Posts Tagged ‘opera’
“Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
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As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
“Music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music”*…
“Classical music” is a label applied to radically different compositions across more than 1,000 years of history. Composer, conductor, writer, pianist, and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin that we need a better definition…
… What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?
Our answers to these questions will depend on what exactly we love about this music, and what we care about preserving, enriching, and expanding. Claiming that classical music deserves a prominent place in American culture merely because we want to safeguard a particular sound, style, or cultural or ethnic lineage—“music that sounds like Brahms,” or “music from one of three Central European countries”—would be a losing cause.
But a better answer is out there. Rather than defend the “classical” in classical music, I want to champion a particular creative process. What links Hildegard von Bingen and Kaija Saariaho, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Benjamin, is not a specific sound or aesthetic but a shared technology of transmission. At its core, classical music isn’t “classical.” It is written music.
By “written music,” I mean music that comes into being through the act of composition. Music from practically any tradition can, of course, be written down. If you’re a Beatles fan, you can buy a collection of Beatles sheet music, and if you want to plunk out your favorite jazz standard, you can order a copy of The Real Book, which contains the essential harmonic and melodic information for hundreds of well-traversed tunes. (Both a Real Book and a 1,136-page tome called The Beatles: Complete Scores are sitting on my piano as I write this.)
Though all music can be documented and experienced in multiple ways—scores, recordings, live performances—one approach to distinguishing musical traditions is to ask which form a given tradition treats as authoritative. It would be odd, for instance, to claim that a collection of printed scores constitutes a definitive document of the Beatles canon, because the unquestioned reference point is the band’s studio albums. My Beatles compendium proudly declares its own contingency: Printed on the front cover is an all-caps proclamation that its pages contain FULL TRANSCRIPTIONS FROM THE ORIGINAL RECORDINGS.
In other words: albums first, scores later. Taylor Swift’s 2019 decision to rerecord her earlier albums was a potent gesture, even a radical one, precisely because in pop music, the studio album typically possesses an authority upon which all subsequent iterations—whether live performances or written transcriptions—are based. Only by returning to the studio could Swift achieve control over her master recordings and literally set the record(s) straight.
Jazz musicians and aficionados tend to have a different perspective. Even though certain albums (Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme ) have attained the status of holy relics in the minds of many listeners, I think most jazz lovers would agree that the genre is not defined by the worship of specific studio recordings. Fans are more likely to value the evanescent moment of live performance, with its potential for spontaneous expression, for the very reason that a familiar tune can sound different every time it’s performed. A major artist such as Miles Davis might have performed and recorded a certain song—“My Funny Valentine,” for example—many times throughout his career, and there’s no reason to automatically treat a particular performance as the authoritative version. In spite of The Real Book’s name, jazz musicians rarely consider the printed score to be “the real thing” either. No self-respecting jazz musician would play a Real Book score exactly as written.
Western classical music is an unusual case. The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven’s symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed many more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same score. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage. Even an extreme case, such as Cage’s famous 4’33”—a work in which performers refrain from playing their instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds—depends on its score, a simple and playful set of written instructions. (In fact, to a greater degree than most notated music, 4’33” is inconceivable as a work of art without those directions.)
If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of “classical” music. All kinds of unexpected affiliations and affinities emerge beyond music that’s typically thought of as belonging to the tradition. Many of the big-band masterpieces of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, for instance, strike me as indistinguishable, in their creative genesis, from orchestral works by Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland that were being written around the same time: They are notated in exquisite detail, usually for large ensembles, and Strayhorn’s gorgeously balanced wind and brass voicings remind me in particular of Stravinsky’s. To my ear, Strayhorn is a symphonist at heart. His work—in its fundamental writtenness—has more to do with that of many so-called classical composers than it does with, for example, that of an artist like Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz master who ostensibly hails from a tradition that is continuous with Strayhorn’s, but whose method could hardly be more different.
Written music matters for the same reason written langauge does: To write is to free oneself from the constraints of memory. It’s possible, in a novel or an essay or a nonfiction narrative or a book of poems, to devise an aesthetic structure full of details, depths, and digressions that would be far harder to construct in a purely oral storytelling tradition, one in which verbal transmission works through either memorization or improvisation. When you write, you don’t simply set down your thoughts; in the process of writing, your thoughts are transformed, and allowed to assume a newly complex shape—the miraculous scaffolding that emerges from the accumulation of thoughts on the page.
Our world is awash in written language, but not written music. The musical genres that dominate mainstream American culture are all more or less oral traditions….
… Musical literacy is a highly specialized skill; to become a fluent reader of music, a student needs to be given the kind of focused instruction that not all public schools have the funding to provide. Exposure to music education, beyond the rudiments, all too often becomes a question of whose family can afford expensive private lessons. We can react to this fact by feeling guilty about it, and letting notated music be tainted by its association with elitism, or we can push for an expansion of musical education. We all understand that to teach a child to read and write is to endow them with potent means of expression and self-discovery. Why should musical literacy be any different? Even a basic grounding in musical notation can transform a child’s sense of what can be communicated to another human being, especially—and this is crucial—if notation is treated as a tool of creativity rather than simply an unpleasant test of the ability to play all the right notes or else.
If we understand that writing, in music as in language, has the potential to be a force for liberation, and that it can transcend localized questions of style and aesthetic, we might come to a fuller sense of what music can be in our lives—the many forms it can take, the many truths it can tell. And if I could prescribe one thing for our world at this moment, it would be to deepen and expand our understanding of what it is to listen…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?” (gift article) from @theatlantic.com.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (though we might recall that Martin Mull observed that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”)
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As we read and write, we might recall that this date– National Opera Day— is the anniversary of the premiere in 1874 of Modest Mussorgsky‘s (and here) Boris Godunov at the Mavrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. (Some sources give the date as January 27 of that year.) Mussorgsky’s only completed opera, it is considered his masterpiece.
Mussorgsky composed the work, based on Pushkin‘s 1825 play Boris Godunov (and here), between 1868 and 1873. By the 1980s In the 1980s, Boris Godunov had moved closer to the status of a repertory piece than any other Russian opera, even Tchaikovsky‘s Eugene Onegin, and is the most recorded Russian opera.
“I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history”*…
Using his “musical animation machine.” Stephen Malinowski illustrates the genius of Bach’s “Great” Fugue in G minor, BWV 542…
Q: What’s so “great” about this fugue?
A: It’s called “great” to distinguish it from the other fugue in G minor (BWV 578) which is called “little”; you can compare it here. The BWV 578 fugue is a stand-alone piece, but BWV 542 is a pair of pieces; its full title is “Fantasia and Fugue in G minor.”…
* James Hilton
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As we marvel, we might recall that it was on this date in 1762 that Christoph Willibald Gluck‘s glorious opera Orfeo ed Euridice premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. The first of Gluck’s “reform” operas (which brought “noble simplicity” to what had become abstruse opera seria), it was hugely influential on subsequent German operas. Variations on its plot—the underground rescue mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions—can be found in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Wagner’s Das Rheingold.
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all”*…
Jack Shepherd, in praise of phrases that persevere…
I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away — they often wear their unbelonging openly — words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection — “point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.”
A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”…
Some of the fossils the authors single out (such as “whilom”) have themselves mostly vanished from the language since the book was published, but many more are still with us: “Umbrage,” for instance, which is never seen outside of the phrase “to take umbrage at,” is a word that literally means “shade” or “shadow” (as in umbrella), and someone takes umbrage at something (presumably) because it has cast a shadow on them (a converse of the more contemporary “throwing shade.”) “Dudgeon,” similarly, can’t walk on its own two feet outside of the phrase “High dudgeon.” Greenough and Kittredge speculate that it could be related to an earlier dudgeon that referred to the wood used to make knife handles, but most other sources are skeptical of this. In fact, it may have its roots in the Italian aduggiare, “to overshadow,” which would make it, rather satisfyingly, a cousin to umbrage.
Armed with the concept of “fossil words,” you can start to see them everywhere: The “Pale” that only exists in “Beyond the Pale” is unrelated to the “Pale” that means “colorless” — it’s an otherwise obsolete word from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” and, by extension, “boundary.” The “Dint” that can nevermore escape from the phrase “By dint of” was once a mighty sword strike — the Old English dynt means “a blow from a weapon.” “Offing,” a nautical term for the open sea as it’s seen from the shore, now survives only in “In the offing,” which itself probably only survives because it was a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster…
Unlike the “Step” that means “moving a foot forward” and comes from the Old English steppan, the “Step-” in “Stepchild” is the last remaining vestige in English of a word that meant “bereaved.” As Greenough and Kittredge explain:
“The step- in stepson and the like is the adjective stēop, ‘destitute,’ ‘bereaved,’ so that stepson or stepchild is the same as orphan, which comes from the Greek for ‘bereaved.’ Stepfather and stepmother are therefore terms which could only have arisen after the step- had lost its proper sense. A stepmother is not a ‘bereaved mother,’ but one who takes the place of a mother to the bereaved children. This illustrates the tendency of language to form groups, and to make new words to fill out any gaps that may be observed in any group.”
Which is to say that not only have these charming little time travelers made homes of their own in the language, some of them are starting families…
More examples of long-lived lexicography: “These Lovely “Fossil Words” Are Hiding in Plain Sight,” from @expresident.
* Winston Churchill
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As we honor our elders, we might note that the work that went far to popularize the word “bohemian,” Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, premiered in Turin at the Teatro Regio on this date in 1896. It was conducted by the then 28 year old Arturo Toscanini. While it was dismissed by some critics at the time as simple and unchallenging, it has become a central part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
“The bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s”*…
Elena Passerello on Mozart’s feathered collaborator…
… So what kind of murmur began that spring day in Vienna when a twenty-eight-year-old Mozart, jaunty in his garnet coat and gold-rimmed cap, strolled into a shop to whistle at a starling in a cage? That bird must have zeroed in on Mozart’s mouth, drinking-in the whistled seventeen-note opening phrase from his recent piano concerto:
Mozart’s melody riffs in G on a simple line heard in many a volkslied, so the starling might have been hearing similar tunes from other shoppers that whole month. Or perhaps Mozart himself had been in a few times and had whistled his line enough for the bird to imprint it. No matter how the starling learned the song, on May 27, 1784, it spat that tune right back at the tunesmith—but not without taking some liberties first.
The little songbird un-slurred the quarter notes and added a dramatic fermata at the end of the first full measure; we can only guess how long it held that first warbly G. In the next bar, it lengthened Mozart’s staccato attack and replaced his effete grace notes with two pairs of bold crotchets. And the starling had the audacity to sharp the two Gs of the second measure, when any Viennese composer worth his wig would keep them natural and in line with the key. Those bird-born G-sharps take the steady folk tune into a more harmonically complex place, ignoring the fermata-ed natural G that comes just two notes earlier and pushing toward the next note in the phrase—an A—creating a lifted E-major chord. Mozart apparently loved this edit, because he bought that bird on sight.
For good measure, he drew a little treble staff in his expense book and scored the starling’s tweaks under the note of purchase:
And under the last measure, an acclamation—“Das war schön!” (“That was wonderful!”)—scribbled in the maestro’s quick hand.
There is no other live-animal purchase in Mozart’s expense book, and no more handwritten melodies; no additional transactions were praised as schön! This is one of the very few things we even know about his purchasing habits. He’d only begun tracking his spending that year, and by late summer, Mozart had abandoned the practice and only used that notebook to steal random phrases of English. So this note of sale is special among the extant scraps from his life.
The purchase of this bird, Mozart’s “Vogel Staar,” marks a critical point for the classical period. At the end the of eighteenth century, tunes were never more sparkling or more kept, their composers obsessive over the rhetoric of sonata form: first establishing a theme, then creating tension through a new theme and key, then stretching it into a dizzying search for resolution, and finally finding the resolve in a rollicking coda. The formal understanding of this four-part structure permeated classical symphony, sonata, and concerto. By 1784, sonata form had imprinted itself on the listening culture enough to feel like instinct; Vienna audiences could rest comfortably in the run of classical forms as familiar—and thus enjoyable—narratives. And nobody played this cagey game more giddily than Mozart.
Of all the things Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart brought to human sound, the most important might be his sense of surprise…
The full– fascinating– story: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Vogel Staar,” from @elenavox in @VQR.
Pair with “Masterpieces Galore: When Mozart Met the Enlightenment” (gift article)
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we whistle along, we might send sonorous birthday greetings to Henri-Étienne Dérivis; he was born on this date in 1780. A leading bass in the Paris Opera Company for 25 years, he made his debut as Sarastro in Les Mystères d’lsis (the French version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute) in 1803.
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