Tristan und Isolde

Tristan und Isolde tonight via Metopera Free Streaming at the time of Coronavirus!

"I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance –: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise."

Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck

My great love is Tristan und Isolde, and for that Wagner will have his place in the history of European culture because there he drops all his ideological bullshit, and all his dangerous sides. And finally he is really concentrating on his music and his poetry. And here he develops all his greatness. There is the Wagner that I am looking for.
Gottfried Wagner, TV documentary

"Tristan is not about 'being', it’s about 'becoming'. And it’s not an opera about love, but about death. The fear of death. This is the motor of the opera. There’s nothing more democratic than death."
Daniel Barenboim before his Met debut with Tristan und Isolde

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La Traviata & La Bohème: TB & Morality

As I listen to the performance of La Traviata at The Met of December 15 2018 which is the same one with the same cast we went to on December 22, 2018, I will reprint an earlier blog.

A reprint from Dec. 17 2013

La Traviata & La Bohème: Illness & Morality

In The Cockroach Catcher:

“It would not be a great surprise to anyone who has any inkling of the history of medicine that sooner or later any medical condition with an alleged aetiology of pure psychological origin will prove to have a non psychological cause. This is particularly true of those conditions classified by non-psychiatrists.

In the past, ignorance has led to belief that certain conditions are either punishment by god, visions of great religious significance or simply madness. Accordingly you might be burnt, become a saint or simply be given one of the psychiatric medications.”

Tuberculosis is one such condition that came to mind, more so as last Sunday we saw a production of La Traviata by one of opera’s grandest composers, Giuseppe Verdi.

In 1897, a young nun Thérèse Martin in a convent of Lisieux was dying of tuberculosis. She was essentially writing the equivalent of the modern day blog in the form of a diary. She was 24 then and had led an uneventful and sheltered life, taking the veil at only 15 and in contrast to most saints, she experienced and accomplished little. With her tuberculosis, her health deteriorated rapidly and she spent her last five years in the convent’s infirmary, continuing to diarise her innermost thoughts and emotions up until her death. The convent published her writings as an autobiography: Story of a Soul. After her death, many miracles were attributed to her intervention. In 1925, she became Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, and during World War II, Pope Pius XII proclaimed her co-patron saint of France, along with Joan of Arc.

Yet not long before the Industrial Revolution, in folklore, tuberculosis had been regarded as vampirism. As people with TB often had red, swollen eyes, pale skin and coughing blood, stories abounded that the afflicted could only replenish this loss of blood by sucking blood.

All of this changed in the nineteenth century – Mimi in La Bohème, Violetta in La Traviata (from Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, and Alexander Dumas’ novel La dame aux Camélias) and of course Hugo’s Fantine in Les Misérables. Tuberculosis became the preferred cause of death for a certain type of female character.

Verdi at 38 began an affair with a singer who was later to become his wife. Many viewed La Traviata as Verdi’s own way of testing public opinion. His new wife was luckier than Violetta.

Verdi of course was an opera revolutionary and in a letter to his friend Cesarino de Sanctis early in 1853, he wrote, “For Venice I am writing La Dame aux Camélias, a contemporary subject. Another composer might not want to do it perhaps because of the costumes, the period, and a thousand other awkward scruples … But I am doing it with total pleasure. Everybody screamed in horror when I suggested putting a hunchback on the stage. Well, I was happy to compose Rigoletto.”

He was not so lucky with Venice as they insisted on 1700 costume when Verdi wanted contemporary ones. In that production, Violetta was nowhere near consumptive although it might well be a reflection of sopranos of the time: big and fat.

Luckily for us, his threat to withdraw the opera completely was rescued by a second performance that fitted in with Verdi’s ideal and the opera world was blessed with one of the three most performed operas; La Boheme and Rigoletto being the other two. All three operas remain my favourites.

Carlos Kleiber’s Traviata starring Ileana Cotrubas and Placido Domingo has to be the all time best in my eyes (or more correctly to my ears), closely followed by Angela Gheorghiu’s amazing performance under Sir Georg Solti.
In 1993 we went to Boheme at the Met. A very beautiful and slim Mimi appeared and you could hear the silence in the audience as she started to sing. It was one of the best Boheme’s: Angela Gheorghiu’s debut at the Met.

Tuberculosis sells.

Opera in the end is still one of the best medium as Dumas is hardly known nor performed nowadays.

Other Opera Posts:

NHS: Learning From Boris

The Dark Side: Il Trovatore
Illness and Morality

Doctor Atomic

Lunar Eclipse
Lohengrin: Speech Disability, Design & Hypertension 

Bayreuth: The Ruling Class & Photography

The Dark Side: Il Trovatore Another Baby Murdered: Mother threw own baby in fire

Today the Met is streaming this opera for free: here is an earlier blog.

Metopera Website

“A mother stole a baby from a wealthy family. She proceeded to throw her own baby into a fire and bring up the baby from the wealthy family as her own.”

That was not another Social Services blunder.

That was at the Royal Opera House on the 13th of April 2009.
Verdi’s Il Trovatore is probably well known to most for its Anvil Chorus. For me it is about The Dark Side, the dark side of human nature.

“My hunch is that despite media coverage many of us still fail to grasp the dark side – the dark side of human nature. Until we do, we shall continue to read about child abuse, abductions and murders of the worst kind.” From The Cockroach Catcher.

Much has been written about training others to do the doctor’s work in an attempt to save health cost. What is not covered is the fact that there is training and there is a broader aspect of education. The ability to transmit culture external to genetic coding is what distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animal species on Planet Earth. Many bloggers are well educated in this cultural respect either by design, by choice or by accident. There is now an uncomfortable feeling of de-education in the Brave New World. Will the next generation of doctors, nurses and bloggers be as cultured? I do wonder!

In Il Trovatore, Azucena is the mother who killed her own baby and Manrico was brought up by her. Manrico is the brother of Count Di Luna that burnt Azucena’s mother for being a witch. Azucena had to avenge her mother’s death. How much hate can you hold. She had to throw her own child in the fire, bring up Manrico so that he would one day be killed by his own brother! Unbelievable! The full synopsis here.

Well, that roughly is it, Il Trovatore and the dark side. One of Verdi's best!

London debut: US soprano Sondra Radvanovsky in Il Trovatore

TelegraphThe Royal Opera House. Il Trovatore: unitl May 7, 2009.

The Metropolitan Opera Il Trovatore: until May 8, 2009

Opera posts:Doctor Atomic
Illness and Morality
Lunar Eclipse

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