“Opera as Opera” news: At last, after a frustrating delay since the quick sellout of the first printing, the second one is ready for shipment as of Dec. 4! Those who have pre-ordered should be receiving their copies within days of that date (at least for domestic orders), and fulfillment of new orders should be prompt. Thanks to all for your patience. P.S.: see note at the end of today’s post.

Further: I recently did an interview with host Lawrence Pugliese of Radio Free Brooklyn for its far-ranging cultural program “Troubadours and Raconteurs,” in which we discussed aspects of “Opera as Opera” and related topics. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. After broadcast airings in several markets in the Northeast, it’s taking its eternal place as featured segment in “T & R”‘s Episode 294, reachable at www.radiofreebrooklyn.org. We’ll also be posting it on a media page soon, along with my interview with Christopher Purdy of Station WSOU (Columbus, O.) and the video of my talk, conversation with Marc Scorca, and Q & A at Opera America. We’ve been lagging slightly on this front, but will be catching up. To today’s ruminations:

As with Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel (see the post of Dec. 12, 2017, Extermination, Salvation, Frustration), the plot-and-character conformation of Marnie owes its nebulous presence in our cultural atmosphere to the half-life of a movie by a famous director, though in this case the composer and librettist (Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright, respectively) tell us they have worked primarily from the movie’s novelistic source, by Winston Graham. Movies are starting to take the position relative to opera occupied first by classical myth and legend, and later by plays (and, less frequently, novels) as items of cultural literacy that audiences could be depended upon to at least know about, if not know directly, and thus to establish a certain level of advance validation for the work in question. Whether or not this is a viable idea (movies, and for that matter novels, being conceived and structured along other than stage lines, and very few of them having attained the numinous weight of myth) is a larger question than I’m going to tackle today, except to repeat that in such cases, if I’m unfamiliar with the source materials beforehand, I prefer to remain so until after I’ve determined whether or not the opera works for me on its own recognizance. (I still vaguely mean to catch up with Buñuel’s Angel someday, but since I think Hitchcock a wildly overrated artist by any grown-up standard, I’ll probably not even feint in the direction of Marnie, The Movie.)

The thrice-told tale, as disclosed by the opera, goes thus: Marnie, a chic young woman who easily attracts unwanted male attention, is haunted by a repressed-memory sense that she may have killed her baby brother. She acts out her resulting “need to transgress” by stealing money from office safes in her places of employment, then moving on with a changed identity. But in the instance shown, the man who interviews her for her next change of job turns out to be the same one, a certain Mark, who had indicated some interest in her in the old one. He  recognizes her, but hires her anyway and keeps her secret until she tries to steal from his firm, whereupon he forces her into marriage as the condition of keeping quiet. After a crisis or three, including Marnie’s suicide attempt when Mark tries to consummate the marriage and the death of her beloved horse in a hunting accident (with Marnie in the saddle), she hits the office after hours and cracks the safe one more time, only to find herself constrained by nascent feelings of affection for Mark. Then, following her mother’s death, she’s told by her neighbor that it was the mother, not Marnie herself, who was responsible for the infant’s demise. As she turns herself in to the police for her serial transgressions, she declares herself free. There are other characters, incidents, and subplots, but those are the basics of the story.

The latest on “Opera as Opera”: Our shipping date for the second printing is December 4. Orders can be entered at any time. Meanwhile, we have received two more wonderful reviews, from Donald Vroon in the venerable American Record Guide and from Robert Matthew-Walker in the even more ancient Musical Opinion Quarterly (U.K.). The reception has been extraordinary, and we understand more is on the way!

Today, I promised some words about Nico Muhly’s “Marnie.” And indeed I have seen it. However, I’ve decided to postpone comment until I can wrap it up with Kaia Saariaho’s “Only the Sound Remains,” which is coming up shortly. But there’s plenty to chew over below.  

I once had a student from a small Orthodox community in Israel, who had come to New York to study. He was an interesting man from a culture I knew little about, so we learned from each other. Among the things I learned of from him was the continued life of an ancient prohibition against male  proximity to a singing woman. If he arrived at my studio while a lesson with a female student was still in progress, he would wait outside the door till the lesson ended. One day, after having assured several young women that “No, no, it’s not you, it’s him,” I asked him if he knew the original reasoning behind this rule. He answered with a grave sincerity: “The woman’s voice is very beautiful. If you heard it and were in the room with her, you might want to go to her before you are married.” I thanked him, and of course we continued to observe the rule.

In Act 2 of Karl (Karóly) Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba), set in a lush garden at night, the eponymous Queen instructs her slave Astaroth to lure the love-dazed Assad with her singing. Astaroth obeys with a vocalise replete with Oriental-sounding intervals, long sustained notes, and ornaments. Assad responds with a short, beguiling aria, “Magische Töne.” It happens that for collectors of historical records, these are the two most notable of several fragments that kept The Queen of Sheba‘s aura alive over the past century. The vocalise (called the Lockruf) is most famous in the voicing of Selma Kurz (though an earlier version, by Elise Elizza, while lacking Kurz’s Guiness Book of World Records extended trill, would probably be almost as highly regarded had it been recorded later), and the latter in stunning interpretations by Leo Slezak and (in Italian) Enrico Caruso. And sure enough, poor Assad, though figuratively outside the studio door, soon finds himself—for the third time and counting—hopelessly enmeshed in the Queen’s on-again, off-again allurements. ^(I)We aren’t speaking here of plain old powerful attraction at first sight. We’re dealing with enslaving, all-enveloping, lost-to-the-world sexual intoxication that presents itself as the mother of all the games of tease, then play hard-to-get, that some girls learn at a remarkably early age. Poor Assad’s first encounter was up in Lebanon, whither he’d been dispatched by King Solomon on a diplomatic mission to the Queen, only to encounter an irresistibly beautiful woman plashing about near his mossy bank, as such are wont to do. As he approached her, she not only failed to repel him, but drew him into a fervent, inevitably wet embrace. And no sooner did Assad conclude—reluctantly, I’m sure—that escape was impossible than she vanished into the cedar-scented air.