As of August 24th, Pennsylvania is still without a budget.
Here is a video clip posted initially on Facebook by Stuart Landon who was at that July rally in the Capitol Rotunda.
He was standing not far from me, near the back of the main entryway, facing the steps. It's a little noisy, the audio may be a little hard to understand at times, and it's heavily edited – the whole rally was 90-minutes long – but I think it will you give you more than just a taste of what was happening there: - - - - - - -
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Yesterday, the Patriot-News in Harrisburg printed an article written by Rep. Dwight Davis, D-Philadelphia, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the more electrifying speakers at the July Rally for the Arts.
He begins the article by describing a beautiful summer evening in Harrisburg's Reservoir Park, watching the Gamut Classics' Shakespeare Festival production of Cymbeline – where the audience included “teens and senior citizens, families with children, single adults and empty nesters. And it was free.
"Before the show, a troupe member urged the audience to support the arts. 'Call your legislators,' she said. 'Tell them not to cut funding for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.'
"What she should have said was: 'Thank you. You made this happen. Your state tax dollars helped pay for this production.'"
It is productions like this that help bring The Arts (with or without a Capital A) to the public, rather than keeping them locked up in books or dark rooms out of sight, out of hearing, out of mind, accessible only to those who are already familiar with them.
It is an idea like “funding for the arts is a luxury that can be eliminated when the money gets tight” that helps perpetuate the argument that the arts are elitist and exist only for the entertainment of a small niche in the community at large, that funding for the arts is therefore expendable.
If arts organizations of any kind in this state are going to continue to exist after the proposed budget “zeroes out” funding for them, those that are still able to present performances will only make it more elitist because only the wealthy will be able to afford the ticket prices.
It's not just performances of Shakespeare or Classical Music. Yes, a large part of it also involves bringing the opportunity to students in the rural counties of Pennsylvania to take music lessons after school or attend a drama camp to experience making the arts first-hand, not just passively.
It is sometimes these discoveries that influence a child's future – not necessarily to turn them into future artists (though what's wrong with that?) or future audience members but to help make them better educated, well-rounded individuals who can experience life a little differently, with a little more depth and understanding of everything else going on around them.
Cutting what educational projects exist for the arts in the schools will hurt Pennsylvania students across the commonwealth, offering them even less than the nearly nothing it already does.
Meanwhile, some 55 days into the new Fiscal Year, the state government is still debating funding the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts with $14.6 Million.
People who support the arts – even just buying a ticket to see a concert or a show or attend an exhibit – will spend a little more money along the way, adding some $2 Billion dollars to the state's total economy.
Cutting that money will damage a lot more than just the image of Pennsylvania as a great place to live with a well-rounded quality of life when we'd be the only state in the nation WITHOUT a council for the arts!
At the July rally, people were passing out buttons advocating a “nickel-a-week” – the Patriot-News editorial chimes in saying it would cost “two-cents-a-week” - for taxpayers to support the arts at this level.
Trust me, when we're talking about all the tax-payer money that's being spent in this (or any other) state for good causes or for bad ones, $14.6 Million is not a lot of money in the over-all scheme-of-things. And cutting $14.6 Million dollars out of the final budget is not going to bring down the $1 Billion difference between the proposed budgets by any huge amount.
It's not too late to write your legislators in support of arts funding in Pennsylvania! You can find out more about this here.
And you can read a couple of my previous posts, here.
- Dr. Dick - - - - - - - Thanks to Stuart Landon for permission to post his rally video.
Thanks also to Sean Adams, a former co-worker of mine, now also among the laid-off and unemployed artists in the state, for pointing me toward the two most recent Patriot-News articles.
The uncredited rally photo (posted by the Patriot-News) focuses on sign-holder Melissa Dunphy, another former co-worker, who's gone on to become an employed actor in Philadelphia while pursuing a graduate degree in music composition (her Gonzales Cantata, setting the transcripts of the Senate judiciary hearings of the former Attorney General, will be performed in a different rotunda in Philadelphia at the Philly Fringe, Sept. 4-5-6, 2009).
Put Tuesday, September 8th, on your calendar – then WATCH... THIS... SPAAAAACE...
Because right after Labor Day, Thoughts on a Train is going to launch the revised edition of “THE SCHOENBERG CODE,” a serial novel in 12 chapters (a musical parody of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, “The Da Vinci Code”).
Follow a serial killer into the dressing rooms of Carnegie Hall!
Unlock secret messages left behind by composers in their music! (And some that weren't!)
Hear what some insist are only shocking rumors – that Beethoven and his Immortal Beloved had a daughter, and that their descendants live among us today (in fact, one of them could be living next door to you)!
Dr. Dick comes face-to-face with a secret society, the Penguins of God, out to destroy any evidence about it they can find! Are they really behind the deaths of prominent performers of new music?
Can he and his trusty side-kick Buzz Blogster solve the puzzles in time?
Meet Antoinette Avoirdupois, a math major turned violist, who is unaware of her true identity.
Meet Lance Teabag, muck-raking musicologist, who is completely aware of his true identity.
Meet Inspector Hemiola and the International Music Police, intent on solving the murder of three conductors in one night in New York City!
And be prepared to meet Nepomuck and his [shudder] White Viola, a killer instrument that went over to the dark side following a lunch accident in Stradivari's Workshop!
Be prepared! Be very prepared!
That's “The Schoenberg Code” - right here at Thoughts on a Train – starting the day after Labor Day!
This Friday, I'm doing a pre-concert talk for my friends at Gretna Music, this one for the string quartet, Momenta. They'll be performing two concerts this week – on Friday (8pm) it's Ernest Bloch's “Prelude,” Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 and Beethoven's Quartet in E Minor Op. 59/2. Sunday's concert (7:30pm) includes Schumann's String Quartet No. 3 plus two contemporary works, one by Luciano Berio for Viola & Tape and the world-premiere of “Suspended Love” (a work for violin & percussion) by Kee-Yong Chong, one of the leading composers from Malaysia.
So I've been brushing up my Schoenberg (he's pictured here with a portrait by Richard Gerstl from 1906) – especially with the impending launch of the revised edition of the classic thriller, “The Schoenberg Code,” a serial novel in 12 chapters (watch this space).
The 2nd Quartet is one of those more-talked-about-than-performed works (this performance will actually be the first live performance of it I've ever experienced in 50 years of concert-going). And yet it's considered to be a major work of the early 20th Century, credited with being the first step on the road to “atonality.”
In this case, the quartet starts in F-sharp Minor; the scherzo is in D Minor; the third movement, which adds a soprano to sing “Litany” by Stefan George, is in E-flat Minor. It's the fourth movement with the soprano singing another George poem that begins famously, “I feel the air of another planet,” that is the first foray into non-tonality. But it doesn't sound that much different from what we've heard in the earlier movements: true, he quits using a key-signature and there are fewer traditional chords but before what had been going on in between a lot of those traditional chords was not exactly giving it a very strong sense of traditional tonality.
Still, despite this whiff from another planet's atmosphere, the quartet ends on an F-sharp Major chord, just as you would have expected in the Tonal World. But like landing on the moon 40 years ago, it was just one small step – though a very important one – before setting up something more permanent.
Here is an audio from YouTube (one of those without a video component) with the LaSalle Quartet and soprano Margaret Price, in the 4th Movement of Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2: - - - - - - -
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Soprano Katharine Dain will be joining Momenta for this Friday's performance at Gretna Music.
There were lots of composers in the late-19th Century who pushed the boundaries of that tonal world. Wagner, most famously, in Tristan und Isolde in the late-1850s, though he pulled back from it when he returned to the Ring after it was finished. Well into the 20th Century, Tristan was regarded as the closest any composer had ever come to leaving the Earth's atmosphere of comfortable tonality.
Franz Liszt, after giving up the flashiness of his virtuosic years to write eerily meditative pieces, composed his “Bagatelle without Tonality” in 1885. Here, harmony loses its traditional function to become simply “color.” For instance, the upward rush of “dominant 7th” chords, because they don't resolve as they ought to, just becomes another sound without any hierarchical context – which anticipates what Claude Debussy would be composing in a few short years.
One of the primary tenets of Tonality was the expectation that a piece begins in a key and would end in the same key (or, if in a minor key, in its relative major which isn't so much a change of key as a change of modality). What happened in between was part of the drama of classical music's most basic forms: statement of a key, digression from that key, then a resolution of the harmonic drama by returning to conclude in that key.
By 1901, Gustav Mahler had already been fudging with those expectations and discovered the world didn't end when his 2nd Symphony started in C Minor but ended in E-flat Major (which at least is the same key signature) or more adventurously when the 4th started in G Major and ended in E Major (no traditional relationship, there).
Schoenberg's 1st String Quartet (that is, the first published one) was a one-movement work in D Minor. Even though it ended in D Major, what happened in between the first chord and the last ones some 40 minutes later was so intensely chromatic and so little related to the “home key” (the tonality of the piece), it left heads spinning for lack of anything to hang on to, given the normal scheme of things.
“Atonality” is usually viewed as the antithesis of Tonality or, in most chases, as utter chaos and, therefore, ugly. But you can be “not tonal” and still have the standard recognizable chords of tonality: they're just not operating the way people were used to (that's the difference between chords and harmony: technically, harmony is the process by which chords connect; tonality, then, is the context in which the harmony operates).
Debussy's “impressionistic” use of chords was not necessarily always tonal but no one really considered it “atonal” and certainly not chaotic or ugly. Still, some people (even today) find it unsettling because it doesn't “go anywhere” the way tonality propels chords. For others, it just sits there, sounding pretty but not compelling. In a way, it's like reading a novel built on “stream of consciousness” – it's interesting (maybe) but what's the story about? There's no plot. Tonality, then, is like having a plot – you don't know if it's going to be a happy or sad ending but you know, at least, it's going to have an ending, some sense of resolution.
Of course, the idea of having a singer in a string quartet (and not having it called a “Soprano Quintet,” for instance) is also unexpected. Beethoven added voices to the symphony and Mahler added “song” to the possibilities of what a symphony could be: his 2nd, 3rd and 4th symphonies include songs – and even his all-instrumental 1st Symphony incorporates a well-known song (most people think of it as “Frère Jacques”) in its third movement. But Schoenberg was the first (that I'm aware of) to write a string quartet – the chamber music equivalent of the symphony with all its serious baggage – with a soprano. (Other works may have been vocal works scored with a string quartet, but they weren't called, in the abstract sense, String Quartets.)
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But there's been one thing that always puzzled me about this piece – not the tonality thing, not the adding-a-soprano thing: it's a quotation in the 2nd movement, a well-known song that everybody in the audience would probably recognize.
“Ach, du lieber Augustin!”
What the heck is THAT doing in here?! It never made sense to me. We're going along in this skittish scherzo with its march-like parody and then – whoa – here comes this little children's ditty. And it's just a once-and-done appearance, a mere snippet. Did the 2nd violinist get bored and just start playing whatever came into his mind? Is there, perhaps, some deeper significance I'm not getting?
Schoenberg never wrote about WHY it's there – at least that I've found (I haven't read all his essays, yet). He did mention that the audience's reaction at the first performance was pretty grim after the first movement (essentially, no reaction). But when it came to the appearance of “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” which he thought might elicit some chuckles of recognition, they broke out into rude laughter that never stopped. By the end of the performance, the poor soprano was in tears: everybody was laughing and shouting so much, did anyone even hear the music?
I never really knew what “Ach, du lieber Augustin” means, though. The line “alles ist hin” that concludes the first stanza means “All is lost.” But the next stanza includes the line
“Money's gone, girlfriend's gone”
And I thought, “aHA!”
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Now, let's look at the two poems by Stefan George. The 3rd movement's poem, “Litany,” begins on the same pitch as F-sharp but now it's a G-flat in E-flat Minor, for those of you interested in tonal continuity. After a recollection of the first movement's opening, she begins to sing “Deep is the sadness that overclouds me”... It is the prayer of a man faltering towards the hope that, by the final two lines, God will
“Kill ev'ry longing, close the wound, Take from me love and give me thy peace.”
The movement is a set of variations moving along under the vocal line and based on motives first heard in the very opening of the quartet (so much for chaos: score one for unity of design). Schoenberg would famously state that all music is repetition – and variation is a form of repetition where some things change and others don't.
But at the end of this movement, the soprano cries out, reaching a high C on the word “liebe” – love – before dramatically swooping over two octaves down to a B below Middle C. (Yowza!)
For years, I'd heard this work (in recordings), sometimes never really paying attention to the words but certainly never paying attention to their significance: why these words? What made him chose this poem? What impact does his life at the time have on this music?
Now, many program annotators avoid getting into the details of a composer's personal life to explain (if one could) what this music “means.” Sure, one could talk about the struggle with Fate that is the heart of Beethoven's 5th Symphony as the composer wrestling with his deafness. This certainly personifies the struggle but also limits it: without that, the music transcends a personal experience to become a universal struggle that we can all, in some way literally or figuratively, relate to.
What was going on in Schoenberg's life at the time he wrote the 2nd String Quartet?
Two years earlier, he began widening his creative outlet by taking up painting. There was a painter named Richard Gerstl (see his self-portrait from 1901, right) who gave him some guidance and ended up renting a studio in the building where Schoenberg lived. They sometimes painted together and Gerstl accompanied the family on holidays in the country. Schoenberg's wife Mathilde also studied painting with Gerstl. He painted several portraits of her, in fact: one with one of her daughters, you can see below.
It wasn't long before the painter and the composer's wife started having an affair.
Schoenberg was certainly no easy person to live with. Prone to paradoxes, as Alma Mahler described him, he was impulsive and (as Gustav Mahler once called him) conceited. Strongly opinionated, he could suddenly become very rude in conversation even with his friends. Distrustful of audiences because of the nasty reactions most of his music had elicited, he demanded loyalty from his friends and considered anyone who disagreed with him as being against him.
Perhaps that was why Mathilde ran away with Gerstl.
Schoenberg knew they were having an affair and cautioned his friend that “no woman should come between them.” In June, Mathilde took her children to Gmunden to get the family's summer holiday ready, one that would include as their guests several of Schoenberg's students, his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky and his wife – and Richard Gerstl. The discussion of the affair was the substance of most of the 20 letters Mathilde wrote from Gmunden to her husband back in Vienna during those two weeks in June. Apparently, the “retreat” was not going to be the happiest of vacations. She wrote,
“Am I really always so disgusting to you? And are you always so good to me? You'd really like to beat me up sometimes (but I would fight back). You're always so good and I'm insufferable – that's the way it is and always has been. It really sickens me because I am so very fond of you. But do you believe me?”
On the 26th or 27th, Schoenberg arrived at Gmunden almost at the same time Gerstl did.
On July 5th, Schoenberg received a copy of new poems by Stefan George, mostly about death and transfiguration, misery caused by love and “a wish to be dead to the world.” At this point, he picked up the fragments he'd written the year before for the start of a new string quartet, one in F-sharp Minor. The first movement was complete and the second movement not quite.
Perhaps the spot he started again would be where he now quoted “Ach, du lieber Augustin” – it may explain its unexpectedness, a parody of an old Viennese Waltz: “all is lost, all is lost,” the refrain goes, perhaps rattling through his brain like an ear-worm.
He soon started sketching a setting of “Rapture” (better known by its first line, “I feel the air of another planet”) as the 3rd movement. In the midst of that, though, he then started on “Litany” which he completed by July 11th. By the 27th, he had gone back and finished the 2nd movement. There's no date on the manuscript for the completion of the last movement: anecdotal evidence indicates he had completed the sketches either in July or, more likely, August.
On August 27th, Schoenberg walked in on his wife and Gerstl, catching them, as they say, in flagrante delicto. Mathilde left her husband and ran off with Gerstl. Her subsequent letters were nearly incoherent with “clearly suicidal impulses”. Schoenberg wrote out several wills, himself, expressing in one his “regret at what he had not yet achieved.”
He returned to Vienna. The quartet was now complete. One of his students, Anton Webern, eventually persuaded Mathilde to return to her husband which she eventually and reluctantly did.
Schoenberg immediately resumed setting more poems by Stefan George to music, a cycle that became “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” which he'd already begun working on before. George's story of a middle-eastern prince in love with an unattainable woman turns “the garden into a scene for anguished passion as he is gripped by an erotic impulse so strong it imperiously drives him to the edge of self-destruction.”
By September, he was finished with the 13th song of the set that would eventually consist of fifteen songs in all – and Schoenberg was, by the way, a dyed-in-the-wool triskaidekaphobe.
On November 4th, then, Richard Gerstl gathered some of his sketches and paintings in his study, and burned them, then stabbed himself, and finally hung himself, naked, before a mirror.
The quartet received its first performance - a disaster (see Schoenberg's description, below) - a few days before Christmas.
The following February, Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet, Op. 10, appeared in print with a dedication, “To my wife.”
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Perhaps the argument could be made, as many writers insist, that a composer's personal life has no bearing on his creative output, that Beethoven would have written the same music (or similar music) whether or not he'd been deaf, that Brahms' 1st Symphony would still have taken a long time to finish even if Clara Schumann never existed. It's possible Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet would have been the same regardless of how successful the summer vacation of 1908 had been.
But I doubt it.
Of the premiere, Schoenberg wrote in 1936 when the Kolish Quartet's recording of his string quartets was being produced:
My second string quartet caused, at its first performance in Vienna, December 1908, riots which surpassed every previous and subsequent happening of this kind. Although there were also some personal enemies of mine, who used the occasion to annoy me - a fact which can today be proved true - I have to admit, that these riots were justified without the hatred of my enemies, because they were a natural reaction of a conservatively educated audience to a new kind of music. Astonishingly, the first movement passed without any reaction, either for or against. But, after the first measures of the second movement, the greater part of the audience started to laugh and did not cease to disturb the performance during the third movement "Litanei," (in form of variations) and the fourth movement "Entrückung." It was very embarrassing for the Rosé Quartet and the singer, the great Mme. Marie Gutheil-Schoder. But at the end of this fourth movement a remarkable thing happened. After the singer ceases, there comes a long coda played by the string quartet alone. While, as before mentioned, the audience failed to respect even a singing lady, this coda was accepted without any audible disturbance. Perhaps even my enemies and adversaries might have felt something here.
You can listen to the entire quartet at the Arnold Schoenberg Jukebox, here. You can download the score of the entire quartet, here.
It is in his introduction that Shawn writes how all that's been written about Schoenberg's music in the past hundred years is so technically oriented to be of little value to someone who just wants to LISTEN to the music: “perhaps,” he says, “Schoenberg's work deserves a more superficial treatment than it has hitherto received.”
Which reminds me, don't forget to check back in at Thoughts on a Train, starting Tuesday, September 8th, for the first installment of The Schoenberg Code - a serial novel in 12 chapters, my musico-literary parody of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.
Since I can't get anything longer than 30 characters to post to Twitter and given the time already spent and the frustrations I've had while dealing with that hassle, I might as well have written a full post for the blog...
The news, basically, is this: at 11:45 this morning, I managed to finish the second of the seven songs I've been working on this summer. Despite a couple weeks of expert procrastination and general laziness, I managed to finally complete my setting of Saint-Aimant's “The Lazy Poet.” (The text I'm using is included in this earlier post.)
Part of the problem was trying to create some kind of structure – formally and harmonically – that would reflect the structure of the poem which, despite being about a lazy poet who can barely bring himself to write anything, is a full-fledged sonnet.
Distractions aside, I'd finished the piano part – having spent a month working out the harmonic and formal frame-work of the song – and had only begun setting the first line of the vocal part when, suddenly, I stopped.
After three weeks of doing nothing (as far as the song was concerned), I then picked up and started the voice line over again. Then in three days, I succeeded in setting all fourteen lines of the poem – working out the melodic structure and relating it to the specific harmonies I'd previously composed – and completed it before any further distractions set in.
Part of the problem was creating some kind of arpeggiated accompaniment like an indolent barcarolle but still using my 6-note pitch-groups that are part of my standard musical language. I'd come up with a pattern that could fluctuate as needed, modulate where required and give an overall sense of expectations, much the way standard tonality would. Writing a melody that would fit its own parameters linearly and then ground itself at the right points with the underlying harmonies is no different than how a composer would work when composing in D Major.
But I've been trying to come up with comparable procedures (if not “rules”) for a non-tonal system (or at least a non-traditionally-tonal one) that sounds different on the surface level yet works just as consistently with what we normally think of as traditional music's inner-workings, rather than sounding largely “arbitrary” or “esoteric” as many listeners usually dismiss atonal or serial compositions.
So the linear challenge was to create something that could, first of all, be sung and that worked melodically, reflecting the delivery of the poetic text. That's the primary focus. By limiting myself to certain chords created by the convergence of melody and harmony, I found the possibilities were more effective than just sitting there plunking out more arbitrary options, wondering “how does this one sound?” and “how does that one sound?”
Anyway, now I need to turn the sketches into something legible. I doubt the “Finale Notebook” software I'd been using before will be sufficient for any examples, but I'll see what I can manage – or just scan the handwritten manuscript and post it. Ah, but I need to get a new scanner for that, or maybe just break down and get real music-writing software instead of hand-copying it (which also entails buying a new computer, but hey...).
I'm still not sure what to call these songs. The theme of all seven texts is basically “inspiration,” but if I call them “Songs of Inspiration,” people may be expecting up-lifting biblical quotes or texts culled from greeting cards. Inspiration here is more about the creative process – for instance, my lazy poet is balanced by a hard-working web-weaving spider, a more industrious kind of artist – but “Songs of Creativity and Inspiration” sounds more like a sub-title while “Musings” reflects only one aspect of it.
But anyway, this one song is now done: two down and five to go. Now, which will be the next one?
I'm tempted to attack the last one, next, a driving brush-fire of a text that needs incredible energy, both to perform as well as compose. After two months of summer indolence deep in the heart of Dog Days, is this really what the doctor ordered?
It is now August and Pennsylvania is still without a budget. There's no need, in this space, to go into the details of what is (or is not) going on, why it's been allowed to happen or how (if ever) it's going to be resolved. My focus, here, is on the amount of funding allocated for the arts in Pennsylvania.
When I attended the “Save the Arts in Pennsylvania” Rally in the Capitol Rotunda last month, the place was packed with screaming, cheering, clapping, chanting supporters. “Art is the heart of Pennsylvania” was one of the big points – “you can't spell SMART [or, for that matter, HEART] without ART” being one of the big points regarding the role of arts in the already beleaguered education funding.
But we're talking about $14,000,000 in arts funding. That may sound like of a lot of money but when considering a couple of billion dollars between Rendell's proposal and the Senate Republicans', it really just a dribble in the bucket.
Of course, the argument is, if you're pitting health care and police protection against something viewed merely as “entertainment,” no one does anyone a favor by this either/or mentality. The old argument of “Shoes or Shakespeare” is just old...
In Allegheny County alone, the Arts (in various manifestations) generated over $340 Million in “local economic activity” and supported the equivalent of over 10,000 full-time jobs. It also contributed $33 Million in tax revenues, including $18.5 Million that went to the state. That's what the Pittsburgh area alone generated for the state's income in 2005. In return, the entire state was hoping to get $14 Million back.
Now, if you think this is all about supporting “elitist” organizations where people dressed in furs and diamonds throw air-kisses at their friends in the lobbies of posh cultural palaces, I should mention a Philadelphia-based report that said statewide various programs and performances drew 30,000,000 people, generated $2,000,000,000 and supported 62,000 jobs.
The rotunda at the capitol was packed with kids that day, with people in shorts and t-shirts and while some of them were artists and some of them were students who'd benefited by an after-school theater or music program, some of them were people who were “consumers” and supporters of the arts, whether they contribute thousands of dollars or just buy tickets or who just appreciate the value of an arts program that has, in one way or another, made their lives richer or given their kids a different perspective on life today.
In fact, during the 90 minutes of the rally with all of its speeches, no mention was made of ANY of the classical music organizations in the Harrisburg area – not the Harrisburg Symphony or any of the community orchestras in the area, not Market Square Concerts (by name), not Concertante, not the opera companies, and I don't think I heard mention of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, either (a fixture on the national dance scene as a training ground for ballet dancers going off to major companies around the country). If I'm not mistaken, neither were the orchestras in Lancaster and York mentioned, but that could have been during the cheering and drum-beating for some of the other groups and programs from across the state that were.
The thing is, there are many arts organizations that produce all manner of cultural programs for people who live all over this state, not just in the big cities. They're all in danger.
If the legislators get their wish, there will no funding for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the body that doles out grants to support arts groups across the state. That means Pennsylvania will be the ONLY state in the nation NOT to have such a council.
So you might say “well, then, they can survive on the National Endowment for the Arts.” Except grants from the federal government are usually tied into matching grants from the state governments. So it's more than just cutting back or eliminating state funding.
To raise the $14 Million being cut from the budget, each Pennsylvania tax-payer would need to pay a nickel-a-day or an additional $2.60 for the year.
Another news item this past week reported that convicted former State Senator Vincent Fumo will lose his state pension of $100,500/year. Now, I know not every state government retiree would be getting that much annually, but 139 pensions of that size would equal... oh, about $14,000,000...
Now, by stating these next two observations, I'm not placing them in an either/or competition. I'm just sayin'...
Also in the news the day of the Arts Rally, there was a report that said a proposal restored $7,000,000 to the budget to support the Scotland School (originally zeroed out so the school would have to close). Whether this will be enough to keep the school in business and maintain whatever benefits students will receive from it – certainly, anything that will benefit the children of veterans is a good thing – I don't know, but I'm thinking there's money for 263 students in one school (as of June, 2009) that's half the amount of money the Arts would love to see budgeted for thousands of students across the entire commonwealth.
I'm just sayin'...
Over the weekend with the likelihood the Harley-Davidson motorcycle plant will close in York because business is down, losing all those jobs, and the fact other states are now courting the company to come build in their states, the Governor quickly proposed $15,000,000 as a start in what's “probably going to be a $100,000,000 endeavor.”
I'm not arguing the importance of the Harley plant to York County's economy or even to the state's. True, Harley can make a lot more noise than the Arts groups and get more attention, but I'm just sayin'...
It's not just about State Workers being held hostage because they're not getting paid (but are still expected to work just as much as they do when they are getting paid).
Most artists, arts organizations and community-based after-school programs live from pay-check to pay-check, too: for them, it's a way of life, not just something they have to face every year at Budget Time. Nobody's coming up with special legislation to bail them out...
(And I have to wonder: if health care reform and stimulus packages smack of socialism, why is “Cash for Clunkers” so popular? I'm just sayin'...)
In times of financial crisis, it may be unrealistic to be idealistic, but programs like these are not luxury items. They're also the soul of Pennsylvania.
It's been a busy day, here, posting about the Summer Music 2009 concerts this week with Market Square Concerts and trying to get caught up on a few things this past week.
Mostly, I was getting behind due to some problems with the 'new' computer knocked out by a virus and the 'old backup' computer which was being pretty sluggish and at times non-functional. After the nastiness on July 3rd, trying to post something about the Harrisburg Symphony's concert-in-the-rain, I was unable to get in and do much posting after 10 hours of downloading tribulations - what I was able to get done took about three or four times longer than usual because of the slowness. But then, not only did my brother Norm, passing through the area, help me get rid of a nasty old Trojan on the new one, he installed Linux' Ubuntu on the 'new' PC so I can now say "buh-bye" to Microsoft Windows as my main cybersqueeze which has always been a kind of uncomfortable shot-gun affair, anyway. Aside from a few issues with the possible purchase of certain music-writing software like Sibelius or Finale which seem to be only Microsoft friendly (and no, I can't afford to go out and buy a new MAC just for that, yet), I can honestly say now, "I don't do Windows."
So here are some of the posts I've been working on recently:
For tomorrow's concert at Market Square Church which begins at 6pm (ahem, note: 6:00 pm EDT as in SIX o'clock) with an "up-close/personal" post about the Shostakovich Piano Quintet which Stuart Malina will be playing with the Fry Street Quartet (wonderful videos including the Fugue being played by Glenn Gould and an unnamed quartet and of the scherzo with Martha Argerich, Joshua Bell & Various & Sundry Friends)
For Saturday's 8pm concert at the Glen Allen Mill (directions included in the summary post) with an "up-close/personal" post about the Chausson Concerto in D for Violin, Piano & String Quartet which Odin Rathnam and Michael Sheppard will be playing with the Fry Street
for Sunday's 4pm concert at the Glen Allen Mill with an "up-close/personal" post about the Schubert Trout Quintet which Stuart Malina will play with members of the quartet and bassist Donovan Stokes including some great video clips of a legendary performance by Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta
I know I should really do one on the three Beethoven Quartets the Fry Street will be performing, too -- Op.18/5 on Wednesday, Op.18/4 on Saturday and Op.18/2 on Sunday -- but I figure Beethoven probably needs less introduction or doesn't have as many interesting back-stories as the Chausson, Shostakovich or the Trout Quintet have.
Plus, I need to get back to the song cycle: I was able to finish the piano part of the 2nd song, "The Lazy Poet," which took exactly a month in itself. Other things in my schedule have precluded concentrating on the vocal part, now, but at least I was able to sit down and figure out enough of it to think - knocking on plastic laminated artificial wood-substitute - that it should go fairly quickly. And there are other things to mention - the books I've been reading and the complete restructuring of my diet which has resulted in at least some weight loss - but I'll save those for later.
Time to go listen to some music - most recently, I've been immersing myself in the Ligeti Etudes, but more on that, later, too.
One of the statements that was made at yesterday's "Rally for the Arts in Pennsylvania" was that Art is the Heart of Pennsylvania (or of any community, by extension) though one could argue it is also (if not more importantly) the soul.
Signs reading "You Can't Spell SMART without ART" (or for that matter, HEART) focused on the importance of young people's exposure to the arts, whether it's active (as students taking lessons to become performers whether they become professional artists or not) or passive (as an audience to experience a response to that art).
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I think we're talking about only $14M being cut from the budget to support all of the arts across the whole state. In terms of money spent on various projects of any kind, that doesn't seem like a lot of money, that $14M is going to close a gap measured in B's.
Later, I'll write more about the rally itself, but I found this today and wanted to share it with you. It's a talk from the founder of "El Sistema," the much talked-about music program in Venezuela. The second clip is a performance by one of the country's youth orchestras (not the more famous, more widely traveled Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra) with a talk by conductor Gustavo Dudamel, perhaps the hottest figure in today's music world, at 25 the in-coming music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and himself a product of El Sistema.
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What would have happened to all these children if the government of Venezuela, long before the present administration there, had said "Art is a luxury and funding for it is not important: we will cut it from the Budget"?
If you're a creative artist or a performer; if you have ever enjoyed a performance as a member of the audience; if you have ever had an emotional response to a painting or to a theatrical production; if you have ever felt an epiphany from an experience with something artistic, whether it changed your life or just improved your day; if you have seen the expression on a child's face coming face to face with something artistic that cannot be explained in a government report, you know the importance of art in our every-day lives.
Tuesday morning at 11:00, Citizens for the Arts will be holding a rally in the main Rotunda of Pennsylvania’s State Capitol here in Harrisburg in support of the arts in the state. Given the economy and the on-going budget stalemate, state support for the arts across the commonwealth has probably never been more at risk.
Wouldn't it be interesting if, somehow, we could remove "all the art" in the Capitol building so the legislators would experience it, even for one day, without all the contributions made to the building by artists?
- - - - - * Attendees should plan to make appointments with their legislators while in Harrisburg. The House generally goes into session at 11 AM and the Senate at 1 PM so appointments may be easier to make prior to the rally. Don't be discouraged if you are not able to meet with your legislators and meet with staff instead. Staff do relay your messages. If you are unable to schedule an appointment, stop by their offices and leave materials behind. You can find your legislators office information on the General Assembly website (check link through the original web-link). If you want to stop by the Governor's office, it's located at 225 Main Capitol.
* Jump Street is offering free parking at their offices. The Jump Street address is 100 N. Cameron Street, Harrisburg. (For walking directions from Jump Street to the Capitol, check the main rally page.) - - - - -
Please take this opportunity, if you’re in the area, to show your support for supporting the arts.
It’s been two years, now, since the music world was dealing with the news of the deaths of three great singers: Beverly Sills died on July 2nd, Regine Crespin on July 7th, and then on July 10th we were waiting for news about tenor Jerry Hadley who had been placed on life-support following an attempted suicide, then waiting for the inevitable news of his death which finally came 8 days later..
Jerry Hadley had been one of the leading American tenors in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Then his career (and life) fell on hard times, as often happens to singers who, usually, reach a point where they are considered “past their prime.”
I had blogged about it when I worked at the radio station, but those posts are no longer available. There were numerous e-mails from people who knew him and people who just loved his singing. An e-mail today from a friend and colleague of his, Robert Chapman, who had contacted me then, prompted me to remember the events of those days.
After hearing the news about Jerry’s being on life-support, Mr. Chapman wrote to tell me about his experience working with Jerry when his career was getting underway. He allowed me to quote him then and I re-post that quote now:
- - - - - This afternoon, I was listening to Jerry's recording of 'A Tazza 'e Cafè! (from his RCA recording A Song of Naples). This happy song, lovingly sung by a grandson of Italian immigrants, is how I choose to remember our mutual friend.
When I first met Jerry, he wanted to pick my brain about what it was like to sing in European opera houses (I'd spent several years at the Frankfurt Opera). I asked him which tenors he most admired and might want to pattern his career after. Without any hesitation, he replied "Fritz Wunderlich." "An excellent choice," I said, of the great German tenor whose life was tragically cut short at 36. Over the years it became more and more apparent that the singer whose career most closely paralleled Jerry's was not Wunderlich's but Nicolai Gedda's. For the most part, each chose their roles wisely, although both Jerry and Nicky eventually succumbed to the temptation to take on roles that Mother Nature never intended them to sing. Both were very smart but, after all, they were TENORS!
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(Typical baritone humor, there...)
Bob, who’s since been working for a non-affiliated classical music station in North Carolina, wrote to tell me, “I've stayed in touch with [Jerry’s] former wife, Cheryll, and she's given her imprimatur to the two shows I'll be running, this week and next, on the WCPE Opera House in tribute to Jerry.” He included this information which you can listen to on-line.
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On this week's WCPE Opera House, tenor Jerry Hadley stars in two of the four operettas by Franz Lehár that he translated and recorded with maestro Richard Bonynge: The Czarevitch and Giuditta. The plot of The Czarevitch is loosely based on a true story: the self-imposed exile of the son of Peter the Great, Alexei, who shirked his father's command by running away to Naples with his Finnish mistress disguised as a page. In the operetta, the mistress is replaced by a ballerina, Sonia, who is initially disguised as a boy! Giuditta was Lehár's last and most ambitious work. Of all his works it is the one that most approaches true opera, the resemblances between the story and that of Bizet's Carmen and its unhappy ending heightening the resonances. Perhaps the best known song in the work is the soprano aria "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß" ("Kiss my lips and your heart is aflame"), sung by Giuditta in the fourth scene.
In The Czarevitch, Mr. Hadley sings the title role and Nancy Gustafson is Sonia. Deborah Riedel sings the title role in Giuditta, with Hadley as Octavio. Richard Bonynge conducts the English Chamber Orchestra and the London Voices in both recordings.
Next week we'll conclude this Lehár festival and tribute to the late Jerry Hadley with performances of Paganini and The Land of Smiles. Not surprisingly, the former has some extraordinary fiddling, and the latter contains perhaps the most famous operetta aria every written, "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" ("Yours is my heart alone").
The WCPE Opera House is heard every Thursday evening at 7 o'clock in the Eastern time zone on 89.7 FM in central North Carolina, and we're streamed online at http://www.theclassicalstation.org .
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Jerry was very happy singing operettas as well as the more serious operas. He was also a champion of 20th Century works, singing in the world premiere of John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” at the Met. He was more recently taking on a new role in one of my favorite operas, the last one Benjamin Britten composed, as Aschenbach in “Death in Venice.”
Here is a brief excerpt from the video of a concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Bernstein had hand-picked Jerry for the title role and the recording they made is one of my favorites. Here is Jerry Hadley singing “It Must Be So” with the composer on the podium in 1989.
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There are so many stages to deal with here: the terrible question of suicide, for one; the power depression has that it could actually destroy someone so positive and seemingly successful like Jerry Hadley; the long wait that week two years ago, hoping against hope. Then the grief that, however obvious it may have been before, sinks in more intensely afterwards with that sense of loss, that there was never a chance to say good-bye, no final performance to offer a farewell bravo, so many songs left unsung. Only the healing of time will help with the perspective.
That he should have – or even could have – resorted to suicide as a solution shocked me, even though I didn’t know him all that well and had not been in touch with him for a long time now, thinking all the things I should have – could have – done to keep in touch.
Jerry went off to become famous: I was happy to have known him then and each performance I saw, each recording I heard, each review I read made me happy for him, that things had gone so well for a kid who went off to grad school, never having seen an opera, and landed a lead role at his first audition.
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During my last year of teaching at the University of Connecticut, I was one of four on a faculty search committee to hire a part-time voice instructor. There were three or four candidates: one of them was okay but unmemorable, another had respectable credentials as both a performer and teacher in the Hartford area and would have served our purposes well enough, but the last one was this young man coming in from Illinois. I don’t recall what he sang but I remember, by the third or fourth measure, looking over at the soprano who chaired the voice department and realizing she and I were in agreement on one thing already: this was a talented young man. Unfortunately he had no teaching experience, just out of graduate school. It was fairly obvious why he was here: it was fairly obvious why most auditionees came to UConn – it was half-way between Boston and New York which is a world away from Illinois, for instance, and a great place to jump-start a career in opera.
The soprano and I agreed, silently, that this was a career that needed to start. Of course the other two felt the Hartford tenor should be hired because he had the experience but the soprano and I lobbied for the future: hire the Hartford tenor the next time around, but aside from the fact where does a talent like this learn to teach students, let’s get this guy closer to New York so he’ll be singing for Beverly Sills at the New York City Opera and the music world will thank UConn for making it possible. Or something to that effect, but eventually we won over the others on the committee and so we were able to offer the job to Jerry Hadley.
He told us the story that he was a simple small-town guy who liked musicals and sang a lot in church. When he went to the University of Illinois to work on a masters in music education, someone heard him singing show tunes in a practice room and interrupted him, inviting him to come on down to the opera auditions.
“I’ve never even seen an opera,” Jerry told him, blushing at the idea of actually singing in one, apologizing for not having anything remotely operatic in his repertoire. “But the guy said ‘Just sing what you’re singing now and let them figure it out.’ So I went.”
The next day, the cast list for the opera department’s production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” went up and Jerry looked at the list. He saw he was down for Tamino. He asked one of the other singers there, “Is that a good role?” Yeah, well, it’s the lead role… one of the great tenor roles in the repertoire!
Meanwhile, having left UConn for an attempt at life in New York City myself, I ended up living in an apartment at 101st & Broadway. It was a mile-and-a-half to Lincoln Center, around 66th & B’way, a distance I walked almost daily (it was often faster to walk than take the bus or even the subway), going to concerts at the New York Philharmonic or performances at the Met, at City Opera, at Alice Tully Hall.
It was an exciting time if a bit tenuous financially but an adventure and for the most part I loved it. I met a concert pianist who specialized in new music in my building and wrote a piece for her to perform at Carnegie Recital Hall. And across the street in a parallel apartment building (although on a grander, older, better maintained scale) I could hear a very fine tenor warming up several days a week.
Then the news arrived that Jerry Hadley had indeed come to New York and sung for Beverly Sills. He was signed by the City Opera company immediately and was to make his debut in the rather brief role of Arturo, the husband murdered by Lucia prior to the Mad Scene in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” It was a start.
I was there for his opening night and I guess he sang well, though I was just too excited for him to notice if he had or hadn’t sung his best. He certainly didn’t sound like a kid who’d never seen an opera about 5 or 6 years earlier. He didn’t, however, come out for the final bow, for some reason: perhaps since he was killed off fairly early in the opera, he didn’t bother to hang around, which was kind of odd. When I went backstage to congratulate him with some other friends from UConn, he had, in fact, left before the opera was over. There was a celebration somewhere ;-) I assumed...
Later that night, I walked back to my apartment, excited that someone I knew had just sung at City Opera! As I crossed the street to my building, somebody who looked familiar was getting out of a cab. It was Jerry! We hugged and I congratulated him and then said “so YOU’RE the tenor I keep hearing over here?!”
Yes, it turned out, he had a friend who lived there, and when he came down to New York to take lessons or to audition or to see performances, that’s where he stayed, right across the street from me! As Henry James supposedly once said, “there aren’t enough people to go around in the world.”
What are the percentages of singers who never get beyond even that level of accomplishment: I mean, to be singing small roles at City Opera is quite an achievement, no? I don’t recall what operas I saw Jerry in before I left New York in 1980. I remember hanging out with him backstage after one or two of them – I’m pretty sure one was another “Lucia di Lammermoor” but now he was singing the Big Tenor role, Edgardo. There was also a wonderful “Barber of Seville.” I came back to Harrisburg and Jerry went off to sing in Vienna, at the Met, in London and eventually just about every place where good tenors go to sing! I saw him in a TV broadcast on PBS, Live from the Met as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” "Yes!" I remember thinking, "he's made it, now!"
When we got the Telarc recording of “The Magic Flute” with him as Tamino at the radio station where I then worked, I had to restrain myself from telling his audition story every time I’d play Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schön. (You can hear a bit of it by checking out clip #6.)
He seemed poised for a good career, getting past the sudden rise to stardom and settling in to roles that were good for him, and avoiding ones that weren’t. He said he’d given up on Pinkerton in “Madame Butterfly” with Puccini’s big, beefy orchestral sound because, compared to some of the roles he’d made a success of, as he told Will Crutchfield of the New York Times in 1984 , “my only options [with Pinkerton] were to pray, hope and sing as loud as I could, and to me that’s not singing.” He went on to sing a lot of Mozart and operas from the French repertoire like “Faust,” “Manon” and… oh yes, and “Werther”...
It’s so difficult now, thinking of him singing Werther, the young hero of Massenet’s opera. In this misguided romance, Werther borrows a pair of pistols from the husband of the woman he’s in love with, only to shoot himself with them on Christmas Eve...
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But I would prefer to remember his own recounting of that unexpected opening night at City Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Have you ever had stage-fright or wondered what it would be like to go out on stage and not know what you’re doing there? This is from Jerry’s own account of what his opening night debut at City Opera was like in 1979. I was even THERE and yet I didn’t know most of this had been going on! I was sitting up in Peanut Heaven and was lucky to know which character I was looking at was him!
Jerry was supposed to make his debut later in the season, but on fairly short notice, he was called in to replace the scheduled Arturo in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Arturo is not a great part – he comes in, sings a little aria to Lucia’s brother, discusses his impending wedding with Lucia, they sign a marriage contract, Lucia’s real boyfriend Edgardo (the Real Tenor part in this opera) shows up, they all sing the gorgeous Sextet, then, brandishing their swords, chase Edgardo off as the curtain falls. Lucia then kills Arturo on their wedding night and, spattered with his blood, comes in and sings the incredible Mad Scene. But by then, Arturo is basically just a stain. Like I said, not a great role.
On the other hand, not bad for a debut. After all, I think Kiri Te Kanawa made her stage debut as one of the walk-on flower maidens in the brief wedding scene in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” talk about nothing parts, and look where she ended up!
Ah, but what didn’t happen to Jerry Hadley that first night at City Opera?
He had no stage rehearsal, allowed onto the stage to check out the set for only moments in between scenes just before he’s supposed to go on. It turned out to be only seconds before the stage is filled with everybody but he recognizes no one because he’d never SEEN them before in costume. He was supposed to go out and sing to Lucia’s brother but had no idea which one was him!! A friendly baritone pointed him in the right direction.
When he sat down, discussing details of the impending marriage, he had no idea his sword got caught in the rungs of the chair. And when he got up to follow Lucia’s brother across the stage, here was this chair dragging behind him. Now, I remember seeing that but from where I was up in the Cheap Seats, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly had happened. Some guys came over and helped extricate the chair from his scabbard.
Then his floofy hat caught on fire. The plumage sticking out the back made contact with the flame of a candle as he turned to see his bride-to-be coming down the steps (who was trying not to laugh). The people in the chorus behind him managed to put the hat-fire out in time but the hat, pinned to the back of his wig, slipped off his head. Lucia’s supposed to be distraught over being forced to marry this guy instead of her True Love, Edgardo, right?
But there’s her future husband at the bottom of the steps, his wig askew and this hat hanging off the back of his wig. He was supposed to bow to her with a sweep of his hat – but since he didn’t know there was no hat there, he says he did this kind of Veronica Lake thing and flipped his hair at her! He’s lucky she didn’t kill him on the spot…
Well, once all that’s happened, you figure it’s a short scene, what else can go wrong, right? Edgardo, the Real Tenor, makes his entrance. They all sing the Sextet – no action here, just stand there and sing – but at the end the men draw those swords of theirs and chase Edgardo off the stage.
Unfortunately, not having had any stage rehearsal, Jerry didn’t know exactly where he should be standing or what the other guys were going to be doing. So he draws his sword. They draw their swords. And as they turned to face the back of the stage and the retreating Edgardo as the curtain comes down, Jerry jumps in the air, having taken two swords “right where it hurts.”
On stage, there’s a moment of silence. Then everybody breaks out laughing behind the curtain, welcoming him to the company. Is this, like, hazing? When the curtain first went up on his scene, he saw Beverly Sills, the great soprano who by then had become the director of the City Opera company, sitting in the director’s box, giving him a big smile and a thumbs up. After the chair thing and his floofy hat breaking out in flames, he looked up at one point and the only thing he could see is this mass of red hair on the box rail: she was laughing so hard, she couldn’t even sit up.
At intermission when she came back to his dressing room – after he was thinking “well, it was nice to be able to sing on stage with an opera company like this at least once,” assuming that was his first and last night in the opera world – she looked like she was trying to put a good face on everything but then just broke out in prolonged laughter. He did everything BUT break his leg that night.
Now I understand why he hadn’t come out for the final bows at the end of the opera. We had been told backstage there was a celebration somewhere – but he may have left out of embarrassment, going on the assumption, well, that was that and it was nice while it lasted.
So when I saw him later that night, getting out of a cab in front of the building where he was staying (and right across from my apartment, too!), he must have wondered why I too didn’t break down laughing talking about it. But he sang well and that’s what counted. And that, really, was all I remembered.
Fortunately, he had a second chance. And he went on to become one of the most famous American tenors of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He sang everywhere, sang almost everything (which may have not helped his voice endure into those longed-for post-Golden Years), recorded tons and won three Grammy awards. Paul McCartney chose him to sing in his “Liverpool Oratorio” and Leonard Bernstein hand-picked him for the Candide project in 1989. What an amazing career.
I had said “about 26 years” but that’s not accurate – I think that was my own calculation, from that debut in 1979 to about the time I’d heard were his last performances, not knowing he was still singing even up through May this year, just not at places like the Met. And he made his official stage debut in an opera in 1976, a year or two before we hired him at UConn. So yeah, 31 years is a pretty good career – you’d think.
But musicians can be an odd lot and opera singers even odder. There’s this problem with separating the singer from the character – the same with any actor – and there’s the public person and then there’s the private person. True, paparazzi don’t normally stalk opera singers, but there are private lives that we, on our side of the footlights, know nothing about.
If few of his friends could comprehend the depth of his depression, growing out of more than one or two issues we read about in the press, think how it must appear to those of us who see an incredibly successful career and assume “wow, he must be very happy!”
I played three short selections at the end of my weekly Request show the week he died, a small tribute to Jerry Hadley.
Hearing that amazing voice, so recognizable and one that belonged to somebody I once knew as a friend, it was difficult to come back on-air and do the traditional “that was” back-announce, keeping an eye on the clock to make that network join at 9:00:00pm. I was able to deal with it until the very end of the last selection – “Make Our Garden Grow” from Bernstein’s Candide which brings me to tears even under normal circumstances. - - - - - - - - - - Dr. Pangloss has this odd little line interjected before the final chords: “Any questions?”
For some reason, wishing someone “Good Luck” before a performance is considered Bad Luck – perhaps it will jinx the performance, another of those backstage superstitions – so instead, well-wishers and colleagues will say something awful like “Break a leg!” And so reverse psychology becomes a tradition.
Mezzo-soprano Joyce diDonato, who’s rapidly becoming one of the best known opera singers in the business today – if you haven’t heard her recordings, you may have seen her in the Metropolitan Opera’s HD Broadcast of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” a couple seasons ago – was singing the opening night performance on the 4th of July of another lively production of this lively classic in London at the Royal Opera House when indeed she did, quite literally, break a leg!
Shortly after her big show-stopping aria, Une voce poco fa, she had a slight faux pas when she slipped and fell. Gracefully, as only Joyce, a consummate actress with great comic timing, would do, of course. She got up, dusted herself off and hobbled around, everybody thinking it was all part of the scene. She thought she had sprained her ankle. At least, that’s what was announced to the audience at intermission.
The physical limitations were one thing – the pain must have been something else. But in the best sense of the “old trouper,” the show went on. With the help of her great cast – ooh, there’s another pun, but more of that later – she was able to make it through the rest of the opera with first a cane and then a crutch. At one point, she sang the line – as written – “I have a cramp in my foot” which prompted some audience applause and laughter. She was even able to improvise a little with the crutch, decorated with a bright pink flower, which came in handy during the Storm Scene when she trashes the set!
Stiff upper lip aside (and how would one sing with such a lip?), she was congratulated by the London critics who praised her singing’s “delicious innuendo and fabulous aplomb.”
After the curtain calls and the standing ovation, she went to the hospital where the doctor was horrified to discover she had been on her feet for three hours after she fell. Officially, she fractured her fibula but fortunately with no apparent damage to the ligaments or the joint. (Whew!) While technically that’s not “breaking a leg,” it’s close enough for jazz.
Now she’s facing 6 weeks of NOT being on her feet in order for it to heal - properly. So last night’s performance was – in the best Bette Midler manner – sung in a wheel-chair. Granted, the wheel-chair might be a bit anachronistic for 18th Century Seville, but her cast was covered in a bright pink sock to match her costume!
I’m not sure what one can do to replace the expression, “Break a leg!” She suggests “in the mouth of the wolf” which sounds like the Italian version of something else equally bad for you but, as she points out, far less likely to happen.
In the past, I used to joke with performer-specific breaks – to a string player, “break a string!” or a singer, “break a lip!” But then one night, a string player I’d said that to actually broke a string and I felt awful... So now I leave it more generically to “break a nail” or (better yet) just “have fun!” Perhaps that’s why I always hear singers say to each other backstage, “toi toi,” whatever that means. The implications are better than “Knock ‘em dead!”
Speaking of which, here she is, singing that very fall-inducing aria Una voce poco fa from the Met production of “The Barber of Seville”: - - - - -
Photo credit: Joyce and her cast at the London hospital, posted on her blog. Another photo on the blog, taken after the performance, includes her Count Almaviva, Juan Diego Florez, and the equally indispensable, flower-bedecked crutch. Check back, too - she has promised pictures of the cast in action on the stage of the Royal London Opera!
While I’m sorting out stuff for a setting of “The Lazy Poet” (which is taking far too much work), I’ve been blogging elsewhere about summer concerts:
This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony will be performing five free concerts around the area (Lemoyne, Harrisburg, Annville, Carlisle & McAlisterville). You can read the post at Dr. Dick’s Harrisburg Symphony Blog.
Though the weather is fine – F-I-N-E – this morning, the forecast for this evening is a bit iffy with a chance of showers and possible thunderstorms before 11pm: if you’re wondering about tonight’s Negley Park concert, in case of rain it will be held indoors at the Washington Heights Elementary School on Lemoyne’s Walnut Street just a few blocks away – a weather up-date will be posted on the Harrisburg Symphony’s website if the location will be moved.
The story behind Philip Glass’s Violin Sonata made the Wall Street Journal today – you can find a link to the article in a post over at Dr. Dick’s Market Square Concerts Blog, with some links to past posts about the world premiere in Harrisburg at Market Square Concerts this past February.
Market Square Concerts is gearing up for Summer Music 2009 in three weeks – there are some details about its three concerts as well as a tease for the new 2009-2010 season, here.
And now, back to writing romantic arpeggios and sleepy triads to inspire “The Lazy Poet.”
"A piece that ten people care passionately about is worth more than a piece that 10,000 people don't mind listening to." -- Charles Rosen
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"If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist." - John F. Kennedy
On July 14th, there was a rally to support funding for the arts in Pennsylvania, organized by Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania.
