The above-titled post will be published on MONDAY, JULY 12. In it, I’ll look forward to the Met’s first-ever presentation of the original (1869) edition of the work by looking back at very different performances as heard on the earliest Met broadcasts, starring Ezio Pinza and Alexander Kipnis, with some attention to the succession of orchestrations the house has since employed.

CLO

ANNOUNCEMENT # 1, to repeat the information on my minipost of June 6, for those who may have missed it: We have now launched my video series under the sponsorship of Bel Canto Boot Camp. These will be weekly episodes based on the Introduction and Part 1 of Opera as Opera, which consists of 14 essayettes on aspects of our artform. In each episode, I’ll be  reading the indicated essayette, then answering some excellent questions about it posed by the BCBC leadership. So the thoughts of the brief essays are elaborated, and I think there will be material of interest even for those who have read the book.

The series will culminate in the fall with a live, interactive Book Club event, in which questions will be welcomed from viewers in real time. The first video is up on the BCBC website now (links below), and the episodes will remain on the site, in front of the paywall, for the duration of the series and beyond. All three links will get you there, but I do recommend that you explore the BCBC site, and learn about this enterprising organization’s exciting activities in the education and hands-on training of a new generation of classical singers. 

The links: 

To the BCBC website 

Directly to the CLO page

And on youtube

Announcement # 2: After delays and frustrations occasioned by the shocking bankruptcy of our printer followed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have at last gotten underway with the third printing of Opera as Opera. Inasmuch as we have sold out the second printing more quickly than expected, there will be a slight delay until the availability of the new printing. (Shipping is currently expected for July 6.) However, pre-orders are being taken, and the steps for ordering remain unchanged; just click on Opera as Opera on the home page.

Finally, I must record with sadness the death of Joel Friedlander. Joel was a highly regarded consultant and designer in the field of self-publishing, with a long track record of successful projects, and with books and articles turned to by many for information and advice. As a beginner in self-publishing, I turned to Joel first for much-needed consultation, then contracted with him for the interior design of Opera as Opera. His work was superb, and his collaboration through the editing process unfailingly warm, friendly, and supportive. I, and the field to which he contributed so much, will miss him.

And to the topic of the day: 

 There are stirrings, signs of a re-awakening from our suspended animation to the possibility of something resembling opera in its natural state. Overseas, this has already happened in certain places with certain restrictions. Here in New York, the stirrings are muffled owing to the persistence of serious labor disputes at the Metropolitan Opera, and the announced plans for a full 2021-2022 season (to say nothing of the company’s long-term prospects) have a wobbly-in-the-knees look. Nonetheless, we have reason to hope that by the turn of the year opera in full, opera whole, will be back before us. People of high professional standing will sing from a stage and play from a pit, and we will gather to see and hear them.

Today, June 6th, marks the launch of my video series under the sponsorship of Bel Canto Boot Camp. These will be weekly episodes based on the Introduction and Part 1 of Opera as Opera, which consists of 14 essayettes on aspects of our artform. In each episode, I’ll be  reading the the indicated essayette, then answering some excellent questions about it posed by the BCBC leadership. So the thoughts of the brief essays are elaborated, and I think there will be material of interest even for those who have read the book.

The series will culminate in the fall with a live, interactive Book Club event, in which questions will be welcomed from viewers in real time. The first video is up on the BCBC website now (links below), and the episodes will remain on the site, in front of the paywall, for the duration of the series and beyond. All three links will get you there, but I do recommend that you explore the BCBC site, and learn about this enterprising organization’s exciting activities in the education and hands-on training of a new generation of classical singers. 

The links: 

To the BCBC website:  

Directly to the CLO series page:

And on youtube:

Some seventy to seventy-five years ago, in the late-mono, early-stereo LP time, we wrestled to the mat the problem of making effective opera recordings under expanded studio conditions. We didn’t always keep the beast pinned, of course, and there were several different approaches embraced by the commercial recording labels that we could contrast and argue over. But on a fair number of occasions, we did more or less figure out how to get a recognizable result. Then the economic support for that enterprise fell away, and the industry came to a close-to-dead halt. Now, it seems, we’ve forgotten what we once knew. Sony’s Otello, recorded in Rome in 2019 and released some ten months ago, is an ugly example of this loss.

As I noted with respect to Meistersinger (see the post of 1/17/21), it’s so rare these days to see high-level operatic forces committed to the recording of a 19th-Century canonical work that one is almost compelled to give heed. The ostensible selling points for this version of Verdi’s great tragedy would be the conductor, Antonio Pappano, and the tenor, Jonas Kaufmann. But I was also interested by the fact that this was not a recording drawn from a live production, like the Meistersinger, but an old-fashioned summoning of the vassals to a series of recording sessions, and with the present-day model of the forces that produced one of the first LP Otellos back in 1954, Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia. After one listening, I’ve kept it in lead position here strictly on a current-interest basis, but won’t be trying your patience with extended performance analysis. This is not so much because I think the performance is terrible, but because the recording itself is so unmoored from operatic reality that I can’t tell.

I hope we can all agree that an opera should take place in a shared space, in which all its elements are heard and seen in constant relation to one another, and that as the performance goes forward in this space, the dynamic range of its sounds is sufficiently proportional to ensure a continuity of musical and dramatic expression. Without those basic conditions, we don’t really have an opera, and simply having one must precede any evaluation of its merits or report on its impact. This recording fails to establish those basic conditions. It does not sound as if its elements share a space or are in constant relation to one another. Rather, its sounds seem to emanate from a number of sources (as distinct from the “locations” of staging or of musical origin, which in any case are minimal), each designed to enhance its assigned fragment, which is then strategically positioned in a mix, as I imagine many rock albums are constructed. (My knowledge of rock albums is extremely limited.) The puzzling aspect of this is that while the Santa Cecilia’s present home, the auditorium in the Parco della Musica, may not be one of the world’s great acoustic treasures, it’s not half bad—no reason I can think of that a good recording couldn’t be done there. And with respect to a proportionality of dynamics, the recording is beyond the bounds of what would enable an ease of continuous ear-contact, a sense of presence, and keep us in touch with the progression of the drama. Sometimes this is hard to disentangle from the fetishizing of the soft end that has been epidemic among conductors and orchestras for some time now; but whether or not that’s the case here, the recording’s width of dynamic range (which we would normally count as an asset) is too extreme for settled listening.

The post scheduled for today, Friday, May 14th (subject matter above) will be published on Monday, May 16th. Thanks for your indulgence.

CLO

Some Opera as Opera news: the inventory of the book’s second printing is down to single digits, but after considerable travail (long story), we have been able to get underway with a third printing. It is possible that, given the required lead press time, there will be a brief interim with inventory at zero. Pre-orders will be taken, however, and fulfilled as quickly as inventory is restored. I will keep you posted here. Thanks.

Louise popped back into my consciousness while I was writing my last post, on Mascagni’s Iris. It’s not that these two operas are all that much alike (for starters, Louise is lovable, Iris not, except in a perverse sort of way), but apart from my general mind-drift through the subject of verismo, there was something in the atmosphere of the Act 3 prelude in Iris (the descent into the underworld of the sewer) that put me in mind of the interlude at the start of Act 2 of Louise, “Paris Awakes,” which introduces us to the street life at the foot of Montmartre at daybreak. And Louise is true verismo, both in subject matter and musical style—the only French example of that genre to achieve a lasting success. Its composer, Gustave Charpentier, called it a “musical novel,” and it does suggest both a Zola-esque naturalism and a Balzacian ambition, the latter particularly when we think of its stillborn successor, Julien, which sought to carry its protagonists forward into other adventures with other characters. Here in New York, it is one of five operas that had been fairly regularly in the repertory of the Metropolitan through the 1940s but vanished abruptly as of 1950, never since to return. (The others: Mignon, Lakmé, The Golden Cockerel—but sung in French, as Le Coq d’or—and L’Amore dei tre re.) All five were given some life support by the New York City Opera at one point or another, with Louise and Golden Cockerel (with the Sills/Treigle team) getting the best response, and the San Francisco Opera staged Louise for Renée Fleming as recently as 1999. But Louise is now no more than an antique curiosity for American operagoers, and not much more than that even in France. Which is a shame.

Looking back over some of my Louise recordings and materials, I re-read, I believe for the first time since its publication, my High Fidelity review of the 1977 Columbia recording, conducted by George Prêtre.^(I) I was interested to find that, already aware that Louise was fading from our ken and thinking in the context of socially committed theatre like ours of the 1930s, I was concerned to locate points of connection between the work and contemporaneous audiences. And now, in this time of Mandatory Relevance and much confusion as to just what “relevance” is, I cannot do better than to cite myself on the aboutness of Louise: “[it] is in part about the lot of the urban workingman; in part about a young woman’s difficulty in establishing an identity vis-à-vis restrictive parents or a dominant lover; in part about the overwhelming nature of the modern city, whose powers of magnetism and alienation seem so tightly knit together; in part about the qualities of what we now call the nuclear family and the patterns of tyranny and rebellion we so often see as native to it; and in part about the very perplexing question of just what does constitute personal ‘freedom.'” I later speculate on what may become of Louise now that she has fled her home for the final time under wrenching circumstances, and I note that Julien (himself immature and self-centered, I’d now add) seems only the catalyst to this action—Louise has fled to the city itself, the “Paris tout en fête” in which she will now have to make her way, “en fête” or not.

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. 

˜ ˜ ˜

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)