Renay's Toledo Opera Blog

On To The Next Fifty Years!

 As Toledo Opera embarks on the next 50 years, we do so at an exciting time in the history of opera.  New productions that are adventurous are enlivening the art form and Toledo Opera has responded with our recent productions of Salome and Candide. We will, of course, still want to walk that fine line between traditional and inventive. It is really the piece that determines the interpretation. Being very text oriented, I try to listen to what the storyline is saying and respond with an appropriate production. Opera is about telling stories in a way that clearly and logically engages the audience. We will do this in both traditional and new productions.

An important goal for Toledo Opera is to continue setting our sights high. Toledo Opera is an institution of great worth and great potential for the future, and I believe that bringing it to a new international standard is a very exciting and realistic goal. We already receive national and international critical acclaim which has helped us in attracting some of the brightest and most talented singers to our stage. We will work on expanding the boundaries of the opera experience by presenting works of the highest artistic caliber that will engage a diverse audience and instill a love of opera in people of all ages.

This institution is truly a jewel in the City’s cultural crown and I am humbled, energized, and excited by the opportunity to lead this company into the future.  All of us at the Opera understand that a strong and vibrant arts community is essential to the continued growth of this region, and we embrace the role we play in enriching the lives, hearts and minds of our citizens.

  

 

Candide

I am really looking forward to Toledo Opera's performance of Candide which culminates our 50th anniversary season. There is something about the title character's journey from childlike optimisim to reluctant reality that strikes a chord in us all. We are all on a course of maturation throughout our lives, and we must reconcile the diverse facets of our being. In Candide, you have the innocence of Candide, the outrageousness of the Old Lady and the cynicism of Pangloss, to mention just a few of the characters. But eventually, we arrive at the final message of Candide, that each of us must simple "do the best we know - and make our garden grow."

Salome on March 14, 20 and 22, 2009

Oscar Wilde's play Salome is perhaps most associated today with the works it inspired - the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, and the Richard Strauss opera Salome. Wilde's drama itself was inspired by a series of artworks in a variety of media. His knowledge of the oconography of Salome was immense. Salome and Herodias were almost as popular among 19th century artists as the Virgin Mary was among medieval artists.

When Strauss saw Wilde's play in Hedwig Lachmann's German translation, he recognized its enormous potential as a libretto for an opera. It premiered in Dresden in 1905, and word quickly spread throughout Europe about this groundbreaking opera. At its second performance, famous composers from all over Europe made a pilgrimage to Graz to hear and see for themselves what precipitated such a response from the opening night audience. Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma were all there. Imagine being in that audience!

Wilde's Salome elicited from Strauss a more daring and demanding musical language. The music he composed has incredible orchestral brilliance and boldness, and its superb theater.

I am truly excited about Toledo Opera's production of Salome. It is a big undertaking for any company, and, I think, Toledo Opera will have every reason to be proud of what it has accomplished.

Viva Verdi! 2009 Opera Gala

Toledo Opera’s 2009 Gala is one of the most anticipated performances each year. It gives the Opera a wonderful opportunity to showcase great singers in repertoire that we normally are not able to mount in a fully staged production at the Valentine Theatre. The stage at the Valentine Theatre is small and limits the sets that are available to us for rental. Additionally, the wing space and backstage area are small, which means that if an opera has different sets for each act, there is very little room behind the stage to store them. So, what exactly does this mean? Operas like Nabucco, Aïda or I Vespri Siciliani would be quite difficult, if not impossible, for a full scale production. But, we still want you to have the opportunity to hear selections from these great masterpieces. And so you will, at the Opera Gala!

 

There are also operas that have great music, but their stories are really impossible and convoluted. These operas are no longer performed, but we shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to hear their music. One such piece at the Opera Gala is the overture to Oberto.

 

We have also thrown in a couple of barn burners that simply have to be included because they are so exciting like the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore and the Drinking Song from La traviata.  All in all, this should be a really fun evening!

 

We know that when the performance is over you won’t want to go home – after all, it is Valentine’s Day. Bring your sweetie or come solo to a party at the Toledo Club. For more information, you can visit our website.

 

See you at the Gala!

Two more performances of Rigoletto-

I really do understand why Rigoletto remained Verdi's favorite opera. The characters are so very human. All of them are have multifaceted personalities: Gilda, naive and sweet, but still capable of disobeying her father, not once but twice. The first time when she lies to him about meeting an anonymous suitor in her garden, and the second time when she returns to Sparafucile's home and eventually sacrifices herself  for the man she loves. Rigoletto, is an evil, mean-spirited character, but he reserves one pure place in his heart, and that is for his daughter Gilda. Sparafucile is a paid assassin, but even he has his own strange code of honor. The Duke, a duplicitous cad, actually believes, for a brief period of time, that he really does love Gilda. Giovanna the nurse, adores Gilda, but for a small sum of money from the Duke, she ignores Rigoletto's instructions not to let anyone in his home. What a great cast of characters which makes for exciting drama. Combine this with some of the most lyrical music Verdi wrote, and you have the quintessential Italian opera.

Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse was adapted by Francesco Maria Piave for Verdi's Rigoletto

Victor Hugo was an arch-Romanticist, the reigning king of the new literary forces who was seeking to portray the truth of human existence. He was fascinated with extreme contrasts of human character, and boldly announced that he would no longer parade one-dimensional protagonists who were either all-virtuous or all-villainous. In Le Roi s’amuse, he created the ambivalent jester Triboulet, a tragic man with two souls: he was physically monstrous, morally evil, and a wicked personality, but also a man who was simultaneously magnanimous, kind, gentle and compassionate. Hugo’s Triboulet – Rigoletto in Verdi’s opera – was outwardly a deformed and physically ugly hunchback, a mean and sadistic man. But inwardly Triboulet was an intensely human creature, a man filled with impassioned love that he showered boundlessly on his beloved daughter.

 

Verdi, an avid and intellectually curious reader, had read Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, but had never seen the play on stage. Hugo’s play survived only one night of its premiere in 1832. Censors banned the play from French, German, and Italian stages.

 

But Verdi recognized in Hugo’s play those sublime operatic possibilities to stir moral passions. He wrote to his favorite librettist of the time, Francesco Maria Piave, “I have in mind another subject, which, if the censors would allow it, is one of the greatest creations of modern theatre. The story is great, immense, and includes a character who is one to the greatest creations that the theatres of all nations and all time will boast."

 

Verdi's life as a young composer and father

When Verdi was a young man in his twenties and newly arrived in Milan with his family, he experienced a great tragedy that was to mark the rest of his personal and creative life. In the span of a few short years, his wife and both his children, a son and daughter, died tragically of mysterious fevers. Understandably, the loss nearly drove the young composer into complete and utter despair. In the midst of his grief he was forced to complete a comic opera that had already been commissioned. Not surprisingly, Un Giorno di Regno  was a failure and left the young composer vowing never to compose again. But a chance encounter with Ricordi, the great music publisher, luckily brought the composer's self-imposed absence from the stage to an end when the libretto of Nabucco was put into his hands.

Perhaps as a result of his early loss and thus the frustration of all of Verdi's paternal instincts (he never had additional children with his second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi), the theme of fathers and daughters, and parents and children in general, figures prominently in so many of Verdi's operas. Of the twenty-eight operas he composed, many of them explore the theme of parental love in its many guises.

In Rigoletto we have a rather unusual father-daughter situation. Rigoletto is a reviled and deformed man, shunned and mocked by society, and in possession of a cruel and mocking wit in his role as court jester to the Duke of Mantua's court. He is nevertheless portrayed as deeply human and selfless in his love for his only daughter, Gilda, whom he keeps isolated and under guard, protecting her from the lecherous reaches of the Duke's court. His love, of course, as so often happens with over-protective parental love, verges on the obessive, and in the end smothers the young Gilda, making her more prone to the advances of someone like the Duke.

 

 

 

Rigoletto is unique in many ways

Rigoletto does not follow the formula of other Italian Operas. It has only a brief prelude, not a full-blown overture. The chorus has no women. There are no big finales involving all the principal singers and chorus at the end of the various acts. The characters in the opera do not reveal their personalities in a single aria, but reveal themselves over the course of the entire opera. And what characters they are! They are among the most vivid creations in all opera, thanks to Verdi's brilliant music.

What in the world is going on at Toledo Opera?

It is difficult for me to believe, but the summer is drawing to a close. Within the next few months I will travel to New York to hold auditions for our 2009-2010 season. I have been giving lots of thought to what I should program, and I think I have finally made a decision. Unfortunately, my lips are sealed - no matter what you do, I am not spilling the beans just yet!!

Scheduling auditions is a complicated process. First, all the various managements must be contacted and notified about the operas we will be producing. They send me many, many names of singers they would like me to hear for the various roles, and I cannot possibily hear them all. So, my next job is to narrow down the list of singers I can hear from each management. After that, each singers must be given a specific time and day. Basically, it is a scheduling nightmare. But, alas, it must be done.

I will also hear young singers who are interesting in auditioning for our Young Artist Program. This past season, our young artists visited 68 schools. Yes,  you read that correctly 68 schools in two months! They were real troupers and did a superb job.

I am chomping at the bit for our rehearsals to begin for Rigoletto. I am very excited about the cast, and, of course, it is truly an amazing opera. The complex quality of the characters in this opera is a big part of what makes it a special and an enduring favorite for me. Verdi gives us a deformed and mean-spirited jester who is the virtual embodiment of paternal love, a virtuous heroine who is nevertheless willing to die for her black-hearted seducer, and a vicious libertine who is handsome and enticing enough to seduce several of the female characters. That kind of character complexity was a new development for opera.

Musings on Giuseppe Verdi

It is still over three months before our singers arrive to begin rehearsing for our opening production of Rigoletto for our 50^th Celebratory Season, but all of us involved with the production are already quite busy with various artistic decisions that must be made now.

But today, that is not what I am thinking about. I am thinking about Giuseppe Verdi, this incredibly great composer and master of the human soul. Rigoletto truly launched Verdi on a different path. He abandoned the heroic pathos and nationalistic themes of his early operas and was now seeking subjects with grater dramatic and psychological depth. These subjects emphasized spiritual values, intimate humanity and tender emotions.

It was in this period that he composed some of the best loved operas of all time: Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, I Vespri Siciliani, Simon Boccanegra, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, Don Carlo and Aida. These operas continued his quest for a greater dramatic synthesis between text and music.

In Verdi’s operas, fathers are powerful men with tempestuous passions. These men are often in conflict with their children (sound familiar?). Verdi, of course, was in conflict with his own father and only when Verdi was fairly advanced in his career did he have a relationship with his father that was not fraught with conflict. Rigoletto, of course, represents one of Verdi’s quintessential father figures. We’ll talk about that next time.