The complete idiot's guide to classical music (53 page)

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
E. Donall Thomas, the doctor whose revolutionary treatment gave Carreras back his life and career, won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Medicine in recognition of his significant achievements in leukemia research.

What operetta is to the Viennese, and musical theatre to us in America, the zarzuela is to the Spanish. Placido Domingo (1941–) was born into the special musical world of this opera-operetta hybrid: his parents, Placido Sr. and Pepita Embril, were stars of the most successful zarzuela company in Madrid. Following a 1949 Latin American tour, they decided to remain in Mexico City, founding their own company there and allowing their young son to take on a number of small children’s parts in their productions. Placido Jr. also loved attending orchestral and stage rehearsals; he hung around the set designers and costume makers and did other odd jobs around the place—he liked to put the scores out on the players’ music stands.

His musical talent clear, young Placido started piano lessons, entered the Mexico City Conservatory at age 14, and even after his voice broke, continued to make himself useful around the zarzuela company, playing the piano at rehearsals, and even getting to conduct a little. Gradually, he found himself singing in the company (as a baritone), and later became a veteran trouper, with 185 straight performances as one of Alfred P. Doolittle’s cronies in a Spanish-language production of
My Fair Lady
, followed by another 170 or so in Lehar’s popular operetta
The Merry Widow
.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
At 18, Domingo tried out for the National Opera, and was told by the auditioning committee that he sounded more like a tenor than a baritone. So he sight-read a tenor aria and was signed to his first operatic contract. Wisely, he didn’t give up his day jobs. He played piano for a touring ballet company, hosted his own musical show on Mexico’s Channel 11, helped train a zarzuela chorus, and recorded backup vocals for Mexican cover versions of American pop hits.

Domingo, meanwhile, had graduated from small to leading roles at the opera, and a performance of
Tosca
proved pivotal. This was because Nicola Rescigno was in the audience, music director of the Dallas Civic Opera, who promptly signed up the young tenor for his American debut as Alfredo (opposite Joan Sutherland, no less) in
Lucia di Lammermoor
.

Feeling the need for more seasoning, and the opportunity for more regular singing work, Domingo joined the Hebrew National Opera company in Tel-Aviv, where he got both, racking up nearly 300 performances over the next two and a half years. By 1965 he was back in the U.S., singing Don Jose in
Carmen
for Washington Opera, and at his New York City Opera debut as well.

Perhaps it is this wide range of theatrical experiences that helped make Domingo the complete musician. How many other opera singers can you name who are equally at home with folk tunes and pop ballads, can accompany themselves at the piano, and are skilled enough conductors to land podium assignments at the Met?

A dramatic debut at the Met followed, when Domingo was called upon—with 35-minutes notice—to step in for the ailing Franco Corelli in Cilea’s
Adriana Lecouvreur
. Not a season has gone by since 1968 without Domingo on the company’s singing roster, where he has starred in at least 30 different roles. All the while, of course, the tenor found himself in increasing demand all over the world. The year of his debuts in London and at La Scala was 1969, and one of his proudest moments followed in 1970 when he was invited to sing a solemn mass in the Vatican, attended by Pope Paul VI.

Domingo was the leading tenor at the Met’s opening night productions for three out of the next four years. His formal conducting debut came in 1973 (at his alma mater, New York City Opera), with further podium opportunities unfolding at the Met in such operas as
La Boheme
,
Carmen,
and
Tosca
. His recordings encompass an incredible variety of material, which extends far beyond the operatic borders to everything from folk songs to tangos, zarzuela arias to movie ballads. Like Beverly Sills, Domingo has eased into administrative duties, acting as artistic advisor to the Los Angeles Music Center, and serving as music director for the World Opera in Seville.

“My life has so far been lucky and happy,” Placido Domingo wrote at the age of 40; in the more than 15 years since then, we are the lucky and happy ones for having been able to bask in the warmth and brilliance of his musical art.

Some people swear that Luciano Pavarotti is even more famous than that other Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso. Perhaps the only role in which he lacked credibility was the commercial where he insisted that nobody recognized him without his American Express card. Thanks to a lifetime in the public eye, complete with TV specials, talk-show interviews, zillions of recordings, and even a Hollywood movie, Pavarotti’s distinctive voice and ample figure (“he gleefully thumbs his stomach at the universe,” wrote Stephen Rubin) are not likely to escape attention, offstage or on.

Born in Modena, Italy (1935–), Pavarotti gained his love of singing from his father, a baker who sang in the local opera house. He had little formal training, yet his was a natural gift, and it began to be honed by years of singing in church and finally, at age 19, voice lessons with the tenor Arrigo Pola.

After winning a singing contest in 1961, Pavarotti made his operatic debut as Rodolfo in
La Boheme
, making enough of a stir to prompt La Scala to offer him a contract understudying three major roles. It must have been a highly tempting proposition, but in an example of the wisdom that would continue to shape his future career decisions, Pavarotti turned it down, telling the management that he would prefer to wait until he could enter the illustrious house as a star.

Instead, he looked for other performing opportunities, finding one in Dublin, where he sang the Duke in
Rigoletto.
As good luck would have it, Richard Bonynge was in Ireland, auditioning artists to partner Joan Sutherland on an Australian tour. When he heard Pavarotti, Bonynge knew his search was over. The young tenor got the job, went on the tour and, he readily admitted later on, learned more from the great soprano than from all of his previous teachers. “He was always feeling Joan’s tummy to find out how she breathed,” said Bonynge, obviously not the jealous type.

Pavarotti would become Sutherland’s close friend and frequent singing partner over the years (“The Big P.” the soprano calls him affectionately). Alas,
La Boheme
remained his “lucky opera,” and Rodolfo was the role he chose for his debut performances in Vienna and at Covent Garden in 1963, two years later at La Scala (he did indeed arrive as a star), San Francisco in 1967, and the Metropolitan in 1968, where his
Boheme
was chosen as the first live telecast from the Met.

Even with his operatic career in full swing, Pavarotti started making time for recitals, which would henceforth be a prominent feature of his musical life. (On the list: the first ever recital given on the stage of the Met.) His remarkable range, topped by a spectacular upper register, his smooth, confident style, and his infectious, endearing personality, have all combined to make him a welcome guest in concert halls around the world; without question, the Pavarotti magic is not dependent on fancy sets, resplendent costumes or on stage dramatics.

The tenor’s recordings and videos could probably fill a small music shop: His entire stage repertory is available on compact disc, and you’ll also find Neapolitan romances, Christmas hymns, operetta songs, and in-concert recitals taped at New York’s Carnegie and London’s Royal Albert Halls. If you dig around enough in the LP bins, you may even emerge with the soundtrack of his film
Yes, Giorgio
. Twenty years ago, Gerald Fitzgerald said that “not since Caruso has a tenor from Italy so captured the imagination of music-lovers. Pavarotti has become a fact, an indispensable fact, of our musical life, and from the evidence at hand his momentum has yet to reach full throttle.”

Moving along into his sixties now, Luciano Pavarotti has stepped back from a number of the challenging roles that catapulted him to worldwide fame, and his appearances are fewer and farther between. Nontheless, he remains one of the most popular, widely recognized performers in the world today. When he knocks off another high C, throws his arms up in triumph, waves his ubiquitous handkerchief, and beams at his cheering audiences, you know that the master is still very much in charge.

 

• Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and Kathleen Battle are among the most famous of all singers because of their extraordinary singing style.
  
 

• Soprano Beverly Sills went on to manage an opera company after singing in one.
  
 

• The Three Tenors—Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti—started touring together and have become a legend in their own time.
  

Chapter 20
 
It’s Not Over Till the Fat Lady Sings

 

• The beginnings of opera
  
 

• The operas of Rossini and Bellini
  
 

• Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, and Bizet
  
 

• Combining the opera ingredients
  

Opera is the original multimedia entertainment. It involves a fusion of words and music (and often dance), it combines visual drama and vocal melody with orchestral underpinnings, adding sets, costumes, and lighting effects to the overall package. Compared to the way it was when opera was born some 400 years ago, the singing is superior and the acting more artful (at least we like to think so; not too many of us were around in 1600 to check it out). And obviously, the set, costume, and lighting designers these days make full and often brilliantly inventive use of every available modern technology.

Around 1600, a group of Italian poets, singers, scientists, and composers used to hang out at the palace of a Florentine nobleman. They called themselves Camerata (small chamber) and their company included Vincenzo Galilei, father of the celebrated astronomer.

 
Music Word
Opera,
in Italian, is the plural of “opus” and therefore means “works.” That, of course, is a broad enough term to take in almost everything, and often that’s just what you’ll find in opera: solo songs, ensemble numbers, spoken declamations, ballets, orchestral overtures and interludes, special lighting and other stagecraft effects, plus an endless variety of stage action, from wedding ceremonies to murders most foul.

During discussions of how to advance the arts in society, they hit upon the idea of emulating the simplicity that supposedly had been the essence of ancient Greek music. Of course, nobody knew what ancient Greek music sounded like; fortunately for them, nobody knew what it didn’t sound like either, so they couldn’t quibble.

One of their first steps was the publication of a group of songs by one of their members, a part time composer named Giulio Caccini. It was called “Nuove musiche” (New Musics), and instead of the polyphonic construction favored by most Renaissance composers, these airs were designed for a single voice with an accompaniment of chords. The next step was pulling together a number of these individual pieces into longer productions called “dramma per musica,” or drama through music. These in turn became known as “opera,” which in Italian simply means “works.” To this day, that’s often what you get when you go to the opera.

The first important composer to suggest the heights to which such a fusion of music and drama might rise was Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). He greatly enriched the orchestral accompaniments, used harmonic dissonances for expressive purposes, wrote hauntingly lovely melodies (they say that hundreds of people were moved to tears by a lament in his opera
Arianna
), and created the earlier works that still hold the stage today. Among his most popular works are
Orfeo
and
The Coronation of Poppea
.

With that kind of head start, it’s no surprise that Italy remained the operatic headquarters of the world, exporting its glories far and wide.

 
Important Things to Know
French opera, for instance, was largely sparked by a kid from Florence named Giovanni Battista Lulli, who never lost his Italian accent, but got to be the King’s favorite once he changed his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully. Handel, who went to Italy to learn how to write operas, settled in London only to find that his greatest competitor was the Italian Giovanni Bononcini; and in far-off Russia, Catherine the Great got Paisiello and Galuppi and Cimarosa and all sorts of other Italian composers to write operas for her court. Even Mozart, you’ll recall, set many of his finest operas to Italian librettos.

Gioacchino Rossini leap-yeared into the world on on February 29, 1792. His mother was a singer and his father alternated between being the town trumpeter and the town butcher, so young Gioacchino grew up with a love for opera and all the bologna that goes with it. He sang in an opera at age 11, then made his first attempt at writing one a year later. His exceptional talents really began to take shape after his family moved to Bologna. Rossini never really went in for much formal training, but he did take a few courses at the conservatory, even winning a medal for counterpoint, and writing a cantata that was played at his school’s annual ceremonies.

His early operas didn’t really go anyplace, but Rossini worked fast when he had the mind to, churning operas out at astonishing pace: Four in 1812, another four in 1813. He went steady with
The Italian Girl in Algiers
, made a hit with
The Turk in Italy
, even fooled around with
The Barber of Seville
, but you can put those eyebrows back down: Those are all opera titles. So are
The Thieving Magpie, Tancredi,
and
La Cenerentola
(Cinderella) and the dozens of other works that made Rossini one of the most famous men in Europe. Heads of state from Sweden to Turkey sent him presents, gave him honorary titles, invited him to court, and generally treated him like the (musical) royalty he was.

 
Music Word
Libretto
is Italian for “little book,” and in the old days, librettos (or libretti to use the proper Italian plural) were bound in booklets and handed out to the audience, since nobody would know what was going on otherwise. Not that they necessarily knew what was going on after reading some of the farfetched plots, but at least they had a fighting chance.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
The Sultan of Turkey bestowed the Order of Micham-Ifihar upon Rossini, and the composer liked to wear a ribbon decoration that arrived from the King of Sweden. The Czar of Russian sent along a fancy snuffbox, and in Paris, King Charles named Rossini Inspector General of Singing in France. Poor Rossini never quite knew what to do with that last honor, though he did wander around Paris for a while, inspecting the songs of street beggars.

Gioacchino Rossini was indeed one of the great early 19th century contributors to the art of Italian opera. “Give me a laundry list,” Rossini said, “and I will set it to music.” By the time he was 38, he had turned 38 laundry lists (sorry, librettos) into operas; then, figuring enough was enough, he quit.

Rossini’s music is often described as bel canto, which simply means “beautiful singing.” Unlike Weber, Rossini had no interest in portraying supernatural events, bringing ancient legends to life or infusing his stageworks with nationalistic fervor. His gifts lay in making opera a delicious entertainment. “His melodies have chuckles and sparkles in every bar,” wrote David Ewen, “his effervescent music bubbles like champagne.” So let’s have a toast to old Gioacchino, a bit of an eccentric perhaps, but an opera composer for the ages.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Rossini could be quite acerbic. One of Meyerbeer’s nephews visited Rossini to show him a Funeral March he had written in honor of his uncle’s death. “Very nice,” Rossini said after scanning the score, “but don’t you think it would have been better if
you
had died and Meyerbeer had written the March?”

On February 29, 1868, Rossini gathered friends and family around to celebrate his 19th birthday. He had a been a leap-year baby, remember, and indeed there been only 19 February 29s since his first one in 1792. On the other hand, he was increasingly troubled by a superstitious fear that something terrible would happen on Friday the 13th. Oddly enough, he was right: Rossini died on November 13th of that same year. It was a Friday.