Dear David:
I may understand. I just freaked out myself
and suddenly started pounding my head
with my fists. You said you wore a bandana
to keep yours from exploding. Henze is doing
just that right now in his Dionysian Third
on my ipod (Yes. That means I have a Henze
playlist. And an extensive one at that).
What we do matters. Despite what
the critics in Poetry magazine write,
we don't do it for recognition.
Like you said, we do it to prove
our status as human beings.
We do it to live.
If not to give meaning,
then to offer multiple readings--
alternate takes--on life.
And even though you left
yours unfinished (does anyone
really, truly finish...)
You made a difference, man.
You lodged stories and characters
where they will stay for who knows how long.
(Who says fiction isn't real?!?)
What we do matters. Art matters.
How else can one make sense
of life--much less approach death?
(this should be an endnote,
a la Infinite Jest, but alas,
it is merely parenthetical:
religion as art; philosophy as art;
relationship as art--all creative acts.
Every leap--whether aesthetic, ontological,
existential--is an imaginative feat,
a stance, a statement
both of will and being)
Yet we shouldn't be so hard
on ourselves. Or our work.
The restless, insatiable,
demanding ones (and if not
indefatigable, then relentlessly
searching, questioning, attempting)
should give ourselves a break
before we break ourselves.
(I didn't mean for that to
veer into cliche. Yikes.
Please forgive me)
What I meant to say was:
You lived the questions into art
and cracked open claustrophobic spaces.
In the process of your
unbecoming you left us
something, and that matters.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Serenade & Night Flight: Britten & Dallapiccola
In one of the pithy essays from his masterpiece collection, Labyrinths, Jose Luis Borges writes of "Kafka and his Precursors." In typical Borgesian fashion, a connective thread is woven from Aristotle to Browning to Kierkegaard, with pit-stops along the way. Borges says that our connection to the present (ie: Kafka) directly informs our interpretation of the past (ie: Browning) rather than the chicken-and-egg assumption that the past affects how we interpret the present. Therefore, "every writer creates his own precursors" and therefore performs the Borgesian task of making connections across time and space in the labyrinthine world in which we find ourselves.
Last weekend I had the privilege of performing Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the fabulous hornist, Joe Levinsky, and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, led by one of the country's outstanding conductor's, Elizabeth Schulze. The Maryland Symphony was founded over a quarter of a century ago by the British conductor and horn player, Barry Tuckwell. Fitting that Tuckwell was a champion of the Serenade, and is the soloist in one of the definitive recordings of the work, which also features its other creators: Britten himself is the conductor, and the tenor is his partner & collaborator, Peter Pears.
In an earlier post, I wrote about Music and Social Conscience--inspired by the conflation of January's historic Inauguration, concerts I was preparing to conduct and programs I was preparing to propose--and referenced Britten and his output. His life and music are themes to which I regularly return: besides being the greatest composer of the English language and one of the giants of 20th c. music, he was the source of my DMA dissertation, and the raison-d'etre behind much of my work in the UK, and is simply one of my favorite composers. I find Britten's music to be more relevant now than ever, and all of these signifiers inform the fact that the Virginia Chorale will be devoting a portion of each of our next five seasons to surveying Britten's choral works in our Britten Project, culminating in a centennial concert for his birthday in 2013, which just happens to be the name day of the Patron Saint of Music, St. Cecilia (Nov 22).
Anyway, Britten's Serenade is the quintessential example of this composer's gift for creating a song-cycle from a poetic anthology. Britten is unique among vocal composers in amassing a body of song-cycles both on individual poets (Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Hardy, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Blake, et al) and on original "librettos" of anthologized poets (three of his five orchestral song-cycles, Our Hunting Fathers, Serenade, and Nocturne, use this device of multi-voiced lyrics as their source).
One of the most dog-eared books in my own collection is "Britten's Poets: An anthology of the poems he set to music." It is nearly 400 pages of nothing but the poems themselves. One of the indices lists the poets Britten set, and it includes nearly 100 different poets in a half-dozen different languages. I should also add that Pears was Britten's literary equal, if not the more well-read of the two, and his assistance in choosing and ordering the poetic sequences has been under-appreciated.
Britten finished the Serenade, op. 31, in the spring of 1943, before he turned 30. It was his first major opus to be premiered following his and Pears' return to the UK from self-imposed, conscientious-objector exile in the US. His status as a C.O. affected his life on several levels (he had to appeal to the tribunal, and was granted his exempt status only after a second appearance; his friend and colleague, the composer Michael Tippett, served time when his application for C.O. status was rejected). It also deepened his lifelong commitment to pacifism & non-violence, and furthered the conviction that the creative artist contribute to society.
At the time, Britten was just beginning work on his first opera, Peter Grimes, whose success would establish his fame and further his reputation as the leading composer of his generation. Britten and Pears both identified with Grimes' themes of isolation, outcast, and exile--as artists, as conscientious objectors, and as homosexual men. These themes--also incarnate as innocence and experience, youth and age, virtue and corruption, individual and the people--would populate his operas and infuse his song cycles for the remaining three decades of his astounding career.
The Serenade is framed by a prologue and epilogue with the horn playing natural harmonics, recalling the (innocent?) days when the instrument was associated with hunting calls. In between, 6 poems (spanning several centuries of British verse) take up nocturnal themes from dusk and twilight to dreams, nightmares, and visions. Britten creates a distinct sound-world for each, informed by the poetry itself. The first setting, Charles Cotton's crepuscular evocation of the sunset, uses the poetic images of the shape-shifting twilight as material for a dialogue between the tenor and horn. The second song, "Nocturne" is a setting of Tennyson's Ireland-inspired lyric "The splendour falls on Castle walls" and features an infectious recurring exchange between the tenor and horn, evoking the echoes resounding from the majestic mountainous setting. Britten was a prodigy, a "natural," and this is nowhere more evident than in the architecturally balanced form of his major works. The central movements of the Serenade are linked by a shared motive, first heard in the horn in the "Elegy" (Blake's "The sick rose) and taken up by the tenor in the anonymous "Dirge." The Elegy features the most extended horn solo, and exploits the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument (Britten praised the original dedicatee, Dennis Brain, as having the facility of a clarinettist). The Blake poem, ostensibly about the "invisible worm" that poisons the Rose from the inside out, is a metaphor for any kind of sickness (syphilis or cancer ) sin, and/or evil itself--whether the specter of fascism, totalitarianism, or the "benign" evil of conformity or repression. Interestingly, Britten uses a 12-tone row for the "invisible worm" in the horn melody. Never a disciple of Schoenberg's school, he did admire Alban Berg's more lyrical use of 12-tone techniques, and the grafting of the chromatic tone-row within tonal contexts. The Elegy's intensity is matched by the relentless toll of the Dirge, which assigns the tenor 8 consecutive verses of morality-play inspired verse in excruciating tessiturra. While Britten downplayed the importance of the Serenade in his letters ("nothing important, but quite pleasant, I'd like to think") participants on both sides of the stage are apt to take a different view from the central movements. The Dirge is relieved by the exquisite setting of Ben Jonson's paean to Diana, goddess of the moon, in the "Hymn." The horn takes off and the tenor hopes to keep up in this exemplary setting of Britten's mastery of yet another form, the scherzo. Following the "excellently bright" song to the moon, the horn exits to prepare for the offstage epilogue, and the tenor intones Keats haunting sonnet to sleep "O soft embalmer of the still midnight." Britten's mastery of vocal shading, string scoring, liquid harmonies and dramatic shape--encapsulated in a single movement--is nowhere on better display than here.
Immediately following the 2 memorable performances of the Britten (on 2/14 & 2/15), I headed up to NYC for a concert version of Luigi Dallapiccola's first opera, the one-act version of Antoine Saint-Exupery's (The Little Prince) novel, "Night Flight." Dallapiccola (1904-1975) is the greatest Italian composer of the 20th century, and one of the great voices of social conscience--"music of commitment" was his own term for his works. A victim of racial and political prejudice as a youth in the first world war, he was acutely sensitive to the precarious position of the individual in a totalitarian regime. His wife, Laura, was Jewish, and Mussolini's race laws forced the couple into hiding in the mid-30's, just as Dallapiccola was finding his voice.
Like Britten, he admired Berg and along with the Austrian composer, is the greatest exponent of lyrical melody within dodecaphony (12-tone, fully chromatic, atonal music, in a nut-shell). The opening theme of 'Volo di Notte' is a cantabile (singing) 12-tone row for a solo viola over a luminous series of B-major triads. The theme is associated with light and the stars, and returns near the end of the opera when the lost pilot is flying over the sea, ascending to the stars (and his imminent death).
The story is ostensibly about the "night flights" in South America and across the Atlantic to Europe just as WWII was clouding that continent. The pilot, Fabien, is lost as storms surround his flight, the operators on the ground are powerless to help, and the imperious commander, Riviere, is weighed down by his insistence on continuing the night flights, even as he loses one of his pilots. Like much great art, Volo di Notte works on several levels. Dallapiccola was impressed by the figure of Riviere--a man of great will power, vision, and strength, who is looking to the future, and balancing the responsibilities of the tasks (and lives) under his command. Riviere is also a complex and difficult character, who appears implacable in the face of his pilot's fate, is quick to put his subordinates in their places, eschews intimacy and love, and even the semblance of interpersonal relationships. I have the privilege of portraying the Radio-telegrapher who communicates the status of the strengthening storms (an obvious metaphor for 1937). Fascinatingly, in the Saint-Exupery novel, the storms are likened to a "worm in fruit...ripe to rottenness" --a Borgesian reference to Blake's elegy, and another (if unconscious) link between these two great 20th century composers.
About 2/3'rd of the way through the opera (the "vanishing point"--follow Borgesian trail to previous entry on Roberto Bolaño, inquiring readers) the Radio-telegrapher finally makes contact with Fabien, and from that point until the pilot's disappearance, the telegrapher assumes the voice and character of the pilot, in a music that is as violent as the storms and as transcendent as an outer-body experience of soaring to the stars. This great scene ends with Fabien's beatific vision of the stars, accompanied by the original theme (this time sung wordless by a soprano). Dallapiccola uses a wide range of declamatory techniques (again, indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, but wholly original) and calls for 4 different types of declamation: spoken text without pitch or specific rhythm, spoken text with assigned rhythmic values, a rhythmic declamation that is "as if without sound" and a Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang ("speak-singing") that is rhythmic and approximates pitch somewhere between speech and song. All of these techniques are used independently and in combination in this moving scene.
Dallapiccola would go on to write his two greatest works immediately following 'Volo di Notte.' Following Mussolini's tightening of the political reins, the composer realized "only by means of music would I be able to express my indignation" and wrote a set of choral pieces called "Canti di prigionia" (Songs of prisoners) and his greatest one-act opera, "Il Prigionero" (the Prisoner). Both involve specific characters and stories universalized by Dallapiccola's assimilation of dramatic form and musical technique. One of those techniques is to combine the cantabile-informed 12-tone rows with hints of gregorian chant (the Dies Irae--day of judgment), a technique that serves the dual purpose of grounding the music tonally & aurally, yet at a deeper level signifies the multi-layered, Borgesian aspect of art that transforms the particular into the universal. His music is difficult (and fitting for its subject matter), as relevant as ever, and representative of what great music of commitment can be.
Last weekend I had the privilege of performing Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the fabulous hornist, Joe Levinsky, and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, led by one of the country's outstanding conductor's, Elizabeth Schulze. The Maryland Symphony was founded over a quarter of a century ago by the British conductor and horn player, Barry Tuckwell. Fitting that Tuckwell was a champion of the Serenade, and is the soloist in one of the definitive recordings of the work, which also features its other creators: Britten himself is the conductor, and the tenor is his partner & collaborator, Peter Pears.
In an earlier post, I wrote about Music and Social Conscience--inspired by the conflation of January's historic Inauguration, concerts I was preparing to conduct and programs I was preparing to propose--and referenced Britten and his output. His life and music are themes to which I regularly return: besides being the greatest composer of the English language and one of the giants of 20th c. music, he was the source of my DMA dissertation, and the raison-d'etre behind much of my work in the UK, and is simply one of my favorite composers. I find Britten's music to be more relevant now than ever, and all of these signifiers inform the fact that the Virginia Chorale will be devoting a portion of each of our next five seasons to surveying Britten's choral works in our Britten Project, culminating in a centennial concert for his birthday in 2013, which just happens to be the name day of the Patron Saint of Music, St. Cecilia (Nov 22).
Anyway, Britten's Serenade is the quintessential example of this composer's gift for creating a song-cycle from a poetic anthology. Britten is unique among vocal composers in amassing a body of song-cycles both on individual poets (Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Hardy, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Blake, et al) and on original "librettos" of anthologized poets (three of his five orchestral song-cycles, Our Hunting Fathers, Serenade, and Nocturne, use this device of multi-voiced lyrics as their source).
One of the most dog-eared books in my own collection is "Britten's Poets: An anthology of the poems he set to music." It is nearly 400 pages of nothing but the poems themselves. One of the indices lists the poets Britten set, and it includes nearly 100 different poets in a half-dozen different languages. I should also add that Pears was Britten's literary equal, if not the more well-read of the two, and his assistance in choosing and ordering the poetic sequences has been under-appreciated.
Britten finished the Serenade, op. 31, in the spring of 1943, before he turned 30. It was his first major opus to be premiered following his and Pears' return to the UK from self-imposed, conscientious-objector exile in the US. His status as a C.O. affected his life on several levels (he had to appeal to the tribunal, and was granted his exempt status only after a second appearance; his friend and colleague, the composer Michael Tippett, served time when his application for C.O. status was rejected). It also deepened his lifelong commitment to pacifism & non-violence, and furthered the conviction that the creative artist contribute to society.
At the time, Britten was just beginning work on his first opera, Peter Grimes, whose success would establish his fame and further his reputation as the leading composer of his generation. Britten and Pears both identified with Grimes' themes of isolation, outcast, and exile--as artists, as conscientious objectors, and as homosexual men. These themes--also incarnate as innocence and experience, youth and age, virtue and corruption, individual and the people--would populate his operas and infuse his song cycles for the remaining three decades of his astounding career.
The Serenade is framed by a prologue and epilogue with the horn playing natural harmonics, recalling the (innocent?) days when the instrument was associated with hunting calls. In between, 6 poems (spanning several centuries of British verse) take up nocturnal themes from dusk and twilight to dreams, nightmares, and visions. Britten creates a distinct sound-world for each, informed by the poetry itself. The first setting, Charles Cotton's crepuscular evocation of the sunset, uses the poetic images of the shape-shifting twilight as material for a dialogue between the tenor and horn. The second song, "Nocturne" is a setting of Tennyson's Ireland-inspired lyric "The splendour falls on Castle walls" and features an infectious recurring exchange between the tenor and horn, evoking the echoes resounding from the majestic mountainous setting. Britten was a prodigy, a "natural," and this is nowhere more evident than in the architecturally balanced form of his major works. The central movements of the Serenade are linked by a shared motive, first heard in the horn in the "Elegy" (Blake's "The sick rose) and taken up by the tenor in the anonymous "Dirge." The Elegy features the most extended horn solo, and exploits the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument (Britten praised the original dedicatee, Dennis Brain, as having the facility of a clarinettist). The Blake poem, ostensibly about the "invisible worm" that poisons the Rose from the inside out, is a metaphor for any kind of sickness (syphilis or cancer ) sin, and/or evil itself--whether the specter of fascism, totalitarianism, or the "benign" evil of conformity or repression. Interestingly, Britten uses a 12-tone row for the "invisible worm" in the horn melody. Never a disciple of Schoenberg's school, he did admire Alban Berg's more lyrical use of 12-tone techniques, and the grafting of the chromatic tone-row within tonal contexts. The Elegy's intensity is matched by the relentless toll of the Dirge, which assigns the tenor 8 consecutive verses of morality-play inspired verse in excruciating tessiturra. While Britten downplayed the importance of the Serenade in his letters ("nothing important, but quite pleasant, I'd like to think") participants on both sides of the stage are apt to take a different view from the central movements. The Dirge is relieved by the exquisite setting of Ben Jonson's paean to Diana, goddess of the moon, in the "Hymn." The horn takes off and the tenor hopes to keep up in this exemplary setting of Britten's mastery of yet another form, the scherzo. Following the "excellently bright" song to the moon, the horn exits to prepare for the offstage epilogue, and the tenor intones Keats haunting sonnet to sleep "O soft embalmer of the still midnight." Britten's mastery of vocal shading, string scoring, liquid harmonies and dramatic shape--encapsulated in a single movement--is nowhere on better display than here.
Immediately following the 2 memorable performances of the Britten (on 2/14 & 2/15), I headed up to NYC for a concert version of Luigi Dallapiccola's first opera, the one-act version of Antoine Saint-Exupery's (The Little Prince) novel, "Night Flight." Dallapiccola (1904-1975) is the greatest Italian composer of the 20th century, and one of the great voices of social conscience--"music of commitment" was his own term for his works. A victim of racial and political prejudice as a youth in the first world war, he was acutely sensitive to the precarious position of the individual in a totalitarian regime. His wife, Laura, was Jewish, and Mussolini's race laws forced the couple into hiding in the mid-30's, just as Dallapiccola was finding his voice.
Like Britten, he admired Berg and along with the Austrian composer, is the greatest exponent of lyrical melody within dodecaphony (12-tone, fully chromatic, atonal music, in a nut-shell). The opening theme of 'Volo di Notte' is a cantabile (singing) 12-tone row for a solo viola over a luminous series of B-major triads. The theme is associated with light and the stars, and returns near the end of the opera when the lost pilot is flying over the sea, ascending to the stars (and his imminent death).
The story is ostensibly about the "night flights" in South America and across the Atlantic to Europe just as WWII was clouding that continent. The pilot, Fabien, is lost as storms surround his flight, the operators on the ground are powerless to help, and the imperious commander, Riviere, is weighed down by his insistence on continuing the night flights, even as he loses one of his pilots. Like much great art, Volo di Notte works on several levels. Dallapiccola was impressed by the figure of Riviere--a man of great will power, vision, and strength, who is looking to the future, and balancing the responsibilities of the tasks (and lives) under his command. Riviere is also a complex and difficult character, who appears implacable in the face of his pilot's fate, is quick to put his subordinates in their places, eschews intimacy and love, and even the semblance of interpersonal relationships. I have the privilege of portraying the Radio-telegrapher who communicates the status of the strengthening storms (an obvious metaphor for 1937). Fascinatingly, in the Saint-Exupery novel, the storms are likened to a "worm in fruit...ripe to rottenness" --a Borgesian reference to Blake's elegy, and another (if unconscious) link between these two great 20th century composers.
About 2/3'rd of the way through the opera (the "vanishing point"--follow Borgesian trail to previous entry on Roberto Bolaño, inquiring readers) the Radio-telegrapher finally makes contact with Fabien, and from that point until the pilot's disappearance, the telegrapher assumes the voice and character of the pilot, in a music that is as violent as the storms and as transcendent as an outer-body experience of soaring to the stars. This great scene ends with Fabien's beatific vision of the stars, accompanied by the original theme (this time sung wordless by a soprano). Dallapiccola uses a wide range of declamatory techniques (again, indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, but wholly original) and calls for 4 different types of declamation: spoken text without pitch or specific rhythm, spoken text with assigned rhythmic values, a rhythmic declamation that is "as if without sound" and a Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang ("speak-singing") that is rhythmic and approximates pitch somewhere between speech and song. All of these techniques are used independently and in combination in this moving scene.
Dallapiccola would go on to write his two greatest works immediately following 'Volo di Notte.' Following Mussolini's tightening of the political reins, the composer realized "only by means of music would I be able to express my indignation" and wrote a set of choral pieces called "Canti di prigionia" (Songs of prisoners) and his greatest one-act opera, "Il Prigionero" (the Prisoner). Both involve specific characters and stories universalized by Dallapiccola's assimilation of dramatic form and musical technique. One of those techniques is to combine the cantabile-informed 12-tone rows with hints of gregorian chant (the Dies Irae--day of judgment), a technique that serves the dual purpose of grounding the music tonally & aurally, yet at a deeper level signifies the multi-layered, Borgesian aspect of art that transforms the particular into the universal. His music is difficult (and fitting for its subject matter), as relevant as ever, and representative of what great music of commitment can be.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Michelangelo, Schiller, Rilke & humanist elegies
Johannes Brahms' choral-orchestral masterwork is Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem). He wrote several other choral "tone-poems"--single movement major works for choir & orchestra--that have not found their rightful place in the repertoire. Three of these works are choral settings of great German Romantics: Goethe's Gesang des Parzens (Song of the Fates), Hölderlin's Shicksalslied (Song of Destiny) and Schiller's Nänie (Elegy). (The most famous example is Brahms' Alto Rhapsody, an extended scena for alto & male chorus on an excerpt from Goethe's poem "Harzreise im Winter"). Telling that the three choral tone-poems take up the humanist thread of memory and elegy so exquisitely woven in the Requiem.
As the singers of the Virginia Chorale, our fabulous pianist, Charles Woodward, and I were rehearsing Nänie today (for our upcoming Romantic Celebration concerts Feb 21-22) I was struck by a particular manifestation of that humanist thread of elegy. Brahms wrote Nänie as a tribute to his friend, the painter, Anselm Feuerbach. Schiller's poem is a dense web of mythological allusions, lamenting the tragedy of life cut short, the double-edged sword of martyrdom, and the transience of mortal life itself. Brahms' setting, true to form, seizes on the salient universal/humanist qualities of the Greek references (Orpheus and Eurydice, Adonis & Aphrodite, Achilles & Thetis) and offers us a splendidly-faceted gem.
Schiller's poem resembles a sonnet, and following four couplets which depict the Grecian heros and the mothers, lovers, and deities who lament their passing, there is a "vanishing point" as the final quartet (that is, the last four lines of the poem) begins. Following music inspired by the poem's coupling of narrative & dramatic images, Brahms turns inward and sets the text "Dass das Schöne vergeht, dass das Vollkommene stirbt (that beauty must pass away, that the perfect must die) with particular poignancy and intimacy, preparing the way for the affecting coda and close of this marvelous, unjustly neglected masterwork.
The intimacy with which Brahms sets the above line brought to mind one of Benjamin Britten's most affecting songs. Britten's first mature song cycle is the 7 Sonnets of Michelangelo, and the first written expressly for his collaborator and partner, Peter Pears. The final song of the engaging set of sonnets is an elegy, "Spirto ben nato." The final couplet of this sonnet (for the artist's lover, Tommaso Cavalieri), inspired one of the first of Britten's many memorable cadences:
What law or earthly government, what cruelty now or to come,
Could forbid Death to spare such a beautiful face?
The sonnet says in words what Michelangelo's sculptures evoke. Through artistic genius, a human subject is eulogized and immortalized. Grief, death, and loss are given voice, given shape and form, and universalized through artistic inspiration.
Rilke's famous sonnet on the "Archaic torso of Apollo" is also (and always) relevant. In addition to the classical subject (the Greek god of the Sun, and father of Orpheus), Rilke shares with Michelangelo, Schiller, Britten & Brahms an inspired humanism that infuses a particular subject with universal significance. All of these examples work on the level of artistic metaphor, as the nature of artistic creation itself is a human effort to best mortality. Rilke addresses the audience with a memorable closing couplet that makes explicit the artist's (usually tacit) desire to move, inspire &/or affect:
For there is no place that does not see you:
You must change your life.
To me, all of these classical, humanist poems and pieces are mitigating agents of openness. They rise above the cool allure of atheism that rejects the balm of ontological security, while resisting the pull of triumphalist fundamentalism which often avoids engagement with the unpleasant facts on the ground to which such elegies give voice.
As the singers of the Virginia Chorale, our fabulous pianist, Charles Woodward, and I were rehearsing Nänie today (for our upcoming Romantic Celebration concerts Feb 21-22) I was struck by a particular manifestation of that humanist thread of elegy. Brahms wrote Nänie as a tribute to his friend, the painter, Anselm Feuerbach. Schiller's poem is a dense web of mythological allusions, lamenting the tragedy of life cut short, the double-edged sword of martyrdom, and the transience of mortal life itself. Brahms' setting, true to form, seizes on the salient universal/humanist qualities of the Greek references (Orpheus and Eurydice, Adonis & Aphrodite, Achilles & Thetis) and offers us a splendidly-faceted gem.
Schiller's poem resembles a sonnet, and following four couplets which depict the Grecian heros and the mothers, lovers, and deities who lament their passing, there is a "vanishing point" as the final quartet (that is, the last four lines of the poem) begins. Following music inspired by the poem's coupling of narrative & dramatic images, Brahms turns inward and sets the text "Dass das Schöne vergeht, dass das Vollkommene stirbt (that beauty must pass away, that the perfect must die) with particular poignancy and intimacy, preparing the way for the affecting coda and close of this marvelous, unjustly neglected masterwork.
The intimacy with which Brahms sets the above line brought to mind one of Benjamin Britten's most affecting songs. Britten's first mature song cycle is the 7 Sonnets of Michelangelo, and the first written expressly for his collaborator and partner, Peter Pears. The final song of the engaging set of sonnets is an elegy, "Spirto ben nato." The final couplet of this sonnet (for the artist's lover, Tommaso Cavalieri), inspired one of the first of Britten's many memorable cadences:
What law or earthly government, what cruelty now or to come,
Could forbid Death to spare such a beautiful face?
The sonnet says in words what Michelangelo's sculptures evoke. Through artistic genius, a human subject is eulogized and immortalized. Grief, death, and loss are given voice, given shape and form, and universalized through artistic inspiration.
Rilke's famous sonnet on the "Archaic torso of Apollo" is also (and always) relevant. In addition to the classical subject (the Greek god of the Sun, and father of Orpheus), Rilke shares with Michelangelo, Schiller, Britten & Brahms an inspired humanism that infuses a particular subject with universal significance. All of these examples work on the level of artistic metaphor, as the nature of artistic creation itself is a human effort to best mortality. Rilke addresses the audience with a memorable closing couplet that makes explicit the artist's (usually tacit) desire to move, inspire &/or affect:
For there is no place that does not see you:
You must change your life.
To me, all of these classical, humanist poems and pieces are mitigating agents of openness. They rise above the cool allure of atheism that rejects the balm of ontological security, while resisting the pull of triumphalist fundamentalism which often avoids engagement with the unpleasant facts on the ground to which such elegies give voice.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
VC Program Notes: A Romantic Celebration
Below are my program notes for the Virginia Chorale's upcoming concert of Romantic choral music.
The 19th century is arguably the most beloved period in Western music history, as the enduring popularity of Romantic composers from every corner of Europe attests. Our first program of 2009 is a mid-Winter toast to this grand tradition . It is also a tribute to my predecessor, Robert Shoup, whose first concert as the Virginia Chorale’s second music director was devoted to music from this rich epoch.
The period is notable for many reasons. With the revolutionary, “heroic” style of Beethoven in the early years of the century, the orchestra emerged as one of the most important vehicles for substantive music via the still developing genre of the symphony. The important forms of the preceding Classical period canonized by Haydn and Mozart—the symphony, solo concerto, & string quartet—were given programmatic weight and depth by Beethoven and his successors, like Brahms, Bruckner & Mahler. At the other end of this colorful spectrum, composers like Schubert & Schumann concentrated as much creative energy into miniature forms like the art song, and intimate “musical moments” for solo piano. The rise of choral societies—both amateur and professional—championed by the likes of Mendelssohn and Brahms, laid the groundwork for organizations like ours. Concurrently, 19th century opera flowered in Italy with the triumvirate of composers—Bellini, Donizetti & Rossini—writing virtuoso vocal music in the style we call Bel Canto (literally “Beautiful Singing”). Giuseppe Verdi inherited this mantle. As Beethoven did with the symphony & string quartet, Verdi interwove form and content with Shakespearian dexterity to create a body of musical dramas unparalleled in the history of Italian opera. Space limitations prevent me from further developing these threads of analysis, thus we will leave Berlioz, Wagner, Russia, and the English musical Renaissance for another program (the latter is here represented by Stanford’s exquisite motet, Beati quorum via).
The first half of the program is a novel twist on the most traditional of sacred music forms, the Mass. Our “eclectic and romantic” mass is framed by sublime movements from Joseph Rheinberger. Like Dietrich Buxtehude two centuries earlier, Rheinberger is an unjustly neglected composer known primarily for his organ music. His Mass for double choir in E-flat is a masterwork indebted to the poly-choral style of the Venetian baroque. Dedicated to Pope Leo XIII, its style places Rheinberger in opposition to the conservative Cecilian movement, which sought to restore supposed Renaissance-style “purity” to liturgical music and rejected the expressive, subjective mien of Romanticism. Even so, Rheinberger (like Brahms) was not a musical pioneer aligned with Wagner and the so-called New German School, and his idiosyncratic style resists pat classification. Another idiosyncratic composer whose output refuses simple categorization is Anton Bruckner. A self-effacing, diminutive, late-blooming, Wagnerian disciple who was a master organ improvisationalist, Bruckner is known for his massive, Teutonic symphonies and his Cecilian-inspired motets. "Os Justi" is a gem of the latter genre, inspired by the Cecilian movement’s interest in Renaissance polyphony but highly expressive and individual and therefore not in line with the movements’ reforms. Following the successes of Elgar and Holst, Charles Villiers Stanford was among the generation of English composers indebted to Wagner and German romanticism, and thus one of several sparks responsible for the “English Musical Renaissance. “ So-called because of the dearth of successful English composers in the 18th and early 19th century, this romantic Renaissance in Britain produced a vast body of music for the concert hall and the cathedral. "Beati quorum via" is an exquisite 6-part motet displaying Stanford’s characteristic melding of a continental romantic idiom to a refined Anglican sensibility.
While not liturgical, the trio of opera choruses that form the heart of our eclectic Mass function as a Credo. Verdi’s opera choruses have been beloved of singers and audiences since their composition. In the case of these two popular examples from "Macbeth" and "Nabucco," the chorus is pivotal—functioning at both the dramatic and symbolic levels, in a counterpoint of meaning and significance. Both the Chorus of Scottish refugees and the Chorus of Hebrew slaves comment on the action like a Greek chorus. Both choruses speak for their collective peoples, and thus represent the dramatic conflict of their respective narratives, even as they transcend the specificity inherent in the unified drama. Verdi is the Shakespeare of opera for this singular gift: humanizing the particular into the universal. In between Verdi’s inspired choruses we insert the miniature “cantata” sung offstage in Act II of "Tosca." (I wrote a blog about operas at the movies--Tosca and Die Walküre--last month, for enquiring minds). The earnest prayer of the chorus accompanying the eponymous soprano is rarely heard, such as it is, subjugated to the action onstage where the villain Scarpia interrogates and prepares to torture the artist Cavaradossi. We beg the indulgence of the opera purists among us, and hope the airing of this chorus will illuminate a new angle on it.
We conclude our multivoiced Mass with 2 double-chorus settings of the Sanctus. Mendelssohn’s German version, "Heilig," is a miniature treasure from this beloved composer whose bicentennial we celebrate in 2009. With characteristically deft voice leading and harmonic control, the 8 voices enter independently and sequentially, and the texture varies between antiphonal exchange and homophonic statement. Rheinberger’s "Sanctus" is an apt companion to Mendelssohn’s version. It also features descending sequential writing of melodic and harmonic efficacy, here in voice pairs. As in the Kyrie, the fluent antiphonal dialogue unabashedly betrays its debt to the opulent textures of the Venetian Baroque.
"Der Gang zum Liebchen" is responsible for my enduring love affair with the music of Johannes Brahms, and one of the most intimately shaped examples from the dozen vocal quartets the composer wrote throughout his prolific career. Incidentally, I learned this chorus as a member of the 1988 Virginia Honors Choir, which performed at a conference that also featured music of Brahms by the Virginia Pro Musica, under the direction of Donald McCullough. "O schöne Nacht" and "An die Heimat" are also among Brahms’ greatest miniatures (the oxymoron is deliberate) and as such, represent the essence of romanticism distilled. Love and longing, the artist as wanderer and sojourner, the allure and mystery of night—moon, stars and heavens—and the search for meaning are all central components to “Der Romantik.” This is the “stuff” of poetry, indeed the sentiments that engendered some of the most enduring art we have.
Nänie is among a handful of major choral-orchestral works still underappreciated by a composer whose immortality could stand on the stature of his greatest choral masterwork alone, the German Requiem. Composed in 1881 in memory of his friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach, "Nänie" (Song of Lament) is a choral tone poem evoking the mythological references central to Schiller’s poem. Along with Goethe, Schiller (most known to English-speaking audiences for a particular “Ode to Joy” immortalized in Beethoven’s 9th) played a vital role in reviving interest in the Greek myths and in the ancient world in general. Schiller’s readers would have registered the mythological references in the poem that serve as metaphors for lament over mortality. I am struck by the irony that the translation in the classic modern recording (by Robert Shaw) contains 5 footnotes explaining the references to: 1. Hades/Pluto, 2. Orpheus & Eurydice, 3. Adonis, 4. Achilles, and 5. Nereus. The poem laments that neither human supplication nor divine intervention can preempt death. The first reference is the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice. When his beloved died, Orpheus charmed the underworld with his beautiful music and persuaded Pluto to return Eurydice to life. The god set the condition that Orpheus proceed & not look back, but Apollo’s son doubted, and Eurydice vanished. Adonis was a mortal beloved by the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who could not save him from death when he was killed by the jealous god of war, Ares/Mars, who took the form of a wild boar. Achilles was a Grecian hero, the son of Peleus and the sea-nymph, Thetis, herself daughter of the sea-god, Nereus. Achilles was killed at the gates of Troy with an arrow shot through his heel, by Paris, son of King Priam. While a poem with so many references to violent deaths in epic tales might inspire music of a martial character, Brahms emphasizes the lamentations in music of lyric sweep and pathos. Fittingly, for a work memorializing an artist, Brahms laments the loss of beauty (ie: art) and links Feuerbach to the most artistic of the mythological characters, Orpheus. This sets the stage for the other metaphors, and Brahms finds musical character for each reference, most strikingly for Achilles’ mother, Thetis who “ascends from the sea” in vocal lines that rise in unison and resound in a soprano & tenor duet as the sea nymphs “raise the lament for the glorified son.” It is this image of glorious memory with which Brahms rounds off his evocation. Where Schiller’s lament ends with an image of all going “down to Orcus [the underworld] unsung” Brahms seizes the penultimate line of the poem as the inspiration for the work’s close. In a master -stroke return of the opening theme, this lyrical line also serves as a sublime coda (“to be even a song of lamentation in the mouth of the beloved is glorious”).
Following excerpts from Brahms’ rousing, Hungarian-influenced Zigeunerlieder (“Gypsy Songs”) we will close our Romantic program with another kind of sublime coda. "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" is one of the great songs of Gustav Mahler. Written at the turn of the 20th century, it is as a poignant essay on sublimation, transcendence through art, by a composer at the zenith of this remarkable period of music history.
The 19th century is arguably the most beloved period in Western music history, as the enduring popularity of Romantic composers from every corner of Europe attests. Our first program of 2009 is a mid-Winter toast to this grand tradition . It is also a tribute to my predecessor, Robert Shoup, whose first concert as the Virginia Chorale’s second music director was devoted to music from this rich epoch.
The period is notable for many reasons. With the revolutionary, “heroic” style of Beethoven in the early years of the century, the orchestra emerged as one of the most important vehicles for substantive music via the still developing genre of the symphony. The important forms of the preceding Classical period canonized by Haydn and Mozart—the symphony, solo concerto, & string quartet—were given programmatic weight and depth by Beethoven and his successors, like Brahms, Bruckner & Mahler. At the other end of this colorful spectrum, composers like Schubert & Schumann concentrated as much creative energy into miniature forms like the art song, and intimate “musical moments” for solo piano. The rise of choral societies—both amateur and professional—championed by the likes of Mendelssohn and Brahms, laid the groundwork for organizations like ours. Concurrently, 19th century opera flowered in Italy with the triumvirate of composers—Bellini, Donizetti & Rossini—writing virtuoso vocal music in the style we call Bel Canto (literally “Beautiful Singing”). Giuseppe Verdi inherited this mantle. As Beethoven did with the symphony & string quartet, Verdi interwove form and content with Shakespearian dexterity to create a body of musical dramas unparalleled in the history of Italian opera. Space limitations prevent me from further developing these threads of analysis, thus we will leave Berlioz, Wagner, Russia, and the English musical Renaissance for another program (the latter is here represented by Stanford’s exquisite motet, Beati quorum via).
The first half of the program is a novel twist on the most traditional of sacred music forms, the Mass. Our “eclectic and romantic” mass is framed by sublime movements from Joseph Rheinberger. Like Dietrich Buxtehude two centuries earlier, Rheinberger is an unjustly neglected composer known primarily for his organ music. His Mass for double choir in E-flat is a masterwork indebted to the poly-choral style of the Venetian baroque. Dedicated to Pope Leo XIII, its style places Rheinberger in opposition to the conservative Cecilian movement, which sought to restore supposed Renaissance-style “purity” to liturgical music and rejected the expressive, subjective mien of Romanticism. Even so, Rheinberger (like Brahms) was not a musical pioneer aligned with Wagner and the so-called New German School, and his idiosyncratic style resists pat classification. Another idiosyncratic composer whose output refuses simple categorization is Anton Bruckner. A self-effacing, diminutive, late-blooming, Wagnerian disciple who was a master organ improvisationalist, Bruckner is known for his massive, Teutonic symphonies and his Cecilian-inspired motets. "Os Justi" is a gem of the latter genre, inspired by the Cecilian movement’s interest in Renaissance polyphony but highly expressive and individual and therefore not in line with the movements’ reforms. Following the successes of Elgar and Holst, Charles Villiers Stanford was among the generation of English composers indebted to Wagner and German romanticism, and thus one of several sparks responsible for the “English Musical Renaissance. “ So-called because of the dearth of successful English composers in the 18th and early 19th century, this romantic Renaissance in Britain produced a vast body of music for the concert hall and the cathedral. "Beati quorum via" is an exquisite 6-part motet displaying Stanford’s characteristic melding of a continental romantic idiom to a refined Anglican sensibility.
While not liturgical, the trio of opera choruses that form the heart of our eclectic Mass function as a Credo. Verdi’s opera choruses have been beloved of singers and audiences since their composition. In the case of these two popular examples from "Macbeth" and "Nabucco," the chorus is pivotal—functioning at both the dramatic and symbolic levels, in a counterpoint of meaning and significance. Both the Chorus of Scottish refugees and the Chorus of Hebrew slaves comment on the action like a Greek chorus. Both choruses speak for their collective peoples, and thus represent the dramatic conflict of their respective narratives, even as they transcend the specificity inherent in the unified drama. Verdi is the Shakespeare of opera for this singular gift: humanizing the particular into the universal. In between Verdi’s inspired choruses we insert the miniature “cantata” sung offstage in Act II of "Tosca." (I wrote a blog about operas at the movies--Tosca and Die Walküre--last month, for enquiring minds). The earnest prayer of the chorus accompanying the eponymous soprano is rarely heard, such as it is, subjugated to the action onstage where the villain Scarpia interrogates and prepares to torture the artist Cavaradossi. We beg the indulgence of the opera purists among us, and hope the airing of this chorus will illuminate a new angle on it.
We conclude our multivoiced Mass with 2 double-chorus settings of the Sanctus. Mendelssohn’s German version, "Heilig," is a miniature treasure from this beloved composer whose bicentennial we celebrate in 2009. With characteristically deft voice leading and harmonic control, the 8 voices enter independently and sequentially, and the texture varies between antiphonal exchange and homophonic statement. Rheinberger’s "Sanctus" is an apt companion to Mendelssohn’s version. It also features descending sequential writing of melodic and harmonic efficacy, here in voice pairs. As in the Kyrie, the fluent antiphonal dialogue unabashedly betrays its debt to the opulent textures of the Venetian Baroque.
"Der Gang zum Liebchen" is responsible for my enduring love affair with the music of Johannes Brahms, and one of the most intimately shaped examples from the dozen vocal quartets the composer wrote throughout his prolific career. Incidentally, I learned this chorus as a member of the 1988 Virginia Honors Choir, which performed at a conference that also featured music of Brahms by the Virginia Pro Musica, under the direction of Donald McCullough. "O schöne Nacht" and "An die Heimat" are also among Brahms’ greatest miniatures (the oxymoron is deliberate) and as such, represent the essence of romanticism distilled. Love and longing, the artist as wanderer and sojourner, the allure and mystery of night—moon, stars and heavens—and the search for meaning are all central components to “Der Romantik.” This is the “stuff” of poetry, indeed the sentiments that engendered some of the most enduring art we have.
Nänie is among a handful of major choral-orchestral works still underappreciated by a composer whose immortality could stand on the stature of his greatest choral masterwork alone, the German Requiem. Composed in 1881 in memory of his friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach, "Nänie" (Song of Lament) is a choral tone poem evoking the mythological references central to Schiller’s poem. Along with Goethe, Schiller (most known to English-speaking audiences for a particular “Ode to Joy” immortalized in Beethoven’s 9th) played a vital role in reviving interest in the Greek myths and in the ancient world in general. Schiller’s readers would have registered the mythological references in the poem that serve as metaphors for lament over mortality. I am struck by the irony that the translation in the classic modern recording (by Robert Shaw) contains 5 footnotes explaining the references to: 1. Hades/Pluto, 2. Orpheus & Eurydice, 3. Adonis, 4. Achilles, and 5. Nereus. The poem laments that neither human supplication nor divine intervention can preempt death. The first reference is the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice. When his beloved died, Orpheus charmed the underworld with his beautiful music and persuaded Pluto to return Eurydice to life. The god set the condition that Orpheus proceed & not look back, but Apollo’s son doubted, and Eurydice vanished. Adonis was a mortal beloved by the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who could not save him from death when he was killed by the jealous god of war, Ares/Mars, who took the form of a wild boar. Achilles was a Grecian hero, the son of Peleus and the sea-nymph, Thetis, herself daughter of the sea-god, Nereus. Achilles was killed at the gates of Troy with an arrow shot through his heel, by Paris, son of King Priam. While a poem with so many references to violent deaths in epic tales might inspire music of a martial character, Brahms emphasizes the lamentations in music of lyric sweep and pathos. Fittingly, for a work memorializing an artist, Brahms laments the loss of beauty (ie: art) and links Feuerbach to the most artistic of the mythological characters, Orpheus. This sets the stage for the other metaphors, and Brahms finds musical character for each reference, most strikingly for Achilles’ mother, Thetis who “ascends from the sea” in vocal lines that rise in unison and resound in a soprano & tenor duet as the sea nymphs “raise the lament for the glorified son.” It is this image of glorious memory with which Brahms rounds off his evocation. Where Schiller’s lament ends with an image of all going “down to Orcus [the underworld] unsung” Brahms seizes the penultimate line of the poem as the inspiration for the work’s close. In a master -stroke return of the opening theme, this lyrical line also serves as a sublime coda (“to be even a song of lamentation in the mouth of the beloved is glorious”).
Following excerpts from Brahms’ rousing, Hungarian-influenced Zigeunerlieder (“Gypsy Songs”) we will close our Romantic program with another kind of sublime coda. "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" is one of the great songs of Gustav Mahler. Written at the turn of the 20th century, it is as a poignant essay on sublimation, transcendence through art, by a composer at the zenith of this remarkable period of music history.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
"...to adventure, art, and peace"--music & social conscience
As we prepare for the most significant presidential inauguration in recent memory, a fact made more resonant by the concurrent celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr Day, I find myself returning to what I call music of conscience--music that connects with historical issues, that raises awareness, that gives voice to the silenced, that remembers, that honors, that refuses to yield to the anesthetizing pull of the tides that would drown those voices. I have been working with our Young Singers Project singers on a challenging program of American Choral music called "How Can I keep from singing?" The title song of the program is a beloved Quaker hymn, and still a favorite in the Peace-church tradition (the protestant churches--Quaker, Amish, Brethren & Mennonite--that have been abolitionist and pacifist for centuries). The program also features settings of canonical American poets like Dickinson, Sandburg, and Frost, by Barber, Glass, and Thompson, respectively. In addition to other hymn settings by Alice Parker and Aaron Copland, the program's final sections are devoted to the spirituals of William Dawson and the music of our pre-eminent African-American composer, Adolphus Hailstork. One of Dolph's most beloved choral works is "A Carol for All Children." Setting an original poem, this "Carol" is a beautiful prayer resembling a lullaby, wishing love, joy, and peace for the children and the world they inhabit. We are also offering one of Hailstork's most gripping a capella works, "Crucifixion." Indebted to the traditions of the Black church, this work is a series of variations on the spiritual "He never said a mumblin' word" --a series that add up to an intense and moving, wholly original composition.
I had the pleasure and honor of hearing my colleague, Carl Haywood, director of choral activities at Norfolk State University, as guest organist at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday service at Christ and St Luke's Episcopal Church in Norfolk. Following "Lift every voice and Sing" Dr Haywood played a rousing set of variations on "We shall overcome." Following church, I listened again to Hailstork's moving elegy to Dr King, "Epitaph," watched the opening Inauguration events at the Lincoln memorial, marveled on the historic circle connecting Lincoln to King to Obama, and began to create a playlist called "Music of Conscience."
Joining the Hailstork elegy and the choral works mentioned above on my (personal, subjecive) playlist are (thus far) about 11 additional hours of challenging, engaging, sometimes difficult, always affecting music written to oppose injustice, oppression, violence and to honor the memory of martyrs like Dr King and those whose names most of us will never know.
Yesterday, the MET, a beloved cultural institution whose reputation does not rest on contemporary, consciousness-raising operas, broadcast one of the most topical new works in the classical music world, "Doctor Atomic." John Adams is one of the most important voices in music today, and this is in no small part because of his cutting-edge operas. Adams' early music was indebted to the minimalist music of composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. While traces of that concentrated, repetitive & hypnotic style remain, Adams' music is entirely his own, assimilating techniques of modernism with tradition into a style that sounds like, well, Adams. His first two operas tackled politically challenging topics, and his courage in dealing with complex, even controversial subjects hasn't dimmed. I think it is a telling symptom of our political pusillanimity where "engaged art" is concerned that his opera on the murder of a Jewish American by Palestinian terrorists, "The Death of Klinghoffer" has not received a full production in the US since its creation. It has been criticized for painting "sympathetic" portraits of terrorists. Never mind that both sides are given equal voice, nowhere more tellingly than in the respective "Chorus of Exiled Jews" and "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians." Adams, not initially a vocal composer, has found a groove for writing effective, dramatic music for both voices and chorus. Thus it is poetic justice, following the cancellation of a production of "Klinghoffer" shortly after 9/11 (political sensitivities), that he was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a 9/11 memorial piece. "On the Transmigration of Souls" won three Grammy's and has become one of several major works by this composer to vie for the canon of great 21st century scores. "Doctor Atomic" concerns the making of THE bomb, and centers on its creator, Robert Oppenheimer. The opera works on one level as a documentary narrative on the making and testing of the bomb, on another as a character study of Oppenheimer (and his circle), and on a metaphysical level as an existentialist meditation (but isn't that the subject/purpose of all art? To give/create/question meaning?)
Adams has written a dramatic oratorio called "El Niño" which is both a traditional Christmas story and a window into Latin American culture, including memorial tributes to victims of political and military crimes. The recording of the oratorio is especially memorable because of the singing of the late mezzo soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose distinguishing timbre, dramatic sense, and visceral engagement give a movingly human voice to the Spanish poems set in the oratorio.
Another distinct voice on the contemporary classical scene, and one even more beholden to Latin American "Liberation Theology" that connects faith to oppression and injustice (and therefore, to action and social justice) is the Scottish composer, James MacMillan. Both a personal and critical favorite, MacMillan's music combines a keen dramatic sense with elements of chant, the Anglican tradition, and indigenous music of his own country (Scottish laments: notated "cries" and "sighs" figure prominently). I have a disc that features two of his major choral scores, "The Seven Last Words" and the "Cantos Sagrados." The former is a haunting series of variations on Passion-tide texts that particularizes the drama of one of the holiest of Christian observances, Good Friday, while simultaneously universalizing the drama's subject of suffering, martyrdom, and collective grief. "Cantos Sagrados" is even more closely aligned with Liberation Theology's tenets of justice for the oppressed, and reinforces this by juxtaposing contemporary Latin American poems with the sacred liturgical texts. Both scores are challenging and demanding for listener and performer alike yet are immediate in their emotional & spiritual appeal. Like much great art, regardless of genre or subject, these works "work" on many levels, and are even more rewarding for the participant willing to invest in their worlds. The Virginia Chorale will include one of MacMillan's shorter works, "A Child's Prayer" in its Anniversary concerts April 18 & 19. This haunting, a capella communion hymn comes from the world of the Passion-tide "Seven Last Words" and is a memorial tribute to the victims of the Dunblane tragedy, one of the first instances of serial-killer gun violence in the UK (in this case, an elementary school in Scotland). Overtop a chordal foundation of steady, yet brooding harmonies, MacMillan writes a chant-like duet for two trebles, evoking the pure sound of children's voices. The choir takes up a typical MacMillan texture of imitative, Scottish-lament-inflected lines before the ethereal duet returns to close this moving elegy.
And I will close this rambling entry for now, but will return with more about the subject of this subject line, Benjamin Britten, and some of the great body of music written to commemorate "war...and the pity of war..."
I had the pleasure and honor of hearing my colleague, Carl Haywood, director of choral activities at Norfolk State University, as guest organist at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday service at Christ and St Luke's Episcopal Church in Norfolk. Following "Lift every voice and Sing" Dr Haywood played a rousing set of variations on "We shall overcome." Following church, I listened again to Hailstork's moving elegy to Dr King, "Epitaph," watched the opening Inauguration events at the Lincoln memorial, marveled on the historic circle connecting Lincoln to King to Obama, and began to create a playlist called "Music of Conscience."
Joining the Hailstork elegy and the choral works mentioned above on my (personal, subjecive) playlist are (thus far) about 11 additional hours of challenging, engaging, sometimes difficult, always affecting music written to oppose injustice, oppression, violence and to honor the memory of martyrs like Dr King and those whose names most of us will never know.
Yesterday, the MET, a beloved cultural institution whose reputation does not rest on contemporary, consciousness-raising operas, broadcast one of the most topical new works in the classical music world, "Doctor Atomic." John Adams is one of the most important voices in music today, and this is in no small part because of his cutting-edge operas. Adams' early music was indebted to the minimalist music of composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. While traces of that concentrated, repetitive & hypnotic style remain, Adams' music is entirely his own, assimilating techniques of modernism with tradition into a style that sounds like, well, Adams. His first two operas tackled politically challenging topics, and his courage in dealing with complex, even controversial subjects hasn't dimmed. I think it is a telling symptom of our political pusillanimity where "engaged art" is concerned that his opera on the murder of a Jewish American by Palestinian terrorists, "The Death of Klinghoffer" has not received a full production in the US since its creation. It has been criticized for painting "sympathetic" portraits of terrorists. Never mind that both sides are given equal voice, nowhere more tellingly than in the respective "Chorus of Exiled Jews" and "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians." Adams, not initially a vocal composer, has found a groove for writing effective, dramatic music for both voices and chorus. Thus it is poetic justice, following the cancellation of a production of "Klinghoffer" shortly after 9/11 (political sensitivities), that he was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a 9/11 memorial piece. "On the Transmigration of Souls" won three Grammy's and has become one of several major works by this composer to vie for the canon of great 21st century scores. "Doctor Atomic" concerns the making of THE bomb, and centers on its creator, Robert Oppenheimer. The opera works on one level as a documentary narrative on the making and testing of the bomb, on another as a character study of Oppenheimer (and his circle), and on a metaphysical level as an existentialist meditation (but isn't that the subject/purpose of all art? To give/create/question meaning?)
Adams has written a dramatic oratorio called "El Niño" which is both a traditional Christmas story and a window into Latin American culture, including memorial tributes to victims of political and military crimes. The recording of the oratorio is especially memorable because of the singing of the late mezzo soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose distinguishing timbre, dramatic sense, and visceral engagement give a movingly human voice to the Spanish poems set in the oratorio.
Another distinct voice on the contemporary classical scene, and one even more beholden to Latin American "Liberation Theology" that connects faith to oppression and injustice (and therefore, to action and social justice) is the Scottish composer, James MacMillan. Both a personal and critical favorite, MacMillan's music combines a keen dramatic sense with elements of chant, the Anglican tradition, and indigenous music of his own country (Scottish laments: notated "cries" and "sighs" figure prominently). I have a disc that features two of his major choral scores, "The Seven Last Words" and the "Cantos Sagrados." The former is a haunting series of variations on Passion-tide texts that particularizes the drama of one of the holiest of Christian observances, Good Friday, while simultaneously universalizing the drama's subject of suffering, martyrdom, and collective grief. "Cantos Sagrados" is even more closely aligned with Liberation Theology's tenets of justice for the oppressed, and reinforces this by juxtaposing contemporary Latin American poems with the sacred liturgical texts. Both scores are challenging and demanding for listener and performer alike yet are immediate in their emotional & spiritual appeal. Like much great art, regardless of genre or subject, these works "work" on many levels, and are even more rewarding for the participant willing to invest in their worlds. The Virginia Chorale will include one of MacMillan's shorter works, "A Child's Prayer" in its Anniversary concerts April 18 & 19. This haunting, a capella communion hymn comes from the world of the Passion-tide "Seven Last Words" and is a memorial tribute to the victims of the Dunblane tragedy, one of the first instances of serial-killer gun violence in the UK (in this case, an elementary school in Scotland). Overtop a chordal foundation of steady, yet brooding harmonies, MacMillan writes a chant-like duet for two trebles, evoking the pure sound of children's voices. The choir takes up a typical MacMillan texture of imitative, Scottish-lament-inflected lines before the ethereal duet returns to close this moving elegy.
And I will close this rambling entry for now, but will return with more about the subject of this subject line, Benjamin Britten, and some of the great body of music written to commemorate "war...and the pity of war..."
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Roberto Bolaño: "dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love"
I have just finished reading Roberto Bolaño's sprawling and concentrated, epic and contemporary novel, 2666. Over 1100 pages in the original Spanish, the new translation comes in at just under 900 pages, and is the remarkable swan-song of the Chilean poet, novelist, and provocateur who died in 2003 at age 50. Bolaño's biography and the astonishing output of fiction of his final decade have taken the English-speaking literary world by storm (6 novels, two of them epic in proportion, and a collection of short stories). An anti-establishment poet, jailed (like many of his contemporaries) after Pinochet's coup of 1973 (look it up, kids: on September 11, no less) he is just coming to our attention. The first of these epic novels, "The Savage Detectives" (1998) appeared in English in 2007 and was heralded as one of the best books of the year. It is a wild, 700-page ride chronicling the exploits of two "visceral realist" poets, autobiographical characters based on the author and his friend, comrade & co-conspirator, Mario Santiago. In real life Bolaño & Santiago called themselves "infra-realists," rejected the literary and political establishments, read avant-garde writers of all periods (from French Symbolism to Surrealism to Kafka to Sci-fi) and were the literary revolutionaries of their day, disrupting readings of writers they opposed (both for their literature and their politics). With the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, "2666" (itself one of the notable books of 2008) Bolaño has been established as THE major Latin American writer of his generation, and the most important voice to appear on that scene since the "Boom" (the generation of writers led by Gabriel Garcia Marquez--"Love in the time of Cholera" and "100 Years of Solitude" among other fables known for their "magic realism"--and one of many writers Bolaño & co. rejected).
His style is difficult to succinctly describe. He can be a fast-paced storyteller, writing a page-turner mystery or action tale. His voice is of his time, and its contemporaneousness is a distinguishing feature for so literary a writer. Indeed, the writing is a dense labyrinth of references and allusions, metaphors and allegories, and the more well-read one is, the more one gets the references to writers and artists, the artist's life, and the creative process itself. Yet one needn't be a Renaissance-type reader to get Bolaño: the writing is challenging and entertaining, provocative and ruminative, at times gritty, even raunchy (films of his novels would be rated R), and at turns utterly romantic and poetic. I can't remember having such a range of reactions to a work of fiction--Bolaño's writing spans the gamut of human emotions, responses and pursuits. It is alternatively laugh-out-loud funny, morally exacting, riveting as a thriller, and dense as graduate seminars on literary criticism or philosophy.
"The Savage Detectives" is laid out in three panoramic sections. The first and last relate the story of the two "visceral realist" poets and their exploits in Mexico: literary, political, social, sexual in a distinct Latin American voice that is beholden to the poet's own journey from Chile to Mexico to Spain in the late 20th century--a distinguishing characteristic from the voices of the Boom (more beholden to the 19th century European novel, to oversimplify to the point of insulting all the involved parties). The middle section of the novel is a dizzying collection of short stories told in first-person perspectives from an array of characters, locations and years (Mexico, France, Italy, Austria, and among others, Israel, from 1976 to 1996). The last section gives the novel its name, brings the narrative from the first section to some sort of conclusion, and eerily (if opaquely) foreshadows the "vanishing point" of his final novel, "2666."
That focal point is the Sonora Desert of Mexico, where in the real-world Cuidad Juarez, hundreds of women were murdered in still-unsolved cases (an expose of the crimes can be found on Amnesty International's site). Bolaño calls his border town Santa Teresa (there are allusions to Saints throughout the epic novel), and it is a common denominator in the 5 separate novellas that make up "2666"--a point of no return, a literal and symbolic cemetery. Another common denominator is the novel's mysterious protagonist, the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi. The name itself is a cryptic allusion to the Renaissance Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And in that connection lies one of the seeds of Bolaño's genius. Natasha Wimmer, translator of both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" talks of Bolaño's fascination with detectives. The intersection in these stories between the unravelling of mysteries and the life of artists (especially writers), and the author's knack for weaving between these worlds while concurrently entangling them in layers of significance is but one of Bolaño's distinguishing marks. I would like to think he'd be pleased that this reader's curiosity was piqued enough to investigate--like a cultural detective-- references from the novels' characters & settings.
The novel's first section "The Part about the Critics" introduces us to this writer, Archimboldi, who is a cult favorite among the European literary cognoscenti. The French critic, Pelletier, the Spaniard Espinoza, and the Italian Morini share an obsession with both their nobel-prize-hopeful-author, and his unlikely pre-eminent British advocate, Liz Norton. I don't know another writer who manages to weave a love rectangle around a dense tale of that most erotic of fields, literary criticism. Among the other cast of fascinating characters are a self-mutilating artist, critics from Serbia & Swabia, and a Pakistani taxi driver who figures in one of the most topical (& unsettling) episodes in this opening novella. The critics end their search for Archimboldi (so reclusive, none of his critics, biographers, or readers have ever met him) in Mexico where they meet the fascinatingly unbalanced professor Amalfitano. The second "Part about Amalfitano" chronicles this curious character, his estranged wife, their daughter, and the voice(s) inside his head. The third "Part about Fate" follows an African-American journalist as he faces his mother's untimely death, interviews a founder of the Black Panthers, and is then sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match after his Harlem magazine's sports-writer is murdered. While in Santa Teresa, among other adventures, he falls for Rosa Amalfitano, and hears more about the mysterious murders of women that have been happening around the maquiladora factories in this city on the Mexico-US border. The central section, "The Part about the Crimes" at nearly 300 pages alone, is the longest, densest and most difficult section of the novel. It chronicles, with documentary attention to detail, the murders of young women. I found myself asking, on more than one occasion, "what kind of man writes these kinds of gruesome details, page after page, of violent crimes committed against women?" The "Crimes" follow one another in pithy, biographical sketches of the victims, their families, the circumstances and details surrounding them, and the suspects (if any). These episodes are occasionally interrupted with other characters that connect us to a sense of time & place already established, even if the narrative connection is tenuous. One of the obvious answers to the question I posed about this section is the same answer to any question about dredging up the grisly details about any kind of "hate crime"--to tell the truth, to give voice to the silenced ("poetry exists so that the dead may speak" said a more poetic voice than mine), and to open eyes and ears to the ugliness many would just as soon ignore, avoid, or smooth-over. This dynamic is harrowingly paralleled in a central story from the final "Part about Archimboldi." This final novella tells the fascinating story of the making of Archimboldi. Without revealing plot details the curious reader will want to discover unassisted, Archimboldi is a soldier in the Nazi Army. While interned in an allied camp, he hears a first-hand story about one episode of atrocities that contributed to the Holocaust. The connection of the Polish town where those crimes occurred is not explicitly linked to Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi is headed as the novel ends. It doesn't have to be. Nor does it need tout itself as "historical fiction" to resonate so palpably with atrocities from the Holocaust to the "disappeared" of Latin America. This tour de force also works as a meditation on the mysterious makings of an artist, and the stories and lives--real and imagined--such an individual spins into being.
This enthralling, dizzying, disturbing, provocative, fascinating, entertaining, and allegorical tome might be the best epic novel of its time. The title of my essay on my new favorite author comes from one of his poems, titled "Dirty, Poorly Dressed." Featured in the Poetry magazine of last November, it is from his collection, "The Romantic Dogs" and ends with an autobiographical, artistic credo that applies to any and all of his works:
Only fever and poetry provoke visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these paths or these plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until at last my soul came upon my heart.
It was sick, it's true, but it was alive.
The cryptic title of his last literary testament, 2666, is alluded to in one of Bolaño's earlier novella's "Amulet" as his executor illustrates in 2666's afterword: "more like a cemetery...not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968...but a cemetery in 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
His style is difficult to succinctly describe. He can be a fast-paced storyteller, writing a page-turner mystery or action tale. His voice is of his time, and its contemporaneousness is a distinguishing feature for so literary a writer. Indeed, the writing is a dense labyrinth of references and allusions, metaphors and allegories, and the more well-read one is, the more one gets the references to writers and artists, the artist's life, and the creative process itself. Yet one needn't be a Renaissance-type reader to get Bolaño: the writing is challenging and entertaining, provocative and ruminative, at times gritty, even raunchy (films of his novels would be rated R), and at turns utterly romantic and poetic. I can't remember having such a range of reactions to a work of fiction--Bolaño's writing spans the gamut of human emotions, responses and pursuits. It is alternatively laugh-out-loud funny, morally exacting, riveting as a thriller, and dense as graduate seminars on literary criticism or philosophy.
"The Savage Detectives" is laid out in three panoramic sections. The first and last relate the story of the two "visceral realist" poets and their exploits in Mexico: literary, political, social, sexual in a distinct Latin American voice that is beholden to the poet's own journey from Chile to Mexico to Spain in the late 20th century--a distinguishing characteristic from the voices of the Boom (more beholden to the 19th century European novel, to oversimplify to the point of insulting all the involved parties). The middle section of the novel is a dizzying collection of short stories told in first-person perspectives from an array of characters, locations and years (Mexico, France, Italy, Austria, and among others, Israel, from 1976 to 1996). The last section gives the novel its name, brings the narrative from the first section to some sort of conclusion, and eerily (if opaquely) foreshadows the "vanishing point" of his final novel, "2666."
That focal point is the Sonora Desert of Mexico, where in the real-world Cuidad Juarez, hundreds of women were murdered in still-unsolved cases (an expose of the crimes can be found on Amnesty International's site). Bolaño calls his border town Santa Teresa (there are allusions to Saints throughout the epic novel), and it is a common denominator in the 5 separate novellas that make up "2666"--a point of no return, a literal and symbolic cemetery. Another common denominator is the novel's mysterious protagonist, the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi. The name itself is a cryptic allusion to the Renaissance Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And in that connection lies one of the seeds of Bolaño's genius. Natasha Wimmer, translator of both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" talks of Bolaño's fascination with detectives. The intersection in these stories between the unravelling of mysteries and the life of artists (especially writers), and the author's knack for weaving between these worlds while concurrently entangling them in layers of significance is but one of Bolaño's distinguishing marks. I would like to think he'd be pleased that this reader's curiosity was piqued enough to investigate--like a cultural detective-- references from the novels' characters & settings.
The novel's first section "The Part about the Critics" introduces us to this writer, Archimboldi, who is a cult favorite among the European literary cognoscenti. The French critic, Pelletier, the Spaniard Espinoza, and the Italian Morini share an obsession with both their nobel-prize-hopeful-author, and his unlikely pre-eminent British advocate, Liz Norton. I don't know another writer who manages to weave a love rectangle around a dense tale of that most erotic of fields, literary criticism. Among the other cast of fascinating characters are a self-mutilating artist, critics from Serbia & Swabia, and a Pakistani taxi driver who figures in one of the most topical (& unsettling) episodes in this opening novella. The critics end their search for Archimboldi (so reclusive, none of his critics, biographers, or readers have ever met him) in Mexico where they meet the fascinatingly unbalanced professor Amalfitano. The second "Part about Amalfitano" chronicles this curious character, his estranged wife, their daughter, and the voice(s) inside his head. The third "Part about Fate" follows an African-American journalist as he faces his mother's untimely death, interviews a founder of the Black Panthers, and is then sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match after his Harlem magazine's sports-writer is murdered. While in Santa Teresa, among other adventures, he falls for Rosa Amalfitano, and hears more about the mysterious murders of women that have been happening around the maquiladora factories in this city on the Mexico-US border. The central section, "The Part about the Crimes" at nearly 300 pages alone, is the longest, densest and most difficult section of the novel. It chronicles, with documentary attention to detail, the murders of young women. I found myself asking, on more than one occasion, "what kind of man writes these kinds of gruesome details, page after page, of violent crimes committed against women?" The "Crimes" follow one another in pithy, biographical sketches of the victims, their families, the circumstances and details surrounding them, and the suspects (if any). These episodes are occasionally interrupted with other characters that connect us to a sense of time & place already established, even if the narrative connection is tenuous. One of the obvious answers to the question I posed about this section is the same answer to any question about dredging up the grisly details about any kind of "hate crime"--to tell the truth, to give voice to the silenced ("poetry exists so that the dead may speak" said a more poetic voice than mine), and to open eyes and ears to the ugliness many would just as soon ignore, avoid, or smooth-over. This dynamic is harrowingly paralleled in a central story from the final "Part about Archimboldi." This final novella tells the fascinating story of the making of Archimboldi. Without revealing plot details the curious reader will want to discover unassisted, Archimboldi is a soldier in the Nazi Army. While interned in an allied camp, he hears a first-hand story about one episode of atrocities that contributed to the Holocaust. The connection of the Polish town where those crimes occurred is not explicitly linked to Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi is headed as the novel ends. It doesn't have to be. Nor does it need tout itself as "historical fiction" to resonate so palpably with atrocities from the Holocaust to the "disappeared" of Latin America. This tour de force also works as a meditation on the mysterious makings of an artist, and the stories and lives--real and imagined--such an individual spins into being.
This enthralling, dizzying, disturbing, provocative, fascinating, entertaining, and allegorical tome might be the best epic novel of its time. The title of my essay on my new favorite author comes from one of his poems, titled "Dirty, Poorly Dressed." Featured in the Poetry magazine of last November, it is from his collection, "The Romantic Dogs" and ends with an autobiographical, artistic credo that applies to any and all of his works:
Only fever and poetry provoke visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these paths or these plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until at last my soul came upon my heart.
It was sick, it's true, but it was alive.
The cryptic title of his last literary testament, 2666, is alluded to in one of Bolaño's earlier novella's "Amulet" as his executor illustrates in 2666's afterword: "more like a cemetery...not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968...but a cemetery in 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Opera at/in the movies: 2 Toscas & a Valkyrie
Movie-going opera buffs have had multiple opportunities to celebrate this season, the advent of the Met HD broadcasts notwithstanding. I waded patiently through Bryan Singers' latest film, "Valkyrie," starring Tom Cruise as the treasonous anti-Fascist Nazi officer, Colonel Stauffenberg. "Valkyrie" is named after the eponymous mythological warrior daughters of the gods, and is the name of Wagner's most famous opera, the second installment in his epic tetralogy, "The Ring of the Nibelungs." "The Ride of the Valkyries" is the most famous excerpt from the opera (and whether or not you recognize the title, you've heard the music--in films like "Apocalypse Now" and, with bemused apologies to Richard & family, cartoons like Bugs Bunny--"kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."). It appears in the film soundtrack as a clever plot device: Stauffenberg's children are playing a version of war while the old victrola plays the record. A bomb siren sounds, the family retreats to the basement, the record skips, and after a few unnerving explosions, the record skips to the "Ride of the Valkyries" which prompts an epiphany from Cruise's character and determines the (ultimately failed) plot to assassinate Hitler. "Valkyrie" is the name of the military plan to be implemented in the event of the Fuhrer's death or incapacitation, involving a reserve army assuming power and executing orders in the name of the regime. Stauffenberg and his circle of plotters rewrite Valkyrie surreptitiously as a crucial component to their risky & complicated plan. In one of the most memorable scenes in the film, Stauffenberg meets Hitler, hoping to obtain the Fuhrer's signature on the secretly revised plan. Hitler describes the Valkyries as the mythological warriors who mysteriously determine which soldiers deserve a noble death, and cryptically states that "one cannot understand National Socialism without understanding the Valkyries."
[Momentary digression for serendipity: As I am writing this, my local NPR station, WHRO, is playing "Ride of the Valkyries" and reminding listeners our esteemed regional orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, will be playing a program of the same name next weekend, featuring Lorin Maazel's arrangement of orchestral music from the "Ring" cycle. This is music that begs to be experienced live, so I hope Hampton Roads readers will go support the VSO and enjoy an evening of powerful music unlike any other.]
"Tosca" has played important roles in two very different films this season, "Quantum of Solace" and "Milk." The salient characteristic these two films share is how much more engaging they are than "Valkyrie." Both James Bond and Harvey Milk attend live performances of the opera, and that is where the comparison ends. The Bond film, unsurprisingly, requires no prior knowledge of the opera, though the dramatic irony inherent in the co-opted "Te Deum" scene adds a layer of meaning to the action film (the villainous baron, Scarpia, sings of his rapacious lust for the heroine in a blasphemous scene underpinned by the choir & choristers singing the most liturgical of canticles). "Tosca" serves as a foil to the movie's action, as Bond attempts to break into the plot of his arch-rival, having stolen an ear-bud the villains are using to secretly broker a deal during the opera. We half expect Daniel Craig to steal a costume and appear on stage to disrupt both opera and plot, but after some back-stage combat, Craig's deliciously smug Bond trumps the plotters and causes their abrupt exit as Act one of Tosca comes to a more eventful close than is usually the case.
"Tosca" appears throughout the excellent (if uneven) film "Milk," as the title character (brilliantly portrayed by Sean Penn, reaffirming his status as the greatest actor of his generation), listens to his favorite opera. One of the appealing aspects of Puccini's music is the immediacy of its emotional character (interestingly, this is the bane of his music's existence for his many critics...but that's another story!). Thus, one need not recognize "E lucevan le stelle," the hero's aria near the end of his life--and therefore his relationship with his lover, Tosca--to hear it as a lament. The plaintive clarinet solo which presages this most passionate of tenor scenas is obviously tragic. But to know that Cavaradossi is singing of the memory of the "sweet kisses, the languid caresses" while Scott Smith (beautifully portrayed by James Franco) leaves his lover, Harvey Milk, was enough to make this opera queen cry. I know I'm not the only opera buff who immediately recognized the plangent tone of Giuseppe di Steffano (who died in 2008), in one of opera's ultimate cult classic recordings, featuring the muse of the opera queens, Maria Callas. But I digress. I don't know Gus Van Sant's operatic pedigree, but based on this film, I am impressed.
The night before he dies, in the panoramic, multi-layered penultimate scene, Milk attends a performance of "Tosca" at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, one of the world's great opera houses. We see him take in the opera's final, shockingly violent moments, as Tosca realizes the "staged' execution of her lover was real, so rather than fleeing Rome with a safe passage to political asylum, Cavaradossi is dead, thus she flings herself from the parapet of the Castel Sant' Angelo, making her violent death the ultimate act in the opera. That "Milk" is as much political documentary as narrative film & biopic, therefore rendering suspense moot, in no way detracts from the affecting gravity of Milk's last night at the opera. This poignancy is reinforced by the final, slow-motion image from this exquisitely shot scene, where Milk's assassin, Dan White (an exceptional supporting turn by Josh Brolin) shoots him at point blank range, and the final image flashing before Milk's eyes are none other than the banners for Tosca, waving outside the Opera House, across the street from his City Hall office. I don't know if I've committed a sin in film criticism by divulging such details, but I know I would see the film again, for the above- mentioned scenes, for the relevance & importance of the film's subject, and the exceptional performances of James Franco and Sean Penn.
[Momentary digression for serendipity: As I am writing this, my local NPR station, WHRO, is playing "Ride of the Valkyries" and reminding listeners our esteemed regional orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, will be playing a program of the same name next weekend, featuring Lorin Maazel's arrangement of orchestral music from the "Ring" cycle. This is music that begs to be experienced live, so I hope Hampton Roads readers will go support the VSO and enjoy an evening of powerful music unlike any other.]
"Tosca" has played important roles in two very different films this season, "Quantum of Solace" and "Milk." The salient characteristic these two films share is how much more engaging they are than "Valkyrie." Both James Bond and Harvey Milk attend live performances of the opera, and that is where the comparison ends. The Bond film, unsurprisingly, requires no prior knowledge of the opera, though the dramatic irony inherent in the co-opted "Te Deum" scene adds a layer of meaning to the action film (the villainous baron, Scarpia, sings of his rapacious lust for the heroine in a blasphemous scene underpinned by the choir & choristers singing the most liturgical of canticles). "Tosca" serves as a foil to the movie's action, as Bond attempts to break into the plot of his arch-rival, having stolen an ear-bud the villains are using to secretly broker a deal during the opera. We half expect Daniel Craig to steal a costume and appear on stage to disrupt both opera and plot, but after some back-stage combat, Craig's deliciously smug Bond trumps the plotters and causes their abrupt exit as Act one of Tosca comes to a more eventful close than is usually the case.
"Tosca" appears throughout the excellent (if uneven) film "Milk," as the title character (brilliantly portrayed by Sean Penn, reaffirming his status as the greatest actor of his generation), listens to his favorite opera. One of the appealing aspects of Puccini's music is the immediacy of its emotional character (interestingly, this is the bane of his music's existence for his many critics...but that's another story!). Thus, one need not recognize "E lucevan le stelle," the hero's aria near the end of his life--and therefore his relationship with his lover, Tosca--to hear it as a lament. The plaintive clarinet solo which presages this most passionate of tenor scenas is obviously tragic. But to know that Cavaradossi is singing of the memory of the "sweet kisses, the languid caresses" while Scott Smith (beautifully portrayed by James Franco) leaves his lover, Harvey Milk, was enough to make this opera queen cry. I know I'm not the only opera buff who immediately recognized the plangent tone of Giuseppe di Steffano (who died in 2008), in one of opera's ultimate cult classic recordings, featuring the muse of the opera queens, Maria Callas. But I digress. I don't know Gus Van Sant's operatic pedigree, but based on this film, I am impressed.
The night before he dies, in the panoramic, multi-layered penultimate scene, Milk attends a performance of "Tosca" at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, one of the world's great opera houses. We see him take in the opera's final, shockingly violent moments, as Tosca realizes the "staged' execution of her lover was real, so rather than fleeing Rome with a safe passage to political asylum, Cavaradossi is dead, thus she flings herself from the parapet of the Castel Sant' Angelo, making her violent death the ultimate act in the opera. That "Milk" is as much political documentary as narrative film & biopic, therefore rendering suspense moot, in no way detracts from the affecting gravity of Milk's last night at the opera. This poignancy is reinforced by the final, slow-motion image from this exquisitely shot scene, where Milk's assassin, Dan White (an exceptional supporting turn by Josh Brolin) shoots him at point blank range, and the final image flashing before Milk's eyes are none other than the banners for Tosca, waving outside the Opera House, across the street from his City Hall office. I don't know if I've committed a sin in film criticism by divulging such details, but I know I would see the film again, for the above- mentioned scenes, for the relevance & importance of the film's subject, and the exceptional performances of James Franco and Sean Penn.
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