purcell did not compose operas per se except for Dido and Aeneas, written for a girl's school.  His other stage works are referred to as "semi-operas," and are built on existing stage plays by adding musical sections for minor characters or subsidiary figures who have nothing to do with the primary play at hand.  Thus we got the funny "Scene of the Drunken Poet" from The Fairy Queen, an anonymous rewrite of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The scene features-- what else?-- a drunk, stuttering poet who stammers and stumbles his way through a group of mocking fairies.  The intention may have been to mock a contemporary poet (Thomas d'Urfey or Elkanah Settle), but its onomatopoeic text has nothing to do with the rewrite of Shakespeare.  English bass-baritone Jonathan Best was amusing as the Poet, making his stuttering, drunken way from a seat just behind ours in the orchestra, up to the stage.  Then there was the "Frost Scene" from King Arthur, an early bit of the baroque propensity to set metaphors to music.  Purcell succeeded remarkably well in writing music which shivers and chatters with icy cold, certainly an analogue to the weather outside the theater.  

The main event was the music for the play The Indian Queen, by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard.  The story is about a conflict between the Incas and the Mexicans, and Montezuma is a character.  The play itself is a dreadfully dull affair in rhymed couplets (trust me, I was forced to read it as a student), but Purcell's music, which once again sets a text which is ancillary to the main story, is lovely.  It is reminiscent of the great final scene from Dido and Aeneas.  Henry Purcell died before he could complete the music and his brother Daniel finished it by composing a masque for the last act with Cupid, Hymen and two carping "married people" as characters.  It is nice music, but not as good as brother Henry's, and the conductor, Harry Christophers, placed it separately in the program, so that the concert would end with Henry's music and not Daniel's.

It was all quite lovely, and instructive in understanding the path in the early baroque (Purcell's dates are 1659-95) that led to opera in England.  The splendid Handel and Haydn Society Chorus and their Period Instrument Orchestra under Christophers was buttressed by soloists, including Best and Zachery Wilder, a tenor.  In spite of the "Frost Scene," the concert proved a heady antidote to the reigning cold outside.  Alas, there were no birds to be noted in the Purcell music, but there was a pretty, young soloist whose name was Vogel ("bird" in German).  That's probably pressing the bird metaphor beyond its limits.  


"Niente uccello, e` bordo": L'elisir d'amore at the Met

Back in New York, the cold wave had finally broken and the temperature was nearing 60 when we trooped through a persistent drizzle to see the new Elisir d'Amore at the Met.  This production will probably be familiar to anyone reading this since it opened the Met season last September, was seen in theaters in HD, and was broadcast on PBS on January 18.  The January 30 performance we saw was streamed live on Sirius radio.  The production is better in the opera house than in the movies because the amusing and theatrical Barlett Sher production with old fashioned painted sets (by Michael Yeargan) and clever pastel costumes by Catherine Zuber is obviously aimed at a theater audience and not created for the camera.  Sher sets it in 1836, a few years after the 1832 premiere.  The cast was the same in these post-holiday performances as earlier in the season too-- Anna Netrebko as Adina, Matthew Polenzani as Nemorino, Maurius Kwiecien as Belcore and Erwin Schrott as Dulcamara.

The genesis of Elisir is well known.  Donizetti had established himself as Italy's preeminent composer in 1830 with Anna Bolena.  His compatriot (and sometimes rival) Vincenzo Bellini was working himself on a serious opera at the time--Ernani (later, of course, set by Verdi).  Bellini was so worried about competing with Donizetti in the realm of serious opera, that he dropped the Ernani project, switched gears, and wrote the pastoral opera semi-seria La sonnambula instead, something very different from Anna Bolena.  Then, a year or so later, Donizetti came back with his own pastoral comedy, L'Elisir d'amore.  Felice Romani was the librettist for all three of these operas, and apparently he put together the libretto of Elisir in eight days.  Donizetti set it to music in about two months, not an unusual feat in those days, but quite remarkable considering the excellence of the score (and book).

Romani based his work on an existing libretto called Le philtre that Eugene Scribe had concocted for D.F.E. Auber.  The story is based on enduring stereotypes which descend from the Roman comedy of Plautus (200 BC) through commedia dell'arte.  Belcore (Brave Heart) is a typical miles gloriosus or braggart soldier.  His boastful aria "Come Paride vezzoso" is a perfect little miniature of unbridled swagger for this type.  Dr. Dulcamara (Dr. Bittersweet) is the charlatan doctor of the ancient Romans or commedia, and he is still with us on television, selling products ("But wait…order now and you will get a second whichit absolutely free, both for $19.99 plus shipping and handling") we don't need or want.  Nemorino's name means "Little Nobody" in Latin and Adina is a name which means roughly 'lovely'.  

The plot of Nemorino buying a "love potion" to win Adina's love is straight out of commedia too, and is what the ancients called an "error fabulae" plot, the 'misunderstanding of the story', which, cleared up, makes everything turn out well in the end.  But Romani invested his romantic leads with a seriousness and sympathy which you don't find in either Roman comedy or commedia dell'arte.  Almost the first time Nemorino opens his mouth, he sings "Quanto è bella," a suave, slow melody that immediately defines his character as something other than the country bumpkin.  His "Adina, credemi" which begins the Act I finale, is also a window into the depth of his feeling, and of course "Una furtiva lagrima"  (was there ever a more beautiful aria?) clinches the argument.  Romani was dead set against including the romance, but Donizetti insisted on it.  Years after Romani's death, his widow Emilia Branca was still insisting on the inappropriateness of "Una furtiva lagrima" in the biography she wrote of her husband.  But no one else in the world agrees.  

Adina, too, changes from the flighty young woman in Act II, and recognizes the real love that Nemorino offers, and her "Prendi, per me sei libero" is the equivalent of Nemorino's earnestness.   Nemorino grows too, gaining confidence and courage, qualities that the bashful bumpkin of Act I lacks.  This sentiment and growth in character are quite different from the Roman comedy and commedia models--and from opera buffa.  There is precious little sentiment in The Barber of Seville, for instance, and the characters do not grow or change.

The real miracle about L'elisir d'amore, however, is Donizetti's score, which reflects perfectly all of the variations in mood and changes in character.  Donizetti wrote lots of comic operas, many of them charming, but none (except the sharper Don Pasquale) is as fine as Elisir in conveying the fine shadings of text and in offering us a continuous parade of wonderful melody.  To me, it has always been a well-nigh perfect score in which every piece is as fine as all the others: there is no second rate music.  Berlioz didn't like it (a good sign when it came to Donizetti), but Wagner arranged it for piano.  One remembers that the opera opens with Adina telling the story of Tristan and Isotta.  Did that spur Wagner's interest in the old Celtic tale?

Donizetti scholar William Ashbrook defines two distinct musical styles for Donizetti-- one he called "popoloresco" and the other a more elevated, formal style derived from opera seria, via Rossini.  The former style is based in Neapolitan folk melody (and sometimes popular songs from other parts of Italy, like the Venetian barcarolle that Dulcamara and Adina sing in Act II), and is characterized by easy melodies and jaunty rhythms.  The more formal style has more fioratura and is more sober.  Elisir is definitely in the 'popular' style, as befits its village setting.  Maria Stuarda, a story of queens and nobility, is in Donizetti's more formal style.

Everyone in the new Met production was at the top of his or her game, with the possible exception of Mr. Schrott, who had a little trouble with the fast Italian patter of "Udite, udite, o rustici" and couldn't be heard well all the time in Act I.  He improved in Act II.  Mr. Scrott's Dulcamara was the most un-buffo wily doctor that I have ever seen: he is young, handsome and slim compared to the usual fat, old swindler we are used to.  Anna Netrebko seemed to be having a wonderful time in the part of Adina; she is playful and of course beautiful (the HD camera makes her look plumper than she really is) and vocally she is faultless.  Matthew Polenzani was a mellifluous Nemorino, and his soft, floated notes at the end of "Una furtiva lagrima" brought a moment of total silence from the awed audience and then cries of "bravo" and "bis."  Still, his finesse in the aria was not quite as great as some of the wonderful tenors of the past (starting with Caruso) who have essayed the part.  He was athletic and well-nigh perfect as an actor, funny too.  Maurius Kwiecien was a swaggering-- and sometimes more violent than usual-- Belcore.  Vocally, he was perfection.

In short, this Elisir d'amore was a performance to treasure and remember in a gentle and un-mucked-up production that always respected the music and the story.  The house had many empty seats, too bad for those who did not fill them, because it is hard to imagine that Broadway, with its endless iterations of The Lion King, offers anything more delightful than this 180 year old, perfect, comic opera.


The rara avis: Lalla Roukh

The last of the operas we had come to New York to see was Félicien David's Lalla Roukh, performed at the Frederick Rose Theater on Columbus Circle by the Washington, D.C., company Opera Lafayette.  This enterprising young company has been performing rare examples of French baroque opera, mostly opera comiques (with spoken dialogue) for the last several years, and this was its first excursion into the vast and little known repertory of nineteenth century opera comique.  There had been one performance of Lalla Roukh in Washington a few days earlier and the excellent cast recorded it for Naxos, but other than that, there had been no performance of this once wildly popular opera for at least 113 years.  There is no recording, not even of one excerpt.  No one alive now had ever heard it before the Opera Lafayette performances as far as I know.

If the title sounds vaguely familiar, it is because it is the name of a work by the Irish poet and writer Thomas Moore, a work once so popular that there was actually a middle-aged woman at the opera performance whose name was Lalla Roukh.  She said it had been a tradition in her family to name a female child after the Moore heroine for many, many years.  In the Moore tale, Lalla Roukh is a Moghul (Moslem) Indian princess who has been betrothed to the King of Burkhara, whom she has never seen.  On the long journey from Delhi to Samarkand in Bukhara (in today's Uzbekistan) the Princess encounters a minstrel who keeps serenading her with narrative songs.  Lalla Roukh of course falls in love with the penniless minstrel, who of course turns out to be the King in disguise-- because he wanted to test his betrothed and make her love him for himself and not for his position.  In Moore's work, the story of Lalla Roukh is a frame tale in prose; the four narrative poems that the minstrel sings to her are separate stories which make up most of the work.  David's librettists, Michel Carré and Hippolyte Lucas, took the frame tale as the basis for their story and discarded the rest.

Félicien David is an interesting composer (1810-76).  Early in his life he was an ardent participant in the Saint Simonian movement, a group of utopian socialists who believed in world peace fostered by greater communication and trade, and who preached the coming of a female messiah.  Naturally, they believed in rights for women that were far ahead of their time.  They also believed that music held a central place in promoting harmony, understanding and peace, and musicians were much honored by them.  One of their projects was to promote building a canal at the isthmus of Suez because they felt that the increased trade would produce mutual understanding.  Again, they were decades ahead of their time.  David wrote hymns for the group and choral pieces, until they were eventually banned by the French government which did not like their socialist tendencies.  

David traveled with other adherents of the cause to Turkey and Egypt on a long trip and was much influenced by what he heard there.  Because of his trip and his interest in the region David became one of the first 'orientalist' composers and led the movement of music and opera in particular that used 'oriental' subjects.  "Oriental" in those days meant everything from north Africa across what we call the Middle East through India to China and even Japan.  From the time of Lalla Roukh (1862) to at least Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904/Japan) and Turandot (1926/China) opera composers exploited the "orient" and satisfied a burgeoning western interest in exotic lands.  Some of the more famous works that used these locales and offered vaguely "oriental" sounding music were The Pearl Fishers (Bizet, 1863/Sri Lanka), Lakmé (Delibes, 1883/India), La reine de Saba (Gounod, 1862/ancient Ethiopia and Yemen) and even Aida (1871/Egypt).  

David first became well known to the general public with his programmatic symphonic ode Le désert (1844), a sort of secular oratorio with spoken narration which depicted several aspects of a camel caravan moving across the Egyptian desert including a sand storm, a stop at an oasis and the muezzin's call to prayer in the morning.  It is almost the only piece of David's music that I had ever heard, way back in 1969, and I have been fascinated by him ever since, but unable to hear almost anything by him!  In Le désert David used what he called "airs arabes," native melodies he transcribed while in Egypt.  In his career David used many exotic locales, and not only in the "orient": there was Brazil for his opera La perle du Brésil and the Caribbean for an oratorio about Columbus.  He also attempted a big grand opera called Herculaneum which capitalized on the ongoing interest in that buried ancient city.  And there was much chamber music, some of which has been recorded.  

Lalla Roukh balances the love plot with a comic set of characters, the ambassador assigned to bring the princess to Samarkand, Baskir (a bass) and the Princess' lady-in-waiting Mirza.  The music is luscious and tuneful and cleverly orchestrated.  The "oriental" atmosphere is achieved with the use of certain instruments and harmonies and does not use authentic Indian or Persian melodies.  It is hard to understand why some of the arias and duets have not survived in the repertories of modern singers and why this opera faded so quickly and completely from the scene after 1900 when it had been heard hundreds of times in a dozen different languages and countries in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century.  The great satirist and cartoonist Daumier drew a cartoon showing the bourgeois flocking to the opera.  Daumier probably felt that David had sold out his socialist principals to appeal to the moneyed bourgeois, but flock they did, and for a long time.

No doubt Lalla Roukh was very influential as practically the first of the "oriental" operas.  You can hear bits and pieces of it in Berlioz' Les Troyens (Berlioz was full of praise for the work), in both The Pearl Fishers and Carmen, and in other works.  If David's work has survived at all, it is through the works of other, better known composers.  

Opera Lafayette's production did the work proud.  Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, took western artists to task (including Verdi) for offering a false picture of a world they did not understand and had no real wish to (the world of the 'Other'), but Opera Lafayette took pains to bring in representatives of and artists from India to complement the western artists.  The Ambassador of India headed the list of individuals that the company thanked and Her Excellency was there at the performance we saw.  More important, they brought a wonderful American/Indian dance troupe called Kalanidhi Dance to perform dances in the Kuchipudi style of southern India.  The group danced a separate little ballet to Indian music before the opera started, and performed the several ballet episodes within the opera itself.  These beautifully clad young women added a touch of the authentic East to the western opera comique, and their choreographer, Anuradha Nehru, created lovely dances which respected the French music of David, and the French text.  The opera worked as the Saint Simonist David may have wanted it to: as a window on that Other that promotes understanding and cooperation between cultures.  After all, this was a Persian style tale with an Indian heroine by an Irish poet, set to music by a French composer using a French text, with multi-national singers, an American dance troupe composed of women of Indian heritage, an Indian costume designer who used Uzbek textiles and colors, offered by an American company performing in French to an international audience in a polyglot city.  It was an undertaking worthy of the world we live in.

One of the best things about the production was that everyone spoke excellent French.  The copious dialogue was cut, but enough was kept to reveal the idiomatic French.  The music offers each principal an aria in each act.  Both of Lalla Roukh's are astonishingly varied and good-- "Sous le feuillage sombre" and "O unit d'amour."  Why haven't they been recorded?  Noureddin, the minstrel-king, sings a romance in typical couplet form in Act I ("Ma maitresse a quitté la tente") to entertain the Princess, and in Act II he sings a barcarolle (O, ma maitresse") off stage, an utterly charming piece which our production enlivened with a solo dance.  There are duets in both acts, and one of them, a comic duet between Baskir and Noureddin in which the former laughs about how he will dupe the King not knowing that he is confessing to the King in disguise, might remind us of the smuggler's quintet in Carmen (1875), but would have reminded Carmen's early listeners of Lalla Roukh.  The love duet in Act II ends with a section that reminds Ralph Locke, a musicologist who has written about David, of the final slow cabaletta in Lucia di Lammermoor.  At any rate, Donizetti can be heard from time to time too.

Marianne Fiset was a powerful heroine, especially in her beautiful aria "O nuit d'amour" near the beginning of Act II.  Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, a Chilean who was born and grew up in Geneva, was a mellifluous Noureddin, the King in disguise, while the excellent Nathalie Paulin was a funny and agile Mirza.  Perhaps best of all was Bernard Deletré in the comic role of Baskir.  Mr. Deletré also directed the proceedings and cut the spoken text. There were also two comic servants to Baskir named Bakbara and Kaboul (David Newman and Andrew Adelsberger).  Mr. Adelsberger has appeared with Opera Fort Collins as Bartolo in The Barber of Seville.  These two gentlemen played a very funny drunk scene, most typical of French opera comique if not of Moslem culture.

There was minimal scenery (a couple of tents) and the chorus was dressed in nineteenth century black, and sang from stage boxes for the most part, but gorgeous costumes, using the bright colors of India and Uzbekistan, by Indian fashion designer Poonam Bhagat made up for any lack of sets.  Opera Lafayette founder Ryan Brown conducted idiomatically.  This rara avis really flew!

Hearing L'elisir d'amore was like putting on an old, comfortable sweater.  Everything about it was familiar, but it fits so well that it is always welcome.  Hearing Lalla Roukh is like finding a new wine (albeit in an old bottle).  It is what some of us jaded, devotees of the lyric muse treasure most: finding something new and very good, forgotten on the dusty shelves of an old library, and understanding what our great, great grandparents found so charming over a century ago.  We hope against hope that these performances will inspire other innovative companies to take up a work so full of grace and beauty so that it will not be consigned to the shelf for another hundred years.

This visit to New York was a good one in spite of the frigid air: six very fine productions out of six, and proof that the small, innovative companies like Bronx Opera and Opera Lafayette are alive and can compete with the giant machine that is the Met, but also that on good nights the Met can produce some very good opera in spite of the yawning hugeness of the house, and that the best singers in the world are very good indeed.

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The Birds of Winter: Opera in New York
January, 2013

Fluttering Birds: The Lustful Count

A Tale of Two Cinecasts: Aida and Cendrillon in Ft. Collins
December 20, 2012

On a day when our hearts are so very sad over yet another gun massacre in a country that has not learned the obvious lessons of gun violence, we went to Aida at the Cinemark Theater in Ft. Collins, the latest in the Met’s HD series.  As the Greeks, who invented tragic drama knew, tragedy can be uplifting filtered through the sublimity of art, something not at all the case on live newscasts.

Charles Ralph had sent me an article from the Independent newspaper by a certain Alexandra Coughlan which denigrated the cinecast of live opera.  She had, she said, walked out on a cinecast in London last year of Handel’s Rodelinda from the Met.  Her argument seemed to be that opera at the movies distorts the live theater experience and denies us the “ritual” of attending a live performance.  She went on to argue that directors could, however, profit by bringing cinematic techniques to live opera performances.  One wonders where she has been.  Directors have been using cinematic techniques in opera for decades (my first was probably the New York City Opera’s wonderful production of Janacek’s The Makropolous Affair in the 1970’s), and today’s directors, who are often more familiar with the movies than the history of opera direction, for better or worse, use movies as touchstones all the time.  In the last couple of years I have seen live productions that reference silent movies, thirties’ melodramas, the movies of the ‘Abbot and Costello meet the ghost’ variety, forties’ film noir, science fiction, gangster movies and screwball comedies.  

As to Ms. Coughlan’s denigration of cinecast opera, you may have the luxury to be a snob if you live in London, or New York, Berlin or Paris, but for the millions of us who live in the rest of the world and who love opera, the performances seen in movie theaters are a godsend.  For the Aida on Dec. 15, the Cinemark theater in Ft. Collins was almost full at 11 AM on a Saturday.  People applauded the arias of singers half a continent away.  Young people could afford the ticket price, and there were many there.  Many of us wept at the end as Verdi intended.  A man next to me was at his first Met HD broadcast.  When we sat down, he said, “No whining,”  humorously, as if my wife had dragged me out on a Saturday morning to go to an opera.  Little did he know that if anyone had done the dragging, it had been me.  During the opera, munching on his giant popcorn, he kept saying “Wow!”  At the end he said to his wife (who may have dragged him away from TV football), “We have to come to another one of these.”  No, Ms. Coughlan, you cannot take that pleasure away from us.

The Aida production itself was a throwback to another era.  Aida is so familiar to those of us who love opera (it was my second opera recording an eon ago) that it is easy to forget that Aida is the culmination of the decades-long development of grand opera.  This month London’s Covent Garden staged Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, often cited in operatic histories as one of the first grand operas. (Maybe Ms. Coughlan went.)  Robert had it all-- spectacle, ballet, shock value (a ballet of lustful, dead nuns resurrected from the grave to seduce the hero), great ensembles, duets, a cast of thousands (well, a hundred or two).  That was 1831.  By the time you get to Aida (1871), Verdi has subsumed all of the lessons of grand opera in a work where the ballet, spectacle and other elements are thoroughly integrated with the personal tragedy of three people-- Aida, Amneris and Radames.  

Verdi understood that a grand opera was wanted for a great, historic occasion-- the inauguration of the new opera house in Cairo, itself a cultural monument to cap the opening of the Suez Canal.  He wanted an “Egyptian” tinta or ‘feeling’ to the work; he asked the museum of historical instruments in Florence to send him some ancient Egyptian musical instruments in their collection to hear how they sounded.  They may not have made it into the opera, but it is undeniable that the “feel” of Aida is different from the feel of Ballo, or Traviata, or Otello.  But he also wanted spectacle-- a grand triumphal scene-- to equal the great triumph of the Canal.  He understood that a great celebration of Egypt’s pharaonic era was appropriate.  But he wanted an Italian love story suitable for opera.  Aida is the combination of East and West-- a celebration of Egypt’s glorious past with an operatic love triangle at its center, and in the context of European Grand Opera which had been developing for the previous forty years or more.  It worked: here we are 140 years plus later, moved by the tragic love story set in an opulent past of Egyptian splendor.  And if musicians love the opera’s more intimate moments, who in the audience doesn’t thrill every time we hear that great triumphal march and the spectacle it accompanies?


Sonja Frisell designed the production we saw at the movies decades ago.  It must be one of the biggest productions in the Met’s repertory.  Huge ‘Egyptian’ sets, a huge number of supernumeraries, horses, a huge chorus, trumpets on stage: everything.  Cecil B. DeMille must have been smiling in that section of Heaven reserved for Hollywood directors of biblical epics with about as much historical veracity as Aida.  The grand opera part of the production was indeed “grand” in a way that few opera productions are anymore.  It was much closer to what Verdi intended than Francesca Zambello’s modernized, druggy version set in a bombed out building in the contemporary Middle East which played last summer at Glimmerglass.

Like the monumental sets, the acting was “monumental,” in the old operatic sense of the word.  It might as well have been 1967, with Leontyne Price as Aida.  Semaphoric hand gestures, singers directing their singing to the audience (or the camera) rather than to their fellow singers.  Amonasro’s rolling eyes.  Amneris’ make up and costume looking like it was meant for a silent movie actress.  I suppose it all fit with the production concept.  But with singing like we got on Saturday, who needs a modernized production or realistic acting?  Everything about Aida is outsized.

Our Radames, Roberto Alagna, has been singing this role for many years, and he is a little past his prime.  Yet he still looks good with bare arms and legs, and he managed a “Celeste Aida” with a beautiful high pianissimo finish, as Verdi wrote it: pp diminishing to pppp.  I have heard very few tenors who can do that, who do not belt out that final high B flat.  Verdi marked the note “morendo”-- dying out-- as Radames contemplates Aida, and his hope to give her “un trono vicino al sol” (‘a throne close to the sun’).  Alagna did it.  On the other hand, he tired by the end of the long opera, and his final duet with Aida was wanting-- he failed to sing some of his phrases and had difficulty with the soft and sad “O terra, addio.”  I could forgive him-- he will be 50 next year.

Alagna’s Aida was Liudmyla Monastyrska, a Ukranian soprano, and a recent debutante at the Met.  She is the real reason I wanted to see this Aida, and, vocally, she was worth it.  She is the Verdian spinto soprano we have not had for several decades.  As far as I could tell, she was note perfect in “O patria mia,” which is a difficult shoal on which many a soprano has foundered.  She has the power to push and soar over the combined chorus and orchestra (“spinto” from “spingere”-- to push) and the delicacy to sing the softer lyric parts.  Her voice can also assume a dark quality which served her well in “O patria mia” and the duets in Act III.  And she seemed as fresh at the end of the four hour performance as at the start, managing the delicate pianos of  “Vedi, di morte d’angelo” and “O terra, addio” movingly.

Amneris was the veteran Olga Borodina, and vocally she was superb as ever.  For once I was as moved by her plight as I was by the fate of Aida and Radames, and the judgement scene, which can drag on, did not.  George Gagnidze, an eye-rolling Amonasro, was vocally powerful, and as for his acting-- well, he should have been a silent film actor for Cecil B.  Miklós Sebestyén as The King and Štefan Kocán as Ramfis rounded out a vocally impressive cast.  Fabio Luisi, who has a lot on his plate these days, led everyone knowingly and the chorus was superb.

I was put off by some of the camera work, which seemed pedestrian by most Met standards.  This time there were camera shots from above, which looked odd and would never be a perspective that a normal opera goer could see.  In some of the dance sequences, that camera made the dances look like a Busby Berkeley movie musical from the thirties.  Other closeups of the dancers simply made the choreography look chaotic.  The close-ups beloved of these TV directors simply don’t work so well in grand choral scenes.  Given the traditional stand and sing production and the spectacle, perhaps this would have been better from a fixed seat in the house than on the movie screen.

Still, the near-capacity audience at the Cinemark seemed enormously pleased with the performance, and the popcorn stand did big business.

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Meanwhile, three days later, and across town at the Carmike theater in Ft. Collins, a hearty group of ten or so of us gathered for Massenet’s Cinderella opera, originally recorded at London’s Covent Garden in July, 2011.  The Carmike does not have the sound system that the Met’s HD theaters have, and they don’t have the advertising budget of the Met, nor do they make it easy to find out what is showing when, but they do have a special on popcorn and soft drinks on Tuesdays.  So we were able to munch a popcorn-and-coke dinner during the interminable ads before the movie started.  

The Covent Garden production by Laurent Pelly was first seen at Santa Fe in 2007 and is well traveled.  I saw it live last May in the ornate opera house in Lille, France, and loved it.  Carmike had originally announced a film version (not an opera house cinecast) of Rossini’s Cenerentola, but something got in the way, so they substituted another Cinderella, even though they had shown the same production last January.

The Cinderella story is perhaps the most defuse folk tale in the world; there are ancient versions in Africa and China.  In the west, we are mostly familiar with three versions-- the sentimental tale with the fairy godmother and a glass slipper told by Charles Perrault in the seventeenth century and popularized by Disney; the more comic and ironic version with little magic and a cruel father instead of a wicked stepmother used by Rossini in Cenerentola; and a tragic version used by Shakespeare to overwhelming affect in King Lear.  Massenet follows the Perrault tale for the most part.  In the first two acts, we get the familiar elements-- the wicked stepmother and the stepsisters, the put-upon, but kind husband, the fairy godmother, the magic coach and horses and ball gown, the meeting with Prince Charming, and the glass slipper.  Act III is the creation of Massenet’s librettist, Henri Cain, however, with Cinderella and her father determined to leave their sad life together, Cinderella fleeing alone, and a dream sequence (or is it a dream?) in an enchanted forest where the Prince and Cinderella are brought together by the Fairy Godmother (Mariane) and declare their love.  The last act takes us back to the familiar tale with the fitting of the glass slipper and the triumph of Cinderella, called Lucette in the opera.

As far as I know, it is Massenet’s only comedy, and one of his last operas, premiering at the Salle Favert in Paris in 1899.  It was a huge success, but it fell on hard times until fairly recently, and aside from the well traveled Pelly production, it has been produced in 2011 in Cleveland and this fall in Bloomington at Indiana University.  

Pelly’s set consists of walls with working doors with the words of the Perrault tale inscribed (in French, of course) on them; the walls swing open or close to create playing spaces of various sizes.  Pelly has said that the costumes are based on figures he remembers from the fairy tale books of his childhood, especially the ones with illustrations by Gustave Doré.  Madame de la Haltière (the wicked stepmother) and her daughters are clad in impossibly ugly and hilarious outfits, as are the various women at the ball who would like to win over the Prince.  Cinderella gets a traditional Disney princess ball gown or her “cinder” servant clothes as appropriate.  

Pelly remarks that all of Massenet’s cues and suggestions are found in the music, and he has been sensible enough to follow those cues with great ingenuity, whether the music is comic or pompous or sentimental or magical.  In the enchanted forest scene, the enchanting music is as magical as anything created by Mendelssohn or Britten or anyone else who has tried to create fairy-dust music, but that scene is not set in a forest as it is supposed to be, but on the rooftops, with lots of chimneys of various types puffing smoke.  I thought it the one misstep of the production, perhaps because it (intentionally?) reminded me  too much of Mary Poppins, another fairy godmother.  And it contradicts the libretto, which speaks of a “magic oak tree” and a “forest.”

Prince Charming in the cinecast was sung by British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, looking remarkably boyish.  Originally (1899) Prince Charming was a falcon, sort of between soprano and mezzo, and Cendrillon was a soprano, but in the film, great mezzo Joyce DiDonato sang the role.  The fairy godmother was coloratura soprano Eglise Gutiérrez, certainly the most buxom godmother in all of fairydom.  A close up revealed that only a safety pin staved off a wardrobe malfunction.  I rather prefered the more sprite-like Fairy of Kathleen Kim (familiar to Colorado audiences from Central City’s Handel productions); she was La Fèe in Lille.  A bit of truly luxurious casting had Ewa Podleś singing Mme. de la Haltière, the wicked step-mother.  Podleś imposing voice could not be entirely flattened out by the movie theater sound.  The father, Pandolfe (Jean-Philippe Lafont), had the best French diction, but was not in the same vocal class as the ladies.  There was  a large cast of servants, ball goers and courtiers who were really chorus members and dancers.  Each played their character to a tee.  Conductor Bertrand de Billy brought an appropriate French lightness to the orchestration, so necessary to the success of this bon-bon.

I thought that the extremely choreographed theatrical production worked better on stage than in the movie version.  Somehow, the flatness of the sound and constant use of close-ups took away some of the magic that I felt Pelly conveyed in the theater.  Still, it was a snowy evening well spent.  I only wish that the Carmike people would make the series better known.  A lady we sat next to at the Saturday Aida knew nothing about it.


 The Compassionate Ruler: Mozart's Tito at The Met in HD
December 1, 2012

Even the casual tourist to Rome will likely remember the Arch of Titus, sitting solidly at one end of the ancient Forum, across the boulevard from the larger Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum.  The Arch celebrates the triumph of Titus, general of the Roman legions and victor in the long Jewish Wars in Judaea which ended with the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.  Recently cleaned friezes inside the Arch depict those legions in the triumphal procession carrying booty from Judaea and the destroyed Temple in particular, including the sacred Menorah and the Pentateuch.  This same Titus returned to Rome when his father Vespasian become Roman Emperor.  One of his jobs was to head the Praetorian Guard for his father, and he rounded up enemies and potential enemies with violence and brutality.  But in 79 AD Titus followed his father to the imperial throne and in the three short years of his reign, his reputation underwent a radical change.  An early act was his rejection of his long-time paramour, the pro-Roman Jewish queen, Berenice.  She had been with him since his time fighting the Jewish Wars, and she had come to Rome with her brother Agrippa II.  Eleven years his senior, she nonetheless lived with Titus as his wife, but the Roman people did not want their emperor to marry a foreigner, and she was sent back to Judaea.  In her own right she is the subject of major plays by Corneille and Racine and a slew of operas, novels and dramas.   

Another of Titus’ acts was reining in the secret police and passing laws restricting the prosecution and punishment of people for being ‘traitors to the state’, laws which Nero and Vespasian had used to control enemies.  Titus was also the Emperor to dedicate the great Flavian Amphitheater with games which lasted for weeks.  Today we know that arena, constructed under the Flavian family of emperors (which included Titus) as the Colosseum after a colossal statue of Nero which once stood outside its walls.  These were very popular acts, but the major events which characterized Titus’ reign were beyond his control-- the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum and other Campanian cities and a great fire in Rome, which destroyed a lot of that city.  Titus acted swiftly and dug into his own wealth to help the victims; in fact he was in Campania, directing the relief effort around Pompeii when the fire broke out in Rome.  When he died in 81 AD, probably of an infection (but typically rumored to have been poisoned by his brother Domitian, who succeeded him), he was a revered and beloved leader.

It is this view of Titus, the compassionate and forgiving ruler, which Roman historians bequeathed to later generations.  In Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1300) he is the “good Titus,” and by the time we get to the eighteenth century Enlightenment with its reverence for all things Roman, Titus has become an emblem of virtue, the ideal ruler.  In 1734, Metastasio, the greatest librettist of the first half of the eighteenth century wrote La clemenza di Tito (Titus’ Clemency) for the composer Antonio Caldara.  After the fashion of the day, Metastasio introduced romantic conflicts in a fictional story based on Titus’ reputation for virtue.  At the beginning of the opera, we see Titus’ rejection of his beloved Berenice for the good of Rome, but the rest is not history.

In the libretto, Tito’s good friend Sesto, originally a castrato role, is in love with Vitellia, daughter of the deposed Roman emperor Vittelius (Roman history gets confusing, but in the year Titus’ father Vespasian became emperor, there were four emperors in quick succession, one of whom was Vittelius).  Vittelia, however, lusts not after Sesto, but the throne.  As the opera opens, she is jealous of Berenice, whom she thinks is to become empress, and she manipulates Sesto into agreeing to kill Tito.  Upon learning that Berenice has been sent home, she changes tune and stops the plot, thinking that Tito may choose her as empress, but Tito chooses Servilia, Sesto’s sister.  Once again, Vitellia is irate and spurs Sesto on to kill the emperor.  But Servila is in love with Annio, a patrician and friend of Sesto, and she confesses her love to Tito, who nobly renounces his plan and unites her with Annio (a mezzo pants role).  Sesto, unaware, sets fire to the Capitol and stabs someone whom he believes to be Tito in the confusion.  Act I ends with Sesto’s remorse and the other characters (except Tito) expressing their horror.

In Act II Sesto is arrested for treachery, and Tito (who has not been slain) is torn between his love for his friend and his duty as emperor to sign the death decree demanded by the Senate.  In the end, Vitellia confesses, and Tito, in the spirit of the clemency of the title, pardons everyone and is hailed as the ideal ruler.

Some 57 years after the Caldera/Metastasio opera’s premiere, an unexpected commission came Mozart’s way from an impresario who was called on to produce a new opera for the coronation celebrations for Leopold II as King of Bohemia.  The impresario, Domenico Guardasoni, had precious little time after he was first approached in June, 1791, for the coronation was to be in September.  There was no time to obtain a new text, so Caterino Mazzolà, the court poet, dusted off Metastasio’s fifty year old libretto (which in the meanwhile had been set almost forty times by various composers) and updated the long succession of da capo arias with ensembles and the big concertato finale for Act I.  Leopold II already held the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and those rulers saw themselves as the successors of the Roman emperors, so Tito was a particularly appropriate story, with its lessons for a (hopefully) compassionate and kindly ruler.

Mozart was not Guardasoni’s first choice for a composer, but Antonio Salieri, the first choice, was too busy to undertake the commission.  Mozart, ill and without funds, in the last year of his life, jumped at the chance since the promised fee was generous.  Many see the score as a throwback after the brilliance of the more psychologically astute trio of Mozart/Da Ponte operas and the uniqueness of The Magic Flute, composed first, but premiered after La clemenza di Tito, and for a long time Tito was undervalued by critics.  Now, however, for audiences used to the opere serie of Handel and Vivaldi and others, La clemenza di Tito is taken in stride.


The Met in HD offered the opera on December 1, with a splendid cast in a splendid production dating to the 1980’s by the late, exceedingly great director Jean Pierre Ponnelle.  The production is dignified and stately with beautiful sets representing an eighteenth century painterly view of ancient Rome.  Costumes are ‘eighteenth century-Roman’, bewigged, rich and beautiful.  The production, sets and acting are all restrained and perfectly in keeping with the noble story and measured music.  That is not to say that the cast was without passion.  All acted and reacted in a manner more trained towards the camera than the cavernous opera house, to the benefit of those of us watching in a movie theater.  Kate Lindsey as Annio moved like a boy and seemed particularly free in her skirted toga while the wonderful Elīna Garanča as Sesto projected her torment as well as could be expected in a role which makes little psychological sense; but the music Mozart gave Sesto and Garanča’s performance of it-- for example in the famous aria “Parto, parto”-- made up for any shortcomings in the character.  Tenor Giuseppe Filianoti played the idealized and noble Tito with grace and ringing tones, while Oren Gradus was a fine Publio, the Emperor’s Praetorian chief.  British soprano Lucy Crowe (Servilia) has a perfect, velvety Mozartean sound.  Although Tito is the tile role and an obvious didactic complement to Leopold, the real crux of the opera is the wicked Vitellia, sung by the veteran Barbara Frittoli.  Vittelia gets the opera’s most famous aria, "Non più di fiori," which comes near the end.  This great piece, with its wonderful obbligato for basset horn, is not only a virtuoso piece, but the aria where the soprano must move from the scheming bitch she has been up to now to the repentant suppliant she becomes at the end so that all may finish happily.  (Personally, however, I think that Tito does punish Sesto with a fate worse than death by uniting him with Vitellia.)  Frittoli may have lost the bloom she once had, but her performance was solid.  The specialist Harry Bicket led the Met Orchestra and chorus in an exciting and wonderful performance.

La clemenza di Tito may not be Mozart’s best opera when compared to the more advanced, psychologically apposite Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni or Così fan tutte.  But he makes the opera seria form work, eschewing the virtuosity of, say, Vivaldi for deep emotion and ensemble performance rather than star turns.  And of course the music is Mozart, and that is as great as it gets, especially when performed by absolutely top singers in a production which may be thirty years old, but which, like Rome itself, has aged very well. 


CSU and Colorado Celebrate the Founding of the Ralph Opera Center
October 27, 2012

When I retired from 37 years at the California State University (that other CSU) in 2007, I knew that moving to Colorado would bring lots of welcome changes-- being closer to our children and grandchildren first of all, but also living in a beautiful setting with fewer people, far less traffic and cleaner air.  But I must admit that I was worried that compared to the busy arts scene that we enjoyed in the large urban area that is southern California, I would find little of artistic interest in the quieter, more pastoral setting of northern Colorado, especially in the field of my life-long passion for opera.  That concern was a measure of the ignorance of people from the “coasts.”  I had nothing to worry about.

In fact, I had no idea how vibrant the musical scene was in the new area we were to call home.  All of that was made crystal clear last night when we attended the Gala Concert held for the opening of the Ralph Opera Center at Colorado State (“our” new CSU).  The concert starred numerous current students, alums and faculty performing a generous group of operatic hits along with the CSU Sinfonia and the combined Concert Choir and Chamber Choir, 73 members strong, conducted by Wes Kenney. 

All of the excerpts were appropriate for a celebratory Gala-- the overture to Die Fledermaus, arias from Carmen, The Merry Widow, The Daughter of the Regiment, Cavalleria Rusticana and South Pacific; the “flower duet” from Lakmé; and the Act I finale from Candide.  This last ensemble, “Make Our Garden Grow,” was a particularly appropriate lead-in to an intermission where fund raising (successful, I hope) for the Center’s programs took place.  The second half of the program included several excerpts from Reta Ralph’s favorite opera, Tosca.  Along with the love duet and arias for Tosca and Cavaradossi, we got the whole Te Deum Act I finale thanks to the presence of a large choral component and an orchestra.  And a really frightening Scarpia!  The whole thing ended with amusing tongue-in-cheek bows in the direction of the Three Tenors.  Only we got eleven-- count ‘em, 11!-- tenors singing Granada and “Nessun dorma.”  It was great fun and a rousing finale.


The concert was of course in celebration of the Ralphs-- Charles and Reta-- whose generosity, and not only of the financial sort, has been such a spur to the development and furtherance of the cause of great music in Colorado.  I did not know Charles and Reta until recently, but obviously many of the singers-- students and alums who have gone on to successful careers-- and music faculty from CSU, CU, and UNC have known them for many years, and have benefited from their encouragement and active support. 

So it was that Peggy and I had great fun attending the Gala in spite of an afternoon spent in the hospital taking care of the aftermath of broken ribs I suffered in a passenger train derailment, of all things.  We couldn’t stay away, because like everyone else in attendance we were grateful to the Ralphs because by the most fortunate chance we have landed not in a barren artistic borderland, but in the most fertile ground, where lots and lots of people love the lyric muse, where good people like the Ralphs make sure that talented young young people have the chance to develop their art and people like us whose only talent is in listening, have a chance to satisfy our love of music.

Towards the end of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, the assembled cast of virtuosi sing,

L’allegria è un sommo bene,
ond’a noi fé dono il cielo;
sani e freschi ci mantiene
nel bel grembo del piacer.

Cinti ognor d’ameni fiori,
fra le danze, il riso e il gioco,
colle grazie e cogli amori
non pensiamo che a goder.

Joy is the greatest good,
that heaven grants as gift to us;   
it keeps us healthy and young
in the loving embrace of pleasure.

Surrounded by its sweet flowers,
‘Midst dancing, laughter and games,
with grace and with love,
let’s think of nothing but joy.

And so we felt at the Gala Celebration for the generosity of the Ralphs, lucky to be where we are, delighting with others through the shared joy of music in allegria, the “greatest good.”

October by the Bay

October 18: Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick

As part of its Fall, 2012 season, San Francisco Opera offered two works based on literary masterpieces-- sort of.  The first of these was Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick (hyphen intended), a recent opera (2010) drawn of course from Herman Melville’s novel, the work that probably comes closest to deserving that elusive epithet, “the great American novel.”  Reducing Melville’s 800 page story of whaling in the nineteenth century to the confines of a two hour plus opera (a 60 page libretto) would seem to be a daunting task.  Melville’s work is only a seafarer’s tale of obsessed Captain Ahab’s search for a great white whale called Moby Dick in its barest bones-- an ancient story which echoes the Odyssey, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and numerous other works which recount an epic journey by sea.  Melville’s work is also a meditation on death, a philosophical examination of religion, a sociological study of the men’s interactions on the Pequod, a history of whaling, a detailed how-to explanation of whaling in the  nineteenth century, a scientific examination of the order cetacea-- and probably much more.  But Gene Scheer, Heggie’s librettist, has cut away most of what makes it such a wide-ranging work of literature and reduced it to the seafaring tale of the mad search for the white whale; the myriad characters in the novel, Dikens-like in their quirks, complexities and attitudes, are reduced to a few major characters who crew the ship: Captain Ahab, Starbuck, Pip, Stubb, Flask, Queequeg, and of course the narrator, in the novel named Ishmael, but called Greenhorn in the opera.

By way of example as to Scheer’s daunting task, in the novel, the first 100+ pages are devoted to the meeting of the native harpooner Queequeg and the novice whaler Ishmael in Nantucket and the preparations for the voyage. Scheer does away with all that and opens the opera about a week into the Pequod’s trip, the first time that Captain Ahab ventures forth to meet his men.  Thus the entire opera takes place on the ship, except for the final scene, after the disastrous encounter with Moby Dick, when we find Greenhorn adrift on top of Queequeg’s coffin and rescued by another passing whaler; he is the sole survivor of the Pequod and the one who lives to tell the tale.  Here at the end, when Greenhorn is asked his name by the captain of the rescue boat, Scheer finally places the most famous line in American literature-- the first line of the novel: “Call me Ishmael.”

At the October 18 performance, which we attended, I particularly wanted to arrive in time for the pre-opera lecture since this was a new work for me.  I can’t say that I learned much from Desirée Mays, the lecturer, who sometimes works for Santa Fe Opera, since most of what she did was retell the story with a few musical excerpts.  (Hey folks, what’s the matter?  Did you forget your bifocals at home?  The story is printed in the (free) program that you get when you walk in.  Read it!  Why do we need someone to retell the story?)  Mays did win a couple of points by informing us that a now-ubiquitous coffee company based in Seattle had originally considered naming its brand after Melville’s ship instead of the ship’s first mate.  This was news to me, although it did not have much to do with the opera.  How perilously close we came to having our $10 caramel-frosted double latte with fat-free milk and two sugars at a Pequods instead of a Starbucks!

As it turned out, the opera itself is not that complex musically and did not need a lot of introduction as all of the singers’ English was clearly pronounced and understandable and there were supertitles as well to clarify anything that was hard to hear.  The outlines of the story in Scheer’s libretto are easy to follow, although the characters do not seem to have much depth or interest except as cyphers who play their roles in the plot.  That is, it did not seem to me that Scheer managed to transform Melville’s clearly delineated and unforgettable characters into their operatic equivalents; nor did Heggie’s music define the characters very completely in musical terms.  Compare this to Verdi’s I due Foscari, which I had recently seen in Los Angeles.  It is by no means the best of Verdi’s operas, and its libretto has serious problems, but the three principal characters are clearly differentiated in the libretto and Verdi immediately defines them in musical terms so that we understand their motivations and emotions with an immediacy that never happens in Moby-Dick.  

Heggie’s music has sometimes been compared to Britten and Wagner, and although I certainly heard Wagner often enough in the orchestration, I didn’t see much similarity to Britten, except that two of Britten’s major works (Peter Grimes and Billy Budd) are about the sea and have much “sea music” in them.  Also, as in Britten, atmosphere is very important, usually more important than the vocal parts.  Heggie’s music is certainly approachable for a large audience (the opera house was packed for our performance) and is “operatic” in its sweep and drama.  It is anything but “academic,” or appealing only to a small audience of musical experts, intellectuals and operatic snobs.  

Rather, much of the time it seemed to me like an exceptionally good score for a film-- a film about the sea, like Master and Commander (which had a wonderful score, but used music from classical and baroque composers).  Thus music is used more to establish or build general mood or atmosphere rather than to express character conflict or interior feeling.  Since the opera is built on the major crisis moments of the novel, the general atmosphere is wrought and stormy almost all the time.  The continual climaxes, surging “waves” of music and a lot of the orchestration have a very filmic feel.  Most of the vocal line, on the other hand, is declamation.  There are occasional lyric periods in the score-- a duet here, a chorus there (particularly the choruses), but about 75 to 80% of the time the principals engage in musical declamation over the orchestral surge.  With climax after climax from the opening bars on, when you finally get to Ahab’s confrontation with the whale, it is a bit anti-climactic.
 
Since the men of the Pequod are the opera’s only possible cast, all of the singers are male, as is the large chorus, except for Pip, the cabin boy, which is a “pants role” sung by a woman.  There could have been an interesting love story in the opera, for Melville is surprisingly clear about the love and sexual relationship between Queequeg and his narrator from very early in the novel.  But Scheer and Heggie decided not to go there, and without a woman on board, traditional romance is out; thus there are few (or no) chances for lyrical romantic episodes to punctuate the storm-and-stress stuff.  The best of the lyrical moments is probably the duet between Ahab and Starbuck shortly before the sighting of Moby Dick, a duet of reminiscence when Starbuck almost persuades Ahab to give up his quest.  However, I have to admit that the Ahab-Starbuck duet with its nostalgic reminiscence of a gentle life in old Nantucket had me wondering where Nan with her bucket was-- the “Nan” who appears in so many limericks, clean and otherwise.  But that was my problem, not the problem of Scheer or Heggie.

Jay Hunter Morris was very good as Ahab, a role originated by Ben Heppner, who was supposed to sing most of the performances in San Francisco, but who withdrew.  The role’s tessitura seemed high to me at first hearing, and Morris’ unique ‘heldentenor’ voice was a good fit.  Famously, he has to wear a prosthesis for Ahab’s peg leg throughout the opera, a painful ordeal no doubt.  It is not so easy for me to judge a singer whose chief job is to declaim a text, but Morris seemed quite up to the task.  Tenor Stephen Costello was convincing as Greenhorn and bass Jonathan Lemalu was likewise as Queequeg.  I was somewhat less entranced with baritone Morgan Smith as Starbuck, but as I said, it is difficult for me to judge singers in this kind of opera.

The real star of the show was the show itself, directed by Leonard Foglia with set design by Robert Brill, projection design by Elaine J. McCarthy, wonderful lighting by Gavan Smith and period costumes by Jane Greenwood.  An amalgam of computer design, video projection and a traditional set of a sailing ship’s deck with its complex rigging, the “show” was cutting edge, the best of its type that I have seen.   At the opening bars of the overture or prelude, depicting the sea, one sees constellations in a night sky which gradually morph into the outlines of the ship as if on a blueprint, and that turns into the stage set itself, the deck of the Pequod.  In several scenes, the singers are called upon to hang from the rope rigging or the masts and sing to each other, a striking effect.  

The opera has many scene shifts which are accomplished through these projections, but also through the movements of the sails, dropped from top to bottom or left to right, like scrims pulled briefly across a set.  Interestingly, this was the way that scene changes were often accomplished in the nineteenth century-- a secondary curtain or scrim pulled across the stage gave just enough time to raise or lower the painted scenery and to effect quick set changes without ringing down the main curtain.  All of this kept the show moving rapidly, inevitably forward, and so it did with Moby-Dick.

The orchestra played with power and majesty under Patrick Summers, who has been involved with this opera from the beginning, and particularly noteworthy was the male chorus under Ian Robertson.  One of the things that makes Moby-Dick successful is the choral writing.  So many recent operas shy away from big effects and tend more towards chamber dimensions.  Moby-Dick is a “big” opera with a large orchestra and a male chorus of 40 (along with 12 principals and many stuntmen).  There are individual, set-piece choruses, along with choral participation in ensembles.  I suspect that the work’s very size, fairly unusual in contemporary opera, has contributed to its popular success.

Moby-Dick was premiered as the opening offering of the Winspear Opera House in Dallas in 2010 and was a joint production of San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary and the State Opera of South Australia.  I believe that the San Francisco performances are the last in this production’s circuit.  In some ways it seems that Moby-Dick is like many recent Broadway musicals, where the physical production is more memorable than the music or the story.  That does not mean that the music or the story is negligible, but for me, of all the elements that make up the popular success of Moby-Dick, the production itself is the most important.  Opera depends on so many elements for its success that one of them is inevitably going to stand out.  In our technology-obsessed age where so many shows and films (not to mention video games) value effect over performance or even the substance, it is not surprising that the most astonishing aspect of this very effective opera is the technological one.


October 19: Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuletti ed I Montecchi in a Pouf

Bellini’s take on the story of Romeo and Juliet was another of the October works which helped celebrate the War Memorial Opera House’s eightieth anniversary and the ninetieth of the San Francisco company itself  (the third work was Lohengrin, which we did not see).  This time the production was a borrowed one, from Munich’s Bavarian State Opera.  Bellini’s work could not be more different from Heggie’s Moby-Dick.  Song-- the melodic vocal line-- dominates Capuleti to the degree that everything else is of secondary importance.  Bellini’s long melodies are at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from Heggie’s declamatory style.  In Bellini, the orchestra is often used as simple accompaniment to those glorious melodies, while in Moby-Dick, almost all of the musical interest is in the mood and scene-painting of the orchestra.  The productions on this occasion offered stark contrast too: Heggie’s opera was presented with all the resources of contemporary, technology-based stagecraft.  The Bellini opera’s production was an example of contemporary German regietheater; it cared not a whit for the story or the music, and bordered on eurotrash.  Both productions are arch examples of two major ways in which operas are staged today.  It might even be argued that one is typically American with its reliance on techno-wizardry, and the other typically European with its reliance on the controlling concept of the Director-God, who may or may not be interested in the work he/she is presenting.  

At first glance, both operas seem to find their genesis in literary masterpieces, but that is deceptive too.  Heggie’s work is certainly based on a masterpiece, but Bellini’s has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.  Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani (probably the greatest of the early nineteenth century opera librettists) may have based his work on some of the same Renaissance sources that were also Shakespeare’s source material (though Shakespeare’s sources probably passed through French intermediaries), but more to the point, on an 1818 Italian play on the subject by Luigi Scevola.  Romani, who did not read English, probably did not know Shakespeare’s play, which was first translated into Italian in 1831, a year after Capuleti’s premiere, as part of the first Italian language version of Shakespeare’s complete works.

If there ever was a hand-me-down opera, it was Capuletti.   Nine months before the March,1830, premiere at La Fenice in Venice, Bellini and Romani had suffered a real fiasco with their opera Zaira in Parma.  In spite of Zaira’s failure, La Fenice had contracted with Bellini as a back up in case a projected opera, commissioned from Giovanni Pacini, who was ill, failed to materialize.  Indeed, Pacini did fail to complete his opera, and Bellini, who liked to work slowly, had to come up with a new work in short order, so he turned to the music from Zaira, a work he had no reason to think would ever be revived.  Why waste the music?  Likewise, Romani turned to a libretto he had written in 1825 for composer Nicolai Vaccai.  Vaccai’s Giulietta e Romeo was successfully premiered at La Scala, and had circulated in many of Italy’s theaters and abroad.  Thus tweaking the music from a failed work and using an existing libretto, Bellini and Romani came up with a new work in time for the announced opening on March 11.  The title I Capuletti ed I Montecchi was chosen so that the new work would not be confused with Vaccai’s still popular work.  Although Bellini’s work gradually replaced Vaccai’s in popularity, some people-- to wit, the most famous singer of the era, Maria Malibran-- preferred Vaccai’s final, tomb scene, and Vaccai’s final scene was often substituted for Bellini’s in nineteenth century productions.  

As far as I know, the first mention of the Capulets and the Montagues (the Capuletti and the Montecchi) occurs in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where they are held up as examples of warring families belonging to those vague political factions of the thirteenth century called Guelphs and Ghibellines.  The political intrigue of the struggles between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines is so complex that it is just too confusing to get into.  I like to remember that Guelphs built their castles and fortifications using squared crenelations on their battlements while the Ghibellines used crenelations with ‘V’ grooves carved in the middle so that they could tell friend from foe when it came to boiling oil time and and where to aim the siege machines.  Or was it the other way around?

No one knows whether the story of Giulietta (Juliet) Capuletti, and Romeo Montecchi has any basis in fact, although the families existed,  but by the Renaissance the outlines of the fatal romance were fairly well formed, especially in a novella by Matteo Bandello, the author of one of those collections of short fiction so popular in the Renaissance, the most famous example of which is Boccaccio’s Decameron.   In any case, Romani’s tale is a traditional operatic one of a young woman in love who is torn between her duty to family, personified in her father Capellio and her love for the scion of the family’s sworn enemies, the Montecchi.  There is nothing here of Shakespeare’s investigation of the varieties of love, of political intrigue, teenage recklessness, and not all that much about love and death.  

Romani’s libretto for Vaccai (and Bellini) was very traditional in another way-- Romeo was to be sung by a woman.  There was a long and honorable tradition of heroic male roles taken by women in numerous operas from Handel and Vivaldi right through Rossini, and Bellini’s opera is the last work of consequence in this noble tradition.  As the vocal categories became more and more clearly defined, Romeo became a role for a mezzo-soprano and Giulietta was a soprano, giving Bellini (and Vaccai before him) the chance to do what he did so well-- write melting duets in thirds where the two voices blend, surely one of the most pleasing aspects of the bel canto tradition.

Although Capuletti remained popular throughout most of the nineteenth century, it was eventually eclipsed (in part by Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, which was based on Shakespeare), and was rarely performed in the first five decades of the twentieth century.  Like so many bel canto works which had languished on library shelves, Capuletti’s fate was linked to the bel canto revival that occurred in the 1950’s and ’60’s and is still on-going.  There was a major revival at La Scala in 1966, but a female Romeo seemed too exotic for audiences of the day, so Romeo’s role was rewritten for tenor and sung by Giacomo Aragall.  A very young Luciano Pavarotti sang the written tenor role of Tebaldo (Tybalt).  The production came to New York, reintroducing the work to these shores, and gradually I Capuletti ed I Montecchi has entered the repertory, and is performed regularly alongside Bellini’s other masterpieces, Norma, I puritani and La sonnambula.  Fortunately, the tenorized Romeo dropped by the wayside, and we hear the opera today as Bellini intended.

Bel canto operas are always judged by their singing, and in this case that means the roles of Romeo and Giulietta themselves.  Among the other characters, Tebaldo gets a fine aria with cabaletta in Act I and he sings a duet with Romeo in the penultimate scene, but otherwise, that’s it.  Capellio and Lorenzo (Juliet’s doctor, not her priest) are comprimario roles.  Eric Owens as Tebaldo was quite strong in his aria and duet with ringing high notes, written and unwritten.  But we are really here to listen to Joyce DiDonato as Romeo and Nicole Cabell as Juliet, aren’t we?  

Both of these fine singers were constrained by a truly awful production, but they nevertheless managed some lovely singing.  I have to say that DiDonato disappointed me to some degree, sounding occasionally shrill or with an unpleasant edge to her voice in the upper range.  I think that she is better in Rossini’s demanding coloratura, where she knows all the tricks, than she is in negotiating the purity of Bellini’s long, long legato lines.  She certainly looked the role of the young Romeo and acted about as well as could be expected given the production she was trapped in.  

Nicole Cabell, last summer’s Leïla in Santa Fe Opera’s Pearl Fishers, was easily up to the role’s demands 90% of the time-- as long as you closed your eyes so as not be distracted by the absurdities devised by the misbegotten stage director.  If she could be faulted, it was in the degree of subtlety that accomplished singers bring to the printed vocal line.  Although Bellini does not demand the same level of ornamentation as Rossini, a sensitive singer can bring nuance and expression to the melodic line.  Cabell will probably grow in this, but she is not entirely there yet.

Riccardo Frizza’s reading of the score was sensitive and allowed those endless Bellini melodies the room they needed to breathe and spin out.  Frizza included all the cabalettas and their repeats, as Bellini and God intended. The chorus was well rehearsed and sang with commitment, although the women of the chorus never appeared on stage.

The production, one of those close-your-eyes-and-enjoy-the-music affairs, was by Vincent Boussard with costume design by Christian Lacroix.  You know you are in trouble when you sit down, open your program and find an extensive “Director’s Note,” so that the director can explain to you what he was trying to do since you-- the public-- are too stupid to figure it out from the production itself.  Reading the note by Broussard, however, did not help me: “Is it possible that even the highest degree of love and the most refined culture are left utterly crippled when coupled with the cruelty and craziness of people sick with revenge?”  Huh?  Nor did the pre-opera lecture help.  Once again we got a retelling of the story along with the news that this is not Shakespeare and has nice melodies.  Now that’s enlightening!

Broussard’s “concept” seemed to be that Capuletti depicts a society ruled by violent men and that women have no place in it except as ornaments to the warring males.  Thus we never hear a woman, except for the severely repressed Giulietta, open her mouth on stage, even when the libretto specifies that women form part of the chorus gathered to celebrate the planned-- and thwarted-- wedding of Giulietta and Tebaldo.  Broussard keeps the female part of the chorus off stage in that scene, and instead we have female supernumeraries in gaudy dresses, all with roses stuffed in their mouths.  Oh, the subtleties of symbolism!  

Giulietta is dressed throughout in what appeared to my untutored eyes to be lingerie.  Turns out, however, that it was an example of the most famous creation of costume designer Christian Lacroix, a Paris couturier, who about a decade ago designed a short, puffy skirt called a “pouf,” topped by a lace-up-the-back bustier.  Giulietta lives and dies in her white pouf.  She is buried in it, and in the end she gets up from the grave and heads for “the light” in it.  The men are all dressed in mid-nineteenth century, dusty great coats or in some scenes, evening dress, with stove-pipe hats à la Abraham Lincoln.  For those women with roses in their mouths, Lacroix “was allowed” to raid the costume warehouse of the Bavarian State Opera with a pair of scissors and take snippets of this old costume and sequins from that one and stitch them all together for the gaudy costumes for the wedding scene.  I guess that’s brilliant from a fashionista point of view, but it was just perplexing and distracting if you were there to enjoy the opera.

The set consisted of “walls” made out of “a reflective cloth overlaid with a combination of printing (by computer) and scenic painting.”  In the first scene a large number of saddles and stirrups hung from the ‘ceiling’ for no apparent reason and in Giulietta’s feigned death scene the men of the chorus were seen carrying the tack around and ignoring her agony.  In Act I, Scene II, where we are introduced to Giulietta, a white utility sink adorned the back wall, and that’s where we discovered Giulietta kneeling in her pouf.  When she begins her great aria “Oh! quante volte, o quante” (the melody of which Bellini took from his first opera, a student work called Adelson e Salvini) Broussard had Ms. Cabell climb up on the sink and sing the whole of her immensely sad, elegiac and romantic aria standing in her pouf on the sink.  Later, when Romeo enters for their gorgeous duet, they are not allowed to embrace, touch or even get within five feet of each other.  Only in the final moments of the opera, when the libretto has them definitively dead, were they allowed to hold hands for their final walk towards “the light.”  At the beginning of Act II, to the long and beautiful prelude, Giulietta entered on the edge of the stage apron, balancing as if on a tightrope over the edge of the orchestra pit.  I thought that maybe the director had gotten confused about the opera he was doing, and thought that this was La sonnambula, with Amina sleepwalking across the rickety bridge above the mill wheel.  There were other instances of directorial and design silliness, but this will have to suffice since trying to remember it all is painful for me.  In spite of Broussard’s claims to the contrary, none of this had anything to do with the story and certainly none of it showed any sensitivity to the music, so elegiac and wistful that Chopin wanted to hear Bellini’s melodies as he lay dying.  

Why is it that these misguided regietheater types love to take on bel canto operas, a style that they so obviously don’t believe in?  Ms. DiDonato recently came from a run of an equally foolish production of Rossini’s La donna del lago in Europe.  She had better be careful about associating herself with such dreadful settings for her art or she may find the productions she is in diminishing her reputation.

In sum, I enjoyed Heggie’s opera-- it was the first time I had ever seen a composer appear on stage to take a bow after the work, and the applause was thunderous-- but I found more show than substance.  As for Capuletti, Bellini is one of my favorite composers, and the production, for me, vitiated much of the effect of the beautiful singing.  San Francisco Opera now moves to more familiar territory with Tosca, The Tales of Hoffmann and Così fan tutte, but two new works come next spring and summer-- Nolan Gasser’s The Secret Garden in March and Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene in June and July.  All told, it is a pretty adventurous season.