Maria Callas, Voice of the Century

Maria Callas was an opera singer in a class all by herself, and her popularity and the sale of recordings has grown steadily since she died in 1977. In a You Tube video from the film “Philadelphia”, Tom Hanks' character, dying of Aids plays a Callas aria and through tears explains better than anyone ever has, how her music has the power to affect people. Callas' ability to interpret opera brought back from obscurity a number of composers like Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini and several dozen operas which had been forgotten by the time she started singing in the late 1930’s. The playable list below has 20 arias from four of her albums.

To understand why she was great we need to take a closer look at how opera and song accomplish the things they do.

 OPERA.

Yip Harburg the songwriter who wrote “Over the Rainbow” said,  
"Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought."

An opera is a dramatic composition where plots often contain great joy, utter despair and situations outside normal experience. Since audiences haven’t personally experienced the extreme and psychologically complex events found in opera they also have not experienced the feelings the characters are going through as the opera unfolds. Since Callas could transform herself into a character with utter realism through her singing and her acting, audiences could actually feel and experience these new or stronger emotions and left the theatre with a wider experience of human emotions than they came in with.

The effect she had on audiences was dramatic, traumatic and life changing and why one had to wait in line for days just to get standing room tickets for her performances. In 1954 she performed La Traviata at La Scala and so transfixed the audience that when it was performed again 8 years later with someone else, the performers were booed off the stage and it was not restaged there for 25 years

Opera and emotions

When someone has a strong emotion like jealousy or love and tells you about it, you may factually understand what is said. But if those same feelings are put into song, and sung by a great singer you will not only "understand" that someone “done her wrong” but can experience those inner thoughts and feelings. Great Blues singers do this very well in short songs with issues of love and loss. Opera takes this very much farther with complex stories that take time to explain and develop. Opera allows audiences to feel the emotions of characters in ancient, primordial and archetypical myths and bring them into their personal experience. Popular song may help you really grasp why Frankie shot Johnnie, but opera can show you how it feels to be so vengeful over betrayal and rejection you would kill your children to get back at their father.

Music and song permit the transmission of feelings from one person to another  and can change another's "thoughts and feelings". Callas took thoughts and the feelings the composer placed in the score and placed them inside the audience to experience and feel them as the composer intended. When she sang the beautiful aria "O Mio Babbino Caro" where a girl begs her father to let her to marry a boy or else she will kill herself by jumping into a river from a particular bridge, her primary goal was not to show off her voice as another singer might, but for her audience to experience that desperation.

A vivid example of the relation of song and emotion was seen when Paul Potts won the British American Idol competition in 2008 with the opera aria Nessun Dorma which has been viewed 80 million times on YouTube. He only sang for a minute but the audience is applauding within fifteen seconds, and tears are visible on a judge’s face by thirty. This shows how even singing in a foreign language can instantly generate emotions.

Callas’ performances had the same dynamics as with Potts but with the added impact of a story, acting, and audiences who generally understand her words. Songs affect emotions because they are processed by a primitive part of our brain that is hard wired to our feelings, not by the part that handles thinking, speech and rational processes. That’s why some people who have suffered such severe strokes they can no longer speak, can still sing long complicated songs and learn new ones. Song is hardwired to emotions so it is able to expand human feelings beyond the range we encounter in normal living. 

Why are we built like this? Speculation is that a couple of million years before humans talked they used sound to warn each other about danger and mothers who reacted the quickest lived to have more babies. Much later in our evolution we developed other parts of the brain to allow us to talk, but singing remained, in part possibly to allow us to relive previous experiences with the emotions others went through when the original events transpired. 

How did she do it? To communicate like she did required extraordinary preparation, here are some of the ways she was differed from other singers and actors.

Callas totally “became” her character. When she sang she was literally transformed personally, emotionally and physically into her character. Unlike most other singers she neither demanded nor made concessions to the physical demands of singing over the acting requirements of a role. Most singers refuse to assume certain physical positions while singing like laying down or perhaps kneeling because of the effect on the diaphragm and vocal chords, but she insisted she be directed as an actor not a singer so her movements were directed by the demands of the action rather than the requirements of singing in full voice, although this placed additional, and sometimes dangerous demands on her body because her approach can damage the organs of voice.

Her movements were real. Callas’ movements and props broke with past traditional practice and flowed naturally out of her character, unbidden, in a natural way such that even her slight hand or eye movements when not singing could create credibility in those who were. One could watch a whole videotape of her one-person concerts just to observe how she used her hands. While in a role of a consumptive girl she created a gesture where when not singing she would reach for something on her desk but abandon the gesture midway as she was too weak to complete the effort. She said her preparation for such roles was sometimes dangerous.

Since she became her characters to the point of taking on their physical characteristics and illnesses, her “acting” was of a level such that when her role required her to die on stage, sometimes the other performers thought that she (Maria Callas the person) had somehow accidentally died on stage.  During the opera Medea where the story had her character about to murder her two children, another person on stage thought Callas was going to actually hurt them and hustled them off the stage.

Callas could “forget” rehearsals – The main difference between how any actor responds to a situation compared with real life is actors know what is about to occur or what will be said whereas in real life you don’t. Callas “forgot” what was to happen to the point where words that were sung or spoken to her by other characters were heard by her as if for the first time. So that if another singer forgot lines she could not whisper the next line to help out as most actors can, because on stage, she did not know the next lines of others. Offstage of course she did know everyone’s lines and roles because from her first years as a music student she atypically attended the rehearsals and classes of other students to observe their lessons and even sat in with the rehearsals of musicians, a practice she followed throughout her career. So usually she understood better than anyone else the role of other singers and also the conductor, director, and musicians.

She had incredible will power and extraordinary self-confidence. When she returned to America from Greece after the Second World War she tried to find roles and after much frustration obtained an audition and was offered two starring roles at the met, the holy grail of all aspiring opera singers in the world. But, since she did not like the roles they offered, (one was as the young girl in Madame Butterfly), against the universal advice of her supporters, she turned down the Met and went back to Europe. 

A few years later when she was a frumpy, ill-dressed 190 pounds she decided to turn herself into a thin, beautiful, fashion plate and in fifteen months, she did, and then sang the role of the young, thin, Butterfly. Below are before and after pictures of her.

Callas had unusual teachers. The style of opera she sang, dramatic coloratura, takes an unusual voice and involves complex trills, runs and musical ornamentations that show off the female soprano voice. This opera style, typically Italian from middle 1800’s although popular today, had almost died out when she began singing in the late 1930’s. By a lucky coincidence, as a teenager, Callas who was born in America found herself living in Greece and was taken under the wing of a famous retired opera singer and an older conductor whose careers went back to when this music was still performed. She learned everything her teachers had to teach and endlessly studied scores when not in class. Her unusual training gave her a three dimensional grasp of the score and the composer’s intent and the internal dimensions of the music and her role as if she had been trained in the previous century.

She had unusual control over her voice. Her kind of singing requires rigorous training and she developed a control over her voice which is described in the book “Callas at Julliard, the Master Classes" where she describes how she approached breathing and the voicing of syllables and notes such that one feels she could have written a book on the subject of any musical phrase she ever sung. She mastered the physical mechanics of creating notes and tones and sounds by preparing her voice with a rigorous practice routine that for over twenty years left her little life outside singing.  In rehearsal most singers give their voice a break and don’t sing in the full voice you use when on stage in performance, Callas did not rehearse or give her voice a break in rehearsal she always sang in full voice.


Callas – the result. In a theatre, ordinarily, the audience is what is real and what happens on the stage is pretend or a play; in a Callas performance often these roles were reversed so what happened on the stage became real and everything else, including the audience became pretend. She so became her role and so completely experienced the feelings and thoughts of her characters, the audience was able to experience her thoughts and feelings too and in those moments, audiences felt human experiences hitherto unfelt and thus became more human.

Samples of her music

Catalani: La Wally - Act 1: Ebben? Ne Andro Lontana, The Voice Of The Century

Puccini: Gianni Schicchi - O Mio Babbino Caro, La Divina Track 14

Puccini: Turandot - In Questa Reggia, La Divina, Track 15

Bellini: La Sonnambula - Compagne, Teneri Amicic, La Divina 2, Track  14

Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani - Merce, Dilette Amiche - Bolero  La Divina 2, Track  7

Gluck: Alceste - Divinites Du Styx, Voice Of The Century, 
Puccini: La Bohème - Si, Mi Chiamano Mimi, La Divina, Track 10

Verdi: La Traviata - Sempre Libera,  La Divina, Track 8

Verdi: Rigoletto - Caro Nome,  La Divina, Track 7

Bellini: Norma - Casta Diva, La Divina, Track 5

Rossini: Il Barbiere Di Siviglia - Una Voce Poco Fa, La Divina.,Track 4

Bizet: Carmen - L'Amour Est Un Oiseau Rebelle (Habañera), La Divina, Track2

Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Un Bel Di, Vedremo,  La Divina,Track 1

Gluck: Orphée Et Eurydice - J'Ai Perdu Mon Eurydice, Voice Of The Century

Giordano: Andrea Chénier - Act 3: La Mamma Morta, Voice Of The Century

Verdi: Macbeth - Nei di della vittoria …, Verdi Arias I

Saint-Saëns: Samson Et Dalila - Mon Coeur S'Ouvre, La Divina,Track 6

Gounod: Romeo Et Juliet - Je Veux Vivre Dans Ce Rève, Voice Of The Century

Verdi: Ernani - Surta È La Notte, Verdi Arias I

Verdi: Il Trovatore - Miserere, Verdi: Il Trovatore (Highlights)

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7G6pDxKIs65ZNepO7b8Vad?si=770c68e04f574ce9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaite' Parisenne by Offenbach

This recording of Gaité Parisienne (Parisian Gaiety) is considered by many to be the best ever made. Fabulous sonics and one of the best RCA Living stereo recordings. Great introduction to big, open, romantic orchestral music. Themes are very beautiful and accessable. If you have good speakers the oomph of this recording will give you a real physical experience as few other recordings can and a real palpable physical  "punch" in the chest. You can really physically feel this recording.

The 23 cuts are all short: try 1,2,4,10,15,17,18,21,22

The CD also contains another stunner La Boutique Fantasque (The Magic Toy Shop) by Rossini.  Try the first cut.  I first heard it over 50 years ago and can remember those first few bars as if it was yesterday. One of my absolute favorite pieces of music.

Both are good introductions to large "symphonic" music although neither are symphonies. Both are  orchestral music that accompanied a Ballet.  All the reviews of this anywhere read like this  "…exuberant conducting, virtuosic playing and brilliant engineering makes for a recording of truly historic and heroic..." Originally released on vinyl as RCA LSC-1817 without LaBoutique (more room on CD's than records.)

Recorded in 1954 at the end of mono and the beginning of stereo recording with legendary tube equipment.

Samuel Barber Agnus Dei (3 versions), School for Scandal

When people far in the future are choosing a short list of sacred music from our time, Agnus Dei by Samuel Barber will probably be up there along with the music of Bach and Mozart.  Agnus Dei began as the second movement of Barber's String Quartet in B Minor (1937) and Toscannini asked for it to be arranged for orchestra where it became the Adagio for Strings (1938). Later Barber set it to part of a mass and named the resulting choral version Agnus Dei (1967).   

On this playlist the SQ is by the Emerson SQ, the Adagio for Strings by Shippers and the Agnus Dei by the Choir of Trinity College. This playlist also includes Barber's wonderful piece, Overture to the School for Scandal, which he wrote as his first orchestral composition while a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. (Must have been tough on the faculty.)

The album with Agnus Dei is a 2 CD's collection of of Barber's work and includes a well regarded (and slower) version of Adagio for strings by Bernstein and also the curious piece Knoxville Summer of 1915. 

Louis Gottschalk - what American Classical music could have been

Gottschalk, America’s first internationally known pianist and composer and a favorite of Berlioz and Chopin wrote classical music with folk themes and melodies of the Americas, particularly the Caribbean. He was black and a favorite of Abe

Lincoln who attended his concerts.

Musical scholars say American rock and roll and jazz began in the wild and fantastic music performed by hundreds of Caribbean and African slaves on African drums and American brass musical instruments on Sundays, their day off, in Congo Square in New Orleans in the early and mid 1800’s. Less well known is that American classical music began there too because among the listeners of that music in the 1830’s was a child, Louis Gottschalk who from infancy danced to those rhythms from his porch where he could hear them.

At 13 Gottschalk he went to Europe to study piano and soon became America’s first internationally known performer who Chopin said he would be one of the greatest pianists of the century. Later he wrote classical music with Caribbean and African themes and rhythms which were remarkably popular in America and Europe. Alas, this branch of American classical music died when he did at age 40 as American culture increasingly thought proper classical music must sound like Brahms and Beethoven and American rhythms or music with American folk tunes was scorned as vulgar. But with Gottschalk we can still hear what American Classical music could have been and should have been if audiences, musicians and conductors had not been convinced that black music was vulgar and not proper for cultured white people. American critics who embraced European composers who incorporated folk themes from their countries into their music, nevertheless spurned Gottschalk and other black American classical music composers for doing the same thing.

In his worldwide tours Gottschalk produced stupendous incomprehensible spectacles called

“monster concerts” with hundreds (once 900!) performers on the stage playing his music.

Alas, even today books about classical music listing hundreds of composers often do not even mention him. But only a stone dead heart could not love Gottschalk. Like Chopin he was a one of a kind – no predecessors or successors.  Spectacularly handsome and devastatingly attractive to women he was once actually kidnapped by female admirers. He traveled and performed extensively worldwide always accompanied by two 10-foot Chickering pianos. Gottschalk performed all over the world until he died at 42 after collapsing during a concert in Brazil while conducting 600 musicians in a composition of his called “Morte”. 

Eugene list the pianist rediscovered his lost music in the late 1950’s and popularized it and fortunately was recorded by Vanguard who makes excellent recordings. 

Recommended compositions are "Grande Tarentelle for Piano and Orchestra ", a piece with relentless forward momentum, and "Night in the Tropics' 

Gottschalk’s music is growing in popularity – so interpretations/ and quality of recordings is evolving, but you can’t go wrong with reissues of the older Eugene List performances but Philip Martin on Hyperion is getting excellent reviews. An interesting video about Gottschalk's irresistibility to women is here.

 

Schubert Lieder, SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Schubert was a wonderful composer and left an amazing legacy of all kinds of music including songs (lieder). The problem with trying to access his song reportoire is the vast

quantity of it - he wrote over 600 songs. Jim Svejda the dean of classical music appreciation said of them, "It is still difficult to offer any coherent recommendation of Schubert song recordings. ...lieder...continue to appeal to a small but rabid crowd."  It took me 50 years of listening to classical music to get around to them but now I find that I enjoy them when I can't find anything else I  want to listen to.

So, to write a piece that that gives a fair overview of Schubert's songs is a challenge because there are 600 of them which I am listening through, and every important singer male and female recorded them on innumerable recordings and they are all sung and indexed in German which I do not read or speak.

Fortunately  the genius Spotify playlist creator Ulysses who has 175,000 Spotify followers and assembles countless stupefying monster playlists like all the compositions of many composers, all the Gramophone awards by year etc. put together a complete Schubert Lied playlist consisting of of all Schubert songs on the Naxos label (35 cd's). And one can always depend on this label to make great recordings - both in engineering and performance, They are the future and the savior of classical music.

Below is a preliminary playlist to get started and I will be adding more songs as I listen through them. Ian Bostridge is a famed interpreter of these songs and while I usually really like about one in twenty Schubert songs, on Bostridge's albums I like one in two. The playlist consists of half the selections on this album + another  by Roman Trekel.

This is a good explanation of how one of his songs works musically.

The complete Schubert Lieder Naxos Playlist

Max Bruch - 2 &1/2 masterpieces SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Max Bruch (1838-1920) was a composer from the middle of Classical Music's Romantic era of big, lush, symphonic music  (think Brahms & Bizet). His music is as solid as he looks and he wrote two of the most beautiful pieces for Violin and orchestra, his Violin Concerto #1 and the Scottish Fantasy (basically another violin concerto). There are a half dozen VC's at the top of anyone's list - like Beethoven's, Brahms', Mendelssohn's but some critics - like the violinist that Brahms wrote his VC for, claim his violin works belong up there with the great master's.

You don't hear Bruch's name much because although he wrote hundreds of compositions only  a couple became famous. Like Bizet, he is what some call a "one evening" composer in that all his great pieces can be easily heard in one evening.

For the other 1/2 masterpiece I suggest two more works if you really like Bruch. His Cello piece kol Nidrei with Jacqueline Du Pre, (give it at least 8 minutes before you give up, it grows on you) and his Octet (paired with a great recording of the Mendelssohn Octet.)

The playlist below has both of his violin pieces performed by a Akiko Suwanai a Japanese Violinist on an acclaimed Phillips recording with Marriner. (You don't often go wrong with Phillips or Marriner.)  Both pieces are from disc 15 of a 35 disc set. But if you are a traditionalist, you also might like the classically acclaimed Heifetz or Perlman recordings of the VC#1. A good alternative to the Scottish fantasy might be the recording by Fedotov.
 
Bruch also wrote the seldom recorded, virtually unknown, Oratorio, "Moses".  The playlist below includes several tracks from one of two recordings. if you like it you might like Bruckner's Requiem. It is seldom recorded so there are few choices to listen to - only one on Spotify.

All his recordings have an authority or weight about them, they are stentorian, and his music is always more than you expect. Bruch doesn't tire on repeated listening,  he is what Melville called a "deep diver".

If there is any piece of classical music more beautiful than the 4th movement of the Scottish fantasy I have not heard it. 

Music of the Renaissance - a sampler

From roughly 1400 to 1600 Europe went through the Renaissance (to remember the dates think Columbus in 1492 and add and subtract 100). When it began, man didn’t have printing, mass produced books, realistic painting, diplomacy, theatre, the scientific method, accounting, fashion, or much knowledge about the culture of Greece and Rome.  By its end we had all that and more and were at heights never again attained in all the major and minor arts including architecture, painting, sculpture, jewelry, and furniture. Renaissance leaders labeled the era before theirs the “dark ages” and systematically resurrected long abandoned Greek and Roman culture from 2000 years before to consciously create modern man. The playlist below contains music from fifteen albums of renaissance music - all from great sounding recordings -

usually one piece per album.

Music-wise the Renaissance was the transition between medieval music and Bach and produced over 500 composers, and most are unfamiliar. Renaissance music always sounds like it is from an earlier, simpler, innocent time, and throughout the period there was a high value placed on doing everything very beautifully. This music is somewhat harder to get acquainted with than later classical music because the composers, titles and types of individual pieces of music are unfamiliar or often in Latin or Italian, and performers, ensembles and record labels are generally unknown and numerous.

The shrinkage in size of liner notes from records to CD’s and now their virtual elimination on Internet music sites has been hard on all classical music but even worse for this and earlier music. The earlier you go the less helpful the whole corpus of music reviews and music catalogs are in finding good sounding music, although there is certainly infinitely more to listen through if you have the time. The way the great body of “classical music” is organized in stores and on the internet with CD guides and reviews and music organized into categories of symphonies, chamber music etc. works OK for the three musical eras that followed this era (represented respectively by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but not as well for the Renaissance and it is even worse before the Renaissance when composers didn’t usually sign their compositions and most music has no “composer”. Here is a link to the Top 500 Renaissance composers  500.

Can we talk?
Much Renaissance music is religious and frankly boring, but here and there are real gems. No one seems to have put together a “best of” list. Over the years I picked up hundreds of albums of renaissance, Medieval and early music and I noted on the cover the compositions I particularly liked. Actually, the  “important” composers of the Renaissance aren’t necessarily the ones that are most listenable to me.

The twit’s left off Dunstable!
Yes, I have not included any pieces by John Dunstable or as he is often called "Dunstaple", but he was more or less the first composer of this era and his music is very nice so if you want to have your house sound like a great cathedral full of ethereal voices. Alas I haven't found any particular pieces of his that really knock me out and those are all I ever put on playlists. He wrote religious music (at least that is all we have surviving of his work) and was the first to set masses to a single melody.

Cries of London
An interesting insight into London circa 1600 at the very end of the Renaissance is a song made up entirely of the cries of food and other street venders and hawkers. It was fashionable in those days to set their cries to music and the 6 CD set from which this is taken has one whole CD of them.  The singer is Alfred Deller a contra-tenor who is one of the best singers of Renaissance songs. He has a very high voice like a woman soprano although he is a big man with a beard. Weelkes, the composer wrote religious works but frequently got in trouble for being drunk in church, blaspheming and swearing during services. Parts of it may be hard to follow so the text is here. (Of Weelkes his bishop once said of him:)



Dyvers tymes & very often come so disguised eyther from the Taverne or Ale house into the quire as is muche to be lamented, for in these humoures he will bothe curse & sweare most dreadfully, & so profane the service of God … and though he hath bene often tymes admonished … to refrayne theis humors and reforme hym selfe, yett he daylye continuse the same, & is rather worse than better therein. 


The best kept secret of the renaissance. 
After the Renaissance ended we returned to the dark ages and there we remain.  To get civilization back on track "going forward", we need to do it the way they did and teach Latin and Greek in all our schools - in the classroom, as in life, the hard way is the best way.