In a word ...

S U M M E R ...

 

A farewell to suspension of disbelief...

A starving bohemian poet 

shivering in an unheated Paris apartment

A teenage girl

who ignites the lust of every man in sight

This is not about making fun of people's appearance.  Eating can be as much of an addiction as smoking.  And the melancholy facts of biology, amplified by a few decades of gravity acting on the human body, will eventually make all of us look like a piece of luggage that's been through too many airports.

Opera singers are not immune to such realities of life.  If anything, they are further disadvantaged by certain necessities peculiar to their profession.  One is that a voice capable of soaring effortlessly and musically above the surging fortes of a full-sized orchestra requires years of singing less demanding roles before it settles into a refined and long-lasting instrument.  Which means that by the time opera singers become really good at what they do, their rosy-cheeked and milky-skinned youth is well behind them.  Another is that very powerful voices tend to come with refrigerator-sized chest cavities enclosed in bodies ample of hip and generous of bosom. 

Until the arrival of opera on DVD the singer's physical appearance, even if grotesquely unsuitable for the role, has never posed a problem that could not be solved by the combination of an inch-thick layer of makeup, concealing costume, merciful lighting, and at least 15 -20 feet of distance to the nearest viewers.  But when trying to suspend disbelief while watching live video recordings of operas on DVD, I have to struggle against frequent, lingering, high definition wide-screen close-up shots of the singers' faces and bodies.

I lose this struggle every time.  And how could I not if instead of Puccini's starving poet and Strauss' teenage princes the video screen shows me (respectively) a glistening fat fuck and a once very busy but now long retired Las Vegas whore?  Even when an excellent singer's appearance happens to be perfect for the role (e.g., Laura Aikin in the magnificent production of Lulu from Zurich), the sadistic timing of close-ups during vocally demanding parts does its best to focus my attention on torrential downpours of sweat, bulging eyes, popping veins, straining neck muscles, contorted faces - in short, on all the things you'd expect to see in a patient undergoing colonoscopy without anesthesia.

As far as I can tell, it takes a hopeless retard in charge of filming a live opera performance to embrace indiscriminate application of cinematic close-ups to a genre which thrives on highly exaggerated makeup, gestures, and diction required for projecting emotions and meanings in theaters with a seating capacity in the thousands.  Aside from having permanently humiliated some dedicated and talented singers challenged by their weight or age, this "cinematization" of opera has also led to the increasingly frequent casting of singers based on their appearance instead of their singing abilities and musical talents.   I certainly can't argue against the visual thrill of Salome portrayed by a slim, sexy nymphet in a skimpy nighty, who rubs her cheek against the thigh  - and barely an inch away from the penis - of a muscled and fully naked slave holding the bloodied head of Jokanaan in his hand.  But every time the nymphet opens her mouth to execute one of those wide-leaping intervals, I wish that the slave's penis were shoved deep down her throat to keep her from screeching and squealing through her vocal part at 1/4 to 1/2 tone below true pitch on many high notes.

With the recent flurry of newspaper "pieces" debating the rise of live opera videocasting in movie theaters, I thought the above issues would be at the top of the list of topics for serious discussion.  Alas, so far this toothless "debate" seems to have all the markings of an implicit PR campaign aimed at promoting the business of filmed opera... 

  

A case in point...

Ernst Krenek

(portrait by Oskar Kokoshka, 1931)

Here is a chance for you to hear what I meant in a couple of recent posts when I said that some 12-tone compositions - such as Krenek's works for string orchestra - sound more melodious and lyrical than many tonal works.  At the time I had only one recording of Krenek's music for strings -  a hideously over-equalized and cavernous commercial studio recording on Capriccio CD - which I could not offer as an example on my blog for obvious reasons.  Yesterday, however, I came across a live broadcast of Krenek's Symphonic Elegy Op.105, performed by St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Thomas Zehetmair on April 10, 2010.  Naturally I could not resist the temptation of adding this live recording to the blog as a supplement to my ongoing whining in defense of non-tonal music.

I find a delightful sense of irony in the fact that Krenek's Elegy, written in 1946 in response to the tragic death of his idol Anton Webern, can be described in the forbidding jargon of musical analysis emphasizing that the work's tone row contains certain structural symmetries so beloved by Webern - e.g., that the second half of the row is the retrograde inversion of the first half.*  To many music lovers such a description would immediately suggest that the music is "mechanical", "mathematical", and devoid of emotional significance - which is precisely what they have been conditioned to expect from 12-tone music by several decades worth of widely disseminated idiocy known as mainstream music criticism.  Yet what any music lover would actually hear is a bittersweet, poignant lyricism which makes much of tonal music from the same period sound old-fashioned, predictable, or even stale.

A case in point is Viktor Ullmann's String Quartet No.3, a tonal work written only a couple of years before Krenek's Elegy.  Although Ullmann had studied with Schoenberg, his quartet inhabits the same sound world of suave chromaticism as the music from Richard Strauss' post-Rosenkavalier period.  (The opening movement of Ullmann's work could fool you into thinking that you're listening to a discarded interlude  from Strauss' Capriccio.)   This is not to say that Ullmann's work is not lovely (it is), or that it is boring (it isn't), but only that its melodic contours and harmonic progressions sound outdated when heard next to Krenek's equally lovely 12-tone works for strings.  (Just as Ullmann's one-act comic opera Der zebrochene Krug - adorable as it is - is another example of warmed-over Richard Strauss, which sounds positively dated when heard next to such comic one-act operas as Schoenberg's Von Heute auf Morgen.)  If you are not familiar with Ullmann's work, you can judge the fairness of my comparison for yourself by listening to the included live performance of Ullmann's quartet (Utrecht String Quartet, May 14, 2005, Amsterdam).

_______________
*  For additional symmetries see Stewart, J. L., Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music,  U. of California Press, 1991, pp. 251-252.

Great music, bad operas...

ELLIOTT CARTER

What Next?

July 27, 2006

Tanglewood Festival

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra

conducted by James Levine, 

directed for the stage by Doug Fitch

Cast: Kiera Duffy (Rose), Jamie Van Eyck (Mama),

Christin-Marie Hill (Stella), Lawrence Jones (Zen), 

Chad Sloan (Harry or Larry), Rebecca Danning (Kid)

Watching an opera whose plot does not involve sex or murder (preferably both, in either order) is like attending a Hollywood party whose favors do not include cocaine:  there are vastly more rewarding ways to spend one's time.  Despite the nearly tautological certainty of this wisdom,  there is a small but distinguished group of composers whose neglect of the dramatic requirements of opera as an art form seems to border on the delusional.  From Beethoven's Fidelio to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Janacek's House of the Dead, and Dallapiccola's Il Prigionero, these composers had written operas in which the characters do little more than deliver impassioned pronouncements on lofty topics, as if the principal business of opera is to serve as a musically enhanced vehicle for grandiose messages on timeless metaphysical, theological, or socio-political issues.  To paraphrase one of Samuel Goldwyn's immortal quips:  Messages are for Western Union.  Operas are for entertainment.

A few days ago I added Elliott Carter's 40-minute long opera What Next? to the top of the above list of operatic failures, which I remember primarily for their disastrous mismatch between glorious music and stillborn libretti.  Of course I knew the music of Carter's opera for a long time, courtesy of my local library's copy of the superlative recording by Peter Eotovos and the Dutch Radio Chamber Orchestra (on ECM label).  Because the library CD was missing its booklet with the libretto, I could only infer from the occasional snippets of decipherable English that there wasn't much going on in that opera dramatically speaking.  But the music -- by turns dramatic,virile, angular, playful, and poignantly lyrical -- was so magical that when I finally obtained a complete video recording of a fully staged production, and with English subtitles to boot, I just couldn't wait to experience the opera of which this unforgettable music was a part. 

     

 I wish I hadn't.  Paul Griffiths' sophomoric libretto -- an awkward mix of disconnected pseudo-existentialist musings, shrunk to the length and depth of cartoon captions in the New Yorker magazine, and delivered by one-dimensional characters who have absolutely nothing else to do -- is simply embarrassing; doubly so for a man previously known to me as an outstanding music critic and writer on 20th century music.  The experience of hearing Carter's magnificent music as an accompaniment to such comatose stage proceedings left me with feelings of loss, frustration, and disappointment as acute as those you would have after visiting an upscale massage parlor where an impossibly gorgeous girl spent the entire hour summarizing for you the main points of Locke's Treatises of Government...