Aaron Copland, The Tender Land (1954)

Wait, Aaron Copland wrote operas? Since when? Why was I not aware of this?  Maybe because I haven't paid attention at all.  Hard to say.  Well, in fairness, he only wrote two of them, and they don't exactly occupy a central place in his ouevre, but still. I guess I'm a pretty casual Copland fan; I've always enjoyed Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid, very evocative, but I can't claim to be super-familiar with his work.

Still, there's this. It's not very widely performed, but you can find a reasonable production by the Lyric Opera of Melbourne in two parts here (with a significant caveat that I will get to later). I don't know anything about them, but I'm favorably inclined because their youtube page includes this, a pro-marriage-equality jazz number from when that was an issue in Australia.

So what's the story here? Well, it takes place in the Midwest, apparently during the depression, though it's not exactly explicit. There are two sisters, Beth and Laurie Moss, who live with their mother and grandfather. Beth is generally more conventional, whereas Laurie is more the there-must-be-more-than-this-provincial-life type. Laurie's going to graduate from high school the next day, so they're having a party, even though there are stories of a couple of strange men in the area causing trouble. As it happens, two itinerant dudes, Top and Martin show up looking for work, and in spite of his initial skepticism, Grandpa Moss agrees to hire them. At the party, Laurie and Martin make eyes at each other and decide that they're in love. But Grandpa, naturally, is PISSED OFF when he see this, especially since, omg, Top and Martin are obviously the guys who've been causing trouble. Then it turns out they're not, those guys were arrested, but STILL, he orders them to leave in the morning. Laurie and Martin agree to elope, but then Top convinces him that that's a bad idea and they should just leave. So they do, and Laurie is sad, but she's going to leave to, I dunno, seek her fortune, I guess, because that's just the kind of person she is. End.

The thing I have no note is that the dumb ol' Melbourne Opera screwed up: the second part isn't complete. It shuts off in the middle of a duet, probably fifteen or twenty minutes before the end. And they have comments disabled, so I can't even yell at them about it! I found another production of the final scene here,but that still means I missed the end of the scene where they plan to elope and the whole of the one where Martin is convinced not to. Bah!

Still, I've seen almost the whole thing; I think I get the picture. It counts. So...well, it's an opera scored to unmistakably Coplandian music. As you'd expect, with some country/folk elements, especially in the dance scene, though not as much as you might expect. But hell, it's fine; I like the music, so I liked that. But I have to say, it's pretty limp in the story department. We don't really get a good idea of who Laurie is or why she wants what she wants (or even what she wants, in any concrete way), and Top and Martin just come across as buffoons. I'm not sure if the romance is supposedto be as totally unconvincing as it is (I mean, it could be), but either way, I don't feel it really adds much. Although, to be fair, I can see how these problems might be papered over with a better production; not that this is bad, but it's pretty amateur-feeling, and while I think amateurs are great, they don't necessarily do the piece any favors. Oh well!

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Die tote Stadt (1920)

Korngold was known as a child prodigy; he wrote this opera at the age of twenty-three. Like Franz Schreker, his life was disrupted by the nazis, but he was more fortunate than Schreker: he moved to the US in 1934 and reinvented himself as a composer of scores for Hollywood films, for which he won several Academy Awards. Good for him.

It's based on a symbolist novel called Bruges-la-Morte. It concerns Paul, who's just some guy except that his young wife Marie recently died, and he's set up a sort of shrine to her in his house, in spite of his friend pointing out that this might not be healthy. He gets another woman, Marietta, to dress up as Marie for him (shades of Vertigo?). He's sort of torn between his attachment to Marie and being in love/lust with this new woman, and to what extent are these two attachments different? He starts to go somewhat crazy. He imagines himself bringing Marietta back to his house and arguing with her because she wants to get rid of all the signs of his dead wife, until finally, he kills her. When he realizes how deranged this vision is, he resolves to try to move on with his life. The end.

I have to note that in the Operavision performance I saw--no longer online--it is not even a tiny bit clear that the bit with Marietta and her murder is supposed to only be in his head. The traditional-style staging is for the most part good, but boy. I think the problem is that in the last scene it leaves her corpse onstage. If they'd gotten rid of it, it would've been easier to realize that this was all a hallucination. "So what did you thinkwas actually happening?" Excellent question, for which I don't have an answer. I suppose I just thought it was kind of weird and inscrutable. Still, once you realize what's going on, it's certainly more psychologically subtle than most operas.

As for the music...well, it's easy to see why Korngold was able to find success in Hollywood. It's very lush, melodic stuff, that can be meltingly lovely and/or really tense and dramatic with none of the atonal quality of a Berg that you might expect. Here, listento Renée Fleming singing one of Marietta's arias. Kind of stunning. Korngold only wrote five operas; wikipedia says he was working on a new one at the time of his early-ish death in 1957. Am I an elitist for thinking that operas are just kind of...better than film scores, and wishing he'd written more of the former. Ah well. My horizons are expanded, at any rate.

Franz Schreker, Der ferne Klang (1912)

Schreker is largely unknown today, but he was huge in his time. According to wikipedia, at his peak he was the second-most-performed living opera composer in the Weimar Republic, after Richard Strauss. Unfortunately, the rise of naziism was the end of all that; he wasn't directly murdered, but the rise of anti-Semitism and the increased supression of his work undoubtedly led to the stroke that killed him in 1934 at the age of 56. I feel like we don't spend enough time remembering what total worthless shitheads nazis were and are.

Well...be that as it may, let's go back to his breakthrough work. Appreciate the good times. The title means "A distant sound," but I think it's better to translate Klang as "clang," on the basis that it's much funnier-sounding. A distant CLANG! That's really the only comical thing here, though. Fritz and Greta are in love, but he's a composer, and before he marries her he wants to go off to find this mysterious distant CLANG that he senses. Unfortunately, her mother is abusive and her father is abusive and alcoholic, so she runs off and allows herself to be taken to a brothel by a procuress. Skip ahead some years and she's a star courtesan with whom everyone's in love. She's going to marry whoever can sing the most moving song, which several of them do, but then Fritz (not having found the CLANG he was looking for) appears and she agrees to marry him, but he rejects her when he realizes she's a prostitute. More time passes. Fritz's opera is a failure because he just can't find that elusive sound. He and Greta meet again and this time they're really going to marry and he finally hears the sound but dies before he can write it down. Finis.

This stuff with love and music may remind one of Tannhäuser; the music and general aesthetic of the piece will definitely remind one of Lulu(though this is somewhat less grim--a lot of the secondary characters are more sympathetic than expected). I don't think it's ever going to be my all-time favorite sort of music, but I nonetheless like this a lot--more of that good ol' German expressionism. The second act in the brothel is especially effective. Schreker wrote his own libretti; it seems that he had a very distinct artistic vision, and I'd love to see more of his work. This production from the Royal Swedish Opera is I believe the only video recording of any of Schreker's operas. That's a shame, and I hope it's rectified in the future, but at any rate, it's a very good one, one of the best I've seen from Operavision. A handsome traditional production that anyone should like, and Agneta Eichenholz is an excellent Greta,which is a larger role than Fritz--Daniel Johansson is basically fine in that role, even if he doesn't quite have the same stage presence. I am again grateful to Operavision for providing.

George Frideric Handel, Orlando (1733)

I feel like I lose all perspective when it comes to Handel operas. I subjectively feel that I like some more than others, but that may be more a function of my mood and other external factors when I'm watching them than on the operas themselves. Which one is best? Well, at this exact moment, I feel it may be this one, which fucking owns bones. But I may feel differently after seeing the next one!

More interesting to talk about is the story. As much as it's true that almost every opera is based on Orlando Furioso, it's also true that Handal actually only wrote three such (this along with Alcinaand Ariodante; this was the first, but they were all written in a three-year period--was Ariosto-mania sweeping the nation at the time?). And this one is by far the least faithful to the original text. Okay, you think, it's probably gonna be an Orlando/Angelica/Medoro thing, and indeed it is--but of the five singing roles, the other two are made up out of whole cloth: you have Zoroastro, a sorcerer looking after things and fixing problems (they could've just used Malagigi, an actual good sorcerer in Ariosto); and Dorinda, a shepherdess with whom Medoro was involved before Angelica, and in whom he's still ambiguously interested--there's some mention of shepherds in the part of the poem where Medoro and Angelica get together, but no named characters, and nothing like this. Also--this is a small thing and I have no idea why it's here or what to make of it--we are told that Angelica and Medoro are cousins. Why?

Regardless: love it. Love it love it love it. We've got this production here, which is a bit weird, as productions of baroque operas tend to be, but pretty good. It take place in a somewhat abstract modernday setting. Zoroastro is a scientist in a lab coat, drawing diagrams about Orlando's mental state on a chalkboard (including both "Orlando Furioso" and "Orlando Innamorato," a fun callback to the poem of which Ariosto's is a continuation). I was at first slightly disappointed that there were no countertenors--Konstantin Wolff as Zoroastro, in the opera's baritone role, is the only male singer--but I got used to it quite fast (and it shows how much tastes change--can you imagine a post-baroque opera with no tenors?  Is there such a thing?  I mean, okay Puccini's Suor Angelica, but one that has male singers at all?). I especially liked Christina Clark as Dorinda. She's African American, which is great; there need to be more black singers, but unfortunately, there's next to no information about her available online. The one thing in this production I wasn't a big fan of was the decision to make Medoro kind of handsy with her--making him seem like more of a creep than the libretto necessarily mandated. C'mon.

Still and all, GREAT. I think Handel's pretty definitively my favorite composer at this point. GIVE ME MORE.

Kevin Floyd

I first met Kevin when I took his gender theory class as a graduate student (what we call "queer theory" when we want to sound like radicals). I had previously been extremely phobic about critical theory as a general concept, but I'd taken a class in semiotics the semester before and I was kinda warming to it. It was a transformative class: one of those things that really, really influences how you perceive the world. I was honestly a little intimidated by the intensity of his intellect and, let's face it, by his being way more handsome than any English professor has any business being; nonetheless, later when I need a director for my dissertation, he was the obvious choice. We had some very heavy theoretical discussions, and O how he put me through the wringer with regard to my writing, which he perceived--obviously correctly--was not as clear or focused or scholarly as it needed to be. There were times when I really seriously thought I wasn't going to have what it took to do it. But somehow I did, and even if I didn't follow the sort of academic trajectory that he had, I was still lastingly grateful. Mine was the first doctoral dissertation he ever directed, as it happened, but he did not miss a beat.

I wish I'd had more of a relationship with him, honestly, but there was something about him and about my general social awkwardness such that that never happened (okay, we might as well be brutally honest, it was obviously in large part because I felt self-conscious that I had failed as an academic, and I didn't want to feel like I was secretly being judged which again I do because I'm kind of ludicrous). The only subsequent contact I had with him was requesting letters of recommendation (with which he was always extremely conscientious). Well, so it goes.

Anyway, I suppose it's probably pretty obvious where this is going, at least in outline: a year ago or a little less I learned from another of his students that he'd been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor (I did send him a note of general appreciation when I learned the news; no idea if he read it), and today I learned that he'd died on Thursday. He must've been in his fifties; I don't know exactly.  I know the above photo isn't great, but he was extremely not-online, and it's the only one I could find.  Talking about "fairness" when it comes to things like this isn't very helpful or meaningful, but I can only record my subjective reaction, which is that BOY is this ever unfair. Sure it's universal, but the idea that this stupid, random brain malfunction could silence such a strong voice...goddammit. Don't really have much to say here; just felt that I shouldn't let this go by unremarked. Rest in power.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Golden Cockerel (1909)

This was Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera. Appropriately, I guess, it's based on a Pushkin poem. It's another fairy/folktale kind of thing--the most mysterious I've seen yet.

So we start with a magician or astrologer who tells us that even though the story is remote, it has an important moral for us to learn. Then, we go to the court of this Tsar (the fact that he's a tsar makes you assume Russia, but a lot of the music has a vaguely "Arabic" sounding theme). He's not happy because he worries the tsardom will be attacked, and his bumbling idiot sons are no help. Fortunately(?), the magician gives the tsar a golden cockerel which will tell whether the land is safe or not (the cockerel is an actual singing role for a soprano). In return, the tsar promises him his heart's desire, to be named later.

So the cockerel convinces them that there will be war, so they decide to preëmptively attack their neighbor. The idiot sons manage to get themselves killed, but the tsar falls in love with the beautiful tsaritsa of the enemy kingdom. There's a lot of abstruse singing. The two decide to get married. There's a very spectacular ceremony back at the court, but then the magician appears and says that he wants the tsaritsa, and will not be convinced otherwise. The tsar tries to kill him, but is himself killed in an unclear way (the wikipedia description says the cockerel does it, but that wasn't clear in the production I saw). The entire court disappears and the magician reveals the shocking (?) truth (?): that the whole thing was an illusion, and only he and the tsaritsa were real people.

Well, if you can pick the moral out of this, you're welcome to it. The music's frequently glorious, though (especially the wedding celebration holy shit), so what else do you need? Well, maybe you would like characters with more of an internal existence, but it's a fairy tale, so it's all good. It wasn't performed 'til after Rimsky-Korsakov's death because the censors didn't like it: supposedly, the stuff with the ill-advised military action was a satire of Russian policies of the time, or at least that's how they saw it. Of course, it was based on a poem from years before, which doesn't preclude that per se, but I dunno.

I have never seen a Mariinsky Theatre production that failed to deliver on the spectacle, and this one continues the tradition. It's also the only one I've seen that includes weird, contemporary touches, however, so some may kvetch based on that. The biggest one here is the cockerel itself: here, she's a modern-day tourist with a chicken-shaped backpack, first seen taking selfies in front of ancient ruins. This works fine, and the body of the thing itself is basically in fairie tale mode, although there is a certain amount of action that's just confusing. Well, it's fine, as are the singers. My favorite is Andrei Popov as the magician; it's possible that he doesn't quitehave the voice for the role, but he makes up for it with stage presence: all very deliberate movements in a very dapper suit. It was wondering why his name sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized it was because he likewise stood out as the holy fool in Boris Godunov. Nice. I'm glad he's gotten to perform at the Met.

Ivan Zajc, Nikola Šubić Zrinski (1876)

Never thought I'd see another Croatian opera, but with Operavision, all things are possible. This is my religious credo. According to wikipedia, Zajc "is often called the Croatian Verdi." Is he, wikipedia? Is he REALLY? Is he "often" called anything, at least outside of his home country? Hmm. Well. Be that as it may, he wrote a bunch of operas, of which this seems to be considered the best.

So here's what happened in 1566: Ottoman forces led by Suleiman the Magnificent wanted to invade Vienna, but first they had to get through a fortress in Hungary called Szigeth. And to do that, they had to get past a force of Croatians commanded by Zrinski (it's not quite clear to me why you had Croatians fighting in Hungary, but apparently these events are celebrated in both countries). They were badly outnumbered, but they managed to hold off the Ottomans for over a month; Suleiman himself died, albeit of natural causes (well, presumably stress-induced also, but still, a bit anti-climactic); the Ottomans won the final battle and Zrinski was killed, but it was a Phyrric victory, and they turned back without reaching Vienna.

It's certainly an irresistable subject for a patriotic opera. This is kind of what you'd expect: a lot of boilerplate about the unstoppable Croatian spirit, which doesn't exactly speak to me in itself; nonetheless, there are some very rousing choruses here that make me want to shout CROATIA FUCK YEAH! I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Ero the Joker,the other Croatian opera I've seen. The singing was maybe not quite world-class, but it seemed better to me (although in both of them, the really obvious microphones the singers are wearing distract). This actually features two singers in common with that one: Stjepan Franetović, who played the title role in Ero, as Suleiman's second-in-command; and Ljubomir Pušarić (whom I singled out for lukewarm praise in Ero) as the title role here. They both seem better to me, somehow. Maybe it's just a better opera. It is kind of notable that the singer playing Zrinski's wife is extremely blatantly younger than the one playing his daughter, but what the hey!

One weird, notable thing is that, per wikipedia, the rousing climactic chorus--which apparently remains popular in Croatia--is also a fixture of Japanese glee clubs.  You can read all about it in an article entitled "Jedan odlomak iz povijesti suradnje Japana i Hrvatske: Hrvatska pjesma "U boj" i japanski muški zbor," or "An Episode from the History of Cooperation Between Japan and Croatia: Croatian Song "U Boj" and Japanese Male Choirs."  How many episodes are there, do you think?

The Croatian Verdi? Well, I don't know about that. I was more reminded of Rimsky-Korsakov, especially in the lengthy dance sequence that opens the second act. But that is NO. BAD. THING. I'd be happy to see more of his work should the chance arise. This is what Operavision is good for. The standard-repertoire stuff they put on is all well and good, but it's, you know...standard. You can see it anywhere. Things like this are why I like them.