Opera League Seminar: Puccini

Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was born in 1858, which makes this year his sesquicentennial (I don't get to use that word nearly enough). To mark the occasion, Los Angeles Opera is staging four Puccini operas throughout the year. The first two will be the final two of the 2007-2008 season: Tosca this month, followed by La Rondine in June. The next two will kick off the 2008-09 season in the fall: Il Trittico and Madama Butterfly. That Madama Butterfly, man. This'll be the third time L.A. Opera's staged that sucker in the last five years. I saw it those first two times and I suppose I'll see it again. Even if you don't know or don't care much for opera, you can't go wrong with Puccini. The man's music is gorgeous, especially the music from Butterfly, as well as Tosca and La boheme. The latter was just on the L.A. Opera stage last fall. Like Butterfly, they throw it up there every couple years. Also like Butterfly, La boheme as well as Tosca are not only considered Puccini's masterworks, but are also considered staples of the operatic repertoire. In other words, if you can only see one opera in your whole life, any of those would be a terrific choice.

I like how, for the four they picked, they balanced it out with two of his very well-known works with two lesser known pieces. Puccini composed both La Rondine and Il Trittico when he was in his late fifties, well past his prime. As for the trio of masterworks, he churned those out in his late thirties and early forties. He completed Il Trittico the year he turned sixty, and that was the last opera he completed. He started another piece called Turandot but wasn't able to finish it before succumbing to throat cancer a month shy of sixty-five. Our man Giacomo was a chain cigar smoker. It should be noted, though, that his not finishing Turandot didn't stop others from finishing it for him. A younger Italian composer named Franco Alfano wrote the last bit. Turandot had its big premiere a year and a half after Puccini's death. Here's one interesting tidbit. Puccini's handwriting was so God-awful that poor Franco, when reading it over to decide how to conclude it, had to use a magnifying glass. He did so much damage to his right eye that once Turandot was finished, dude was practically blind in that eye. But not permanently. He had to spend something like three months indoors with as little lighting as possible. We've all heard about suffering for your art, but suffering for someone else's art?

Now about Il Trittico (Italian for The Triptych), it's actually not one opera but a trio of one-act pieces shown consecutively. The first is called Il tabarro (The Cloak), about a love triangle that turns bloody. Then you've got Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), about a cloistered nun hiding a pretty important secret. That one also ends on a kind of downer note. And finally, to lighten things up before you head out for your post-opera dinner, is the romantic comedy Gianni Schicchi. That has a pretty famous aria called "O mio babbino caro" ("Oh, my dear daddy"). For the L.A. Opera production this September, William Friedkin will direct the first two. Have you heard of him? He's primarily a film director whose career blasted off on a tailfire of pea soup in the early seventies with The Exorcist. He's actually directed stuff for L.A. Opera before, but the man directing Gianni Schicchi is a first-timer when it comes to opera. That piece will mark the opera debut of none other than Woody Allen. Yes, that Woody Allen. Should be interesting, no?

Here's how today's Opera League seminar worked. It took place at a part of the opera house I'd never been before: the fifth floor. The first four floors are all seating for the auditorium. I've been on most of those. In fact, speaking of Puccini, the one and only time I was cheap enough to get a fourth-level seat was to see Turandot in June of 2002. That sucked. Not the opera, the seat. I'll never do that again. You're literally looking straight down at the stage from a mountaintop. You can't see much beyond the stage's front third, so that at times a bunch of action is going on out of sight. Since then, my seat has almost always been in the orchestra ring.

The fifth floor features a bunch of offices and meeting rooms, as well as a huge banquet hall overlooking the Music Center plaza. The banquet hall is where today's event took place. From 9:30 a.m. until around 10, the 80 or so League members who showed up were afforded a pretty nice breakfast spread: cereal, fruit, bagels, pastries, and mucho coffee, which I desperately needed. Seriously. No sooner did I walk in and hand the guy my ticket than I made a B line for the caffeine. You have to understand that to get up early enough on a Saturday morning so that I can get downtown by 9:30 in the a.m. is something I'm simply not accustomed to. While slurping down the hot black stuff, I got to know a couple of the bigwigs on the Opera League board. First I chatted up League treasurer Edmund Shaff, a big rotund guy in his sixties with teeth and a voice stained with nicotine. Ed was quite the jovial chap. He laughed a lot and seemed thrilled to be talking to an Opera Leaguer under fifty. "Get involved!" he said. Uh, excuse me? Aren't I here giving up the first half of my Saturday? What Ed really meant, though, was that I should take advantage of all the League's volunteer opportunities. I assured him that, yes, I filled out the volunteer form that came with my welcome package back in March. Among the things I said I'd do was chauffeur opera stars to and from LAX and their hotel. No joke, that was listed as one of the opportunities. I can't wait to see if they take me up on that.

I also met this gal called Millard, Brita Millard. Always smiling like Ed, while gazing at me through those specs that are thicker than the White House columns, ol' Brita is one of the directors on the Opera League board. Her German accent gave her away in about five seconds. Having studied German for many years and having been over there a couple times, I couldn't resist asking her where exactly she was from. Brita's from Salzburg and immigrated to the States in '89. When she was still living there, she helped run the Mozart Festival every year, an event I'm frothing at the mouth to go to for obvious reasons. I related to her my brief but awesome visit to Salzburg in the summer of '99. I'd been too late for the Festival, but I did get to see the house Mozart grew up in. Just to show you how minuscule our world really is, Brita was a volunteer at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA two weeks ago (she works at UCLA during the week). She was one of the ticket takers and ushers at Moore 100, the venue I was at for the Future of News panel. The gal was probably the one who scanned my ticket for Pete's sake. And now here we were, conversing on the top floor of the Dorothy Chandler about what a cool place Salzburg is.

It was around 10 or so that we all took our seats for the first part of the seminar, a lecture by Michael Hackett. Mike's a fiftysomething guy with snow-white hair whose bread and butter job is professor of theater at UCLA. I've seen him before as one of the guys who gives pre-performance lectures in the mezzanine lobby one hour before the opera starts. On this morning he spent about an hour and fifteen minutes anatomizing Tosca. Before I get to the stuff he talked about, let me give you the gist of what Tosca is about.

It's set in Rome during the summer of 1800. The main character is, you guessed it, a gal called Tosca, Floria Tosca. She's a very famous singer. Her boyfriend is this painter named Mario Cavaradossi (please say that extremely fast five times before reading on). Mario's life gets complicated right off the bat for a couple reasons. First, when he paints, he uses models. Tosca doesn't dig that. To call her the jealous type doesn't do justice to her volcanic temper. And then you've got this guy called Angelotti, an old pal of Mario's who's just escaped from jail. Mario agrees to let Angelotti hide out at his villa, an act which invites the attention of Rome's police chief, a flaming prick called Scarpia. His tracking Angelotti is actually second fiddle to his goal of wooing Tosca. He doesn't just fancy Tosca. Dude's head over heels in love with the diva. He'll do anything--and I mean anything--to get her in the sack. All of this is established in act one.

Act two is nothing less than action packed. Scarpia's men apprehend Mario and bring him to Scarpia's place just as the prick is sitting down to dinner. Scarpia asks him where he's hiding Angelotti, but of course Mario won't give in that easily. And so Scarpia's men take him away and torture him. Tosca arrives per Scarpia's invite. They have supper while Mario can be heard screaming in utter agony in the next room. Tosca's obviously beside herself and wants to know the score. Scarpia's like, "If Mario doesn't spill the beans, he's a goner." Mario never does, but it becomes a moot point. When Scarpia's men corner Angelotti back at Mario's villa, the dude kills himself. Scarpia then arranges for Mario to be executed. Tosca's like, "Oh come on, man! Just let Mario and me leave the country, and everything'll be cool." And then Scarpia goes, "If you let me rape you, you and your boyfriend can take off." Tosca finally agrees. Scarpia says he'll arrange for a mock execution for Mario. Just as he's approaching Tosca to rip her dress off, she whips out this dagger and stabs him to death.

And now we arrive at the third and final act. We're on the roof of the local prison, the Castel Sant’Angelo. Mario's waiting to die. He doesn't know about any mock execution. Tosca shows up with the letter Scarpia signed saying the execution's a phony. She's accompanied by some of Scarpia's pals, who don't know he's dead. They go through the whole execution thing with the firing squad. Here's the thing, though. It's real. Scarpia never meant to spare Mario. So Mario gets blown away. Tosca, once again, is beside herself. Just then, some cops come in and tell the others that Tosca killed their boss. When they try to apprehend her, she says "Screw it!", runs up to the top of the parapet, jumps off and dies. The end. Cheerful, eh? Take my word for it, though: The music is awesome. When I see it over Memorial Day weekend this year, it'll be my second time. You can appreciate the music that much more if you go in already knowing the plot.

Tosca premiered in January 1900, about a month after Puccini turned forty-one. It was an instant hit. The opera was adapted from a French play from 1887 called La Tosca by Victorien Sardou (operas, like movies, are either original stories or adaptations). Puccini saw it when it first came to Milan and wanted to adapt it into an opera immediately. Sardou, however, sold the rights to some other composer. After a few years, this composer decided he could do nothing with it, so the rights reverted to Sardou. By this time Puccini had lost interest. It took none other than Giuseppe Verdi, another Italian musical giant, to convince Puccini to do it. At this point Puccini was knee deep in La boheme. Once that was in the can, he set to work on Tosca. So you see? Again, just like movies today, it could take forever and a day to get an opera off the ground.

To warm us up to Puccini, Mike played this radio recording from 1907, when Puccini was paying a visit to New York. Puccini said a bunch of stuff in Italian, in the middle of which he said in English, "America forever!"

Mike had some interesting stuff to say about the piece. From my point of view as a film buff, he started with a terrific hook: Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. He said that Rome wasn't just a setting, it was another character. Trying to imagine Tosca without Rome is like trying to imagine North by Northwest without Mount Rushmore. Can't be done. The reason for this is the opera's religious subtext. Rome, as we all know, is a city with a history as layered and complex as they come. This includes a pre-Christian history. Specifically, the opera's constant tug-of-war raging beneath the surface involves Dionysus (also known as Bacchus, the god of wine and fertility) versus Apollo (god of light, healing, music, poetry). In other words, it's partying and having fun versus rigid formality. What with Rome being home to Vatican City, part of this history has to do with the Pope putting the kibosh on anything bacchanalian. Mike mentioned this one Pope--I think his name was Gregory--who prohibited anyone and everyone in his domain from playing wind instruments. Apparently wind instruments symbolize Dionysus. As for the opera, you've got Mario, who we first see painting a portrait of Mary Magdalene. And then you've got Tosca, who's got a penchant for wearing red (a Dionysian color) and drinking wine. And of course Tosca and Mario seem destined to have children together, what with fertility being another big Dionysian theme. Who screws it up? That asshole Scarpia, the rigid Roman police chief.

Mike said that paintings of Christ can usually be described in Apollonian versus Dionysian terms. The vast majority of them tend to be Apollonian. That is, very formal and clean, with Christ on the Cross looking very thin and frail in his usual crucified pose. Once in a while, though, someone comes along and does a more Dionysian portrait of Christ. Mike's prime example of that was the painting The Entombment by Peter Paul Rubens, a Flemish painter of the Baroque style from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It shows Christ after the Crucifixion. He's being carried into the tomb by his mom Mary as well as John the Evangelist, who's decked out in a brilliant red robe (there's that color red again). In this one, Christ isn't skinny or frail at all. He's actually quite toned. And the wound in his abdomen, per Mike, looks like a vagina-shaped slit. I never would've thought that had Mike not pointed that out, but now that he mentions it, it does. And it's also in the dead center of the painting.

So anyway, the Dionysian versus the Apollonian: This is the struggle going on under the surface. Tosca shows that pre-Christian religion was still extant in nineteenth century Rome. Mike even went so far as to say that he doesn't buy that Tosca's death at the end is the end of her. Instead, the way Puccini sets it up, you never really see her body. She jumps off the rampart, but then what? Mike said something like she passes into the eternal, which I think means she goes to Heaven and lives happily ever after in the afterlife. He even said that the wound on Christ in The Entombment could be understood to be the opening to the eternal. I don't know, that seems a bit of a stretch, but he was very sincere in that interpretation.

Another thing he talked about was torture and its distortion of reality. If you recall, act two features Scarpia forcing Tosca to have dinner with him while they (and we) listen to Mario being tortured next door. As part of his lecture preparation, Mike looked up the definition of torture on both Wikipedia and Amnesty International. In both cases, torture is described as the eroding away of your higher senses, so that your sense of reality is distorted. Since the torturing of Mario is happening as the result of orders from Scarpia, a significant agent of the police state, Mike said that Puccini's implication was that not just torture, but a police state as a whole, can distort reality. Remember that this opera takes place in 1800, when Napoleon was doing his thing. Also remember that Puccini wrote this circa 1900. It wasn't long until fascism reared its ugly head.

After talking about all the thematic stuff, Mike then talked about some of the performance history. Going back to the original play of 1887, he said the first person to play Tosca was none other than French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Sarah was perhaps the most famous actress of her day, starring in productions all over the world. As her career progressed, she took on roles that were less vocal and more conducive to miming. Sometimes she'd drive audiences crazy by having her back to them while making gestures or what have you. That's why La Tosca was up her alley. There's that scene in act two where Tosca goes for the knife to stab Scarpia. Mike said that kind of drawn-out sequence is perfect for someone who's more into physical performance. Tosca slowly makes her furtive way to the knife while Scarpia drones on about raping her. One interesting tidbit about Sarah as Tosca. Even after the opera came out, the original play continued to tour widely. In 1905, when Sarah was sixty-one, she traveled with a production of La Tosca to Rio. When she jumped off the rampart at the end, she injured her leg. Talk about a nagging injury, after ten years gangrene set in and she had to have the leg amputated.

One more performer Mike talked about in connection with Tosca was someone from the 20th century whom he got to see on stage. Chap's name was Corelli, Franco Corelli. He was an Italian tenor whose heydey was the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. He passed away in 2003. Mike was only twenty-one when he first saw Franco on stage. At first he didn't like him at all. His singing style rubbed Mike the wrong way. He thought Franco was trying too hard to force the emotion or something. It was only much later when Mike discovered that Franco, despite his fame and stature in the opera world, suffered from a stage fright that was no less than paralyzing. He'd sweat so many buckets before a production that he'd have to swab his pits and, yes, his crotch, before going on. After he learned that, combined with the fact that he slowly but surely got used to Franco's performing style anyway (Franco was hard to avoid if you were an opera regular back then), he became one of Franco's biggest fans. For Tosca, Franco usually played Mario. He also did other Puccini stuff, such as Turandot. Oh, and he even played Mario in a film adaptation of Tosca back in the fifties.

And that was pretty much all Mike had to say. It was a quarter past eleven by now. We were given a fifteen-minute breather to relieve the ol' bladder as well as nibble a bit more on our way to getting coffee refills. At 11:30 or so a guy about Mike's age came on stage. This guy's name was Allan Edmiston. His official role is moderator for Opera League events. His day job is associate clinical professor of cardiology at USC. When he's bored, he serves on the leadership committee of the Wagner Society of Southern California. Man, before today, I had no idea there was a friggin' Wagner Society. Suffice it to say Allan loves his opera.

He was joined on the stage by a very elegant and well-dressed elderly gal named Victoria "Vicky" Hillebrand. When I say elderly, I mean she's ninety-six. She'll turn ninety-seven in August, God bless 'er. A long-time L.A. Opera patron, Vick was here this morning to talk about her former boss, an American opera star named Dorothy Kirsten. Dorothy, a New Jersey native, was a contemporary of Franco Corelli. Born a year before Vicky, Dorothy passed away at age eighty-two around Thanksgiving of '92. If you were around in the fifties and sixties, even if you didn't like opera, she was a hard name to avoid. Just like today, even if you're not into the whole opera thing, you may recognize names like Luciano Pavarotti or Placido Domingo. Well, right. Dorothy was of that stature. Our gal Vicky began working for her in 1950, and soon enough they became fast friends. Vicky stuck with her to the end.

And so this morning from 11:30 until a little past 12:30, Allan basically interviewed Vicky on what life was like with Ms. Kirsten. Honoring Dorothy Kirsten was especially apropos at this seminar because she made a name for herself doing tons of Puccini stuff. For instance, when she made her debut at the Met at age thirty-five, it was to play Mimi in La boheme. And the role she performed the most throughout her career? The title character in Madama Butterfly, which she performed at the Met some 280 times. And yes, she did Tosca quite a bit. Here's an interesting tidbit. Her final performance at the Met was Tosca. It was on December 31, 1976. The conductor for that performance was a little-known twenty-nine-year-old named James Conlon...who today just happens to be the resident conductor for L.A. Opera. James is a kool kat. He's a little guy who's always wearing a tux with long coattails. Sometimes he makes an appearance at the pre-performance lectures, where the guest lecturer (e.g. Michael Hackett) will interview him about the piece that's about to be staged. He's a great interviewee because his answers are both very detailed and delivered in plain language so that any opera virgins in the audience won't be too intimidated. Anyway, so James was only twenty-nine, and he was the one to conduct Dorothy's final opera. Dorothy also performed with Placido Domingo when that guy was much younger and just starting out. Placido, by the way, besides being a world-famous singer himself now, also serves as L.A. Opera's general director. So look at that. Dorothy Kirsten's connections to my fair city's resident opera company are manifold.

One thing Vicky wanted to be sure to point out early on was that Dorothy was quite the versatile singer. Besides opera, she dabbled in pop tunes. She did stuff with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Nelson Eddy, and Perry Como. Vicky played us a radio recording of a duet Dorothy did with Ol' Blue Eyes. In fact, Frank gave a pendant to Dorothy with his name engraved in it. After Dorothy passed away, Vicky inherited it. She was wearing it at the seminar this morning. That's kind of, I dunno, amazing maybe?

Vicky also brought some DVDs showing Dorothy doing her thing. The first one was this talk show appearance she made in the seventies. The host asked her if she'd sing an aria for everyone. So Dorothy, dressed in a conservative sort a woman's suit, stood up in front of the audience and belted out this gorgeous aria from one of Puccini's masterworks. I think it was from Madama Butterfly. Anyway, amazing. Gal was in her sixties, mind you, and she just got up and melted your heart as if she were a diva in her prime. Two other clips Vicky showed us were from the Ed Sullivan Show. One had Dorothy and Franco Corelli doing a duet from Tosca, with Franco as Mario and Dorothy as you-know-who. It was gorgeous really. Vicky told us that even though Dorothy and Franco were both five-five, for that Ed Sullivan appearance Franco was standing on a platform so that he'd look tall and strapping next to his leading lady. The other Ed Sullivan clip featured Dorothy and this other gal singing a bit from Madama Butterfly. Whereas the set for the clip with Franco was spare, for Butterfly the set was done full out as if it were a real performance. And Dorothy and the other gal were decked out in their costumes and make-up and could easily've passed for Japanese. Dorothy was unrecognizable. These clips were well chosen, as they demonstrated in spades just what this woman was capable of.

Indeed, she even made a pair of Hollywood movies, both in the early fifties just as Vicky started working for her: Mr. Music and The Great Caruso. Speaking of Hollywood, guess who Dorothy's costume designer was for all her operas? Edith Head. That name ring a bell? Edith is the most legendary costume designer, like, ever. She worked in theater and opera as well as movies. Get this: Edith scored so many Oscars for costume designing that, to this day, no other woman has racked up as many trophies. In any category. This was the woman who dressed Dorothy.

One piece of trivia Vicky shared about Dorothy's personality was that she was positively terrified of flying, which of course explains why she wasn't big on touring. The thing about opera is, if you want to make it as a singer, you can forget about putting down stakes anywhere. Seriously, if you ever go to an opera, flip through the program and check out the performers' credits. It's quite common to see that they've performed at places like Tokyo, San Francisco, New Mexico, London, Munich, Milan, Paris. No kidding, and all in the same one- or two-year span sometimes. Well, that eventually didn't work for Dorothy. In her early fifties she did a three-city tour in the Soviet Union (Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga) playing the role of Violetta in Verdi's La traviata. Besides the fact that it was unbelievably cold (Vicky said it was below freezing pretty much the whole time), it meant a ton of flying. When Dorothy got back to the States after that, she was like, "No more."

And that about did it for today's Puccini seminar. It was quite a full morning as you can see. And definitely a fulfilling one. This was only my second seminar since becoming an Opera Leaguer, and already I've learned a ton. The free food hasn't hurt either.

Here some photos I snapped with the ol' cell camera. In the first one, that woman in green is Opera League President Dorothy Wait.