Teresa Stratas at 70

One of the great actresses of the operatic stage turns 70 in a couple of weeks.

Of course, CBC is going to pump the hell out of this milestone, as they should, bumping live opera to play, on the radio, the Salome film recording she did with Böhm. Wouldn't it be nice to broadcast it on CBC TV too?

One can dream...

Anyway, in a cheap attempt to divert attention away from all the bad news Austria is getting in the papers these days, I should note that ORF1, the Austrian public radio station has beaten we canucks to the punch with an entire program devoted to Teresa Stratas on their Apropos Oper program.

I would have loved to tell you this before it came on, but unfortunately, I'm liveblogging this one. So tune in if you can, right now, and if not, listen to CBC on the 24th.

O Soave Fanciulla

There is that time, when one is in their 20's, still drunk in the freshness of adulthood, when every thought seems hard like a diamond, and every passion seems inexhaustable and timeless...listen to this:

The first time I went to see La Boheme was in 1995. I was still a music student in Calgary, and utterly devoted to German opera. Wagner and Strauss and Mozart (I know) represented to me what opera was for, with most italian opera being high on style and low on substance.

So I walked out of the first act, and I ran into one of my music professors. He asked me what I thought, and I said something to the effect that Boheme was beautifully set but the story obvious and not terribly interesting.

My professor, a man whose walls in his home were covered in books and CDs and records, a man, to say the least, of great learning, a consumate scholar, a man with a reputation at the University for being too academic for those in music performance, you know, the real musicians, who just wanted to play, turns to me and says, "Some day you will watch that first act without the eyes of youth, and when you do, you will see what it is you cannot, a sentiment which only comes with age."

Nothing worse can be said to a 20 year old than that they are to young to understand something. To paraphrase Robert Lowell, this comment stuck like a fishbone in my consciouness. My age? How dare he? Me age? I was an adult for crying out loud! It said so on my driver's licence. I could buy beer.

But I forgot. Until 3 months ago, as I sat watching Bravo and the clip above came on. And I sat there, in my home, my kids upstairs, my wife sitting there next to me, and suddenly what he had said made sense. The question I then ask those of you who happen upon this is - do you?

Or if not that one, how about this one?



Perhaps it is that I had not loved like that before, or that I could not love like that yet, but I completely understand what my professor was telling me, and I now understand why Puccini, despite the dramatic flaccidity of his work, still beats out nearly everyone else. I understand why, to many, he is opera.

It is because no one before him ensnared so completely that first moment of true love.

Merry Christmas.

This Sounds About Right

The funniest thing is the way I expound all this to my hired servant, because when you're full of a thing, you can't stop talking about it, and you keep looking for some new angle from which to show how wonderful it is.

A quote by Goethe from The Perfect House, a book by the architect Witold Rybczynski on Andrea Palladio's country villas. Good light reading for the bus - I highly recommend it.

I have not read much Goethe. Instead, I have always spent more time with his morose walking companion, Louis van, who was really a Schiller man at heart.

Nevertheless, many of my blogging chums are talking about Goethe, so I thought I'd lazily toss my hat in the ring, given this quote appears to sum up nicely the kind of community I've elected to hang around in, and it appears in a breezily written book about a subject I know nearly nothing about.

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A quick note - BBC3's Early Music Show has an hour this week on Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni, better known as Franceso Cavalli, and his most famous opera, La Calisto. This has long been a favourite of mine, and it seems to me as though late 17th Centruy italian opera is really the only remaining patch of land unreclaimed by the major opera houses. Is it too much to ask the COC to do a mainstage production of these works?

Cavalli's work shows the fragmentation of form that occured after Monteverdi, setting the stage for the much maligned, little understood, and immensely popular Baroque opera we see before us. Nevertheless, there's a freedom in Cavalli, a playfulness, that I find absent in the later French and Italian works of the period. Cavalli was writing when opera was the big thing, but it was still pretty fresh.

Indeed, I wonder if the resurgence in baroque opera has something to do with its realignment with our own mass tastes - the carving apart of music, action and emotion suits us better than the pre-Freudian psychologizing of Wagner, his development of the musical practice of motivic development to dramatically represent psychological progression simply too much for us to take in all at once these days.

I can't get enough Wagner - I'm odd that way. But I can't get enough Cavalli either. Go check out the Early Music Show this week and let me know what you think of him. If you like him, then let's keep talking about him.

Faust at the Canadian Opera Company

I attended last night’s COC production of Faust by Charles Gounod. The omnipresent JohnTerauds of the Toronto Star, who appears to be the last of the classical music review dinosaurs in a major Canadian newspaper, reviewed it unfavourably.

I too was disappointed by the production, although I disagree with him about the production getting in the way – if anything, Nicholas Muni’s production was the only bright spot in an otherwise mediocre effort by the COC. Moreover, I found the balance, both within the orchestra and between the orchestra and the singers, very poor.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin got some fire out of the orchestra, especially during the use of Gounod’s ballet music for Faust as entr'actes, but even then, much of the punch was lost because the lines were not always clear.

As I mentioned, the production itself was very good, with what I would call a kind of burlesque feel, taking burlesque in its historical sense and not its current incarnation. The singers and chorus were costumed firmly in the 19^th Century, but the set itself was spartan and effieciently deployed to support what is a dramatically weak opera.

Can it be that the COC still can’t do two really strong productions at the same time? Seems so, because the reviews for Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk appear to be very positive (I won’t see it until the 15^th).

Let's hope I'm wrong.

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One of the odd things about seeing Faust is the fact that it was not too long ago when Faust dominated the operatic stage. Why did it fall from favour? Why does something as awful as Tosca or Il Trovatore seem to pack them in but many other fine works are never seen again? Why was Faust so popular to begin with?

These are some of the kinds of questions that preoccupy me, and hopefully you. That is, if I can make reading about them compelling enough. I know I'm not there yet, but I'm looking forward to the task!