Benjamin Britten, Billy Budd (1951)

Britten's most famous opera is also--unless there's something really obvious I'm forgetting, as is so often the case--the most famous opera with an all-male cast. I am trying and failing to find anything interesting to say about that fact, but I thought it was at least worth noting.

This is of course based on Melville's final, unfinished novel, which I am forced to admit I have not read. Well, actually, I could easily claim to have read it! It's my blog! I can do what I like! But, I haven't. And I think that really influenced my viewing of the opera. All I really knew about it was the very general premise--implacably evil officer plots to destroy preternaturally good sailor. I knew none of the details, and as such I found myself caught up in the plot in a way that I might not have been otherwise. Seriously, this shook me. I kept wanting to go, no! This can't be happening! Argh! And at the end, when the sympathetic yet ineffectual captain ponders to himself, I could have saved him, I thought, yeah! Ya coulda done! Or at the very least, make a hell of a lot more of an effort than you actually did! I mean, obviously, I know that all this is the point, and the whole mixture of human fallibility and ambiguous morality is a SUPER-Melvillean thing, but at any rate. Regardless. I got caught up in it. I had, as the kids say, All the Feels.

It's a powerful drama; what can I say. Claggart, the evil master-of-arms, is a great character. Nominally, he's motivated by envy of Billy, but it really comes across as just this implacable, motiveless, Iago-like malevolence. Certainly his villain aria, "O beauty, O handsomeness, goodness" is a highlight. And yet, Billy himself is also a more appealing character than you'd expect from someone whose main characteristic is "saintliness." His one defect is a stutter that manifests itself under stress, and you might wonder: how does that work in an opera? And the answer is: fine. It's not an issue. I mean, a few times he's not able to articulate lines, and that's about it. Nothing distracting or anything. And I DO like Britten's music, as I may have said and/or implied before.

There are actually like four or five different productions I could have watched, but I chose this Met made-for-TV movie, just because I wanted to see the great James Morris as Claggart--one of his signature roles, as I understand it. And, yup, he's terrifically sinister. As he dies (um, spoiler) this little half-smile flits across his face that's just chilling as anything. Dwayne Croft is very well-cast as Billy, guileless and likeable, and OH MY GOODNESS does he nail his wrenching pre-death aria ("look! through the port comes the moonshine astray").

What can I say? I'm a Britten fanboy; that's all I can say. I feel linguistic patriotism to have discovered such an indisputably great English-language composer (okay, so I already had the second half of Handel's career; you know what I mean).

Michel Tabachnik, Benjamin, dernière nuit (2016)

Who exactly is Michel Tabachnik? Well, he's a Swiss composer and conductor. From poking around on the internet I think that, although he's fairly prolific as a composer, this is his first opera, but I could not swear to that with absolute certainty. His wikipedia page says nothing about this or any other such that he might have written. That seems to indicate a...let's say lack of particularly intense general interest in him and his work, but who knows?

"Benjamin" is Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual best-known--at least to non-experts like me--for his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," who in 1940 tried to flee from Vichy France to Spain thence to cross over to Portugal and go to the US; when he was turned back, in despair he committed suicide by morphine overdose. You know, apropos of absolutely nothing, but I've noticed that people who turn away refugees are always judged extremely well by history; they're seen as great heroes who definitely did the right thing and are worthy of emulation. What's especially good is when they say things like "my ancestors came here The Right Way; why can't they?" These are just profoundly moral people whose worldviews are built on a deep reservoir of compassion.

Too much? Once you start with the bitter sarcasm, it can be kinda hard to know where to stop. In any event, it's not exactly a cheery subject for an opera, is it? Which puts it in good company, of course, but somehow the fact that it's a real event in living history makes it seem all the grimmer. Still, the artistry in good opera redeems the tragedy, doesn't it? We'll see to what extent that's the case here. As you can imagine, this isn't very plot-heavy: there's a long-ish scene at the beginning with no music and only spoken dialogue, as Benjamin takes the drug in his hotel room and waits to die; his fractured memories are what make up the story; as Benjamin-the-actor remains on stage, Benjamin-the-singer appears for the musical part of the piece, which consists of a number of scenes each centered around someone who played a role in Benjamin's life, most of whom will be familiar names: Arthur Koestler, Bertolt Brecht, André Gide, Hannah Arendt, and others (and I must say, they generally do quite a good job of making the singers look eerily like the historical figures).

Anyway, it's interesting stuff. The music changes notably depending on whom Benjamin is interacting with, becoming, for instance, more strident for Brecht, romantic for his on-again-off-again lover Asja Lacis, and taking up strong Jewish-sounding motifs for Gershom Scholem, a German-born Israeli intellectual. The whole thing takes place in Benjamin's hotel room, with video projected onto the walls (that's in the debut, from Opera de Lyon--probably the only place it's ever been performed?)--including, towards the end, of someone doing a google image search for Paul Klee's portrait of Benjamin (which also features elsewhere in the piece):

I have to say, not a great likeness. Yeah, everyone's a critic.

The opera was interesting and sincere. I don't know if I loved it, but then, I don't know if I entirely wrapped my head around it either. It definitely seems to be a serious work worth engaging with, and possibly revisiting.

Benjamin Britten, Albert Herring (1947)

So apparently after The Rape of Lucretia, Britten understandably wanted to do something lighter, and thus we have his first comedy, based, of all things, on Maupassant story transplanted to England.

The plot is that all the bluenosed bigwigs in town want to choose a May Queen for their annual festival, but they rule out all the local girls as too slutty. What to do? Well, someone suggests, how about a May King? There's this Albert kid who's sufficently virtuous! He's a bit dim, but hey. Well, Albert is neither dim nor "virtuous" in their sense; he's just repressed by his puritanical mother. Nonetheless, he's not too keen on this idea in spite of the cash prize. However, he's dragooned into doing it anyway. But when his pal Sid and Sid's girlfriend Nancy decide to loosen him up by spiking his lemonade at the party--well, things get interesting! Wait, seriously? Sid and Nancy? Yup. One of those things that you feel should mean something, but pretty clearly doesn't. Alas. The ultimate message is: if you repress people to much, they'll eventually act out in explosive ways. It's easy to see how this could have tragic results, but this is pure comedy.

I'll come straight to the point: this opera is incredibly charming and delightful, and pretty risque for the time, I should think. I do think that the third act--where Albert has disappeared and everyone's worried OH NO HE MUST BE DEAD--probably goes on a bit longer than it needs to (seriously, given the tone of the first two acts, it would be indescribably strange if this suddenly turned into a tragedy), but that's a minor criticism. I watched this Operavision production (no longer online, alas) from the Royal College of Music. A few of the parts are sung by older singers, but most of them are by young people just starting out in their careers, and considering, it's stunning how good they all are. No amateur hour this. Society may be falling apart, but we sure are still capable of producing quality singers! If that's any comfort. It originally takes place in 1900, but here it's been updated to--as far as I can tell--more or less the time of the opera's composition. I suppose some of the attitudes on display here are perhaps rendered a little archaic, but honestly, I didn't know the milieu had been changed while I was watching, and it felt entirely natural.

Hmm.  Think I'll space out the Britten operas a little, but I do at some point intend to go through everything or more or less everything that he did in that vein.

Benjamin Britten, The Rape of Lucretia (1946)

So it's Roman Times, and Tarquinus is in charge. The situation is explained by male and female "choruses" (just one person each, in fact), who are observers outside time who throughout the opera comment on the action in a Christian fashion, and also get emotionally caught up in the goings-on. But anyway. Tarquinus. Tyrant. He's drinking with his subordinates at an army camp, but everyone's jealous of Collatinus, the only one whose wife (Lucretia) has been faithful while they're away. But how faithful IS she, really? Tarquinus decides to go back to Rome to see. I mean, the title kinda gives away what happens next, doesn't it? Lucretia is traumatized, and even though Collatinus accurately asserts that it wasn't her fault and there's no need for shame, well, what do YOU think she does? Keeping in mind that this is an opera?

HOLY HELL, man. I don't necessarily know what I was expecting here; this isn't one of Britten's better-known works. But I was really, seriously blown away here. If anyone expresses doubts that English-language opera can have the heightened emotion of the best Italian opera, just put this on and say "watch and learn, you clod." It's what Britten called a "chamber opera," with just a small ensemble of musicians; the music is accessible--more so, I'd subjectively say, than Peter Grimes--and the whole thing is just dramatic as anything.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that this Glyndebourne production is so good. Well, I guess the production itself is actually a little weird, with the stage covered with loose gravel that characters are always scrabbling around in, but really, it's all about the singers. Duncan Rock is good as Tarquinus, playing the character as this kind of entitled fratboy douchebag, a characterization that certainly fits. BUT. Christine Rice as Lucretia? In my top five operatic performances, without a doubt. Please keep in mind that I don't actually have a list of top performances, and granted it's hard to really make comparisons like this, but she is just stunning. Things like this remind you of why you like the artform in the first place.

Let's talk briefly and only semi-relevantly about the word "rape." Now, we probably all know that our current meaning has not always been the meaning; that it used to just generally mean taking something away by force. The rape of the sabine women and Pope's "Rape of the Lock" do not involve rape rape (I mean, okay, the former could,but you're being anachronistic if you're saying that that's what the name means). The play that this opera was based on is twentieth-century, so the word definitely meant what it means, but it's possible that the title is along the lines of the earlier use--I mean, that's what it usually means in pieces of this sort where it's in the title--and although in this production it's pretty darned unambiguous, it probably could be played differently if one were so inclined. That would get icky pretty quickly, so I don't recommend it, but it's worth thinking about, I suppose.

Am I correct in thinking that the phrase "rape and pillage" is in the same category as redundant legal phrases like "null and void," "cease and desist," and "assault and battery," where they wanted to include words from both French and Anglo-Saxon roots so there would be no possibility of misunderstanding? We don't think of "rape and pillage" like that because these days the words have two different means and because "pillage" is old-fashioned and not, as far as I know, a current legal term.

Well, that had nothing to do with anything. Sometimes I just have a thought in my head and want to say it even if it doesn't seem substantial enough to warrant its own blog post. But the point is: THIS OPERA RULEZ DUDE. Miss it at your peril.

George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess (1935)

Well, if Britten is the most famous English-language opera composer, here's possibly the most famous single English-language opera. American opera, certainly. Nicely timed for Black History Month, we have the Met's new production Live in HD. Why not? It seems a little weird that I hadn't seen it before this, but I think that's at least partially due to not being quite sure what it really was: the only thing I knew from it was "Summertime"--the most-covered piece of music ever, with tens of thousands of recordings--and, like, it's a pop song. How is this from an opera? Not that I have anything against musical theatre or anything, but in that case it wouldn't necessarily be something I'd've focused on. It was actually a revelation to hear that song--it opens the opera--sung as an operatic aria, and suddenly understand. It's recognizably the same thing, but also very different. Anyway, definitely an opera, this, though it could easily be--and has been done--as a musical.

But the problem is, I'm very concerned that I don't have anything useful to say about it. "You don't have anything useful to say about anyopera." Well, that's as may be, but at least when I'm writing about something slightly less massive and massively known, I don't feel as self-conscious about that. But here, I am. Should I point out the irony of the fact that the African American opera was written by a white guy with a libretto by a white guy based on a book by another white guy? It's been done! Should I note that it's in some ways a little bit racially problematic? Ditto. Actually, I would strongly recommend that any interested parties listen to the episode on the subject of the Met Opera Guild podcast, which is a very good overview. I often find the podcasts in this series less than compelling because they consist primarily of detailed plot summaries, and I'm not sure what the point is--if I'm interested enough to want to know the plot, I'm definitely interested enough to actually seeit!--but this one really delves into the issues surrounding Porgy and Bess, and even the short-ish plot summary includes useful analysis.

Anyway, wanna know what? I liked it. Quite a lot. See, again, I feel self-conscious about even trying to summarize it, because is this news to anyone? Well, Bess is a woman struggling with drug addiction and, it's implied, a former prostitute, who escapes her violent boyfriend, Crown, and gets together with the crippled Porgy. This goes well for a while, until Porgy kills Crown; he isn't actually a suspect in the murder, but he's taken in to identify the body, leaving Bess sufficiently freaked out that when the suave drug dealer/pimp known as Sportin' Life asks her to go off to New York with him, she does it. Porgy gets out, and resolves to find her, even though he doesn't have a clear idea of where or indeed what New York is. That's all, although it might not give you a full picture of the work: there's a lot of slice-of-life stuff here that doesn't really relate to the main story. And that's fine.

I mean, you can see why it's popular. Gershwin was definitely a tunesmith, and the fact that I only knew "Summertime" definitely says more about my sheltered existence than anything else. Certainly, the appeal of things like "Ain't necessarily so," "I got plenty of nothing," and especially the love duet "Bess you is my woman now." I should probably also give a shout-out to Ira Gershwin for the lyrics; this opera is often credited to "the Gershwins," and I think ARGH NO that's not the convention; librettists aren't mentioned in the same breath as composers (I also think that about Gilbert and Sullivan), but, well, you can kind of understand why we do. Anyway, now I feel more cultured. It's pretty darned tragic that George died so young, depriving the world of god knows how much more iconic music.

This Live in HD performance featured something I'd never seen before: a pre-opera announcement by Peter Gelb. As I understand it, these things are generally bad news because they mean that one of the singers you wanted to see has been replaced by an understudy, but not so here: all he had to say was that Eric Owens (as Porgy) had a cold but would be performing anyway. The only point of which seems to be "if he sucks, that's why," which doesn't instill a great deal of confidence. But he was fine; I suppose someone more sensitive to these things than me could have sensed that something was off, but I did not. Angel Blue, as everyone says, kills it as Bess; I'd only seen her before in a small role as Helen of Troy in Boito's Mefistofele, but she definitely deserves to be a lot more well-known. However--curveball!--to me, the highlight here was actually tenor Frederick Ballentine, making his Met debut as Sportin' Life. He brings real insinuating, serpentine charisma to the role, making an extremely bad guy (he's a worse person than Crown, I'd say, if less overtly violent) seem perversely appealing.

The production is fine, if, I can't help feeling, slightly too crowded for its own good. Also--and I don't know whether this is more a matter of the production or if it's just inherent in the piece itself--Bess' struggles with drug addiction and her efforts to leave her past behind feel sort of clumsy, like she really just ping-pongs back and forth as the plot requires, rather than having realistic internal struggles. Or maybe I'm just asking for something that opera as a form isn't super-well-equipped to provide.

Gershwin insisted that the opera should have an all-black cast (except for a few white cops limited to speaking roles), and the family's estate mandates that that be the case to this day. That does raise potentially prickly problems about who counts as "black" (there are one or two chorus members here who, if you saw them on the street, you probably wouldn't think of as such); still, in spite of whatever problems you might have with aspects of the story, that's very progressive, and if it weren't so, it probably wouldn't maintain its popularity today: if it had historically been performed in blackface, it would probably today be considered too toxic to perform. You do have to wonder, though: if it's possible to get high-quality all-black cast--as it very clearly is--then WHY are other Met productions so overwhelmingly white? I know that color-blind casting is generally the rule, which is good ("you're okay with an all-black cast for Porgy and Bess but not an all-white cast for others operas, I see how it is you vile sjw hypocrite." Yes. Quite.), but the way that shakes out, well...I mean, I know there are reasons for that that aren't motivated by racism, but STILL, it's at least something to think about.

Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes (1945)

And now...this! Britten's first big success. The more I think about it, the more I realize that he really is THE biggest name in English-language opera, unless you count Gilbert & Sullivan, which I've decided not to. Purcell, sure, but I just don't think he's as prominent, at least these days. Most of Britten's operas have become part of the repertoire, which is impressive for ANY mid-twentieth-century composer, let alone an English one. So that's cool.

Anyway. It's a seaside fishing town, and Peter Grimes is a fisherman whose apprentice has died at sea under somewhat murky circumstances. It's determined that the death was accidental and not Grimes' fault, but suspicion lingers among the townspeople. There's a sympathetic teacher, Ellen Orford, who tries to help him, but suspicion grows and ultimately bad stuff happens. Thus we have what the host, Natalie Dessay, characterizes as "the sad, horrible story of Peter Grimes." I dunno; it's definitely not a comedy, but I don't know that I'd say it's more "horrible" than your average operatic tragedy. Then again, maybe they're all horrible! Maybe we just like a horrible artform! Who can say?!?

What's interesting to me is that Grimes is a really ambiguous character in ways you don't normally see in opera. You generally know where you stand with operatic characters, or at least find out fairly quickly, but not so here. You never really see inside his head or know exactly what he's thinking, and it's far from obvious that he's innocent of the crime he's accused of; he's obviously not mentally well and subject to fits of rage. He may not deserve what he gets, exactly, but he's certainly not a complete innocent. What with this uncertainty, I would call this one of the most modernist operas I've seen, at least storywise.

After seeing it, I'm definitely a fan of Britten. It didn't take much. To my untrained ear, the music sounds somewhere between the atonality of a Berg and a more traditionally melodic romantic sound. He's very good at choral music, and he's able to evoke the wildness of the ocean in a way I haven't seen since Der fliegende Holländer. This Met production is great in all ways, but especially in the way of Anthony Dean Griffey, who acts the hell out of Grimes. He has a climactic mad scene--something you don't normally see with male characters, and it's great.

Dang. As noted, most of Britten's operas are widely performed and readily available, so I look forward to exploring his career.

Jaromír Weinberger, Spring Storms (1933)

Hey everybody, let's watch a Weimar-era operetta! The last Weimar-era operetta, in fact: it debuted just as the nazis were taking power and was quickly shut down. This is apparently partially a reconstruction, per operavision:

The original full score as well as most orchestral parts are lost. Only the piano reduction, the bass drum part and a detailed prompt book with the libretto remained unscathed. The pianist and arranger Norbert Biermann used these as well as the gramophone recordings to reconstruct the missing orchestration and compose new extracts for the Komische Oper Berlin’s production.

All right. I'll take it.

Operetta sort of confuses me. What is it? Is it more like an opera, or more like a musical? I think the latter when I hear Gilbert and Sullivan but the former when I hear French or German operetta, but is that really just a language thing? Hard to say. I probably haven't seen enough of it to have a clear picture. But I'd like to fix that problem! I would, but it's easier said than done; Weinberger, for instance, was famous in his time, but you sure can't find videos of much or any of his stuff.

Well, we have this, anyway. It's an unusual setting: it takes place in Manchura during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The Russian general, Katschalow, has his problems: Japanese spies have infiltrated his headquarters; his strong-willed teenage daughter Tatiana is carrying on with a fast-talking German journalist, Zirbitz; and to top it off, he's in unrequited love with an archduke's widowed daughter, Lydia--who herself is in love with and loved by Ito, one of the aforementioned Japanese spies. What will happen?

I sort of wasn't loving this at first. Part of that's just endemic to the genre: operettas generally have a way higher dialogue-to-singing ratio than I care for (the most famous German-language operetta, Die Fledermaus, has the same problem). But I was also comparing it in my head to another obscure operetta of the time that was on Operavision, Paul Abraham's Roxy und ihr Wunderteam. That one is much more immediate that this, and the music, really, is considerably more memorable.

Still! I did ultimately get into this. It's an unexpected (at least by me) mixture of comedy and pathos, both of which ramp up in the final act, in a way that's a little tonally weird but still basically works. I'm not really familiar enough with the sensibilities of the time to know whether a romance between a Japanese man and a European woman would've ruffled anyone's feathers, but it's interesting in either case. Tatiana and Zirbitz also make a charming couple (the Operavision description characterizes him as "nauseating," which seems bizarrely judgmental to me--he's a comic character, and I suppose a little obnoxious, but that makes it sound like he's a villain, when he isn't in any sense). Possibly because I'm not more familiar with operetta, all I can think to compare it to is Puccini's La rondine, which was originally meant to be an operetta itself and has a similarly bittersweet tone. And you know, the music isn't bad: in particular, Ito's aria of regret at the end is legit devastating.

What's not so great here are the subtitles: they don't even try to translate all the dialogue; it's really just enough to understand what's going on, leaving out a lot of the comedy. There's one moment that stood out where Zirbitz distinctly says "Sherlock Holmes," but what the context for this is shall remain forever mysterious to non-German-speakers. I hate to sound ungrateful, given all the enjoyment I get out of Operavision, but boy. Not their finest moment. I hope they bring us more operettas, but I also hope they do a better job of subtitling them.