MEANDERING MONDAY – #ROW80 REPOST FROM 3/27/2013 - “A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO THE OPERA”

THIS IS A REPOST FROM 3/27/2013 AND I TRULY ENJOYED WRITING THIS! I HOPE YOU ENJOY READING IT AND LEARN A BIT ABOUT OPERA AND SOME CRAZY HISTORY ALONG THE WAY! :D


Young Person's Guide to the OPERA

Young persons today have lost sight of the fact that opera used to be the 19^th century's version of “Jersey Shore.” Well, kind of. Persons in operas did all sorts of outlandish things that just were not done in polite company. Actually, this analogy doesn't play out well, because all of the shit that goes on in “Jersey Shore” pretty much goes on in real life. Never mind.

Anyway, opera was THE form of entertainment back in the days before television and iPods and all of that, so composers and librettists were hell-bent on coming up with some pretty outrageous stuff to keep the hoi-polloi amused. In Italy, Puccini ruled and he wrote some beautiful stuff. Between Puccini and Guiseppe Verdi, Italian opera was well represented.

The Germans on the other hand, had a few problems. One of them was the Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm was a bit odd. He, uh decided, much like Stalin did in Russia several decades later, that he would decide what was acceptable for German audiences. Never mind that the Germans had been raised on the Aesir and Ragnarok and were already of a Berserker mentality. There was a problem with his favorite composer, who later became Hitler's favorite composer. Herr Richard Strauss lived long enough to achieve this dubious distinction, but Strauss really didn't give a fig what Wilhelm, or Hitler or Göebbels thought and went on to compose operas that were, ah, indeed in questionable taste.

The other is that for sheer crazy, German opera just can't be beat. Before Richard Strauss, we had Richard Wagner, whose magnum opus is the “Ring Cycle,” 20 hours of mayhem. Incest, death, destruction, war, 20 questions with dragons, trolls, witches, stupid but good looking heroes, Brünhilde, Rheinmaidens, Välkyrie, Valhalla, topped off by Götterdammerüng. A very happy batch of operas indeed, called "Das Ringen der Nibelungen," or "The Ring Cycle." I'll let Anna Russell describe it for us.

This set the stage for Richard Strauss who thought wholesome stuff like Salome, during Kaiser Wilhelm's reign, prior to WW I - and who was a bit of a stuffed shirt about morals in public, but behind closed doors? One of his ministers would drop dead during some bacchanal or other while wearing a pink tutu - would be perfect for operatic treatment. Herr Strauss was an awesome composer, but he had not clue one about anything socio-political during his long life. He thought it was a swell idea to collaborate with Stefan Zweig as his librettist during his stint as Reichsminister of musik for the Third Reich under Josef Goebbels. Herr Zweig was Jewish and living in London. Herr Goebbels was pissed about it and Strauss was lucky not to get a one-way ticket to Dachau.

Well, during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was a notorious blue-stocking, Strauss thought it would be a hella idea to do an operatic treatment of “Salome.” D'you remember this story? Antipas marries Herodias so he can get at her daughter Salome. John the Baptist is locked up in Antipas' prison under the palace. Salome gets a gander at John, as he squabbles over theology with some pharisees and goes all googly-eyed over him, but John spurns her for the harlot-in-training that she is. Antipas wants to see Salome dance, but she's all like, “Ewwww.” Herodias is rather annoyed at both Antipas and John, spiteful bitch that Herodias is, and she tells Salome to dance for Antipas, because Antipas will give her whatever Salome asks for, and she should ask for John's head.

Herodias is sick and tired of Antipas mooning over both Salome and John the Baptist. Antipas is afraid of John, as John is a man of God and keeps saying all this scary stuff from his cistern. So, Salome says, “Okay, A, I'll hip-hop for ya” and does the “Dance of the 7 Veils.”

  This is a more modern treatment, but the staging is so well-done, I chose this.

Once done, she asks for the head of John the Baptist and the evil deed is done. Next comes perhaps the most unbelievably hellish passage in music imaginable, as a huge hand rises out of the cistern bearing the head of John the Baptist. (Unfortunately, this is a bad edit, and you get part of her love/death song to Jokkanaan).

Antipas is horrified, but the nightmare is not yet ended. Salome proceeds to roll around on stage with the severed head of John the Baptist and sings the most glorious song of love that is also horrifying, but beautiful. 

So, Antipas has her put to death by the Roman guards. Curtain falls.

Great stuff! Seriously, this is music I grew up listening to and played, so even though my ears are by no means jaded, one can see why I am pretty tolerant of today's Rammstein-like groups and less than thrilled with precious music like Mozart. I love Haydn. Haydn took chances and is wonderful. Enough digression.

Strauss went ahead and debuted this opera without the Kaiser's approval. The Kaiser's favorite minister later died wearing a pink tutu at some function or another. So much for propriety; the Kaiser had a really bad year; the Archduke Ferdinand of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was assassinated shortly thereafter, and the Kaiser's year was about to get REALLY bad.

I played in Opera Tampa for 12 seasons, so I have plenty of rich material to draw from. We did mostly Italian opera. Maestro Coppola (the same family that produced Francis and Nic Cage) summed it up this way: “Anyone can play a Goddamned German opera. It's just 1, 2, 3, 4. In Italian opera there are so many rubatos and tempi changes it requires so much artistry. You are all here because you were hand-picked. Be proud.” Tyrant. I miss it. Maestro wasn't necessarily wrong, although in his waltzes, Richard Strauss affords lots of rubatos in the Viennese style. You may have picked that out in the "7 Veils." For the record, I LOVE playing Richard Strauss; supremely challenging and he pushes orchestras to the limits. In "Ein Heldenleben," (A Hero's Life" with him as the hero) during it's debut, one of the first violinists complained to him that a certain passage is unplayable. He casually looked over the score and said, "Don't worry, it's unplayable in the flutes, too." It is in the violas as well. Let's end this with one of the funniest Bugs Bunny cartoons ever.

Probably one of the best Wagner treatments I've ever seen. I played with the Warner Brothers Orchestra, after jumping ship from the Disney folks up in Detroit, many years ago. Man, did you have to play your ass off, but it was a HELL of a lot more fun! 

ROW80 DAY 12 - SO WHAT IF IT'S THE WEEKEND?

Now that I'm "retired," weekends don't have the same meaning for me that they might for the 40 hour a week wage slave. When I did work, I worked more than 40 hours and I know that most people do, either out of necessity or because they genuinely love their jobs, so the 40-hour-work-week thing is kind of mythical. Of course, if we all lived across the "pond," in Orlando, er, ah, Paris, France, we'd work 20 hours a week, or something and take 37 weeks off a year. At least that is what I keep reading on HuffPost, or is it the Daily Beast? I don't know. I'm still reeling from the fact that TomKat didn't work out; I thought it was a forever thing. Holy Toledo! What next, Katy Perry and Neville Brand*? Oh, she was married to Russell? Who the hell is he? Never mind.

*Neville Brand (August 13, 1920 – April 16, 1992) was an American television and movie actor. The one Katy wasn't married to; color me shocked. Of course, I didn't know he died in 1992. That kind of slows down the romance.

*Russell Edward Brand (born 4 June 1975) is an English comedian, actor, radio and television presenter, singer, columnist, and author. The one she was married to. Is he funny?

So, you can see that I am really on top of it culturally, as well as politically, socially and economically, too. Or I will be, just as soon as I dig around in the couch I bought and dragged home from the Goodwill. Apparently, the people who deep clean the furniture and make it look less contagious beat me to whatever treasures lay in the depths. Nary a coin to be had. I did however, find 2 rusted bobby pins, a Buzz Lightyear head and a Pokey character and some hairballs.

Well, I was never one of those people who hated Mondays, was kind of okay on Tuesdays, sort of happy-ish on Wednesdays, lighthearted on Thursdays, tapping my toes on Fridays, drunk on Friday nights, drunker on Saturdays, blurred on Sundays and do the whole fucked up Merry-Go-Round all over again come Monday. I kind of let my dad do that. Except he just drank all the time. At least he was happy about it.

No. Although I did my share of tippling, playing music for a living and then going back to school because I was stupid enough to marry ANOTHER viola player who thought I was going to magically turn into a fucking zither player after I married this fucking dimbulb and I was too fucking nuts to tell him to A) go fuck himself or B) go fuck himself, so I did the simplest and easiest thing possible: I went back to school full time and majored in computer science. What a wise choice, because A) I did so well in Algebra and Geometry in High School, garnering an aggregate grade of "C" and those were sympathy grades and B) I fucking HATED math and C) I originally majored in a discipline that has been the same for the last 140 years and computers are ground-breaking technology. I turned one on... once. Maybe. Fucking brilliant. Made sense to me. Off I went.

Well, guess what I found out? Music is math. After all those years of fighting it, it turns out that all those cute little patterns and relationships, hand framings and thirds, fourths, seconds, tri-tones and such I learned on my viola? They're all in there. They're all in math. And they're just the cutest little things. Oh, I worked my ass off. I did 4 years of math in 2 years. I approached my college Algebra, Calc and Trig the way I did my viola in College. 8 hours a day every day. I really loved it. I had a professor, Dr. Gingrich who thought I was a "caution." I got all in a panic over something, I can't remember what and in an aside asked him about the "pretend numbers." He looked at me quizzically for a minute. "oh, imaginary numbers."

I finished school and divorced the dimbulb. And silly you just knew that was a match made in heaven. By this time, I was playing and traveling most of time. Weekends had no meaning at all. Musicians usually play on the weekends and Mondays are what we call "dark." During certain holidays, I used to play every day for about 3 months straight with no days off. I have friends who play out at Disney in their Candlelight Spectacular. That cranks up between Halloween and Thanksgiving and doesn't stop until after January 1st. The musicians will play 7 or 8 shows a day, of 45 minutes a piece. I played for Disney once up in the Midwest and swore never again; it was like boot camp, and frankly I don't like Disney. A friend of mine calls it "Mouseschwitz." I loved playing for Warner Bros. Give me Bugs anytime.

Speaking of old Bugs, I have Opera stories. I played in Opera Tampa for about 12 years. We've had about every catastrophe. Well, not every catastrophe. We didn't have the "Aida" one, where the elephant got loose, but we did have the Circus horse thing. We also set Mimi on fire in "La Boheme," but we were only kidding. Musicians are barbarians.

Anyway, I need to read me up some how-to on how-to end these blog posts. Just taking off and not wishing you good evening, or some other happy-crappy just doesn't seem right, but there it is.