September 2007 Archives

Lucia di Lammermoor at opening night of the Metropolitan Opera -- a perfect example of a piece that ought to feel more like the era it comes from. And would be more exciting if it did.

The performance, by the way, was dreary, up until the stretta at the end of the second act. Then all at once it heated up, and the third act, especially the last two scenes, had some emotional punch. But don't believe what you read in some of the reviews! For most of the first two acts, the orchestra sounded like it was sleepwalking. The director clearly hadn't worked much with the singers. Reliable gossip said that she hadn't, and what happened on stage suggested that the gossip was right. Two entire scenes -- the Lucia-Enrico scene at the start of the second act, and the Wolf's Crag scene at the start of the third -- were incoherent. Community theater. (More on that later.) The baritone yelled; he does it well, and he's lively, in a crude way, but he yells. The bass sounded like a computer simulation -- like the result of some process that somehow took the mathematical average of every more famous bass who's recorded the role. I couldn't sense any feeling from him, or any personal involvement. The two leads, Lucia and Edgardo, sang like B grade singers -- oh, don't get me started. I'm hardly alone in thinking this. One particularly annoyed music writer -- not my wife -- said in the press room during the second intermission that the performance was "amateur night." I wouldn't go that far, but I can't think that Natalie Dessay, for all of her virtues, is anything like a major Lucia. For one thing, she can't turn a bel canto phrase in a way that's going to touch anyone's heart. Her acting, in her role, seemed mostly physical; not much of it came from her singing. Just compare her to Lucias of the past (Callas, Sutherland, Sills, Renata Scotto, Anna Moffo, to name some who recorded the role).

But there were some good things, too, and the final two scenes really did pack some punch. So I came away from the evening grateful at least for that. I love this opera, and at least some of it, even in this performance, got to me. All I ask is for a little more of it to do that!

And now for the pastness of it. Lucia of course is a 19th century opera, written and performed at a time when Italian opera houses were noisy places, full of active conversation during performances, and lots of excited noise whenever the audience heard something it loved or hated.

(Fabulous story: in 1872, Verdi's Aida was premiered in Parma. In the third act, when Amonasro, during his duet with Aida, sings "Riverdrai le foreste imbalsamate," the audience went crazy. They loved the music so much that they started screaming. They wanted Verdi to take a bow. Immediately! Not at the end of the duet, but immediately. They wanted the baritone to repeat the phrase. And Verdi loved this! He said, toward the end of his life, that he didn't like the German practice, which was new in the 19th century, of listening to operas in silence. He liked an Italian audience, which would participate in the performance, and show how it felt. Note, by the way, that this phrase of Amonasro's is a quiet moment in the music. So the audience could launch itself into a noisy passion when it heard something subtle, not just when the music itself was loud and explosive. Many thanks, by the way, to the Karadar classical music website, where I could second-guess my memory, and make sure that I really knew what Amonsaro sings at that spot. I did. But how fabulous to have a site where -- among many other things -- I can read the libretti, in Italian, of all Verdi's operas.)

Back to Lucia. Our idea of artistic opera performance -- which comes from our idea of classical music as serious art -- says that operas should be serious drama. So they should be staged that way, with an emphasis on meaning, emotion, and character. We don't want moments when people are merely carried away with excitement onstage.

Which then leads to a contradiction. There are parts of Lucia -- and parts of any bel canto opera, or anything Verdi wrote in the first half of his career -- where the 19th century comes screaming through loud and clear. In excited moments, just for instance, the timpani, bass drum, and cymbals often play on every beat. (Look, for example, at the interlude between the two statements of the baritone's cabaletta in the first scene, or the coda; or at the last few pages of the stretta in the second act finale; or the opening chorus of the mad scene.) This is noisy. Or certainly it was in the 19th century. Opera orchestras were smaller then, so the percussion would have cut through more strongly. There wasn't any way to hide the percussion in a smoothly blended orchestral sound, because the instruments of the time didn't make a sound that easily blended, and in any case there weren't enough rehearsals to achieve any kind of smooth orchestral blend. And, finally, the percussion players were excitable Italians. Besides, why would Donizetti write anything that obviously noisy, if he didn't want it to be heard?

But the racket this percussion makes would today seem too crude for classical music. So you almost never hear it. Our orchestras can blend their sound very smoothly, and conductors bury the percussion in the orchestral mix. In fact, it's actually hard to make that not happen. Once, when I was hosting a concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony, I tried to get the percussionists to really play out during a Rossini orchestra, and even when they thought they were doing that, they were still pretty restrained. It just went against all their training to crash out their sound as shamelessly as 19th century opera seems to demand.

So that contradiction -- between what's written in a 19th century Italian opera score, and our ideas of how classical music ought to sound -- can in fact be resolved, simply by keeping the percussion quiet. But another contradiction is harder to hide. At the end of every dramatic episode comes a cabaletta (called a stretta in larger ensembles), or in another words a piece of loud, fast music, often with a simple, highly rhythmic melody, designed to bring the scene to a close with maximum excitement. You can try, if you want, to stage Lucia is serious, brooding drama, and in some parts of the opera, that'll work just fine. But then comes a cabaletta, and everything serious just gets blown away.

How can a serious modern performance deal with that? A generation or so ago, the cabalettas were shortened. One of their features is a repeat of the big tune, so for much of the 20th century these repeats were cut. At least then the cabalettas were shorter, even if they weren't very decorous. And I suppose you can perform them very artistically, mining them for whatever subtleties they might hide in the middle of all their excitement. And sometimes those subtleties really are there. You can force the singers -- if you're a powerful conductor, or at least if you're Riccardo Muti -- to suppress the loud high notes they usually sing when the cabaletta ends, since those aren't actually written in the score. (19th century singers, or at least singers in the first half of the 19th century, didn't sing loud high notes, and seem to have ended cabalettas with a burst of flashy ornamentation.)

Or you can simply stage the end of every scene very seriously, as if the cabalettas weren't happening. But this will always be unsatisfactory. The cabalettas still are there, and in current performances their repeats may not be cut. And their music wants to break loose. That was its purpose! If you don't acknowledge this, somehow, in your staging, you'll have dampened the musical flow of the opera, which means that you'll dampen the rhythm of its drama (which keeps shifting, in each scene, from emotional introspection, when the music is slow, to impulsive excitement, when the cabaletta inevitably appears).

So -- in my opinion, at least -- you're stuck. You want to take these operas seriously, but their inner nature jumps up to bite you.

The answer? Give in! Play and sing the cabalettas for everything they're worth, or more precisely for everything the 19th century thought they were worth. Make the percussion as noisy as possible. Do this even when the music of the cabaletta seems to completely contradict the drama on stage, as it does, for instance, at the end of the first act of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, where the tenor is poisoned, and the soprano first has to tell him that, and then feed him the antidote. All this goes on during a cabaletta, and the music surges out heedlessly, with a dance rhythm, in a happy major key. The moment when the tenor gets the antidote doesn't even register in the music, and all that tells you this is life and death drama are some fabulous horror-movie chords that come up out of nowhere to surprise you in the middle of the headlong rush. (Well, horror-movie chords of a 19th century kind. I've read some 19th century comments on opera that show how people reacted to chords like these. Harmonic shifts that might not impress us very much could actually, back in the day, strike terror into peoples' hearts.) My suggestion for performing this cabaletta: Bring out the horror-movie chords, make them really noticeable, and, for the rest, understand that physical verve, for Italians in the 19th century, was all by itself dramatic, that the precise kind of physical verve we hear in this Donizetti piece was something new at the time, and that this by itself was enough to create all the excitement a poisoning should need.

This isn't the kind of drama we take seriously. But if we mined these 19th century operas for it (that's the wrong expression; we don't have to mine anything; the cabalettas and percussion sit right on the surface, plainly in view), the works will come alive. They'll jump off the stage, and make, I'd think, a much more vivid impression than they do when we take them seriously.

And they'll also seem more contemporary. Remember that we're very used to stylized things, in our time, and that we're also (as a culture) very comfortable with excess. (Heavy metal. Megachurches. Thomas Pynchon novels.) So there's the paradox -- by looking for the purely 19th century traits in these pieces, we'll actually tie them into powerful traits in our own cultural life, and bring them surging into the present day. (Though of course these might not be cultural traits of classical music. But that's classical music's problem.)

I'll say some more about the Lucia performance in my next post.

I want to restate here some things I wrote in answer to Gabriel Solis's comment on my last post. Thanks, Gabriel, for getting me thinking.

Classical music performances -- even of music of the past -- are always contemporary. That is, they smell of the present more of the past. That's because the style of performance has changed over the years (as anyone can hear from recordings). So any performance we hear of anything in the classical repertoire is going to be done in one of our contemporary performance styles. (I say "one of," because by now there's more than one. Daniel Barenboim vs. Roger Norrington in Beethoven, for instance.)

And in fact the whole notion of classical music is contemporary. That's true just about by definition. You can't have classical music -- music that has attained some kind of classic status -- if you don't have contemporary music to contrast it to. Besides, the concept of classical music (as I've said here many times) didn't exist before the early 19th century, and so music written before that couldn't be classical. Which is to say that there wasn't any consciousness of any classicism in the minds of the composers, and thus no inherent air of classicism (in all of its aspects -- a sense of importance, a sense of hoped-for timelessness, a sense of assumed grandeur, whatever) built into the music.

Even once the concept of classical music appeared, its meaning changed over time. Each new generation felt it differently. Classical music performances, then, reflect our present idea of what classical music means. And almost all classical music performances -- I'm talking, just to make this clear -- about the classical music mainstream -- do convey a sense of "classical music," quite apart from the sound and inner content of whatever piece is being played. For a striking (and, interestingly, non-mainstream) example, listen to performances of Aphex Twin's "AFX237V7" conducted by John Adams with the London Sinfonietta, and compare them to the original Aphex Twin records. (Go to the iTunes music store, search for Aphex Twin, and put the songs in alphabetical order.) The Adams performances sound classical; Aphex Twin, in his original form, just doesn't. (You could also compare the Aphex Twin arrangements with the performances by another new music group, Alarm Will Sound, which I haven't done.)

So what happens if we made classical music sound like it came from the past? Paradoxically, we'd radically freshen it. We'd strip it of its classical veneer, and hear it with really fresh ears. We'd also unravel some contradictions that have grown up over the decades, when traits from the past in classical pieces contradict our idea of what classical music should be. More on that -- and on how we might make classical pieces sound like they come from the past -- in my next post.

I didn't write my "Capitano Sangue" post as well as I might have, and maybe some things weren't clear. I especially should stress that I'm not objecting to art from the past, including classical music from the past. This year I think I've read six Trollope novels, just for instance (the first four from the Barchester series, and the first two Pallisers.) And I've listened with pure happiness to two Verdi reissues from the Lamberto Gardelli series that came out on Philips in the '70s , I masnadieri (Carlo Bergonzi is such a joy to hear) and La battaglia di Legnano. Plus I've been listening intensely to Toscanini recordings of standard classical repertoire; more on that in another post.

But you couldn't possibly miss that Trollope lived long ago. All the particulars of 19th century courtship and marriage, one of his big subjects -- it's very far from how things are now. But of course that's one of the reasons I read him. It's intriguing to go to a different place, especially one with enough connections to our time that we can savor the differences. (His prose is one of those differences; nobody writes like that now, and nobody should.)

With Verdi, I know I'm in the past, too, but that might be for personal reasons. If you see Rigoletto at the Met, I don't think that feels like the past, or at least it doesn't to me. It feels like going to the opera, as we know that activity today. But to me., Verdi comes from another era in part because I've studied him so much, and also studied the history and culture of 19th century Italian opera. Among much else, I love the musical forms that opera composers used back then, and especially the sweeping cabalettas that end almost every scene. For those who don't know this music, almost every scene comes to rest in the middle with a slow piece of music, and then ends with something that's usually fast, with a simple melody and propulsive rhythm, which is supposed to end the scene in a burst of excitement. This has to be one of the most commercial musical forms ever devised. The idea is to leave the audience cheering. And the simple melody is always repeated, which serves many purposes. The repeat could make the audience happy. If they like the tune, they get to hear it twice. And, since the operas tended to be written and rehearsed in a hurry, repeats made everybody's work easier. If a lot of music was repeated, the composer could write less, and the singers and orchestra had less to learn.

Between the two statements of the melody, and after the second one, you'd typically hear noisy music. That helped keep the excitement going, and helped bring it to some wild height of madness after the second statement of the melody had finished. But all this isn't as simple as it sounds. Simple music is in some ways harder to write than complicated music. If you write a fugue in 19 voices, everybody knows you're very serious, and often people (especially connoisseurs) will nod their heads in solemn approval, even if the results aren't all that interesting. But if you write a tune designed to knock an audience absolutely dead, everybody knows pretty quickly whether you've succeeded or failed, and if you've failed, they just won't cheer.

So here's something I really love about this cabaletta form. (The fast piece at the end of each scene is called a "cabaletta," except in the case of large ensembles, typically found at the end of the first or second act, when the cabaletta is called a "stretta." See how intense a classical music nerd I can be?) As the 19th century winds on, the form starts to degenerate. Early on, in Bellini's operas, cabalettas seem to make sense. The repeats seem motivated. Between the verses, the singers keep singing, often with the help of a chorus. They keep saying whatever got them excited enough to sing the cabaletta in the first place, which then makes us in the audience feel there's a reason to sing the whole thing again.

But in Verdi's time, cabalettas started to seem a bit old. Eventually Verdi just about stopped writing them. They'd passed their use-by date. When they do crop up, as they do all through the two operas I've been listening to, they sound a little pro forma, put into the opera because they're supposed to be there, but not necessarily because anyone (Verdi included) really believed in them. The tunes aren't so good; that's one giveaway. But an even stronger giveaway is what happens between the verses. You start getting music written only for the orchestra, which leaves the singer stamping around all alone on stage, then turning once more to the audience to sing the melody a second time, for no apparent reason.

So here's why I'm a real 19th century opera junkie. In some ways, I love the unmotivated cabaletta repeats better than the ones that make sense. This is what happens when you fall in love with a genre, quite apart from the pieces that comprise it. I feel that way about other things -- '50s science fiction films, for instance, and doowop songs. Somebody might say, "That's the stupidest monster I've ever seen." (Talking, maybe about the giant locusts that climb up Chicago buildings in The Beginning of the End. They filmed the scene by putting real locusts down on a photo of a Chicago building. Sometimes the locusts walk right off the building into the air around it.) I say, "I love the stupidity." Or else someone complains that doowop ballads almost all have the same chord progression, the immortal I - VI -- IV ( or II) - V. I say, "I love that chord progression," and it gives me a tingle even in a really bad song. (I think it tells a little story: Comfort gives way to risk and excitement, with a knot in the pit of your stomach; then there's reassurance, and finally resolution.)

So in bel canto opera, and the Verdi operas that followed, I love the cabalettas. Which also help me remember that the operas were written a long time ago.

But now let's get away from my obsessions, and rejoin the classical music mainstream. There, music from the past is the norm, and it tends to lose its pastness. Which in one way makes sense, because the music still is with us, right here in the present. But in another way it makes no sense, because the style and content of the music comes from the past. I think we should notice that, just as we notice that Trollope's marriages come from the past (not to mention the style of his writing). But I think we don't, often enough, because we're not conditioned to question classical masterworks. We tend to accept them unquestioningly, and when we talk about their history, we do it in scholarly terms, so the history becomes a distant object of contemplation, and not a reality that might hit us square in the face during a performance.

Footnote to this: the most fully 19th century trait (for me, anyway) in I masnadieri is the soprano role, which was written for Jenny Lind (pictured above), a soprano generally thought to have more pipes than guts (or, more sympathetically, an incomparable technique, but not much sense of theater). Verdi liked her, apparently, but wrote her a remarkably empty part, full of embellishments. The music, Julien Budden says in his three-volume study of Verdi, is "tinsel-like"; I'd call it the frilliest soprano role Verdi ever wrote, and to me it's really almost a shock after Verdi's other sopranos, who tend to be women with guts, and sometimes even outright demons like Lady Macbeth, Abigaille in Nabucco, or Odabella in Attila.

The frills end up making a kind of sense, because this piece has a climax that's over the top even for Italian opera. The tenor, who's an outlaw, kills the soprano (his beloved), to save her from sharing his immoral life. How appropriate, then, for the soprano to be all frilly (and how even more fitting it would have been if Verdi had written music for the tenor that suggested his unease, as he did with the distantly similar title role in Ernani; I masnadieri isn't one of Verdi's more convincing operas). But the frills also place the piece squarely in the 19th century. I don't think I've ever met, in my 20th and 221st century life, a woman as frilly as this one, and I'm not sure I could have, unless I visited the deep South during the '50s.

Trollope might have recognized her, though. And to judge from that picture of Jenny Lind, she must have fit the singer perfectly.

If you want to know why classical music has receded from our culture, just watch some of Captain Blood, the classic (and wonderfully silly) 1935 pirate film, starring Errol Flynn. It might as well be an opera. Its plot, dialogue, and aesthetic are almost operatic, and so is its score, by Erich Korngold.

Which meant that in 1935 you could go to the opera, and go to the movies, and see practically the same thing. So opera was close to everyday life, in a way that it just can't be now.

Why not? Because the horizons of our culture have expanded. Last year I saw Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette film, and not long after saw Don Carlo at the Met. Coppola shows the French royal court as a dizzy, corrupt place, full of modern references (dance music from our own time, shoes from our own time), and full of individual aristocrats, each with his or her own personality. Verdi might have been a great composer, but through no fault of his own he lived in the 19th century, and in Don Carlo he shows us the Spanish royal court as the 19th century might have imagined it, formal, a little stilted, and full of aristocrats who (apart from the leading characters) sing anonymously as members of a chorus. You really can't do that any more. Through no fault of its own (to repeat the phrase), the opera looked like an old movie.

I took a long trip over Labor Day, to attend anniversary celebrations for a marvelous art project my wife's stepfather has funded for the past 40 years. And while I was there, I made my debut as a free improviser, either on piano (when one was available), or else with anything that might make sound -- chairs I could drag along a concrete floor, my voice, resonant steel stairs I could stamp on -- when we improvised inside a sculpture as large as a house (larger than many houses) that my stepfather-in-law commissioned on the land near his home.

All this was very informal. But I was working with experienced musicians, from Boston and Germany, both of them partners of artists at the celebration. So the musical circumstances were highly professional, though also quirky. I was right at home. Certainly I've been hearing free improvisation (and sometimes reviewing it) for more than 30 years. But what surprised me was how authoritative I felt. I'm not saying I sounded authoritative; that's for others to judge. But I felt as if I'd been doing this all my life, which really wowed me, since I haven't performed in public for maybe 20 years (I used to sing opera, conduct, and sometimes play keyboards), and especially since I've never felt this comfortable at the piano. I blanch whenever I want to play some musical example for the classes I teach.

Now, for whatever reason, everything feels changed, and I want to do lots more of this. As I don't have to tell some of the regular readers here (Eric Barnhill, Eric Edberg, to name two), there's a great freedom in improvisation, when you hit a groove, and the ideas just come to you. When I felt self-conscious, or cut off from the other musicians, I'd remember a Pauline Oliveros piece I heard at Lincoln Center a few weeks ago (and wrote about for the Wall Street Journal). She has the audience performing; you take a breath and then sing a sound to match what someone else is singing. Then you take another breath, and make a sound of your own. I could do that just as well on the piano, and it helped focus me on the others, as well as on myself.

One marvelous moment, that happened each time we played -- when you know you're at the end, and you also know (with no doubt at all) that the others know it, too.

A wonderful thing: Nonmusicians can do this. When we improvised inside the sculpture, the artists joined their partners, making whatever sounds they felt like, including whistling and tongue clicks, which brought alive some very quiet moments.

We wondered if we'd disturbed a colony of bats.

My wife came in after we'd started, and told me later that she could hear the whole sculpture vibrating, from outside it.

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On the plane coming home, I took out my iPod, and started listening to Stockhausen's Mantra, a richly detailed piece for two pianos, with some added percussion, and also with electronic transformation of some of the piano sounds, so you think you're hearing some electronic version of John Cage's prepared piano. Or two prepared pianos. This is intricate music, which I'm learning very slowly, going back over the first few tracks many times, to make sure I've absorbed it all. It's not that the events are tricky to grasp; they're pretty simple, in some ways (lots of repeated notes). But there are so many of them! And so richly varied, so many harmonies (for instance) passing under and around a repeated minor third in the introductory first section of the piece.

On the plane, though, it all seemed abstract, cold, uninteresting. So I listened to Lucinda Williams. I have all her albums on my iPod, except the eponymous one, her long-ago breakthrough, which -- and can you believe it, for someone so important? -- is out of print, available only for huge prices used. (Somewhere I might still have my LP copy, in a box in my basement. My LPs went through a fire, but I wish I'd kept better track of them.)

She grabbed me right away, from the first catch in her voice in "Right in Time," from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road ("You left your mark on me/It's permanent, a tattoo"). This was what I wanted; something for my heart. "Lake Charles," from the same album, apparently about someone who died, though death is never spoken out loud; she keeps naming places the man lived or liked, or music they heard, as if those nameable remembered wisps were all she had to hang on to. Or "Ventura," from World Without Tears, where she wants "to get swallowed up in an ocean of love," and evokes that ocean with a single chord progression, four chords, repeating all through the song, over which she somehow creates both a verse and the kind of soaring chorus that normally gets its impetus from new chords. That's harder, compositionally (just try it), than writing a fugue.

I listened to her for more than hour, as happy as I've ever been on a plane. And then she wore me out. It was too much.

Back to Stockhausen. Now Mantra was everything I wanted -- abstract, absorbing, detached. I was happy again. And that's how it is, at least for me, with classical music and pop. They do different things (and not only the things I've described; pop can be detached, classical music can set me on fire). I could never say which was better. "Better for what?" I'd have to ask. I need them both in my life.

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Note to Seth Rosenbloom: I'm going to post and reply to the passionate comment you posted. It's too long simply to stand as a comment; it needs a blog post of its own, especially since it raises so many crucial issues. Forgive me for not acknowledging it sooner.