San Juan Symphony OPERAFEST, notes on the program

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. - Kenneth Clark

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. - W. H. Auden

Logic and sensibility are indeed rare qualities in the opera house. Like myth, fairy tale and legend, opera functions on a level where consciousness rarely intrudes. Its power comes not from tightly woven plots, but from conveying basic truths about the human condition through symbols and archetypes. Add the emotional magic of music and the incredible becomes real. However, without sets, costumes, lighting and all the props of the theater, it is difficult to make the mythic believable and demonstrate the full power of opera. Today’s concert is built on opera’s other great asset:  the magnificent capabilities of the human voice. For Operafest, we’ve chosen a great variety of operatic highlights, presented by four soloists, to offer a glimpse of the drama and atmosphere of opera.

Destiny is made palpable in Verdi’s Overture to La Forza del Destino by the unforgettable opening bars. Three imperious brass hammer blows and a turbulent theme in the strings set the tone for a story driven by the romantic themes of forbidden love, inescapable fate and religious redemption. Forza was originally composed for St. Petersburg, then revised for La Scala, in Milan, in 1869. The overture is a compendium of the opera’s best tunes, all held together by the restless destiny motif which insinuates itself threateningly throughout the work.

In the fourth act of Puccini’s La Boheme the poet Rodolfo and the painter Marcello are in their garret trying to work. They have been separated from their girlfriends, Mimi and Musetta, for a number of months. Marcello pretends disinterest when Rodolfo mentions seeing Musetta, finely dressed and riding in a carriage, but Rodolfo knows he’s faking. When Marcello counters with a similar story about seeing Mimi doing well Rodolfo feigns approval, but both men are preoccupied with thoughts of their lost loves and can’t concentrate on work. Their poignant longing breaks out in an extraordinarily lyrical duet for two men.

French composer Leo Delibes is known almost solely for his opera Lakmé, written in 1883.  The story is set in the temples and exotic gardens of India, where a British officer falls in love with Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahman Priest. Like Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Delibes’ work deals with personal and cultural tragedies arising from the meeting of two incompatible cultures. The British touch desecrates things Indian, delicate and sacred. The Act I Flower Duet finds Lakmé with her servant, Mallika, bathing in the woods and enjoying the calm beauty of a stream shadowed by perfume-laden jasmine and roses.

Mozart’s operas are masterpieces of musical characterization. Don Giovanni, the seducer known to all Western cultures, is both hero and villain. His actions are heinous but his courage and glamour are irresistible. In the duet, “La ci darem la mano,” he has come across the pre-wedding party of two peasants, Zerlina and Masetto. He’s sent Masetto away, then in the duet flatters Zerlina and promises to marry her himself. She hesitates, doubts his sincerity, but is easily undone by this nobleman’s suave ways. Luckily, as they march off toward his villa, Zerlina will be rescued by an older woman who knows a thing or two.

In Mozart’s best-known opera a philandering Count wants to prevent his servants, Figaro and Susanna from marrying.  He hopes to exercise his droit de seigneur, a master’s antiquated right to spend a night with his servant bride before giving her to her groom. In many turns of plot, the peasants outwit the aristocracy. Written in 1786, a few years before the French Revolution, the opera, and Beaumarchais’ play on which it is based, threatened to strain the already tenuous relations between the classes. Mozart avoided censorship only by carefully editing Figaro’s monologues on social equality. Needless to say, the general public flocked to see such a sensational subject on stage.

In this duet between Susanna and Figaro from the finale of the opera, a plot to entrap the Count and expose his philandering has brought everyone into the palace gardens at night. Mistaken identities and suspicions of infidelity lead Susanna to begin slapping and kicking her groom, but to Figaro her blows are welcome evidence that she loves him alone. Their reconciliation prepares for the larger reconciliation of the Countess and Count, after the latter has been properly chastised for his infidelity.

B.F Pinkerton, a blustery lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, has come to Japan on assignment. To make his stay more comfortable he’s arranged for a house, servants, and a Japanese wife. Madama Butterfly is a beautiful fifteen year-old geisha. Innocent and trusting, she needs the marriage to escape family debts. The wedding ceremony is interrupted by the shouts of her relatives, who curse her for repudiating her family and religion. One of opera’s greatest love duets begins as evening falls and the couple is left alone for the first time.  As the two find their way on their wedding night, the music moves from hesitant formalities to rapturous desire, only occasionally colored by shadows from Butterfly’s forsaken past and the tragedy that will follow when Pinkerton sails home and abandons his Japanese possessions.

In almost every national culture that produced opera, operetta flourished as a lighter form of entertainment that included music, spoken dialogue and dance. Spanish Zarzuela and German Singspiel are close relatives of operetta. Written in 1858, Orpheus in the Underworld was the first of Jacques Offenbach's outrageously funny operettas, a send-up of Greek mythology. A highly disrespectful French romp, it involves nymphs, shepherds, gods and goddesses, with the fun reaching its climax in the riotous revels of the celebrated Can-can.

Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) is at once an absurd fairy tale comedy and a serious parable of the soul’s quest for enlightenment and inner harmony. A German Singspiel, it combines sublime music and often ridiculous texts, cloaking its philosophical and religious message in enigmatic veils and poetic mists. Goethe tried to write a sequel to it; Shaw called it “the music of my own church.” In the quintet from Act I, we meet Tamino, a brave youngster who will undergo initiation to win a princess as his sacred bride. His country-bumpkin sidekick, Papageno, lacks Tamino’s intelligence and courage, but has a simple and frank good nature. Three ladies, messengers of the all-powerful Queen of the Night, guide the two men on their perilous mission to rescue the princess.
 
Zarzuela is a form of Spanish musical theater originally from the seventeenth century.  Over the years it evolved into an exotic mixture of contemporary popular styles, valuing vitality and theatricality over originality. Pablo Sorozábal, born 1897, was the last great composer of Zarzuelas.  He pursued a serious career as conductor of the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, while writing popular Zarzuelas into the 1950’s.

In Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix,  a girl from a mountain village has fallen in love with a young artist from Paris. Her aria expresses all the convictions and illusions of young love.  Donizetti, along with Bellini and the young Rossini, was a major proponent of the early nineteenth-century operatic style known as bel canto, in which the beauty of the voice, its melodic line and its virtuosic capabilities, are paramount. 

Carmen is the dark beauty with a fiery temper who lures an inexperienced young soldier, Don José, into a world of passion and risk that leads both to a tragic end. In the original story by Prosper Mérimée on which Bizet’s opera is based, Carmen is a professional seductress and thief, a key player in a band of gypsy outlaws. Hardly a proper subject for an opera in Paris of the 1870s, the scenario was denounced as immoral and scandalous. But Bizet and his librettists avoided the lurid details, and focused instead on Carmen’s fatalism and hedonism:  she lives entirely for the present moment. When a reading of cards presages her own death, she accepts her fate with a mysterious and admirable strength. The opera’s tragedy is powerful precisely because it seems at various junctures so avoidable. José is a mama’s boy, completely ill-suited to Carmen’s whims and the risks of her world. The anarchy unravels him and he becomes a dangerous instrument of fate.

In the Seguidilla, Carmen has been arrested and José, who has been assigned to guard her, is seduced into releasing her. She sings of drinking and dancing on the outskirts of Seville and having just met a handsome young officer who will accompany her there. The Toreador Song introduces the bullfighter, Escamillo, whom Carmen falls for immediately. The Final Scene of the opera takes place outside the bull ring. José implores Carmen – it’s not too late to begin a new life together. Carmen has reason to fear for her life but boldly confronts José. It’s over - dead or alive, I will never be yours. Trumpets and cheers for Escamillo are heard from inside the arena as the gypsy and the soldier act out the end to their fateful story.

The energetic Prelude to the third act of Wagner’s Lohengrin sets the stage for tremendous wedding festivities. In the opera it leads directly into the Wedding Chorus, now well-known as “Here Comes the Bride.” But the bridal pair are soon separated. Lohengrin’s vows as a knight of the Grail take precedence. Only by relinquishing his bride, Elsa, is he is able to complete his mission to restore her long-lost brother to the throne of Brabant.