Today’s post concludes the article begun last week (published Nov. 29). If you missed Part One, I urge you to read it before proceeding to Part Two, below. The two constitute a continuous argument, but I felt that this consideration of the thought of the radical and influential operauteur Yuval Sharon, who challenges the fundamental assumptions of our artform but is working on some of its cornerstone works within its longstanding institutional structures, merited a stand-alone status.

Yuval/Time/Ambiguity, etc. Every so often, another one comes along—an inventive, ambitious, personally persuasive director of reformist bent whose work and ideas are far enough to one side of the operatic mainstream to earn him the status of enfant terrible, creative disruptor, or, in time, innovative thinker. These directors are talented and intelligent. Their critiques of whatever constitute the “traditional” ways of creating and presenting opera in the times of their flourishing are often entirely justified and keenly put. They frequently assert a sociopolitical motivation for their work, and as they progress beyond their artistic enfance, seek a spiritual connection to it as well, generally found in non-Western religious or mythic sources. But each has before him the problem that terribilité must be redefined in evermore radical terms, until his disruptions and innovations bring him to the boundary beyond which he isn’t really speaking of opera anymore. And such has been the absorption of successive versions of the terrible into the mainstream that we have reached that boundary, and the pretense of reforming within the artform as it has evolved must be dropped altogether.

That, at least, is the conclusion we must draw from A New Philosophy of Opera, by Yuval Sharon. He’s the latest director in a twisting line of descent that includes Peter Brook, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson, before we lose the trace amid the troops of auteurs that now occupy most of opera’s territory. And you have surely heard of him. He’s the fellow who directed La Bohème for the Detroit Opera with its acts played in reverse order and with an added character called The Wanderer, played by George Shirley, interrupting the music to call attention to choices Puccini made in his musical narrative, and who (take a deep breath now) with his own company, The Industry, created such events as Hopscotch, in which limos holding four ticket-buying passengers each plus musicians in residence (to each limo, that is), plus a puppet, tooled about Los Angeles following three separate routes (you had to buy into all three to take in the whole shebang), the performers playing and singing the while, with the music and words of several local composers and librettists, loosely related to the adventures of two characters from Julio Cortázar’s “anti-novel” Rayuela, before returning to a Central Hub where a secondary audience could follow the proceedings via onscreen streaming—a neat experience, I can imagine, for the handful of participants and audience-passengers, and to some degree for the Central Hub viewers, for whose sakes Sharon wangled the co-operation of L.A. authorities and the commitment of publicly accountable funds, and somehow managed to declare Hopscotch an anti-elitist event, at least in his own mind.

At least for some readers, this morning’s article did not post correctly, the text continuing unpaginated in email instead of going to the blog. We’re working to track this down. Meanwhile, here is a link directly to the blog post, properly paginated and footnoted. 

Apologies,

CLO 

Following his NPR program devoted to Marston’s 10-CD Lawrence Tibbett release, for which I wrote the booklet essay, Joseph Horowitz has posted an article, The Baritone as Democrat, in The American Scholar, here. In addition to a concise narrative of the great baritone’s life and career, with its unequalled “crossover” triumphs (a “Star of Stage, Screen, and Radio,” as the réclame went), Horowitz speculates intriguingly on how differently the course of opera in America might have run had the dream for which he fought (of an American repertory, and opera in translation) had been realized, and even if—as was once held plausible—he had succeeded to the artistic directorship of the Metropolitan Opera. Recommended.

I have decided to split this article into two posts, because I feel the second part, which deals with the radical director Yuval Sharon’s ideas and work about the nature of opera and its production (he will be staging Tristan und Isolde and the Ring for the Met beginning next season), as contained in his new book and in his Bayreuth production of Lohengrin, are best considered in a stand-alone context. Below, Part One.

The Met/Gelb/NYT. As with the 2023-24 season here at our local opera house, the present one is backloaded—most of what seems to invite critical attention falls late, and I have already offered my thoughts on Les contes d’Hoffmann. But there has been plenty to chew over since ’23-’24 staggered to a close with a revival of Madama Butterfly and a death-of-art production of Carmen (see Butterfly Revived. Carmen, Not, 5/24/24). The chewing began in mid-June, with a three-day volley of opera-related small-arms fire in the New York Times. On the 15th, Zachary Woolfe, the paper’s chief music critic, conducted a post-season survey (a half-page plus a column) that alternated artistic evaluation with box-office returns, special attention being given to the Met’s “swerve” toward contemporary opera in an effort to boost cratering attendance and lure younger and first-time ticket buyers. The article avoided anything definitive-sounding or alarmist, but the tone was of distinctly modified rapture on the artistic front and of sobering reportage on the audience-hunting one—no big game had been brought to ground.

The very next day, Joshua Barone contributed a bottom half-page (above-the-fold space being devoted to promo photos of the Intendants of the Staatsoper (Bogdan Roščic) and the Volksoper (Lotte de Beer), the latter posing dancily on the seatbacks of her auditorium) to how wonderful things are in Vienna, as indeed they are from the audience support p.o.v.—according to the article, typically 99.5-100% attendance at the Staatsoper, for many more productions and performances than the Met is currently managing.^(I) Artistically, Barone reports, Roščic’s kind of innovation involves a renewal of the core repertory, while de Beer’s is feminist and new-work-oriented. He does not paper over the Staatsoper’s administrative problems (see below), but the overall feel of his piece is positive. And the day after that, the NYT published a “Critic’s Notebook” article by Barone, an evaluation of Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s artistic leadership of the Met, with the emphasis on his work with the orchestra (a “mixed tenure . . . evident at recent shows,” ran the subhead) and on the limited portion of N-S’s élan vital that is available to the company amid his other commitments (he conducted only four of the company’s eighteen productions in ’23-’24). 

No presentation of Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (at least none that I have seen or heard tell of) has escaped the complications attendant on the opera’s gestation and birth. Those originate in the mass of materials the composer left for his unfinished work, continue with the choices made among them by scholars, directors, and conductors, and end with casting decisions. The long-standard performing edition came close to one sort of solution, largely through eliminating or simply passing over the most obvious contradictions, and made for a relatively tight, playable show that was satisfying if decently performed. The version revived by the Met this season goes far in the other direction, inviting back many of the complications and adding a few of its own. It makes for a baggy, musically uneven evening that would in best-scenario imaginings require a more consistently fulfilling level of performance to stay out of the doldrums.^(I)

The composer began serious work on the opera only in the late 1870s, trying to prepare it for projected productions that did not materialize. But he had been intrigued by the subject for nearly thirty years. Whether or not he’d known E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, either in his native German or his naturalized French, I don’t know—given their presence in the culture he grew up in, it’s hard to believe he had not. In any case, he had seen the play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on several of the tales and entitled Les contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann, in 1851, and had dreamed of an operatic adaptation ever since. For all those years, there’d been neither time nor reason to work on a realization of the dream. A German Jewish emigré to Paris in the riotous aftermath of the July Revolution of 1831, soon followed by a cholera epidemic, he’d first made his way with his cello, playing in the pit of the Opéra-Comique and then, with a combination of virtuosity, wit, and charm, delighting the patrons of the salons that were the route to social acceptance. Finding some success as a composer of incidental pieces and songs, he had won the license to open his original, tiny Bouffes Parisiens, where he had purveyed a mishmash of proto-operetta-ish skits and duets, pantomimes, and mélodrames—all restricted not only by the space but by licensing requirements to three or four characters—that eventually developed into dozens of whimsical one-act operettas, items of pure distraction for the theatres and habitués of the boulevards and visitors to the great international exhibitions. It wasn’t until 1858 that his breakthrough hit of Orphée aux Enfers began the string of full-length operettas, with their satirical brashness and greater musical and dramatic development, that both defined that genre and made his lasting reputation as its master.

Fellow devotees,

My article on this season’s Met revival of Les contes d’Hoffmann, originally scheduled for today, will be published on Monday, Oct. 28. I’ll be discussing the life and career of Jacques Offenbach; the music and dramaturgy of the opera itself; the choices to be made amongst the materials left at the time of the composer’s death, as sorted through by latterday scholarship; and all these in reference to the production and performances as seen and heard on Oct. 1.

CLO

“Keep trying, Conrad.” The words came to me across a few empty folding chairs as we exited the St. Regis Hotel ballroom on a November day in 1978. I had just chaired a panel on the training of opera singers at a Central Opera Service conference. The panel was a prestigious one, and two of its members, the soprano Patricia Brooks (” . . . our Schröder-Devrient,” as the director David Alden named her for her wonderful work with the NYCO in the ’60s) and the director and teacher Robert (“Bobby”) Lewis (the only alumnus of the famed Group Theatre to have much involved himself with opera and musical theatre), were personal choices of mine, with the intent of injecting a robust plug for the incorporation of serious acting technique into the operatic training curriculum. The discussion had been lively, questions and comments from the floor well taken, and the vibe in the room positive. Surely a successful little event. Yet the words “Keep trying.” They came from John Ludwig, whom I knew well, first as the General Manager of the Center Opera in Minneapolis, and later as the Executive Director of the National Opera Institute. We’d conversed many times. He’d read some of my articles, heard some of my speeches, and listened as I advocated for a better understanding among operafolk of what the study of modern acting principles could contribute to opera. In his wryly supportive tone was an understanding he was sure I shared: yes, people like the idea, it sounds good to them—but nothing much will come of it, because with the exceptions of a minority of the professionals present, they don’t really understand what I’m talking about, or what it would entail. They’re opera people; the music says it all; you’ll never get through. Still—keep trying.

And so I do. Just as I believe that the primary generating force behind the great E-19 maturation of our artform was its in-common dramatic narrative, rather than any of its significant musical developments (that is, the former drove the latter, more than the other way around), so I believe that the key to vitality in performance lies in contacting its dramatic sources. Opera exists when, and only when, performers commit sung theatrical actions. The action and the singing must arise from a common source, neither complete without the other. I have left “acting” in quotation marks to try to discourage thinking of it as a separate element. 

I know that for many opera devotees this is not familiar ground. There will be concepts and names for which I will try to provide context, but which some readers may consider inapplicable or even unwelcome to the operatic situation. I urge them to hear me out.    

I often hear people say that although operatic singing has admittedly been in decline for several decades, operatic acting, at least, has improved. And my first lazy response is a tentative, limited agreement. But then: How can that be? Since operatic acting is first of all a matter of dramatic expression by vocal and musical means, how can it have strengthened even as its primary component, singing, has weakened? Isn’t the most important thing we mean when we say that operatic singing has declined is, precisely, that it has lost much of its dramatic potency, in terms of force, nuance, and above all, passion? I think it is. So any perceived “improvement” must fall in the area of physical behavior. Or, to put it another way, of acting for the eye. Which in turn suggests that in the always-fluctuating sensory blend of the operatic experience, attention has been drawn away from the ear and toward the eye, and that a high aspiration, a key element of what I call the “modern acting sensibility” ^(I)as brought to bear on opera, has been abandoned. That aspiration is, or was: to create an indissoluble bond between body and voice, so that their actions arise from the same mental/visceral source, and are received by the audience as a single sensory experience. It is only if we separate the two, and then concentrate on the bodily one, that we can detect any “improvement” in operatic acting. When people speak of such an improvement, what they really mean is that it more closely resembles all the other acting they’re seeing, which for most people most of the time now means acting for the screen.

Performances of two canonical mainstays, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Bizet’s Carmen, marked the closing weeks of the Metropolitan’s 2023-24 season. The Butterfly was a revival of the 2006-07  production that initiated Peter Gelb’s tenure as the company’s General Director. Anthony Minghella is given original “production by” billing, with sets designed by Michael Levine. Carolyn Choa is succeeded by Paula Williams as director and choreographer, and the conductor is Xian Zhang, in her debut assignment. Carmen is a new production directed by Carrie Cracknell, an English theatre director, again with Michael Levine as designer, and with Diego Matheuz  conducting (also a company debut).

Most of the advance interest (including mine) in the return of Butterfly was in the assumption of the title role by Asmik Grigorian. This Lithuanian soprano has established herself with major roles (Salome, Lady Macbeth, Turandot, in addition to Cio-Cio-San) in some of the major European houses (the Bolshoi, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, etc.). She carries the opera gene: her mother sang leading roles in Baltic houses, and her father, Gegam, is remembered from his performances and recordings for the Mariinsky. She is an interesting artist, who gave a poised, insightful  performance of distinct profile in this revival of a stylistically queasy production. She abjured most of the text-and-tradition invitations to Asian mimicry that used to be de rigueur in favor of playing the woman, and I found her physical acting consistently absorbing once we were past Act 1. I am sure it registered tellingly on the broadcast video.

The voice, though, is of modest size and restricted span. It is attractive and steady, albeit pale in timbre, in its upper octave, but has no grounding at the bottom and not much body in the midrange. There is plenty of precedent for voices of lyric, or even lyric-coloratura, format in this part—it isn’t necessary to have the engulfing lirico spinto of Tebaldi or the penetrating dramatic soprano of Destinn to succeed in it, and indeed many of its most affecting moments are “small” moments. But they need to be conveyed by a voice with solidity in the lower and middle ranges and/or the technique and imagination to use peculiarly Italian registral blends to make peculiarly Italian inflectional points. Grigorian has neither such solidity nor such technique, so whether or not she has the imagination is moot, and for all her compelling work as an actress for the eye, there is very little, interpretively speaking, for the ear, apart from her efforts with dynamic shadings. Even those, while sensitively guided, are limited in their effect because she has so little wiggle room to play with. And there are things I simply don’t understand. Here is an obviously gifted woman, musical and dramatically intelligent, from an operatic family; yet either her training included no development of the lower register in her voice, or for some perverse reason she’s decided to ignore it. (I will give long odds that it was the former.) Then, once launched, she’s tackled some of the biggest roles of the repertoire short of true Heldensopran, and has been hired by world-class companies to sing them. I’ve seen a few clips of her Lady Macbeth and Turandot. Those roles are preposterous for her, however lovingly the camera receives her.

First, a small correction. In describing some of the highlights of the 1956-57 Metropolitan Opera season (see Callas, Part One, 3/2/24) and relying on memory, I mistakenly named the bass Gottlob Frick among the prominent German artists imported for that season’s Ring cycles. But he did not arrive until the cycles of 1961-62. Kurt Böhme was the principal bass of the ’56-’57 Ring.

And a reminder for anyone who may have missed my announcement of 3/21/24: Marston’s long-delayed 10-CD set of studio and broadcast recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, to which I contributed the booklet essay, is at last available. See the Marston website for ordering details.

In 2018, I placed La Forza del destino, one of Giuseppe Verdi’s late-middle-period masterpieces, in my series of MIA (“Missing in Action”) operas. After a longish absence, it had been scheduled for a new Metropolitan production that year. But it’s a big show, and owing to a shortage of dollars, it was canceled. So I wrote about audio and video productions of the 1950s, when both cash and singers of the kind Forza requires were in better supply. (See the posts of 1/12/18 and 1/27/18.) Now, despite further depletion of the former and no significant change in the quality of the latter over the ensuing six years, Forza has returned, after a fashion, in a new production directed by Mariusz Trelinski and conducted by Yannick Nézet- Séguin.

I wish there were a way to write out the simultaneity of operatic experience; that is, to convey the reception of the sights and sounds coming from without, jumbled with the communiques from within, the flashes of prior experience that glimmer constantly in the background of the new sights and sounds, and which, like flares, fitfully illumine their contours and qualities. There isn’t, though. One is forced to lay out these elements of experience for display, and then try to explain how their interrelationships do or don’t satisfy one’s longing for a wholeness. And much depends on the state of that prior knowledge, and on an awareness of how it has led to whatever beliefs and standards one brings to the new encounter. One of my frequent, highly informed correspondents recently wrote to me about a live regional performance she’d attended, of another 19th-Century masterwork. Well aware of the physical and financial limitations on her home company, she was more than willing to cut some slack in the matter of production choices, and was grateful that this one wasn’t of an extreme conceptual type. Still, it was displaced to the here-and-now, so though she enjoyed many aspects of it, she ” . . . remained annoyed at the timewarp, which just plays as stupid if one knows the libretto!” Yes. Also if one knows the music, the atmosphere, the set of cultural values, etc., that are of the work’s essence, none of which fit the time and place of the production or the society shown in it. Yet, though the directors of nearly all contemporary opera productions countenance exactly this stupidity—embrace it, in fact—they are not themselves stupid. They are adversarial, dedicated opponents of the very material they are interpreting, and they count on some combination of three states of mind in enough of their audience to forestall violent rioting: ignorance—lazy, willful, or native; intimidation in the face of the stupidity, tolerance of which is presumed to arise from insights elevated above anything that smacks of the literal or commonsensical; or (in a small but influential minority) actual agreement with the cultural replacement project underway.

Dear devotees: I am pleased to be able to announce that Marston Records’ 10-CD set devoted to the recordings of the great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett is at last ready for release, and that an hour-long program, heard on 435 NPR stations (link below) has been aired in connection with it. Since I contributed to both the set and the broadcast, I cannot review them. But I can briefly describe and (of course) recommend them.

The Marston release. The set, long delayed owing to complications that originated with the pandemic shutdown, comprises every side that Tibbett recorded during his long, exclusive relationship with RCA Victor, including unreleased alternate takes, plus a large selection of his radio and film recordings, and even a live recital from the Worcester Festival. It is by far the most inclusive gathering of Tibbett material ever released, and is up to Marston’s customarily high standards of restoration and presentation. Coming up on 75 years since his last Metropolitan performance, there is still a plausible case to be made for Tibbett as the greatest male American classical singer. He set a standard for the singing and acting of the major Verdi baritone roles (Simon Boccanegra, Iago, Rigoletto, Germont) that has not been surpassed. He championed the cause of American opera with Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson, Louis Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones, and others, and with Helen Jepson was the first to record the important solos and duets from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, with the composer in attendance. With his hundreds of radio broadcasts, early sound film appearances, and extensive recital tours, he penetrated the American popular culture as no other operatic artist before or since. In my 35,000-word essay, I place critical discussion of his recordings in an ongoing biographical context, and attempt to bring some further clarity to the causes of the vocal crisis that, though it did not end his career, sharply curtailed his effectiveness over its final decade. The set’s booklet also contains an introduction by Will Crutchfield and a wonderful trove of photos, some never before published. The set may be ordered now, and will ship before the end of the month—see the Marston website for details.

The NPR program. This is an episode in the long-running series More than Music, conceived and hosted by Joseph Horowitz. The series is devoted primarily to American music and the American classical music scene, including its black and indigenous influences, so Tibbett’s uniquely American story is a natural fit. The program presents some choice Tibbett recordings reflecting his broad artistic sympathies, alternating with discussion guided by its host, with observations from an intriguing quartet of guests: baritone Thomas Hampson, tenor George Shirley, author and NYT columnist John McWhorter, and myself. It was first broadcast on the morning of March 19, with times dependent on local stations’ schedules. The full program, along with Horowitz’s excellent article in artsjournal on Tibbett and our rapidly changing sensibilities, can be accessed here.

˜ ˜ ˜

NEXT TIME: Under the time pressures of my recent articles on Maria Callas, I neglected this usual end-of-post feature. So: my principal subject will be the Metropolitan’s new production of Verdi’s long-absent La Forza del destino, whose MIA status I first wrote about a little over six years ago. Has that status actually changed? Target date: Friday, April 19.

My review of the most frequently cited extrinsic factors in the early and pronounced decline of Maria Callas’ voice (see last week’s post) has left us uncertain as to what might or might not with any confidence be declared causative. But what about an intrinsic one? That is, might there be something inherent in the way she sang that could have been a significant contributing element, if not the sole determinant? We should remind ourselves that singing, like any other discipline (especially one with a strong physical component), is best learned when young, and not easily re-learned later. Once set, the laying-down of tracks, the engagement of a complex of co-ordinations in a very particular pattern organized for a very particular purpose, responds with confusion when asked to re-direct. So it is especially regrettable that we have not so much as a single sampling of her singing from her years in Athens, the years of intense advanced study and early professional forays. It’s always difficult to know what value to place on reviews and testimonials, even from professional observers, singers, or teachers, unless one has become very familiar with their knowledge, predilections, and motives. We may, though, draw at least tentative conclusions from an accumulation of such reports and their alignment (or not) with what we are able to hear for ourselves, via recordings from a few years later. There is a goodly collection of such reports sprinkled through the opening chapter of Michael Scott’s book, and I think that with all due caution we can conclude that Callas had from the beginning “you know, the big voice,” and that at times she drove it overly hard in the exclusively spinto-to-dramatic roles she sang (no others were on offer). She was also evidently a very quick learner who had already acquired crack musicianship, and was in possession of enough florid capacity and range to embrace the challenging big-but-mobile Weber and Beethoven arias she essayed. The sopracuti were not really on display in her recital and concert programs, unless they poked through in the “Bel raggio lusinghier” or a Trovatore aria she sometimes programmed (which one is unspecified).

It is also difficult to know what has passed between teacher and pupil, not necessarily with respect to the teacher’s “method” or principles or declared goals, or with the pupil’s talent and dedication to them, but with respect to what has really been absorbed into the pupil’s network of reflexive activations at the functional level of technique I spoke of earlier. When Callas auditioned for lessons with the distinguished coloratura Elvira de Hidalgo in 1939, the latter heard “a violent cascade of sound . . . dramatic and moving;” it was as if she had been “waiting for that voice for a very long time.” In other words, there was already extraordinary material to hand, many tracks already laid down from this 15-year-old’s previous study, from her ambition and her imagination, her obsessive silent singing. Still, at that age the imprints are yet fresh, and more easily re-routed. It is clear that in Callas’ five years of work with de Hidalgo, at least two things were emphasized. One was the development of both ends of the range, but in particular the lower end by means of the chest register, which de Hidalgo herself, in company with all the Southern European high sopranos of her day, deployed. (We can hear it in especially enlivening form on her zarzuela recordings.) True, Callas was at the age where that function is emerging anyway, but de Hidalgo unquestionably summoned it and cultivated its uses; Callas herself referred to this. The second was mastery, in the form of an infinitely repeatable precision of pitch and rhythm, in music demanding extremes of velocity and flexibility, including elaborate embellishment—which meant, first and foremost, music of Italian Romantic styles. (Mozart and Handel call equally upon that mastery, but the former was only lightly engaged by Callas, and the latter not at all, save for a lonely outing of “Care selve.“)^(I) Obviously, Callas’ singing reflected both these emphases. But the critical question with the chest register (apart from its very existence, at issue in contemporary pedagogy) is what working relationship it forms with the two-thirds-to-three-quarters of the female range lying above it. And the critical question with the time-honored methods of mastering velocity and flexibility, assuming they have been well taught and well learned, is whether or not the teaching and learning of them has remained congruent with the essentials of strength and balance in the given voice. Those methods, enshrined in traditional progressions of exercises, belong to the executional level of technique. In and of themselves, they have but a fortuitous agreement with functional requirements, and even when they are to the keenest of perceptions successful, they are replete with opportunities for the kinds of unrecognized compensations, or overrides, I referred to earlier.