The Barber of Seville at the Lyric Opera

Rossini’s The Barber of Seville certainly is a popular opera.  Since Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 1954 inception, the comedy has been performed in 14 seasons, more often than such favorites as Rigoletto, Carmen, Lucia, and Aida.  The story revolves around the matchmaking machinations of a fellow (Figaro) who has a day job as a barber, as he tries to link up his rich patron, a count, with his young inamorata Rosina, who is the ward of an elderly doctor who also has designs on her.  

The opera is an enjoyable comedy, easy to understand, and enduringly popular as a respite from the tragic, and often excessively melodramatic, staples of the repertory.  It’s a visual delight and the audience was certainly entertained.  Musically though the opera does not have the memorable, emotive arias, duets, and ensembles of dramatic opera, but it has plenty of melodic scenes with appealing harmonies.  The cast was terrific, and thankfully, the Lyric played it straight with the production, without any dysfunctional, annoying modern reinterpretations.

Some of my earliest exposure to opera and classical music came from Looney Tunes cartoons, and in my memory I can see and hear the parody of the Figaro, Figaro, Figaro riff that, as fact would have it, is sung in the opera by Figaro himself.  Sitting there taking in The Barber, I was distracted in my mind’s eye by images of Bugs Bunny singing the piece on stage, outwitting Elmer Fudd while the annoyed audience throws produce at him.

R Balsamo

Our Lyric Season Closes with Old Favorites Traviata and Boheme

Here’s a belated note about two wonderful operas we saw, moreover heard, this past winter (which only ended the day before yesterday, hence I didn’t realize I was so dilatory in posting).  Actually, some recent Lyric Opera promotional materials spurred me to write.  The Lyric, understandably needing to promote itself these days perhaps more than ever before, markets itself as providing beautiful musical art that everyday people can (and should) enjoy while simultaneously casting itself as a vehicle for a more rarefied opera lifestyle.  High-definition DVDs played on big screens with surround sound and an ever more-juvenile pop culture are taking their toll.

Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Boheme have of course some great similarities.  Each is a story centered on a Parisian woman who wins and then loses at love, only to be reunited with her lover just before dying from tuberculosis.  Each opera is its composer’s most popular – and not for nothing is that true, as they are so full of beautiful music each is the equivalent of a greatest hits album. 

The Traviata production featured Albina Shagimuratova as Violetta, Giorgio Berrugi as her lover Alfredo, and Zeljko Lucic and his father Germont.  In recent years Lyric patrons have heard the wonderful voices, and seen the wonderful acting, of Shagimuratova and Lucic, while Berrugi was very strong in his Lyric debut.  Boheme starred Maria Agresta as the ill-fated Mimi, Michael Fabiano as her lover Rudolfo, Ann Toomey as her friend Musetta, and Zachary Nelson as his friend Marcello.  Agresta and Nelson were heard last season in Puccini’s Turandot. 

Both productions featured strong singing and acting, with sets that were visually traditional yet appealing to a more modern sensibility – no wacky reinterpretations here by self-centered directors.     

Lyric patrons won’t see these two gems for a while.  Traviata and Boheme were last produced in 2013, so it’s maybe a 5-6 year cycle.  Next year Luisa Miller and Madama Butterfly will provide our Verdi and Puccini fixes, spiced up with a production of selected scenes from Donizetti’s The Three Queens and Rossini’s Barber of Seville.  But for now Lyric patrons have warm weather to get through.

R Balsamo

Related posts on these operas:

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2016/09/la-traviata-at-michigans-harbor-country.html

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-boheme-at-lyric.html

Director John Ford at 125

John Ford

I’ve loved movies from as far back as I can remember, and my favorites growing up were filled with action and adventure.  When as a young adult I finally began paying attention to directors, I discovered that many of the films I admired most were made by John Ford.  Today is his 125^th birthday.

Ford was a prolific director, even by the higher-output standards of his time, and he had astonishing breadth in subject matter.  He won four Academy Awards for Best Director, more than anyone else.  But although those four films were all non-westerns, Ford is best known today for his magnificent Westerns.  

Harry Carey Sr, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Henry Fonda (in his early days), and especially John Wayne, whom Ford made a star in his 1939 film Stagecoach, are just some of the actors particularly associated with Ford.  In fact, he cast in supporting roles a large group of regulars that became known as the Ford Stock Company.

Ford was admired for his genius, both in narrative and in technique.  But he was a gruff, often-unpleasant man, and at times mean and vindictive – especially when drunk.  Given his personality, Ford had a poor and unsatisfying family life, but in his films he seems almost obsessed with the rituals of community and domestic life.  Many of his best films center on family – some of his earlier ones, like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, can seem overly-sentimental and mannered today, but some that came later are personal favorites – The Quiet Man and Donovan’s Reef.  Other non-Westerns that I particularly enjoy include What Price Glory, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Last Hurrah.

Ford's Westerns stand out, many of them filmed in Monument Valley (which he put on the map).  Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are particularly noteworthy favorites.  And then there’s his masterpiece, The Searchers, which many film buffs consider perhaps the greatest Western and one of the best films ever made. 

There are certainly other directors who have made many great films; for me Billy Wilder particularly stands out in this regard.  But Ford had an extra dimension, a thread, in his films that is hard to identify or describe, but it’s there.  Once, as the story goes, Orson Welles, certainly no slouch himself as a filmmaker, was asked to name the directors he most admired, and he replied: "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

R Balsamo  

Van Dyck’s Palermo Madonna and Child

On Christmas Eve two days ago I posted (link) a photo of the beautiful Caravaggio painting of the Nativity that was stolen from a Palermo oratory in 1960.  Christmastide has me thinking of another Palermo oratory I had the pleasure of visiting a few years ago. 

Oratories are small, Roman Catholic chapels for private worship.  Palermo, Sicily, has three of which I am aware, built by confraternities -- private altruistic organizations of men bound by a trade or specific object of religious devotion.  In walking distance of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, in which now hangs a reproduction of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, one can find the Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico.  This chapel sits behind Palermo’s great Dominican basilica of San Domenico (which unfortunately was closed both times the missus and I tried to visit in the spring of 2016). 

The Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico is stunning.  Bathed in white with gold accents, the space is full of three-dimensional ladies, knights, and playful putti.  The magnificent altarpiece is the large painting Madonna of the Rosary with St. Dominic and the Patroness of Palermo, executed by Anthony van Dyck in 1628. 

Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico in Palermo, Sicily

Van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who achieved great success in England, in the Netherlands, and in Italy, where he spent six of his 42 years studying and painting.  His Wikipedia entry states that for him Titian’s “use of colour and subtle modeling of form would prove transformational, offering a new stylistic language that would enrich the compositional lessons learned from Rubens.”  Van Dyck spent time in Palermo, about 20 years after Caravaggio passed through Sicily, and left behind in the Dominican community a stunning painting to be especially enjoyed this Christmas season. 

R Balsamo

Caravaggio’s Nativity

Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence is a warm scene of dramatic moment composed with his typical striking use of light and shadow. 

Caravaggio was born Michelangelo Merisi in Milan and came of age in the nearby town of the name by which he became famous.  Pugnacious and temperamental, he spent a fair amount of his all-too-short life on the lam, running from the jailer or the assassin.  He spent some time in Sicily late in his short life of 38 years, and it was probably there in 1609 that he composed The Nativity .  The painting found its way to a confraternity hall in Palermo, the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, where it was on display until 1969 when it was stolen by the mafia, according to all evidence.  It has never resurfaced, and is said to have been destroyed.  Recently, a faithful reproduction of the painting was created and is now on display where the original hung. 

R Balsamo

Cendrillon at the Lyric Opera

The Lyric offered up a solid production of Cendrillon, French composer Massenet’s version of the Cinderella story.  This is the opera’s first showing at the Lyric in its 64 seasons, although it has offered up Rossini’s variation on the theme, La Cenerentola, no less than six times.  Massenet’s version is half comedy (awfully slapstick in this production) and half drama, and he gives Cinderella’s father a sizeable role.  Although the story line for the most part is an operatic version of a chick flick, there are a few worthwhile moments.  Particularly of interest, and the highlight for me, is the serious, touching Act III scene between Cinderella and her father, as she despairs of ever again seeing her magical love Prince Charming. 

In popularity Cendrillon does not rank with Massenet’s main four – Manon and Werther, followed by Don Quichotte and Thais.  The Prince is a “trouser” role, written for a contralto and featuring a mezzo in this production; for me, the opera would be more appealing if the part were transposed for a tenor.  

Soprano Siobhan Stagg was terrific in the title role in her American debut, and I also particularly enjoyed bass-baritone Derek Welton as her meek but gentle and caring father.  Sets consisted of various moving panels with writing on them – inexpensive, minimalist, and very uninteresting.  I know opera companies are struggling with cost control, but this was a pretty lame effort.  The show was almost a concert version in costume.  The blame for the set, though, gets spread around to many other opera companies, so the Lyric is mostly off the hook.  Hell, even the Met used it.

I’m happy to have seen Cendrillon, though I don’t think I would go out of my way to see it again.  If an opera company is going through the expense of putting on a show, there are a lot more appealing choices on the list before you come to Cendrillon.  The set was available, sure, but sets abound.  And it’s not as if a packaged cast, already rehearsed, was readily available, for only Alice Coote as Prince Charming was a carry-over from last spring’s production at the Met.  So here are two picks, for example, that jump to mind long before Cendrillon – Puccini’s sleeper Manon Lescaut, last seen on the Lyric stage 13 years ago and just that once since 1977, and even Massenet’s own take on that story, Manon, regarded by some as his best opera and last seen at the Lyric in 1983 – 35 years ago.

R Balsamo

Opera’s Shrinking Audience

Earlier this Fall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago suffered through a short musicians’ strike that caused the cancellation of a few performances, but a quick resolution was reached and productions are back on.  However, the cause of the strike was proposed reduced employee compensation that the Lyric said was necessitated by the fewer performances and reduced revenue as a consequence of its shrinking audience.

I've been wondering about this development and why it is so.  Multiple factors seem at play.  Certainly the wide availability of high-fidelity opera CDs and DVDs has made an impact.  Perhaps even more importantly, opera seems generally much less familiar to most people than it was decades ago.  The general dumbing-down of our popular culture has had an impact – rarely do opera stars appear in general entertainment and public venues as they did in the past.  For example, years ago opera stars could be seen on widely-watched TV variety shows and Johnny Carson-like late shows, but programs like that are no longer common, and the late-night shows have degenerated into junk time hosted by smug, smirking, and sarcastic personalities offering sophomoric entertainment to pseudo-adults stuck in perpetual adolescence. 

So what can opera companies do in the face of these secular trends?  By themselves, unfortunately perhaps not much.  But they can redouble efforts to promote opera and their performers in the broader culture and in the media.  Add perhaps some programming shifts.  How about adding a few evenings of great scenes from a number of operas?  Tosca Act 1, La Traviata Act 2 Scene 1, and La Boheme Act 3, for example, with narrative introductions that explain each scene.  Solo concerts are fine, but they lack the beautiful mixture of voices in duets and trios and scenes, and lack as well the costumes and the sets that make opera such a wonderful visual experience. 

What about being more aggressive in offering smartly-edited performances of operas that perhaps don’t get shown because they’re too long or too complicated.  The Lyric’s recent complete staging of Bizet’s The Trojans (Les Troyens) was wonderful, but it is very long; some opera companies eliminate the first two acts which are frankly not the more musically-pleasing parts and are severable plot-wise.  Although I like having an opera produced in its entirety, if length and cost prevent its production an opera is much better being trimmed than never being seen.  Rossini’s William Tell is another candidate.  Ballet sequences, where they exist in some operas, are now often omitted in the interest of time, so the precedent of editing operas is already established.

Finally, I wonder if opera selection has been a factor in recent years.  The current Lyric management seems to have a tilt toward German, Russian, and modern operas.  Of course those operas have their fans, but I have known few casual opera lovers to pine for a German or Russian opera, or hum a tune from an atonal modern show.  In the professional opera world and among the intelligentsia that may be true, but for many of us in the hoi polloi German and Russian operas remain better in theory than they sound in practice.  A good example of the recent selection tilt is the 2016-2017 Lyric season, which featured two German operas and one Russian among the eight produced, and, remarkably, no Verdi or Puccini.  Don’t get me wrong – it featured some wonderful productions – Norma, Carmen, and a premier of Berlioz’s masterpiece The Trojans.  But no Verdi or even Puccini? 

I realize that some in the high-brow set love to love not-very-popular operas, and I am certainly not arguing for Boheme, Butterfly, Tosca, and Traviata every year or two, but can the Lyric find room for more Italian classics?  In its 64 seasons, including the current one, the Lyric has put on Puccini’s beautiful Manon Lescaut just four times, just once since 1977 and not since 2005-2006.  What about Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, put on just three times over 30 years ago, or his Luisa Miller, done just once in 1982.  How about more Bellini, whose version of the Romeo and Juliet story, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, has appeared just twice.  And never on the menu in 64 years are such notables as Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers and I Lombardi, Bellini’s Il Pirata, and Rossini’s William Tell.

My ideas might not help the Lyric and other opera companies much, and even then perhaps only at the margins.  Opera as an art form is swimming against the cultural current for the first time in its history, and it’s a tough slog.

R Balsamo

Il Trovatore at the Lyric Opera

Il Trovatore is an operatic treat, musically and visually, and the missus and I were delighted to take it all in the other day at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  We last saw it four years ago to the month at the Lyric, and it was just as fresh and wonderful this time around.  Its music to me is as beautiful as any Verdi wrote.  After its world premiere in Rome in 1853, according to The Lyric Opera Companion, a music critic wrote:  “The music transported us to heaven ... because this is, without exaggeration, heavenly music.  The public listened to every number in religious silence and broke into applause at every interval.” 

As remarkable as Trovatore is, given the wealth of the Verdi repertory it is only the fourth most-shown Verdi in the Lyric’s 64 seasons, appearing nine times, after Traviata, Rigoletto, Un Ballo, in that order, and tied with Aida.  The first production was in 1955 with none other than tenor Jussi Bjorling and soprano Maria Callas.  How’s that for casting?  In fact, in November of 1955 alone, when the Lyric’s season was very short and very, very sweet, opera lovers had not only Callas (in three operas) and Bjorling (in five!), but also Giuseppe Di Stefano, Renata Tebaldi, Tito Gobbi, and Carlo Bergonzi, plus Chicago (Melrose Park) native Carol Laraia, stage name Carol Lawrence, in no less than six productions.

Trovatore has not been everyone’s cup of tea, puzzlingly.  Highbrow critics slam it for its allegedly confusing libretto, but, assuming the knock is even true, few opera lovers have read the libretto, and the plot seems straightforward to me, and with supertitles at a performance the narrative is quite understandable.  Those same critics also look down their noses at Verdi’s supposed retreat in Trovatore from the musical “advances” of Rigoletto (which premiered two years earlier) toward the ideal – loved by the cognoscenti – of the Wagner-like “numberless” opera – in other words, music that’s better than it sounds, as Twain supposedly phrased it. 

Il Trovatore is a wonderful opera, and the Lyric put on a great show.  Highlights of the performance were soprano Tamara Wilson as Leonora, mezzo Jamie Barton as Azucena, baritone Artur Rucinski as Count di Luna, and Roberto Tagliavini as Ferrando.  On tenor Russell Thomas I plead the 5th.  The choruses were terrific, as usual at the Lyric.  And the sets were visually arresting and appropriate to the storyline, and a welcome step up from the less-expensive offerings (however understandable) that occasionally pop up.  Costuming was fine enough for the leads, but the Lyric seemingly ran out of gypsy costumes, for most of the gypsies in the Anvil Chorus gypsy camp scene, set in 15th century rural, northeastern Iberia, were dressed in relatively-dressy 17^th century clothing, including some in top hats; well, there always has to be some transgressive functionary who likes to poke the audience in the eye, highlighting the need for constant adult supervision.

Stephanie von Buchau writes in The Lyric Opera Companion that “Il Trovatore is the quintessential Italian opera, its drama propelled by the human voice.”  In fact, it is so quintessential that it was chosen as the opera backdrop for the zany antics of the anarchist Marx Brothers in their film masterpiece A Night at the Opera.  High praise indeed.

R Balsamo

A post on the 2014 Trovatore at the Lyric:

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/il-trovatore-at-lyric-opera.html

Singer/Songwriter Steve Goodman at 70 – You Better Get It While You Can

Today would have been the 70th birthday of the late, great Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman.  For anyone who saw him perform, it was impossible to imagine that a man with such youthful energy and bounding joy could ever grow old.  Sadly, he did not, passing away in 1984 at age 36 from the leukemia that plagued him throughout his too-few years among us.

His performances were full of energy and sparkle and good humor.  Much of what he sang were his own compositions, and his style was certainly eclectic, ranging from folk to country & western to oldies, from soft ballads to comedy to satire to jazzed-up foot-stompers.  Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing him live, especially in a small club on a warm summer night, can only wonder why he did not become a bigger star. 

I saw Steve Goodman perform many times in Chicago, in small folk-houses and in large halls (like the Park West on Armitage Avenue).  Most of the venues are long-gone.  I first saw him in the mid-1970s at the Earl of Old Town saloon with the great Chicago blues band Martin, Bogan & Armstrong, and I will never forget their exhilarating rendition of Mamma Don’t Allow It, which no one there, especially the musicians, seemingly wanted to ever end.  A couple years later I returned to the Earl to see Goodman once again, and smiled as, early in his act, he pulled an audience member up to play with him.  They played for hours, and seeing Steve Goodman and John Prine do an impromptu three-hour riff was a thrill I still remember.  In his middle career years he was joined in concerts, and on recordings, by county music legend Jethro Burns.  I once drove alone from Chicago to Rockford, almost a hundred miles from where I started on the South Side, in a light snow storm (I was very young then) to see the two of them play; consummate musicians they were, Goodman on his guitar and Burns on his mandolin.  (I had the pleasure of conversing with Jethro Burns for a couple of minutes during a break while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the small, two-man men’s room – a most pleasant fellow).  A few years before his death, Goodman moved, with his wife and children, to Southern California, hoping for more success from the connections he could make there.    

His breakout hit was City of New Orleans after it was recorded by Arlo Guthrie.  He had great range in his many compositions – from Would You Like To Learn To Dance, a soft, gentle invitation to take a chance at love, to Banana Republics, a ballad about disaffected American expatriates south of the border.  Some were intensely personal, filled with bittersweet emotion, notably My Old Man in which he mourns and reconciles with his long-passed father, and Old Smoothies, about the joy his loving grandparents experienced watching an old couple ice skating together.

Goodman had a great sense of humor, and what a treat it was to see as well as hear him do Talking Backwards, The Auctioneer, Vegematic, This Hotel Room, or of course The Broken String Song (which always seemed like he was making it up on the spot when he actually took time to repair a broken string in the middle of a set).  He could fill up half an evening, if he wanted to, with just these fun, and funny, songs.     

North-sider that he was, Goodman was a big, and long-suffering, fan of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and composed two tunes still often played today – Go Cubs Go and A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request (featuring the now inoperative lyric, funny then – “the doormat of the National League”).

Along with life-long friend John Prine (fellow Chicagoan and fellow former US postal worker), Goodman wrote Souvenirs, a favorite of mine, and the “perfect” country song You Never Even Call Me By My Name.  He also popularized songs of other composers, notably Michael Smith, who wrote The Dutchman, Roving Cowboy, Crazy Mary, and Spoon River – all soft ballads that became big Goodman fan favorites.  Goodman was a leading figure among the Chicago singer/songwriters and folksingers in a now-bygone era, along with others such as Prine, Bonnie Koloc, Ed and Fred Holstein, and Tom Dundee.  

Although not well-known by his fans during his lifetime, illness and mortality were always on Goodman’s near horizon, perhaps explaining in part the energized emotion and bittersweet tenderness of so many of the songs he sang.  His You Better Get It While You Can was more poignant than many of us realized at the time (“from the cradle to the crypt is a might short trip, so you better get it while you can”).  Steve Goodman passed away in late September 1984, just days before his beloved Cubs finally entered post-season play for the first time since before he was born.

Although I enjoy a great deal of popular music I don’t go to concerts much, preferring mostly to listen to music in a comfortable arm chair with a subtle pinot at hand.  But Steve Goodman had to be seen in person, to share in his warmth and energy, and so I have seen Steve Goodman far more than any other performer, and he is still sorely missed, after all these years.

R Balsamo

Related Posts:
John Prine at 65
Folkie Tom Paxton at 75
Laura Nyro in My Head

Faust at the Lyric Opera

Chicago’s Lyric Opera has a striking new production of Faust, Gounod’s most popular opera whose story is loosely based on Goethe’s most famous play.  The Wikipedia entry for the latter asserts that it “is considered by many to be Goethe's magnum opus and the greatest work of German literature.”  The basic story is well-known – a disenchanted, aging philosopher named Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for his earthly transformation into a dashing and attractive young man, especially, but not exclusively, so he can pursue the beautiful young maiden Marguerite.  Many suffer tragic consequences. 

Faust debuted in Paris in 1859 and has become a world-wide favorite.  Created in the French grand opera tradition, like many others of its kind it is so long that many productions scale it back.  Thankfully, the ballet is often omitted entirely.  Faust offers some wonderful music in addition to its thought-provoking story line.  But although there is beautiful, flowing music in this opera, little of it seems to show up in compilations of favorite opera selections.  The tenor aria “Salut, demeure chaste et pure” is the only one I’ve frequently encountered.  

The Lyric production featured terrific singing from the leads and the usual great vocals from the chorus.   French tenor Benjamin Bernheim played Faust in his American debut, Ana Maria Martinez played Marguerite in her one appearance in this role (Ailyn Perez sang the role in the other performances), Christian Van Horne played Mephistopheles, and Edward Parks was Marguerite’s brother Valentin.  The sets, although somewhat abstract in parts, were for the most part interesting and relievedly period-appropriate.  Taking in the Lyric production in sight and sound was a delightful way to spend a few hours.

Faust has evoked some strong feelings.  Despite being French and spending time studying in Italy, Gounod fell under the spell of Wagner.  In the Lyric Opera Companion, Dale Harris writes that after the appearance of Faust “accusations of ‘Wagnerism’ were leveled against [Gounod].”  Harris quotes one British critic who “accused [Gounod] of being to all intents and purposes a German composer ... and too much after the manner of Wagner to please the lovers of unadulterated music.”   Joseph Wechsberg writes in his masterful The Opera that “Gounod’s Faust remains one of the most popular works in the repertory, but compared to Carmen it is second-rate salon music...  The critics hate Faust and the public loves it.” 

Many music lovers take a different view.  The Lyric offers that “the score ... simply bursts with memorable music. Marguerite’s Jewel Song, the Soldiers’ Chorus, the spectacular final trio — these and much more make Faust a sublime experience.”  And the public does love it.  At the Lyric, in the last 50 years Faust has been the tenth most frequently-produced opera in the Italian and French repertory, with its six productions second only to Carmen of those by French composers.  Boito’s treatment of the same story in his opera Mephistopheles seems well-regarded, if not more regarded, by critics but has not been as popular with the public, as illustrated by its only two Lyric productions in the past 50 years – both in the 1990s. 

The moral of the Faust story is immortal.  Although the notion of literally selling one’s soul to the devil may strike a great many today as fanciful, selling out one’s principles and honor for some temporal advantage is not, so the story has lasting relevance.  Such folly is all the more tragic when committed by someone old enough to know better, for truly there’s no fool like an old fool.

R Balsamo

Norma at the Lyric Opera

The summer solstice is that discordant jolt when just as the warmth arrives daylight begins to shorten.  For opera buffs looking ahead to the next season it’s also a time to take one last look in the rear view mirror.  Patrons of the Lyric Opera are in the middle of a Bellini double-header treat – last season’s Norma, a highlight, and next season’s I Puritani.  Can’t gainsay that.

Composer Vincenzo Bellini is the pride of Sicily.  After his all-too-short life of 33 years, he was buried in the cathedral of his home town Catania, in the shadow of Mt. Aetna looking out on the Ionian Sea.  I regrettably missed visiting that church during my one time on the great island – I only came as close as the nearby airport.  Bellini wrote some wonderful melodies, and one can only wonder what more he would have written had he not died so young.

Norma is the story of a druid high-priestess in Roman-occupied Gaul who faces a reckoning after her longstanding illicit, secret lover, the Roman military leader and enemy of her people with whom she has two young children, decides to decamp for Rome with a younger priestess, his new infatuation.  She had betrayed her religion and her people for him, and faces the consequences, moral and otherwise.  Eventually the Roman sees the error of his ways, but, since this is Italian tragic opera, after all, too late to save either of them.   

The music is spectacular, with the long-flowing melodies for which Bellini is famous.  The singing for the role of Norma, said to be very challenging, I find smooth and full of harmony with little of the unappealing (at least to me) vocal calisthenics common in opera at the time.  Maria Callas gets much credit for reviving so-called bel canto opera in the 1950s, and in fact she made her American debut singing Norma in Chicago at the Lyric in its inaugural 1954 season.  In the program guide, Lyric “dramaturg” Roger Pines quotes the late superstar soprano Joan Sutherland calling Norma “the pinnacle role,” and he writes that “there is no greater music for a soprano in the entire operatic repertoire.”

This time around Norma was performed and sung beautifully by Chicago native soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who appeared recently at the Met in the three Donizetti “queen” operas.  At the Lyric she was joined by, among others, Elizabeth DeShong as Adalgisa, her conflicted rival in love, and by Russell Thomas as the unfaithful Roman proconsul Pollione.  Radvanovsky’s repertory includes Verdi’s I vespri siciliani; Lyric patrons can only hope.

As for the production, the sets and direction frequently let the audience down, unfortunately a not uncommon problem in opera these days.  Part of opera is visual, so a good set that can help convey the story and stimulate the imagination greatly enhances the experience, while one that is bland, or anachronistic, or confuses the narrative detracts.  The entire Norma set was a single scene, visually interesting in the abstract, but not one representative of Roman Gaul.  I doubt there would be a structure with 60 foot high thick, decorative wooden columns supporting a large indoor space in rural, sylvan Gaul.  And the entire opera was staged in this drab-gray "space," despite some of the scenes taking place in the forest or in a hidden hut deep in the woods.  Well, in the program guide the director says he was visually inspired by … wait for it … Game of Thrones, so that explains that.  That’s relevance, the holy grail of many a hip post-modern director.  But this was a multi-partner co-production, so there’s lot of responsibility spread around.  I appreciate and value imagination, but within the confines of the narrative. 

Some years ago when back in Chicago, Radvanovsky would stop by for delightful chats about opera with the incomparable Milt Rosenberg on his storied late-evening radio show Extension 720; I caught at least one of those programs, and more if memory serves.  I miss that show very much, but that’s another story. 

R Balsamo

Carmen at the Lyric Opera

Carmen resounds once again at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and I was fortunate to take it all in last week.  The opera is the final and most popular work of French composer Georges Bizet, and the most famous of all French operas.  Bizet’s only other commonly-known work is the opera The Pearl Fishers, known primarily for its marvelous tenor-baritone duet Au fond du temple saint, the first version of which I think I ever heard is the famous one by tenor Jussi Björling and baritone Robert Merrill.  Going back-to-back on Bizet, the Lyric has The Pearl Fishers on next season’s schedule.

Carmen of course tells the tragic story of the bold, seductive gypsy temptress who drives the beguiled Spanish soldier Don Jose into abandoning his duty and his gentle, innocent hometown sweetheart.  Don Jose falls hard for Carmen despite her telling him, quite openly, that she is an unfaithful lover, and when she eventually leaves him for the dashing toreador Escamillo tragedy ensues.  We see through vivid action and marvelous music how passion can be the road to ruin.

But despite all the wonderful music, so evocative of the Spanish setting, the realistic subject matter and the immorality of the main characters did not initially endear the opera to Parisian audiences.  Bizet died suddenly at age 36 just a few months after Carmen’s premier in 1875, and we are left wondering if disappointment played a part.  But Carmen has become one of the world’s favorites.  In his extensive review of the art form titled The Opera, Joseph Wechsberg highlights Carmen as “a perfect opera.”  It anticipates the Italian verismo form, which portrayed the everyday life, often brutish, of everyday people made of real flesh and blood.  The enticing Act 1 habanera, Carmen’s lusty number that snares Don Jose, is perhaps the most recognizable scene in the opera; an indication of its popularity is its appearance in the movie Going My Way, where famed mezzo Rise Stevens gives a spirited performance at the Metropolitan while watched in the wings by Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley.  Carmen’s rhythmic Act 2 seguidilla puts the finishing touches on Don Jose’s enchantment.  I’m not sure, but I may have first heard the rousing Toreador song in a Looney Tunes cartoon.  Then there is the great Act 2 tenor aria known as the Flower song for the bright red rose through which Carmen had selected Don Jose as her next lover, and Micaela’s Act 3 heart-felt pleading aria to Don Jose elicited enthusiastic applause at the performance I attended.  The Prelude and the Interlude are wonderful, and popular, orchestral pieces, and were performed very well by the Lyric’s orchestra.

 

The mood was set from the start of this production with the vivid, lush blood-red curtain that caught everyone’s attention as we took our seats.  The set though was a minimalist one, so common these days, but given that limitation it was surprisingly creative and effective.  The relatively brief ballet numbers added zest to the performance; of particular note was the exceptionally-creative and visually-arresting dance opening in Act 4 in which flowing dresses were used as bull-fighting capes against a flaming red background – the performance elicited an approving gasp from the audience.  The one disappointment, a small one, was the insertion of a distracting, writhing sideline ballet sequence between a shirtless man with a bull-head hat and a toreador in Act 4 while Don Jose and Carmen were having their final confrontation.  Sometimes, even in opera, less is more.     

The music is, of course, spectacular and we come to hear it all.  Georgian mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili was in fine voice in her Lyric debut as Carmen, although I thought she could have acted more seductively in her movements.  She has sung the role of Carmen at the Metropolitan, and The New Criterion music critic Jay Nordlinger wrote of her “big, glowing, smoky voice” in a 2012 performance.  American tenor Brandon Jovanovich was strong as the callow and hapless Don Jose.  He recently appeared last fall at the Lyric as Aeneas in Berlioz’s grand opera masterpiece The Trojans and did a great job in that role.  Nordlinger caught Jovanovich a few years ago at the Met in Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and wrote of him:  “I always knew him as a solid and appealing lyric singer [but] I had no idea he could pull off [this role].  Jovanovich was like a young Marlon Brandon. And he could sing: freshly and ruggedly, easily and commandingly.”

Italian soprano Eleonora Buratto was warmly received as the innocent Micaela, who contrasts sharply with the bold, alluring Carmen.  Lyric Opera Ryan Center alums/members, Americans all, were strong in their roles:  Christian Van Horn as the toreador Escamillo, Bradley Smoak as Don Jose’s superior officer Zuniga, and Diana Newman and Lindsay Metzger as Carmen’s friends Frasquita and Mercedes.  The Lyric chorus, including a talented group of kids, was terrific, as usual.

As is so unfortunately common in opera these days, the director changed the setting of the story in order to insert some sort of additional meaning or send some personal political message.  Rather than write his own opera, he hijacked someone else’s.  In this case, director Rob Ashford moved the story from early 19^th Century traditional Spain to the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War – so instead of bright, traditional Spanish dress we get many performers plainly clothed in drab colors.  But the greater offense was the director’s transmogrifying the men with whom Don Jose takes up after his desertion from smugglers to revolutionaries fighting for “liberty.”  In an interview in the program, the director gives his reason – “The [Spanish Civil] war was often described as Fascism vs. Democracy – so it seemed a good parallel for the opera.”  Unfortunately director Ashford is completely unfamiliar with the relevant history despite opining on it.  In the Spanish Civil War, the “revolutionaries” were the traditionalists, commonly characterized as fascists, who were supported by Nazi Germany; that side was fighting communists and anarchists, loyal to the radical socialist government, who were supported by Communist Soviet Union.  There were horrible atrocities on both sides, and neither side was remotely fighting for “democracy” or “liberty.”  A modest proposal is that opera directors stick to operas as written and stay away from subjects about which they are unfamiliar.  The Lyric has a dramaturg on staff, but it needs an historian as well.

I first saw Carmen at the Lyric in the early 1980s, with Placido Domingo as Don Jose.  Quite coincidentally, just one week earlier also at the Lyric we attended a wonderful concert headlined by the now 76 year-old Domingo.  I had forgotten the exact year of that earlier Carmen, but the concert’s program informed me that it was 1984.  I’m fortunate to have seen Domingo at both ends of his remarkable career.

Carmen has permeated popular culture.  There are some non-traditional appearances of the opera’s story and music that I particularly enjoy.  In 1984 pop music star Malcolm McLaren released an album of pop adaptations of some well-known opera selections, and his riff on Carmen and the Habanera is quite entertaining.  The creative Oscar Hammerstein II transposed Carmen’s story and lyrics to the early 1950s in the American South and Chicago in the film Carmen Jones, which featured an all-black cast with Dorothy Dandridge in the title role.  Finally, the British duo Opera Babes sing a wonderful duet with words put to the Carmen Interlude, an enchanting piece of music; they have performed some of their entertaining repertory, including the piece from Carmen I would like to think, at the Los Angeles Opera House with none other than Placido Domingo.

R Balsamo

Les Troyens (The Trojans) at the Lyric Opera

Looking back upon the many wonderful musical performances I took in this past year, the highlight was the Chicago premiere last month of Les Troyens (The Trojans), the opera masterpiece from the prolific French composer Hector Berlioz.  The libretto, which he wrote in addition to the music, is faithfully based on sections of Virgil’s Aeneid, a foundational work in Western literature, which tells the story of Aeneas and his band of Trojans who survive the fall of Troy and wander the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Italy where they are destined to found the great city of Rome.  The opera focuses on two parts of that epic story – the fall of Troy and the Trojans’ time at the North African city of Carthage where its Queen Dido and Aeneas experience the great love affair that ends tragically when the reluctant Aeneas is ordered by the gods to leave for Italy to fulfill his destiny.  

"The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas," by English painter Nathaniel Dance-Holland

Les Troyens is considered one of the gems of Grand Opera, large-scale works with huge casts, elaborate sets, and evocative ballet which portray some great historical theme.  Berlioz fell in love with the Aeneid after reading it in Latin as a boy and bringing the story to the operatic stage was the toil of his later life.  It is now regarded as his opus magnus.  The story of the Aeneid, particularly its first half which mirrors Homer’s Odyssey, is still read in high school Latin courses (like mine of some years past) and still captures the imagination of many a young man. 

The opera is full of soaring melodies that flesh out the mythological historical drama.  The long, elaborate love duet (Nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie!) is one of the most beautiful in all of opera.  An Act 4 quintet is a particular favorite of mine.  In fact, the score is so full of treats that the two most recognizable tenor arias are given to singers other than the lead tenor role of Aeneas.  In Dido’s touching farewell aria (Adieu, fière cité), Berlioz reprises the main melodic line from the earlier sumptuous love duet just for a moment, then ends it all on a somber note, reflecting the love destroyed by fate and the gods.  Opera at its grandest. 

The singing was excellent – strong, clear, and passionate.  The strong cast was led by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham as the ill-fated Queen Dido, Brandon Jovanovich as the conflicted hero Aeneas, and soprano Christine Goerke as the doomed Trojan seer Cassandra.    

The set was of the barren, minimalist variety one has come to expect these days in opera, although for this grand dramatic story I was expecting more.  One example: the cave scene in which Dido and Aeneas consummate their love and create their bond is not shown, thus omitting an important event that drives the plot.  Another: nary a glimpse of the Trojan fleet along the Carthaginian shoreline, where some of the events take place.  At the opera’s end, in the libretto Dido’s sister Anna and minister Narbal curse at the departing Trojans in their ships, but in the Lyric production there are no ships at which to gesture, so the two just sing at the audience.  There was creativity nonetheless; most notably, the Trojan Horse made its appearance as the arresting projection of its giant, awesome shadow on the war-ravaged walls of Troy. 

The costuming, though, was an affront – intellectually vapid and artistically offensive.  Rather than transporting the audience’s imagination back to the days of Troy and Carthage, the director Tim Albery and his accomplices sneered at the audience and degraded the masterpiece by costuming the characters in an incoherent array of random fashions of the last hundred years or so.  Ancient Queen Dido, for example, when first introduced is wearing a modern women’s business suit, and later the noble warrior Aeneas wears a cardigan sweater over what looked like a pair of chino pants and boat shoes.  Not only were such visuals ridiculous, reflecting poorly on both the immediate perpetrators and Lyric’s oversight, but some of the story’s drama got lost.  For example, at the end Dido orders Aeneas’s armor, clothing, and weapons burned on a great pyre.  Aeneas had left them behind at the palace when he abruptly sailed for Italy with his people on strict orders from the impatient gods.  In the story Dido climbs up onto the pyre and suddenly slays herself with Aeneas’s sword.  The symbolism of all this was lost in the Lyric’s production because placed on the pyre were no armor and sword but just some unidentifiable and formless cloth items (maybe that cardigan sweater!).  Dido’s kills herself not with the sword of the departed Aeneas, her unfaithful lover, but with some random dagger that was lying around.

One final point about director Albery, who displays an attitude all too common these days.  From "A Talk with the Director" in the Program Guide:  "You could say [that Aeneas's decision to leave Dido to found his own great city of Rome rather than marry Dido and become king of the city that she created] is a metaphor for male ego and ambition.... He's got his Italy right there, but he just can't accept it."  What a misunderstanding of Aeneas's motivations and of themes of the Aeneid – of self-sacrifice, of duty and honor, to accomplish a goal greater than one's own self-defined pleasures.  It's much easier, of course, for this director to alter the story of the Aeneid than to write his own opera, for that would require real effort.  Apparently it’s too much these days to expect solipsistic directors to faithfully portray an opera in its proper place and time rather than to degrade it to satisfy their own juvenile transgressive needs.

But despite the disappointing visuals, the story and the music were all there, plenty enough for the mind and the ear.  The Aeneid is a great narrative, a poem actually, full of the greatest human drama, and Berlioz brought much of it to the opera stage.  After one hundred and fifty years, Les Troyens finally made it to Chicago.  We can warmly thank the Lyric Opera for that.

R Balsamo

Lucia di Lammermoor at the Lyric Opera

Lucia di Lammermoor is back in Chicago at the Lyric Opera.  It was last presented just five years ago this month, when soprano Susanna Phillips kept us in the audience spellbound, and a bit apprehensive, during the opera’s famous “mad scene” as she moved up and down a tall winding staircase without railings.  The staircase is gone in this season’s production but the set and the singing were just as outstanding.

Lucia is widely regarded as Donizetti’s masterpiece, written when the composer was just 37 years old and premiering in Naples in 1838.  The plot is simple, especially by opera standards, featuring proverbial “star-crossed” lovers in Scotland caught up in a blood feud between their families.  The tragedy is set in motion when Lucia’s brother Enrico and a retainer trick her, with a lot of browbeating thrown in, into marrying an aristocrat for her brother’s benefit rather than the man she loves.  Unfortunately, besides not being rich and influential her lover Edgardo happens to be her brother’s enemy.  Returning from an overseas mission, Edgardo bursts in on the scene just as the marriage is completed and confronts Lucia, each one mistakenly feeling betrayed by the other.  The famous sextet breaks out as the six major players simultaneously express their various emotions and desires.  The just-married Lucia, learning that her lover was true after all, goes mad and tragedy ensues.

As popular and famous as it is, I must confess that the opera’s so-called “mad scene” is not one of my favorite parts.  The long, multi-part Act 1 love duet is splendid, the deservedly famous Act 2 sextet is a highlight in all of opera, and the moving Act 3 lament by Edgardo that ends the opera is wonderful.  But opera aficionados do love that mad scene, in which sopranos over the years have added their own vocal embellishments to an already difficult score.  In his critical treatment The Opera, Joseph Wechsberg writes that the “Mad Scene is a ne plus ultra tour de force for prima donnas ...  Afterwards, nineteen other composers wrote ‘mad scenes’, giving their prima donnas such murderous fioriture [florid embellishment of a melody] that only a ‘mad’ woman would be expected to sing them.”      

Gaetano Donizetti

Speaking of singing, it was uniformly terrific, featuring as leads Russian Albina Shagimuratova as Lucia, Pole Piotr Beczala as Edgardo, and American Quinn Kelsey as Lucia’s nefarious brother Enrico.  The sets were arresting and enhanced the experience.  Large multi-sectional panels divided the stage into a foreground and background, and particular arrangements of the panels in various scenes allowed for an interesting visual complexity, accentuated by skillful use of strong light and deep shadows.  With an otherwise minimalist set, which I usually do not care for, the effect was powerful and a strong stimulant to the imagination.

The recording I enjoy is from 1971 with a truly all-star cast – Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Chicago’s very own Sherrill Milnes, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, with Sutherland’s husband Richard Bonynge and the Covent Garden Orchestra and Chorus.  Opera doesn’t get any better than that.

R Balsamo

Jan Morris of the Pax Britannica Trilogy at 90

Today is author Jan Morris’s 90^th birthday.  What a treasure trove of writing she has given us.  She has been as prolific as she has been masterful, and I have read much of her work though far from all.  She mixes history and culture and travelogue into most interesting evocations, and of these I have especially enjoyed, many times over, her treatments of Venice, Trieste, and Hong Kong.  But I believe her masterpiece is her trilogy of the history of the British Empire – the Pax Britannica Trilogy.  History it is, but really a pointillist portrait of the sights and sounds, the ethos and the pathos, the glory and the tragedy, of that remarkable historical phenomenon. 

I have reread that work many times, and I always find something new to reflect on, to marvel at.  I often pick up a volume and begin reading on a randomly-opened page, it’s that good.  I can’t think of another book, three actually, that have enjoyed more, or learned more from.  Formally prose, so many passages reach the poetic that it is as pleasurable to read, for those who enjoy the English language, as it is informative and stimulative.

Jan Morris wrote these volumes as a young man, as James Morris before her gender change.  She writes in the Introduction to the last volume:

Mine is an aesthetic view of Empire, and there is no denying that as the flare of the imperial idea faded, so its beauty faded too.  It had not always been a pleasant kind of beauty, but it had been full of splendor and vitality, and when the Empire lost its overweening confidence and command, its forms became less striking and its outlines less distinct....  My book is therefore sad without being regretful.  It was time the Empire went, but it was sad to see it go; and these pages too, while I hope they are not blind to the imperial faults and weaknesses, are tinged nevertheless with an affectionate melancholy....  I hope my readers will discover in themselves ... at least some of the mingled sensations of admiration, dislike, amusement, pity, pride, envy and astonishment with which I have watched and pictured the passing of the British Empire.    

Morris is very witty, and I have captured a few examples of such in my two previous posts, the first seven years ago now.  One more:  The early British West African trading firm Swanzy’s, later to form a part of the conglomerate Unilever, at one point gave its historic, ceremonial staff, an important totem at one time, to the British Museum, “and thus [it] disappeared from human knowledge.”  Yet another (it’s hard to stop):  The appointed successor to Tennyson as Poet Laureate was one Alfred Austin, and enthusiast of Empire and of mixed reputation, who, writes Morris, “was apparently impervious to criticism, and this is lucky, for nobody has had a good word for him since his death in 1913.”

Morris visits cemeteries.  She reads the stones, she sits and soaks in the sights and sounds, she finds the stories that end there.  I’ve also walked among the stones, wondering about the stories untold, or half-told.  Near one of my family’s graves there is a four-grave plot, with a large monument.  The "darling beloved" James Jr. died in the early 1930s at the age of six.  One ponders for a moment the inestimable sorrow of the parents, and then one sees that a second grave is that of James Sr., who died just a few years later.  The other two plots are unfilled.  What became of the mother?  Were there other children?  Did she remarry and does she now lie a thousand miles away next to her second husband, leaving the first joys of her life lying together without her?   

Morris visited the southern England grave of the enigmatic romantic T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) in 1976 on the anniversary of his 1935 death, and found the grave covered with flowers.  In South Africa she visited the graves of the British killed there in the Second Boer War, writing “when I was there in 1975 I thanked the gardener for tending the British graves with such care.  ‘So long as you’re satisfied,’ he gently replied.”  She found the grave in Bermuda of a young lieutenant who died in 1837, buried under the epitaph “Alas he is not lost / But is gone before.” 

One last clip, which I have quoted before, for me one of the most touching.  In the southeast tip of Europe, she visited a cemetery holding the bodies of the many young Australians and New Zealanders whose lives were thrown away there through the criminal incompetence of the British military leaders in an especially senseless and horrific war:   

"In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: 'God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will' ... for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon."

The most beautifully evocative writer I have ever read. 

After supposedly retiring, two years ago she published “Ciao, Carpaccio! – An Infatuation,” a personal appreciation of the 15^th century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio who populated his carefully detailed paintings with whimsical animals and objects.  Morris tells us that she is no scholar of art and that her “infatuation” with the painter is “largely affectionate fancy.”  One day while looking through a book with photographs of his work she saw in a small, curiously perched bird, overlooking a great scene, the spirit of the artist himself, writing “that before I went to bed I resolved to write, purely for my own pleasure, this self-indulgent caprice.”  Would that she will have more such caprices in the coming years.

R Balsamo

La Traviata at Michigan’s Harbor Country Opera

You don’t always have to be in a big city to find opera.  The other day we enjoyed a wonderful performance of Verdi’s La Traviata, the world's most popular opera by the world's most popular opera composer, in the sleepy little town of Three Oaks, Michigan.  The hamlet sits amidst corn and bean fields a few miles inland from the Lake Michigan shore in the southwest corner of the state (surprisingly only 90 minutes from downtown Chicago).  The production was the latest offering from Harbor Country Opera.  [“Harbor Country,” for those who might be wondering, is the somewhat fanciful marketing label that the local Chamber of Commerce cooked up for a string of Lake Michigan shore beach towns in the southwest corner of Michigan, an area that contains but a single actual harbor.  Furthermore, Three Oaks is included in this trademarked marketing “region,” despite being seven miles inland.  Whatever.] 

McMurray, Caraman, & Steyer (L to R) in HCO's La Traviata

Harbor Country Opera is a little gem, and its majordomo Bob Swan, an opera singer himself, has been staging productions for quite some time.  In recent years we have taken in, for example, a most enjoyable showing of La Boheme and a wonderful concert by Isola Jones, the famed Met star, accompanied by Bill McMurray and John Concepcion.  That La Boheme was a full production of the opera in the large auditorium of the high school in New Buffalo, the one town in Harbor Country with an actual harbor.  For La Traviata the setting was the small stage at the Acorn Theater, a modest space in a converted factory that once made corset stays from turkey feather quills when whalebone was getting hard to come by.  Fortunately, corsets went out of style before turkeys became hard to come by.  Swan and company put on a production of the major scenes from the opera, with a cast of essentially the three main characters who do most of the singing in the complete opera.  The performers were in full costume, though understandably the set was minimal.  A narrator explained the story line between scenes.  La traviata means "the fallen woman," and the libretto is based on La Dame aux Camélias – The Lady of the Camellias, a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils.  The camellia flower in bloom is an iconic image for this opera.

The voices were strong and clear, and the acting was convincing.  I don’t know how Swan managed to get performers of this caliber to this rural corner of Michigan, but he did.  Christine Steyer was Violetta, the consumptive courtesan, Emanuel-Cristian Caraman was her paramour Alfredo, and Bill McMurray was Giorgio Germont, Alfredo’s father.  All three have extensive performance resumes, and in fact McMurray appeared in the above-mentioned La Boheme as well as in concert with Isola Jones.  The baritone-soprano complex duet between the elder Germont and Violetta, in which he seeks to convince her to forego her loving relationship with his son for the sake of his family’s reputation, is one of my favorite duets in all of opera.  And the touching “Parigi, o caro” duet between Violetta and Alfredo, in her last moments, was splendidly done.  All in all, a wonderful show from a wonderful cast.  And notably, the bar was stocked with chilled Prosecco, a Venetian sparkling wine appropriately served and enjoyed at an opera that debuted at the storied La Fenice opera house in that very city.

At HCO’s “Broadway Blitz” show earlier this summer, Bob Swan introduced the show and mentioned some recent health trouble.  The other day he looked stronger, a most welcome sign for fans of Harbor Country Opera.  Salut, Mr. Swan.

R Balsamo

Lyric Opera Under the Stars – 2016

The opera gods had their way last Friday and stopped the light drizzle just as the concert began.  It turned out to be a beautiful evening under the stars at Chicago's lakefront Millennium Park for the annual Stars of the Lyric Opera concert.  

The concert, though, was a bit more mixed than the weather.  The new regime at the Lyric does not seem overly-enamored with Italian opera, and the concert as well as the new season reflects that (just two of the upcoming season's eight operas are Italian, with not a single Verdi or Puccini; but in fairness the two chosen – Norma and Lucia – are two of the very best). Selections from four of the new season's eight planned operas were performed, highlighted by mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner's appearance in a flaming red dress as Carmen for the habanera, which she sang wonderfully.

Other than the selections from Carmen and Lucia and a crowd sing-along of the stirring Va Pensiero chorus from Nabucco (a highlight of last season), there wasn't much red meat, operatically speaking, on the bill.  No duets or trios, and just how many concerts feature not one but two bass arias?  I was hoping for a selection from the upcoming Berlioz masterpiece Les Troyens (The Trojans), which I have been studying, but no dice, and nothing from Norma.

Nevertheless, a wonderful way to spend a Friday September evening by the lakeshore, gratis, thanks once again to the Lyric Opera.

R Balsamo

Hemingway’s Collected Letters

Ernest Hemingway wrote a great many letters in his lifetime.  They were usually very informal, often full of strong enthusiasms, coarse language, and unbridled emotion.  They were not written as works of literature, or anything close to that.  They were spontaneous and of the moment.  They reveal a great deal about the man, less about the writer.

Hemingway’s letters are scattered all over the world, some in libraries and some in private hands.  After Hemingway’s death, Carlos Baker sifted through what was then available to him and in 1969 published a collection of letters he thought were the best.  But they were just a small fraction of the entire corpus.  Now, a group of scholars is in the process of publishing a multi-volume collection of every known Hemingway letter in existence, fulsomely annotated and carefully documented – The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.  The first volume was published in 2011 and three volumes of an anticipated twelve have been published so far, in beautifully-bound editions by Cambridge University Press.  The letters are being published in chronological order, and the editors supplement them with copious introductions, notes, chronologies, glossaries, maps, and indexes.      

Bruce Bawer reviewed (link) the first three volumes in the February, 2016, issue of The New Criterion, a terrific journal of criticism and commentary to which I subscribe.  He is not very enamored with the letters he has read thus far.  Bawer finds them for the most part uninteresting, often casually written, and not indicative of the great writer’s literary talent.  Bawer sees in the letters a very human, flawed man  – he sees the man behind the curtain and doesn’t like what he finds.

Having now read many Hemingway biographies, most of the letters in the Baker collection, and all the letters in the first two volumes in this new collection, my view is different from Bawer’s.  Although Bawer’s points are well taken, and valid to a point, I find Hemingway the man fascinating, and his letters flesh out that man more than any other source.     

In his letters we see how Hemingway approached his life and his writing.  He may have been economical with words in his serious writing, but he was garrulous in his letters.  We see how his relationships with family and friends (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Archibald MacLeish) grew, blossomed, and deteriorated.   We see his need to be surrounded by friends, with himself as the center of attention, in his frequent urgings to friends to come and stay with him to fish and hunt and travel.  The letters are often emotional, frequently gossipy, and occasionally petty.  There’s bluster, and passion, and anger.  He was very numeric – we see a man continually aware of his finances and his productivity (page counts of works in progress are frequently conveyed to friends and editors), a man who kept detailed logs of fish caught and animals shot, of miles driven and expenses incurred.  He could be very kind and considerate, or a total jerk, and he was definitely not a family man, mostly neglecting his three sons, four wives, and others in his orbit.  We see a man whose friends and family and women are cast off one-by-one along the way, and wonder why.  Hemingway was funny and inquisitive, and very competitive, always exploring, thinking, pushing limits.  He was a man full of vim and enthusiasm, who could not stay in one place (or with the same people) for very long.   

The plan for the series is to publish only letters from Hemingway himself, and not those of his correspondents, providing explanatory notes to help with context.  About 85% of the letters have never been published before, and a great deal of effort seems to have gone into tracking them down all over the world.  At the time of the first volume, letters had been collected from almost 250 sources, not only libraries and similar institutions but from over 175 dealers, private collectors, and individual Hemingway correspondents.  Hemingway himself had saved some material – early drafts and some copies, whole or in part.  He seems never to have thrown out even a scrap of paper with writing on it, perhaps learning the value of saving material from his mother, who meticulously kept detailed scrapbooks on each of her children, filling six large volumes on her son Earnest’s activities through his involvement in the First World War.  Hemingway, by the way, saved a great many lists, from shopping items to camping trip needs, and, like his father, organized himself through them.

Hemingway’s letters in a very real sense constitute his autobiography, however unintended.  He took life his way with passion and vigor, and though the picture is not always pretty, there’s much to be taken away in his letters by those of us more inclined to quiet reading and quiet times.

R Balsamo