I have been reading enthusiastic reviews of Aria Code, a new series of podcasts sponsored by WQXR, the Metropolitan Opera and WNYC Studios. And after listening, I agree.
Each podcast discusses one aria. Just one. Afterward, the aria is presented in its entirety without interruption.
For those looking for an introduction to opera, this is what I would call an easy on-ramp. The presenters provide diverse views and insights into each aria, revealing details one might not have heard otherwise. Each podcast lasts around 30 minutes.
Arias from Verdi’s La Traviata and Otello, Puccini’s La Boheme and Tosca, and Saint-Saën’s Dalila have been presented thus far.
Opera fans, this post is for you! Not an opera fan yet? This is also for you! The OperaVision website and the OperaVision YouTube channel have a wide variety of operas for you to enjoy (or just sample, if you’d like). The operas are available on demand, free of charge, no login necessary.
Here’s some of what’s currently available on demand:
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
Handel: Semele
Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel
Martinu: Juliette
Mascagni and Leoncavallo: Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci
Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro
Offenbach: Blaubart
Poulenc: Dialogues des Carmélites
Puccini: Turandot
Verdi: Aida
Wagner: the entire Ring cycle
Here’s what’s coming up in April:
April 1 Wagner: Parsifal
April 2 Rossini Gala: Homage to Conductor Alberto Zedda featuring a number of overtures and selections from Rossini’s operas.
April 8 Verdi: Il corsaro
April 14 Verdi: La Traviata
April 26: Donizetti: La Favorite
What if you’re not sold on the idea of opera? Do you think language will be a barrier? These operas have subtitles in a number of languages. Don’t know how to get into opera? Check out OperaVision’s New to Opera? tab. Not sure if you can devote a couple hours in one sitting? Then watching from home is perfect! You can take a break whenever you want and come back whenever you want (just remember to write down the timestamp where you stopped). It’s a great no-risk opportunity to sample a variety of different opera styles or find a new favorite.
If you watch something that you like, let us all know about it!
The Opera Platform website, long the home of free opera webcasts, is now Operavision.eu. Operas typically remain available for viewing on the site for six months after their initial webcast, and some are available with subtitles in multiple languages. Operas currently available on the new website include Puccini’sTosca and Madama Butterfly, Handel’sAcis and Galatea, and Verdi’sLa Traviata. Haven’t watched opera before? Check out Operavision’s New To Opera? tab for some helpful information.
Also, opera fans, please note that Operavision will present Wagner’s entire Ring cycle in separate webcasts beginning 28 October 2017, and, on a lighter note, Mozart’sThe Marriage of Figaro on 3 November.
Beethoven, Mozart,
Bach wrote music for all time,
And now, all of space.
Bach traveled on foot
Over two hundred miles to
Hear great music, learn.
Now his music flies
Beyond the sun’s reach, into
Interstellar space.
This week NASA is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. When Voyager 1 and 2 were launched, each carried a golden record containing images and the sounds of Earth. Along with greetings in over 50 human languages, whale song, and sounds of nature, there was a selection of the world’s music, including classical music.
One of the spacecraft has now left our solar system and is in interstellar space; the other will be there soon. And as they travel through the dark and empty space between the stars, our “silent ambassadors”1 carry the story of who we are. Here are the classical selections chosen for the record:
Bach walked 250 miles to hear the music of Dieterich Buxtehude and learn from him. The Voyager spacecraft are now 10-12 billion miles from Earth and are outward bound at around 40,000 miles per hour. They’re still sending back fascinating and valuable data. Like Bach, they have traveled a long way in the pursuit of knowledge. And the results have been glorious.
Image of Saturn, its rings, and two moons taken by the Voyager spacecraft. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
What music would you select to represent all of us?
The Opera Platform will present ten operas as part of the European Opera Days celebration, May 5-14, 2017. On-demand viewing begins at midnight CET (11PM UTC; 7PM EDT). Here’s what you can see:
Ginestera: Bomarzo from the Teatro Real Madrid
Bizet: Carmen, two performances, from the Latvian National Opera and the Opéra de Lyon
Vivaldi: Farnace from the Opéra National du Rhin Strasbourg
Janáček: Foxie! Cunning Little Vixen from La Monnaie De Munt Brussels
Rossini: Il Turco in Italia from the Bergen National Opera
Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea from Opéra de Lille
Charpentier: Médée from Theater Basel
Thordarson (Þórðarson): Ragnheiður
Mozart: The Magic Flute (set in outer space) from Den Norske Opera Oslo
Consider Chopin,
Whose pianistic brilliance
Reached beyond the grave:
His unpublished works
Were supposed to be destroyed;
But fate intervened.
But then sometimes fate
Abruptly ends the music–
Sometimes in mid-line.
These posthumous works
Let the creative candle
Burn a bit longer,
Another insight
Into the life and soul of
A voice lost to us.
Work gets interrupted, whether it’s the humble writing of a blog, or the composition of a symphony. Sometimes things are…terminally interrupted, or lie finished, but unpublished, languishing long after a composer’s death.
Chopin requested that all unpublished works that were “not worthy of me” be destroyed after his death.1 But Chopin’s mother and sisters countermanded that, and had Chopin’s friend Julian Fontana pick out the best pieces, which were then published and cataloged as posthumous works.2,3
And this is hardly a unique case. After Schubert’s death, some of his unpublished songs were gathered into a song cycle that was called Schwanengesang (Swan Song). While some of the songs appeared on consecutive pages in Schubert’s manuscript version, by no means were all of the songs unambiguously meant to be presented together, and his last song, Taubenpost, was clearly added by the publisher.4
And then there is the matter of incomplete works. Schubert’s eighth symphony remained unfinished at the time of his death. Mozart’s Requiem was incomplete—he had written sketches for several movements, and it fell to Franz Süssmayr to complete it, who added some movements of his own for good measure.
Bach’s The Art of Fugue ends in the middle of a fugue. Mahler’s last symphony was unfinished, and Puccini’s opera Turandot was missing part of the finale at the time of his death.5
Last page of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. The note written by CPE Bach says, “in this fugue, where the name B A C H is introduced in the countersubject, the composer died.”
In some cases, the works are presented as is (Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9). But given the human nature to tinker, some latter-day composers have tried their hand at completing some of these incomplete works based on the composer’s sketches (see here for a list). Not all of these extrapolations have been universally accepted. They are interesting experiments though.
Some works that see the light of day only posthumously may be awkward yearbook pictures from a composer’s youth, others unsuccessful experiments that the composer neglected to pitch into the fireplace. Others, gems that lacked a bit of polishing and a publisher. Yet all give one more glimpse into the composer’s life, like finding a photo of a relative long gone. I cannot help but quote Douglas Hofstadter’s poignant reference to a Chopin étude (please forgive the length) from his book I Am a Strange Loop.6
One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, aid to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.
After a few minutes of emotional pondering—soul-searching, quite literally—I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.
“In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad—and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority—to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards—scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being—his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions—and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”
Hofstadter, Douglas R., I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007 pp 9-10.
Image attribution: Final page of Bach’s The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach. (Berlin State Library, Germany.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABach-unfinishedfugue.jpg . The note at the end, written by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, says, “in this fugue, where the name B A C H is introduced in the countersubject, the composer died.”
