A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: One-off Masterpieces
Looking back over this series of articles, I re-read the first one, entitled Palestrina to Pärt, and thought, as I have written about so many wonderful composers, that I might expand that first foray into a closer look at the operas which have come down to us from fine talents, but which have not resulted in a large body of work, being, as it were, one hit wonders!
I mentioned, in that first article, Bartok’s ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ and Bizet’s ‘Carmen’, to which I might add Giordano’s ‘Andrea Chénier’, Ullmann’s ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ and Weill’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’. De Falla’s ‘La Vida Breve’ and Weber’s ‘Der Freischütz’ make up my, obviously totally subjective, final selection. I have myself sung in four of these operas, but I know the others quite well, and feel they deserve a look. Readers will have their own ideas, and I apologise if I have missed something out. Feel free to comment at the end of this article. In fact, I would appreciate more comments generally about this series of articles. There is an interesting debate to be had!
I touched on ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ in that first article, but now, perhaps, I could expand on my thoughts. I explained that I had sung the opera twice, but in English translation, and that the Hungarian language was an integral part of the sound world that Bartok was creating. This is true, but slightly misses the point. The most extraordinary aspect of ‘Bluebeard’ is the way Bartok handles the vocal writing and the orchestration. Written for only two solo voices (bass and mezzo-soprano) and big orchestra, it puts a lot of stress on the performers. Fortunately, it is quite short, lasting only just over an hour, but it packs a vast amount of emotion into its pages, and both singers are present throughout.
There is so much symbolism in the opera that one often forgets to look at the music. It deals with loneliness, loss, curiosity, power, relationships, trust – so many of the building blocks of human life. On the face of it, a duke returns to his ancestral castle with a new bride, Judith. He confronts her with seven locked doors and is persuaded by her urgings to open each one in turn. At first Judith does most of the talking, as each door reveals a facet of Bluebeard’s character, represented by a room. The first is the torture chamber, then the armoury and so forth. As a door opens, the music takes a twist, and a minor second in the orchestra tells of blood. We find a garden, then, in a stroke of total genius, the fifth door opens to reveal the whole of Bluebeard’s magnificent realm, as the most enormous chord of C Major hits us in all its glory. Judith is overwhelmed and cries out on a top C. The duke continues to warn her not to ask further, but she cajoles him to open the sixth, to show us a sad eerie lake of tears.
The final door opens at last to reveal Bluebeard’s previous wives, not dead, but in a waking limbo. As the opera progresses, Judith says less and less, and Bluebeard explains about the other wives, in a beautiful series of utterances which are among the most fantastic sections of music I have ever sung. Technically, the role needs a bass voice with an easy top up to E and occasionally F, but with a capability, towards the end, of great warmth and compassion despite the grim scenario. The character must never seem evil or cruel to us, and the feeling is one of resignation and acceptance of fate, rather than pleasure in the reality of this living nightmare.
Bartok was a very deep and introverted person, and it is not hard to see how this story and libretto (by Bela Balazs) must have appealed to the young composer. The opera was premiered in 1918 but remained largely unknown until after the Second World War, and the composer, who died in 1949, never lived to see its success. I saw it first in the early ‘70s in a touring version brought to Scotland, by, I think, Sadler’s Wells, and it made a startling impression. There is an interesting snippet of fact that its first performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera, in 1974, featured Scotland’s David Ward as Bluebeard!
Georges Bizet (1838-75) is another of these composers I have been writing about in this series of articles, where one of the first questions is “What if?” He died at the height of his powers and fame in 1875, just after the premiere of ‘Carmen’, which was not a stunning success, but had made the public sit up and take notice of the 36-year-old. Indeed his death created such a storm that those critics who had panned ‘Carmen’ on its appearance a few months earlier, decided that it was a masterpiece, now that the composer was dead.
A strange quirk of fate has allowed me to sing in more Bizet operas than most artists, and given that, due to his untimely death, he had written only a few, this was surprising. Sadly, the role of Escamillo in ‘Carmen’ lies too high for me, so I have never appeared in the opera on which his fame rests, but I have sung in ‘Don Procopio’, ‘Les Pecheurs de Perles’ and ‘Ivan IV’ and have been part of a double bill which featured his ‘Djamileh’. I have also sung, in concert, Ralph’s aria from ‘La Jolie Fille de Perth’, based on Walter Scott’s novel, an opera with supposedly the worst libretto of any opera ever written (a highly competitive field!).
‘Don Procopio’ is a jolly romp, not unlike ‘Don Pasquale’, about an old man duped by a young woman. It was significant for my career, as it was the first opera I ever appeared in, during my gap year between St Andrews University and the Guildhall School, when I decided to take the teaching course at Moray House College in Edinburgh (as a fail-safe if my career didn’t work out!). The Edinburgh University Student Opera Group put the work on, with local semi-pro soloists and a student choir and orchestra, and I have reason to believe it was quite good. I sang Don Andronico, an elderly miser, and I can only imagine how awful my acting must have been, and how callow my 23-year-old voice must have sounded.
A few years later, at Scottish Opera, I sang the role of the high priest, Nourabad, in the “Pearl Fishers”, dressed n a black bin bag. There are four roles in the “Pearl Fishers”, the love triangle of Soprano, Tenor and Baritone, serious parts all, and Nourabad! There must always be a high priest in all exotic operas set in foreign lands, and Nourabad is typical of most. Clad in my bin bag, I had to invoke the gods at various stages, in grand scenes with full chorus. The occasional appearance of the wind machine added to the general volume level, and I suppose the audience were able to see me opening and closing my mouth and making wild high priest gestures.
Despite my general lack of involvement in the story, and paucity of musical effectiveness, it was a fun experience. We had some very fine singers taking part - Jill Gomez, Ian Caley and Sergei Leiferkus, at the beginning of his starry career – and one of the performances at the Edinburgh Playhouse still holds the record for the largest indoor audience of any fully staged opera in the UK. There are some moments of absolute genius in the score: a great aria for baritone, some beautiful music for soprano and a delicious, and extremely difficult, high floating aria for the tenor. And, of course, there is the famous tenor/baritone duet, which is one of the wonders of the whole operatic repertoire, a magnificent piece of glorious romantic music. It is fortunate that the baritone part is much lower than the rest of the role, and I have been able to sing the duet in concert many times over my career, including the reception after my wedding!
In 1987, I was asked to sing the role of Yorloff in a reconstruction, by Howard Williams, of Bizet’s lost opera, ‘Ivan IV’, about Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The origin of this piece is extremely confusing involving both Gounod and Bizet. Performed for the first time in 1951, it was only our performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London with Chelsea Opera that really brought it to public attention in Howard’s performing edition. We had a great cast of British singers, including Anthony Michaels -Moore, Elisabeth Collier and Justin Lavender, and our concert version gained great plaudits from the national press. My role, as the baddie, was great fun, and I remember the whole enterprise fondly, although am unable to recall a note.
I never sang in “Djamileh” but performed Il Talpa in Puccini’s ‘Il Tabarro’ in Lyon, as part of a double bill with the obscure Bizet opera. More exotica!
As is well known, “Carmen” was a real succès de scandale at its premiere in 1875, although Bizet never lived to see its eventual triumph. It was seriously criticised for vulgarity and the risqué nature of the story about an amoral woman in Seville, based on Prosper Merimée’s novella, Carmen, published in 1845. I remember reading the novella as part of my French course at St Andrews University in the early 1970s and being fascinated how this strange work metamorphosed into perhaps the most famous of all operas. It had been Bizet’s idea to turn the novella into an opera and, using the established duo of Meilhac and Halévy, it was written in the normal opéra comique style with dialogue separating the musical numbers. Some of the characters were moderated by the librettists to allow this immoral story to appear on stage, and Bizet interpolated a lot of splendid Iberian swagger into the music.
Over the years, the opera has acquired a large amount of baggage, primarily the composition of accompanied recitative replacing the dialogue, none of it by Bizet, and most of it terrible. Despite this, it became loved world-wide, and modern performances now reinstate the dialogue. The film version, ‘Carmen Jones’, relocating the story to 1940s North Carolina, with a black cast, and with Escamillo turned into a boxer, appeared in 1954, and widened the audience further.
I’ve noticed recently, on Facebook, that it has become quite chic to attack ‘Carmen’ as a tired old warhorse, but I reckon its combination of a truly shocking story and Bizet’s marvellously inventive music allow us to look on it still as one of the greatest operas. It has, sadly, also become a bit of a competition to see how outrageous each new production will be, but I am certain that a hundred years from now, audiences will still be swooning at the Flower Song, the Habanera and the Toreador Song!
To conclude this first part of my look at the composers of one-off masterpieces, I offer you ‘La Vida Breve’ by Manuel de Falla. This short tale of sordid love in Granada is rarely performed but I have appeared in two productions, quite different from each other, in Brussels, at La Monnaie, and in Leeds, with Opera North. First performed in Nice in a French translation in 1913, it quickly reappeared, urged on by his friend, Debussy, in its original Spanish language version in Paris and Madrid later that year and in 1914, with a much altered score, emphasising the Andalucian character of the story.
My first acquaintance with the opera was nearly my last. I had been cast to sing Uncle Sarvaor, the heroine’s taciturn and generally miserable uncle, and spent the period before travelling to Brussels learning and memorising my role. As usual. I often use a recording to help me learn operas, but, for some reason, had not done so at the start on this occasion. About a month before I was due to arrive in Brussels for the first rehearsal, I found a recording with Carreras and Berganza, and settled down to listen to it and see how I was getting on with the memorisation. A few minutes into the recording, it began to dawn on me that the cast were singing in a completely different language to the one I had been memorising. Although written in Spanish (of which I had some knowledge), they were all singing in the Andalucian dialect of Granada. It was like learning a role in Oxford English, only to discover that I should be singing in broad Glaswegian! Panic ensued. As this was all before the Internet, I had no idea what to do about this disastrous turn of events, until a stroke of inspiration took me to a couple of Tapas bars in Edinburgh, where I found a delightful Andalucian girl who helped me learn the dialect. Consequently, I arrived at La Monnaie, smugly self-satisfied, to find that one or two of my colleagues had not discovered the awful truth!
When I sang the same role many years later at Opera North, I contacted the Leeds management in advance, to check that they were aware of the language problems. I think they were, but an email came out the next day “reminding” the cast members of the dialect dilemma.
Both productions were very gritty, as befitted the story, but the Monnaie one used all the fiery Spanish incidental music, including a Flamenco troupe for the wedding scene, while the Leeds version was much more surreal. Fake blood flowed copiously in both productions! It’s a dark and powerful piece, but well worth seeing.
In Part 2, I’ll be looking at some other one-off masterpieces, including Ullmann’s ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ and Giordano’s ‘Andrea Chénier’.
