Sun(day), Bloody Sun(day)
Lully’s Phaëton is an interesting animal. But first, a setting:
I’ve been working with Brooklyn Academy of Music for the past six weeks. It’s a 45-minute commute from my alcove in Queens, but it’s a straight shot on the N line thru Manhattan and into the Borough of Kings. It’s great for me because it’s a good time to commune with myself; I read, I crank up myPod, and I always have a seat because I get on so early in the line. I’ve been averaging a (healthily-sized) book a week. And this past week, I’ve decided to turn back to the Minkowski Phaëton.
At one point, the train goes above ground as it crosses the East River after Canal Street and before Atlantic/Pacific. You see the Brooklyn Bridge, the buildings of the Financial District, and the construction off in the distance. With last week so chilly yet sunny, there was something glorious about alighting at that point and seeing the sun coming up for the day. It works. It’s a good thing. It’s the pumpkin oatmeal of multiple-sensory experiences on the MTA. This opera (burned courtesy of the New York Public Library’s performing arts branch) may be a regular on the pod for a while.
That being said, I’m really coming ’round to Jean-Baptiste. And it’s an appropriate moment to start getting him, since Phaëton may be his most personal opera. It may also strike a personal chord with me. While I was by no means the offspring of an impoverished family of Florentines (though I do have some ancestral routes in Firenze) with a pronounced lack of education (I’ve also never done a tap routine with royalty–French or otherwise, nor have I given myself a fatal case of gangrene), I feel the same ambition and drive that steered Lully’s career from the minute someone detected his musical talents. And sometimes I feel myself flying too close to the sun. I’m at a point where I’m easily working 80 hour weeks–last week I got up at 4:30am, worked til 7:00, got ready to be at BAM by 9:30, left at 5:00, went to the library to work on the NEA Opera Honors til 7:00, and then got home and worked some more until 10:00. This week, I read an old article in New York Magazine on burnout and felt more exhausted than ever. Fortunately, I know myself well enough to keep from crashing and burning.
Lully, not so much. He died in one of the more hardcore ways–stabbing himself in the foot with his boom rhythm stick during a concert (ironically, to honor Louis XIV’s recovery from illness), developing gangrene, refusing (presumably out of pride) to have it amputated, and dying less than two months later. Think of the blow an amputation would have done to his ambition as a musician and dancer. Talk about a guy who goes down with the ship. Or chariot in the case of this opera’s title character, who–in an effort to prove himself–flies a chariot too close to the sun.
Of course, Phaëton is also brought down by his affairs of the heart as much as his affairs of the ego, a situation with which Lully himself was all-too familiar.
(PS: Ovid count? 9. This could turn into a drinking game.)
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Tags: boom stick, brooklyn, brooklyn academy of music, le roi danse, louis xiv, lully, mta, new york public library, opster project, phaeton, queens
Perfidious Poppea
After Danielle de Niese’s recent (Le) Poisson Rouge concert, I decided to let one Angeleno meet another and brought my boyfriend, Lawson, around to the autograph table. Ok, the egotist in me also wanted her autograph on the full-page interview I did of her for TONY, but that’s neither her nor there…nor is it in a frame on the wall behind my desk….
At the table, they’d set up her new Mozart CD among some other fanfare, including the new DVD of the Glyndebourne L’incoronazione di Poppea, something I wish had been out when I’d gotten to Poppea on the Opera Project and rocked out with the 90s-fabulous Rene Jacobs DVD.
“Oh, they finally put it out on DVD,” I casually mentioned to Lawson, turning the case over to inspect the back.
“No dear,” some altacaker behind me said, snatching the DVD from my hand. “That’s not the same as what you just saw tonight.”
“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” I said. If she only knew how intimately aware I was of that.
“No, you just don’t understand…none of you understand…you just don’t get it…Harry, tell them how they don’t get it.”
Before Harry could respond, we began to slowly inch away.
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Tags: danielle de niese, l'incoronazione di poppea, le poisson rouge, monteverdi, mozart
I love the intersection of opera and other forms of art. Take, for instance, Lully’s Persée. Having been to both Barcelona and Florence, I remember Dali’s and Cellini’s sculptures of Perseus with the decapitated head of everyone’s favorite gorgon, Medusa (a “head” joke is too easy). I also had the grand plaisir of seeing a Lully opera (finally!) thanks to Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Lully has begun to click, and re-listening to him in October for brush-up is kind of the perfect seasonal complement to riding the N train from Queens to Brooklyn in 40 degree, golden sunny, turning-leaves weather. It’s a weather I missed for two years in LA.
It’s funny, though, to see the cross-cultural interpretations of one Ancient Roman poet. The first time I saw Cellini’s 
Perseus was when I saw Benvenuto Cellini at the Met in the winter of 2003; it was the Playbill cover (or it was in a painted reproduction). I all but forgot about it until I moved to Italy in 2005 and went to Florence in the wee weeks of 2006. It reminded me of the constrained ruthlessness of the Berlioz opera (which, at this rate, I’ll hit by the time I’m 30), something violent in the Baroque curvatures.
And then there’s Dali. His sculpture reminds me of his moustache, loose, flowing, and yet stylized. On my bohemian budget in Barcelona, I still thought about splurging on a lobster so I could answer it like a telephone and say “Hello?…Hello?…It’s for you.” But the big M’s head in this sculpture looks close enough to a cellular crustacean. And I’m already a bad enough Jew that one absence of shellfish is probably not the worst thing in the world.
But despite the veritable bloodbath that Cellini conjures up in his beheading of Medusa and the controlled chaos of Dali’s meditation on the same theme, Lully’s opera is downright soothing. I still have the Netflix Red Envelope from when I had the DVD sent over in July, and before sending it back the other week, I popped it in one morning. It was 5:00 am, I couldn’t sleep, and I figured I may as well get some work done on the supertitles I’m translating for Florida Grand Opera. It was still pitch-dark out in Queens, and I think that’s what Lully needs. There’s too much glitter onstage to compete with natural sunlight. And even though that makes it hard to see sculptures, the dark does well to illuminate JB.
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Tags: benvenuto cellini, lully, metamorphoses, opster project, ovid, persee, perseus, salvador dali
Time Out
I have a stack of papers on my (brand-ish new CB2) desk full of notes from the recordings I’ve listened to for the Opster Project. They’re there. I’m at the close of the 1600s, and I promised myself I wouldn’t go into the 18th Century until I catalogued the 17th Century. It’ll happen.
Guerilla promotions in Whole Foods, Union Square
Meanwhile, the past month featured two articles by me for Time Out New York, the first (“Choose Your Diva“) sparked a brief (yet juicy) conversation on Parterre.com. As someone who read the original Parterre in high school–much to my mother’s chagrin–this was probably the best early birthday present I could have asked for. I thought I’d hit gold when someone called it “insipid.” Then someone else wrote “Who does Olivia Giovetti think she’s talking to? Children?” and I wanted to have the whole post framed. Of course, we also got a lot of great reactions to the piece and I probably had more fun writing this than any other article.
A few weeks later, I interviewed soprano Danielle de Niese for her Mozart Album release party/concert at (Le) Poisson Rouge. We also touched on her run as Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met. I was fortunate enough to catch both opera and concert–and doubly fortunate to catch Figaro before Tosca, thereby starting this season off on a positive note. de Niese performs with the same energy that I hope to harness when it comes to cultivating new audiences for a purportedly dying art form. Her concert at LPR (a venue I’ve written about before) was an important step out of the opera house and onto the home turf of opsters and opster-potentials.
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Tags: danielle de niese, le nozze di figaro, le poisson rouge, met, metropolitan opera, parterre, time out new york, tosca
Cultural Policy Mad Libs
Remove “jazz” from today’s edition of Soundcheck on WNYC and replace it with “classical” or “opera” and you’re pretty much in the same ballpark.
Yet while the Terry Teachout-led debate is pretty tame (“I just wish the conversation was more about solutions. Despite methodological problems w/NEA survey, we all know jazz is in deep trouble,” tweeted composer/bandleader Darcy James Argue), the dialogue it sparked on both WNYC’s comments feature and Twitter was pretty fascinating. It seems that critics are still wont to herald the death of jazz/classical/opera [Name of Music Genre], but who’s offering the solutions to these problems? Moreover, are the data we’re collecting speaking to the actual nature of the problems? We seem to be relying far too much on the quantitative over qualitative here, yet read a comment like Faith from Rockland County’s and you see that it’s way more than a numbers game:
“As someone who is frequently the youngest member of the audience along with my boyfriend (ages 24 and 22 respectively) at jazz concerts, I think part of the problem is the older jazz community. We are often treated rudely, as if we don’t deserve good seats, don’t get it, and don’t belong.”
I have a whole ‘nother rant on the model that has to change, but it’s still in development on my end and therefore deserves some time to percolate. In the meantime, I’m with Darcy on this one: Where does TT get off saying that you need a large institution in order to yield effective marketing practices?
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Tags: audience development, darcy james argue, gen x, gen y, jazz, terry teachout, twitter, wncy
Apollo 1674
This is how you make the French like opera: You write an opera in honour of Louis XIV after a victory over Burgundy, and kick it off with some nymphs in the Seine river aching and longing for his return from battle. Then you write a sort of Orfeo with a happy ending, courtesy of Euripides (I have a truly awful Euripides/Eumenides joke, which sounds like rubbish coming from anyone but my old theatre history professor). For something dubbed a tragedie-lyrique, there’s certainly enough feel-good material to last you on the ride back to Versailles. That’s Lully’s Alceste in a nutshell.
It’s no surprise that Lully had the monopoly on opera in late-17th century France, particularly since he was responsible for cramming the art form down his (adopted) countrymen’s throats. Particularly, he knew how to finesse it in the same way that some people can get their bosses to do amazing things by making them think that it was their idea all along; and it starts here with the prologues. Though the Italians certainly weren’t above a little relevance to their day and age, it was truly overt in France, prologues referring to the reigning monarch by name, stroking their ego, singing their praises (you can see from whence that turn of phrase came).
Speaking of French and Italian (which is basically what Lully was–a Parisian by way of Florence–the birthplace of opera), Alceste may be the best example of the fusion between French and Italian style–a way of slipping in some Cavalli and late Monteverdi while making it distinctly gallic. The recits particularly fuse the two cultures quite nicely.
There’s also a sophistication of music, and we can see counterpoint come into its own as early as the overture. There are distinct conversations between the instruments and, later, the voices. The theatre in Paris, as much of a social realm as it was, rewarded the close listeners while still amusing the casual ears. And we can thank Lully for the beginnings of the French overture, particularly those dotted rhythms which make even listening to the opera a regal experience. It’s a trend that, as I’m discovering in Huguenots rehearsals, did not die with the French monarchy.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take off my powdered wig.
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Tags: alceste, burgundy, euripides, french opera, louis xiv, lully, orfeo, tragedie lyrique
You Break It, You Bought It
When the curtain closed on the Amato Opera earlier this year, it also closed on a piece of Bowery history: After 61 seasons, the feisty company—squeezed in next to the former CBGB—succumbed to land sharks when impresario and conductor Tony Amato announced he was retiring and selling the 107-seat house. With the company’s final bow in May, though, came news of a promising coda, as several company members announced the formation of the Amore Opera Company.
And you can read the rest of my breaking news over at The Volume…and thanks to Opera Chic for pointing out (way earlier in the year) this fabulous set of award-winning Amato photographs. I kind of want one of these for my wall.
Filed under: organizational change | 1 Comment
Tags: amato opera, bleecker street opera, bleecker street theater, breaking news, cbgb, east 4th cultural district, fourth arts block, the volume, time out new york
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