On this date in 1917, Alexander Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy) was premiered in Stuttgart. It is the first of two operas that Zemlinsky (1871-1942) based upon the works of Oscar Wilde. Der Zwerk (The Dwarf) followed in 1922.
Last Wednesday, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled its latest new media strategy: the Met Player. Over 150 operas from the past 71 years are available for listening or viewing on your computer. The oldest is a 1937 Carmen with Rosa Ponselle, the newest are from the 2007-2008 high definition move theater broadcasts, including definitive performances of La Fille du Regiment (Dessay, Flores) and Eugene Onegin (Fleming, Hvorostovsky), and the Tristan und Isolde featuring Deborah Voight and Robert Dean Smith.
Updated on Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 02:05 by
John Gibbons
The Met’s study guide for Satyagraha asked the reader to consider Glass’s decision to set the original Sanskrit, rather than an English translation. I think it is a sound decision, despite the fact that it would appear to be motivated by essentially the same factors which prompted Stravinsky to set Oedipus Rex in Latin. Latin, not Greek!
Updated on Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 06:22 by
John Gibbons
For the first time in my life I listened today, with undivided attention, to Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, in an admirable performance from the Met. I carefully read the quite helpful study materials available from the Met’s website. My point of view is likely to be less valuable than that of a Glass aficionado, since love is a prerequisite for understanding. Furthermore, my comments may either seem like a betrayal to those who agree with my customary aesthetic agendae, or insufficiently laudatory to those who already esteem this work. This post is likely to please no one, more’s the pity.
Every winter it seems like “something’s going around at work” but this is ridiculous! Six singers have made unscheduled Met debuts in the past two weeks, and one, the American tenor Robert Dean Smith, offered a Tristan that ought to go down as one of those “Were you there?” moments.
Heather Mac Donald is intrigued by the backstage insights that add so much to the Met’s movie theater broadcast program. For a longer look at some of the unsung (but not totally unsinging) backstage crews who make opera possible, Bonnie recommends a wonderful documentary about life as a Ring Cycle stage hand.
Several readers have alerted us to this performance of Renee Fleming singing the Korngold aria “Ich ging zu ihm” from Das Wunder Der Heliane. Learn a little more about this rarely-performed work.
Several comments on yesterday’s Met Opera broadcast of Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
Anyway, I got to thinking: What operatic characters get lost in their operas? Maybe I should send the question to the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, and win their super-duper prize package, but such is my loyalty to Holdekunst readers that I offer it here first, gratis.
The most poetic line of Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Strauss’s opera (premiered 1919) is sung by a small chorus of night watchmen at the end of act one; they adjure the town’s husbands and wifes to “love one another more than your life, and know this; not for your life’s sake alone is the seed of life given to you, but is solely for the sake of your love…you husbands and wives, who lie in one another’s loving arms, you are the bridge across the abyss over which the dead come back to life. Blessed is your work of love!”
Can art be “a bridge across the abyss”? And are we in fact poised above an abyss, en general? Or does an artist manufacture the concept of “an abyss” to make his work appear to be redemptive? I don’t know, but the piece worked for me, from beginning to end. The theme of the wounding of the falcon, which became a love motif throughout the course of the piece, uniting the Mozartian couples Pamina and Tamino and Papageno and ..I mean, Emperor and Empress, Dyer and wife, was especially memorable; it better have been, because Strauss repeated it a zillion times in a zillion ways, but he had the courage of his convictions, and it paid off; the leitmotivic organization was splendidly cogent.
Strauss may have been a bourgeois, and this passage may appear to be the grossest of bourgeois sentiments, couched in Teutonic sonic gargantua, but I was there today, in the theatre, (albeit the dress rehearsal) and moving it was, and how. The opera started at one and ended at five; that’s four hours! Four great hours. The acts get progressively better, as well. And I’m an opera lover born, but I can lose the thread, time to time, opera is demanding. Not today. And the plot is the most recondite imaginable. This is an encomium, if you like.
If you live in Chicago you ought to go. In the past I’ve been rebuked (getting rebuked is a super fun habit of mine) for not being sufficiently positive about the Lyric Opera; it’s a pleasure to be able to wholeheartedly and absolutely without reservation recommend this splendid effort. Everyone knows how great Deborah Voigt (the Empress) is. And lots of guys know the fine talents of Jill Grove (nurse), Franz Hawlata (Barak the Dyer — WFMT listeners also heard his wonderful Hans Sachs last week) and Christine Brewer (Dyer’s wife); but the tenor who sang the Emperor, an unknown quantity to me, Robert Dean Smith, was equally splendid. And tenors have a tough time making their way in Strauss. Not Mr. Smith, whose scene with the falcon in act two was memorably beautiful. Memorably beautiful. I use words lightly all too often, but not here. Memorably beautiful.
The production is a (reasonably conservative) winner, by Paul Curran, and Sir Andrew Davis and the orchestra were really, really wonderful… and I know I’ve had my criticisms of both orchestra and conductor in the past… this was first rate. The Lyric made my day. Bravo.
If you can’t make to Lyric:
Richard Strauss - Die Frau Ohne Schatten / Solti, Studer, Terfel
starring Cheryl Studer, Thomas Moser, Marjana Lipovsek, Bryn Terfel, Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz
R. Strauss - Die Frau Ohne Schatten
starring Wolfgang Sawallisch, Luana DeVol, Peter Seiffert, Janis Martin, Marjana Lipovsek
