https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd1IxHkkKcTqmxQPaP2AWrY2l4EnULB0D&fbclid=IwAR3_uqb2bbmeXLLvihKz5CO_Y4qWgaEiGy84slz3JspAgeJOLBthobk1xoQ
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Winterreise
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd1IxHkkKcTqmxQPaP2AWrY2l4EnULB0D&fbclid=IwAR3_uqb2bbmeXLLvihKz5CO_Y4qWgaEiGy84slz3JspAgeJOLBthobk1xoQ
Saturday, May 16, 2020
SFO Fateful & Fragile Love: Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi
https://sfopera.com/globalassets/streaming-pages/capulet/capuleti_synopsis.pdf
When Vincenzo Bellini arrived in Venice in mid-December 1829 to oversee La Fenice’s production of his 1827 Milan hit Il Pirata, he may still have been smarting from the recent drubbing administered to Zaira, his rather hastily-conceived opera that had been the young composer’s first out-and-out flop. An anonymous handbill had shown up on the streets of Parma immediately following Zaira’s premiere at the new Teatro Ducale: “anyone who finds the musical inspiration of signor Bellini is besought to take it to the box office of signor Bandini, the impresario, and he will be treated courteously.” That must have hurt.
Boom-and-bust being ever the nature of the theatrical beast, Bellini appears to have taken his punishment in stride. There was no particular reason for him to fret; his rise so far had been meteoric and despite youth and inexperience he was in steady demand throughout Italy. His reputation was blossoming. His fees were escalating. His was a charmed life. as of 1829 there could have been no hint that it was also destined to be tragically short.
Born in Catania, Sicily in 1801 to a poor, sprawling, yet tightly knit family, Bellini was raised and educated in music by his grandfather, a local church musician who gave him perhaps more practical experience than solid technique. When Vincenzo came of age in 1819 he was packed off to Naples, where he entered the real Collegio di Musica, a state-run academy. master teacher Nicolò Zingarelli had such confidence in Bellini’s rapidly evolving gifts that he determined that Vincenzo’s graduation opera would be performed in public by Conservatorio students. the resulting Adelson e Salvini—a soapy trifle set in an Irish castle—turned out to be the sleeper hit of 1825 and became a Sunday afternoon staple for the rest of the year. Adelson’s surprise success led to Bellini’s receiving a commission from Naples’ imposing Teatro San Carlo for a full-length opera. Bianca e Fernando was premiered in May 1826. When Bianca followed in Adelson’s footsteps by becoming a hit, Vincenzo Bellini had indubitably arrived, not only as a professional composer but also—thanks in part to his golden-boy good looks—a sought-after presence in posh Neapolitan salons.
Bellini skipped nimbly past the usual gauntlet of provincial theaters, threadbare productions, and semi-starvation that was the usual lot of the neophyte Italian opera composer. instead, he bounded straight to the top. The agent of his rocket-propelled rise was the roughshod, shady, yet solidly reliable impresario Domenico Barbaia who, together with several equally dicey confederates, managed both the San Carlo and Milan’s La Scala. even if the semi-literate Barbaia’s overriding motivation was money— he ran the lobby casinos that subsidized Italian opera productions off and on until about 1820—his taste was impeccable and his nose for talent was keen. the exact details are lacking, but it’s clear enough that Barbaia snapped up the sparkling young Sicilian with a contract for a show scheduled for October 1827 at La Scala. By April Bellini was in Milan, working industriously on his new project while networking and cultivating contacts. the most significant of those was Felice Romani (1788–1865), a Genoese poet and librettist whose portfolio included collaborations with every leading operatic light of the day, including Rossini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Pacini, Mercadante, and Vaccai. Between 1827 and 1833, when their partnership ended in quarrels, Romani and Bellini would collaborate on La Straniera, Zaira, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La Sonnambula, Norma, and Beatrice di Tenda.
And Bellini’s La Scala debut, Il Pirata, which was a resounding success, surely aided by the mega-wattage of vocal effulgence on stage: Henriette Méric-Lalande, Giovanni Battista Rubini, and Antonio Tamburini. Il Pirata was more than a showcase for superstar singers, however. it marked the definite arrival of Bellini’s unique compositional voice, in particular the liquid and fragrantly ornamented bel canto line—a style of singing stressing ease, purity, and evenness of tone production and an agile and precise vocal technique that was to influence so many romantic composers, including Frédéric Chopin. Bellini was fully aware of the magnitude of his accomplishment. In a letter to his uncle he exulted: “my parents and relations can rejoice together; your nephew has had the good fortune to produce such a success with his opera that he does not know how to put it into words.”
In the afterglow of Il Pirata’s starburst, Bellini went back to La Scala for another go at bottling lightning: La Straniera, a barely coherent but attractively creepy gothic tale that inspired Bellini to fashion a brilliantly radical score. Despite its emphasis on austere declamation over lyric numbers, La Straniera delighted Milanese audiences. Then came May 16, the Teatro Ducale in Parma, and Zaira. Romani dawdled at fashioning a workable libretto from Voltaire’s tragedy. Bellini seemed emotionally disconnected from the project, even distracted. the audience included a grumpy contingent with a bone to pick over the chosen libretto. Zaira died, but at least it bequeathed its best parts to posterity. Bellini would mine it extensively for his next opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the happy byproduct of his December 1829 trip to Venice to oversee the production of Il Pirata.
The management of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice had good reason to suspect that the ailing composer Giovanni Pacini would be unable to deliver his setting of Romani’s proposed Giulietta Capellio for the 1829 Carnival season, so they secured a proactive, just-in-case contract with Bellini. that was a smart move. Pacini never showed up and the opera—now a six-week rush job— landed in Bellini’s lap. there was no time for Romani to write a new libretto, so he dusted off his 1825 Giulietta e Romeo for Nicola Vaccai. The equally pressed Bellini ransacked his earlier operas for appropriate material, not only the hapless Zaira but reaching as far back as Adelson e Salvini. It was an exhausting sprint for both of them, exacerbated no doubt by dreadful winter weather that contributed to Bellini’s nasty attack of “sudden bilious gastric inflammatory fever”—an ominous precursor of the dysentery that would kill him five years later.
The enervating trial of its composition notwithstanding, I Capuleti e i Montecchi erased any lingering memory of Zaira’s failure with a triumphant premiere on March 11, capped three days later by the Venetians treating Bellini to a torch-lit parade complete with military band banging out hit tunes from the show. But not all were amused. Hector Berlioz was passing through Florence when I Capuleti was playing at the Pergola theater. He entered the Pergola practically salivating at the prospect of an evening spent in communion with his beloved Shakespeare. He left the Pergola spitting tacks. “Bitter disappointment! no ball at the Capulets’, no Mercutio … no Shakespeare, nothing—a wasted opportunity,” he fulminated in his Memoires, eviscerating “this wretched libretto carved out of Shakespeare’s great play.”
Berlioz was unaware that Romani’s libretto had little if anything to do with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—a common misconception even today. The most likely source was the 1818 play Giulietta e Romeo by Luigi Scevola, with perhaps some extra material from Nicolò Zingarelli’s 1796 opera, neither directly derived from Shakespeare. Thus I Capuleti e i Montecchi offers its own take on the Romeo and Juliet story, one without those familiar accoutrements such as Mercutio, the balcony scene, or the nurse.
Berlioz had another nit to pick. the female Romeo stuck in his craw. “to write Romeo’s part for a woman—as though there were some law that Juliet’s lover must always appear shorn of his manhood … Moses or Othello discharged in a piping treble would hardly be more incongruous than a female Romeo.” Incongruous, yes; uncommon, no. As of 1830 the trouser role was on its last legs, so to speak. It appears to have originated when women substituted for castrati—singers castrated in boyhood to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their voices—in Baroque operas. that led to the practice of writing male roles explicitly for women, keeping with a general preference for high-voiced heroes, just the opposite of cultural norms today. Romeo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, written specifically for reigning diva Giuditta Grisi, was to be the last major trouser role in Italian opera. It wasn’t just dead tradition that was driving Bellini; the musical advantages are aptly demonstrated by the ravishing first-act duet (I Capuleti’s equivalent of the balcony scene) in which the complementary ranges of the two singers allow for a close intertwining of vocal lines that could not be achieved with a male Romeo. a related practice of casting females as boys or youths (Cherubino in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro) was to persist; even Berlioz, high dudgeon notwithstanding, got into the trouser-role business with the young apprentice Ascanio in his 1838 Benvenuto Cellini.
As Bellini decompressed from his Capuleti-induced euphoria, he could not have known that he had just crossed an invisible boundary—the one separating his (brief) early period from his (also brief) artistic maturity. I Capuleti e i Montecchi serves as both anthology and capstone of Bellini’s pre-1830 career. Now he was to produce a trio of masterpieces that stand at the very summit of Italian opera. His maturity commenced with a stumble, however, as he and Romani started work on an ill-advised adaptation of Victor Hugo’s controversial play Hernani—which soon proved to be too hot a potato for the Italian censors to handle. Thus chastened, Bellini and Romani turned instead to La Sonnambula, a sweet pastoral drama that won itself a permanent place in the repertory.
On July 23, 1831 Bellini wrote to his friend Alessandro Lamperi: “I have already chosen the subject for my new opera, and it is a tragedy entitled Norma, ossia L’Infanticidio, by Alexandre Soumet.” the tragic story of the druid priestess who goes nobly to the stake for love inspired Bellini to create his juiciest female role and his best-known opera. that said, Norma’s first performance in December 1831 was something of a disaster, but from the second performance onwards Norma was a hit and quickly made its way throughout Europe. it was followed by 1833’s Beatrice di Tenda, a notably less successful venture that ended the Bellini-Romani partnership in a sad fusillade of quarrels.
Paris beckoned. From August 1833, Bellini’s home was the City of Light. The comely young Bellini hobnobbed with Rossini and Chopin as he oversaw productions of Il Pirata and I Capuleti, butted heads with intransigent bureaucrats at the Paris Opéra, and saw his swan song I Puritani through to a wildly successful premiere at the Théâtre-Italien in early 1835. But time was running out. His long-standing intestinal disorder flared up; a liver abscess developed. He died, alone, in suburban Puteaux from amoebic dysentery on September 23, 1835, just five weeks shy of his thirty-fourth birthday. His casket now rests on a marble monument in the Duomo of Catania and bears this line from La Sonnambula: “Ah! I did not think to see you extinguished so soon, o flower.” Bellini’s output may be small, but as in all things, quality trumps quantity. His relatively early I Capuleti e i Montecchi achieves not only a potent blend of dramatic tension and lyrical charm, but also—like the early Shakespeare play upon which it is not based—conjures up a beguiling glimpse of the great things yet to come.
Scott Foglesong has been on the faculty of San Francisco Conservatory since 1978. A pianist and lecturer, he also serves as a contributing writer and “Inside Music” lecturer for San Francisco Symphony.
Note: This essay was published in a 2012 edition of San Francisco Opera Magazine.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
SFO 'Mephistopheles'Notes on 'Mephistopheles'
"Mefistofeleles is as old as the Bible and Aeschylus. Mefistofele is the serpent in the Garden of Eden; he is the vulture of Prometheus. Mefistofele is the doubt that generates learning, the evil that generates good. Wherever the spirit of negation is to be found, there is Mefistofele. Job has a Mefistofele called Satan; Homer has one called Thersites; Shakespeare has another called Falstaff. Goethe’s original inspiration lies in forming a single type from these three: one who is as hellish as Satan, as grotesque as Thersites, as epi-curean as Falstaff. Mefistofele is the embodiment of the eternal No addressed to the True, the Beautiful and the Good.”
These words from the printed preface to the first edition of Mefistofele tell us more about their author, Arrigo Boito, than about Goethe’s super-devil. Born in Padua in 1842, the son of a Polish countess and a ne’er-do-well miniaturist from the Veneto, Boito was something of an outsider on the Italian scene. His father decamped after two years of marriage, leaving Arrigo’s mother to bring up her two children. Of his family Boito knew only his mother’s relations, but he considered himself wholly Italian with a mission to enlarge his country’s intellectual and artistic horizons and into the vanguard of European culture.
The time was certainly ripe for such an ambition. Under the powers of the Holy Alliance, Italy’s art and literature had tended toward stagnation, and never more palpably than in the decade that fol-lowed the collapse of the 1848 uprising. Even opera, the one musi-cal sphere in which Italy had retained a certain hegemony, was languishing. The post-Rossinian tradition that sustained the inven-tion of Donizetti and Bellini had lost its vitality. Only Verdi remained capable of perpetual self-renewal. Beneath the surface, however, powerful forces were stirring; powers that would break out into the open the moment Italy attained freedom and independence.
The movement known as Scapigliatura (literally, “dishevelment”) took its name from a novel by Carlo Righetti, but its true founder and guide was the writer Giuseppe Rovani, an imposing figure who mentored a host of young artists and litterateurs on aesthetic and moral principles. Their aims were above all iconoclastic. They defied the accepted canons of art and religion and detested the cautious reformers. Thus, the liberal Catholicism of Alessandro Manzoni, the one surviving literary giant of the age, was anathema to them. “Now is the hour of the Antichrist,” the poet Emilio Praga proclaimed. “Christ has died again.”
Returning to Milan in 1863 after two years abroad, Boito threw himself heart and soul into the movement, becoming one of its leading propagandists both in music and literature. As a theatrical critic he attacked the entire apparatus of the established church: “Our generation... cries aloud that every day Catholicism crumbles, that fetishism is in ruins, that a restless search for truth… is rear-ing its head. It cries continually that God has putrefied, that man has made himself divine, that the Man–God no longer exists, that Genius alone is the Son of God... that the Holy Spirit is no longer amongst us, that there is no Easter, no Virgin, and no Resurrection...” and so on. His most characteristic product of those years was a bizarre poem, II Re Orso (King Bear) about a monarch haunted by a mysterious voice that bids him beware of the “worm’s bite”; and of course it is the worm who wins in the end, devouring the king’s dead body. The general layout, with its recur-rent motifs and wealth of verbal assonance, gives the sense of a symphonic poem in words, and not by chance.
For Boito, music remained the supreme art—"the queen of all the arts; more than a queen: a goddess." He preached the regeneration of the long-lost Italian instrumental tradition chiefly through the study of the great German classics, whose authors he discoursed upon in bursts of high-flown imagery, not always comprehensible. “Haydn proceeds from Bach like the flowering cytisus from the terrible rock.” In Schumann’s music it is not Schumann who sings, “it is a Sybil, a grace, a zvango [a word for which you will search in vain in an Italian dictionary], a god. Every time the critic’s pen encounters the name of Beethoven it should pause before it, like a pilgrim before a cross.” The comparison of a Mozart slow movement with one by Mendelssohn prompted him to a notorious blaze of rhetoric:
The Sublime is simpler than the beautiful. The Beautiful can become incarnate in every kind of form from the bizarre to the multiple and disparate: for the Sublime only one form will suffice: the grand form, the form that is divine, universal, eternal—the spherical form. The horizon is sublime, the sea is sublime, the sun is sublime. Shakespeare is spherical, Dante is spherical, Beethoven is spherical; the sun is simpler than a carnation, the sea simpler than the brook, Mendelssohn’s Adagio is spherical and simpler than Mozart’s Andante.”
For Boito, however, the ultimate goal always had to be opera. “Let us practice the symphony and the quartet,” he declared, “so as to be able to tackle the lyric drama.” Not the kind of opera to which Italians had long been accustomed. To the post-Rossinian tradition with its abundance of fixed patterns such as the aria, the duet, the pezzo concertato, he opposed a firm Mephistophelian “No!” These were mere formulae—a term that by its etymological derivation revealed its essentially trivializing nature. What was wanted was form in the grandest sense. But how was it to be achieved? Evidently not with the help of Wagnerian methods.
“Wagner,” Boito admitted, “destroyed the operatic formula, Wagner promised to enlarge the bounds of rhythm and melody, Wagner in his triple role as poet, composer, and aesthetic philosopher seemed to be the man born and predestined to accomplish the mission of renewal… It would be unkind of us not to recognize in his music a powerful instinct, a vigorous muscular frame, but his dramas are inept and ridiculous in the face of the task they were called upon to undertake.”
Clearly it was up to Boito himself to set an example for others to follow; in due course the opportunity presented itself. Among the themes that occupied Boito throughout his life was the polarity of good and evil, and nowhere did he see this problem more compre-hensively worked out than in the monumental poetic drama of Goethe. The notion of Faust as an operatic subject seems to have occurred to him during his conservatory days in the 1850s; by 1867 its realization seemed a possibility. The venue was to be Milan’s La Scala, where the musical director was Boito’s old teacher Alberto Mazzucato. He could also count on the support of Filippo Filippi, the leading critic of the time and himself a member of the Scapigliatura, and that of Giulio Ricordi, a close personal friend and the effective head of his ailing father’s publishing firm.
It was not Boito’s first venture into the operatic world. In 1865 he had already written a libretto for his friend Franco Faccio’s Amleto. But Mefistofele, as it would be called, was to be very different: a large-scale music drama exploring the German poet’s thought in all its ramifications without any concessions to current practice. Its only conventional feature was to be Mefistofele’s aria “Son lo spirito che nega,” cast in the form of French couplets in the manner of Meyerbeer (a composer, incidentally, much admired by Boito). Even this would contain its own condemna-tion: a refrain consisting of loud whistles, the traditional [Euro-pean] sign of audience disapproval. At the premiere, alas, this turned out to be more than a metaphor.
The first performance took place on March 5, 1868, and Boito himself unwisely assumed the direction. Not everything was disliked. There was some applause for the Prologue in Heaven and for the quartet in the garden scene, while the Classical Sabbath was heard in respectful silence. For the rest of the score, whistles and boos were the order of the day. In view of the opera’s immense length (the show ended at half-past one in the morning) it was decided to revive it in two parts, to be given on successive evenings. But in this form, the opera fared no better. The singers were hopelessly demoralized, and amid shouts of “Basta!” the cur-tain fell on March 8 on the original Mefistofele, never to rise again.
The critics were no less hostile. Some accused Boito fatuously of having imitated Wagner, whose name was then on everyone’s lips, though few had heard a note of his music. Typical of the general consensus was a notice that appeared in L’Emporia Pittoresco: “The music of Mefistofele could not please.... There is no passion, and the monotony of the recitative ends by boring. Boito should realize that he has given a far more convincing proof of his talent for literature, and his failure may turn out to be a blessing if it induces him to cultivate that field and no other.” Nor was the verdict of Boito’s friend Giulio Ricordi very different, though expressed in more diplomatic terms. “Boito has written an opera with many virtues and not a few defects. The question is: are these defects due to inexperience as regards the stage and matters theatrical? In that case, so much the better; we shall note a steady progress from one opera to the next, and in due course I shall hope to number Boito among the great composers. If, however, these faults are the result of a preconceived theory, of an unshakable artistic conviction, then I must say with all the frankness which informs my warm and deeply felt friendship for Boito: you may be a poet and a distinguished man of letters, but you will never be a composer for the musical stage.”
Unfortunately, we cannot judge the matter for ourselves since no holograph of the 1868 version of Mefistofele exists, nor was it ever published in vocal score. When he came to revise it seven years later, Boito tore out and destroyed the pages that he wished to replace. No trace remains of a dialogue between Faust and his disciple Wagner on the real and the ideal, an encounter with Lilith on the Brocken followed by a “black” Miserere, and an extended scene set in the throne room of an emperor to whom Mefistofele presents himself as a new jester. Two pieces were added: the duettino “Lontano, lontano, lontano,” lifted from Boito’s unfinished Era e Leandro and Margherita’s prison aria, “Spunta l’aurora pallida.” The effect of the revision was to reduce the opera to manageable proportions and a somewhat more traditional layout. The five acts became four; and Faust was transformed from a baritone into a tenor.
The premiere of the new Mefistofele took place on August 5th, 1875, at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna, which prided itself on its forward-looking policy (in 1871 it had witnessed the first Italian performance of a Wagner opera, namely Lohengrin). The result, if not an uncontested triumph, was enough of a success to permit a circulation among the major theaters of the peninsula. For a revival in Venice the following year, Boito made a further modification, after which the opera entered the international repertoire. Nowhere was it better received than in England, where it would feature in several Covent Garden seasons towards the end of the century. Reviewing the revival of 1889, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Boito’s version of the Faust story seems almost as popular as Gounod’s”—surely an overstatement, considering that the French work was given at Covent Gar-den every year from 1863 until 1911— ”though Gounod’s is a true musical creation whereas Boito has only adapted the existing resources of orchestration and harmony very ably to his libretto. The whole work is a curious example of what can be done in opera by an accomplished literary man without original musical gifts, but with ten times the taste and culture of a musician of only ordinary extraordinariness.”
A shrewd judgment, this, like so many of Shaw’s on Italian opera. It is true that Boito never developed a musical style that is instantly recognizable as his own. That of Mefistofele is distinctly eclectic. More than one critic noted the debt of Faust’s solo “Dai campi, dai prati” to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata; anyone familiar with the love duet in Franco Faccio’s I Profughi Fiamminghi would have found a clear precedent for Margherita’s “Cavalliero illustre a saggio”; and the main theme of the duet between Faust and Elena belongs to the family of Verdi’s “Dunque l’onta di tutti sol una” in Un Ballo in Maschera.
The years that followed the fiasco of 1868 had taught the com-poser some valuable lessons. He had descended from the clouds of Scapigliatura theorizing to become a practical man of the theater. He wrote several libretti for other composers to use, among them La Gioconda, Ponchielli’s most successful stage work and arguably the only Italian “grand opera” that can stand comparison with Verdi’s Aida. He even came to terms with Wagner, making translations of Rienzi, Das Liebesmahl der Apostolen, and eventually Tristan und Isolde. But his atti-tude to the Master of Bayreuth remained ambivalent. He was stirred by the music, but repelled by the dramaturgy. He compared Die Walküre to a stopping train that takes ages to reach its destination.
By 1870 the Scapigliatura had begun to disintegrate. Many of Boito’s former associates had espoused realism in art and the left wing in politics; he himself held proudly aloof from both. As a writer he inclined towards the subtly allusive metaphor, the pregnant phrase, drawing upon a vocabulary that ranged from medieval times to his own day but always supremely adaptable to musical thought. The chief fruits of his literary labors were gar-nered by the aged Verdi in Otello and, more especially, Falstaff. And indeed Boito was later to claim as his chief glory the fact that he had “made the bronze colossus resound twice.” Meanwhile, as a musician, he found himself increasingly isolated among his own countrymen. He had no sympathy with the “young school” headed by Puccini and Mascagni. He wrestled continually with his most ambitious project, a huge opera on the subject of Nero and his persecution of the Christians. Like Gustav Holst, he suffered bouts of nervous agraphia, during which he was unable to hold a pen. By the time Boito died in 1918, only four of the five acts had been set and not even they were fully scored; six years were to pass before Toscanini with the aid of the composer Vincenzo Tom-masini was able to perform a presentable version of the torso. In Boito, the intellectual had for a long time stifled the creator.
Mefistofele remains his sole musical monument. It is, as Shaw observed, essentially the work of a literary man. But, if not a mas-terpiece of musical organization, several of its ideas are striking and imaginative. There are no lapses of taste; there is never a note or an instrument too many. The chorus “Ave Signor degli angeli,” with its suggestion of perpetual ascent, is unique in opera; nor will you find a more perfect miniature than the duet “Lontano, lon-tano, lontano.” Nowhere is the attention allowed to wander. Lacking both forebears and descendants, Mefistofele is a work that we should be the poorer without.
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