Slatkin’s Folie de Regisseur
Leonard Slatkin explains to the Detroit Free Press that everything was going great guns with the Met Traviata rehearsals until he played stage director, telling Alfredo (James Valenti) to take visual focus in the final seconds of the opera.
After that, he claims, Angela Gheorghiu (intentionally?) started “singing flat, missing entrances and distorting phrases beyond recognition.” Gheorghiu, The Met, and Thomas Hampson all studiously avoid replying to the assertion.
As someone who was there for the only performance slatkin conducted with gheorghiu of traviata (the prima), I can say that they are both at fault, though my sense was that AG was simply very, very nervous performing with slatkin. The final dress had many of the same issues (though to a lesser degree), and as willful as AG is, i’m sure she did not try to engineer trainwrecks. Also, the performance I saw with her and Abel had no issues whatsoever. She was just as willful and flexible with the rhythm as the prima, but had a better partner in the pit who knew how to adjust and anticipate her interpretive choices. This, I think, partially if not mostly shows who really was at fault between slatkin and AG.
oh and btw, it’s not like angela was the only one having issues with slatkin. Hampson was bars apart from slatkin in parts of the second act, and valenti had issues with both the libiamo and alfredo’s act III (before parigi o cara) entrances, where slatkin inexplicably held back the tempo where the momentum was clearly going forward.
Agreed about Abel. He’s an extremely experienced and abel – I mean ABLE – opera conductor.
I didn’t hear the prima, but I remember being struck by how untogether things were at times during the broadcast. If this was Abel’s first performance with no prep, good on him, but I remember AG being off a lot, both pitch- and tempo-wise.
http://parterre.com/2010/05/11/who-criticizes-the-critics/
This May 11th comment by Gianni B coincides with what Slatkin says in the article:
“I am sorry but I found Kellow spot on. I was there that evening and I have a very different take on what transpired. In my career, having sung the opera early on as Germont and then Alfredo, what Signora Gheorghiu did that evening was nothing short of an assassination attempt on Maestro Slatkin. Entering 3 beats early on entrances, standing in other artists sight lines to block the view of the conductor (which is why Hampson got lost and had to stop), purposely jumping tempi,using ritardandi that were completely unmusical and had nothing to do with Verdi style. This was an artist that knew the score backward and forward making an ass out of someone who was not nearly as familiar.”
So yeah, I think Slatkin is right and that AG took him out. Slatkin isn’t doing himself any favors by rehashing and making this all public though. Particularly quoting Gelb as saying, “I know she’s difficult”.
“Who’s beating time?” …..a question Callas usually asked before signing a contract. Gheorghiu and Millo know a HELL of a lot more about TRAVIATA and Verdi than Slatkin. After all, we’re not talking about Karajan, Bernstein, Reiner, Szell or Levine here!!
Well, then, so long as there’s precedent for disrespecting a colleague, it’s all okay.
Slatkin’s comments are sheer nonsense, even though said nonsense is from his perspective. He proved himself to be incompetent in the moment of truth in performance and it’s recorded for posterity. Angela was not to blame for HIS incompetence.
Presuming that the stage director is more than a traffic cop and has done his or her work well, one of the most insidious things a conductor can do is to tamper with the staging -- especially after the director has left the building. Modern opera houses are fully equipped with closed circuit TV monitors placed everywhere so the singers can watch the conductor without cheating their glances to the podium in ways that are not necessary. At the Met and other houses, the prompter is not only an invaluable support for the singers, but an extra set of hands for the conductor.
I’ve known conductors who have infuriated singers and directors by going to the singer’s privately (sometimes with others present) and undermining the work the singer and director were trying to create by insisting that the singer forget about the staging and watch the conductor. Collaboration between all of them is the best possible world, but (often) many star conductors don’t even attend the majority of staging rehearsals or prove to be something tolerated rather than welcomed. (Watch the rehearsal footage of Barenboim rehearsing Carmen and Rheingold at La Scala and draw your own conclusions, but one can’t really tell from that because the cameras put everyone on the spot, so to speak.) It’s even worse when the singers have to fend for themselves after weeks of rehearsals with clueless stage directors -- and there are far to many of them around these days.
Slatkin’s train wreck with Hampson in the Germont Violetta duet was bad, but most people in the business have heard worse. This one, however, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man on the podium should not have been there.
He should have let that unpleasant situation rest in peace rather than provoking reactions such as his interview has produced here.
My favorite story about fixing such train wrecks remains with the legend of the prompter who was helpless in the mix and hung a sign on the box saying “Selbstbedienung” (self-service).
Anyone remember that trainwreck Rigoletto quartet La Cieca posted last year?
Yves Abel said he had one hour with AG in her dressing room before their first performance (which was the broadcast matinee), and after that they just went for it “looking in each other’s eyes”. By all accounts, this seemed to have been enough….
Sometime in the ’90s I ran into him in Central Park on his bike. He was on his way to conduct (what was, as I remember) his first Carmen at the Met. No rehearsal. He was heading to Domingo’s dressing room to go over the score with him, check tempi that the cast was used too, etc. Imagine conducting Domingo (more than a decade ago) in CARMEN. You really would have needed to know your stuff. Abel was quite sanguine about it and, by all accounts I heard, the performance was a success.
Rehearsal is not the only way good musicians who really know the score can make a good musical and dramatic effect. There can be sorcery of a sort that Slatkin doesn’t seem to have been available for in this instance.
A good traffic cop who delivers very many able performances and the occasional very good one when he isn’t busy k*ssing singer’s a**es.
A good routinier. Used to be a derogatory term but in today’s day and age even those can be hard to find.
With unreliable singers like Gheorghiu a good routinier is probably good enough!
A (neutral?) question that bears somewhat on the controversy:
My first LP of Traviata (can’t remember which, long gone) ended, AFTER Violetta’s death, with four lines sung by the 3 men in the room. As (imprecisely?)
remembered:
“Violetta!”
“O Dio soccorsi!”
“E spenta!”
“O mio dolor!”
That was my only recording for ages, so it’s what I took to be the standard ending, and I was nonplussed when I heard my first wordless ending, which seems to be the tradition now, because I never heard the words again.
I raise this point because of these lines in the interview:
“After Violetta dies, Slatkin proposed that to animate the final bars, the last gesture should be left to Alfredo, who would look up to God as if to say, ‘Why me?’
A (maybe non-neutral) question: Is this fresh, new, near-regie proposal a reference to the old tradition (the last line especially) that I remember, or have I gone completely dotty and no such words ever existed?
Anyone out there with more knowledge and memory–and maybe even a score–clarify this thing that has always left me a tiny bit shocked that “there aren’t any words here?”
Chère Donna :
http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/traviata.html
According to this libretto – here is the ending :
“TUTTI
O cielo! muor!
ALFREDO
Violetta!
ANNINA E GERMONT
Oh Dio, soccorrasi
DOTTORE
(dopo averle toccato il polso)
E’ spenta!
TUTTI
Oh mio dolor!
(quadro e cala la tela.)
FINE
All of the characters present at Violetta’s death have their own reactions even though they sing the last exclamation together. However, as has been stated before here on Parterre, Alfredo does not sing “O mio dolor!” That is a misprint in many editions of the score. Verdi wanted him to sing “O rio dolor!” The others sing “O mio dolor!”
I always wait for the similar omitted lines at the the Nile scene of AIDA in hopes that they will also be sung.
typo! should have typed “at the end of the Nile scene (but most of you knew that).
This one only has one of the omitted lines:
So, in retrospect, if Slatkin really did want Alfredo (as La Cieca says above) “to take visual focus in the final seconds of the opera,” perhaps Slatkin was simply trying to point out that there IS a different in that moment, which often goes unobserved when the singers are working with scores that have the old mistake of the survivors singing the same text (see 17).
Aren’t there two different performing traditions for the end of Traviata? I thought I remembered that in one, she dies and no one sings anything, and in the other, they sing their lines.
correct – those are the traditions, and when they sing they should sing it correctly as explained above.
Thank you ALL for your help in proving to me, if no one else, that though the memory is foggy, it’s not pitch black. Yet.
So now I can relate another memory that I’m more confident can’t be wrong: On that first recording, which engraved its tempi and interpretations so firmly in my brain, we come to the point when Violetta enters Flora’s on the Baron’s arm and he spots Alfredo. He warns her, “Non un squardo, non un detto!” and she sings the lines that end with “Pietà Gran Dio di me!”
On that old recording, the soprano took the repeated phrases at a slow, broad, expansive tempo that I found thrilling and heart-breaking. Now those verses are sung at pretty much the same tempo as all the agitato music that surrounds them.
It makes more sense musically and even dramatically, I suppose, but how I miss the soaring arc! I’m guessing the score indicates “a tempo,” but that a soprano used to be allowed greater liberty to mold her plea to God in a way that would best display her gifts.
Is this, too, part of the “two traditions”? And doesn’t it too bear on the current AG v Slatkin debate?
Donna Carlo, I wish you could remember who the artists were in that long gone recording. Can you remember even one?
Hi SF: One possibility is Licia Albanese, who was featured in several of my very earliest LP’s. But would Toscanini have permitted such deviation from the written score, if that’s what it is?
This is why I don’t discuss memorabilia as others do here. My memora is distinctly disabiliated.
The Toscanini recording DOES include the “mio dolore” section. That’s the one I grew up with as well. Toscanini would not only have permitted it — he insisted on it.
Re: your memora:
The earliest Traviata in my collection dates from the ’50s (with Callas). I usually think of pre-1975 recordings as being cut (thanks Sutherland…), not expanded, so I’m curious to hear the record of your memories.
My fave Traviata (sorry Ms. Moffo) is the Kleiber, with Domingo and Cotrubas, and I can’t remember what they do at the end. Nor can I remember what happens at the end of the version with Lorengar and Aragall. Interestingly, the Kleiber/Domingo/Cotrubas was listed in the current Gramaphone as one of the greatest 150 recordings of all time.
I am foraging through the Naxos Music Database right now – seriously – anyone with a library card should go online right now and see if your library subscribes to it. Think of the Parterre debates into which you can fearlessly thrust your nose, or even win hands down.
The Albanese Toscanini has a wee bit of a slow down for the Pieta gran dio etc etc line. The Steber Merrill Di Stefano Traviata with Antonicelli conducting has a much more elastic arch through that section. Alas, I have to stop my survey of old Traviata recordings with a shamefully small sample size, because I really need to freakin’ get back to work.
SF: Oh, in many cases, memory is a curse, and forgetfulness a blessing. There is, in fact, a whole new science devoted to erasing the bad ones (see Slate’s six-part series). You lost your job and became homeless? Molested? Unhappy childhood? Forget it. And so on.
Impersonal Anecdote: A 92-year-old lady was in the last stages of a slow and strangely kind Alzheimers. Whenever her son brought her flowers, she glowed with joy. She’d turn away to look at her son, then turn back to look at the flowers. New Joy. “What beautiful flowers!” 20 seconds later, same thing, and so on until the flowers went the way of all life.
As for your curiosity, Babs (who knows what it is to grow up with a recording and has a memory like a hard drive) and PJ confirm: It was the Toscanini. I never heard the Steber (tiny record store, opera selection small but choice, little money, intense pleasure).
“On that old recording, the soprano took the repeated phrases at a slow, broad, expansive tempo that I found thrilling and heart-breaking.”
I’ve been having the same problem lately with the most heart-thrilling phrase in opera: the one where the FIGARO Countess forgives the Count. Nowadays, conductors often go lickety-split through it as though she’s singing “Pass the jelly.”
I so agree Alto! That should be one of those transcendent moments in which listeners have epiphanies right and left and promise themselves to be better human beings when they leave the theatre… but the demands of the current fashion in performance practice are generally interpreted to dictate otherwise.
What does the score indicate?
CruzSF: Contessa perdono… Piu docile sono starts at andante & only later the final septet (Questo giorno di tormenti… Corriam corriam corriam corriam corriam corriam hehehe) @allegro assai. I think most studio recordings (in which time is not a major issue, as opposed to live recordings) follow (subjectively) the correct tempo.
soubrettino: Thanks! Someday, I’ll have my own copies of these scores. But not yet. Thanks again.
soubrettino: And of course, you make a good point about the recording vs. stage performance concerns re: time.
“Andante”, not “Adagio molto”. And how slow should an 18th Century andante be..?
I will never forget hearing a Countess, with a very small company, who took an 11-second pause before starting the line. It sounds like too much, I know, but it was absolutely thrilling, and just as you found yourself wondering if she would say it at all, she sang it.
I never have really swallowed that kind and gracious Countess bit until we did our modern-dress production of SUSANNA GETS SCREWED at the Helena Grand Opera and Barbecue. The Count and Countess were played by a real-life husband and wife, Ted and Bonnie Gilhooley. Ted had been poompering around backstage and Bonnie was fed up. When the moment for “forgiveness” came, Bonnie waited a bit, then pulled him up from his kneeling position, looked him straight in the eye, pulled out her .45 and stuck it right under his ear and sang her line. Ted got the message that his poomper days were over.
FWIW, the Moffo-Tucker-Merrill RCA recording with Previtali has both the final lines (which I have to say I never mind being dropped in production — kind of the equivalent of: “She’s dead.” “How sad!”) and the ritardando on both occurrences of “Pieta’ gran Dio, pieta’ gran Dio di me!” Not to say that this is the earliest recorded instance, but it’s there, I remember it well.
There can be no debate – the result is in the pudding and it sucked in performance.