Opera aficionados hear about Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, "The Girl of the Golden West," perhaps the only opera he composed during his most productive years that has not received the critical praise nor the huge popularity of the operas he wrote then: La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Manon Lescaut. The three one-act operas he wrote that are often performed together as Il Trittico vary among themselves in their relative success as separate items: Il Tabarro is performed now and then, Suor Angelica less often, and Gianni Schicchi frequently, benefitting from being his only comic opera.
Despite Fanciulla's status as an oddball among his oeuvre, I'd been planning to see it for ages but somehow never got to the theatre until last Saturday when we saw it in a movie theatre as part of the Metropolitan Opera's live broadcasts in HD. True, its problem, as usually argued, remains that it lacks the many wonderful arias and duets of the popular Puccini perennials. This opera does have one major aria--a tenor one near the end--which was added by the composer at the "suggestion" of the original performing tenor at the premiere, one Enrico Caruso. Not surprisingly, it is a fine piece.
What was most surprising, however, is that the opera itself was delightful. It did gain, of course, from an excellent new Met production as well as a top-drawer cast headed by Jonas Kaufmann, probably the reigning active tenor today, and Eva-Maria Westbroek, whom I had previously seen in Wagner, notably as Sieglinde in Die Walkuire. The villain of the piece is the baritone, the sheriff, Jack Rance, played by Željko Lučić, who is a fine singer, too, whom I recall from playing the title role in the Met's "Las Vegas"-set production of Rigoletto.
The dialogue, as translated in subtitles in the theatre, was not at all embarrassing in the way operatic language often can be. The plot of this operatic western was pretty decent, too, especially in the world of opera stories, which admittedly do not set a very high standard for verisimilitude. Not only that, but the title-role soprano, Minnie, played by Miss Westbroek, did pull off the poker game scene, in which she wins by cheating, with plenty of aplomb.
There are several major supporting role and the overall chorus of miners performed well and convincingly. Kaufmann's performance was no less than superb--he possesses and knows well how to use his beautiful vocal instrument. I thought that Westbroek and Lučić also sang well and portrayed their characters well. The attractive Miss Westbroek also has the signature golden hair suggested in the English translation of the title.
So this turned out to be a satisfying operatic experience. I will confess that one cannot take the story any more seriously than Puccini's other plots and in that vein, I'm somewhat pleased that the opera actually--and rarely for opera--has a happy ending. Walking out of the theatre was definitely a pleasure because of the enjoyment engendered by the show.
Monday, October 29, 2018
Monday, October 22, 2018
The Great Danbury Railway Fair
When I was growing up, one major attraction not too far away that almost everyone I knew wanted to visit was the "Great Danbury Fair." Danbury was not that far away in Western Connecticut and the fair, held in the autumn, was described in glowing terms that later were rekindled in me when I first read James Joyce's story, Araby, in which a boy longs to make it to a highly-touted fair and ends up being completely disappointed when he finally gets there.
In this case, I never managed to join up with some friends to go, and my father made it clear that he regarded this fair as a total tourist trap, which, who knows, it may well have been. I never even passed through Danbury until last weekend when we were staying there over a weekend when we were attending a nice family wedding out in the country about 20 miles north of Danbury near Candlewood Lake.
Having some free time on Saturday, I paid a visit to the Danbury Railway Museum, located in the heart of town where there is a large loop of tracks alongside a great old New Haven station. The old station, well-preserved, is now the museum and includes a large railyard in the middle of the loop where the museum maintains in various states of renovation a fleet of about 20 engines and other rolling stock.
Along the loop also stands a modern rail station that serves as the terminus of a Metro North branch line inherited from the New Haven, excuse me, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, which maintained two stations in Mt. Vernon, where I grew up. This Danbury branch, which breaks off from the main Shore Line at Norwalk, once extended as far as Pittsfield, Mass. It is mentioned in a very good John P. Marquand novel, B.F.'s Daughter, in which a character boards a train on the now-abandoned stretch for Grand Central.
The museum in the old station has a good range of mainly New Haven memorabilia, especially good old maps. There are several layouts and dioramas of model trains and a gift shop featuring a wealth of old railroad books for sale at very reasonable prices. And on the platform where they were running brief three-car trips around the railyard ferrying passengers, mostly kids, to a pumpkin patch, a charming hot dog vendor was selling decent dogs with your choice of yellow or brown mustard and several other condiments. It's the first place I've found in years where he puts the mustard on and then the sauerkraut. It's those simple things that no one seems to know how to do any more.
In this case, I never managed to join up with some friends to go, and my father made it clear that he regarded this fair as a total tourist trap, which, who knows, it may well have been. I never even passed through Danbury until last weekend when we were staying there over a weekend when we were attending a nice family wedding out in the country about 20 miles north of Danbury near Candlewood Lake.
Having some free time on Saturday, I paid a visit to the Danbury Railway Museum, located in the heart of town where there is a large loop of tracks alongside a great old New Haven station. The old station, well-preserved, is now the museum and includes a large railyard in the middle of the loop where the museum maintains in various states of renovation a fleet of about 20 engines and other rolling stock.
Along the loop also stands a modern rail station that serves as the terminus of a Metro North branch line inherited from the New Haven, excuse me, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, which maintained two stations in Mt. Vernon, where I grew up. This Danbury branch, which breaks off from the main Shore Line at Norwalk, once extended as far as Pittsfield, Mass. It is mentioned in a very good John P. Marquand novel, B.F.'s Daughter, in which a character boards a train on the now-abandoned stretch for Grand Central.
The museum in the old station has a good range of mainly New Haven memorabilia, especially good old maps. There are several layouts and dioramas of model trains and a gift shop featuring a wealth of old railroad books for sale at very reasonable prices. And on the platform where they were running brief three-car trips around the railyard ferrying passengers, mostly kids, to a pumpkin patch, a charming hot dog vendor was selling decent dogs with your choice of yellow or brown mustard and several other condiments. It's the first place I've found in years where he puts the mustard on and then the sauerkraut. It's those simple things that no one seems to know how to do any more.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Listening to Lepore
Jill Lepore's essays in The New Yorker have been an adornment there for some time. She is of course a prominent historian, holding a chair at Harvard as well as a staff writer position on the magazine. Perhaps this demonstrates how her writing style is wonderfully enticing, but is accompanied by a piercing capacity to look at history from a different direction and provide enlightenment in areas previously undisturbed for eons.
She spoke at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC recently and accompanied her lecture with slides that illustrated how much of what we assume is totally new in American life, especially politics, has occurred before, or as she said, our history offers multiple precedents. I've started reading her lengthy new history of the U.S., These Truths, which expands on her essays but essentially focuses on the parts of American history she deems important and often previously ignored.
The overarching theme of the first section, for example, is the conflict between liberty and slavery that dominated the entire "discovery" and colonization of the New World. Examining the events of those centuries through this viewpoint gives new meaning to what were previously mere statements of what happened.
I've found her essays always stimulating. In several pages, she covers an amazing amount of ground, usually penetrating to the core of her subject. I've read several biographies of Clarence Darrow, including his own, but her short summary of his life, career, and significance did a better job of explicating the story of America's greatest lawyer than any of the longer works.
She wrote not long ago about the crime victims' movement in the U.S., something with which I've been involved now for several years. It struck me that she was the first analyst I've encountered who wrestled with the continuing tension between the rights of defendants and victims. This has not been easy to resolve nor should it be. Lepore forces us to confront these competing interests and strive to find ways to reconcile them.
She spoke at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC recently and accompanied her lecture with slides that illustrated how much of what we assume is totally new in American life, especially politics, has occurred before, or as she said, our history offers multiple precedents. I've started reading her lengthy new history of the U.S., These Truths, which expands on her essays but essentially focuses on the parts of American history she deems important and often previously ignored.
The overarching theme of the first section, for example, is the conflict between liberty and slavery that dominated the entire "discovery" and colonization of the New World. Examining the events of those centuries through this viewpoint gives new meaning to what were previously mere statements of what happened.
I've found her essays always stimulating. In several pages, she covers an amazing amount of ground, usually penetrating to the core of her subject. I've read several biographies of Clarence Darrow, including his own, but her short summary of his life, career, and significance did a better job of explicating the story of America's greatest lawyer than any of the longer works.
She wrote not long ago about the crime victims' movement in the U.S., something with which I've been involved now for several years. It struck me that she was the first analyst I've encountered who wrestled with the continuing tension between the rights of defendants and victims. This has not been easy to resolve nor should it be. Lepore forces us to confront these competing interests and strive to find ways to reconcile them.
Beckett and Lepore
Putting Beckett in the title of my last posting here turned out to be particularly Beckettian as by the time I finished going on about opera, I had totally forgotten to discuss Beckett. Each month, the Capital James Joyce Group meets at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC: after reading Joyce's novels and stories aloud, we decided to tackle three short Samuel Beckett novels.
Beckett's relationship to Joyce comes from their common origins in Ireland although the Protestant Beckett (1906-1989) went to Trinity College, Dublin, and Joyce (1882-1941), a Catholic, to University College. Both left Ireland to create their work and reside in exile. In Beckett's case, he was mostly in Paris, where when Joyce spent some years there, Beckett served as his secretary. Both, of course, charted totally new courses for the novel.
Beckett lived long enough to win the Nobel Prize in 1969. Beckett's prose is usually not as dense with allusion and other semi-hidden content as Joyce's; this does not make it any easier to read as his characters rant or reflect seemingly endlessly as they confront what generally looms in his work as the meaninglessness of existence. You can conclude that it does not matter where you pick up a Beckett novel because starting in at any point does not make much difference.
The pearls in Joyce are actually more obvious, excepting, as always, Finnegans Wake, which remains sui generis and probably resulted from his effort over the last two decades of his wife to virtually create a new language which incorporates the many others in which he was fluent. But in Ulysses, there is a generous view of life in 1904 Dublin, complete with humor as well as pathos.
Joyce's musicality makes reading his prose aloud lends a great deal to enjoying his work. Beckett also gains from hearing his writing aloud because his sometimes endless sentences and paragraphs can otherwise make it difficult to digest or even grasp what he's saying. If his characters didn't focus so much on the quotidian and the practical obstacles of life, which often results in humor, his stories would lean toward depression. His overall theme has been stated as despair followed by the will to live.
Beckett himself once addressed how he differed from Joyce: "I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."
One critic once noted in describing Waiting for Godot that Beckett succeeded in writing a play in which nothing happens and then repeated in the second act what he had written in the first and so succeeded in writing a play where nothing happens twice. Godot, however has become much more accepted in the theatrical canon (which might disturb Beckett) because every time you see it (as with Joyce, his work plays more effectively than it reads), you discern more.
Beckett's relationship to Joyce comes from their common origins in Ireland although the Protestant Beckett (1906-1989) went to Trinity College, Dublin, and Joyce (1882-1941), a Catholic, to University College. Both left Ireland to create their work and reside in exile. In Beckett's case, he was mostly in Paris, where when Joyce spent some years there, Beckett served as his secretary. Both, of course, charted totally new courses for the novel.
Beckett lived long enough to win the Nobel Prize in 1969. Beckett's prose is usually not as dense with allusion and other semi-hidden content as Joyce's; this does not make it any easier to read as his characters rant or reflect seemingly endlessly as they confront what generally looms in his work as the meaninglessness of existence. You can conclude that it does not matter where you pick up a Beckett novel because starting in at any point does not make much difference.
The pearls in Joyce are actually more obvious, excepting, as always, Finnegans Wake, which remains sui generis and probably resulted from his effort over the last two decades of his wife to virtually create a new language which incorporates the many others in which he was fluent. But in Ulysses, there is a generous view of life in 1904 Dublin, complete with humor as well as pathos.
Joyce's musicality makes reading his prose aloud lends a great deal to enjoying his work. Beckett also gains from hearing his writing aloud because his sometimes endless sentences and paragraphs can otherwise make it difficult to digest or even grasp what he's saying. If his characters didn't focus so much on the quotidian and the practical obstacles of life, which often results in humor, his stories would lean toward depression. His overall theme has been stated as despair followed by the will to live.
Beckett himself once addressed how he differed from Joyce: "I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."
One critic once noted in describing Waiting for Godot that Beckett succeeded in writing a play in which nothing happens and then repeated in the second act what he had written in the first and so succeeded in writing a play where nothing happens twice. Godot, however has become much more accepted in the theatrical canon (which might disturb Beckett) because every time you see it (as with Joyce, his work plays more effectively than it reads), you discern more.
Friday, October 5, 2018
An Operatic Interlude, then Beckett
Wednesday found me at the dress rehearsal for La Traviata at the Washington National Opera, as the local company is now styled. To my mind, this extremely popular Verdi mid-period opera may be the most delightful of operas when it comes to pure musicality and the singing opportunities it offers. The cast were all making their debuts at this company, which tells one little about their background: Venera Gimadieva as Violetta, Joshua Guerrero as Alfredo, and Lucas Meacham as his father, Giorgio.
Aside from leading the famous Brindisi, the drinking song, at the start of the first act, Alfredo has no major singing (he does join Violetta again in a brief duet) until the second act. Violetta is the star of the opening act with the two major arias that end the act: È strano! ... Ah, fors'è lui , in which she contemplates whether he is the one to take her away from her self-destructive partying life as a courtesan (to use the classic euphemism that is always used in describing her), and then Sempre libere (always free) which expresses her seeming choice to live her seemingly joyous life until her already likely early death from consumption.
These, together with the preceding party scene with the brindisi and love duet and general singing, make this act one of the glories of opera: just steady delightful song from orchestra and singers. Act Two introduces the not-so-nasty villain of the piece, Alfredo's father, Giorgio Germont, who urges Violetta to abandon Alfredo so that Alfredo's sister may marry successfully, which has been threatened by Alfredo's relationship with Violetta. She does follow his request and Alfredo storms after her.
The baritone here is far from the villainous Count de Luna of Il Trovatore or Don Carlo in La Forza del Destino. Those are Verdi baritone roles of unremitting evil. Giorgio is given a wonderful aria to make his position sympathetic, even in our very different time. Alfredo previously has had some good singing and to me, this first scene continues the uninterrupted delight of the first act.
Francesca Zambello, Washington Opera's artistic director (and also in charge of the Glimmerglass Opera) is directing this production, which does have excellent sets and costumes. She has chosen to place the intermission between the two scenes of Act Two, which is far from traditional, but which works well. Scene Two is Flora's party, There's some gypsy and Spanish "entertainment" featuring dancing girls and then Alfredo's denunciation of Violetta and encounter with her regular consort, the Baron, Giorgio appears to chide him.
After a scene change, Act Three takes place in Violetta's bedroom where she is dying. There is a carnival outside in Paris and this production makes the bedroom seem like a hospital word, a motif used in the opening pre-party Prelude before Act One. Alfredo and Giorgio appear to make amends before the well-played (in this production) death scene.
This is a frequently-performed opera; I've probably seen four or five different productions and heard more on the radio. All in all, this was a delightful operatic evening, with good singing and excellent conducting by Renato Palumbo.
Aside from leading the famous Brindisi, the drinking song, at the start of the first act, Alfredo has no major singing (he does join Violetta again in a brief duet) until the second act. Violetta is the star of the opening act with the two major arias that end the act: È strano! ... Ah, fors'è lui , in which she contemplates whether he is the one to take her away from her self-destructive partying life as a courtesan (to use the classic euphemism that is always used in describing her), and then Sempre libere (always free) which expresses her seeming choice to live her seemingly joyous life until her already likely early death from consumption.
These, together with the preceding party scene with the brindisi and love duet and general singing, make this act one of the glories of opera: just steady delightful song from orchestra and singers. Act Two introduces the not-so-nasty villain of the piece, Alfredo's father, Giorgio Germont, who urges Violetta to abandon Alfredo so that Alfredo's sister may marry successfully, which has been threatened by Alfredo's relationship with Violetta. She does follow his request and Alfredo storms after her.
The baritone here is far from the villainous Count de Luna of Il Trovatore or Don Carlo in La Forza del Destino. Those are Verdi baritone roles of unremitting evil. Giorgio is given a wonderful aria to make his position sympathetic, even in our very different time. Alfredo previously has had some good singing and to me, this first scene continues the uninterrupted delight of the first act.
Francesca Zambello, Washington Opera's artistic director (and also in charge of the Glimmerglass Opera) is directing this production, which does have excellent sets and costumes. She has chosen to place the intermission between the two scenes of Act Two, which is far from traditional, but which works well. Scene Two is Flora's party, There's some gypsy and Spanish "entertainment" featuring dancing girls and then Alfredo's denunciation of Violetta and encounter with her regular consort, the Baron, Giorgio appears to chide him.
After a scene change, Act Three takes place in Violetta's bedroom where she is dying. There is a carnival outside in Paris and this production makes the bedroom seem like a hospital word, a motif used in the opening pre-party Prelude before Act One. Alfredo and Giorgio appear to make amends before the well-played (in this production) death scene.
This is a frequently-performed opera; I've probably seen four or five different productions and heard more on the radio. All in all, this was a delightful operatic evening, with good singing and excellent conducting by Renato Palumbo.
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