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.