I Hear Wagner Singing
GOODMAN, JOHN
On Music I HEAR WAGNER SINGING BY JOHN GOODMAN s ^JroME years ago, actor Severn Darden, one of the then-unknown Compass Players at the University of Chicago, hired a Rolls-Royce and dressed...
...Rock also leans upon the rites of Bayreuth: bringing religion into the theater and/or narcotizing the audience...
...He rolls dead at her feet, his enigmatic silence maintained as the curtain falls...
...Like other melodramatic operas in the verismo style, The Medium tends toward highly emotionalized situations and extreme characters to offset its poverty of real life...
...Getting the music to properly articulate the drama has always been the problem...
...John Cage could hardly have existed without Wagner...
...This hash of decadent spiritualism, deluded parents, abused children, and a vile witch-mother, along with the blatant echoes of Hamlet —the ghost...
...Instead of spontaneity...
...Yet the modern genre, which remains popular, is perhaps the most pretentious and ludicrous of all...
...The vivid theatrical life of the 19th century has now pretty much completed its transmutation into other forms...
...so is the light show, the occasional shamanism, the overpowering volume...
...Childish games also begin Act II...
...Although much Wagnerian opera is grandiose imposture and loose chromatic display, that judgment docs not really detract from his accomplishment...
...The Medium, more offensively than the majority of melodramatic operas, is all didactic content, irrational plot and realistic language—none of it very memorable except for the composer's gaffes...
...To keep the Menotti flame burning, Columbia Records, aided by a generous if misguided private gift, has issued a new recording of The Medium (ms 7387), featuring Re-gina Resnik in the title role of Madame Flora (Baba), and the Opera Society of Washington under Jorge Mester's direction...
...Aiming to eclipse the classical tradition, he promoted an esthetic which has had far-reaching effects in the most unlikely places...
...In the course of these maudlin proceedings Doodly appears and Mickey's laughter is heard (through Monica's deceptions...
...but the music was bad and the drama worse...
...Opera is merely one of the casual-tics...
...Monica confesses her love for Toby, who grunts pathetically in reply...
...She challenges the apparition to speak and, receiving no answer, fires a gun through the curtain where the mute boy has hidden himself...
...On Music I HEAR WAGNER SINGING BY JOHN GOODMAN s ^JroME years ago, actor Severn Darden, one of the then-unknown Compass Players at the University of Chicago, hired a Rolls-Royce and dressed himself as a bum to attend an opening-night performance by Chicago's Lyric Opera company...
...Gobineau, seeking the presence of their drowned child Mickey, and Mrs...
...Menotti uses banal sensation and exotic settings...
...Perhaps in doing so he ruined opera for all time...
...Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress went back to the procedures of Mozart and before...
...An electric doorbell signals the arrival of Baba's clients, Mr...
...Menotti, however, is a miniaturist—The Medium takes hardly more than an hour to perform—and Strauss is anything but that...
...A meager hint of modern Wag-nerism in the opera house was the recent New York performance of the rock opera Tommy by The Who...
...There is no continuity to the score and, except for a few thematic repetitions, it is wispy and thin...
...Gradually, calm is restored as sweet Monica sings a gypsy ballad...
...In practice, too, Wagner continues to intimidate by the sheer magnitude of his work and by his powers as a symphonist...
...On the other hand, neither could Charlie Parker, whose melodic flights ruthlessly transformed the Wagnerian pop ballads...
...Toby, decked out in Madame's robes, imagines himself a regal personage...
...This agreeably fatuous gesture has always typified my feelings about opera-going in this country, for Darden's masquerade was no more absurd than much of what goes on inside opera houses in the name of art...
...Mixed-media entertainments are, of course, Wagnerian...
...Baba, getting drunk, again accuses Toby, who again makes no sign to confirm or deny her suspicions, even when she whips him...
...Now totally drunk and distraught, she drives Toby from the house...
...Baba tells her clients, now returned for another seance, that she has cheated them, but their faith in their visions remains unshaken...
...As to the music, it is completely inadequate for the emotions the libretto seeks to express...
...Queen Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius behind the arras —is supposed to be taken quite seriously, as Menotti tells us in his album notes...
...The drug scene is part of this...
...Because opera, as Virgil Thomson said, is complete musical theater, it can include the most elaborate set-pieces, scenery, costumes, waterfalls, ballets, a circus, anything—as long as the text is dramatically effective...
...I mean the kind of psychomelodrama developing from Wagner and Strauss that took either the road of high seriousness and experimentalism with Leos Janacek and Alban Berg, or the path of sentimental fantasy and commercial traditionalism with Gian Carlo Menotti...
...Because the operatic scene is so pompous and moribund, it might be charitable not to dwell upon its decline...
...T M. hear Wagner, for instance, all through the popular sentimental songs of the last 40 or so years— in their lush orchestrations and their mythologizing of romantic love...
...In her hysteria she drags Toby from his puppet theater and accuses him of trying to frighten her...
...Nolan, hoping for a sign from her dead daughter Dood-ly...
...Apparently, serious composers arc unable to write decent operas because they know nothing about drama...
...Menotti goes further than most in these directions, as a look at the plot may serve to indicate...
...Pace Wagner, it is no exaggeration to say that the most mawkish of these sonas are devotional exercises in instant transcendence, in other woras, wish-fulfillment or fantasy...
...in the best songs' sincere attempt to make the dramatic lyric and the music work together as one conception...
...Opera today cannot begin to function on this personal level, and no composer has the technical vision or the transcendental intentions of a Wagner...
...Jazz, in fact, is the most severely anti-Wagnerian music insofar as it remains committed to the blues and a stark emotional realism...
...Wagner thought of himself as first of all a dramatist whose function was to compose and coordinate every aspect of a production...
...Eager to reduce opera to a neat commercial package, the Menottis are still anxiously revolting against the 100-year-old precepts of Wagnerian music-drama...
...The curtain rises on Monica, Baba's daughter, and Toby, her mute gypsy ward whom she discovered in Budapest, indulging in happy games of fantasy...
...All goes well until Baba feels a clammy hand on her throat and, horrified by this apparition, dismisses everyone...
...Rock works both sides of the street, sometimes in the satiric or detached mode, sometimes cultivating its own mythology, drama and symbols...
...Instead of allowing the music to underscore the emotion by remaining disjoined from the words, as in traditional melodrama (hence its name) and in more contemporary developments like the Brecht-Weill Singspiel, Gian Carlo tries to write opera—that is...
...The trouble is that his music won't hold up its end: Screaming and grunts and electric bells are laughable when used as substitutes for musical emotion...
...In modern opera, the stress on psychopathology has called forth rather ingenious solutions...
...But it is impossible to be serious about a work that presents one inflated, sensational cliche after another in a straight, naturalistic manner...
...in the use of the voice as an instrument of the orchestra...
...Upon being refused, he indulged in a brief but violent rant against the opera establishment, retired to his Rolls and sped away into the night...
...As the car pulled up to the opera house, a flunky unrolled a red carpet and Darden, singing arias, proceeded through the crowd of formally attired patrons to the box office and demanded a seat...
...When he furtively returns, perhaps for love of Monica, Baba hears the noise and fears a return of the ghost...
...and Mrs...
...For these he is indebted, strange as it may seem, to the classical operatic tradition and to that old master of dramatic bloat, Richard Strauss...
...Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu successfully used elaborate tone-row devices...
...the film soundtrack, with its generally realistic intentions keeping speech and music separate, is not...
...words and music composed in a unified conception...
...Then the evil Baba enters, to prepare them for their part in the seance—the children, it seems, manipulate the special effects for Baba's spiritual shenanigans...
...Menotti's names are powerfully affecting...
...Menotti relics on such trite devices as scries of 1940-ish dissonances...
Vol. 53 • August 1970 • No. 16
