Opera Based on Newspaper Cartoons!

From time to time I read articles bemoaning the supposed "fact" that concert audiences don't like modern music.  This kind of sweeping generalization makes me want to tear out whatever hair I have left!  The authors always focus on the hundreds of people who leave the hall when a modern work comes around.  What about the thousands who show up?  It's just the old story of the optimist and pessimist.  I'd always rather look at the donut than the hole (metaphorically -- since I'm diabetic any actual looking at donuts is just trouble!).  My rant for the day.


Perhaps the trick is that modern concert music has become so diverse in its range -- more so than any previous era -- that music lovers develop an appreciation for particular composers, while not enjoying the works of others so much.  Take me as an example;  I'm a lifelong fan of the music of Leoš Janáček, a Slovak composer who lived from 1854 to 1928.  And yet I'm quite well aware that many people don't enjoy his music.  But then, maybe they haven't sampled this particular piece.  By the dates, it's obvious that his life and career overlapped those of the famous Czech composers Smetana and Dvořák, but don't look for similarities!  All of  Janáček's greatest works were composed during the last decade of his life (that is, of course, after World War One) and that includes the beautiful opera I'm writing about today: The Cunning Little Vixen.


I said "cartoons" in the headline, but it would actually be truer to refer to the source material as what is now called a "graphic novel" -- a detailed story told by means of a series of illustrated panels accompanied by text, where the words and pictures equally help to carry the story forward.  The original was published as a newspaper serial.  Janáček adapted his own libretto (in consultation with the original author), making an important change that turned the ending darker while still holding out hope for a cycle of renewal, death and new life.  This is the theme in the work which speaks loudest and most deeply to me.


This story is a tale of nature in the forest.  There are several human characters, including a teacher, a forester and his wife and so on.  But the key characters are all animals and birds and insects, including the title character.  In the first act the Forester is asleep when he's woken up by a frog jumping into his lap.  He sees and catches the young Vixen and takes her home to confine her, but she manages to chew through the rope that holds her, attacks the rooster and the crested hen, kills the chickens and escapes.  In Act Two, grown to adulthood, she meets a young fox and falls in love -- with the inevitable result.  The gossiping forest creatures all tell tales and the act ends with a wedding scene.


In Act Three the poacher sets out a fox trap, which makes the young vixen cubs laugh.  But the poacher, seeing the Vixen, shoots and kills her.  The Forester sees the Vixen's fur hanging around the neck of the woman he loved at her wedding, and flees back into the forest where he falls asleep.  The opera ends when a baby frog jumps into his lap, wakes him, and says that he is the grandson of the frog who woke him at the beginning. 


Janáček set this pastoral tale -- almost a fable, really -- at the very height of his musical powers.  The techniques he used are familiar from other mature works of his.  The orchestral parts in many places are dominated by short little ostinato phrases repeated on and on, while other themes wind around them.  Melodic lines have some smooth contours, but also some wide, difficult leaps.  The music always is grounded in some kind of tonality, but the use of unexpected chord relationships and modal harmonies derived from folk music gives it an astringency foreign to the work of Smetana and Dvořák.  Please note, though, that "astringent" doesn't mean positively painful to the ear!


The first act in particular is chock-full of delightful and memorable melodies, and this is certainly not always the case with Janáček.  If you've ever heard a suite of excerpts from the opera played in a concert, it usually will consist of excerpts from Act One!  In particular there is a charming, gossamer-light waltz tune for a dance of grasshoppers and crickets, who obviously can't be thumping around to the strains of a full orchestra!  The final scene of the act, showing the Vixen's escape, would do duty very nicely for a cartoon or movie chase scene, complete with a squalling soprano line from the Crested Hen!


The gossiping birds in Act Two are beautifully represented by an unaccompanied chorus, eventually joined by orchestra for the concluding wedding.  The third act begins with an ominous march-tune for the poacher setting out his traps.  And so it goes.  The music couldn't possibly be more unlike the work of Wagner, but it does share with Wagner's works the illustrative quality that allows us to see equally the dancing flames around Brunnhilde or (in this case) the flittering dancing of insects.


The title role of the Vixen needs a lyric soprano voice, not without weight, but certainly not a Wagnerian soprano from what Anna Russell once called the "brass bra brigade"!


The opera has been recorded several times and has seen performance more often in recent years.  Indeed, there has even been a TV cartoon version created, with singers and players under the direction of Kent Nagano!  Every reviewer I've ever read, though, has said that the closest to a definitive recorded version is the classic Decca set conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras.  It's a striking thought that an Australian should become the first conductor to record all the Janáček operas complete.  His complete identification with the music of the composer is one of the two major strengths of this recording.


The other one is the singing of the late, lamented Lucia Popp in the title role.  No less than with Daphne by Richard Strauss which I wrote about a few months back, this is a role written in the subconscious hope that some day she would come along to sing it!  Her voice is ideally attuned to the composer's sound world, light in tone but sufficient in weight for louder passages, and with a soaring lyrical quality matched to spot-perfect intonation even on sweeping high phrases with big leaps in them. What a peerless performance -- surely the one to which all later performers of the role will and must be compared.

Mahler In A Light-Hearted Mood

As a devoted lifelong fan of Gustav Mahler, I'll be the first one to admit that you can't usually use the adjective "light-hearted" to describe his music.  Ah, but then I forgot this recording, which I grabbed at random off the shelves and plugged into the car's CD player today.

In his younger years, during the decade of the 1880s, Mahler composed a sizable number of song settings.  For some, he wrote his own poetry (as he did also for the cantata Das Klagende Lied and the finale of the Second "Resurrection" Symphony of 1894).  In other cases he used poetry from the folk-poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn").   The only songs from this period that are at all well-known are the four Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfaring Youth").  The remainder were gathered by Mahler and published in several volumes. 
The title under which Mahler published this collection was simply Lieder und Gesänge.  It was a later publisher who added the descriptive "aus der Jugendzeit" (from Youth).

With the exception of the familiar Fahrenden Gesellen cycle, these songs are a good deal lighter and less full of doubts than the later works of the composer.  Some moments of darkness intrude, but on the whole the tone is bright, cheerful, even playful.  And that characteristic is beautifully captured in the recorded performance at hand, featuring the British mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker and her preferred accompanist, Geoffrey Parsons.

Mahler understood full well that the art of composing a Lied, the art of saying a very great deal in a very short space of time, required considerable discipline.  So too does the art of performing Lieder and this team certainly knows how to do it.  The result, paradoxically, is singing and playing of the highest artistry devoted to the purpose of appearing artless and innocent -- a requirement of the texts of some of these songs.

The recital begins with three earlier songs that stand outside the collected volumes.  These are followed by the 13 Lieder und Gesänge, and the record concludes with the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in a new edition by Colin Matthews which brings the piano/vocal text in line with the orchestral/vocal text (the former piano edition was based on an earlier version of the cycle, probably by mistake).

Dame Janet Baker was renowned for her interpretations of the music of Mahler, and with good reason.  Few singers in my lifetime, apart from Maureen Forrester, have been able to enter so thoroughly into Mahler's unique and unsettling world vision.  These songs give her a chance to display a lighter touch, along with superb comic sense where it's required.  Droll as some of these songs become, there are others that are darker and these too she compasses beautifully.  Parsons is throughout a sympathetic and insightful accompanist.  The 1983 recording still sounds superb.

This marks one of the earliest entries in what has now become the longest-running series of Lieder recordings in history.  Hyperion Records would soon become the issuing company of Graham Johnson's daunting project to record all of the 600-plus Schubert Lieder, with various singers and accompanists taking on songs best suited to their voice type.  The company has continued on with Lieder and song cycles of many other composers, following a similar model.  In the process, Hyperion has become identified with the world of the European art song as thoroughly as Decca or EMI have come to be known as operatic labels.  These recordings -- and this Mahler disc definitely ranking among them -- have come to be regarded as some of the greatest treasures of the era of recorded music.
 

An Occasionally Brilliant Mass

It's not often that I venture outside the strict bounds of so-called "classical" music, but every once in a while I do, and the results are often both surprising and unexpected.

In 1970, Leonard Bernstein composed Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Dancers, and Players to a commission for the opening of the Kennedy Centre for the Arts in Washington DC in 1971.  Ever since, critics have argued over this multi-faceted work's place in the composer's canon, and in the history of music.

While I had no opportunity to see the initial production, and Mass has been only rarely re-staged (although more frequently performed in concert), the original cast recording conducted by Maurice Peress is still available in re-issue on Sony Classics.  It was, of course, recorded under Bernstein's personal supervision.  Several more recent recordings have also been made.  My general impression from that original recording is that the work's many shortcomings are outweighed by its strengths.

Of course, you have to remember that Mass was, in the most literal sense of the term, an occasional piece.  As such, it is very clearly representative of one way of looking at the events of its own time.  The shadow of the Vietnam War, that wrenching crisis of America's conscience, broods over many pages of the libretto.

That libretto is, perhaps, the greatest weakness of Mass, viewed as a lasting musical work.  It is, in fact, so much of its time that it may appear incomprehensible to anyone young enough to have missed living through that era.  It is, in large measure, filled with satire (dripping with satire, really, in the "Gospel Lesson: God Said", a parodistic takedown of the Creation story).  Other passages are earnest to the point of being embarrassing.  But with all of that, the text is clear as a bell about its intentions, and the rhyming is smooth, never forced.  The words communicate very well as they are being sung.

The story (and there is a story line) shows a young man who appears, singing A Simple Song and accompanying himself on a folk guitar.  He is invested with the robes of a priest and the ritual gets underway.  At each stage of the "service", his robes have ever more elaborate and multiple layers added.  At the climax of the Agnus Dei, he flings the Sacrament to the ground, rips off his robes, dances on the altar, all in a musical mad scene even more harrowing than others found in earlier operas.  Finally he collapses downstage centre, exhausted and used up, and crawls off into the orchestra pit.  A pair of singers start a quiet canon arising out of a reprise of the opening number, and all the cast gradually join in.  At last, the Celebrant appears again from the wings, dressed as at the beginning, and joins the canon, and the circling chain of embraces taking place with it.  The boys choir descends the steps and exits through the audience, touching hands with audience members as they go and urging them to "pass it on" as a taped voice says, "The Mass is ended; go in peace."

Now, as kitschy as all this sounds, for my money it works -- and I know there will be those who disagree with me, perhaps vehemently.  Musically, Mass is a compendium of so many styles that it's difficult to name them all: rock, pop, jazz, blues, classical, are all used.  The strength of this miscellany is that Bernstein knew how to work in all those modes, and filled his work with catchy tunes, gripping harmonies, and hair-raising climaxes.

His method, in broad outline, is the same as Britten's method in War Requiem:  interweave the Latin text of the mass with modern poetry, expressing complementary viewpoints.  In Bernstein's work, there is no such strict divide between the musical styles.  Classical devices like canons coexist with rock riffs.  Orchestral strings interweave with electric guitars and drum kits. 

The net result, as mixed as it is, becomes for me very compelling.  I have a similar reaction to many earlier (and undoubtedly greater) works.  I hate having to leave in the middle to go off and do something else; once the piece has begun, I have to -- want to -- listen to the end (a little less than 2 hours).  There are highlights, of course, but in general the work as a whole exceeds its component parts.  Some of the best parts are the ones where Bernstein makes brilliant use of the irregular rhythms he loved so much: the 5-beat pattern of the Gloria Patri, for instance, or the Gospel Lesson where the very catchy tempo moves in groups of 11 beats! 

The success of the performance rests, in no small measure, on the amazing performance of the penultimate mad scene by Alan Titus, the young (at the time) baritone who sang the role of the Celebrant.  As recorded, his voice covers an enormous range of tone colours from deep-throated low notes to high falsettos, with everything from shouts to whispers in between.  It's not surprising that his career took off after such high-level exposure, but also and not least because of his extraordinary achievement in that taxing 15-minute mad scene.

The one section that I always go away hearing on replay in my mind is the gradual crescendo of the Agnus Dei.  Here, in his extroverted way, Bernstein is clearly following Beethoven's indication that this is "a prayer for inward and outward peace".  The texts sung by various soloists indicate turbulence of mind and emotion, and a need for certainties which life simply cannot provide.  As the piece builds up, more and more layers of sound from various sources are added on until it becomes an unholy uproar.  This cacophony is suddenly stopped dead by the Celebrant's triple cry of:  "Pacem!  Pacem!  PACEM!!!", followed by the sound of the monstrance and chalice shattering on the floor.

The quiet ending of this exuberant piece always leaves me reflecting that we -- all of us -- need to sometimes strip away the layers of artifice built up in our busy lives, and reach back into that inner core where the ultimate roots of our personal needs lie.  Not easy to do, in our noisy, hectic, hustle-bustle world -- but ultimately, I think very necessity for our sanity and well being.  That message for me resounds much louder than they preachy anti-war material in the text.  But it is the whole work that takes me there, because the entire piece is one single prolonged build-up to the moment when the Celebrant loses it completely -- and then finds it again, right back where he had his beginning.

A Fairy-Tale Comes to Brilliant Life

The Russian composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is justly renowned as one of music's supreme masters of orchestration due to his magnificent masterpieces Scheherazade, Russian Easter Overture, and Capriccio Espagnol.  Less well-known and certainly due for more recognition, are the fairy-tale operas he composed which he himself regarded as his major musical legacy.  It's telling that insofar as these works are known at all in the Western world, they are known mainly from the vivid orchestral showpieces peppered throughout the scores.  Indeed, Neeme Jarvi many years ago made a splendid multi-CD set of orchestral suites from the operas with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos records, a set which is still available in re-release.


Even from that point of view, the particular opera I was listening to yesterday doesn't register on the map and few North Americans have even heard of it.  This is The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya.  While this work still sees performance inside Russia, it has remained very rare in the rest of the world.  It's a pity, because Rimsky-Korsakov himself regarded it as his supreme artistic achievement.  Indeed, it is sometimes described as the "Russian Parsifal", more perhaps because of the thematic content than out of any real musical similarity.


Listening to The Invisible City of Kitezh, you have to be prepared to make allowances for sound.  There are only 4 recordings ever made, as far as I know, and the 2 currently available were both taped during live performances.  Inevitably, you have to cope with stage noises, odd balances, and voices that seem to recede into the background as their owners move upstage.  It's a small price to pay for the privilege of becoming familiar with such fine music.


The lengthy title shows that the libretto is actually a conflation of two different legends, and this conflation was apparently planned right from the outset of discussions between composer and librettist.  The two stories are well integrated in the libretto, and the combination certainly allows for an eventful story.


In the opera, Fevroniya is depicted as a pure maiden, most at home in the world of nature.  The score opens with her radiant hymn to nature, featuring a soaring refrain for the principal soprano that becomes a motif for the innocence and purity of Fevroniya throughout the opera.  In that first scene she meets the Prince Vsevolod who falls in love with her.  They sing a beautiful love duet, and he places a ring on her finger.  In Act 2 their marriage scene, at first joyful, is interrupted by news of the invaders coming to threaten their homeland.


The most striking parts of the score, musically, are the scenes involving the invading horde of Tatars who surround and threaten the city of Greater Kitezh.  The contrast to the beauty of the opening scenes is reminiscent of the similar contrasts in Borodin's Prince Igor, but with the harsh brutality of the invaders even more sharply differentiated from the civilized tones of the city.


Stricken by the death in battle of Vsevolod, Fevroniya prays for the city to be hidden from the invaders and a golden mist rises from the lake, concealing the city but still allowing the sound of its bells to be heard.  As the sun rises, the mist conceals the city but a striking orchestral passage depicts how its reflection can be seen in the waters, and how the Tatars flee in terror.


In the achingly beautiful final act, Fevroniya meets the bird of paradise who tells her that she must die, but will then receive the reward of her goodness.  An entr'acte leads us into the "heaven" which Greater Kitezh has now become, and there Fevroniya is reunited and wed with Vsevolod to the acclaim of the people.


In this large-scale work in 4 acts, Rimsky-Korsakov not only revealed his undoubted talent as an orchestrator, but also showed his supreme skill at setting words to music.  Most impressive is the way he can continue to vary orchestration in his usual fluent way without ever swamping the singers in a tidal wave of sound.  The melodies throughout are memorable, with Fevroniya's hymn remaining lodged in my mind long after I have heard it.  Also unforgettable is the battle scene, and the interlude leading to the finale.


The recording I have is a live performance on 3 Philips CDs from the Kirov Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1994, under the direction of the pre-eminent Russian conductor Valery Gergiev.  None of the singers are well-known in North America, but all are thoroughly intimate with the style of the piece, and sing with fervour and passion.  The Kirov orchestra is equally splendid in supporting the singers and in the orchestral showpieces and interludes.  The sound is rather dry, and (as I said earlier) stage noises are occasionally intrusive, but on the whole this is certainly a great performance caught on the wing, and the rapturous applause at the end of each act shows that the audience were thoroughly captivated by the spell of the music.  There is also a more recent live recording available on Naxos, which I have not heard, but which has the undoubted virtue of a lower price.  Given the overall excellence of recent Naxos issues, I'm sure it would make a worthwhile alternative.


In my opinion, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya is a major masterpiece and is long overdue for wider familiarity and recognition.

A Beautiful Choral Rarity

In the 1800s, large choral societies were a favourite form of music making in Europe, Britain and North America.  As a result, many works were composed for these large amateur choirs by composers great and not-so-great.  This was particularly true of Britain, where large choral festivals took place yearly up and down the country and needed a continual stream of new works to feed the flame of the choristers' passion for music.  Much of this choral music has now disappeared from use, as large choirs have become much less common.

That's a pity.  The combination of a large chorus and the Romantic orchestra creates a uniquely powerful sound that certainly stirs my blood whenever I have a chance to hear such a work!

One composer who made his mark in this way was the Czech Antonin Dvořák.  His first major choral-orchestral work, the Stabat Mater, made a huge impression in England and was very frequently performed there.  This led to several more works for English festivals from Dvořák's pen, culminating in his majestic Requiem of 1891. 

In recent years, the Stabat Mater has still seen performance.  It can be done readily with a reduced ensemble of strings, a few winds, and organ, and thus lies within the range of many larger church choirs.  But the Requiem requires the full orchestral forces, and is much more sophisticated and complicated music in a way that demands professional players, soloists and conductor.

Other than that fact,  I've never understood why the Dvořák Requiem has remained so little heard.  Its last performance in Toronto was in the early 1970s under the noted Czech conductor Karel Ancerl, then music director of the Toronto Symphony! 

That's about to change -- tomorrow to be precise -- and I will definitely be there, and writing about the performance on my other blog, Large Stage Live.

But here are some observations about the music itself.  This Requiem was definitely written as an oratorio for concert use, not as a liturgical Mass.  The composer's thinking is primarily symphonic, and his use of themes through the work reflects that fact.  Words are often repeated, sometimes even cut up and rearranged, to suit the musical lines.

The Requiem opens with a haunting figure of F-G flat-E-F -- up a semitone, down a minor third, and up a semitone to return to the opening note.  This motif generates musical consequences of all kinds, and is treated as a motto theme throughout the entire work.  The music flows freely between chorus and soloists, rather than being strictly divided into choral and solo numbers. 

The Dies Irae opens with another striking figure, an agitated ostinato repeating minor thirds down-up-down.  This figure is almost an exact crib of a similar ostinato in the long opening movement of Dvorak's first symphony, written several decades earlier.  By the time he wrote the Requiem, the score of the symphony was long lost, and I can't help wondering if the crib was intentional or simply an intuitive choice that suited the setting.

Then comes the Tuba mirum, the passage announcing the last trumpet and the end of the world.  This is where such composers as Berlioz and Verdi let themselves go thoroughly with extra brass bands, rolling timpani, thunderous sounds roaring forth into the void.  Dvořák goes to the exact opposite pole.  The strings actually put on their mutes, and a single trumpet pianissimo plays a quiet fanfare form of the original motto figure. 

The Recordare  is a beautiful flowing movement for the solo quartet, a nice point of repose before the build-up through the Confutatis maledictis to the Lacrymosa which brings the first part of the work to a dramatic conclusion -- following a huge climactic cry of despair the orchestra gradually descends along the same opening motto to a quiet ending.

The Offertorium opens in a much sunnier mood, and leads into the by-now-traditional fugue on Quam olim Abrahae promisti.  By the way, Verdi only pretended to write a fugue here but dropped it as soon as the four soloists had each taken a short entry!  But Dvořák's fugue is the full show, and a very hearty and robust one too.  The succeeding Hostias is much quieter, more subdued, with the soloists singing lyrically above quiet insertions from the chorus.  The Quam olim Abrahae fugue is then repeated. 

The Sanctus and Benedictus flow in an easy triple time, with soloists alternating with chorus, and ending with fanfare figures on the brass underlying the final Osanna in excelsis.  Then comes the achingly beautiful Pie Jesu, for choir with a lovely lyrical interlude from the solo quartet.  This text is strictly not part of the liturgy at this point, but is repeated here from the end of the Dies irae sequence to wonderful effect.  This is music that is steeped in sorrow, but all the more lovely for that.

The final Agnus Dei opens in a more dramatic mood.  Once again the motto theme underlies the prayers for peace, at first sombre, then growing brighter until the final Dona eis requiem is floated in the air by the sopranos.  Then the soprano soloist enters to a new rising theme for Lux aeterna luceat eis.  In two short sequences she quickly leads the chorus to the work's resplendent climax, with the full choir and orchestra, and tenor and soprano soloists ringing out over the body on a high A-flat (shades of Verdi again!).  As this climax resolves itself, the music gradually quietens down.  A last crescendo accompanies the final repetition of the words Lux aeterna luceat eis and the orchestra then dies away, the motto theme closing the work in the same dark, quiet realm where it first appeared.

Whenever I listen to one of the two recordings I have of this work, it totally envelops me.  No, it's not as gigantic as Berlioz nor is it as dramatic as Verdi -- those being the two Romantic composers whose Requiems are still widely known.  But Dvořák was a skilled composer at the height of his powers, knew exactly what he was doing, and the result is well worthy to be named alongside the two others I have mentioned.

Recordings:  there are a number of them available, but by all accounts I have read (and I agree with them) the one to go for is Karel Ancerl's version from 1959.  It was made as a co-production between Deutsche Grammophon and the Artia record company of Prague (now known as Supraphon).  Soloists were Maria Stader, Sieglinde Wagner, Ernst Haefliger, and Kim Borg, all splendid singers of the time.  It has been re-released in CD form on several occasions by both companies, and copies can still be found. 

In second place, I would put the Decca recording made by Istvan Kertesz in London.  This was laid down in 1969, a few years after his recording of the first-ever complete cycle of the Dvořák symphonies for the same company.  His soprano is Pilar Lorengar, and her big dramatic voice outshines Stader in that magnificent final climax, firmly supported by the deep pedals of the Kingsway Hall organ, which were not nearly as audible on LP as they are in the CD reissue.