Grand and not so Grand Opera
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music GRAND ANDNOTSO GRAND OPERA BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH In great drama, history is a sweeping vista where the speculative mind can divine the forces that shape human destiny. Viewing...
...Superbly engineered with a grandiose sense of acoustic space, Angel's recording has the advantage and lasting merit of being the first...
...Rienzi is the last of the Roman tribunes...
...written in 1840, before Wagner had reached 30, Rienzi dates from the period of Meyerbeer's reign in Paris...
...By that time, Wagner's genius had veered off on its own highly innovative course, his life's work coming to a close with Parsijal in 1882...
...The mind was not invited to this feast for the senses...
...Although Paris did not accept it for performance, Wagner's first major opera was scaled to the resources of the city's stage...
...The most spectacular entertainment of a gaudy age, Parisian grand opera in its 19th-century heyday plundered the past—real and legendary—to cater to purely sensual cravings...
...the crude score finishes the schematiza-tion begun by the librettists...
...Meticulous in diction, commanding in tone, resourceful in characterization, Martin's performance makes this neglected piece coming glowingly alive...
...Domingo sings the one hit tune...
...and the garlands they held in store for those who could please seduced everyone?masters and novices, natives and foreigners—to lavish his talents on the uncertain enterprise of wooing them...
...Among the three principals, the balance is awry...
...Musically and theatrically, he meant Rienzi to outclass anything ever shown before, and while it lacks the depth and texture of his later work, it is a marvel of energy and theatrical know-how...
...Giacomo Meyerbeer, neither the inventor nor the last practitioner of the genre, nevertheless practically conquered it for his own...
...While not without lyric interludes, Chimene's part conspires principally to exploit the mettle of a powerful and steely instrument...
...In the travesti role of Adriano, Janis Martin is the one soloist whose singing provides genuine glamor...
...promised a lofty mystique...
...Nor does cutting corners to reduce production costs—as sometimes happens in more intellectual forms of theater?lay bare a deep poetic core of meaning: In a spectacular, the surface is the essence...
...how did they meet its demands...
...In the dramatically diminished role of the Infanta...
...Chimene's rival in love, Eleanor Bergquist contributes lovely high-floating lines in her song in the second act, and many in the supporting cast discharge their functions reasonably (though in barbarous French...
...The split personality of Rienzi—visionary leader, stealthy avenger, Machiavellian strategist—requires a more complex dramatic artist than Rene Kollo...
...Even at that early stage of his career, Wagner already knew how to paint the most various moods and had mastered the art of building convincing dramatic action in rich musical terms...
...Three years later (a full decade after A'ida and Carmen), Jules Massenet poured stale wine into old bottles to give the world he Cid...
...long runs, fame and fortune were his—triumph in Paris was triumph indeed...
...leisurely views of the limbs of the corps de ballet...
...Queler's reading of the music, committed as it is...
...Unfortunately, the bright spots cannot dispell the impression that a single hearing of this archaic score is perhaps one too many...
...There is justice in the verdict of time...
...Still, one wonders how much valuable music has been consigned, for lack of props and costumes, to near oblivion...
...Yet it is a bold and colorful score...
...it sees the protagonists, however blazing, as mere vessels for the protean and elusive power that passes through an unchanging, boundless, blustery sea of men...
...can we determine their measure by the build of their vehicles...
...Columbia's Le Cid will satisfy the Domingo and Bumbry factions, yet it cannot rehabilitate the opera...
...A man risen from the peopie, he struggles, deep in the Middle Ages, to rekindle the flame of his city's greatness...
...Artistically, French operagoers made no very serious demands, but they knew what they liked...
...rapid scene changes in exotic locales...
...Grand opera contrived to weave a spell at once highfalutin and sleazy...
...Modern stage technology, with its films and projections, is able to conjure great open spaces fairly economically, but fails when trying to fake grand opera's mass and weight...
...cannot help exposing a stentorian monotony...
...Whatever its worth as stage spectacular, the opera (derived from Corneille's play) emerges on disc as a concerto for two singing egomaniacs and supporting cast...
...The huge choral forces, though, achieve brilliant massed effects, and boast sopranos who can sing a cappella with the ethereal purity so often undeservedly ascribed only to choirboys...
...The stars of the age shone in grand opera, too...
...Histori cal curiosity notwithstanding, some monstrosities are better off extinct...
...Viewing Shakespeare's tetralogy of the rise of the House of Lancaster or Schiller's trilogy of the fall of Wallenstein, the audience occupies a serene and lucid vantage point...
...The opera juxtaposes scenes of intimacy with great displays of pageantry, and the skillful intertwining of public and private keeps the thread of action taut...
...massive deployments of extras...
...And in the grandest sequence of the opera —the departure of Rienzi's forces against the nobles, Adriano's vacillation over Irene's command not to take arms against his own father, and the anguished prayer of the Roman women for the safety of their men—they stand up fearlessly to the onslaught of the full orchestral artillery...
...The score is long, and Wagner did not maintain a constant level of inspiration throughout, but the music is never less than engaging, and at times reaches heights of true eloquence...
...Musically retrograde and dramatically impoverished, Massenet's late blossom of an exhausted form took Paris and later America by storm?then disappeared...
...After all, important composers attempted the genre...
...Her lover Adriano, last scion of a noble house and alternately Rienzi's rescuer and would-be assassin, breasts the fire encircling the Capitol to join the pair in death at the final curtain...
...For grand opera, though, history is just a glad-rag shop...
...Until last year, that is, when the enterprising Eve Queler revived it in concert for Placido Domingo and Grace Bum-bry...
...today, record companies corner the pirates' market by making their own live recordings...
...Overworking a tiny handful of motifs (suggestive rouehly of love, honor, duty, etc...
...And two recent releases, Richard Wagner's Rienzi (Angel SELX-3818) and Jules Massenet's Le Cid (Columbia M3 34211) speak to them directly...
...O noble lame etincelante, three times, growing more ardent each time...
...As for Siv Wennberg's Irene, despite some terrific vocal sharpshooting at the start, the faults of her technique —such as forcing every sound past an initial wheeze of laryngeal resistance—soon become glaring...
...He commands two registers—blank and menacing—and his pinched, constricted delivery cannot possibly be what Wagner had in mind...
...It tells the well-known tale of Rodrigue, named the Cid, who saves Spain from the Moorish invasion in the field but finds cruder battles at home: He is forced to slay the father of his beloved Chimenc in an affair of honor...
...he quells the factious nobles but at last falls himself to the wrath of the citizens...
...his last effort, VAjri-caine, premiered posthumously in 1865...
...On their favorites the Parisians showered the most extravagant favor...
...Little survives of these efforts today, besides a large body of elaborately bound scores in the stacks of music libraries, and an occasional volume in a used-book display by the Seine, No house in the world can afford to mount the operas as their creators intended...
...As a result, the works of last century hold a tenuous position at the outermost fringe of today's repertoire—not wholly forgotten but not rightly recalled...
...Bumbry has just the voice for it...
...Tricked out in scarves and armor, flanked by the brass and drums, many a hollow thought could strut the stage to great applause...
...Meyerbeer died in 1864...
...In the shrill, ungrateful displays, she numbs the ear, warming for some smooth and lambent phrases only near the end...
...Only his sister Irene stands by him throughout...
...Under Heinrich Hollreiser, the Stat-skapelli Dresden orchestra performs stirringly, albeit without great refinement...
...Historical" subjects, reduced to moral fables of clashing loyalties and magnificent passions, offered every opportunity for sounds to thrill the ear and sights to stun the eye: vibrant encounters of heroes and heroines whose very names (Vasco da Gama, Esclarmonde, etc., etc...
...He was compared with Michelangelo, and even with Christ...
...With his incomparable generosity of spirit, he spreads his sun-like talent over the universe of the tenor repertoire, and one need not regret his brief shining on Le Cid, but his sensitive musical-ity is not sufficient to enliven more than a few fragments of its mostly inert matter...
...Owing an audible debt to Beethoven, Weber and the be...
...The forays record companies have lately been making into this area are helpful in answering both questions...
...canto composers from south of the border, Rienzi foreshadows little of Wagner's amazing later developments of symphonic elaboration...
...A decade ago, such an event would have spawned illegal tapes that originated under raincoats...
Vol. 60 • June 1977 • No. 12
