Verdi Responds to Shakespeare: A Note on Macbeth

We spent some time we didn’t have this evening, watching a Glyndbourne production of Verdi’s Macbeth. Some quick thoughts;

Verdi did three Shakespeare Operas—Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, of which Macbeth is, by any measure, the weakest. But that is more a testimony to the strength of the others than it is to any intrinsic deficiency on the part of Macbeth. Granted, Verdi can’t do all the leaps and swoops now that he learned to do later—when you get right down to it, he is rather a slow starter. But that sets the bar unacceptably high: by most measures, nothing exceeds the later Verdi. Meanwhile of the early Verdis that remain in performance-Macbeth is far more polished than Nabucco, far more arresting than Luisa Miller (which I can swear we saw just a couple of years back—but Mrs. B says she can’t even remember it).

What’s really interesting is the way Verdi deals with Shakespeare. I embrace the notion that to make a good movie, you need a mediocre book which is why Gone with the Wind (say) or Bridges of Madison County are so much more fun to watch than the yawners from Merchant-Ivory.

It’s hard to make that theory fit here. Granted, maybe you could say that Falstaff is a great opera based on a weak play (Merry Wives of Windsor—but even here, I would want to insist that the play isn’t as bad as people seem to think it is). Otello takes a great play and makes it into a great opera. Some would say a greater opera. I wouldn’t go so far; I’d rather just regard them as a pair of twin peaks, each astonishing in its own way (and, bye the bye, rather different, one from another).

Macbeth draws on a much stronger play than Merry Wives, and it never achieves the heights of Otello. But Macbeth honors its source: it’s not an insult, and it’s not just a visual aid. Over and over, watching the opera, I found myself thinking—you know, this really is a glorious play. That’s a compliment to Verdi. He knew it was glorious, and even if he did not transcend his source, still he knew how to convey has own sense of awe and wonder.

Afterthought re slow starter: By the age of 46, Shakespeare had pretty much closed up shop. After the age of 46, Verdi still had Otello and Falstaff ahead of him –and also La Forza del Destino, Don Carlos and Aida. He may have been a late starter, but I can’t think of anyone comparable who lasted longer, except Sophocles (who, as it is said, was still going at 90).

Afterthought on sources: Aside from Shakespeare, Verdi also drew heaviliy on Schiller, about whom I know almost nothing (except as filtered through opera). I wonder if Verdi’s relation to Schiller is anything like his relation to Shakespeare?

The Met's Ballo: A Discovery

Mr. and Mrs. Buce caught the Met HD performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera yesterday and I must say it came across as a better opera than I had realize, or remembered.  I'm pretty sure I have seen it before, at least on disc, but as must be evident, it didn't make a dent on me. 

I herewith revise my opinion.  Grant that this isn't top-of-the-line Verdi.  But accept also that with Verdi (as with, e.g Shakespeare) even second rate is likely to be better than first-rate anybody else.  And recognize also that under conditions like these, the problem for the second-tier may not be its inferiority but just the fact that may get lost in the shuffle.  If Ballo is "mediocre"--in the strict sense of "middling,"--it's "mediocre only in that it stands below, Falstaff or Otello or--well, you get the idea.

Another problem:  shaky provenance.   If you know only one thing about Ballo,  you know know that this is the one that met with censorial disapproval because it feature(d) the assassination of a King in Sweden and the authorities thought that hit a bit too close to home.  Whereupon Verdi responded, "va bene, Boston," and whisked them all off to a locale where he had never set foot and about which he knew nothing.  The modern observer is likely to suspect that if Verdi didn't take his own intentions more seriously than that, then there was no reason for us to do so either.

This was probably never a fair inference, but whatever; at any rate, in recent years, Ballo has moved back to Sweden and the American stuff is history. Seen in its  native habitat, there's nothing particularly weird about it: just a good, straightforward Verdi plot, with an insolent  authority figure, a troubled friendship and a ong, slow, loud, death scene.   I suppose this might be a problem: Mrs. B says it all reminds her too much of her favorite Rigoletto, from just half a dozen years before. I can see her point, but I think there is a difference here: I think you see Verdi really trying hard not to repeat himself; to stretch out, to explore some different musical forms,  In his exhaustive appraisal of the operas of Verdi, Julian Budder quotes a 19th-Century review, saying that Verdi here "having rejected convention and formula, having assigned to each character his own particular language and having rendered the dramatic situation with evident effectiveness, in fact [has] moulded the drama."  This strikes me as good enough for government work.

One could add the fact that it's a marvelously singable piece of work, and that the Met fitted it out with a world of talent.  For my money, Stephanie Blythe might be the most accomplished singer now working and my only complaint is that in her role as the fortune teller, she gets to go home so early (I'm intrigued to note that the cast for Verdi's original "Boston" version specifies that she be "of the negroid race," or so it is translated in Budder).  I'll even give grudging points to  Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the aggrieved and betrayed best friend.  But I do have to wonder--how did a tough kid from Siberia get such impeccable teeth?

Verdi v. Verdi (and the Role of the Orchestra)

European opera managers must smile with contempt at their American counterparts for giving away programs.  It's almost as silly as an airline letting you board luggage for free.  But we might as well enjoy it while we can; it gives us stuff like this:

For a poet as complex as Shakespeare, the musical language of the first half of the nineteenth century was not really adequate.  There are wonderful things in Rossini's Otello of 1816 (which is based on a French eighteenth-century translation, far from the original Shakespearean text), in I Capuleti e I Montechi of Bellini (which has very little to do with Shakespeare) and Verdi's Macbeth of 1847 and 1865, but the language of the period did not permit the composers and the librettists to enter fully into the thoughts of the English writer.  Rather, their aim was to transform the drama into a series of closed numbers, arias, duets, etc., of the kind that Verdi was writing and the public expected in 1847.

So musicologist Philip Gossett in "Giuseppe Verdi and Falstaff," in the (free) program for the current San Francisco opera season.  I suppose one way to grasp his point would be to listen to a (pretty good) early Verdi like, say, Nabucco, or an (excellent) Rossini like The Barber of Seville and reflect on the range and variety of devices available to the Verdi of Falstaff that simply wouldn't have been on offer for his earlier self.

Part of it, surely, is the influence of Verdi on Wagner--a complicated topic by any measure, but on even the narrowest reading, the influence is there.  Mrs. B points out wrinkle: the role of the orchestra as a virtual character in the opera itself.  Wagner is partly responsible here, but Mrs. B points also to Puccini, with a notable wrinkle.  That is, in Puccini, the orchestra can be downright obtrusive, whacking you over the head with its own interpretations, leaving nothing to imagination or chance.  The orchestra in Falstaff is a vivid presence, but here I'd say it is not a hindrance.  Rather, you really need the orchestra to keep you on track among the torrent of vocal possibilities under exploration on stage.

An Old Man's Challenge

Verdi's Otello opened at La Scala on February 5, 1887. Verdi would have been 73. It was the capstone of a great career. Many Verdians would have endorsed it as his greatest achievement.

They say that one of the governing principles for a respectable old age is to leave the party before you hear the sirens. But one more project lured Verdi on after Otello: by 1890, in his 77th year, we find him at work on what would in fact be his last opera—Falstaff—in collaboration with his indispensable librettist, Arrigo Boito.

The decision to go forward was not automatic. “Did you never think of the enormous number of my years?” Verdi wrote to his collaborator. “Suppose I couldn't stand the strain? And failed to finish it? You would then have wasted your time and trouble to no purpose.”

Boito's response is a model of subtle persuasion:

The fact is that I never think of your age either when I'm talking to you or when I'm writing to you or when I'm working with you.

The fault is yours.

I know that Otello is little more than two years old, and that even as I am writing to you it is being appreciated as it should by Shakespeare's compatriots. But there is a stronger argument than that of age, and it's this: it's been said of you after Otello: "It's impossible to finish better."This is a great truth and it enshrines a great and very rare tribute. It is the only weighty argument.

Weighty for the present generation, but not for history, which aims first and foremost to judge men by their essential merits. Nevertheless it is indeed rare to see a lifetime of artistic endeavour concludes with a worldly triumph. Otello is such a triumph. All the other arguments—age, strength, hard work for me, hard work for you, etc., etc.—are not valid and place no obstacle in the way of a new work. Since you oblige me to talk about myself I shall say that notwithstanding the commitment I should be taking on with Falstaff I shall be able to finish my work within the term promised. I'm sure of that.

I don't think that writing a comedy should tire you out. A tragedy causes its author genuinely to suffer; one's thoughts undergo a suggestion of sadness which renders the nerves morbidly sensitive. The jokes and laughter of comedy exhilarate mind and body. ... 

You have a great desire to work, and this is an indubitable proof of health and strength. "Ave Marias" are not enough. Something else is needed.

All your life you've wanted a good subject for a comic opera, and that is a sign that the vein of an art that is both joyous and noble is virtually in existence in your brain; instinct is a wise counsellor. There's only one way to finish better than with Otello and that's to finish triumphantly with Falstaff.

After having sounded all the shrieks and groans of the human heart, to finish with a mighty burst of laughter—that is to astonish the world.

So you see, dear Maestro, it's worth thinking about the subject I've sketched; see whether you can feel in it the germ of the new masterpiece. If the germ is there, the miracle is accomplished.

And Verdi:

Amen, so be it!

We'll write Falstaff then! We won't think for the moment of obstacles or age or illness! ...

Falstaff opened on February 9, 1890, just a few months shy of Verdi's 80th birthday.   It was to be his last opera, although he continued to compose until as late as 1897.  He died in 1901, at 87.

Update:  Apologies for neglecting to credit this. It's almost entirely a ripoff from  the indispensable Operas of Verdi by Julian Budder, vol. III 424-6 (1984).

Don't Miss Ernani

If you've got any taste for opera--and if you missed the opener Saturday--remind yourself to make room for the replay on Wednesday March 14 of the Met's HD presentation of Verdi's Ernani.

Yes, it's early, green Verdi, not up to the standard of the the bigfeet of decades to come.  The plot is absurd even by operatic standards and you pretty much skip the (short) fourth act.   But if you want to understand the arc of Verdi's career, it's essential.  This is the one in which, as the serious students might say, Verdi becomes Verdi: you've got your lovestruck but troubled soprano; your faintly befuddled tenor; your imperious and manipulative baritone and your sinister passacaglia basso.  Good singing all around here, but I'd say that the prize goes to Ferruccio Furlanetto, who has lately taken total command of those Verdi basso roles (I see he'll be back at the Met next year in Don Carlos).  In a break-time interview, Joyce DiDonato asked him a question about (I'm quoting from memory) how you deal with the ahem somewhat shaky structure of the plot.  His answer was something on the lines of you just have to make the character carry conviction and the  rest will take care of itself.  Good point: works for Verdi's great progenitor, Shakespeare, and Furlanetto shows how it can be made to work here, too.   

The Verdi Biz

I met a lady today in Italy whose name is Verdiana. Apparently in Italy there are Wagnerians and Verdians and her papa wanted everybody to know she was on the right side. It's a tiny whiff of just how much cultural apparartus still persists around here in the wake of the Great Man.

Granted, he was a first-rate talent, but that is not quite enough to explain all the stuff he left behind. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that he got his timing right: the 19th Century liked heroes, and Italy in partiularly needed a roster of great men to define its nationhood. You can only go so far with Garibaldi, and although just about every Italian city has a main drag named Via Cavour, still I suspect not one in a hundred Italians could so much as tell you who Cavour is. Verdi at least has a legitimate claim to fame.

Verdi probably did a not to nourish it himself when, after achieving fame and fortune, he moved back to his home turf at Busseto, with the intention (so it appears) of picking fights with his old friends and neighbors. They even built a pocket opera house in his name; he publicly snubbed it. As I guess I've said before, conflict is a kind of intimacy: some people just can't get enough of it.

There also, so I am told, a Verdi family, and apparently they control the paper. And I gather (though Google seems to be no help here) they too are feuding: evidently a critical player died without a will and his children have fought each other to a standstill. All I know for sure is that at the Verdi country house, nobody is mowing the lawn.

Finally, here's one I never heard of before: the Club dei 27: self-appointed self-designated keepers of the flame, one for each (so it is said) Verdi opera. All male of course (and doesn't this sound like a guy thing?). The woman (not Verdiana) who told me about it said that just the other night at the Parma opera, she sat next to Giovanna d'Arco. Evidently Stiffelio just died. I surmised that the lady who told me the story believed that she would make a fine replacement Stiffelio, but I don't think she' enjoy it: way too laddish. Maybe they need a lady's auxiliary.

Opera Note: Save your Viaticus Latin Folks, Rome's Gonna Rise Again

--Okay, okay, I'm tired of your begging. So I'll do the Met, but only on one condition.
--Sure, name it.
--That you let me do Attila.
--That we let you do--um, say again?

Well, I suppose it didn't actually happen quite like that, but I do know two things: (1) after years of trying, the Met finally did snag Ricardo Muti for a conducting gig; and (2) they presented him in one of Verdi's lesser known and (let's be frank about it) weaker operas.

The Met's presentation is saved by two facts: one, like Shakespeare, Verdi may sometimes create an inferior product, but never a really bad one, nor a product that lacks in interest. And two: Muti himself, who seems unfailingly able to work his magic with Verdi-- so much so that if I'm right, and that if he did negotiate for Attila, then the chances are he was onto something, and understood that he could nurture something on this unpromising soil that would be worth the effort.

Attila's biggest drawback may be the source of its considerable success in its own time: it is, perhaps, Verdi's most "political" opera, with a theme--beleaguered Romans fight back against uncouth Huns```--fit almost too neatly into the aspirations of Italians in his day.

What saves it--I assume, what Muti saw in it, is that it begins to sound like (although it has not yet fully become) the mature Verdi. Julian Budden says:

"[O]f all Verdi's essays in the grand manner composed to date [1846] none shows so great a consistency of language. Even Nabucco contains reminiscences of Donizetti and Rossini. In Attila every phrase is characteristic, each aria is an archetype of the composer's e`arly manner.

Muti's conducting, as interpreted by the Met orchestra and its splendid chorus, affirm the intuition that Budden is right here, and they make it all worth the price of admission. Which is a good thing, because nothing else was spectacularly impressive. Singing was not bad but fairly routine (did they blow their casting budget on the conductor?). The set seemed to be some kind of Italian jungle with holes in it, so you felt like you were watching most of the performance through a porthole or a well-trimmed Dunkin' Donut. But forget that: Muti's conducting alone was enough to justify the Met's decision (if it was a decision) to let him have his way.

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.   

Carlton Recommends Budden on Verdi

A shout-out to Underbelly’s culture consultant Carlton for the culture-find of the years: Julian Budden’s three-volume set, The Operas of Verdi (link), which is just what it appears to be—a detailed examination of all Verdi operas, chronologically, with tons of musical examples. Il Teatro Buce is an established venue for Verdi DVDs, but we have to admit we are not superswift auditors, and we can use lots of good critical guidance. Here it is, all in one place, and I can testify that it works. We spent two evenings going through Don Carlos—not an easy task, because there are so many versions, and no two performances stage it exactly the same way, and Budden tries to cover them all, but well worth the effort. We gave another two evenings to Traviata which is, by any measure, pretty accessible Verdi, and one we thought we knew pretty well. Silly us: there are a thousand leaps an connections that Budden offers, which we had missed.

Incredibly, the set seems to be out of print at the moment. I got mine used from Amazon, and I must have got the last reasonably-priced sets—the prices on current offerings are enough to crack your glass eye straight across. But there seem to be quite as number of single volumes on offer, so it shouldn’t be difficult to put together a set of your own, and at a saving.

So, two down and—what, 20-odd?—to go, but that is fine. Lots more pleasant weekend evenings to look forward to. Carlton says he’s only sorry he can’t find this kind of resource for any other composer. Amen to that, but now that I think of it, I realize I did get some profit out of Bruce Alan Brown’s Così fan tutte in the “Cambridge Opera Series,” and I see by the flyleaf that they have a lot more in the same line (link). Anyway, thanks Carlton, and here’s wishing you many happy aural hours.

Terfel's Falstaff

You know I'm not a serious opera fan because I've seen only one performance of Bryn Terfel in Verdi's Fallstaff.  Not the three, or five, or ten, or 100, which may be the gold standard for the real fans.  I am thus unable to confirm that the new version at the San Francisco Opera (which we saw last night) is, as represented, more somber and correspondingly less comical than some of its predecessors.  I'm sorry I haven't, though.  Terfel is an appealing, engaging, accessible singer by any standard and if last night's performance is any evidence (and it probably is) then a whole catalog of Terfel Falstaffs would be great fun indeed.

A couple of other loose ends about Falstaff: One, it occurs to me that maybe this is an opera more fun for the singers than the audience.  Or at best, it needs an audience with pretty strong musical chops.  I guess I've written before that it was, ironically, the first opera I ever saw--and I was told I probably wouldn't get it and I didn't get it.  I've seen it several times since and I've come to enjoy it and I think I have some sense of what it is about. But my own musicianship never gets above the sing-in-the-shower level and I suspect that there is stuff I will  never appreciate as well as someone who, say, sings every day for money, and once in a while gets a chance really to blow it out with this masterwork.

Related point: I think there is a sense on which Verdi's Falstaff bears comparison with Shakespeare's Hamlet.  No, no, bear with me for a moment.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us everything he knows about theatre, everything he has learned in his entire career.  So with Falstaff and Verdi and opera.  The notable difference is, of course, that Shakespeare was in his 40s when he wrote Hamlet; he'd been in the game for a dozen year to so and had perhaps a dozen more to go (is that all?  Yes!).  Verdi, of course, was in his 80s, with his entire life to look back on.

And one more: people always talk about Falstaff as a comedy.  I suppose it is as a sense: it is also, at best, rather mean-spirited, unkind.  And has anybody noticed that it is a "comedy" mocking as a foolish old man, written by, yes, another old man?

Juan and Natalie, Together Again

Vinzenzo Bellini died at 33. Per Wiki, he actually completed 11 operas, though I don't think any more than half them can be counted as still in the canon. Giseppi Verdi made it to the age of 87; Wiki counts (only?) 28 finished operas, although that doesn't include a lot of multiple versions, reworkings, etc.

But here's the more interesting datum: Verdi didn't really hit his stride until #17—Rigoletto, produced when he was 36, i.e., three years after the age at which Bellini died. Question: what if Bellini had lived until 87, and Verdi had died at 33?

Okay, it's pointless. But it does help to reflect on the possibilities of a career so cruelly cut off so early. For the plain truth is that Bellini can be a disappointment: one of the most listenable composers ever, yet at the same time, one of the slackest. Whatever else you can say about Bellini operas, they lack sinews and a rib cage—in a word, drama, precisely the quality that makes Verdi so distinctive.

I mulled this point over in mind last Tuesday night at the Met—more precisely in the Director's Circle, that's two flights up--as I listened to Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez in La Sonnambula. That's our customary location and I will always remember my first visit in 1996 I heard Carol Vaness and Susanne Mentzer sing “Soave Sia Il Vento” in Cosi Fan Tutti (and here it is!).

Cosi was a magical moment. But here's the thing: watching La Sonnambula was the first time I've ever wished I were watching the movie-theater performance in HD. This isn't any kind of general rule: I don't intend to abandon the live performance, and some of the Hds have been just way too gimmicky. But for Bellini, a few of the in-your-face doodads would have been a help.

A second invidious comparison: Flórez and Dessay did a fine job here, but it was hard not to compare this presentation with their last Met outing, in Fille du Regiment a year ago (link). They may be singing just as well this time, but you couldn't quite tell because there isn't nearly as much to do

Fn: Looks like I will get my chance to see if it is better in HD, next Wednesday night. Now, if I can rejigger my schedule...

Opera Notes: Jenůfa, Giulio Cesare, Nabucco

A lot of opera action lately on the big screen at Il Teatro Bruce. A quick summary:

• The pick of the week is Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, from Kultur (link), a nasty little story tale peasant lust and infanticide, and what’s not to like? The Czech language (or is it Moldavian dialect?) lends itself to this kind of raw humanity; it carries a lot more conviction than the kind of dilletantism you get from Puccini. And I have to admit I found it a lot more accessible than Cunning Little Vixen, which I have to admit I don't really get.

The pick of Jenůfa is Anja Silja, hitherto unknown to me, who seems to have had a long, busy, interesting career that invites more attention (link). Roberta Alexander in the title role is good also, although she has less to do except to sound baffled and desperate. The men were fine, but their characters are more limited so they didn’t have the scope to dazzle.

• David McVicar’s Giulo Cesare (link) (also from Glyndebourne) is perhaps more assertively controversial—at first blush it looks like the kind of high-saliency high camp you expect from Peter Sellers. But McVicar offers something often missing from Sellers: music. Maybe the credit goes to the music director, William Christie, but in any event, it is interestingly sung, well played, throughout. Cleopatra and (especially) Cesare are well cast, but this performance really belongs to Patricia Bardon (as Cornelia, widow of Pompey) and Angelika Kirschlager (as Sesto, Pompey's son).

The campy staging (McVicar himself calls it “Bollywood”) is a question. It certainly gives reviewers something to talk about. I’d say that it works, but only because the cast is so strong—with weaker singers, you’d notice, and be offended by, the staging much more quickly.

• Verdi’s Nabucco (link) is a different matter altogether. If I read the liner notes right, this is was Ricardo Muti’s debut performance as music director at La Scala in 1987—a job he left amid some rancor just a couple of years back. The audience loved it, and it was well sung, but you can’t get away from the notion that this is second-tier Verdi: interesting, certainly worth seeing once, but not something I’d hurry back to (I may be a dissenter here; apparently it has enthusiastic acoloytes). You can almost imagine the young Verdi, like the young Shakespeare at one of his own first plays, watching from the wings and saying “hm, won’t do that again.”

Ashland Cymbeline

When I was a junior in high school, Mr,. McAllister, the orchestra leader, came to Donald Mothes and (who?) and me and said: "Now boys, we are going to the opera.  It's not an ideal opera, not the one that should be your introduction to opera, but it is the one I have tickets to and we will do what we can."

And we did.  Mr. M drove us to into Boston and back (pre-expressway, a real grind).  I have no idea who paid for dinner but I'm pretty sure it wasn't I.  And we went to the opera: Verdi's Falstaff.  

All thanks to Mr. M but I didn't see another opera for about 20 years, and I think he was probably right about first-time introductions.  I've since grown to love Falstaff but it is absolutely not one I would put at the head of the list of candidates for first-timers.  Carmen for sure.   I suppose La Bohème.  Maybe even Rigoletto but Falstaff is just way too inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a pretty good sense of what he might listen for.

I suppose I'd say the same sort of thing about Shakespeare's Cymbeline.  I don't want to torture the comparison: Falstaff still is, at the end of the day, a much better piece of work.   And Verdi was in his 80s when he wrote; Shakespeare, not yet 50.  But it was Verdi's last work and  for Shakespeare, at least one of the last (the evidence is equivocal).  They have common virtues in that each represents a kind of summing up, something on the order of autumnal wisdom.  And a common vice: in each the artist tries to cram in too much.  In both cases you find yourself thinking--hey wait a minute; what did he just say (or sing)?  And the action has moved on without you.  Ideas--in music, or in verse, often good ideas, just come flying too thick and fast.  And in Cymbeline, at least, I just can't get control of the plot. I've seen it three times in my life (that I remember) and in each case I find myself saying--um, just how did we get to Wales, and why are we here?

All of which is by way of background for a pleasant surprise: faced with these obstacles, I think Ashland this year is doing a superb job with it.  They've worked hard to make it accessible and intelligible--I wonder if, in general, they are getting better at the verse?  And as to the generally refractory structure, they've decided mostly to go with the flow.  Or rather, more than the flow: somebody obviously decided that they can't really conquer all the clutter and distraction without doing violence to the essence.  So let it all pile in and in addition, pile on some more (this is, for example, the first Cymbeline  I ever saw with a Disney subtext, and it doesn't hurt).

The result is a Cymbeline in which, for all the play's natural frustrations, you really are able to discern a distinctive tang, a flavor consistent and memorable and not quite like anything else Shakespeare ever did.

Getting a Grip on Rossini

Chez Buce has enjoyed the viewing of two Rossini operas in the last couple of weeks, with  lot on common. One, we'd never really heard of either. Two, they both showcase Juan Diego Flórez who (among other achievements) is on the shortlist of Mrs. B's operatic heartthrobs.  And three, they both come from the Rossini Festival at Pesaro, Rossini's  birthplace, on the east coast of Italy, downhill from Urbino and south of Ravenna.    Mr. and Mrs. Buce have never set foot in Pesaro.  I guess I've breezed by at 55 mph but without so much as a how d'ya do.  

But our inattention doesn't seem to have impeded them in any particular way.  Seems like they have established themselves as a major-league summer festival venue, with three theaters, a comfy state subsidy, and the mandate to keep alive--or better, to revivify-- some of the overlooked items among the 40-odd entries in Rossini's operatic catalogue.

The two new entries in our consciousness are Matilde de Shabran, #32 (1821)  if my count is correct,  and Zelmira, #33,  a year later in in 1822.  Zelmira gets a place in the larger constellation because it was the next-to-the last Rossini opera to open in Italy, and also the first to introduce him to a more general European audience (months later, in Vienna).

This makes about a dozen Rossini operas we've seen live or on disk.  We've perhaps as many Verdis, so we've reached a point where it is possible to put these individual items in a more general framework. Let me see what I can do.

One, it's increasingly clear how much Rossini must have dominated the Italian scene in his own time.   Stendhal brackets him with Mozart although the compliment verges on the back-handed:

I have bracketed [Mozart and Rossini]  together for, under the combined influence of distance, of he difficulty experienced in reading Mozart's scores, and of the average Italian's utter scorn for any artist of foreign origin, it ma legitimately be claimed that Mozart and Rossini made their début simultaneously in the year 1812.

So Stendhal, Life of Rossini 125 (Richard N. Coe trans. 1970).  It's actually not entirely clear what Stendhal has in mind here: of Mozart's juvenilia were produced at La Scala in the 1770s, and the Rossini catalog assigns five operas to the year 1812.  But the drift is right: Italians don't seem quite to have got the point of Mozart, at least in the 19th Century.  And at him, so it is said, even Donizetti and Bellini,  worked in Rossini's shadow (though poor Bellini, who died so young, scarcely had a chance).  

But the other side of the coin is to marvel at the things Verdi learned how to do that his predecessors, even at their best, simply didn't know how to do.   You can see the point on full display in Matilde di Shabran.  It brims over with wonderful ensemble work--even a love-duet with two active onlookers, all four participating in the music.  There's some glorious music here but almost invariably, what you see each character assigned to a role and then permitted to interweave their vocal lines without  breaking type.  This is precisely the sort of thing that Verdi figured how not to behave, as he learned to fill is characters with more nuanced and more nuanced destinies.

Remarkably, you see just a hint of what you might call Verdian character development in Matilde di Shabran--specifically in Flórez role as Corradino, the lord of the manor.   The plot point is that Corradino has the public face of a monster but we learn in the first act that he's actually a pussycat.  The upshot is that Flórez, for one, is able to put some nuance and variety into his character in  way that it nobody really found again until Verdi smoked it out 40 years later.

Fun fact:  if I read the notes right, this is Flórez' third appearance in this role in this place--and that his first one came classic storybook opera fashion in 1996, when he got his great breakthrough by stepping in (at age 23) for a more established talent who was taken sick.  The other singer was Bruce Ford who had a respectable run in the Bel Canto repertoire, although a skim of his webpage suggests that  he may be out of action.

Here's a good review of Matilde di Shabran.  Here's an enthusiastic appreciation of Zelmira.

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.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Don Carlo

Okay, so back to Verdi's Don Carlo, specifically the Met's HD transmission of same today. The short point is that it was superb, a splendid response to a score that needs no less.

Though it has competitors, I suspect that among serious Verdi fans this might be the all-time favorite.  Among more casual opera goers, perhaps less so: it is probably less vivid in mind than half a dozen others, from Rigoletto to Falstaff.  The same evidence supports both points of view: Don Carlo is massive--running a bit shy of five hours portal to portal in today's version, which is about par.  And there are three versions in two languages; while they are largely similar, there's enough difference in detail to make you wonder whether you've really seen it before.  And it takes six strong voices which means it will be a lucky day before you see an all-round strong performance.

The plot, too, is a bit of an oddity.  It seems simple enough on the surface: young love seeks to outwit the elders in the quest for freedom.  Well, yes, but in this case, the desired one is also papa's wife, which adds a touch of incest, not to say confusion.  And papa--specifically, King Philip II of Spain: Verdi dismissed him as a "savage monarch," and at times,  he does play the villain of the piece.  But in fact, he is not his own man: we quickly learn that he is a mere pawn of the dread Inquisition and that his own terrors and disappointments are as great as those of anyone else in the cast (Don Carlo surely is, bye the bye, the most anti-Catholic of operas, although I'm not sure anybody pays that point much mind).

Six roles, but fact it is the young lover and freedom fighter, Don Carlos himself, who bears the brunt of the work: he is on stage in almost every scene and interacts with virtually every other character.  Carrying the weight today was Roberto Alagna, and you might have been surprised to see (hear) how good he was.  It's easy to underestimate Alagna: he came to the major league in the baggage of his former wife, Angela Georghiu, and he offers so relaxed and laid-back a manner that you might well mistake him for the boy who cleans the swimming pool. (and it wasn't that long ago that he walked off a major stage in a pout).

In fact, Alagna has a steady and dependable voice, coupled with a capacity to connect with almost anyone with whom he share the stge.  Don Carlo is very much a duet opera--as Alagna says, "a duet, not  duel," with lots of intense, breath-to-breath voice-to-voice encounters.  So while he might not be the most brilliant Carlo in terms of technique, he's got just the mix of stamina and emotional availability you need to make this work.

Simon Keenlyside as his best buddy and sometimes collaborator, seems to offer more by way of suavity and nuance.  But--Mrs. B would kill me for this--but I wonder if his situation isn't the revere of Alagna's: he's pretty good at expressing himself, but perhaps not quite as good as you, if you are not paying attention, might think. 

For me, however, the real star of the show was Ferruccio Furlanetto as the king. He has three big moments: one with Keenlyside, one with Eric Halfvarson as the Grand Inquisitor, and a nine-minute display of isolated anguish on his own. He nailed them all: here is a guy who can sing but also, clearly, has given a lot of thought to what he wants to do and why he wants to do it: he is the glue that holds a pretty good production together.

The women were a bit more problematic.  Marina Poplavskaya as the bride/beloved has a luscious voice although I'd say her emotional range was narrow. Part of the problem may be her relationship with Anna Smirnova as Princess Eboli. I gather she Smirnova has taken some flac elsewhere and I feel no need to pile on. But she seemed to me to be miscast: her first song was supposed to be light and sexy which apparently she can't do at all. The rest of the afternoon she sang more convincingly but she seemed to be looking for, and never quite finding, a fixed center for her character.

I don't want to forget Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who looks like me must be all of 13 years old as conductor. Poplavskaya called him "Mozartian" which is extravagent but not entirely off point: he gets a kind of clarity and ease out of the orchestra while making it look like he's just having a grand time. He debuted at the Met a while back in Carmen; he did  fine job there, but I suspect that maybe Don Carlo was a better showcase for his talents.

Staging was restrained, which I thought a relief.  There is so much else going on, you don't want to have to worry about sets too.  Anyway, thank heavens they didn't bring Zeferelli; he would have given us a real auto de fé.

Appreciation: Gondoliers

We caught a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's Gondoliers at UC-Davis this afternoon. It was my first Gondoliers since, um, about April 1947, when I (aged 11) was hauled along, more or less unwillingly, to admire the annual class musical at Manchester (NH) High School Central. I certainly liked it better this time, although I think I can see why it is (on this side of the puddle, at least) one of the less popular G&S offerings. Granted that it offers a lot of the signature devices that make G&S so enduringly popular, still on the whole I'd say it's a bit more S than G, a reminder that Sullivan in his other life burdened us with stuff like Onward, Christian Soldiers! and The Lost Chord. Especially at the start: at least in this avatar, you lead off with about 20 minutes of uninterrupted singing--no banter--that leaves you pining for surtitles.

Two things I wouldn't have noticed in 1947:

One, how much it taps into, not only Commedia dell'Arte, but the whole grand tradition of comic schtick, straight back to Plautus and Terence. This isn't a criticism. Every text is a context, and something like G&S can be more fun if you recognize the element of parody and homage.

And two, how much it owes to "real"opera. I said at the break that it certainly offered echoes of Donizetti. Mrs. B said: you mean Rossini. Well, no actually, I meant Donizetti, but I can see her point. From Donizetti, there's the cheerful absurdity of Daughter of the Regiment or Elixir of Love. But reflecting Rossini, there are those marvellous tandem contraptions where the soprano is climbing Mount Everest while the orchestra swims the Mediterranean (or sometimes, the other way around). And the glorious ensembles--but the ensembles go all the way back to Mozart.

Fun fact: Gondoliers opened in 1889, the 12th G&S and their last big success. For comparison, Verdi premiered Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893. For strength and staying power at the end of a long career, I'd say Verdi gets the prize.

Opera Note: Capriccio:

Watching Renée Fleming and friends as they diverted themselves in the overheated drawing room (complete with harpsichord and harp) that forms the set of Richard Strauss' Capriccio, all I could think was: somebody needs to haul these people out to the countryside and make them dig irrigation ditches.  There are many things you can say about this remarkable opera but one is that it is a monument--no, a love letter--to the haute bourgoisie that define so much of the dart world around the end of the 19th Century.  Thin Proust's Paris, Mann's Hanseatic League, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha (the Compsons, remember?), even, by a slight stretch, the Ranevskys in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.  They're civilized (more or less), they're cultivated (somewhat), they are cosseted (more than they know) and they are bored, bored, bored, much more than they want to admit even to themselves.   In the case of Strauss' "countess": and friends, they turn it all into a kind of parlor game or, as Strauss calls it,  "A Conversation Piece for Music."

But I risk letting myself be misunderstood.  There are actually many things to enjoy about Strauss' farewell offering on the opera stage--not least the fact that by planting his tale at the very epicenter of frivolity, Strauss has  poofed (one suspects intentionally) an overripe raspberry into the mustache of his supposed mentor and protector, Adolph himself, the voice and face of the Thousand-year Reich (think an uptown version of this).

Beyond context--Capriccio can be read as an old man's work, fit company (if not quite a match) for Verdi's Falstaff, Shakespeare's Tempest or maybe Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus--the wry wisdom, the same not of not quite mellow reconciliation.  Also and perhaps more important, it has something close to Verdi's musical fertility: it spills out ideas as if the composer had decided that, this behing his last outing, he might as well empty the bin (and indeed the plot, if there is one, turns on a slightly clownish old producer, here played by Peter Rose whose CV itself includes at least one first-rate Falstaff).

Still you'd have to concede that goes slack after a while.  And for all its charms, you come to realize pretty quickly that it's here because Fleming, still at the peak of prestige and able to demand about any role she wants.  Fortunately this one suits her: at 52 she, like her "Countess," (and the composer) is willing and able to preside over a contention about the nature of art, and to provide her own summing-up.  That finale has her on stage mostly alone for the last 20 minutes and here is one place where I think that HD proves markedly inferior to live performance.  Even Fleming's face can grow tiresome after a while and you find yourself closing your eyes just to get away from her. Fortunately, there is music enough to keep you engaged, challenged and entertained right through to the last bar.  

Political Footnote:  I have to admit to a bit of ambivalence about Strauss' allowing himself to be protected by the Nazis, in a world where Joseph Roth drank himself to death and Stephan Zweig committed suicide.  I don't suppose I'm informed enough to judge, although I have heard that he had a Jewish daughter in law to protect, and grandchildren.

Linguistic Footnote:   It just now sank into me that a Capriccio is not the same as a Carpaccio.  A Capriccio is, I take it, a small caprice.  A Carpaccio is, of course, a large carp.  

Questions About Italy

If culture is a secular religion, then I guess you could say we are on pilgrimage among the shrines of Verdi country (we could paint a 747 on the outside wall of our house in Palookaville, like Egyptians do after they make the Haj). Meanwhile, two question:

One, why did Verdi move back to Busseto when he could have settled in Milan, Paris, Rome? One has to conclude (not so?) that he really enjoyed quarreling.

And two, who paid for rebuilding the cultural infrastructure of Parma? It's a projection of state power in a country that was too poor for that sort of thing. Do I smell the CIA?

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Mozart's La Clememza de Tito ...

... is much better than I had realized before.  That's a considered judgment, based on the HD of the Met presentation conducted by Harry Bicket.  Granted it's a perfunctory assemblage on a borrowed libretto (did I read somewhere that it had been set 40 times before?).  And everybody knows that opera seria is a pain.

But here's the thing--well, bear with me for a moment, this is going to be a stretch.  Consider Hamlet.  Yes, I know, Hamlet is a much bigger deal than CT. But recall how Hamlet comes about.  It's about midway through Shakespeare's career.  He's tried everything at least once. Now he gives you a kind of summing-up of everything he knows about the theatre.  So Mozart here: he is in the last year of his life. Apparently he was scratching to put food on the table but you also get the sense that he was desperate to show us what he knew while he still had the chance.  They say that old artists paint with fewer and fewer strokes.  Bicket in an intermission issue said something to the effect that Mozart when young would have spent ten minutes telling you something that he gets off in ten bars here.  Concentrated, almost frantically direct and to the point.

Which brings me to a second comparison, even more of a stretch: Verdi, Falstaff.  A last chance to tell you everything he knows.  You have to stay alert and catch your breath, it is all going by so fast.  With the qualification, of course, that Mozart in his testament is just 35 years old, while Verdi in his was over 80.