SO YOU WANT TO GET INTO OPERA?!

Vol. 1: MOZART

Look — lately, I haven’t felt inspired to write about makeup. Even if I try to be honest and frame it in terms of “Ok, if you were thinking of buying this ANYWAY, here’s some more information about it”, I feel guilty that I’m contributing to a culture of rampant vapid consumerism. There are a couple things I’d like to review eventually (in general, things I had a hard time finding honest reviews of in other places) but in the meantime, I thought I’d pivot to something that’s been taking up more of my interest and time: my other hobby, OPERA!!!!

Intro + Background

My goal here is to provide some biased opinionated starting points if you are interested in opera but don’t really know where to start / don’t really want to do a whole Great Courses series style introduction. Me, I really got into opera when I was about 14 — my parents like classical music (my mom even had some greatest hit arias CDs and “watched the Ring on PBS” when I was in utero) but it was watching Amadeus in my 10th grade history class (yes, our teacher counted this as teaching — #publicschool) where something just clicked. I became obsessed — every Saturday during the opera season, I’d listen to the live Metropolitan broadcasts (a tradition that continues 17 years on!); I’d beg my parents to drive me to the closest big city to attend Met ‘Live in HD’ broadcasts; my birthday presents were nosebleed tickets to SF Opera and chunky three disc CDs. I even taught myself Italian by reading librettos with side-by-side English translations while listening along and copying verb conjugation tables from the back of an Oxford Italian-English dictionary.

It’s just something that’s stuck with me, and year after year I continue to find joy and solace in this art form.

Writing about it, I just want to provide some examples of things I like that you might like (or might not!) that are also potentially things not everyone talks about in your usual ‘Beginner’s Guide to Opera’-type intros. ALSO I hope to emulate a book that was very influential when I was starting out, Denis Forman’s 'A Night at the Opera, which is a great starter book that pokes a lot of fun and in general makes everything seem a lot more accessible and enjoyable. The thing I hate most about opera fandom is anyone who has any kind of snobby pretension — I’ll never forget a few years ago I met another young-ish person who was also into opera and I was so excited, and they said “Oh what do you like?” and I said “Oooh, I’ve been really into Rossini’s Cinderella lately, I’ve been watching a lot of old performances with Cecila Bartoli and it’s really great”, and they took a pause and said with gleeful poorly-veiled distain, “Oh, you mean La Cenerentola?” 😑

Fuck that energy. I really don’t want to have any of that kind of vibe here. I admit, there is a fun kind of pretension in opera fandom that comes from having super specific opinions and getting into fights over them in YouTube comments*, but I think that’s different than being a snob.

The content of these posts will just be random YouTube videos of excerpts from opera I really like, with some discussion of why I think they are cool. One of the biggest reasons I really liked that Night at the Opera book was that it had a section for each opera that gave ratings for parts of the opera piece by piece, so I could just purchase and download those specific arias / ensembles / sections etc. from ITunes that were recommended, enjoying the opera without necessarily slogging through the whole thing. Now that we live in the age of FREE YOUTUBE VIDEOS of really great performances, many with ENGLISH SUBTITLES, (some even with side-by-side original language + English subtitles!!! God bless you Agapò te Musikè 2), it’s really easy to experiment and sample and find things you like.

MOZART!!!

Alright, let’s get into some actual music! I got into opera via Mozart, so I think it’s a great starting point for this series. Mozart in general was a cool, weird dude — there’s a cute Opera After Dark podcast episode that talks about his interest in fart and poop jokes, and reading his letters you just get the sense he would have been a fun person to know. Personally, through his music, I think of Mozart as sophisticated, witty and also very empathetic. I’m trying to avoid words like genius, because, well, ok they are TRUE, it’s just that I think when we talk about Mozart in such superlative terms, it can get in the way of just sort of FEELING his music in a more intuitive visceral way. If you get too caught up in the technicalities of why it’s so good, you can forget to just feel what’s happening.

Something that’s special about Mozart’s operas is his real interest and empathy for his female characters — you can feel the empathy, affection and admiration he has for women. Lately I’ve been listening a lot to “Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata” (This ungrateful soul has betrayed me) from Don Giovanni. Talking about Don Giovanni is a whole thing — it’s a complicated opera but also I think there’s a tendency to put a little TOO much psychological import on it because the main character is a rapist and men have this obsessive fascination about what that MEANS**… putting all that to the side for a second, you have this character Donna Elvira, who fell in love with Don Giovanni, he dumped and abandoned her, and she went looking for him and found him but keeps getting rejected and betrayed by him and is very angry and upset. Despite herself however, she still loves him. That’s what this aria is about, “ma se guardo il suo cimento, palpitando il cor mi va” — when I look at his face, my heart still goes crazy. I like that it doesn’t really have a resolution, and I like that it feels very empathetic to what that kind of feeling feels like. My favorite favorite Mozart soprano is Kiri Te Kanawa, but I can’t find the exact version of hers I like on YouTube with subtitles, so here’s another one I really like with Cecilia Bartoli. Her take is impressive because she takes time and space for the emotional beats AND has the technical ability to be exposed in those moments and still hit everything perfectly. Skip to 2:03 in for it to really pick up:

The other thing I really like about Mozart is his ensembles — there’s many moments in his operas where the plot is being driven along at the same time as really fun, expressive and exciting music is happening. There’s a scene in Amadeus that references one of these from the Marriage of Figaro, and it does a good job of capturing how exciting and innovative it is (for opera in general, you have this gradual evolution from music being interrupted by talking or the sing-talking of recitatives to eventually just end-to-end music like you get with Wagner or Puccini). There’s two of these really great sequences in Marriage of Figaro, and I think my favorite is the one that comes at the end of Act 2. The plot is silly, but it is kind of helpful to know what’s going on — but it also doesn’t really matter? Opera to me is like sports — you don’t watch baseball for the rules, you watch it to see how the players operate within the confines of the rules. I think of opera plots in a similar way — it’s not about the story really. I mean, the story adds pathos to what’s happening, but it’s really about the expression of those feelings, and how the performers and orchestra are interpreting and working together to communicate those feelings.

Ok so, end of Act II — Marriage of Figaro is a domestic drama. The Count wants to cheat on his wife, and she is sad about it. Figaro and Susanna are servants in this household, and are trying to get married, but the Count is trying to sleep with Susanna***. The whole opera is a series of misunderstandings and setting up traps for the Count which then go awry and they have to get out of them, etc. etc. — here, the Count thinks the page, a young boy named Cherubino that has a crush on the Countess, is hiding in her closet. The page WAS hiding in the closet, but when the Count and Countess leave off stage to go get the key to open the locked closet door, Susanna sneaks in, frees the page, and takes his place. So when in a murderous rage the Count opens the door and finds Susanna, both the Countess and Count are shocked. Taking advantage, the Countess and Susanna use this as an opportunity to make the Count feel bad, and there’s this great moment of reconciliation where the Count apologizes and all three sing “da questo momento quest'alma a conoscerla/mi/vi apprender potrà” - from this moment I’ll / they’ll try to understand each other better (in the clip @ 1:18:05). In that moment these people really do want to be better versions of themselves for each other, and the music just does such a good job of evoking what it feels like to fight with someone you love and then reconcile with sincere forgiveness and repentance. Even though the plot is a bit ridiculous, Marriage of Figaro is full of these really truthful and relatable moments of interpersonal relationships — of quotidian disappointment we can have in the people we are closest to and the remarkable faith and forgiveness of love.

Immediately, Figaro comes in wanting to start the wedding with Susanna and the energy shifts again back to the Count being suspicious, questioning Figaro about a letter he wrote, essentially more silly plot business, which is more of an excuse for fun back-and-forth music as the Count tries to catch Figaro in a lie and Figaro keeps evading him. We get this great suspenseful volley between the Count and Figaro leading eventually to this beautiful section where Figaro, Susanna and the Countess plead for the Count to just give in — “Deh signor, nol contrastate, consolate i miei/lor desir” - come sir, don’t be obstinate, give in to our wishes (@ 1:21:11), interspersed with this impatient underlying rhythmic line of the Count continuing to plot. I love these ensemble pieces for the rich sound of multiple voices on top of the orchestra, and the contrasts you can get depending on what each person is saying / feeling.

Next, the gardener comes in yelling he’s seen Cherubino jump down from the window and the Count gets set off again. We now get some new suspenseful sparring music as the Count and Figaro go back at it, with a rewarding finish as Figaro (with the help of Susanna and the Countess) finally out-maneuvers the Count (1:26:38). I love the Count’s line, “Questo birbo mi toglie il cervello, tutto è un mistero per me” - this rascal drives me crazy, everything is a mystery! (my favorite Counts spit this line with a lot of contempt and frustration, with a good trill on ‘birrrrrrrrbo’). There’s also a cute musical joke when Figaro lies and says that HE was the one who jumped, not Cherubino, and that he sprained his foot, the note he sings is purposefully off key (1:24:35).

After this, more people storm in and all hell breaks loose and you get a more dramatic finish to the act. Personally I lose a bit of interest at this point — there’s some fun moments but it’s also a little too bombastic opera-opera — for me, the best parts of the Act II finale are when you get this slow build and then a very satisfying subtle cathartic payoff that marries the text of what’s happening musically. It is, all in all, ~20 minutes, but each section is such a nice build to the next I find it captivating. I couldn’t find a good version of just this section, but did find this excellent subtitled version of the whole opera (with Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess!!!) — the unbroken section of music that ends the act starts at 1:09:58.

So far we’ve got a sad solo and a lengthy ensemble, so I’ll finish with a love duet that’s a relatively new favorite of mine from Cosi Fan Tutte. Cosi Fan Tutte is another example of a plot that on the surface is incompatible with modern sensibilities, but if you have the right person explain to you why it’s interesting and compelling and you see the right production (for me this was Agapò te Musikè 2’s YouTube video comments; Daniel Heartz’s book Mozart’s Operas and the beloved 2006 Glyndebourne production) things just sort of click into place. The plot builds off of a ‘swapped lovers’ trope that was apparently a thing in the 17th / 18th century: at the start of the opera, two young women are in love with two young men, the young men make a bet with an older dude and pretend to go off to war but instead come back in disguise and try to woo the young women (switching partners), trying to prove to the cynical old dude that their girlfriends are faithful. Eventually, both girlfriends respond positively to the “new” guys, but get outed at the end and supposedly go back to their original partners and the opera ends weirdly with this sort of shrug moral that “they who look on the bright side will always be happy”… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The key with this one is to pay closer attention to the music, which has lots of empathy and affection for these young women AND which reveals that one of the men (the tenor) also responds to their “new” partner, falling in love with the other girl. Musically, it’s a story about young love and how we all have this tendency to feel emotions very strongly at that age, and how it’s something kind of ridiculous that we can make fun of, but also something to look back on with empathy, affection and pity, and that there are serious heart-breaking aspects of that kind of love you feel at that age too.****

The duet I really got captivated by is near the end, where the tenor finally wins over his “new” girl. Plot-wise, the soprano is preparing to escape the conflicting romantic feelings she’s started to develop for the tenor by dressing up as a soldier to join her original baritone boyfriend at the front, but the tenor storms in interrupts her. In a documentary about this really great 2006 production*****, one of the people they interviewed (I think it’s the director?) talks about how in this moment, Mozart has one line of music in which the soprano falls in love with the tenor, and how amazing it is that so much is there in that one line. Here’s the full duet from that 2006 production, with the magic line at 3:10. The words themselves are also very pretty: “Volgi a me pietoso il ciglio: In me sol trovar tu puoi: sposo, amante, e più se vuoi — Idol mio, più non tardar” - turn a merciful eye to me… only in me can you find a partner, a lover and anything else you want — my idol, don’t wait any longer. 😭

Phew! Ok that’s it for now. Honestly, I truly don’t really think anyone will read this BUT if you have, hopefully you’ve found it interesting and/or useful! I’m not a musicologist or opera professional, I’m just an opinionated enthusiast. 💁‍♀️ I’ll conclude with my favorite line of all opera (again from Marriage of Figaro): “io non impugno mai quel che non so” — I’ll never deny that which I don’t know! 😉

*A recent favorite — someone commented on this video of Mario Sereni in Fanciulla Del West, “Sereni was much less impressive in person at the Met (the radio flattered his sound and exaggerated the amplitude of his voice) and was frequently out of tune. You're better off with recordings.” and Sereni’s SON responded “ma va affanculo!! canta tu come mio padre ..stronzo !” — essentially, “fuck off, like you could sing like my dad, idiot” lol!!! Opera YouTube comments are the best.

**Personally, I think it’s a combination of different societal norms at the time that he is portrayed musically / dramatically as more of a scamp than a true villain — I like productions like this one that try to complicate this idea and portray him as sort of a crazy megalomaniac that has an American Psycho-esque charm, so it gets turned into a critique on how awful people can get away with doing awful things and still seem charming on the surface. I’m so disappointed in that particular production because the whole cast and concept is so good EXCEPT for Don Giovanni. His voice just isn’t consistently strong enough, and I like the physicality but it seems to be coming at the expense of his vocal performance which is a bummer. It’s still worth checking out though for the other people (I especially like Nahuel di Pierro as Leporello and Julie Fuchs as Zerlina).

***Similarly to Don Giovanni, the fact that this is just a thing happening that sort of goes unquestioned (I mean, people in the opera are upset about it / plot against it and try to stop it from happening, but it’s not really portrayed with the same level of gravity we would have towards it today) should be taken with a grain of salt that this was written in 1786 — honestly, I think it’s interesting and kind of cool that as an audience are never prompted to have any empathy for the Count, musically Mozart mostly makes fun of him and uses every opportunity to portray his pride / masculinity as sort of pathetic and fragile.

****Also it’s not set in stone that the characters go back with their original partners, so you have a possibility for a more satisfying ending that at least the soprano and tenor end up together.

*****What makes a ‘great’ production for me — at least in this case — is really excellent acting that communicates the story in a compelling, engrossing way AS WELL AS expressive, technically well-executed singing. It’s kind of rare to consistently have this across ALL the roles but this production comes pretty close!