Opera and Religion : Oil and Water, or Waoil?

At Nick's request (this is Majel, not Nick speaking in the third person), I'm posting a recent email exchange that we exchanged -- certainly not in an effort to make either of us look smart because, frankly, I sound outright mental while Nick at least demonstrates that he went to school, but because if it elicits feedback (which I desperately need) the humiliation will not have been in vain.

ME (today, early in the morning):

It's starting to look like the focus of my dissertation is something that has never been addressed in musicology (unless I'm heinously mistaken). Not only do I find the topic fascinating, I find it fascinating that NO ONE seems to have ever thought to address it, or has had the slightest interest in addressing it. But I'm also having trouble putting it into focus.

A few months ago, I started to think about the way that SO many of the operas we perform today take biblical or otherwise religiously-themed subjects as their starting points. This in itself is pretty interesting, even though you could easily make the case that all art, literature and music stem from religious beginnings. But not only would that be way bigger than one dissertation, my field is music, and there the evidence is in abundance:

Many of Handel's operas from the 18th century (Jephtha, Saul, Judas Maccabaeus, Israel in Egypt, Solomon, Theodora, Die Schöpfung), and from the 19th Parsifal, Nabucco, Giovana d'Arco, I puritani, Samson et Dalila, Hérodiade, and oh, Lord, you could stretch this list to include stuff like Robert le Diable and all the many Faust operas, and in the 20th century there's Salome, Moses und Aron, Dialogue of the Carmelites, Wozzeck, and if you stretch it Four Saints in Three Acts, Rake's Progress and maybe Satyagraha and El Nino are vaguely spiritualized operas, speaking of which, you might have caught Dr Atomic's "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" (on poetry by Donne), and so on and on.

The point is, even though opera had a religious point of departure hundreds of years ago making religious themes an obvious point of fixation THEN, composers STILL love to enact scenes from the bible or create intensely religious moments in their operas. They love to quote huge sections of the bible (Schoenberg for Moses und Aron). And surely del Tredici imports old medieval plainchant into his operas, doesn't he? Everything about what these people do draws on religion. BUT: writing on religious subjects and using religious music does not and has never made it possible for opera to become *religious* music/drama. There's something that performatively (in the Austinian sense, if you know this guy) bars opera from taking on a significance that all music performed in church has automatically. In the same way that the piece of bread you receive during communion IS literally the body of Christ, the music in church IS literally religious music; but opera performed in church has no IS. In Austinian terminology it would I think be an "unhappy" or "infelicitous" performative. (Although, being the music director at an Episcopal church, maybe I should try that out. What do you think?) Opera can, it seems, TREAT religion, but it is limited to critique and commentary of the latter.

The reverse, it's worth noting, is also true: a lot of previously religious music is still performed in church, but has lost its significant IS by being available in the "classical" bin at Borders. [Does the religious/classical combo music serve today as a vaguely "spiritual" substitute for people who no longer have religion in their lives? Is there some weird, deep alienated post-individualistic feeling that makes us reach out for Bach in our hour of 21st-century need? YES! Of course it is. I guess Bob Fink already wrote this book.]

Maybe it's also worth turning to see how the line between sacred and secular works in the other arts. If Johnny Cash writes a song with God in it, does he thereby become a Christian rock artist, God forbid? Not really. But what about C.S. Lewis's allegorical novels? Well, we tend to pigeon-hole him as a religious writer. If Mel Gibson makes a film about Christ's death, does that make him less of an asshole (that last one was just a joke)? [On that last point, though, doesn't it seem possible today to be religious without being religious -- what in God's name is the Church of Scientology anyway if not a church with no God in it? This goes hand-in-hand with my comment on Borders, earlier.]

It also seems worth considering that a lot of composers who didn't do operas with religious themes did set a whole hell of a lot of music outside the theater to religious texts (Britten!!) which would seem to suggest that there's something about theatricality that alienates the religious impulse from itself. Add theater and you lose God. In the same vein, the truly religious composers of today (Taverner and the other two) don't write operas. (Cause operas are somehow the work of the devil?)

Are you worried I'm getting really interested in religion? Cause I am.

***

NICK (later today):

I don't think I have a whole lot to say on this except that I think there's probably plenty of (non-musical) writing on the slow and steady secularization of western culture over the last 500 years, and by what means other things have come to occupy that spiritual hole that religion used to fill. And I'll bet that you could approach this body of writing from many angles -- you could find the religious studies people's thoughts, the sociology people's thoughts, the psychology people's thoughts, the pop-culture people's thoughts -- I'll bet you could even find some really great Russian-studies/Communist/Marxist studies on the same.

I also know that there's writing (although I forget by whom) on Mendelssohn's (and other composers of his day) creation of "religious kitsch" -- see, for example, Elijah. I think the argument was something to the effect of how Handel set religious stories, but Mendelssohn tried to BRING RELIGION into the concert hall. Just check out his choral writing in that piece -- it's totally Bach lines and voice-leading but with Mendelssohn harmony. But this is problematic, yes? Bach wrote FOR the church. Bach's music was utilitarian-sacred. Even the big ones -- the Passions, the B-minor mass. These were FUNCTIONAL in the church. Not so for Mendelssohn ... not so for any "mass" or "requiem" after Felix, except maybe for Bruckner, whose masses were, again, functional. (Poor provincial Bruckner.)

And wasn't Wagner's whole schtick to basically replace the Vatican with the theater at Bayreuth? Music for Wagner WAS religion. And can you honestly tell me that Mahler's music is not the same? And yes, this is different from Tavener or Pärt or whomever, whose music could stand as ceremonial sacred music, could be used in a service (although, interestingly, it never is, at least in this country -- so then, isn't this really just Mendelssohnian kitsch kicked up a notch? It's like the personal beliefs of the composer are irrelevant). I think this is still basically the case for opera as well -- there are composers who find compelling stories in the bible and set those stories to music (like ... even ... dare I say ... ME!) and there are composers who want their music to be a "religious experience."

And let us not even forget about the whole INDUSTRY of "sacred" composition in this country. Just find yourself a catalog of sacred choral music. It's out there -- academia just doesn't care because the music tends to be so trite. These composers probably make enough money to survive on composition alone, but not enough money that they come anywhere close to Hollywood or pop-music wealth. Therefore, it's mostly ignored except by those who care. Interesting that you're now in a position to care.

On your other point, about theater in the church, yes, I think you're right, that since medieval time, there has been a decided taboo around drama in church. And there's plenty of writing on the history of this if you dig around in the annals regarding the beginning of opera and the beginning of oratorio. Hildegaard certainly had her morality music-drama things done in church, and were, so I understand, expressly religious. But this is still different from the celebration of something sacred. Maybe that's the thing -- the mass itself is a reenactment of a thing that actually happened. It's the telling of a story. It is its own play -- it is THE ONLY play, THE ONLY story. There's no room in church for other plays to be sacred. That's the gig of mono-theism -- only ONE THING can be sacred. That's WHY the oratorio developed. The church wanted operatic drama, but couldn't possibly tolerate the staging and the acting of OTHER stories with the same bombasticity that had previously been reserved for the conveying of the supernatural. If the magic of the music (the choirs, the organ, the orchestras) could be used to convey something OTHER than the mass, then just what was the nature of this magic? It turns out that the choir of sakbuts was NOT the voice of god, but just a choir of sakbuts. So oratorio was the compromise. Bring in the music, tell Biblical stories, but NO ACTING. (And were you so inclined, I'd bet my firstborn child that you could trace this back to the origins of Christianity in all of those other pre-Christian belief systems wherein the job of the holy-man/leader/shaman thing was to take on a VOICE other than his own -- to become disembodied, to be embodied by dead relatives or high spirits or whatever ... and how, basically, acting is magic, and singing is magic, and together these things are at the very core of what we understand to be supernatural.)

Wagner came at it from the other side, right? He couldn't possibly be a church composer because it was passé and he thought he was god. So instead he brought the church into the concert hall. I mean, shit, Parsifal is basically an elaborate mass couched in the guise of an opera: Wagner's Mass in Parsifal Minor.

So in short, no, I don't know that there is any writing specifically on what you're getting at, but it would seem to me that there are plenty of seeds sewn in all of the related topics you would need to get into.

May god have mercy on your musicological soul.


[Please note that Nick has subconsciously taken to using MY capital letters for emphasis in his own writing. I'm taking over the WORLD!]

-m.

Barge Music, South Hadley, Norfolk, Darmstadt

If you're in NYC, check out:

June 27 • Friday, 8 pm
Student Tickets are $15
Here and Now: Celebrating American Contemporary Women Composers
Chen Yi "Night Thoughts" for Flute, Cello and Piano (2004)
Katerina Kramarchuk "Epilogue" for Cello and Piano (2008)
Hilary Tann "Llef" for Flute and Cello (1993)
Shulamit Ran "East Wind" for solo Flute (1987)
Gabriela Lena Frank "Cuatro Bosquejos Pre-Incaicos" for Flute and Cello (2006)
Alexandra Du Bois Sonata "The Storm" for Cello and Piano (2005)
Belinda Reynolds "Cover" for Flute, Cello and Piano (1996/1998)

Neolit Ensemble
Amelia Lukas, Flute
Victoria Bass, Cello
Katya Mihailova, Piano

***
And in other news...

I signed my letter of agreement on Wednesday to take over as the new conductor of the South Hadley Chorale in South Hadley, MA, which, I should point out, ought not be confused with the South Hadley Canal. The Chorale website has not yet been updated to reflect my signing on, but will be shortly, I'm sure. Huzzah and huzzah and bring on the Bruckner (Mass no.2, in e minor, that is - bizarre little piece accompanied by an orchestral wind section but no strings).

Tomorrow I depart (sadly) the good people of Norfolk (the Nor-Folk if you will), and am off to the 44th International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt on Friday. I was just glancing at the schedule of events and was thrilled to notice that Opera Cabal's favorite guest soprano, Tony Arnold, will be on hand to perform Kurtag's Kafka Fragments (among other things). Personally, I'll be studying with Lucas Vis, and anticipate running amuck and causing mass confusion amongst the Germans with my eerily similar cohort, Nick Deyoe.

(n.)

Hyde Park Salons

Since the summer of 2006, I've been running a salon series in Hyde Park (if I were more fashionable I might say "curating") serving as a forum for artists of any definition to present work of any kind. At the last salon, Thomas Christensen (Professor of Music, University of Chicago and quite the specialist in 19th-century salon culture) debuted some Schubert 4-hands with his wife, Clara Christensen, also a brilliant pianist).


Larry Zbikowski (by now a regularly-appearing performer and Associate Professor of Music at the U of C [in that order ;)]) presented a classical guitar program in the form of an aural experiment. Larry's work since coming to Chicago hovers around the intersection of music and cognition, and the audience was asked to draw its own interpretive conclusions about the titles of various pieces without being told in advance what they were (one of the audience members actually correctly guessed at one of the titles -- "El Colibri" ["The Hummingbird"], by Julio Salvador Sagreras).*



The next salon on July 26th, however, features less traditional fare, including a presentation on tea by Gregory Freeman, another on abstract art (Danielle Klinenberg), and a short film by David Bashwiner, a.k.a. Jack Classick. While I generally avoid performing at my own salons, Opera Cabal received a recent commission from Lydia Goehr/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Columbia University (it's complicated) to produce a staging of Bach's Cantata 201 next winter, and I'll be workshopping one of the arias from the Cantata with choreography by Irene Hsiao to brainstorm ideas for the staging.

For a write-up on the salons last winter, see the University of Chicago magazine.

*Larry, we expect a footnote and doughnuts if this makes it into your next book!

morefeo

The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (my current and, as it turns out thanks to the good news from Darmstadt, very temporay employer) kicked off the summer with a production by the Yale Baroque Opera Project of...you guessed it...L'Orfeo. I think this production could not have been further from what Majel reported went on in Norway, as I think that THIS L'Orfeo was supposed to be in the vein of "historical performance"...judging, that is, by the togas:


(Casey Breves, here, as Orpheus. In the evening performance Birger Radde turned in a very mature, dramatically compelling, and spotlessly enlightened performance...which is to say nothing of his live re-enactment of Schubert's Erlkonig at the afterparty.)

Then there was the ubiquitous harpsichord, the choir of sakbuts and the not ONE but TWO theorbos.

What's a theorbo, you ask? Why here's one now:


(In case the image is too dark, it's basically a giant lute with a 5-foot long fret board)

The production was directed by former Yale-ster, Ethan Heard, and the orchestra was directed olde-timey style by lead fiddle, Robert Mealy. But I don't really want to talk about the production*. It mostly looked like this:



(It didn't really glow red, that's just a byproduct of shooting with a slow shutter speed. The orchestra was below the stage, the continuo was onstage in front of what looked like a wall removed from the dining hall of an Ivy League college.)

*Maybe I should mention a couple things about the production. 1. the staging of Orpheus crossing the River Styx was pretty freakin' awesome...and I'm sad that my camera battery died before that scene came up, so I can't display the awseomness; 2. the continuo group was mindblowing. Bravo continuo players (Grant Herreid, Charles Weaver, Christa Patton, Avi Stein, & Michael Rigsby)! I also liked Charon's costume. If his face had been totally hidden, it would've been perfect:



What I really want to do here is to float that idea that Monteverdi's latent (or blatant - I don't know much about Monteverdi) homo-erotic mysogeny really rears its ugly head in L'Orfeo.

Let's think it through:
1. All the BEST writing in the opera is for male duets. The choruses are lively, but wantonly and disgracefully repetitive. There are, of course, no arias to speak of. The recitative is, of course, famous for being the beginning AND the end of great recitative writing....but the duets are where it's at, and almost all of the duets are for two men. The exception? Pluto and Proserpina, wherein she slyly seduces him into giving Orpheus a chance to save his ladyfriend, Pluto, all the while knowing he will fail.

2. The only really great writing for any female role is for the Messenger (sung gut-wrenchingly stupendously by Annie Rosen) at the announcement of Eurydice's death. Why, here's Eurydice now, doing what she does best:



3. Aside from dying and being Orpheus's dramatic raison d'etre, Eurydice is virtually a non-entity. She sings a little bit at the beginning, shows up dead, then makes a silent cameo in the underworld just before getting sucked back to hell.

4. After Eurydice is sucked back to hell, Apollo (GLORIOUS Apollo!) descends and carry poor, sad, heartbroken, ready for a rebound Orpheus up to heaven with him...without so much as a thought as to Euryidice's fate. He does so after singing what I can only describe as the greatest love duet in the opera...with Orfeo. Love-death indeed.

Here's Lucy Fitz Gibbon as Orpheus's faithful sidekick, La Musica. She was also quite good...although I wasn't so into the magic glowing bauble thing she had to carry everywhere.



And so Norfolk is underway. If anybody reading this is in NW Connecticut in the coming weeks, I STRONGLY encourage catching a show here. The Music Shed alone is worth the cost of admission and a drearily long Act 4. The next two weeks bring new music (programs yet unknown to me), and beyond that, the chamber music for which Norfolk is so famous.

(n.)

Alice in New York

It's clear from my entries on this blog over the past year, and it's a belief I share with the cynical other half of Opera Cabal, that most opera being produced on American stages today is uninspired at best. It's also the reason I find opera so exciting to produce. Imagine being a cook in a world where no one has discovered salt. And then one day, you happen upon a strange rock ...

Battling the ebb tide of idiotic contemporary opera, Peter Westergaard's Alice in Wonderland premiered last Tuesday at New York's Symphony Space. If you are an opera and you're struggling with whether you're worth sitting through, lemme give you a tip. Consider incorporating a British starling bird call into your score:



Apart from this fabulous thing, and a variety of pitch pipes and hand chimes, the best part about this opera is that, in a stroke of genius, Westergaard's orchestra IS the a capella ensemble of singers that make up its cast. So in one of my favorite moments, after a scene as the (drag) Queen of Hearts, Westergaard's bass, Eric Jordan, quickly rushed back to stage left along with the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter and the Doormouse to become the sounds of the caterpillar's hookah with pitched gurgles, ribbits, and blips.

As Anthony Tommasini points out, the opera is a work in progress, but its opera-in-a-trunk quality (in the attempt to make scenes flow seamlessly, a lot of lines are shouted from off-stage and costume changes happen in full view of the audience) I found it pleasantly relaxed.



Speaking of birds, is anyone interested in verifying that this is in fact the strangest website ever created?

And speaking of Nick, since he's apparently too humble to broadcast this himself (or did you just stop reading our blog, Nick?), Nick is going to DARMSTADT this summer on a full conducting scholarship. No small thing.

Orlando at the Chicago Opera Theater

The fact that I have a problem with leaving operas at intermission came as a blow to the friendly greeter at the exit of the Harris Theater last Thursday when I bailed on Justin Way's Orlando. But don't blame me. Blame the enlightened faculty at the University of Chicago. Since I met Philip Bohlman, I can't help thinking silly things about opera today. For instance, that it has the power to keep systems of cultural domination -- systems that seem oh, so in the natural order of things -- functioning smoothly (which is to say, unnoticed). Like golf and caviar and summer houses, it's all fun and games to go to the opera and see brightly-colored Turkish harems from the 18th century and dancing Jews from the 19th until you remember than Turkey still can't get into the EU and Elie Wiesel still has memories of Buchenwald. Yes, I'm afraid it's good to remember that opera has an excellent way of glossing history, and no, it doesn't have anything to do with the music. The singing was top dollar. If you must go, go blindfolded.

-Majel