‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Eboracum Baroque is a flexible period instrument ensemble, comprising singers and instrumentalists, which was founded in York - as its name suggests, Eboracum being the name of the Roman fort on the site of present-day York - while artistic director Chris Parsons was at York University.
‘There could be no happier existence. Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room - he played and sang to us - we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy.’
When soprano Eleanor Dennis was asked - by Ashok Klouda, one of the founders and co-directors of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival - to perform some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs Op.108 at this year’s Festival, as she leafed through the score to make her selection the first thing that struck her was the beauty of the poetry.
“At the start, one knows ‘bits’ of it,” says tenor Mark Padmore, somewhat wryly, when I meet him at the Stage Door of the Royal Opera House where the tenor has just begun rehearsals for David McVicar’s new production of Death in Venice, which in November will return Britten’s opera to the ROH stage for the first time since 1992.
“Trust me, I’m telling you stories …”
When British opera director Nina Brazier tries to telephone me from Frankfurt, where she is in the middle of rehearsals for a revival of Florentine Klepper’s 2015 production of Martinů’s Julietta, she finds herself - to my embarrassment - ‘blocked’ by my telephone preference settings. The technical hitch is soon solved; but doors, in the UK and Europe, are certainly very much wide open for Nina, who has been described by The Observer as ‘one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera’.
“We need to stop talking about ‘diversity’ and think instead about ‘inclusivity’,” says Bill Bankes-Jones, when we meet to talk about the forthcoming twelfth Tête à Tête Opera Festival which runs from 24th July to 10th August.
The young Hong Kong-born British composer Dani Howard is having quite a busy year.
For Peter Sellars, Mozart’s Idomeneo is a ‘visionary’ work, a utopian opera centred on a classic struggle between a father and a son written by an angry 25-year-old composer who wanted to show the musical establishment what a new generation could do.
“Physiognomy, psychology and technique.” These are the three things that determine the way a singer’s sound is produced, so Ken Querns-Langley explains when we meet in the genteel surroundings of the National Liberal Club, where the training programmes, open masterclasses and performances which will form part the third London Bel Canto Festival will be held from 5th-24th August.
“Sop. Page, attendant on the King.” So, reads a typical character description of the loyal page Oscar, whose actions, in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, unintentionally lead to his monarch’s death. He reveals the costume that King Gustavo is wearing at the masked ball, thus enabling the monarch’s secretary, Anckarstroem, to shoot him. The dying King falls into the faithful Oscar’s arms.
A mournful Princess forced by her father into an arranged marriage. A Prince who laments that no-one loves him for himself, and so exchanges places with his aide-de-camp. A melancholy dreamer who dons a deceased jester’s motley and finds himself imprisoned for impertinence.
‘Aloneness’ does not immediately seem a likely or fruitful subject for an opera. But, loneliness and isolation - an individual’s inner sphere, which no other human can truly know or enter - are at the core of Yasushi Inoue’s creative expression.
What links Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cavalli’s La Calisto? It sounds like the sort of question Paul Gambaccini might pose to contestants on BBC Radio 4’s music quiz, Counterpoint.
Though she won praise from the literary greats of her day, including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon, the Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was little-known among the contemporary reading public. When she visited the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, the publisher of her first and only collection, The Farmer’s Bride (1916), she was asked, “Are you Charlotte Mew?” Her reply was characteristically diffident and self-deprecatory: “I’m sorry to say I am.”
“It lives!” So cries Victor Frankenstein in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein on beholding the animation of his creature for the first time. Peake might equally have been describing the novel upon which he had based his 1823 play which, staged at the English Opera House, had such a successful first run that it gave rise to fourteen further adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novella in the following three years.
It sounds like a question from a BBC Radio 4 quiz show: what links Handel’s cantata for solo contralto, La Lucrezia, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and the post-punk band Joy Division?
The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions - creative, cultural and political.
![Ingo Metzmacher [Photo by Mathias Bothor]](http://www.operatoday.com/Metzmacher.png)
Erich Korngold’s Die tote Stadt comes to the Royal Opera House in January 2009. It’s the first time this production has been seen in London : it is the famed Willy Decker production from Salzburg in 2004 which did so much to restore Korngold’s status.
The production has been heard in Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Interestingly, of all the conductors who have participated, Ingo Metzmacher is most closely associated with modern, avant garde music. What drew him to Korngold, who has a reputation for romantic lushness and glamor ? “Because it is a modern opera”, he says, “written on the edge of modernism”.
Die tote Stadt was a written in the aftermath of the First World War, when Austria had lost its empire. Korngold’s father, Julius was a prominent Viennese music critic, so the young composer grew up in circles of privilege. “Die tote Stadt”, says Metzmacher, “looks back one more time” on the glorious past, “but at the same time it’s aware that this will be the last time for looking back”. The plot is about a man who lives in the past but then makes a decision to go forward. It is a brilliant evocation of the ‘good old times’ but you can already feel that change is coming. It’s like an old photograph. You like to keep it and look at it, but you know that reality is different. I feel in this piece a kind of ambiguity I like very much. It is on the step towards a new world, but before going ahead it looks back one more time. Korngold looks back, excited by the beauty, grandeur and brightness of the world he knew.”
There are differences between the opera and the novel on which it was based, Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges la Morte. “In the book”, Metzmacher adds, “the man really commits murder and goes mad. But in the opera, it’s just a dream, he wakes up and walks away. That’s what composers do, they adjust the plot for their needs. The music is sombre at times, but basically it’s bright, shiny and optimistic – brilliant, not depressing at all. So let’s be glad he wrote an opera in this way”. It’s Korngold’s opera, something new rather than a slavish imitation of the novel. Interestingly, the novel is about a man dominated by the memory of his dead wife. The libretto was credited to “Paul Schott”, but was in fact written jointly by the composer and his father.
Metzmacher conducted this production of Die tote Stadt in Amsterdam in 2005. “Sometimes,” he says, “I’m drawn to a piece from the start, but it’s always a good sign when you come back to something and find more interesting things in it. It’s ambivalent, ambiguous. I like to think of it as a very beautiful object, very shiny and precious, but it’s like there are cracks in it, it’s not whole anymore. It’s something which is still beautiful, but it’s from the past and there are fine cracks in it. When we look back on the past, we prefer the good memories. In Germany we say things can be “too beautiful to be true”. You can feel that in this music, and I think Korngold used it deliberately for that purpose”. It’s a striking insight. Luscious as this music is, it’s not a recreation of past glories as such, but of their memory.
Like the hero Paul, the music moves on. “There are passages in this piece that are really amazing, really modern in concept. Harmonies and clashes of keys”. The plot itself is dissonant, for Paul, the hero, comes to know that he cannot remain in the past, so in many ways Korngold is taking his cure faithfully from the narrative. So why didn’t the composer himself move forward to new things ? “It’s a difficult question”, says Metzmacher. Korngold probably didn’t make up his mind consciously not to “follow the open road”, as Metzmacher puts it. “Schoenberg opened a door, but many others didn’t follow him. So Korngold is in good company.” He was taken out of his environment by the Nazis and went to Hollywood. “By the time he came back in the 1950’s, time had moved on and he had lost contact with developments”.
“You have also to remember that Korngold was a Wunderkind, a child prodigy. He had an incredible ability to write music, it came so easily to him. Listen to the piano sonata he wrote when he was 10 or 11 years old. It’s just unbelievable! A good composer is one who has his own language which is original and individual. Korngold had his own language, so how could he have changed it ? It’s his music. I think we should just listen to the music. It’s pointless to ask why he didn’t write anything more modern or different. Schoenberg was a different kind of person, he had to work for what he achieved, so his situation is completely different”.
When Korngold left Vienna, he went on to a successful career as composer of film music. Since films had been silent until the end of the 1920’s music for film was a whole new genre. “Korngold was the vanguard, the front line, in writing music for film. It’s interesting that so many men from the Austro-German tradition went to Hollywood. They had to do to make a living in exile but they made the style”.
Die tote Stadt is hardly “unknown” although it’s not been fully staged in London before. It was extremely popular in the 1920’s and 30’s. Some of the songs, like the famous Glück, das mir verblieb and the Pierrot’s Lied have been recorded by many singers, from Lotte Lehmann to Renée Fleming. Apart from the arias, what is most interesting about the opera as music? “The orchestra love playing it”, says Metzmacher, “even though it’s quite difficult. I don’t know what’s not to like about it. From the very first bars, one is won over. It sets the tone immediately. There are very few pieces which start with this BANG. You hear right from the beginning what Korngold likes to do.”
“A good opera”, says Metzmacher, “always comes to life when the specific musical language of the composer meets the core of the plot. In this case, this composer, who was so brilliant, recreates the music of the past but makes it in his own language. The libretto is about a man who lives in the past, in a city that also lives in the past. There are many different layers of meaning. It’s a bit somber and there’s struggle but it’s also about seeing the horizon, finding something to look out for. It’s an existential problem we all face. How much of the past do we hold on to? How do we overcome the past? How much to lose, how much to carry on forwards? It’s very interesting, and makes this opera so special”.
Anne Ozorio