Conductors are supposed to live forever; everyone knows that. So even after learning the seriousness of his condition, I never really imagined that I would have to live in a world without Robert Bass. It doesn't seem possible. Bob’s been a central part of my life for twenty years--almost as long as I’ve lived in New York--and he transformed the world for me. Six days a week, I was just an ordinary New Yorker, but every Monday night, I became something more--a musician, and part of something much bigger than myself.
I grew up thinking of Carnegie Hall as a legend and a symbol--the place the greatest musicians aimed for. Because of Bob, the first time I ever entered the hall in real life, it was to perform there. I found myself singing with musicians I’d idolized for years (including one or two on whom I'd had mad schoolgirl crushes). In my fondest daydreams, I might have hoped to shake James Levine’s hand someday, but instead I found myself singing the Verdi Requiem under his baton. I had a front row seat in rehearsals where I could listen in as Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the flute player figured out how to coordinate their rubato in “Eri tu.” I watched Bob and Deborah Voigt working out the fine points of her debut performance of Fidelio. I sang in the U.S. premiere and (fifth performance ever) of an opera by Handel. I was able to impress even my less-than-classically-inclined friends by appearing in the MTV awards, and by singing in the American debut of Paul McCartney’s oratorio.
I could go on listing moments like these—times when I felt like Cinderella suddenly transported to the ball—for ages. But of course the glamour, the excitement, and the public notice, thrilling though they were, were not what really mattered. The important thing about Bob was not that he gave the members of the Collegiate Chorale the chance to sing with some of the world’s greatest musicians, or in some of the most exciting performances of the New York season. The truly remarkable thing was that, under his guidance, we genuinely belonged there. He took a bunch of singers of varied levels of talent, skill, potential, and determination, and every week he pushed us, cajoled us, and bullied us into becoming a group that was much more than the sum of its parts. In recent years, I would sometimes hear a choral piece on the radio and be struck by the beauty of the chorus's sound and the depth and passion of the performance—only to discover at the end that I had been listening to the Collegiate Chorale. Bob made of us an instrument that could (and did) hold its position anywhere in the world, with anyone.
When I joined the Chorale Bob was just ending his boy-wonder years--he took control of the Collegiate Chorale at only 26 (younger than Gustavo Dudamel is now). I watched him transform the group from a skillful and highly respected traditional choral society into his personal vision of a unique "celebration of the vocal arts." Especially in regard to some of the administrative changes, this was not a painless process, and I think it's safe to say that no one agreed with every step he took. (Even I found it hard to summon up complete enthusiasm for his decision that, to create the best possible sound balance, our small corps of professional choristers should stand in the front row despite the fact that this put six-footers in front of five-foot-two me.) But he left us with the Collegiate Chorale we know today. Over the years we moved from a concentration on choral classics to an emphasis on vocal versatility, adding concerts of hard-to-classify vocal pieces such as the New York premiere of the "White House Cantata," which offered the audience a chance to hear the marvelous music Leonard Bernstein wrote for a doomed Broadway show, or a live performance of Prokofiev's choral score for "Ivan the Terrible," with scenes from the movie. Most notably, he added regular performances of opera-in-concert, giving the chorus a chance to become vocal actors.
I think what endeared Bob to us, even when he was driving us crazy and riding roughshod over our sensitivities was his blazing passion for the music above all else. The most important thing was not how the chorus felt, what the audience or the critics thought, how famous or important the soloists were, or how prominent the event was. He cared greatly about all these things of course, but only as they served the goal of making music, and making it with as much depth, meaning, and excellence as possible. This commitment was visible in every performance he conducted. As much as I could, I always tried to memorize my part, because I didn’t want to miss a moment of watching Bob and seeing the intensity and love that radiated from him as he conducted.
One of my last memories of Bob underlines for me the way he strove for musical excellence above all else, even at times when it would have been perfectly understandable to retreat to more personal concerns. When I heard he was ill, I offered, as one does in such situations, to help out any way I could if he or his family needed anything. He thought about it and said, well, his score library was kind of disordered—could I come up and try to make sense of it with him?
And now, unbelievable as it seems, all this single-minded passion and determination is gone, and the world is a much less magical place than I thought. When we meet next Monday for our first rehearsal, it’s going to seem very strange to sit down and try to sing the Verdi Requiem. How I hope we will be able to recapture Bob’s conviction that realizing the profound beauty of this extraordinary composition is important in a way that transcends our personal sorrow and sense of loss.
I will be thinking of several things as we begin to prepare for our first concert without Bob. Last year, Opera News magazine online published an article in which Bob talked about his most cherished recordings. One of them was the Collegiate Chorale’s own performance at Verbier of the double chorus “Sanctus” from the Verdi Requiem. When we were preparing for Verbier, Bob kept pushing us on that one long after we thought we knew it quite well enough. On our first day in Switzerland, we found ourselves almost immediately at a rehearsal, and James Levine started us off with this double chorus. Completely disoriented from jet lag, half-asleep on our feet, and badly in need of a meal, we nonetheless pulled it off cleanly and elegantly. Bob was visibly proud of us then, and I’m sure he would expect no less from us at next Monday's rehearsal.
At this first rehearsal, as we look back on Bob’s tremendous achievement in transforming The Chorale, and look forward to the future in which it will be our responsibility to maintain and enlarge on what he gave us, I can’t help feeling that he chose for us the perfect piece with which to carry on. Not because it is a requiem, but because it is both intensely operatic and a great choral classic.
And so was Bob.
-- Janet Pascal, Chorale Music Librarian
Monday, September 1, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Chorale in Israel July 18-21
For the past few days, Jerusalem has been swarming with Collegiate Chorale members. One spot many of us made sure to visit was Saint Anne’s Church. At the start of the Via Dolorosa, this church is a very beautiful, very plain, and very old building. It is reputedly the place where the Virgin Mary was born, and it is definitely a place of miraculously fine acoustics A note sung in this church will resonate for three or four seconds, so that you can sing in harmony with yourself. One morning, a quartet of professional singers from the Chorale was tempted to experiment with the acoustics by trying out some of their concert pieces in the space. So a lucky group of tourists was treated to an impromptu concert.
Aside from that, the Collegiate Chorale's last three concerts were one small one in Jerusalem (just the Bach), a repeat in Haifa (the same wobbly chairs to climb on, but we got there on time, and so did the conductor), and the grand finale in Jerusalem at the convention center, which includes a large, attractive theatre with nice bright acoustics.
The morning of the last concert, we visited Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Memorial. Whatever your ancestry or religion, this is a place that evokes deep emotions and stays in your thoughts for a long time. Inevitably, our experience at Yad VaShem colored our performance that evening of the Sacred Service--a piece written, in the 1930s, by a man coming to terms with his Jewish heritage. For other reasons as well, this was a highly charged concert for us. It was our last performance, and the last night of our very intense experience in Israel. And it was taking place actually in Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the piece. Thomas Hampson came backstage in the interval before the performance to tell us how important performing the Sacred Service had been for him, and to thank us for sharing the experience with him. "I will be hearing the sound of your glorious chorus in my mind for a long time," he told us.
In almost all respects, we gave our best performance yet. In the tumultuous ovation at the end, it looked like Zubin Mehta might forget to acknowledge our soprano and alto soloists--but Thomas Hampson turned and acknowledged them, with great enthusiasm. Then Zubin Mehta took the bouquets that had been presented to him and to the cantor (I certainly hope with the cantor’s assent), brought them back and presented them to Hai-Ting and Jeanmarie, and kissed them both. And then he raised his hands over the whole chorus in a kind of benediction and said, "I hope to see you again very soon." We certainly felt blessed.
Aside from that, the Collegiate Chorale's last three concerts were one small one in Jerusalem (just the Bach), a repeat in Haifa (the same wobbly chairs to climb on, but we got there on time, and so did the conductor), and the grand finale in Jerusalem at the convention center, which includes a large, attractive theatre with nice bright acoustics.
The morning of the last concert, we visited Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Memorial. Whatever your ancestry or religion, this is a place that evokes deep emotions and stays in your thoughts for a long time. Inevitably, our experience at Yad VaShem colored our performance that evening of the Sacred Service--a piece written, in the 1930s, by a man coming to terms with his Jewish heritage. For other reasons as well, this was a highly charged concert for us. It was our last performance, and the last night of our very intense experience in Israel. And it was taking place actually in Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the piece. Thomas Hampson came backstage in the interval before the performance to tell us how important performing the Sacred Service had been for him, and to thank us for sharing the experience with him. "I will be hearing the sound of your glorious chorus in my mind for a long time," he told us.
In almost all respects, we gave our best performance yet. In the tumultuous ovation at the end, it looked like Zubin Mehta might forget to acknowledge our soprano and alto soloists--but Thomas Hampson turned and acknowledged them, with great enthusiasm. Then Zubin Mehta took the bouquets that had been presented to him and to the cantor (I certainly hope with the cantor’s assent), brought them back and presented them to Hai-Ting and Jeanmarie, and kissed them both. And then he raised his hands over the whole chorus in a kind of benediction and said, "I hope to see you again very soon." We certainly felt blessed.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
The Chorale in Israel - July 17
Well, our first Haifa concert was a bit of a challenge. We spent the morning exploring the old city of Jerusalem for the first time officially (although lots of people had already gone there on their own. There’s so much to see that it was frustrating to have to leave after such a short visit, but we wanted to be sure to get back to our hotel with plenty of time to rest and bathe before we left for Haifa. We departed with what seemed to be comfortable time to allow us to arrive an hour early, to work out seating, change, and warm up. But the traffic was awe-inspiringly bad. Think Holland Tunnel at 4:30 on a Friday. We crawled along so slowly that I was starting to wonder what they would do if we weren’t there by the time the concert actually started.
We made it with 25 minutes to spare, but as it turned out, we needn’t have worried. As we were all clustered around the stage door, we got a message: Zubin Mehta was still stuck in traffic and wouldn’t be there for another half an hour. This was a good thing, because we needed every minute we could get to work out logistics.
I suspect most Israeli halls don’t have a lot of experience working with a large chorus. They’re very thoughtful about things like providing us with water and tea, but they haven’t thought the whole thing through. For instance, no one at Haifa had realized that a group of 100 people in a strange place need some kind of liaison to explain things. When we arrived, we were told to go upstairs. So we did, and took possession of the first large room we found, even though it seemed too small. And it *was* too small, because it was the wrong room. No one knew we were supposed to be up a floor higher. No one showed us the entrance to the stage, so we had to find it ourselves—and it’s not always as obvious as you might think. Especially not in this case, because there was a section of audience seating diagonally to the left and to the right behind the stage. I don’t know how well they could hear, but certainly all they saw was our rear ends. And the announcements about Zubin Mehta’s progress were only in Hebrew, so most of us didn’t know what was going on. (Fortunately a few chorale members speak Hebrew, and orchestra members were also very kind about translating.)
We had believed that the same risers we had used in Tel Aviv would be in Haifa, so we assumed we would all just arrange ourselves exactly as before When we finally got a chance to see them, though, we discovered that it was actually the same risers, minus one little section. So we knew that a few people wouldn’t fit, but not how many. And we had no time to try them out. More disconcertingly, instead of stairs to climb up the risers, they had put out three chairs for us to walk over--upholstered chairs, which wobble when you step on them. So our various leaders huddled together to work out a plan of action, and then I got to explain to everyone (I make the announcements because I have a VERY LOUD voice) that some people might have to stand on the floor if they didn’t fit, and that everyone should please try not to break their necks when wobbling over the chairs, and that if there were any pitfalls we hadn’t discovered yet, we should all just improvise and cope somehow and prove what consummate professionals Which we did. I was very proud of us.
Zubin Mehta finally showed up (looking as unruffled as if he hadn’t just been stuck in a traffic jam for hours), and we filed on as if we knew what we were doing, with no accidents. And the concert went surprisingly well. All the chaos seemed to make everyone feel free to cut loose a bit The oboe player really "put a dreidel on it." The Bach soloists did much more elaborate embellishments than usual, and sounded the best they have yet. And in the Bloch, Zubin Mehta took some blisteringly fast tempos. Maybe it was just to make up time, but they were extremely exciting. It was flattering that he felt confident the chorus would be able to stay with him if he took unexpected tempos, and it was gratifying that we did, in fact, stay with him. So the evening of mishaps ended in triumph—but we didn’t get home to bed until almost midnight.
-- Janet Pascal
We made it with 25 minutes to spare, but as it turned out, we needn’t have worried. As we were all clustered around the stage door, we got a message: Zubin Mehta was still stuck in traffic and wouldn’t be there for another half an hour. This was a good thing, because we needed every minute we could get to work out logistics.
I suspect most Israeli halls don’t have a lot of experience working with a large chorus. They’re very thoughtful about things like providing us with water and tea, but they haven’t thought the whole thing through. For instance, no one at Haifa had realized that a group of 100 people in a strange place need some kind of liaison to explain things. When we arrived, we were told to go upstairs. So we did, and took possession of the first large room we found, even though it seemed too small. And it *was* too small, because it was the wrong room. No one knew we were supposed to be up a floor higher. No one showed us the entrance to the stage, so we had to find it ourselves—and it’s not always as obvious as you might think. Especially not in this case, because there was a section of audience seating diagonally to the left and to the right behind the stage. I don’t know how well they could hear, but certainly all they saw was our rear ends. And the announcements about Zubin Mehta’s progress were only in Hebrew, so most of us didn’t know what was going on. (Fortunately a few chorale members speak Hebrew, and orchestra members were also very kind about translating.)
We had believed that the same risers we had used in Tel Aviv would be in Haifa, so we assumed we would all just arrange ourselves exactly as before When we finally got a chance to see them, though, we discovered that it was actually the same risers, minus one little section. So we knew that a few people wouldn’t fit, but not how many. And we had no time to try them out. More disconcertingly, instead of stairs to climb up the risers, they had put out three chairs for us to walk over--upholstered chairs, which wobble when you step on them. So our various leaders huddled together to work out a plan of action, and then I got to explain to everyone (I make the announcements because I have a VERY LOUD voice) that some people might have to stand on the floor if they didn’t fit, and that everyone should please try not to break their necks when wobbling over the chairs, and that if there were any pitfalls we hadn’t discovered yet, we should all just improvise and cope somehow and prove what consummate professionals Which we did. I was very proud of us.
Zubin Mehta finally showed up (looking as unruffled as if he hadn’t just been stuck in a traffic jam for hours), and we filed on as if we knew what we were doing, with no accidents. And the concert went surprisingly well. All the chaos seemed to make everyone feel free to cut loose a bit The oboe player really "put a dreidel on it." The Bach soloists did much more elaborate embellishments than usual, and sounded the best they have yet. And in the Bloch, Zubin Mehta took some blisteringly fast tempos. Maybe it was just to make up time, but they were extremely exciting. It was flattering that he felt confident the chorus would be able to stay with him if he took unexpected tempos, and it was gratifying that we did, in fact, stay with him. So the evening of mishaps ended in triumph—but we didn’t get home to bed until almost midnight.
-- Janet Pascal
Friday, July 18, 2008
The Chorale in Israel - July 13-16
July 13 was our first concert in Tel Aviv. Our hotel is so close that almost everyone walked over—we must have been an interesting sight in our all-black dresses or tuxes (depending on gender). Since the temperature is around 100 degrees (and steamy) even a short walk in all black is a bit of a challenge; personally I stopped at the wonderful gelato place on the corner and ate grapefruit gelato while I walked, to keep cool.
The concert was tremendously exciting. Zubin Mehta communicates more with his hands than with words. And as I said, he is very easy to follow, and very compelling, so he really gets results. (Although he’s pretty good with words too. He wanted the oboe soloist to end a phrase with a bit more of a flourish, so he told him, "Put a dreidel on it." Which he did.) The whole chorus kept our eyes glued on him, and we sounded wonderful (if I do say so myself). Before the intermission a small chorus composed of mostly the professional singers sang Bach’s "Wachet Auf," and managed, after working very hard, to attain the nimbleness and clarity Mehta was looking for. The tenor recitative was taken by our own Doug Purcell from the chorus, who did a beautiful job. I saw Zubin Mehta mouth at him "Bravo!" when he finished.
After intermission came the main attraction, Bloch’s "Sacred Service," a rendition of the Jewish Sabbath service, which the Israeli Philharmonic had actually never performed before. So it was quite an event in this country. The auditorium, which seats 3,000 was pretty close to sold out for all three concerts. Having the full orchestration instead of the organ adds a real emotional depth, especially when the orchestra is as wonderful as the IPO. All the instrumental soloists play as though they have a special understanding of this piece, which, in a way, I suppose they do. Thomas Hampson was extremely moving. I heard someone remark that he could become a cantor tomorrow if he wanted (except of course he’d have to convert). The whole chorus was inspired and sang with real passion, and so did our two choral soloists. Thomas Hampson was heard to remark that he had never heard a voice like that rise out of a chorus before. And Hai-Ting again turned quite a few heads in the orchestra when she sang. So from all angles, I’d say the chorus did itself proud. The audience certainly thought so. The ovation for the Bach piece had been warm, but for the "Sacred Service" it was quite rapturous, and went on and on.
The next two concerts went just as well, despite the fact that before one of them, many of us had been all the way to the Sea of Galilee—which is extremely beautiful but not very near by—and back, and had only reached our hotels, sweaty and exhausted, an hour before the concert call. The last concert had a bit of added solemnity because it was performed on the evening of the day that Israel received back the bodies of the two hostages kidnapped by the Hezbollah. Zubin Mehta spoke quite movingly and called for a minute of silence before the Bloch, and afterwards I think the piece, with its timeless evocation of hope and of sorrow, had a special resonance for much of the audience.
- Janet Pascal
The concert was tremendously exciting. Zubin Mehta communicates more with his hands than with words. And as I said, he is very easy to follow, and very compelling, so he really gets results. (Although he’s pretty good with words too. He wanted the oboe soloist to end a phrase with a bit more of a flourish, so he told him, "Put a dreidel on it." Which he did.) The whole chorus kept our eyes glued on him, and we sounded wonderful (if I do say so myself). Before the intermission a small chorus composed of mostly the professional singers sang Bach’s "Wachet Auf," and managed, after working very hard, to attain the nimbleness and clarity Mehta was looking for. The tenor recitative was taken by our own Doug Purcell from the chorus, who did a beautiful job. I saw Zubin Mehta mouth at him "Bravo!" when he finished.
After intermission came the main attraction, Bloch’s "Sacred Service," a rendition of the Jewish Sabbath service, which the Israeli Philharmonic had actually never performed before. So it was quite an event in this country. The auditorium, which seats 3,000 was pretty close to sold out for all three concerts. Having the full orchestration instead of the organ adds a real emotional depth, especially when the orchestra is as wonderful as the IPO. All the instrumental soloists play as though they have a special understanding of this piece, which, in a way, I suppose they do. Thomas Hampson was extremely moving. I heard someone remark that he could become a cantor tomorrow if he wanted (except of course he’d have to convert). The whole chorus was inspired and sang with real passion, and so did our two choral soloists. Thomas Hampson was heard to remark that he had never heard a voice like that rise out of a chorus before. And Hai-Ting again turned quite a few heads in the orchestra when she sang. So from all angles, I’d say the chorus did itself proud. The audience certainly thought so. The ovation for the Bach piece had been warm, but for the "Sacred Service" it was quite rapturous, and went on and on.
The next two concerts went just as well, despite the fact that before one of them, many of us had been all the way to the Sea of Galilee—which is extremely beautiful but not very near by—and back, and had only reached our hotels, sweaty and exhausted, an hour before the concert call. The last concert had a bit of added solemnity because it was performed on the evening of the day that Israel received back the bodies of the two hostages kidnapped by the Hezbollah. Zubin Mehta spoke quite movingly and called for a minute of silence before the Bloch, and afterwards I think the piece, with its timeless evocation of hope and of sorrow, had a special resonance for much of the audience.
- Janet Pascal
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Chorale in Israel - July 12
Today was the first Collegiate Chorale concert. It was a small chorus of the professional singers, conducted by Bob, with Ken at the piano, with some a cappella numbers and several solos and small ensembles. For the last number, "Every Time I Feel the Spirit," any chorale member who wanted could join in. It took place at the Tel Aviv Museum, which has a stunning collection of modern art. During the break between the rehearsal and concert, we could wander around and look at it.
Bob had structured the concert to show all the diverse possibilities of the choral form (and show off the versatility of the chorus), so it covered a wide range of composers and styles, from Renaissance motets to Brahms to Verdi to Leonard Bernstein. A high point was a small group doing a hilarious version of Duke Ellington’s "Hit Me With a Hot Note," which Nancy Wertsch, our choral contractor, wrote herself.
The concert was something of a revelation. Any of us who have stood near the pros in rehearsal knows that they are all excellent musicians, but I hadn’t fully realized until this concert what truly formidable talent we’re singing with. These people could give the stars at the Met a run for their money. Doug Purcell sang Kurt Weill’s "Kiddush," and Elizabeth Hillebrand sang "A Simple Song" from the Bernstein Mass, and they both sent chills down my spine. Jess Munoz sang two songs by Charles Ives and made them sound simple, beautiful, and accessible, which is no mean feat. Cliff Townsend sang "I Been in the Storm So Long," a spiritual for which he also wrote the arrangement, which showed off some really impressive bass notes, both from Cliff and from the male chorus. And Jeanmarie Lally gave a performance of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" that would have made Scrooge weep. It was particularly impressive in her case, because the museum had decorated the stage with a huge bouquet of lilies, to which she is terribly allergic. But during the break before the performance, one of the other sopranos thoughtfully took a paper towel and removed every stamen from every flower, thus disposing of the pollen.
The audience loved it. About twenty members of the chorale had joined in for the last number, so we got to enjoy the applause as well. There were two encores--including "Every Time . . . " again so we extra singers actually got to sing twice.
Afterwards there was a little reception for us in the museum lobby, under a big Jackson Pollock painting, with lots of delicious little delicacies, and much mutual congratulation. I can’t speak for Bob, but he certainly looked extremely happy. It was too good a concert to present only once. I hope they manage to do it again in New York so everyone gets a chance to hear it.
-- Janet Pascal
Bob had structured the concert to show all the diverse possibilities of the choral form (and show off the versatility of the chorus), so it covered a wide range of composers and styles, from Renaissance motets to Brahms to Verdi to Leonard Bernstein. A high point was a small group doing a hilarious version of Duke Ellington’s "Hit Me With a Hot Note," which Nancy Wertsch, our choral contractor, wrote herself.
The concert was something of a revelation. Any of us who have stood near the pros in rehearsal knows that they are all excellent musicians, but I hadn’t fully realized until this concert what truly formidable talent we’re singing with. These people could give the stars at the Met a run for their money. Doug Purcell sang Kurt Weill’s "Kiddush," and Elizabeth Hillebrand sang "A Simple Song" from the Bernstein Mass, and they both sent chills down my spine. Jess Munoz sang two songs by Charles Ives and made them sound simple, beautiful, and accessible, which is no mean feat. Cliff Townsend sang "I Been in the Storm So Long," a spiritual for which he also wrote the arrangement, which showed off some really impressive bass notes, both from Cliff and from the male chorus. And Jeanmarie Lally gave a performance of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" that would have made Scrooge weep. It was particularly impressive in her case, because the museum had decorated the stage with a huge bouquet of lilies, to which she is terribly allergic. But during the break before the performance, one of the other sopranos thoughtfully took a paper towel and removed every stamen from every flower, thus disposing of the pollen.
The audience loved it. About twenty members of the chorale had joined in for the last number, so we got to enjoy the applause as well. There were two encores--including "Every Time . . . " again so we extra singers actually got to sing twice.
Afterwards there was a little reception for us in the museum lobby, under a big Jackson Pollock painting, with lots of delicious little delicacies, and much mutual congratulation. I can’t speak for Bob, but he certainly looked extremely happy. It was too good a concert to present only once. I hope they manage to do it again in New York so everyone gets a chance to hear it.
-- Janet Pascal
Sunday, July 13, 2008
The Chorale in Israel - July 11
Today is our first Sabbath in Israel. Also our first (and second) rehearsal with orchestra and soloists. It’s always so exciting the first time you hear the complete realization of what you’ve been working on. And since, when we performed the Sacred Service earlier at the Central Synagogue, it was just with organ, this is the first time many of us have heard the full orchestration. It’s a wonderful orchestra, especially the strings.
We were out from under that overhang, on risers, and the sound difference was amazing. I was proud of us. The first thing we sang was an a cappella section, and when we finished the orchestra burst into applause—which I’m sure was partly politeness, but sounded spontaneous as well.
When Thomas Hampson arrived, there was a certain amount of flutter among the female singers. "Look," the alto next to me said, "it’s Don Giovanni!" He sounded wonderful in the cantor’s role, but was still trying to remember to sing "Adoshem" instead of "Adonoi." (We’re doing this to avoid singing God’s name in a secular setting.) It can be kind of confusing when the phrases are so familiar that "Adonoi" just rolls off the tongue automatically.
The soloist doing the spoken part turned out to be a familiar face. He was the cantor from Long Island, who had substituted at the last minute for our Central Synagogue performance, in the singing role. He was supposed to be miked, but there was some technical problem with the mike, and no one could find the technician for awhile. Zubin Mehta really doesn’t like to waste time. "What is this, early Shabbos?" he muttered while we were waiting.
The smaller solos are sung by some of the pros in the Chorale, and they did us proud. I particularly enjoyed watching the orchestra when Hai-Ting, the alto, first came in for her fairly extensive solo. About half the heads I could see suddenly turned round to stare. They clearly hadn’t expected a voice like that to emerge from the middle of the chorus. She got what was definitely spontaneous applause. Jeanmarie is doing the soprano solo, and she actually gets to sing a little duet with Thomas Hampson! (And they sound lovely together).
After rehearsals, we had a Sabbath dinner for the whole Chorale A couple of members did an impromptu candlelighting service, and then we had the most typical Jewish meal you can imagine: gefilte fish, chopped liver, chicken soup (no matzoh balls though), brisket...
Then much of the chorus (including me!) went down to stick our toes into the Mediterranean Sea before bed.
--Janet Pascal
We were out from under that overhang, on risers, and the sound difference was amazing. I was proud of us. The first thing we sang was an a cappella section, and when we finished the orchestra burst into applause—which I’m sure was partly politeness, but sounded spontaneous as well.
When Thomas Hampson arrived, there was a certain amount of flutter among the female singers. "Look," the alto next to me said, "it’s Don Giovanni!" He sounded wonderful in the cantor’s role, but was still trying to remember to sing "Adoshem" instead of "Adonoi." (We’re doing this to avoid singing God’s name in a secular setting.) It can be kind of confusing when the phrases are so familiar that "Adonoi" just rolls off the tongue automatically.
The soloist doing the spoken part turned out to be a familiar face. He was the cantor from Long Island, who had substituted at the last minute for our Central Synagogue performance, in the singing role. He was supposed to be miked, but there was some technical problem with the mike, and no one could find the technician for awhile. Zubin Mehta really doesn’t like to waste time. "What is this, early Shabbos?" he muttered while we were waiting.
The smaller solos are sung by some of the pros in the Chorale, and they did us proud. I particularly enjoyed watching the orchestra when Hai-Ting, the alto, first came in for her fairly extensive solo. About half the heads I could see suddenly turned round to stare. They clearly hadn’t expected a voice like that to emerge from the middle of the chorus. She got what was definitely spontaneous applause. Jeanmarie is doing the soprano solo, and she actually gets to sing a little duet with Thomas Hampson! (And they sound lovely together).
After rehearsals, we had a Sabbath dinner for the whole Chorale A couple of members did an impromptu candlelighting service, and then we had the most typical Jewish meal you can imagine: gefilte fish, chopped liver, chicken soup (no matzoh balls though), brisket...
Then much of the chorus (including me!) went down to stick our toes into the Mediterranean Sea before bed.
--Janet Pascal
The Chorale in Israel - July 10
Today we met Zubin Mehta for a piano rehearsal. The chorus likes him a lot-he's very easy to follow. The Bloch Sacred Service is full of places where the tempo gets stretched and compressed, and where the dynamics swell and sink often and quickly. You have to be pretty nimble to stay on top of everything. It can be really difficult for one hundred people to keep together like this, but the way Zubin Mehta conducts makes it easy. He's very businesslike. At first I was worried that maybe he didn't really like us, because we'd sing a passage, and he'd just nod and go on to the next, unless he had a specific comment to make. But it turns out he just doesn't waste words. When we finished going through the piece, he said, "Usually choruses sound terrible up there [in the loft]. You sound very good." And, hallelujah, it turns out we won't have to perform up there after all. There will be risers on stage, they just don't bother to set them up for rehearsals. So if he already thinks we sound good, he should be very happy when we get out from under that overhang. At the end of the rehearsal, he said, "My orchestra's really going to enjoy you." He says that Israel doesn't have much of a tradition of choral singing; since there isn't usually a choir in Jewish services, Israel doesn't have nearly as many choristers running around as we do in the U.S. Mehta definitely wants more consonants from us (lots more), but he told us that we were pronouncing our Hebrew vowels just right for the time and tradition in which Bloch wrote the piece. He said modern Israelis would try to correct us, but we shouldn't let them. Another example of the way music crosses cultural and national boundaries--where else could you plausibly have a man born in India telling a bunch of Americans not to let their Hebrew pronunciation be influenced by what native Hebrew speakers have to say? Tomorrow we get to meet the orchestra (and Thomas Hampson).
-- Janet Pascal
-- Janet Pascal
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The Chorale in Israel - July 9
Today we had to chance to get acquainted with Tel Aviv a little. We started with a general bus tour of the city. According to our guide, there are actually 14,000 Bauhaus buildings here, so many that it’s been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We visited Rabin Square, where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The solemnity of the memorial site is a little modified by the inexplicable presence, on the roof of the building overlooking the square, of a gigantic yellow blow-up duck. Then we went back to Old Jaffa, which is a complex of narrow little flint streets and stairs—largely reconstructed now after war damage, but still charming. Not only was Jonah here, we saw the rock to which Andromeda was chained before being rescued by Perseus, and the house of the Simon the Tanner, where Peter received word from God that henceforth all non-Kosher food was permissible. Many of us then chose to rest up before rehearsal at the beach. The water is that beautiful Mediterranean blue, and not even cool—it’s like bathwater (except for the occasional jellyfish). This evening we had our first rehearsal in Mann Auditorium. It was with Bob, and Ken at the piano, not yet with Zubin Mehta and the orchestra, so we had a chance to get used to the space. The hall’s a little shabby looking, but it’s a nice warm, resonant space, and good to sing in. Unfortunately we arrived to discover that we were not going to be on risers on the stage, as we are used to. Instead, the chorus sits up in a sort of gallery above the stage—like a choir loft, only in front. The seats are rickety fold-up benches, with a tendency to snap closed noisily when you stand up, and so close together that some of the taller singers have nowhere to put their legs. Our seating chart that Bonnie and Joe spent so much time and care compiling had to go out the window. But we took it in stride, and the rehearsal went very well, considering how zonked we all were. Bob seemed satisfied with us. Tomorrow we get to meet Zubin Mehta.
Janet Pascal - Chorale Member and Music Librarian
Janet Pascal - Chorale Member and Music Librarian
The Chorale in Israel - July 7-8
I’m happy to report that El Al realizes the Collegiate Chorale deserves celebrity treatment. At the airport we were all ushered as a group to the head of the line and processed by agents who were, appropriately, using music stands as makeshift desks. After an eleven-hour flight, we arrived in a rather dazed state at our hotels, where we had only a few minutes to collapse before getting back on the busses for our welcome dinner. The hotels are two side-by-side Bauhaus buildings (most of Tel Aviv is Bauhaus style), one of which is a quite beautiful former cinema that shows Charlie Chaplin silent films on the wall of the lobby. Our welcome dinner was in Jaffa, the part of the city that was here before Tel Aviv was founded—it’s the place from which Jonah set sail on route to his encounter with the whale, so it’s been around for a while. We couldn’t see much on the way, but we caught some glimpses of the Mediterranean. The restaurant was a lot of fun—long communal tables that were already covered with little dishes of pickled things and Middle Eastern spreads, falafel, and flat bread when we arrived. It seems to be the place to come for your birthday in Tel Aviv; periodically a loud, sort of jazzy recording of “Happy Birthday to You,” modulating into “Supercalifragilistic” would resound through the room. After about the sixth repetition, some of the more sensitive musicians in the group were threatening to stab themselves (or others) with their shish-kebab skewers. Then home to our hotels, where we all collapsed, despite the fact that by New York time it was only 3 in the afternoon.
Janet Pascal - Chorale Member and Music Librarian
Janet Pascal - Chorale Member and Music Librarian
Friday, February 29, 2008
Some Background on Handel's Jupiter in Argos
The Chorale will be giving the North American premiere of this opera—in fact, it will be the first modern performance outside of Germany, and something like the fourth or fifth performance ever. It’s one of Handel’s last operas, written in 1739, and marked a kind of transition for him. In 1720, the Royal Academy of Music—London’s Italian opera company—was established, and Handel became music director. About half of the operas presented by the academy were Handel’s own, and he was also responsible for luring Continental opera stars to England. The venture was fantastically successful. There was such a fad for Italian opera that a rival composer, Giovanni Bononcini was also engaged by the academy. Each composer had fanatical partisans. In this feud, the Prince of Wales backed Handel, and much of the nobility supported Bononcini, so it was all very political. The rivalry became so notorious that John Byrom wrote a satire about it: “Some say, compar'd to Bononcini/That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny./Others aver, that he to Handel/Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle:/Strange that this difference there should be/Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!” which is in fact the origin of the nursery rhyme characters Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.
By the late 1730s, though, the fanaticism had died down The English were getting rather tired of Italian opera, and Handel’s company wasn’t doing so well. At the same time, he was having increasing success with a form of music he more or less invented—the English oratorio. After the bishop of London made it illegal to perform staged biblical stories, Handel began writing what were basically unstaged opera with biblical subjects. Musically they were a lot like operas, but made more use of the chorus.
By 1738, Handel was concentrating on oratorio. He had just presented Saul and Israel in Egypt, and he probably wasn’t planning to bother with an opera that year. The subscription season had been cancelled because of lack of interest. This changed when he heard that two Italian singers, Constanza Piantanida, known as La Posterla, and her daughter were coming to London. He decided to capitalize on the interest they aroused by creating an opera for them. He didn’t have a lot of time, and so he quickly assembled what is called a “pastiche opera.” This means he took an existing libretto—in this case Giove in Argo, by Antonio Lucchini, which he had heard with music composed by Antonio Lotti in Dresden 20 years earlier. Then, into the libretto, he inserted previously written arias designed to show off the particular skills of the singers he had on hand. Pastiches were fairly common— they were kind of the “juke-box musicals” of their day. Handel had already created several others. They often contained music from a wide variety of composers, but in this case Handel stuck with his own music.
He took arias from his previous works Acis and Galatea, Alcina, Arminio, Atalanta, Berenice, Ezio, Faramondo, Giustino, Parnasso in festa, Scipione, Teseo, and Il Trionfo del Tempo, as well as an opera he was still working on, Imeneo. So if you’ve heard any of these operas, you might recognize an aria here and there—Handel’s audience certainly would have. One of the best-known today is “Tornami a vagheggiar” from Alcina. Joan Sutherland was very fond of this one—in fact when she sang the title role in Alcina, she appropriated the aria, even though it was supposed to be sung by another character. It’s number 21 in our score, and if you’re curious you can hear Joan Sutherland singing it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIX6ILuSbo0&feature=related). As a rule, pastiches had little or nothing new in them. But Handel didn’t just use familiar material, he also composed new music—three arias from an opera he was still working on, three brand new arias and a couple of ariosos, the final chorus, and the recitatives. Something approaching a third of the opera would have been new to its audience.
Documentation of the first performance is practically nonexistent. It wasn’t advertised as an opera—it was called “a dramatical composition intermixed with choruses and 2 concertos on the organ.” Because of this, some people wonder whether it was staged at all or just performed in concert the way we’re doing it. But most likely it had some staging, since several contemporary letters speak of it as an opera. The first night audience was fairly large because people were curious to hear and see La Posterla and her daughter, who seem to have been the object of a certain amount of tabloid-like gossip. One of those contemporary letters I mentioned was mostly about the rumor that Constanza was trying to convince people her daughter was actually her sister, so she wouldn’t have to admit her age (she was in her forties). Unfortunately the Italian singers turned out not to be as gifted as Handel had been led to believe: the mother, who sang Isis, had a voice too small for the theatre, and the daughter, who sang Diana, was completely inexperienced. After the second performance, they left, and the opera closed.
The score is lost, so for many years no one knew what pieces Handel had chosen to put together his pastiche. And so the work was virtually forgotten. In the 1930s, two variations of the libretto were discovered, and from them, music scholars were able to work out more or less which arias had been used. Guided by the libretto, they began to reconstruct the score. But there were two arias no one could track down. Many of the recitatives were also missing. Just a few years ago, musicologist John H. Roberts solved the mystery of the missing arias, when he discovered them in a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. It turned out the arias weren’t by Handel at all. They were what is called “suitcase arias”—pieces the diva brings along with her and makes the composer insert in the opera somewhere—from an opera called Lucio Vero written by Francesco Araia. I admit I’d never heard of Araia, but when I looked him up I discovered that his main claim to fame (other than being included in a Handel opera) is that he brought Italian opera to Russia, where he lived for quite a while and wrote the first Russian-language opera. Constanza had previously sung his arias in St. Petersburg, and now she added them to Isis’s part—“Ombra che pallida” and the accompanied recitative that precedes it (numbers 24 and 25 in our score), and “Questa d’un fido amore” (number 29).
So now the main missing pieces of the opera were filled in. All that was still lost were the recitatives for acts 2 and 3. Two musicologists, Steffen Vos and Thomas Synofzik, leaped in ahead of Roberts with a reconstruction presented (and recorded) in Bayreuth in 2006 (kind of stealing his thunder). Roberts’s own reconstruction was performed in May 2007 at the Handel Festspiele in Göttingen and then in Hanover (and it was recorded as well). Except for these performances, we will be the first to sing this opera in 269 years.
You’ve probably noticed that the plot of Jupiter in Argos is a little hard to follow. Partly that’s because it’s a pastiche, so arias had to be shoehorned in where they didn’t exactly fit. But really, the plot is no more absurd than a lot of Baroque operas. The conventions of the pastoral, where noblemen and women masqueraded as Arcadian shepherds, would have been much more familiar to Handel’s audience than they are to us today. So would the stories of classical mythology. Librettists could afford to be playful with the myths and trust their audience to catch the references. The story of this opera is only marginally connected to its mythological sources, but here’s a little background, so you can see what kinds of fun the librettist was having.
Jove (or Jupiter), the leader of the gods, famously chased after every attractive young thing he saw—in fact, sometimes it seems like that’s all he ever did. The two heroines he woos in the opera are two of his best-known conquests. Isis, in this context, is actually Io, a priestess of Jupiter's wife Juno. After Jupiter had his way with her, she was turned into a cow—either by Juno, who was jealous, or by Jupiter to protect her from Juno, depending on which version you listen to. Juno sent a gadfly to torment the cow, which chased her all the way to Egypt. There she became conflated with the goddess Isis (maybe because Isis often wore symbolic cow horns on her head). As Isis, Io was indeed married to Osiris, who is her lover in this opera. The mythological Osiris was also Isis’s brother, although the librettist has understandably omitted that detail. As in the opera, Io’s father was named Inachus, but he was not a king of Arcadia who was deposed and murdered—he was a river god.
The opera’s version of Calisto (whose name means “beautiful”) matches its source a bit more closely. Her father really was Lycaon, a mythological king of Arcadia, although he didn’t kill anyone to become king. Still, even though he didn’t commit the crimes he’s accused of in this opera, he was not a nice person. He is best known for serving Jupiter a meal of roasted human flesh (possibly from one of his 50 sons) to see if he would notice. Jupiter did notice, and retaliated by turning Lycaon into a wolf. Lycaon's daughter Calisto was a companion of the goddess Diana the huntress, and Diana did make her swear to preserve her chastity, just as in the opera. After Calisto lost her virginity to Jupiter, thus breaking her vow, the angry Diana turned her into a bear. Jupiter later made her a constellation, and she is now Ursa Major, the Great Bear (more familiar to us as the Big Dipper). Handel’s audience would have known the story of Calisto the bear, so they probably would have been amused by the action-packed last scene of the opera, which is set in motion when Isis enters—pursued by a bear.
The audience was even more likely to be amused by the way Jupiter magnanimously renounces his pursuit of both girls in the end, because he is so impressed by their purity. This was not Jupiter’s customary procedure. In the myths, he successfully seduced both our heroines, which is why two of the moons of the planet Jupiter are named Io and Calisto in their honor. (This means Calisto's in the heavens twice.)
This way of using figures of Classical antiquity as characters who are, on the whole, like people of the composer’s own time, is very common in baroque opera. In many other ways, as well, Jupiter in Argos is a typical baroque opera. Its central feature is a string of brilliant da capo arias. These consist of an A section, a contrasting B section, and then a repetition of the A section. This repetition was the singers’ chance to show off, since they were expected to improvise all kinds of elaborate ornamentation the second time around. As a pastiche, Jupiter in Argos is a collection of hit tunes, so the level of vocal fireworks would be particularly high. The words of an aria were just a few lines, repeated over and over, and the texts tended to be somewhat general. Usually they depicted some kind of intense emotional state. This is what made pasticcio operas possible—when an aria is just saying “I’m jealous” or “I’ve been abandoned” or “I shall die bravely” it’s pretty easy to pick it up and move it to another plot where the same emotion occurs. (In contrast, imagine trying to move, say, “Mi chiamano Mimi” into another opera.) The da capo aria dominated baroque opera—ensemble numbers were very rare. Jupiter contains only one, a duet for Aretes and Calisto.
The plot was carried almost entirely by the recitatives, when people explain what’s going on, and converse with each other. There were two kinds of recitative. One is secco, which was used to get through long swatches of speech. It has pitches and rhythm assigned to each syllable, but tries to more or less simulate the pattern of natural speech. It’s accompanied only by a continuo, which is usually a harpsichord, sometimes joined by a bass instrument. The secco recitatives for acts II and III are the one part of Jupiter that seems to be irretrievably lost. In our edition they have been reconstructed by John Roberts.
Then there’s recitativo accompagnato, which is accompanied by the orchestra and more songlike, but still keeps some of the characteristics of speech. The accompagnato sections of Jupiter are all Handel’s, except for the one by Araia. Next is arioso, which lies somewhere in between accompagnato and aria—it’s sung, with orchestration, but doesn’t have the formal structure of an aria. Isis has a couple of arioso pieces—numbers six and seven in your scores. To get the idea of the difference between arioso and accompagnato, think of the beginning of the Messiah. When the tenor sings “Comfort ye my people” that’s arioso. When he reaches “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” it becomes accompagnato recitative.
Like a typical baroque opera of the period, Jupiter in Argos is mostly made up of these elements, but there are also some ways in which it’s rather unusual. As I mentioned earlier, Handel was moving away from opera and toward oratorio by the time he composed Jupiter. One sign of this is that, unlike most of Handel’s operas, there is no role for a castrato. But the most notable feature of the opera is its unusually large, almost oratorio-like, number of choruses. If you include the two choruses we repeat, this work has ten choruses—more than any other of Handel’s forty or so operas. By including so many choruses, Handel was probably hoping to use the success of his oratorios to revive the public’s waning interest in Italian opera. He could also have been taking advantage of the improved choral forces he had assembled to perform his oratorios. Whatever the reason, it’s certainly nice for us.
--Janet Pascal, Chorale Member and Chorale Music Librarian
By the late 1730s, though, the fanaticism had died down The English were getting rather tired of Italian opera, and Handel’s company wasn’t doing so well. At the same time, he was having increasing success with a form of music he more or less invented—the English oratorio. After the bishop of London made it illegal to perform staged biblical stories, Handel began writing what were basically unstaged opera with biblical subjects. Musically they were a lot like operas, but made more use of the chorus.
By 1738, Handel was concentrating on oratorio. He had just presented Saul and Israel in Egypt, and he probably wasn’t planning to bother with an opera that year. The subscription season had been cancelled because of lack of interest. This changed when he heard that two Italian singers, Constanza Piantanida, known as La Posterla, and her daughter were coming to London. He decided to capitalize on the interest they aroused by creating an opera for them. He didn’t have a lot of time, and so he quickly assembled what is called a “pastiche opera.” This means he took an existing libretto—in this case Giove in Argo, by Antonio Lucchini, which he had heard with music composed by Antonio Lotti in Dresden 20 years earlier. Then, into the libretto, he inserted previously written arias designed to show off the particular skills of the singers he had on hand. Pastiches were fairly common— they were kind of the “juke-box musicals” of their day. Handel had already created several others. They often contained music from a wide variety of composers, but in this case Handel stuck with his own music.
He took arias from his previous works Acis and Galatea, Alcina, Arminio, Atalanta, Berenice, Ezio, Faramondo, Giustino, Parnasso in festa, Scipione, Teseo, and Il Trionfo del Tempo, as well as an opera he was still working on, Imeneo. So if you’ve heard any of these operas, you might recognize an aria here and there—Handel’s audience certainly would have. One of the best-known today is “Tornami a vagheggiar” from Alcina. Joan Sutherland was very fond of this one—in fact when she sang the title role in Alcina, she appropriated the aria, even though it was supposed to be sung by another character. It’s number 21 in our score, and if you’re curious you can hear Joan Sutherland singing it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIX6ILuSbo0&feature=related). As a rule, pastiches had little or nothing new in them. But Handel didn’t just use familiar material, he also composed new music—three arias from an opera he was still working on, three brand new arias and a couple of ariosos, the final chorus, and the recitatives. Something approaching a third of the opera would have been new to its audience.
Documentation of the first performance is practically nonexistent. It wasn’t advertised as an opera—it was called “a dramatical composition intermixed with choruses and 2 concertos on the organ.” Because of this, some people wonder whether it was staged at all or just performed in concert the way we’re doing it. But most likely it had some staging, since several contemporary letters speak of it as an opera. The first night audience was fairly large because people were curious to hear and see La Posterla and her daughter, who seem to have been the object of a certain amount of tabloid-like gossip. One of those contemporary letters I mentioned was mostly about the rumor that Constanza was trying to convince people her daughter was actually her sister, so she wouldn’t have to admit her age (she was in her forties). Unfortunately the Italian singers turned out not to be as gifted as Handel had been led to believe: the mother, who sang Isis, had a voice too small for the theatre, and the daughter, who sang Diana, was completely inexperienced. After the second performance, they left, and the opera closed.
The score is lost, so for many years no one knew what pieces Handel had chosen to put together his pastiche. And so the work was virtually forgotten. In the 1930s, two variations of the libretto were discovered, and from them, music scholars were able to work out more or less which arias had been used. Guided by the libretto, they began to reconstruct the score. But there were two arias no one could track down. Many of the recitatives were also missing. Just a few years ago, musicologist John H. Roberts solved the mystery of the missing arias, when he discovered them in a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. It turned out the arias weren’t by Handel at all. They were what is called “suitcase arias”—pieces the diva brings along with her and makes the composer insert in the opera somewhere—from an opera called Lucio Vero written by Francesco Araia. I admit I’d never heard of Araia, but when I looked him up I discovered that his main claim to fame (other than being included in a Handel opera) is that he brought Italian opera to Russia, where he lived for quite a while and wrote the first Russian-language opera. Constanza had previously sung his arias in St. Petersburg, and now she added them to Isis’s part—“Ombra che pallida” and the accompanied recitative that precedes it (numbers 24 and 25 in our score), and “Questa d’un fido amore” (number 29).
So now the main missing pieces of the opera were filled in. All that was still lost were the recitatives for acts 2 and 3. Two musicologists, Steffen Vos and Thomas Synofzik, leaped in ahead of Roberts with a reconstruction presented (and recorded) in Bayreuth in 2006 (kind of stealing his thunder). Roberts’s own reconstruction was performed in May 2007 at the Handel Festspiele in Göttingen and then in Hanover (and it was recorded as well). Except for these performances, we will be the first to sing this opera in 269 years.
You’ve probably noticed that the plot of Jupiter in Argos is a little hard to follow. Partly that’s because it’s a pastiche, so arias had to be shoehorned in where they didn’t exactly fit. But really, the plot is no more absurd than a lot of Baroque operas. The conventions of the pastoral, where noblemen and women masqueraded as Arcadian shepherds, would have been much more familiar to Handel’s audience than they are to us today. So would the stories of classical mythology. Librettists could afford to be playful with the myths and trust their audience to catch the references. The story of this opera is only marginally connected to its mythological sources, but here’s a little background, so you can see what kinds of fun the librettist was having.
Jove (or Jupiter), the leader of the gods, famously chased after every attractive young thing he saw—in fact, sometimes it seems like that’s all he ever did. The two heroines he woos in the opera are two of his best-known conquests. Isis, in this context, is actually Io, a priestess of Jupiter's wife Juno. After Jupiter had his way with her, she was turned into a cow—either by Juno, who was jealous, or by Jupiter to protect her from Juno, depending on which version you listen to. Juno sent a gadfly to torment the cow, which chased her all the way to Egypt. There she became conflated with the goddess Isis (maybe because Isis often wore symbolic cow horns on her head). As Isis, Io was indeed married to Osiris, who is her lover in this opera. The mythological Osiris was also Isis’s brother, although the librettist has understandably omitted that detail. As in the opera, Io’s father was named Inachus, but he was not a king of Arcadia who was deposed and murdered—he was a river god.
The opera’s version of Calisto (whose name means “beautiful”) matches its source a bit more closely. Her father really was Lycaon, a mythological king of Arcadia, although he didn’t kill anyone to become king. Still, even though he didn’t commit the crimes he’s accused of in this opera, he was not a nice person. He is best known for serving Jupiter a meal of roasted human flesh (possibly from one of his 50 sons) to see if he would notice. Jupiter did notice, and retaliated by turning Lycaon into a wolf. Lycaon's daughter Calisto was a companion of the goddess Diana the huntress, and Diana did make her swear to preserve her chastity, just as in the opera. After Calisto lost her virginity to Jupiter, thus breaking her vow, the angry Diana turned her into a bear. Jupiter later made her a constellation, and she is now Ursa Major, the Great Bear (more familiar to us as the Big Dipper). Handel’s audience would have known the story of Calisto the bear, so they probably would have been amused by the action-packed last scene of the opera, which is set in motion when Isis enters—pursued by a bear.
The audience was even more likely to be amused by the way Jupiter magnanimously renounces his pursuit of both girls in the end, because he is so impressed by their purity. This was not Jupiter’s customary procedure. In the myths, he successfully seduced both our heroines, which is why two of the moons of the planet Jupiter are named Io and Calisto in their honor. (This means Calisto's in the heavens twice.)
This way of using figures of Classical antiquity as characters who are, on the whole, like people of the composer’s own time, is very common in baroque opera. In many other ways, as well, Jupiter in Argos is a typical baroque opera. Its central feature is a string of brilliant da capo arias. These consist of an A section, a contrasting B section, and then a repetition of the A section. This repetition was the singers’ chance to show off, since they were expected to improvise all kinds of elaborate ornamentation the second time around. As a pastiche, Jupiter in Argos is a collection of hit tunes, so the level of vocal fireworks would be particularly high. The words of an aria were just a few lines, repeated over and over, and the texts tended to be somewhat general. Usually they depicted some kind of intense emotional state. This is what made pasticcio operas possible—when an aria is just saying “I’m jealous” or “I’ve been abandoned” or “I shall die bravely” it’s pretty easy to pick it up and move it to another plot where the same emotion occurs. (In contrast, imagine trying to move, say, “Mi chiamano Mimi” into another opera.) The da capo aria dominated baroque opera—ensemble numbers were very rare. Jupiter contains only one, a duet for Aretes and Calisto.
The plot was carried almost entirely by the recitatives, when people explain what’s going on, and converse with each other. There were two kinds of recitative. One is secco, which was used to get through long swatches of speech. It has pitches and rhythm assigned to each syllable, but tries to more or less simulate the pattern of natural speech. It’s accompanied only by a continuo, which is usually a harpsichord, sometimes joined by a bass instrument. The secco recitatives for acts II and III are the one part of Jupiter that seems to be irretrievably lost. In our edition they have been reconstructed by John Roberts.
Then there’s recitativo accompagnato, which is accompanied by the orchestra and more songlike, but still keeps some of the characteristics of speech. The accompagnato sections of Jupiter are all Handel’s, except for the one by Araia. Next is arioso, which lies somewhere in between accompagnato and aria—it’s sung, with orchestration, but doesn’t have the formal structure of an aria. Isis has a couple of arioso pieces—numbers six and seven in your scores. To get the idea of the difference between arioso and accompagnato, think of the beginning of the Messiah. When the tenor sings “Comfort ye my people” that’s arioso. When he reaches “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” it becomes accompagnato recitative.
Like a typical baroque opera of the period, Jupiter in Argos is mostly made up of these elements, but there are also some ways in which it’s rather unusual. As I mentioned earlier, Handel was moving away from opera and toward oratorio by the time he composed Jupiter. One sign of this is that, unlike most of Handel’s operas, there is no role for a castrato. But the most notable feature of the opera is its unusually large, almost oratorio-like, number of choruses. If you include the two choruses we repeat, this work has ten choruses—more than any other of Handel’s forty or so operas. By including so many choruses, Handel was probably hoping to use the success of his oratorios to revive the public’s waning interest in Italian opera. He could also have been taking advantage of the improved choral forces he had assembled to perform his oratorios. Whatever the reason, it’s certainly nice for us.
--Janet Pascal, Chorale Member and Chorale Music Librarian
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
About the Bloch Sacred Service
Though Ernest Bloch was raised in a Jewish household, as a child he was much more interested in music than religion. It was only during the aftermath of the notorious anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair, while he was living in Paris, that he began to think of himself as a Jew. Not long after, he had the first germ of the idea for Avodath Hakodesh, the Sacred Service. He wrote to his friend Edmond Fleg in 1911, “I think that I shall write one day songs to be sung at the synagogue in part by the minister, in part by the faithful. It is really strange . . . this impulse that has chosen me, who all my life have been a stranger to all that is Jewish.” In one of his composition notebooks of the period, he wrote down a six-note motif—G-A-C-B-A-G—which would ultimately become the opening phrase of the Sacred Service and permeate the entire piece, noting that it was for “a possible Jewish service.” It was not until 1929, however, while living in San Francisco, that he was finally able to write this service, when his friend Reuben Rinder, the cantor of Temple Emanu-El commissioned him to set the Union Prayer Book version of the Saturday morning Sabbath liturgy. A generous monetary grant enabled him to spend the next four years in the Swiss Alps, writing, and the work premiered in 1934.
Behind the mundane details of the genesis of the piece, however, lies an intense psychic drama. As Bloch began to reclaim his Jewish heritage, he wrote to Fleg, “an immense sense of pride surged in me. My entire being vibrated; it is a revelation.” His description of an overwhelming moment when the limited human spirit is suddenly lifted into the realm of the infinite has many Biblical parallels—think of Moses on Mount Sinai, or Elijah encountering the “still, small, voice.” It is a moment of spiritual revelation that informs and animates the entire Sacred Service. Again and again, when talking about the piece, Bloch returns to the idea. The lovely passage Associate Conductor Timothy Mount read to us at rehearsal is one example. In it, Bloch describes the way he immersed himself in the Hebrew text for the Sabbath service (remember, he had to learn Hebrew in order to write the piece): “I have absorbed it to the point that it has become mine and as if it were the very expression of my soul. . . . It has become a cosmic poem, a glorification of the laws of the Universe … a dream of stars, of forces … the Primordial Element … before the worlds existed. … It has become a 'private affair' between God and me.”
Perhaps the fullest explanation Bloch gives of this experience of transcendence that he was trying to capture comes in his description of writing the “seu sheorim” (lift up your heads) section in the third movement. This section introduces the highly charged moment when the Torah is taken from its ark to be displayed to the congregation, and the chorus sings “Torah tzivoh,” (the Torah, which God gave through Moses, is the Law of the House of Jacob.) This part of the service is the physical embodiment of Bloch’s spiritual drama—the moment when ordinary people are brought face-to-face with the divine. As such, it was a crucial section for Bloch, and he struggled to get it right. “When I read ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors and the King of Glory shall come in,’” he wrote, “I could not understand what this was about. It mystified, puzzled and worried me. I was in the Swiss mountains at the time; the day was foggy, the fir trees drooped, the landscape was covered with sadness, I could not see the light. Suddenly a wind came up, the clouds in the sky parted and the sun was over everything. I understood. I felt God was within me at that time in lifting up the clouds.”
While the drama depicted in the Sacred Service is highly spiritual, it is not essentially Jewish, or indeed connected to any specific religion. Time magazine (which back then was actually interested in classical music premieres) pointed this out in a review of the first New York performance: “in spirit his Service was universal, as much for Gentiles as for Jews.” And Bloch himself believed that the work was “more cosmic and universal than Jewish.” He made this explicit in his commentary on the end of the work. He claimed that the final twenty-five measures took him two years to write—and no wonder, considering what he was trying to accomplish: “The last part,” he wrote, “is like an epilogue. Here is the whole realization of humanity, the love of God, when all men will recognize that they are brothers, a fellowship in spirit and united, and on that day the world shall be one.”
So the Sacred Service dramatizes a spiritual journey taken by all people. But for Bloch to express it to his satisfaction, he had to draw deeply from his own Jewish background and heritage. As he put it, “A tree must have its roots deep down in its soil. A composer who says something is not only himself. He is his forefathers! He is his people!”
The Collegiate Chorale will be embarking on this spiritual journey at the historic Central Synagogue, a beautiful Moorish revival building. Their cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, will join us to discuss the background of the piece, and the ways Bloch changed and adapted the traditional Sabbath service for his purposes. Like Bloch, she has the unusually rich perspective on Judaism that comes from starting with a different point of view. Born in Korea to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist mother, she is the first Asian-American cantor in North America. She knows first-hand how flexible and accomodating Jewish traditions can be--one year for the bitter herb called for in the Passover seder, her mother used kimchee.
(For a full, and quite moving, account of the writing of the Sacred Service, visit http://www.zamir.org/Notes/NFZ-Spring05.shtml. A fascinating piece by Angela Buchdahl on her background can be found at http://www.shma.com/june03/Angela.htm.)
Behind the mundane details of the genesis of the piece, however, lies an intense psychic drama. As Bloch began to reclaim his Jewish heritage, he wrote to Fleg, “an immense sense of pride surged in me. My entire being vibrated; it is a revelation.” His description of an overwhelming moment when the limited human spirit is suddenly lifted into the realm of the infinite has many Biblical parallels—think of Moses on Mount Sinai, or Elijah encountering the “still, small, voice.” It is a moment of spiritual revelation that informs and animates the entire Sacred Service. Again and again, when talking about the piece, Bloch returns to the idea. The lovely passage Associate Conductor Timothy Mount read to us at rehearsal is one example. In it, Bloch describes the way he immersed himself in the Hebrew text for the Sabbath service (remember, he had to learn Hebrew in order to write the piece): “I have absorbed it to the point that it has become mine and as if it were the very expression of my soul. . . . It has become a cosmic poem, a glorification of the laws of the Universe … a dream of stars, of forces … the Primordial Element … before the worlds existed. … It has become a 'private affair' between God and me.”
Perhaps the fullest explanation Bloch gives of this experience of transcendence that he was trying to capture comes in his description of writing the “seu sheorim” (lift up your heads) section in the third movement. This section introduces the highly charged moment when the Torah is taken from its ark to be displayed to the congregation, and the chorus sings “Torah tzivoh,” (the Torah, which God gave through Moses, is the Law of the House of Jacob.) This part of the service is the physical embodiment of Bloch’s spiritual drama—the moment when ordinary people are brought face-to-face with the divine. As such, it was a crucial section for Bloch, and he struggled to get it right. “When I read ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors and the King of Glory shall come in,’” he wrote, “I could not understand what this was about. It mystified, puzzled and worried me. I was in the Swiss mountains at the time; the day was foggy, the fir trees drooped, the landscape was covered with sadness, I could not see the light. Suddenly a wind came up, the clouds in the sky parted and the sun was over everything. I understood. I felt God was within me at that time in lifting up the clouds.”
While the drama depicted in the Sacred Service is highly spiritual, it is not essentially Jewish, or indeed connected to any specific religion. Time magazine (which back then was actually interested in classical music premieres) pointed this out in a review of the first New York performance: “in spirit his Service was universal, as much for Gentiles as for Jews.” And Bloch himself believed that the work was “more cosmic and universal than Jewish.” He made this explicit in his commentary on the end of the work. He claimed that the final twenty-five measures took him two years to write—and no wonder, considering what he was trying to accomplish: “The last part,” he wrote, “is like an epilogue. Here is the whole realization of humanity, the love of God, when all men will recognize that they are brothers, a fellowship in spirit and united, and on that day the world shall be one.”
So the Sacred Service dramatizes a spiritual journey taken by all people. But for Bloch to express it to his satisfaction, he had to draw deeply from his own Jewish background and heritage. As he put it, “A tree must have its roots deep down in its soil. A composer who says something is not only himself. He is his forefathers! He is his people!”
The Collegiate Chorale will be embarking on this spiritual journey at the historic Central Synagogue, a beautiful Moorish revival building. Their cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, will join us to discuss the background of the piece, and the ways Bloch changed and adapted the traditional Sabbath service for his purposes. Like Bloch, she has the unusually rich perspective on Judaism that comes from starting with a different point of view. Born in Korea to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist mother, she is the first Asian-American cantor in North America. She knows first-hand how flexible and accomodating Jewish traditions can be--one year for the bitter herb called for in the Passover seder, her mother used kimchee.
(For a full, and quite moving, account of the writing of the Sacred Service, visit http://www.zamir.org/Notes/NFZ-Spring05.shtml. A fascinating piece by Angela Buchdahl on her background can be found at http://www.shma.com/june03/Angela.htm.)
-- Janet Pascal, Singing Member and Chorale Music Librarian
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