Ticket to the Opera: Discovering and Exploring 100 Famous Works, History, Lore, and Singers, with Recommended Recordings - Brossura

Goulding, Phil G.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0449005666 ISBN 13: 9780449005668

Casa editrice: Random House Publishing Group, 1999

Riassunto

In Ticket to the Opera, Phil G. Goulding finally makes the magic and mystique of opera accessible to all. Here he offers a complete operatic education, including history, definitions of key musical terms, opera lore and gossip, portraits of famous singers and the roles they immortalized, as well as pithy introductions to the greatest operas of Europe and America and their composers. The book's centerpiece is what Goulding terms "the collection"--85 classics, among them Aida, The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and Madama Butterfly, that have been packing the world's opera houses for years. This entertaining, meticulously researched book also includes a fascinating chapter on American opera from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess to Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and a discussion of the gems of twentieth-century opera featuring works like Leos Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Alban Berg's Lulu, and Serge Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges.

Whether you're a curious neophyte, a music lover interested in branching out, or an aficionado eager to compare notes with a brilliant fellow opera buff, you'll prize Ticket to the Opera as an essential volume in your music library.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Phil G. Goulding was born in San Francisco in 1921, grew up in Cleveland, attended Hamilton College in upstate New York, and spent World War II in the Navy. He has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1950 as a newspaper reporter, an assistant secretary of defense, and a petroleum industry executive. He wrote Confirm or Deny, a book about the Pentagon, the press, and the public. With his wife, Miriam, he now divides his time between Washington and a Chateaugay Lake cabin in the Adirondacks.

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INTRODUCTION
 
 
This book is for the opera Unwashed … or the minimally Washed.
 
The Unwashed may never have seen an opera live, or even on television. The minimally Washed may go to the opera occasionally and/or may own a few recorded excerpts. Basically, however, Unwashed and minimally Washed are amateurs, novices, neophytes, beginners. They’re people who feel equally uncomfortable with opera as with the sport of cricket.
 
Yes, that’s the best analogy. This book is primarily for those in the United States who know little more about opera than they do about cricket.
 
Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus, would have understood my approach. Son Wolfgang was opera’s greatest spontaneous genius, who made music when George Washington was president. While he was working in Vienna in the late 1700s, Leopold sent him this written counsel:
 
“I advise you when composing to consider not only the musical, but also the unmusical public. You must remember that for every ten real connoisseurs there are a hundred ignoramuses. So do not neglect the so-called popular style.”
 
Leopold recognized what every big city ward leader knows: There are more amateurs out there than there are experts. Certainly I’m not inclined to characterize readers of this book as “ignoramuses,” but in writing it I’ve tried to follow the thrust of the senior Mozart’s advice.
 
Superstar Beverly Sills once wrote that opera was not only for hothouse plants. Easy for her to say, but, in fact, she was right on target. My objective is to bring opera closer to more people, and my main message is that anyone can become modestly washed in opera in a reasonably short period of time. Nothing is scary about it. With radio, television, and today’s recording technology, it doesn’t even have to cost very much. Opera is sitting out there for everyone. In many cities, there is even smaller-scale live opera in theaters and auditoriums that are not formal opera houses.
 
Sadly—in part because of high ticket prices in the major houses, rich patrons, highbrow critics, wealthy board members, and indifferent public relations—opera in this country has an elitist history. The regrettable truth is that here in the mid-1990s it still intimidates or bores a lot of people.
 
The happy reality is that it shouldn’t. Opera is theater, designed to entertain. It is about magic, mystery, mayhem, mistresses, and murder. And, above all, about love. In Europe, pasta-eating and sausage-munching lowbrows who drink cheap wine and cheaper beer have enjoyed it for centuries.
 
So can millions of Americans today, whether they’re into Chablis, Brie, and the new-rage coffee bars or into hot dogs, a Budweiser, and a stop at the Dairy Queen.
 
Much of opera combines superb spectacle with marvelous tunes. Someone has said it is better than a circus because it can include a circus. It is drama and melodrama, sparked by passion, sex, sentiment, and suspense and heightened by lovely music. Unfortunately, a few well-meaning experts talk about “demystifying” opera, a psychological turnoff from the start for the Unwashed. Professional football is a whole lot more complex and harder to understand than opera, and no one expounds about “demystifying” it.
 
Common sense shows several advantages of opera over straight drama, for the Washed or the Unwashed. Song is more compelling than mere speech. Vocal duets, trios, and quartets offer an incomparable way of communicating different emotions simultaneously, impossible to achieve in a spoken play. Background orchestral music, as every moviegoer knows, intensifies dramatic color for comedy or tragedy.
 
Sure it’s different from straight drama, concert, or Stephen Sondheim’s latest hit Broadway musical—but, if you can speak the language, not all that different.
 
Don’t be put off by these nice folk who declare that opera is a “sublime life-enriching art form whose poetry transcends mere narrative.” Maybe so, but I prefer a sunset for life enrichment. Better yet, a third dog. Forget about art form. Think of opera as something that’s entertainment, that’s fun.
 
How to tell the Washed from the Unwashed? Several quick tests can help you distinguish them.
 
The Washed historically have opposed translations in lights above the opera stage or printed at the bottom of the television screen. They have argued that these encourage the audiences to pay less attention to the singers, action, and drama.
 
The Unwashed, neither fluent in foreign languages nor familiar with opera plots, find these on-the-spot translations enormously valuable.
 
“Just listen,” the Washed say. “You don’t need to know the words. You can hear the expression of love.”
 
Yeah, right. That’s okay for music alone, if you’re in front of the fire with a lover listening to a tape, but it doesn’t do much for the drama.
 
The Washed say: “No Norma seems able to encompass all aspects of the role, although Callas comes closest—closer than Sutherland, Caballé, Verrett, Bumbry, Scotto, and Olivia Stapp.”
 
The Unwashed probably know a Norma but may not identify Norma as an opera by a fellow named Vincenzo Bellini. They almost certainly have heard of Maria Callas, in part because Jackie Kennedy later married Callas’s boyfriend, Aristotle Onassis. And maybe they recognize Joan Sutherland as a great singer, but quite likely they consider Verrett, Bumbry, and Stapp to be a law firm in Beverly Hills.
 
The Washed write that “Sills ‘made’ the Tudor trilogy.” The Unwashed, not ignorant and doubtless aware that the Tudors once ruled England, picture the trilogy as three London houses in a row with stucco and dark brown wood—not as three operas in which Beverly Sills played English queens.
 
The Washed include all professionals who have to do with opera—from critics to composers and conductors, from singers to scenery movers and set designers, from management to musicologists and musicians. The Washed also include academicians, lecturers, authors, a lot of experts heard on classical radio, and countless true opera buffs out in the civilian world.
 
The Washed would score an A on the following quiz, and the Unwashed would do poorly. But here’s a promise to the Unwashed: After reading the book, you’ll be able to answer at least ten of the seventeen questions without referring back to the text. That won’t make you a professional, but it will impress your dinner guests.
 
BEFORE AND AFTER TEST
 
1. What French opera is the partial counterpart of Richard Wagner’s German Ring?
2. Who or what is a Cav-Pag
3. How many operas, if any, did Ludwig van Beethoven write?
4. How many operas, if any, did Johann Sebastian Bach write?
5. What German-born opera composer is buried in London’s Westminster Abbey?
6. Who are the three major bel canto opera composers?
7. Which American opera is the best known overseas?
8. Name five other American operas and/or opera composers.
9. Who or what is a Bayreuth?
10. Give two classic examples of a trouser role.
11. When Richard Strauss was a little boy, why did he dislike Richard Wagner?
12. Why is French opéra comique sometimes pure tragedy?
13. What is the opera connection of the famous astronomer Galileo?
14. What do these three men have in common: Lorenzo da Ponte, Arrigo Boito, and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal?
15. Name one opera by Claudio Monteverdi.
16. Who is the Spectacle King of opera?
17. Which composers and operas are more oriented toward the orchestra than the voice? Which use the plot chiefly as a backdrop for the singers?
 
If you can answer most of these already, return the book and ask for a refund. You’re excessively Washed, you can comprehend opera reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and you own (or aspire to own) a condominium on New York’s Upper East Side or a house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
 
AMATEUR AUTHOR
 
I’m a nonmusician who, eleven years ago at age sixty-four, was a musical know-nothing. Then, chiefly as a self-education project, I spent seven years researching, interviewing professionals, and writing a book on classical music. Published in late 1992, it is entitled Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1,000 Greatest Works. I wanted to call it Classical Music for Dummies Like Me, but Ballantine wouldn’t do it. That book worked pretty well, and the publishers asked me to do the same thing on opera. This one has been nearly four years in the making.
 
I’m now retired, but my career was wholly unrelated to music, as a Washington journalist covering politics, presidents, and the Pentagon; assistant secretary of defense; author of a book on the Pentagon, the press, and the public; and executive with the American Petroleum Institute. Today, I’m a sometime judge of the Rooster Crowing Contest at the annual Franklin County Fair in New York’s upstate Adirondacks.
 
Oh, and a soda jerk, grill cook, and Cleveland taxi driver before college graduation and World War II naval service. Nothing in this nontechnical operatic road map will be over the head of any other taxi driver, including those in Washington who tried to surrender to their fares during the Gulf War.
 
Since several composers in my classical music book wrote operas, when this project began I was opera-neutral and blandly bathed. But I remain an amateur, a onetime journalist looking in from the outside and here reporting my findings back to other amateurs.
 
INSIDE THE BOOK
 
The first step is to narrow the field.
 
More than 25,000 opera scores are in the Library of Congress. A thousand or more operas are produced internationally with reasonable regularity. That’s far more than any nonconnoisseur can handle. This book reduces the number of players and the size of the playing field, in part by identifying great operas and herding them into three separate groups:
 
The Collection
The Twentieth-century European Package
American Opera
 

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Random House Publishing Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0449005666
• ISBN 13: 9780449005668
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 720
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile