Renée Fleming and Capriccio

When Renée Fleming had her tour de force Met opening night gala of 2008, there could no longer be a doubt as to her standing as our great American opera diva. She is the first woman and only the second singer in Met history to headline an opening night. For the unprecedented evening she sang selections from La Traviata, Manon, and the final scene from Capriccio. Critics seemed to think that the later was her best, and everybody hoped for more to come. Last night our dream came true when Ms. Fleming sang in the full length opera. From start to finish, she seemed to feel right at home in this luxuriously decadent, serene, and musically sensitive work. It is obvious that she loves singing Strauss; not only does her voice so effortlessly melt into the orchestral texture, but she rolls around in it, blooming every chance she gets. One would be hard pressed to find a better match for the fabulous Countess than this diva.

The kind of respect and excitement Ms. Fleming generates with whatever project she takes on demands sincere admiration and respect. She is as mainstream a star as opera singers can become, for which the closeted opera world should be eternally grateful. Naturally, I get excited when she comes to the Met. Unfortunately, she has yet to rock my socks off. Last month, she employed the same vocal style she does in Strauss to Armida, which ended up making Rossini sound a little bit too luscious with not enough bite. For such a technically precise, direct, and light style as bel-canto, her velvety and buttery voice just sounded awkward.

Some people complain that Ms. Fleming's voice often remains at a distanced, static emotion; that it lacks a certain intensity of direction on a literal communication level. Take as a contrast Maria Callas, whos emotional sharpness still seems to rip at ones heart today, even through a pair of headphones. Most of the times I've seen Ms. Fleming, I end up pulling at strings, trying to fall in love. But obviously, falling in love cannot be forced. Capriccio and late Strauss in general are such a beautiful fit for her because directional clarity is not as urgent. There is a lot more bathing in ones own sound, which she does oh so well. For me, the sustained pleasure she produces is rather like taking a slow bite from a chocolate moose cake. You don't necessarily feel rejuvenated afterwards, but the instant gratification makes the experience worth it...maybe. My date for the evening seemed completely uninspired. There was a certain drama missing from his usual night at the opera.

Capriccio was Strauss's last opera. It premiered in Munich in 1942, at the height of World War II. The plot centers around the age-old debate about which is more important- words or music, (Prima la musica, Poi le Parole). This idea for an opera had originated between Strauss and his librettist at the time, Stefan Zweig. After the death of Strauss's longtime collaborator, Hugo con Hofmannsthal, in 1929, Strauss managed to find an equally vibrant partnership with Zweig. Their original plan was to present Capriccio first, posing the eternal question, and then to follow it with their "answer"- the mythological subject of Daphne. Because Zweig was Jewish, their close association was eventually forced to take on an intermediary, the aryan theatre historian Joseph Gregor. Where Zweig was a creative artist, Gregor was an academic, and Strauss became consistently frustrated with his new partner. Fortunately, Strauss had already been discussing the opera with a friend, the conductor Clemens Krauss. Krauss took over the half completed project, but evidently a fair share of the final libretto is by Strauss himself.

The original idea of pairing Capriccio with Daphne was now thought to comprise too long of an evening, so Strauss came up with a better idea. Halfway through Capriccio the audience learns that what they have been listening to all along is in fact the "answer" to this eternal debate between words and music: Capriccio itself, is the balanced work of the composer, Flamand, and the poet, Olivier. Strauss then uses these two paradoxical characters as the main love bait for the Countess. In the final eloquent scene, these are the two sides that she is debating, portrayed literally as which person she should fall in love with, and figuratively with obviously much broader implications. It is a conundrum that Strauss so beautifully presents as his final oeuvre.

(The picture above is from the 2008 Capriccio. I like the dress better than her new one.)

Go see Nixon in China!

Don't really like opera? It can be a little difficult to relate to, i know. Is it because you can't understand what's going on and it all just seems laborious? Fair enough... but there is a cure! The Met is putting on a production of John Adams's Nixon in China, directed by the brilliant director, Peter Sellars.

It's about modern American history! How more monumental of a contemporary subject can we get than Nixon opening up US/China relations? (Well okay, an opera about the Cuban missile crisis would be awesome, but that probably won't happen for a while). Pretty fabulous if you ask me. And to top it off, the opera's in English :)

There should be more buzz surrounding the event, given that both countries are now the two largest economies in the world... and that Obama just held a state dinner for Hu Jintao... and that Michelle's dress was gorgeous!

Alex Ross explains in his book, The Rest is Noise, why Americans should be so excited about this opera :

"Nixon in China, Adams's first opera, brings about an even more dramatic transformation of European form. Nothing seems more inherently unlikely than the idea of a great American opera - possibly the greatest since Porgy and Bess - based on the events surrounding President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. When the director Peter Sellars first proposed the subject, Adams assumed he was joking. At the premiere, which took place at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, many critics thought the same. Yet Sellars knew what he was doing. By yanking opera into an a universally familiar contemporary setting, he was almost forcing his composer to clean out all the cobwebs of the European past. Adams also had the advantage of an extraordinary libretto by the poet Alice Goodman. Many lines come straight from the documentary record - the speeches and poetry of Chairman Mao, the fune-spun oratory of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, the convoluted utterances and memoirs of Nixon - but they coalesce into an epic poem of recent history, a dream narrative in half-rhyming couplets."

So okay, mom. I know you are considering coming up to NYC for a weekend. And don't get me wrong, I do love our dinner/broadway/Silvio Rodriguez outings. But if there's a glimmer of hope in you enjoying an opera, this is it. Come on.... just do it. Don't worry, I won't make you stand.

A Goldberg Variation for the Day

I have found the musical representation for this wet, nasty, freezing rain/snow going on outside. It is not dreary or miserable (as I would certainly be if I were stuck outside in this mess), but instead very cozy, like I am now in bed, just looking out through the window. It is Variation 28 from Bach's Goldberg Variations.

In 3/4 and two voices, it is reminiscent of a dream sequence. The eighth note progression is a chaconne, and over that are these twinkling thirty-second-notes. The twinklings are not particularly melodic, as each flourish is between just two notes, but latched onto the eighth-note chaconne, the whole thing has a forward propelled, scurrying feel. We are occasionally brought out of this dream world by the grounded sixteenth-notes, played by both hands and in inversion from one another (ex. bar 9).

Listening to this from inside looking out with a cup of hot tea in my hands is oh, so cozy. You should try it...really.

I also can't get this image out of my head of a man in a business suit running through central park on a day like today because he's late for a meeting. He's holding a briefcase over his head, trying to shield himself. He pauses momentarily under an awning to rest and get his bearings (bar 9), but a biker zooms by and splashes him. At the end, he finally arrives at work, soaking wet but out of the madness.

Yup, I'm sure that's what Bach had in mind...

Happy listening :)

(Variation 28 starts at 8:15 in the clip below.)

The Met's? Really?

This week the Met premiered a "new production" of La Traviata, directed by Willy Decker. The exact same production was actually premiered over five years ago at the Salzburg Festival, staring the romantic duo Anna Netrebko and Ronaldo Villazon. It was a smash hit that year, in 2005, and was considered to have given Traviata a strap-on. Netrebko and Villazon sounded amazing and looked sexy.

Last week the production was imported, with different singers, as the Met's dramatic replacement for the stale Zeffirelli Traviata, that dominated the house for over a decade. Peter Gelb (the Met artistic director) obviously intended to make a stark contrast between then and now, but the fact remains that this is not new art and certainly does not belong to the Met, (contrary to Anthony Thommasini saying in the New York Times that "this is an involving and theatrically daring production that belongs to the Met"). They paid to import a production that had already proven to be an artistic success elsewhere. For an institution that is considered by many as the leading opera house in the world, imported art is lame. Come on. This production is radical, sensual, and minimal, but get your own.

I have included a picture of Anna Netrebko in the NEW production of La Traviata at the 2005 Salzburg Festival.

Translation or Poetry?

I'm not exactly a poet, but I do appreciate the beauty of words strung together in an artful and rhythmic manner. Operas are often times translated literally. That's just the easiest way for an audience to understand what is going on, on the most basic level. These are the translations most often used for supertitles, CD jackets, and printed librettos handed out to an audience. But relying on these steril translations completely ignores all the time that the librettist, who is really a poet, spent on composing the text. We often only associate composers with opera, relegating the librettists to the sidelines. But the librettist was(is) the most important artistic partner a composer has throughout an opera's development. Consider the partnerships of Mozart/Da Ponte, Strauss/von Hofmannsthal, Verdi/Piave then Boito. Each of these produced some of the greatest operas in the repertoire today. It is obviously the music which brings these text alive, hence musical drama, but we ought not forget the poets. They take great care in structuring a text to have a certain number of syllables per line, depending on the music's meter, while at the same time rhyming and giving the phrases emotional depth. We, as an audience, cheat ourselves out of experiencing this magical marriage of words and music by remaining complacent, satisfied with unartistic translations.

J.D. McClatchy's new book Seven Mozart Librettos is a verse translation of Mozart's mature operas. It is the most reassuring hope English translations have of matching the poetry of the original. What McClatchy does not do is maintain the musical meter, making this book unusable for performance. But by twisting the literal meaning occasionally (never deviating too far away), he makes the lines rhyme and come alive with imagery. Opera translation is finally actually a libretto again.

Lets take as an example the aria Dove Sono from Le Nozze di Figaro. The original Italian by Lorenzo da Ponte is rhymed with a specific number of syllables per line. You can almost feel the rhythm when speaking them...

Dove sono i bei momenti

di dolcezza e di piacer,

dove andaro i giuramenti

di quel labbro menzogner?

Perché mai se in pianti e in pene

per me tutto si cangiò,

la memoria di quel bene

dal mio sen non trapassò?

Ah, se almen la mia costanza

nel languire amando ognor,

mi portasse una speranza

di congiar l'ingrato cor!

The literal English translation, naturally, totally ignores the rhyme and meter. It goes something like this...

Where are those happy moments

Of sweetness and pleasure?

Where have they gone,

Those vows of a deceiving tongue?

Then why, if everything for me

Is changed to tears and grief,

Has the memory of that happiness

Not faded from my breast?

Ah! if only my constancy

In yearning lovingly for him always

Could bring the hope

Of changing his ungrateful heart!

Here is McClatchy's version...

Where are they now, the vanished days,

The moments of pleasure's afterglow?

Where are the vows, the murmured praise

Spoken by that liar so long ago?

Why, if sweetness turns to regret,

If every hope becomes a grief,

Why is it still I cannot forget

The love that vies with disbelief?

If only my waiting, my long endurance,

The patience that true love imparts,

Could bring the slightest reassurance

Of changing his ungrateful heart!

There is rhyme, a meter, and imagery, just like the original Italian. It is poetry! Too bad the meter is not the music's. The thing is, McClatchy HAS proved he can translate to a performable version. The current abridged English version of the The Magic Flute at the Met is his own. And it is a success! Was doing the same for all Mozart's mature operas too daunting?

Figaro Overture

Yes, I'm alive! Sorry for not posting in months. I've been taking classes in music theory/history and have started re-studying harmony and counterpoint. Left with little free time, going to the opulent Met Opera has taken to the back burner. Don't get me wrong. My obsession over the artistic merit of productions was and will continue to be a 'hoot', but it just does not get at what is so fabulous about these composers we put up on a pedestal- that is their music. Everything important about our beloved Beethoven, Puccini, Verdi, etc. can be discovered by studying the score. Passive listening annoys me- turning intricate music that was never meant to be just 'pretty' into mere background noise. If we don't make an attempt to actually understand what is going on (my problem with not translating operas into English for an English speaking audience), and if we never open a score of the cherished symphonies, masses, concertos, sonatas, whatever, classical music will indeed suffer the fate that its arcane name suggests. This music was meant to shock, to deviate from what came before. So lets stop thinking about it as superfluous fluff.

I want to point something out from the overture of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro that you can only undertand from his manuscript. It used to be common practice during the classical period to include a minuet or another dance form in the development (middle) section of a piece. It acted as a break from the high energy main theme, often giving more power to its recapitulation. In the Figaro overture, Mozart first planned on writing a typical dance in a swinging 6/8 meter during the development. For whatever reason he later changed his mind in favor of the driving, mischievous, dare I say heroic main theme. As we can see from the facsimile reproduction of Mozart's manuscript, he actually crossed out the beginning of the 6/8 section, wrote Da Capo (back to the beginning), and started writing the recapitulation. (The crossed out section in the first image above would have acted as the transition to the 6/8 section, which is seen in the last measure. In the second image we can see DaCapo and the beginning of the main eighth-note theme in the violins). Whatever his motives were, the result is a much more energetic overture than would have been the case had he stuck with the dance break. See?! Now tell me knowing that now won't make your experience cooler when you hear it performed live. Mmmmmmhm.

A Courtyard Opera

Most people with an education have probably heard a tune by the nineteenth-century Italian opera composer, Gioacchino Rossini. Probably "Largo al Factotum" from Il Barbiere di Siviglia, where Figaro comically repeats at tongue-twister speed "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro..." Or maybe the overture from Guillaume Tell, which I think used to play in a jewelry commercial. But few people have heard any of his serious operas written for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, which set the standard of Italian operatic style for the nineteenth-century. Even fewer have heard his early farces, which Rossini wrote between the ages of 18 and 20 for the Venetian Teatro San Moisè, a smaller and far less demanding opera house than the Teatro La Fenice or Milan's La Scala. These works were shorter, one-act operas, that rarely circulated nineteenth-century Italy after their premiere. They were the perfect unassuming medium for young composers. Nothing seems to have changed today in contemporary society, when young, unknown and energetic artists exhibit their work in Brooklyn warehouses, some of whom later end up showing their work at MOMA.

So these were Rossini's first operas. They show plenty of life and energy, yet never get too serious. The subject here is a performance in Geneve last night of perhaps his best known farce, La Scala di Seta, written in 1812 at the age of 20.

Since 1966, the Opéra de Chambre de Genève has produced rare operas, works that are often times overshadowed by a composer's more mature works, or operas by composers like Cimarosa or Piccinni who most people haven't even heard of. It's a great platform for a low budget company. By not performing repertoire standards, critics are less likely to ridicule you for being unorthodox. Even cooler, you get a chance to perform rare music. However, performing operas with little modern performance history while working within the confines of a low budget are no excuse for a stale production devoid of artistic originality.

The production last night of La Scala di Seta was held in the outdoor courtyard of a classical stone building, Cour De L'Hôtel De Ville, in the old town of Geneva. It's a perfect summer idea, (even though there was absolutely no breeze). The acoustics were also surprisingly resonant, vivaciously vibrating. The Orchestre de Chambre de Genève played cleanly and sprightly for the most part, especially during the overture. Their attentive conductor, Franco Trinca held the cast and orchestra together unnoticeably, and always seemed to be in comfortable control. Everything started off well with the overture. The interplay between solo oboe and orchestra were a reminder of how exciting lock-step tonality can be. This is the type of music that brings a listener back into their center after a hectic day. It actually subconsciously makes you breath deeper.

Unfortunately, the overture was the end of my honeymoon. There is nothing more boring in an opera production than a set comprised of four doors/walls aligned along the circumference of the stage, a table and chairs as the principle props, and nineteenth-century-style costumes, with plenty of neck ruffles. Just because the work is a farce does not mean it should become a joke, a parody of itself. In La Scala di Seta there is a character (Dorvil) who repeatedly climbs up to enter through his lover's stained glass window (Giulia). One does not need a lot of money to come up with a creative way of representing that. Cheeky entrances through a lime green door, from an offstage completely visible to the audience, are not sufficient. A creative director would have found a way of making this more interesting, regardless of the amount of money made available to him.

What bothered me most was the lack of supertitles. When an audience does not understand the meaning of what is being sung, they are missing out on more than half of the composer's intention. Opera is music's representation, and augmentation, of language. That which cannot be expressed simply by words, as music lovers proclaim. Geneva is in French speaking Switzerland. And those who don't speak French (like myself) probably understand English. Two lines of supertitles would probably help for an Italian opera. And come on, who doesn't own a laptop? Does no one involved in this production have access to a projector? Call me naive, but it can't be that hard. There was a row of clean white stone wall directly above the stage that would have been perfect for supertitles, maybe even in two languages. When a production fails to provide the audience with supertitles or at the least a translation of the libretto, they are robing the audience of the full experience.

The singing was entertaining and at times riveting. Most impressive was William Lombardi, playing Dorvil. His tenor voice was by no means large enough to overcome the audience, but its intensity more than compensated. It is always more enjoyable hearing a singer push himself to the point of cracking, using all the expressivity he has inside, rather than hearing someone just play it safe, never surpassing pretty. Other singers had moments like this, but most overacted. And again, cheeky acting is no substitute for the natural comedy that would emerge if the audience understood what the hell was going on. Opera is not a circus, you don't need to overcompensate by shoving it down our throats. If all the pieces were in place last night, the woman sitting in front of me would have laughed a lot more instead of fanning herself or fixing her hair. Pity.