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

Dear devotees: It’s come to my attention that many of you received an uncorrected version of Friday’s post, Quiche-o Carlos/Ariadne Rescued? After a total internet outage of 24 hours’ duration that caused the original delay, some glitch in the publishing process sent out the last uncorrected draft, rather than the finished version. It contained a number of references awaiting verification, as well as other corrections detected in the final proofreading, and an inactive link to the Russell Baker column. The error was detected and the updates made within a couple of hours, but if you received the earlier version, by all means swap it out for the finished one. 

My apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks for reading, as always.

CLO

P. S.: But now I find (at 11:55 PM on the 27th) that even after again entering the corrections and viewing them, they did not all update. BUT NOW THEY ARE DEFINITIVELY OK. 

I wonder how many readers’ eyes will light up on mention of Russell Baker. He was the longtime author of The Observer, a regular feature of the New York Times’ op-ed page, purveying a type of humor that, save for an occasional foray by Calvin Trillin, we don’t have much of anymore—keen-eyed and pointed, but always urbane and genial. The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Don Carlos, sung in French for the first time in the company’s history, put me in mind of one of his most fondly-remembered pieces, whose title I had recalled as Are You Macho or Quiche-o?, but which the NYT archive has down as The Two Ismo’s. Picking up on a little essay by Philip Lopate, Quiche Blitz on Columbus Avenue, Baker writes of “two violently opposed doctrines of social conduct” that are rending the “urban war zone” whose nexus lies directly before the Met itself.^(I) He compiles an impressive collection of distinctions, amusing because they were dead-on at the time, between the styles of the eponymous factions. I could sample them here, but far better that I send you to the source, here.^(II)

The conductor of the new production is Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It isn’t the first time we’ve heard his way with this score. When he led the Nicholas Hytner production (in Italian), some years before his ascent to the Musical Directorship, I wrote of both production and conducting that “they seemed concerned with making a weighty, deep, long work seem less weighty, deep, and long” (see Opera as Opera, p. 648). That is even more the case now. The maestro has found a cast to help him lift further off the weighty and deep parts, though not by any means to lessen the long. And since the cast is what ultimately decides the fate of a performance (and, in this instance, clamps an apparently welcome damper on the presence of N-S’s orchestra), I’ll start there.

The Cast: To pacify in advance any devotees who might be looking on Matthew Polenzani as an eccentric selection for the title role, the NYT hastened to assure us that we wouldn’t be hearing anything so obstreperous as a Corelli- or Del Monaco-like voice. Something subtler, more nuanced, more French would soothe our sensibilities. What this meant became apparent immediately in Polenzani’s voicing of “Je l’ai vue” (“Io la vidi” to you, and I shall continue to translate for recognition’s sake), which, given a tolerance for a mannered approach, could have served nicely in one of Fauré’s purely lyrical songs in a comfortable recital venue with a discreet accompanist. The ridiculous Polenzani vs. Corelli/Del Monaco straw-man setup aside (Del Monaco, I’m fairly certain, never sang the part, and it was not one of Corelli’s best, though of course there were moments that tingled with the visceral excitement of his voice and benefited from his handsome, standup presence), there is an almost horizonless expanse between these extremes. It has been occupied at the Met by a long succession of tenors, beginning with Giovanni Martinelli back in the 1920s, continuing with Jussi Bjoerling in the 1950 production that launched the Bing regime, and coming on down to Roberto Alagna, who sang it there in 2010 and is the Carlos of the 1995 EMI French-language recording from the Théâtre du Chatelet. For my money, Neil Shicoff demonstrated with his Eléazar (La Juive) that a relatively slender but well-supported and equalized voice, combined with an intense acting talent, can make for a satisfying grand opéra tenor hero, particularly of this troubled sort.

With apologies for the late posting, here is the article scheduled for yesterday, February 25.

The Metropolitan Opera has been on hiatus for the month of February, and while there has been some local operatic activity that may figure in an end-of-season appraisal, this has been a quiet time with respect to my current preoccupation, the condition of the canon at the international level of performance. So, as I indicated at the end of my last post, I’m using my space today to take some tracings from the genealogy of Met performances of one canonical masterpiece that has been in this season’s repertoire. And having given deservedly short shrift to the company’s current mock-up of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I have chosen that work as the starting point for the journey. It’s arguable, I suppose, whether or not it represents a wider gap between what I know to be a particular opera’s demonstrated potential on the one hand, and what I recently saw and heard on the other than, say, the past fall’s Meistersinger (see “Ha, diese Meister!“, 11/22/2021). But none has made me more keenly aware of what’s been lost, or more interested in defining exactly what that is, and where it went missing along the way.

Nozze di Figaro also happens to be an opera with whose performing tradition at the Met, for all practical purposes, I have been familiar from the start, at least where singers are concerned. That is: from the time (1940) the Met took up the opera after a 22-year absence, and any strong connection to a tenuous earlier performing tradition had been broken, most of the singers regularly cast were ones I came to know over the air and in live performance. That was also the time when the Mozart/Da Ponte operas were coming in for revival more broadly—for though they were never as completely on the outs as the operas of Handel (except for Così fan tutte, which was exactly that), they had spent many decades flying well under the Romantic radar. The 1930s had seen long strides toward restoration, of which the longest were the performances at the festivals of Salzburg and Glyndebourne and the return (again after a more-than-two-decade void) of Don Giovanni to regular performance at the Metropolitan. The  Figaros and Giovannis of both Salzburg and the Met had Ezio Pinza in their title roles; for twenty or so years, he set the standard—vocally, musically, charismatically—for these extraordinary characters. The Glyndebourne productions of all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas received “complete” studio recordings (recitatives cut to the bone); for fifteen or so years, they had to be considered definitive in the absence of competition and, along with the Beecham recording of Die Zauberflöte, constituted a significant factor in earning for these works their proper standing in the modern opera repertory.

I would describe what’s gone missing as falling into two broad categories. In Category 1 are all the things that interpretations of Le Nozze di Figaro need to have in common, so that we are able to recognize the opera in performance as a work of understood artistically satisfying qualities, and expect that they will be present. These elements are derived from two sources, namely, the musical and verbal text itself, and the things that talented performers have revealed as necessary to its basic fulfillment, and have thus become parts of its performing tradition. Category 2 holds everything that individual performers of imagination, personality, and presence bring to the music and drama of the piece. Since the piece at hand is an opera, much that belongs to both categories is found in its vocal and musical expression; but since an opera takes theatrical form, much else must come from the theatre’s territory. Of course the contributions of extraordinary performers will at times ambush our in-common expectations in a way we receive as revelatory, so that the tradition is supplemented. But that’s not involved in the recent Figaro experience. We aren’t dealing with anything gained, but only with things lost, and going in search of them.

A supportive, congratulatory note before I get to today’s topic: in this uniquely trying season, we must be grateful that our local opera company, the Metropolitan, has forged ahead with performances. There are more dark nights than usual, and reduced attendance at most of the lit ones (I have never seen the auditorium as sparsely occupied as at the Figaro discussed below), so the financial inroads must be painful. But the Met has persevered, and with a  professional and reassuring handling of the logistics forced upon it by the pandemic. It has taken as a given that opera must go on. As must the critic’s task of attempting to accurately record and honestly evaluate the events of the continuance. 

And a note to some concerned readers: a Turandot follow-up, acknowledging the thoughtful responses to my article on that work and taking advantage of materials kindly forwarded by one reader that will help me elaborate on the uncut version of the final scene, was intended as part of today’s post. I’ve decided, though, to look in on the second cast of the run a little later in the season—so it makes sense to amalgamate the follow-up with any remarks I may enter on that occasion. To the subject du jour:

Two cornerstone works returned to the Met’s repertory over the past month. One, Verdi’s Rigoletto, was a new production, and the other, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, a revival. Both were staged in a manner that most observers would probably classify as “conservative,” “harmless,” or even “traditional”—that is, neither is of a high-concept, overtly estranged sort. Neither is abstract. Neither denies narrative, or imposes another narrative in place of, or in addition to, the one indicated by the work’s verbal and musical text. Yet both displace the time (and one of them, the place) of the operas’ action, resulting in an ongoing alienation, a subversion of even the possibility of real belief and emotional investment that gnaws at the root of the works while leaving some sprouts and sprigs on view. Since I draw a line of principle between myself and such productions and find so few standing on my side of the line (so widespread is a mindless acceptance of these obvious assaults on artistic integrity), it sometimes seems futile to detail why this fresh example is objectionable, as is the next. However, there is always the potential for the latest specimen striking home with the odd person or persons, in addition to the value of bucking up the morale of any who see the point and find themselves marooned with me. So, I suppose it is incumbent on me to give these specifics some evaluation, insofar as a single viewing can support that.

Like a number of directors who have had an impact on the New York opera scene over the past half-century-plus, Bartlett Sher has come to opera from the mainstream American spoken theatre, where he has had a good measure of success with both musicals and plays. He has won a fistful of awards, and been the artistic director of important companies. By now he is also an old opera hand, and he and his frequent design partners (Michael Yeargan, sets,  Catherine Zuber, costumes, and  Donald Holder, lighting) certainly know what they’re doing together. So one recognizes that there is a variety of stage intelligence at work, the question being: is it the right variety? Is Sher’s kind of theatrical knowledge and experience, his way of arriving at insights on character action and concept, of value with masterworks of the 19th-Century operatic repertory? My own experience with his work has been rather sharply divided between the generally-happy-with-quibbles kind (the theatre productions I’ve seen—South Pacific, Golden Boy, Awake and Sing,) and the altogether miserable kind (the operatic ones—the catastrophic collaboration with Es Devlin on Otello, see the post of 1/18/19; Roméo et Juliette, see “Under the Bus: Roméo, Act 1,” 4/13/18; and Two Boys, which I discuss in Opera as Opera).