Sandow

I was listening to Il giuramento, an opera by Mercadante, the top dog among 19th century Italian opera composers whose work hasn't survived in the repertoire. He writes smooth melodies, whips up at least the appearance of drama, and expertly handles every aspect of the 19th century Italian style.

So what's missing? I'd put it this way -- his characters never grab you, singing (as a subtext to whatever their words are) "I am somebody!" (To borrow Jesse Jackson's phrase.) Listen, by contrast, to just about any Verdi aria. Verdi's characters are always somebody, so strongly so that we take it for granted, and imagine (or at least I do) that this is just how Italian opera is.

It's easy to mistake this for an achievement in musical composition. It isn't. It's an achievement of imagination, which composing serves. If you're blessed (or cursed) with dramatic imagination, you'll hack away at your music till it sounds like the people you imagine. And you don't need special composing talent to do that. You'll do it at whatever level you've reached as a composer. Look at Boito -- he had modest composing skills, but fabulous imagination. His music isn't very good, much of the time, but it's vividly dramatic. (Not that it wouldn't be more vividly so, if he wrote more vivid music.)

I loved the comments on my recent post on opera titles. They built a safety net under my limited Italian, provided wonderful examples of the things I was talking about, and took my ideas a lot further. And I want to sent a happy shout to Cori Ellison, who commented, who works professionally with titles, and provides a point of view that the rest of us don't have.

It all makes me want to state, or restate, some general points.

First, it strikes me that we tend to think of titles as purely explanatory, a neutral element in an opera performance. But I don't think that this is right. They're part of what reaches the audience from the stage. They're part of the artistic experience. So they should be planned together with every other artistic element in the production, and should be held to the same standard.

Secondly, I think that titles are meant to overcome difficulties in classical music, in this case the inconvenient fact that the standard operas are almost all (from the point of view of the English-speaking world) in foreign languages. And this meshes with an overall sense that classical music offers difficulties -- or, even worse, the perception that there are difficulties -- and that therefore it should be made simpler. So the titles are made lean, and purely functional. But again I don't think that's right. I think we underestimate how much our audience reads, how much they can appreciate literary things. And we especially underestimate the younger audience, which loves offbeat and unusual things, even things that are weird.

Finally, I want to repeat something I said in response to one of the comments. If I ever write another opera, and if it's performed in a place that offers Englilsh titles for English-language works, I want to specify the titles in the score. I want them to do more than overcome any diction problems, by communicating exactly what the characters are singing. I'd like them to be an artistic element in their own right, possibly (I haven't thought this out in much detail) by adding narration (with attitude), and by adding asides that the characters don't actually speak. I'd sometimes want titles when nobody is singing. I'd prefer, I think, a production with clear diction and no titles at all, but if we're going to have them, I want them to contribute something on their own.

A New York Times story says today that the New York City Opera will lay off 11 full-time employees. That's 13% of their staff. The company, as quoted in the story, says it needs fewer staff members this year because, well, basically the company won't be giving any normal performances. And there's of course an economic factor, too. Says a spokesman, quoted by the Times, the company "believes that this reorganization will position the opera to deal with current economic conditions."

This leads to a cascade of questions.

Did the company need these 11 people when it put on normal seasons up to this past spring?

If so, why doesn't it need them now? And how can it say, as it's quoted as saying in the Times, that it has no plan to rehire them?

And most of all -- did the company see this coming? Long ago, when we first learned that this year's season would essentially be cancelled (the company is doing only a few small performances, scattered around New York), it was clear to any classical music professional that this would be expensive, more expensive, in some ways, than doing normal performances. That's because the company still has many of its normal expenses -- including its orchestra, its chorus, and its staff -- but loses much of its income. (No ticket sales.) I wasn't the only one who wondered if they'd prepared for the financial hit they'd be taking.

And now this. Did they expect it? I'm surprised the Times story didn't probe for that, especially since it very usefully mentioned that City Opera's fundraising has been hurting. Mthe eaybe "current economic conditions" jumped up and slapped City Opera in the face, but maybe they also hadn't prepared well enough for the financial impact of not performing, whatever the economy did.

What's going to happen next?

I have a piece on Berlioz's operas in the new issue of Opera News. You can read it online here. It was fun to write -- I didn't know Benvenuto Cellini well, and didn't know Béatrice et Bénédict at all. Was very surprised to find out that B&B is a dud, in spite of a ravishing duet at the end of the first act. (Which has nothing to do with the plot -- one sign of the things that make the opera a dud, at least for me.)

Among the many delights I had was listening to the first Colin Davis recording of Cellini, which I think is one of the great opera recordings of all time, even if the piece isn't one of the great operas. (Except for the second act finale, which combines, if you can believe this, Rossini with a foretaste of Petrushka.) One highlight of the recording is Nicolai Gedda, just about perfect in the title role, dashing and a little silly, with that fabulous voice and perfect control of amazing high notes, all the way up to D flat, which he plays with, the way somebody might stroke a kitten. (Well, after walking out on a ledge 500 feet above the ground; it's not easy to sing high D flat, or the C sharp, equally caressed, that Gedda sings in the love duet in the Davis recording of La damnation de Faust.

The second Davis Cellini, a live performance with the London Symphony, is negligible. The singing doesn't come within miles of the first recording.

Also perfect: Jules Bastin as Mephistopheles on the Faust CDs. Though overall the old Charles Munch recording, from the 1950s, is more powerful, with a better Marguerite and a tremendous Faust (David Poleri, a tenor who started out brilliantly and then fizzled). Though there are two disappointments. One is Martial Singher, the Mephistopheles, a reigning French baritone of the era, who should have been perfect, but was running a fever when the recording was made. And you can hear it. (He told me this himself, when I studied voice with him, while I was in high school.)

The other disappointment is the chorus. Munch, music director of the Boston Symphony back then, made Berlioz recordings in Boston -- Faust, the Requiem, and L'enfance du Christ -- using student choruses from Harvard, Radcliffe, and the New England Conservatory. I don't remember minding those choruses when those recordings were new, and I had them, but now the choral singing sounds thin, and just won't wash, in an era when recordings are mostly made with professional choristers.

Ssee how much I love classical music, when I'm not fed up with the classical music business? My criticisms, I've come to understand, are the complaints of a lover who wants his beloved to be better.

From one of my wife Anne Midgette's terrific pieces on Christoph Eschenbach in the Washington Post:

He has long ago discarded the standard tailsuit in favor of a crisp Nehru jacket; at the Orchestre de Paris, where he is music director...a fashion house was brought in to design an alternative to the players' traditional formal dress.

So it can be done, unless the players and audience in Paris just hate what they're wearing now. Any word on that?

(Anne's other Eschenbach piece is here.)

Added later: I searched online in vain for photos of the orchestra in its designer wear. But I did find this, from a British review last month:

If nothing else, the Orchestre de Paris wins the Best-Dressed Musicians at the Proms award. They looked wonderfully chic in their natty tunics. I wish my colleagues on the fashion desk had been there to give you a more expert description.

The critic then goes on to trash the way the orchestra played.

Followup to my post about the language of Italian opera, and how it's never rendered properly in opera-house translations.

I was listening again to Il Trovatore, and came to the moment when the baritone realizes that the gypsy he's captured is not only the woman who burned his infant brother alive, but is also his hated rival's mother. The rival is named Manrico, and, as I listened, I heard the baritone labelling the gypsy with these words: "Di Manrico genitrice."

Which is very fancy, to the point of silliness. First, it's backwards poetic phrasing: "Of Manrico the mother." Except the word used isn't mother, but something wildly stilted: "Of Manrico the parent," or (because "genitrice" is far more stiff than that) "of Manrico the begetter."

But I'm sure it'll be translated at the opera house, in the titles, as "Manrico's mother." When I saw La Gioconda at the Met, there were countless examples of that. The libretto (written by Verdi's great librettist Boito, under an assumed name) is highly literary. In the last act, the baritone, skulking as usual, observes that night is falling.

Except he doesn't put it that way. He sings, "Il ciel s'oscura" -- "the heavens are darkening," or something like that. I've taken my Italian about as far as it can go, but I know that the normal word for "sky" is "cielo," not "ciel," and "s'oscura," to the best of my knowledge, isn't common usage. Put the baritone's words into Google Translate, and it can't find an English rendering at all.

But the translation on the seat in front of me just said "Night is falling," which robs the opera of all its melodramatic flair. At least try "The sky is darkening," like this English translation available online. (You'll have to scroll far down into Act IV to find the line.)

My Wall Street Journal piece about the Don Rosenberg fiasco ran today. The link will take you to it.

I'll have a piece in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow -- Saturday -- about the mess in Cleveland. Most of us know about it, I'd think. Don Rosenberg, for 16 years the very good classical music critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been demoted, presumably because his reviews of the Cleveland Orchestra weren't favorable enough.

Not that my piece breaks new ground. The New York Times wrote a story, after Tim Smith, classical critic of the Baltimore Sun, admirably broke the news in his blog. The comments he's gotten, many from Cleveland, are must reading.

I raise some strong points, though, and I challenge the orchestra to fix what might be a serious hit to the perception of its integrity.

...one of the world's top opera singers sings La Gioconda at the Met, and gets just polite applause for her big killer aria. But that's what happened to Deborah Voigt last night. What went wrong?

She's not a strong presence onstage. She keeps leaning forward, which makes her look weak. And she's not a diva. When she first comes onstage, you don't even notice her. In the old days, when a star Gioconda made her first entrance, not singing a note, a shockwave went through the opera house, and the crowd would go wild. Voigt might think she's an actress, avoiding all that bad old operatic exaggeration. But the opera demands that grand old style. Without wild, grand heat, the music will die. Listen to Zinka Milanov singing the aria, from a live 1953 performance in New Orleans. Hear the electric shock in her very first notes. She grabs you by the throat, and doesn't let you go. (And you can't fault her dignity.)

Voigt's voice is too light for the role. Especially in her middle range. She can pump up the low notes, and belt out the highs. But the middle -- where the role demands that she sing with great empahsis -- doesn't have any force. Listen to Milanov, in the aria's climax. Hear how she goes up the scale, hurling the high note out from the notes that lead up to it. And then how powerfully she comes down from the high note! This (along with the size of the note, and its sheer diva force) is why the climax is powerful. Voigt can't do this. Her high notes came out of nowhere, and mostly had no effect.

OK, I can't resist. Just a few notes about the very blah show onstage at the Met Opera opening.

Renée Fleming. No heat onstage at all, either in her singing, or her presence. Occasionally an emphatic moment in her acting, but none of the acting was sustained. She doesn't (to my ear) act through her voice in crucial long legato passages, like "Dite alla giovane" in the big Traviata scene with Thomas Hampson. But above all -- no heat! If this is our reigning prima donna, than opera isn't what it used to be, or what I want it to be.

And one vocal note. In the final part of the gala, when Fleming sang the final scene from Strauss's Capriccio, she finally sounded fabulous. Here the wonderful evenness of her sound from top to bottom pays off for her. She sounds easy and natural. But not in Traviata! Verdi -- even in a role that's lighter than most of his other soprano parts -- asks for more emphasis in the bottom octave of a soprano's range than Fleming can easily give. She's worked out a way to pump out some low notes artificially, but it doesn't sound comfortable, and can't work in the lower middle range, where so much of the role lies.

But then we already heard this when she did Bellini's Il Pirata at the Met. Her role lay very low, with hardly any high notes at all -- in most of her duet with the tenor, she doesn't sing above G. And she just wasn't effective. Her voice didn't soar.

And now this year she's going to sing Trovatore! Her role there is heavier and lower than either Pirata or Traviata. How's she going to make that work? (Just think of the "Miserere," where she'll really have to dig into her lower octave.) I don't get it, not at all.

As somebody commenting noted (though very kindly not in these words), I was completely out to lunch there. The Met will mount a new Trovatore this year, but not with Fleming. Though she will be singing Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in Washington this year, which is also not very plausible, for the same reasons. Like so many bel canto roles (despite the stereotype that equates bel canto opera with high notes), it's written fairly low, and because it's an intensely dramatic opera, requires the singer to hurl out strong emphasis in her lower range. Which Fleming's voice just doesn't naturally do.

Thomas Hampson. Fabulous singing, as Germont, in the Traviata scene. And strong, committed acting. To my ear, he doesn't really have a Verdi sound, but what he does is marvelous despite that. The part lies very high -- constant Fs and G flats -- and he sang them easily. Most baritones, including many of the great ones (Tito Gobbi would be a notable example) sound like they're working hard in that range. The notes sound high. They don't come out easily. But not Hampson. He sounds like his range is just a whole step below the normal tenor range, or at most a minor third lower. So F and G flat come out like notes at the top of his high middle range, and he can sing them with marvelous color and ease, and with lyrical phrasing.

As he made his entrance in the Traviata scene, the orchestra played his music almost with ferocity. I just about jumped out of my seat. What was that about? But it turns out that, in Hampson's idea of the role, Germont enters just about shaking with rage. James Levine had clearly caught onto that, and got the orchestra to play what Hampson was about to act. Bravo for that. Operatic artistry flying very high.

The orchestra. Of course the Met orchestra is marvelous, but I'd guess they didn't have much rehearsal for this performance. Traviata, of course, they can play in their sleep, and the scenes from Manon, too. Not that they sounded asleep. Under Levine, they sounded wonderful in Traviata. But in the Capriccio final scene, they didn't sound good at all. Clearly they don't know this music well, which isn't their fault -- they don't play it much, and some members of the current orchestra may never have played it all. And it's tricky music, full of subtle shifts from one harmony to another. Or, often, in typical late Strauss fashion, shifts through several harmonies in succession, a kind of iridescent shimmer of evanescent chords.

And here the orchestra unfortunately sounded more than a little lost. They hadn't learned to hear those shimmering chords as yet, and didn't project them cleanly. There were ensemble, balance, and intonation problems, too, and the overall sound was often coarse. Maybe the conductor, Patrick Summers, wasn't up to the job. I don't know his conducting, and wouldn't venture to judge. But I'm sure that if Levine had conducted all three scenes, instead of just Traviata, or at least if he'd led Capriccio, he'd never have let the orchestra sound that way. I can't believe he wouldn't have given himself enough rehearsal to make the music sound. I trust he'd never settle for less. (And so he shouldn't settle for less when others conduct.)

It's a new delight for me. I used to think fashion was frivolous, not anything (God help me!) serious people should care about.

Then I started watching Project Runway. And got hooked. Of all reality shows (at least in my experience), it's the fairest. To viewers, I mean. You can see the fashions the contestants design, just as well as the judges on the show can. You can see who does well, and who does badly. You can develop your eye, as I did. You can learn to see how fashion can be art. You can hear the judges -- expereinced fashion people, some of them top designers -- talk about the work they're seeing. You can see that their standards are high, and their judgment artistic.

And finally it came to me. Fashion can be exciting because it's a place where art, commerce, craftsmanship, and sexuality all come together. Which, if you ask me, is hot. And (as I hardly need to say) that's not a place where classical music very comfortably lives. Though why shouldn't it? It certainly did in past centuries. Handel's opera companies in London -- artistic (just listen to the music), commercial to the hilt, and with a lot of sexual excitement about some of the singers (the prima donnas, and, inevitably, the castratos, who were infertile, but as sexually potent as any other man).

Why can't classical music do that now?

I went to the Metropolitan Opera season opening last night, and didn't see much glamour, in the audience or on the stage. And since we've been talking about clothes here, let me stress something that hit me very strongly. A man in black tie doesn't look dressy any more, at least not to my eye, and certainly doesn't look fancy or glamorous. I saw a few men in tuxes, and the effect was blah, no more striking than a man in a business suit.

And why? Because fashion has moved beyond that. Fashion designers -- along with plain old non-designer people -- have come up with sharper, more interesting, more striking, more contemporary looks than black tie, and that's now what you want to wear if you want to be festive or glamorous.

Which is yet another reason why formal dress -- and even business suits -- on classical musicians makes hardly any difference. It all just looks blah. I go back to the Northern Sinfonia, in Newcastle/Gateshead in England, all dressed in spiffy black. That made an impression. The musicians looked as if they were about to do something that mattered, something other people might enjoy. Other people, that is, oriented toward the world as it is now.

What did I wear to the Met? I have a Kenneth Cole outfit, jacket and pants, that I think looks sleek. I wouldn't wear it with a tie. I normally wear it with a black Kenneth Cole shirt, with subtle stripes, a shirt that's both dressy and casual, as I think the entire outfit is.

But this time -- after an informal conversation at lunch the other day with someone who knows fashion really well -- I decided to push things a bit. So I wore the jacket and pants with a black t-shirt, one with a striking white design on it. And it's a t-shirt celebrating Meredith Monk, one of my favorite artists of any kind, so I was doubly happy to wear it.

I felt a little uneasy -- would I look too dressed down? But when I saw how blah the crowd looked (and this was downstairs, in the pricey seats), I felt completely comfortable. The Met opening is supposed to be glamorous, and at least (without making any great claims about my success) I was trying. I wish I'd thought to have someone take a cell phone photo. Then I could show you all how, at least, I tried.

And as for the performance -- utterly blah. Don't get me started!

I've said before that I don't love English titles onscreen or in the opera house when an opera is sung in English. (Scroll down to the section on Britten's Peter Grimes if you follow the link.) They seem geeky, to say the least, and only reinforce the notion that opera is -- by nature -- remote and unfathomable. (Even while they make it accessible. There's a paradox there.)

Well, late in July, I saw Britten's Billy Budd in a quite good production at the Santa Fe Opera. Of course there were titles, but I was also able to understand most of the singers, a good deal more than half the time they sing. And yes, the singers in this opera all are men; it's women who have an especially hard time being understood, thanks to acoustical peculiarities with certain vowels sung on high notes. But still -- I understood these singers most of the time.

And it was when one of them suddenly sang one line -- in the midst of a longish aria --  that I couldn't understand, that I suddenly realized what one of the problems is. There might be inherent problems in understanding the words when opera singers sing. There may have been problems like that even in smaller theaters in past centuries. (The texts of the operas being performed were routinely on sale, for instance, in 19th century Italy.) But how hard do we work, even now, on making sure opera singers can be understood?

Yes, an opera singer will be trained in diction -- clarity and correct pronunciation of all languages -- and coaches sometimes will work on those things, even with established professionals. But is there anyone sitting out in the house during rehearsals, telling singers when their words aren't clear? I've never heard of that being done. Would a rehearsal be stopped because someone couldn't be understood in the 25th row? Would anyone have told the singer who made me think all this, "Look, almost everything you sang was understandable, except the two phrases at the start of page 193 in the vocal score"?

And if we don't work on this, why should we be surprised when singers' words aren't clear? They themselves can't know when they're understandable, and when they're not. Maybe if we made this a higher priority, those strange, redundant, English-on-English titles wouldn't be needed.

When I was younger, into the 1960s, the president of the US never appeared in public without a suit and tie. Or at least a jacket and tie.

Then late in the '70s Jimmy Carter went on TV wearing a sweater. That was the beginning of a huge change. Now it's routine to see presidents and presidential candidates in shirtsleeves. Our society, in other words, has gotten lots less formal.

So why shouldn't classical music follow suit? And if the might and majesty of the U.S. government now doesn't have to be represented by a gentleman in business clothes, why should classical music need to underline its importance with the kind of clothing even presidents would never wear?

(A portion of a famous photograph by Weegee, showing society women on their way to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season in 1943. Yet another example of formal dress of a kind we just don't see anymore in real life.)

First, the new comment system -- I love it, love it. Comments go online without waiting for my approval. So they go up fast, many of you comment on the comments, conversations start. And I don't have to do anything at all. I don't have to take time to approve each one, and I'm freed from the temptation of adding my own replies, nearly every time. This is good for my schedule, and good for, oh, let's say my lightness of being. Many thanks to the readers who suggested I adopt this system.

But, a question -- would you all prefer that I commented on the comments more, as I used to? Yes? No? Tell me what you think.

And about the formal dress discussion -- I loved that, too. Seems like you all covered a lot of ground, and that a lot of points of view were represented, very fairly. One thing I noticed: some of us (me included) are very sure that our point of view is right. Or, maybe more precisely, that it's the most important point of view. People who like formal dress think concerts would suffer without it, and think that many others in the audience agree. People who don't like formal dress (me included) think it weakens concerts, and think it might keep (or at least help to keep) a new, young audience away.

The most fair conclusion I can come to, observing this, is that both sides are partly right. Both kinds of people really do exist, the ones who like formal dress and the ones who don't. What we don't know, as Rebecca wisely pointed out, whether formal dress really does keep any large number of people away.

I'd also add that we don't have numbers -- we don't know how many people are attached to formal dress, how many people in the audience already (and among musicians) would like to see it go away, and how many people might be more likely to come to concerts if the dress was looser, less predictable, less formal, more fun. And is either group growing? Is either group shrinking? Are there fewer people each year who demand formal dress, and more who want it over with? Is less formality the trend of the future, and formal dress a remnant of the past? I think that's true, but I don't have data. I can't prove it.

Yvonne is right -- we have to be adaptable. This is one of many areas in which classical music might have to play both sides of the fence, at least for a while. We might need formal concerts for the people who want them, and less formal ones for other people. And I guess there should be studies of what people in the audience -- or the prospective audience -- might really want. Maybe studies like that already exist! If anyone has heard of any, please let me know.

But studies might not be accurate. That is, many people may never have seen a full orchestra, for instance, dressed informally, and therefore don't know how they'd really feel if they were hearing one. The study, in other words, might end up skewed toward favoring formality, just because too many people haven't experienced the alternative.

And new music, as Wendy noted, doesn't go well with formality. Bill, I think, implied something like that when he cited the Kronos Quartet as an ensemble that defines its brand -- so to speak -- and also supports its art by dressing in an individual way. Which reminds me that, as far as I know, very few chamber ensembles -- and certainly very few made up of young musicians -- dress formally for concerts. For new music, white tie and tails (and the women's equivalent) really doesn't seem to fit. Especially if a piece sounds and moves with echoes of pop culture, or is a happy or devastating assault of noise. What's the meaning then of tails? Irony wouldn't begin to be the word that might describe the disconnect.

Finally, I might note some successful ways I've seen ensembles dress. Way back in the 1960s I saw a performance of Stravinsky's Les Noces at Harvard, conducted by Leon Kirschner. The chorus wore black pants or skirts, and brightly colored t-shirts. I'd guess the choral singers picked their t-shirts independently. The look was festive and alive, perfect for the festive piece. (Well, OK, the piece lives partly in the Russia of centuries ago, and the t-shirts were very up to date American, but still they worked.)

And once I saw the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in a purely orchestral concert, featuring new music, dress similarly -- black below the waist, colors above. But no t-shirts (if I remember accurately), and with more muted colors. Finally, the Northern Sinfonia, the orchestra that serves the twin cities of Newcastle and Gateshead in England, dresses in informal spiffy black, not a jacket or a tie in sight. They play in a large modern concert hall, exactly the kind of space where most of us are used to seeing tails. When the musicians walked on stage, the hall came alive. They looked relaxed and happy, with no need, apparently, to invoke an atmosphere of sanctity, or any sense of the importance of what they were about to do.

In Britain, I can imagine, orchestras are more likely to be informal, because the musicians tend to be younger. (Orchestral pay is very low, so not so many people continue playing in orchestras as they grow older.) And for the Northern Sinfonia, it's a way of life. At the concert, I happened to be sitting next to the man who ran the arts center that includes the concert hall. He himself is informal -- his trademark dress is a shirt with no jacket. He looked quite spiffy. I asked him if the orchestra always wore what they were wearing, and he said -- very proudly, I thought -- "Yes! They even dressed this way a month ago, when the Queen came to a concert."

Which again shows how very differently people can react to this issue.