On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Operas in Waiting By John Simon Why are theatergoers constantly on the lookout for something new, while operagoers revel in the same old war-horses and resist change in the...
...Individual singers on the earlier Swiss recording may be slightly superior (though Stephen Tharp's new Tristan is the equal of Eric Tappy's), the new version by I Cantori di New York under Mark Shapiro is more than satisfactory...
...Based on a lost play by the pseudonymous Frenchman Marc Henry, the libretto was written by the playwright-novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers, the most decadent of German writers and a subsequent Nazi...
...On top of that, Myrtocle, yearning for her husband, sings one of the songs of Bilitis...
...Even Myrtocle's moments of agony when, going blind again, she writhes in pantomime, are enveloped in the most sumptuous orchestral music...
...The linearity becomes more evident later, in Le Vin herbe, I detect rather a quality of medieval tapestry: a large canvas representing an elaborate story or stories with many details, each given equal importance yet managing to accommodate itself into a harmonious whole...
...It is ironic, by the way, to have a libretto attacking the Northern barbarians set to music so indebted to composers from those regions...
...Trying to wrest it from her, the old man throttles her...
...The playing and singing on the recording are of impressive quality, with Kurt Rydl as Archibaldo outstanding...
...Kobbé's Opera Book gives the running time as 110 minutes, but this recording by the Vienna Symphony under Vladimir Fedoseyev takes less than 100, tempering the lustiness...
...This heavily Bach-influenced music by a Protestant minister's son is permeated by restraint, gravity and a certain chasteness even at emotional climaxes...
...Eventually, he devoted himself solely to composing 21 operas, of which only the abovementioned two matter...
...That Beckett's words are still those of Shaw and, to a considerable extent, of Shakespeare...
...Its libretto, based onhis play, is by SemBenelli, at the time second only to Gabriele D'Annunzio as a provider of librettos...
...D'Albert's music, on the other hand, is truly astounding: From start to finish, almost uninterruptedly, it offers the most mellifluous melody...
...Archibaldo is blind because he cannot see the true feelings of a conquered people...
...And what of the music...
...Personally, I find certain passages a trifle too understated and chilly...
...The formertend to be younger and less affluent, hence more restless and demanding, less conservative and inflexible...
...Despite a brief, unsatisfying American revival not long ago, it now skirts oblivion...
...It is rather unlike that of Montemezzi's Italian contemporaries of the verismo school...
...The Roman envoy Arcesius—an ugly, limping, misshapen man—adores his beautiful and loving blind wife, Myrtocle...
...There are a few short passages in this 108-minute work that are stichomythic and a little less melodious, and there are a few moments of scurrying presto to accompany action, themselves rather fetching...
...Myrtocle, overjoyed, awaits her handsome husband...
...So is the entire rather senseless Ewers libretto: A blind woman, with her overdeveloped other senses would not think her ghastly, clubfooted husband handsome...
...This is the perfect, the absolute decadent opera...
...How, then, are we to create a public not only for very new compositions but also, and especially, for valuable older ones that have not become standards...
...Opera oratorio means that the story is not completely dramatized: A full or partial chorus carries most of the narration, with the soloists emerging from the chorus for the dramatic roles...
...Masterpieces such as the Petite Symphonie concertante and the Concerto for Seven Woodwinds, Tympani, Percussion, and Strings, to name only two of many, should long since have become staples...
...Told how much Fiora loved Avito, Manfredo, not to be outdone, also kisses the poisoned mouth...
...Manfredo takes time off from warfare to visit his wife...
...There is a significant difference between theater- and operagoers...
...Fiora is now laid out in the crypt of the castle church...
...Three years later, in 1916, Eugend'Albert(1864-1932) wrote his second-most-popular opera after Tiefland (1903), Die toten Augen (The Dead Eyes...
...On an older Swiss recording (Jecklin 581), with the composer as pianist, 12 singers take care of everything...
...the rest is all cajolingly incantatory...
...Le Vin herbe, at the threshold of that period, already displays most of its ripest features...
...The blind, snooping Archibaldo's hearing is uncannily sharp, though, and he senses a recurrent male presence around Fiora...
...Frank Martin (1890-1974) may be the last not yet fully recognized modern musical genius...
...The booklet notes are generous and helpful, and the English translation better than for the Jecklin...
...The plot reflects the taste of the period...
...Though generously recorded, his works (he wrote in all forms) are all too rarely performed...
...The action proper takes place in lerusalem on Palm Sunday...
...Prince Avito...
...Just as you can stand before those tapestries long and often, and keep making discoveries, your repeated hearings of this music will afford you subtle revelations of delicate feeling within the encompassing near-Calvinist austerity...
...The sparse instrumentation was prescribed by the terms of the original commission...
...The composer, d'Albert, was of Italian descent, born to a German kapellmeister and a Scottish mother in Glasgow...
...Martin put it to good use, letting it "remain secondary but not modest, like the scenery in a play...
...George Jellinek observed in History Through the Opera Glass that "Fiora is Italy herself...
...She has tried everything to recover her sight, in vain...
...Conformity to systems or rules "is no more than an act of elegance, an intellectual pleasure...
...Like the plot, the music concentrates on the quadrangle Archibaldo-Manfredo-Avito-Fiora, and without quite becoming sublime, does not lack for either melodic or dramatic interest...
...His prime begins around 1940...
...If it was not, more dramatically, Fiora, the singular amore in the title wouldn't make sense...
...Fiora's exaltation confirms his suspicions, and she defiantly confesses everything except the name of her lover...
...There is an air of piety about this music, of a somewhat melancholy, resigned decorum...
...L'amore dei tre re (The Love of the Three Kings, 1913) by Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952) was a respectable success both abroad and in America, Toscanini having conducted its Met premiere in 1914...
...A nice English translation of the complete Bédier by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld was published as The Romance of Tristan and Iseut by Pantheon in 1945...
...She receives him with cold courtesy but, touched by his love, agrees to wave her white scarf from the battlements to encourage him on his mission...
...Inasmuch as some of the most famous operas are allowed (perhaps even expected) to have preposterous plots—think, for instance, of Il trovatore or Adriana Lecouvreur—the reason for Die toten Augen's neglect cannot be the libretto...
...Why is the strong and healthy Galba a pushover for the deformed Arcesius...
...Benelli even leaves some people in doubt about whom the third king loved: Was it, secretly, Fiora, or merely his son...
...On Music Operas in Waiting By John Simon Why are theatergoers constantly on the lookout for something new, while operagoers revel in the same old war-horses and resist change in the repertoire...
...No attempt is made to convey time or place, however, although other things are nicely suggested...
...Although theater tickets have gone up steeply in price, there are various ways of obtaining them at reduced cost, and at their most expensive they are still cheaper than most opera tickets...
...In the notes to this live recording from the Bregenz Festival of 1998 (Koch Schwann 3-6570), Norbert Christen remarks on the composer's "ideal of rich, mellow sound which, even in the forte passages, never rasps but retains a rounded quality without seeming overloaded...
...You could not be more cosmopolitan than d'Albert...
...The lustiness of the music is mostly reserved for the orchestra, with the vocal line rather more sober...
...And why would Jesus, curing her, predict that she would curse him...
...Frank Marttn's Le Vin herbé (The Spiked [or Herbed] Wine, 1938-41) is an opera oratorio for chorus, seven strings and piano...
...Avito rushes in and kisses her mouth...
...The new double-CD recording (Newport Classic 85670) has eight soloists plus a chorus of 34 along with the eight instrumentalists, though the added voices are no real gain...
...Nevertheless, from this sober texture—two violins, two violas, two cellos, a double bass, and piano—surge gripping moments of fervid introspection as well as deep-seated passion, anger and despair, always mantled in hard-won discipline and dignity...
...Crushed, the old man exclaims, "Manfredo, Manfredo...
...Furthermore, whereas the innovative play can gradually build up an audience by word of mouth, an opera house must fill its much larger premises with an immediate crowd for the four or five performances of a work in a particular season...
...Enter Archibaldo, thinking he has seized Avito, but it is Manfredo who dies in his arms...
...Is it that a new play, however daringly conceived, uses the same language...
...It is the story in French of Tristan and Isolde, in a version quite different from Wagner's and based on Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut by Joseph Bédier (1900), a retelling derived from four medieval romances artfully conflated...
...Nevertheless, the climactic moments are full of passion, and there is no dawdling in between...
...What follows is a stab at calling your attention to three imperfect but worthy recent recordings...
...Arcesius and Galba (secretly in love with Myrtocle) return, but the former, terrified at being seen by his wife, hides...
...Die toten Augen begins with a Prologue in the mountains, where a good shepherd sets off at nightfall to find a lost lamb...
...This does perfectjustice to the central love story, and to Bédier's sensitive treatment of it...
...At that moment the good shepherd from the Prologue crosses the square with the lost lamb cradled in his arms...
...As the fearful Arcesius comes crawling back, he is met by a wife who, sightless again, continues adoring him...
...One modest approach might be promoting the CDs of such operas in the print media, and hoping that a music journalist's words might reach the right influential readers...
...Some of this has to do with money...
...She is still carrying on with Avito on the sly, Manfredo being mostly off to do battle in the North...
...Though there are no arias proper, the whole opera, vocally and orchestrally, is lilting, melting, insinuating, seductive...
...The vocabulary of music, by contrast, changes radically...
...Martin's is a work for fairly modest forces...
...A brilliant pianist, he gradually gave up his career as a virtuoso and became director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik...
...Whether Ewers knew or not that the poem was fake, its inclusion here is typically decadent...
...Why are even such occasionally revived masterpieces as The Makropoulos Affair and The Rake's Progress far less popular than Rigoletto and Tosca...
...Christen calls attention to a "tireless repetition of tiny patterns," or ostinatos, as well as to the "tendency to move the action forward with woodwindpassages, in the Debussy manner...
...The Swiss composer chose three of the 19 chapters and the Prologue and Epilogue, setting them without alteration...
...D'Albert was in love with things German and composed only in that language, yet he wandered restlessly and lived everywhere, finally embracing Swiss citizenship but dying in Riga...
...what really matters is "the composer's fidelity to his innermost sense of musical expression and construction...
...These erotic poems, attributed to a Greek poetess and lover of Sappho, were in fact an 1894 hoax perpetrated by the French writer and classicist Pierre Louys, author of the once notorious novel Aphrodite...
...Besides, L'amore dei tre re must surely be read as a patriotic allegory on the threshold of World War I and Italy's shaking off the Austrian yoke...
...Moreover, how does the mountain shepherd of the Prologue end up on a Jerusalem square...
...A great, death-intoxicated love scene (think of Tristan or Pelléas) ensues that ends abruptly with the approach of Archibaldo, who hears hastily departing footsteps...
...The latter are largely wealthy older people, resistant to innovation and often going to the opera not to hear but to be seen...
...They do not want to be bothered making adjustments in what is part of their social life...
...Manfredo enters and, while wondering why he can't hate his rival, informs him that Archibaldo has smeared Flora's lips with poison, and that Avito's life is forfeit...
...Winning the Mendelssohn Prize, he traveled to Vienna to study with Hans Richter...
...The opera reflects Martin's idiosyncratic take on the 12-tone scale, centered, in the composer's words, "on an almost constant use of chromaticism [that] never rejects what is to me the very fundament of music—the tonal functions...
...The hurriedly returning Manfredo, made more civilized by having been born in Italy, can only forgive and admire Flora's devotion, even if it was to another...
...During the love scene between Fiora and Avito, for example, we hear the clattering hooves of Manfredo's galloping horse...
...Why not mercifully leave her sightless...
...There are modern operas, though— Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring is one, Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers is another—that do not require excessive adjustment to new modes yet fail to win over opera houses and their clientele...
...Now old and blind, he has passed the reins to his son Manfredo (the names indicate conquerors from the North), to whom the beautiful Fiora was given in marriage despite a prior engagement to her Alturan lover...
...They do make somewhat greater demands, but are no more dissimilar linguistically from their predecessors than a Tom Stoppard or Harold Pinterplay from one by George Kelly or Elmer Rice...
...Even tolerant people may boggle at the abandonment of arias and espousal of the 12-tone system in Lulu and Moses und Aron...
...As a youth, he fled to London, where he studied piano and, with Sir Arthur Sullivan, composition...
...It must be said that D'Annunzio would have managed this better, albeit with greater prolixity...
...Rushing out of concealment, the madlyjealous Arcesius strangles him...
...And when infrequent operagoers scrape up enough funds for an exceptional opera visit, they may prefer to see one of those highly-touted favorites they keep hearing about...
...When the heartbroken woman asks who the hideous murderer was, Arsinoe's answer devastates her...
...Albert neuman has observed that "melody, in Frank Martin's work, is treated with a 'protestant' severity and thus possesses an archaic linearity...
...You can find traces of Wagner, Debussy and Strauss in both the libretto and the score, but the work is ultimately sui generis...
...The obvious arias are pretty much dispensed with, save for the so-called hidden ones, as when Archibaldo sings of his love of Italy or Manfredo ardently woos his aloof wife...
...He is blind, too, to his own feelings...
...While Arcesius and his friend, the dashing officer Galba, are off consulting with Pilate about how to deal with Jesus, Mary Magdalen guides Myrtocle and Arsinoe to a meeting with him...
...The Dresden Philharmonic is masterly under Rolf Weikert, and the singing is generally first-rate from a cast featuring Dagmar Schallenberger as a Myrtocle exuding true romantic passion...
...This is important, because Bédier's version is in many ways superior to Wagner's, and has a simplicity Wagner could nowise have matched...
...Jesus cures Myrtocle offstage, but we hear his voice predicting that by nightfall she will curse his name...
...Her slave Arsinoe hears the Jewish women by the well talk of Jesus, a miracle worker...
...It is not that the three works I have discussed are never performed—I Cantori has given the Martin twice in the last 15 years, and recorded it the second time...
...it feels more than it blurts out, preferring to speak in whispers rather than shouts...
...She assumes Galba to be her husband, and he cannot resist her passionate kisses...
...I think it is the excess of melody that causes mild revulsion, like pigging out on candy...
...As if this weren't symbolism enough, Arcesius and Myrtocle keep rehashing the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which holds symbolic parallels to their story...
...then to Weimar, to continue with Franz Liszt...
...Heroically, Myrtocle stares into the setting sun until she is blind again...
...He also embraced a number of women, six of whom he married, the second being the worldfamous pianist Teresa Carreño...
...But all three deserve greater exposure...
...The populace, in single voices and chorus, grieves for her...
...She tries to resist but soon yields...
...A 10th-century barbarian baron (or king), Archibaldo, conquered Altura, an imaginary Italian province, 40 years earlier...
...It is astonishing, though, how much quiet intensity is generated by this often madrigal-like music...
...Montemezzi's only hit, it has been variously called Debussyiste or, more justly, Wagnerian...
...So you too, without remedy, are with me in the shadows...
...Entwined, they re-enter their home...
...Up on high her strength fails her and she manages only a few feeble waves, particularly since Avito pops up to lure her into his arms...
...Still, the fine new recording (CPO 999 692) makes for highly enjoyable listening...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
