Opera

If there’s one thing people find annoying about classical music anoraks, it’s our passion for vintage recordings. ‘Listen to that ravishing rubato,’ we gush, as an elderly soprano swoops and scoops to the accompaniment of what sounds like a giant egg-and-bacon fry-up. And if non-anorak listeners do manage to ignore the pops, scratches and static, what do they hear? Wrong notes. Plenty of them. Is that really Artur Schnabel murdering the mighty fugue of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata or is it Les Dawson? There are actually two problems here — a disconcerting style of performance and crappy recorded sound. It’s important to distinguish between them. Those 78rpm records and the first

Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn producer’s eye, there was the pasticcio opera. Literally a musical ‘pastry’ or ‘pie’, these brought together arias from different operas, often by different composers, in a single work, designed as a way of feeding an 18th-century public whose appetite for opera was greater than composers’ ability to sate it with new music. Everyone did it — Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and of course that ultimate musical pragmatist Handel — but that didn’t make the practice any the more respectable, as one satirist’s pasticcio ‘recipe’ makes clear. Pick out about an hundred

Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one years separate them, but it seems, as one looks back, enormously more than that. Think of 1994 and now, no time at all, and not only for an ageing opera reviewer. Both works tend to be routinely referred to as masterpieces, but seeing them both in the space of three days — Mahagonny at the Royal Opera, The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music — I felt fairly strongly that they are both patchy pieces, neither representative of their composer at or even near his best. What is

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though

When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on to the genre, before it simply ceases to be itself? These questions dominated a week in which directors turned vivisectors for new productions — reimaginings — of Purcell’s Indian Queen (ENO) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Silent Opera). Anyone familiar with Peter Sellars’s work will know better than to expect any paring back from the larger-than-life American. Amplification is the order of the day for Purcell’s semi-opera — expanded from a trim 50 minutes of unfinished music yoked to a play by Dryden and Howard to a three-and-a-half-hour musico-dramatic spectacle. If

Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments in opera, to be sure, but few arias can rival it for the way its beauty kicks you in the back of the knees; its gentle rocking motion causes your shoulders to slump while the little floated top notes dilate the music’s gaze, drawing the listener irresistibly into its secret promise of untroubled bliss. Nor does it help that the aria’s whole point is to be irresistible. ‘Daddy dearest, I love him so,’ sings Schicchi’s teenage daughter Lauretta. She might equally be thinking of a doggy in a window: it

La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas that Rossini wrote for Teatro San Carlo in Naples between 1815 and 1822. At the time the opera was produced he had at his disposal not only a great soprano, for whom he wrote with considerable flair, but two expert tenors and a contralto taking the part of the young male lover. In the first-ever production at the Met in New York that has just opened, the colours move from the sultry sky of Scotland in the first act to the starkness of a field after battle and then the

This is an extract from this week’s magazine, available from tomorrow. La Donna del LagoMetropolitan Opera, New York, in rep until 14 March La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas that Rossini wrote for Teatro San Carlo in Naples between 1815 and 1822. At the time the opera was produced he had at his disposal not only a great soprano, for whom he wrote with considerable flair, but two expert tenors and a contralto taking the part of the young male lover. In the first-ever production at the Met in New York that has just opened, the

Iolanta / Duke Bluebeard’s Castle  Met Opera Live The Met’s antepenultimate relay of the season was an enterprising pairing of two operas, one of which we should see more often, and both of them done with intelligence and care. Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, his last opera, inconveniently lasts about 100 minutes, so is especially hard to find a partner for. It is a strange, touching piece, though it has few of the characteristics we associate with him. There is hardly a memorable melody in it, and little that is overwrought, indeed the colours are pastel. Iolanta is a princess, blind from birth, but skilfully kept in ignorance of her condition, and surrounded in this production by bored

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore for hire. Embroiled in an epic tug-of-war as to which of the three art forms — word, music or dance — should be primary, it was also lithe and experimental. In fact, it was more like performance art than anything you’ll witness in a modern opera house. Why this historical detour? To remind us not

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Met Opera Live This was another excellent performance from the Met, though that house’s addiction to enormously elaborate scenery – most of which could be sold off to Las Vegas – reaches lunatic proportions, robbing the work of its dream-like or hallucinatory quality, though that must surely have been a large part of Offenbach’s intention. The paradox of Les Contes d’Hoffmann is that the finer the performance, the more frustrating the piece itself becomes. Perhaps it has that in common with its near-contemporary Carmen, another work that succeeds only on a superficial level. Neither, notoriously, reached a definitive form before its composer died, though Hoffmann is very

In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted excerpts from Das Rheingold in the first half of the programme, and Rachmaninov’s little-known opera The Miserly Knight in the second half. The idea, I gleaned from a pre-concert chat by the conductor and others, was that the first half would shed some light on the second, showing that although Rachmaninov, at one time an industrious operatic conductor, almost certainly never conducted Wagner, he was strongly influenced by him. The point seems academic, unless you are interested in the minutiae of musical history. Anyway, the Rheingold excerpts failed miserably, on

The Merry Widow Met Opera Live ‘Even today, at 75, the waltz from The Merry Widow sends me into a fit of rage,’ wrote Richard Strauss to his close collaborator Clemens Krauss in 1940. In a brilliant piece in his book Essays and Diversions Robin Holloway discusses why that waltz, and indeed the whole of Lehar’s masterpiece infuriated Strauss so much, and mainly concludes that Strauss was jealous of the man who could write the ‘deathless’ tunes of The Merry Widow. Five years before, Strauss had complained ‘to think that one must get to be 70 years old to discover that one’s best gift is for kitsch!’But that only shows

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are

Orfeo Royal Opera, Camden Roundhouse, in rep until 24 January What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness