Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Opera

Opera’s First Kiss: A History of Onstage Love

Opera, of course, is full of passion. There is plenty of seething always, and doomed love, and not infrequently a corpse or two (or more).

Thinking about first kisses today, I found myself wondering, what was the first operatic kiss? Meaning, when was it first deemed permissible to have the characters kiss on stage?

I’m not talking about modern productions, which often have characters in Handel operas rolling around on the floor together. I’m speaking historically.

As this article points out, there is abundant longing in so much of opera, but until a certain, fairly recent point in time, kissing itself was rarely depicted, or perhaps accepted.

https://www.deutscheoperberlin.de/en_EN/opernsaenger-kuesst-man-nicht

I’m not sure how authoritative the writer’s conclusions are, since my thoughts immediately turn to Bedřich Smetana’s “The Kiss,” which, as may be surmised from the title, hinges on a lip-lock as the entire motivation of its plot. Smetana’s opera, first performed in 1876, easily predates “Falstaff.”

From that same year comes the wake-up smacker in Wagner’s “Siegfried.”

Bizet’s “Carmen” was introduced in 1875. The amorality of its heroine (one critic described her as “the very incarnation of vice”), as well as the work’s antiheroic tone – the story is set among the common milieu of soldiers, cigarette girls, and toreadors – generated much hostility and indignation.

On a lighter note, there’s “Were You Not to Ko-Ko Plighted,” from “The Mikado,” from 1885, with its refrain of “Oh this, oh this, this is what I’ll never, never do” (punctuated by kisses, naturally).

Of course, by 1905, the genie is well out of the bottle, and we have Salome making out with the severed head of Jochanaan (John the Baptist).

Can there not have been abundant kissing already in the 18th century, the age of Fragonard? How do you do “Così fan tutte” without at least a few pecks? Or was it all kissing of hands?

Again, I am not talking about modern stagings of classic operas. Extensive Google-searching is turning up very little in the way of history and quite a lot in terms of anecdotes about singers’ first on-stage kisses. Here are a couple from a cute series put together by San Francisco Opera:

Some shop talk on opera kissing:

http://sestissimo.blogspot.com/2008/10/opera-kissing.html

As always, Pavarotti takes the prize:

Franco Corelli and Maria Callas at the Old Met in 1965

January 4, 2021
La Bohème A Christmas Eve Tragedy

Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La bohème” opens in an artist’s garret on Christmas Eve. After Mimi and Rodolfo meet cute (she knocks on his door looking for a match for her candle), they join their friends on the boisterous streets of Paris for a good old-fashioned Latin Quarter Christmas. This effectively knocks out the first two acts.

By Act III, their love is on the rocks. On a snowy night, Rodolfo confides to the painter Marcello that Mimi is slowly dying of consumption (tuberculosis). He loves her still, but he doesn’t have the money to take care of her, so he is feigning jealousy in an attempt to drive her into the arms of another. Mimi overhears, and apparently agrees to the split, but then the lovers decide it’s too horrible to part in winter. We know it’s just an excuse, though, so that they can stay together until spring.

In Act IV, we have no idea what month it is, but it’s sometime later. Mimi shows up at the garret, and she is not well. The circle of bohemians offer comfort, each in their own way. Earrings are sold for a muff, and an overcoat is hocked for medicine. Left to themselves, Mimi and Rodolfo relive their past happiness, but the reunion is agonizingly brief. Their friends return, only just in time for everyone to dissolve into tears.

Merry Christmas.

On Puccini’s birthday, here’s a recording of André Kostelanetz (also born on this date) conducting a purely orchestral suite of highlights from “La bohème”:

Mimi’s hands are cold, so Rodolfo goes to work. The old smoothie.

December 22, 2020
Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” Lives Again

One hundred years ago today, Erich Wolfgang Korngold achieved his greatest operatic success at the age of 23, with the double-premiere, in Cologne and Hamburg, of “Die tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”). One of music’s most astounding child prodigies, Korngold had been the talk of Vienna since the age of 11, when his ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”) was first performed at the Vienna Court Opera. By then, Gustav Mahler had already declared him a genius. Richard Strauss would express terror at the boy’s frightening precocity.

Undoubtedly, Korngold is much better known to movie-lovers for his contributions to the Golden Age of Hollywood, including his classic scores for the swashbucklers of Errol Flynn (“Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “The Sea Hawk,” among them). Sadly, fascism and war gutted the Vienna of Korngold’s youth, and avant-garde arbiters and ideologues ensured that his brand of tonal, melodic music would be pushed out of the concert halls for decades

Interestingly, the opera’s scenario bears a striking resemblance to that of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” with an overwrought protagonist falling for a free spirit, who happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife. The dysfunctional relationship quickly spirals out of control.

For 18 years after its debut, “Die tote Stadt” was the most frequently performed opera in Vienna. Then for half a century, it fell virtually silent. Performances were rare, but in recent decades, once more, it’s begun to pick up steam. “The Dead City” lives again, in the affections of opera companies and their audiences, though too many modern productions clash with the essentially Romantic nature of its music. There are psychological depths to be plumbed, for sure, but the imagery should never be aesthetically unpleasant.

I’ve been privileged to see “Die tote Stadt” twice on stage, but of course I’ve listened to it many more times on recordings. It is a melancholy masterpiece by one of my favorite composers. It’s only a pity he didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of its belatedly revived fortunes.

Carol Neblett and René Kollo perform the opera’s famous duet, “Glück, das mir verblieb” (“Joy, that near to me remained”), commonly presented in recital as “Marietta’s Lute Song” (actually just the first five minutes of this video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrLvKVF2ME

Joyce DiDonato coaches baritone Germán Enrique Alcántara in “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen,” Pierrot’s aria, the opera’s second best-known number:

December 4, 2020
Twain’s Take on Music & Opera

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, no writer enthralled me more than Mark Twain. His observations could be so contemporary, so scathing, and so hilarious.

As with much else, Twain had a lot to say about music. He was not a big fan of classical music, least of all opera. Or so he maintained. Everyone loves a good bon mot, so we all remember the withering zingers.

But taken collectively, Twain’s reactions are more of a mixed bag. He likes the stuff he knows and enjoys Wagner in moderation. At the very least, he concedes that he wants to like “the higher music,” but would like to do so without expending the time, the effort, and the attention it would take to make it more rewarding, or at the very least comprehensible. Somehow, he just never caught the spark that for me flared into a wildfire. Perhaps if at the time the ability to hear the music had been more accessible.

I gather, more than anything, it’s the phonies that he found repellent, and justifiably so. He singles out those who make a big display of themselves, humming along to ensure everyone around them recognizes their authority and absorption. It’s worth noting that this was at a time when going to the opera was more of a rarified experience, for many financially prohibitive, and perceived as a social gathering of the upper classes.

Twain’s experiences with music were in the days before records, before classical radio, even before supertitles at the opera. He refers to melodies he knows from having encountered them on a hand-organ or a music box as the extent of his music education. These, he confesses, he finds delightful when heard in the opera house. So it seems the potential was there. What he lacked was regular exposure, without the annoyance and affectations of other people – a few more positive experiences. What he might have thought in this more democratic age of cell phone disruptions is anyone’s guess.

Twain on opera:
http://www.twainquotes.com/Opera.html

Of course, he could be just as irreverent about the banjo:

Mark Twain on the ‘glory-beaming banjo’

It’s okay, Sam. You may hate classical music, but we still love you. Happy birthday.

November 30, 2020
Christopher Lee Opera Secret Revealed

During the course of our discussion of “The Devil Rides Out,” last night on Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, Roy and I touched upon the fact that Christopher Lee’s great regret in life was not pursuing a career as a professional opera singer.

In his autobiography, “Tall, Dark and Gruesome” (later reissued as “Lord of Misrule”), Lee talks about how, whenever he was Sweden, he would make it a point, in his downtime, to slip off with amateur opera companies and tour with them incognito. He filmed “Tales of Hans Christian Andersen” in Sweden, and for a time he was engaged to Henriette von Rosen. His Swedish connections were such that when Von Rosen’s father threw up a final impediment, that he would allow Lee to marry his daughter only if he could obtain permission from the King of Sweden, Lee was able to so – like something out of a fairy tale in itself!

Ultimately, Lee did not marry Von Rosen (the situation seemed very high-maintenance), but he did attract the attention of tenor Jussi Björling. He recounts the story, as well as his family history in the opera, in one of the videos linked below.

First, here’s Lee in an off-the-cuff demonstration of his singing ability, with selections from “The Flying Dutchman” and “The Damnation of Faust;” and then, to keep it seasonal, he recites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”:

Much later, he shares an anecdote and proves that he’s still got the pipes:

Finally, Lee recounts his experience with Björling and his family’s role in bringing opera to Australia:

Of course, as he points out, if he had, after all, become a professional opera singer, his career would have ended decades earlier. But as an actor, he was able to continue to do what he loved until the end of his long and fruitful life.

Really, when you think about, is there all that much difference between gothic horror and a life in the opera?

October 26, 2020

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