Ways of Seeing

There’s something truly lovely about sitting up on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night rain with a cup of tea and Lully’s Thésée.  Which makes me think there’s something wrong with listening to Lully’s operas as opposed to watching them as I find this completely soothing.  Then I realize I’m without some of the tragedie-lyrique’s main components–ballet, machinations, spectacle.  In fact, I don’t have any watching on the list until we get to Persée…Hm.

But on the other hand, solely listening has made me pay close attention to the recits in this story (which essetially picks up on Medea after her break-up with Jason…unfortunate that Cavalli’s happy end couldn’t last).  The French playwright Moliere had died right around the time that Lully began to take the French stage, and while his company didn’t fare too well post-mortem, his spirit seems to live on in many of Philippe Quinault’s libretti.  Quinault has a sense of the dramatic that puts Faustini to shame, and yet there’s a simplicity in the wants of the characters.  Their emotions are accentuated in Lully’s notation, drawing out notes that encompass words like heureux, amoureux, and secours.  He also gives musical altitude to high emotions–ecstassy and chaos–in sharps, and lays flats on tender or melancholy moments.  Spectacle enough for me.

Ovid count thus far…7

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.

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.

I Got Yer Lully Right Here

I’m in a dorm.  Now, when I went to college, I never stayed in a dorm.  I had apartments, including student apartments, but never a single room with a kitchen three floors below.  Fortunately, I have a grad student dorm so I don’t need a communal shower.  Greetings from Bard, where I’m currently running supertitles for Summerscape’s productions of Les Huguenots and Paulus!

Somehow in the middle of techs, a commute to upstate New York, and scrambling to get my stuff in New York proper in order for three weeks, I managed to get a $10 copy of the recent release of Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione on DVD.  After seeing Half-Blood Prince (oh yes I did…they had the same cinematographer as Amelie), I was sort of hoping for a sort of Hogwarts-meets-baroque-opera love affair.  Instead I got Lully’s first–and opera’s first–tragedie lyrique.  BFD (no, really).

In her dissertation on Jean-Baptiste Lully and His Tragedies Lyriques, Joyce Newman lays out the definition–and trends–of a TL quite clearly and succintly, yet raises the question: is tragedie lyrique opera?  Or is opera too stilting a term?

Here’s what Newman (“Hello, Newman…”) has to say:

“The tragedie lyrique is one of several dramatic forms which evolved in seventeenth century France containing music, ballet, spectacle, machines, and instrumental music.  Each of these forms has a particular name which attemps to describe the work exactly: ballet de cour, ballet heroique, comedie-ballet, tragi-comedie, tragi-comedie-pastorale, pastorale, pastorale heroqique, and others.  The terms arenot interchangeable, and to use the generic term ‘opera’ merely confuses the issue.”

With Lully, opera became something that is truly greater than the sum of its parts.  The potential to excite, to stimulate, to completely wire someone (experiences many of us opsters have felt in the present day) became fully realized in late 17th-century France.  It helped that Lully–in the wake of his success with Cadmus et Hermione–was able to obtain an injunction stating that “no more than two singers and six violins might be used in production of theatrical works outside the opera.”  This pissed off Moliere’s troupe, but it also meant that Lully–and opera–would hold a monopoly on many forms of popular French theatre (like machine plays and pastorales).

Cadmus has all the makings of a tragedie-lyrique (duh statement, but follow me on this).  It takes a character of “heroic proportions”, follows his metamorphosis “from one state of being into the other”, and builds each set around one giant spectacle.  It was actually a happy accident that I watched, rather than listened, to this petit monstre as it gave me an idea of how crazy the opening night must have been.  Lully took the Italian opera form and made it his own.  Even though the plot centers around mythic people, there is an abandonment of the uber-gods in the music; the prologue takes us out of the heavens and down to earth with musically pastoral praise of the breeze, birds, and flowers.  The music itself has an earthy–and at times downright Gallic–quality, yet is highly stylized.  The repetition here blows the straightforward text of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo out of the water.  And there is ironic use of keys, foreshadowing of the tragedy part in this TL even in the prologue when everyone is happy and blithe (“Et pourquoi ne nous rirons pas?” the chorus asks at one point, finding no reason why they should not laugh…oh, if only they knew).

On a related note, I’m thinking of starting a tally of operas based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Score another for him with this libretto, albeit it makes a few inaccuracies (like mixing up Hermione with Harmonia…merde alors).

It’s a Venetian Opera Threesome. And I’m Kissing and Telling.

I was hoping to mark Bastille Day with the first French opera; but I’ve been running behind on writing about the other operas that have been filed as “listened to.”  Forgive the round-up, but I’m lolling for Lully:

We gave Cavalli a grand finale by listening to Ercole Amante over Chicken Milanese (a nod to his Lombardian roots), Bellinis (a nod to the Venetian opera tradition), and a few of Brooklyn’s finest mini cannoli (a nod to my adoration of pastry shells stuffed with creamy cheesy goodness, which will make up for the fact that I couldn’t see this production of Ercole).  I had grander plans for a molto tradizionale Lombardy dish–brasato di maiale nero (or pork braised in chianti)–but I was happy to have mustered the energy to ask my boyfriend to bread chicken cutlets.  It turned out to be just as well; Cavalli sort of petered out in his final years.  Like Statira, he took a step back on the groundbreaking natures of La Calisto, Xerse, and Giasone and went to a structure that lacked an arc, lacked variety of emotions, and was molto repetitive with motifs, musical resolutions, etc.

Sartorio‘s L’Orfeo revisits the familiar operatic plot with a new twist.  Written ten years after Ercole Amante, Sartorio worked on Cavalli’s separation of aria and recit and treads upon opera seria in this, his final (and ironically only available) work.  Like Rossi’s Orfeo, the plot strays from the central idea established by Peri, Monteverdi, and the boys.  Which is a really kind way of putting it: Ellen Rosand doesn’t pull any punches (and is STILL kind) in writing that the myth of Orpheus “mistreated; deconstructed, rearranged, and deformed, it was subjected to numerous anachronisms.”  Achilles and Hercules make guest appearances (a conceit that the librettist actually apologized for), Orpheus plotted Euridice’s death (but was beat to the punch by that dastardly snake), and there’s a happy ending with the wedding of two secondary-that-graduate-to-primary characters.  It’s no surprise that the music is sickeningly jovial as a result, even the laments sound like a trip to Dylan’s Candy Bar.  This makes me wonder about Sartorio’s other operas; is this just a keen sense of irony?  Or was he on Zoloft through most of the 17th Century?

It was hard not to love Pasquini‘s La Forza d’Amore, even if it was almost impossible to figure out the plot save for some romantic entanglement between a pastor and one or two nymphs.  Even my Italian isn’t getting me too far with this one, but with the recording (thanks anonymous reader who sent me the MP3s!) it could be fun to translate and synopisize the story.  Regardless, it was so refreshing to come to this after the last few Cavallet-me-downs and Sartorio’s musical WTF.  At times clipped and staccato, it was nonetheless full of pastoral grace and spritely vigor, with an arc of musical emotions that made a plot seem almost suplerfluous.  It’s a refinement of Sartorio’s seria beginnings, and predicts the next century.

But first we have some French (and English!) to deal with…

About Last Night

Consider it a recession one-two punch: Famous for touring the five boroughs each summer, the Metropolitan Opera announced in April that it would be offering a series of recital concerts in lieu of their traditional—and highly anticipated—complete opera performances. And at last night’s opening concert, we were told that the Central Park SummerStage sound system is in need of a $250,000 upgrade. While the latter made for some cringeworthy moments in the first act (not to mention an amplification of every breath and cough from the headset mikes), it didn’t detract from the fact that this recital by Alek Shrader, Paulo Szot and Lisette Oropesa, pictured left to right above, may have been one of the Met’s best summer performances, period.

Read the rest of my review over at The Volume…

Le Quatorze Juillet

Tuesday in the Park With Ludwig (and Wolfie)

I’ve been playing catch-up over the past week, and in the midst of plowing through the 17th century am enjoying one of my favorite parts of summer in New York: the free concerts in the parks.  Last night was the Met at SummerStage (my review of which will appear later this week in Time Out New York’s The Volume), tonight is an evening of Beethoven and Mozart courtesy of the New York Philharmonic.  My boyfriend and I are meeting up with a girlfriend for a wine and cheese picnic on the lawn beforehand; and while the Magnolia sugar-fest and Veuve Clicquot Traveller set (which costs more than my monthly electricity bill) are way out of our bohemian, opster range, it was nice that Andrea Strong feels the same way I do about this time of year.  I wonder, if she goes, what her take on Alan Gilbert will be (and if it will be any more sophisticated than my opinion of Magnolias’s red velvet cupcakes).

L’Incoronazione di Statira

Back to Busenello!  One of Venice’s first public librettist, the man behind the first Cavalli opera (in the Project) and Monteverdi’s swan song comes back for one last spin with Cavalli’s Statira: Principessa di Persia.  And in doing so, he kind of takes us back.  The prologo takes a bit away from my idea of the “typical” Cavalli prologo/sinfonia, reflective more of Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse than a true Cavalli.  If it’s Cavalli, it’s Cavalli circa 1640–and what a difference 15 years makes.  That isn’t to say that there’s a lack of vocal fireworks with opportunities for singers to show off in a mini-da capo sort of way.

Da capo isn’t for this opera; Busenello heavily relies on recits (indeed, at one point we get eight in a row) in a pattern that breaks the rules of a mid/late baroque opera.  Even many of the arias–such as the first one, “Notte ascondi i tesori”–sound more recit like.  This leads to a retro (as retro as you can get in 17th Century opera) ambiguity of cadence.  Ambiguity, in fact, abounds in this piece.  Rosand writes in Opera in 17th Century Venice that the “dramma per musica” (the preferred title for Statira) meant a somewhat imperfect marriage of words and music, and the favor was not on the side of the libretto:  “Alone, these little books were but shadows, texts needing music (and staging) to endow them with life.  Never intended to stand on their own, they were admittedly, glaringly, and self-consciously incomplete.”

And yet, here’s the interesting thing about opera…

It was kind of a mistake.

In Man and His Music, Alec Harman and Anthony Milner write of opera’s beginnings:

“This ‘new music,’ as Giliu Caccini, one of its creators, called it, is a rare instance in the history of any art of theory preceding practice, for it was deliberately modelled on ancient Greek tragedy, which, so Caccini and the group to which he belonged thought, was sung in its entirety.  They were wrong in this, as only the choruses were actually sung, but they were right in that Greek tragedy is essentially a lyrical art which, at moments of great emotional stress, cries out for and almost completely received some kind of instrumental accompaniment.”

Can you imagine if the Camerata had gotten it right?  We’d have jumped straight into singpsiel.  Or operetta.  Or Rock of Ages.

When Statira (whose plot is like a mix between Xerse and Poppea, complete with cross-dressing countertenors, a loosely [and that's being generous] root in history, and a jilted lover) first opened, Busenello was still on about the proper performance practice of Greek tragedy (ironically, in 2009, many are debating the proper perfomance practice of 17th Century Opera).  What it boiled down to for Busenello was an excuse to not write florid, poetic libretti similar to those of his contemporaries.  Randall explains this with a theory (at least on Bus-Nelly’s part) that since his poetry was to be sung, poetic models need not apply, especially since–if the Greeks DID sing their poetry–their music would be worlds away from what they were hearing in Venice over a millenium later.

Well, duh.

The alyrical aspect of Busenello’s lyricism may also stem from a caveat that apparenty existed since opera’s nascence: the audience could see through the illusion that singing was not speaking (yes, another duh).  Randall writes: “What sparked all of these librettists’ preoccupation with the genre, their attempts to justify the combination of music and drama, either through classical precedent or modern taste, was their discomfort with the question of verisimilitude.”  What Busenello may have done was try to approximate–to the best of his ability–dialogue within the confines of musicality.  Seeing that written out seems harsh; especially for a guy who was responsible, in part, for “Per Te Miro,” but it could be a plausible artistic theory.  We see it now in modern opera and it comes and goes in cycles.  Apparently the cycle started in Statira.  Yet in opera, there has to be a suspension of disbelief, a coat-check for verisimilitude.  There’s only so much you can get from the theory of it–that of a sung story.  But the music adds another layer of emotion we would not necessarily get from mere spoken dialogue.  The music conveys the unspeakable.  It shadows, it sets us on edge, it reassures us, it sets a character’s fate, it puts the plot in motion or brings it to a crashing halt.  We only have so much time with these characters and we need to know all that we can.

And some things are just better left unsaid.

Forest for the Trees

A discussion with a dramaturg friend once centered around texts used to prepare roles.  Being a dramaturg for a Handel-minded house, she mentioned George-Friedrich’s Xerxes as an instance where historical research on the roles would leave you up the wrong tree, and a better study would be the performance practices of Handel’s time (provided that the staging was that of a traditional Xerxes, but that’s another story).  Listening to Cavalli’s Xerse, the opera which Handel re-set for his work, I found myself more drawn to researching the theatre and opera of mid/late 17th Century Venice.

Xerse’s librettist, Nicolò Minato, was one of a few writers who wrote almost exclusively for Cavalli’s composition.  When you hear C’s “Ombra mai fu,” you get an idea as to why (and when we hit Handel I’ll do a side-by-side comparison so as not to get ahead of myself here…in the meantime, tell me it doesn’t sound a bit like Bach’s “Bist du bei mir“).  Minato’s disregard for the actual historical tale of Persian ruler Xerxes is a turning point for librettists–most of whom (Minato included) remained fairly faithful to the source material for their operas.  This change, however, proved to be quite successful for both librettist and composer, and Minato’s liberty-laced libretti became the norm after Xerse.

It’s here in Xerse that we also see the development of the da capo aria.  While some texts pinpoint Monteverdi’s Orfeo as the foundation of da capo; something which I tend to disagree with namely as Orfeo (along with most operas up until Giasone) didn’t feature clearly defined arias.  A few, yes, but mostlly the line between aria and recit was blurred.  Cavalli began to pioneer this style of “attention-pieces,” pieces for which the audience would quiet down and give their due, interspersed with recitatives–sing-speak–that, while furthering the plot, allowed focus to drop in the opera house.  I’d also like to think that this is how da capo evolved as a form; the audience misses the first A section of the aria, they know they can catch it again.  The audience loves (like, The Beatles loves) the first A?  They can hear it again.  It’s a business move of sorts, giving the people what they want.  It also gives composers the opportunity to play around with the text, such as in “La bellezza è un don fugace” which promintently features some mad sixteenth notes.

But the real reason behind da capo was to allow singers to showcase their pipes.  More than offering repetition of the aria’s strophes, it offers a singer the chance to truly own an aria.  Once again, Rene Jacobs has rescued a work from total obscurity with the only recordng of this piece in its entirety.  However, I have to wonder how true it is to Cavalli’s original production–or the production values of Cavalli’s time.  It’s a very clean sound from the cast, but in a da capo piece like Ombra mai, the strophes were tame.  Last week, I turned in an article to Classical Singer on the importance of improvisation for opera singers, with the underlying theme that it’s not just for cadenzas anymore.  However, given the chance to add variations and ornamentation, what singer WOULDN’T want to make the piece truly their own, especially in a work so inherently own-able?  It’s such a shame to see singers timid of the music; while it’s sung beautifully, I think the pressure of bringing an otherwise unheard opera to life causes many to miss the forest for the…well, the other things.