Steen More Great Operas

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-6912-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 530 Seiten

In volume II of self-standing Short Guides to 25 of the world's greatest operas, Michael Steen, author of the acclaimed The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, and Great Operas provides another compendium in his ebook series.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steen, Michael

Leseproben

ORFEO ED EURIDICE, ORPHÉE ET EURYDICE: BACKGROUND Until the revival of baroque opera after World War II, Gluck was the earliest composer to hold a place in the operatic repertoire. His Orfeo was regarded as ‘the great-great-grandfather of operas’. At that time, radio listeners became familiar with its individual ‘best tunes’, particularly Che far’ó senza Euridice?1 recorded by so many of the great, notably Kathleen Ferrier; and later, Maria Callas and Janet Baker. This Italian aria dates back to Gluck’s original Orfeo ed Euridice which was premièred in the Court theatre in Vienna on 5 October, 1762. This was a moment in musical history three and a half years after Handel died: and it took place just a few days before the six year-old Mozart jumped on the broad lap of Empress Maria Theresa, navigated her ample bosom and gave her a juicy kiss. Orphée et Eurydice, in French, which Gluck adapted and extended for his production in Paris almost twelve years later, included today’s favourites such as his Dance of the Blessed Spirits and Eurydice’s Cet asile aimable et tranquille.2 The elaborately ornamented Amour, viens rendre à mon âme, which concludes act 1, derives from an edition prepared nearly a hundred years later by Berlioz, the French composer. Of all the versions of the opera, it is the ‘Berlioz’ one which is generally heard today. Meanwhile, Orfeo had been performed around Europe. In London, in 1770, it was extended with music provided by J. C. Bach, the ‘English Bach’, the son of J. S. Bach. The original Orfeo ed Euridice, which is notable for its simplicity but particularly for its briefness - hence the Bach additions - provides a musical milestone between the elaborate Italian operas recently exemplified by the followers of Handel, and the operas of Mozart: between, say, Giulio Cesare and Don Giovanni. Gluck Gluck himself had previously composed operas in the lengthy,3 ornate, baroque style with which he was familiar from his time spent in London in the mid-1740s. Those operas were designed to show off the celebrity singer’s voice. Continuity was broken because the opening section of an aria had to be repeated and ornamented; the strutting peacock (or hen) could then exit to thunderous applause while the chorus stood on the sidelines looking like two rows of organ pipes. This stilted style had reached its sell-by date. It had become absurd. With the reform of opera in mind, the influential nobleman in charge of the Viennese theatres brought together Gluck with Raniero Calzabigi, a remarkable librettist. Together, librettist and composer declared that they wanted the ‘greatest effort to be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity’. The librettist Raniero Calzabigi (1714-1795) The colourful life of Calzabigi was first centred on Naples. He was involved in a poisoning, so he decamped to Paris. There, he ran a lottery in partnership with Casanova, who described him as ‘a great opportunist, well versed in financial operations, familiar with the commerce of all nations, learned in history, a wit, a poet and a great lover of women’. Possibly because he was implicated in a fraud, he moved on to Vienna. But the subject matter of Orfeo, which Calzabigi based on the poems of Virgil, the classical Roman poet, was still mythological. It was desirably so not least because the authorities regarded classical Graeco-Roman subject matter as sufficiently distant and unreal that it would not be subversive. It took Mozart to humanise opera, as we know so well from The Marriage of Figaro. His characters were real, even subversively so. Gluck own adaptation, Orphée et Eurydice adjusted for the Paris ‘market’,4 and to a text by Moline,5 was staged very successfully in August 1774, a few months after the death of King Louis XV. (Gluck worked on the sepulchral opera during the period of court mourning.) He turned his intimate court opera into full length entertainment suitable for a bigger auditorium, and the ‘butterfly-minded’ Parisians of the eighteenth century. It was ‘a slacker, more disseminated opera than the concise original’. He virtually rewrote the recitative, and, among other changes, he replaced the old-fashioned instruments with modern ones - clarinets and oboes replaced cornetti and chalumeaux. Whichever version is used today, a modern opera house may not replicate the ‘authentic’ Orfeo which Gluck had in mind. The part of Orfeo in Vienna had been written specifically for a leading castrato, Gaetano Guadagni. For Paris, where castrati were despised, Gluck revised it for a different male. Joseph Le Gros, although considerably more fortunate than Guadagni, also came from an unusual species: he was neither castrato nor falsetto, but was the high tenor known as ‘haut-contre’. Both castrato and the ‘haut-contre’ provided a different timbre and volume from the English counter-tenor ‘whose gentler and more ecclesiastical falsetto would be ineffective, if not inaudible’, in a dramatic role in a large theatre. Berlioz’s subsequent version, first performed in November 1859, was specifically tailored to the show off style of Pauline Viardot, the distinguished mezzo-soprano,6 and had input from Camille Saint-Saëns, who would later compose Samson et Dalila.7 Stars and ‘beautiful simplicity’ are rarely compatible. Viardot sang a long and elaborate cadenza at the end of the already highly-ornamented Amour, viens rendre à mon âme which concludes act 1. It is certainly beautiful, and ‘bravura’, but it hardly constituted the ‘simplicity’ which was Gluck’s objective. The first stars Handel composed the part of Didimus in Theodora for the castrato Gaetano Guadagni (1725-1792). Although regarded as a very great actor - he had been greatly influenced by David Garrick - the English public disliked him because of his reluctance to interrupt the stage action by taking applause. Joseph Le Gros (1739-1793) came from the north-east of Paris, about forty miles from Rheims. His ‘haut-contre’ was the principal male solo voice heard in French opera between Lully and Rameau. He had a particularly good higher register from to F to B flat while his lower notes were weak. He was prominent in French musical circles and directed the ‘Concerts spirituels’ until they were dissolved at the time of the Revolution. His obesity led to his retirement in 1783. Today, with three major versions of the opera available, there are as many compromises between them as there are publishers and conductors who have chosen to present the opera to the public. As the late Sir Charles Mackerras observed: ‘Not to use the Paris version would be to lose some of the best-loved and most theatrically effective music Gluck ever composed.’ The playwright and music critic George Bernard Shaw called Gluck ‘the Wagner of his day’. ‘Listen to Orfeo and you hear that perfect union of the poem and the music which you have only heard before in the cantatas of J. S Bach and the music dramas of Wagner. Instead of the mere opera-making musician, tied to his poem as to a stake, and breaking loose whenever it gives him an excuse for a soldier’s chorus, or a waltz, or a crashing finale, we have the poet musician who has no lower use for music than the expression of poetry’. A hundred years earlier, a Paris salon hostess had found the music so profound, so moving, so agonising, so absorbing’ that more than twenty times she was ‘impelled to shut herself away so as to renew the pleasure’. For her, these voices, melodies, and accents ‘made very grief a substance of delight’: she felt felt herself ‘for ever haunted by those tender and lamentable strains: I have lost thee, my Eurydice’. Similarly, many in the middle of the twentieth century experienced a deep emotional experience when they listened to Kathleen Ferrier’s ‘deep maternal contralto, of a particularly English and quite untheatrical quality’. A later Orpheus Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953), a telephone operator, emerged from World War II factory recitals to be one of the finest singers of her time; she died from breast cancer aged forty-one in October 1953. In the previous February, the première of her Covent Garden Orpheus under Barbirolli ‘touched the sublime’. However, by then, her left femur had disintegrated under the treatment following a mastectomy. Three nights later, her leg collapsed after the bone broke during act 2. She managed to finish the performance. For the audience, ‘there was no hint of any catastrophe’, according to Dame Eva Turner, the soprano, also from Lancashire: ‘we were just mesmerised by her beautiful singing’.   1 Che far’ó senza Euridice? translates as ‘What shall I do without Eurydice’, ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’. 2 Cet asile aimable et tranquille ,‘Happiness is to be found in this delightful and peaceful place’. Amour, viens rendre à mon âme, ‘Amor (Cupid,...