The purpose of Classical Connections is to further engage Utah Symphony guests during their experience at the hall, offering a new level of contextual understanding about the various connections that each performance has to other disciplines, art forms, and community issues. It’s basically another way for us to make your experience at the symphony as insightful and enjoyable as possible!

In the coming weeks, you can plan on seeing the display at most concerts, with various rotating content topics that relate to that evening’s repertoire. This past weekend, Classical Connections featured information about the human voice and how it is such a versatile musical instrument. It was a pleasure for us to also work with the National Center for Voice and Speech to compile most of the educational content for this particular display.

Come join us this weekend for the Messiah Sing-In to see this particular content rotation of Classical Connections up in the lobby again, and don’t forget to share YOUR voice on the display’s comment board as well as with the 3,000-voice audience choir that will fill the hall each night!

by Luke Howard

Many consider the ensemble pieces the most successful examples of vocal writing in Fidelio. The Act 1 quartet (discussed in Lesson 2), the “Prisoners’ Chorus,” the final trio, the concluding rejoicing—these are precisely the places where Beethoven can treat the voices symphonically, and that is his métier.

Caption: Image of the Prisoner’s Chorus from Utah Opera’s 1999 production of Fidelio

Next, the famous “Prisoners’ Chorus:”

(Music starts at 0:57)

There is no question this is gorgeous music—a terrific 7-minute chorus in the style of a German Männerchor. But how does it propel the drama? It doesn’t. Absolutely nothing happens on stage during the chorus, and the theme of its text is only incidental to the opera. For all the lofty philosophizing about freedom and liberty in this chorus, the opera itself is about the love of a woman for her husband, and her bravery. A brave wife’s love is what the final chorus celebrates, and what the original subtitle of the opera underscored. This is another example where Beethoven’s remarkable music is far more important than the dramatic pacing or the story at this point.

Finally, the “stand-off” in Act II, “Er sterbe”:

The music in this scene is amazingly vivid—impassioned, emotional, moving—and yet Pizzaro, Leonore, Florestan, and Rocco stand there virtually stock-still for a full five minutes, with daggers and pistols drawn, making sure to reveal their true identities to all before the drama can continue. Then everyone freezes when the trumpet signals the arrival of the Minister, and they sing at length again about Leonore’s love and courage. The most exciting scene of the story, and the most musically animated, is actually one of the most visually static parts of the opera.

There is no issue at all with Beethoven’s musical instincts. He develops themes, varies the melodies, sustains the musical interest with masterly perfection. That is Fidelio’s greatest strength, and undoubtedly the reason for its continued success. But dramatically, in terms of the action on stage, these scenes are weak. (I personally find them almost farcical, for opposite reasons. The Act I quartet is a comic scene, but is treated as a very serious theme and variations. “Er sterbe,” on the other hand is a serious scene, the most intense of the opera, but the dramatic pacing so attenuated as to make it almost ludicrous on stage.)

Caption: Fidelio, Act II, Scene 3 (”Er sterbe”), an engraving from 1815

What carries the day is Beethoven’s music. It is proof, if it were needed, that opera is essentially a musical genre, not a dramatic genre. Otherwise (as a critic once claimed) Meryl Streep would be hired to sing every mad scene, and Sigourney Weaver would do everything else. We forgive opera for not being totally realistic because there is compensation in the music itself. And with Beethoven’s Fidelio, there is more than enough compensation for the weaknesses in dramatic pacing and libretto. Wilhelm Fürtwangler, the great German conductor, once observed, “Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary.” So the struggle Beethoven experienced in producing Fidelio wasn’t so much a struggle to write a good opera. It was the struggle to write an opera on his own terms, a symphonic opera that breaks all the “rules” of staged drama and allows the music itself to be the lead character. It is what he excelled at in his symphonies, and in that struggle to symphonize the opera genre with Fidelio, he succeeded beautifully.

Director Eric Einhorn gives instructions to Brenda Harris (Leonore/Fidelio) and Corey Bix (Florestan)

When I first began studying Fidelio, I couldn’t help but have the feeling that it was not like other operas. The plot — though just as implausible as most opera plots — seemed rougher. The characters seemed less defined and three-dimensional, when compared with characters from Mozart’s operas. I struggled with how to bring this story to life in a way that would speak to audiences and support Beethoven’s grand score.

After going through the score several times, I realized that the elements of the opera which had been giving me trouble were pointing me away from my usual aesthetic of hyper-realism toward the grander world of myth. Using Joseph Campbell’s landmark book The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a guide [the same book used by George Lucas to craft Star Wars], Fidelio became a perfect example of the hero’s journey found in universal mythology. Campbell’s step-by-step breakdown of the hero’s journey lined up almost number-by-number with Beethoven’s score. The characters and events in the opera create a story that is meant to be seen on an archetypal level, rather than a hyper-real level.

Myths require a delicate balance between detail and generality in order to fully deliver its message. It is that balance that drove the visual world of this production. The set, from Virginia Opera, is extremely industrial and cold, consisting of walls, a steel bridge, and a pile of rubble. It suggests the world of a prison in its coldness and distress, without the need of barred cells.

Fidelio set (from Virginia Opera)

Florestan languishes in his cell.

The costumes, designed specifically for this production by Susan Allred, further the mythic idea by creating an archetypal costume language: the good guys are clearly good and the bad guys are clearly bad. The costumes are rooted in the mid-20th century, but the silhouettes have been changed slightly to obscure an exact period in order to highlight the universality of opera’s message.

Pants for the male prisoners' chorus. Each pair has been individually hand-painted. The amount of distressing and number of bricks is intended to reflect how long each prisoner has been held captive by Don Pizarro.

Don Fernando's coat

Soilder coat

By exploring the epic qualities of the opera, it is my aim to work hand in hand with the score to deliver Beethoven’s grand message of love and redemption in the face of tyranny to the audience.

Mark Schnaible (Don Pizarro) lears over his prisoners.

Leonore-as-Fidelio stops Don Pizarro from murdering her husband Florestan.

Leonore and Florestan profess their love for each other.

Lesson 1: Composition and Disastrous Premiere(s)
Lesson 2: Beethoven’s Struggle with Fidelio

So why precisely did Beethoven, the great musical genius, struggle so much with Fidelio? First, Beethoven was not a natural dramatist—certainly not in the way that, for example, Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi were. He did not possess an innate understanding of the stage, and his sense of dramatic pacing in a theatrical context (as opposed to a purely musical context) was clearly lacking. Second, his choice of genre created its own problems. Though the story itself is decidedly serious, Beethoven wrote it as a singspiel—a lighter form of musical drama with spoken dialog and an expectation of some comic content. Beethoven did include comedy, particularly in the first act, but the effect was to dilute the seriousness rather than highlight it. Mozart understood how comedy can enhance drama, and demonstrated that marvelously in a work such as Don Giovanni. But trying to tell a serious story through a genre designed for light entertainment creates a tension between content and form that Beethoven never really grasped and never fully solved.

Margaret Jane Wray as Leonore in Utah Opera's 1999 Production

George Gray as Florestan in Utah Opera's 1999 Production

What saves this opera from potential mediocrity is the music. But this isn’t simply a case of great music compensating for a composer’s lack of stage know-how. It is a different kind of opera from those being produced in the early 19th century, an opera in which music dominates completely and dramatic integrity is secondary. When Gluck attempted to reform opera from the excesses of baroque artificiality in the mid-18th century, he had suggested that dramatic integrity should be returned to opera—that music should serve the drama. And except for Mozart (who would never let music be subservient to anything!), that notion was beginning to catch on in Romantic-era operas with passionate stories and vivid musical settings. But—and again, Mozart is the exception here—opera composers tend not be great symphonists (think Wagner, Verdi, Puccini), and great symphonists (Haydn, Brahms) tend not to write great operas. For Beethoven to write a successful opera, I believe, he had to approach it as if it were a symphony. And there is no major opera quite that is quite so symphonic as Fidelio.

Some examples might be useful to illustrate this. First, the quartet from Act I, “Mir ist so wunderbar”:

(2000 Met production with Utah’s own Jennifer Welch-Babidge as Marzelline!)

The story has been all light-hearted to this point. And the plot devices of love triangles and mistaken gender are straight out of opera buffa. But this ensemble set piece is written as a theme and variations, shifting the main theme from voice to voice while adding counter-melodies that weave through it, and later putting the accompaniment in triplets. It is exactly the same musical process, though with different emotions entirely, that Beethoven had used in the finale to the “Eroica” Symphony, and again later, in the second movement from his Symphony No. 7.

(especially from 0:19 to 1:58)

(0:00 to 2:42)

Beethoven seems to be thinking instrumentally in the Fidelio quartet rather than vocally (which should come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to sing Beethoven).

This quartet is immediately followed by a buffa aria from Rocco, which makes it something of an odd little insertion of quasi-symphonic seriousness into an essentially comic series of scenes in the first act. Of course, the act takes another oddly serious turn when Pizarro appears. And then there is no (intentional) comedy in the second half of the opera at all. Dramatically it’s a bit of a mess, but musically it’s stunning.

by Luke Howard

It might seem strange that one of the most innovative and talented composers in the history of Western music, the man who single-handedly revolutionized the symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata in the early 19th century, should write only one opera. Music seemed to flow naturally from Beethoven. It’s true that, unlike Mozart, his music did not emerge with seemingly effortless facility; we know from his sketchbooks and letters something of the struggles he endured to compose. But it was almost always produced with supreme artistry and, yes, genius. Nobody questions Beethoven’s gift.

So why only one opera? And why should he feel the need to revise it so frequently? Why are there four different overtures for the opera? Clearly, the gestation of Fidelio was a challenge that created more than the usual amount of trouble for the composer.

Joseph Sonnleithner and Jean-Nicolas Bouilly

Beethoven started work on Fidelio in early 1804, but it was not premiered until 1805. It was revised the following year (and performed with almost exactly the same cast), and revised again in 1814. All three versions were published together as his Op. 72. The libretto Beethoven used in the 1805 version was by Joseph Sonnleithner, based on a French libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal composed by Pierre Gaveaux. (According to some sources, the original plot is based on a true story.) Bouilly’s libretto also served as the basis for the 1804 opera Leonora by Ferdinando Paer. At some point Beethoven procured a copy of Paer’s score for his own library, but no one is certain whether he had heard Paer’s opera yet or had access to the score while working on his own version. Certainly, he had begun thinking about his own opera before Paer’s was produced in Dresden in October 1804.

Pierre Gaveaux and Ferdinando Paer

These various versions of the opera tell a roughly similar story. Leonore, disguised as a young (male) prison guard named Fidelio, manages to find her husband, Florestan, who has been kept as a political prisoner under the orders of a malevolent governor. She rescues him just as he is about to be murdered by the governor, and the couple are happily reunited. These kinds of “rescue” operas, very popular in post-revolutionary France, were enjoying a renewed vogue as Napoleon’s army swept across Europe in the first decade of the 19th century. Although the plot is primarily about Leonore’s courage and her love for Florestan, the political undercurrents—highlighted in Beethoven’s version, especially—added some historical depth to the story.

Fidelio was premiered at the Theater an der Wien in November 1805, only days after Napoleon and his army had occupied Vienna. With a popular storyline, contemporary political relevance, and nearly two years of effort by Europe’s leading composer of the day, Fidelio seemed to have all the ingredients for a success. But the performances were a disaster, attended by almost no one except for some of the composer’s friends and a handful of stray French soldiers. (Ironically, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” which expressed both admiration for and disappointment with Napoleon, had been premiered in the same theater several months earlier in 1805.) Problems with the libretto, and Beethoven’s inherent difficulty with producing convincing music for the stage, were the main issues. When he revised the opera the following year, it was performed by almost the same cast, and was slightly more successful. Beethoven had composed a new overture for the 1806 revision (now known as the “Leonore Overture No. 3”—the original 1805 overture is usually designated “Leonore Overture No. 2”), and tightened up the libretto, especially in the first half of the opera. It would have had a longer run had not Beethoven run into difficulties with the theater management.

For a planned 1808 revival in Prague, Beethoven wrote a third overture (“Leonore Overture No. 1”), but the production was cancelled. Then, with the help of Georg Freidrich Treitschke, Beethoven revised the opera yet again in 1814, including another new overture (the “Fidelio Overture”). This final version was, at last, a great success, even though (as Beethoven remarked to Treitschke) it had emerged with difficulty over a long period of time. The composer wrote: “I assure you, dear Treitschke, that this opera will win me a martyr’s crown. You have by your co-operation saved what is best from the shipwreck. For all this I shall be eternally grateful to you.”

Lesson 2 of 3 will be posted on Friday, September 23rd. Stay tuned!

From the beginning of his life, Ludwig van Beethoven was destined for one full of fame, fortune and friction.  Named after his grandfather, a musician of the Roman Catholic Flemish Court, and one of three survivors of the seven children his parents bore, Ludwig van Beethoven was destined to carry the musical weight passed through generations of his family. In addition to his grandfather’s legacy, his own father was a tenor in the Electoral court and his first music teacher.

Beethoven studied as a young man with famous pianists such as Haydn, gaining a quick reputation as a virtuoso pianist in his early teens.  Studying abroad, Beethoven quickly returned home as his mother passed on and he raised his siblings while his father battled being an alcoholic.

Even as his name began to grow among Europeans and his talents were esteemed, his health began fading. Beethoven’s hearing gradually began deteriorating from a ringing in his ears to almost complete deafness as he continued to compose masterpieces, conduct, and perform. His encroaching deafness led him to contemplate suicide, and it is now rumored that he also battled bipolar disease. There is also speculation that he suffered from irritability brought on by chronic abdominal pain beginning in his 20’s attributed to lead poisoning that later resulted in his death.

Beethoven never married, but he was engaged to Giulietta Guiccardi, whose father was made thwarter of the lovers, and she joined in marriage to a noble man. Nevertheless, he had a close and devoted circle of friends all his life, thought to have been attracted by his reputed strength of personality. Towards the end of his life, Beethoven’s friends competed in their efforts to help him cope with his incapacities.

Completed in 1824, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 “Choral” was the last complete symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.  It incorporated part of An die Freude (”Ode to Joy”), a poem by Friedrich Schiller written in 1785.

In the first performance of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Beethoven pounded out the beats he couldn’t hear (his hearing now completely gone). According to one witness, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.” Beethoven was given five standing ovations – people waved handkerchiefs in the air and raised their hands and hats so Beethoven, who was now deaf, could see the response. Never before had the theater seen such an enthusiastic response from the audience. In the end, he truly conducted an “Ode to Joy,” which may be a tribute to his life. Though it was hard, frustrating, and sometimes overwhelming, his was a fulfilled life that would be celebrated, at least nightly, somewhere around the world to this day.

Imagine this scene: It is March 9, 1842 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the premiere performance of Verdi’s Nabucco is underway. In the third act there occurs a chorus of Hebrew slaves who sing “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate…Oh mia patria si bella e perduta” (“Fly, thought, on wings of gold…Oh, my country so beautiful and lost.”) in a moving musical moment of patriotic unity, shared suffering and longing for home. In a place like Milan, still living fitfully under Austrian rule, this thinly veiled but fully intentional anthem for the cause of Italian revival strikes an immediate and vociferous chord with the audience.

So fervent is the nationalistic sentiment in the theater this night that at the end of the opera the audience demands an encore performance of “Va, pensiero,” this in direct defiance of the official ban on such things (the Austrian authorities have previously declared encores verboten, believing them to be unacceptable overtures to public disorder). This act of collective civil disobedience marks an important moment in the history of the unification movement and an equally meaningful landmark in the life of the composer himself. It is the moment that Giuseppe Verdi becomes the voice of a revolution and inspires all Italy to sing. It is a moment worthy of great opera.

Now imagine this: This celebrated event of musical and political history, so reverently referenced by scholars and biographers never actually happened. Verdi was sympathetic to the ideals that had taken hold among his countrymen but contemporary research now shows he was not making any overt social stand with the slave chorus. The audience, if it did insist on an encore that evening, very likely heard something else entirely and there is no indication now that “Va, pensiero” made near the impression on them that we once thought. To be certain, the same modern study also shows that the Nabucco chorus would indeed become the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento, but only years later after unification, more an acknowledgment than a harbinger. By this later date, however, the tale of the “Va pensiero” encore and its spontaneous adoption as “the music of the people” was so ingrained that even Verdi himself believed he had composed it with special purpose.

The Risorgimento (resurgence or a “rising again”) sought to unify the disparate City-States of the Italian peninsula under one flag and one government and was inspired in part by the French Revolution and the nationalist idealism it spawned throughout Europe. The movement also hoped for a renewal of the great Italian society and its people, believing that freedom from foreign influence would reawaken their fragmented national personality. It would be a lengthy process, lasting from 1815 until the creation of the Italian Kingdom in 1861.

Among the history that would thereafter be written by the victors was the aforementioned Verdi myth and, by extension, the notion that many of his operas in the 1840s and 1850s (I Lombardi, Ernani, Attila, etc.) were subtly political and encoded with support for the revolution. When viewed with a distant post-Risorgimento perspective, there certainly seem to be moments in his work during that period that reflect the mood of the day, but little evidence exists to support the idea that Verdi was doing anything other than setting compelling scenes to wonderful music as he always did and always would. In almost every case, he was composing, not sermonizing. The one notable exception was La battaglia di Legnano, an 1849 opera with obvious (and intentional) patriotic overtones.

It would be wrong to assume that Verdi was lukewarm on subjects of Italian unity and sovereignty. As evidenced by La battaglia, he was a true believer and expressed so clearly in a letter to his friend Piave during the height of the activities in 1848. “The hour of liberation has come, believe it” he wrote. “It is the people that wish it and when the people want it, no absolute power can put up a resistance!” This very real expression of support for the revolution probably helped newly unified Italians later “read back” (as biographer John Rosselli puts it) into the composer’s past intentions. This made it easy to imagine him as the artistic standard-bearer of the Risorgimento throughout the long struggle, that he had been in lock-step with them all along. Earned or not, his name meant revolution and towards the end of the Austrian rule in 1859, another legend has it that opera fans began to shout Viva V.E.R.D.I. during their applause as a secret call for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re DItalia (“Long live Vittorio Emanuele, king of Italy”).

In the end, it matters little whether or not Giuseppe Verdi was a willing and active contributor from the very beginning to the events that surrounded him. It might actually be sufficient that when his compatriots needed a symbol strong enough to validate their memories, his music proved not only fitting but possibly even a bit prophetic, a perfect soundtrack to their decades of resistance. Who can say that his muse was not somehow bound up in the spirit of his time and that the message his fellow Italians later believed they had received wasn’t actually in there somewhere front the start? Can history not be both technically incorrect and somehow exactly right?

It might be best to focus last on Verdi’s greatest non-musical gift to his country, one about which there is no doubt at all. Just three years after the completion of his last opera, Falstaff, the aging composer founded his Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a rest home for retired musicians that still operates today. It is in Milan, of course, sustained by royalties from his operas and the master himself is buried there. A crowd of over 900 citizens attended the funeral ceremony and under Maestro Toscanini they joined voices for their national hero Verdi, a man whose role in their liberation might well have been little more (and not one bit less) than the reflected glory of his prolific greatness as a composer. What did they sing?

“Va, pensiero…”

In many ways, Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera, 1893’s Falstaff, surprised his contemporaries. The Maestro had, after all, declared his retirement from opera composition after Aida’s premiere in 1871, with Rigoletto, La Traviata and nearly 30 other operas behind him. He had held true to that determination to compose no more operas for more than 14 years when, in the mid-1880s, an enticing libretto on a Shakespearean theme tempted him to take up his pen again. The result was the 1887 masterpiece, Otello. And then, amazingly, Verdi produced yet one more, Falstaff, five years later.

Some might think it strange for Italian, non-English-speaking Verdi to be attracted to these two stories based on Shakespearean plots, but Verdi had loved the works of the English Bard from his youth onward. In fact, he had already written an opera based on Macbeth (1847), and had toyed all his life with the idea of an opera based on King Lear.

Opera fans of Verdi’s day were also certainly taken aback to learn that the Maestro had turned in a new direction with Falstaff and had at long last taken on a comedy. All of his greatest works, Otello included, had been tragedies. One early work, Un Giorno di Regno (1840), had been a comedy, but that opera had flopped, and Verdi had avoided comic topics ever since. However, as critics now, post-Falstaff, have been quick to point out, Verdi’s wife and two children had all died during the composition period, and the commissioners of Un Giorno had refused to release him from their contract. Critics also refer to scenes in many of Verdi’s tragedies that scintillate with humor, illustrating his yet-unexplored capacity for comedy.

It was composer-librettist Arrigo Boito, thirty years Verdi’s junior, who enticed Verdi back to opera composition with his Otello libretto, and it was he who then lured Verdi to the topic of Falstaff. He suggested that septuagenarian Verdi would surprise the world with a final “might burst of laughter.” Verdi liked the idea and began work in 1890 on what he soon was calling the Big Belly Project. He wrote,

I’ve wanted to write a comic opera for forty years, and I’ve known The Merry Wives of Windsor for fifty…Boito has resolved all the ‘buts’ and has written for me a lyric comedy quite unlike any other. I’m enjoying myself.

Boito provided a masterful libretto, making a strong plot and compelling characters by combining elements from several Shakespeare plays in which the character Falstaff makes an appearance. His major source was the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, which, as legend has it, was the fulfillment of a request from Queen Elizabeth I, who had enjoyed Falstaff in his appearances in the Henry IV history plays, and requested a play about Falstaff in love. In the history plays, Falstaff is a witty philosopher-knave who hangs out in taverns entertaining his cronies and running up bills for capon and sack (chicken and wine). Shakespeare proposes, via The Merry Wives play, that a hedonist like Falstaff would “use” love as he did every opportunity in life: as a way to get money to feed his physical pleasures. So rather than actually falling in love, Falstaff speaks the words and acts out the gestures of love for pecuniary gain.

Most scholars agree that the Falstaff of Merry Wives falls short of the character in Shakespeare’s history plays. The Henry IV Falstaff is just as rotund and pleasure-seeking, to be sure, but he is also a good wit-sparring partner and foil for Prince Hal, and he seems to come out on top somehow, ever when he has dragged himself under. In contract to idealistic characters in the history plays, who seek personal honor on the battlefield, realist Falstaff speaks a soliloquy about “honor”:

Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No…what is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air…Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.

When Prince Hal and Falstaff’s cohorts, for the sheer entertainment value, decide to trick Falstaff in order to enjoy his “incomprehensible lies,” hoping for “argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest forever,” Falstaff is quickly able to see he’s been fooled, but can also concoct a way to take credit for the very trick they pulled on him. He claims “I am not only witty in myself but the cause that wit is in other men.”

Boito, for his Falstaff libretto, made superb choices, slimming the story so there is time for music by combining and shifting and deleting and muting this or that character, but keeping the basic stories of the original comedy:  The main story concerns Falstaff, certain that his immensity is an aphrodisiac, writing identical love letters to two women in town, not realizing they are best friends. The women are married and have access to wealth—and that’s where he would like them to lead him. The women collude to put Falstaff to shame, and they do so—in two tricks rather than the original three of Shakespeare’s play. I applaud Boito’s choice in this deletion: fooling the man three times just seems mean, and makes Falstaff an ineducable sap.

Two sub-plots remain: Master Ford, the husband of one of the merry wives, has an awful temper, and he attempts, unsuccessfully, to pull his own ruse on Falstaff and on his wife. The women are just too clever, but they bring him into the fold to pull the final trick on the old jolly fool. The other sub-plot involves daughter Nannetta and the man she loves and wants to marry, Fenton. Her father does not approve, but the women help her out in the process of their final plot against Falstaff. Boito’s libretto scatters snatches of love scenes for the young couple throughout the opera, like “powdered sugar over a tart,” he explained. He also uses an Italian sonnet as text for Fenton’s aria in Act III, and a two-line refrain that the lovers share between them in their mini love scenes:

A kissed mouth doesn’t lose its freshness;
Rather, it renews itself like the moon.

Boito also pulled elements, including the Falstaff’s honor soliloquy, from the Henry IV plays, to bolster his title character. And he gives Falstaff the final word in the opera, which he does not get in Shakespeare’s comedy. In Merry Wives, Falstaff recognizes he has been fooled, and then just fades away as the focus turns to the weddings and what Master Ford has to say in his comeuppance. In the opera Falstaff, Boito pulls the great line about Falstaff’s being not only witty in himself, but the inspiration of wit in others. Falstaff not only gets the last word following that…everyone in the cast joins in with him, repeating and embellishing the truths he expounds: “we are all fools, and we all laugh at each other. But he laughs best who laughs last.”

What an opportunity for composition Boito gave Verdi at this point: to write music expressing and illustrating this theme. Verdi chose to use the opera buffa tradition of having the characters come downstage to sing the moral of the story. For their music he elected to write a fugue, a rare choice in opera, especially for voices. Falstaff introduces the theme, and then one by one other characters chime in, imitating and overlapping his tune. The result eventually sounds like cascading laughter, with titters encapsulated in staccato melodic triplets, and waves of laughter rolling loudly and then pianissimo, with silences as all the characters take a deep breath, and then bellow again. We hope you’ll want to laugh along!

Here’s a great opportunity to make certain you have a fantastic experience during Utah Opera’s Little Women in March. You can learn about the story and music of Little Women from its composer, Mark Adamo, in a FREE online course. Weekly lessons that include music excerpts and production photos will be e-mailed on four consecutive Tuesdays beginning February 15th. To sign up for the course, send an e-mail message to Paula Fowler at pfowler@usuo.org.

A story changes—slightly or dramatically, intentionally or not—every time it is retold.  This is true whether the re-telling happens orally, or on stage, or on film.  And every audience member for each re-telling has an opinion about whether the re-creation was successful.  Re-tellings survive only if audiences like them.

I find (like most of you, I suspect) that movie versions of novels are generally disappointing, and I am tempted to be upset by the changes made for Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera version of “Hänsel und Gretel.”  The plot is stripped of many dramatic elements in the original tale written down by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and I also see the justification for arguments by some music critics that Humperdinck’s elaborate Wagnerian style of composition clashes with the simplicity of the fairy tale.  But this opera has been successful since its first production on December 23, 1893.  Audiences have loved it for over a hundred years, and I do too.

The work of this opera began when Adelheid Wette, Humperdinck’s sister, asked her brother to compose four songs to accompany a puppet show her two daughters were putting together for a performance at home.  The evening was such a success that Humperdinck decided to make an opera based on the original pieces, expanding the four songs to a Singspiel (with spoken dialogue connecting the musical numbers) and then to a fully-sung opera.  For this project that became known as the “family headache,” Adelheid served as librettist and created a “kinder, gentler” version of the Grimm Brothers’ tale.

Frau Wette deleted troublesome plot details.  In her version of the story, Hänsel and Gretel’s mother no longer purposefully loses them in the woods, hoping they’ll die; nor does the witch eat the children she captures.  Improving the family’s impoverished home life no longer depends upon Hänsel and Gretel gathering jewels after the witch is dead.  And at the end of their adventure the children do not have to find their way out of the forest and across a river in order to reach home.  All fearful and dangerous elements disappeared in Frau Wette’s re-telling.

Instead, the mother in the opera is merely distressed with the family’s poverty and sends her kids out of the house to collect berries, mainly to get them out of her hair.  Hänsel and Gretel get lost in the woods all on their own, without parental misdirection.  And as for the family finances, we see them remedied by the father at the end of the first scene.

In her gentling process, Frau Wette not only deleted scary parts of the story; she also added elements not found in the original, many of them supernatural comforts.  The siblings don’t have to be frightened in the woods, because fourteen angels, plus a Sandman and a Dew Fairy, watch out for them.  Their father’s comforting maxim used as a “leitmotif” tells us not to worry about them either:  “When we cannot bear our grief, then the Lord will send relief.”  This music appears not only in the children’s famous Evening Prayer, but also in the Prelude and the conclusion of the opera.  This is the heavenly assurance with which the two children go to sleep the evening before they meet the witch, and which cushions the entire opera for the audience.

The experience with the witch is made less frightening too:  for the sake of stage production, Hänsel and Gretel’s four-week enslavement to the witch’s whims in the story turns into events of a single afternoon, and the witch has magical powers but is a bumbler.  Additionally, rather than eating the plumped-out children she traps, the witch has been turning them into gingerbread cookies and apparently not eating them at all….Hänsel and Gretel get to bring them magically back to life.

Thus, instead of watching two kids enter adulthood as they face parental desertion, survive in a forest, triumph over a cannibalistic witch, and rescue their family financially…we watch two kids who know their parents love them, who have angelic support when they get lost, whose cleverness saves them on their journey, and who get to return to their family.  At opera’s end, they are more experienced and a bit wiser, but they are still kids.

It’s an appealing idealism that audiences have loved for a long time. And they’ve loved the music too, despite its critics.  Most people familiar with Richard Wagner’s operas can hear Wagner’s influence on Humperdinck’s work.  As a young composer, Humperdinck met the aging Wagner in Italy, and followed him to Bayreuth in the early 1880s at Wagner’s invitation to assist him in producing Parsifal.  Humperdinck studied the score as he served as a copyist, and he coached the singers; he even joined a Wagnerian music club.  Wagner died in 1883, just seven years before Humperdinck began work on what became his most successful opera, so it should be no surprise that Hänsel und Gretel manifests Wagnerisms.

Wagner’s operas demand huge orchestras capable of wide varieties of color and texture, and dynamics ranging from the utmost tenderness to loud climaxes.  His music is full of chromaticisms, and is especially famous for its use of the “leitmotif,” or signature music to indicate a particular character or emotion.  Humperdinck pays tribute to Wagner by incorporating many of these musical elements in Hänsel und Gretel.

Humperdinck begins the Prelude with quiet horns playing the Evening Prayer leitmotif and then weaves in other themes from the opera, always returning to snippets of the prayer.  The Prelude starts simply, builds to a climax, and then gently subsides with a recapitulation of the prayer motif.

Another leitmotif is the father’s “Ra-la-la-la” music, which begins in a minor key as he enters on the sad scene of his wife with the broken milk jug, but changes to major as he displays the bounty from his day of successful broom-selling.  The theme returns at opera’s end as the parents come upon the happy scene of their children dancing with the revivified gingerbread kids.

However, Hänsel und Gretel is not a collection of Wagnerian clichés.  Humperdinck kept in mind that even though he was writing an opera for adult singers who could sing over a large orchestra, his story was not about Wagnerian mythical heroes; he was writing music that needed to describe the lives of children.  For this purpose, he quotes two authentic German folk songs:  “Suse, liebe Suse” in Act 1, and “Ein Männlein steht im Walde” in Act 2.  The rest of the children’s tunes, such as dance game the two kids play, are original with Humperdinck.  They sound like folk songs because of their simple rhythms and melodies.  Humperdinck also reflects simple childlike joys through play with the orchestra in moments like the Cuckoo echo game Hänsel begins in the forest scene.

Two magical moments shine musically and dramatically for me in Hänsel und Gretel, even though neither is action-packed.  One is, of course, the Evening Prayer, which happens right in the middle of Act 2.  We’ve heard it threaded through the opera, so when we actually hear the centerpiece, we’re prepared for this duet to be an important moment.  The children (two women) kneel, and their voices, so close in timbre and pitch, intertwine and climb over each other in delicious harmonies, with growing intensity created through chromatic developments, until they resolve to a peaceful musical unison.

A second miracle moment for me in this piece involves a dramatic nod to Wagner, whose operas generally conclude with the redemption of a major character, such as the Flying Dutchman, who is freed by Senta’s sacrifice.  After Gretel heroically pushes the witch (played by a character tenor in our production) into the oven, the two children rejoice and dance again, until they realize they are surrounded by gingerbread children singing “O rühre mich an, dass ich erwachen kann!” (“Please touch me so I can awaken!”).  It is beautiful to see Gretel and Hänsel’s triumph restore not only their own lives but those of so many other once-victimized children.  They all join together in a celebration of life that dances and then reflects, in the music of the Evening Prayer.

A young Richard Strauss was the conductor of the first performance of Hänsel und Gretel, in Weimar, 1893.  He wrote to Humperdinck his response to the score:  “Truly, this is a masterpiece….It is a long time since I have been so impressed with any work.  What heart-warming humour, what charm and simplicity of melodic line, what art and subtlety in your handling of the orchestra, what a triumph of form overall.”

Come experience this triumph of retelling, of idealism, of beauty and of childhood in Utah Opera’s performances of Hänsel und Gretel.