Tag Archives: Opera

by | November 9, 2015 · 6:00 am

Bryn Terfel’s physical fitness

 

In a 2011 interview, Bryn Terfel noted that a strong constitution is essential for the role of Wotan in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he was currently performing at the Metropolitan Opera.

“If you’re not one hundred percent, there’s absolutely no way you can get through a piece like Die Walküre…if Rheingold starts there will probably be three or four performances, and you have to be very careful how you conserve energy during the period you’re there.”

“Mozart, for instance, is sociable—you do go to restaurants and theaters and anything the city has to offer. But with Wagner you seem to lock the door and take the low road. You’re more cautious: ‘No, I can’t come out to dinner—not this time.’”

Quoted in “The wanderer” by Brian Kellow (Opera news LXXV/11 [May 2011] pp. 22–27).

Today is Terfel’s 50th birthday! Below, as Wotan at the Met.

Comments Off on Bryn Terfel’s physical fitness

Filed under Opera, Performers

Tagged as , , ,

by | October 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Pavarotti sings for soccer

 

The group New Order’s World in motion, commissioned by the British Football Association to mark the 1990 World Cup soccer finals, “is probably the least likely official football theme song ever recorded: Denying its own status as a football song, introducing elements of subcultural love lyrics, and becoming a gay club hit, but also assuming the burden of combating football’s major peripheral problem, hooliganism, the song is ultimately unheimlich, even despite its closing chorus that speaks of ‘playing for England; playing this song.’”

This according to “Playing for England” by Paul Smith (South Atlantic quarterly 90/4 [fall 1991] pp. 737–752). Smith goes on to note that “both the BBC and the independent television companies forewent the pleasure of having ‘Love’s got the world in motion’ going across the airwaves every night, and the BBC used as their World Cup theme another piece of music that quickly became a number one hit: Luciano Pavarotti singing his version of the Nessun dorma aria from Turandot.”

Today would have been Pavarotti’s 80th birthday! Below, singing Nessun dorma in 1994.

BONUS: By way of contrast, New Order’s song:

Comments Off on Pavarotti sings for soccer

Filed under Curiosities, Opera, Popular music, Reception, Sports and games

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | September 9, 2015 · 6:00 am

Halka in Haiti

Halka in Haiti

Inspired and provoked by the title character in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, two artists and a curator decided to revisit the mad plan to bring opera to the tropics.

With an eye to undercutting Fitzcarraldo’s colonialist Romanticism, they decided to confront a particular set of historical and socialpolitical realities by staging Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka, which is considered Poland’s national opera, in the unlikely locale of Cazale, Haiti, a village inhabited by descendants of Polish soldiers who fought for the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s.

On 7 February 2015 a one-time-only performance of Halka was presented to a rapt local audience on a winding dirt road in Cazale. A collaboration between Polish and Haitian performers, the event was filmed in one take to be presented as a large-scale projected panorama in the Polish Pavillion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

This according to Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W: C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska (Warsaw: Zachęta: Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2015).

Above, a still from the film featuring a local extra (more stills are here); below, the Biennale installation (the music starts around 5:08).

Comments Off on Halka in Haiti

Filed under Curiosities, Opera

Tagged as ,

by | August 5, 2015 · 6:00 am

Emma Abbott in the heartland

Emma Abbott

Stung by the mixed reviews of New York critics who apparently preferred their divas to be foreign-born, the operatic soprano Emma Abbott created a highly successful—and somewhat revolutionary—niche for herself.

In 1898 Abbott founded the Emma Abbott English Grand Opera Company with her husband, Eugene Wetherell, as business manager. There were precedents for translating operas into English, and even for Abbott’s role as both prima donna and production manager; the distinctive and brilliant move was to take her company to the U.S. heartland with the perfect persona for 19th-century American tastes.

Having grown up poor in Peoria, Illinois, she had the quintessential American dream narrative. She was openly both devout and patriotic, often interpolating beloved religious and U.S. songs into her opera performances. And the marital bliss projected by her close relationship with Wetherell further burnished the persona that her audiences relished.

As Abbott’s close friend and biographer Sadie E. Martin recalled, “The pleasing voice and manners of the operatic star, and her sympathetic nature, seemed at once to attract towards her the hearts of the public. She was from the first very popular, and after the first year there were many who watched, waited, and longed for her annual appearance, as for that of an old friend.”

By the time she retired, Abbott had officiated at the openings of more opera houses than any singer before her, and—owing also to her canny buisness sense—had amassed a fortune far beyond that of her European counterparts.

This according to Women in the spotlight: Divas in nineteenth-century New York by Andrea Saposnik (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing).

Comments Off on Emma Abbott in the heartland

Filed under Opera, Performers, Reception

Tagged as ,

by | July 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Oscar Hammerstein and Carmen Jones

 

Oscar Hammerstein’s Americanization of Georges Bizet’s Carmen—68 years after its premiere—altered its form from the operatic genre to that of musical theater and transformed the place and time to a setting more familiar to a Broadway audience.

Instead of playing in Seville, Carmen Jones takes place in a city of the American South, African Americans become the sociological equivalent of Spanish gypsies, and the cigarette factory becomes the more topical World War II army parachute factory.

The change from bullfighting to boxing, a spectator sport that had become increasingly popular in America since the 1890s, demonstrates how Hammerstein distances the Carmen story from the world of Prosper Mérimée’s novella without diminishing its universal constants of human tragedy.

This according to “Carmen am Broadway: Oscar Hammersteins Carmen Jones” by Manfred Siebald, an essay included in Caecilia, Tosca, Carmen: Brüche und Kontinuitäten im Verhältnis von Musik und Welterleben (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2006, pp. 225–234).

Today is Hammerstein’s 120th birthday! Above, a portrait by Abbey Altson from 1943, the year of Carmen Jones’s premiere; below, an excerpt from Otto Preminger’s 1954 film version.

1 Comment

Filed under Dramatic arts, Opera

Tagged as , , , ,

by | June 1, 2015 · 6:00 am

Frederica von Stade and temperamental people

 

In an interview, the famously agreeable mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade explained why she enjoys working with temperamental people.

“First of all, it’s fun, and secondly, because people protect themselves in all different kinds of ways.”

“I protect myself by being quiet, and going in my dressing room and being upset there by myself. Some people get it out. I admire that more, because it’s gone.”

“As much as we use our voices and our minds, we use our confidence. You take confidence away from a singer and you’ve taken their feet away from them. And to protect your confidence takes all kinds of tricks—some people have it on the outside, some have it on the inside, and whatever works, works.”

Quoted in “My audience with The Grand Duchess” by David F. Wylie (Journal of singing LXV/1 [September–October 2008] pp. 95–104).

Today is von Stade’s 70th birthday! Above, with Hannah in 2014 (we like to imagine that Hannah is only moderately temperamental); below, in one of her signature roles as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

Comments Off on Frederica von Stade and temperamental people

Filed under Opera, Performers

Tagged as , ,

by | March 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Stravinsky and Baba the Turk

 

Like many operas, Stravinsky’s The rake’s progress is deeply flawed, confused, and contradictory. It presents an overextended musical pastiche, an overly clever libretto by W.H. Auden, and a grim view of human nature.

Yet the scenes of act 3 encompass comedy, dramatic tension, and lyrical pathos, and the opera redeems itself because it moves into its own Bedlam, the land of opera. Although the character of Baba the Turk remains enigmatic in the theater, she embodies the spirit of the opera. Baba was Auden’s way of asserting the power of art over nature.

This according to “Redeeming the rake” by David Schiff (The Atlantic monthly CCLXXX/5 [November 1997] pp. 136–139).

Below, Baba portrayed by Dagmar Pecková.

Comments Off on Stravinsky and Baba the Turk

Filed under Humor, Opera

Tagged as , ,

by | January 10, 2015 · 6:00 am

Sherrill Milnes, farm boy

 

In an interview, the U.S. baritone Sherrill Milnes recalled growing up on a dairy farm in Illinois.

“It was down and dirty. Small family. Manure. Everything. Milking cows. Dairy is tougher than grain or beef. Twice a day the cows have to be milked. You’re sick? Too bad. You have to do it. You sprained your ankle and it’s swollen? Too bad. You have to do it….I suppose it created a certain work ethic that was undeniable.”

When he started to focus on singing as his career he sang to the cows, and even practiced dramatic bits while driving the family tractor.

“I was in the early stages of my career and practicing the different laughs of the various operatic characters…and, at one point, I looked over and there was a car stopped with about four heads sticking out the window looking at this insane person, driving a tractor, laughing [makes the different laughs]. Well, I didn’t do that for days—I kept looking around to see if any cars were coming.”

Excerpted from “A conversation with Sherrill Milnes” by Leslie Holmes (Journal of singing LXVI [September–October 2009] pp. 97–101).

Today is Milnes’s 80th birthday! Below, singing “Oh, de’ verd’anni miei” in a 1983 production of Verdi’s Ernani.

Comments Off on Sherrill Milnes, farm boy

Filed under Opera, Performers

Tagged as , , ,

by | November 8, 2014 · 6:00 am

Le vie dei suoni

Le vie...

In 2014 Cafagna Editore launched the series Le vie dei suoni with Vincenzo Pucitta: Il tumulto del gran mondo, edited by Annamaria Bonsante. The book includes an introduction by Philip Gossett.

Below, Marilyn Hill Smith and Della Jones sing Un palpito mi sento, a duet from Pucitta’s La Caccia di Enrico IV (1809).

Comments Off on Le vie dei suoni

Filed under Classic era, New series, Opera

Tagged as , ,

by | October 22, 2014 · 6:00 am

Mei Lanfang on film

Mei Lanfang 3

Performances of excerpts from the kunqu classic The peony pavilion (牡丹亭, Mudan ting) marked the respective beginning and end of the film career of Mei Lanfang (梅兰芳). While fortuity and the canonical status of the play might be enough to explain this coincidence, Mei’s interests in both the venerable kunqu and the new medium of cinema suggest a productive line of inquiry into their expressive potentiality.

In his 1959 film of Dream in the garden (游园惊梦, Youyuan jingmeng), the precisely choreographed “meeting of the eyes” (dui yanguang) during the dream scene is translated into refreshingly rare exchanges of cinematic point-of-view. The original play’s motif of transcendence as represented by the romantic dream encounter at once opens up a self-referential space for Mei’s performance and frees the film medium here from the sole function of photographical preservation.

In this sense, Mei’s own interpretation of the transformative fairy quality (xian qi) of the play and the film medium could be seen as a footnote to his own art of impersonation. The film thus also complemented his stage performance in the masculine and patriotic General Mu Guiying (Mu Guiying guashuai) of the same year, which added a paradoxical last touch to his career as a female impersonator.

This according to “Meeting of the eyes: Invented gesture, cinematic choreography, and Mei Lanfang’s Kun opera film” by Dong Xinyu (The opera quarterly XXVI/2–3 [spring–summer 2010] pp. 200–219).

Today is Mei Lanfang’s 120th birthday! Above and below, he portrays the star-crossed Du Liniang in Dream in the garden.

1 Comment

Filed under Opera

Tagged as , , , , , ,