Songs of Love and Death

Get ready—it might be a bumpy ride.

You will tell me you don’t like opera. You don’t understand it, you don’t think it’s “natural.” In fact, it sounds fake and phony to you. And it’s just for snobs, right?

Depends on time and place. Even now, the opera enjoys popular status in Italy, where one opera house, La Scala, is famous for its high standards and harsh catcalls and boos for anything less than the best. And in Mozart’s time, the general populace went about their business humming the latest arias of Mozart’s operas.

Is it fake or phony? Yes, but no. To me, the voice of Whitney Houston could reliably send me howling into the streets. What I heard was a voice that was utterly artificial, but was crudely honed to sound casual, natural. The operatic voice is, yes, trained to an extraordinary degree. Opera is to pop music as ballet is to hip-hop.

Nor does it begin to sound good initially. Here’s how it worked for me—it sounded bad until one extraordinary passage, which caught your heart and stopped your breath and left you wondering—how can a person do that? Consider the following aria, which did it for me…. 

Yes, it’s the opening scene from the movie Diva from the 1981. I was 25, a cellist, and not much interested in opera. The high, loud notes sounded like shrieks to me, but that moment when the soprano, in the middle of her range, soars up an octave and shimmers onto a soft, pure note, and vanishes it into heaven? I knew that was hard—I could barely imagine it on a cello—but that wasn’t the point. It gave me the chills.

So I was hooked—on that aria, at least. But there was still a lot of opera I didn’t like. Rossini, to me, sounded trite, and composers like Bellini and Verdi? Sorry—I didn’t get it.

Nor, I have to say, do I get them now. I do better, with Puccini—another composer who manages to achieve three-minute vocal orgasms. Check this out…. 

  

I live in Old San Juan, a blue-cobblestoned Colonial city--very picturesque and romantic. Once, late at night, I say a couple strolling down the streets. The man, darkly handsome, was holding his lithe companion's face caressingly in his hands, and dusting it with kisses under the street lamp. I did what I had to do, and wafted the aria above through the open doors and the bougainvillea-laden balcony down to them. Everybody gets to be in a movie once in a life. They kissed rapturously through the aria, then looked up and hailed us; we lifted our glasses. Young love must be saluted.

So I am limited in my love for opera. Perhaps it's fair to say that it's an unexplored world for me. Which is why I approached the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss with trepidation.

It's personal, I admit. I've played tone poems of Strauss, and my feeling is generally that they're a lot of work for very little pleasure. I hear you out there, saying, "tone poem?" A tone poem is a single piece of music that evokes or illustrates an idea, a landscape, even a novel. And you know the most famous of the Strauss tone poems. Here's the opening:




This clip is ten minutes, and it's one of four. And however cool the opening is, for the next forty minutes, you'll be bombarded with more notes than you can imagine an orchestra playing. Which is why the every audition for a professional orchestra includes an excerpt from a Strauss tone poem. Which is unfortunate--one professional cellist matter-of-factly told me that page six of Don Juan was "unplayable." Fortunately, enough else is occurring on the stage that you can play "Yankee Doodle" until things simmer down and no one will know the difference.

But what I didn't now is that early Strauss is heartbreakeningly (I think it's a word, the computer disapproves--you choose) beautiful. And Strauss returned to the style at the very end of his life, in 1948 when the composer was 84.

The first song, entitled "Frühling' or Spring. Sung in German, it's a rapturous love song.

All this changes in the last three songs, as the mood turns autumnal and death intrudes into the picture. Aptly so, for this song is called "September." And here, as much as the soprano, it's the French horn that gives it the haunting, eerie quality. Listen to the end of the second song--how superbly Strauss sets up the solo, and how ruminative the feeling is....



That ending gets me every time. And the third song, "Going to Sleep" depicts the physical and emotional fatigue of the weary. But wow--listen to what the violin solo can do, depicting the sweetness
 of sleep, of rest.



Well, from sleep, it's only a small step away from death, which is, in fact the last word of the great, monumental last song. And here, Strauss uses flutes to personify the sound of larks soaring at sunset (which is in fact the name of the song).

A word here about the majestic voice you've been hearing. For thirty odd years, Jessye Norman was the absolute queen of opera. She's what's known as a dramatic soprano, the voice is full and commanding. Yes, she did other parts (in Chicago, I saw her do Gluck, a German baroque composer) but her specialty was the heavier, dramatic, and often stately parts. And she owns--in my book--these songs.

But there's a problem. A soprano perhaps fully her equal had been the original intended performer of these songs. And though there is a clip of Kirsten Flagstad, the sound quality is lesser. What to do?

Easy. Here are both.