A perfect storm of life and work has forced me to postpone till next Friday, Apr. 16, the post scheduled for today. I’ll be writing about Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, a repertory opera in  the first half of the 20th Century, but Missing in Action since. I will discuss the work by means of audio and film recordings from the 1930s through the 1950s, featuring a number of important singers and the noted film director Abel Gance.

My apologies for the delay.

C.L.O.

Today, I’d like to begin with some words about my longtime friend and colleague Peter G. Davis, who died on Feb.13. I was first acquainted with Peter in 1964, when High Fidelity Magazine, for which I’d been writing for five years, acquired the venerable Musical America, where Peter had been working. He soon began contributing the occasional review (he worked for HF/MA’s parent company, Billboard, during this time, as well), and within a couple of years succeeded to the post of HF’s Music Editor. This was when I got to know Peter better, since my copy passed through his hands, and we had many stimulating exchanges about the works and performers under discussion, as well as general goings-on in the musical (especially operatic) world. He edited with a light hand, but very attentively, and when he questioned something, it merited questioning.

Peter began reviewing for The New York Times in 1967, moved over there in 1974 as Sunday Classical Music Editor, and in 1981 went on to New York Magazine, where he was to hold the post of Music Critic for 26 years. In 1997 he published his richly informative The American Opera Singer/The Lives and Adventures of America’s Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Doubleday), which, together with Oscar Thompson’s 1937 The American Singer: 100 Years of Success in Opera (which it extends and, in part, displaces) gives us our most thorough, judicious, and entertaining account of that subject. Our paths continued to cross over that time, and when he left New York in 2007, we stayed in touch, most enjoyably over lunch or brunch at our favored Upper West Side bistro, Café Luxembourg.

Of course our tastes were not identical, but we were always in broad agreement about operatic matters, especially with respect to directorial assaults on the integrity of works and the general decline in the expressive power of classical singing. That perspective pretty much disappeared from the New York journalistic narrative with Peter’s departure from the beat. I wish there were a way to capture Peter’s default personal tone. It was always quickly responsive, but wry, and amusedly fatalistic about the state of affairs, whatever that might be. It was a tone that didn’t often get into his writing, which was direct and incisive; I don’t think a reader would be likely to conjure Peter’s personality accurately from his prose. For those of us who knew him, on the other hand, a tiny, quick dart would sometimes shoot past from the prevailing gentleness of manner, as reminder of his professional self.  

Peter’s health suffered a number of complications in recent years. It became difficult for him to negotiate the stairs to what would have been his quite ordinary top-floor brownstone walkup apartment had he not years earlier secured the air rights above it and constructed an eyrie that made it into a duplex—records and scores in orderly array along the walls—to which he was confined after a stroke a little over two years ago. He was sustained through all the travails both there and at their second home in Connecticut by the devoted caretaking of his husband, Scott Parris. I was fortunate to have an extended phone visit with Peter just a week before his final hospitalization, reminiscing at length about events and people long gone by. Although his speech was sometimes blurred, all his mental sharpness and talent for concise, dry assessment was very much intact. Happily, that characteristic impression, unimpaired, is mine to take onward with me. 

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My original thematic rationale for today’s article was, I thought, sound. As with my catchup comments on the Kubelik Meistersinger two posts back, I would look at two recordings of a certain age that had been in my “listen soon” pile for too long, and which pled for consideration together on three grounds: 1) each is of a fringe-of-repertory opera dating from the “autumn of Italian opera”^(I) years; 2) the composer of one (Riccardo Zandonai) was a pupil of the composer of the other (Pietro Mascagni); and 3) each stars a revered interpreter of just such works, the soprano Magda Olivero. On the sidelines, if needed, were two more rare works by these same composers in recordings long owned—but neglected—by me. For reasons noted below, that idea has fallen short of expectations. But the Mascagni work, Iris, has proved well worth exploration, and Zandonai will still hang about in token form.

The above-named article, together with some memorial words and a couple of updates, originally scheduled for today, will be published tomorrow, Sat. Mar. 13.

CLO 

Before getting to the cheerless main subject of today’s post, a brief update—also less than uplifting—on one aspect of my essay The Racial Moment and Opera (9/11/20). This is the controversy engendered by the debate over the claimed white supremacist content of the work of Heinrich Schenker, founder of an important system of analysis in the field of music theory. As you may recall, this arose from a paper delivered by Phillip A. Ewell, an African-American theorist, and responses to it published in a special issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which in turn occasioned a storm of outrage on social media from other scholars, students, and faculty at the University of North Texas (where the Journal is based), calling for the removal of Timothy Jackson (founder of the Journal) from its editorship and from his tenured faculty position at UNT. UNT duly launched an “ad hoc” internal investigation, as a result of which Jackson was indeed removed as editor (though not as professor), and the future of the Journal was thrown into doubt.

Now, Jackson has filed a lawsuit against UNT and seventeen of his erstwhile colleagues, alleging defamation and First Amendment retaliation for “expression of views out-of-step with the prevailing campus orthodoxy.” His lawyer, Michael Thad Allen, claims that the investigation “made up the procedural rules as it went along” and may itself have been unconstitutional, and that Jackson’s “only sin was to defend classical music from spurious charges of ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy.'” I don’t know how this legal proceeding will turn out, or should turn out (this imbroglio is entangled in such matters as “black anti-Semitism,” the implications of Critical Race Theory, etc.), but this way of going about things, with its spirit of personal vengefulness, is deplorable, and does seem to be poisoning the air on some campuses. There are several accounts of these developments online, which you can locate at The Fire (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education); The College Fix; the National Association of Scholars (NAS); Inside Higher Ed; and the Denton Record. At least a couple of these are coming from the political right, as was the breakout story in the National Review, but the issues being raised are real, and if no attention is being paid by more moderate or liberal sites, that is not to their credit. On to today’s topic . . .

 I chose the title for this post in acknowledgement of the listen-to-the-science fact, complete with supporting evidence, that very few people (opera people, that is) want to read about it. The evidence is of the comparative-statistics sort, the stats consisting of the page views of the subject on these posts, supplemented by the number of mentions in reviews and reader responses of the section of Opera as Opera devoted to the matter; and the comparison being the number of page views given to every other subject I’ve addressed, both here and in the book. So, with thanks to those who stick with me here, and an understanding, if sorrowful, wave of the hand to everyone else, I once again attempt to call to your attention the very shaky prospects for the financial health (read: “survival”) of our artform. I will also offer a proposal about public funding that I am sure many will see as so radical as to be frivolous, but which I have come to believe at least merits serious consideration.^(I)

It is no longer common to find, among the announcements and reviews of recent CD releases, notice of a recording by frontline forces of a conceded 19th Century operatic masterwork, particularly any of the large, late ones of Giuseppe Verdi or Richard Wagner. So when I saw that a recording of the Salzburg Easter Festival’s 2019 presentation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger had been released, and that among its attractions were a conductor I’ve admired (Christian Thielemann) and, as Hans Sachs, one of the very few contemporary singers who’s piqued my interest in a big-role, big-opera context (Georg Zeppenfeld), I sat up and paid attention. If we have a Weltklasse conductor and Sachs, I reasoned, then given bare adequacy from the rest, we are well along the way to a satisfying experience. At the same time, I saw an opportunity to give attention to a much older recording I’ve owned for a number of years, but not yet heard: the 1967 Bavarian State Opera radio performance, with a promising-looking cast under another conductor I like, Rafael Kubelik. It was sent to me by a thoughtful reader, and has been shooting guilt-inducing glances at me ever since.

I concluded my last post with the thought that it may be time to give us all a rest from Wagnerism—not so much its cultish fandom, which I hold harmless, but its endless academic examination of everything in the acid-rain atmosphere out around the works themselves, which I do not—and try to focus on what’s really in the operas. That might also enable us to recognize the grievous damage inflicted on the operas (and on us) by the intrusion of such examination, nearly always broadly political in motivation, into the realm of production and performance, a taking-on of adversarial critique by the very persons charged with advocating for the works. I have a hunch that Thielemann may agree with me about this. “I am convinced that a conductor does not need a ‘concept’ for the work,” he says in one of several program-booklet essays. “You just have to lay yourself open confidently to its humor, its wit, and the tricks it plays.” He’s speaking of his own métier, of course, but I wonder if he is not also suggesting an attitude toward that of the stage.

True, in the case of Meistersinger, a comic opera of unprecedented length, breadth, and depth that also serves as a national monument, it is hard to avoid the intertextual connections among Wagner’s works. Except that I don’t think of them as “intertextual,” since although text may indeed confirm some things and suggest others, for me such connections have not arisen primarily from texts, but from performance, from hearing the music played and sung and watching the story play out in real time. And while audio recordings, videos, and films are documents, and can thus be considered “text,” live performance cannot be fixed through inscription. It can only be experienced and re-experienced, never quite the same, its meanings, connections, and insights gradually surfacing and cohering in individual minds and in the collective one, if we grant the existence of such a beast. That’s the most wonderful thing about live performance—it throws off the shackles of text and lifts off into free flight, taking us along for the ride. With any recording of a live performance, we hope that the fixed document thus created retains some of the feel of that flight.

The post scheduled for today, Fri., Jan. 15, dealing principally with the 2019 Salzburg Easter Festival recording of Die Meistersinger and related matters, has been delayed one day, till the evening of Sat., Jan. 16. Thanks for your patience.

CLO

Before tackling today’s topic, I’d like to call attention to an important piece in Arts Journal by Joseph Horowitz, on the subject of the fate of arts funding under our current pandemic and political circumstances. It’s the best analysis, with historical background, that I’ve seen on this live-or-die subject. 

Today’s post is inspired by Wagnerism/Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, by Alex Ross. I say “inspired by” to make clear from the start that this will not be a review of the book in any coherent and balanced sense. There are already plenty of those, and more in the offing, I’m sure. Besides, I haven’t finished reading it yet. I am at the moment on p. 391—just done with Wagnerism in Virginia Woolf, starting with same in Marcel Proust—with only 269 pp. to go in main text. Twelve days till deadline; I should be through it by then. And please understand: if you are interested in the book’s subject (that is, the impact of Wagner’s operas, prose writings, and other life achievements on subsequent cultural developments in every species, though principally literature, except for opera and music themselves), by all means read it. It is an impressive achievement of research and synthesis that views familiar ground from a new p.o.v. and ploughs some long-fallow acres, too, and as always with its author is highly literate and fluidly composed. Any reader will learn from it, and anyone who’s written much above the Twitter level will understand and respect the labor and devotion involved in its creation. I shall return to aspects of it below, after consideration of related matters I happen to find urgent.

I was truly surprised when I first heard a few years ago that Ross was working on “a Wagner book.” From my regular readings of his New Yorker columns, I had formed an impression that he wasn’t really on a Wagner wavelength, and that opera in general was not among his foremost interests. Probably I shouldn’t have been so taken unaware, for among other uses his new book serves nicely as a prequel to his The Rest is Noise (2007).^(I) That book takes as its starting point the 20th Century fin de siècle, over which Wagner “lowered” as a “lurking presence” (words Ross uses in online interviews on Wagnerism) and exerted an “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom’s now almost epithetic phrase, cited by Ross), out from under which it squiggled and squirmed to escape. But since it is the ongoing squiggling and squirming that Ross has, with every sign of approbation, given most of his extremely selective attention to as a journalistic writer, his approach to a major Wagner project was, in prospect, bemusing.

As with most prominent authors these days, Ross has been the subject of several video interviews in connection with his new book. I’ve seen two of them so far. I have learned to grant a substantial discount on what even the most experienced interviewees find themselves saying in response to questions—so much depends on the knowledge and biases of the interviewer, and a subject can find him- or herself wandering along strange paths. One of Ross’s interlocutors, for instance, is Tyler Cowen. Cowen is an economist of good standing and libertarian leanings, whose name rang a bell with me because in my book I had devoted an endnote to disputing what I take for slippery reasoning in one of his articles with respect to “Baumol’s Disease,” an important theory in the economics of the performing arts, and its application to the High-Culture, nonprofit sector. ^(II) As an interviewer on the subject of Wagner, Cowen poses what I charitably assume to be faux-naïf questions, the kind meant to represent what an earnest but culturally uninformed person might ask. (To paraphrase: “I have a beautiful recording of Rheingold highlights conducted by Kempe—why should I listen to the whole thing?” Or, “Who in today’s pop and rock scene carries on something from Wagner?”, etc.). By the end, I’ve decided that some of this naïveté is pas faux. The other interviewer is Stephen Fry, an accomplished actor and man of parts, who handles the cultural materials with far greater deftness. After the necessary preliminaries, he directs Ross immediately to his late chapter on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf.

The Three Tenors of ’90s réclame were sons of the EuroAmerican South. Here now come elevenfold their number from the EuroBrexit North. Thirty-one of them, sitting on my plate like the local’s Sunday Roast, inhabit Marston’s newest release, a three-CD set entitled “A Survey of British Tenors Before Peter Pears.” They are presented in alphabetical order, which means that by happenstance the sequence opens and closes with tenors of marked similarities, one of them (Dan Beddoe) a Welsh-born singer who made his career almost entirely in the U.S., and the other (Evan Williams) of U.S. origin but Welsh descent, who sang extensively in the U.K. and immersed himself in its oratorio and concert tradition. By “marked similarities” I don’t mean that Beddoe and Williams sound exactly alike (and they are singing very different pieces here, Beddoe the two essentially lyrical ones from Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Williams the martial “Sound an Alarm” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus). I mean simply that both possess hefty voices that are always engaged with firm support, not wispy ones that dally around on the surface; that as a result they sustain a steady line with even vibrato; and that with occasional minor lapses (Beddoe allowing weak syllables on short notes to cheat the indicated vowel, as in “rightch’s” for “righteous,” Williams sometimes neglecting final “d’s,” as in “soun'” or “aroun'”) they sculpt their words with the completeness of the great 19th-Century elocutionists, to which their singing styles are so closely related (and vice-versa). And they are two of the finest among the thirty-one, with the warmth and easy largeness of Beddoe’s tone and the fervency of his emotional connection (hear the longing ache at “O, that I knew/where I might find Him”) the better captured by his early (1926) electrical recording, but Williams’ rock-steady sound and musical surety coming through just fine on this expectably excellent transfer of his 1904 acoustical.

The recordings assembled here range from 1901 (Ben Davies singing Bishop’s My Pretty Jane, and William Green with John Braham’s The anchor’s weighed) to 1950 (James Johnston with the “Song of the road” from Vaughan Williams’ Hugh the Drover, which brings us to the dividing line the set’s compilers ^(I) see with Peter Pears.) There are seventy-five selections in all. Some of these tenors—principally those who achieved significant reputations in opera, and most of them from the electrical era—are well known to serious vocal collectors. They would include Joseph Hislop, Heddle Nash, Webster Booth, and Walter Widdop, in addition to John McCormack, who offers three songs. I was familiar with several more via grazing encounters, and with a number of others by reputation only. But nine of them, by my unofficial count, were new to me even by name. So a considerable light is shone into this corner of vocal history, at least for me, and has somewhat revised my assumptions about it. When I thought about it at all, I held a vague notion of it as the home of McCormacks manqués, or tenors of the Ralph Rackstraw/Nanki-Poo Fach, of greater or lesser endowment. And a few of these might fit that description—Tom Burke with an expert “O vision entrancing” from Goring Thomas’ Esmeralda, for instance (opening out rather surprisingly to a superb high B-flat), or Walter Glynne with an impeccably declaimed and intoned rendering of the Messiah sequence running from “Thy rebuke hath broken his heart” through “But thou didst not leave his soul in Hell.”

The trials and tribulations of our beleaguered USPS—beset by pandemic and the election deluge, and sabotaged from above—have meant that some of the recorded materials intended for this week’s post have not arrived in time for me to consider them. So I’m postponing the entry for one week, to Friday, Nov. 20, at which time I’ll be writing about no fewer than 33 tenors—31 of them contained in Marston’s 3-disc compilation A Survey of British Tenors Before Peter Pears, plus important recent releases devoted to Richard Tauber and Jussi Björling. Till then, stay well.

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First, a quick note re Opera as Opera. The book has received one more highly favorable review, this one from Will Manus in Lively-Arts, a West Coast-based online journal with a broad scope. An unanticipated pleasure, to receive such attention this long after publication. Here’s the link. Incidentally, the book’s inventory is getting quite low, and there are no plans for a third printing. So, if you or anyone you know . . .

In the interim since my last post we’ve had further pandemic-related developments that are no less discouraging for being predictable. In my home city the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the entire theatre community have all extended the moratorium on live performance until at least September of 2021, and performing arts organizations across the country have announced similar cancelations. The situation overseas is not much better, though the more general recognition of the arts as public goods has at least provided something of an economic buffer. (Even Boris Johnson’s UK administration has coughed up extra subvention at a level that may not satisfy all its constituents, but which looks mighty appealing from here.)

There’s no way to put a happy face on all this. But one thing we can do in such a prolonged time of inactivity and attrition is to think over what sort of operatic theatre we want. There will be vacuums into which entities will eventually be drawn, and it would be good to influence some of those entities in artistically productive directions. For me, this means working toward a company whose training and rehearsal processes rid us of auteurial, conceptualist approaches to production, and instead burrow into the manifest content of works. It is fair to ask exactly what that implies, and what such work would consist of. So today I am focusing on one aspect of it—the individual performer’s preparatory exploration of character development, as seen through a single example. It’s hard to approximate the experience in words, but I’ll give it a try.

At the end of today’s post, you’ll also find some informative updates on the last one.

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In search of interpretation, operatic performers have three sources to draw upon: the text, oral tradition, and something we call “imagination.” All three are necessary, but the one I want to concentrate on here is the third. It is the one that separates transcendent performance from admirable (or less admirable) recitation, and yet the one I find most often left to chance. Indeed, I’ve come to believe that if what we are trying to do is mark a path toward transcendence (and in opera, where else would we be headed?), we’re going about it backward. We need a craft of imagination, a technique for the release of the performer into vocal and physical action. It is nascent in all talented young performers, but it needs encouragement and guidance, and I think that in our current systems of training we tend to suffocate it in correctitude. So while I will sometimes refer to both text and oral tradition in what follows (in fact, we’ll begin with an examination of text, but not in the usual musicianly way), I will be concentrating on this “craft of imagination.”