After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen

Salome (Angela Denoke at Covent Garden, 2010) finally gets to kiss the mouth of the prophet Jochanaan, who may have wished he'd let her do it when his head was still attached to him.

by Ken

It was as part of our Caballé-remembrance series that, last week, we ventured into Salome ("Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role"). Now, having ventured there, I don't see how we can leave without some further exploring, and for this week's installment we're not even going to have Caballé at the center -- though I think you'll notice, if you compare her with the (very fine) other Salomes we'll be hearing, that she's plugged into the role in a way that is very much her own.

Just to recap, the opera is set on a terrace of the palace of Herod, the tetrarch of Judea, inside which a great feast is taking place. For a while the audience is invited to observe the wild infatuation of a handsome young captain, Narraboth, with the princess Salome, daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter (as well as niece) of the tetrarch (her father, Herodias's first husband, was Herod's half-brother), and we've been introduced to some of the many palace functionaries and guests who populate the terrace (and the opera), including a page of Herodias (presumably male) who appears as fixated on Narraboth as the latter is on Salome. We've also heard briefly from a still-invisible character: Safely locked away in a heavily guarded cistern is the prophet Jochanaan, aka John the Baptist, who despite his unfortunate incaraceration voices a soaring brand of religious ecstasy, for which Strauss found an appropriately ecstatic musical format, even as the prophet details the sea of human corruption all around.

Last week we heard Salome make her escape from the banquet to the terrace, and this week we're going to overlap a clip we heard last week, so we can immediately hear Salome switching on a dime from pouting rage to angelically youthful sweetness. One point to note: As far as I know we're not given an age for Salome, but the implication seems fairly clear that she's still a teenager, and again I would call attention to the young-girlishness that comes out so strongly in Strauss's musical setting, at least if the singer can make it come out, which it seems to me Caballé did, at least in the RCA recording of the opera conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, better than any other Salome I've heard. Again, the sound that's made by a big-voiced singer capable of scaling the voice down has an intensity and excitement that a smaller-voiced singer can't match -- as a matter of fact, as I think I've already mentioned, Birgit Nilsson, the greatest of the post-Welitsch Salomes, who pretty much obliterated the competition in the flaming outbursts, did some of her most memorable work in Salome's quiet moments.


LET'S HEAR SOME MUSIC ALREADY!

"The secret of life is revealed to them in it," says the Composer of his "Ariadne auf Naxos"

"Das Geheimnis des Lebens tritt an sie heran, nimmt sie bei der Hand" ("The secret of life is revealed to them in it, takes them by the hand")


Sena Jurinac (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded 1958

Tatiana Troyanos (ms), Composer; San Francisco Opera Orchestra, János Ferencsik, cond. Live performance, Oct. 28, 1977

Irmgard Seefried (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 7, 1954

Julia Varady (s), Composer; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded January 1988

by Ken

This is, in case you hadn't guessed, once again the possibly over-earnest Composer, in the Prologue to Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, having just heard that a little comedy dance entertainment is to be given following the premiere of his new opera seria, Ariadne on Naxos, here in the home of the richest man in Vienna.

This 10-11 seconds of music is one of those infinitely deep-reaching musical nuggets we've been encountering all through the Prologue to Ariadne -- for that matter, all through the opera as a whole -- which lodge in the most intimate recesses of the mind and don't let go. Lately we've been focusing more on the comic view of life represented in the opera by the grand comedienne Zerbinetta and her quartet of commedia dell'arte players, as against the view embodied in the plight of the abandoned Ariadne as argued by her deeply feeling Composer. Now I think we need to return to the Composer's point of view.


NOW LET'S HEAR OUR NUGGET IN CONTEXT

Richard Strauss: "Music is a holy art," sings Strauss's Composer -- plus Two (out of Four) Last Songs, part 1

"What is music then?"


The question is asked at 0:28 of this concluding clip of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos -- asked and then answered by the composer of the about-to-be-performed "opera seria" (Sena Jurinac), as filmed at the 1965 Salzburg Festival, directed by Günther Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm (with Paul Schoeffler, nearly 68, as the Music Master; in a moment we'll hear him 21 years earlier).

COMPOSER: What is music then?
[With almost drunken solemnity] Music is a holy art, which brings together all men of courage, like cherubim around a shining throne, and for this reason it is the holiest of the arts. Holy music!
[ZERBINETTA appears at the back and calls her partners onto the stage. HARLEKIN comes hastily out of the room on the right, buckling his belt as he runs onstage.]
What is that? From where?
[SCARAMUCCIO enters, like HARLEKIN finishing his dressing as he comes.]
These creatures!
[TRUFFALDIN and BRIGHELLA enter.]
In my holy sanctuary cutting their capers! Ah!
MUSIC MASTER: You allowed it!
COMPOSER [furious]: I ought not to have allowed it; you shouldn't have allowed me to allow it! Who told you to drag me into this world? Let me freeze, starve, die in my own!
[He runs off in despair. The MUSIC MASTER looks after him, shaking his head.]

-- English translation by Peggie Cochrane

Julia Varady (s), Composer; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Music Master; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded January 1988

Imrgard Seefried (s), Composer; Paul Schoeffler (bs-b), Music Master; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance in honor of Strauss's 80th birthday, June 11, 1944

Tatiana Troyanos (ms), Composer; Paul Schoeffler (bs-b), Music Master; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 29, 1967

[in English] Janet Baker (ms), Composer; Malcolm Donnelly (b), Music Master; Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Norman Del Mar, cond. Live performance from Glasgow's Theater Royal, 1977

by Ken

In last week's post, "Why won't everyone just let poor abandoned Ariadne die in peace?," as we focused on the two-part monologue of the title character of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, one thing I was constantly on the verge of saying was: Just listen to the epic, unrestrained gorgeousness of this music. For sheer unrestrained gorgeousness, I'm not sure I know anything like it in all of music. Somehow, though, I managed to leave it to the music to speak for itself.

Last week we were stressing the "serious" side of Ariadne -- without, I hope, completely losing sight (or sound) of the comic side, because it's the combination of the two that make the opera, in its revised 1916 form, with the Prologue added, such a treasure -- treasured not least by its composer. It wasn't an accident that it was chosen to honor Strauss on his 80th birthday, via the performance from which we heard the whole Prologue in the October 11 post "Meet the composer, Richard Strauss-style."


"MUSIC IS A HOLY ART"

Sunday Classics snapshots: Meet the composer, Richard Strauss-style

The first part of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos, with Paul Schoeffler as the Music Master and Sena Jurinac as the Composer (we're going to hear the radiant Jurinac in her glorious 1958 studio recording, which I've described as the best recorded performance I know of any operatic role, and Schoeffler in a 1944 live performance), staged by Günter Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm, filmed at Salzburg in 1965 -- the remaining four parts are also on YouTube.

by Ken

It was a long, arduous path from conception to ultimate creation, the strange entertainment concocted by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his librettist on two previous, wildly different operas, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, in collaboration with the great stage director Max Reinhardt, who had collaborated with them on Rosenkavalier.

The original idea was to provide a half-hour musical entertainment to be inserted in an adaptation (by Hofmannsthal) for Reinhardt of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Not surprisingly, the half-hour entertainment grew and grew, until it was a weird one-act opera that -- despite being scored for chamber orchestra -- would tax the vocal resources of the greatest opera houses. And it combined two seemingly uncombinable art forms: a deeply serious opera seria that is observed, commented on, and eventually intruded on by a troupe of commedia dell'arte musical comedians. And of course it was imprisoned inside the play, and constitued too much opera for playgoers and too much play for operagoers.

Long story short: Eventually Hofmannsthal and Strauss liberated Ariadne by creating a Prologue, set backstage in the room of the home of the richest man in Vienna where the evening's entertainment is shortly to be performed. And they created the character of the Composer, the creator of a deeply serious opera seria. The new Prologue not only explains how these two wildly different entertainments came to be scheduled for the same evening's entertainment (and, eventually, how they come to be combined) but creates for us the world of a theatrical backstage. (The always-practical Strauss arranged an orchestral suite from the incidental music he had written for the play, in its German guise as Der Bürger als Edelmann.)

We've already heard the very opening of the Prologue -- still scored for chamber orchestra, as the original opera-intermezzo was.

R. STRAUSS: Ariadne auf Naxos: Prologue: Orchestral introduction


Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Mar. 28, 1970


AS THE CURTAIN RISES ON THE PROLOGUE --

Ghost of Sunday Classics: Hoffmann just can't get over his "three mistresses"

"It's a song of love that soars aloft sadlly or madly": Nazhmiddin Mavlyanov (Hoffmann) and Hibla Gerzmava (Antonia) at Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theater

by Ken

In preparation for our quick survey of the poet Hoffmann's account of his three "mad loves," as set out last week, in last night's preview we made the acquaintance of the first of them, Olympia-- the "artist," according to Hoffmann's reckoning. (We'll come back to this in a moment.) As I noted last night, making Olympia's acquaintance is more than Hoffmann did before he fell soul-convulsingly in love with her. (It doesn't help that the poor fellow is literally looking at her through the equivalent of rose-colored glasses, sold to him by one of Olympia's creators, the eccentric inventor Coppélius.) Of course this is only the teeniest exaggeration of the way many of us so frequently fall just as consumingly in love as our poor hero has.

As noted, we're going to sample some of the astonishing music by which Offenbach captured the states of need and urgency and bliss that afflict Hoffmann in all three of his mad stories. First, though, let's meet another, very different object of the poet's passion: Antonia, one of the theatrical literature's great creations.

(Note that we're going to hear a sprinkling of German-language performances today. As with Gounod's Faust, the German-sourced Tales of Hoffmann -- the fantastic fables of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the source of the opera's tales, are standbys for German readers -- was taken up by German audiences if anything faster and more avidly than by French ones.)

OFFENBACH, The Tales of Hoffmann, Act III, Orchestral introduction and Romance, Antonia, "Elle a fui, la tourterelle" ("She has flown, the turtledove")

Munich. The home of Crespel. A bizarrely furnished room. At right a clavichord. Violins suspended from the wall. At left a window. At the back two doors, one the door to Antonia's room; in front, at left, a window casement that leads to a balcony, which is closed by a curtain. Between the two doors at the rear a large portrait of a woman hanging on the wall. The sun is setting. ANTONIA is seated at the harpsichord.

Romance, Antonia
She has flown, the turtledove!
Ah, a memory too sweet!
An image to cruel!
Alas, at my knees
I hear him, I see him!
Alas, at my knees
I hear him, I see him!
[She walks to the front of the stage.]
She has flown, the turtledove,
she has flown far from you;
but she is always faithful
and she keeps her faith!
My dearly loved, my voice calls to you!
All my heart is yours!
All my heart is yours!
She has flown, the turtledove,
she has flown, she has flown far from you!
[She approaches the harpsichord again and continues, standing, leafing through the music.]
Ah, dear flower that has just bloomed,
in pity answer me!
You that know if he still loves me,
if he keeps faith with me!
My dearly beloved, my voice implores you,
ah, let your heart come to me,
let your heart come to me!
She has flown, the turtledove,
she has flow, she has flown far from you.
[She lets herself fall on the couch in front of the harpsichord.]

[in German] Julia Varady (s), Antonia; Munich Radio Orchestra, Heinz Wallberg, cond. EMI, recorded 1979

Rosalind Plowright (s), Antonia; Symphony Orchestra of the Opéra National du Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels), Sylvain Cambreling, cond. EMI, recorded June-July 1988

Victoria de los Angeles (s), Antonia; Paris Conservatory Orchestra, André Cluytens, cond. EMI, recorded 1964

Beverly Sills (s), Antonia; London Symphony Orchestra, Julius Rudel, cond. ABC-EMI, recorded July-Aug. 1972


HOFFMANN'S "THREE MISTRESSES"

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN POSTS

"The poet Hoffmann and the legend of Kleinzach" (Sept. 14)
Preview, "The name of the first was Olympia" (Sept. 19)
"Hoffmann just can't get over is 'three mistresses'" (Sept. 21)
Preview, "Our Frantz knows it's all a matter of technique" (Sept. 27)
"Who is the author of Hoffmann's misfortunes?" (Sept. 28)