Category Archive: Opera
Meeting the Mastersingers
8 July, 2018 A very pleasant Sunday salon at the Hackett-Jones residence for the SA Wagner Society’s afternoon with some of the featured players from the forthcoming State Opera’s dramatic concert production of Act III of Meistersinger. ASO french horn players Emma Gregan and Alex Miller gave us some nice pieces written for horn (by Brahms, of all people!) These pieces were very easy on the ear, whilst apparently rather difficult to play. Hearing them, one started to daydream of a tense afternoon tea with Wagner, Brahms, Cosima and Clara Schumann debating the role of music, perhaps with Eduard Hanslick…
Continue Reading →In Search of Wagner
The sentimental Marat
(By Theodor Adorno) (written 1937-38) (Rodney Livingstone translation) (2005) Whilst Adorno (1903 – 1969) was a thinker of wide learning and deep perception, here he is defeated by Wagner, as well as by his own Frankfurter-Marxist dogma and drab obsession with the dialectical. He’d love to dismiss RW as repulsive, dangerous, tin-eared, a Jew-baiter and Jew-hater, formless and, worst of all, bourgeois; yet a kind of intellectual honesty keeps creeping-back in to Adorno’s highly profound skull that undermines all of his grumbling. Wagner is not only sui generis; he is unimpeachable; Adorno’s brilliant attacks, often highly personal, fail utterly, proving…
Continue Reading →Cosi fan tutte
At the Metropolitan Opera, NYC, April 2018 – Mozart, the Met, and Spring in New York…what more could one wish for? Some Spring weather, perhaps? Cosi Fan Tutte has the most preposterous plot in all opera, which takes in a lot of territory. But Mozart’s music rolls along so merrily that it doesn’t matter, and the piece can survive, and even be enhanced by throwing the switch to vaudeville, as director Phelim McDermott does here by re-imagining the action in 1950s Coney Island. Lucy and Desi and Ethel and Fred…ah, no, sorry, let’s start again: Ferrando (Ben Bliss) and Guglielmo…
Continue Reading →Hamlet Sings! We Laugh!
Hamlet, Glyndebourne Festival Opera production, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 6 March 2018 You know the story, or perhaps you can condense it into one word, as did the English stage director Tyrone Guthrie: “Mummy!” But you might prefer to concentrate on the post-modern man Shakespeare seems to have had in mind with Hamlet: “the revolutionary whose manners and ways of life are attached to the old régime, whose ideals and loyalties belong to the new, and who, by a kind of courageous exhibitionism is compelled to tell the truth about both.”* Bloom calls the play (which admittedly, has its own structural…
Continue Reading →Caruso
Enrico Caruso born 25 February 1873 (died 2 August 1921) The great operatic Napolitano was one of the first tenors to ‘cut a disc’ and it made him world famous. Even now you can divine his strong, clear voice and range on scratchy phonograph records (see below). Although primarily based at the Met in New York, he sang all over and had a big repertoire (including Lohengrin in Buenos Aires). Melba wrote of him: “As a voice – pure and simple – his was the most wonderful tenor I ever heard.” Toscanini, it is said, said of him: “If this Neapolitan keeps singing…
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