Warning: lousy sound alert! Also, this is 1962, and the voice has developed those issues which prevent many people from listening to her – the spread at the top etc. Despite this, it’s a lesson in operatic acting, and an unexpected one. Watch her body when the horns make their stabbing sounds at the beginning – it’s as if she’s been stabbed. Again at the strings leading into ‘O regina’ and again at each subsequent transition, the body is one with the music.

Compare, if you like, someone like Elena Obratsova in performance (http://youtu.be/mguac0EuQoU). Music in the pit, acting on the stage, little connection. ‘Ti maledico’ might be addressed to someone else. Or compare her gesture at the final ‘O belta’ to Callas’s conventional-seeming but subtle folded hands.

There’s the accompaniment, notated in 6/8 against the singer’s 2/4. Lots of three against two then, no problem, except that the LH of the piano is syncopated, there are integral grace notes and almost everyone uses lots of rubato. Too much of that and the song loses its pulse – Dvorak marks it andante con moto – and becomes a series of stop-starts. We have a tendency to feel phrases as working towards the middle and then away. but these have their weight at the end, and they mustn’t become lead boots.

Then there are the markings, which most people at least seem to have glanced at. There’s nothing to stop you interpreting, of course – no one right way – but it seems to me that the markings all indicate that Dvorak wanted a certain quality to the song -  think of it as confiding, inward. (If you don’t want to do it the composer’s way, at least be clear what you don’t want to do.) He directs the singer to start the first stanza piano and mezza voce and the second pp. Did I say there were no technical difficulties? Well, piano, mezza voce rising to a high G – that’s not so easy. Again almost everyone makes it simpler technically by opening out on the G, singing it more loudly than the rest of the phrase.

Then there is the question of how to treat the two added bars in the second stanza, that lovely expansion of the melody at the song’s climax. Do you attach them to the phrase before, or the phrase after? Where’s the breath? Do you reinforce the feeling con expressione or can you let the phrase expansion do that for you?

Published first as one of a set of Gypsy Songs, and first sung by a tenor, the song was designed for domestic, small-scale performance. It’s unfortunate that people choose it as as an encore with orchestra and still more unfortunate when they help out poor Dvorak by adding half a stanza.

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Netrebko would like to make an announcement.

In complete contrast, here’s the girl from Richmond, keeping those Gs and F#s right in line and observing the pp in the second stanza. Oddly, she doesn’t bother with the crescendos much.

Not much feeling there, though? – more of a demonstration.

If you’d like to sample the dozen, here’s the playlist. There’s a good version by Magdalena Kozena, a lovely, simple one by Kiri Te Kanawa and a heartfelt one from Sutherland, marred by a deeply unfortunate introduction and horror visuals. But the pick of the bunch, for me, is someone who sings the first stanza as Dvorak wrote it, and alone amongst my dozen, attaches the extra bars to the phrase before. Like Sutherland and Kiri, she brings to it the inwardness and tenderness the song requires.

He contemptuously dismisses the belief that listening to ‘good’ music makes you a good person, as if that were still the stock argument for the defence. Does anybody still use it, I wonder? Certainly not in the world of grant applications and fund-raising campaigns. For some time now the stock arguments there have concerned ‘access’ and ‘identity’.

Orchestras formed in a stratified society and appealed to connoisseurs. The kind of democracy we enjoy levels itself against hierarchies of taste and substitutes what passes for relativism: YMMV, IMO – all that. It also produces a large number of people who actively hate the high arts – relativism has limits. Since the 1960s, the education system has been conquered by various anti-elitist beliefs. One teacher I met who worked in our western suburbs scorned the very idea of providing kids with stringed instruments: ‘irrelevant’. At present, the private schools and some few government schools hold out, but even there I notice that the musical interludes at ceremonies tend to be from the big-band repertoire: mainstream jazz is our new posh.

So I don’t see a big future for the symphony orchestra. Does anyone?

Local choral societies are no longer the backbone of musical Britain that once they were, partly on account of gut-scraping fatwas issued against Handel performance that might violate narrow, bogus notions of ‘authenticity’.

GBS once said that “the Handelian chorus must be put down, if necessary by military action”. He could not have foreseen death by aspic.

Don’t miss Natalie Dessay in rehearsal for her first Olympia, where the voluble director is Roman Polanski.  Dessay marks most of the time, taking instruction from choreographer, director, conductor, but we get a bit of it at pitch when Hugues Cuenod enters. You get to hear the underlay of the voice.

There’s also a brief clip from that performance:

And (unmissable!) Dessay singing the whole piece in a production at Orange.

Finally, a contrasting product from  Patricia Petibon in what must have been a hugely enjoyable recital.

Here in full, the Wikipedia plot summary of La Vie Parisienne (1866).

Act 1

The story begins at the railway station, where the employees boast of all the wonderful places in France. Soon, Baron and Baroness Gondremarck arrive from frozen Stockholm for a Parisian holiday and ask tour guide Joseph Partout to show them the city’s glittering night life. Finally, Pompa di Matadores, a Brazilian millionaire, arrives to spend a fortune in the capital.
Act 2

Métella, a demi-mondaine with a heart of gold, reads a letter from Baron Gondremarck’s friend, Baron Frascata, asking her to give Gondremarck the same pleasure she once had given him.

Act 3

At a party, the guests vow to make their pleasure long lasting as they eye one another, waiting to see who will make the first move. Bobinet rises to greet the crowd with a drinking song. The champagne flows and Baron Gondremarck (and everyone else) gets drunk. The party turns into a wild, sensual debauch.
Act 4

The Brazilian millionaire is offering a masked ball. Métella, anxious to win back Gardefeu, is in league with the Baroness, who wants to extricate her husband from the perils of Parisian life. The Brazilian and Gabrielle, the pretty glover, discover the virtues of love at first sight. All ends happily.

So: in Act 1, the characters assemble and – the curtain falls. In Act 2, Métella reads a letter, perhaps silently, broodingly, facing upstage. In Act 3, however, all hell breaks loose. I very desperately want to see this operetta.

What was Wagner ‘s conception of the good life?  Take Valhalla: as the music rolls out for the grand procession across the rainbow bridge Loge tells us that all is not well. This is Irony, the gods are doomed, yes, yes. But until that unhappy day, what are they actually going to do, this lot?

Wotan of course has plenty to occupy his mind. What about the others? Run the universe, presumably, but there is almost nothing to indicate what that involves. We get only one detail of home life in Valhalla. From Wotan and Brünnhilde we learn that there are lots of feasts attended by heroes who have died in battle. The heroes are looked after by ‘wishmaidens’ whom it is difficult to imagine, given the palpability of this heaven, will remain maidens for very long. So all in all, we have a dim impression of godly stuff going on in the background, storms to whip up, battles to intervene in, while in the foreground life centres on men who having fought, now qualify for feasting and fucking. As a dramatic conception, Valhalla is much cruder than (say) Camelot. Heaven for the under-18 rugby team.

But surely there is nobility somewhere in the whole caboodle? We are not supposed to admire Valhalla, the defence might run, but see it for what it is, a Bad Idea which in the course of the cycle will be exposed. At the end of the opera, when Valhalla burns and the waters of the Rhine overflow, Hope and Love are invested in the new race of truly human beings.

Yes, but what are they going to do? What goals do Wagner’s heroes pursue? Why don’t they attain them? And what happens to the women in their lives?

*Or, as Kobbé has it, “Kundry, gazing up to him in gratitude, sinks gently into the sleep of death and forgiveness for which she has longed.”

In music departments around the world, the traditional course in the history of music – now called ‘Western art music’ – has been under pressure to give way to a course in the history of popular music (now called ‘music’).  More inclusive, less élitist, all that.

I thought I’d help this reform along with some suggestions for the year 1911.

The grand music of Louis XIV’s time -that deliberate, sustained trumpet-and-drum stuff -  fares better because of the much weaker link between music and empirical meanings. Only flint-eyed materialists find nothing but court propaganda in Lully; for most people, the stately processions and rituals invoked by the music might as well take place in Ruritania.
But of course to listen to a Te Deum on the radio while doing the gardening is something less than the experience of those who crowded the church to welcome home Louis from one of his homicidal trips abroad.

Is there such a thing as authentic, guilt-free grandeur in music? I hope so. I’m not contemplating  a Hymn to Social Inclusiveness, or an Ode to the Health Care Reform Bill.

Here’s the last minute or so of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony #4. Out of context, it just sounds like lots and lots of E major, too much maybe.

NielsenIViv

In context, that’s grand, I reckon.

Formally, Nielsen’s symphony can be summed up as the process of getting from D minor to E major the hard way. Here’s how it begins.

NielsenIVi

Throughout the work, the music arouses those feeling-states of stress, confusion, agitation and states of calm, assurance and clarity. (And lots of other less determinate states of feeling, but let’s keep it manageable.) It places these passages in a a drama of overcoming. E major is worked towards, fallen away from, briefly established, more firmly established and finally speaks unequivocally to close the symphony. A completely abstract and arbitrary structure of key centres becomes a physical, emotional and intellectual experience.

Whereas the music of Lully’s time was designed to impress the listener with the might and dignity of the king and his court (by extension, the glory of France) this symphonic grandeur invites every listener to go on the journey, work through the struggle and to exult in the feeling of achievement. In that sense, it is a document of democracy. Behind Nielsen of course stands Beethoven. The “Inextinguishable” bears a family resemblance to Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’s First and all the other 19th century works that progress from stormy minor-key first movements to triumphant endings. But I seem to find a particular satisfaction in the works written late in the symphonic tradition, In Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Magnard – even Elgar.