Placido: Bob Wilson broke my pipes
In an article in the LA Times focused mainly on Placido Domingo‘s renewal of his contract as general director of Los Angeles Opera, the tenor blames his current bout of tracheitis on his participation in Robert Wilson‘s production of Parsifal last fall. Domingo has already nixed his participation in a Wilson Walkuere skedded for Paris in April, but he’s planning on performing Cyrano at the Met on March 8 — barring a fresh attack of Wilsonoma, presumably.
I like to quote critic John Yohalem: “Saying Leonie sang sharp tonight is like saying Leonie sang Strauss tonight.”
Yes ITDG, I had those notes at 15. I think I had mentioned in a much earlier entry that I originally started out singing baritone repertoire. At the same time I was singing this soprano arias at pitch in a well-developed falsetto (what I mean by that is that the sound didn’t have a falsetto quality to it), I was also singing through Mozart baritone arias – Figaro, Leporello, Papageno, and even the Commendatore – it’s scary to think that I actually had a low A at the time! Now I can’t even think that low.
I barely have a low C – it’s only I note I use if it’s in a run or touched upon lightly – otherwise I try very hard not to sing anything below an Eb or D in public. So at 15, my voice had already changed, but I still managed to keep alot of those extreme high notes until my 18th year when I ended up losing them all at once, including the very lowest notes – but like I’ve said, I’ve retained a very high upper extension to my full voice – the highest note I’m ever willing to perform is a G above the F in Puritani. When I have sung Mozart’s concert aria “Popoli di Tessaglia,” (in my octave, mind you) I have sung those G’s.
Speaking of Orpheo – I wish more companies would present the 1774 Paris version of the opera where Orfee is a tenor, there is more music and a fuller orchestration. I hate to admit it, but for my tastes, Gluck definitely improved the opera the second time around, the Italian version to my ears, tends to be very boring and slow – which I should attribute mostly to interpreters rather than the composer. I would love to hear Daniels in that opera, though.
I also could sing some very high notes at age 15–I could reach D and occasionally touch E. I couldn’t really sing much up there, though my high A was pretty good. There were a few blank spots, too. My voice had changed–I could hit the D below the bottom staff (reach it healthily, at least) and the D above the top. Again, that doesn’t mean I was much of a singer. By next year, I had lost the ridiculously high notes and sang the bass part in choir. I’m a baritone and my falsetto ends around the D on the staff.
Ooh…no anonymous comments anymore, eh?
I’m only seventeen, but in training, and it seems every other leason I’m switching between Baritone and Tenor arias. Sometimes I even do Counter-Tenor (I can go up to a high A-flat, and down to a middle D).
On another Note, I’m LA-based, and saw the Robert Wilson Parsifal twice. It was pretty terrible, and Domingo looked very uncomfertable. What did him in, I think, was singing such an arduos role while cramming his 65-year-old body in stiff poses that he had to maintain for such a long time.
People have asked it before, but I’ll ask it again….
Why do the superstar singers allow themselves to be “done in” by the directors?
Do we really think Birgit Nilsson or Leontyne Price would have allowed someone to tell them to do some sort of bizarre stage action that goes against the text?
I once asked a very famous mezzo why she put up with the nonsense in a “Trovatore” production (characters standing next to other characters eavesdropping when they weren’t even supposed to be in that scene… people moving around slowly like chess pieces … red chairs and broken statuary everywhere… an upside red chair hanging from the ceiling).
This famous mezzo replied that after you do one of your signature roles so many times in traditional productions, you want to do something different, and if a director asks you to do something different, you go along with it because it’s different.
I someone can’t see Callas, Pavarotti, or Sutherland doing the stage action today’s singers are being asked to do.
Someone really needs to slap some directors. I volenteer to take a fist to Bob Wilson. I’ve seen three of his productions (Parsifal and Butterfly in LA and Lohengrin at the Met) and I thought that Only Butterfly had the characters acting like themselves or made any sense. And did anyone here about that Butterfly in Sttugart (I think) where Suzuki performed Oral sex on Pinkerton in the middle of the love duet? and at the end, Butterfly killed her Child, Suzuki and Pinkerton, and then stared madly into the audience as the evening ended? Oy.
Yes, Baritenor’s description of the “Butterfly” performance is the problem we’re facing these days.
At any given performance, there is probably at least one person attending that opera for the first time, and that person is going to think this is the plot of the opera the way the librettists wrote it and the composer agreed to the action while composing it.
Later, that person is going to get into arguments with people: “Butterfly kills her own child! I saw it! That’s the way it happens! I saw it!”
I’m sure a lot of people in San Francisco think “I Puritani” is a tragedy because the baritone stabbed the tenor in the back during the final chords. They are going to say “But I saw it! He kills him! There’s no happy ending! She went crazy again because the baritone killed the tenor! How can you call that a happy ending!?”
Anyway…I guess I can live with Isoldes who don’t die… and Amnerises who drink poison and die…and Alfios who stab Lolas to death, but the basic fundamental stage directions should be followed, n’est-ce pas?
A rather famous bass-baritone is currently appearing in production of Der Fliegende Hollander which he thinks is crap, but he did not know what the production was going to be until long after he signed the contract. And he couldn’t really have backed out because he’s a Big Star appearing with a small company that doesn’t normally get Big Stars, except him, who appears out of patriotism. Mind you, Placido can’t really use the same excuse in LA, being General Director…
This raises a question I’ve always wanted to ask: At the end of Vespiri Scilini, is anyone left standing, traditionally (I’ve never heard it?)
Was there seriously a performance of Puritani when the tenor gets stabbed as it ends? What the hell?
Luckily, my home base, LA Opera, has stayed basically traditional as far as keeping to the plot points go. The only glaring exceptions I’ve seen were the Parsifalse (as I’ve dubbed it)and in IL TROVATORE, where di Luna shoots Manrico instead of sending him off to die.