opera

Why Opera?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 7 Comments

[This is the first of nine extracts from a book Why Opera – An introduction to an art form – Opera in nine easy pieces.]

1

Opera?

Just over twenty years ago, a Melbourne restauranteur and wine maker, Rinaldo di Stasio, got together with two cooking writers, Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, to write a book about Italian cooking called Allegro Al Dente, Pasta & Opera.  The authors believed that opera and Italian cooking went together.  They were dead right, even if the French composer, Hector Berlioz made what Banjo Paterson may have described as a ‘rude remark’ about Italian cooking and opera.

Music for the Italians is a sensual pleasure and nothing more.  For this noble expression of the mind, they have hardly more respect than for the art of cooking.  They want a score that, like a plate of macaroni, can be assimilated immediately without having to think about it.

Now, we’ll have to confront snobbery and bitchiness in various forms on our journey in this book, but, among other things, it is odd to see a French man putting down the art or role of cooking.

The authors of Allegro al Dente put out a CD with the book.  It has fifteen of the biggest hits of opera delivered by a shining gaggle of its biggest hitters back then.  The sleeve notes said:

Here is the polished power of Carlo Bergonzi, the seductive charm of Giuseppe di Stefano, the radiant brilliance of Dame Joan Sutherland, the heroic emotion of Mario del Monaco, the sweet honey of Mirella Freni and Cecilia Bartoli, the warmth and colour of Renata Tebaldi, and the state of the art performance that is Luciano Pavarotti.

What a great idea – even if they missed out on my two heroes.  I was still engaged in taking my daughters to the opera about five times a year, and wondered if I might write an introduction to opera for them – and anyone else who might be interested.  (I had written a short outline of a history of the world for them.)

Until very recently, I wondered how I could write an introduction to opera without knowing what works – such as the arias on that CD – that members of the reading audience might have.  You see, I’m a bit slow on the internet.  I plead age.  But I now find that anyone can access a vast range of opera on the internet for nothing, on sites like YouTube, so that anyone could have access to the equivalent of as many of those CD’s as they like.  (Is that why op shops are loaded with CD’s?)

From that discovery comes this little book.  It is written on the basis that the reader will accept the invitation to listen to or watch the works of opera that are referred to.

So, roll out the red and white check tablecloth, get out the pasta or the bread and cheese, open the Chianti or Coonawarra Cabernet or Grampians Shiraz, and, as a sports commentator used to say just before the start of a Grand Prix, pump up the volume!

But, rather than ask what opera is, we might ask what art is.  You can look up the dictionaries if you like, but to my mind they miss the point.  If I ask what Milton, Turner and Tchaikovsky have in common, my answer is that their art is a lyrical reflection of the human condition.  The key word there is ‘lyrical’ – their art is the imaginative and appealing way that they bring us to their reflection.  ‘To be or not to be’ is a very different proposition to ‘Why don’t I just top myself?’  A sonnet by Shakespeare does carry more clout than a Phantom comic.  To use the jargon of the advertiser, the art is the hook that draws us in to get the message.

Well, opera is theatre or drama set to music – so there may be two avenues of lyrical reflection – the drama, or theatre, and the music.  When you think about it, you could say the same of most songs.  Take the poetry of Robert Burns.  You can read it on the page; you can hear it read aloud, or recited from memory; or you can hear it sung to music by, say, Kenneth McKellar.  The effect may well be very different.  Would the poet be offended if many said that they thought that the last mode of performance was the most lyrical?

Let us look first at music.  It is clear that song and dance respond to deep needs in the human condition.  Indeed, our music may be one of the critical things that distinguish us from our primate ancestors.  Music and dance appear to cross all borders of time and space in mankind.  In my kitchen, there is a framed photo of a man with no apparent clothing, very pierced ears, and a very odd haircut.  His eyes are shut, and he looks concentrated, but to be at peace.  The inscription reads: ‘Photograph of a Maquiritare Indian of Northern Brazil in the 1950s, listening to a gramophone record of Mozart’s music played by the French explorer Alain Gheerbrant during an expedition to the Amazon.’  If you find that to be moving, you will see why I framed the photo.

Let us look then at drama or theatre.  More than 2,500 years ago, the Greeks reached a very high stage of development in both tragedy and comedy as modes of theatre that helped them to see their world.  The works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes are still read and performed.  Sigmund Freud was greatly interested in their insights into our psyche, although some would say that symbolism has necessary limits in science.  Curiously enough, the Greeks found that the sound of the words carried further when they were sung.

Nearly two thousand years later, a professional English playwright began writing and performing in plays that would lay the foundation of modern theatre, and in which Europe reached well beyond its ancient sources.  The shell-bursts of the genius of William Shakespeare have altered not just how we see drama, but how we see ourselves.  Shakespeare was vital to the development of the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (‘Joe Green’), so much so that he wrote three operas based on three leading plays of Shakespeare.  With that fusion of poetic and musical genius, what insights might we get from that lyrical reflection upon our condition?

We might add something more on drama.  In a book published in 1949, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, by John Danby, the first sentence reads: ‘We go to great writers for the truth.’  Later, the author unloads this zinger:

It is only dramatically that the manner of living thought can be adequately expressed.  A discursive philosopher is tied to the script of his single part.

This is a precious insight for our purposes.  Later, Danby referred to the well‑known aphorism of Thomas Hobbes that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.  Some may take that view of life, but where do you think you might better seek enlightenment on the nature of life –Hobbes’ Leviathan or Shakespeare’s King Lear?

So, drama set to music is an obvious candidate for an art form.  This book will follow the opera houses’ current practice and focus on four composers – Mozart (1756-1791), Verdi (1813-1901), Wagner (1813-1893) and Puccini (1858-1924).  The main operas looked at will be for Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, Cossi fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute; for Verdi, La Traviata, Rigoletto, A Masked Ball, Don Carlos and Falstaff; for Puccini, La Bohême, Tosca, Madam Butterfly, and Turandot.  Wagner is a different proposition.  Together with The Barber of Seville and Carmen, these operas would all vie today for position in the top bracket for box office or recordings.  There will be additional chapters on sources and directions, bel canto, and the twentieth century.

In each chapter references, will be made to extracts from operas that are freely available on sites on the internet – ‘freely’ there including at no cost.  This will enable readers to be introduced to the greatest performers that have lit up our stages and enriched the western world – and to the hot shots of now.

Just how you take to opera is a matter for your own taste and capacity.  All of the operas that we will look at were composed to be performed live on stage with a live orchestra and no mechanical assistance for the voices.  Many opera fans would prefer to take their opera live at the theatre.  Presently in Australia, you can generally get a cheap seat at the opera for less than what you pay for a lot of pop concerts or for some seats at AFL home and away games.

On the live stage, you get the suspense of any live performance.  Will they pull it off?  Or will this soprano buckle under the weight of that big aria in Turandot – as some say happened to Maria Callas?  Opera is a bit like Formula 1 – there is complicated technology; big amounts of money; bigger amounts of ego; and huge amounts of bullshit.  But – in the end, someone has to get out there on the day or on the night and pull it off – and come mortally close to their limits while doing so – when failure is very, very public, and they have no place to hide.

But, we are so well treated by both recordings and films now.  Some years ago, I was watching Pavarotti in a free concert in Central Park.  The camera zoomed in as he reached down to hit the high note, and I could see a look of white terror in his eyes that reminded me immediately of the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes when he realised that Ingrid Bergman had chosen his gin joint to walk back into his life – and it’s something you only get on the big screen.  Then there is the sound quality, both contemporary and reconstructed.  I have never seen Victor Trumper bat, but I have seen and heard Enrico Caruso and Maria Ponselle and Nellie Melba sing.  I can witness history.

And with opera, as with Shakespeare, and any drama, there are some pieces that you would rather just sit in comfort and listen to rather than go and see it on stage or film.  For example, there are problems with staging King Lear – most directors over-cook the storm scene; plucking out eyes is not fun to watch, especially with this script; the fall at the beach is tricky; and this is a play where the cast has to bat right down the order, and some companies outside of England can find that hard.  I have seen this play butchered – butchered – in Melbourne, London, and Chicago, and I would need serious provocation to try my luck again – especially if I can hear Paul Scofield or Ian Holm in the comfort of the hearth.  You can find similar issues with most of Wagner – before you get to their back-breaking length.  And there is an amazing range of material on film.  A couple of years ago, I paid less than $100 for a set of 33 disks showing 22 operas of Mozart performed at Salzburg – premium performances of his whole oeuvre for the cost of a reasonable seat for a Figaro at the Australian Opera.

Whether you want to go to the opera or not bears on another issue.  Many of the operas we see were composed with the assistance of patronage.  Most are now performed with the backing of patrons.  But no opera that that I know of was created for the benefit of the aristocracy or establishment.  But that sadly is not the impression that a lot of people have of opera.  They see it as an establishment toy, rather like polo or an exclusive school.  This is bloody sad.  A leading guide to opera says that many people are put off it by ‘the social exclusivity cultivated by many opera houses, especially in the English-speaking world.’  The guide (Opera the Rough Guide) is English.  That proposition would hold for Glyndebourne, but if it holds for Covent Garden, that is not the fault of those now running that house.  In Opera, A Penguin Anthology, Stephen Brook says that ‘the duchesses have been replaced by the dispiriting bosses whose companies donate money to the opera house.’  Boy, did he get that right – and not just for England.  You can see bank managers shuffling around with their triumphantly defiant wives – at the expense of the shareholders.

The snootiness problem is not so acute in Australia.  There I think the issue may lie in uncomely phrases like ‘cringe’, ‘sheilahs’ stuff’ or ‘toffs’.  We might hope that by now we might have gone past such hang-ups.  Can we proceed in this book on the footing that in order to enjoy opera, in whatever form you like, you do not have to be a toff, a smart-arse, or a fairy?  You don’t even have to wear a tie.  There is no reason why you cannot go to both the opera and the Melbourne Storm on the same day – although experience suggests that if alcohol is to be consumed, some prudence might be shown about the order of the performances.

So, let’s hear no more of that bullshit about class.  Among other things it’s said not to be Australian.  Let’s look kindly on those who need to put people in boxes and label their attitudes, and hope that these poor souls find both enlightenment and liberation.

Two points of what might be called housekeeping.  You don’t need to know a note of music to enjoy Beethoven’s Fifth – or opera.  I suspect that most people who go the opera will have my level of musical literacy – nil, nix, nought, and nothing.  For the musically trained, this is a tale told by an idiot – but I’ll lay off the sound and the fury.  I started a course on reading music nearly twenty years ago in preparation for a summer school at Oxford.  To the consternation of the tutor and myself, I failed – badly.  Fortunately, that course was abandoned – and we looked instead at Shakespeare in Verdi – much more to my taste and capacity.  (So emboldened, I later took a course on Bach’s orchestral suites at Cambridge – the demons people fear about some subjects that they are in awe of tend to disappear in the daylight.)

Then, if you want a good book-length companion, I recommend the Rough Guide.  You can pick it up for a song second hand.  It is as complete as it is brilliant.  The English are the best at this kind of thing and at dry put-downs.  You get a biography of the composers and then for each major opera, there is a synopsis, a commentary, and a recording guide.  At the end there are helpful lists of houses, performers and conductors, and a glossary, all written by people who know their stuff.  You want to know about Franco Corelli?  ‘One of the loudest and most exciting singers of the twentieth century – and almost certainly the most intoxicatingly vulgar.’  (That is not necessarily a put down.)  Domingo?  ‘The most versatile and most recorded tenor in history.’  What about our Joan?  ‘Her large physique highlighted her poor acting, and she was criticised for her poor diction, but no one ever went to hear Sutherland sing to listen to the words.’  This guide is remarkably good, in a market that sees a lot of rubbish.

Let us, then, turn to our first two samples – the duet ‘Io l’ho perduta’ from Don Carlos by Verdi, sung by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill, and the aria ‘Ebben?  Ne andro lontan’ from La Wally by Catalani sung, by Maria Callas.

Now, we all know that Verdi was Italian, and it’s a fair bet that Catalani was also Italian – but few people have heard of Catalani, and very few have ever seen or heard La Wally.  But many people will soon be at home with the soft pathos of the Callas aria – especially if they have seen the French movie Diva, where this aria is the centrepiece.  (And watching the film Diva may be as good a way as any to see the mystique of drama performed to music.)  You can feel the dramatic tension build up to the duet, but when it unfolds, it does so with a melodic lilt that you might catch from a rotunda in Sicily on a warm summer day.  That is very typical of this composer.

And both these pieces remind us that at heart opera is nothing if not Italian.  What do I mean by that?  The composers that we admire were not afraid to express emotion and they were not shy of style.  They had what footy coaches liked to describe as ‘attitude.’  They come straight at us like Ferrari, Ferragamo, or Maserati.  Or pasta al dente and the check table cloth.  They are rakishly in your face.

And you have just been exposed to two of the greatest voices that the opera stage has ever heard – and two of the saddest tragedies.  Bjorling came from a good musical family, but he was, perhaps like Bret Whiteley, daunted and almost crushed by the weight of his own genius, and he became a helpless drunk.  (Bjorling and Merrill have another famous duet, ‘Au fond du temple saint’, from The Pearl Fishers by Bizet.  I have seen a grown man cry over that performance after another bad day at the footy.)  Callas was adored.  She was looked on with awe.  She had no peer on the stage.  She had the power of Muhammad Ali to change the way that people saw their world.  But her personal life got messy, her voice cracked, and she was monstered by a dirty rotten rich pig.  In his wonderful DVD, Three Legendary Tenors, Nigel Douglas quoted someone saying of Bjorling that his voice was ‘heavy with unshed tear.’  That beautiful line goes for Callas too, and what you have here in their purest form are the dignity of the human voice and the majesty of drama in music.

And, yes, for the removal of doubt, I am not just a fan or acolyte of Bjorling and Callas – I am an addict.  Either can render me lachrymose at the drop of a hat – irrespective of what happened at the footy, and with not a drop of red in sight.

May I then go back to the Indians in the Amazon?  The book that the photo came from, Mozart and his operas, by David Cairns, says that when the French explorers approached the Indians with various records on their portable gramophone, there was at first no response.  They stayed shyly but stubbornly inside.  Then the French put on ‘their beloved Mozart’, and out came the Indians immediately, as the author says ‘compelled – like man and beast in The Magic Flute – by the Orphic power of the sounds.’  David Cairns concluded his Prologue this way.

We too are under the spell.  A contemporary of Mozart said that his music would ‘speak to unborn generations when the bones of kings have long since crumbled to dust.’  More than two centuries after his death, it speaks as never before.  Precisely how it does so we cannot, finally, say.  But it speaks, surely, not so much through the charm of its perfect patterns as through its comprehension of life, its penetrating knowledge of women and men, its profound humanity.

Does it not look to be the case that people who go to God without having drunk freely from this cup have sold themselves short – sadly and badly?

Passing Bull 29 – Let the sun shine upon ME

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

A member of the Seekers once described a friend of mine as a Kelvinator – she could not walk past a fringe without opening the door to feel the light shine upon her.  That was not fair to her, but it is dead right for some people who are, one way or another, in the entertainment business.

There must be something very bad in the legal air in Sydney.  Dyson Heydon has been making a fool of himself ever since he accepted his commission from Tony Abbott.  Now we have an intense competition between former members of the Supreme Court as to who can be the rudest and the silliest.  It is very unsettling to watch, even from this side of the Murray.

A lot of it has to do with ICAC.  A lot more has to do with Margaret Cunneen S C who is regularly described in the press as ‘one of Australia’s most accomplished criminal prosecutors and a media darling’.  She sounds like a real Kelvinator.  She just cannot help herself.  The other day the AFR reported that she had said of ICAC that ‘they are out of control, these people.  The whole thing has to be completely destroyed.’  And of the ACC: ‘The whole thing is a total attempt to annihilate what they think is a very political conservative, when I was told I had a chance to be a Supreme Court Judge.’  She referred to a former Supreme Court judge who had defended ICAC as ‘an old man with dyed hair trying to get back on TV.’  She said of the head of the child abuse Royal Commission that he ‘seems to have it in for me – I think McClellan is the author of all my bad press, until ICAC.’

This is all unspeakably vulgar and unprofessional.  If this woman ever had any prospect of a judicial career, she has none now – and at her own hands.  You wonder if she is fit for any office at all.  The press says that her ‘background briefings, networking and friendships with journalists are legendary.’  The last thing that this country needs is a prosecutor who goes in for that sort of thing.

Shane Warne and Eddie McGuire are both legendary Kelvinators.  Warne is now intent on proving just how stupid he really is.  The other day he attacked Steve Waugh for dropping him.  It gives you an insight into ego when someone complains of being dropped.  That must be unthinkable.  But even if there were some ground for the complaint – and there was none – Warne should have kept his mouth shut  Steve Waugh is in my view the toughest cricketer that we have produced in my time, and that means he is the best.  The difference between him and Shane Warne is that he has character.

There is another reason why Warne should be keeping his head down.  A charity that he was associated with, the Shane Warne Foundation, looks to have been a temple built for egos.  It is being shut down.  Eddie McGuire was one of the ‘celebrities’ on the board.  He said that ‘The reason why nobody has bailed off the board is that we really believe in this bloke, we believe in Shane Warne, we know his heart, we know his track record, we know he has recast this foundation.’  Well, Eddie, perhaps you should have bailed off the board when you found out that the brother of Warne, Jason, had been paid an $80,000 annual salary in the same year that the foundation had donated just $54,600 to charity.  Looking after the family before charity does not look good in a charity, not least if those who run it are in it for their own ego.

In both these instances, the bullshit is corrosive.  Bullshit and ego are a bad mix.  Cunneen, Warnie, and Eddie have all made enough money out of blowing their own trumpets to be able to afford to buy banks of Kelvinators and leave them on with their doors open all night.  That might serve to cool them down, which would be helpful for the rest of us.

Movie and Opera

Different people see films and operas differently.  Some people liked Titanic – The Age gave it five stars and I have never forgiven them – and I thought it was the worst film I have seen.  Some people like Looking for Grace, and I thought it was the second worst film I have seen.  It was staggeringly slow, boring, incredible, and irritating.  A money back job.  I thought the Melbourne Opera show of Mozart’s Seraglio was a wonderful night’s entertainment – and I may have been the only one there not speaking German.  This is what Mozart, at least in that phase, and entertainment should be.  The Age reviewer must have slept through the opera and his writing his review.

Poet of the month: Philip Larkin

Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your expenses

Hurrying to catch my Comet

One dark November day,

Which soon would snatch me from it

To the sunshine of Bombay,

I pondered pages Berkeley

Not three weeks since had heard,

Perceiving Chatto darkly

Through the mirror of the Third.

 

Crowds, colourless and careworn

Had made my taxi late,

Yet not till I was airborne

Did I recall the date –

That day when Queen and Minister

And Band of Guards and all

Still act their solemn–sinister

Wreath- rubbish in Whitehall.

 

It used to make me throw up,

These mawkish nursery games:

O when will England grow up?

But I outsoar the Thames,

And dwindle off down Auster

To greet Professor Lal

(He once met Morgan Forster),

My contact and my pal.

Two pairs of hands

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

There is a famous photo of Maria Callas as Violetta, the wronged courtesan of La Traviata (from La dame aux camellias).  She is standing weeping like a distressed, wasted waif, wringing her hands.  The caption frequently says that even her hands seemed to weep.  It is a moment of theatre at its highest given by a woman who lit up the whole theatre and changed people’s lives.  Callas used her hands crossed over her chest to remarkable effect when taking bows – or when making an entrance, as at the Garnier before the French President, and upstaging Bridget Bardot, well after her voice had failed.  Callas made even her bows into an art form.

There is another famous photo of Callas in the great Visconti production of La Traviata at La Scala in 1955.  She and Giuseppe di Stefano are taking their bows.  She is what the French call radieuse; he looks handsome and respectful of her priority.  The photo, a copy of which hangs at home, is taken at the side from behind, so that their image is set against rows of boxes near the stage.  Her fulfilled radiance is caught by the full glow of the footlights.  (That loathsome shipper who defiled her life was years away.)  Her right hand holds a bouquet, and di Stefano has her left hand.  This is a portrait of accomplished artistry at what might be called the altar of the temple.

Jonathan Thurston is number 6 for the Cowboys, Queensland (the Maroons), and Australia.  He is a half-back and goal kicker – that is, he is one of the play-directors in his kind of rugby.  When the scouts came back from North Queensland about twenty years ago, they said that they had found a blackfella who could play footy, but they said that this one was too small and could not tackle.  He is now, and has been for some time, widely seen as the most valuable player in his code in the world.  Watching him at work is one of the great moments in Australian sport.  Typically he might be standing there passing the ball between his hands, with twelve of his bruisers behind him, and thirteen of the others facing him.  Each one of them could render him into something like manure, but they seem to be caught in the moment.  He just holds the ball while he holds his eye on them – he is waiting for the first hint of a drop in a shoulder that might suggest a weakness in the line.  If he sees it, he has a split second to move to pass to one of his own players, or to put himself in what he hopes will be a hole in the enemy line.  Because of the off side rule, he has to know what is going on behind him.  He therefore has to have the coolness and the antennae and play-making powers of Diesel Williams (who also had another party trick of a different order).

On the weekend I saw Thurston on TV threading a pass that shocked the commentators.  They said that it was like threading a needle – while human missiles were flying all around him.  After many slow motion replays, we finally caught the moment when that beautiful pair of hands released the pass backwards at the precise moment that allowed it to pierce the fray and to hit its fast moving target.  The other side hardly knew what had happened, and with anyone else we would have said that it was a fluke.

Whether you prefer the grace of the hands of Thurston to those of Callas is a matter of taste, and nothing more than that, but thank God that there is still some magic left in the world to relieve us of the drab misery of the measurers and the fibbers.

Don Giovanni

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

When Louis XVI saw the play The Marriage of Figaro, he was a lot more worried than his queen or most of his nobility.  He was even heard to mutter something about the Bastille.  The play was dead against the nobility.  The old jokes were turned on their head, and they were now directed at the aristocracy.  They were laughing at their forthcoming destruction, and the play was written by one of them.  At the heart of the comedy was the claimed right of an aristo, as they would come to be called, to the body of a peasant bride-to-be.  In the play, Figaro, whose bride is threatened, utters these lethal lines to Count Almaviva:

Because you are a grand seigneur, you think yourself a great genius… nobility, wealth, rank, offices!  What have you done to have so much?  You have hardly given yourself the trouble to be born and that’s about it: for the rest you’re an ordinary person.

Well, not long after this, the play was banned, and not much later, the worst fears of Louis were realised when the people of Paris and France rose up against those ancient feudal claims of the aristos, and the Bastille fell to the Paris mob on 14 July 1789.

Mozart depended on patronage, but he was no admirer of the aristocracy’s claims to hold people down.  He wrote two operas in which an aristo asserts rights over a bride.  They are his two most popular operas and many would say that they are the two greatest operas ever written.  But they are so different.

The Marriage of Figaro was first performed in 1786, just three years before the fall of the Bastille.  Mozart and da Ponte had a lot of trouble getting the work cleared for the stage.  They left out the purple part above.  The Count has designs on the wife-to-be of Figaro.  He is thwarted in scenes of high comedy.  But the pain suffered by the Countess, his wife, balances the whole opera.  She has two arias Porgi, amor and Dove sono, that have an elegiac wistfulness that reminds us that people get hurt by breaches of trust, and that for that matter most jokes involve someone getting hurt.  In the end the Count pleads Contessa, perdono, and she does, and the music of the reconciliation can make your hair stand up on the back of your neck – and it drove poor Salieri mad in Amadeus.

Don Giovanni, which was first produced in 1787, is altogether different.  The hero is a serial seducer and abuser of power, a totally amoral person, whose real evil is that he remains a source of fascination even to his victims.  He starts with an attempted rape and a cold blooded murder, and he never looks back or shows any regret.  He does not repent and he literally goes to blazes before our eyes.  That end was stated in the first chord of the opera, which one learned critic called ‘the most magically evocative chord in the history of music.’

In perhaps the most perfectly integrated opera ever made, you hardly get the tone of Porgi, amor or Dove sono.  The emotional or sexual balance comes from the peasant bride Zerlina who has her own brand of seduction which she airs in two of the best songs of the show.  She is in my view pivotal to the drama, to use a footy term, because she is the only woman to defy Don Giovanni, and who displays her own wares to effect.

Both of these operas balance heavy and light.  The dramatic satisfaction comes when the balance is right.  At the end of the first, you have the reconciliation; at the second, you watch a bad man go down swinging, unbroken by the system.

There may be some tenderness at the moment with the second.  This is not the best time in the history of this nation, or any other English speaking nation, to be making gags about people who abuse their position of trust to get sex.  And make no mistake – this man does just that knowing that he will likely ruin the person that he abuses.  He personifies the arbitrary cruelty of the old regime, like a spider with flies.  When Zerlina protests that she is about to be married, Giovanni says that it would be absurd to think that a noble like him could leave a jewel like her to that stupid peasant.  There is not one iota of moral difference whether he gets his way by force or deceit – he is a master of cruelty, and his real evil lies in the apparent magic of his power.  Don Giovanni lives for conquest and thrives on conflict.  There is a bit of Napoleon and Hitler in him as there is in all of us.  Are we happy to laugh all this off?

Some of these doubts crossed my mind as I watched the solid performance by the AO.  There is nothing to laugh at about rape.  There is nothing funny about a person abusing trust for a moment of sensual pleasure that may blast for the victim forever.  But this opera is not a lecture in ethics; it is not even a morality tale; it is a work of art, an opera, and people who want to spell out some kind of ‘moral’ from works of genius like those of Shakespeare or Mozart might have more tickets on themselves than is handy.  And it may not be such a bad thing to be reminded by a German – or someone from Austria if you prefer – of the danger of surrendering yourself to a cruel egomaniac of magnetic and seductive charm.

The AO production was well set and costumed.  The lead has matured to give up that Zorro look, which is good.  Neither female lead brought the house down, but after all, Donna Anna is a bit of a pain and Donna Elvira is a bit of a dill.  The rest of the cast were solid, and poor Don Ottavio gets two good songs and sustained frustration capped off with a further sentence of twelve months’ chastity at the end.  Just how much sexiness you want in this show is a matter of taste, although one member of the chorus seemed intent on a pelvic knee-trembler on one leg which may have given her father pause if he were in the house at the time.

My favourite part of this opera is a little trio near the end of Act 1.  It is for a tenor and two sopranos.  (One of my recordings has Schwarzkopf and Sutherland.)  It is just a short link that you will miss on most highlights discs, but it is one of those moments when prodigal genius leads to a shell-burst of magic.  I think Mendelsshon thought that it was the most beautiful music that he had heard.  I thought that it was done just right in Melbourne, by the singers in their gowns and masks to remind us of the link to commedia dell’arte.  That alone warranted the outlay on the ticket.

The AO are doing Figaro as well later this year, and you be a mug not to catch at least one of them.  They are among the title deeds of our civilisation.

There are countless recordings and films of both.  I mention just two DVD versions of Don Giovanni.  One comes from the Met in 2002 with James Levine, Bryn Terfel and Renee Fleming.  It has a traditional Zeffirelli setting.  The other comes from Salzburg in 2006.  It is directed in current garb on an ultra-modern revolving stage by Martin Kusej who is I gather as averse to shocking people as our Barry Kosky.  You get the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Harding, and Thomas Hampson and Christine Schafer.

Both productions, ultra-orthodox and ultra-unorthodox, are stunning and just about flawless.  If I had to pick, I might go for Salzburg, since you cannot trump that band on Mozart, and Mr Hampson is impressively revolting in the lead, although a young woman of Asian extraction nearly steals the show as Zerlina at the Met.  The Salzburg production is not for everyone.  It will alarm traditionalists, but like or love it, you will not forget it – especially the cemetery and dinner scene at the end.  The stone guest is one of the great moments of our theatre, and this version is up to it for me.

I have a soft spot for this piece because it was the first opera I took my girls to and I was a little surprised that they were still awake when the statue of the Commendatore moved.

When Tchaikovsky got his hands on the score of Don Giovanni, he said that he was in the presence of God.  Flaubert said that God had made three things – the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.  You would have to have balls or a lot of Brownie points to say something like that.  No wonder that poor old Salieri just went crackers.

Verdi and Monaco

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The music of Don Carlos is pure Verdi.  Sadly, the plot is as ratty as that of Il Trovatore.  There are two love triangles, which is one too many, and every now and then some bastard pops up and asks ‘What about the Belgians?’, and we get a close run contest between an ugly king and an uglier inquisitor.  The basses generate high drama and the tenor and baritone have a duet that is matched in popularity only by that from the Pearl Fishers.  Any number of footy drunks have well-worn recordings of the late great Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill doing both that they put on to drown their grief at another kicking.  But Don Carlos has a lot more throughout its very great length.

The current AO job is sound.  The principals have the necessary fire power but even they got drowned once or twice by an orchestra that reminded me of Charlotte Corday after she had stabbed that rotter Marat: ‘I have always been a republican and I have never lacked energy.’  It was a very good show, but this might be one of those operas that some are happier with on disc at home – preferably without the aggravation of seeing your team get hammered again beforehand.

I went home after the matinee to watch the practice runs of the Monaco Grand Prix.  What do opera and F1 have in common?  At least three things.  They are both in the entertainment business, and they both like to see themselves as high-end, although the opera houses do not emphasise that too much when they have their hands are out for public money.  They are both hugely expensive, full of history, mystique and bullshit, all dotty over the latest technology, and claiming very great and high patronage – but in the end some dude has to get out there and lay their courage, talent, training, and self on the line – and it can get very ugly if they bugger it up.  (This is the part I like about both – I admire the courage, the moral or intellectual courage, as much as anything else.)  And they both have limited repertoires.  If you took out the top four of Mozart, Verdi and Puccini, the rest get a limited run, and we are just not making it any more (a problem we do not have with theatre or literature).  The competition in F1 is far too restricted, at the moment life threateningly so.  If Ford, BMW and Toyota cannot go the distance, who can?

One big difference is that F1 like any sport is unpredictable.  The manageable variables are fuel, tyres and brakes.  They make a Grand Prix like a chess game played at 300kph.  The two jokers in the pack are the weather – God, I like it when it rains – and driver error or engine failure.  Either can knock out a blameless driver, or lead to the safety car coming out – which can reconfigure the whole race.

On Sunday, everything was going to plan for the too dominant Mercedes team with their drivers at 1 and 2.  The commentators were just saying that everything might change if the safety car came out when a brilliant seventeen year-old driver got just a fraction too ambitious in overtaking, touched wheels, and crashed into the barrier head-on at sickening heart-stopping speed.  He was OK but the safety car came out, and Mercedes called in their number 1 to pit.  This commonly happens, and they wanted him on fresh tires for the remainder of the race.  But they did not have to bring him in, and they were horrified to see him come back out at number 3.  They had cost the world champion the race.

It would be unfair to call this hubris on the part of the current ruler of the paddock.  But they had forgotten my version of Occam’s razor.  If you have simple solution, don’t buggerize around trying to find that is more refined or elegant.  That just does not make sense.  And Mercedes instantly confessed their error and apologised – both team bosses did so immediately.  They said that there were too many people with too many opinions and that as a result there had been a simple failure of management.  And I instantly knew just what they were talking about.  I see it so often in rooms full of lawyers.

Now, if you got a cock-up like that at the opera, you would want your money back.  But in that kind of entertainment that used to be called sport, the human drama is all part of the show, and I am glad that we don’t always run like clockwork.