Josh McNeill

Tag: opera

Creole, like 20th century African-American spiritual opera from New York.

April 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Opera Creole. It’s an intriguing name for a musical group that conjures up numerous possible meanings. Do they sing opera standards in Creole? If so, is it Haitian Creole or Louisiana Creole? Or do they sing music written by Creole people? If so, which definition of Creole people are they going with? Have any Creole people written operas in the first place? But Opera Creole isn’t really any of these things; it’s more like this:

Not that I have anything against Scott Joplin, and Treemonisha is certainly a hidden musical gem, but what does the work of the originator of ragtime, a native Texarkanian, have to do with anything Creole?

I saw this group a couple weeks ago at the Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church in New Orleans and what I discovered was an attempt to paint a portrait of the musical life of Creole people in the city during the 19th century. The program has headings that touch on favorite arias, compositions by Creole composers, and.. African-American 20th century spirituals?

Again, how does Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Bernstein’s Mass fit in with Creole musical life in 19th century New Orleans? Why include music from an entirely different century in an entirely different styles, particularly when the name of the group, Opera Creole, suggests that the music they perform will be operatic? This sort of disparate arrangement of sources creates an incoherence that’s really a missed opportunity to focus on some of the things mentioned above, which to my knowledge are entirely absent from any group performing today.

Opera Creole verges on some truly unique programming choices, though. The set begins with E tan patate and Fais dodo (Go to Sleep) and ends with Cher, mo lémmé toi (Dear, I Love You), three Louisiana folksongs arranged by musician Camille Nickerson. This was the first time I had ever heard, or even heard of, classically-oriented music sung in Louisiana Creole. One would be hard pressed to find examples of the language in Cajun music, la-la, or Zydeco, let alone orchestral music. The group also had the audience sing two repeated lines from the last piece, providing an opportunity to learn a common Creole phrase (Mo lémmé toi kòm ti kochon lémmé labou [forgive the spelling], I love you like small pigs love mud). A whole program dedicated to this type of thing would go a long way towards giving the group a unique twist while also helping to maintain an endangered local language, yet these songs acted simply as bookends to a very different collection.

Little-known Creole composers, such as Edmond Dédé and Samuel Snaër, also fit into the program. In this case, I mean Creole as in 19th century concept, which essentially included anyone born in Louisiana. This confuses the matter even more as Opera Creole seems to be going by the more modern definition of Creole, meaning anyone of African and French descent born in Louisiana, or perhaps just anyone of African descent period. Ultimately, I’m not sure what Opera Creole is really about, but this idea of the changing definitions of Creole may be worth a follow up post.

Are English R’s ridiculous?

July 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, sung by an opera singer from Spain/Mexico:

Now sung by another opera singer from France:

They’re not singing in English, obviously, but what caught my attention was that Plácido Domingo uses alveolar trills (rolled R’s produced in the front of the mouth) while Roberto Alagna uses uvular trills (produced at the top of the throat, although he does use one alveolar trill around 2:17). Alveolar trills don’t really exist in French except for in older dialects of Quebec French, at least according to Wikipedia, but they do exist in Spanish. Nevertheless, I was more surprised by Alagna’s pronunciation as I’ve heard plenty of native French speakers use the alveolar version in French opera.

This happens in English opera quite a bit, too. Check out this clip from Britten’s Gloriana, particularly around 1:45:

Aveolar trills abound (as well as some unnatural sounding vowels such as in good when they sing “good countess”). These definitely do not exist in any dialect of English and yet these singers are all native English speakers. What’s the deal? Apparently English R’s are ugly and lack clarity. A quick web search will pull up this claim repeated ad infinitum but I’ve yet to find anyone state exactly who decided on this. Afterall, I personally find trills in English singing to sound silly and to completely ruin clarity (I recently watched that Britten opera and had to use subtitles).

I e-mailed a well known phonetician about this as I knew that he also sang in a choir of some sort and he responded that this is a holdover from Italian teachers. This makes sense. Opera is really an Italian form and alveolar trills definitely exist in Italian. Even the vowel shifts make sense with this explanation. Good in the Britten clip sounds like [u] to me, like a Spanish U, which I believe is the same as an Italian U, whereas it should be [ʊ] in most dialects of English.

I’m not too sure why singers have just taken these claims for granted for generations, though. This suggests that basically all music sung in English other than opera sounds terrible to them. Maybe it does. I can name more than one classical music fan that’s pretty elitist in their attitude towards other genres. Maybe it also has something to do with the potential for people to accept authority with little question. Coincidentally, I was recently doing some ethics certifications for human subject research and the Milgram obedience experiment came up:

Nationalistic international opera.

February 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I went to the New Orleans Opera to see The Barber of Seville this past fall and one thing in particular struck me: we sang the national anthem before the performance began.

I’ve never been to the New Orleans Opera, in fact I’ve only been to The Met once and the San Francisco Opera once, even though I’ve seen over a hundred operas on video. (They’re just too damn expensive for my poor soul and I’d rather dish out the money only if it’s a new opera, a rare creature these days.) At the other two performances, the national anthem was not played, though, and I assume it normally isn’t. I don’t know why, but it struck me as a bit odd to use it for such a European art form. I mean, we were all there to see an Italian opera. Nationalism is nothing new to opera, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in this way. It usually involves developing a style distinct from that of the operas composed in other countries, or simply using the language of one’s own country.

This might not be obvious to people who don’t listen to opera, but it was historically not composed in one’s native language. Italians had such a stranglehold on the form for so long that Mozart, for instance, wrote most of his operas to Italian language librettos, even if they were premiered in Vienna. It makes me wonder what audiences did to cope back then. Today, if you go to see an opera, you’ll be given supertitles somewhere so you can still understand what the singers are saying but I don’t think this technology existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This almost seems like it could explain why opera librettos are often so ridiculously bad: no one really cared about the story. For instance, Anthony Tommasini, writing about seeing Renata Tebaldi performing La Bohème in his youth says:

I had only the vaguest idea of what the opera was about. But listening to her uncannily sumptuous singing, I was overcome with indefinable feelings of longing, sadness, bliss and loss.

Before supertitles, people could enjoy opera purely for the music. Maybe this is part of the reason composers always get top billing in operas while the librettists are often so overlooked that only hardcore fans even know who they are. By contrast, musicals often give equal billing to the composer and the the writer (just look at Rodgers and Hammerstein or even teams that put together psuedo-musicals like Arthur and Sullivan). The difference between musicals and operas here is musicals are usually adapted to the language of their audience. Les Misérables was originally in French but it’s known in England and the US in English. In fact, it’s known in a number of languages as is made obvious by this special performance:

To my understanding, translation of operas is extremely rare, although The Met has begun doing it for works like Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The difficulty lies in how intertwined the words and music become in opera, as attested to in the linked to New York Times article. Translations of writing are difficult enough, let alone singing. There’s also the issue of how absurdly conservative opera audiences are (attested by the fact that there are many many opera houses who put on season after season of works all dated before 1900).

The extent to which this is about nationalism might be questionable, though. The premier of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Italy was actually performed in Italian, for instance. Of all people, Wagner, the pillar and effective founder of German opera, was performed in Italian while he was still alive. I’m fairly certain that he approved and wanted this to happen more often, too. I can’t find it now but I recall a tweet by @CosimaWagner that claimed Wagner expected his operas to be translated. Yet, Wagner was about as nationalistic as composers come.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my whole point is that this is simply an unusual way of asserting one’s nationality. I understand it for baseball games, it would even make sense to me if they were performing an American opera, but it’s just an unusual coupling with Rossini. Although this wouldn’t be the first time the United States National Anthem has found its way into an opera. I’ll leave you with American music in Italian by Giacomo Puccini, sung beautifully by a Swede:

Singing about bombs.

October 14, 2008 / / 1 Comment

I know there aren’t many people who like opera or even know anything about it but I like it a lot. That being said, I feel the need to expose people to tidbits here and there that might break the stereotype of opera being some boring, stuffy, old crap with funny singing.

This, the Batter My Heart aria, is probably the most moving part of John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. This premiered in 2005. That’s right, people still write new operas. You might notice, if you bother to listen, that this sounds nothing like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Contrary to popular belief, classical music comes in many flavors and the well known flavors tend to be very old and out of use.

Adams is a post-minimalist composer. Essentially that means rhythm is very important to his sound as well as lingering on a chord for long periods of time. For anyone who’s into jazz, it’s a similar idea to modal jazz. For anyone who’s into rock, Sigur Ros is a good example of something in the same vein. The “post” part means he’s allowed to travel out of the boundaries of the rules that minimalism created that I’ve mentioned already.

Anyway, this aria is pretty high on energy which is not what one would normally think of when they hear the word “opera”. The words are taken from a poem by John Donne. What’s happening is Oppenheimer is combating the moral issues created in himself while creating the atomic bomb. Take a listen:

Just for fun, I think I’ll post one of John Adams’ early works for piano. This one I just like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3abjsYUkk4 (embedding was disabled for this one)

Wagner is cool, really!

June 21, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Some of you that know me probably know already that I’ve been getting really into the whole classical music thing for the last year or so. It sounds kind of ridiculous to listen mostly to a genre that the great majority of people out there would consider background music at best but there’s very good reason. There’s real depth to classical music and it isn’t as hard to grab onto as you would think, it just takes time. Modern pop music is all about instant gratification and while that’s great, there’s a lot to be said for art that forces you to slow down and get caught up in the whole story that’s unfolding in front of you.

A great example is Richard Wagner. You know, the opera guy with all the valkyries and whatnot. He was a master at building tension and suspense in his music. One of his operas, Tristan und Isolde, spends the entire opera building up tension and only finally releases it at the very end. Unfortunately this mastery is also why most people can’t bother to listen to his stuff, we’re too impatient. So, I’d like to invite anyone who is willing to listen, and I mean really listen, to Wagner’s Prelude to his last opera Parsifal to give it a shot. It’s very slow to pick up but, if you allow yourself to get caught up in it and see it through to the very end, it’s incredibly rewarding.

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