Opera League Seminar: La Traviata and The Birds

Today I attended an Opera League seminar on two of LA Opera's upcoming productions: La Traviata and The Birds. It was a beautiful spring day today, perfect for taking a jaunt downtown to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

I forget the guy's name who delivered the La Traviata lecture. He was a distinguished middle-aged gentleman with a walrus mustache and hair receding in front while long, curly, and graying in the back. The focus of his lecture was Violetta, La Traviata's lead female character.

If you're not an opera person, you should know that La Traviata is definitely one of the greats, and that's mainly because it was composed by one of the greatest opera composers ever: Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). He did this one right in the middle of his career, when he was forty or so. It premiered in Venice on March 6, 1853. At this point Verdi had already done Rigoletto but was still years away from his final four operas: Don Carlos, Aida, Otello, and Falstaff.

In English La Traviata literally means The Woman Who Strayed, and that pretty much sums up Violetta. Well, of course it's a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, Violetta is based on a real person. The opera in general is kinda sorta based on a true story. The lecturer expounded on that before talking about the Violetta character.

So here's the scoop. La Traviata was adapted from the novel La Dame aux camelias (The Lady of the Camellias). It was written in 1848 by Alexandre Dumas, fils. Does that name sound familiar? Yes, same as the guy who wrote The Three Musketeers. Only it's not the same guy. It's his son. That's what fils means. In English we'd call him Alex Jr. So Alex Jr., right? He was the son of a very famous author, but that by no means meant he had a dime to his name. Alex was mainly a playwright. He only wrote a couple novels, and La Dame was his first. He wrote it when he was in his early twenties. Like a lot of first novels, it was very autobiographical. A few years earlier, when he was twenty or twenty-one or so, he had an affair with this gal named Marie Duplessis. She died of TB in 1847 at the age of twenty-three. Alex was heartbroken. Mind you, Marie got around. She was known as the mistress of more than a few rich guys, but apparently her feelings for Alex were genuine. They must've been because, like I said, he was hardly rich. After she died, Alex felt compelled to write a romantic novel inspired by her. In the novel she's called Marguerite Gautier. That's also what she was called when Alex adapted the novel into a play four years later. In the U.S. the play was titled simply Camille. It was a smash. Alex's money problems were over.

One of the people who saw the play in Paris was this forty-year-old Italian composer named--you guessed it--Giuseppe Verdi. He fell for it and immediately set out to adapt it into an opera. I don't know why he changed the lead female's name from Marguerite Gautier to Violetta Valery, but there you have it. And the Alex Jr. character is now called Alfredo. Did I mention this is an Italian opera? Oh yeah.

After the March 6, 1853 premiere, Verdi's review was: "Fiasco! Fiasco! Fiasco!" The gist of his beef was that he wanted his opera to be set in the present day, but the theater management wanted it to take place circa 1700, complete with the wigs and attire of that time. Apparently this meant they didn't have to have female characters who were courtesans. Management didn't think audiences would like that. They also didn't think audiences would want to see an opera with characters wearing present-day attire. Weird, huh? Although come to think of it, if I were to go see an opera that took place today, it would take some getting used to. Funny, huh? How, then as now, we associate opera with the distant past? At any rate, Verdi eventually used his own money to stage it his way. His version had its premiere fourteen months to the day after the original premiere: May 6, 1854. And the rest, as they say...

The lecturer's main point in talking about Violetta was how prismatic a role it is. In other words, it has so many dimensions that it's very difficult for any one singer to nail it in its entirety. Maria Callas made this role famous because she had all the facets down pat, but she's an exception. Violetta is one of those roles that's ripe for a singer's personal stamp. The lecturer said the only other operatic role he knew of that offered as much range was the title character from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The first act of La Traviata is all coloratura. Vocal fireworks, in other words. The lecturer played a recording of someone singing an act one song in 1907, all of six years after Verdi's death. The singer was Dame Nellie Melba. That name didn't mean anything to me, but apparently Nellie is quite the opera legend. I first deduced that from the "ohs" and "ahs" coming from many of my fellow attendees when he said her name. Nellie was the first Australian opera singer to achieve international success. She and English theater actress May Whitty were the first two entertainers to be given the Dame title. And get this, if you're ever in Australia, check out their $100 bill. That's Nellie's face on it. Cool, huh? The lecturer also mentioned that she was quite large and had something like twenty different entrees named after her, including one called Peach Melba. There's a statue of her in Melbourne, where she lived. After he played the recording, he said that she was riffing this particular scene, the way we think of jazz musicians riffing. He specifically called her the Duke Ellington of opera singers, although the Duke didn't come along until some decades later. He said that singers who did this were either showing off their voice and/or expressing something innate about the character. In this recording it was all about the former.

The second recording he played was a 1972 version of the same aria sung by another famous Australian soprano, Joan Sutherland of Sydney. He said that she couldn't handle the Italian well at all. "No grace with the language," he said. Now that might be because she was an Australian born to Scottish immigrant parents. You talk about a confusion of Anglo accents. He said that even if you're fluent in Italian, which he is, it's impossible to understand her, whereas someone like Pavarotti was perfectly understandable. To which I say of course he would be, seeing as how he was a native. The lecturer also pointed out that Joan went one octave higher than Nellie. The conductor in this version was Joan's husband, Richard Bonney.

Whereas act one is all about the vocal fireworks of coloratura, act two is more subdued. What happens is, Alfredo's dad Giorgio wants his writer son to break up with Violetta because Alfredo's sister is getting married, and the last thing they need is some scandal. The lecturer played the third song in this act, which is when Giorgio, played by a baritone, voices this concern. Violetta is also in this scene. He told us to pay attention to how the orchestration simulates a heartbeat when Violetta sings. And here we start getting to his point about how Violetta is multifaceted. The Violetta of act two is diametrically opposed to the fireworks gal from the first act. The soprano playing Violetta in this recording was an Italian named Renata Scotto. Her big strength was the Violetta of act two. As for act one, the lecturer said she was decent but couldn't compare to Nellie or Joan.

Like many great Italian operas, La Traviata is a downer. Just as Marie Duplessis died of TB in real life, so does Violetta in the opera. This struck a raw nerve with Verdi when he first saw the play in Paris. A little over ten years earlier, when he was in his late twenties, his wife and two infant children died of typhus in an eighteen-month span.

In act two Violetta caves in to Giorgio's demands and dumps Alfredo, who of course is shocked and chagrined. The lecturer played the next song in act two, in which Violetta reads a letter from Giorgio. In it he's basically apologizing for Alfredo's scathing reaction to her breaking up with him. Giorgio wants Violetta to know that he respects her for the sacrifice she's made for his family's reputation. At this point Violetta's pretty sick. The lecturer said this recording is the best of this particular scene. I can't remember the name of the soprano, but apparently she was so big that during a production of La Traviata in Barcelona, she broke the bed on stage. Damn. Her singing is top notch, though. He said that the way she says in Italian, "It's too late," barely above a whisper, is flawless. These days sopranos have a tendency to shout that line even though, in reality, no one racked with TB would have the strength to talk loud, let alone shout.

He skipped ahead to the sixth piece from act two. Alfredo is now very contrite, partly because Violetta's on the verge of death, in "Chapter 11" as the man said. This recording was done live in front of an audience at the Salzburg Festival and is the only live recording of this scene. The soprano in this one was a Russian named Anna Netrebko. She's the only Violetta we got to hear who's actually current. She's still in her thirties and still very much at the peak of her powers. TIME put her on its 100 Best list in 2007.

As for the death scene, the lecturer said it actually has a basis in medicine. Again, Verdi's personal tragedy meant he knew a thing or two about this condition. In Verdi's day it was documented that when someone died of TB or typhus, they'd get a surge of energy just before expiring.

Our man concluded the lecture by saying there is no single definitive version of Violetta. Today we have plenty of talented sopranos who are very good at it, but usually they're only expert at one particular aspect. It's a role so ripe for interpretation that it makes La Traviata one of those operas that's never the same twice. He said this isn't an opera you can check off your list after you've seen it once. He himself has seen it over a hundred times, and it's always fresh because of how each soprano handles Violetta. "You should have a lifetime relationship with La Traviata," he said.

Okay that does it for that lecture. Now for The Birds. Before this lecture started, Anne Russell Sullivan, who handles artists services for the Opera League, came up to the stage and issued a sort of SOS. The premiere of The Birds is this Saturday (April 11), and they're aiming to make a DVD of the performance. Usually the way it works is, you record two or three performances and choose the best one. Well, LA Opera's only doing four performances of The Birds. As of today, they don't have the three hundred....thousand!....dollars needed to make the recordings. One of the League's angels has already pledged half of the amount if the rest of us can pitch in the other half. Anne didn't sound desperate or anything, but she did make it sound urgent. "Time is running out," she said. I'm afraid they won't be getting my money, but that's just because I don't have any to spare. If I could help, I would, but as of now, my annual League membership fee is pretty much all I can give to the League right now. I hope they pull it off.

And now Michael Hackett, Opera League regular, stepped up to give the lecture. He's middle aged with a big gut and pure white hair but has a youthful countenance and voice that belie his mature years. Before I get into his lecture, let me give you the context of LA Opera's staging this piece. The company's music director, James Conlon, has this ongoing project called Recovered Voices. Every spring, toward the end of the season, he'll put on one opera written by a Jewish composer who was either censored or just plain murdered by the Nazis. The composer of The Birds, Walter Braunfels, survived World War II, but the Nazis made sure his career languished. Since then he's been mostly forgotten. This, of course, is the point of James Conlon's project. He's trying to bring back the forgotten masters whose careers the Nazis ruined.

Michael started with the opera's source material. Like La Traviata, The Birds is an adaptation. Only in this case it's adapted from an Ancient Greek play by Aristophanes (446-386 BCE). If we were curious about Aristophanes after today, he said Wikipedia had a lot of good stuff, high praise from him since he's always wary of Wiki. The flip side of that coin, Michael said, is that there's still a lot about Ancient Greek theater we just don't know. Most of what we know about Aristophanes himself comes from his plays. Back then plays had interludes when the actors would stop acting and address the audience. Aristophanes was eighteen, by the way, when he wrote his first play.

The Birds is a comedy, and back in that time comedy could be even more political than it is now. The tyrant Cleon took Aristophanes to court for libel over one of his works. Seriously! You could do that back then. It took a year to settle the case. Maybe Aristophanes wasn't fazed by that kind of thing. His dad was a playwright. So were his sons.

Aristophanes got to show off his work at two annual festivals: The Festival of Dionysus and the Festival of Lenaia, both of which were held in Athens. Mike went into tons of detail about the Dionysus one. Do you know Dionysus? In Greek mythology he's officially the god of wine. Unofficially he's the god of hardcore partying. Seriously, ask anyone. And Mike told us he's an Eastern god, originally Sheba from India.

The Festival of Dionysus was basically the Olympics of theater. It took place every year in the middle of March. Now when we talk about Greek plays, it isn't what we think of today. Greek theater encompassed everything: Music, poetry, acting, lyricism, writing, you name it. This is where Wagner got his idea for Gesamtkunstwerk, which is literally German for "total artwork." Anyway, at these festivals the chorus was made up of citizens who'd scored their gigs a good eleven months ahead of time. The chorus leader was hand-picked by the mayor. He either had to be wealthy or at least popular enough to attract the wealthy donors. At the Dionysus festival each play was performed only once. So maybe it was tougher than today's Olympics. Back then you only had one chance to prove yourself. And only men could be in the plays, by the way. It was a different time.

Day one of the festival kicked off with a press conference, followed by the reenacting of the coming of Dionysus, and then after that the sacrifice of a goat. That makes me think of something fascinating that Michael said. The word "tragedy" comes from the Ancient Greek for "goat song." Wow, right?

Anyway, on day two of the festival you had all ten tribes of Greece compete in contests for best actor in a comedy, best actor in a tragedy, and so forth. The winners of these contests got to wear gold crowns for a full year. Sound familiar? Gee, I wonder where our Academy Awards come from...

The third, fourth, and fifth days would be devoted to staging the tragedies. You'd have three tragedies per day, and they'd be trilogies, with a common theme or narration uniting them. Each playwright would be expected to do a tragic trilogy, plus a satyr play. You know what a satyr is? The Romans called them fauns. They're basically man-goats. Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia was a satyr. Michael referred to them as "fat little guys with dangling dicks." Ooooookayyyyy. Anyway, a satyr play was a satirical comedy. Satyr gives us the word satire. So each playwright at the Festival of Dionysus would churn out a trilogy of tragedies, and then pen a fourth piece which would satirize those tragedies. Satyr plays would typically have gross scatological humor as well as political humor and ironic commentary on religious themes.

But wait. It's not over yet. The sixth day of the festival would be for the straight comedies. This is where Aristophanes thrived, and it was on this day of a particular festival that he premiered The Birds. Not only would the playwrights have to write a comedy for the sixth day, but they'd be expected to use topical political humor with contemporary real-life characters a la Saturday Night Live. This is where Aristophanes got in trouble with Cleon.

Actors wore masks in those days. They were considered priests of Dionysus. Their power of speech was apparently an endowment from Apollo. Acting was considered a sacred duty. Michael said that with Dionysus and Apollo you had a Jungian union, although of course the Greeks couldn't've thought of it that way.

Aristophanes was a pretty popular guy, but that wasn't always a good thing. Besides The Birds, he wrote this other comedy that was a hit. In it he was basically making fun of Socrates for the way the great philosopher would take young guys on these field trip country sojourns for philosophy lessons or what have you. Eventually and tragically, this play was used as evidence in a trial against Socrates that led to his execution. Suffice it to say Aristophanes felt awful about that.

Okay now let's talk about The Birds. Here's the premise, right? You've got these two guys. Michael called them the Ancient Greek versions of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom from The Producers. Anyway, these two guys are tired of city life in Athens and just want to get away from it all. While traveling through the countryside, they come upon this place called Cloud Coo Coo Land. Yes, that's exactly what it's called, Cloud Coo Coo Land. It's a land populated by a race of birds who are bigger than your average bird. And they can talk too. They're more like bird-human hybrids, I suppose. The leader of the flock is this bird-man named Hoopoe. When they first meet him, Hoopoe's in the middle of molting. He used to be a human named Tarius. That whole backstory was cut out of the opera apparently. Too bad.

Cloud Coo Coo Land seems like a utopia to the two protagonists, but they can see that the bird people have issues. So they make a proposition. They tell Hoopoe that the birds should block the sacrificial smoke coming from the temples on earth so that it won't reach the gods. And while they're at it, they should prevent the gods from congressing with humans. Hoopoe calls forth all of his fellow bird people to relay this proposition. And you've got all kinds of birds here. In the original text of the play Aristophanes was very specific about the different sounds they make. To make a long story short, the birds accept the proposition, but it all goes to shit when one of the two guys usurps control of Cloud Coo Coo Land and becomes a tyrant, even taking Zeus's handmaiden for his wife. The gods are upset, but in the end the two guys win. Walter Braunfels changed that in the opera. At the end of his version, the gods get pissed, especially Zeus of course. He rips shit up. The two guys live but trek back to Athens with their tails twixt their legs.

Michael explained that immigration and naturalization were hot button issues in Greece at that time. Interesting, huh? That's one of the themes Aristophanes was getting at here. Another theme is how humans are shells, dead leaves who've lost not just their connection with nature but their integration with it. This was a big theme in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Another thing about the original play was that it wasn't what we'd think of as a play. As Michael pointed out about Greek plays in general, The Birds provides a juxtaposition of great poetry, music, acting, singing....and a lot of scatological humor. That last ingredient didn't make it into the opera either. Which is fine by me. That kind of humor can get old fast. One example Michael cited was how, at one point in the original play, all of the bird characters turn to the judges in the audience who were responsible for picking the winner of Best Comedy and say that they'll get bird shit rained on them if they don't give the prize to The Birds. They also say that boring theater's a good time to fly up and take a dump on theater.

Let's talk about the German composer who adapted this play into an opera. Walter Braunfels was born in 1882 and hailed from a very musical family. Dad was Jewish, Mom, Christian. Like Mozart, Walter was a piano prodigy when he was six or something, but he wasn't a fan of practicing. When Mom pointed out that Mozart's dad would tie him to a chair to make him practice, Walter would shoot back with, "But Mutti, I don't wanna be like Mozart."

For a while it looked like Walter would be a lawyer. Then things changed, as things are wont to do. In 1902, when he was still studying law, Walter caught a production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Like people his age who saw Star Wars in '77, it changed his life. He dropped out of school and made music his career. On a side note, and speaking of Wagner, one of Walter's dad's side jobs was to translate the Nibelungenlied into modern German. Do you know what that is? It's basically Germany's answer to Beowulf, an ancient epic poem written eons ago in a form of German unrecognizable today. And it was also one of Wagner's main sources for his Ring Cycle.

Not surprisingly, Walter excelled as a practicing composer. Today he's considered one of the big three of early twentieth century European composers, the other two being Franz Schreker and Richard Strauss. Walter started working on The Birds, his third opera, in 1913. And then of course the first World War started, Walter had to fight like everyone else, and the opera was put on hold. He didn't finish it until 1920. Like I said above, he changed the ending. The humans don't win. The gods punish them. Also, whereas the original play features a lot of characters visiting Cloud Coo Coo Land for one reason or another, Walter got rid of all of them except Prometheus, the guy who invented fire. In the opera he apparently shows up at one point to warn the birds not to mess with the sacrificial smoke. As for the two main characters, Walter got rid of their Greek names and renamed them Good Hope and Loyal Friend. Michael said that LA Opera's music director, James Conlon, thought of them as Papageno and Tamino from Mozart's The Magic Flute. In other words, one of them is nice to a fault while the other's a flaming manipulative prick.

The opera opens with the main female bird, Nightingale, singing to the audience and welcoming them to the eco wonderland that is Cloud Coo Coo Land. It's a utopia untouched by humans and all the junk humans build. At this point in the lecture Michael walked over to the windows and pointed north to the hills separating downtown from the Valley. These hills are dotted with houses (overpriced houses at that). Michael was almost sneering when he remarked how those beautiful verdant hills would've made such a great view if not for all that human interference. Well, in Cloud Coo Coo Land you don't have that.

Loyal Friend wants to get away from the city because he's tired of art being compromised to make money. Good Hope, meanwhile, is sick and tired of women being mean to him. The Athens dating scene hasn't been too kind to him apparently. I can relate. L.A.'s dating scene is the worst. Anyway, so art and love are their motivations to get out of Dodge. It's through those two things that Walter Braunfels is channeling the high Romantic era of half a century earlier, when Wagner was doing his thing. And speaking of Wagner, Michael said that Walter was specifically channeling Tristan and Isolde, the opera that changed his life.

Pretty much all of the bird songs survived the adaptation, as do all of the major bird characters like Hoopoe, Nightingale, and Wren. Speaking of Hoopoe, one of his main conflicts is convincing the other bird folks that Good Hope and Loyal Friend are okay, that they won't shoot them out of the sky and make hats out of them and so forth. The two humans have a proposition that might serve the birds' interests. The birds are reluctant but come around. Then, like the play, it all goes to shit. And like I said above, Walter changed the ending so that the gods win. Zeus comes in and kicks the two guys out of Cloud Coo Coo Land, expelling them from Paradise, if you will.

Michael played an excerpt from the beginning of act two. It's nighttime. Good Hope's sound asleep. Nightingale starts singing this gorgeous aria, waking up Good Hope. The entire aria lasts something like a half-hour. You don't see that often in an opera. Judging by the excerpt he played, it does sound exquisite. I'm looking forward to hearing the whole thing. The sad thing here is that, even in the embrace of Nightingale's voice, Good Hope's heart still can't quite beat in unison with nature. While Walter did make some plot changes, the opera is still true to the eco spirit of the play.

Mike also played an excerpt from the final sequence. Something ineffable has struck Good Hope by way of love and art. Zeus kicking him out of Cloud Coo Coo Land is the least of his problems. He realizes the world he's going back to is cruel and won't let his love flourish. He misses Nightingale. Okay, so no one dies, but it's still kind of depressing, huh? Keep in mind, though, that Walter wrote this just before and after World War I, one of the most depressing events in world history, millions upon millions of young men mowed down in the prime of their youth. And for what?

The fact that the Nazis gave Walter Braunfels a hard time goes to show how determined they were to "purify" their race. As I said above, he was half Jewish. And then in the 1920s he converted to Catholicism. What's more, in the 1930s he wrote a lot of music the Nazis actually liked. Still, his father was Jewish, and that was a major strike against him. Plus, he wasn't exactly the biggest fan of the National Socialist party, nor was he shy about making that known, so there you have it. Indeed, being half Jewish and outspoken got a lot of people killed. He, too, could've easily been a goner.

While he may have survived, though, his career was not so lucky. At first things looked hunky-dory. He resumed a gig he'd held before WWII as head of this prestigious music school in Cologne. And he continued making cash on the side as a virtuoso pianist for hire. But his compositions didn't sell so well because they were too religious for the public's taste. He really took his Catholicism to his musical heart, and it never caught on. Worse, his style of music became passé. The new generation of musicians set out to destroy the traditional twelve-tone melody system. Sayonara, Strauss. Combined with the fact that the Nazis had censured all the Jewish arts before the war, Walter was pretty much finished within just a few years of the war's end.

It's funny, you know? Well, not funny. Terrible. When The Birds premiered in 1920, it was a huge success, the way we'd think of a Hollywood blockbuster earning a hundred million dollars its first weekend or something. No exaggeration. Michael gave some statistics about how many performances it had and how it was performed at all the major European opera venues. By the time he passed away in 1954, though, Walter Braunfels was all but forgotten.