I Really Wanna Like Opera

Episode Notes The Royal Academy's version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1nbImXmpis&t=15s&pp=ygUKZGlkbyBvcGVyYQ%3D%3D The Dutch National Opera version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF1rqnAcEKQ&list=RDQF1rqnAcEKQ&start_radio=1&t=4262s&pp=ygUKZGlkbyBvcGVyYaAHAQ%3D%3D Our Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/c/3MinModernist

Episode Notes A part of the Three Minute Modernist Family of Podcasts! Join Our Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/3MinModernist Sources https://web.archive.org/web/20110719215238/http://sscm-jscm.press.illinois.edu/v9/no1/harness.html#ch7 Wikipedia - History of Opera San Francisco Opera - History of Opera ~Script~ It’s the end of the sixteenth century, and there are Humanists run around, willy nilly, being all artsy, and not a little bit fartsy. There’s a strange feeling in the air, like they want to bring Ancient Greece back. The Rennaisancers had focused on biting the entire bit of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, so the Florentine Camerata, arguably the most hipster of any group not based in or around Williamsburg Brooklyn, decided that it was time to bring Greek drama back.  But also, they really liked music.  And so, Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini created the first modern Opera, Dafne, a retelling of the done-to-death Dafne myth, was performed in 1598. And I would do an entire podcast series on Dafne, if it weren’t almost entirely lost.  But Peri’s next work survives, and that’s where my journey starts.             What journey, you may ask?  Well, I grew up going to the symphony with my grade school class, the Lollipop Concerts they called them. I was secretly buying Mahler and Philip Glass CDs along with The Specials and Gun ‘n Roses at Tower Records during high school, listening to the hits of Stravinsky on our local left side of the dial radio station. I loved orchestral music, I love string quartets. And yeah, I love Death Metal, ska, punk, jazz, bubble gum pop, goth, funk, y’alternative and musicals on and on.  But you know, I never got into one of the forms of music that helped define the art music world. One of the forms of musical expression that some point to as the peak of cultural excellence. I just never got into it, and you know what, my goal for 2024 was to get into it. Hard. Because…             I Really Wanna Like Opera.  OK, I’m Chris Garcia. I’m an archivist, a writer, and pro wrestling enthusiast. I’m decidedly not the target audience for opera these days. When I started looking into the opera world, I wanted to go to the very beginning, but I almost immediately discovered that the first modern opera, Dafne, was lost like tears in the rain. Jacopo Peri’s follow-up, though, was still around. And thus, I headed to YouTube to find it. As they were trying their damnedest to relaunch Greek drama, the second opera, the oldest surviving, was based on another myth – Euryadice. That’s right; we’ve been recycling content for new media since the dawn of time.  Like everything I do, I had to dig into the deepest history, and with opera, that’s pretty deep. There’ve been songs that tell stories back beyond recorded history. The oldest existing songs are either religious rites or story songs, or workman’s songs, like the Egyptian song that tells the story of The Two Brothers. The opera, in many ways, eschews these sorts of songs in preference to story. It is the explicit use of theatricality, that these are to be staged stories (at least for the first five hundred years or so) and thus they needed to be presented in a more-or-less specified context – a salon, or later, a theatre, which took them out of the mainstream of music, which was more often encountered in the wild, as it were.  Opera did not end up having nearly the influence on modern popular music that orchestral music did.   It did, however, lead to the Musical, which is another podcast for another lifetime.  OK, the idea to revive Greek drama was interesting. It’s not like the 16th century was some dead zone for theatre. The Brits were doing a lot with theatre at the time, and not just Shakespeare, who was alive and presumably well (if he ever actually existed…) when Peri’s operas debuted. In Italy, though, there was a long history of theatrical starts-and-stops. Ancient Roman theatre basically recycled Greek dramas, though produced some impressive comedies of their own. The Fall of Rome led to a dead period, but the church brought it back using actors and theatrical presentations to tell the stories of parables and other Catholic niceties. These placed the center for drama within churches in Italy, which only started to change with the rise of Comedia del-Arte, which took the show to the streets…or town plazas. Anywhere they could put up a stage, really.              In Ferrara and Rome, there were those who had been studying and translating the ancient Greek texts for almost a century. They had started to produce them in theatrical settings, and later theatres, but also they were not averse to doing open-air productions. No matter what the form of artistic expression, there will always be indies. The division between what would become traditional drama and liturgical plays is fairly stark, and at the time could more-or-less be divided into dramas, which were mostly what the Church was presenting, and comedies, which were secular, though when you presented a Greek play, it was always seen as secular, whether or not it was a comedy or a drama, though I’d wager they hoed closer to the dramas than the comedies.              So, if they were reviving Greek drama in Rome and Ferrara, why was Opera needed to act as a part of the revival?         You see the Florentine Camerata believed that the choruses found in Greek drama were originally sung. This is something of an outsider concept, though there is some evidence that might have been, at least at times. They also thought that maybe, just maybe, the entire things had been sung, and those dumb Ferrarans and the smug intelligentsia of Rome had completely botched their revivals because they didn’t realize it.  Never let interstate battles for intellectual superiority go uncommented on.               Now, Italian music has always been there. The Romans had music, I mean how could you not? They tended towards ancient Greek tunings on instruments, but the fall of Rome introduced musical traditions from more of Europe. While there were countless local folks songs, remember Italy wasn’t really Italy until the 19th century. There was liturgical music, chants and plainsong from the monks and congregational choirs started to be formed about this time. There were madrigals, and there were early versions of orchestras as well. One thing that was an important aspect of the rise of the scene that led to opera was monody. These were accompanied solo voice pieces. These were supposedly a revival of Greek musical practices by the folks of the Camerata, but they also went in more for the spirit than any sort of historical accuracy. They tended to be designed for the expression of emotional content, often with stories attached, and often in-character works. These can certainly be seen as the first steps towards arias, no? It was this stream that fed into the likes of Jacopo Peri and company for the first operatic works.              After a solid week of digging into early Italian musical history, it was time to actually approach listening to an opera.              OK, this was not the first time I’ve ever listened to an opera. I actually have been to see them a few times, first at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where I saw Madama Butterfly, and once in San Francisco, where I saw Nixon in China. Admittedly, those are two pretty different ends of the same stick. I shouldn’t say I listened to opera – I heard opera. I had no idea about any of it, no clue what any of it meant, the history, the ideas, the differences that mattered, and the similarities that led to definitions. That, I guess, I was saving for the days when I would have time, like in my early 50s with two nine-year olds running around, a job with an hour commute daily through the mountains, and an active publishing life. Sure, it was the perfect time to undertake a new hobby.              Because I’d be damned if I didn’t become an operaphile.              There are three versions of Eurydice on YouTube, and I chose one that I rather liked because it started with a terrible introduction theme. Literally MIDI music in what is thought of as an Italian Medieval theme, I reckon. The group performing it were graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaine, with a few faculty sprinkled in with ‘em. It was a lovely version, and of the ones I found on YouTube, it was easily the most fulfilling as far as what I want out of an easily accessible opera. I’d say it was the most approachable of all them, which is great for a guy who really doesn’t know how to approach any of this stuff!  The story of Eury0dice? Well, as this was a part of reviving Greek drama, to have Eurydice as one of the first pieces makes total sense. There are no surviving Greek play version of Orpheus and Eurydice, though it appears in reference in a few Roman works, and almost certainly had Greek and Roman adaptations that did not survive. Of course, the story has been adapted hundreds of times since, most famously by Jean Cocteau. The libretto, created by Ottavio Rinuccini, opens with La Tragedia, the Tragic Muse, who sings calls to the audience for emotional reaction. That’s a prologue that, structurally, feels straight out of a Greek play, though I think it would have been done as a Chorus. This is basically telling the audience that there are different tones coming at them soon. I’m not 100% sure from my reading of it, but I think it also kinda serves the same purpose as the TV theme song. It tells you what you’re about to watch, and gives you the tone of the larger piece.  So, I can, in my head tie this to the works like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or The Brady Bunch.              I gotta reach sometimes, right?             Now, listening to this on its own, and not speaking a lick of Italian, it feel, how do you say…stiff. A lot of opera does, which is why it can be a daunting hill to climb. On one hand, there is clearly something going on within the music and singing th