I never heard so musical a discord
Andy's comments to my previous post have put me in reflective mood with regards to the incongruities of the music heard in some operas when compared to their settings. To the best of my recollection, there is very little in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor to reinforce the Scottish locations, while Andy points out the unlikely pairing of Puccini's hyperlyrical style with a Western setting in La fanciulla des West. John Wayne it ain't.
However, it strikes me that some operas get away with this quite neatly. Bizet's Carmen benefits from the ease with which French composers of the period adopted an Hispanic idiom, with the result that the music sounds typical of its composer without losing any of its Spanish flavour. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Aida is historically so far removed from modern times (only marginally more than when it was written) that any attempt on Verdi's part to introduce even pseudo-ancient Egyptian influences would sound quite strange. It's probably helped by the fact that next to nothing is known about music of the period: despite the survival of some instruments and various pictorial representations of music-making, there's still a lot of conjecture about what it sounded like.
That said, there's one opera, among the best-loved of them all, which has almost succeeded in side-stepping the issue entirely. Le nozze di Figaro is an Italian opera composed by an Austrian, based on a French play set in Spain - and just to spice things up, one of the characters speaks of going on a diplomatic trip to London. Mozart's only attempt at making the music sound relevant to its setting is a fandango at the end of Act III, and to be honest it doesn't work - you can tell he never crossed the Pyrenees. Obviously the work as a whole more than makes up for this (very minor) blemish, but the sheer mixture of cultures involved in its conception is impressive in its own way. Given how much of a cultural melting-pot Vienna was in its imperial days, it's almost a shame the EU never seized on Figaro's pan-European qualifications ...
(Bonus points if you can name the source of this post's title. Without the assistance of a search engine!)
However, it strikes me that some operas get away with this quite neatly. Bizet's Carmen benefits from the ease with which French composers of the period adopted an Hispanic idiom, with the result that the music sounds typical of its composer without losing any of its Spanish flavour. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Aida is historically so far removed from modern times (only marginally more than when it was written) that any attempt on Verdi's part to introduce even pseudo-ancient Egyptian influences would sound quite strange. It's probably helped by the fact that next to nothing is known about music of the period: despite the survival of some instruments and various pictorial representations of music-making, there's still a lot of conjecture about what it sounded like.
That said, there's one opera, among the best-loved of them all, which has almost succeeded in side-stepping the issue entirely. Le nozze di Figaro is an Italian opera composed by an Austrian, based on a French play set in Spain - and just to spice things up, one of the characters speaks of going on a diplomatic trip to London. Mozart's only attempt at making the music sound relevant to its setting is a fandango at the end of Act III, and to be honest it doesn't work - you can tell he never crossed the Pyrenees. Obviously the work as a whole more than makes up for this (very minor) blemish, but the sheer mixture of cultures involved in its conception is impressive in its own way. Given how much of a cultural melting-pot Vienna was in its imperial days, it's almost a shame the EU never seized on Figaro's pan-European qualifications ...
(Bonus points if you can name the source of this post's title. Without the assistance of a search engine!)
posted by Anthony at
11:33
1 Comments:
Re Aida: Not "authentic" or "academic," to be sure, but I always found the "Immenso Ftah" scene with its harps and offstage high priestess quite effectively evocative, even if it is just a romantic Italianate approximation. (There's also the oboe solo in "O patria mia" -- get it, a reed by the banks of the Nile?) The same with the bacchanale from Samson et Dalila. Surely that doesn't sound like anything ever heard in antiquity, but it is awfully fun. I had a college professor once completely dismiss Salome's Schleiertanz as "orientalist dreck." : ( I like that piece.
By
Andy, at 5/6/07 23:13
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