Fifth Shade of Grey--A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

And everybody loves to change it.....

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a Chaconne?

The Chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!

Fourth Shade of Grey--When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of Traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right--nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernandez once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.