One of the things I shared with Scalia (other the generic ones of being conservative and Roman Catholic) was a love of opera, a love he also shared with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Fausta put up a few posts in memory of Scalia (really nice production of Don Giovanni here — fits with Valentine’s Day, too), so I figured I will, too.
Fausta posted Scalia’s favorite opera, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, but according to this, he was also enamored of Madame Butterfly and La Traviata.
So first, a toast:
And now, Madama Butterfly:
And the full Traviata:
And heck, I can’t do an opera post without posting some Mozart, so here’s Cosi fan Tutte, that “perfect” opera for Valentine’s Day:
A flight of angels sing thee to thy rest, Scalia.
]]>Well, I found this great resource of live (and recorded) classical music performances, medici.tv, and got to watch via live streaming video the Salzburg Festival’s production of Don Giovanni. Now you can watch it, for free, on-demand.
It’s got one of my favorite barihunks in the production: Luca Pisaroni plays the Don’s servant Leporello.
Warnings: Don Giovanni is not a “family-friendly” opera to begin with, given that it starts out with a rape and a murder. And then the Don seducing a woman right as she’s going to get married. Then there is the catalog aria (from a different production)….but given that a completely naked woman, save a mask, shows up during the overture, you’ve been warned. (Note: most productions don’t have naked ladies. This one doesn’t have a huge number of them, either, but the point is: it’s a little racy.)
I had seen him in a different production of Don Giovanni with Luca Pisaroni as Leporello, and I think he does even better in this one (also, they figured out how to make him a little less hot… the problem with the Met production of Don Giovanni with Luca was that even grunged up a bit, he was still more hot and masculine than the lead. You can’t have Leporello hotter than the Don. That just won’t do.)
Anyway, here is Luca doing the Catalog Aria in a modern way: (checking the phone, as opposed to unscrolling a list on parchment)
…but in Spain, there are a thousand and three….
hmmmm.
]]>My favorite, affordable opera company at the time was NYC Opera (aww, RIP, NYC Opera). One of the shows I saw there was The Love for Three Oranges, a Prokofiev opera, with design (costumes, set, etc.) by Maurice Sendak. I just finished reading a retrospective of Sendak’s work ( a great coffee-table book chock-full of Sendak’s art) and I discovered how involved Sendak was in opera.
He was a Mozart-lover like me.
And was really into opera.
How could he not be?
Unfortunately, I can’t find really good clips of Sendak productions. In one case, that of the Magic Flute, his set and props were destroyed in a storm. However, it looks like some opera companies have reproduced the sets, etc., or adapted what they could.
Here is an image of the three-wise-boys from the Magic Flute visiting Mozart while he composes:
Sendak also did design for the Nutcracker ballet:
But not only did Sendak do design for well-loved operas and ballets, he also had a couple of operas written based on his own work.
Yes, there’s a Where The Wild Things Are opera.
(No, I don’t know if it’s any good in terms of music). Also, another Sendak-originated opera: Higgledy Piggledy Pop
But something I do know is enjoyable: a couple of Ravel operas Sendak designed for – I also saw these in NYC.
All of these are “fantasies”. But sometimes with a bit of bite. Evidently, when Sendak designed for a production of Hansel and Gretel, some older adults complained about how dark it was.
People, the witch has actually killed and eaten scores of children. It’s right there in the opera. How is that not already dark?
The first act has Hansel & Gretel going on about how hungry they are and how poorly their family is doing.
THERE’S A REASON IT’S THE GRIMM FAIRY TALES.
(Yes, I know that it was the name of the Grimm brothers, but it’s remembered very well because those tales are fairly grim, if you actually read their versions. Nasty. And entertaining! Much better than Disney.)
So, though I can’t find great video clips for Sendak’s stuff (nor really good pictures), here are a couple video clips for taste:
And an interview with Sendak in how he got involved in opera professionally:
I saw this article recently about bringing opera to kids in England, and there’s a lot in there that I agree with.
The danger is that the whole business of opera in schools gets swaddled up in sanctimonious evangelizing and patronising waffle that leaves the impression that opera is musical cod liver oil – something which does you good even though it doesn’t taste nice at the time, something people ought to like and that if you don’t, you are in some sense falling short. This is one point at which that tiresome shibboleth about opera being “elitist” kicks in.
Let’s be clear about this. Opera is not medicine: it isn’t good for you, or bad for you. It’s a form of entertainment, to which nobody is under any obligation to sign up, and if you don’t like it, fine. I played football at school and once went to a Premier League match: I didn’t enjoy it at all. End of story.
But of course, there is something to be said for giving children the opportunity to decide for themselves whether opera is something that intrigues them. Radio, television and the dominant musical culture isn’t going to give them that any more – certainly not in the way that it did 30 years ago, when BBC Two broadcast a Ring cycle from Bayreuth over 10 Sundays in prime time – and that is where a scheme like English National Opera’s Opera Squad comes in.
Opera Squad consists of a group of young singers and a section of ENO’s orchestra spending a day at a “challenged” comprehensive school in the Greater London area. Led by a compère or animateur, they take over the hall or gym to present a 40-minute introduction to opera – focused on one work – in a series of sessions, each tailored to the general intellectual level of each student Year. The atmosphere is informal, with plenty of time for questions and a degree of participation. Later the students will visit the Coliseum, touring the theatre and watching an entire dress rehearsal.
Now the author of the piece has some issue with how opera is presented to children, but I will say that one reason the ENO is well-suited for this endeavor is that they do opera only in English
The company has aimed to present the standard operatic repertoire, sung in English, and has staged all the major operas of Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, and a wide range of Verdi’s operas. Under Mackerras and his successors the Czech repertoire has featured strongly, and a broad range of French and Russian operas has been presented.81 The company has for decades laid stress on opera as drama, and has avoided operas where vocal display takes precedence over musical and dramatic content.81 In addition to the operatic staples, ENO has a history of presenting new works, and latterly of commissioning them.
Once upon a time, I would have taken issue with this (like, say, a half a year ago), but when I recently learned there was a period in the Met Opera’s history when they did nothing but German opera, and that includes German versions of Italian operas…. yeah, I am not about to get bitchy about English, which is nowhere as ugly as German (okay, at worst, they’re equally ugly for operatic singing.)
But the main point is that it’s difficult to get into Italian opera if you’re having to read English subtitles along. It distracts from the beauty of the music. So what generally happens is one becomes really familiar with particular pieces, and so I do not need the subtitles for many of the numbers in my favorite opera, The Marriage of Figaro (also, I know enough Latin & French that I pretty much get the gist even if I don’t have the whole memorized).
Similarly, I have seen Shakespeare edited for performance to modernize the English a bit. One can take it as it is and present to an audience, but it takes really good actors for that. It’s no big deal to update a bit of the language…. but people get pissy about it. Well, I’m not reading Homer in Attic Greek, though I know that I’m going to miss a lot of the subtleties of his language use when I read in translation. But I don’t know Greek (yet).
So here’s the author’s recommendation:
Virtuosity and energy should be keywords – the tralalalala of “Largo al factotum”, for instance, would make an instant impact if sung with panache, as would the comic finale to Act I of The Barber of Seville. And if you want high notes, why not the dazzling circus feat of the Queen of the Night’s top Fs in her second aria? They certainly fascinated me when I was a lad. You won’t get much change out of playing 13-year-olds melodies of elegant reflective melancholy: what they want is thunder and lightning, the drama of grand crescendos and spooky sound painting.
Another suggestion: might it be an interesting (and relatively cheap) experiment to send school groups to an HD cinema relay of a spectacular Met production – The Magic Flute, say – without setting up any preconceptions or suggesting that they are about to encounter something that in any sense requires explaining or introducing? The Magic Flute’s first audiences, after all, didn’t worry about the formalities and niceties of opera: for them, it was just a smash-hit fun musical in a West End theatre, and today it’s still not a million aesthetic miles from The Book of Mormon.
Heck, Taymor’s Magic Flute is available on DVD — no need for the special live HD broadcasts from the Met (though one can do that for their other performances, which aren’t on DVD – in general, it’s difficult to get recordings from the Met, but more on that another time).
My kids love this opera, and there’s a whole story behind that for another time (next Sunday). So I asked them which video clips from Youtube I should include.
Bon said this was her favorite – I’m going to give it without context:
Even without knowing anything about the opera, it’s a funny number.
And then there’s Mo’s pick from the end of the opera:
So now I’m going to talk a little bit why this is the perfect intro opera, whether for kids or adults. First, it’s Mozart. Can’t go wrong with Mozart.
Second, great staging and costuming. Very engaging.
Third, the casting — no, not all choices are that great, but I will concentrate on one: Nathan Gunn as Papageno. One of the best Papagenos I’ve seen — not because of singing quality (heck, the first Papageno had weaknesses, which is why the character gets so much musical support from the orchestra, but more on that another time). Because he’s charismatic. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen is good singers cast as Papageno… but they don’t have any charisma. That’s as bad as a Puck (from Midsummer’s Night Dream) or Figaro (from Barber of Seville or Marriage of Figaro) lacking charisma.
The whole point of the character is to be the everyman character that everybody likes, no matter how stupid he is (think Homer Simpson). If the singer is flat, in a characterization way, it doesn’t matter how well he nails the notes.
Finally, D’s favorite clip, as he has often attempted to sing this:
Just because this is a kid-friendly opera doesn’t mean there’s no virtuosity.
And that’s the great bit about this opera — you’ve got a range of voice types, some of the characters are fine to cast on their vocal quality and others on their charisma. There’s lots to appeal to kids, and there’s no lack of quality on the musical side.
I will speak more on other kid-friendly operas in the future, but this is a great place to start.
For convenience, while you wait for your DVD to arrive, here’s is a full video playlist on Youtube. Enjoy!
]]>Most of Mozart’s best ensembles are comic, so I’m saving those for Sundays and the Easter feast season, but this quartet is appropriate and haunting.
Here is a quick set up: Idomeneo, King of Crete, is one of those Greeks who went off to the Trojan war and had a lot of trouble getting home (you may have heard of Odysseus’s problems). He got shipwrecked and to survive, he promised Poseidon (here Neptune or Nettun in Italiano) that he would sacrifice the first person he saw when he got ashore. Which was his son Idamonte. Whups.
Meanwhile, Idamante is caught in a love triangle with Electra (you may have heard of her family troubles from Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripedes) and Ilia, a Trojan princess. Idamante is not interested in the very crazy and vengeful Electra, and Ilia is conflicted for falling in love with the Greek Idamante given that, ya know, the Greeks destroyed her city, killed her family, and enslaved her. But she gets over it.
I am not giving more details, because then this quick set up is no longer quick.
The quartet I am going to embed, in two versions, is near the end of the opera. Ilia and Idamante have finally declared their love for each other, they get caught by the king, Idamante is supposed to be exiled from Crete (the king thinks that the way he can prevent Neptune from killing his son is by putting him on a boat and going to some other polis. Great thinking, dad.)
So Idamante and Ilia despair of being parted, Idamante is grieving over his father seemingly rejecting him, Electra is pissed that Ilia asked her to comfort her, the successful girl in the love triangle, and the king is rending his garments that Neptune is forcing him to do this.
Here’s the quartet:
Now, up to this point, I’ve given you only one version of a piece. The reason I ran the one above is it had English subtitles, gives a bit of the setup, and it has a traditional staging and costuming. To give you a taste. There’s one aspect of it I don’t like — Idamante being played by a tenor.
Now, Mozart did write the piece for a man. Just one missing his testicles.
In the wikipedia article on the castrato the part was written for, we find out this about this quartet
Mozart wrote the quartet Andrò ramingo e solo to start with Idamante, but the style was completely new and nothing like it had ever been seen in opera seria. None of the singers were up to the task and they all reacted against it. Mozart wrote to his father in the depths of despair, blaming the worst reaction on Dal Prato. He said Dal Prato’s voice would not be so bad if it came out from somewhere other than his mouth. He was completely unable to intone the quartet, Mozart said, had no method, and “sang like a young boy auditioning for a part in the chapel choir”. Mozart must have been fond of this quartet because he arranged for a private recital two and a half years later, with himself singing the role of Idamante (in a transcription for tenor). He burst into tears and had to run out of the room, and not even his wife Constanze could talk him into coming back.
Poor Mozart. So he did rewrite it for tenor, but we’ve got much better singers now than Mozart had to work with (think of opera singers as the pop stars of the day, and the castrati as the pop starlets, and you’re not far off.)
I have seen the quarter both with tenors and with women singing Idamante’s role (I have not seen/heard a countertenor yet, so no opinion). But of the youtube varieties of the quartet I can find with a soprano voice for Idamante, this is my favorite (though I like neither the staging nor the costuming… and forget about the acting. This is not about the acting)
Heartbreaking. Gorgeous. Two sopranos for Idamante and Ilia means the voices can blend so much better than a soprano and tenor.
(Also, I don’t much like tenors. Baritone or gtfo, imo.)
Anyway, given all the opera fanatics out there, it’s not surprising there are awesome opera videos on youtube.
I do weep for Mozart, who only rarely got singers equal to his compositions. But do not weep for us, because we can get the best singers, on demand, at any time.
I pray for the souls in Purgatory, but especially for the repose of the soul of Mozart. I hope he gets to hear his music perfectly performed, always. That’s my idea of heaven.
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