The State of the Union of Drama and Music

A sample survey of the contemporary opera world

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint: This isn’t the genre you associate with this composer - almost 100% guaranteed!

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 classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results

CGF Newsletter 26
Henri Tomasi, Paysages: 1. Marine 

Not many takers on last week’s Name that Tune, though not surprisingly we all homed in on the French essence. I guessed Nadia Boulanger, Manuel de Falla, and Georges Enescu, arguing that the latter two spent enough time in Paris to imbue their work with un certain je ne sais quoi. Listener Eric came in with a much more sensible guess of Fauré.

About M. Thomasi, I’ll just mention that, as far as I know, he’s only really known for one piece, his trumpet concerto, and I only know that piece because it was performed at the Chicago Symphony one time when I was giving the pre-concert lecture. But clearly a composer worthy of further investigation based on this selection.

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.

Contemporary Opera Roundup

In the past calendar year I’ve attended performances of five contemporary operas, a number that’s high by my standards. I think they amount to a fairly representative sample of what’s going on in the world of opera, so I’m going to take them one by one, give a little review, and see what lessons I can draw from the lot.

Anne Frank

Shulamit Ran, composer; Charles Kondek, librettist
Premiere production at Indiana University, Bloomington, March 2023

I hinted in CGF Newsletter 15 that I might travel to Bloomington to attend the premiere of this opera, and it so happens that I ended up doing just that. It made for a fun little jaunt, and I had a great hang with Listener Satish, frequent submitter to Name That Tune on the CGF podcast. We crashed the new faculty reception being held in the lobby, and during intermission, I got recognized by an IU student in the audience. So a great time was had by all.

Unfortunately, the opera was bad.

I’ll start with the libretto, which was an unmitigated disaster. It is often written in rhyming couplets, and we’re talking like sub-Dr. Seuss level rhymes. The characters speak in a heightened, “purple” language that is at once abstract and absurd. And obvious. Oh lord, how could we have made any of this more obvious?

Maybe I overestimate contemporary audiences. Lord knows the internet has proven that things which seem clear as day can be wildly misinterpreted, and this is not a particularly safe moment to make subtle points about the history of the Jewish people. (Of note: we had to pass through enhanced security, ie. metal detectors, in order to get into the hall.)

But Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most affecting works of world literature not because its author lays out her themes in the most didactic way possible. It’s because her writing reveals such a special, sparkling person who happens to be subjected to unimaginably bleak conditions due to a societal and government ideology of historically evil proportions. Unlike the librettist of this opera, she doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight to make overt diatribes.

Then there’s the music. What a disappointment. As I mentioned in my preview back in December, I was excited to hear this opera because in Shulamit Ran’s recent work, as exemplified by her third string quartet, she has been heading in a new direction, more Bartóky, more tonal, more interesting. But the music of this opera was a throwback to 1970s modernism, with certain tonal touches to reflect individual lines of dialogue. There was little to no continuous musical texture; ideas came and went sporadically.

Perhaps this opera would have played back in the 70s, but those were different, worse times for music. The IU students did an out-and-out spectacular job of performing this incredibly complex work, both on the stage and in the pit. The same goes for my former teacher, Arthur Fagen, who told me that it was by orders of magnitude the most challenging opera he ever had to conduct. It was dispiriting to see so much talent wasted on such poor material.

Blue

Jeanine Tesori, composer; Tazewell Thompson, librettist
Seattle Opera, March 2022

I bring up this opera next because it suffered many of the same flaws as Anne Frank. This time, the subject matter is police violence visited upon Black families in America. Once again, this is a work with the political nuance of an “In this house we believe” yard sign. Again, the thematic points are made so obvious as to be bludgeon-worthy. The libretto was certainly of a higher quality than Anne Frank (it would be hard to be much worse) but it was not anything I would call good.

The music was an interesting case. I’d hoped for some tunes from a composer mainly known for her work on Broadway, but come to think about it, she’s one of the least tuneful composers writing for the stage. (I’ll never know why people liked the score Caroline, Or Change beyond the fact that it had a talking washing machine.) I felt that with her score for Blue, Tesori was setting out to prove that she was a “Composer” who could write Contemporary Music with the big boys. I just wish she hadn’t.

Vinkensport

David T. Little, composer; Royce Vavrek, librettist
University of Washington Opera Lab, April 2022

This is the only one of the five operas I’m discussing that was a comedy, and I think that’s probably indicative of the ratio of comedic to dramatic work in the field as a whole.

Dramas are fine, but not everything has to be a tragedy. I promise you it doesn’t. But the penchant for writing tragedies, especially tragedies featuring women exposed to extreme violence (see more ahead) is, to my mind, played out.

So back to Vinkensport. This wasn’t a particularly funny comedy. It’s a chamber opera with a plot that revolves around a peculiar Dutch passtime called Vinkensport, “in which male common chaffinches are made to compete for the highest number of bird calls in an hour.” Sorry for the spoiler, but turns out that one of the competitors has a speaker in her bird crate, and she’s playing a recording. LOL!!!!

This opera suffered from the Lost effect, a trope that I have come to despise: a group of people are put in a room together, and then we have to learn about their dumb backstories instead of having, you know, a plot happen.

The libretto was so-so, and the music was fine.

The Hours

Kevin Puts, composer; Greg Pierce, librettist
Premiere production at the Met in December 2022 (I saw it in an HD cinema)

I wrote my major thoughts about this opera back in the same newsletter edition in which I previewed Anne Frank, but allow me to summarize: the music wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really an opera score.

In an opera, the music is the main factor. It should set the scene, tell the story, characterize the characters, and generally be the opera. Yes, opera is a gesamtkunstwerk that requires the talents of people from many different disciplines (and here I would just mention that in each of the operas under discussion, the sets and costumes were nothing short of spectacular) but the music is supposed to be the primus inter pares.

In The Hours, the music functioned like a soundtrack, accompanying the action of the plot. It’s not that the music was bad per se, it’s just that it wasn’t doing the heavy lifting. I was able to enjoy the piece as a theatrical work because the plot was compelling, the libretto decent, and the staging interesting. It’s just not an opera, though there there were peop be people singing on a stage and playing in a pit, but it’s not an opera.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Sheila Smith, composer; Stephen Kitsakos, librettist
Premiere production at Seattle Opera, February 2023

I’ve saved this one for last because it was far and away the best of the bunch. This opera had many things going for it: great plot, fascinating setting, compelling characters, beautiful production. The orchestration is such that we should all bow down at the feet of Sheila Silver (a composer I had never heard of before) and worship her brilliance. Every moment of this score had me dropping my jaw or shaking my head at how gorgeous and compelling the music was coming out of the pit.

Just one thing was missing: tunes. There were no memorable melodic lines given to the singers, which was all the more incomprehensible given the generosity with which Silver lavished melody upon the orchestra. The opera ends with one of the main characters facing execution at the hands of the Taliban. The lights dim all around her, and she’s lit with an exquisite halo effect. Everything on stage is saying: “Here comes the aria!” but instead of a song, we just got singing.

The State of the Art

Overall, based on this small but representative sample, I can’t say that new opera in the 2020s is in particularly good shape. I could easily add to the mix some other disappointments in this genre from the past 10 years: Kevin Puts’ Silent Night and Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain come immediately to mind. In fact, I would be very hard pressed to think of an opera written in the past 10 or even 50 years that I really admire. Again, it’s not like I’ve seen everything (Jake Heggie’s works are a huge lacuna in my knowledge) so I wouldn’t set myself up as the leading expert.

Contemporary composers not writing compelling scores is a problem that’s hardly contained to the world of opera, but opera exacerbates it. My friend Satish had to leave Anne Frank thirty minutes before the end of the show. Three hours of music that’s simultaneously aggressive and boring is a lot to stomach. But as I mentioned with regard to Suns, it seems that even when you can get these people to write great scores, you can’t pay them to write a melody!

All this really makes me sadder than before for the loss of Stephen Sondheim, the one person who was writing compelling, characterful, plot-driving music for the stage. Sadly, I don’t think there are many composers in the Broadway world who are pushing the musical theater—writ broadly—in convincing directions either. Certainly not Jeanine Tesori, definitely not Pasek & Paul, and, as much as I liked Hamilton at the time, having now seen In the Heights, the thought of Lin Manuel Miranda being the keeper of the torch is... ugh.

There’s one figure I’m keeping an eye on: Michael R. Jackson (not that one) whose A Strange Loop is a fascinating piece. Not entirely to my taste, but undeniably important and interesting.

Classical Mixtape

Rachel J. Peters, Rootabaga Country: Henry HagglyHoagly’s aria

Obviously this week, I’ve got to recommend some opera, and some contemporary opera at that, and some good contemporary opera after all that bleakness!

Rachel Peters is a composer I found randomly while doing some research for the podcast, and I recommended one of her pieces for the mixtape back on CGF 75. I really vibe with her musical sensibility, and we now follow one another on Twitter. She doesn’t have too much representative work up on her YouTube page, but this cute little song for a cute little character seemed like a nice antidote to the above.