Call Sheet 2004-20

For Tuesday, May 16, 2004

DRAFT CARNEGIE PROGRAM:

I forgot to add the trio from last act of Butterfly. Please add this to the draft of yesterday.

The trio will be sung by Jeeminn, Hector and Jim with Alternates of:

Any mezzo who knows it, Joe and Ivan.

There are some large scenes in that draft program and I have yet to consider the order. However it would be unfair to any singer to make them sing a big number that requires forte singing followed closely by another number requiring the same vocal output. Therefore I want all alternates to be ready to replace those nominated in the role as some re-arrangement might be necessary. Some one nominated in a role might finish up singing a role where they were listed as an alternate and vice versa.

Silvana can't get to rehearsal on Tuesday until 8.00pm. However, all the others should come as early as possible so that we can rehearse in two rooms with all partners of your ensembles.

CONCERTS IN GENERAL:

An artist's first job is to discern what the public wants. One can, of course, specialize in a certain type of repertoire such as Lieder, or Art Songs or Ballads etc. The speciality can even be more limited such as French Art Songs (e.g. Maggie Teyte, Gérard Souzé), English Art Songs (e.g. Kathleen Ferrier), Brahms (Alexander Kipniss) Schubert (Richard Tauber), Ballads (John Charles Thomas) etc. but once you specialize, you need to determine that there is audience today for such specialization and you need to be better than anyone else. Above all, you need to bring a fresh approach or else you will be dismissed when compared to what has gone before. However, most of the singers of the past who had enormous public appeal sang everything that the public wanted to hear. In short, they knew how to sell a song. Moreover they would infuse it with their own very individual artistry. All sang words that were readily understood so that one could write the text as they sang them. Yes! Even if it was in a language which was not your own. That tells us, that their words were important. They had to pronounce them clearly and it is often said that "If you can say it, you can sing it." The clear diction alone was not enough to sell the song, aria, ballad etc. It was the inflexion given to the words, reflecting the meaning that the artist wanted to share with his audience that infused the piece with the individual artistry. Sir Thomas Beecham, never one to mince words, summed up singers like so:

Extract from "The Sunday Times September 16th. 1962:

SIR THOMAS BEECHAM ON SINGERS

About singers: "There is not a voice to approach Caruso's.

Gigli. was a beautiful singer, and just as good an artist; but not the volume of voice, or the same quality of voice. Caruso is pre-eminent; and when he was young had all the top notes you would want in the world, and the middle-range lovely register of a light baritone. It was unique. The singers of today have a certain standard of accomplishment. For instance, in the United States, there are quite a number of accomplished sopranos. They all, sing well, but you can't tell one from t'other. The feature about the great singers of my youth was the remarkably individual character of them all; each one was like nobody else. No one else had a baritone voice like Maurel, nobody had a bass voice like Plançon, nor was there a mezzo-soprano like Calve. Caruso was the same, and so was Chaliapin: the standard bass of today is as different from Chaliapin as Westminster Abbey is from Euston Station".

Each of the singers mentioned by Beecham had great operatic and great recital careers. In recital they sang a wide repertoire, always giving the public what they wanted. None of those artists ever shrank from singing a Victor Herbert Song or a even a Blues song or a song made famous by Bing Crosby. They just made sure that they brought a fresh approach. They never copied another artist's rendition.

Now giving the public what the public wants is the surest way of introducing what you want to that same public. As Mark Antony demonstrated in the Forum, before he could give a speech, he had to give the public what they wanted. The public were applauding Caesar's assasins so first of all, he had to grab its attention with "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." The next line is a stroke of sheer genius. The crowd had accepted Caesar's assassination as a noble act committed by patriots for the good of Rome, so rather than attack the crowd for its misplaced reasoning, he simply placated it by saying "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft' interred within their bones." Step one, He has the public's attention and has them on his side. Now watch him turn them. But that is too long a speech for here.

Now let's turn to a man who made a fortune from song. You probably all saw the movie "Bugsy" and can remember Bugsy buying a house, complete with butler, from Lawrence Tibbett . Let's say, there was no haggle over the fortune Bugsy Siegel paid. He wanted the house and he made an offer which Tibbett could not refuse. It was too good to be true, but true it was. But what was the root of Tibbett's fortune? It was the public. He gave the public what it wanted and he was prepared to look at anything they wanted with a keen artist's eye. Here is what he had to say about music. It would be wise for you to take heed because singing will be your career and singing is no more than communicating your imagination to your public. Do not limit your imagination.

TIBBETT ON MUSIC FROM "LAWRENCE TIBBETT Singing Actor":

Nothing, however, has been able to temper my radical ideas about music, for no one has ever convinced me that they are radical at all-they're just common sense. From the day I learned to pronounce "wind" and to sing "have" instead of "haw-vuh" I have fought against the hokum that surrounds my profession. To me, art is good art when it produces a worthy emotion, and if you are charmed by Rudy Vallee's rendition of I'm Just a Vagabond Lover, I shall not quarrel with you. The only person I want exterminated are those who don't like any music of any kind. All classical music is not good and all popular music is not bad, and the only way to judge singers and songs is to decide whether they do well the job they set out to perform.

I like Rudy Vallee's singing. I think he is the best of the crooners. I admire Al Jolson. The expert Harmony of the Duncan Sisters, singing Remembering in Topsy and Eva, moved me tremendously, and certainly was a more important contribution to art than the efforts of a mediocre pair of opera singers whom I heard a few nights later doing their best with the love duet in Tristan und Isolde.

There are singers of classical songs who have no little prestige but who leave their audiences utterly cold. Some of the patrons of the Metropolitan Opera Company would consider it sacrilege to mention Jolson and Vallee in the same breath with these inadequate operatic performers, but to me Jolson singing Sonny Boy is more truly a real artist than these near-greats ever have been or ever will be.

At the peak of all music I place the best operatic artists and the best classical music. But in my home, mixed with my most highly prized phonograph recordings of operatic masterpieces sung by Caruso and Amato, I have Paul Whiteman's orchestra, playing When Day is Done and The Rhapsody in Blue; Duke Ellington's The Indigo Blues, and Don Azpiazu's stirring reproduction of The Peanut Vendor.

When I was making The Rogue Song in Hollywood, every chance I got I dragged Clif Edwards (Ukulele Ike) into my dressing-room and made him play St. Louis Blues. Edwards has an amazing natural sense of rhythm, almost equaling that possessed by Bill Robinson, the syncopating Negro tap dancer, whose instinctive sense of rhythm is not surpassed even by that of Toscanini, the great operatic conductor.

I like all kinds of good music and I sing all kinds. I do not try to force any particular brand upon the public. If you get more pleasurable emotion when I sing Oley Speaks' Sylvia than when I sing Lully's somber aria, Bois Epais, I feel that it is no reflection on your intelligence. In fact, in many cases it is a real sign of superior mentality, because a lot of people who say they like Bois Epais are not intelligent at all-they're justposeurs and liars. Frequently I sing The Song of the Flea, and every now and then, after a concert, well-meaning old ladies protest that it is quite vulgar. When I point out that the words are by Goethe and the music by Moussorgsky, they say, "Oh, that's different," and, all flustered, apologize. There's intellectual snobbery for you!

In my concerts I always sing one or two operatic numbers, because in the smaller cities the people do not get opera and they have a genuine love for the best operatic music. I do not, however, sing operatic numbers that are strange to the ears of the audience. In spite of the protests from some of my colleagues who say I am lowering myself, I sing usually either the prologue from Pagliacci or the toreador's song from Carmen, because-although I must admit I am a bit tired of them, myself-those are the two operatic numbers that are best liked by the great majority of non-professional music lovers. I sing a few songs in French and German and Italian, because, in addition to the handful who really enjoy them, there are always a number of people in an audience who feel they have been classically cheated unless they have been given something they do not understand. They are the folks who believe that sulphur and molasses must be very good for you because it tastes so bad. So, when they hear music that gives them no sensation of pleasure whatsoever, they think it must be something of unusual merit and that, unless they applaud loudly, people will class them as ignoramuses. I like people who, when certain selections give them a pain in the neck, have the frank-ness to say so.

It is tradition around the Metropolitan Opera House that Caruso said people applauded his name and not his voice, and he proved it. In Pagliacci the Harlequin's serenade is sung off-stage by Beppe, a minor character. It brings no more than per-functory applause. Unbeknown to the audience at the Metropolitan, at many a per-formance Caruso, as a joke, sang that off-stage aria, and not even the critics ever noticed that the serenade was sung in anything more than an adequate manner.

In Hollywood, at a party one evening at Charley Farrell's, we were sitting in the back yard (patio in Hollywood) and I was asked to sing. I stood up and improvised for five minutes, singing in an imitation of Russian-of which language I know not even one word. I sobbed, I laughed, I waved my arms, making up music and words as I went along. Finally I stopped, exhausted by my emotions. They cheered and applauded like mad-Farrell, Virginia Valli, Paul Bern, Janet Gaynor, Robert Montgomery, Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Howard, and a dozen others.

"What is that?" they asked. "It's magnificent.

"An operatic number by the Russian composer, Kovlikoffoskowsky," I said, inventing a name.

"Beautiful!" they said.

It was not good music, because I am not a composer. And the words, of course, meant nothing.

An exotic movie actress, reputed to have been a member of the Russian nobility, grasped both my hands.

"Eet ees tremen-dous!" she cried. "My fav-rit aria.

I nodded, "My Russian pronunciation isn't very good, though," I said.

"You are too mo-dest," she insisted. "I understood av-ry word!"

I let it go at that.

Perhaps the most popular tune ever written is Carrie Jacobs Bond's A Perfect Day. The fact that you maybe sick and tired of it makes it no less a great song. I think the words are maudlin, but the music has real merit. Had it been trash, it would not have lived. I had a long argument about it with Paul Gallico, a concert pianist and father of Paul Gallico, a New York sports writer. He had told me that my artistic standards were low because I sang Ethelbert Nevin's Oh, That We Two Were Maying. I knew it was a good song because it always made me weep-which is all I need to know about a song. When I told him what I thought about A Perfect Day he had a fit. A year later I heard him play a Schumann sonata. This sonata begins with a strain that is definitely like the first phrases ofA Perfect Day. If one was the work of genius, so was the other. I pointed out to Gallico the parallel and sang the two tunes to him.

"The trouble with you," I said, "is that you've read books in an effort to learn what you ought to like, instead of letting your own emotions and common sense do the judging." He stuttered, scratched his head, and walked away. As far as I can remember that's the only argument I ever won from a classical musi-cian about A Perfrct Day. But I'm still trying.

There is no reason why we should be apologetic about our American music. Take The Glory Road, a Negro spiritual written byJacques Wolfe, a music teacher in the public schools of Brooklyn, N.Y., who is no more a Southerner than was General Grant. I believe The Glory Road is just as fine a musical composition as Leoncavallo's prelude to Pagliacci. We have a number of popular patter songs that are as good as Li donna è mobile from Rigoletto-Vincent Youmans' Hallelujah, for example. We are leading the world in popular compositions. Jerome Kern's 01' Man River, Youmans' Without a Song, and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue equal anything ever written by the Viennese composers of operettas past and present, and surpass in real emotional musical quality half of the arias of standard operatic composers whose works are the backbone of every Metropolitan season. Of course, we are producing a lot of rot. Tunes are being stolen and imitated. Generally our lyrics are gosh-awful. But the amount of good stuff is astounding. The history of great music in all nations is that good popular music preceded good classical music. We are building a sound foundation, and one of these days Americans will be turning out operas that will livejust as long as Carmen or Tosca or Faust or Tristan und Isolde. We probably would be doing it now, were it not for the fact that composers and librettists have to eat, and the only real financial encouragement they receive comes from musical comedy and from the movies. The system of payment for the work of American operatic composers is murderous to genius. For instance, I doubt that Edna St. Vincent Millay and Deems Taylor in a lifetime will make as much money out of their splendid opera, The King's Henchman, as the authors of Yes, We Have No Bananas made during the first month the song was on sale.

Victor Herbert wrote Natoma, a fairly good grand opera, and could have turned out, I am sure, an operatic score of high rank and lasting quality if he had been willing for a year or two to give up the theater-which he loved and which made him rich and famous-and slave for the opera, which looked upon his genius with neither sympathy nor understanding.

If the millions of persons in America who are interested in better music could only be square with themselves they would encourage honest thinking and expression throughout the world of music. Impresarios, conductors, singers, musicians, com-posers, and librettists generally cannot express themselves naturally because, the moment they do, influential patrons inhibited by their confounded hokum com-plexes, unable to relax and to be on the level, will shake their heads and say, "Well, yes. I think I like it. But is it art?" What nonsense.

The greatest music is that which thrills you most, and no one was ever really thrilled by sham and bombast and pretense.

I have heard magnificent symphony orchestras that left me weak in my chair, famous singers who raised my blood pressure almost to the point of apoplexy, mighty choruses that intoxicated me more than my first bottle of champagne, but I have never been so shaken emotionally as I was a few months ago by 1,500 Negro children singing in a high school auditorium in Birmingham, Ala. They sang Standin' in the Need of Prayer and other spirituals, under the direction of an untrained Negro who knew none of the tricks, none of the "methods," who just believed that the way to sing was to throw yourself naturally into it and sing! I was wrecked for the remainder of the day, and that night I gave one of the best concerts of my career because, from beginning to end, through classical selections and popular ones, I was inspired by the freedom and simplicity of those children. They sang parts perfectly, with harmony as sure as that of a great pipe organ. I never heard such precision of attack, never such sheer vitality of tone. You could under-stand every word uttered by those 1,500 voices. Often at the Metropolitan Opera House, with only four persons singing at the same time, you can't catch a single phrase. Those children sang for thejoy of singing-just opened their throats and let go. I was tingling all over. Shots of electricity went up and down my spine. My voice choked so that I couldn't speak. Tears ran down my cheeks.

Seldom at the Metropolitan, or at Carnegie Hall, have I found musical perfection, but certainly I found it in the auditorium of a Negro high school in Birmingham, where girls and boys sang superbly because they sang honestly. If one of the patrons of the Metropolitan Opera had been standing there beside me and at the end had said, "Well, yes, I think I like it. But is it art?" I swear by all the gods that be, I would have killed him.

I'll see you all on Tuesday.