On Singers and Performers

Confession—the news is so bad I’ve turned to music to get me through the day. So I devote half an hour to reading about North Korea, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—oh, and let’s not forget those politicians pondering the seriously hard question of whether any lunatic (literally) should be able to buy a gun—and then I take a walk. Or rather, it’s “then we take a walk.” This week, Ralph Vaughan Williams joined me, and excellent company he was. He told me, which I didn’t know, that he had volunteered for World War I when he was 41—well past the age when he was compelled to. And he had served time as an ambulance carrier in the fields. Then he came home and saw the whole thing happening all over again, fifteen years later. He didn’t go, of course, to the Second World War, but he wrote a bitter, very dissonant symphony—completely unlike his usual stuff—about it. Years later, he said, “I don’t know if I like it, but I meant it.”

Second confession—Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

Or not. The music is going strong, there is a Vaughan Williams Society promoting his work, and if his words were resonating in my mind, on the morning trot, well—is he really dead? And so to the greater glory of Vaughan Williams, I wrote a post about him, and put it in a new blog, Words on Musick. (Sorry for the affectation—that “musick” business—but somebody had already got to “music”). The next day I got into Cecilia Bartoli singing all those wonderful arias written for castrati—the ones only a manic singer on cocaine can sing. They’re fun, they’re (mostly) more a romp than music, but who cares? There’s a place for Mozart, a place for Broschi.

Right, so that lead me into the world of the soprano, and I wasted an hour which I cheerfully have watching a BBC documentary on castrati—the singers who had parts removed to preserve their voices. And I discovered two or three remarkable singers. There’s Radu Marian, a guy from Moldavia who for medical reasons never entered puberty (though I noted today that he sports a mustache—don’t know what that’s about….) Anyway, Radu has a clean, high voice—fully soprano, very pure, and yes, I mean it when I say high. He could break glass.

Another singer, as well, Michael Maniaci, who like Radu never entered puberty—they’re both astonishing singers. Right, so it felt that the world needed to hear me weigh in on this, so I wrote about that.

It’s unfortunate, how easily just doing something three days in a row becomes a habit. What to write about today?

Well, there is the intemperance of commentary on YouTube; has anyone noticed it besides me? Or is it that musicians—I’m skating quite close to the truth, here, just to mix a metaphor—are an irritable, irascible bunch? Anyway, the YouTubians / YouTubists / YouTubers / nothing-satisfies-the computer-these-days are going at each other with sabers over the question of Simone Kermes. Here is one of the more temperate remarks—I fear to introduce the more incendiary to the Gentle Readers of this blog:

Whatever she's taken, I think I want some too! She has such a gorgeous voice but the coloratura just isn't accurate at ALL from the word go although she has way better technique than Bartoli (it's hard to do it properly!) All this drunk-auntie-at-a-wedding dancing, what is all that about? It is so vulgar I actually sort of love it. Quite frankly the best Rodelinda in the world (IMO) doesn't need to "prove" she can sing this (or not). 8/10 for singing, 10/10 for chutzpah!

This from the hugely talented and universally acclaimed…La Prima Ragazza.

I think you get my point. One of the reasons nobody listens to classical music much is that regular people have been snobbed out of it. Yeah, in the movies, classical music is OK. But actually go to a concert, with all the formality, the protocol, the anxiety of when you’re supposed to clap…. And what if you don’t like the music?

Well, Kermes gets called by Mosart200657 “The Operatic Lady Gaga,” so I decided to check her out. And here she is, romping her way through Come Nave in mezzo all’onde.

Well, as always, I’m mixed about it all. I think Ian Bostridge said it best: pop music is now the mainstream; if you really want to be counterculture, listen to Mozart. And isn’t it hypocritical to keep viewing popular music as somehow the underdog?

And why does Simone Kermes have to emulate Lady Gaga? Why does she have to sell herself—isn’t the voice and the music enough?

That said, I’m not so sure that I can comfortably pan her. If she wants to romp around on-stage, why not? Yes, it’s all a bit campy, it may also distract from the aria, but it’s another point of view, it’s something to see. My only problem with it is that Kermes will never out-gaga Gaga.

When are we going to admit the truth?

She easily out-sings her.

Wonderful Terrible Music

OK—you should probably hear it once in your life, if you want to consider yourself musically well traveled.

Welcome to the rarified world of composers seriously obscure like Porpora, Hasse, Broschi. How obscure? Well, my computer has just red squiggled the names, and I’ve spent a moment or two wondering if it was worth the time to add them to the dictionary. Would I ever write them, much less even remember them, again? Or would I be sufficiently annoyed by the squiggle appearing throughout the document that it would be worth it?

This ambivalent attitude towards these composers carries over into their music, which is absolutely wonderful—wow, the sheer number of notes they can pack in a score! These guys must have died of writer cramp; it’s music that tires me just to listen too, imagine writing the stuff…..

And do I care enough even to find out anything about even one of these guys? Luckily, I did—though more out of duty than interest. But I’m happy to tell you that his story is just as good as Farinelli’s, and it’s even true!

Now we back up. People have been cutting balls off boys for millennia, for varying reasons—humiliation, slavery, or just well, for a song. Quite literally—there were, according to Wikipedia, castrated males in the early Byzantine Empire. But the castrati first get into opera in the middle of the 16^th century—just as opera was being created. So it’s no surprise to find castrati in the operas of Monteverdi.

Knew that, but what I didn’t know is that castration does more than preserve the voice of a boy before puberty. The lack of testosterone also weakens and lengthens the bones—among which are the bones of the rib cage. So these guys developed huge chests, and phenomenal breathing capacity. As well, they had more agility than the female singer, and produced a distinct sound. All of this meant that composers could write music of phenomenal vocal difficulty, inversely related to any musical worth.

If you’ve seen the movie Farinelli, you’ll know—they were the Michael Jacksons and Beatles of their day. People went wild for them, they became hugely rich, they died young (generally). At the height of the craze for castrati, 4,000 boys a year were castrated.

Times changed, fashion changed. The last role for a castrato was written by Meyerbeer in 1828, but the tradition lingered on until quite late in—guess where—the Catholic Church. Yes, popes as far back as Benedict XIV in 1748 had tried to ban castrati, but their popularity was such that people might leave the church had Benedict done so. So as late as 1913, there was a castrato in the Sistine Chapel Choir. There has been talk, by the way, of urging the church to make an official apology.

There is, in fact, a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, which you can hear below. Be warned, though, that styles in singing have changed in the last hundred years, and Moreschi may not have been that great a singer (sorry—it seems really mean to pan a guy who lost his balls….). But it’s a thing to hear.

It’s a rather forlorn sound, and it must have been a difficult life, living as the last relic of a dying tradition. Moreschi stands in contrast to his colleague three hundred years earlier, Siface, who was acclaimed as the best singer in the world by a critic in London (never an easy accolade to attain), and had a crazy love life. 

You’re asking—at least I think you’re asking—how can a castrato have a love life? My answer: I don’t know, nor am I willing to find out. This isn’t that kind of blog, dammit.

All right, getting over my fit of pique and moving right along, I give you in Spanish what happened since it’s more complete and somehow sounds better:

Estuvo al servicio del el Duque de Módena y se enamoró perdidamente de Elena Marsili, viuda del conde Gaspari-Forni y hermana del Marqués Giorgio Marsili de Bolonia, quien se opuso tenazmente a la relación amorosa entre Siface y su hermana, por considerar a los castrati como un engendro (sic, or should it be asi?) de la naturaleza y una afrenta a la memoria y la sangre de la casa de los Marsili. El asunto fue llevado ante el Duque de Módena, quien tenía alta estima por el castrato y decidió alejar a Elena de Siface, enviándola al monasterio de San Lorenzo.

OK—loose translation. Siface falls head over heels with Elena Marsili, a dame who’s the widow of the Count of Gaspari-Forni (definitely sounds like comic opera) and the sister of the Marquis Georgio Marsili, who absolutely weirds out that his sister could be getting it on with a freak of nature. So everybody runs over to the Duke of Modena, who was wild about the castrato, and who decides to stick Elena into a monastery—always a good solution, right?—in San Lorenzo.

And is Siface beaten? Nope—not he!

Aun así Siface no renunció a Elena y cuando le fue dado el rol de Perseo en la ópera de Martelli, el cantante pudo frecuentar más Bolonia e inmediatamente pidió salvoconductos para visitar a Elena en el monasterio. El escándalo público y la ira del Marqués Marsili llegaron a su punto más álgido. En hechos no esclarecidos del todo, el cantante fue asaltado en su carruaje que lo conducía a Bolonia por 4 hombres enmascarados que le dieron muerte, primero con bayonetas en su espalda y le remataron destrozándole el cráneo. El juicio iniciado no pudo inculpar al Marqués pero el Papa en persona se decidió a intervenir y desterró al Marqués de Bolonia y los Estados Papales. Elena Marsili desapareció del monasterio meses más tarde y se dice que coleccionó un gran número de aventuras amorosas, según muchos por venganza contra su hermano.

Siface doesn’t give up but rather, when he gets a role in Bologna, he begins begging permission to visit the monastery. Now the Marquis gets really pissed, and guess what happens? Four masked guys hop into the carriage that Siface is riding in; they kill him and then rekill (well, what else is rematar, computer?) by destroying his cranium. Well, they can’t pin it on the Marquis, so the pope steps in—I’ll send a sworn official translation to any of you scoffers out there—and exiles the Marquis from the Papal States and Bologna. The pope could do stuff like that in those days. Now then, what does the fiery Elena do? Wonderfully, she sticks out her tongue at her brother, escapes the monastery, and goes off screwing half the men in Italy!

I think, Dear Reader, that you really should send me a good bottle of scotch for digging up that story!