Opera Music

A Wagner documentary without Howard Goodall or Stephen Fry? Yes, it can be done. Here's the earliest effort: Carl Fröhlich's 1913 silent movie The Life and Works of Richard Wagner. The series of reverential vignettes was put together to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth. Ideally it would have been accompanied by an orchestra playing Wagner's music at each showing, but the makers didn't want to stump up the required royalties. So they commissioned Giuseppe Becce to craft a Wagner-like score; close enough to sound like the real thing, but different enough to avoid legal retaliation. Becce bore such an uncanny resemblance to Wagner that he was drafted in to act the part of the composer as well. There's no sound on the video above, so feel free to slam on some Daft Punk. For a more traditional dose of Wagnerian bombast, there's Tony Palmer's 8 hour bio-fiction Wagner. It's a patchy effort, but there's plenty of music, and Richard Burton is as watchable as ever: Finally, here's an oddity from 1982: Petr Ruttner's more fartsy than artsy Wagner e Venezia, with Orson Welles voicing the composer:

At the end of this week we'll be celebrating the beginning of summer, 2013, and we'll begin getting ready for our exciting 2014 International Season! What better way to do that then to have a few podcasts dedicated to a 'refresher' course in opera? Today Nicolas Reveles, our Geisel Director of Education and Outreach for San Diego Opera takes a look at the essence of the art form, how

Since 1981, San Diego Opera has staged Puccini’s Tosca five times, plus I have seen the excellent film with Kabaivanska, Domingo and Milnes, a previous production at Los Angeles Opera, and several televised versions. So why drive to Los Angeles to see Tosca again? The answer – to see and hear its star, Sondra Radvanovsky. [...]

American tenor James Valenti will essay a new Verdi role at Caramoor this summer…. Don Carlos. The role which is a custom fit for Mr. Valenti’s vocal instrument as we find it today, will likely give new facets to the character where other artists have not been able to do so. Operaphiles recognize there is [...]

“The question on everyone’s lips at Carnegie Hall was, ‘Is Jimmy back in form?’ The answer, after a nearly three-hour program featuring the Met Opera orchestra and piano soloist Evgeny Kissin, was ‘yes, maybe’.” [New York Post]

For the (dubious) benefit of overseas readers, who may until now have been living in blissful ignorance of Lord Tebbit of Chingford, his reappearance on the British political stage might prove, short of Margaret Thatcher’s resurrection, the ultimate in ‘80s retro. Notorious for stances that threatened to make the Prime Minister herself resemble a woolly-minded liberal – his advice to the unemployed was that they should follow his father’s lead, getting on their bikes to find some work, and he suggested a ‘cricket test’ for immigrants, to assess their loyalty on the basis of which team they supported – he seems more recently to have become obsessed with homosexuality, to the extent that a friend of mine suggested he should consider seeking asylum in Iran or Saudi Arabia. (The idea of him as the Abu Qatada of Teheran is not entirely without its amusing side.) He certainly has longstanding form, having written to The Daily Telegraph in 1998, perturbed that gay men might do each quasi-Freemasonic ‘favours’, were they to be permitted to attain political office. His latest intervention, an interview with The Big Issue reported today (click here) has as its context a failed bid by the extreme Right of the Conservative Party to derail legislation to enable gay marriage; Tebbit now finds himself exercised by the possibility of a lesbian queen who might have an artificially inseminated heir. Other interesting light is cast upon his subconscious by his concern that gay marriage might lead to his marrying his son in order to avoid inheritance tax. (If I were Tebbit Jr, I should probably now be in the departures lounge, nervously consulting my wristwatch.) On the eve of Wagner’s 200th birthday, I wondered initially whether this story might draw a few threads together. Might we out Tebbit as a Wagnerian? Had he simply been listening to too much of Die Walküre (see the clip below for Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, declaring their love for each other, the curtain falling just in time to spare too many Chingford blushes.) But alas, not. I reminded myself that in the world of Tebbit, the issue is about inheritance. He does not seem so much as to consider the possibility that some of those gay couples might wish to marry out of love. One might claim Wagnerian influence in that respect too; Wagner was at best ambivalent concerning marriage, arguing rightly, in Proudhonian fashion, that it was little more than an instantiation of bourgeois property relations, and having his Jesus of Nazareth stand as a liberator of mankind – and womankind – from all such constraints to human flourishing. Inheritance – ‘the world’s inheritance’ of the Ring and the Ring’s ring – is equally deadly. Yet in Die Walküre, Wagner straightforwardly offers us a portrayal of two human beings who fall in love, unconcerned with society’s judgement upon them, unconcerned even by the discovery that they are brother and sister. Their love, of the moment, refusing to be set in stone either by the runes of Wotan’s spear of law or Fricka’s dead hand of custom, defies bourgeois marriage, yet not after the fashion of Norman Tebbit’s Thatcherite reduction of all to financial and contractual concerns; quite the opposite. Now it may well be, as Wagner's intellectual development tends to suggest, that the hopes placed by many in love are illusory, that we should do better to attend to Schopenhauer than to Feuerbach, and that marriage may certainly not prove to be the best way forward for anyone of any sexual orientation; Brünnhilde belief that she is married, cruelly symbolised by the ring itself, does her and Siegfried no good at all. But Wagner points to renunciation; he certainly does not suggest that we retreat to a world of loveless marriages, such as those of Sieglinde to Hunding, or others conducted purely for reasons of inheritance. Wagner’s relevance? (Wagners Aktualität, as an

Nicola Luisotti and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra climbed out of the War Memorial pit, braved the wind whipped bay and held spellbound an audience at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley.

As everyone must know by now, Wagner will be 200 tomorrow. I posted a few thoughts a couple of days ago concerning his continuing, inescapable impotance from a standpoint of composition and stage direction. Most of my 2013 Wagner experiences have yet to come, but so far I have no doubt as to that which has made the greatest impression on me: Oper Leipzig's tremendous advocacy for Die Feen. I urge anyone for whom it might be the slightest possibility to consider a visit. It is by any standards a wonderful opera, both in its own right and on account of the uncanny presentiments it offers not only for every single one of Wagner's subsequent stage works, but also for works such as Gurrelieder and Die Frau ohne Schatten. Moreover, it benefits both from an intelligent production and fine musical performances. (The only case in which the Chelsea Opera Group's concert performance a little over a month earlier was preferable was Elisabeth Meister's stunning Lora, though it also had a good cast overall.) If any operatic staging this year, other than Stefan Herheim's forthcoming Salzburg Meistersinger - and I think I can say this before having seen a minute of it - demands wider circulation on DVD, it must be this. In the meantime, the late Wolfgang Sawallisch's recording, from the 1983 Munich season in which he, at the Bavarian State Opera, conducted all of Wagner's dramas, remains the only truly recommenable recorded performance; I provide a link below. Here, howver, is a taste of the twenty-year-old composer's first completed opera, its Overture performed by the same orchestra in 1952, conducted by Franz Konwitschny (yes, father of Peter), who imparts just the right balance between roots in Weber, Marschner, and others (Beethoven and Mozart being more evident elsewhere in the score), and a forward-looking dramatic imperative which belongs unmistakeably to Leipzig's greatest son:

I had one of those tedious days yesterday getting stuff done - but lovely to clear the desk and to-do list.  But it ended with a very happy dinner with David Agler, Artistic Director of the Wexfor Festival, who is in town briefly.  I hope to make it to Wexford again this year......... The rest of the week is somewhat hectic.  I will be in France this afternoon until Thursday morning, the exciting new Wozzeck at the ENO on Thursday evening, on Friday some lovely catch up with a dear friend who is getting married in July - and I can't be at the wedding, and then to Norwich for the weekend. This is for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. From then on its all go until I get back from my Europe Neue Stimmen tour on June 16.  Lots of excitement ahead!

How do you do full justice to one of the greatest geniuses in all music? On May 22, we celebrate the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner. We know from various sources that he was not exactly a Teddybear, but most of us who appreciate opera, treasure his work, separately from any personality characteristics;in fact, if we delved into the lives of many composers, we might not find everyone as lovable as we might want. Who cares? Here are some scenes from his operas with the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Knappertsbusch: Gotterdamerung: Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey and Funeral Music Parsifal: "Ich sah das Kind" sung by Kirsten Flagstad Walkure Finale sung by George London Tristan und Isolde Prelude and Liebestod sung by Birgit Nilsson. (63 min.)