Classrooms can be amazing places for discovery, especially for the teacher. Sometimes we can’t anticipate what develops right in front of us.
Not long ago I showed two contrasting DVD versions of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly to my opera class.
Having talked about the differences between theatrical realism and verismo –not at all the same things—we began with Frédéric Mitterrand’s 1995 film version. Starring soprano Ying Huang and tenor Richard Troxell, this is a very handsome version that seems to stop at nothing to create its illusion of reality. Although Ying Huang is not Japanese, she looks enough like Cio-cio-san to help us believe in this tale of east meets west.
At the other extreme is Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1975 production originally made for TV. Starring Mirella Freni & Placido Domingo, this is a very theatrical approach.
I thought I’d be demonstrating the ways that different interpretations offer us variety, encouraging us to revel in the divergence we encounter between different directors, and the pleasures we could take.
Instead we were confronted with some of the limits of verisimilitude. Richard Troxell’s Pinkerton is shown up close in Mitterand’s film. With each subsequent viewing I feel more and more troubled with the character of Pinkerton, surely one of the least heroic leading roles ever to emerge from Puccini’s pen. While he sings well, Troxell is trapped by Mitterand’s framing of the role. For those who seek realism, Mitterand seems to spare no expense, but I am not sure that the result makes the opera more meaningful.
Ponnelle’s approach has many strengths, but in passing it’s worth noting that one of its chief objectives seems to be a kind of rehabilitation of Pinkerton. I’ve never been fond of the character, but nothing could make it so clear as our head-to-head comparison in the classroom, as though Ponnelle wanted us to like our American naval officer. Where the opera pushes him aside after the first act, making Pinkerton almost a bit player –absent in Act II and remorseful but inexorable in Act III—Ponnelle reframes everything around Pinkerton. The opera begins with a surreal flashback of Pinkerton’s frenzied pursuit of Butterfly that concludes the work, as she kills herself.
My favourite moment in Ponnelle’s interpretation is the inventive introduction to the last scene. We see images as if from Butterfly’s dreams, figures moving in the manner of stylized Kabuki figures. Her dream includes her physical (re-)union with Pinkerton, surreal figures associated with the USA (including Uncle Sam & someone resembling Wild Bill Hickok), and a Butterfly who dreams of assimilation, counter-intuitively dressed in western clothing for a change. While this is not by any means a recent film, Ponnelle’s profound images are deep & troubling, calling me back again and again for repeated viewing.
Watching Ponnelle’s work I feel convinced that, contrary to what some people would say, opera scores are far from exhausted, if only directors would seek to explore them more fully.
The conversation about the arts is as much about the audience as it is about the art. If you’re marketing the question can be one of identification (who’s coming to see/hear) as much as how to find, connect with and retain that audience.
While it’s been said before, this is a time of transition, a new world being born from the old. We have new works co-existing with the old, and new ways of presenting & packaging those creations.
New platforms are coming into play for all of the arts, and opera isn’t being left behind, whether we’re speaking of opera in your movie theatre or your telephone. While the music you hear from your tiny device may not offer the faithful audio reproduction that a high-end system can in your home, that’s not relevant when you’re jogging, cycling or driving.
Nikitin and his controversial tatt
And the communications can be very political. The Metropolitan Opera saw a scandal erupt online earlier this year when their General Director Peter Gelb seemed to be censoring Opera News, the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s own publication. I believe Gelb’s approach was short-sighted, in failing to see the value in the vibrant –if sometimes dissenting–discourse around his own company & their productions. In similar fashion, The Bayreuth Festival –an opera house that has seen more than its share of controversy –was again in the spotlight for many of the wrong reasons, with the departure of Yevgeny Nikitin from their production of Der Fliegende Holländer over tattoos that may or may not have included a swastika. Like the tattoo itself, the story was a jumbled mess, and a case study in how not to handle a situation.
Wayne Gooding, Editor of Opera Canada
Speaking of conversations, new media and controversy, I was happy to participate in The Big COC Podcast Episode 1 with Wayne Gooding of Opera Canada, John Gilks of operaramblings and hosted by the COC’s Gianmarco Segato. Episode one includes round table discussions about the controversy at Bayreuth, thoughts on marketing classical music in Toronto and the question of operetta in an opera house, especially considering the upcoming production of Die Fledermaus by the COC.
I’m going to talk about another aspect of the composer that fascinates me, one that probably deserves greater attention considering that it’s rarely discussed on-air or in reviews.
Debussy is usually spoken of as an impressionist composer, an epithet that I’d consider mistaken for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it can’t be used in the same way that it’s used for painters, who were working towards certain objectives. While the epithet was not originally meant as a compliment — a criticism of paintings whose brush-strokes were visible, and whose vibrant colours and everyday subject-matter might be found jarring when compared to classical painting–one should be wary of using this for composers. While there are analogous effects in Debussy, the same can be said for some of the compositions of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky or Richard Strauss, just to mention three late romantic composers who exploited vivid orchestral colours.
My main objection is that the visible brush-strokes and the appearance of spontaneity in such paintings is totally unlike what Debussy—one of the most deliberate composers of all—actually sought to create. There is a certain irony in the use of a painterly epithet for Debussy when his scores are among the most carefully created of all music, so much so that they can be seen for their aesthetic design qualities upon the page: particularly if one accepts the hypothesis in Roy Howat’s Debussy in Proportion. Howat examines the musical specimens in terms of two numerical concepts associated with formal balance:
symmetry or bisection
the ratio known as Golden Section
Howat explains Golden Section this way (in an explanation at the very beginning of his book):
…Recognized since ancient times as important in architecture, painting and natural organic growth, the Golden Section (Golden Mean, Golden Ratio—henceforth “GS”) is the way of dividing a fixed length in two so that the ratio of the shorter portion to the longer portion equals the ratio of the longer portion to the entire length. In mathematical terms, b/a = a/ (a+b)
Howat then mercifully gives us a diagram to illustrate, one that I will more or less paraphrase roughly (forgive me that the proportions aren’t properly illustrative of GS: the line is roughly at the division point):
| a | b |
There’s another proportion known as the Fibonacci series, where each number in the series is found by adding the two previous numbers. Here’s an example of numbers in the series (even if it goes on and on from here)
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, and so on to infinity. Notice that each number is the sum of the two numbers immediately before it in the series.
Golden Section and the numbers of the Fibonacci series can be observed in nature, which is one reason that such proportions are important.
An example from nature illustrating the applicability of the Fibonacci series to proportions in nature
There’s no smoking gun for Howat’s hypoethesis, but there is one remarkable letter Debussy wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand that Howat cites. On that occasion the composer was carefully counting bars and beats. The letter tells us of a necessary change to give the piece (“Jardins sous la pluie”) le divin nombre. Was Debussy on this occasion giving us the one and only clue to an otherwise mysterious compositional process? We don’t know for certain.
Howat gives several examples of compositions that he parses for size, showing how the various sections (delineated by such features as changes in orchestration or tempo) often seem to reflect something like a proportional construction using either Fibonacci numbers or Golden Section.
Remembering that such proportions also have metaphysical associations –for example as noted in the letter where the composer called it “the divine number”—we can see additional indirect support for Debussy’s possible adherence to such an approach in his fascination with the occult. One could list several pieces of evidence, both among Debussy’s works and in his known friends & associates, that lend support to the idea that Debussy was fascinated with metaphysics and hidden meanings.
Among the compositions parsed by Howat, some of his analyses are virtual tours de forces, exquisite explorations of the ways music can be constructed. I am persuaded by his prose, for example his reading of L’isle Joyeuse, an illumination that takes the work apart without dissecting it. I play and hear this piece differently since reading Howat’s study. The additional advantage of this performance by Maurizio Pollini is that you can see the beauty of the design for yourself even if you don’t read music.
Howat ends with the humble assertion that his book should raise more questions than it answers, a thought that works well for me, considering Debussy’s stated objection to formulas. In the end I was relieved that Debussy couldn’t quite be reduced to a system, although I wasn’t surprised at the evidence that he was much more than an intuitive artist.
In the Tuesday gatherings of Mallarmé and his followers, poems, plays, or songs might be performed to an appreciative audience. Nobody minded if the work being auditioned was unfinished. A glimpse of a dream could be every bit as powerful. For the symbolists directness and blatancy were frowned upon, while under-statement was the ideal. The goal was to intimate or suggest rather than state. It shouldn’t therefore be a surprise that this reticent group sought problematic signification and even valorized incompleteness as a model for perception and meaning.
Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun, while complete, presents images that seem fragments of something larger, intimations of a transcendence that slips through our fingers, and his dramatic fragment Hérodiade–which could not be staged—was still worth reading and publishing, even in unfinished form.
No wonder that Claude Debussy felt at home in this circle, and not merely because his first great masterpiece was his orchestral Prelude to Mallarmé’s poem.
While Schubert may be famous for his “Unfinished Symphony” it is really Debussy who should be known for projects left in varying states of incompleteness; and this should not be held against him.
There’s his one complete opera: Pelléas et Mélisande. But before undertaking that opera, he had to let go of Rodrigue et Chimène, a work nearing completion that had been a torment to him. Where Pelléas was a dream project, setting a play from a much-admired playwright (Maeterlinck), in a style close to his heart (symbolist) , Rodrigue et Chimène was an unfortunate project in comparison.
The libretto by the librettist Catulle Mendès had been rejected by other composers, before Debussy came along around 1890 to begin the project for reasons in a direct contrast to the rationale for Pelléas. Where the Maeterlinck project was idealistic & daringly original, corresponding to the composer’s dream of “two associated dreams”, Mendès presented Debussy with a commercial opportunity, and a way to make money. From 1890 to 1892, the composer created most of the work but without orchestration. Presumed lost, it has only been reconstructed in the last little while, including missing passages that were filled in, using a style imitating other passages by Debussy.
When you listen to the reconstruction of the opera (See CD link above), you get something diametrically opposite to the reticent symbolist style of Pelléas. There are choruses and battles. Where Pelléas surrenders to his fate, Rodrigue is an epic warrior. Alien as the story is to our usual understanding of the composer & his literary preferences, Debussy’s work deserves to be heard, one of the most exciting compositions I’ve encountered in the last decade. If only it could be produced.
But that early incomplete opera was neither the first nor last such fragment.
Previously Debussy had undertaken an adaptation of some of Villiers de L’lsle-Adam’s Axel, perhaps to determine its aptness for operatic adaptation. Before Rodrigue et Chimène came Diane au bois, a work that I’ve only heard in a partial excerpt as part of a lecture by Richard Langham Smith; his analysis is wonderfully suggestive in connecting its methods to those found in later compositions such as the Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun, including a small sample performance.
After Pelléas, Debussy would make two attempts to adapt Edgar Allan Poe.
Le diable dans le beffroi (The Devil in the Belfry)
La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher)
Guilio Gatti-Casazza, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera
Neither of these would be completed, even though Debussy was commissioned in advance for them by Giulio Gatti-Casazza of the Metropolitan Opera.
And this is far from a complete list of Debussy’s fragments and unfinished projects. But it must be remembered that at this time, in his circle, there was no shame in creating an unfinished fragment.
Every now and then life gives us a glimpse of hidden meanings. Maybe it’s all in our head, but even so one can’t help wondering. Coincidences can seem like more than mere chance.
In the 1990s I spent a few years as the tenor soloist at an Anglican church in North Toronto. The organist, Art Wenk, was one of the most impressive musicians I’d ever met, a man of eclectic taste & musicianship.
Although most times he turned his own pages sometimes the piece was so difficult he’d need someone to turn pages: for instance when he played the Bach St Anne prelude and fugue. Oh and by the way that’s not Art playing.
I left the position at the church because I was expecting to be too busy when I started grad school.
I didn’t make any connection when I came upon a pair of books about Claude Debussy, by someone named Arthur B. Wenk. First I came upon Claude Debussy and the Poets(1976), one of the most purely entertaining books on a composer that I have ever encountered, possibly because the author writes about music as part of the broader milieu, across several disciplines. The book works whether you come to it via French poetry, musicology, or simple curiosity. Nowadays it would be called “a good read.”
I suppose Wenk was ahead of his time. Inter-disciplinary study isn’t new anymore. It’s the norm. What Wenk brought to Debussy was a thorough grounding from the literary side, exploring the composer’s sources and inspirations, coupled with a musicologist’s eye for the score and its details.
Wenk was the one who noticed that Debussy put the same number of bars in his Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun as there were lines in Mallarmé’s eclogue. Or as Wenk put it “it seems more than coincidental.”
Wenk takes us through several different kinds of input. There’s Pierre Louÿs, Debussy’s friend & room-mate, who wrote the Chansons de Bilitis. There’s Debussy himself, who wrote the poems of the Proses Lyriques that the composer set. And there are the different kinds of inspiration supplied by Banville, Baudelaire, and especially Verlaine (who caught Wenk’s eye as much as Debussy’s).
And there’s another book from Wenk, titled Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music (1983), where the analysis is predominantly musicological, and much dryer in its style, but every bit as incisive.
Our paths crossed again thanks to the Canadian Opera Company’s Opera Exchange, and by this time I’d put two and two together, realizing that Art & Arthur B were the same Wenk. The occasion was the COC’s 2008 production of Pelléas et Mélisande. I talked about symbolists, and then Art talked about Debussy.
Wenk is a man of many talents. He continues to excel at many sorts of keyboard. He’s still a musician (piano or organ), and he’s still a writer. Wenk now writes mystery novels.
It seems perfectly natural that the hero of his novels is musicologist Axel Crochet, considering that Claude Debussy’s music criticism early in the 20th Century was published under the nom de plume of “Monsieur Croche”.
“Sesquicentennial” –a word we don’t hear too often –means 150th anniversary.
Claude Debussy
On August 22nd 1862, Claude-Achille Debussy came into the world. In response I’m going to post a few times over the next week in my own personal sesquicentennial commemoration. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed. Today people are talking about Julia Child and Oscar Peterson, both of whom are exactly 100, and in the days to come there will be others such as Gene Kelly, who’ll have his centennial the day after Debussy turns 150.
There are many things one can say, but I believe I want to save something for the posts that are to come this week. Tonight? Simply a few of his greatest hits in recognition of the possibility that some people don’t know him as well as others.
So I shall offer a countdown of five Debussy tunes.
#5? why not begin with something that came up in a music textbook. Leonard Meyer wants to argue that Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” may be good but isn’t great like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Me? I am not so sure, although I find it irritating that I am asked to pick one, when clearly we have both (or should I say all five? The Beethoven is, after all, four movements).
Here it is in a piano version. Why piano? Debussy played it on the piano for his friends before it was premiered. Do you believe in ghosts? Player pianos perfectly mimic the movements of hands that long ago ceased to be alive. There may seem to be a ghost in the machine.
#4 Let’s listen to something more in keeping with the assumptions people have about Debussy. He’s often spoken of as an impressionist composer: even though it’s a misnomer. While Debussy famously disliked epithets, this one is especially wrong considering what impressionists were really all about. But nevermind. Here’s a piece that people think of as impressionist music, jeu de vagues from his orchestral suite “La Mer” (or The Sea), a colourful display if ever there was one.
#3: This tune always makes me smile, one that’s perhaps not as well-known as it should be. It’s called “En bateau” from his Petite Suite, originally for piano four hands, but just as lovely –and better known—in an orchestrated version. Purist that I am, I want to show it in its four hands version, because two at a piano resemble two people rowing a boat (one at each oar). It’s not killer difficult –and indeed Debussy rarely is—but my it’s an eloquent evocation of the sensations. Note, that’s not the same as impressionism is it..?
#2: This is another composition that I adore, the Prelude from the 1st book called “La Cathedrale Engloutie”. It’s a version unlike any I have ever heard, on a piano roll created by none other than the composer himself, and much subtler than any other interpretation I’ve encountered.
Finally #1? The tune Debussy is best known for is one of his simplest, namely “Clair de lune” from the Suite bergamasque. This simple composition is regularly transcribed to other instruments, ensembles, orchestra or even synthesizer. Here’s a version that is even simpler than the original, for guitar. And by the way, “simpler” doesn’t mean “easier”.
I saw Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal tonight via the miracle of the internet, a complex take on the opera that rewards the serious viewer/listener. I found it here, via links that may not be live much longer. If you want to see for yourself, don’t wait!
Stefan Herheim (link to Bayreuth Festival article about him)
Herheim’s production isn’t new but is reprised this summer, rich with associations from history, from Wagner’s biography and the mythology of the story itself. Much in this production is self-reflexive, both as far as Wagner is concerned and German culture. Wagner’s home –known as “Wahnfried”—is referenced in the set design, as is the Bayreuth Festival theatre itself.
Gender is one of the key issues Herheim seizes upon. We had already seen gender as a focus in Syberberg’s 1983 film of the opera, where the protagonist changes gender from male to female partway through the second act. Herheim takes it further, likely influenced by the possibility that Wagner may have been a cross-dresser, emerging from the composer’s correspondence; Klingsor –the evil magician—is therefore portrayed as a flamboyant transvestite.
Several characters ambiguously conflate with others:
Kundry and Parsifal’s mother Herzeleide are combined, as we see the birth onstage in the opera’s Prelude, again reminiscent of Syberberg’s film.
We see a young boy in a sailor suit carrying bow and arrow in the Prelude who might be Parsifal, although as the opera begins, we meet several other young men similarly attired. Later we’ll meet Parsifal still attired as a boy in shorts & sailor suit even though he’s a full-grown man. We also see another boy who might be Amfortas, and a boy who substitutes for the swan (in one of the most powerful effects of the act).
Even so I would say that this production is relatively straight-forward in its approach to Parsifal. Much of the last act reads as a very conservative approach, particularly in context. Act II, which ends with the destruction of Klingsor’s castle, is staged so that the swastika banners are unfurled five minutes before Parsifal blows them all away: a moment that feels very cleansing considering the festival’s history.
When we get to Act III, amid the ruins of Germany and the festival in modern dress, the arrival of Parsifal in traditional garb is breath-takingly edgy, precisely because it employs the conventional costume. The moments in the final hour that are usually most powerful in audio recordings are also the most powerful in this production.
Amfortas, who at times has resembled Jesus Christ, comes in for the final eulogy over Titurel in modern dress among a partisan parliamentary chorus, some heckling rather than grieving. When he finally succumbs to his despair and rips his business suit open, revealing his unhealed wound, the effect is more powerful than you might expect, particularly when Parsifal arrives with the spear.
The musical presentation was stunningly good, leading me to hope there will be a DVD of the production. I was delighted to read that Philippe Jordan was the son of Armin Jordan, who was conductor in the Syberberg Parsifal. Both Jordans keep things moving briskly, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but definitely accords with my preferences.
Thomas Jesatko (Klingsor) and Susan Maclean (Kundry). Photo: Enrico Nawrath / Bayreuther Festspiele
Of the singers there’s a lot to celebrate. Kwangchul Youn creates a Gurnemanz of compassion, powerful at times, yet very delicate in the last act. Burkhard Fitz makes Parsifal completely three-dimensional, taking him from the clueless youth of the first act, to a very subdued, world-weary hero in the last. Susan Maclean’s Kundry is wonderfully detailed and committed, at times a bit strained at the top but never dull and often gorgeous in the lower register. Detlef Roth creates an Amfortas reminiscent of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, at times very lyrical, and with a conflicted dignity reminding me of Hugh Laurie (aka House). Thomas Jesatko is a thoroughly enjoyable Klingsor, at times played as if he were a music-hall performer rather than an opera singer.
Here’s Act One as of August 13th, although the link may not be live much longer.
The phrase “Coen Oddball” may seem redundant or non-specific, when that bizarre heading matches so many of the Coen Brothers’ films.
Raising Arizona? oddball comedy
Fargo? oddball thriller with pregnant cop stalking killer on frozen lake
Oh Brother Where art Thou? Homer’s epic in a daring adapation transplanted to the American South, complete with a fabulous soundtrack
Indeed, if they’re all oddballs, coming to the umpteenth in a series, one might well think they’re becoming banal and predictable.
But maybe not with the Coens, the oddball’s oddball. If they’re reading this I hope they’re smiling, even if their mom (wherever she might be: is she still alive?) might shake her head in disapproval.
I sometimes think about this in the abstract. I went to lunch yesterday with a friend, discussing his current music-theatre project, which he very generously opened up to me over lunch.
Artists are expected to show originality. Newness is one of the yardsticks by which we recognize importance.
But as always there’s a problem. We only really know what we have seen before. Creators employ genres that invoke patterns for the audience so that there’s at least something familiar, to fall back on.
We’re all different, and one way to understand that difference is the amount of novelty we crave. There are people who want the same breakfast every day, and rely upon the arts for a similar sense of order in their lives.
By a serendipitous coincidence, I watched A Serious Man last night. This is another Coen Brothers film, but one that for me brings up that whole question of newness, originality and intelligibility. As far as I know it did not do well at the box office: which may not be significant, but likely matters to those people who cough up the $ for the next Coen brothers film.
The first five minutes are in Yiddish. Then we’re in modern times, albeit not quite the present. Perhaps the 1960s? In that first half-hour –when I was admittedly sleepy and still feeling the effects of wine from dinner—I was trying to get a handle on this mysterious flick, and yes, nodding off a couple of times. I suppose I may have missed 5 minutes.
Gradually it started to make sense precisely because A Serious Man so studiously avoided being intelligible in any of the usual ways.
At times it resembles a comedy.
It’s full of judaica.
The film is pre-occupied with questions that can’t be answered. Sometimes they are deep questions with spiritual import. Sometimes they’re trivial matters. But the film is all about questions and questioning. A gambler seeks to find a system to win. A boy prepares for his bar mitzvah. All kinds of things go wrong in the protagonist’s life, from his struggles with a TV antenna that won’t allow his son to watch F-Troop, to the flagrantly bizarre arrangement his wife wants to foist on him.
In the process the questions being asked of us are often unintelligible.
I think the Coens were concerned they were becoming predictably oddball, that the phrase “Coen oddball” was now something you can google and even define. “Oh my God”, I hear Joel saying to Ethan, “we are no longer unpredictable!”
Or so they may have said, before they went back to the well, back to their roots, for A Serious Man.
For those who require complete intelligibility without ambiguity, stay away from this film. It will upset and anger you. And while you’re at it, vote for Mitt Romney. If you’re rich he’ll take care of you. If you’re poor and you vote for him? You’ll get the world you think you deserve: when Obama wins and you get another four years moaning.
I recommend this film without reservation to those wanting that magical experience of being lost in something new. No it’s not at the theatres any longer. I found it on DVD (click the picture for Amazon).
Last weekend John Terauds used the occasion of the Simcoe Day holiday to celebrate the quintessential Torontonian composer, Godfrey Ridout.
It reminds me of a time long ago, when I took a course taught by two giants at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, namely Harvey Olnick & that very same Godfrey Ridout. The current dean of the Faculty Don Mclean was also in the class, although I am certain he wouldn’t remember me. I remember Don as the brightest student in the class.
I recall something Ridout said about Wagner that struck me as one of the most insightful things I’d ever encountered in a class, as if the professor understood the psychology of composition & performance. Or so i felt at the time.
Ridout described how an orchestra might have played the “Ride of the Valkyries” in the 19th century. Those quick runs would be ragged, discordant because of the mistakes the violinists would likely make in attempting to play those quick notes. And I remember, almost as a footnote, his acknowledgment that nowadays violinists in any decent orchestra could play the piece without the raggedness Wagner must have heard, and indeed, expected when he wrote it. Here’s an older performance that might give a bit of an example of what Ridout meant.
Would he have expected musicians to master the piece a century later? Perhaps. Ridout was indeed suggesting a few things:
that the way Wagner heard the composition in his head was not with perfect playing
that making a mess of a difficult passage could conceivably serve a purpose
that (as I have alluded in other posts on this board) maybe musicians are more capable now than they were in Wagner’s time
That all comes back to me now, courtesy of Stewart Goodyear. I have been playing and listening to Beethoven piano sonatas all summer. I am reminded of Ridout’s commentary on Wagner, when I think of Artur Schnabel, whose approach to several sonatas has a ragged wildness comparable to what Wagner might have experienced in his century, hearing the Ride of the Valkyries. What indeed did Beethoven expect when he wrote these works?
It’s possible to play perfectly, especially if one doesn’t go as fast. Playing with the unbridled passion of a Schnabel, however, leaves you open to the occasional fudged note. I remember discussing certain pianists whose performance was fraught with this kind of thing. Rudolph Serkin’s Emperor Concerto many years ago at the Toronto Symphony was the occasion for a kind of psychological test. Those of us up in the balcony, seduced by Serkin’s mugging and posturing weren’t troubled by the notes he missed; whereas our friends on the orchestra floor –unable to see the histrionics—were fully aware of all the errors he was making. I think the mystique of the romantic virtuoso included a modicum of errors that one forgave if the aura was sufficiently heady.
But I’ve seen Beethoven in a new light, since hearing Goodyear. For example, let’s talk about the CD with the last three sonatas, op 109, 110, and 111.
In each sonata Goodyear has the capacity to surprise even a jaded veteran like myself, someone who thinks he knows how the pieces should usually sound, and was sure he has heard it all before.
Wrong.
I think I can now say that the whole set –all 32 sonatas—is for all intents and purposes perfect. But I’m not sure that playing a mistake-free cycle is the great achievement one might think. To do so is tantamount to reciting the complete plays of Shakespeare correctly: a technically impressive feat, but not really art. It’s what one does with the expression that matters, surely.
Each of those last sonatas illustrates the depths of Goodyear’s grasp of Beethoven. I am waiting for the world to discover this set, even if there isn’t likely going to be the same paradigm-shifting excitement as the one that greeted Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.
I’ve found each pianist seems to have an approach that in the best cases is more like vision or even a special genius. Barenboim, whose playing is often slow and deliberate, is a man I have always admired since I first encountered his old TV series Barenboim on Beethoven on TVO when I was too young to have yet played those sonatas. When I first tried out the “Waldstein”, it was with Barenboim’s analysis in my head, his demonstration of how the first subject –the repeated chords—rises while the second lyrical subject descends. Barenboim had been my ideal.
I bought most of Schnabel’s old mono set, jumped at the chance to get Kuerti’s thrilling new set (or at least I bought it when it was still new), and listened to individual sonatas by many more players. Recordings offer solutions to the problems we sometimes can’t solve when we sit down with a score. And yet each of these pianists seems to characterize Beethoven with their own individual sound, their particular genius. This is as true for Glenn Gould (whose odd reading of the Op 14 #1 left me a bit mystified) as for Gavrilov (who seemed more genuinely at peace in the tortured first movement of Op 111 than in the calm second) or Ashkenazy (whose steady and un-mannered playing gave Beethoven much the same gravitas I found in Barenboim’s readings).
Underlying each of those readings is a drama enacted between the player and the work. In the faster movements that means, making choices:
playing slower but accurately, as Barenboim or Ashkenazy or Brendel did (although of course this is a generalization… sometimes any of them can play quickly)
playing faster, and in order to avoid errors, to sacrifice expression, becoming somewhat mechanical. Gavrilov is he one who comes to mind but he’s not the only culprit. I hate being unkind, but if the fast and precise playing loses contact with emotion, what else can I call it but mechanical? Like a machine in other words.
playing faster with passion and therefore making errors, as in the manner of a Serkin, a Horowitz, or a Schnabel
There might be another option. Stewart Goodyear plays the fast passages with astonishing clarity, without being mechanical, and with every bit as much passion & expression as a Schnabel. I get a rush several places from the exquisite clarity, the thoughtful management of the voices & the drama underlying every moment. It’s as though the passionate Schnabel has been reincarnated as a muscular young Canadian, putting that passion into a physique executing note-perfect readings, the best of both worlds. Instead of a struggle (recalling the analogy i made in the spring, describing the Beethoven Marathon, as climbing Everest), it’s as though we’re nearing the summit, and now blissfully above the clouds, in the clear air where the angels dwell.
The slow passages are soulful & subtle, crisply understated in a black comic vein that reminds me frankly of the detached touch of Gould playing Bach. Goodyear never lingers over anything, never outstays his welcome in a passage with sentiment. And his scherzi are riotously joyful, with all the boisterousness of Olympic track athletes out for a drink after winning a medal.
I looked for some sign that Goodyear was seeking to explore historically informed performance (HIP), in the spirit of Norrington or Gardner, but saw no mention of such issues in the liner notes. Wait, let’s have a bit of a digression and talk about those notes, which are an additional achievement from Goodyear, full of poetic descriptions of the sonatas (as you can see for yourself).
For example:
“I always saw the fourth movement as a dance of raindrops, a ballet depicting a windy shower. The constant triplet eighths notes representing the rain, the contrasts in dynamics representing the sudden shifts of the wind. The prestissimo is a medley of what we have experienced in this sonata. We had the dramatic first movement, the operatic second movement, the spook-fest third movement, and now the fourth movement gracefully melding everything. It is almost as if Beethoven is telling the listener: “Deal with it..I’m here. Now dance to my beat.”
So, to return to my HIP thought, I feel the same kind of loyalty to Goodyear’s readings as I do to those symphonic readings that burst free from the older conventions (whether we’re talking Norrington & Gardner, or even Mackerras & Bruggen), even though i don’t believe Goodyear was seeking any sort of authenticity in his readings. I have been trying to reconcile myself to old favourites –Klemperer especially—who no longer move me as they once did. Now this summer, Goodyear has changed the way I hear Beethoven’s sonatas, likely for years to come.
My Canadian Opera Company ticket subscription arrived in the mail today. I was never in doubt about renewing the tickets, still starry eyed by the new building and the overall quality of what we’ve been getting.
Even so—I tell myself—it’s worth remembering that a subscription is like a contract with the open-ended possibility of renewal. I pay the COC. This buys seats for each show on a particular night, and also preserve those seats for my renewal in the years to come. If I’m feeling particularly positive at renewal time I can also throw in an extra contribution to the COC.
Richard Bradshaw (Michael Cooper/COC)
In exchange? The minimum is that I get a series of operas. On those nights I will get to watch the company that I’ve come to know, including members of the orchestra, ensemble and soloists.
But speaking of contracts, the COC have another contract to add to the list. Yes, they have the contract with each of us, that unspoken promise to be better every year. We renew our tickets, and we wait, not just because we read the brochure starry-eyed and eager. I think of Richard Bradshaw’s wonderful ambition that he once expressed –sorry I don’t know where—to make the COC the best theatre in Toronto. It’s compelling because it’s such a simple idea, and particularly marvellous coming from a conductor.
One reason so many of us are devoted to the COC is because we’ve watched the company aim for that target –being not just a good opera company but the best theatrical experience in the city—and sometimes succeed.
And so the footnote announced a few weeks ago, is just another in the series of contracts, promises that have been made and hopefully shall be kept.
In the wake of Richard Bradshaw’s untimely death in 2007, Alexander Neef became general director the next year. August 15th is a little over a week from now, the fifth anniversary of Bradshaw’s passing. I am amazed at how fast the time has flown. I remember chatting briefly with him in the lobby a couple of times, memories I treasure.
COC general director Alexander Neef (Michael Cooper/Canadian Opera Company)
Neef? While Bradshaw died five years ago, Neef was only able to show his true colours in the last few years, given that the COC stayed on Bradshaw’s creative trajectory for at least two years (for example, the COC’s splendid production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace in 2008 was still really a product of Bradshaw’s company, not Neef’s). We’ve seen better casting, fascinating productions from famous directors, and yes, controversy.
I say bring it on.
The announcement I am speaking of is the extension of Neef’s contract through the 2020-21 season. It’s far enough in the future that I can sleep a little better.
There are, broadly speaking, two separate pathways to appreciate opera, and since I am suggesting there are only two paths of course this will oversimplify even more outrageously than, say, Boito adapting Shakespeare. But here goes.
One is based on individual virtuosity, and the awareness of those heroic individuals. Opera to them is an assemblage of talent ascending to high notes, to say nothing of the many skills in several disciplines, so many shining moments. On this side you might find the folks who brava, bravo and bravi, and I believe this is where fans come for specific arias, a favourite singer, and a tune they will even hum in the washroom.
The other road is more dramaturgical, bookish and scholarly, a series of stories set by great composers, adaptations, seasons to commemorate the Wagner & Verdi bicentennials, perhaps more a matter for those who woot for what they like. Once upon a time I felt that if it wasn’t a bravo it was disrespectful, but I’ve come to believe that all enthusiasm is sacred.
So in other words I probably sound like a conservative twit no matter which side of the fence I might sit on. But that’s just it. Opera is a form constructed of two things:
our devotion to stardom and our love of a story
our favourite aria and the scene it appears in
a series of moments, that may or may not cohere into a wonderful evening
I feel Neef is taking care of both groups, speaking as someone who is appropriately schizophrenic, unable to decide whether I prefer to say I love stars or star vehicles. How about both? Neef has been getting us better and better singers, showcased in a fascinating array of operas.
And I feel happy that Neef’s contract was extended, as the evidence of my own extended contract arrived in the mail, namely my tickets. It’s not sacred like a marriage, but even so, this is another contract based on love. I don’t see the romance cooling anytime soon.
Having talked about the differences between theatrical realism and verismo –not at all the same things—we began with Frédéric Mitterrand’s 1995 film version. Starring soprano Ying Huang and tenor Richard Troxell, this is a very handsome version that seems to stop at nothing to create its illusion of reality. Although Ying Huang is not Japanese, she looks enough like Cio-cio-san to help us believe in this tale of east meets west.
Ponnelle’s approach has many strengths, but in passing it’s worth noting that one of its chief objectives seems to be a kind of rehabilitation of Pinkerton. I’ve never been fond of the character, but nothing could make it so clear as our head-to-head comparison in the classroom, as though Ponnelle wanted us to like our American naval officer. Where the opera pushes him aside after the first act, making Pinkerton almost a bit player –absent in Act II and remorseful but inexorable in Act III—Ponnelle reframes everything around Pinkerton. The opera begins with a surreal flashback of Pinkerton’s frenzied pursuit of Butterfly that concludes the work, as she kills herself.
barczablog 