what operas, doc?

[calimac]

Having gone yesterday to a San Jose Opera performance of The Barber of Seville (Scott Bearden does a great job, both in singing and in comic acting, with the buffoonish villain Dr. Bartolo) - that's the second opera I've seen performed in 15 months, a very high rate for me - I'm going to tease the people waiting for my list of pop songs that I like with, instead, a list of operas that I like.

It's not a much longer list. I'm not an opera person, I'm a symphony and chamber music person. All music exists in time, but the music I like gives the air of being a static structure that you're examining in time. It's the aural equivalent of walking through a great architectural creation, or turning a beautiful small sculpture over in your hand and looking at it from different angles.

Whereas opera is drama. Different thing. Drama with music in it, and the two don't always mesh. Even the most dedicated opera fan will admit that opera is often not very good drama. And the music is often designed to showcase the singers rather than exist as beauty for its own sake. (Yes, there's concert music that does that too. It's not my favorite concert music.)

I like:

Mozart. I've seen Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro, and that's a fair chunk of Mozart's masterpieces.

Rossini. Love his overtures, though the only operas I've seen staged are Barber and a translated adaptation of L'Italiana in Algeri titled The Riot Grrrl on Mars.

Carmen by Bizet. The only opera ever written with more than one really good tune. (I am aware that Bizet wrote other operas. I know nothing about them.)

A smidgen of Wagner, if I can have him in a smidgen. My favorite whole Wagner opera is Das Rheingold, because it's short and because it's an ensemble piece, with a minimum of hours and hours of two characters alone on stage emoting at each other loudly.

American ballad operas. Works like The Crucible and The Ballad of Baby Doe by otherwise obscure composers like Robert Ward and Douglas Moore (respectively).

But in all these cases "like" is a mild word. I'm not jumping up and down in eagerness to see any of them. What I really like is Gilbert and Sullivan. They wrote 14 collaborative operettas, of which two are never performed; I've seen the other 12, most of them many, many times. And their apostolic successors are American musical theatre, alias Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Bock and Harnick: sure, why not? I'd rather see those than a grand opera, and that's about as lowbrow as you're going to see me get.

Comments

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

All music exists in time, but the music I like gives the air of being a static structure that you're examining in time. It's the aural equivalent of walking through a great architectural creation, or turning a beautiful small sculpture over in your hand and looking at it from different angles.

Beautiful! And yet that's not at all how I experience the classical orchestral and chamber music I love. I have to think about this.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I know that a lot of people have to hear a series of musical events as a story, and I've seen a lot of painful attempts to read textbook sonata-allegro form as a dialectical conflict. With some freer works often come program notes on the lines of "The whole orchestra cries out in agony, but is unable to stop ..." the marching tread in Holst's "Saturn" or the insidious B Major (or whatever key it is, I forget) in Nielsen's Fifth, or whatever. I can't read music that way, it sounds inane.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I found another expression of the same idea in Larry Rothe's article in last week's SF Symphony program. Quote:

"Music is something you enter, a kind of aural real estate. I believe I always thought of music in architectural terms, as a structure awaiting visitors, but I was not able to put that idea into words until I heard composer John Adams describe one of his works as 'a memory space'. ... Not all music is meditative, as is Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, but all music is something you enter. In there, you get to know a little more about what you feel and believe, what you like and dislike, what you aspire to and what you can do without. And I'm not talking about art as respite, as some retreat where we go to slip away from a world that has grown too overwhelming. If music is a sanctuary at all, it is a sanctuary where we renew our energy and redefine our strategies for taking possession of the world. Music is not a hiding place. It's a place where we recharge, an anteroom from which we emerge onto the stage."

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I recall first hearing the idea of composition-as-architectural-space expressed in an overview of Bruckner symphonies, that in each we move through a grand if static space, which is slowly revealed as the music progresses. During my first major year-long Bruckner freak-out (in which I began a program of listening to all the symphonies and their respective iterations in chronological order -- I got as far as the 6th before a break was necessitated, so that I am in the odd position of being intimately familiar with most but not all versions of Bruckner's first 6 symphonies while never having heard any version of the last three), I kept trying to get with that program and it never worked for me -- it was too confining. It was obvious to me that Bruckner's symphonies are redolent of the grand acoustical spaces of the Austrian Alps, and that there is a sense in which that landscape -- the landscape of his youth -- is the imaginative setting for all his works.

So music for me is like being on a journey (not a story though, not in any crassly reductionist way) through a landscape -- and in that sense it is similar to being on a journey through an architectural space. Where you would suggest the unfolding of the space or the turning of an object in hand, I would suggest that it's not only the landscape, but one's pathway through it, and the character of the traveller, and the weather, both inner and outer. (Acoustical environments resound differently depending on the weather conditions, and echo is after all the mother of musical imitation.) So our conceptions are similar, and yet they feel very different to me -- perhaps because I must include the listener as a player, a player played upon who plays upon the play. If you will.