Looking for Operatic Subtlety, Go Elsewhere!

With those words, Anthony Tommasini, venerated music critic for the New York Times put his finger on one aspect of the tremendous reception given to I Gioielli della Madonna on Monday night, 5-24. What a wonderful audience! What a tremendous event. Thanks to the very hard work of over 200 performers, led by the irrepressible David Wroe, I Gioielli really took the audience by storm. Right from the opening bars, with the hundreds of chorus members ranged on 3 floors of boxes above the orchestra, a chorus of children, a mandolin/guitar ensemble, soloists joyously pealing vocally over the top of it all - percussion, brass, strings, woodwinds - it was as though all of creation were singing.

Theatre Business, Management of Men

Those words come from a famous quote by Yeats, who was busy keeping the Abbey Theater together in Dublin. These days it would be looked upon as mysogynistic and sweeping. But ask Duane Printz what it's like to almost single-handedly raise the money and deal with all the daily trials it takes to put on an opera. Who was it said that 'it's a super-human thing to write a symphony'? (That one was referring to Beethoven.) But it is just as super-human, that is, beyond most people's capacity, to wear so many hats, be so many personae, to make so many decisions, sometimes with the implication of the outcome not at all clear, hoping that it will all come together at the last minute. Teatro Grattacielo's last production was fraught with cancellations, last-minute substitutions, illness, family problems, as was fervidly covered by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times. But the production of Il Piccolo Marat was tremendous. The very wigs of some of the audience were blown straight back by the sheer force of nature that the opera brought to the hall, with unfamiliar music that was stirring, enormous, vital. Maestro David Wroe was in command of the forces that evening, as he will be on the 24th of this month when I Gioielli della Madonna bows at the Rose Theater in Columbus Circle at 8 pm. That opera will have similar if not larger forces, and should prove to be a marvellous evening. We all know that the powerhouse that is Duane Printz, founder, artistic director of Teatro Grattacielo, will not fail the operagoing public. The question that remains, is simply how do we make sure that everyone knows about it who'd be interested in coming to see it?

You are urged to pass along all the information you can about it - subscribe to us on Twitter, this blog, the eNewsletter, and pass the along to your friends who love opera. Because this one is one for the real, the true, the ever-faithful admirers of opera. It is an ongoing task to reach that opening (and closing!) night, a labor of love. To conflate Yeats and Frances Alda, Opera Business is the business of Men, Women, and Tenors.

Complexity and Simplicity

Looking at the score of "I Gioielli della Madonna" one is struck by the enormous complexity to it at times. From the opening bars, it is chaos unleashed. Street vendors in Naples are shouting out their wares for sale, children are passing, choruses of townsfolk are commenting, Greek-chorus-like in the manner that all opening choruses act, a piper is piping, mandolins erratically enter and disappear. Truly it is a musical collage that fits together roughly with great effectiveness. If you can read music, take a look at the score, here (click on the bottom snippet to launch), and see what I mean.

And yet if you look at it, it's not the Schoenberg or Boulez manner of being complex. The meter is steady; the rhythms fit together well; it has 'windows' of visibility in it so that the layers can be heard. Very skillfully done. Then it all thins out when soloists come in, and lo and behold, there is a theme we hear! A theme that comes back again and again during the opera, which binds it all together. A simple, falling theme the kind of which has been known and loved since the days of Mozart.

Many of the canzones in the opera are ultra-simplistic: little waltzes, stornellos, serenades, many of which might have stepped from an operetta or an opéra-comique. Jostled side by side, it makes for an even more terrifying story. So much horror beside such common, quotidian melodies. It makes one very uncomfortable.

The ending, during which Gennaro commits suicide on stage with a knife he finds among scattered detritus on the floor, is accompanied by a celeste--the sunbeams falling on the jewels, on the Madonna. Enough to make you shudder.

I Gioielli will be performed by Teatro Grattacielo this month, on May 24th at the Rose Theater. You should go see it - there's only one performance, and it hasn't been performed in NY since 1926.

Intermezzi

In I Gioielli della Madonna there are two Intermezzi, one of which is torn from the material of the rest of the score, the other as though it were a piece from his trunk. Not that either one is inappropriate, but these Intermezzi were a feature of verismo operas, rather like the ballet in French opera. The first and most famous (discounting Carmen and La Traviata, of course), was that from Cavalleria Rusticana, Mascagni's 1890 shot over the bow for realism. That intermezzo had been written in 1888, two years before the opera was composed, but Mascagni had seen the Verga play in 1884 - and may have considered setting it as far back as that date. However, in the manuscript of the earlier intermezzo to Cav, which does differ slightly from the published version, it says as a tempo marking "imitating the prayer" - referring to the "Regina Coeli" ensemble of which this intermezzo is a reminiscence. So literally, did Mascagni write the intermezzo first and then retrofit everything else around it? Not unheard of.

In Wolf-Ferrari's case, there is no evidence that the slower intermezzo was written earlier, but it sounds as though it were referring to something else altogether. There are several YouTube versions of it. The Serenata Intermezzo which imitates not the prayer, but the ribald serenade that Rafaele sings to Maliella in the second act of the opera, seems more at home in the score, but is evocative in a playful way that seems to say that the composer is taking the side of the ruffian, not the moral center of the drama. That version is also rife on the Tube. (Thinking back to Bizet, it is hard not to compare this piece with one of the last Entrac'tes in Carmen, even down to the last two notes.) Perhaps each intermezzo is, then, a reflection of the characters in the opera, the men who are keen on gaining the attentions of Maliella.

Were there any doubt that the opera has moments of orchestral brilliance, there is also a Camorrist dance -- think of that, a sort of mafioso apache dance--that keeps the excitement up. Again, on line. Tell me that first part of it doesn't sound like it came from a draft of Carmen! (You may feel, 'all this needs is a tambourine' -- you don't have long to wait.)

Well, let us hope that the audience doesn't agree with the characters that sing in La Bohème, "Quest'intermezzi me fai morrir d'inedia."