REMINDER: Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 in the Marc Scorca Auditorium of Opera America, 330 Seventh Avenue, New York City, I’ll be reading from “Opera as Opera,” conversing with Marc Scorca himself about aspects of the book and the operatic scene, and following with a Q & A session. I hope to see many New York area readers and devotees then!

 In the mid-1950s, I worked for a couple of years as a secretary (or “male secretary,” as it was customarily named) in the travel trade, for Thomas Cook & Son. Those were the twilight years of the “Cook’s Tour” company as the more or less royally designated booker for the imperium on which the sun never set. The office atmosphere was neo-Dickensian, with pay scale to match, and my position next-to-bottom rung. But there were some nice end-of-week parties, at which the Basic Black dresses, bow ties, seersucker suits and ice-cream jackets created a sort of penniless glamour—or, for reasons about to become clear, what I might call Threepenny Glamour.

At these parties, music was always playing—monophonic LPs, or—in some instances still—78s, on whatever console or low-hi-fi component rig the evening’s host/ess could afford. This being a travel-bum crowd, the repertoire was predominantly from across the pond. Charles Trenet,  Germaine Montero, and Bea Lillie were big. But more often than not, prime playing time was given to Noel Coward (The Las Vegas Album) and Lotte Lenya (the Berlin Theatre Songs album). They were not taken as mere background music (there was Mantovani for that). Folks stopped chatting, gathered round, and followed. They knew the words, they knew the tunes. Newcomers were initiated, and soon joined in the unison choruses at the payoff lines of “In a Bar on the Piccola Marina,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” or of “Surabaya Johnny,” the “Alabama Song,” or “Pirate Jenny.” Coward had for some years been in somewhat the same condition as the Empire itself, but was now revived for one more go-round by his brilliant nightclub appearances. Lenya carried the guidon for a culture that actually bore the same time stamp as Coward’s, but was to us by way of discovery, old/new, rebellious/decadent. Coward singing Coward and Lenya singing Weill may seem a very odd pairing. But they had in common inimitable personalities, a mastery of cabaret craft, and a tone of world-weariness that suggested past excitements now faded, old wisdoms that were slipping away.

One of the three distinct Weills, Weill the Third, had already been known to us. That was the Weill of the American musicals and the hit songs they birthed (“September Song,” “Speak Low,” and others); of Down in the Valley, the brief American-style Schuloper that wedded an operatic parable to the folk-music movement of the time; and of Street Scene, Weill’s operatic adaptation of Elmer Rice’s play, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, that ran on Broadway for 148 performances. But now Lenya, the composer’s widow, carried the torch for Weill the Second, first via the hit production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de Lys and its cast album, then with the above-noted LP, and then, at least for us in New York, through a long series of performance events: I recall a Weill evening at the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, with Threepenny in its Blitzstein translation; a full-blown concert performance in German at Carnegie Hall that brought us Ludwig Donath and Polyna Stoska as the Peachums^(I); and The Seven Deadly Sins at the New York City Ballet, with Balanchine the choreographer, as he had been at the work’s premiere (Paris, 1933). The New York City Opera staged Threepenny, in German, rather ponderously and in too large a theatre, with Martha Schlamme as Jenny and Kurt Kasznar as Macheath. And along the way, there were the superb complete original-language recordings on Columbia (Philips) of Die Dreigroschenoper and a work previously unknown to most of us except through one of its numbers, the aforementioned “Alabama Song”—Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). All this was very much driven by the stardom of Lenya, and enabled by the presence of the same emigré generation that also formed a core audience for the big-business years of Lieder singing here.

The main subject of today’s post is the adaptation of Carmen made by Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 for an all-black cast, as revived by the Classic Stage Company here in New York for a run that has just ended. ^(I)First, though, I can’t resist bringing you a brief coda to the discussion of keyboard continuo playing we’ve had running over the last three posts (q.v.). Piano maven Gregor Benko called our conversation to the attention of his friend and colleague Frank Cooper, a retired professor, harpsichord collector, and expert in “harpsichordiana.” Prof. Cooper comments as follows:

“Missing from this highly informed exchange is the instrument itself which was used in all Italian opera houses and is depicted in the pits of some other countries—the thinly constructed Italian harpsichords made from cedar, with no lids to aim their product. Voiced properly, they radiate sound instantly, brightly, with pronounced ictus and rapid decay. Hence, they impart bite to the rhythmic impulse of the ensemble, give the pitches clearly, and thus are maximally utilitarian. They invite ornamentation to keep the sound alive—thus helping pitches to aid the singers who, in Baroque and Classical operas, sang from close to the lip of the stage and straight at the audience. Second best are early Flemish and German types; least best, the ubiquitous 18th Century French models with their suave sophistication. Now they do get lost as continuo instruments in pits. Chances overall for clarity come from so-called ‘authentic’ instrument ensembles for obvious reasons. Leather-plectra-ed Pleyels, Neuperts, Sperrhakes and their like in the once-modern vein were virtually inaudible without amplification against modern instrumental ensembles.”

To which Will Crutchfield responded:

“Every word [of Prof. Cooper’s commentary] is exactly right. He is talking about harpsichords, and describing, in much more specific detail, the types I was referring to in my very first answer about Don Giovanni. [At the Purchase performances of Mayr’s Medea and Rossini’s Tancredi] we were playing not a harpsichord but a piano, a replica of I can’t recall what original—I think it’s Viennese and circa 1800. We call such things fortepianos today. But that’s an arbitrary term to make a useful modern distinction. “Pianoforte” and “fortepiano” were synonymous alternatives at the time, and since the world settled on the former, the latter was revived when people wanted simply to describe an early version of the thing. The relevant point is that it can play either forte or piano depending on the physical force applied by the player, which is exactly what a harpsichord doesn’t do. On harpsichord the player creates more volume by throwing stops and playing a greater quantity of notes.

“‘Fortepianos’ also vary in strength. Ours wouldn’t be loud enough for playing any version of a concerto, but is very well suited to recit and continuo playing, and playing whatever in a living room.”

SAVE THE DATE!—For all who are in the New York City area: On Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 PM, I will be reading from my book, Opera as Opera/The State of the Art, in Marc Scorca Hall at the HQ of Opera America, 330 Seventh Avenue, NYC. The reading will be followed by a conversation with Marc Scorca, OA’s longtime CEO, and then by a Q & A session. This will be an evening that should interest all professionals and devotees alike. I will of course be posting reminders—but enter this in your event calendar now!

And now to the subjects at hand. You may recall that in my Don Giovanni articles (June 22 and July 6), one of the topics that reared its head was the function of the keyboard instrument. I took special note of the recitativo secco accompaniments as rendered on a modern piano in old Metropolitan Opera and Salzburg Festival performances under Bruno Walter (with the maestro himself, I am told, tickling the ivories), and the much more perfunctory ones, by an unidentified player, on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival recording under Fritz Busch. And I contrasted this with the latterday performance-practice employment of any of several keyboard instruments (plus, in many cases, a low-string continuo instrument), and in particular the highly elaborated uses—sometimes participatory, sometimes ornamental—of the fortepiano in the Musica Aeterna recording led by Teodor Currentzis.

Among the reader responses to these posts was a particularly edifying one from Will Crutchfield, who has rare expertise in these matters, and my exchanges with him were extended by my attendance at a performance of Mayr’s Medea in Corinto by his Teatro Nuovo company (a bit on that  below). In his first commentary, Will picked up on three points contained in my posts. The first was my observation that the harpsichord requires amplification from the orchestra pits of our large theatres. I had based this on experience: at several performances of operas requiring continuo at the Met or the NY State (now Koch) Theatre, I had made my suspicious way down to the edge of the pit at intermission to eyeball the situation (once, this necessitated taking the elevator down four levels from the  Met Balcony), and on every one of those occasions, there was the microphone, its little water-moccasin head a-grin, set up alongside the keyboard. I know many operaphiles will say “Who cares, so long as the balance is right?”, and pragmatically speaking they would be on solid ground. But the amplification of any performance element in music written for acoustical instruments gets my slippery-slope goat. In any case, here’s what Will said:

“First, harpsichord does not need miking, even in a big theater, if it is a strong instrument with appropriate registrations available, favorably placed for acoustics, and played by someone who really knows how to get sound out of it.

“Also, we really have no idea whether Mozart’s operas were done with plucked instruments or what we now call ‘fortepianos,’ because the noun used in rosters and pay-sheets was almost always ‘cembalo,’ which is generic—it describes a function, not an instrument. Given the transitions in progress at the time, probably mostly hammers, not quills, by the time of the Da Ponte operas. (But meanwhile people did not necessarily rush to throw out an instrument that was holding up—Beethoven’s cello sonatas were published as for ‘pianoforte or harpsichord.’)”

˜ ˜ ˜

There’s nothing to really argue over here; good information, and I have no “alternative facts” to hand. I’d only note with respect to miking that I guess I’m still waiting for all those “ifs” to fall into place. (I can always go back to my in-your-face Wanda Landowska-with-RCA-engineer recordings.) And as I timidly noted in Don Giovanni, Part 1, and without plugging for a re-retrenchment, the modern piano requires none of the “ifs” except the strong player. Surely that’s the reason it came into use? That, and as with all the other arguable, but broadly accepted, improvements in orchestral instruments throughout the 19th Century, the fact that many people listened and said “Oh, that’s a more beautiful tone”?

As I noted at the end of Don Giovanni 2 (July 6), I’ve been getting questions and comments  from obviously well-informed readers that call for further elaboration or clarification. This happens especially when I write about vocal technique, and it reached peak intensity when I wrote about two ascendant stars, Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko (see the post of May 25). Some of these responses come from readers who are knowledgeable about singing and singers but are not  voice professionals, and aren’t necessarily familiar with the lingua franca of singers and pedagogues—among whom, I should note, there is by no means universal agreement on the interpretation of many terms. Others come from readers who are professionally involved with voice, but are either confused by or in disagreement with my way of talking about what we’re all hearing—either they hear differently, or they hear as I do but differ with my analysis. And finally, there can be puzzlement over my sometimes idiosyncratic syntax, or with neologisms I invent when I think there is no standard word, or only an imprecise word, for what I mean. So today I will address some of these questions, and will append a little glossary of my own usages. Some of these last I have so far avoided here. But I use them in Opera as Opera, and will be referencing them in posts from time to time.

It is one of my ambitions to direct more readers’ attention to what I call functional hearing, to how voices are put together and how they work, and to the causative relationship of vocal function to vocal aesthetics. That would lead to a richer understanding, to less misapplied enthusiasm, greater appreciation of true expertise, and more informed discussion and argumentation about singing—all, it seems to me, desirable for the health of our artform. So I’m grateful for questioning that pushes me to be as clear as possible on the subject. The first series of inquiries comes from a credentialed correspondent I’ll call Reader One. He has handily put some of the terms in bold face. I’ve edited a bit. Since he quotes directly from the Kaufmann/Netrebko post, I suggest reference to that for context.

1) Q: ” . . . the fundamental, structural parts of technique, not the pretty artifacts” (pretty artifacts–would these be coloratura, trills etc.?).

A: Yes, exactly. But I intend the term to extend to almost everything we call “effects”—even the messa di voce, for instance, and particularly the diminuendo phase of it, or the suspended pp high note, which, especially in early Romantic writing, have become signature interpretive gestures, to the point of tedium in voices of no great presence or timbral interest to begin with. They are all legitimate technical accomplishments, but what one has to keep in mind is that they can sometimes be executed by voices that are actually quite out of balance, seriously constricted, or incompletely developed, and are not always as indicative of “good technique” as they may seem. Firm, even tone, with undistorted vowels and no noticeable weaknesses up and down the range, is a better indicator than flashy, sexy gestures, no matter the voice type.

In Part 1 (June 22, q.v.), I wrote about two representations of Don Giovanni—the video of the 2011 La Scala production and the 1942 Metropolitan Opera broadcast (audio only)—musing the while on the very different operatic worlds they evoke, on the eye-dominant vs. ear-dominant routes they take into the receptor’s sensorium, and on my own experience of coming to love and revere this work, as contrasted with that of a young person of the Here and Now. Today, I’ll be reporting my responses to another Now-and-Then pairing, one that seems to offer a more logical comparison of audio-only like with like but which, partly for that very reason, has provided an even more graphic illustration of shape-shiftings in the operatic universe. In both these examples, the work gains admittance by ear, where it summons mind’s-eye visions of the drama’s progress. Or, perhaps, not.

I append this last phrase because of an observation made by Teodor Currentzis, the maestro  of the Now half of today’s pairing. In a conversation with a well-versed, strangely anonymous interlocutor (himself?) that is included in the bound package, at one point he says first that he believes Don Giovanni has been less well conducted on records than the other Mozart operas, and then that it is “a difficult opera even to listen to on a recording.”  When Alter Ego asks why, Currentzis answers (and I think I must give him some room here): “Because the listener is so drawn into this captivating plot that it’s very difficult to follow the action of the music itself. It almost is overly theatrical . . . And while we are drawn into the drama, we miss all the musical detail. Don Giovanni is a monumental piece, but it is full of exquisite detail and orchestral colours.” Reading this, I think: “Currentzis is obviously a terrifically smart fellow, and truly devoted to his mission. In his dialogue with Alter Ego, he says many insightful, though eminently arguable, things. But I find myself wondering if he thinks that in this or any opera, the aesthetic should be brought forward at the expense of the dramatic? And whence does he believe the music comes—exquisite detail and orchestral colors included—if not from the telling of the story?” I also reflect that I have never found Don Giovanni at all difficult to listen to on a recording, where it is my favorite Mozart opera, just as it is in the theatre.

But, not to play point-scoring games with an absent opponent, I tell myself that what he must mean is that recording is the ideal medium with which to focus our attention on things we often miss, and that he has a particular view of what those might be. Surely he can’t mean that we shouldn’t become involved in the story, but rather that the story will emerge in different guise if our attention is re-directed in accordance with what he’s hearing. To do this, he fashions a performance that seeks to draw us in close up, so that the ear must lean in with unbroken concentration, rather as ours did to track the suspense of radio serials in the AM-only, monophonic days of yore. And as then, the times we can kick back and relax, receive the performance without straining,  are when the theme music or the commercial jingle comes up strong—which is to say, when the orchestra asserts itself. But for longish stretches here, it’s as if, even as the Lone Ranger and Tonto are exchanging key plot-and-situation points sotto voce (“S-s-s-h—he’s behind that rock, over there”), the William Tell overture keeps on playing. And we do love the William Tell overture, but what was that he said?

The latest on “Opera as Opera”: We are promised a shipping date of July 16. Full info on ordering, including pre-orders, will be posted here and on the “Opera as Opera” page of my website within a few days. 

I recently laid out a pocketful of change for the DVDs of the Dec., 2011 performance of Don Giovanni at La Scala. I intended it mostly as catch-up listening/viewing on Anna Netrebko, in connection with my reactions to her Tosca (see my post of May 25), but didn’t get around to it. I also hadn’t listened yet to an older purchase, the Naxos Immortal Performances CD restoration of the March, 1942 broadcast of D.G. from the Metropolitan, the LPs of which I’d first heard upon their first release on Eddie Smith’s Golden Age of Opera label in the late ’50s, and had referred to periodically ever since. And I decided that, with D.G. on the mind, I would indulge a curiosity about the 2016 studio version emanating from the P. I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre of Perm, the final installment of that company’s recorded Mozart/Da Ponte cycle.

Knowing that, whatever they might contain, the 2010s representations would give views of the work radically different from that of the Met in the 1940s, I thought about the experience of a young person coming to this Top Ten opera now in contrast with my own early familiarization with it, conditioned by Met performances similar to the 1942 airing and by the only complete recording then in existence, a studio version on 23 78-rpm discs in three volumes, based on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival production. And having learned by now that my style of thinking and writing is insufficiently Hemingwayesque to explore these examples in a single post, I’ve decided on a two-part article, with the Met and La Scala up for consideration today, Glyndebourne and Perm two weeks hence. It’ll be a trip, I’m sure, but possibly a trip without a destination, because that is in the nature of the times.

The Met performance is conducted by Bruno Walter and stars Ezio Pinza—a collaboration quite worth a few words of its own. They were close in many ways. They first worked together at the 1934 Salzburg Festival, Walter already long established as one of Europe’s most important symphonic and operatic conductors, and Pinza as the Metropolitan’s leading basso. (It had been for him, in fact, that Gatti-Casazza, burned at the box office by previous Mozart projects, had restored Don Giovanni to the repertory in 1929 after a 21-year absence. And it was because of Pinza’s vocal and personal magnetism that the Don—and later Figaro—became for many years the property of basses and bass-baritones, rather than of baritones.) Walter worked with Pinza to reconfigure his portrayal of the Don, nudging him toward the the embodiment of “a magnetic rogue,” rather than a ” conquering male.” ^(I) After the big success of the 1934 production, D.G. stayed in the Salzburg repertory, with Walter always the conductor and Pinza the Don, except for one season, when Mariano Stabile took the role. (A recording of the 1937 revival survives, though barely; we may take a sideways glance at it, too.) In Bruno Walter, Pinza felt he had found a conductor worthy of the respect he had held for Toscanini—”but neither distant nor harsh”. Moreover, Pinza and Walter’s younger daughter, Greta, both in much-deteriorated marriages, fell in love and appeared headed for a marriage of their own, very much with Walter’s blessing. Then Greta was shot by her husband in a murder/suicide. The bond between conductor and his could-have-been son-in-law remained strong till Pinza’s death in 1957.

The latest on Opera as Opera: The print run is starting as I write, and a final production schedule (of three weeks or less, I’m told) should be forthcoming this very day. If you’re reading this, you’ll be among the first to be told.

As I get back to this blog-within-a blog devoted to exploring all the ways in which today’s young singers start their formal training in a quite different state-of-being than that of earlier generations, I pause to contemplate the next item on the docket and am struck anew by the apparent futility of discussing any single factor independent of a thousand others, and by the tension between working insights and cultural overview.

In my last post, I described the present vocal condition of two of our most gifted artists in largely technical terms—a natural emphasis for an author involved with singing from both a practical pedagogic viewpoint and a theoretical one. The most extended and thoughtful response I received came from a  correspondent who’s been reading along pretty much since Osborne on Opera‘s inception, obviously interested in what I have to say, yet also, perhaps, a trifle impatient with my attempts to analyze cause. This correspondent hears all the things I’m describing, but believes they are largely symptoms of a more general sociocultural malaise. After citing the impact of the internationalization of performance on the directness of communication through words, he goes on to outline—quite accurately, I should say—the cultural breakdown of Western civilization (a breakdown broad enough and deep enough, I think, to merit “civilizational” status) through the horrendous half-century of the two World Wars. Referring to W. H. Auden’s perception of opera as an expression of liberal humanism (W.H.A: “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”), he proposes that ” . . . something was finally dismantled in the human spirit by W.W. II,” and that liberal humanism is, effectively, dead.^(I)

I second all my reader’s arguments, and elaborate on them in my book. Indeed, I believe an awareness of this overarching reality hangs over opera’s own view of itself and its function in society. It is revealed in the grasping after some new thing to sing about (and how to sing about it) among our composers and librettists, in the way performers think about themselves and their careers, and in the otherwise inexplicable expressions of some of our most intellectually sophisticated directors. (It is absolutely unavoidable and right for the latter, as citizen-artists, to have the awareness, and absolutely wrong for them to turn it into the basis for adversarial critique while interpreting masterworks grounded in the now presumably lost sensibility.)

Breaking News:  Opera as Opera is now in production, and release date will be announced momentarily. 

I’m not interested in stars. Don’t care about divas and divos, the fashion shoot, the change of gown after intermission, the watch endorsements, the awards, the Pavlovian standing ovations. In fact, I recoil at it all, and need to steady my critical self to guard against penalizing the talented men and women caught up in, lending themselves to, embracing or resisting (and how am I to know how much of which?) these confessions of decadence. I am, however, deeply and daily interested in the nature and progress of talent, in its response to celebrity, and in its survival—in the things that, back in space and time, gave birth to the stars. Often, the fabrications of stardom reach their peak just as the supernova is about to turn into a red dwarf. We who have invested some of our spiritual capital, our resources of thankfulness, in sightings of rare brilliance live in oft-taught apprehension of such transits, and in hope of their postponement.

In opera, the progress of talent is inextricable from the progress of voice—it’s in the nature of a given instrument, its limitations, and how it is used over time. For voice is as voice does. So both its artistic consummation and its longevity depend not solely on good or bad fortune, but on accurate assessment of that instrument, those limitations, and that usage. In other words, on a stubborn cleaving to realities amid the fabrications. Here in New York, we have just had intriguing demonstrations of evolving realities from the two singers who, above all others, we might choose as ideal exemplars of the consummation/survival progression in our present operatic world. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann have both given us some of those sightings of rare brilliance. Both have, to this point, endured in spite of course settings that standard wisdom would warn against, and as of the moment there is no sign that either will fight shy of looming perils: they are together projected for Turandot at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2021, presumably at the behest of impresaria Cecilia Bartoli, whose own judgment in such matters I discussed in relation to Norma (see my post of Nov. 24, 2017).

Poor sense about role selection takes two forms. In the first, the singer takes on a role unsuited in range or calibre or temperament to his or her voice, but deploys good sense and relatively impregnable technique to play within bounds; professionals and connoisseurs may question and admonish, but the singer stays safe, and only the audience is penalized. In the second, the artist makes the same miscalculation but the technique proves something short of impregnable. Then audience and singer both suffer. This second form is, regrettably, the more common of the two. But the first does occur. Netrebko herself (to cite an example I can attest to from live experience) gave us her Lady Macbeth and seemed to incur no immediate consequences. Kaufmann, whose earliest professional tracing I know of is the much-viewed  “Un aura amorosa” from the Piccola Scala in 1998 (light-voiced and uneventful), has now run his trial half-marathon as Tristan, and his instrument is still functional. (See the post of April 26, whose evaluation I’ll let stand as far as it goes. But I go further, below.) And Netrebko, whom I first heard almost exactly twenty years ago in the lyric-coloratura writing of Glinka’s Lyudmilla, has taken her leap as Tosca.

Please take a look at the new “Opera as Opera” page on my website, and watch for further announcements very soon for publication details! 

Toward the end of a season in which I’ve devoted most of my attention to operas of the canon in repertory revivals, it’s been good to see an uptick on the performance thermometer of two Verdi operas, Il Trovatore and Luisa Miller. The scheduling of these works, especially in holdover productions, will never make news, and these days may get us a good scolding from the relevance scouts. But evenings like these are still the bread-and-butter experience—indeed the desired experience—of a large portion of the opera audience, and how far they rise above the grind-it-out level, season-in, season-out, is one determinant of a repertory institution’s survival prospects. It also happens that while the casting of both operas had some happy spots, the overall impression it conveyed of the state of big-opera vocality was sufficiently concordant with observations I’ve made throughout the year to give us grounds for some generalizations on that central topic.

Some of the improvement over the last efforts I’d seen with these pieces (in the same productions) was in the pit. In Il Trovatore (the performance of Jan. 30), the orchestra played with more consistent spark and alertness for Marco Armiliato than it had for Riccardo Frizza on the last go-round, or than it had earlier in this season for Carlo Rizzi in Norma or Emmanuel Villaume in Thaïs. There were several lacunae at points marked as fermatas over empty bars (i.e., dramatic pauses that didn’t hold), but since these all involved the Leonora, Jennifer Rowley, and she had stepped into the role when Maria Agresta cancelled the run, I decided to put them down to insufficient rehearsal and a soprano with a lot else on her mind. ^(I) Otherwise, while this Troubadour could at times have used more romantic shading, it at least chugged along with enough pep and precision to give basic satisfaction. It didn’t sound tired.

The Luisa, too (on April 18), had more orchestral presence, more thrust and parry, than Gianandrea Noseda had given it a few seasons back, and I was happy to thereby revise upward my estimation of Bertrand de Billy, whom I’d formerly heard live only in French operas (Carmen, sprightly and underfed;  Faust, somewhat better; but with Roméo, back to the Comique Syndrome). Luisa, with its superb, taut sinfonia and its intermittently inspired, easily derailed progression of scenes, needs a good pulling-together, and de Billy obliged. Thus, given the superb playing mechanics of the Met orchestra, both these works had sturdy repertory underpinnings.

I should have foreseen the inescapable: just as Italo Montemezzi’s once-exalted, now commonly disrespected L’Amore dei tre re came wafting in on wings of wishfulness fanned by its few surviving cultist followers, and landed, for the first time in more than 35 years, in a production by the New York City Opera at the Rose Theatre, the Fates decreed that it open on the night following a  concert presentation of Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde by the BSO at Carnegie Hall, which had blown into town on a gale of expectation surrounding Jonas Kaufmann’s first stab at a big chunk of the male title role. For Montemezzi’s compact melodrama has always been tagged as one of “Tristan’s Children” (the title of the germane chapter in Alan Mallach’s fine “Autumn of Italian Opera”), setting it thereby to an Oedipal struggle that no work can reasonably hope to win.

Yet it was the champions of this opera, including musicians and critics of high standing, who themselves first labelled it an “Italian Tristan,” and the moniker is understandable, however overblown. Dramatically, L’Amore posits the Tristan situation with one variant—the princess who is the female partner of the meant-for-each-other couple is unwillingly married to the scion of the conquering tribe’s First Family, not his father (L’Amore) or uncle (Tristan). It is the most thoroughly through-written score of any Italian opera written up to that time that I can think of, and though its vocal line is often rewarding and always singable, its music is for long stretches driven by the orchestra, with some use of Leitmotivic devices. Its plot turns around a long Act 2 erotic encounter that carries the lovers into an otherworldly state on cushions of chromatic musical language marked by richly orchestrated interludes and the call of a distant voice. The old “king” (a baron, but the difference is academic) is in this case actually, not metaphorically, blind. And this last calls to mind another opera wherein a sightless old king is father to a foreign princess’s husband, and to which Montemezzi’s has often been compared—Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

When I reviewed the release of the RCA Victor recording of L’Amore, ^(I) I wrote that “The parallels with Maeterlinck’s Pélleas are either uncanny or just plain canny.” Note that I was referring to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas, not Debussy’s, because I was comparing it with Montemezzi’s source, a play by Sem Benelli, and one of the parallels I was talking about is that both Montemezzi and Debussy set their plays directly into sung form with little or no “opera-izing” alteration, a procedure only then becoming at all common. Concerning the plot-and-character likenesses, I said: “We have a beautiful young princess, living in a grim castle with kings of another race, married to one and watched by the aged father. Her true love is a young man of her own temperament; there is a sense of shared childhood between them. In a central position is a scene showing the princess in a tower, with her lover imploring from below; at the denouement, with the antagonist poised to surprise the lovers in a violent manner, the young man cries ‘Your mouth, your mouth!’ In the final scene, the princess lies abed, surrounded first by mourners of the realm, then by the surviving kings.” These similarities easily clear the Funny Coincidences bar, and the synchronicities line up, as well. (Play/opera premieres: Pelléas 1892/1902; L’Amore 1910/1913. Maeterlinck was by the latter date at the height of his considerable standing, and while Benelli is commonly considered a sort of poor man’s d’Annunzio, I’d nominate Maeterlinck as a likely strong second influence.)