Happy 200th birthday, Signor Verdi!

Today's the big day for Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest of the Italian operatic masters, who was born in the village of Le Roncole, in the duchy of Parma, on Oct. 10, 1813.

He took the line of Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti to its greatest heights, to be followed by Puccini. In his long and successful career, Verdi wrote (and usually directed) dozens of operas -- Nabucco, MacBeth (one of his favorite sources was Shakespeare), Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata (the last three, among his greatest works, premiered over just two years), Un Ballo en Maschera, my personal favorite Aida, then at the end of his career Otello and the comedy Falstaff. He also composed a masterful Requiem and other choral works. And those are just his greatest hits!

Verdi never gave up the tradition of "set pieces" -- aria, recitative, duet, quartet, chorus, etc. -- but he worked closely with his librettists to turn his operas into continuous, compelling music dramas.

He almost gave up writing music early in his career, after the deaths of his wife of only four years and their two infant children. But the inspiration never quit, and his first work after those devastating events was Nabucco, whose tale of an oppressed people struck a chord with his fellow Italians and across 19th century Europe.

Because of his many "political" subjects, Verdi always had trouble with the censors. In Un Ballo en Maschera, about the assassination of a Swedish king, he had to change the setting in its early performances to the American colonies of the 1600s, where the major characters took such names as Tom and Sam.

Verdi supported the cause of Italian reunification, and after that was achieved in 1861, he served briefly in the Italian Parliament, although he was never much interested in politics. Some of his fellow compatriots furthered their cause by using the popular Verdi's name in the cry "Viva Verdi" as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuel, Re D'Italia," referring to King Victor Emmanuel II.

Verdi lived to be 87 years old. He died Jan. 27, 1901, in Milan. His funeral was attended by some 200,000, who heard a large orchestra and chorus composed of musicians from throughout Italy, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, perform appropriate selections from his works, including the well-known chorus "Va Pensiero!" from his first big success, Nabucco.

A friend of mine once remarked about how classical composers often have what are, to us out here in the sticks, strange-sounding names: Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc. Nary a Smith or Jones among them. I pointed out that one of the great composers of 19th century opera was a fellow named Joe Green.

And Joe Green did as much as anyone to move the genre of opera away from just a string of songs to a unified and powerful drama. On his 200th birthday, hats off to the Italian Maestro -- Giuseppe Verdi!

The Steel Curtain Falls on NYCO

The sad news was announced last week that the New York City Opera is canceling its 2013-14 season and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Or, I guess I should say, what was left of one of this country's great opera companies.

The demise of any arts organization, especially one as feisty but esteemed as the NYCO, is a loss for all of us. And Lord knows we've had too many such losses over the last few years.

Long known as New York's antidote to the staid Metropolitan Opera, NYCO was always a champion of American works and young American artists. At the same time, it offered fresh takes on the old standards.

Perhaps the company's greatest legacy to the world of opera is the use of supertitles. When introduced with the strong endorsement of its general director, Beverly Sills, in 1983, supertitles -- projecting a translation above the stage of the text being sung -- were a controversial novelty. Now, there is almost no opera house in the world that doesn't use them in some form. And they can largely be credited with the resurgence in opera's popularity after their debut.

The many problems that plagued New York City Opera, leading to last week's announcement, were to a great extent the result of a string of bungled efforts by its top management to keep the company afloat.

In 2006, the NYCO board hired Gerard Mortier, who ran the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera, to be general manager and artistic director. Here was a guy who was very comfortable using Europe's generous government funding to mount radical modern operas or the kind of nonsensical versions of standard works that more sensible operagoers might call "Eurotrash."

And now he was in charge of a company that always had to run on a shoestring. As the financial crisis hit, the board pared its promise of $60 million to mount a 2009-10 season of all-20th century works down to $36 million. So he quit.

The NYCO then turned to a dark horse -- a fellow who had just taken his first job running an opera company a few weeks earlier -- to lead the company, with the economy in almost full collapse. The dark horse was George Steel, who was at the time general director of the Dallas Opera.

In his brief tenure in Dallas, Steel managed to piss off just about every constituency that could have made him a success -- the board, major donors, the artists and musicians, the staff -- so no one was actually sad to see him go, and so quickly!

By all accounts, Steel apparently took the same tack in New York. He put his well-honed arrogance to use alienating everyone involved in this storied institution. And, having no clue how to keep a struggling New York City Opera afloat in tough times, he began to dismantle it, ensuring the company's doom. It was the one thing George Steel was singularly capable of doing.

And so, tragically ...

"La commedia è finita!"

World-class music in Dallas

The 2013-14 arts season, at least for me, got off to a rousing start this past weekend with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's opening round of classical concerts.

Under the baton of maestro Jaap van Zweden, the concert opened with a Berlioz song cycle, Les nuits d'ete, or "Summer Nights," with mezzo-soprano Annalisa Stroppa. I was not familiar with this work but found it enjoyable, although I'm unlikely to rush to the iTunes Store to download it.

The second half of the program was devoted to the ever-popular Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony. Leave it to Jaap and the DSO to give this chestnut a performance like you've never heard before! The goal of any great conductor (which Jaap is) and great orchestra (which the DSO is) playing great music (which this is) is to show you nuances that you had never noticed before. Which they did. Whether it's the contrasts of dynamics, tempos and emotions throughout the work, the beautiful French horn solo at the beginning of the second movement (performed flawlessly by the DSO's new principal horn David Cooper), the lilting waltz of the third movement, or the brilliant climax of the finale, this group performs like a world-class ensemble.

And make no mistake about it, the DSO under Jaap van Zweden in just a few years has turned very nearly into a world-class orchestra, if they're not already there. I'm frankly amazed and dismayed to look around and see ANY empty seats in the Meyerson Symphony Center when they perform. They should be selling out every concert. And their marketing arm is certainly doing their best to try to reel 'em in.

Somehow it is not sinking in to Dallas' fairly extensive classical music audience that you can go hear some of the best performances you'll ever experience with a short trip to Dallas' Arts District. Maybe if you're fabulously wealthy and can jet off to New York or Vienna, but even then you aren't guaranteed the consistency of great playing that you'll hear by staying in town.

Let me assure you that I'm not compensated in any way for this shamelessly glowing endorsement. Jaap and the DSO are just that good.

See you there!

Return of the Titan

Back in May, I spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon listening via satellite radio to a live concert from Carnegie Hall featuring the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. This hot-shot "pit band" turns into a world-class symphony orchestra when its members go up onstage, as they do two or three times a year.

But this was a particularly momentous occasion, because for the first time in two years, the Met's esteemed music director, James Levine, took the podium to conduct the marvelous ensemble that he's polished and perfected during his 40-plus years at the Met.

Levine has been plagued with back problems that required extensive surgery and left him unable to conduct -- until now. He used a motorized wheelchair and a platform, built by the Met's incredible backstage crew, that raised him up to where he could see and be seen by the entire orchestra.

And to open this much-anticipated concert marking his triumphant return, Levine chose the Prelude to Wagner's Lohengrin, a captivating piece that was singularly appropriate for the weekend before the bicentenary of the composer's birth. I wrote earlier about this piece after the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, under Jaap van Zweden, performed it in an all-Wagner concert the same weekend as the Met Orchestra's concert.

On hearing this performance, there should be no doubt that Levine's physical problems haven't cost him anything musically. Those who suggested he should resign as the Met's music director when he had to stop conducting should now feel free to hang their heads in shame. It was his back that went out -- not the musical genius that's kept on giving to appreciative audiences for over four decades.

Levine's friend Evgeny Kissin joined him for a brilliant performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, and the concert concluded with one of my favorite symphonies, Schubert's Ninth. The Met Orchestra under Levine was as you would expect -- sensational.

The Met's radio announcer, Margaret Juntwait, even helped by not falling into a trap that's bugged me for years about the Schubert symphony's nickname, the "Great." People who should know better -- classical radio announcers, even the web page for Carnegie Hall -- almost invariably refer to the Schubert Ninth as "the Great symphony," inferring the common English meaning of that word as "of high quality" rather than the original intent of the German "große," meaning "large." His publisher dubbed it "the Great C Major Symphony" to distinguish it from his Sixth Symphony, the "Little C Major." There's no doubt that it's "great" music, but "Great" was used for the distinction because of the Ninth's length (almost as long as Beethoven's Ninth) and the size of the orchestra required to play it. 

Next month, Maestro Levine will undergo the real test of his recovery when he returns to the pit at the Met to conduct a run of Mozart's Così fan tutte, followed by a new production of Verdi's Falstaff around the holidays, and Berg's Wozzeck along with Così again in the spring. Plus three more Carnegie Hall concerts with the Met Orchestra.

Welcome back, Jimmy!

Happy Fourth of July!

It's Independence Day! We can have a picnic lunch, shoot off some fireworks (if legal in your location), go to a baseball game, watch fireworks, listen to patriotic music!

If you're in Boston, you can go to the Esplanade along the Charles River and listen to the venerable Boston Pops Orchestra play such thoroughly American tunes as the "Stars and Stripes Forever," "America the Beautiful" and -- the 1812 Overture!

The what?

Yes, the 1812 Overture! Because nothing is more patriotically American than a song written by a patriotic Russian celebrating the military defeat of one of America's longest-standing allies that also includes a glorious tribute to one of the more despotic lines of European royalty!

Remember the American Revolutionary War? The one that cropped up right after we issued a Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776? Oh, yeah, kind of the whole point was to prove that we could exist independently of despotic European (in this case British) kings. But we blithely accept the 1812 Overture's use of the Czarist Anthem in our celebrations of independence.

And yes, the French army over whose defeat the overture gloats with a rather sardonic quotation of "La Marseillaise" was led by Napoleon Bonaparte, a revolutionary despot with whom the U.S. had something of an on-again, off-again relationship.

But I've always been bemused by American orchestras' adoption of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture as an American patriotic piece. Much of that phenomenon may have to do with Arthur Fiedler's inclusion of the work in the Pops' annual Fourth of July concerts on the Esplanade, complete with cannons, bells and fireworks. He did that to bolster sagging attendance -- and it worked! That event is widely seen as the premier Fourth of July celebration in the U.S.

Tchaikovsky himself didn't particularly like the overture. He wrote it because there was a very nice commission involved. He knew it was raucous and didn't have much artistic merit.

It's also an interesting side note that neither "La Marseillaise" nor the Czarist Anthem, the themes in the overture representing the opposing armies in France's ill-fated invasion of Russia, would have been heard by either side in 1812. Napoleon had banned "La Marseillaise," which came out of the French Revolution, and the Czarist Anthem wasn't written til a good 20 years later.

But today, enjoy the freedom to grill you some hot dogs, quaff some good American beer, whistle the Trio from "Stars and Stripes Forever" -- and leave Russia to the Russians.

A religious experience

Last month, on the weekend before Richard Wagner's 200th birthday, the Dallas Symphony gave a concert devoted entirely to the 19th-century German master's music. 

Music director Jaap van Zweden has turned the DSO into a truly top-shelf orchestra, and lucky for people like me, Wagner is right in his -- and their -- wheelhouse. This group thrilled sophisticated audiences in Europe this spring in concerts that included the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. 

And these musicians were no less thrilling that Friday night when they opened their all-Wagner concert at the Meyerson with three of his preludes, and concluded with a sensational concert performance of the first act of  his music-drama Die Walküre. 

The first half of the program -- the preludes to the first and third acts of Lohengrin, and the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg -- showed the wide range of emotions and drama in Wagner's music, and the wide range of the DSO's capabilities.

The ethereal spirituality of the opening bars of the Lohengrin prelude immediately prove that Wagner is not all about blaring brass and screaming sopranos and "kill da wabbit!" The opening is scored for four solo violins and the rest of the violins divided into four parts, and they build the instantly mesmerizing theme from a breathtaking pianissimo.

This is where Wagner perfected an orchestral technique that he used several more times, most notably in the prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The music starts very softly and slowly builds, with the melodies moving from section to section. Just over two-thirds of the way through, the music reaches its peak, with brass now blaring and (almost) the entire orchestra accompanying. From there, the music begins to fade, until at the end, it falls back to its pianissimo beginnings with just the divided violins. 

I find it fascinating (and this is probably the key reason I keep coming back to this and other great music) that even though you may have heard a piece dozens, maybe hundreds of times, there's always something new to discover in it. When Jaap and the DSO got to that climax two-thirds of the way through the Lohengrin prelude, just as they hit that dramatic, blaring, fortissimo chord, I saw that the strings stopped playing! So what you get for a couple of bars is a straight wind band sound before the strings re-enter. Later, when I thought about what that little passage would have sounded like with full strings added in, I knew that Wagner of course was right. The brassy, forceful wind sound is perfect, but I had never noticed that little trick before. 

The prelude to Act III of Lohengrin is the opposite of the first act prelude. It is loud and raucous. Wagner intended for this music to represent the wedding feast after the marriage of Lohengrin and Elsa, and you can tell that there's plenty of swigging of steins of good German beer, along with dancing, carousing and what-have-you. It's great fun.

In the opera, this prelude goes straight into the most famous music Wagner ever wrote -- the Bridal Chorus, or what everybody calls "Here Comes the Bride." It includes a chorus of villagers accompanying the happy couple to their wedding chamber, and it's got some nudge-nudge-wink-wink lyrics to go along with it. Apparently, Wagner was either appalled or amused (history is not sure which) when he heard that it had been used as the processional in a church wedding -- possibly the one between Princess Victoria of Britain (daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia in 1857. The lyrics, the dramatic origins of the piece, and the fact that Elsa and Lohengrin's marriage doesn't last 20 minutes (a blink of an eye in a Wagner opera) are why many churches frown on or even ban its use as a wedding march. But they'll let you use it in Vegas.

The Act III prelude, as performed by the DSO, stops just before the Bridal Chorus begins, while we're still at the party. Why spoil the fun?

The Prelude to Meistersinger is the closest thing to a traditional opera overture that Wagner wrote in the latter part of his career. It contains all of the opera's major musical themes masterfully woven together. It's interesting to note that, unlike almost any other opera overture by any composer, Wagner wrote this before he composed the opera itself. Amazingly, the themes survive intact over the course of the opera.

The end of this prelude uses the same music that ends the opera, and the last voices you'd hear in the opera during this very recognizable music are the chorus', singing the praises of the popular and avuncular Meistersinger Hans Sachs: "Heil, Sachs! Nürnbergs taurem Sachs!" (Hail to Sachs! Nuremberg's beloved Sachs!) As I listened to that part of the Prelude, at the point where the chorus would make this affectionate gesture in the opera, it occurred to me that the Meyerson audience that night could have easily stood up and sung: "Heil! Jaap! Dallas' taurem Jaap!"

Almost a year ago, I wrote on this blog about one of my favorite scenes in all of opera, Act I of Die Walküre. By the time he wrote this in the mid-1800s, Wagner had pretty much perfected his technique of using the orchestra to help tell the story being played out on the stage. The orchestra leads the drama's steady buildup from beginning to end. And using leitmotifs as themes, he develops the music much as a symphony composer would. That, plus its use of only three singers and no chorus, is why this work is perfectly suited for a concert performance.

With Wagner's expanded orchestra squarely on display, we can really see and hear how all the parts work together. And to top it off, the DSO brought in three top-notch singers:

• Clifton Forbis as Siegmund, the misunderstood young man (he's actually the son of the god Wotan, although he doesn't know it), fleeing his enemies, who stumbles into a hut in a forest to escape a raging storm. Forbis has been around awhile, and has earned his reputation as an accomplished opera singer, including many Wagner roles. He did a remarkable job last year as Tristan with the Dallas Opera.
• Heidi Melton as Sieglinde, who's been forced into a loveless marriage and helps the stranger who's stumbled into her home. Melton is an up-and-coming dramatic soprano who has the chops to make it in the demanding world of Wagner opera. I saw her just two weeks before this, singing one of the three Norns in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Götterdämmerung, the last part of the Ring of the Nibelung.
• Eric Owens as Hunding, Sieglinde's brute of a hubby, who returns from battle only to find his enemy being sheltered by his wife. Owens is knockin' 'em dead around the world, not only in Wagner but in new works, as well. He turned in a masterful performance as the evil Alberich in that same Met production of the Ring.

I'm a little too unschooled in the fine points of vocal artistry to play the critic, but I can say that all three lived up to their reputations in this DSO performance.

The orchestra also was in top form, including all the "extra" instruments that Wagner employed to fill his musical palette, like the bass trumpet and of course the Wagner tubas, played by members of the DSO's French horn section along with some fine extra musicians.

At one point late in this hour-long piece, I got a chuckle from the reaction of this mostly symphony-going audience, many of whom apparently had not read the program notes and did not know the story. Aided by supertitles, it became obvious that the young couple onstage who were falling desperately in love, despite her unhappy marriage, were also realizing that they were long-lost twin brother and sister, which seemed only to fuel their ardor! At this realization, a murmur ran through the Meyerson crowd. So even after almost 150 years, Wagner continues to shock his audiences with his strange but captivating story.

It's hard to describe how all these great musicians made everything come together so spectacularly, except to say that the entire evening, at least for me, was nothing less than a religious experience!

'Das ende, das ende!'

I've heard that the most difficult scene to stage in all of opera is the end of Götterdämmerung, which concludes Wagner's monumental Ring of the Nibelung, because so many things have to happen in a very short span.

In 84 bars (about 3-1/2 minutes):

• Siegfried's funeral pyre is lit, and Brünnhilde jumps on her horse and rides into the fire, carrying the Ring and proclaiming her devotion to Siegfried. 
• The Gibichung Hall, where most of the shenanigans of Götterdämmerung have taken place, collapses into ruins. 
• The Rhine overflows, and the Rheinmaidens swim in to claim the Ring from the pyre. 
• Hagen, who was born and raised for the sole purpose of reclaiming the Ring for the Nibelung Alberich, plunges into the water screaming "Zurück vom Ring! ("Away from the Ring!")
• As one of the Rheinmaidens holds up the Ring in triumph, the other two grab Hagen and pull him under the water, drowning him. 
• In the distance, Valhalla can be seen burning, with all of the gods inside.

From that point, the orchestra takes control, reminding us in magnificent Wagnerian style of the heroism of Siegfried and the compassion of Brünnhilde, that the era of the gods has passed and that a new era has dawned.

I've heard that to pull off any production of the Ring successfully, the director has to work out that final scene of Götterdämmerung first. If you can do that, everything else in this four-opera, 18-hour spectacle can fall into place. 

I fear that Robert Lepage, director of the current Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring, didn't do that. In developing his concept, he seems to have been preoccupied with getting his Machine to work and meeting the stringent deadlines of getting that first performance of Rheingold onto the Met stage. In performance, it almost looks like the staging of the end of Götterdämmerung was an afterthought.

Here's what happens:

• Grane, Brünnhilde's steed, is represented by a mechanical horse, which works OK when it's accompanying Siegfried on a boat on the Rhine. But when Brünnhilde makes her ultimate sacrifice to save the world, she climbs up on this metal contraption and is pulled slowly toward the pyre -- hardly an epic gesture of selflessness.
• There's no representation that I noticed of the Gibichung Hall collapsing, which Wagner intended as a physical analogy for the end of the corrupt Gibichung line. Plenty of productions leave this out, as that point is kind of obvious, so I have no quibble with Lepage doing the same.
• The flooding of the Rhine is projected on the Machine, and the Rheinmaidens hold up the Ring. But then Hagen, who's been standing over to the side for all this, kind of stumbles into the slightly lowered area just in front of the Machine, clumsily grabs for the Rheinmaidens, and then they do an utterly unconvincing job of drowning him.
• The Machine's planks reposition themselves, and instead of Valhalla burning with all the gods inside, we see on top of the Machine various statues of the gods, which crumble. Kind of anticlimactic, especially when it's accompanied by some of the most climactic music ever written. At least the statues just crumbled. I understand that in the very first performances of this, the heads of the statues exploded, one by one, in a rather cartoonish ending for one of opera's great dramas.

In the final bars, we see the Machine bathed in blue making a wave motion. This is the first image we saw at the beginning of Das Rheingold, representing the primeval waters of the Rhine, and it's return at the very end of Götterdämmerung is quite effective. Too bad what leads up to it didn't really work. 

What's particularly disappointing in all this is that with all the things they can make the Machine do -- all the shapes it can take, the wonderful projections, the grand size of the thing -- they couldn't come up with anything that made the audience go "Wow! That was like the end of the world!"

A lot of controversy is generated by directors these days, especially in productions of Wagner, by moving around the time and place of the operas, "deconstructing" them, adding unnecessary elements, emphasizing some "message," using shock just so people will remember them, even in some cases changing the story, and all the other trappings of "regietheater." I've long contended that what directors should be doing is using the marvelous techniques and advanced technology that are available today, and that weren't there in the 19th century, to tell Wagner's story! Don't try to impose a different story on Wagner's music. Your "genius" in making such attempts pales in comparison to his theatrical genius. If you have your own story to tell, write your own damn opera. Don't burden Wagner's music with your pathetic ego trip, which your apologists defend as "artistic expression."

That said, it's obvious to me that Mr. Lepage set out to do exactly what I've suggested, and for that he deserves praise. He wanted to create a new and fantastical way to tell the story of the Ring, and let the audience take something new from Wagner's story. For the most part, I think Lepage's Machine succeeded. And certainly it's true that no production of the Ring is "perfect," because of its inherent size and complexity. But for whatever reasons -- time, money, having to worry more about the Machine than the production -- he wasn't able to get this Ring as close to perfect as we've come to expect from a house like the Met.

I'm really glad I got to see this production of the Ring so close to Wagner's bicentenary. Despite some problems with the Machine and the production, it was a thrill to hear it performed by such excellent singers and the superb Met orchestra. To all involved: "Heil!"