Kurt Nemes' Classical Music Almanac
(A love affair with music)
This is a reblog about the scene in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” where Lady Macbeth goes mad as interpreted by Verdi. Anna Netrebko and Željko Lučić sing. From a recent blog post on a delightful site called “The Mad Scene (Opera in the Key of Crazy).
This made me look up another performance of the Maria Callas singing Lady Macbeth after listening to this commentary called “Top Three Moments for Verdi’s Lady Macbeth” by Midge Woolsey on WQXR in New York:
Nel Dì Della Vittoria
Maria Callas
In 1975, my first long-term girlfriend, Lacy, and I had a fairly comfortable relationship. We shared very similar tastes in art, literature and music, and this fact made us pretty compatible. That is why we stayed together for around two years. At the beginning at least we just liked hanging out with each other.
Indiana University, as I have mentioned before, has a huge music school. To give you an idea of how big, in 1975 they had five full student orchestras, ranging from so-so to superb. The school also mounted a full opera season of works not only from the standard repertoire, but also modern works as well. And they didn’t just focus on Baroque to Early Modern. They had a serious Jazz studies program with its own orchestra, an early music ensemble, an electronic music studio, and they premiered a number of works by contemporary composers.
Once Lacy, who played the upright bass, came back from class very angry. Her orchestra had been rehearsing a work by some modern composer. She said they all turned the page in one section and the composer’s instructions were something like “improvise.” “That’s cheating!” she yelled. “That’s not composing.”
So Lacy and I probably went out to see a concert at least once a week. The people in the French House read the daily listing of concerts and student recitals in the student newspaper, and we also went out en masse. Once we all organized an outing to go see the school’s production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The school announced that they would break up the five-hour performance with a two-hour intermission and start a bit early. That way, people could watch the first half of the opera, go to dinner, and come back for the conclusion. Our group decided to go to a posh restaurant in Bloomington called Sully’s Oaken Bucket and regale ourselves with a fine meal.
The sets for the opera had been done by a German professor in the school of music or theater. His claim to fame was having done the set for some opera at the Met in New York. He had tried a German Expressionist approach and had used virtually no props, creating an inward-looking mood by using only blue lighting.
What a bore! Someone had once told me that what made Wagner so great was that he had merged music with drama and–as director of his own opera house in Bayreuth–he had created a perfect multi-media event. Well for this production they had stripped it down to just three elements–voice, orchestra, and lighting. Part of the charm of opera, for me at least, is the pomp and theatricality and pageantry of it all. Even if one part, say the acting, is bad, you still have the singing, the costumes, the sets, and the music to stimulate you. This production of Parsifal was almost abstract and you were held captive by the hours and hours of sung dramatic text without any melody.
By the time intermission came, we bolted for the door and headed for our restaurant. This was the first time I eaten in a fancy restaurant as an adult with a group of my peers, and I must confess to being a little put off by the prices. Being the child of parents who’d lived through the Great Depression, I was used to always pinching pennies, looking for bargains, scrounging at garage sales and rarely splurging on something so extravagant and ephemeral as a fancy meal. I did manage to find a dish which fell in my price range–a shrimp curry, I believe–which wasn’t spectacular but did the job. I enjoyed the company however, the conversation and maybe even a glass of wine. Oddly enough we didn’t hurry back to the opera and ended up arriving about ½ hour late for the second part. The meal and the hour both conspired against me and I have to confess to falling asleep.
Fortunately, the school that year also produced Verdi’s Rigoletto and they went all out on the sets and costumes. One scene took place in the Duke’s palace and they had constructed a huge raised dance floor with a grand staircase leading up to it that was painted to look like marble with gold leaf. I think that one of the guys in my dorm, who was majoring in dance or theatre, auditioned and got a part as one of the dancer during the ballroom scene. The singing was superb and the orchestra on top form that night and it met all my criteria for a great production.
Verdi received a commission early in his career to write an opera for the Fenice theatre in Venice. He had been influenced by tragedies like Hamlet and King Lear but eventually settled on Victor Hugo’s play, Le Roi S’Amuse. Verdi and his librettist had to rework the story several times in order to get past the censors who did not take kindly to the portrayal of kings as scoundrels or suffer things like curses on stage, which might inflame the clergy. They changed the king to a Duke but left him a cad. The court jester is one Rigoletto, who though he plays the buffoon, sees the debauchery of the Duke and his court. Because he is deformed, he justifies his own intriguing to pit the different male characters against one another. He has a beautiful daughter named Gilda, whom he keeps sequestered far away from the influence of the Duke.
This opera has several famous arias. In “Questa o Quella” the Duke sings about his amorous adventures and how one girl is just as good as another. Later, he sings the famous, “La Donna e Mobile” in which he describes all women as fickle and only good for one thing. Eventually it turns out that the Duke has managed to seduce Rigoletto’s daughter. Rigoletto plots revenge. By a strange twist of fate, the thugs Rigoletto sends to murder the Duke accidentally kill his daughter instead, and deliver the body to him in a sack. He opens the bag to find his dying daughter and realize the curse that he has brought on himself.
Verdi wrote this opera in something like 40 days at the age of 37. Though over 150 years old, the base motivations for power and conquest still seem as applicable to our modern world as it was to Verdi’s. These days, I think the modern malaise is is the desire to make excuses for dropping one’s own morals in the face of those in power who do so. Nice guys finish last also has become a mantra in my home country. Maybe so, but once you compromise your morals, it’s over.
<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000041Q2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0000041Q2&linkCode=as2&tag=themusalm-20″>Buy CD or MP3s of Verdi – Rigoletto / Sutherland, Pavarotti, Milnes, LSO, Bonynge</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=themusalm-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0000041Q2″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />
In 2000, when I started The Musical Almanac, I couldn’t decide whether culturally, we were better or worse off than a during the 1800s. The US had just seen the impeachment of its president after a witch hunt of many years that exposed his amorous indiscretions. The opposing party came in shortly after that and we had September 11, the War in Iraq, a global economic crisis, and what seems to be a tide of rising fundamentalism in the West. Despite the fact that the ice caps are melting, there are stronger storms, worse droughts, and increase in certain disease, many people still deny climate change.
In other parts of the world the Internet has brought information and instantaneous communication to even the remotest parts of the globe. As we have seen with the Arab Spring uprisings, this technology has caused an absolute explosion of ideas. The times they are a changing. Since it all started in North Africa, let’s look at an opera set in Pharaonic Egypt.
| Celeste Aïda, forma divina, | Heavenly Aïda, divine shape, |
| Mistico serto di luce e fior, Del mio pensiero tu sei regina Tu di mia vita sei lo splendor. Il tuo bel cielo vorrei ridarti, Le dolci brezze del patrio suol : Un regal serto sul crin posarti, Ergerti un trono vicino al sol, |
Mystic garland of light and flowers you are queen of my thoughts you are the splendor of my life I would like to give you your sky back the sweet breeze of the fatherland: to put a regal garland on your heart to build up a throne for you next to the sun |
Such grand themes!
I wonder what connection this story had with the people of Verdi’s day. Aïda is based on a story created by a leading Egyptologist of the day. The previous century Napoleon had campaigned in Egypt, and his troops discovered the Rosetta Stone. With the spoils he sent back and Champollion successfully translating hieroglyphics, Europe came under the spell of Egyptiana. Both England and France were busy building empires during the 19th century, which some might argue did more damage than any McDonalds at the foot of the Great wall of China.
Verdi wrote Aïda in 1871 for the Khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. Verdi was 58 at the time and of such a stature that he was able to command the equivalent of $200,000 in today’s money, to write the opera. It premiered in Cairo on Christmas Eve and in Milan about a month and a half later. It was met with immediate success and remains a standard of the repertoire.
When Verdi died in 1901, the entire population of Italy went into mourning for him. I used to marvel at this, until I moved to Naples in 1980. When I first arrived, a friend of a friend put me up in an old 18th century palazzo that had been turned into apartments. He had a daughter who was about 9 or 10 at the time. My room was next to the bathroom. One day, I awoke to the sound of this little girl, who during her morning ablutions, stopped to belt out a rousing popular Neapolitan song of the day. On another occasion, while sitting in a restaurant in the back streets of Naples one Sunday morning, a middle-aged man drove up on his Vespa on which he had affixed a crate for carrying the bottles of seltzer water he was delivering. When he alit, he stopped and suddenly burst into a beautiful love song that echoed throughout the narrow streets.
Sometimes artists put down the common people as being philistinic and unappreciative of their art, but the fact of the matter is that how technology and education is used and who uses it is a political decision with serious economic underpinnings. Before we go name calling, it’s important to figure out who’s pulling the strings.
Listen to a Podcast of this Post: Here on Podomatic
It still astounds me to realize how many pieces of classical music have been used to flog products. While searching through music news groups recently, somebody asked the question, “Do you know which piece of music is used in the Buick Century commercial?” Someone answered almost instantly: “Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole.5th movt.”
Psychological research on memory and learning tells us that people remember better when we involve more than one of the senses while learning something new. The theory states that you thereby “hang” the memory on more than one hook and that makes it easier to find for later retrieval. Thus, it would make sense to light a stick of incense, put on some great music, and sit in a comfy chair while studying for a test. School systems systematically ignore these findings and school kids today still sit in stony silence, wedged in chairs/desks that make the Iron Maiden seem like a Lazy Boy recliner.
The Portuguese Mateus Wine Company used the “Triumphal March” from Aida in the early 1970s to sell class. Mateus sold a rose wine in a bottle that looked like it was made of terra cotta, and the white was packaged to look like a bottle of Armagnac.
The commercial gives you, the viewer, the point of view of a middle-class couple opening the door to receive guest for a party. The music starts as the door opens out to reveal a ridiculously long arrow-straight sidewalk up to the front of the house (this is the suburbs, right?) Another couple walks toward the camera carrying a bottle of Mateus and present it to the hosts when they arrive at the door.
It’s quite a clever how Mateus uses the music to convey as sense of dignity to what probably turned out to be a 1970s wife-swapping party. In short they were selling a dream–that this crass, materialistic, anti-intellectual couple had class. No matter that alcoholism claims more lives and has shattered more homes than all the “illegal” drugs combined. Image is everything, after all. And alcohol is legal. As an adolescent, I loved the commercial. Later, as a college student, I followed its message and abused alcohol almost every chance I got. So it was quite an effective campaign, if you ask me.
In high school, my friends the M* family told me the source of the music. I dutifully trundled down to the library and checked out Aida and eventually went on to purchase it. It proved quite valuable later on when I went to college. My second year I transferred to a huge university (student population circa 33,000) that actually had high-rise dorms. My tower sat opposite another tower, which was our rival. Some nights, people in one dorm would throw open their windows and start shouting at the other dorm. This would escalate on both sides until almost everyone was involved. After about an hour of this, I would open my window, put the speakers of my stereo on the ledge and crank up the “Triumphal March.” Eventually the shouting would stop.
I used to flatter myself that playing this piece caused the end of these little outbreaks. In all honesty, though, the people probably just got bored (or hoarse) from all that yelling at each other and just stopped. Still, I like to think that I had a hand in bringing culture to my fellow drunks.
Hooray for libraries! Had I grown up in France, where they didn’t have lending libraries until about 30 years ago, I probably would only have discovered half the classical pieces I love. My small hometown public library in Mishawaka, Indiana (pop. 33,000 circa 1972) had quite a respectable collection of classical albums. Whenever I heard a new piece on the local classical music station, I’d write the name down and pay a visit to the library to check it out.
In the olden days, when you checked records out from the library often they were in less than pristine condition. Back then most everybody had these huge old console stereos with tone arms that weighted about 12 pounds. True, when hi-fis were in vogue, the records were made of pretty strong plastic. When the next generation of stereos hit, with feather-weight arms that held magnetic, not ceramic, cartridges, record labels started to scrimp on the plastic and then things became really bad. You’d check out one of these flimsy records and it would sound like a hail storm. I swear you could hold these disks up to the light and see through them from where the old steel styli had worn through them. Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit. Only Deutsche Grammophon continued to use high-quality, thick plastic right up to the end. These were the Mercedes of LPs.
When CDs arrived on the scene, they were a big improvement. True, if you abused a CD it might end up skipping about a 1000 times a second, so that Brahms ends up sounding like it’s performed by a Rap group. But a problem with checking out CDs from the library is that the staff aren’t diligent about finding people who do not return them with the liner notes and booklets. Often, therefore, you don’t even know what the names of the tracks are if they aren’t printed on the disk itself. Of course, even more annoying are record labels that scrimp on the booklet, which are often pathetic advertisements for other records on the label. They don’t have any meaningful text in them or description of the music in them.
Again, in the era of LPs, you could actually learn something from the liner notes. True sometimes these were written by pompous gas bags, but most of the time they included some biographical information or anecdote about the composer or the orchestra or even interesting facts about the piece itself. Sometimes, they actually hired someone who understood music theory to explain the piece. Not being a music major, a lot of this information–about keys, chord progression, etc.–went over my head, but it was nice to know it was there anyway. And I’m sure some people understood it.
Rock albums on CDs also have been hit by this cost-saving measure, or else record companies just spend their money on artsy advertising. That’s not such a loss, as rock critics/journalists sometimes can’t string two sentences together, or they gush in flowery or gonzo-type prose, which is really ghastly. For example, here is an excerpt from a recent album review I found in Rolling Stone:
The whole album thumps like the soundtrack to a lost Eddie and the Cruisers sequel, one where Eddie gets crucified by Roman soldiers, while Gaga stands under the cross weeping and sending dirty texts to the DJ..
Which brings us back to today’s piece. One of the albums I used to check out from my hometown library was Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Il Travatore (The Trubador). As in the case of many pieces during this period, I was drawn to it for a particularly rousing section that had been used in some film or commercial. This was the “Anvil Chorus.” It appears in Act II, scene one, in which a band of gypsies sing a chorus about a beautiful gypsy maid while bashing away on their anvils. The sound of crashing metal worked into a classical piece excited the little boy in me, no doubt. That leads into a soprano solo, in which the gypsy woman, Azucena, sings an ominous aria.
One time a friend of mine and I went to see a revival of the Marx Brothers’ film, A Night at the Opera. In one part, Harpo is chased onstage during a performance of an opera, which turns out to be Il Travatore. He dresses in the costume of a gypsy woman, and when Azucena starts to sing, he rises up next to her an makes his trade mark ugly face, the “Gookie.”
This of course has nothing to do with the opera, but I found it hilarious, and it only served to make me appreciate the piece more. (Not to mention how intellectual comedies used to be.)
I include a link here to the plot of Il Trovatore. It involves the rivalry between a Count and a gypsy Troubador. The Count has sworn to revenge the death of his infant brother, who supposedly was burnt to death by the gypsies in a vendetta. Only today have I read the synopsis, and I am surprised to find out how complex and powerful is the story line. You’d never guess listening to the “Anvil Chorus.” But it turns out to be almost as moving as Romeo and Juliet with an evil character on a par with Iago in Othello.
Thirty-nine years ago, when I discovered Il Travatore at the local library, I would have laughed at the plot. It’s too melodramatic. How many people burn babies and kill to revenge themselves of events that happened generations previously? Since then, however, we’ve seen continued fighting between Jews and Arabs; Iraqis and Iranians; Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims; and countless other toil, strife and genocide, the roots of which go back for centuries. The plot of Il Travatore, unfortunately, seems much more plausible and contemporary to me now than it did all those years ago.
In 1975, my first long-term girlfriend, Lacy, and I had a fairly comfortable relationship. We shared very similar tastes in art, literature and music, and this fact made us pretty compatible. That is why we stayed together for around two years. At the beginning at least we just liked hanging out with each other.
Indiana University, as I have mentioned before, has a huge music school. To give you an idea of how big, in 1975 they had five full student orchestras, ranging from so-so to superb. The school also mounted a full opera season of works not only from the standard repertoire, but also modern works as well. And they didn’t just focus on Baroque to Early Modern. They had a serious Jazz studies program with its own orchestra, an early music ensemble, an electronic music studio, and they premiered a number of works by contemporary composers.
Once Lacy, who played the upright bass came back very angry. Her orchestra had been rehearsing a work by some modern composer. She said they all turned the page in one section and the composer’s instructions were something like “improvise.” “That’s cheating! That’s not composing.”
So Lacy and I probably went out to see a concert at least once a week. The people in the French House read the daily listing of concerts and student recitals in the student newspaper, and we also went out en masse. Once we all organized an outing to go see the school’s production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The school announced that they would break up the five-hour performance with a two-hour intermission and start a bit early. That way, people could watch the first half of the opera, go to dinner, and come back for the conclusion. Our group decided to go to a posh restaurant in Bloomington called Sully’s Oaken Bucket and regale ourselves with a fine meal.
The sets for the opera had been done by a German professor in the school of music or theater. His claim to fame was having done the set for some opera at the Met in New York. He had tried a German Expressionist approach and had used virtually no props, creating an inward-looking mood by using only blue lighting.
What a bore! Someone had once told me that what made Wagner so great was that he had merged music with drama and–as director of his own opera house in Bayreuth–he had created a perfect multi-media event. Well for this production they had stripped it down to just three elements–voice, orchestra, and lighting. Part of the charm of opera, for me at least, is the pomp and theatricality and pageantry of it all. Even if one part, say the acting, is bad, you still have the singing, the costumes, the sets, and the music to stimulate you. This production of Parsifal was almost abstract and you were held captive by the hours and hours of sung dramatic text without any melody.
By the time intermission came, we bolted for the door and headed for our restaurant. This was the first time I eaten in a fancy restaurant as an adult with a group of my peers, and I must confess to being a little put off by the prices. Being the child of parents who’d lived through the Great Depression, I was used to always pinching pennies, looking for bargains, scrounging at garage sales and rarely splurging on something so extravagant and ephemeral as a fancy meal. I did manage to find a dish which fell in my price range–a shrimp curry, I believe–which wasn’t spectacular but did the job. I enjoyed the company however, the conversation and maybe even a glass of wine. Oddly enough we didn’t hurry back to the opera and ended up arriving about ½ hour late for the second part. The meal and the hour both conspired against me and I have to confess to falling asleep.
Fortunately, the school that year also produced Verdi’s Rigoletto and they went all out on the sets and costumes. One scene took place in the Duke’s palace and they had constructed a huge raised dance floor with a grand staircase leading up to it that was painted to look like marble with gold leaf. I think that one of the guys in my dorm, who was majoring in dance or theatre, auditioned and got a part as one of the dancer during the ballroom scene. The singing was superb and the orchestra on top form that night and it met all my criteria for a great production.
Verdi received a commission early in his career to write an opera for the Fenice theatre in Venice. He had been influenced by tragedies like Hamlet and King Lear but eventually settled on Victor Hugo’s play, Le Roi S’Amuse. Verdi and his librettist had to rework the story several times in order to get past the censors who did not take kindly to the portrayal of Kings as scoundrels or suffer things like curses on stage, which might inflame the clergy. They changed the King to a Duke but left him a cad. The court jester is one Rigoletto, who though he plays the buffoon, seeing the debauchery of the Duke and his court, because he is deformed justifies his own intriguing to pit the different male characters against one another. He has a beautiful daughter named Gilda, whom he keeps sequestered far away from the influence of the Duke.
This opera has several famous arias. In “Questa o Quella” the Duke sings about his amorous adventures and how one girl is just as good as another. Later, he sings the famous, “La Donna e Mobile” in which he describes all women as fickle and only good for one thing. Eventually it turns out that the Duke has managed to seduce Rigoletto’s daughter who plots revenge. By a strange twist of fate, the thugs Rigoletto sends to murder the Duke accidentally kill his daughter instead, and deliver the body to him in a sack. He opens the bag to find his dying daughter and realize the curse that he has brought on himself.
Verdi wrote this opera in something like 40 days at the age of 37. Though over 150 years old, the base motivations for power and conquest still seem as applicable to our modern world as it was to Verdi’s.
<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000041Q2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0000041Q2&linkCode=as2&tag=themusalm-20″>Buy CD or MP3s of Verdi – Rigoletto / Sutherland, Pavarotti, Milnes, LSO, Bonynge</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=themusalm-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0000041Q2″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />
About 10 years ago, when I started The Musical Almanac, I couldn’t decide whether culturally, we were better or worse off than a during the 1800s. The US had just seen the impeachment of its president after a witch hunt of many years that exposed his amorous indiscretions. The opposing party came in shortly after that and we had September 11, the War in Iraq, a global economic crisis, and what seems to be a tide of rising fundamentalism in the West. Despite the fact that the ice caps are melting, there are stronger storms, worse droughts, and increase in certain disease, many people still deny climate change. In other parts of the world the Internet has brought information and instantaneous communication to even the remotest parts of the globe. As we have seen with the Arab Spring uprisings, this technology has caused an absolute explosion of ideas. The times they are a changing. Since it all started in North Africa, let’s look at an opera set in Pharaonic Egypt.
| Celeste Aïda, forma divina, |
Mistico serto di luce e fior,
Del mio pensiero tu sei regina
Tu di mia vita sei lo splendor.
Il tuo bel cielo vorrei ridarti,
Le dolci brezze del patrio suol :
Un regal serto sul crin posarti,
Ergerti un trono vicino al sol,Heavenly Aïda, divine shape,
mystic garland of light and flowers
you are queen of my thoughts
you are the splendor of my life
I would like to give you your sky back
the sweet breeze of the fatherland:
to put a regal garland on your heart
to build up a throne for you next to the sun
Such grand themes!
I wonder what connection this story had with the people of Verdi’s day. Aïdais based on a story created by a leading Egyptologist of the day. The previous century Napoleon had campaigned in Egypt, and his troops discovered the Rosetta Stone. With the spoils he sent back and Champollion successfully translating hieroglyphics, Europe came under the spell of Egyptiana. Both England and France were busy building empires during the 19th century, which some might argue did more damage than any McDonalds at the foot of the Great wall of China.
Verdi wrote Aïdain 1871 for the Khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. Verdi was 58 at the time and of such a stature that he was able to command the equivalent of $200,000 in today’s money, to write the opera. It premiered in Cairo on Christmas Eve and in Milan about a month and a half later. It was met with immediate success and remains a standard of the repertoire.
When Verdi died in 1901, the entire population of Italy went into mourning for him. I used to marvel at this, until I moved to Naples in 1980. When I first arrived, a friend of a friend put me up in an old 18th century palazzo that had been turned into apartments. He had a daughter who was about 9 or 10 at the time. My room was next to the bathroom. One day, I awoke to the sound of this little girl, who during her morning ablutions, stopped to belt out a rousing popular Neapolitan song of the day. On another occasion, while sitting in a restaurant in the back streets of Naples one Sunday morning, a middle-aged man drove up on his Vespa on which he had affixed a crate for carrying the bottles of seltzer water he was delivering. When he alit, he stopped and suddenly burst into a beautiful love song that echoed throughout the narrow streets.
Sometimes artists put down the common people as being philistinic and unappreciative of their art, but the fact of the matter is that how technology and education is used and who uses it is a political decision with serious economic underpinnings. Before we go name calling, it’s important to figure out who’s pulling the strings.
It still astounds me to realize how many pieces of classical music have been used to flog products. While searching through music news groups recently, somebody asked the question, “Do you know which piece of music is used in the Buick Century commercial?” Someone answered almost instantly: “Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole.5th movt.”
Psychological research on memory and learning tells us that people remember better when we involve more than one of the senses while learning something new. The theory states that you thereby “hang” the memory on more than one hook and that makes it easier to find for later retrieval. Thus, it would make sense to light a stick of incense, put on some great music, and sit in a comfy chair while studying for a test. School systems systematically ignore these findings and school kids today still sit in stony silence, wedged in chairs/desks that make the Iron Maiden seem like a Lazy Boy recliner.
The Portuguese Mateus Wine Company used the “Triumphal March” from Aida in the early 1970s to sell class. Mateus sold a rose wine in a bottle that looked like it was made of terra cotta, and the white was packaged to look like a bottle of Armagnac.
The commercial gives you, the viewer, the point of view of a middle-class couple opening the door to receive guest for a party. The music starts as the door opens out to reveal a ridiculously long arrow-straight sidewalk up to the front of the house (this is the suburbs, right?) Another couple walks toward the camera carrying a bottle of Mateus and present it to the hosts when they arrive at the door.
It’s quite a clever how Mateus uses the music to convey as sense of dignity to what probably turned out to be a 1970s wife-swapping party. In short they were selling a dream–that this crass, materialistic, anti-intellectual couple had class. No matter that alcoholism claims more lives and has shattered more homes than all the “illegal” drugs combined. Image is everything, after all. And alcohol is legal. As an adolescent, I loved the commercial. Later, as a college student, I followed its message and abused alcohol almost every chance I got. So it was quite an effective campaign, if you ask me.
In high school, my friends the Mankowskis told me the source of the music. I dutifully trundled down to the library and checked out Aida and eventually went on to purchase it. It proved quite valuable later on when I went to college. My second year I transferred to a huge university (student population circa 33,000) that actually had high-rise dorms. My tower sat opposite another tower, which was our rival. Some nights, people in one dorm would throw open their windows and start shouting at the other dorm. This would escalate on both sides until almost everyone was involved. After about an hour of this, I would open my window, put the speakers of my stereo on the ledge and crank up the “Triumphal March.” Eventually the shouting would stop.
I used to flatter myself that playing this piece caused the end of these little outbreaks. In all honesty, though, the people probably just got bored (or hoarse) from all that yelling at each other and just stopped. Still, I like to think that I had a hand in bringing culture to my fellow drunks.
Hooray for libraries! Had I grown up in France, where they didn’t have lending libraries until about 30 years ago, I probably would only have discovered half the classical pieces I love. My small hometown public library in Mishawaka, Indiana (pop. 33,000 circa 1972) had quite a respectable collection of classical albums. Whenever I heard a new piece on the local classical music station, I’d write the name down and pay a visit to the library to check it out.
Which leads me to my next thing to be thankful for, namely CDs. In the olden days, when you checked records out often they were in less than pristine condition. Back then most everybody had these huge old console stereos with tone arms that weighted about 12 pounds. True, when hi-fis were in vogue, the records were made of pretty strong plastic. When the next generation of stereos hit, with feather-weight arms that held magnetic, not ceramic, cartridges, record labels started to scrimp on the plastic and then things became really bad. You’d check out one of these flimsy records and it would sound like a hail storm. I swear you could hold these disks up to the light and see through them from where the old steel styli had worn through them. Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit. Only Deutsche Grammophon continued to use high-quality, thick plastic right up to the end. These were the Mercedes of LPs.
When CDs arrived on the scene, I heaved a sigh of relief. True, if you abuse a CD it might end up skipping about a 1000 times a second, so that Brahms ends up sounding like it’s performed by a Rap group. The really annoying thing about the CDs you check out from the library nowadays, that the staff aren’t diligent about finding people who do not turn back in the liner notes and booklets. Often, therefore, you don’t even know what the names of the tracks are if they aren’t printed on the disk itself. Of course, even more annoying are record labels that scrimp on the booklet, which are often pathetic advertisements for other records on the label. They don’t have any meaningful text in them or description of the music in them.
Again, in the era of LPs, you could actually learn something from the liner notes. True sometimes these were written by pompous gas bags, but most of the time they included some biographical information or anecdote about the composer or the orchestra or even interesting facts about the piece itself. Sometimes, they actually hired someone who understood music theory to explain the piece. Not being a music major, a lot of this information–about keys, chord progression, etc.–went over my head, but it was nice to know it was there anyway. And I’m sure some people understood it.
On the plus side, rock albums also have been hit by this cost-saving measure, or else they just spend it on artsy advertising. Rock critics sometimes can’t string two sentences together, or they gush in flowery or gonzo-type prose, which is really ghastly. For example, here is an excerpt from a recent album review found in Rolling Stone:
The whole album thumps like the soundtrack to a lost Eddie and the Cruisers sequel, one where Eddie gets crucified by Roman soldiers, while Gaga stands under the cross weeping and sending dirty texts to the DJ..
Which brings us back to today’s piece. One of the albums I used to check out from my hometown library was Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Il Travatore (The Trubador). As in the case of many pieces during this period, I was drawn to it for a particularly rousing section that had been used in some film or commercial. This was the “Anvil Chorus.” It appears in Act II, scene one, in which a band of gypsies sing a chorus about a beautiful gypsy maid while bashing away on their anvils. The sound of crashing metal worked into a classical piece excited the little boy in me, no doubt. That leads into a soprano solo, in which the gypsy woman, Azucena, sings an ominous aria.
One time a friend of mine and I went to see a revival of the Marx Brothers’ film, A Night at the Opera. In one part, Harpo is chased onstage during a performance of an opera, which turns out to be Il Travatore. He dresses in the costume of a gypsy woman, and when Azucena starts to sing, he rises up next to her an makes his trade mark ugly face, the “Gookie.”
This of course has nothing to do with the opera, but I found it hilarious, and it only served to make me appreciate the piece more. (Not to mention how intellectual comedies used to be.)
I include a link here to the plot of Il Trovatore. It involves the rivalry between a Count and a gypsy Troubador. The Count has sworn to revenge the death of his infant brother, who supposedly was burnt to death by the gypsies in a vendetta. Only today have I read the synopsis, and I am surprised to find out how complex and powerful is the story line. You’d never guess listening to the “Anvil Chorus.” But it turns out to be almost as moving as Romeo and Juliet with an evil character on a par with Iago in Othello.
Thirty-nine years ago, when I discovered Il Travatore at the local library, I would have laughed at the plot. It’s too melodramatic. How many people burn babies and kill to revenge themselves of events that happened generations previously? Since then, however, we’ve seen continued fighting between Jews and Arabs; Iraqis and Iranians; Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims; and countless other toil, strife and genocide, the roots of which go back for centuries. The plot of Il Travatore, unfortunately, seems much more plausible and contemporary to me now than it did all those years ago.
Kurt Nemes' Classical Music Almanac 