When Perfection is not Enough

It’s unfair, damned unfair, and I won’t have it.

Everybody knows that I’m totally hooked on Joyce DiDonato, but then again, who isn’t? It could be that such simplicity is the highest art, but she gives you the impression that, yes, she really is your long-lost sister. And so she’s not easy to like: she’s impossible not to like.

But Renée Fleming?

She’s certainly at the top of her game as well; in fact, both women are. Fleming is a lyric soprano about whom one writer—in a blog called RenéeFlemingAdmirers.net, and the fact that there is such a thing speaks libraries, not volumes—said….

The New York Times writes about her as The Beautiful Voice. In France she is presented as La Cantatrice Rayonnante, when in England she is bearing the name Double Creame. Die German leading newspaper has given her the tittle Schaumgeborene Sopran-Venus. To aloud (sic, very sic) to address to her as Celeste Renée was my proposition. She confirmed it favoring me with her incredible, charming smile. 

OK—be fair: I have the sense that English may not be the writer’s first language, or cradle tongue, as we say down here in Puerto Rico. The point is that Fleming has a gorgeous voice.

Ooops, sorry, but it’s not.

I read somewhere that Jascha Heifetz, when people told him, “oh, your violin sounds so beautiful,” would put his ear to the instrument and say, “funny, I don’t hear anything….” So yes, it’s true that Fleming’s voice is beautiful, gorgeous, polished, and all the other adjectives writers like to heap up. But—surprise—there are lots and lots of gorgeous voices out: it’s not that rare a thing. What is rare is the incredible amount of discipline, work, thought, stamina, and luck that went into getting that gorgeous voice to do what Fleming can do with it.

Is there anything more difficult than singing opera? Because really, there’s the sheer athletics; one tight muscle will very likely produce a tense sound. Then there’s the attention to text, and how many actors, by the way, have to master German, French, Italian, English, and—increasingly—Russian and Czech? And speaking of actors, it’s no longer enough to haul yourself onstage, open your mouth and blow everybody away. Remember Joan Sutherland, whom the opera buffs at La Fenice dubbed La Stupenda? Well, stupendous she was, but in her early days, she had one gesture; a gesture her drama coach called “generally pained expression,” or some such thing. (Every time he saw it, he would shout “GPE, Joan,” and she struggled to change it.) And as if all this weren’t enough, you are called upon—if you’re crazy enough to do it—to spend up to six hours, in the case of Wagner, screeching over 100 musicians who have the advantage—besides numbers—of sitting between you and the audience. Thanks, guys!

Oh, and have I mentioned a final detail? Yes, generally speaking, the polite British and the friendly Americans will look the other way—with perhaps a generally pained expression—as you have your off night. Because look, part of the work you’ve put in is to assure that, by and large, you have a consistent product, one you can roll out even after fighting with your husband on the phone for two hours right before the performance. But that may mean that you’re delivering “good,” but not “great.” But the Italians?

Good, you see, is not good enough in Milan. And there is a group called the loggionisti, who are about as fierce—and certainly as loud—as alley cats in heat. And here’s what happened to Fleming when she sang there:

Quite what Fleming's offence was is unclear, but certainly her opening night as Lucrezia was not the luckiest of performances. The tenor had dropped out and been replaced at the last minute. Then the conductor fainted with a thud at the end of Fleming's first aria. Finally, at the end of her final cadenza, which deviated somewhat from La Scala convention, the gods erupted and Fleming was booed to the goldfretted rafters. It lasted for the whole of her closing scene and afterwards, she wrote, "I began to shake and I shook for days."

Right—you want nice? Stay in Minnesota….

Fleming has, you see, stage fright, and what happened after that experience very nearly derailed her career. Because she knew: if she “took some time off,” she would never go back on a stage. So she had her voice coach walk her to the stage and figuratively push her off the branch and onto the stage. And then, while onstage, she relaxed and could perform. It was the days and hours before the performance during which the anxiety rose to near panic.

It’s surprising, the number of performers who are afflicted, and who nonetheless go on to make great careers, in spite of it. And though it got better for Fleming, it never entirely went away: she was petrified about having to sign the national anthem at the Super Bowl. And why not? She fluffs one line—she would wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “oh shit, who manned the ramparts?—and that will be in the first sentence of her obituary:

Renée Fleming, the brilliant lyric soprano whose career was marred by an unfortunate lapse of memory while singing the Stars and Stripes…..

Oh, and just to increase the pressure, she was singing to football fans, for God’s sake, who are almost worse than the loggionisti. I mean, at least those guys love opera….

There are things you can do to reduce stage fright. First, of course, you can be sure you’re really prepared, that you’ve studied the score, that you’ve put in the work. Then—especially in the case of singers—you got to be sure you’re in physically good shape: hydrated, rested, warmed up. But a surprising amount of it is mental.

It involves a curious paradox—but it’s not about you. Yes, they’re coming to see Renée Fleming, but Renée Fleming as Rusalka. And if you’re singing a song recital? Well, it’s the music, or it’s the character in the song. But it’s not you.

Mostly, it’s the inner critic that somehow, in some way, has to be, not banished, but gently told to back off. Because what will happen if the critic is screaming, “DON’T GET TIGHT! DON’T TENSE THOSE NECK MUSCLES!”

Guess what—your neck is probably tight right now….

And paradoxically, even positive comments derail you, because it’s like what the Buddhists, trying to attain pure consciousness, call the “I’m doing great, wasn’t I!” moment. Which is all to say that it’s not just tennis that has an inner game; opera has a huge one as well.

And sadly, Fleming has paid twice, if not three times. First, there’s all that work she put it in to get that voice where she—and all of us—want it. Then she had to pay again with nearly immobilizing stage fright. And the third slug to the emotional solar plexus?

“She seems so fake,” said one friend.

“Her smile could give you a suntan,” wrote one reviewer.

Guys? That’s what I meant, a thousand words back there, when I said it wasn’t fair. Because as you can see in the master class below, Fleming is both professionally very helpful and wonderfully kind and supportive. Perhaps she learned what not to do from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who reportedly terrorized her. (If so, Fleming is not alone—seeing her on YouTube was like opening the freezer door).

DiDonato has been blessed with a kind of candor, openness that—on the face of it—Fleming doesn’t have. And yet, in comments and interviews, Fleming is remarkably candid about what her career has cost her; at one point, she muses about how much ego strength a man has to have to be “Mr. Renée Fleming.”

In one of his novels, Robertson Davies remarks that the person one has struggled to become is much more the “real” person that one started out as. Why can’t we accept that this extraordinary singer has polished her persona as much as her voice?

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.

Mendelssohn

Susan wrote me an email—did I know of any recording of the complete 12 fugues for string quartet by Mendelssohn?

Actually, I had never heard of the work, so I did what anyone—including Susan, I’m sure—would do. And yes, the clip below from YouTube is what I found.

Also yes, four of the fugues were recorded by the Vogler Quartet. But the other eight? Yet to be recorded, it seems.

It’s both surprising and unsurprising that Mendelssohn wrote these fugues when he was 12 years old. Surprising because they are very complex and very mature—far from what you would imagine even the most talented 12 year old could do. Unsurprising because Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who went on to champion the work of another composer, also of fugues as well as much else—Johann Sebastian Bach.

Susan knew of these works because of the remarkable work of Stephen Somary and his Mendelssohn Project, which has located some 270 pieces of music hitherto unpublished and unknown.

And it’s total justice that Mendelssohn has this champion, since he got a completely bad rap for years. Yes, his music was played—we’ve all heard the violin concerto, the Italian Symphony, Fingal’s Cave. But the critical judgment was that Mendelssohn was conservative, a little light—not the heavyweight that Brahms, Schumann, Schubert were. George Bernard Shaw, in fact, came out and said it: Mendelssohn "was not in the foremost rank of great composers," he wrote in 1898.

There are a number of reasons for this. Paradoxically, Mendelssohn was wildly popular in his time, and that has always cast a bit a suspicion—can a composer be that popular and still be any good? Was he catering to the crowd?

The second strike against him—he was Queen Victoria’s favorite composer, and the two in fact met and made music together (she was a passable singer). More support for the theory that there’s something a bit sentimental about the music.

But the most important factor might simply be racist. Mendelssohn was Jewish, though in fact he was baptized and raised as a Christian. But he pointedly refused to hide his Jewish origins, despite his father’s wish that he use the name Bartholdy, instead of Mendelssohn.

And three years after Mendelssohn’s death at 38, Richard Wagner published a savage attack on the Jews in general and Mendelssohn in particular. The essay, entitled Jewishness in Music, used Mendelssohn as the best example of why “there is no place for the Jew in music.” Yes, he was skilled, he was facile, but he “has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture ... without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music".

We’ve rejected the racism—but have we kept, wittingly or not, the critical judgment of Mendelssohn? Isn’t it time to rethink, and to rehear?

I’ve always thought so, and have been happy that others do as well. What I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of music that was unpublished. Why? Because Mendelssohn was well off, under no pressure to publish. He also died quite young; he may have been too busy composing to worry much about publishing.

So he was prolific, and left scores of manuscripts unpublished. What happened to them?

Here, racism strikes again. In 1936, the Nazis forbade Mendelssohn to be played publicly, and most of the manuscripts, located in the state library in Berlin, were taken secretly to Warsaw or Krakow. When these cities fell, says Somary, the compositions were dispersed in any way possible, and ended up throughout the world.

Right—so is it any good?

Well, Somary says yes. Frequently, an unpublished piece has a reason to be unpublished, but not in the case of Mendelssohn. In fact, the version of the Italian Symphony that we all know is the wrong version, not the revised version that Mendelssohn wanted published.

It might be time as well to start hearing some of the chamber music besides the famous octet. I listened recently to five minutes of the 6^th String Quartet, and it was enough to send me straight to Amazon—I needed that music.

For years Bach was unplayed, almost unknown, until Mendelssohn came along. How fitting that Mendelssohn, unfairly treated, should have found a champion himself.