Classical Music Forum banner

Opera Confessions

15K views 142 replies 37 participants last post by  Bellinilover 
#1 ·
What are your dark secrets concerning how you feel about certain operas:

prepare to tell all ITT :devil:

Me? I fail to feel a real emotional connection with La Traviata, it just leaves me a bit cold.

Also: Shakespeare should never be translated, least of all into italian. I'm looking at you again, Verdi! (Not that I don't love his otello and macbeth)
 
#13 ·
I'm not all that wild about Richard Strauss.

I think Wagner's operas could often do with some editing.

I like Baroque better than 19th century Bel canto.

I need to watch (not listen to) most post-Britten operas to appreciate them.

I follow today's opera singers rather than old-time ones.

Soprano is my least favourite voice type.

I like Domingo better than Pavarotti.

I like Nina Stemme far more than Birgit Nilsson.

I don't care a monkey's about high notes. Low notes, on the other hand....
 
#20 ·
I prefer the soprano and baritone voices to tenor.

I'm not a big fan of Jonas Kaufman's singing, he tends to artificially darken his vowels so that the words come out quite distorted, like he is trying to swallow his tongue!



Why did the older singers seem to have so much more in terms of vocal quality? Modern singers like Netrebko and Kaufman seem to compensate with their looks just a little. Give me lauritz melchior over jonas any day.
 
#21 ·
Why did the older singers seem to have so much more in terms of vocal quality? Modern singers like Netrebko and Kaufman seem to compensate with their looks just a little. Give me lauritz melchior over jonas any day.
to be fair, there are good singers nowadays as well and there were rubbish or over-hyped ones back then (although I think at the level we're talking there's a lot of subjectivity involved. If I don't like a singer's timbre I won't listen, no matter how accomplished he or she might be otherwise). I personally don't mind Kaufmann; far as I'm concerned he's got a pleasant voice and his technique is good. Netrebko, on the other hand... I haven't figured out yet if she's a poor singer or I just don't like the sounds she produces but honestly I'm not losing sleep over it. There's plenty of contemporary singers I like and would rather listen to and admire.
 
#23 ·
Adalgisa, soprano or mezzo?.

I've been always in favor of a philological approach to answer this kind of questions.

Between the dissapearance of the 'castrato' from the Italian operatic stage towards the end of the 18th century, and the undisputed emergence of the tenor as the main male role around the 1830s, in many operas the male protagonist was a trouser role, usually trusted to female altos.

The composer differentiated in the score the trouser rol and the female protagonist, using range and tessitura, as we can easily understand listening for instance to Tancredi and Amenaide.

However, when we are talking about the 'seconda donna' in an opera with soprano and tenor, like in Norma, the differences in range are minimal (usually the 'prima donna' descends to a semitone or a full tone lower, while the top notes are the same pitch, or just a semitone higher). The true characterization was in the singing style; more coloratura and 'fioriture' for the 'prima donna', that got the higher notes in the ensembles and her tessitura is somewhat higher, too.

With the decision to use mezzos (and even dramatic mezzos) to portrait this 'seconda donna' we are very far indeed from the original intention, and while in the 19th century Giuditta Pasta sang Tancredi and Norma, in the 20th, it was Marilyn Horne singing Tancredi and Adalgisa.

I prefer a soprano for Adalgisa (though Horne, and other mezzos, were great Adalgisas, of course).

Mariella Devia and Carmela Remigio singing "Oh, rimembranza" a few months ago, in Bologna:

 
#31 ·
Put me in the 'just say no' to La Traviata camp!

I've also got to take a break from Tosca - wonderful opera, but it plays in DC about every other year - I guess it's a no brainer to fill seats.
I know what you mean. I've just come back from seeing part of an opera festival in the small English town of Buxton which specialises in showing lesser known rep. & it was great fun.

I saw Mozart's La finta giardiniera, Vivaldi's Ottone in villa, Gounod's La Colombe , Saint-Saëns' La Princesse Jaune and Britten's Church Parables.
 
#32 ·
That's a really interesting lineup! I've only seen La Finta Giardiniera, which was a Regie production (Hans Neuenfels) and in German, so was hard to follow. It did feature an outstanding young tenor, though, which was fun.

I don't know the others, what did you think?
 
#34 ·
I enjoyed La Finta Giardiniera the best. It was updated to the 1920s but it worked. Loved the Vivaldi despite not being a fan of high voices & the Saint-Saëns. Would have really enjoyed the Gounod if it had been in French but it was in English.

The standard of singing was far far better than (to my shame) I had assumed. The singers were excellent.

Main reason I went though was to see the Church Parables & they were sublime. I'd already seen all three twice at Southwark Cathedral & was so pleased I'd booked to see them again. I'll do a review when I get a moment.
 
#38 ·
I can't bear Cecilia Bartoli. All that shaking and over the top vibrancy coupled to the way she aspirates all her runs. The basic quality of the voice is quite lovely and sometimes (in slow music) she can sound quite ravishing, but as soon as she starts singing anything with fast runs, I simply can't bear it.

As for her Norma, definitely punching above her weight. I hope I never have to hear it again.
 
#40 ·
I can't bear Cecilia Bartoli. All that shaking and over the top vibrancy coupled to the way she aspirates all her runs. The basic quality of the voice is quite lovely and sometimes (in slow music) she can sound quite ravishing, but as soon as she starts singing anything with fast runs, I simply can't bear it.

As for her Norma, definitely punching above her weight. I hope I never have to hear it again.
Yeah, she has the ability to sound great, but is always way over the top.
It's like a parady or Monty Python send up of opera singing.
 
#39 · (Edited)
i usually go without reading the libretto nor listening to the opera on CD. (tomorrow will be an exception, i just read the libretto of Electra on the bus back from Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs ballet from Kocsák.)

i don't like classical operas.

i prefer big voices over well trained.

i get decent tickets to the opera house for as cheap as i'm afraid to tell.


a year ago -before attending operas- i thought Dire Straits is the highest form of art.
now i won't attend non-classical concerts with 1 or 2 exception.
 
#43 · (Edited)
It probably isn't an uncommon confession to say that I can't much enjoy Joan Sutherland except in her earliest recordings, and that I'd rather hear just about everything she sang sung by someone else. It's more troubling to me that I can't take Montserrat Caballe either - except in her earliest recordings, before the chesty weight dominated the tone, and the guttural attacks and self-indulgent pianissimos became habitual (not to mention the labored high notes). But what really banishes me to outer darkness is that I dislike Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - except, for the most part, in his earliest recordings! I was never much taken with his lightweight, lyric-tenorish baritone, and was more or less through with him after he began to give us nit-picky, detailed, declamatory analyses of songs and operatic roles, some of which he should never have sung (Wagner? Please! Only his Kurwenal - very early, 1952 - really impresses me).

It may be my failure to enjoy the work of the above two leading exponents of Bellini and Donizetti - as well as the musically peculiar things that happen when Rene Fleming attempts them! -that has kept me largely uninterested in their operas. For me Callas still has a near-monopoly on that repertoire. Now that's a confession I make gladly!
 
#73 ·
It may be my failure to enjoy the work of the above two leading exponents of Bellini and Donizetti - as well as the musically peculiar things that happen when Rene Fleming attempts them! -that has kept me largely uninterested in their operas. For me Callas still has a near-monopoly on that repertoire. Now that's a confession I make gladly!
Have you tried with Mariella Devia, for instance as Elvira and Lucia?





A wonderful belcanto stylist.
 
#45 ·
I sympathize on both counts!

Those recitatives are meant to approximate speech, and I think the way they're paced by the singers can determine how agreeable they are. It is absolutely wrong, most of the time, to try to make them "musical" and give them more time than their melodic material warrants. And of course they do work better in the theater than on recordings; they're supposed to correspond to the "action" moments in the plot, and seeing the action helps.

Strauss? I don't know what your difficulties are, but mine are: 1) I find beautiful musical passages in his operas (mainly when sopranos are singing), but a lot of cerebral talk that generates a great deal of not very consequential note-spinning, at which Strauss was too skillful for his own good; and 2) in certain operas - e.g. Salome and Elektra - I feel a mixture of seriousness and kitschiness that makes me unable to respond comfortably on either level - and so I choose not to indulge. I'm sure this is my limitation; plenty of people don't find this a problem.
 
#47 ·
I like his other operas better than Salome and Elektra, a bit to ugh for me.
 
#48 ·
I love Richard Strauss, especially ELEKTRA.

I know this isn't completely rational, but I have a sort of aversion to the idea of hearing Italian singers sing in French. I know many of them did/do it idiomatically, yet I always have this fear that they're going to pronouce it badly and/or impose an inappropriate "Italian passion" on the music. For some reason I don't have this same fear about, say, Spanish singers -- just Italian. Maybe it's that I've heard too many horror stories about Franco Corelli's French.:D
 
#51 ·
I love Richard Strauss, especially ELEKTRA.

I know this isn't completely rational, but I have a sort of aversion to the idea of hearing Italian singers sing in French. I know many of them did/do it idiomatically, yet I always have this fear that they're going to pronouce it badly and/or impose an inappropriate "Italian passion" on the music. For some reason I don't have this same fear about, say, Spanish singers -- just Italian. Maybe it's that I've heard too many horror stories about Franco Corelli's French.:D
Like this. Shudders.

 
#52 ·
Forehead Lip Eyebrow Smile Eyelash


This kind of thing. I have no idea if they are any good, but the marketing really puts me off. It actually does them a disservice as it predisposes me to relegate them to the likes of Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson, when they might well be really good.
 
#56 ·
View attachment 43800

This kind of thing. I have no idea if they are any good, but the marketing really puts me off. It actually does them a disservice as it predisposes me to relegate them to the likes of Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson, when they might well be really good.
Apparently she is inspecting his ear for wax buildup and is pleased to find the canal open. This will enable him to hear her better during the recording session, ensuring that they begin and end phrases together and that the peaks and troughs of their vibratos do not conflict.

Such thorough and uninhibited preparation for musical performance, which in our parents' day was limited by something they quaintly called taste, helps explain why we are now living in the golden age of opera.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top