HowClef-er!: opinions

Friday, 21 March 2014

Lost in Modernization

Leaving the music history lecture on Wednesday with my friend to go and have a coffee we walked in a sort of stunned silence. My friend broke it first:

“I don’t understand. Why would you pay thousands of dollars on the perfect singers and period instruments, and then do that with the set?”

She was referring to the unfortunate rendition of Rinaldo by G. F. Handel we had just watched. A review written by Peter Wells describes the 2001 DVD's situation as this: “it is currently the convention in the staging of baroque opera to seek historical accuracy in the musical aspects but to juxtapose this with modernity of staging, setting and costume.” But he also notes that no one, not even director, explains why Rinaldo looks like a cross between an accountant and mafia member, nor why the set in Act 1 has wallpaper covered in palms with eyes drawn on them (honestly, whoever thought Pan’s Labyrinth would be a good basis for décor?).

I kid you not, this is an image from it.

Rinaldo was the first original Italian opera to be performed in London, and it goes something like this: Rinaldo is a knight of the first crusade who along with Goffredo (yes, Godfrey) is laying siege to Jerusalem to capture it. Goffredo’s daughter Almerina is with them and she is the love interest of Rinaldo. Armida the sorceress is on the enemies side and sees the only way of winning is to capture Rinaldo, so she goes and steals aforementioned love interest. In turn Rinaldo mounts a rescue mission which ultimately means he is caught in Armida’s trap. Armida then falls in love with him and so he manages to escape after spurning her love. There are a series of battles, the crusaders win, and all live happily ever after (with the surprising inclusion of Armida, who converts to Christianity, which is quite different from the original story).

I would without hesitation describe Handel’s music as sublime. At age 25 when he arrived in England he was writing music scarcely rivaled to this day, hence we still listen to it and have DVD adaptions of it. And considering there are no more castrati today, I would say he would have been pleased with David Daniels' performance in this instance. With eyes shut, it sounded as authentic as any good rendition of Handel. As a piece of advice though, I would recommend to keep your eyes shut.

Somewhere out there, zombie-Handel has his eyes firmly shut.

But this begs the question: Should we be reviving and modernizing things of the past? Is there value in mangling Monteverdi, or shifting Shakespeare? I would say yes, though this causes greater difficulty in operas than plays.

For heaven’s sake, maintain your form!

This would be my cry to all those who wish to bring new interest or enthusiasm for something that has long past. If you have kept the original script and not touched it, then do not alter the period set and costumes. Having a 1920s (though seriously, it looks more 1940s) set and keeping the musical style as accurately as you can to the 1710s is only going to cause confusion. My advice would be to just scrap anything remotely 1940s if you can. Anachronisms are just not pretty.

An example of modernization working can be seen in the more recent adaptions of Shakespeare which appeal to youth such as Ten Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew) or She’s The Man (Twelfth Night). The key in this is if you have a modern setting, modernize the language.

I understand that there’s a huge limitation with modernizing an opera as opposed to a play. Composers have been deified and not one critic who knows his Handel would be happy with anyone modernizing the words and music to make it more appealing to youth. The story of Rinaldo has enough drama in it though to draw in a crowd if there were a revamp of the words: Battles, love triangles, pretty woman getting kidnapped. But I see little chance of anyone trying to alter the original masterpiece that it was without going insane. “Improving” and “Handel” do not go in the same sentence.

Unfortunately in all of this, I can only offer one simple solution: do not alter period setting and costume.

No opera should have polka-dots. I'm sure it's a rule somewhere.

In conclusion, I would like to say that this particular version of Rinaldo should have either done everything in period costume or set, or had Armida as a home-wrecker and Rinaldo’s voice dropped an octave. Or two.

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

The Italian Invaders!

Wow. Ok, that title sounds way too dramatic for the actual content. My apologies if you were expecting explosions, mutilation and bloodbaths, but really, this is a music blog. The most violent you’re going to get is a particularly loud diminished seventh chord.

Hint: This is when you generally hear it.

Anyway, today I am looking at how Italian influences on French music came about.

1: The seeds of something more sinister…

(Really, I should make my titles slightly less dramatic.)

The infiltration of Italian culture into France has never been a particularly foreign concept. Indeed, we can see François I (1494–1547) readily introduced Italians into his court and as a result there was greater refinement. Both François I and Henri II employed Italian artists such as Rosso and Primaticcio, who brought various Italian styles into France. Much like in our Baroque music era that we've looked at, interest in the arts changed depending on the monarch, before trickling down to the nobles and then the masses, so it stands to reason that if the king wanted something Italian, Italian was what he got, or if he didn't want Italian, he could feel free to banish them (as Louis XIV did).

2: The whims of a king…

During Louis XIV’s reign Italian music was not tolerated in court. After all, the king had his own personal composer to write songs that basically worshiped him (as mentioned in Lara’s Blog last week), so why have anything else, especially from a series of states with no monarch (gasp!)? It was only in his later years, where he seemed to go through a mid-life crisis, that his tastes changed drastically and he lost interest in what Lully was doing. It wasn't that he now liked Italians. No, Louis had moved away from frivolities that permeated the French court in favor of a more somber tone. I like to think he realized that he was in fact mortal and would one day have to meet his maker, and dancing around on a stage wasn't going to cut it. In any case, he endorsed a more serious kind of entertainment, and expected others to follow suit.
But they didn't.
The nobles of the French court didn't seem to like this change in pace, having spent many years fully immersed in comedie. Of course, they still attended whatever performances the king wanted, but now they were the ones who had to patronize new things.

Italian things.

French dealers 1690s

3: The Italian Invasion

Following Lully’s demise (as seen last week) there was no great French composer to take his place as main man, which allowed several composers with several different styles to take his place. Pieces by Corelli for example crossed the border and sold like hotcakes. Italian operas were included in French operas, as can be seen in Le Carnaval de Venise by André Campra, which is an opera within an opera. The story itself is about a company preparing to play an Italian opera, and the end of it includes snippets from an actual Italian opera, which stands at stark contrast to the French norm. They would only get snippets of these, rather than the entire opera because the manuscripts that were sold would be of the individual arias. Because it was not composed and played for the king, there was no more propaganda, but rather a comedic commentary by a goddess called Folly.

An example of Italian style melisma from Le Carnaval de Venise.

Among contemporary music critics there were those both for and against having the Italian style in France. François Raguenet particularly favored Italian music, and backed his opinion up with saying that French music focuses on the shaping of the highest part and the lowest part, and has a tendency to lump the rest together, whilst Italian music crafts all parts to be equally beautiful. On the other hand there were those such as Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, who claimed that everything in Italian music is done to excess and thus becomes unpalatable to a nobleman’s diet.

So, who won this war? Post your opinion below.

Further Readings:
R. J. Knecht, French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II, 2nd edn (New York, NY: Longman, 1996), pp. 73-85

François Raguenet, from A Comparison between the French and Italian Music and Operas (1702)
and
Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, from A Comparison of French and Italian Music (1704)
(both in Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).)

Further Listenings:
A whole clip of André Campra’s Le Carnavale de Venise on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh7AsOZVEVI

If you can get onto Naxos (my advice would be to go through Christchurch City Library if you are a member) you can listen to individual tracks of André Campra’s Le Carnavale de Venise, and as a source of contrast between French and Italian I would recommend listening to tracks 8, 9 and 10 of disc 2.

HowClef-er!