Yesterday I tagged along as my Carthage colleague Amy Haines took 21 of our music students to see the dress rehearsal of Handel’s Rinaldo. This is something that the Carthage music department has been doing with our students for quite a few years now, but I have typically not come along because I’m a Lyric season ticket holder and am already able to see these operas on my own. In fact, the last time I think I went to one of these dress rehearsals was for a Don Pasquale performance which, according to the Lyric’s website, was way back in 1995. Talk about dereliction of duty! But this time around we decided to require that the cast of The Marriage of Figaro attend Rinaldo, and it seemed only fair for me to come along as well. And as it turned out, three of my private voice students also elected to come along, which made me even more excited to be part of this particular field trip. . . and I am SO glad I was.
Part of me loves trips like this, but there’s this other part of me that stresses out terribly because I’m so anxious for the students to enjoy themselves and come away from the experience with a better rather than a worse impression of what opera is all about… but there are plenty of things that can go wrong. I’m still haunted about a terrible mistake I made back in January of 2000 when the Carthage Choir was on its European tour. I arranged for us to attend the opera in Prague at the gorgeous National Theater which is famous as the site of the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Kathy and I had been there five years earlier with the Alumni Choir, attending a performance of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliette that was absolutely gorgeous. (Our seats were front row center, which made it an even more thrilling joy.) So when it came time for the Carthage Choir’s 2000 tour and we were planning our time in Prague, I insisted that the entire choir attend the opera together. Unfortunately, the opera we were able to see was a strange 20th century work by Leos Janacek called The Makropolous Case… an opera with a rather oddball libretto and a musical score that’s interesting only in subtle ways and doesn’t hit you over the head with musical splendor. But foolishly, I counted on the students just falling in love with the loveliness of the opera house and with the excitement of seeing a Czech opera in the nation of its creation…. and did nothing to prepare them for the opera itself or its strange story of the 327-year-old main character who’s desperately trying to prolong her life still longer. Stupid!!! And the result: as far as I know, not one single choir member enjoyed our night at the opera very much, and more than a few of them actually hated it. And I learned my lesson- never to blithely assume that people will fall easily, effortlessly and immediately in love with opera.
On the other hand, I learned a somewhat contrary lesson several weeks ago at the HD movie theater simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Gotterdammerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle. No one would ever suggest this as a sensible choice to be someone’s first opera, since the opera lasts more than five hours. (With two inter- missions, the simulcast lasted five hours and fifty minutes. That’s a whole lot of opera, even for opera veterans!) And yet, one of the people at the Gotterdammerung simulcast at Racine’s Renaissance Theater was one of my freshman voice students, watching his very first complete opera. And he absolutely loved it! I think it was a combination of the opera- one of the greatest masterpieces ever written in an exciting and engrossing production- and this particular young man, who has an especially keen intellect as well as an inexhaustible love of great music. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty certain that I’ve witnessed the beginning of yet another love affair with opera and I fully expect that I’ll be seeing this young man at many many many more operas from here on.
Anyway, I approached the Rinaldo trip with a lot more hope than worry, but there were still worries. Friday the 24th marked to the day the 301st anniversary of its premiere (thank you, John Kryl, for scaring up that interesting fact off of Wikipedia on our way down to Chicago) so we’re talking about a very early opera that is likely to strike the modern day listener as rather antiquated and artificial, and worlds apart from the thundering glory of Die Walkure or the searing passion of I Pagliacci. Marshall and I have vivid memories of one of the longest nights we ever spent at the Lyric in the last quarter century – a performance of another Handel opera, Xerxes, that felt excruciatingly endless. . . one aria after another that grew more and more indistinguishable from each other as the evening progressed. (The one and only “hit” from the opera, “Ombra mai fu,” was sung immediately after the overture- and everything that came after it was like the world’s longest commercial for Sominex.) We’d seen other Handel operas there that were much more entertaining than that, and I had high hopes that Rinaldo, one of Handel’s best scores, would be much more engaging than Xerxes, which put even two opera nuts like Marshall and me to sleep.
Well, Rinaldo was not another Xerxes– not even close! The score is one of Handel’s best, with several of his most famous arias – with a more generous helping of duets than some of this operas have. And the story, set in the time of the Crusades, with its odd mixture of Christian and magical elements, seemed to hook most of the students more than I would have expected- thanks in large measure to the production itself, which was colorful and interesting. And the Lyric fielded a world class cast led by the finest counter- tenor in the world, David Daniels. Actually, I wish I had done more to prepare the students for the three counter- tenors that they were going to hear. Quite a number of them were bewildered to be hearing soprano sounds emanating from a strapping-looking guy like Daniels, and if you don’t know anything about the legacy of castratos, then the singing of counter-tenors just seems weird. But if anything, the whole counter-tenor thing made the opera just that much more interesting to our students…. whether they were able to accept it or not. Just hearing them talking spiritedly amongst themselves about that and other matters related to the opera was incredibly gratifying. And on the bus ride home, as I circulated amongst them and asked each of them to tell me what their favorite part had been, I could tell that they had really taken it all in and appreciated it. And I was so happy that while a number of them cited as their favorite a funny bit unique to this production in which the evil Armida angrily interacts with the harpsichord player in the orchestra pit (who just won’t shut up), an equal number of students cited the tender aria “Laschia ch’io pianga” as their favorite moment, positive proof that loud and flashy doesn’t always finish first in the hearts of college students. . . especially students like the ones who were on this trip. That was the main reason Amy and I were optimistic that RInaldo would be well-received . . . because these are the kind of students who genuinely love music beyond what is immediately familiar and accessible to them and who are eager for their musical understanding to widen rather than constrict. It does my heart good to see that.
I need to remember that the next time one of them asks me to listen to a song called “Amputation” by a heavy metal band named PUSS. If they can stretch their musical sensibilities to embrace a 300-year-old opera, then I had better be prepared to stretch my own self accordingly.
Wish me luck.
pictured above: Bob Petts and Josh Hamm, two of the Carthage students who attended Rinaldo. I think there’s something about this photo that gives you a sense of the size of the Lyric. We were seated up in the highest balcony, but I think our students liked it up there.