103: Send in the Clowns

Don't you love farce?

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint: This composer died in a year that the summer Olympics were held in London. No need to Google, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Olympics 

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 102
Schubert, Notturno for piano trio

Folks, do yourself a favor and listen to this piece. It’s one of the real treasures of the repertoire, comparatively neglected for not being a movement of a larger work, but noble and beautiful in its own right. If you thrill to the slow movement of Schubert’s C Major cello quintet (and I can’t believe there’s a beating heart on planet earth that doesn’t) this one’s for you.

Having said that, I didn’t recognize the excerpt that Joseph chose for his clip, but I found my way to Schubert nevertheless, after briefly considering Beethoven. Once again, nobody else played this week, which is a trend that needs rectifying. Start weighing in, people!

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Opera Review: Pagliacci

For last week’s Tone Praise, I posted the aria “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci since I was going to see it performed at the Seattle Opera the next evening. Like everyone else, I’ve known that aria since before I can remember, and I think it’s amazing — dark, dramatic, virtuosic — everything you’d want from a tragic opera. Because of that aria, and because Pagliacci is just generally considered a major part of the repertoire, I had high hopes for the piece as a whole.

Hopes that were dashed! Let me say immediately that this is not a review of the performance. The performance was top-notch, with a superb solo cast, a fantastic chorus and orchestra, excellent conducting, and even a good staging (pointlessly set in ~1948 as opposed to ~1865 for some reason, but if you can’t leave well enough alone, that’s not so bad really.)

No, I’m here to critique the opera itself, and let me say, I was disappointed. The show has two, maybe three things going for it: 1) it’s short (act 1 is 40 minutes, act 2 is 30); 2) it’s got “Vesti la giubba”; 3) the image of a clown committing a violent murder during a performance is an indelible one.

Having said all that, the opera is a real let down. Aside from that one aria, which is only about three minutes long, the music is totally mid. Not bad, just mid. Bland, generic, undramatic. As for the drama, the opera contains maybe 20 minutes worth of plot. The plot is padded out with a prologue, some peasant music for the chorus, an incredibly boring intermezzo, and some more peasant music for the chorus. Aside from “Vesti,” the arias do precious little to realize the characters. Even at just 70 minutes the sparsity of plot points makes the show feel long.

Act II is a cat-and-mouse game; you know what’s going to happen and you’re just waiting to see how and when it will transpire. Because the performers are putting on a diegetic commedia dell’arte show, Leoncavallo’s mid-ass music kind of works, but he could do SO much more to ratchet up the tension. As far as I’m concerned, his music does nothing to elevate the dramatic irony inherent in the plot itself.

My theory of opera is that in an opera, the music must be the primary driver of the storytelling, and in particular, the vocal lines. If that sounds unbelievably obvious, I agree — it is. And yet, somehow, composer after composer seems not to understand this most central tenet of the art form.

It’s a shame really, because you could make an absolute firecracker of an opera out of this scenario (and I don’t mean this libretto — the libretto itself is pretty weak, penned by Leoncavallo himself.) I think a natural comparison for Pagliacci would be something like Puccini’s Tosca. Now *there’s* a dramatic opera! You don’t even have to see it staged, hell, you don’t even have to understand Italian to know what’s going on. It’s a satisfying musical object in itself, from the sheer sensuality of its melodic lines to its brilliant orchestration to its indelible sonic scene-painting, all woven together in a series of compelling dramatic arcs.

Here’s the good news though: Pagliacci isn’t a great opera, but it’s not an actively unpleasant thing to sit through, and the fact that it’s only 70 minutes long mitigates the severity of multitudinous sins. I’m also happy to report that I ate a truly amazing meal beforehand at Uptown China — pot stickers, Taiwanese tofu & cabbage, crispy eggplant, and rice cakes. Plus, at intermission my friends and I got waved into the VIP lounge where a handsome young man approached me and said “aren’t you the composer of Cassandra?” So overall, a splendid night at the theater.

Tone Praise

Haydn, Symphony No. 103

It seemed only right to include this splendid symphony for the 103rd edition of Tone Prose, conducted by good old Sir Thomas Beecham.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)