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.

˜ ˜ ˜             

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.”

This Sunday, Sept. 20, at 3:00 PM, I will be interviewed by tenor and voice teacher Steven Tharp on the first of a series of video chats under the auspices of the excellent training program Bel Canto Boot Camp. We’ll be discussing many topics relating to singing and to the current state of opera in general. All are invited, and here’s the link.

And in related news: Will Crutchfield’s “Record of the Week” series is always worth checking in on, but this week’s installment hits on a subject dear to me—the sobering contrast, of both quantity and quality, in the development of young voices (late teens and early 20s) today and those of some 80 to 120 years ago. I’ve written about this both in my book and in the “Before the First Lesson” series here. Will presents a number of startling examples to listen to, and his comments about them, and about this Youth Development Gap, are exceptionally well informed and analyzed.

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When I set September 11 as the date for resumption of tri-weekly posts, I did not envision that it would take the form of this article. But as the summer unfolded, and as the ongoing pressure system of the pandemic collided with the social justice protests and the vertiginous uncertainties of election-year politics, the impact of these developments on the already-prostrate performing arts moved from pending and probable to immediate and certain, and I felt an obligation to offer some thoughts.

I support both the narrow, short-term objective of the social justice movement (serious reform in police training and practice) and its long-term goals of equality of opportunity and access with regard to household wealth, employment, education, housing, and health care. And none of the concerns expressed below approach equivalency with death from a knee on the neck or paralysis from seven bullets in the back at short range. However, I write here about the arts—opera primarily, but the other classical arts by close association—and so it is occurrences related to them that have engaged my professional attention. These occurrences have ranged across several artistic fields, but have one thing in common: the experience of the EuroAmerican cultural mainstream as oppressive and as inimical to aspirations toward social equality and “diversity.” I think we must acknowledge that that tension exists, and needs to be addressed in something other than a dismissive tone. Perhaps I bring two advantages to the table: I’m a critic, and I’m old. I’m aware that these are seen by many as disqualifying attributes. But hard as it is to to apply rational thinking to an emotionally volatile topic, that’s something a critic is accustomed to at least attempting. And while with every generational turnover, there are certainly things the old can learn from the young, a great deal of useful education has actually happened the other way around.

To my regular readership of opera devotees: though this piece is quite long and takes excursions into other artforms, do not despair: it begins with opera, and ends with it, too. Please see the end of the post for a revised future schedule.     

Personal Prologue. I suppose the title should really be The Racial/Generational/Covid 19/#MeToo/HIV/LGBTQ Moment and the Performing Arts, with such living-memory ancestors as Gay Rights, Civil Rights and Affirmative Action, Poor People’s Campaign, and Women’s Lib Moments on immediate background, and Watergate/Vietnam/’68 hovering only a little beyond. Indeed, for my generation, the Sexual Revolution, Cold War/Nuclear/Space, and McCarthy-and-Blacklist Moments are part of the chain, too. Most of these have had implications for what we think of as the High Arts, including opera, and all have contributed to the atmospheric context within which we react to new developments. For example:

During my time of low-key activism in the Vietnam/Civil Rights era (an editors’ and writers’ group under the umbrella of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee), I made a sobering discovery: the new Left was not like the old Left with respect to high culture. The old Left, coming out of the Depression and WPA years, while certainly favoring folk and populist strains in the arts, also retained something of the ideal that all people were entitled to share in the riches of the high culture, to be uplifted by it—why should it belong to only the monied capitalist elite? I’ll give you but a single anecdotal example, which I guarantee is not atypical. In that very time, my dentist was Irving Peress. His name has surfaced again recently due to a new biography of Joseph McCarthy, because his Army promotion figured prominently in the televised hearings that brought McCarthy down. Irving was certainly on the political far left. Of the magazines in his waiting room, where one might have expected Time or U.S. News and World Report, the journal furthest to the right was Ramparts. And the music track that accompanied one’s cleaning or root canal in his office alternated militant labor or racial integration songs with Brahms symphonies. He could discuss either with appreciation; there was no contradiction between them.

The main purpose of today’s post is to share with you a kind of “Wanted Dead or Alive” compilation of persons and tendencies who are contributing to opera’s current problems. It’s part of an email from Fred Kolo (ID below), who has periodically sent thoughtful commentary almost from the beginning of Osborne on Opera three years ago, and it wasn’t originally intended for publication. But I liked it, and like the general idea of including such assessments from professionals in our field, as I did with “‘Jane’s’ Great List,” (1/3/20).  So I obtained Fred’s permission, and present his list herewith.

This will be the final post until September. After several years of high-intensity activity with the publIcation of Opera as Opera and the maintenance (at first biweekly, then triweekly) of Osborne on Opera, I had long planned a summer hiatus, and the lockdown of live performance gives further reason for a pause. I will have plenty to keep me busy. My teaching always comes first. It goes forward via Zoom, a technique that, though not without its limitations and annoyances, has functioned better than I’d anticipated for both my students and myself. And I’ll be working on my essay for Marston Records’ release of the recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, which in terms of both quantity and quality will, I think, be the definitive monument-in-sound to this great American artist.

Over the summer, I shall also be pondering the most productive future role for serious opera criticism disseminated by this now-retro means, the no-frills, long-form blogpost. It’s official that in New York there will be nothing resembling full-scale performance until midway through next season. Even that, I believe, is very much in doubt. Of all the hard-hit sectors of our economy, there is none further from the “ready, set, on your mark” line than the performing arts. Already-fragile companies will permanently close, and the survival of the Met itself is not guaranteed. Since live performance in the theatre is the only “site” on which opera as opera actually happens, we could say that not only are culturally significant works Missing In Action (which has not stopped me from writing about them), but that the artform itself is MIA. Its secondary manifestations—its audio and video recordings, its critical and historical literature—contain a wealth of material worthy of examination, but without the presence of the living art they are there-and-then documents without a here-and-now context.

“Systemic” is a word we’re hearing often these days, most often with regard to race-related social justice protests and initiatives, and to our ways of apportioning and paying for our health care. The use of the word seeks to establish an awareness that the obvious injustices and inadequacies that present themselves daily are not localized anomalies, but symptoms of biased assumptions built into the structures that govern these crucial social territories. That, in turn, implies that while there may be value in publicizing and demanding redress for individual occurrences, that value will be limited so long as those fundamental assumptions are not identified, then acted upon in a constructive fashion. I used the word as I began writing the Introduction to the completed typescript of Opera as Opera, in 2016. I was recounting my strategic withdrawal, fifty years ago now, from eleven years of hot-and-heavy reviewing of records and live performances. I wrote that “. . . I had come to perceive the performance problems I was seeing and hearing more as systemic than as particular to given occasions and artists. To write about them regularly was to risk turning into a repetitive scold, a severely compromised temporizer, or an outright collaborationist of the ‘educative,’ ‘appreciative,’ or promotional sort.” I go on to describe how developments of the intervening years, and the further clarification of my own thinking about these systemic problems, had brought me to the start of my work on the book.

A preliminary note: The full-length Porgy and Bess Roundtable of June10, produced by Joseph Horowitz’s Post Classical Ensemble, with a distinguished panel that includes yours truly, has now been posted, and is available to those of you who missed the original chat. You will find it here, and will then need the following password: 1O^%=0=Y. To skip some irrelevant warm-ups, start the video at 2:20. It’s well worth a look for anyone interested in the work and many of the issues, artistic and social, that crowd around it. And to today’s topic: 

While the musical and dramatic changes involved in reverting to the 1904 version of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, discussed last week, are significant, they pale in comparison to those necessitated by a return to the 1859 edition of Gounod’s Faust. The motivation for the revisions made in these two enduringly popular works were different. Puccini’s were undertaken to rescue his opera from the storm of criticism that attended its premiere—criticism that owed much to the operatic politics of the time, but which obviously hit on some of the composer’s own dissatisfactions with his work. Gounod’s had to do with re-shaping his already-successful opéra-dialogué, first performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris, to fit the presentational practicalities of other opera houses, first in Germany and the French provinces, then at La Scala, and finally at the Opéra itself (1869) in full grand opera form, complete with ballet. It amounts to a transformation from one music-theatre genre to another, though with much of the original music retained in the process.

Parts of the1859 Faust, notably the participation of Siébel and Wagner in the opening scene, have surfaced on previous recordings, and even in our familiar1869 version there have always been questions, in both staged and recorded productions, as to whether or not to include the “Spinning Wheel Scene,” and if so whether or not it should comprise Marguerite’s “Il ne revient pas,” Siébel’s “Si le bonheur,” either or both; as to which version, if any, of the Walpurgis scene to include, etc. In Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1947-48 recording with the RPO and singers of the Opéra Comique, Valentin’s “Avant de quitter ces lieux,” conceived in English (“Even Bravest Heart May Swell”) for Santley at the London premiere, was excised, as was once common practice in French houses apart from the Opéra. But the new recording emanating from the Centre du Musique Romantique Française at Venice’s Palazetto Bru Zane is the first to essay an inclusive return to 1859, with its stretches of spoken dialogue and mélodrame and its extensive additions, subtractions, and revisions of musical numbers. It also embraces the use of period  instruments. And while at first glance it seems odd to find this opera as No. 22 on the impressive list of French Romantic rarities that have to date been committed to disc by Bru Zane, as my readers will recall, I’ve considered Faust among the missing in action for some time now (see “MIA–Gounod’s Faust, 1/4/19).

I think it’s best to begin by listing and briefly characterizing this version’s departures from the familiar 1869 Faust, before evaluating the effects of each and of the performance itself. I’ll pass over the relatively minor changes that occur in the orchestrations of a few of the musical numbers common to both editions. I should add that the score I’ve used for comparisons is the full score published by Dover (1994, reissued 2013), which is a compendium drawn from three  sources (all much earlier, but undated) issued by Bote & Bock, Berlin; by Chappell & Co., London; and by Mapleson Music Publications, N. Y., together with some incidental apparatus provided by Dover’s editors. It is not the same as a full-blown critical edition, but is very useful all the same, including both Louis Schindelmeisser’s Dance Music for the Walpurgis episode (a curiosity, apparently used by some German companies for a time) and Gounod’s own ballet music; and Siébel’s brief intrusion into the Garden Scene (between the Quartet and Mephistopehélès’ Invocation), in which he comically interacts with Marthe and Mephistophélès.