Secco Recit

For slightly-more-than-casual opera goers, Arrigo Boito is maybe the third-best-known opera librettist, after Metastasio and Da Ponte. (This is not counting, for completely arbitrary reasons, W.S. Gilbert, who since the decline of opera seria  is the only opera librettist to regularly have his name listed before  the composer, as well as Richard Wagner, who, of course, wrote his own libretti.) Boito is best known for his work with Giuseppe Verdi. They collaborated on Otello  and Falstaff , both generally regarded to be masterpieces, and Boito also worked on the revised version of Simon Boccanegra , which is as underrated an opera as there ever was. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Mefistofele , the one complete extant opera for which Boito wrote both text and music, should have as well-constructed a libretto as you could hope for. And it does. The biting question is, does the music match up? A scene from Boito's Mefistofele Photo by Karen Almond ...

Yesterday was the Metropolitan Opera Live In HD broadcast of Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright's new opera, Marnie . It was also the last performance in the opera's run, so this review is pretty pointless. But when has that ever stopped me? Isabel Leonard (center) and the so-called "Shadow Marnies." Photo by Ken Howard Marnie  is based on a film by Alfred Hitchcock. (Well, technically it's based on the book by Winston Graham, which Muhly explained was easier to get the rights to. I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but I gather the opera contains elements of both.) A Hitchcock film is in some ways an odd choice for an opera, because much of Hitchcock's skill is in the camera work, which does not translate to a live performance in a 4,000-seat opera house with a fifty-foot proscenium. But it does translate to a cinema broadcast, and several of the shots struck me as something that worked really well in the cinema, but probably didn't p...

In Gilbert and Sullivan's penultimate opera  Utopia (Limited) W.S. Gilbert proposes a system of government designated “Despotism tempered by Dynamite.” According to this system, the land of Utopia is governed by a King who wields absolute autocratic power, but is supervised by two Wise Men. If the two Wise Men feel the King is abusing his power, they denounce him to the Public Exploder. The Public Exploder then blows the King up with dynamite, at which point the Public Exploder becomes the new King. The result, according to the opera, is “an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic powers.” An absurd system of government to be sure, but on closer analysis, it presents an interesting example of the concept of Separation of Powers. Separation of Powers is a model utilized by many modern major governments with the aim of preventing any one individual from acquiring too much power. The idea, as stated by James Madison in Federalist No. 51 , is that in giving each branch of govern...

I give a bit of background information about  Haddon Hall  and its major dramatic issues at the beginning. If you're just here for the production review, you can skip down a few paragraphs. *** The actual Haddon Hall *** The 1892 Sullivan and Grundy opera  Haddon Hall  is sort of like  H.M.S. Pinafore , but on land. Dorothy Vernon is to be engaged to her cousin Rupert, in a generally advantageous match. George Vernon, Dorothy's father, is the Lord of Haddon Hall, and wants the estate to stay in the family. (Rupert, meanwhile, wants the hall all to himself.) But Dorothy is in love with John Manners, a royalist. Rupert shows up, Dorothy refuses him. Dorothy makes plans to elope with Manners. Dorothy elopes with Manners. Parliament grants Rupert lordship over Haddon Hall. Charles II is reinstated to the throne, making Haddon Hall property of the crown, and, at the last second, Manners swoops in with an order from the king restoring George Vernon as the...

I was going to begin this blog post by complaining about the lyric "Up with which below can't compare with." It's a lyric that's bugged me since I first listened to  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever , not least because it's such an easy fix. Just get rid of the first "with." Well, it turns out that in the stage show, Mark Bruckner actually calls Daisy Gamble out on this line right after she sings it. I've checked this with the vocal score, and this is indeed what Alan Jay Lerner wrote. I'm not wholly convinced that Lerner didn't just like the rhythm of the line and added in the dialogue to justify, but justify it he has, so I can't reasonably complain. I  can  however, complain about how he rhymes "azalea" with "failure" in the very same song. (Pronouncing the latter "failya.") As far as I could tell, this lyric was rewritten for the movie to rhyme "least a" with "Easter," which ha...

Between 1869 and 1875, W.S. Gilbert wrote a the libretti for a series of six "musical entertainments" produced by Thomas German Reed. Four of them had music by Reed, and the other two had music by Frederic Clay. These entertainments were exactly that -- light, family-friendly theatrical productions, in which Reed and his wife Priscilla often performed. These entertainments are of historical interest if you're interested in the history of that sort of thing, but they are not frequently produced nowadays. This is partly out of obscurity, partly out of them not tending to be interesting or robust enough to hold an evening on their own (dinner theater might suit them), and the fact that the original scores of most of them are lost to history might have something to do with it as well. I'm not going to stand here and argue that the German Reed entertainments are hidden masterpieces, because they're not. They are frequently funny, and where music exists it is often plea...

I listened to a new musical the other day. Or rather, a half-century old musical, but new to me. Darling Of The Day , by the somewhat unexpected team of E.Y. Harburg and Jule Styne, ran for a month on Broadway in 1968, and since then has more or less faded into obscurity with the occasional attempts to revive it  generally being met with indifference. And after listening to it and studying a bit, I can see why. It's not that great. It's not bad. It's just sort of fine. But I still want to talk about it. I was trying to think of a good reason to talk about it. Then I remembered that this is my blog, and I can just talk about things if I want. So here's a write-up of Darling Of The Day . (Cast album available on  Spotify  and  Youtube  and probably other places too.) The story, in a nutshell, is about Priam Farrl, a famous painter played by Vincent Price. He is tired of being a famous painter. One day his butler dies. Vincent Price decides to fake his deat...