Household Opera

Personal anthology: Thomas Hardy

I've been learning some very basic music theory lately (thank you, Open Yale Courses — it's so much easier to be an autodidact in the age of podcasts and Creative Commons educational materials). And one of the first things I realized was that I wish I'd known more about musical meter during all the years when I was learning about poetic meter.

In the lecture course I just finished listening to, the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" came up as an example of a triple rhythm — specifically, 3/4 time. (Hum it to yourself, tap your foot, and you can hear it: PICture yourSELF on a BOAT in a RIVer with TANgerine TREES...) 3/4 is also the oom-pah-pah rhythm of the great majority of waltzes, which, if you imagine waltzing to the Beatles' trippy psychedelia, only adds to the surreality of it all.

Anyway, I was listening to this example and I suddenly thought "Huh. Dactyls." The dactyl, for those of you who didn't spend your education obsessing over this kind of thing, is the metrical foot with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da). And "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is full of three-syllable words with a dactylic stress pattern: tangerine, marmalade, cellophane, looking-glass, towering. I'd never particularly thought about the meter of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," or made the connection between dactylic meters and waltzing, but there it was.

Dactylic meters can be hard to pull off in English.* They can sound heavy (Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is a standard example: "HALF a league, HALF a league, HALF a league, ONward"), but they're also sometimes used for comic effect. There's no intrinsic reason why a triple meter would be funnier, or more serious, than a duple one, but if you're used to the predominant iambic meter of a lot of poetry in English (da-DUM-da-DUM), anything else is going to stand out.

All of which is a rather long preamble to this Thomas Hardy poem, which is part of a group of poems about the memory of his first wife, Emma Gifford, who died in 1912, and which came to mind when I started thinking about triple meters:

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

— Thomas Hardy (Satires of Circumstance, 1914)

If he'd kept up the dactylic meter of the first couple of stanzas throughout the poem, it wouldn't have been as striking; but as the remembered image of Emma that Hardy conjures in the second stanza dwindles into a ghostly voice in the wind, the triple rhythm starts falling apart along with it. "Heard no more again far or near?" marks the shift; it's as though syllables have started dropping out of the pattern we've come to expect, slowing down the bursts of energy we heard in the previous stanzas. And with the next line — "Thus I; faltering forward," with the only trace of the previous rhythm being the word "faltering" — we're in a different world entirely, a slower and sadder and bleaker one.

This was going to be a simple commonplace-book post, but I got a bit carried away. Prosody geekery and music theory: two great tastes that taste great together!

* The dactyl was the basic foot of ancient Greek and Latin epic, but those meters are based on syllable length rather than stress, so it's a different kind of sound altogether. I once encountered a verse translation of Homer that attempted dactylic hexameter in English, and the lines just sounded interminably exhausting.

Marie Therese, wie gut Sie ist!

It's hard to believe that yesterday's Met HD broadcast of Der Rosenkavalier was the first time I'd ever seen it performed (more or less) live. I've listened to it a bazillion times, watched at least one film version, and trawled YouTube for bits and pieces of it.* Accordingly, I'm going to go on at some length. Those of you who aren't here for the opera posts can skip this one.

• In some ways it feels almost too personal to talk about how much I love this opera in front of the internets. I'm not entirely sure why, but part of it is the fear of lapsing into what Terry Castle calls "that 'purple' quality which so often creeps into the literature of sapphic diva-worship."* And Der Rosenkavalier is the greatest Sapphic diva-worship opera ever, which is one of the many reasons why I love it so much.
• Ordinarily it's the Trio that makes me cry; this time it was the Marschallin's monologue in Act 1 and the scene with Octavian that follows. The heartbreaking thing about it isn't that she's sad about getting older, it's that she's trying to say something to Octavian about what it feels like to be aware of one's own mortality, and Octavian—who's only 17, after all—is just too young to hear what she's saying. They're two people on opposite sides of a hard-to-locate but definite dividing line, and so much of what they say to each other is miscommunication.
• When I first encountered this opera, at age mid-twenty-something, Octavian was the one I identified with. Now I'm older than the Marschallin, and even though I'm well aware that 32 (or 34) is not in the least ancient, I know what it feels like to have crossed that dividing line and to feel time tricking by faster than I used to think it would.
• This production made me notice something I'd never noticed before: in Act 3 when Octavian, in his Mariandel disguise, pretends to be drunk and maudlin, he performs what's basically a miniature, parodic version of the Marschallin's "Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding." I felt silly for noticing it only just now, but this production included a couple of bits of stage business that made the parallel clear: Octavian-as-Mariandel holds up a soup spoon and stares into it in the same way the Marschallin looks into her hand mirror, for example. I'm still pondering: does it mean that some of what she said has reached Octavian on some level after all? Or just that it's been baffling him and is therefore uppermost in his mind?
• Then again, I also only just recently noticed the way the orchestra anticipates the Marschallin's opening phrase in the Trio ("Hab mir's gelobt") just as Octavian-as-Mariandel starts to sing "Nein, nein, nein, nein, I trink' kein wein!" And it was brought to my attention by something I read or listened to...somewhere. I'd link to it if I could remember it.
• Renée Fleming brought some sharp edges to her performance that I wasn't quite expecting, especially at her first entrance in Act 3. She was letting us see how much of an effort it cost the Marschallin to let go of Octavian so gracefully. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that interpretation, but it intrigued me.
• I like Susan Graham, a lot, and I thought she and Renée Fleming played off each other beautifully. But I would kill to see Sarah Connolly's Octavian.
• I'd forgotten how funny the Baron Ochs bits can be. I confess to skipping over some of them when I'm listening at home, in my haste to get on with the soprano-fest. Kristinn Sigmundsson, whose Baron Ochs was so lecherous and self-satisfied as to be strangely adorable, got an especially warm round of applause at the curtain call.
• This bit of James Merrill's "Matinées" (the sonnet sequence from which this blog derives its title) is on my mind today:

Or Lehmann's Marschallin!—heartbreak so shrewd,
So ostrich-plumed, one ached to disengage
Oneself from a last love, at center stage,
To the beloved's dazzled gratitude.

—James Merrill, "Matinées," in Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001)

* In "In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender," in The Apparitional Lesbian (Columbia UP, 1993).

** For your listening and viewing pleasure: Gwyneth Jones, Brigitte Fassbaender, and Lucia Popp singing their hearts out in the final scene. What would I do without YouTube?

A few thoughts on Tosca at the Met

I went to my first Met HD broadcast of the season yesterday, and the first I've been to in two years. (They just added a venue I can actually get to: the Katherine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook. I'm still hoping the broadcasts will make to the Garde here in New London, but 10 miles away is pretty good.) I bought my ticket before Luc Bondy's new production of Tosca opened to a mixture of cheers for the singers and boos for the director. "Well," I thought when I saw the first reviews, "this is going to make for an interesting broadcast."

Maybe it's just that I never saw the Franco Zeffirelli production that preceded this one, but I can't really see what all the booing was about. I mean, I wasn't thrilled with all the directorial choices. The three Brides of Dracula scantily-clad women who cavort with Scarpia at the beginning of Act 2, for example. George Gagnidze already makes the character skin-crawlingly creepy; to have the three of them crawling over him while he sings about using and discarding his sexual conquests seems like overkill. And I don't particularly care that Bondy got rid of the business with Tosca setting candles next to Scarpia's corpse, but I do think that having her react to killing him by first almost jumping out the window and then collapsing on a sofa was inconsistent, at best. I can definitely see her having a "holy shit, what have I done?!" moment afterward, but I think she'd be more likely to want to get the hell out of there immediately.

That said, I just don't get the uproar over either the stylized and non-lavish sets, or the timing of Tosca's grab for the knife, or her freeze-frame plunge off the tower at the end (which reminded me of Hitchcock's Vertigo, which, in my book, is a good thing). None of those choices seemed indefensible to me. And Bondy and the singers also found a few moments that struck me as quite brilliant: the way, for example, Tosca makes her Act 3 entrance with dark blue gloves on her recently bloodstained hands, and when she tells Cavaradossi how she killed Scarpia—"N'ebbi le man tutte lorde di sangue!" ("My hands were filthy with his blood!")—he very gently takes the gloves off as he sings "O dolci mani mansuete e pure." I'd never noticed that moment before.

I think my lack of outrage over this "controversial" production stems from my having discovered opera after I'd already discovered both theater and film. If you've seen, for instance, a lot of live Shakespeare, it doesn't seem at all sacreligious when directors update the setting of a play, or stage it in modern dress on a stripped-down set, or interpret a scene in a new way. Even if you don't like or agree with the interpretation, it would be boring if every production were the same. And one of the many things I love about opera is that it inhabits the territory where music and theater meet. It's not equivalent to theater, but it's also not so detached from theater that it should be treated as an unchanging ritual from which any deviation must be met with yells of protest.

(See also the reactions at Parterre Box, Alex Ross's blog, and My Favorite Intermissions.)

Random bullets of opera

It's so hot my brain is melting. Which means it's time for a link post...

• What if the universe were an opera? I love these music-meets-science kinds of stories. (Via Nicole Brockmann on Twitter.)
• Just added to the blogroll: Eye Bags and Se Vuoi Pace, two blogs about, among other things, queer opera fandom, cross-dressing mezzos in white shirts, and wondrous things to be found on YouTube. (Including a fantabulous Swedish production of Rossini's La Cenerentola, segmented but viewable in its entirety.)
• "Fandom of the Opera," an article from the LA Times from a few years back. I'm not quite at this level of obsession (yet).
• I suppose, given all the attention that Twitter's gotten of late, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of this idea. Wish I could be there to see the results.
• Thanks in part to my trip to Santa Fe, I've been on a Willa Cather kick lately (Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in Santa Fe and elsewhere in New Mexico, was my airplane reading). I think it's time to reread The Song of the Lark, which was inspired by the career of Olive Fremstad (who was evidently quite the crush object for novelists of her time, as she also inspired Marcia Davenport's Of Lena Geyer — another for the reading list). The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska has a scholarly edition of The Song of the Lark online, and PBS has some information on Cather and Fremstad as part of the site for their Song of the Lark adaptation.
• I think I should be able to make it to at least some of the Met HD broadcasts at Fairfield University this year. And there was much rejoicing!

Craigslistlieder!

A few days ago, someone on Opera-L mentioned Gabriel Kahane's Craigslistlieder, a song cycle based on, you guessed it, personal ads from Craigslist. (One of them, the wildly funny "Neurotic and Lonely," can be heard on Gabriel Kahane's MySpace page; or you can listen to them all here).

Tickled, I promptly tweeted about it. At which point a couple of Twitter friends pointed me to Sam Krahn's Missed Connections Song Cycle, this one based on Chicago's Craigslist and first performed at the Green Mill.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has been assembling found poetry from Craigslist, and a Google search turns up a few more examples. (Personally, I think Craigslist poetry sounds best when set to music.) Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time is evidence of the Next Big Thing?

Obviously, the next step is for someone to write some Twitter lieder. Or, perhaps even better, Found Magazine lieder or Passive Aggressive Notes lieder. I'm only half joking. Actually, I'm not joking at all. Any composers out there want to try it?

The convergence of film and opera, or, What I did on my summer vacation

I'm back from my Santa Fe trip, which was just about the ideal vacation. (I only wish I'd been there longer than a long weekend. Next time. And there'll definitely be a next time.) Two eminently enjoyable nights at the opera, in the open air with the mountains in the distance; two magnificent sopranos;* excitingly unfamiliar architecture and landscapes everywhere; excellent New Mexican and Spanish food; a little Georgia O'Keeffe; lots of walking around; the fortuitous discovery of a good used bookstore; and more sunshine than I've seen in New England for ages. How beautiful is Santa Fe? Well, see for yourselves; I took pictures.

I ended up spending a lot of the trip thinking about the convergence of opera and the movies. I'd been looking forward to The Letter, the second opera I saw, for more than a year — ever since last spring's blogger meetup and Met HD broadcast expedition with Terry Teachout, who wrote the libretto and who's been blogging the whole process of writing the opera with composer Paul Moravec. The Letter was originally a short story by Somerset Maugham, which he then adapted into a play, which was made into a movie starring Bette Davis. The visual vocabulary of this production was explicitly and deliberately cinematic and film-noirish. (Some of the musical vocabulary sounded cinematic, too; once or twice I thought of the score of Vertigo.) At one point, Patricia Racette puts on a broad-brimmed hat and a white trench coat straight out of the ending of Casablanca. And, like the movie, the opera starts with six gunshots and a dead guy on the veranda.

It was both intriguing and at times quite startling to see film conventions and operatic conventions collide. Especially because film conventions tend to be so visual and camera-oriented — the close-up, the blackout, the flashback, and so on — and operatic conventions are so closely associated with the stage; even the chorus is a holdover from ancient Greek drama (as interpreted by sixteenth-century Florentines). The overall effect is to defamiliarize both sets of conventions. There are surging strings in the scene between the adulterous lovers, but there are soaring voices as well. There are flashbacks and cinematic lighting, but there's also a stage set that's constantly being shifted before our eyes. And Patricia Racette's character in The Letter is very much in the film noir femme fatale mold, until she starts singing arias — and suddenly she takes on the kind of inner life you get from intensely operatic music, but not so much in actual film noir, where the femme fatale character is usually a) tough as nails and b) something of a cipher. But the worlds of opera and film noir seemed quite close to each other by the end of the evening.

The interesting thing was that I had some of the same thoughts about La Traviata on my first night in Santa Fe, in large part because the director emphasized Violetta's distance from polite society by playing up the "wild party" aspects of Act 1 and Act 3. Noticing that the costumes were vaguely late 19th-century except that all the women's dresses were slit up the front to allow for can-can style leg-flashing, I thought "Hey, they're borrowing from Moulin Rouge!" And then I thought "Well, that's appropriate, since Moulin Rouge borrowed most of the plot of La Traviata." Later on I recalled that Baz Luhrmann is also a theater director who's done a fair amount of opera. All of which made the chorus's little performance-within-a-performance at the beginning of Act 3 ("E Piquillo un bel gagliardo") seem even more metatheatrical.

I'm not surprised that opera and film might converge, especially in the age of opera on DVD and movie broadcasts like the Met's, which have the added benefit of highlighting the acting chops of singers who can act for the camera. I'm sure there are purists on both sides who won't like that idea, but as for me? I'm a fan of both film and opera, and I have a thing for hybridity, not to mention that eminently 21st-century genre, the mashup.** And I say, long may it last; I can't wait to see what's next to emerge from the collision.

* I love Patricia Racette, who got to act up a storm in this production. I love Natalie Dessay even more. Some of the reviewers have been saying her voice isn't big enough for Violetta; I can see that, but in the end, if it's not already obvious from this post, it's the theatricality of opera that draws me as much as the music does. And I don't think I'll ever forget the way she laid Violetta's soul completely bare for us, bit by bit, at the end of Act 1, or the devastatingly quiet remoteness of her "Addio del passato." (I had to take advantage of the prolonged applause afterward to blow my nose honkingly a few times.)

** One of the books I was reading on the plane was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 'Nuff said.

Sound maps

Via Matthew Battles' Twitter feed comes Cinco Cidades, a "cross-disciplinary project documenting the cultures and sounds of five cities across Portugal." Each of the five cities has its own map showing where the various sound files—children playing, street noise, birdsong, local musicians, conversation, bells, subways, construction, residents talking to interviewers—were recorded. What makes the site so fascinating is that it lets you blend the sound files into mixes. Here's one I made just now, which includes the sounds of trains arriving at a station, church bells, a cafe owner talking about coffee, a guitarist playing fado, and (my favorite) ambient radiator-dripping noise from inside a cultural center where music drifts down the halls.

As I was playing with sound files, I immediately started thinking about how one might adapt the same concept, perhaps based on Open Street Map data, with lots of volunteers armed with digital voice recorders. I'm trying to imagine what a sound map of New London would sound like (ferries leaving their dock on the river? local bands? seagulls? Amtrak trains?), or a sound map of Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or New York, or Chicago (to speak only of cities I know reasonably well). I think half the fun of a project like this would be in learning to hear the sounds that you take for granted when you hear them every day but that, all together, make a place sound like itself and no other.

Knitted things for opera people

While searching for interesting sock patterns (I'm almost finished a pair of socks as a present for my grandmother, and I'm on a roll), I came across the Tsock Tsarina, who makes kits for clever themed socks: mythological socks, Egyptian socks, and even a fantastically geeky "Nine Tailors" sock that incorporates a colorwork panel to represent Kent Treble Bob Major. (As a fan of both mathematical knitting and Dorothy Sayers, I'm in awe. And I think I must essay these socks at some point.) But what especially got my attention was the Turandot sock, alluding to the Puccini opera and incorporating a Chinese dragon, double happiness ideograms, and three cabled question marks to represent Turandot's three riddles. And it got me thinking: what else could one design by way of operatic knitting?

There are, of course, plenty of elegant things one could make to wear to the opera. Ravelry lists quite a few patterns for operagoing attire, primarily shawls, shrugs, elbow-length gloves, of which this pattern is perhaps my favorite, and evening bags. But what about motifs that refer to particular operas? Few things are as tacky as an over-decorated sweater, so one would have to be careful not to go overboard with the design. And some operas might not lend themselves to such a project: I'd just as soon not knit a Lucia di Lammermoor garment, in a tartan pattern interrupted by splotches of blood-red and a knife motif. (Ditto for Verdi's Macbeth.)

But there are subtler approaches. I love the tree motif on these "Deep in the Forest" mittens; with a little tweaking, one could turn it a Norma-esque pattern of Druid oaks. Pyramids and lotus columns for Aida would be fairly easy, if a bit over-obvious. And I was thinking that it wouldn't be impossible to design a cable that looks like a lyre for Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, but someone has already created a Eurydice sock much along the lines I was imagining.

And then there are knitted things modeled on what characters in operas actually wear. One could make a whole suite of La Bohème winter knitwear (heavy scarves, shawls, muffs, bonnets), for example. Or Susanna's headdress from Act 1 of Le Nozze di Figaro ("Sembra fatto in ver per me!"), although what the libretto calls a little hat was more likely a garland of orange flowers.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on La Traviata and finish a sweater.

Il tarocco dell'opera

At various points, I've had friends who did Tarot readings, and who could occasionally be prevailed upon to read my cards. I've always found the Tarot iconography interesting to think about, even though I'm a terribly amateurish reader myself. Last year I was amused to come across both a Knitting Tarot deck and an Edward Gorey Tarot. All of which is by way of introduction to the topic of this post, namely: for quite a while I've been wondering if anyone has ever assembled an opera-themed Tarot deck, with cards representing characters and scenes from the entire operatic repertoire. This deck is the closest thing I've found to what I'm thinking of, but it's not all opera-related.

A few of the cards suggest obvious possibilities: Parsifal for the Fool, Sarastro for the Magician, Norma for the High Priestess, various versions of Mephistopheles for the Devil (though, personally, I'd choose Nick Shadow from The Rake's Progress). One could take one's pick of couples for both the Lovers and the Two of Cupss. The Chariot makes me think of Aida because of the Egyptianness of the imagery in the Rider-Waite deck. And so on. (I confess myself stumped by the Hanged Man.)

Just now, Googling "opera tarot," I found this discussion thread at the Aeclectic Tarot forum, and saw that other people have had the same thought, with all sorts of clever ideas for cards I hadn't even thought of. (The Nine of Swords as Lucia's mad scene? The Brindisi from Act 1 of La Traviata for the Three of Cups? Excellent.) But I don't think anyone's actually produced such a deck, all the same.

Anyway, this is one of the things I ponder when I'm in a speculating state of mind. Fellow operaphiles, care to weigh in?

Department of unexpected operatic adaptations

There are some types of source material — Shakespeare plays, classical myths, lives of particularly colorful or notorious monarchs, and so on — that lend themselves readily to being adapted into operas. There are others that seem unlikely but turn out quite well; if Stravinsky could write an opera based on Hogarth engravings, nearly anything is possible. But occasionally, the mind does boggle. I confess to a certain degree of startlement when I read the news that there's going to be an operatic version of "Brokeback Mountain", based (according to an interview with Charles Wuorinen, the composer) on the original short story by Annie Proulx rather than on Ang Lee's movie adaptation. I couldn't quite imagine what kind of musical idiom would work for the story: what happens when cowboy music meets opera?

On reflection, though, I think I'd probably enjoy it more as an opera than as either a story or a movie. The movie, in particular, struck me as very well-made but emotionally remote, as though the massive weight of repression lying over the characters extended to the audience and squelched whatever catharsis the end might have brought; turning it into an opera might reverse that effect. And, as Wuorinen points out, doomed love and the conflict between desire and duty are pretty much staples of every opera plot ever.

But what really boggled my mind was reading that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is going to become an opera at La Scala. I mean, how would that even work as an opera? One scratches one's head and wonders in vain. I'll be very curious to read the reviews for that one.