More Munich Opera: Logistics

Another fragment on Munich opera--this one I share with almost every American opera goer who ventures to Germany and keep his eyes open. The point is not the variety and the quality (both admirable) but the sheer fact that they so so much of it.   We say that "opera houses all over Germany" produce "an opera every night."  Inevitably, I don't know exactly what that means ("all over"?  "every night"?), but it's close enough to true that we can treat it as given: consider the number of not-quite-first-tier American cities who count themselves cultured if they can stage just one a year.    This has to mean a ton of taxpayer subsidy and yes, I can think of so many other, seemingly more appealing, causes to which the euros could be put.  But I'm impelled to offer three observations, all of them probably familiar to anyone who has actually thought about it.

One: I marvel at the opportunities for steady work among opera singers (and, I guess, pit musicians).  It must mean that there is a cadre of able music-makers--not superstar material, perhaps, but talented enough--who have the opportunity to polish their craft and get as much out of themselves as they have to offer. Or  maybe they superstars, just working off a long apprenticeship: Verdi himself wrote a dozen operas over a dozen years before he hit the trifecta with Rigoletto, Traviata and Trovatore (it's wandering but I guess you could say the same thing about Shakespeare--a dozen or more experiments--some quite good-- before he totally nails it with Midsummer Night's Dream).  Query, can anybody name a product of the German opera house system with a similar career trajectory?

Two: the downside of all this is that they must not have time to rehearse.  Yes, yes, I'm sure there are offsite practice halls but it can't be (is unlikely to be) anywhere near the same as being in the real house, with the real echoes and the real timbre.  And there are also simple problems of logistics. I hear tell (I can't find the source right now) of a Carmen who came onstage and realized she couldn't find her tenor. "Où se trouve Don José?" she is said to have said. --"Suivez-moi, madame!" responded a gentlemanly super as he led her downstage.

And three: sets:  I know that the  Met prides itself on being able to change sets about as fast as the pit crew tightens wheel bolts on a NASCAR competitor.  But on a German schedule, you can't really make too many demands.  Couple tight schedules with the Germans' penchant for really loony staging and you are bound to have some train wreck results. Case in point, last week's Marriage of Figaro.* The curtain rises on the bare interior of a box, painted blinding white--so blinding that I kept wanted to shout "okay, I'll betray my loved ones--just stop making my eyes hurt!"  

But that's not all, folks. The later scene, though not a painful, was even sillier.  Mozart fans will recall that what we've got here is a lot of horseplay in the garden at night.  The very stuff of comedy, and how do you create the garden effect on an indoor stage?  Oh, I have it!  You drape the whole thing in cheesecloth (yes?) and let the singers tumble and stumble among the folds while they try to find their pitch!  So in addition to trying to keep track of who is who, and to check the supertitles in a language you don't understand anyway, there is the extra problem of repeatedly reminding yourself just why everyone is wandering around in an exploded laundry.
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*A moment' perfunctory research informs me that this production is not new: actually old enough to drink beer in Munich.  So maybe my argument has nothing to do with anything. Whatever; I like it and I'm keeping it.

Home Again (Munich)

Back again--this time from Munich, with a side trip to Bregenz in Austria, this last for a taste of the Bregenzer Festspiele, hitherto unknown to me. That would comprise--let me count here--ah, yes, six--operas in about ten days which is perhaps almost too much for any taste, but at least enough to justify such a trip.  In sum: inevitably the performances varied somewhat in quality although happily. there really wasn't a clinker in the lot.

The array did include on bona fide premier--something called Tales from Vienna Woods, but no, not that one, another one, on a script by (it says here) "the Austro- Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth" (who?).  The program notes describe it as "a bitter satire about the mendacity and brutality of the petite-bourgeoisie," so no surprise that von Horváth tried to get a score out of Kurt Weill, he of The Threepenny Opera.  Evidently his efforts came to no avail and it lay dormant until this current production, with libretto by Michael Sturminger (who also directed) and music by HK Gruber. On that last you may well say "who?" again but evidently he has a certain celebrity in Austria (where he was born), both as a composer and as conductor of the BBC Philharmonic (local boy makes good). I hadn't done my homework and my German is zilch so the narrative was pretty much lost on me, but if you close your eyes (and stay awake) the music is listenable in its post-Schoenbergian BBC sort of way. Still, you'd better be warned: if you really want to hear it, you'd better hop on over to Bregenz right now, in time for the performance on August 3, its last in the current run, not likely to be repeated (I suspect) for a long while.

Far more memorable was the other Bregenz offering--The Magic Flute ,decked out as what may be the most expensive and dangerous opera performance I've ever seen (and yes, I did see Julie Taymor's giant puppet version (or giant-puppet version) at the Met back in 2006). Evidently Bregenz does this sort of thing: they've got am artificial island offshore but within earshot of an outdoor seating array; it just cries out for traditional spectacle crossbred with Cirque de Soleil.  At least one of my traveling companions thought Mozart would be offended by this travesty but I'm not so sure.  The music is glorious in any costume and the Masonic symbolism, if you care about that sort of thing, comes through just as well on the back of a giant plastic turtle as it does on Julie Taymor's massive jungle gym.  Now that I think of it, my first Magic Flute was the Ingemar Bergman's film version.  I saw that in Hartford, CN, around Christmas, 1975, where I was a little seasick-drunk on cheap sweet holiday sherry, and a script that could survive those limitations is surely ready for anything.

Back in Munich, perhaps a high point was that we got to here Anja Harteros twice--once in the title role of Tosca and later as Leonora in La Forza del Destino.  Here she is doing "Pace, Pace, Mio Dio," in the same staging and the same house a few months back:

I'll save a few more scattered thoughts about Munich and its opera for another day.

Opera Note: Edita

If the Lord is willing' and the Rhine don't flood, then in a couple of weeks we'll have a chance to see Edita Gruberová singing the title role in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in Munich.   Our evidence base is thin here but it seems like something to look forward to.  We saw her once before back in 1998 at La Scala in Milan--one of only two times we've actually made it here to Opera's mother church.   It's not what you would have called careful planning: we walked up to the box office at 545p and asked if they had anything for 730p.  Well, yes. So we got to see Gruberová  of whom we had not heard, singing Linda Chamonex, of which we knew nothing.   It was well worth the effort: even without clues, you could tell she was a talent to be reckoned with.

So far as we can recall, that was the only time we've ever seen her live, though we are the proud possessors of a superb rendition of Così fan tutte where she sings Fiordiligi under the baton of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. I used to say I was no Harnoncourt fan, but this is one I could play again and again.

And that is that.  Or was until last night, when the domestic Netflix goddess conjured up a DVD of--here it is, folks, La Gruberová herself, doing the selfsame Lucrezia Borgia, in the selfsame Munich, five years ago.  As I say, we'd never seen her in it: actually we hadn't even seen the opera; we just wanted to do our homework.

We count it as well spent but for the moment, I want to set the opera aside and focus on the bonus DVD: a film, The Art of Bel Canto, built on Gruberová s career.  It was entertaining and rewarding for many reasons but here is one for the moment: your attention is called to the fact that the Diva is 67 years old--per Wiki, born December, 1946.   That's right, folks, 67 years old, and for an exercise class, how many singers can you name either male or female who are still ticking along at this stage in life?  Men, maybe a few--Placido Domingo (73) of course and I forget who else.  Women.  Hm.  Well, maybe in an earlier generation: I see that Ernestine Schumann-Heink sang Erda in Der Ring des Nibelungen, aged 71.  And that Nellie Melba staged a farewell at Covent Garden at 65.  I suppose there are others.

I haven't any idea how Gruberová  does it.  I'm sure good genes help.  But another guess is that she leads a quiet life: she seems to do most of her performing in Vienna, less than an hour's drive from Bratislava from where she was born.  Also Munich, Linz, Salzburg, Zurich: the neighborhood.  Barcelona and Madrid, but little or no Berlin or Paris.  New York, just a bit: I bet it didn't agree with her (an odd outlier: Tokyo).  About the only role that seems to bend the curve is Zerbinetta from Ariadne auf Naxos which, I gather, she performed some 200 times over 36 years.  And the DVD--it's a charming presentation but tells us almost nothing about the diva herself. She mentions in passing that she has a couple of children and we see her in what might be her country place, but none of the chummy details that are the stuff of celebrity (a Google search does turn up a husband but he doesn't make it to the Wiki).    Sounds like a well-ordered life, but a life well lived.

Where Was the Understudy (I Spy a Koch!)?

Okay, I get it--high drama and a break into legend for Kristine    who died twice at the Metropolitan Opera in 24 hours.  If you follow opera you know all about this by now. Opalais sang Butterfly on the big stage last night; she fell asleep about 5 am and about 8am got a phone call--could she sing Mimi in in Bohème in the same place this afternoon, as stand-in for Anita Hartig who had the flu?  Well, no I'm sleeping.  I mean maybe; I mean--and there she was as the afternoon unfolded, looking a little grey and bewildered which was actually just fine for poor consumptive Mimi,  For the curtain call, she knelt and bowed her head.

Brava, brava and all that Kritine, and best wishes to ailing Anita.  But wait.  There's one guest conspicuously absent from this feast.  And that would be?  And that would be the understudy--the one retained and trained to be ready go at a moment's notice in exchange for her big break (on desultory search, I haven't been able to find her name but I know she's out there somewhere).  Look, very likely Opalais is a better singer--that's why the other is the understudy. But she's also bone-tired.  And even though she knows the part (she has sung it before,  and recently) she doesn't know the blocking, the directorial conception nor any of the rest of the stuff that would have made the understudy a more suitable and reliable choice.

So why not the understudy?  I bet I know the answer, or answers.  Start with the house: 3,800 seats, many, even most, occupied by customers who paid retail. Move onto the HD performance in umpty ump theaters world wide. And wasn't this also a radio day?

All of which puts ineluctable pressure on Met General Manager Peter Gelb to put on a rully big show.  And by "pressure," I mean the bank, the donors, the big money who fill the gap between the stiffs in retail and the full budget.  I'm not saying "the bankers told him to do it."  I'm saying they hired him because they knew he was a guy who wouldn't have to be told, because he was understood it.  So, curse you, David Koch! And I hope someone is buying the understudy a beer. 

Update:  Oh, so that's it (maybe).  Evidently Hartig's scheduled understudy cover was Hei-Kyung Hong who has sung the role some 60 times before: see the interesting comment thread here.  So  it was not a case of depriving the unknown beginner.  Still an odd decision, though.

Winning the Battle of Old Age: Dispatch from the Front LInes

Most remarkable Amazon review I've read all day:

Montaigne dans le métro
It's surely very presumptuous of me to rate Montaigne, but Amazon has asked to share my experience with this Kindle edition and I feel bound to say, urbi et orbi, that it has been splendid. I downloaded the file to my Galaxy S III phone and I read a bit of Montaigne every time I ride the Metro (subway) in Santiago de Chile. (I manage to get a seat because I live at the end of Line 1; on the return journey I sometimes get one because I am over 80). …

Link.  Author is a certain Robert Torretti, otherwise unknown to me.  In another review, he says he watched more than 100 opera DVDs in 2006.  I do like to read about people who handle old age well.

Addendum:  Oh, I see here is a reviewer bio:

Location: Santiago, Chile In My Own Words:Professor of Philosophy, Universidad de Chile Member of Institut Internationale de Philosophie, Paris Author of 'Relativity and Geometry' (Dover), 'Creative Understanding' (U. of Chicago Press), 'The Philosophy of Physics' (Cambridge University Press) You go, Robert.

What the Tenor is Telling You

Lovely Alex Ross piece on Joyce DiDonato (gated) gives us yokels a glimpse into how much there is to opera beyond what we see on stage.  Including an explanation of the behavior of the tenor, from Paul Curran, director of "La Donna del Lago" last summer at Santa Fe:

A compact, fast-talking Scot who has worked everywhere from Sydney to St. Petersburg, [Curran] has a wide frame of reference and a fine understanding of ritual. A former dancer, he wages war on the stock attitudes that opera singers recycle generation after generation--for example, the tenorial arm gesture that he characterizes as "Please examine our fine display of jewelry" or "Would you like a pie?"

The Shostakovich Nose: An Assignment

There's a live/HD performance coming up Saturday of "The Nose" by Dmitri Shostakovich in the William Kentridge staging which opened at the Met in 2010.  So here's some homework.  No, not the Gogol story, silly--which you have already read and fully assimilated.  Rather, take a swing at something by Andrey Platonov, perhaps particularly Happy Moscow, which I mentioned briefly the other day (cf. link, link)  and which captures better than anything I know the mood of anxious and giddy expectancy that seems to have swept (urban) Russia in the 30s--that is, before the Great Purge of the later 30s which did so much to define the Stalinist experience in our memory.  

We know that Shostakovich embarked on his career in a mood of high optimism; we know that Stalin didn't cotton to his operatic writing (he was probably baffled and disturbed by it all).  We know that Shostakovich, unlike so many of his contemporaries, survived the turmoil that devoured so many of his contemporaries, and that he went on to become a Soviet icon.  In his introduction to the new NYRB edition Happy Moscow, Robert Chandler says:

A conventional view of Russian history sees the 1917 Revolution as a movement of Utopian  promise and the mid-1930s as a time of fear-shackled, conventional thinking in every area of life.  In many respects, however, it was the other way around.  For several years from 1917 the Bolsheviks were trying simply to cling to power, most people were trying simply to survive, and only a tiny--though vocal--artistic avant-garde was proposing Utopian plans for the restructuring of both the world and the human psyche.  By the middle 1930s, however, it was the State itself that was claiming to make Utopian dreams into a reality.

 Chandler also retells a wonderful anecdote from Wolfgang Leonhard, the German  historian, about emigrating to Moscow in 1935 with his German communist mother.  He reports that they couldn't get any adequate maps.  The only ones they found showed what the city was like before 1914, and what it would be like in the future.  

Afterthought:  And you know, now that I think of it, I remember one other item that captures the same spirit of Moscow in the 30s. That would be the early chapters of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, of which I wrote here.  Read 'em all, and in any event, enjoy the opera.  

Teammates

Here's a new one on me.  In his remarkable introduction to Beowulf, R. W. Chambers discusses the case of Hrethric and Hrothulf, Scandinavian princes.  Chambers says:

Hrethric is then almost certainly an actual historic prince ... Of Hrothmund, his brother, Scandinavian authorities seem to know nothing. He is very likely a poetical fiction, a duplicate of Hrethric.

You'd been wondering, right?  But what is interesting here is not just Chambers conclusion; rather, it is his argument:

 For it is very natural that in story the princes whose lives are threatened by powerful usurpers should go in pairs. Hrethric and Hrothmund go together like Malcolm and Donalbain. Their helplessness is thus emphasized over against the one mighty figure, Rolf or Macbeth, threatening them.

A footnote expands on the point:

 Compare the remark of Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, as to the necessity of there being both a Rosencrantz and a Guildenstern (Apprenticeship, Book V, chap. v). 

Chambers, R. W. (Raymond Wilson) (2011-03-30). Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (Kindle Locations 649-54 and 8229-8230).  Kindle Edition.   The referenced passage from Wilhelm Meister is:

“Why not compress them into one?” said Serlo. “This abbreviation will not cost you much.”

“Heaven keep me from all such curtailments!” answered Wilhelm, “they destroy at once the sense and the effect. What these two persons are and do, it is impossible to represent by one. In such small matters we discover Shakespeare’s greatness. These soft approaches, this smirking and bowing, this assenting, wheedling, flattering, this whisking agility, this wagging of the tail, this allness and emptiness, this legal knavery, this ineptitude and insipidity,—how can they be expressed by a single man? There ought to be at least a dozen of these people, if they could be had: for it is only in society that they are anything; they are society itself; and Shakespeare showed no little wisdom and discernment in bringing in a pair of them. Besides, I need them as a couple that may be contrasted with the single, noble, excellent Horatio.”

Link.  I admit I had never thought of this before, and I'm wondering how far it can be pursued.  Should we include the case of Brutus and Cassius, for example, conspiring to accomplish the death of Caesar?  Or Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome (though it may be Romulus who killed his brother)?  The Infante Don Carlos and his companion, the Marquis of Posa, in Verdi's Don Carlos?  I thought of one other dandy example when this matter first came to my attention last night, though I'm not bringing it up just now.* There most be others?

*Oh, right: Hengist and Horsa.

Opera in One Paragraph

The topic is Bluebeard's Castle by Bela Bartók.‎

The castle is a sanctuary of operatic secrets. Its bolted doors, pressed by Judith's curiosity, open onto a musical imagery which discloses the guilty mysteries of opera.

The first door reveals instruments of torture, the second an armory. There is gore on everything: opera is synonymous with bloodshed and erotic violence; its arena is Scarpia's hidden back room. Behind the third door is a stockpile of gold and gems: Fafner's hoard in Siegfried, supplemented by the jewels which tempt Marguerite in Faust, Giulett in Les Contes d'Hoffman, and the Dyer's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten. The fourth door conceals a garden of trilling birdcalls, a paradise omnipesent in oper from Monteverdi's Arcadia to Walther's suburban Eden in Die Meistersinger or the summertime of Gershwin's Catfish Row The fifth door opens with a triple forte blast of C major and an orgn volley. Its vista is that of annexed territory, the ambit of Bluebeard's reign; opera indulges the conquistadorial man of power—Monteverdi's Nerone and Handel's Cesare Vasco, Enée and Siegfried. The sixth door unlocks a lake of coldly rippling tears. Opera's emotional reservoir is fed by Charlotte's lachrymose aria in Werther, by Desdemona's first tears, wept as Otello spurns her, or by the distraught Elsa, when Lohengrin leads her to the minister to shed her tears in joy. Beyond the seventh door...

 What is "beyond the seventh door" is left as an exercise to the student. Or consult Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera 225 (1987) from which this excerpt is taken.

Meaningless Opera Statistic of the Day

" [P]ayroll for 3,400 full-time, part-time and seasonal employees [at the Metropolitan opera] eats up 75 percent of the Met’s $330 million annual operating budge."

 That pencils out to $72,794.12 per person per year, which I admit, is about as useful an average as you'd get from adding up and then dividing the total of all their license plate numbers.  That's from Erik Madigan Heck's arch, chirrupy and mostly noncommital New York Times profile of Peter Gelb, the Met's (himself very high-profile) general manager.  A better takeaway: in his earlier years, Gelb served as chief roady for the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (Gelb's job included assuring that the great man had Dover sole for dinner every night):

Not long before Horowitz died, he called Gelb and told him he was like family now and he didn’t have to call him “Mr. Horowitz,” he could call him “Maestro.”

I'd say this has all the earmarks of an anecdote made up by a publicist, but cute enough anyway.

David Discovers the Coolest Thing Ever

David writes:

So there's this term Fach (plural Fachen): system is a method of classifying singers, primarily opera singers, according to the range, weight, and color of their voices. It is used world wide, but primarily in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries and by repertory opera houses (link).

They are sorted by range, and I recently worked out my range. The article gives some roles associated with each Fach. Here are some of mine (cites lifted from Wiki):

(Range: From about the E below low C to the F above middle C (E to f'))

Basso cantante/Lyric bass-bariton/High lyric bass

• • Don Pizarro, Fidelio (Ludwig van Beethoven)
  • Don Alfonso, Così fan tutte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Leporello, Don Giovanni, 
  • Don Giovanni (WolfgangAmadeus Mozart)
  • Figaro, Le nozze di Figaro (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Boris, Boris Godunov (Modest Mussorgsky)
  • Don Basilio Il barbiere di Siviglia (Gioachino Rossini)
  • Silva, Ernani (Giuseppe Verdi) 
  • Philip II, Don Carlos (Giuseppe Verdi)
  • Count Walter, Luisa Miller (Giuseppe Verdi)
  • Zaccaria, Nabucco (Giuseppe Verdi)

Hoher Bass/Dramatic bass-baritone/High drama bass

• • Wotan Der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner)
  • Caspar, Der Freischütz (Carl Maria von Weber)
  • Philip II, Don Carlo (Giuseppe Verdi)

[Jugendlicher Bass 

Leporello, Masetto, Don Giovanni (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

• • Figaro, Le nozze di Figaro (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Colline, La bohème (Giacomo Puccini)

Spielbass/Bassbuffo/Lyric buffo

• • Don Alfonso, Così fan tutte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Don Bartolo, Il barbiere di Siviglia (Gioachino Rossini)
  • Don Alfonso, Così fan tutte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Leporello, Don Giovanni (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
  • Orgon Pernelle, Tartuffe (Kirke Mechem)
  • The Sacristan Tosca (Giacomo Puccini)

So there you go.
 --
Comment: I can see David as Leporello or Figaro but Phillip II would be a stretch.   I'm tempted to pursue this inquiry for myself except that my own range is about three notes.  Still, I would really love to sing Germond in Traviata.  As in

Don't you understand, sweetie?
My daughter is a respectable woman.
And you are a whore.
So I'm sorry, but you'll just have to go.   

Sketchy Notes on Les Troyens

An opera generalization: if I'm going to spend five daylight hours in an opera theatre, I'd rather be in the company of Hector Berlioz than Richard Wagner.  Lots of campy over-the-top self-indulgence in Berlioz but the same is true of Wagner and it is not nearly so hit-you-over-the-head irritating.    In any event, Les Troyens (in HD today) is not really one opera, it's two: one about Troy, one about Carthage one about love and one about war, one with lots an lots and lots of dance.  With so much of the day gone, I take time for only a few brief  notes:

• Susan Graham looks her age (she's 51) but for vocal performance, she is absolutely at the top of her game.


• Last-minute-replacement tenor Bryan Himel makes it look easy.  Which is not remotely to say that it is easy, except in the narrow sense that the role seems almost perfectly suited to his natural talents.


• When people talk about Met conductor Fabio Luisi, they still seem to wind up talking about his predecessor, James Levine. Still needs work on the branding, I'd say.

The Most Perfect Ever?

In an Opera News interview with Susan Graham, interviewer William R. Braun flatly declares Mozart's "Ch'io mi scordi di te?" to be "the single most perfect piece of music ever written."

Is it?  Youtube offers  number of exemplars.   Here's one from my sentimental favorite, Elizabeth Schwartzkopf:

another, this from Leontyne Price:

Braun also says that the piece is also "merciless in exposing the slightest flaw in vocal technique."   Wiki offers a helpful introduction.

Source: Braun, "Life, Continued," Opera News vol. 37, no. 6, December 2012 24-29, 29.

Opera: The Queen of the Bight

Others are already sketching and plotting for the Petraeus movie, perhaps as crafted by Oliver Stone. But I'm thinkin' opera.  I'll bet Thomas Adès' agent is already on line with him, trying to make sure he'll go, as they say, all in (nudge).   I' had been hoping for Juan Diego Flórez and Natalie Dessay but that's only an easy indulgence of my own personal taste.  

As the day goes on, one's thinking evolves.   I'm realizing that the real story is not the general who, until just last week, seemed secure behind the most successful public relations firewall since Douglas MacArthur.  No: the real center is turning to be the doyenne of Tampa Bay society, "Inbox Zero" as Farhad Manjoo has dubbed her,  the lady who told the police to get the kids offa her lawn because she is, after all, the Honorary Consul.  It's see who seems to stand at the center of the great and seemingly ever-expanding web.  By the time we get through all this, the general may be no more important to the story than the poor doofus from the barracks guard is is important to Carmen.

So I'm thinking coloratura and I'm thinking Adès' coloratura; I'm thinkin' Audrey Luna.  You may not be able to understand a word she is saying but she can strip the varnish off an antique dining table, which is to say, powerful and  insistent enough to draw everybody else into her web.  Sharpen your quill pen, Thomas, you're on.

Handel and Ariosto, Together Again

Breakfast music: Handel's Ariodante with Alan Curtis' Il Complesso Barocco, and Joyce di Donato in the castrato role.  The plot, once again, come from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and where would baroque opera be without him?  Here's a study tracing the same story into Spenser and Shakespeare.

Ch'agli nemici gli uomini sien crudi,
in ogni età se n'è veduto esempio;
ma dar la morte a chi procuri e studi
il tuo ben sempre, è troppo ingiusto et empio.
E acciò che meglio il vero io ti denudi,
perché costor volessero far scempio
degli anni verdi miei contra ragione,
ti dirò da principio ogni cagione.
---

Men seek, we see, and have in every age,
To foil their foes and tread them in thee dust
But there to wrek their rancor and their rage
Where they are loved is foul and too unjust.
Love should prevail just anger to assuage;
If love bring death, whereto can women trust?
Yet love did breed my danger and my fear,
As you shal hear if you will give me ear.

So Dalinda, handmaiden and unwitting instrument of evil, telling her own story: Canto five, verse six of Orlando, as translated by Sir John Harrington.  A Renaissance declaration opposing violence against women, what a concept.

A propos of nothing in particular, Mr. and Mrs. Buce were recalling how much fun we had watching Rossino's Le Comte Ory, ending with that notorious three-in-a-bed involving Juan Diego Flórez, and Diana Damrau. I remarked that DiDonato has an appealing raunchiness while Flórez succeeds in being funny without being particularly sexy.

"Tenors aren't supposed to be sexy," Mrs. B said. "Baritones are sexy. A sexy tenor is just icky."

Well, there's Dennis Day.  Oh, right, that just proves her point.

Ensemble

Finishing up the Chez Buce presentation of Il Barbiere di Seviglia (the "broken leg" version) we got to chatting about the peculiar challenges of ensemble work.  Think about it:  Barbiere is quintessentially an ensemble work--five (you could say six) fat parts that depend from start to finish on the performers' capacity to work with each other.

Yet think on this also: it's almost impossible for a stage personality not to be a narcissist. You go into the business in the first place because you are a self-absorbed showoff.  If you are any good--especially if you are any good--you spend more and more of your time in a warm bath of cheering and applause.    Not many can keep their head in that kind of glow.

Yet the really shrewd ones are those who figure out that their success is actually greater if other people also succeed.  In this light, the best performances are those in which everybody makes everybody else look good.  I think everybody hit that standard in the broken-leg Barbiere, though perhaps not all to the same degree.  Joyce DiDonato you can forgive.  The crowd was ready to treat her as special because of the misbehaving bone, and there she was all alone out by the footlights in her wheelchair.  So, give her a bye.  But contrast Juan Diego Flórez. I'm a big Flórez fan, and I like just about everything he does. But he's never better than when he is engaging with somebody else--bantering, tearing his heart out or just indulging in a spot of innocent lust.

An even more interesting case is Francisco Furlanetto, who played Don Basilio. Per Wiki, he's 63 this year. He's always labored under the constraint (if it is a constraint) that he's a bass, and so he's limited to a comparatively small range of roles. My impression is that he spent a lot of years playing first-tier parts in second-tier houses. Again as with Flórez, I think he's great in just about anything. But I suspect maybe he isbest precisely when it is not his job to hog the spotlight; rather to play the critic or the
I assume these guys are both smart enough to know when they are well off. 

Not everybody gets, it, I gather. Apparently there is a whole Hollywood tradition about the place of the straight man in comedy and whether they get the recognition they deserve.

We followed up Barbiere with a viewing of Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus.   Fiennes starred, of course; he also directed.  And somebody (I can only surmise it was he) understood that he'd look better with a strong, discerning, challenging cast who would be able to carry  their own parts, and also to get the best out of him.  Shrewd fellow, and I must say it paid off.

Afterthought: A while back I wrote about seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet with real teens. It occurs to me now that you could see the same principle at work there. Some of those kids knew exactly what they were there for: they talked to each other. Some recited their lines as if they were in a vacuum, all alone on the stage. A rare kind of maturity, this interaction stuff. Some people never get it.

DiDonato Bound

For our viewing pleasure last weekend, Mrs. Buce served up a DVD of Il Barbiere di Siviglia--the 2009 Covent Garden production.  It's a grand show; Mrs. Buce always gets short of breath at the sound of Juan Diego Flórez, here as Count Almaviva. We'd seen him do the role before in a DVD rom the Teatro Real de Madrid and he was dependably wonderful both times.

But the thing about the Covent Garden version is that I can't remember any before that succeeded quite so well as an ensemble piece, demonstrating that you really want five strong singers to make it all come together.

Covent Garden had its quintet, but I'd still have to concede that the hit of the evening was not Flórez nor Pietro Spagnoli in the title role. No, the palm goes to Joyce DiDonato as Rosina and never have I seen it played with such caged sexual energy. You see her for the first time through wrought-iron bars, as if in a cage, and she seems to be shaking the cage through the whole performance.

Not surprise, really. DiDonato has kind of a trade-mark on good-natured lust (watch her go three-in-a-bed with Flórez and Diana Damrau at the end of Le Comte Ory).

But perhaps you are ahead of me here. The clincher was that she'd broken her leg on the first night and had to do the rest of the run in a wheelchair. She spends the whole show whizzing back and forth across in front of the footlights like Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner. All of which worked resoundingly to her advantage. As they say in the theatre--girl, break a leg. Sometimes it can be a good career move.

Here's a snippet from a promo for the fractured video:

Where's the Party?

Does anybody do Chinese opera any more?  I had a chance to see The Red Detachment of Women back a few years ago and to my lasting regret, I somehow missed it.  But if you hear of a performance coming up give me a jingle, okay?


Afterthought:  I suppose I was thinking "in the US." But not necessarily.  If you there's something really good on offer in China, I suppose I might try to make it happen.

Verdi on Verdi

Following up on yesterday's Traviata, I've been dipping into Julian Budder's splendid The Operas of Verdi where, inter alia, I find this nugget:

When in the years immediately following its revival which of his operas written to date he considered his best, he is said to have replied: 'Speaking as a professisonal, Rigoletto; speaking as an amateur La Traviata.

Counting only his work up to La Traviata, I'd say this is a shrewd insight. But I wonder when, exactly, he said it? Of course never did anything again with the spare elegance of La Traviata, but he did do Don Carlos and Otello and Falstaff. They don't exactly put Rigoletto to shame, but they certainly belong on at least the same level.

Natalie

I love Natalie Dessay to pieces but I'll have to concede that she's not for all markets. I thought he Daughter of the Regiment with Juan Diego Flórez was one of the funniest and most charming three hours I've ever idled away.  I think she just nails the quiet dignity of Amina in La Sonnambula  (though I didn't much like the way she had to walk down that skinny little gangway in Vienna).   I thought she was more out of place in Lucia di Lammermoor where she somehow couldn't cut the clowning, even in a tragedy. 

Today for the first time as Violetta in the Met HD La Traviata, I saw her display the kind of vulnerability and pathos that is required of so many operatic heroines, and that she rarely achieves.  The sad irony was that the subject was not her character but herself--Natalie,six days short of her 47th birthday., just coming back from a cold, turned in the most disappointing performance I've ever seen her provide.  And she knew it: in an intermission interview with Deborah Voigt, she apologized for missing a high note (she missed several).  Her Alfredo, Matthew Polenzani, more or less took over.  At first I thought he was just hogging the mike but Mrs. Buce says--and I think she is right--no, he was doing her a favor.  At the encore, her bow came accompanied with  an aspect little short of desolation.

Say this for Natalie: it wasn't for lack of trying.  Her voice seemed strained and she seemed weak but you could tell that she had thought out every line and was delivering the best she knew how.  Say this also: almost everything else in the show seemed to conspire against her.   The set--that austere wall of abstract modernism--is interesting, and it seems to work in a DVD performance that I saw a while back.  But here it just seemed to turn everybody's voice to lead.  And Polenzani--nice man, Polenzani, generous and a trouper, but he wasn't able to relate to her nor she to him.  And Dmitri Hvorostovsky in my favorite role as old Germont--smooth and polished and utterly unmemorable.  Talk about pathos and vulnerability--those are exactly the qualities that make Germont so interesting, as they undercut his persona of stiff pomposity.   In a proper performance, you get the sense that Germont genuinely likes Violetta in spite of himself, and she him.   Hvorostovsky doesn't seem much interested in anybody except himself. 

Some people take delight in the disintegration of a great singer.  Not me.  As I say, I'm more or less nuts about Dessay and I want her to have a long and full and dazzling future career.  Aside from last week's cold, I remember that she's had a couple of semi-recent bouts with vocal surgery.  As she took her bow, I couldn't help but wonder whether this week was just a speed bump or a major inflection point.  From the look  of her, I'd say she was wondering, too.

Afterthought:   Deborah Voigt.  She did the intermission interview, giving herself a chance to hype her own performance as Brunhilde in Wagner's Ring.  I've said before that I don't get Wagner and I won't be seeing her in the Ring. But that voice--even as she speaks, it's like a fine Cabernet.  Indeed hers might have been the best performance of the afternoon.