Opera Rat: The Blog

AN OPERA-TOON MOMENT

The author, opera writer, blogger and devoted Philadelphia 76ers fan Gale Martin graciously invited me to appear in the Sunday Best feature on "Opera-toonity" - on Easter Sunday, no less. Check out the result and the rest of Gale's excellent blog at operatoonity.wordpress.com. I really had to shell out for that "loads of personal appeal" observation. But worth it.

Thanks, Gale.

REVIEW OR RE-VIEW? A 'SCHATTEN' IN THE DARK

I was reading an opera review the other day that started out: "In each of the fifteen different productions of Richard Strauss's Frau ohne Schatten I have attended..."

First thing: I hope he's either getting paid for that, or single. Second thing: I've never seen Die Frau ohne Schatten, but accounts indicate it isn't the composer's masterpiece. My most trusted opera guide (Matthew Boyden's Rough Guide to Opera) speaks of a score more than three and a half hours long, "moments of profound obscurity teetering on pretentiousness," and "pages of painful dialogue punctuated regularly by tumults of ravishing song." If a Strauss fan has seen this 15 times, how many times has he seen Salome? Eighty?

The rest of the review is erudite, historical, comparative, and, for someone like me unfamiliar with Schatten or Strauss, inscrutable. I don't mean that as a criticism; that would be selfish. I imagine such a review serves a Straussian well. Here's my criticism: opera doesn't have enough of any other kind of review.

Opera is operating right now in a vortex of inaccessibility. Classic operas are performed so often that the conversation about them is dominated by subtleties. Newer operas are dominated by music appreciated mostly by experts. And opera in general is all but neglected except in the specialty press. It's as if cuisine were limited to 200 ancient recipes plus molecular gastronomy, and you could read about it only in Gourmet. How would anyone know what to eat? More important: how would anyone get a sense of the joy of eating?

Until opera penetrates back into popular media and culture - and I believe, perhaps naively, that this can happen - allow me to advance, on behalf of opera lovers newly made and opera lovers yet to be, these humble requests to opera reviewers everywhere, even as they bring their intellect and experience to bear:

• Say what the story is about.
• Give the drama as much attention as the music.
• Imagine you're seeing it for the first time, then...
• Tell us if it moved you.

I'll try to do the same, at least in this small space.

LA TRIVIATA: DYING FROM (OVER)CONSUMPTION

My opera sources, such as they are, tell me a second company within day-tripping distance of my midwestern U.S. base is about to announce a '10-'11 season lineup that includes La Traviata.

Can we stop? Please?

One, we're trivializing a great opera. Two, is it really that great? Let's face it: all the best music is in Act I, and then the bitch just takes forever to die. At the end of the second intermission my gin-and-tonic is like, "You're leaving me to go back in there with her?"

Here's the irony: The most admirable qualities of La Traviata are precisely what can save us from La Traviata.

In the recent run-up to Elmer Gantry in Milwaukee, I read about its tortured path to the stage: how it took 17 years, how the composer and librettist nearly went broke, how nobody wants to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars producing an unproven show. Duly noted, and Gantry is a marvel, but honestly - it has two dozen singers and 13 effing scene changes. And that's the cut-down version. For a Sinclair Lewis adaptation. Thank god they didn't start with Dune.

La Traviata, meanwhile, has four roles, modest sets, and a story as simple as it is universal. That's what made it revolutionary in its time. These days a high school could put it on. OK, a high school with one three-octave soprano. But you get the idea. It's easy to see why an opera company, especially in this economy, would embrace the show. It's just too bad there aren't more options like it that haven't been so many times around the operatic block.

For the sake of poor Violetta and her ever-failing health, let's prescribe some long-overdue treatment, for her and for opera: a dosage of new shows modeled on what's truly great about La Traviata. And a temporary quarantine from the original.

OPERA BLOGGERS: WE ARE EVERYWHERE

The January/February edition of Opera Now magazine, which is still the current issue here in the operatic outer reaches of the upper-midwestern U.S., contains an interesting article on the current difficulties in casting Wagner operas. It includes this observation from Katharina Wagner, a stage director and the composer's great-granddaughter:

"There's far too much emphasis on names and creating new stars. Singers aren't allowed to fail, and all it takes is one bad performance for the news to be blogged everywhere."

Wow. I didn't realize opera blogging was so pervasive. And I thought I had a "niche."

INTERMISSIONS: A RANT

Following hear-hears to several ornery tweets about inadequate intermissions, I hereby submit this list of demands, er, ideas to opera companies everywhere regarding fair treatment of operagoers. I'm not directing this at anyone in particular, though an inquiring eye can tell where I've been lately.

1. A civilized show requires two intermissions. Opera should not have halftime.

2. Long shows need longer intermissions, not shorter ones.

3. No intermission should last less than one gin-and-tonic, procured and sipped at moderate speed.

4. Escape quotient: Take the number of aisles dividing your main house, subtract from 3, and multiply any positive result by 2 minutes. Add that to what you think you need.

5. Ringing chimes and flashing lights are preferable to militaristic loudspeaker threats.

6. Post timings for acts and intermissions at the coat checks and list them in the program.

7. If the night gets too long, cut the opera. Nearly every show in the repertoire has flab.

8. Relaxation is remembered after haste is forgotten.

'ELMER GANTRY': MUSIC TO OPERA'S EAR

I have this theory that opera has been holding a grudge against music. Over many years opera figured out the show works best when the music serves the drama. Then musicals came along and made it big doing what opera used to do - stopping the drama to have the actors sing for the audience. That's when opera, in a seeming huff, stopped having songs or melodies at all. New opera became an avant-garde art form, and opera fans decided they would rather see La Traviata 38 times.

In that context, Robert Aldridge's Elmer Gantry, getting its second booking over the weekend at Milwaukee's Florentine Opera after premiering in 2007 at the Nashville Opera, felt like a tent revival in more ways than one. Replete with fight songs and spirituals and hand-clapping, this was anything but the priestly experience audiences have come to expect from a modern opera. At the end of Sunday's second and final performance in Milwaukee, the people stood and cheered as if they'd been saved.

This opera has moments that are positively show-stopping, like the delicious, epithet-laced aria at the end of Act I in which revenge on the thunder-stealing evangelist Gantry is sworn by the ostensibly respectable preacher and YMCA president Eddie Fislinger, sung at the Florentine with exquisite venom by tenor Frank Kelley. (That this smarmy antagonist gets the high notes against the title role's baritone instead of the other way around is one of the show's many smart compositional strokes.) There are also subtler moments that move the audience not just at the end but throughout, as in the middle of Act II, when Gantry's former seminary sidekick Frank Shallard (tenor Vale Rideout at the Florentine), now a properly ordained minister, has a convincing crisis of faith under a starry sky.

But this is no musical. The piece is deftly through-composed. The dialogue is thoughtfully orchestrated at every turn. Spoken words are scarce and purposeful. Never is the drama interrupted to patronize the audience with a big number. Given the source material, it's far from surprising when Aldridge pays homage to the hymns and spirituals that run through the heart of American music. But he quotes from the history rather than pandering to it. The music is accessible, yet distinctly modern, and recognizably operatic for anyone who loves the form.

As if that isn't enough, Herschel Garfein's libretto is in some ways more complex and provocative than Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel of the same title, and certainly more relevant to our time. The novel is an indictment of rank evangelism and religious fakery. But the opera is a question about the nature of belief, with no clear answer at the end. The climactic, chilling and classically operatic funeral pyre consumes hero and villain alike, and mixes their ashes beyond delineation. Only in the end does Gantry live on as the huckster Lewis portrayed.

Elmer Gantry has its drawbacks. Like much of the repertoire it aspires to join, it's too long - it's not hard to identify passages that go on well after their point is made, and even a scene or two that might be cut  without much sewing-up. (This flaw was not alleviated but exacerbated by the Florentine's single tiny and uncivilized intermission, not nearly one gin-and-tonic in duration, a grievous sin in a venue with long rows and no aisles for fast escape.) If you're comparing this opera to Verdi or Puccini - unfair but obligatory - for all its tunefulness it seems to lack the signature melody or motif that echoes in your mind as you leave the house. Perhaps that will emerge with the future bookings this show is sure to get, not to mention the release of the debut recording Naxos made of the Milwaukee run. Either way, I felt the leads got rooked out of much of the show's best music - this seems destined to be a ladder opera for supporting actors.

All in all, though, Elmer Gantry is (so to speak) a revelation. With due respect to the minimalists and atonalists - and I have recently enjoyed Doctor Atomic and Lulu at the Lyric in Chicago - opera is in pitiful need of new shows that are closer to entry-level for audiences. Elmer Gantry is proof that's possible while remaining unmistakably operatic. Let the grudge against music be lifted. Amen.

WHAT OPERA IS UP AGAINST

A ambitious opera company takes a chance on a contemporary show with a theme that's (gasp) relevant to our own time - and this is what they get:

Review: Some stand and cheer, some leave 'Gantry' premiere

From that headline, you're thinking controversy, possible disaster, right? What you learn instead is this:

"Some of the audience at Friday's Florentine Opera presentation of Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein's 'Elmer Gantry' devoured it, standing and cheering at final curtain while a smaller number applauded from their seats and a few left at intermission - all of which are healthy, honest responses to any new piece of art."

I've been to an opera or two. A few people always leave at intermission, some undoubtedly for reasons unrelated to the show at hand. And it seems like if most of the rest of the people are standing and cheering after the final note, what you have is called a "success." From there the reviewer goes on to get out the jeweler's eye and examine this element and that element of the production - the sets, the costumes, the singing, the "overabundance of uninspired group clapping" - while predictably bailing on the central question of all opera: Did it move the audience? Did it bring the tingle? Did it fucking work?

Well, I'm going to see Elmer Gantry today. I'll let you know.

SAVING THE WORLD THROUGH OPERA

Welcome to Opera Rat: The Blog.

Why are you here?

Probably because you love opera, and you love it the way I do - enough not only to watch and listen to it, but also to dream and read and surf and tweet about it. So it's likely we have something special in common.

Why am I here?

Because I believe opera can save the world. No, really.

My love of opera has made me a happier, kinder, and more sensitive person. The world could use some happier, kinder and more sensitive people. So I'm using my only marketable skill - writing - to infect as much of the world as I can with the same love of opera that has so improved my life.

This blog, and my @OperaRat feed on Twitter, and my writing about opera in more traditional media are all intended to serve that simple mission. Even when I'm critical of opera - which isn't unusual - my intent is to help improve the art form and make it accessible to the widest audience possible: old and young, wealthy and humble, aficionados and rookies, snobs and Philistines, all alike.

Finally: Why opera? Why not the symphony, or the theater, or cooking, or baseball, or the Green Bay Packers (other things I love)?

Opera has a special power, deriving from its alchemical blend of drama and music. No other form of art or entertainment can match the thrill opera offers when it's done right. No other form of art or entertainment elicits tears and laughter and astonishment and plain old chills the way opera can.

Not that it always does. Opera needs some help right now, and that's another reason I'm here. But when opera works, it delights the brain, softens the heart and improves the soul like nothing else in our increasingly impersonal and technical world. Let's spread it around, together.