I make the score 15-0. I was going to put it in the books at 9-0, which in major league baseball is the score designated in the rare event that a team does not show up, or field a full complement of players, or, if it’s the home team, it or its fans commit some egregious infraction that does not allow the game to be completed. In those cases, a forfeit is declared, and one run per inning is assigned to the forfeitee—hence, 9-0. However, the Berg team, after long, hard practice, did suit up, take the field, and make every effort to compete. They just couldn’t score against the overwhelming Kentridge lineup. And since Wozzeck has not nine innings, but fifteen scenes, and since in Little League or certain other games fifteen runs is often the margin at which a “Mercy Rule” is invoked and the game terminated, 15-0 seems just and proper. Although the game was over almost before it began, I’ll file a report on it down below. First, though, I’m going to back up and look at some aspects of the opera itself and its performance history, particularly here in New York and in my lifetime—as it happens, two coeval chronicles.

New York and Wozzeck grew familiar, if not intimate, over a span of twelve months in the years 1951-52. True, there had been the American premiere under Stokowski with his Philadelphia Orchestra, in a production designed by Robert Edmond Jones, in 1931, and it had traveled to the old Metropolitan Opera House for a single performance. After that, nothing but concert fragments for twenty years, during which the opera, widely produced in Europe after its 1925 world premiere (Berlin Staatsoper, under Erich Kleiber) was choked off there by Nazi censorship—save for a brief run (remarkable, given the nature of the regime) at the Rome opera in 1942. That production had Tito Gobbi and the American soprano Dorothy Dow as Wozzeck and Marie, with Tullio Serafin conducting.^(I)

Then, in 1951, Wozzeck, presented in the New York Philharmonic’s subscription series, became the most audacious of the concert-opera projects Dmitri Mitropoulos undertook before leaving the orchestra for opera proper at the Met and elsewhere. Those performances also provided the materials for the first complete recording of the work, on the Columbia label. Exactly a year later Joseph Rosenstock, in his first season after taking over the musical directorship of the New York City Opera from Laszlo Halasz, led New York’s first run of theatrical performances, in English, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky and sung by a cast that included Marko Rothmüller (also Covent Garden’s Wozzeck that same year) in the title role, Patricia Neway as Marie, and two of Mitropoulos’ principals, David Lloyd (Andres) and Ralph Herbert (The Doctor). These three performances sold well, and the opera was brought back for two more in the Fall ’52 season.^(II)

Not long ago, around the time of my post on Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Juilliard master classes, I was grousing to a friend about both them and another example of online vocological weirdness, in which a pedagogue in an influential academic position was attempting to instruct us in registrational and other laryngeal occurrences by means of a combination of  technological readings and demonstrations in falsetto. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she answered, perhaps a little impatiently. “All that laryngoscope stuff has been going on for decades now, and I don’t think it’s affected the teaching of singing in any mainstream way. I can think of ten problems more important than that for young singers.” 

“All right,” said I, not one to leave a thrown gauntlet on the ground. “Where’s your list?”

My friend is herself a singer, still quite young, and while I am in touch daily with the world of young singers through my students and colleagues, she has been living in it. She’s an excellent singer and musician and, as you’ll see, smart and articulate. She’s been through respected academic programs, a residency as a young artist in a major European opera house, and in the years since, a representative mix of the performance, audition, day-job, and postgrad study options that young professionals find open to them here in New York. Not to get cute about it, I’ll call her Jane, as in Jane Doe, unoperatic as that may sound. It took her a while (Jane’s busy), but she has finally completed her list.

What I love about it, and find unusual, is that although Jane is personally involved with the aspirational struggles young singers endure, with all their emotional ups and downs, she is also able to step aside from that involvement and adopt an analytical perspective on it.

Naturally, I also love it because I agree with nearly all of it. And in that regard, I must emphasize that while Jane and I do of course exchange thoughts about singing and about performances (she attends the opera frequently), she is a decidedly independent thinker. She confesses that she doesn’t read my blog, and though she loyally ordered her copy of Opera as Opera, has read only sections from the early part of it. So these are very much her observations, which I shall present without comment from me. For my own take on many of her points, refer to Opera as Opera, particularly the chapters entitled “Singing,” “We Go to School,” and the Epilogue, and to my series of posts called “Before the First Lesson,” which are in the archive.

My review of the seasonal Met revival of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” promised last time, follows Jane’s list. I give the list pride of place, because the issues it raises are more important for the future of our art than any single performance event, and this first post of a new year seems an ideal time to ponder them. Jane says:

So here’s “the list.” Each of these eight items could probably receive its own article-length exploration, but this is my rough attempt to get some reasonably succinct thoughts down in writing. These are what I believe to be the largest systemic issues affecting the talent pipeline and talent development of young singers, which—to the extent that one believes there has been an overall decline in the level of quality of operatic performances over the past half century or so—are among the likely contributing factors to that decline. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, and I know of many singers who have combined world-class talent with painstaking work and their own unique humanity to achieve substantial and well-deserved career success. But as when speaking about any set of complex systemic issues, the effects of these macro-trends are seen in overall tendencies, at the population level, and don’t rule out the existence of truly excellent outliers (although they might make them rarer).

N. B.: Owing to a technical glitch, today’s post was originally published with the wrong time stamp, and in a form that did not include corrections made in the final draft. These have now been corrected. My apologies for the confusion.

I could have entered this post in my “MIA” series, following La Forza del destino, Faust, and, in a  way, Don Giovanni—operas not in the seasonal repertory, but beckoning for one reason or another. In this case, though, it is I who am missing in action. The recent event that beckoned most fetchingly was the first New York appearance of Teodor Currentzis with his Musica Aeterna forces from Perm (see the Don Giovanni posts, 6/22/18 and 7/6/18), offering several repetitions of Verdi’s Manzoni Requiem over at The Shed, and at only $40 per ticket. But the dates refused to fit, and to judge from reports of projections and of acoustics that required some electronic boosting, I would probably have found plenty in the way of impediment to satisfaction. Then too, I’d meant to catch one in the recent series of La Bohème performances at the Met. But the last one slipped by at a very intensive work time, so I was once again, wistfully, AWOL. I’d heard tell of some better Puccini singing from this year’s cast; also, that the third-act scrim had been removed, to some acoustical advantage. That had me musing on how much I’d always loved that third act, and how the scrim had played some role in that, and how unlikely it seemed that any piffling difference in the sound would make up for the loss in the vintage-theatre atmospheric effect. They waited till Zeffirelli was dead, I thought. It probably tore, and they just didn’t feel like mending it. And now that this Bohème is the last trace left (at least for us here in New York) of Zeffirelli near the top of his game, there are some things to say about his contribution, and of course about the singers and conductors he collaborated with. Fortunately, we can stay in touch with his Bohème and some of its singers, though at a remove, via video.

First, though, I cannot resist a small homage to the opera itself. It is now the single most standard piece of the standard repertory, the most popular of all operas. Sir Thomas Beecham, who heard a great deal about the performance of Puccini straight from that horse’s mouth, and who conducted one of the most highly regarded recordings of Bohème, observed: “If you were to ask nine operagoers out of ten, in any country of the world, whose operas they like best, as I have done, the answer would be Puccini—not Wagner or Mozart or Verdi—but Puccini. I think it is because he speaks to us personally, in a way we understand. This is the opinion of waiters, hotel managers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, anybody you like.”^(I) I do wonder if Sir Thomas really got around to a minimum of ten mundanely employed operagoers “in any country of the world,” but I don’t challenge his findings.

When the Metropolitan first mounted its present production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in 2007, I gave it a pass. I feared that this landmark work, so aesthetically fulfilling, dramatically gripping, and spiritually liberating if performed well, had already been dealt a mortal blow, at least locally, by the New York City Opera’s jab at it a few years earlier, directed by Martha Clarke and starring the falsettist Jochen Kowalski. Faced with the prospect of a fresh bout directed by the jokey choreographer Mark Morris, with another falsetto voice (David Daniels’) assigned to the passionate utterances of the title character, I didn’t really care to be witness to the knockout punch. And for reasons I can’t presently reconstruct, I missed an interim revival with Stephanie Blythe. This year, with the contralto Jamie Barton, whom I had not heard live, cast as Orfeo, I decided to give it a try.

This presentation was as close to a non-event as it is possible to come with the level of professional skill present at a major opera house. Still, it happened, and I was there (I saw the performance of Oct. 29). So, strictly for the record and before moving on to other things, this skeleton review:

Edition: 1762 unadorned, the hardest of all available choices to enliven—the most dependent on vivid music-making, riveting dramatic characterization, rapturous dancing, and evocative production.

Orchestra and conducting (Mark Wigglesworth, cond.): Underpowered for the house, bland and uncommitted, having neither the sharpness of attack and pungency of timbre of a good period ensemble nor the symphonic grandeur of a full, strongly led modern pit orchestra. Noticeably less present and alive than the similar grouping for Iphigénie en Tauride in 2007, under Louis Langrée.

Physical Production (Mark Morris, dir. & choreographer): Set (Allen Moyer, des.): For Acts 1 and 2 (the mourning, the descent, the Gates, Elysium—90 intermissionless minutes here), an ugly, multitiered metal structure that when deployed made more noise, relative to the music being played, than the notorious Lepage pile for Der Ring. On it: the chorus in seated rows, costumed in fancy period dress (Isaac Mizrahi, des.), as audience to what is “enacted” below. This audience said to include historically identifiable figures, but this not discernible from the front Balcony. Thus, the chorus of demons, shades, etc. not participants in the drama, though singing their assigned parts. A distancing device, a “perspective.” Below this, a semicircle of barren floor space. For Act 3 (the ascent, the reprieve and celebration), a slanting upward path on a stoney wall, with a barrier that conceals the performers’ bodies from waist down; then, as above.

Staging and “Personenregie“: A panto-choreo mélange of unremitting triviality. The members of the corps, dressed in contempo-cazh and tight little suits, scurry about, jump up and down, take movement-class lunges. Orfeo is given a few abstract signing gestures. Morris’s idiom was a somewhat better fit with Rameau’s Platée at the NYCO in 2000, when he at least had his own dancers to work with. But that opera is at best a moderately enjoyable piece of light entertainment, of about the same weight as, say, Anything Goes, but much older, and French, and with distinctly less memorable tunes.

There was once a syndicated tabloid columnist named Sidney Skolsky. He filled his two-or-three-times-weekly pieces with inside dope from the world of Hollywood, including certain items that didn’t necessarily elevate the personal reputations or professional judgment of some of its citizens, and always ended with “But don’t get me wrong—I love Hollywood.” Not wanting to be gotten wrong, and worried that some of you might take me for an anti-Porgy contrarian, I need to stipulate up front that I really do like Porgy and Bess, and I really am glad that the Metropolitan Opera has scored a badly needed smash hit with its new production of it. Yet, much as I like the opera I see and hear in my imagination, and enjoy many of its numbers along the way, it always somehow leaves me unfulfilled, sometimes even empty. On this occasion, it also had me feeling guilty, since the truth is that despite the presence of an abundance of talent and hard work, and commitment to putting the work over as a grand opera, I grew impatient and fidgety as the long evening unwound, and experienced some of that same emptiness at the close. So what I’m going to write here is not so much a review as a series of notes on Porgy and the production, mostly in a spirit of inquiry.

First, though, I must recommend to you the essay-review of the production by Joseph Horowitz in The American Scholar, along with his follow-ups in ArtsJournalBlogs, and the responses thereto. Horowitz is a great champion of the work, of Gershwin, and of the African-American seam in American music. His book “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess” is the best source I know on the genesis of the opera. The posts referred to above include (or provide links to) video and audio segments of Ruby Elzy (the original Serena), Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, John W. Bubbles (original Sportin’ Life), and Lawrence Tibbett singing Porgy excerpts, as well as eloquent written comments by the bass-baritone Kevin Deas (a veteran of many Porgy performances) on the necessity of playing the part as a cripple, as envisioned by the creators. And since Horowitz had a better time with the Met performance than I did, his remarks provide an alternate view of that, as well.

1. In my youth (preadolescence into early 20s), I loved Porgy unreservedly. But that was because I got to know its major “highlights” (and what a succession of songs!) through their first-ever recordings, the album of 78s issued by RCA Victor soon after the opera’s premiere at the Alvin Theatre. Recorded at New York’s Liederkranz Hall in three sessions in October of 1935, the album starred Tibbett and the Met soprano Helen Jepson, with a studio orchestra and chorus led in two of the sessions by the premiere production’s conductor, Alexander Smallens, and in the third (matinee day at the Alvin?) by Nathaniel Shilkret, a veteran Gershwinian and frequent Victor studio conductor. Gershwin supervised the sessions and authorized the results. Tibbett and Jepson sang the solos of all the principals (Porgy, Jake, Sportin’ Life; and Bess, Clara, Serena, respectively). Since Tibbett remains to this day the most compelling singeractor America has produced; the rather underrated Jepson (see my post of 1/4/19, MIA: Gounod’s “Faust”) sang quite beautifully; and since I didn’t yet know the show well enough to see anything wrong with the procedure, I simply went with the emotional power and atmosphere of the records, and took them for Porgy.

Owing to an unusual pileup of teaching obligations, I have re-scheduled today’s post, “Notes on Porgy,” to Sunday, Nov. 3. It examines the Gershwins’ and Heywards’ unique work, its problems of form and the controversies that often accompany it, in the light of the Metropolitan Opera’s ambitious new production. Apologies for the delay.

C.L.O.

I don’t find much time for trawling the net or scanning the social media. But I have friends, colleagues, students, and readers who do, and from several of them in a two-or-three-day period I heard of the dust-up referenced above, and the range of their reactions (outraged, fatalistic, gleeful, etc.) on a topic of such central interest to me was enough to pique curiosity, and then some. The Musical Director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has  been conducting master classes with a select group of young singers at the Juilliard School. His notions about vocal technique (or, to be more precise, his evident unawareness of the technical implications of some of his expressive preferences) came to the attention of a somewhat mysterious site called “This Is Opera.” I don’t know who’s behind this site. A couple of people told me it’s out of Croatia, a couple more that it’s not the work of a single person, but of several, in which case our new gender-woke imperative of using a plural pronoun for a single identity might be applicable. In any case, they is extremely impolite—so much so that some influential entity (presumably the Met, but perhaps Juilliard) exerted sufficient pressure on YouTube to have TIO’s initial assault taken down. A less discourteous version was then reinstated; but the reportedly lively thread of comment at slippeddisc.com (which I came to the party too late to view) was withdrawn. In a more thoroughly supported (but still strongly worded) article, Thomas Prochazka has taken up the subject on the Viennese site Der Merker, as part of his splendid ongoing series, Die Oper—Kritische Zeit fur eine Kunstform? ^(I)

At “This Is Opera,” they fires from the hip. In their manners-and-context-be-damned fashion, they’s incensed about the same devolutionary trends in operatic singing I’m concerned about—so I know how they feels. They are (returning to English) especially exercised on the failure to cultivate the chest register in female voices and the quality we call “core” in voices of both sexes, and they rag incessantly on the subject of “fake modern singing” vs. “real operatic singing.” They aren’t fussy about apples-and-oranges fairness. (Example: TIO shows us a video clip of Kristine Opolais singing the opening of “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” in the recent Met production of Manon Lescaut, and contrasts it with a recording of Virginia Zeani in the same brief passage—video vs. audio and, one could say, a restrained, inward interpretation, sung while contending with the little torture chamber of an inverted pyramid on the Met’s ridiculous set, vs. the emotionally effusive, borderline reckless, audio-only version of a latterday verista.) Nor are they always very selective with their illustrations. (Why, for example, would one choose short takes of the older Gigli ramming through some phrases, the full voice turning stiff and brittle, the once-ravishing mezza-voce into a mouthy croon, instead of an earlier sample? And however turned-on one may be by the sound of a Del Monaco high B-flat, why would he be one’s choice for any phrase from “O Paradiso“?) There’s a lot more in this vein, leaving TIO open to charges of cherry-picking, and sometimes with sour cherries. Also: fearless pronouncements look a lot less fearless when they’re anonymous.

In the early 1990s, I wrote several articles for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Some were tied to then-current live or recorded events (e.g., a piece on Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella; another on the VHS release of old Firestone Hour telecasts; another on two rising young tenors, Ben Heppner and Roberto Alagna), but a couple were lengthier essays that addressed the condition of opera as an artform. They at once summed up themes I had been working through in reviews and articles for a number of years, and prefigured some of the main lines of argument in my recent book, Opera as Opera.

At that time, the NYT entered into a contractual agreement with independent authors that sought to reserve to the Times all reproduction rights, including electronic ones, in perpetuity, with no further compensation to the author. When I resisted this for what I’m sure are self-evident reasons, Jim Oestreich, then the section’s music editor, was able to extend to me the apparently seldom-invoked “Joyce Carol Oates Clause”—named, obviously, for a resister with clout. This wasn’t actually a clause, but an omission of the usual blanket surrender of author’s rights. (That’s why, at least the last time I looked, although you can find these articles listed in the cumulative NYT index, you won’t find them available for perusal or download, even for a fee.) In effect, I sold to the Times, in the words we all used to type in the upper right-hand corner of Page 1 of any free-lance submission (3¢ a word for the pulps and Westerns!), “First North American Serial Rights Only.” According to that understanding, following the initial publication all rights revert to the author, in this case me. So while some publications I have written for (the Financial Times, Opera News, Musical America) are still up and running and would presumably seek to control materials they have published, even in the absence of any written agreement, and others (High Fidelity, Opus, Keynote, The Musical Newsletter) have long since ceased publication and may or may not still exist as legal entities, the status of these NYT articles is clear, thanks to the JCO Clause.  ^(I)

The combination of a nasty technical glitch involving lost copy and an underestimate of required writing time has made this post a full day late. My apologies, and thanks for your indulgence. An Opera as Opera-related note: on his site Der Merker Redaktion.com, Thomas Prochazka, who gave my book its very first review in July, 2018, has written a splendid article focusing on the necessity of unifying singing and acting into a single unit of operatic expression, with several references to the book’s arguments. (See Die Oper: Kritische Zeit für eine Kunstform? (III), July 12, 2019. For any readers who have reached at least the gleaning stage in German, Der Merker is a go-to site for informed opinion on operatic doings in Vienna and environs.

The all-but-total concealment of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas, now over a century old, occasions wonderment whenever an opportunity for re-assessment presents itself—”enigmatic” is a common description of the situation. I don’t think much deep thinking is needed to solve the enigma, but it is still remarkable that in an age when operas strong and weak from every day, month, and year of the artform’s timeline pop up in productions and subsequent recordings whether or not their requirements can be more than modestly suggested in performance, these works, true cornerstones of the international repertoire for three-quarters of a century, remain rarities. In over seventy years of operagoing in one of the former strongholds of grand opera, I have seen staged productions of two of Meyerbeer’s pieces (Le Prophète at the Met and, just recently, DInorah, où le Pardon de Ploërmel by one of our smaller companies, the Amore Opera) and concert presentations of two more (Il Crociato in Egitto, starring Beverly Sills, and L’Africana [sic], with Richard Tucker as Vasco. I’ve missed a local event or two over the years, but that is all.

For this post, I first thought of exploring the two Parisian grands opéras that took Meyerbeer’s standing from that of a promising rival of Rossini to that of master of all that he surveyed, Robert le diable (1831) and Les huguenots (1836). The premieres of these operas happen to bracket that of Halévy’s La Juive (1835), to which I devote many pages in Opera as Opera, and to teeter on the edge of important developments in singing technique (ditto). But as I began listening, I became aware that to do any kind of justice to the “enigma,” one of these works would more than suffice, and I chose Les huguenots as the richer in available materials, with a note to self to get back to Robert, Le Prophète, and L’Africaine before too long. The materials include two “complete” live recordings, a wealth of recorded extracts from the last couple of decades of Meyerbeerian triumph, and some items from the scholarly and performance-criticism literatures. For this last, I’ll be consulting George Bernard Shaw, who for all his Perfect Wagnerism was quite taken with Les huguenots and wrote with some frequency on its London revivals throughout his tenure as music critic. This still leaves much untouched, but is enough to lead us into the mysteries of the work, and, by extension, its all-but-vanished world.

Every so often, the subject presents itself again, even to those of us who approach opera primarily from a day-to-day, performance-oriented p.o.v.: the European/American sensibility gap. I’m not convinced that, in terms of the responses of the large majority of devotees, it’s as wide as it is made to appear in scholarly examination or journalistic report, but there’s no doubt that it exists, and that it affects attitudes toward both creation and performance. I sometimes have occasion here to address the performance aspects, since examples of European direction and design, including some of the heavy-duty conceptual variety, do come our way. But with respect to new creation, especially of the High Modernist sort (and most European work has been of that sort for a couple of lifetimes now), our soil has yielded little to the occasional scatterings of European seed.

The sensibility gap has a way of drifting back into consciousness in the operatic shoulder season of late spring, and so it has been this year, at least for me, as I considered what’s worthy of attention over the summer. Events like the long-awaited premiere of Gregory Kurtag’s Fin de partie (a setting of Beckett’s Endgame) at La Scala, or the air-land Operation Licht that hauled several days’-worth (but still not all!) of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s immense entity (opera? postopera?) into existence over in The Netherlands, aren’t on my beat. But, casting about among recent audio and video documents of Continental origin, I spied L’Invisible, a piece of potential interest on two counts: it is by a long-established High Modern composer of whom I should know more (Aribert Reimann), and is based on plays by a writer I have always found intriguing (Maurice Maeterlinck). This sounded like a good sensibility-gap test case, so I acquired the Oehms Classics recording based on L’Invisible‘s world premiere production (October, 2017, at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Donald Runnicles, cond.), and began to explore.

My only previous acquaintance with Reimann’s music was a stretch of the final scene of his Lear, included in the video set Autumn Journey, a retrospective on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who first sang the title role. (This extract is now online.) Though Lear wasn’t Reimann’s first opera, it was the one that jump-started his reputation as a composer (he is also a noted accompanist, especially in modern repertory), but he has written a number of others. They are all based on the work of serious writers (in addition to Shakespeare: Strindberg, Goll, Euripides, Kafka, Lorca, Grillparzer, and now Maeterlinck), and are thus said to belong to the genre of Litteraturoper. I have always found this a rather baffling category, first because it would seem to take in the overwhelming majority of all operas, at least from Mozart on, and second  because, in Reimann’s case, with the exception of Kafka’s The Castle, these sources are all plays—yet these plays are being referred to strictly as literature, and not as works for performance, so the term makes us wonder about the theatrical awareness of those who use it. Well, it’s only a category, after all, and where Maeterlinck is concerned, it does serve to remind us that, unless one is exceedingly old and was taken to see The Bluebird when exceedingly young, one has in all probability never encountered his plays—even Pelléas et Mélisande, the play—except on the page.