CD Opera Mini-Review: Philador’s ‘Sancho Panca’

by Sam Juliano

The appearance of eighteenth-century opera on CD is a blessing for both fans of opera comique and those looking to broaden the horizons of  a form that takes risks far too infrequently.   The French composer Francois-Andre Danican Philador is thought to be the first to achieve real distinction in a style that eventually merged with Italian opera in the early nineteenth century, in the form of comedy buffa.  Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Don Giovanni are seminal works in the later category.  Philador’s major contribution to the emergence of the opera comique as a respectable musical genre, is the application of realistic characters and situations.  It can be concluded that he handled his limited orchestral resources cleverly, and the vocal lines are rich, melodious and descriptive.

History does relate that there were charges of plaguerism against Philador, published years after his death from the likes of Berlioz and other music critics that he had plundered the work of Gluck, Galuppi, Pergolesi and Jommelli.  The fact that Philador had actually seen Gluck’s Orfeo opened him up for accusations for music that he wrote for Ernelinde and Le Sorcier, two operas that bear more than remarkable similarities.  But both the dubious degree of intent and the non-consumation of such charges should stop the skeptics in their tracks, and allow Philador’s standing to hold sway for this style and time period.  The composer’s most famous (and best) opera is Tom Jones, composed in 1765, and presented in three acts.  Sancho Panza, which was recently recorded and released by Opera Lafayette with Ryan Brown conducting, is considered a more obscure Philador work, but it has gained in reputation over the past decades.  Antoine-Alexandre Poinsinet (1735-1769) created the libretto of Sancho Panca from a particularly mean-spirited passage in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  The knight of the mournful countenance has promised his simple-minded squire, Sancho Panza, the governership of an island for his faithful service – a dream that the duke and dutchess features in Part 2 fullfill as part of an elaborate series of tricks played on Don Quixote and Sancho.  When faced with the real demands of governing the imaginary land -the island of Barataria – Sancho quickly renounces all interest in being a governor.

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La Traviata (No. 36)

by Sam Juliano

Franco Zeffirelli achieved what no other had managed before or since.  He scored major successes on the opera stage, in the theatre and the cinema, and eventually brought these forms together to become the greatest director of “opera films” in a prolific run in the 1980′s.  Once a student of art and architecture, Zeffirelli reportedly turned to the theatre after watching Olivier’s visually arresting Henry V, and while working as a scenic painter in Florence was hired to work as an assistant director under renowned film director Luchino Visconti, for the film La Terra Trema, released in 1948.  Zeffirelli later worked with Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, and in the 1960′s achieved moderate success directing and designing his own plays in New York and London.  His special gift was remarkable visual design and he eventually crafted extraordinary sets for the works of Verdi, Puccini, Bizet and Mozart on opera stages and directed some lush period films based on Shakespeare and religious figures.  In the latter pursuit Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, a stunningly beautiful color film that has retained it’s popularity in schools and on internet chat boards decades later,  featured attractive teens in the lead roles.  While that film remains the one the director is principally known for among film fans, he achieved no less a critical success the year before that with another Bard standard, The Taming of the Shrew, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  In 1973 he again produced visual ravishments with Brother Sun Sister Moon based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and then directed a mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth that still hold high ratings when aired today.  But Zeffirelli to the delight of the purists has always been a staunch traditionalist.  This has endeared him to the brass at the Metropolitan Opera and for those who strongly favor the period trappings and the original intentions of the works’ creators.

The director’s celebrated run of four opera films (two by the master Giuseppe Verdi) was accomplished during a period where he was directing stage productions at the Metropolitan Opera.  One of the films, La Traviata, based on one of Verdi’s five irrefutable masterpieces is considered by many if not most as the greatest opera film of all-time, and the one that above all others stands as the model.  Featuring the then matinee idol singer Placido Domingo, and a model of operatic intensity, the soprano Teresa Stratas in the leads, the resulting film is a benchmark of sumptuous imagery in the service of what many see today as the most all-encompassing art form.

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Don Giovanni (No. 38)

by Sam Juliano

The writer Gustave Flaubert opined that “the three finest things in creation are the sea, Hamlet and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that Don Giovanni is a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection. Virgil Thomson was no less flattering: “Don Giovanni is one of the funniest shows in the world and one of the most terrifying. It is all about love, and it kids love to a fare-ye-well. It is the world’s greatest opera and the world’s greatest parody of opera. It is a moral entertainment so movingly human that morality gets lost before the play is scarcely started.” Beyond that Shaw, Goethe and Wagner considered it the greatest opera ever written. Today this 1787 canonical work of Western culture continues to hold the stage as one of the most-performed operas worldwide, and the one above all others that is seen as the purist expression of the intellectual and dramatic possibilities of the operatic form. At New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, Don Giovanni has been performed over 500 times in about sixty seasons between 1883 and the present. Surely no other opera has been as debated and analyzed, and no other, with the possible exception of Bizet’s Carmen has been held up as the model, the one work that in a number of ways can serve as a definition of the form.

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Parsifal (No. 60)

by Sam Juliano

One of Western culture’s most famous contradictions is an oddity that broaches but never solves one of life’s greatest mysteries.  Richard Wagner, celebrated creator of a brace of philosophically complex “music dramas,” and most influential composer who ever lived, was also a well-known anti-Semite, and a mean-spirited and abusive family man.  That such a person could write what is quite possibly the most ravishingly beautiful and spiritually infused music of all-time is a testament to to the concept that beauty can emanate from the most unlikely sources, where the most soulful kind of artistic expression takes no sides in choosing its creator.

But the composer’s final work, Parsifal, which premiered at Bayreuth in 1878, yields further incongruities connected to its reception and political standing, both of which seem to suggest that Wagner purged himself of his demons and embraced ideals that were in diametric opposition to his inner self.  Adolf Hitler, whose adoration for Wagner’s previous work -especially his monumental Die Ring der Niebelungen and Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg- was infamous, banned any performances of the opera in 1939, presumably because the work’s message of pacifism and its seeming promotion of the Christian ideal of suffering ran counter to the ideologies of the Third Reich.  Hence, Parsifal has never been a work to attract tame response, and the opera has been variously described as sublime, heinous or decadent, which specifically some critics have simultaneously embraced its epic wonderment while still judging it as  “a profoundly inhuman spectacle, that glorifies a barren masculine world whose ideals are a combination of militarism and monasticism.” (Peter Wapnewski)  Considering the suggestive allegory Wagner designed for what he called his ‘last card’ and ‘farewell to the world’ the controversy is hardly surprising.  However, whether Parsifal is a sinister militant fantasy about the redemption of an Aryan Jesus from Judaism or just a feeble Armeggedon cocktail with a strong twist of Shopenhauer, critics of its supposed humanity will never be able to solve the magisterial beauty of its score nor account for the fact that aggression is completely contrary to the opera’s central idea.  Indeed, the opera’s first act overture is among the most sublime passages in all of music with it’s slow tempo mid-way coda, one of the most ravishing themes ever heard by the human ear.  The theme is encored generously through the work, and basically serves as it’s musical identification, with it’s majestic sweep and melodious flow evincing an unusual but indellible blend of bliss and melencholy.

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The Magic Flute (No. 66)

by Sam Juliano

Ingmar Bergman was laid to rest on a misty morning in early August, 2007 on the island of Faro, where he spent the last years of his life.  At the cinema master’s request the ceremony was short and attended by only 70, including celebrated Bergman stock company thespians, Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow and Erland Josephson.  Eulogies were noted for their brevity and the musical itinerery was a sparing employment of J.S. Bach by way of organ and cello.  This modest presentation may be been selected for it’s simple purity, but it underscored a deep passion for classical music that manifested itself from the very earliest films.  Music in Darkness (1948) tells the story of a young pianist left blind by a shooting accident; To Joy (1950) narrates the misfortunes of an ambitious violinist, and Summer Interlude (1951) recounts the life of a ballerina at the Stockholm Opera.  Generous excerpts from Beethoven, Mozart or Mendelssohn are found in these films.  In the opening feature of the celebrated “Faith Trilogy”, Through A Glass Darkly, the extensive use of classic compositions completely supplanted the original film music that was more common during the late 50′s period when Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries appeared.  In Darkly the ‘Sarabande’ from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 2 appears four times.  It’s usage here signaled a marked upsurge in classical accompaniment all the way up to his final film Sarabande in 2003.  While it’s clear that a number of the pieces were vital structural and metaphorical components in his deep philosophical inquiries, there was a clear enough passion for the intrinsic beauty of the music that was deftly used as a mood device.  Robert Schumann’s ravishingly beautiful and gloriously romantic Piano Quintet in E-flat major set the tone for Fanny and Alexander under the film’s lengthy credit sequence, and underlined the film’s brighter contexts.  Conversely, there is telling use of Bach’s Partita in Shame, The Passion of Anna and Hour of the Wolf that connotes despair in its rawest constriction, and the Bach passages in Cries and Whispers are used to piercing effect.  Bergman connects characters to music a number of times, including the sequence in Autumn Sonata when Charlotte sketches the figure of Chopin, before beginning to play the Prelude, and the one where Johan listens at full blast to the scherzo of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in Sarabande.  Lastly, Bergman experiments his sense of musical analysis during an entire film with In the Presence of a Clown, which recounts Schubert’s last days, in both a free and erudite manner.

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Opera Review: John Adams’ “Nixon in China”

John Adams’s ‘Nixon in China’ at Metropolitan Opera

by Sam Juliano

      Together with Phillip Glass, John Adams is a leading composer in what is referred to simply as minimalist opera, a style that developed from the modernism of the early twentieth century, where atonality found it’s way into the musical construction.

Historical and political figures that have fired up opera composers’ imaginations dates all the way back to Handel with Giulio Cesare, and included the likes of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Verdi’s Don Carlo, the latter in which King Phillip II of Spain is transformed a character of Shakespearean dimension.  Yet, an influential precedent was established when Nixon in China premiered at Houston’s Grand Opera almost a quarter-century ago when the opera did much more than just focus on an almost larger than life figure, but basically to present the history of our time as it was being self-consciously made.  In the beginning many were either befuddled or even outraged at the “preposterous” notion of creating an opera about Nixon’s historic China trip, especially after the notorious events that brought sudden closure to Nixon’s term in office, and of the general idea of politics providing the subject matter of an art form that by it’s very nature seemed to preclude such corrupting inclusion.  Yet, this pioneering work in retrospect, provided a remarkable aggregate of material and rich characters, and the very nature of the form, with its blend of artistic disciplines, proved uniquely well-suited to the structure underlying Nixon in China, as it modulates back and forth between grandly thrilling spectacle and introspective doubt.  Hence, it is easy enough to conclude that Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman helped usher in a rebirth of American opera over the past decades by suuccessfully balancing a contemporary sensibility with the musical and dramatic traditions of the genre.

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Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcast of Gaetano Donizetti’s ‘Don Pasquale’

Stage capture from Metropolitan Opera’s production of Donizetti’s ‘Don Pasquale’

by Sam Juliano

     This is the fifth season of HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera house in Manhattan aired to destinations worldwide.  For disciples of the form who reside in the shadows of this famed institution, a quandary remains as whether an appearance at the Met is still preferable to a visit to a local movie house to take in the well-embellished movie screen presentation.  While for opera purists with deep pockets the choice remains a no-brainer, there are some compelling issues in the mix here that are making a decision of preference progressively difficult.  With eleven Saturday afternoon broadcasts on the schedule for 2010-11, (with Wednesday evening encores in place for each opera) the present season offers more titles than any to date, leaving only a smattering of ‘must-see’  operas that aren’t on the HD schedule.  Obviously, for those who can afford it, the ideal compromise would be to attend the eleven broadcasta, and purchase some tickets at the Met for several operas not being offered on HD.  Bt for those who don’t have that luxury, the matter of opera purity is quickly becoming a non-concern.  The astonishing popularity of the broadcasts -many theatres have reported sellouts months in advance- has inspired executive at the Metropolitan Opera to give the viewers many “extras” unavailable to those attending the events in person.  These include interviews with the stars and behind-the-scenes craftsmen bewteen acts, capsule summaries of the opera from a regular host, and the backstage maneuverings of carpenters and set designers.  In addition -and most critically- the company’s cameramen are able to capture vital close-ups, while maintaining a mid-range stage picture, that is preferable to nearly every in house vantage point, save for those blessed with orchestra seats near the stage.

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Verdi’s ‘Attila’ at Met Resurrects Grossly Undervalued Opera

Ildar Abdrazakov playing lead in Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Attila’

 by Sam Juliano

     Verdi’s Attila was written in 1846, but this ninth opera from one of opera’s greatest geniuses has, until this year escaped the attention of planning executives at the Metropolitan Opera, who have shunned the work, largely due to uneasiness with the demand on the singers.  But as part of the company’s commitment to bold resurrections of harmonic works with strong prospective appeal to the core traditionalists, Attila received some impassioned contributions from the director, set designer, singers, and especially veteran conductor extraordinaire Ricardo Muti, who proved to the world that this opera is a rhythmically charged work, with an abandance of solos, and rich musical lines.  With full choruses at the disposal of a polished orchestra who faithfully transcribed Verdi’s lyricism in supple chords and rifts, Muti demonstrated that as a stand alone, Atilla’s music is far from the lowest bracket of the composer’s work.  And when the singing is considered, it’s nearly a towering achievement.  I’d go as far as to contend that it belongs in a short group after La Traviata, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Aida and Otello, with the likes of Nabucco, La Frorza Del Destino, Un Ballo in Maschera, Simon Bocanegra, and Falstaff.  On the best of days it may possibly lead that group, and such was certainly the case on the Monday night I was in attendance.  This was a visionary performance in stark, imaginary staging, forceful singing and rich orchestration, which compellingly blends the youthful, patriotic vigor of its then young composer with the nuance and human insight that would become the hallmark of his long  career that included 28 operas. 

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Brilliant Staging for Dimitri Shostakovich’s avant garde ‘The Nose’ at Metropolitan Opera

                 

by Sam Juliano

     For the second time in the 2009-2010 opera season the Metropolitan Opera has struck artistic pay dirt with a brilliantly staged new production, that sets the bar for creative license and proves that some of the more obscure properties in the repetory can reaches exhalted levels with the right chemistry.  Dimitri Shostakovich’s atonal and avante garde The Nose, written when the celebrated Russian composer was only 22, joins the early season staging of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead as prime examples of how the most unlikely material could be transformed into something really special when the orchestra, conductor and set designers are at the top of their game.

     Shostakovich wrote his first opera at the pinnacle of the ‘anything-goes’ period of early Soviet art in the late 20′s in that window after the revolution when artistic experiment fermented until more oppressive laws discouraged freedom of expression.  In music, the influence of the Western avant-gardists such as Schoenberg, Hindemith and Stravinsky was considerable, and in fact Berg’s Wozzack was staged in Leningrad at precisely the time Shostakovich was penning The Nose.  That opera’s chamber trappings influenced Shostakovich’s work, as did his his fellow countryman Prokofiev’s sometimes chromatic and rhythmatically unstable The Love for Three Oranges.  Although The Nose enjoyed some success in Leningrad, it was not taken up again in that country until the 1970′s, as the piece is forbiddingly hard to stage, with its spiky and difficult orchestral writing and its cast of over 70 characters.  Of course the story of a man who loses his nose, showcases the kind of individuality that was scorned by the authorites, a matter which unquestionably helped shelve the work indefinitely.

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Metropolitan Opera HD Simulcast of Richard Eyre’s New Production of Bizet’s ‘Carmen’

                              

by Sam Juliano

     Georges Bizet’s Carmen is arguably the most popular opera in history, and it’s almost never off the yearly schedules of the largest and smallest companies.  Only Puccini’s La Boheme is in its stratosphere of adoration,  and it stands alone as the indoctrinating vehicle for neophytes to the form.  The opera’s central role is perhaps the defining one for a soprano, and over decades it provided some of the greatest singers with their most electrifing moments onstage.  For the second time this season, the Metropolitan Opera has replaced a long-running Franco Zeffirelli staging, (and a shorter one after it)  but unlike the first instance, where the desision drew ire from traditionalists, (Tosca), this new incarnation by Richard Eyre stands among the season’s most distinguished stagings, with an outstanding Carmen and Don Jose and some virtuoso conducting by a gifted newcomer.  The new Carmen, wields the raw power of the 1875 work, but the underpinnings are more contemporary than the Zeffirelli production, which typically was traditional.

     Carmen, which contains some of the greatest passages in all of music (“The Toreador Song”,” “The Flower Song” and the “Habanera” are musical masterpieces) is a work of superbly balanced construction and extraordinary precision, on in which Bizet is able to express in 16 bars what almost any other composer would need 160 for and might still not succeed.  The opera with it signature sexuality, smoldering passions and violent denouement, has often been understood as a story of ill-fated love between two equal parties whose destinies happen to clash.  But to read the opera in this fashion is really to ignore the faultlines of social power that organize it, for while the story’s subject matter may appear idiosyncratic to us, Carmen is actually only one of a large number of fantasies involving race, class and gender that are known to have circulated in nineteenth-century French culture.   Most interpretations of the opera either assume Carmen’s treachery or else try to eradicate the differences in class, race and gender between Carmen and Don Jose.  To be sure, the illicit sexuality of the opera continues to be acknowledged; but as it took it place within the canon many decade ago, Carmen became a locus for socially-sanctioned titillation rather than a cause for moral indignation.  A self-congratulatory smugness seems to characterize much of what was written about Carmen after it became a staple of the repetory, as subsequent critics gloat when recounting the prudery of Bizet’s initial audiences, along these lines: “The libretto is effective, but far from shocking a generation that now considers Strauss’s Salome tame.  The tragic ending is so seasoned a convention that we accept it without thought.”  In any case the popular literature on Carmen tends to highlight the elements of femme fatale and male victim, often rendering the plot in a gleefully naughty, insinuating style.

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