Lotte Lenya sings Seerauberjenny (Pirate Jenny) from Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). The clip is from G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film of the original stage play by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill. No-one has ever sung it better than Lenya. After all, Weill did write it for her.
Two scenes from Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] (1931), the film by G.W. Pabst that infuriated its authors, Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, by removing most of its nihilism. It’s a very fine film, nonetheless. The first piece features Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny, in one of the most seductively subversive songs ever written….
….and the second Ernst Busch in Moritatsong, later ruined by Frank Sinatra, among others, as Mack the Knife.
Folk legend Sandy Denny (tragically, d. 1978).
I loved her when I was a teenager.
Her voice was the closest thing I ever heard to a living bell — blood and breath mixed in with the brass. It’s hard to get from this video, but it’s there all right on LP and CD. With Fairport Convention, she made Liege and Lief, the finest folk-rock record of the ’60’s, and perhaps of all time.
If you follow the links, you’ll see she burned brightly but crashed badly, as so many do and have done. Somewhere amid alcohol, brain trauma and accident she fell in with death, aged only 31.
The great Russian master of the cello has died, aged 80.
Here is a moving tribute by Stephen Pollard.
Let ‘Slava’s’ sublime talent speak for itself in one of Bach’s great pieces for solo cello. This was music that Rostropovich single-handedly rescued from obscurity and restored to its rightful position at the top of the cellist’s repertoire.
I know opera will always be a minority thing — but why, when people talk and think about singers, do they not talk and think about this one? More glamour than a dozen pop widgets; more talent a couple of (hundred) thousand of them.
American soprano Renee Fleming sings ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvorak’s opera Rusalka. Glorious. Glorious.
Mesiku na nebi hlubokem
Svetlo tvé daleko vidi,
Po svete bloudis sirokém,
Divas se v pribytky lidi.
Mesicku, postuj chvili
Reckni mi, kde je muj mily
Rekni mu, stribmy mesicku,
Me ze jej objima rame,
Aby si alespon chvilicku
Vzpomenul ve sneni na mne
Zasvet mu do daleka
Rekni mu, rekni m kdo tu nan ceka!
mneli duse lidska sni
At’se tou vzpominkou vzbudi!
Mesicku, nezhasni, nezhasni!
______________
Oh moon, in the velvet heavens
your light shines far
you roam throughout the whole world
gazing into human dwellings
Oh moon, stay for a while,
tell me where my beloved is!
Oh tell him, silver moon,
that my arms enfold him,
in the hope that for at least a moment
he will dream of me.
Shine on him, wherever he may be
and tell him of the one who awaits him here.
If a human soul should dream of me,
may he still remember me on wakening.
Oh moon, do not fade away.
(From more fossicking around YouTube. Quite addictive, that place.)
The late Carlos Kleiber conducts the Second Movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Science fiction film aficionados may recognise the music from John Boorman’s ill-fated (but, IMHO, seriously under-rated) Zardoz.
It has all the maestro’s characteristics: sharp dynamics, crisp tempi, and an absolute refusal to give way to sentiment — preserving both the sense of melancholy, and the spirit of dance. Masterly, indeed.
Summary thoughts from a recent swing mainly around Eastern Europe.
The Magic Flute at the Vienna State Opera I’ve already posted about. I didn’t realise at the time that the opera house had been bombed by the Allies towards the end of WWII and what we were sitting in was a painstaking re-creation, 10 years in the construction. They did it well, but the full glory of the neo-Baroque original could not be re-captured. They just can’t do stuff like that any more.
The Marriage of Figaro, at the Volksoper, Vienna, was disappointing. The Volksoper made its name in operetta, and for Wiener Blut and other trifles no doubt would have been fine. But Mozart was beyond them. The opera was sung in German, which I think is always a mistake. It sounded only marginally less awful than it does in English. Mozart wrote his cadences for the Italian language in song, and they just don’t work otherwise. Booking late, we had a box seat overlooking the orchestra, and though I hate to say it, some of the byplay in the pit was more interesting than the action on the stage. First and Second Flute engaged in deep discussions during the long passages of recitative (I never realised before just how boring they are to the orchestra). First Flute produced a letter from her bag, read it, looked distressed. In the next break, Second Flute held forth to her with some kind of advice, which she tearfully attended, nodding gratefully, while he demonstrated something emotionally significant from a notebook of his own. And so it went on, an interesting counterpoint to the lack-lustre performance on stage.
The production was generally OK, and the singing more than passable. But the conductor seemed indifferent to what went on on the stage — he scarcely looked in its direction, seemingly bored whenever the orchestra was not fully engaged. As well, he worked very, very hard, with much ostentatious waving and gesticulation, but I couldn’t hear that anything he did made any difference whatever to whatever the orchestra was doing.
A bad moment came right at the end, where Figaro opened a bottle of champagne and playfully sprayed the orchestra with it. They were furious, marching out of the pit even before the curtain calls began. First and Second Flute remained (I do hope they went home together; they were a fine-looking couple), carefully wiping down their silver pipes. Imagine if any of the instruments had been a Stradivarius.
Basically ho-hum.
Don Giovanni, at the Zagreb Opera, was another thing entirely. A blazing, impassioned performance. The singing was not perfect, with some slight discontinuities between pit and stage, but still very, very good, with wonderful work from the orchestra. This was a reading that left no doubt the drama was framed by the passion of women. Donna Anna was more dominant than one is accustomed to, the very spirit of betrayal and revenge. Even Donna Elvira’s last plea to the doomed Don (”I still love you despite everything”), which so often seems dramatically weak, worked marvellously as the artful stagecraft gave us every hint as to the awful fate that awaited him, and from which she sought to redeem him. And Don Giovanni was magnificent: tall, handsome, careless, cruel, and to the end totally, recklessly defiant. What’s not to like about that?
We were initially put off by the set — in the photographs it looked like a railway station waiting room, albeit art deco, framed in neon — but it the event it worked out brilliantly. The characters came and went through the windows, which sounds awkward but wasn’t. Only the one set was used. All in all, the best Don I’ve ever been to. Slavonic passion as opposed to Viennese elegance. Oh well, both have their place in opera.
The opera house itself is great. Smaller than Budapest and Prague, but of the same neo-Baroque style. Wonderful painted ceilings that I irritated my neighbours by standing up to admire. Interesting if a little sad to see the other opera-goers (God knows what they thought of us): a few trendoids, but most were elderly, dressed in what passed for best under the old regime. They would have been dowdy in 1960. But then style was never socialism’s strong suit.
[More to follow.]
Somehow it was only on reflection that we realised how perfect the performance was, on the night of 3rd October 2006, of Mozart’s most ambiguous and dramatically difficult but most musically perfect opera, The Magic Flute. Of course it’s well known that The Magic Flute changes course mid-way: the putative villain — Sarastro — becomes the saviour figure, and all of that, as though either Schikaneder or Mozart had said, late in the piece, “Hey, hang on….”. But none of that matters. In a great performance, all the incongruities fade away in the face of music of such perfection. It was G.B. Shaw, no less, who said that the music Mozart composed for Sarastro was the only sound one could with decency imagine issuing from the mouth of God.
So it was two nights ago. With a perfect orchestra, faultless singing and the effortless but commanding direction of Alfred Eschwe we experienced virtually the perfect performance. All the bits fell into place and complemented and reinforced each other with a sweetness and felicity that can only be imagined from recordings. And the audience’s applause seemed never-ending.
[This is not a case of being Vienna-struck. Tonight we went to a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Volksoper, about which the less said, the better, at least for now.]
Now, the Staatsoper itself — the venue, not merely the seat of performance. Well, Old Europe was there in strength, dripping with jewels and fine fabrics, men and women both, old and (surprisingly, at least to us) young. Wearing the wealth and heritage of hundreds of restless years with effortless and invisible style, they managed to impale us — the non-European parvenus, the un-dinner dressed — without moving a single muscle of their faces. Like watching an outraged cat: you wonder how they do it. Their disgust and revulsion were the more eloquent for being silent. They hated us, all right, just for being there, for interloping, for being able to jostle with them for a place at the bar — their bar. Perhaps they abhorred us not for simply being, but for not even trying while we were about it. Did we have to turn up in jeans, speaking English?
I could see their point. Indeed, you had to both admire and pity them. Theirs is a Europe which is no more — and perhaps never was, except for them and theirs. But without them and theirs there never would have been a Staatsoper in Vienna, and no patrons for to sponsor young Mozart through to immortality, and no audiences like us to write what I just wrote about the impossiblity of matching the experience of two nights ago unless one goes again to Vienna, to the Staatsoper, and to another performance of one of Mozart’s deathless masterpieces.
Oh, and Vienna is sensual. The streets and buildings breathe it somehow. Even the tramcars are sensual, sliding around on their silver tracks, butting against the stop signs. The women are foot-, earth- and heart-stopping. You never saw such grace and elegance. At least I never did, even in Italy. (The guys are ordinary enough, however.)
The Vienna State Opera performed Mozart’s Die Zauberflote last night and we were there.
It was beyond description. Everything worked as it should, and perfectly.
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