Dear devotees:

Owing to an apparent defect in the publishing function, many readers did not receive my post of Friday, January 27, entitled Fedora!? It is up and running on the site, but for convenience, here is a link.

I always appreciate notifications of non-receipt following the announced date of a posting. We’re trying to track what may have caused the glitch. Thanks for your patience.

CLO 

In its search for works that will hold the attention of today’s audiences for at least a season’s run of performances, the Met has followed two summoned from the days when the term “standard repertory” was not quite yet making sense (Cherubini’s Medea and Mozart’s Idomeneo) to one that had secondary standing in the time of its flourishing, Umberto Giordano’s Fedora. By “secondary standing” I mean two things, first, that it was one of a number of operas from its era that never acquired a high critical reputation but which, in the hands of gifted performers at home in its stylistic assumptions, was a programmable piece so long as those assumptions were in place, then settled into relative obscurity as soon as they were not; and second, that it has always been considered Giordano’s second-best opera, meaning that it is perceived as at least somewhat better than, say, La Cena delle beffe, Madame sans Gêne, or Siberia. Such “second-bests” are trotted out when enough time has passed to qualify them as novelties, and/or when a management has ticket-selling singers who will consent to the leading roles.

Fedora premiered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1898, with Gemma Bellincioni and Enrico Caruso as the protagonist couple, and proved successful for some years thereafter, especially in Italy and South America. It arrived at the Metropolitan in 1906, with Caruso opposite Lina Cavalieri in her company debut, and with Antonio Scotti in the baritone role of De Siriex, and had a three-season run in the mid-’20s starring Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli, and (again) Scotti.^(I) It then languished locally for seventy years, till a revival mounted for Mirella Freni and Placido Domingo, and hasn’t been seen since. I missed that ’96 production. So, my acquaintance with Fedora being only a rather spotty one via recordings, I betook myself down to the Big House to see what I could recover of the onetime excitement.

Like a healthy plurality of 19th-Century opera libretti, Arturo Colautti’s for Fedora was worked up from a popular play, thus ensuring that a rudimentary structure, an established level of theatrical playability, and some audience familiarity with the subject were all in place at the outset. In this instance, Giordano was seeking to capitalize, as did Puccini a few years later with Tosca, on one of the several boffo box office hits of Victorien Sardou. So fashionable was Sardou for the last three decades of the Ottocento, and so unfashionable ever since, that a quick look at Fedora’s standing in its time is at least a matter of curiosity to anyone encountering its operatic adaptation now. Though it was quickly incorporated into the repertoires of nearly all the leading dramatic actresses of the era, it had been written expressly for Sarah Bernhardt, whose personality and range of effect the playwright had shrewdly assessed. That range is suggested in the report on her Fedora by the New York-based critic William Winter who, first noting that Sardou had placed “great stress on the feline elements” of his title character, wrote of Bernhardt that her “intensely vital, impulsive, passionate, erratic personality comported with the character of Fedora, and therefore her performance was excellent.” Winter disapproved, of course. Knowledgeable and perceptive, he also carried to the point of censoriousness the then-common belief that the stage should show only those personages and situations as could be held to be morally elevating—or at least that any others meet their proper comeuppance and that Virtue triumph in the end. Of Fedora he said that its “distinguishing characteristic  . . . is carnality,” and as for the actress, he christened as “The Bernhardt Doctrine” the conviction that ” . . . any kind of conduct, so long as it is activated by ‘love,’ is necessarily impressive and interesting.”

Those of you who read my brief commentary on the Met’s Idomeneo revival (8/10/22) may have wondered why I passed over any mention of the singer of the title part, Michael Spyres. This was by no means because I considered his contribution artistically negligible, but because I wished to take a more extended look at the vocality he is presently championing. The role of Idomeneo, though designated for tenor, lies unnaturally low for any voice we think of as belonging to that category. (Except for a single appoggiatura on an A in “Torna la pace,” its highest note is G, accessed many times, often in passing but sometimes in sustained or declamatory mode.) That’s because it was written for Anton Raaff, a star of the preceding generation whose voice was well past its “best used by” date in 1781. We would normally assume that a role of that time that looks this way on the page must have been written with the presumption of higher ornamental improvisations by the singer. But that seems not to have been the case with Idomeneo. In any case, such interpolations would have been rendered in one variety or another of the reinforced head-voice adjustments with which all tenors then accessed anything above—at a stretch—an old-tuning A, and which we wouldn’t recognize as “full voice.” ^(I))At the lower end, the part requires low Ds, and even a C, which must be solid and sonorous enough to provide a balanced ground against all three female-voiced principals singing far above the “tenor” in the Act 3 quartet. Yet the combination of tessitura and floridity in the writing would prove problematic for almost all voices we define as baritone.

We have to concede that vocal categories are mutable (certainly the histories of “tenor” and “baritone” illustrate that), and that in declaring one to be “normative,” we are selecting it over other possibilities. But in an effort to examine the legitimacy of a proposed outlier category, we do need to be clear about what we are measuring it against. Where “tenor” and “baritone” are concerned, the standard I’ll be using here comprises 1) voices intended to interpret Western classical music; 2) specifically, operatic music of that tradition; 3) thus, music meant to be sung acoustically from a stage, with orchestral accompaniment; 4) finally, music that reflects both categories as settled upon (with much, though gradually diminishing, overlap with previous usages) some 150-200 years ago—in short, what we still think of as the “modern” tenor and baritone vocalities. Eliminated, therefore, are all voices cultivated for microphone usages, regardless of their pitch ranges. Once the requirement for acoustical projection is removed, the categories collapse not only as to amplitude, but with regard to aesthetic standards and technical control as well, and no valid comparisons can be made. This excludes from our consideration all pop/folk/rock singers of the past 80-90 years, and the voices of our popular music theatre of the past 65 or so as well, whether or not they make “legit” noises, since all shows (even the revivals of once-acoustical ones) have been miked during that time.^(II) It also excludes some (not all) voices cultivated primarily for art-song interpretation, and others trained to our inferences of Baroque vocality. These types do sing within the Western classical tradition, and acoustically, but with limitations of amplitude and (usually) of range relative to our standard. And a final grouping cast into outer darkness by this definition is that of the male falsettists—imitation evirati—who call themselves “countertenors.”

A household Covid invasion has forced me to delay the post scheduled for today, Nov. 18. I will be discussing the many fascinating vocal implications of Michael Spyres’ “BariTenor” album, as well as the return of last season’s Met Don Carlo, now in four acts, in Italian, and with a nearly all-new cast and conductor.

I will aim publication for Tues., Nov. 22, and will inform you if there are further changes. A happy Thanksgiving to all.

CLO

With apologies for this day-late posting:

Before taking up the first subject of our new season of 2022-23, we have an interesting  follow-up to my summer bonus post, Spaying the Fella. It comes from longtime friend and colleague Jon Alan Conrad, and concerns the splendid original orchestration for Most Happy Fella, by Don Walker. Jon is currently completing full-score critical editions of Sondheim’s Follies, for MUSA, and Weill’s One Touch of Venus, for the Kurt Weill Edition, both coming soon. And as Jon points out in his letter, not many musicals receive full-score treatment, to say nothing of critical editions, so the exceptions are worth some attention. (N. B.: Jonathan Tunick did Sondheim’s orchestrations, while Weill, a thoroughly developed “modern classical” composer, for the most part did his own, even on Broadway, though with occasional assistance—including, Jon tells us, the overture to One Touch of Venus, in a still-unidentified hand.) Jon knew Don Walker and talked with him at length on matters of orchestration. Here’s what he has to say:

“Despite Don Walker’s origins in jazz (he got his start creating arrangements for popular bands of the period), when he needed to score “legit” he completely knew how to do it, including the elimination of Broadway’s usual “rhythm section” (piano or guitar providing a steady beat) in favor of a more classical distribution of rhythmic elements among the other instruments. That’s a big part of why it works well, and balances correctly, even with expanded string sections in an opera house. The titles that best show his mastery are Carousel and The Most Happy Fella, both scored for relatively large combinations (around 40), with honorable mention for his smaller-scale operetta-style orchestration of She Loves Me.

“For those interested in studying full scores, Walker’s technique can be interestingly compared with that of another master orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, in the scrupulously edited critical edition of Kiss Me, Kate (ed. David Charles Abell & Seann Alderking, Alfred Music, 2015). Bennett orchestrated “So in Love” in Act 1, Walker its Act 2 reprise. Of course, the situations, characters, and original singers are different, and it’s not a matter of one being ‘better’ than the other. But their different approaches provide a great deal to think about and learn from.”

Jon also notes that in reprinting my 1991 New York Times article on The Most Happy Fella, I reproduced its erroneous reference to Walker’s first name, as “Dan.” At least I got it right later on in my post. Apologies, 31 years late, for that oversight, and my thanks to Jon for his expert commentary. With opera companies programming some of the more “legit” musicals with increasing frequency, and with the assignment of orchestrational duties to a second (or in some cases, third and fourth) musician constituting one of the defining differences between a musical and an opera, this scholarship assumes ever-greater relevance to performance practice. As Jon notes, the assembly of a musical is a tangled affair, differing from case to case. We may have occasion to return to it, especially as it relates to operatic practices.

The first post of the new season, scheduled for today, October 1, will be published on Friday, October 7. My apologies for the delay.

CLO

First, an apology: We’ve recently had some difficulties with the pagination gods, resulting in pages of uneven length, some annoyingly short. We’ve managed a partial restoration,  are still working on it, and hope to have a complete resolution soon.

Second, an advance announcement: On Tuesday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 PM (ET), at the invitation of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA and UK, I will be delivering a Zoom presentation on the singing of this technically exemplary tenor. It’ll be a little more than an hour in length, including some time for Q and A, and will be re-shown on Saturday, Oct. 29, at 12 noon. Non-members of the Society can receive a link here to this event; a small fee is involved. I will repeat this information on my next post (see below, at the end of today’s article), along with a little more detail on the content—but registration is open now. I hope you’ll join us. And to today’s unforeseen article:

I had resolved to hold my summer hiatus time inviolate. And if anything were to be allowed to invade, it would have to be some unanticipated event of major operatic importance. But after reading and receiving word-of-mouth about Most Happy in Concert, right over here at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I changed my mind. As you may have heard, this show is derived from Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, which is one of the handful of American musicals that dwells in the borderland between entertainment and art, between the popular and classical cultures, between “the musical” and opera. It’s one of the best of that sort, from the time when that sort was emerging in some force. And since everything I had heard about this adaptation described an extreme form of some of the very things I’ve been writing about with respect to opera—could, if one were easily inclined to dystopian prophecy, even forecast a strain of operatic devolution—I thought it might be worth a look.

Besides, goings-on at WTF have special resonance for my wife, Molly Regan, and me, since for a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s, we spent nearly all of our summer time as members of the Festival’s acting company. For my opera-devotee readers who don’t follow American theatre, WTF, during a long heyday that began in the 1950s, occupied a position among summer festivals roughly equivalent to Santa Fe’s in the operatic world. It had a reputation, upheld frequently enough to be at least grudgingly deserved, for high artistic quality and, even more, for sheer ambition. Under the guidance of its longtime impresario, Nikos Psacharopoulos, and his immediate successors, it took on classics of world theatre (Chekhov and Turgenev, Brecht, Sheridan, Anouilh and Giraudoux, et al., plus the occasional Greek or Shakespearian classic), and American plays of proven worth, most notably those of Tennessee Williams. Prominent theatre actors returned summer after summer, as did a group of solid “working actors,” and bicoastal stars signed on for tempting roles. This continuity gave WTF something of the flavor of a resident company of performers familiar with one another’s work, as opposed to a producing entity jobbing people in. For decades, large audiences held steady for this menu, and for new plays or more obscure revivals on the company’s second, smaller stage.

I will be taking some time off from “Osborne on Opera” this summer, so with today’s extended article, in two parts, I have tried to leave you with food for thought in what I hope is some leisure time of your own. This might easily, and perhaps more sensibly, have been published as two separate posts, and there may be readers who feel that Part Two does not flow with all natural ease from Part One. I suppose that logically, the matter could be seen the other way around: opera happens, after all, in the context of broader social and artistic developments, and against an ever-deeper historical background, and these are the subjects of the books considered in Part Two. In any case, in my mind these parts are not only closely interrelated, but inextricably so.

First, a correction: two correspondents have told me that in the Lucia di Lammermoor performances I wrote about last time, Javier Camerena did not sing the (written but seldom- sung) high E-flat in the cadential bars of “Verranno a te,” but that he and Nadine Sierra switched lines, she taking her (unwritten) E-flat and he singing the tenor high C. Since it passed quickly, made a peculiar effect, and Camerena has been known to essay the altissimo notes, I’d assumed they were going for the gold. But since my readers both have professional ears, and one of them checked a second time against the broadcast, I’m sure they are right.

Second, some news from Bel Canto Boot Camp, with whom I collaborated on the series of videos based on the opening section of Opera as Opera. The founders of BCBC, Rachelle Jonck and Derrick Goff, have co-written and published The Vaccai Project. This volume pulls together in book form all the instructional materials and working advice developed during the virtual teaching sessions of the same name, which kept many a young vocalist working productively on problems of technique, musicianship, language, and style during the Covid lockdown. It’s grounded in Nicola Vaccai’s famous book of progressive exercises in intervals and ornamentation, but embraces a wide range of classical references, as well as constructive advice from the authors themselves. Beautifully laid out, engagingly written, and handsomely produced, it’s essentially a working manual, and thus of practical use primarily to singers, coaches, and teachers. But anyone with an interest in the principles and practices of bel canto vocalism will find it intriguing. It’s available from www.belcantobootcamp.com. Also: BCBC has entered into a collaboration with Guild Hall, out at East Hampton, L. I., for a series of week-long intensive workshops there. In addition to BCBC’s own expert faculty, each week will offer the guest participation of a noted working professional singer with experience in the bel canto repertory. Full details can be seen at BCBC’s website.  

Finally, let me remind readers that Opera as Opera is still in print, and can be ordered from the eponymous page here on the website, or from the broader sources out there. And so to today’s topics, all variations on the question posed above.

The final new production of a repertory work in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season (with the Met premiere of Brett Dean’s Hamlet following next week) is, nominally, of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. For the record: Riccardo Frizza is the conductor, and the principal roles are sung by Nadine Sierra (Lucia), Javier Camarena (Edgardo), Artur Ruciński (Enrico), and Matthew Rose (Raimondo). The main production credits are: Simon Stone (director), Lizzie Clachan (sets), Alice Babidge and Blanca Añón (costumes), James Farncombe (lights), Luke Halls (projections) and Sara Erde (choreography). The score is rendered near- complete, with the Raimondo/Lucia scene and the Wolf’s Crag scene present, and all the once-standard theatre cuts opened except for the brief exchange between Raimondo and Normanno after the Mad Scene. I saw the second performance of the run, on April 26.

This is the same Stone who auteured the Aix-en-Provence production of Tristan und Isolde I wrote about in Régie-Auteurs Gone Feral (9/3/21, q. v. for some background on him and his working methods). As orientation, I’ll give you a brief description of his work on Lucia, reminding you the while that when I use the movie-derived term “auteur,” as I now most often do, I mean “director who assumes the position of co-creator, or ‘writer anew,’ with total control over all conditions of production and performance (including even the basic ones “given” by the original creators), save for the musical ones.” This Lucia is set in contemporary lower-class America. Partly because of the ethnicity of the protagonist couple, whose faces are in our own onscreen, it often appears to be taking place in an urban Hispanic neighborhood, or possibly a Mafia-controlled blue-collar suburb. But Stone places it “somewhere in America’s Rust Belt.” The set pieces are arrayed around the turntable which, as it rotates, displays a large wooden house, a street and a pickup truck; a motel room; part of a convenience store; part of a chain drugstore; and a movie drive-in showing a ’40s Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour flick for the two or three cars spaced in its lot. The house is the Ashton residence, standing in for the Lammermoor castle, and the pickup truck is Edgardo’s, standing in for the ruined Wolf’s Crag tower. The set areas are tweaked for the practical requirements of scenes—e. g., outside or inside the motel room, or dressed up with little canopies, tables, and chairs for the wedding festivities.

Above this sluggishly turning merry-go-round is a screen, as wide as the playing area. On it is projected a second narrative of aspects of the opera’s story—not quite an alternate narrative (as in the vidop Tristan, wherein the movie screen was upstage, rather than above the live action), but a supplementary one, bringing us into screen perspective with the characters and showing us what we would otherwise be left to infer of their actions (what happened just before the stage action, just after it, during it, and whatever else is coursing through the auteurial noggin as the gears begin to turn). Also on this screen are the surtitles—a script that is not only (like most) approximate, incongruous in tone, and evasive of anything that might discomfit, however fleetingly, our social norms, but a rewrite that continually lies outright about what is being sung. Its displacement from the text that is the source of the music is complete except in crudest plot outline.

Dear readers,

After nearly three full days of shutdown owing to a miscommunication glitch between the hosting company and the privacy protection company, we are back up and running. This was particularly frustrating inasmuch as the last post, Quiche-o Carlos; Ariadne Rescued? had received such a wide response.

In any event—we’re back. Spread the word!

CLO