Sunday Random Ten: Special Recitative Edition


 


1. Ben Harper - More Than Sorry
2. Nine Inch Nails - Heresy
3. Steve Coleman and Five Elements - Common Law (alternate take 1)
4. Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Act 3: C'est lui! C'est lui! [Joan Sutherland]
5. The Coasters - Young Blood
6. Charles Brown - Trouble Blues
7. The Beatles - I Wanna Be Your Man
8. Babatunde Olatunji - Ajaja
9. John Fahey - Orinda-Moraga
10. 3ds - Fish Tails

And the sudden-death tie-breaker: Alison Moyet - And I Know.

You know, Opera is a really dumb idea.
Merging music with story is a seductive thing, but it seems you have two main options: 1) Go the balladeer route and have a good story accompanied by really boring repetitive music, or 2) Have excellent music, and have the story shoehorned in in a strained and mannered fashion.
Even these days, with technology good enough that we can perfectly modulate sound levels that music can be controlled so as to never eclipse dialogue or even sound effects, we have a) a piece of music, which, though when it's edited down, can be quite nice, would not be endurable over its entire length--or b) the music video--just try to tell the story of any music video without turning red and losing eye contact.

It's unclear exactly what the idea was at the birth of Western opera in Italy, although the dominant literary form was still the epic poems of Ariosto and Tasso. Combine that with the reverence prevalent at the time of Greek drama, and the conviction that the parts of the chorus were to be sung. (And the influence of the Mass, which, while not a story, was a long ceremony completely sung, certainlt helped.) Certainly the idea of an entire epic poem set to music isn't insane, and probably influenced the idea of slathering an entire drama with it. Of course, any speculation of 'what were they thinking?' can't get very far. And of course, after a while, it didn't matter: it caught on, and that was good enough.

Opera's success wasn't hard to figure out: it had everything: story, music, pretty people singing in pretty clothes, spectacle, swordplay, true love... (sorry, I'm beginning to sound like Peter Falk in The Princess Bride). The fact that that the joins were sort of clumsy and the effect somewhat artificial scarcely mattered. In plain fact, I think, in my own non-expert way, that it was opera which made the modern symphony possible. How else, except by operatic precedent, could you have gotten a bunch of spoiled aristocrats to sit in a darkened hall for hours with nothing to look at but a bunch of indifferently clad musicians (and all men!) sawing and puffing away? Only, I suspect, because opera had gotten them used to it.

It's this everything-in-one-package aspect that also might be the answer to my other question: if Opera is such a dumb idea, why did the human race come up with it twice? Chinese Opera seemingly owes nothing to the Western form--and the strange wavering falsetto gong-bashing music sounds Martian to Western ears--but in form and dynamics (even to the same insufficiencies and artificialities) they might as well be twins. (btw, I heartily recommend the movie Farewell My Concubine --a flat-out brilliant movie which, by the end, almost had me in love with the music of the Beijing Opera--almost.

Richard Wagner articulated it perfectly, that Opera could be the Gesamtkunstwerk--combined work of art--incorporating the best of drama,music, painting, architecture, dance--you name it. Only thanks to Wagner's limitations, he gave us monstrous 5 hour dramas dunked in entire oceans of music. (oh, I'm going to get it for this.) Wagner, at least, was true to his commitment and took as much care in his dramatic structure as in his music. It's just that his dramatic talents were not as prodigious as his musical ones--and in m y extremely humble and extremely inexpert opinion, his insufficiencies as a dramatist distorted his music.

Is it impossible to write a brilliant opera, wonderful in both story and music? I can think of only one opera where the brilliance of the story matches the brilliance of the music, and that's Der Rosenkavalier, written by the brilliant and subtle Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It's not, peculiarly, my favorite opera, but that's partly because I'm not ecstatic over Richard Strauss's music. (Ariadne auf Naxos, which also unites the two, has an even better script by Hofmannsthal, and is perhaps the most charming and magical story ever set to opera.) (Oh, and Craig Russell nearly convinced me by his dazzling adaptation of Pelléas and Melisande--excepth that it was more of the strange and wonderful beauty of Maurice Maeterlinck than of a perfect integration with Debussy's music. Still it gets very close.) And I admit that La Nozze de Figaro, La Bohème, and La Traviata are more my favoriites because Mozart's, Puccini's and Verdi's music is just so damn good, that I go back to them time after time. But I'll say that there are moments in Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne that send shivers up my spine the way that no brilliant aria ever could--and that there's no character in all of opera like the Marschallin.

One of the good things about opera's artificiality is that, if you're into it, you can enjoy it with fat singers, clumsy direction, cheesy (or what-a-bad-idea modernist) sets, and, of course, on CD (or iPod) with no visuals at all, and chopped up into little pieces. And you can do it with non-sublime music sung by a sublime voice, and a story in a language you don't understand. You can even forgive a weakish soprano, a brassy tenor or a blotto baritone and still enjoy all the other stuff. In fact, reality being what it is, a love of opera is a master's class in tolerance.

(And just to be fair, Lakmé is one of those wonderful misguided exercises in world culture, being set inB4ritish controlled West Bengal. You'd never know it from the music, though. It sparkles nonetheless--and Joan Sutherland is one of my favorite operatic voices. I would love to see Bollywood adapt this one.)

Posted: Saturday - March 24, 2007 at 03:29 PM        

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