Wordability

The estimable LindoroRossini is a Russian political scientist in love with bel canto singing. He has posted hundreds of excerpts on YouTube, each neatly annotated. The single best thing about the web is encountering these generous people. Go thence and enjoy.

No sooner had I decided that Pineapple Poll might stand in for the operas than LindoroRossini introduced me to the Charles Mackerras recordings with Welsh Opera (on Telarc). ArkivMusic has all five for US$70.

Works of music that even when I admired them once seemed very long (Mahler #3) now are compassable – I hear them, however imperfectly, as wholes. On the other hand, there are times when just one piece – recently it was a Chopin Ballade – is such an intense experience that it suffices for a day.

Quality versus quantity. The marathons of youth . . . I remember one blissful salad day afternoon spent with a cellist who introduced me to a couple of Boccherini quintets, all six Bach cello suites and for an encore, the Kodaly sonata for unaccompanied cello.

Is it worth spending 2 1/2 hours on a Bellini opera for about 30 minutes of first-rate music? Excerpts don’t carry anything like the full import of that thirty minutes music, because opera, like the novel, is the art of preparation. But really – all that noisy bustle, those indifferent arias for comprimarii, those choruses (Ho ho, let’s drink, whatever). Taking it a step further, why not just listen to some Chopin, where Bellini’s melody is distilled and refined?

Gilbert and Sullivan operas all the way through? Why not just Mackerras’s brilliant ballet suite, Pineapple Poll?

I once had a student who announced rather proudly that she could no longer listen to Mozart. Her ears had been re-configured by Webern, whose Four Pieces for Cello and Piano last about five minutes total. Every phrase unique, no repetition. That was the ideal, she thought.

OK yes, there’s obviously something screwy about an ideal that confines music to Webern.