In addition, to his popular score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream Felix Mendelssohn wrote incidental music to several other plays. Commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the incidental music to Athalia was intended for a private performance of the play by Jean Racine. While the story is a complicated Old Testament plot, Mendelssohn’s music captures the tone of the tragedy with delight, whimsy, and severity.
Interludes in opera articulate moments when the lush voices of singers and vivid spectacle of scenery and action are removed and often the curtain is drawn, and thus they span a functional gap between textless instrumental music and explicit theatrical vehicle. Although composers and analysts suggest rich and multivalent meanings for the music, those implications often escape decoding by audiences. Even the interlude titles — Zwischenspiel, entr'acte, intermezzo — suggest their intermission-like nature. As functional placeholders for scene changes and the like, the interludes are for many a cue to relax attentive listening, read synopses, and whisper with companions. Undaunted by such complexities, Morris takes up the problematic nature of operatic interludes, engaging their ambiguities with eyes wide open in an effort to enrich our understanding of these challenging bits of music.
According to the book jacket, this is the first major scholarly study of Così fan tutte, considered to be one of Mozart's least-understood operas and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte's most interesting text. Così fan tutte has been studied extensively, despite the broad assertion stated in the book. What the author of this study brings to the reader, which others have not, is a detailed examination of the philosophical, pastoral, and comic background of the libretto, characters, and music of the opera. New perspectives on text and tone in the opera, the subtle use of the pastoral mode, and the tension and balance between philosophy and comedy are what the author brings to the study of this work. In addition, the author does an intensely close reading of the primary sources of the opera, in order to support his theories and statements.
The importance of the Teatre del Liceu, can not be overstated. The house ranks with all the leading theatres of the world, being right up there with Paris, London, New York, Vienna, Madrid, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Turin, Naples, Buenos Aires, and other cities of comparable importance. During its long history (158 years at the time of writing) it featured many of the great singers. These include Caruso, Battistini, Tamagno, Ruffo, Caballe, Tebaldi, Mario, Pavarotti, Vignas, Lazaro, O'Sullivan, Stracciari, Pagliughi, Gayarre, Masini, Stagno, Lauri-Volpi, Bellincioni, and countless others. Quite a few of these who sang there before 1897 are represented on the accompanying disc.
Thomas May's stated goal in Decoding Wagner is indeed summarized in his subtitle, An Invitation to His Music Dramas. Mr. May offers an introduction to those who may seek a reliable yet succinct guide in their first Wagnerian experience; a further potential readership is seen among those who have attended performances of Wagner but who wish to expand their appreciation of the music dramas. In his chronological overview of Wagner's oeuvre from the mid-1830s until the close of his career May presents an approachable guide to appreciating the composer's operatic genius. As an illustration of May's commentary on the works, a generous selection of Wagner's music is included on two Discs that accompany the volume in a protective sleeve.
Books described as a "Companion" to this or that and published by university presses should be required to come with a Reader Beware label. As is the case with many books put out by university and many for-profit publishers, the main reason for publishing these is to advance the tenure and promotion prospects of the authors. This is not a bad thing, except that all too often the books aren't very good.
In Making Words Sing, Jonathan Dunsby investigates what he calls the "vocality" of song, that is, the "quality of having voice," as the author states in the introduction to his study. By using this perspective, Dunsby focuses on the intensification of the text that occurs when words are set to music, which stands in opposition to the kind of "songfulness" that Lawrence Kramer discussed in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
"Puccini & the Girl" is a rare and engrossing work of scholarship that can be enjoyed on several levels. For the Puccini-lover, to say nothing of one who has a special interest in La Fanciulla del West, it will provide a wealth of information not previously available, particularly all in one place. Any one interested in the creative process will find it exposed and examined clearly. The scholar will recognize the fascinating chance discovery, the thrill of the chase and the deep rewards of work undertaken lovingly and with rigorous care by the dedicated and passionate co-authors.
Jack Winsor Hansen's 520-page biography of Sibyl Sanderson (1865 - 1903) is packed with romanticism and gossip that will delight and titillate true worshipers of operatic divas and inquisitive opera fans. It also fills a gap in the music-historical writings about opera at the end of the 19th century.
Cage's music is like Einstein's theorem: most people know it exists, know it's important, but beyond these facts know nothing about it (count me in this category when it comes to Einstein).
If any opera lover feels daunted by the many biographies and analytical tomes dedicated to the life and art of Giacomo Puccini, Norton has done that reader a tremendous favor with the publication of The Puccini Companion. Tightly organized, this series of essays details the life, discusses the operas, and provides a wealth of supplementary information about the composer.
When Rudolf Bing came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1950, he scored a tremendous hit with a new staging of the perennial operetta favorite Die Fledermaus. Both at the opera house on 39th Street and on national tour, the slickly Broadwayized Fledermaus packed in big audiences season after season. A decade later, Bing assembled a fine cast and proven production team for the company's first performances of Strauss's Der Zigeunerbaron in fifty years. 18 performances were scheduled. It sank like a stone and has never appeared at the MET again.
Much current popular culture assumes that its audience is knowledgeable of the American musical. References to, and parodies of, specific musicals are frequently a part of episodes of The Simpsons and South Park, and ads for companies as diverse as The Gap and the World Wrestling Entertainment promotion recently have restaged numbers from West Side Story to plug their products or events. Rarely, if ever, are the sources acknowledged; it is simply taken for granted that a general audience will understand the quotations and parodies.
"I particularly want to reach newcomers" writes Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music critic, in his preface. I do not think they will be helped very much by this book. A rookie who picks it up and reads the subtitle may expect something more than two operas by Bellini, two by Donizetti, one Gounod (not Faust), one Massenet (not Manon) and no Lohengrin.
"New musicology" is the cultural study, analysis and criticism of music, which proffers the belief that music has societal, religious, political, personal, and sexual agendas. Consequently, new musicology, much like the discussion of such topics at social gatherings, can be polarizing.
The box-sets contaning the complete recordings of the music of J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart occupy substantial shelf space in the collections of those fortunate enough to possess them.
Here's a serious niche book, a relatively slender volume dealing with a topic at once both arcane and surprisingly central to some of the major controversies in opera production today. I think it has major problems but it has become for me the pebble dropped into the pond that sends ripples to unexpected places, raising interesting questions in the process.
Among the recent publications on opera, The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David Charlton, breaks new ground with its systematic and thorough exploration of grand opera, a specific part of the genre which played an important role in the musical culture of the nineteenth century.
This volume has long been regarded as the definitive work on the subject, and has been quoted in countless later works whenever a reference was required to the performance histories of individual operas. Taken as a whole, especially when one considers the state of library science when the book was first written, it is a magnificent piece of work, and belongs on the bookshelf of every researcher in the operatic field.
During his heyday, Alain Vanzo did not get quite the recognition he deserved. Though the voice was sweeter and more beautiful than the somewhat white sound of Nicolai Gedda, it was the latter who got all the plums; primo because he was a discovery of Legge and a few years earlier on the scene and secundo while opera managers could cast him in other languages than French and Italian.
![Anna Netrebko as Violetta [Photo by Terrence McCarthy courtesy of San Francisco Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/TMact1_0085.gif)
Much ink has been spilled over the failed Marta Domingo production of La Traviata that San Francisco Opera inexplicably imported for its blatantly audience baiting summer season (Traviata, Tosca, Porgy and Bess).
Even the critical intention of finding the positive and ignoring the well publicized negatives of the production endured only through the first act (overheard intermission comments “she seems very organized,” “I’ve seen worse”).
The second act, a Verdi masterpiece, was rendered nonsensical, the storytelling eviscerated — Violetta flippant, Germont deadly cold, Alfredo happen chance. Flora’s party was the occasion of an extended ballet of the sort that makes audiences laugh. Violetta’s death was enacted in the heavens, possibly a reference, maladroit, to the Eurydice myth.
Charles Castronovo as Alfredo [Photo by Terrence McCarthy courtesy of San Francisco Opera]
If there was ever any theatrical integrity to this production it had
evaporated in this strange encounter of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, a superb
singer and a very particular artist, with the wife of Placido Domingo. Clearly
there was no connection between the emotional immediacy projected by Mme.
Netrebko, her dramatic delivery of text that was high Monteverdi in its
directness and intensity, and the stylized, content-less staging perpetrated by
Mme. Domingo.
Mme. Netrebko was in fine form for the June nineteenth performance, the third of her five performances (Elizabeth Futral takes a further three performances, Ailyn Perez one more). Her voice filled the theater with an unusual volume and richness, pitch precision sometimes subjugated to declamation in infinite tonal and rhythmic colorations. It may be noted that she did not take the ‘Sempre libera’ high E-flat, nor did she open the traditional cuts in ‘Ah, fors’é lui’ or her ‘Addio del passato’.
Mme. Netrebko nearly met her match in American tenor Charles Castronovo who brought urgency, voluptuously sculpted text delivery, beauty of tone and a handsome stage presence to this Verdi tenor, though like all of them prototypically unlikeable.
Dwayne Croft (Giorgio Germont) and Anna Netrebko (Violetta Valéry) [Photo by Cory Weaver courtesy of San Francisco Opera]
Dwayne Croft, père Germont, possesses a fine instrument that he uses with
great care, and with commendable musicality. Though naturally commanding his
stage presence and musicianship paled in his confrontations with Violetta and
his son when it needed the immediacy and authority to confuse their youthful
impulses.
Reveling in this charged musicality erupting from the stage conductor Donald Runicles melted into a rapport with the stage that is all too rare in opera, and when it occurs sublime music is sometimes heard. Mo. Runnicles’ mannered tempi and phrasing were elaborated by those mannerisms of his not particularly Italianate soprano and tenor, and tempered by the stylistic cleanliness and musical purity of his baritone. Finally the weeping minor seconds of Violetta’s death rang incisively, with a final agogic [a slight withholding of the beat] choke from the throbbing violins — representative of the Runnicles mannerism catalogue.
Anna Netrebko (Violetta Valéry) and Dale Travis (Baron Douphol) [Photo by Cory Weaver courtesy of San Francisco Opera]
It could have been thrilling indeed, this death, had the stage moved in concert with the Verdi poetic. Mme. Domingo imposed the forms of the roaring twenties, a metaphor that does not seem to match the atmospheres of this mid-nineteenth century morality play, perhaps because art nouveau lines are overwhelmingly sensual, and flashing, reflective surfaces too sexually forceful. Finally La Traviata is a simple story of family life that easily disappears in fanciful images (three ballerinas floated onto the stage to drape Violetta in a bridal gown during the death scene, as one of many examples).
As this review is for Opera Today and not the Harvard Business Review the focus is on the art of opera, not the art of business. Perhaps an evaluation of the business of opera as reflected in this Traviata and last week’s Tosca would validate some of the artistic choices, and one hopes, result in more positive terms. Otherwise there can be no point to San Francisco Opera’s summer season.
Michael Milenski