Benjamin Britten: THE BITTER WITHY

That is the second tune from one of Britten’s last works, Suite on English Folk Tunes. Although the lyrics aren’t set, they are an old vernacular Christmas carol. The withy is the willow tree, which rots from within. This is the last stanza:

Then He says to His Mother: “Oh, the withy! Oh, the withy!

The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to smart,

Oh, the withy, it shall be the very first tree

That perishes at the heart!”

(Britten in his parents' garden)

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked. The person being interrogated by Pilate was a poor Jew from Palestine, who would have only spoken Aramaic. Pilate would have spoken Greek and of course, Latin. The accused, whose name was Yeshu (that is Joshua in Hebrew and Jesus in Greek), wouldn’t have understood, any more than Pilate would have understood him. And would the Prefect of Judea have even met a rough Jew accused of leading a dreary little rebellion? And was Pilate, a crude, cruel soldier at heart, have been given to “philosophical” questions? Not likely. It shows how we humans proceed. We make things up. We have to: we put ten words in a given sequence on a page – and that is not reality, it’s not even how reality happens. What is truth? There’s no such thing.

(at school)

Who was Benjamin Britten? Who knows? He was born November 22, 1913, died December 4, 1976. Yes, a large number of people met Ben in one way or another. (Presumably) a lot of people (relatively) heard poor Yeshu preach or incite rebellion, or do a little of both. Maybe he had a bag a magic tricks to get their attention, and since he was free lance, anything that might entice a drachma or two from those who responded was a good idea. But we don’t have much idea of who he was either. The writing about Yeshu has him manifesting himself in various ways. Ben Britten, likewise, manifested himself in various personas. Most people settled for one, perhaps knowing a little about another. But he was famous and biographies MUST be written.

Humphrey Carpenter wrote the first big biography of Britten and talked to many witnesses who knew him in different ways. (Benjamin Britten: A Biography, Faber and Faber, written in 1992). Now that the centenary is underway there is a new big book by Paul Kildea, (Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, Penguin Global, published this July.)

Kildea is anti-Carpenter. Carpenter had many documents available to him and used them, Kildea has more documents made available more recently including a vast number of letters that Britten wrote (these have been published in separate, expensive volumes).

Carpenter has an “old fashioned style”; he is expansive and likes the anecdote, the short character sketch and repeating gossip. He knew of a certain Britten, but he speaks to others who knew someone different by that name: younger, say; as a conductor; as a sometime friend or collaborator; as a combination of atoms and elements they found detestable. Some of those people only knew a label: queer, and their story of Britten contained their feelings about queer people, hateful sinners, the lot; or fundamentally sad and lost; or trivial -- “That homosexual stuff was really silly,” says the late conductor, Sir Charles Mackerras in the documentary, Britten’s Children (based on the book by John Bridcut). He got into serious trouble with Britten for making a joke about there always being “kids” about. 

But some thought heroic a good word. Britten lived in what for all intents and purposes was a marriage with the tenor, Peter Pears, for thirty five years, more or less openly in England, where homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were criminal until 1967 and men so accused frequently went to jail.  (But Britten hated the word gay, according to Pears in the sappy documentary produced by Tony Palmer called A Time there was.) Britten also disliked gay couples, queeny jokes, camp and effeminate behavior. One of the crazy “reviewers” at Amazon faults Kildea for not mentioning that Ben was bisexual. That goes to an opinion still large in the world that homosexuals are less than human and must be somehow not wholly and utterly “that way” -- we need look no further than a Mr. Putin of Russia. There is no evidence whatever that Britten was ever sexually intimate with a woman. In fact in his diary, as edited by John Evans, Britten writes that he found the naked female body, “disgusting”. But perhaps a later generation of queer would have recognized an internalized homophobia in Ben; or perhaps Ben was stuck emotionally and sexually at the age of eleven?

 Kildea has a more “modern” style, telegraphic. “Supporting characters” are dealt with in a sentence (even those who according to Carpenter were crucial to the composer for periods of time). He is light on hearsay and offers fewer details about the mechanics of how Britten managed to compose so much while in his earlier days, touring with Pears and running the English Opera Company and The Aldeburgh Festival (both founded by composer and tenor to promote Britten’s work).

His main label for Britten is a man absolutely of the 20^th century, of difficult times where the world continuously changed rapidly and radically and technology triumphed. His Britten started his career in the Depression, as the political situation in the world deteriorated. Right after he graduated from the Royal College of Music, a fantastically precocious but sheltered and provincial twenty year old, Britten entered the circle of the great poet, Wysten Auden. This was a left leaning, Bohemian group of people, many of them homosexuals such as Auden and his close friend and sometime collaborator, Christopher Isherwood, who also befriended Britten (judging from the diary, Britten set Auden's poems but much preferred Isherwood's company). Auden got Britten his first jobs -- writing the music for leftist documentaries (Carpenter says it was Britten’s private composition teacher, Frank Bridge who got him the first job), but insisted that the young composer read and think beyond music, understand politics and his own sexuality. As a result, Britten became two of the most unpopular things one could be at the time: a pacifist and a homosexual. (He had already told his older brother of his “inclinations” but it was the acceptance of Auden’s group and the examples there of devoted couples of both sexes that eventually brought Britten “out” – according to Carpenter. Kildea seems to think that it was Auden’s nagging and Isherwood's example that got Britten “experimenting” with males).

Auden and Isherwood later became among Britten’s more famous “corpses”. According to his early friend and librettist, Eric Crozier, Britten warned him that one day he would be a corpse, dead to the composer. Though Crozier was invaluable, Britten turned on him for no obvious reason as they completed Billy Budd. Kildea thinks Crozier exaggerated out of sour grapes, and Britten did stay loyal to a small group of people throughout his life, but the list of the discarded was long, reasons for their “demise” were often unclear, and Ben could be cruel.

Kildea goes into a lot of detail about the discouraging musical life Britten faced (it may be the most interesting part of his book). London was a backwater musically with self promoting conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham and “Flash” Sargent (Sir Malcolm), rough and ready orchestras, wildly underpaid, seriously under rehearsed, and all dedicated to the most conservative repertory, the classics given ramshackle, inaccurate performances. The “new works” that were performed were short, pandered to a dull, unsophisticated audience, often were in a “folk style” that Britten both hated and thought amateurish. There was no interest in the new music being written on the continent or in experiment; radio, though a source of modest income for musicians, was in its infancy in England.

When he and Peter Pears, still just friends, fled to America, hoping for a land of opportunity they found much the same. It was in LA that Ben read The Borough by George Crabbe and with the encouragement of Pears (by then his lover) started thinking of it as an opera.

(Britten and Pears)

They returned to potential trouble as “conchies” in England. Both were able to call in influential allies and were let off with a slap on the wrist. Michael Tippett, the great composer, eight years Britten’s senior, went to jail where he met Britten and Pears by turning pages for one of the recitals they were “condemned” to give in prisons as part of their punishment. They became and more or less remained friends, although Tippett did call Peter Grimes “English verismo”, which he did not mean as high praise. When he was dying, Ben felt Sir Michael had over taken him, after years of obscurity and derision, becoming popular with the always desired “younger people” and with much of his music, including his operas, being recorded by Phillips. One wonders where Sir Michael (who lived until 1998) stands today. Many of the recordings are available, often in cheap reissues, and the music is as tremendous and eccentric as ever; but the huge vogue for his symphonies has ended, he never made the Metropolitan Opera…

Britten’s only serious teacher was Frank Bridge, a full fledged professional composer with a powerful technique and a passionate interest in the “new” music. They met through Britten’s piano teacher when he was 13. Bridge was stunned by the amount of interesting music the boy had written and agreed to teach him, demanding the highest level of clarity and control. “I still feel I haven’t come up to his technical standards,” Britten averred in 1963. Both Carpenter and Kildea shrug him off. At one point it looked like Ben could travel to Germany and work with Alban Berg, whose music he worshiped, though he knew it only from score. According to Carpenter, Bridge told Britten’s parents that Berg was a notorious homosexual and would seduce young Ben; according to Kildea nobody knew much about Berg but being English of that era they assumed the worst and the consensus reached was that Ben was too young to be on his own. (Berg, of course, was a rampaging heterosexual.)

Ben’s composition teacher at RCM, John Ireland, who didn’t have private money or a generous patron, a typical professional, exhausted himself taking every engagement he could, no matter how soul destroying. In the wider culture, there was a glorification of the talented amateur, the gifted hobbyist, a feeling that there was something unseemly about those who identified themselves as professionals and expected to be respected, and worse, paid. Benjamin Britten, a middle class boy from an undistinguished family in the provinces faced a steep mountain to climb.

Stardom is another label. Britten died world famous and wealthy, as that most impossible thing in the 20th century, a composer of operas. By his last few years, seven of his full length operas, Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, The Rape of Lucretia, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Death in Venice, were being produced internationally and often. Almost all of Britten’s work had been recorded, composer conducting or playing the piano, and heavily promoted by a major firm, Decca (for many years known as London in America). That those recordings were so well made, widely distributed and taken so seriously was in itself a tribute to his success; most are still in print.

His smaller operas, The Church Parables, starting with Curlew River, were also done widely. His operas for children – there were many – showed up in surprising places. One might see the amusing Noye’s Flood in suburban New Jersey, or encounter a small company shaking a fist at Let’s Make an Opera/The Little Sweep in Berkeley, with sophisticated people coming over from San Francisco.

And all this has continued. Even his opera for television, not liked by many people when new, Owen Wingrave, is being mounted in theaters, and it’s a rare opera workshop in conservatory or University that hasn’t done several of the smaller works. One of Britten’s big bombs, the coronation opera for Elizabeth II, Gloriana, has been rehabilitated, recorded and released on DVD, seen not as a limp biscuit but as a throw back to the grand operas of yore.  

But questions have been raised (from the beginning) about Britten – not about his virtuosity -- but about his career path. Carpenter tends to make Sir Peter Pears the villain: all of Britten’s operas were chosen because they had an important (usually starring) role for this tenor with an odd voice and a distinctive style (according to Carpenter, one of Britten’s friends in his childhood, described Pears as sounding just like Britten’s worshipful mother, and Britten’s sister, Beth, concurred!). Most of his great song cycles were written for Pears. Did Pears have some unholy hold on Britten? Before Pears, young Britten composed in record time a remarkable work for small orchestra called Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Early in his relationship with Pears, Britten wrote a Berg besotted but tremendously effective orchestral piece called Sinfonia da Requiem. A little later, he created the irresistible The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. But thereafter, most of his non-operatic works were for tenor alone or with additional voices (the Spring Symphony not only has a trio of soloists and big chorus, but boys’ chorus).

Later, for Mstislav Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist (who Kildea claims became a Pears substitute, not sexually – though he doesn’t believe there was much of a sexual connection between Pears and Britten after the mid-fifties – but as muse and chief believer) there was a Cello Symphony (asked about it in an interview near its world premiere, Pears sniffed, “I haven’t heard it”), and there were piano and violin concerti, much revised, and quite a lot of chamber music, especially after his devastating operation to replace a defective valve in his heart. But always there were operas, written with an odd tenor voice in mind. Of course there was the highly promoted War Requiem for tenor, baritone, massive orchestra, chamber orchestra, chorus – and boys – but didn’t Britten thereby become a sort of ceremonial composer, the kind of composer he affected to despise, such as Elgar? (This became one of the best selling classical recordings of its time.)

Carpenter and others blame Pears for manipulating Britten into so much vocal work and into keeping his style for large theater works accessible.

Kildea is less interested in this aspect of their relationship and more in Pears as a manipulative, sometimes hurtful “power behind the throne”, self seeking with a strong control on their ventures into production. The late Robert Tear, a tenor younger than Pears, who was taken into the circle for a time, describes in his book, Tear Here, the atmosphere around Britten as a “royal court”. Pears was chief intriguer and Lord High Executioner. Nothing happened without Britten’s consent, but that was informed by Pears relaying everything from his own perspective (jealous of his position and worried about aging, he made war on Tear but not before the latter was witness to some ugly scenes – Tear’s is another view of Britten, very different in feel from either biographer, and since he was an employee who needed the jobs, arguably more “authentic”.) However, Tear was axed by the enraged composer. His camping up the Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia (a solo part) to relieve tension backstage was caught by Britten and that was that.

Kildea documents Pears’ sexual promiscuity, quite memorably describing the “cruising” scene in London during World War Two. Despite the laws, and the undercover police, a city jammed with horny young men became a kind of paradise for the easily aroused, in which group Kildea includes Pears. Whatever their pre or post war notions of homosexuality, these young fellows found that “puffs” were easy, safe, good for dinner and a tip, and after all, pleasure is pleasure. As Pears became famous in his own right he booked incessant tours, leaving Britten alone by the sea. They fought a lot, sometimes bitterly, but it was Britten who always gave in. “I know that Peter is sometimes unfaithful,” Kildea quotes one of his still living sources about a confidence of Ben’s, “but as long as I don’t know the particulars I overlook it” Kildea notes that Pears booked an American tour in the last month of the composer’s life, fully aware that he could die at any time. “He died in my arms,” Pears says sweetly in A Time there Was. Barely, might be Kildea’s response. 

Kildea claims that during Britten’s operation to replace a heart valve the surgeon discovered that he was suffering from tertiary syphilis. This made news. Pears would have infected Britten. Kildea, in one sentence, mentions a doctor who is skeptical; suggesting that with all of the blood tests Britten would have had in his illnesses, a serious venereal disease would have been detected. Kildea isn’t convinced and yet – is this another example of fictionalizing a life? (Articles challenging this diagnosis have been written).

For a kinder view of Pears (though it’s not a whitewash) one can read Christopher Headington's biography (he also wrote a mild biography of Britten). Nor do all the letters support an unequivocal reading of Pears as a bad influence. Thus we see story telling in place, for every fairy tale needs an evil queen.

Both Carpenter and Kildea offer readable analyses of the music, though neither is as compendious as Peter Evans in The Music of Benjamin Britten (University of Minnesota Press). Carpenter seems to me to be stronger on the operas, more skeptical about the later ones. Britten suffered the usual fate of someone who has an enormous early triumph (he was 31 when Peter Grimes, produced against heavy odds, took London by storm, having an almost incredible success), subsequent works were found wanting in some way. It’s true that Peter Grimes has a sweeping intensity, a creative abandon that carries its own electricity. It doesn’t much matter – as Kildea avers -- that the story doesn’t make complete sense, that aside from Peter Grimes, the characters are stereotypes --- the opera, or perhaps it is mostly Britten’s music -- grabs a listener by the throat and won’t let go.

Britten certainly comes close to that power in Billy Budd, more so in its revision than in its original version, and surely he was allowed a delicious comic romp, Albert Herring. But it wasn’t until The Turn of the Screw, nine years after Peter Grimes and much smaller, using a different musical vocabulary and style, that the same intensity is reached, and its libretto is better. But after Screw, the operas are sometimes unconvincing, though they are always beautifully made. It’s only with Death in Venice, written against a tough deadline (Britten’s operation was looming), that he again approaches the emotional power of Peter Grimes, though with some miscalculations he would have corrected had he had the strength after the operation.

Kildea is something of a cheerleader, even raving about that piece of well made twaddle, Owen Wingrave. But he is very strong on what he has conducted, the many works for choir, the orchestral pieces – it’s good to read high praise for the once dismissed The Cello Symphony, a work I adore -- but Kildea does not make the connection of certain themes and harmonic gestures there with Death in Venice. He is also a compelling advocate for the often overlooked chamber music.

Then there is Britten’s pederasty. Both biographers acknowledge it, though typically, Carpenter goes into far more detail about each of the boys Britten “fell in love” with, including their parents’ reactions and the degree of gossip each involvement generated.

Kildea spends only a short time and focuses mostly on David Hemmings (who was to become a movie star as an adult, famous for Blow Up by Antonioni), the creator of the role of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. Hemmings, 10 when he met the composer, gave reportedly an astonishing performance (he is wonderful on the stunning recording). He plays the haunted boy – haunted either by a real ghost, the dead pervert Quint, or the insane governess, who might be making the whole thing up. Hemmings lived with Britten by the sea in Aldeburgh where the entire company of Turn of the Screw learned and interpreted the opera as Britten completed it. Everyone detested Hemmings. He was ten going on forty; nasty, manipulative and cruel. But Britten’s adoration was so intense it shocked the company, even those used to his crushes. They saw “their Hemmings”, a sly brat; transform into “Ben’s David” an angel of sweetness and eternal vulnerability, with just a light brush of sexual allure.

Though there’s no evidence that Britten behaved inappropriately with any of “his boys” and Hemmings went through the rest of his life denying that anything improper had happened even when he and Ben shared a bed. There were those who didn’t believe him. Pears was one, it seems. “I frightened Peter,” Hemmings says, somewhat mysteriously in Britten’s Children. According to Kildea, Hemmings was the first person to come between them, creating a rift only resolved gradually and with difficulty. Whether or not Pears was certain that Britten had “made free” with Hemmings, as Quint (the part Pears created) is said to have “made free” with young Miles in an early draft of the libretto, he had suddenly seen the danger of Britten’s attachments. A manipulative con artist like Hemmings could easily (perhaps) have taken advantage of Ben’s susceptibilities, regardless of the composer’s iron self discipline. “Eros is in the air,” says Aschenbach, in Death in Venice, as this prim, heterosexual intellectual, unable to curb his obsession with the boy Tadzio, understands that the erotic always and everywhere will not be denied or controlled. A scandal would have destroyed Britten and Pears with him, wiped out all they had achieved.

No such scandal ever happened. In one version of the fiction that was Benjamin Britten (for who will ever know for certain save the relative few involved?) he was completely innocent of anything but an intense response to certain boys that stopped well short of the erotic. In another version of that fiction, perhaps, now and then, Ben “made free” with a willing lad or two, and no one the wiser. In dealing with anyone’s life, one can never know for certain – anything -- really. We have evidence of Ben’s enormous talent and will to create, right up to his death, when he could barely lift his arms. Beyond that…?

Of the two biographies Kildea’s is the tougher minded and more rigorously sourced – that syphilis claim aside. His precise reckoning of Britten’s earnings year to year is fascinating and so is his relating Britten’s public persona to the politics of his time, both of England and of the British musical establishment where Britten was the subject of quiet loathing and various plots, most ineffective (the worst was the Arts Council, the then new arts subsidy board, killing the recording of the world premiere of Peter Grimes. On the committee then was another famous composer, Sir William Walton. Though they cordially despised one another’s work, he and Ben remained friends superficially. But Walton got in quite a blow). Kildea’s tracing of the world tour Britten and Pears took, and the tremendous impact the music of Bali made on the composer (it shows up in many of his later works) and the force of the Noh dramas they saw in Japan is expert.

But Carpenter’s book is like a novel by Dickens. Britten’s life unfolds with enormous energy, an unpredictable version of “Great Expectations”, starting with a very provincial boy with accent to match, his obsessed mother, unshakably convinced she had given birth to at least the equal of J. S. Bach. There are colorful and crazy characters, coincidences and contrivances, tremendous successes and occasional disasters, villains and angels (Ben was both depending on the situation), the blessings of the queen, her mother, even her reportedly philistine consort, with dark detours but true love, however hedged, triumphing eventually. All met with the intonations and impeccable rounded vowels of the aristocracy that Ben adopted with fame. I’ve enjoyed re-reading it. Of course it’s no truer to Britten than Kildea’s tidier and colder work. The public force of the person, when he chose, the private grief and strangeness, the remarkable drive to create against even death itself – none of those things can be caught in prose, or in deeds and contracts, or in pictures and poses.

Thirty eight years on from his death, Britten is still celebrated, early work is still uncovered, performed and recorded, failures are reconsidered. No other English composer of the 20^th century has fared so well (except, ironically, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose work Britten detested, and who he didn’t like personally, despite or perhaps because “Rafe” admitted Britten to the RCM when he was 16, awarded him a scholarship and at school and importantly, later, did him kindnesses and favors.). And one might argue that RVW, born before Tristan and Isolde was finished, always, perforce, kept one large foot in Victorian England.

We can’t “know” Ben, but he could reveal something. His music isn’t the whole story and clears up no mysteries. But in his final opera, Death in Venice, there is not the sarcastic irony of Mann, nor is there the titillation to be had in the beautiful Visconti movie, there is a devastating longing and an annihilating loneliness. Aschenbach dies of cholera, painted and roughed, his hair dyed, watching his adored Tadzio walk out into the endless sea. It’s redemption of sorts, but an icy one. Death’s music is hard, chilly, high and inhuman. Aschenbach is vouchsafed a second of serenity in the city known as La Serenissima, but has never lived, never been loved, never expressed his true self. Admired and wealthy, he is at the moment of his death the lonely fraud who gives the lie to all that fame. “Just live!” is the command to all creatures at first awareness on this planet; Aschenbach who has written and analyzed and created, has not lived, but very late he has learned how glorious life is, and how fleeting. It’s not Mann; it is Britten. You may weep at poor Mimi’s death, or at Madame Butterfly’s seppuku but I think this is the saddest finale I know of in opera. And maybe that is the closest we can come to the “real” Ben Britten.

HENRY HOLLAND HELP, ANNA’S DOING VERDI

(Henry Holland)

There is a huge international cabal to WILL Anna Netrebko a legend. I’ve seen it on social media. I have seen the whores do what they are bid; and as for the ‘Net flacks!!!!! We will read, “how gorgeous she is.” Yup. Why not just bring back silent films, or have her lip sync while a professional does the singing? (They did that often enough in the “old days”. Sofia Loren IS Aida while Renata Tebaldi sings on the sound track.)

It doesn’t matter. On a gay gossip board a thread about Maria Callas just this week brought out enormous ignorance. Once, many people of culture (certainly gay men) would at least have known that her name isn’t spelt Callous and they would have read a few reports about her gifts or problems. Now, it’s mostly morons and the one nasty flamer who is both defensive and a gross ignoramus named Henry Holland, hiding behind anonymity but recognizable. Well, he did have a web site up about sucking used athletic equipment so I assume drying all those sweaty socks in your mouth is an achievement. He is one of the star creeps at Parterre Box. You should look him up.

DG is obviously counting on forcing Netrebko Sings Verdi to become a great seller. 

To have such a grandiose presentation, the actual performances are trivial things. A problem with the same old same old in anything is that so many people have recorded this material, even the once rarely encountered Lady Macbeth arias, that it’s easy to find better, in great sound, at a discount! There is a difference between someone who is not that bad and what true stars were once expected to deliver.

Netrebko will actually sing Lady Macbeth. She has also done the lighter Giovanna d’arco. In the aria she has some trouble tuning the unaccompanied material that starts the scene but it’s an appropriate sound. She doesn’t quite get the marking “semplice” (simply) when the aria starts, and her phrasing is wooden; the triplets on “semplice” and “sua vesta” are not precise or in time. It doesn’t sound as though she understands why they are there. She also has a habit of sliding upwards, why does she scoop upwards the fifth from E flat to A flat that ends the word “giovanna”? There is a larger point here. That fifth punctuates an implied endless phrase, but Netrebko doesn’t sound as though she feels the need to sculpt the entire line and is phrasing with that as the point. There are no niceties in the reading. And, while it’s a decent performance in this dreary context, there is no sense of Giovanna’s circumstances or personality.

Arrigo ah parli a un cor from I Vespri Siciliani is taken rather quickly and the tenderness of accent even a distressed Callas (in her “Callas Rarities” release) brought to it is totally absent. This was a strong part of the Scotto, Cerquetti and Caballė
live performances (I saw first and third, second is thrilling on a pirate conducted by Mario Rossi). There is again a lack of firmness and point in the line. Netrebko does not spin out the span of B to G to F sharp on “io t’amo” in the first verse, “io muoio” in the second, a magical part of every good performance I’ve heard including Maralin Niska and Christina Deutekom neither of whom made history in the role but both of whom were better than this. Nor does she sing the repeat of each of those phrases as an echo, an obvious but lovely touch that everyone does. Netrebko is not very precise in differentiating pitches that are close; the G moving down to the F sharp is blurred. She doesn’t alter dynamics much either; the ability to convey sorrowing inwardness, so striking in Scotto or Callas or Cerquetti didn’t occur to her or she can’t do it. The slow descending chromatic scales toward the end are not well tuned. She sings the written cadenza up to the high C, a good note, but that version takes the line lower in her voice than she can sound. It’s competent. And that is greatness, I guess. (Except that there are many potentially greater singers without these problems, I’d nominate Christine Goerke, Sondra Radvanovsky and, given a bit of luck, Angela Meade).

As a performance from a great star in her prime, the Bolero (slow!) from Vespri is a clumsy joke

No Ruiz in Trovatore act four, means she must herself summon the desolate, hopeless scene in “Timor di me?” She doesn’t. The recitative is lifeless; she can’t infuse the words with urgency or color. She vocalizes the high B flat rather than singing the whole word “[pie] TOSA” then fails to shape the descending line, doing nothing with the final word “sospiri” (sighs). The aria is marked adagio but is rather fast, the quickish tempo lets her blur the trills, they’re there, not wonderful. She changes some words in the aria but more importantly doesn’t feel anything – either the rhythm, or the melodic shape or the situation. She sounds like a graduate student with some ability taking a test. The long cadenza is notable for extra breaths; some vague tuning and a lack of the sense that right here in these notes are Leonora’s thoughts of love soaring softly up to Manrico. The entire aria wonderfully dramatizes its poetic conceit and Netrebko gives no indication of understanding that (or of being able to do it).

Verdi makes the Miserere inevitable that way; the answer to Leonora’s sounds of love in the night is a chorus of death. The monks, offstage, sing a cappella with just a bell forlornly playing an E flat, but when Leonora enters the entire orchestra shudders, these are the wings of death. More than anything Leonora must mirror the rhythm, giving her words a hard or frightened point – Netrebko has no real rhythm, in fact she’s a bit behind. She artificially darkens her vocal color but that actually obscures the words. Moreover, she’s isn’t precisely in tune, she’s not able to sound clearly the crucial phrase E flat F flat G flat down to D flat on contende ambascia. And the cry, sento mancarmi, which others have infused with terror, is entirely bland. The great phrases where she cries, “how could I forget you?” in response to the tenor, “di te, di te scordarvi” are not inflected with anguish, they are dead. Poor Rolando Villazon in a far off echo chamber bleats Manrico.

She shakes a fist a “tu vedrai” but lacks rhythmic point and in fact, is anonymous – allegro agitato is the marking, reflected neither in the orchestra nor in her attack. Verdi marks dynamics, a crescendo on the fourth, C to F (o con [te]), and then again on nella [tomba] and then places accents on strong beats leading to a big crescendo for the cadenza, where she sounds like a babushka in thick boots stomping out the cold. Comical. There’s only one verse. Just as well. Lack of a really thrusting attack in Tu vedrai is a problem in conveying Leonora’s sudden resolve, which must contrast with her dream sorrow in D’amor sul ali errante, and her terror in the Miserere.

In exposed vocal material of this kind the singer’s ability to use cues from the score, from the composer’s own timing of effects and sense of form is crucial. And it’s interesting that Caballė, not always inspired and apt to drop consonants and change vowels, in two live performances (from Florence and Dallas) makes so much more of this scene. That’s a glorious sound but the timbre is by no means all. Within her means, Caballė (who doesn’t sing “tu vedrai”), makes most of the expressive points strongly – without the chance of retakes.

What is there to say about the Macbeth arias, as recorded here? I saw in at least two European on line sites about the bit of Macbeth’s letter to his wife, which are written to be spoken: “Oh!!!! She speaks the opening lines!!!! Amazing!!!” You read them or you skip them. And, dear reader, if you or I whispered them into a mike with a Russian accent we’d sound spooky too, except I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t run out of breath before the short lines were finished.

“Ambizioso spirto tu sei Macbetto” lies over an octave but her attack is rough on the E that starts it, the color of tone changes (for no reason) on the E below and it sounds like she is going to break on the D sharp F sharp E on the word “malvaggio”. Even on a recording she needs to take a gulping breath to manage the big run up to the high C, though none is indicated and it breaks the line. The marking of the aria is “grandioso”. Clearly, Lady Macbeth is to make something striding of the line, to seize it forcefully. Netrebko can’t, she’s working just to get through. The first trill is a blur, she omits subsequent trills and doesn’t feel the rhythm when she cries “io ti daró valore” – (“I’ll give you the courage!”) -- the point of the aria is missed. She can’t make the slow crescendo that is marked to start with “accetta” and to grow to a very loud B flat followed immediately by a drop to pian pianissimo (ppp) – what she does is sloppy and irrelevant.

One is always struck by how much Verdi makes of melodic inflection. In just these few lines all this character’s steely cunning is made to sound by the simplest means. But Netrebko is hit or miss – in all three arias. She shows neither special mastery of the vocal line nor any great imagination. If one turns to another Russian, Galina Vishnevskaya in 1976, singing the role far past her vocal best and working hard to manage, she still understands how to make the rhythms work, how this music must be seized and colored. There, extra breaths and some unpleasant sounds are forgivable because the character is so vividly understood. I end this post with Vishnevskaya in this aria, not because it’s a great performance vocally, because it shows what sheer understanding and an imagination that meets the composer’s intention can do.

In the other Macbeth arias some phrases are easier for Netrebko than others, but she really isn’t able to manage a compelling complete performance of any, and again, for a great singer in her prime the small saves and lazy compromises are a lot to accept. Neither her timbre nor her manner is arresting. She only does one verse (thankfully) of “Or tutti, sorgete!” and doesn’t get a doctor or serving woman to help set the Sleepwalking Scene. She certainly doesn’t set the scene by herself.

La luce langue is about as dead a reading of the aria as I’ve ever heard. Leonie Rysanek couldn’t pitch it but was electrifying live and is rather exciting on the RCA record, Olivia Stapp was not thought a great diva but one wonders, after this. It would take nine Netrebkos to make one Rita Hunter, who being English, one would expect to be awkward in Italian style, but one Rita Hunter makes the impact of about forty Anna Netrebkos and is infinitely more accomplished in florid music.

And now, one even wonders about Netrebko’s usefulness in this rep. At Covent Garden Liudmyla Monastyrska buried her, given what she does here (that telecast is very easy to find). True, she wasn’t subtle or Italian but that was one wallop through these arias. In comparison to all these ladies, Netrebko sounds like an amateur, and the spectacular Christine Goerke, who in different killer parts, has demonstrated all the skills La Lady needs is looking at the role.

Is it possible that Netrebko, 42, and now rather thick set, missed her moment? 

That when she should have been doing Tosca and Manon Lescaut, Desdemona, Trovatore Leonora, say ten years ago, she was taking the easy way out – being a beauty with a good voice? Well, that made her rich and a darling of the Manuella Hoelterhoff school of music criticism: “she’s thin, she’s hot, she’s GREAT!!!” It made her neither an artist nor a virtuoso and these arias (the album extends to an improbably bland “Tu che le vanità”) expose someone who will need all the hype, all the empty queen worship, all the ignorance she can get to seem important in a decade. Henry Holland, calling Henry Holland!!! But then she has the great whorehouse DG behind her. Who can fail?

DISPUTING PUTIN

(picture AP)

I wrote something on Opera-L and surprisingly the three people on Mrs. John Claggart’s face book page urged her to republish it here. I dedicate this to Leslie Barcza. He has a blog (don’t we all, dears?) and it’s worth visiting: http://barczablog.com/ . He suggested I republish something I called portentously enough The Trial of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. So I thought, before the season starts and one gets distracted, perhaps one should give way to one’s pretension.

It’s all brought about by the awful situation for LBGT people in Russia. Putin, dictator there, is looking to exterminate us deviants and inverts. This is an issue taken up on an Opera list ONLY because the Metropolitan Opera, probably the most boring and useless pile of crap among big opera companies, is opening its season with an opera by a homosexual composer named Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin. I suppose he would have been done away with and his opera banned if he had lived long enough to write it.

But the Met is offering a gala to start the season with two Putin collaborators, Anna Netrebko, soprano opportunistisco d’agilità nel letto, and Valery Gergiev, the lousy conductor. Both of these people joined with Putin in 2012 to extol his virtues essential for Mother Russia, and both owe their careers to enormous hype. Anna has made an album of Verdi arias, which my twin will get to very soon.

Gergiev could have gotten nowhere without the amazing support of the government, and he is looking to shore that up by acting the samovar from which Putin can sip. Gergiev got enormous hype (we can’t blame Putin for that since it goes back a ways to the fogs of the 1990s) but he hasn’t got enormous talent. He does have qualities. The Met orchestra drew up a petition about his body odor. That didn’t happen to Toscanini or Mahler when they led the Met. Maybe Gergiev has one upped two legends?

A good summery of Putin’s position, including the promise to jail gay and lesbian tourists is here:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-08/opinions/41199662_1_gays-lesbians-sochi

Here is another summary.

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/international/europe/2013/08/qa_on_anti_gay_legislation_in_russia

The Met made a wimpy statement about the issue.  http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/08/metropolitan-opera-responds-to-anti-putin-protest.html

The kidnapping, torture and killing of an “effeminate” boy by Russian hoodlums is recounted here:

http://www.queerty.com/gay-russian-teen-reportedly-dies-after-being-kidnapped-tortured-by-neo-nazis-20130806/

The English Intellectual, Stephen Fry, has compared Putin to Hitler, and urged the moving of something else coming up of far greater moment than opera, The Olympics. His pleading with The British government is here:

http://www.thejournal.ie/stephen-fry-olympics-1026273-Aug2013/

A high official in the Russian government has demanded that the “hearts of gay people be burned”.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/dmitri-kusilev-degrades-lgbt-tv_n_3743414.html

Now, suddenly, we have the specter of the Olympics held in Berlin in 1936 in front of Hitler, glorifying him, and his “graciously” allowing the black, Jesse Owens, to compete.

 (Alan Goldhammer who honored the widder and her twin by joining up here, wrote “the US Track and Field team did not permit two Jewish sprinters to run on the relay team with Jesse Owens because of the Nazi policies and fear of offending the Fürher. Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were the sprinters in question”.)

Netrebko and Gergiev were among the 499 trustees of the Russian presidential candidate, the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin In 2012.

The great Latvian violinist Gidon Kramer will join one of the greatest pianists in the world, Martha Argerich, and Daniel Barenboim in a concert condemning Putin’s shocking record on human rights, which has extended to assassination. Kremer singled Netrebko and Gergiev out for their pro Putin activism: 

http://www.latinospost.com/articles/25329/20130809/gidon-kremer-attacks-russian-soprano-anna-netrebko-conductor-valery-gergiev.htm

Gergiev made an ad for Putin. The You Tube version and a translation can be found here.

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/blogs/wqxr-blog/2012/mar/02/valery-gergiev-appears-putin-campaign-commercial/

Netrebko (who has double citizenship through marriage, she also holds an Austrian passport) and Gergiev, remarkable for their greed, are supporting a kind of Hitler and that brings up the famous Nazi opera singers and conductors who joined the party, or if they didn’t, happily gave the salute and cooperated in a national frenzy to annihilate Jews, Roma and yes, homosexuals. Only one of these singing monsters went to jail. The Russians, who raped their way across Eastern Germany while “liberating” it, put the famous tenor, Helge Roswaenge in a POW camp for a spell, until his friends could bribe the Swiss to give him refuge (Roswaenge’s home country, Denmark, refused.)

Many of the famous singers under Hitler were older by the time the war ended; those who could, after their “denazification”, usually a year or two of enforced inactivity, continued careers in Germany and Austria, and some visited South America, but were heavily circumscribed about where they could sing. Conductors were different. One of the most gifted judging from records and broadcasts, Oswald Kabasta, committed suicide when the Nazi defeat was absolutely certain. Nazis such as Karajan and sympathizers such as Karl Böhm went on to be worshipped. Clemens Krauss died in 1954 but he and his mistress Viorica Ursuleac, went on despite their many dinners with Hitler (however they are known to have helped some Jews, and Krauss, while running the Munich Opera, hired a few people who didn’t have work papers). Karajan and Böhm were not known to have helped anybody. Karajan got into trouble with the Nazis for mysterious reasons and had to flee to a sweet male poet’s castle in Italy when allies inside the party whispered to him that “they” were planning to send him to the Russian front.

There were many injustices of course. The US and the USSR both recruited (thus saved) SS men and Gestapo officials to be spies, political prison guards and torturers. They also hired scientists such as Werner von Braun who ran a concentration camp. Many monsters just faded back into civilian life. Wieland Wagner also helped run a concentration camp and was Hitler’s favorite of the Wagner family; he was intrustred with “rescuing” The Bayreuth Festival from it strong Nazi associations. The Americans were the easiest to fool, the British tended to be easy going; only the Russians were tough with punishments, unless they thought someone would be useful. But younger people, those in their early thirties at war’s end, could go on to make substantial careers and even become stars.

Was Dame (yes the English damed her) Elizabeth Schwarzkopf DBE the most flagrant example of someone who got away with murder, figurative if not actual (I think all bets are off, but fairness compels me to admit she was never convicted of killing anyone – directly)? Recent information about Karajan has incriminated him more than what many believed, but it’s probably fair to say that his relationship to the regime was complicated and twisted. That was not true of Schwarzkopf.

In any case this is what my twin, Albert, wrote about her, Netrebko and Gergiev on Opera-L:

The Trial of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf:

We are unable to have one here. Therefore it is easy to make statements in either direction that are at best questionable and at worst untrue. But I am astounded by what I read [from FANS]. The two books by Michael Kater are easily available. They are thoroughly documented, and notably evenhanded (he is very careful to distinguish nasty gossip and envious defamation from facts, even about known "villains" as established by his documents).

There are a number of other carefully researched and well documented books about the period and its major players. One can read letters written at the time by many of these people, including Hans Pfitzner who hated Jews, but hated Nazis more, and identified Schwarzkopf as a hateful Nazi. She did indeed join the party. That was not necessary even to ensure a career (though it helped someone who wasn't making quick headway by the normal avenues). It cost a great deal of money, and in fact, by the mid thirties it got harder to do, as the Nazi party was more interested in zealots than opportunists. It also cost a small fortune. That is something she did not have. No one knows how she got the money but it wasn't easy -- and she did get it.

SHE WAS A MEMBER OF THE GESTAPO. She was the information officer at the Berlin State Opera, charged with reporting confidentially on the activities of ALL of her colleagues. THIS IS A FACT. I have known people who thought she was a silly slut who then became quite frightened of her. Two thousand pages of her record with the Gestapo were released right before she died. The papers have not circulated widely and I wonder why. Did she mainly stick with tattling about trivial infractions and thus avoid being taken seriously by her superiors (some of those men were far more interested in other aspects of her body -- of work -- than her spying)? Or did she do real damage to those she disliked?

Let me be clear again. We may eventually know all that can be known and find her better or worse than various people think. We are talking about someone who sold herself to the highest bidders in an organization of horrific evil. And what is this I read? That she never said anything about her Nazi past and that exonerates her? Is that person so utterly an idiot that they think she WOULD? When, helped by the British Nazi sympathizer, Walter Legge, she began to make an international career (many thought he was Jewish, which suited their plan, but he denied it, to me personally on one occasion. He began as one of her lovers, became her “master” as she called him, then her husband) do you think she was going to EXTOL NAZISM AND CONDEMN JEWS? No one EVER thought she was stupid, or lacking in a quick, shrewd, smart opportunism.

We are not talking about everyone who stayed in Nazi Germany and did what they had to in order to achieve some security in their careers. Yes, they all had to make up to the Nazis. As Kater finds in his documents, thus did Hotter and Knappertsbusch, two people thought to be "anti-Nazi" (but both, especially Hotter, fawned on Hitler). Neither was popular with the Nazi toughs in Munich and it appears unlikely that either had Nazi ideals. Neither joined the party.

We know that after a burst of enthusiasm Richard Strauss went into internal exile as far as he could, negotiating a tight rope walk between continuing to collect royalties and conducting (he needed both to survive) and most important to him, saving his Jewish daughter in law (who had relatives who died in the camps) and his two adored grandsons who were counted as Jews. It is said that a Nazi lynch mob was about to attack his villa when the Americans surrounded it, and after he proved his identity to a musical member of the unit, saved him and his family.

Strauss and the far more mysterious Furtwangler were unpopular with many powerful Nazis (the conductor more so) but Furtwangler's case will always be equivocal, as his letters to Albert Speer who played both sides, indicate.

And yes, many, many of the people who had to escape the Nazis and got into America suffered horribly. Bartok (who was not Jewish but anti-Fascist) suffered with fatal illness he couldn't afford to treat and was evicted from the apartment he shared with his wife and son ON HIS DEATH BED. Zemlinsky, a greatly gifted composer and conductor, nearly starved to death and died elderly and alone in terrible poverty. That could easily have been the fate of Schoenberg who had a younger wife and two young children to support. He landed the teaching jobs in LA at the last second, was badly paid and horribly treated at both universities and was forced to retire, but was able to survive.

So it's entirely understandable that those who faced no immediate threat from the Nazi racial laws and had families to support stayed, did what they had to at galas and parties, and hoped for the best (but there were hold outs, Marta Fuchs refused to give the salute and vocally condemned the Nazis. Somehow she escaped. The entire family of the great composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann went into internal exile in a very rural area and coped with severe discomfort rather than compromise with the regime. The famous composer, Stockhausen, kept his head down; his father was in the army and died in battle, his mother had a nervous break down, went to the hospital for help and was shot. When he went to get her body and asked why, he was told "we can't waste food on the worthless".)

But Fraulein Schwarzkopf lived well, in safety, was celebrated until the very end of the war, where after a very bad few months she seduced an American officer who gave her a pass. It is not for me to say she was a bad person, nor dare I suggest I would have behaved heroically under the same circumstances (though as a queer I would have very likely been killed or sent to a camp). But I strongly condemn those who either out of sick idolatry and sheer stupidity lie about what she did. Whatever her talents and later fame, they don't answer very disturbing questions about her.

Meanwhile, with Netrebko: I assume she has received, and, despite her dual citizenship, continues to receive benefits in Russia (which has created a super rich class of amazing resources none of whom are going to battle Putin). She supported a monster, as did the far more corrupt and vicious Gergiev (why don't our Schwarzkopf defenders track down the fifty or so gifted Russian artists he destroyed?). It's abundantly clear how this mediocrity has benefited from the patronage of Putin. But the Met is a business; canceling (buying out) the contracts of all Russian citizens none of whom would find it wise to defy Putin, whatever their personal beliefs (or proclivities) is probably prohibitive in the conservative and frightened eyes of Peter Gelb, who in any case would have to get board approval for any extensive and expensive action (hell, most of those people are sorry there aren't concentration camps here). The Met's statement will probably have to do; perhaps there will be a demonstration. I could fantasize simply replacing all Russians with gifted Americans (there are very many) but were I in his position would I really do it? Meanwhile, Vancouver is willing and able to host the Olympic games. The world should face down vicious tyranny. But the world is a dunghill of interconnected multinational corporations. We can expect worse; Madame Netrebko is a star because of it but not the worst result of it. 

Here are some reactions to on line discussion of this by opera lovers!!

I care more about voice, not sexual orientation of the singers and their politics.

Art in the US needs to transcend politics.  Many, many people in the US still discriminate against the gay community so it doesn't seem that we are totally on the right side of this issue anyway.  

Yeah !!  Let's ruin the Met.

The opening night of the Met's season is NOT the place for a protest about human rights abuses in Russia.

Netrebko is not a political figure. She is the best soprano we have today.

..these suggestions of some...about boycotting the Met's opening "Onegin" ...is just another example of "mid-summer silliness"

Netrebko is my favorite!

-----------------------------------------------

Maybe it’s not the new Russian Fascists alone that should be banned but opera lovers, and hell, even opera?

Hitler and Winifred Wagner greet one another at Bayreuth.

Music at last! What a relief. I hate opera! Sometimes.

Writing a few weeks ago about what was once “new music”; I realized, not for the first time, that opera is a mental illness. A few days ago I listened to one of my favorite pieces, Brahms’ A major piano quartet, something even I played (badly) way back when. I staged a war between the old Arthur Rubenstein and the Guarnieri (Arthur’s second go at the piece, very romantic with a lot of rubato and Arthur clearly dominating the proceedings with many the tempo change mid phrase), the fantastic Sviatoslav Richter live performance with the Borodin quartet, an utterly demented and very thrilling performance, with the Borodins keeping up with Richter with ferocity (just barely in the orgiastic account of the final movement), the Domus quartet with Susan Tomes interrupting tea with just a few slices of mince tart and the great Hollywood Quartet with Victor Aller.

(this is another great performance, with the phenomenal Russian pianist Maria Yudina)

I read along with my tattered score and what was my response? “Thank The Dear there was no singing!” Music at last! What a relief. I’m sorry about the description at the head of this blog, I hate opera!

Sometimes. On Saturday, poor Mrs. Claggart’s Facebook page exploded with encomiums of varying hysteria to an Italian tenor named Mario del Monaco. (Mrs. Claggart has only three friends on Facebook, one of them “Mr. Bianco, IRS”. But she has 300,000 enemies, a category Zuckerberg’s elf invented just for her.) I had to wonder how many people had ever heard of Mario del Monaco? I know not many people currently alive heard him. Mrs. Claggart, when she was a boy, now that she’s a girl, heard him three times in two seasons before a nearly fatal automobile accident reduced his immense, deafening, nothing like it since volume, and prompted him to be more careful both about high notes, and his manner on stage, which became less obviously certifiable (though by the mid 1960’s he did regain some of that Twilight Zone Form adopted by the older Italian tenors). But there is a lot of Mario out there.

                             
                                   (Mario sings "Ghost Riders in the Sky" in Italian)

He was a world star from the late forties and made a great many too closely miked records. Why, I knew a man who had perpetual ear ache. All in fear and atremble he went to his doctor. “Perhaps you’re having a stroke,” the doctor allowed reassuringly. Then the doctor settled back. “Have you been listening to Mario Del Monaco records?”

“Why yes, every night,” the patient replied. “For hours. My wife makes me use headphones” “Well, sir,” said the doctor, breaking out his old Calabash (this was when medical people smoked and died young), “there’s your answer. My wife dragged me to see this so called Del Monaco in Otello and though they all said he was sick and saving, I had a headache and hearing loss for a week. Switch to this young fella named Domingo. You can barely hear him, you’ll be good as new in a couple of days.”

Besides Mario’s commercial recordings (all on Decca except for an early EMI) there are tons of pirates. You can also see Mario. He journeyed to Japan with the Italian companies that ventured there every year starting around 1955. The cameras capture his exuberance. At the end of the Andrea Chenier with Renata Tebaldi, as they go off to the guillotine, he actually leaps toward the blade, loses his balance and falls off stage (and dances out to his deafening ovation like a champ). Audiences worshiped him (well, maybe not the English, they had Jimmy Johnston and Ken Clark for the big roles). The hysterical response given his Canio in Pagliacci there is amazing (but it’s a thrilling performance). He did a Carmen there with Giulietta Simionato, all the famous excerpts survive. In the final scene, failing to convince the obdurate Carmen to return to him, he beats his breast in heart break and frustration. I hadn’t seen that since my father did the same regarding me.

I played that excerpt for a couple of Manhattan litigators who said they were opera lovers. They roared with queenly hysteria. Luckily, I didn’t play the final scene from his Don Jose in Carmen at the Bolshoi, also a collection of excerpts with the great Russians, Irina Arkhipova and Pavel Lisitsian. There he screams, sobs, beats his chest, waves the knife and all but levitates when he finally runs to kill Carmen. What would those lawyers have made of that? And what would they have made of the Russian audience of dignitaries who riot after his Flower Song? (And yes, Don Jose sings it, not The Celestial Voice from Don Carlos, as James Oestreich seemed to think in his review of a recent Carmen in the Paper of Record the New York Times).

He was the most famous (though not the only important) singer of Verdi’s Otello in the 1950’s (bravo, Ramon Vinay!) and one can see him in Japan, reportedly with the flu but the abandon, ferocity and breast beating heart break are all there (as are the renowned Tito Gobbi as Iago and the adorable Gabriella Tucci).

But those litigators would have laughed; it’s a peek into a vanished era. They would have been indifferent to the (eloquent) gestural vocabulary that is part of the acting of the principals and inclined to giggle at “acting” techniques designed for the stage and those in the far balconies not for the camera, and perhaps embarrassed that a group of adults could take an opera as seriously as Del Monaco and Gobbi and Tucci do. Had those wealthy consigliori to the 1% been inclined to father children, their teenagers would have been completely bored within minutes and soon would have been texting, sexting, playing video games and surfing the ‘Net simultaneously.

The Japanese use a three camera technique, borrowed from American sit coms; it works, even in a big theater. The cameras can get close enough for detail but one never loses that this is a stage performance and distance is important. When the cameras pull back one can see three mikes hung from the ceiling, mid house. They are to get the sound clearly on the tape not to amplify or help the soloists. How different from the multi mike and camera fraudulence on the HD broadcasts from the Met, which deliver a very difference experience from the one those sitting in the theater had.

These Japan performances (and the highlights from The Bolshoi) are probably best experienced from VAI (www.vaimusic.com). They’ve put archival films on DVD and cleaned them up as much as possible. All the Japanese films have Kangi subtitles with English subtitles under them, which takes some getting used to. The picture quality of the earlier performances is often somewhat washed out. Besides Mario, there are marvelous demonstrations by Carlo Bergonzi (an amazing Un Ballo in Maschera), Renata Scotto, Alfredo Kraus (an incredible Faust) and Antonietta Stella (my high school pals and I used to call her Toni Starr. I met her some years later and explained this would have been her Motown Name. She squealed with joy). Her performance of Minnie in The Girl of the Golden West is stunning, the only completely idiomatic and the best sung on a video in an otherwise somewhat ramshackle performance.

Mario also appeared on the RAI films that began to be made for Italian TV in the early fifties. They are lip synched but they are carefully prepared and feature singers who are forgotten now like Mrs. John Claggart and her twin and we aren’t even dead (who would miss Clara Petrella in Manon Lescaut and Il Tabarro or Carla Gavazzi in Cavalleria Rusticana? There is even a great Pagliacci with the young, gorgeous Franco Corelli, who, freed of having to produce his tone live, proves to be a wonderful and moving actor. Mario’s accident cleared the way for him to become “the greatest Italian tenor” in the world, and although he couldn’t count, phrase, and sing at the same time, liked to squeeze his nose, wiggle his jaw and do tongue exercises while others sang in live performances, the sound was thrilling. Mario hated him. Naturally. I hate a lot of people too. I understand).

(The Chenier doesn't translate from You Tube, this is from the Otello with Carteri)

Not all the RAI films are so effective. These involve one massive camera stalking the singers. The great Rosanna Carteri sings a spectacular Violetta in La Traviata but has a hard time lip synching, becomes self conscious and then, when the huge camera machine comes swooping in for her close ups, she starts to run away from it. She had charisma, though; if not there, in a performance filmed live in Naples by RAI in 1958. This is of Puccini’s usually dismissed La Rondine, but it is a very moving performance, conducted by a Puccini pal, quite old obviously, Vincenzo Bellezza, who understands the heart breaking nostalgia for a time lost that throbs under nearly every bar, unashamed to use string portamenti and a well controlled but large scale rubato to make these melodies soar (how plain so many sound elsewhere! Even Brahms would have cried). Carteri was very beautiful and is so full of longing and tears that the entire experience is unforgettable. This is also in excellent quality from VAI, distributing the Italian Hardy Label.

Wait have I become an opera queen again? I’ve relapsed!!! As Anthony Wiener knows, the Brahms rehab center did not take!!!

Well, I am a writer with the runs in any case. And we were talking about Mario. He did an outstanding Otello for RAI. But his best performance is in a stunning film of Andrea Chenier. The hokey storey is enacted with life or death intensity, and that extends to all the roles, even the smallest, played with almost Dickensian detail by those wonderful Italian supporting singers of that era (they’ve vanished, as have the stars – none have had successors). Understanding that there is no audience present and that the camera will come very close, Mario who was a good looking man, is utterly human, believable. He relaxes into a completely natural impersonation of the doomed poet. And he is matched by those great singers, Toni Starr and Giuseppe Taddei.

Let’s face it, there was nothing wrong with the composer, Umberto Giordano, that five more years in a tough American conservatory wouldn’t have fixed. Well, he wasn’t as great a tune smith as Cole Porter (who did time in a tough French conservatory, the Schola Cantorum) but in this opera he knows how to set up his tunes very effectively and the recitative beginnings to the many sections that will eventually almost flower into being memorable are wonderfully done. James Levine told me that Chenier was one of the hardest operas to do; Giordano does not use key signatures not because he couldn’t read music as the naughty have had it, but because he belonged to a political movement that disliked hierarchies of all kinds. But Mo. Levine averred getting winds and brass to deal accurately with music full of accidentals (signs that the note should be played up or down) was murder.

The RAI films can be found in good quality from Premiere Opera, and they have good prices, too! (www.premiereopera.com/)‎

Well, Sunday cleared the air for Mario. But opera? There is this gene (or is it a mixture of nature and nurture?) that makes some of us deeply sensitive to voices, so much so, that a timbre and manner we respond to, even on record, seems three dimensional to us. We can become obsessed with some of those magicians, to the exclusion of other factors that matter in opera. Mrs. John Claggart adores music. The sad thing about opera is that it is, I believe, very dependent on vocal capacity. This is not to say that a great conductor, a persuasive production, the music itself can't compensate for a merely adequate cast. I think sadly, that even adequate casts are rarer than they were in a time when singers were generally less well prepared musically and far less inclined to "act" whatever that may mean in opera. I see on the “Opera ‘Net” people claiming that Konzept style productions will bring youths into the opera house. I like some of those productions too. But if those youths have no response to the music, what is there to enjoy in a Konzept production? I have met many the intellectual (and great) musician who thought opera was worthless. Perhaps it is my weakness but I love it, not exclusively, but passionately. And that is why I am sad that there is such confusion, pretentiousness and fakery in the form today. I recently had occasion to listen to music by Carter and Feldman, what a relief that was! But would I want to be without opera? It is a dilemma and maybe I should shut up.