Los Angeles Opera truly has become a company interested in innovation. Next month brings Hercules vs. Vampires, an opera-meets-cult film mashup between Mario Bava’s 1961 film (Hercules in the Haunted World) and LA-based composer Patrick Morganelli.
A century ago, the budding film industry borrowed pretty heavily from opera—which makes a lot of sense, considering how the larger-than-life gestures of operatic acting suited the new medium of silent film so effectively.
And film has been repaying the favor in recent years: Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, Kevin Puts’ Silent Night, Howard Shore’s The Fly, André Previn’s Brief Encounter, even a new opera by Giorgio Battistelli inspired by the controversial Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, set to premiere in May at La Scala.
“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But… really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible,” is the lesson that beams in on the short-wave radio. The hyper-curious, gifted, white-haired German orphan Werner Pfennig and his sensitive sister Jutta listen in, escaping through the invisible waves for a moment from the coal-mining town of Zollverein.
This is just one of many memorably etched moments in Anthony Doerr’s new novel, All the Light We Cannot See. I became a fan of Doerr’s writing last year when his short story collection Memory Wall fell into my hands. Doerr possesses the rare gift of a distinctive style that avoids mannerism and that endows his characters — well, most of them — with depth and compassionate believability.
The beauty of Doerr’s fiction is both stylistic and structural. His lyrical, keenly observed prose in All the Light We Cannot See supports…
We’ve become a culture that’s so fragmented that we’ve kind of forgotten how we fit into the world in which we live. I understand music as a way to reconnect, and to reintegrate our awareness, our listening, ourselves with the larger, older world that we inhabit.
Suddenly what seems like a flood of Tennessee Williams-related material has been vying for my attention. First is the long-delayed but always expected new John Lahr biography, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which I’ve been devouring and don’t want to end. (It won last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award.)
An undated early horror story, “”The Eye That Saw Death,” was recently unearthed from the Williams Archives at the University of Texas at Austin and published in the spring issue of The Strand Magazine.
In March came news that Francesca Williams, the playwright’s niece (daughter of little brother Dakin), discovered a forgotten treasure of memorabilia in her parents’ Missouri basement, with letters going back to the 1920s.
James Grissom’s Follies of God — another project long in the making, and attended by some controversy (it’s Tenn Williams, after all) — has finally been published. From the excerpt Longreads has published of Grissom’s new book:
Tenn believed that writers, all artists, had several homes. There was the biological place of birth; the home in which one grew up, bore witness, fell apart. There was also the place where the “epiphanies” began—a school, a church, perhaps a bed. Rockets were launched and an identity began to be set.
There was the physical location where a writer sat each day and scribbled and hunted and pecked and dreamed and drank and cursed his way into a story or a play or a novel. Most importantly, however, there was the emotional, invisible, self-invented place where work began—what Tenn called his “mental theater,” a cerebral proscenium stage upon which his characters walked and stumbled and remained locked forever in his memory, ready, he felt, to be called into action and help him again.
And for National Poetry Month, here’s a podcast from the Poetry Foundation including Tennessee Williams reading his own poetry.
For another angle on the Semele myth treated by Handel, here’s a painting by Giulio Pippi (called Giulio Romano) and Workshop (before 1499-1546), from the Getty Museum. The painting depicts the happy outcome of poor Semele’s demise. From the Getty’s description:
Originally part of a series of mythological love stories, this panel is a comment on passion’s perils. Semele, a mortal impregnated by Jupiter (Roman king of the gods), is consumed by fire after the god’s jealous wife, Juno (queen of the gods), tricks her into looking directly at him despite his warnings. Below is the newborn Bacchus (god of wine), Semele’s son by Jupiter. As the hapless father flees clutching his thunderbolts, Juno looks on apprehensively.
The Met’s new production of the popular double bill, directed by one of my favorites, David McVicar, opens tonight. The cast includes Eva-Maria Westbroek as Santuzza, Patricia Racette as Nedda, Marcelo Álvarez singing Turiddu and Canio, George Gagnidze as Alfio and Tonio, with Fabio Luisi conducting.
From the Met’s company history:
“Cavalleria” was first performed by the Met on tour in Chicago in December 1891, paired with Act I of Verdi’s “La Traviata.” “Pagliacci” followed in December 1893 at the opera house in New York, in a double bill with Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” The Met was the first opera company to present “Cav/Pag” together on December 22, 1893, and this combination soon became standard practice around the world, but occasional pairings with other operas were still common into the early 20th century.
“Cavalleria” and “Pagliacci” individually shared the Met stage with such diverse works as “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” “Don Pasquale,” “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Fille du Régiment,”Il Trovatore,” “Rigoletto,” “La Bohème,” and even Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Le Coq d’Or.” An unlikely double bill of “Pagliacci” and “Hansel and Gretel” was especially popular, with almost 100 performances between 1906 and 1938.
Among the notable early interpreters of the leading roles were Emma Eames, Emma Calvé, Johanna Gadski, Olive Fremstad, Emmy Destinn, and Rosa Ponselle (Santuzza), Francesco Tamagno and Enrico Caruso (Turiddu), Nellie Melba, Destinn, Lucrezia Bori, Claudia Muzio, and Queena Mario (Nedda), Caruso (more than 100 performances) and Giovanni Martinelli (Canio), and Pasquale Amato (Tonio). A new production in 1951 starred Zinka Milanov and Richard Tucker in “Cavalleria” and Delia Rigal, Ramón Vinay, and Leonard Warren in “Pagliacci.”
This was succeeded by another new staging in 1958, with Lucine Amara as Nedda, Mario Del Monaco as Canio, and Milanov and Warren reprising their roles. The following production, directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli,
premiered in 1970 with Leonard Bernstein conducting “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Fausto Cleva conducting “Pagliacci” and a cast that included Grace Bumbry and Franco Corelli in “Cavalleria” and Amara, Richard Tucker, and Sherrill Milnes in “Pagliacci.”
Among the many other artists who have appeared in the two operas since the late 1950s are Giulietta Simionato, Eileen Farrell, Fiorenza Cossotto, and Tatiana Troyanos (Santuzza), Teresa Stratas and Diana Soviero (Nedda),
Jon Vickers, James McCracken, and Giuseppe Giacomini (Canio), and Cornell MacNeil and Juan Pons (Tonio). Tenors who have faced the challenge of taking on both leading roles include Plácido Domingo, Roberto Alagna, and José Cura.
Here’s a recent essay I wrote for the Boston Symphony on Mozart’s Vienna piano concertos:
Though Mozart is credited with elevating the genre of the solo concerto to its lofty status, varying concepts of the concerto would predominate in later times — with the virtuosity that contributes only one layer in Mozart’s mature concertos later taking on an inflated significance in the heyday of Romanticism, for example. Such relatively superficial associations would in turn dampen interest in Mozart’s own concerto legacy. The piano concertos now guaranteed to attract listeners were for a long time largely neglected, and only came back into favor in the period approaching the composer’s bicentennial…
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 