“Pride” and Prejudice

Moe and Curly: Hikari Mitsushima and Stephanie in Pride

Thanks to end-of-the-month deadlines, I managed to miss the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday; however I wasn’t able to avoid the 3:20 screening of Shusuke Kaneko’s Pride at the IFC center (as part of the NY Asian Film Festival).  What was billed as bitchy backstage comedy with two rival opera singers continually kneeing each other on the way to the top fell flat, but still provided some interesting fodder for my Japanese-fluent boyfriend and I over okonomiyaki post-screening.

Hikari Mitsushima plays Moe, an aspiring opera singer from the wrong side of the tracks (“Senju.  Not the best,” sniffs one diva, which apparently sets Moe off Single White Female-style).  In contrast to her over-the-top-attempted-matricide-bubbly-geisha Eve Harrington is J-Pop princess Stephanie’s Shio, whose own world comes crashing down when endowed-daddy loses his company (and fortune).  Both enter a record label-sponsored vocal competition with the top prize a study in Italy–Moe as a means of clawing herself to the top, Shio in hopes of regaining a part of what she once had.  When Moe makes a dig about Stephanie’s dead mother, the claws come out and Stephanie collapses before performing “Casta Diva.”  The rest of the plot takes about 90 minutes to accomplish what a strong hour could easily encompass, ending in a Chicago-type fashion where (surprise!) the girls sing a duo before (spoiler alert!) going their own separate ways.  Of course, there’s a good amount of drama in between that would make even Puccini or Verdi double over from melodrama overdose.

It’s clear that the author of the manga (on which the movie is based) or Kaneko–it’s unclear which as I’ve yet to find the manga in English–knew their opera.  The plot in and of itself seems an homage to Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor–fighting divas each hoping to be the prima donna, the record label executive character Jirro the impresario.  Shio’s father mentions proposing to her mother (herself a former diva called the Asian Canary) on the Ponte Vecchio–a phrase reverberated in Moe’s performance of “O Mio Babbino Caro” (right before she makes the REAL “o snap!” mother comment).  The geisha (Madama Butterfly) club that both girls work for is called Prima Donna, another cafe is called Figaro.  Shio, herself a Traviata-like character, wears a ridiculously fantastic pink dress–replete with mille feuille skirt–and, upon her collapse, falls like Violetta in the third act, looking like a wilted camillia.

The Italian sensibility, on par with a bel canto plot, seems to work well with the Japanese sense–at times almost kabukian in the drama.  My boyfriend often notes similarity in the cadence between his fluent Japanese and my near-fluent (and Roman accented) Italian; which made these two worlds seem to collide rather nicely on screen.  I had only wished opera was carried further out as a central theme to the movie–though with two pop stars they did need to lapse into that genre for an all-out show-stopping 11 o’clock number that reeked of Chicago “I hate you but we’re performing together” schtick.  Moe’s character–a character that seems to collapse after the first snide remark about her less-prestigious school–is a testament to opera’s hard-to-shake elitist stereotype.  Herself a voice student, she still says “I’ve only seen it on TV.  The opera’s too expensive.”  Later, in the Cardiff or Met Council-like audition, the audience is sparse with one person per every three or four empty seats.  Looking around the IFC theatre, there was a similar spread.

Let’s hope it was because Pride had its own, eponymous, competition going on right outside.

Ach, Ach

The German newswires are reporting that choreography genius Pina Bausch has died at 68.  Days earlier, she learned that she had cancer.  Her mark on the theatricality of opera and classical music was remarkable.  Would that she’d had a greater presence in the US.

What I Read This Weekend

Matthew Gurewitsch’s fantastic profile of mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca: “In Central Europe, where the right opera star can still rock the tabloids, Ms. Garanca has been called ‘the blond Netrebko.’” …and… “‘I’m analytical, not wild,’ she said. ‘When I’m onstage my brain is running like a computer. There are different programs, for voice, for acting, for my body, for the conductor, my colleagues, the staging. And in a pinch I just open a file, or many.’”

An uncertain future for Teatro dell’Opera: After living in Rome for a year, no surprise there.  I saw one opera in the Eternal City and then spread out to the rest of the country.  In a strong capital, you need a strong opera.  As it stands now, Rome is the Washington DC to Milan’s (or even Florence’s) New York.  Maybe now City Opera will catch a break from the (now repetitive) “Endtimes are upon us” articles.

The titular pun I’d been waiting for in Anne Midgette’s nail that hit the head: “He may have gotten the players to play better, but I’d argue that even Kurt Masur had more of a vision of what he wanted the orchestra to be than Maazel, who simply accepts the orchestra as a given, and gets it to play. I think there has to be more to the exercise than this — and I’m not even talking about extra-musical considerations like outreach, but about artistic vision and profile.” (Maazel T’ov)  And a deeper blogxamination of Lorin’s days with the NY Phil and his outbreak of Mahleria courtesy of the LA Times (I’m always amazed at the attention they give classical music there until I realize it all generally comes from NY).

With the Maazel mania, I was also momentarily debating a signed copy of Fiona Maazel’s novel, Last Last Chance, at St. Mark’s bookstore last night.  Instead, and perhaps more pragmatically, I seized up Give My Regards to Eighth Street and Opera & the Morbidity of Music.

Which means now’s as good a time as any to mention the latest installment of my column for Classical Singer Magazine, The $50 Week, is all about getting books and music on the cheap.  The July issue is on newsstands now, or online if you’re a CS subscriber.

The Coronazione Connection

So we didn’t get Cavalli’s Egisto, since it hasn’t made it to a recording (apart from “Arias from”, which for–if nothing else–the sake of my own sanity I’m not including in this project).  Which is a pity, if only because it was the first opera he worked on with Giovanni Faustini.  A bambino compared to many of the players on the operatic scene thus far, Faustini was born in 1615–15 years after the first opera and nearly 10 years after the premiere of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.  At 17, following the loss of his parents and sister, Giovanni and his older brother (and soon-to-be impresario) arco moved to a house in the parish of S. Vidal in Venice.  It was here that they met their friend and neighbour Cavalli.  While Marco revolutionized the public opera theatre, baby brother (perhaps, as suggested by Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon in Inventing the Business of Opera, because of his brother’s success running an opera house) became a librettist.  Cavalli bolstered the writer, which said a lot for Faustini’s talent as, by this point, Cavalli was “on his way to becoming the most important composer in the genre” (Glixon and Glixon).  The second opera in the Faustini/Cavalli partnership was L’Ormindo.

In doing some music history lessons here, it’s also worth noting that Cavalli, while prolific and prodigious, was also more financially stable than many of his peers at the time.  This, as Glixon and Glixon ascertain, may have made him a better composer as he was not composing to eat.  And while there was still a time crunch to get a production on the stage in time, there is a care in Cavalli’s compositional style that shines through in works like L’Ormindo.  Cavalli writes floridly and melodically for the singers, with even the recitatives seeming humable and musically memorable (a technique that would [much] later become uber-evident in Puccini).  Beginning with the prologue, the instrumentation is sophisticated and lush, far beyond the sparseness permeating the works of Peri and his contemporaries.  The setting (in true Faustinian fashion, a royal residence in an exotic locale; this time Fez) is expressed through an idyllic, exotic score that borders on Edward Said-ian orientalism in some moments (especially in the violins).  This is almost a full circle for opera, as vocal music had its proper start in the exotic Middle East (particularly Syria, which is, incidentally, where my maternal grandmother was born).  There is a preemptively Handelian balance of major and minor, and the emergence of a style I like to call “the jilted female lover” piece; a piece so lamentable you know it must end happily in the end for it borders on melodramatic.  Faustini’s comedy of romantic errors ends happily with such standards as a long lost father/son bond, a PYT in a loveless marriage to an older man, and a few suitors with only one winner in sight.

Interestingly in this piece–furthering the exoticism and drawing sharply away from the Catholic church–is the plot point of the seance.  While necessary to further the plot, it’s the first use (to my knowledge, at least) of such a device in opera and makes a statement against the church propaganda operas.  It also plays into then-popular culture and must have been a blast for 17th Century audiences to watch.

Supporting the rumours that Cavalli’s hand may have been in Monteverdi’s inkpot (get your head out of the gutter, I mean it literally) for L’Incoronazione di Poppea is the melodic nature of the arias, duets, and ensemble pieces, sounding almost like cousins to “Pur ti Miro.”  This is the voice of a new Venice, a new opera: an opera that is available for the people, yet stratified in the public opera house; a Venice that remains a seat of art and culture (that still, especially in light of the Biennale this year, exists today).  It may be gradually sinking, but it was and is a grand and glorious ship.  And while many consider opera to be sinking as well, like Venice, it’s going to stick around.

Pride

Close-up…

But Don’t Take My Word for It

My Time Out New York debut (with a tantalizing glory shot of a stack of belgian waffles…be still my beating heart) is in this week’s issue, Live Preview-ing composer and opster Missy Mazzoli’s band, Victoire, which performs at the Stone tomorrow @ 10:00 pm.  Cz-cz-czech them out.

Death in Venice

Yesterday, I listened to Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea.  However I wanted to do it justice and took an extra day to research.  This is Monteverdi’s last opera; composed just a few years before the middle of the 17th Century, capping off the career of a composer who was arguably opera’s first great champion (and who would die shortly after his work’s premiere).  And, as it turns out, it’s an opera with a pretty complicated history.

In her own recent opus, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, Ellen Rosand writes that “The source situation for Monteverdi’s final opera…[is] far more complicated, in fact, than that of any other Venetian opera of the period.”  There are multiple scores without one that can be universally agreed upon as Monteverdi’s autograph.  While many operas undergo changes and revisions, particularly from one city to another, the differences in the Poppea variations are as striking as finding out that your husband is going to send you into exile so he can make his girlfriend empress.  In fact, the Poppea as Monteverdi knew it may not be the Poppea as we know it today–Rosand continually goes back to the Naples revival in 1651 as a hard point of reference.  In fact, it may not even have been a Poppea that Monteverdi knew at all–due to a lack of an autograph score, some question Monteverdi’s authorship of the piece.

This latter argument I tend to disagree with in the same sense that I disagree with the theory that there was more  than one author to the plays of Shakespeare.  There is huge progression from Il Ritorno d’Ulisse to Poppea, however there are strands that make them inextricably linked to the same composer.  His lamentations go right back to Penelope, both with Ottone in the first act and Seneca in…well, just about everything Seneca sings (but especially his death scene).  As the only main bass in the opera, Seneca serves as a special outsider–the only one truly free from blame or accountability, the voice of reason.  It’s no surprise then that he has to take a bath.

Regardless, there were at least a few hands in the pot.  Cavalli and his wife (a copyist said to have worked between 1650 and 1652) did some work on the score for its Neapolitan premiere.  Many agree that Benedetto Ferrari wrote the final duet between Poppea and Nero (the famous “Pur ti Miro”).  Francesco Sacrati has also been linked to the piece ever since his long-lost score (La finta pazza) was discovered and discovered to have similar musical lines with Poppea.  Since no recording has been made of this, I won’t be able to make any calls on that last hypothesis.  I will agree with Rosand, however, that the metrics in such passages as “Pur ti Miro” are almost jarringly different from other, decidedly Monteverdian, passages.

There are touches of Cavalli’s classical shadows here; Nerone and Seneca get downright Mozartean in their duet/argument (could classical have come out of this fury, this heightening of what is already a heightened realism?).  There are young touches in general, as Rosand suggests is at least thanks to the hands of a young copyist.  It’s interesting to note that the last opera in the timeline, Cavallis’s Didone, was written by a late 30′s Cavalli–Monteverdi was nearly twice his successor’s age when he wrote his final opera.  His late-in-life illness also suggests that he may not have kept up with musical and musicological trends as much as he’d have liked to, which is where other composers could have nimbly come in.

In celebration of the Poppea Variations, I listened to one version and watched another.  Both were different from the production I saw in Paris about 5 years ago–a production which I saw because it was the only opera playing at the ONdP the first time I was there, and a production I wish I could see again after I developed a true appreciation for baroque opera.  The first thing I noticed was that the prologue was quick to be dropped from the DVD production I watched–perhaps a good thing as the prologue on the CD went back about 40 years to the time of Peri.  However, the vocals in the prologue did something interesting–in the duet between Fortuna and Virtu, Fortuna’s music was sly and cunning, a symbolic contrast to Virtu’s sweet glissandi.  Was it neccesary for this alone?  Debatable.  Though knowing that part of this opera is based around the idea of amor vincit omina–love conquering both luck and virtue–makes some of the libretti’s points shine–at one point, Poppea even sings “fortune and love are fighting for me” (Poppea’s vocal lines resemble that of Fortuna’s, Drusilla’s that of Virtu’s…see what he did there?).

A word about the libretto.  Busenello (who also wrote for Cavalli) loved his irony.  Though Poppea ends happily for the title character and her lover, what Busenello, Monteverdi, and the opera-going public all knew was that, historically, Poppea would kill Nerone.  Nerone would then be suceeded by Ottavio, whom Poppea initially jilted.  Happy endings (literal and euphemistically) are often deceiving.  And this irony shows at times in the music.  Even in the first act, when Ottone returns home, he is repreented by warm cello tones with no musical foreshadowing that he is about to get the shaft from his lover.  Certo, we all see it coming.

The emotions range for the singers and the music here, and the music ranges from character to character.  The servants are allowed more musically funny pieces that we would later see in Mozart and Rossini.  Though they are not neutral or on the side of good, as Seneca, they are outside of the primary entanglements, which provides them with an outsider’s point of view.   Nerone’s guards, Ottavia’s nurse, Poppea’s nurse, Valetto–all are servants and soldiers, non-deities or royals; as such they offer commentary and comic relief.  Likewise, there is a
celestial quality of the music “Seneca, io miro in cielo infausti” (prophesy of Seneca’s death, provided by the gods).

Amor certainly does conquer all here as well with the eroticism and sensuality in the duets between Nerone and Poppea, heightening from one duet to the next.  Repetition allows for musical progression and vocal flourishes (Nerone’s “Non posso”s, Poppea’s “Tournerai?”s) in the first duet.  Escalated sexuality and sensuality in the next Nerone / Poppea duet, in which Poppea is promised that she will be made queen and convinces Nerone that Seneca is a threat.  Sex, death, and rock and roll.  And all hell breaks loose by the end.

And with sexuality and sensuality comes femininity in vocal lines–Poppea’s soprano vs. Ottavia’s mezzo.  Is it any surprise Nerone sends the latter off into exile, attempted murder aside?

This Diva Looks Like That Diva

How did La Cieca miss this opportunity?

Why I Read Opera Chic

I mean, really…Love it.  Madly.

Science Fiction Double Feature

Cavalli’s La Didone re-entered the cultural consciousness earlier this year with the Wooster Group‘s acclaimed–and off-kilter–production of the opera, re-mixing the familiar Aenid tale of Dido and Aeneas with an Italian pre-moon-landing sci-fi cult classic movie.  Which was kind of brilliant.  Even if some may have seen it as pushing opera to a point where it wasn’t opera anymore, I think that would have at least shaken Cavalli up for me and made me give him another chance earlier this year.

Which, sadly, is more than I can say for this–the only–recording of Didone.  I could have sunk $50 into a DVD that, practically and frankly speaking, I probably would never watch again (I’m bad with opera DVDs, most of the ones I’ve come to own have since been re-sold or given to friends).  But instead I listened to the Hengelbrock recording that Alex Ross refuses to endorse.  Possibly for good reason if, as he says, there are liberal cuts.  Which probably explains the disjointedness I felt from the piece (even clocking in at over 2 hours); so for the time being I’ll leave that to the interpreter rather than the composer.

The biggest thing with Didone is that it has a….(spoiler alert)…happy ending by librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello, who also wrote for Monteverdi.  Iarbas saves Dido from self-destruction and marries her.  Which means the mezzo (or in this case, the alto) gets the girl.  These operas tend to curl my toes (I love a good trouser role).  The happy ending is hinted at in the fascinating balance between major and minor keys, watching the notes themselves battle it out like gods and mortals for Dido’s life (this happens right away with a fireworks prologue for Fortuna, then followed by a dirge-like sinfonia).  Like his Apollo and Dafne, Cavalli associates his brass with the male bravado, particularly with the gods–in this case, Nettuno.  Interestingly, Nettuno’s instrumentations almost exactly mirror that of Iarba’s in the next scene, though Iarba’s brass is much gentler, kinder.  The machissmo is still there, but it’s bereft of any bragadaccio, musically foreshadowing the King’s benevolence (as opposed to the gods’ vengeance).  The layers of music then build in the next scene–the first scene with Didone, as good a time as any for all (musical) hell to break loose.

Cavalli is a master of  using varied instrumentations corresponding with mood, plot, etc.  While this opera is still written for a small orchestra, no longer is orchestration an all-hands-on-deck sitch.  Different instruments represent the feminine and masculine, the mortal and the immortal.  idone and Anna have a much more feminine sound and rhythms, particularly when Anna sings.  This adds to the dramatic and emotional arc created by the music itself, keenly seen in Didone and Enea’s scena in the third act.

The recits here–particularly for the gals–are no walk in the park.  It helps that this particular Cassandra sings with a full throated, heart-on-the-sleeve operatic belt, subsiding in time for her solo in the scena terza; she nimbly shows off the layers that Cavalli created with which singers can play around.  There’s a seemingly limitless number of shades and shadows that can touch these characters.  And “La Caccia” must have been in everyone’s heads at the bar afterwards.

Check out this video (also courtesy of Mr. The Rest is Noise) at around 2:45/2:50 for one of the more famous pieces from the opera: “Alle ruine del mio regno,” sung by the incandescent contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux.