Prima la musica, dopo le parole; or Opera and Acting

Wort oder Ton: the great question at the center of Strauss’ last opera “Capriccio” beckons us to consider which is of greater importance in an opera – the words or the music. Even when not directly attempting to answer this question, opera singers confront it in their interpretations for the stage. Should the demands of the score take precedence over those of the script? Some of my favorite singers have weighed in on this question.

My portrayals are based entirely on the musical score. I cannot go beyond, or outside, what the composer has written because I feel a character right from the opening orchestral bars…[the music] immediately suggest[s] what lines your interpretation should take.  – Nicolai Ghiaurov, in Helena Matheopoulos Divo: great tenors, baritones, and basses discuss their roles.

Ghiaurov hailed from Bulgaria, as do so many other fantastic opera stars, and his voice is my #1 favorite of all basses (Rene Pape is my favorite living bass). His philosophy of acting is drawn organically from the score, painting his character with the colors of the instrumental and vocal writing provided by the composer. Ghiaurov sang most of the great bass roles and is best known for Mephistopheles (Gounod), Boris (Mussorgsky), and Filippo (Verdi). http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/opera/OFB/stars/ghi01.htm This site has several samplings of his long career – check out the Rachmaninov excerpt from 1956!

What [Tullio Serafin] said that impressed me was:  "When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that. " If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears — and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also — you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know. – Maria Callas, BBC (April 1968) on Maria Callas : The Callas Conversations

Callas is of course renowned for her acting as much as for her voice. Her philosophy agrees with that of Ghiaurov, basing the interpretation of a role on the expressive content of the music. She stands in great contrast to other sopranos who shared her repertoire of bel canto music, who allowed the “beautiful” part of bel canto to carry the interpretation of roles such as Lucia or Anna Bolena. Callas knew the dramatic power of these operas could be tapped through a close look at the music and that a great opera singer is more than a songbird.

There are other theories of opera acting which rely more on the physicality of the actor than on the music. I personally agree with Ghiaurov and Callas, because their approach can be extended past vocal music into the instrumental repertoire. Not every composer has coded a dramatic interpretation into his or her non-vocal music, but observing what clues the composer leaves us and remaining faithful to them is a good philosophy for pianists and singers alike.

Pop music and ear training

Oh, the things you learn from life when you're a music major.

I sucked at ear training when I got to UNH. Some of my friends have even said I might be a little tone deaf, because it takes a lot sometimes for me to match pitches, or tell if I'm singing sharp or flat. (That's why it's fortunate I play piano!) But nevertheless, I didn't have any remedial theory homework the summer between orientation and freshman year, and I got passing grades – actually quite decent ones – in the four semesters of Ear Training. For me, the breakthrough came halfway through the second semester, over Spring Break 2009.

I went to New Orleans for an alternative spring break trip, and doing light carpentry work with my team, heard a LOT of pop songs. If I didn't know the words to most of them the first day, by the end of the week I did, and I noticed many common features among songs that got frequent airplay. Certain chord progressions repeated throughout this repertoire, and it became possible for me to improvise the melody or a harmony line along with the song by following the progression. Not surprisingly, the songs were harmonically simple and mostly picked up on three common progressions in Western music: I IV V I, root progression from dominant to tonic; I vi IV V I, the rock'n'roll progression (heard in songs like Heart and Soul); and the blues, I IV I V IV I. These progressions make improvised lines easy to create because of the common tones in I, IV, and vi, and knowing cadential formulas from Theory I provided the basic framework to follow. (Theory taught me to resolve tritones out, and to take the melody 3-2-1 over a I64 V I bass – all features of Western tonality which are woven through pop music whether we normally pay attention to them or not.)

After spending a week immersed in pop music, I found theory and ear training both easier. The easy melodies which stick in your ear are also very useful for immediately recognizing the 3^rd or 5^th scale degree, and even intervals are better remembered in a pop context. (Minor 6^th is the first two notes of "In My Life" by the Beatles; Major 6^th is the first two notes of "All at Once You Love Her" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Pipe Dream;" and the Star Wars theme begins with a perfect 5^th.) I've never stopped listening critically to pop music and along the last 2 years, I've found some gems in odd places. Two of my favorites are below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt0_oPPK6eA From the Country end of the spectrum, Big & Rich "Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy." The melody is doubled at the octave, and the two singers mix pitched speaking voices with singing. Overall, the effect strikes me as a reflection of early styles of organum, where the melody would be doubled with a perfect interval (4^th, 5^th, octave). Their speaking-singing also reminds me of Rex Harrison speaking his way through Henry Higgins on Broadway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4xp2lgiAjY Amie, by Pure Prairie League. The main body of the song is very typical of 1970s folk blends like America or Kansas, but near the end as the song is playing out (and nothing new is happening in the text) the supporting harmonies highlight the melody in an unusual way. Leading to IV through V7/IV over 1 (in this case, A – A7 –D over an A pedal), the melody itself is sung below the backup vocals. The lyrics here are "fallin' in and out of love with you" and until the word "love" the backup vocals are following the melody's contour a third above. At "love" the interval between melody and accompaniment widens to a minor 7^th, as the backup vocals follow a descending line above the melody's pedal point. This dissonance is very exposed by being higher than the melody, but the well-matched timbres of the voices mitigate the dissonant quality and allow this passage to express tension in a wistful way, while bringing the song to a quiet close.

Drive My Car: sexual politics in words and music - Summer 2011

Featured on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ song “Drive My Car” was co-written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The style looks back to classic rock-n-roll with a modal melody and blue-note inflections, and references Otis Redding’s bass-heavy version of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”[1] Examination of the lyrics as set by Lennon and McCartney shows a dynamic of power being established between the song’s narrator and a “girl.” This power play of the dominant female and the willingly subservient narrator who wishes to join her future plans is written into both the lyrics and the musical elements of the song.

Verdi: the Falstaff fugue - Spring 2011

Verdi’s last opera may well be his greatest, and Falstaff has received its share of analysis and interpretation from multiple angles, as befits this great magnum opus. This paper will address some details of the overall work, while focusing in greater depth on the fugue[1] at the end of Act III, a topic which receives less attention than others in this opera.

Falstaff, Verdi’s last opera, premiered when the composer was nearly 80 years old. The project had been germinating in his mind for years,

Consonance: Different Approaches to Organum in Paris and Aquitaine - Spring 2011

The innovative expansion of music into polyphony forever changed the face of Western music and widened the horizon for composers of the future. Two major schools of free organum have had a lasting legacy which continues to influence music today in overt and hidden ways: the Parisian school at Notre-Dame, the great Gothic cathedral; and the manuscript tradition preserved at the abbey of St. Martial, at Limoges. These traditions date from an era when music was created largely in religious context and preserved in both functional memory and print; the ideas of “composer” and “genius” had

Kindespflicht, oder das höchste der Gefühle: Filial Relationships in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Idomeneo - Spring 2011

Mozart's final Singspiel, like many of his previous works, features paired characters with opposite or complimentary attributes. The Queen of the Night, and her opponent Sarastro, the ruler of all that is light and good, are the most prominent pair (and highest in the social hierarchy); Pamina and her lover Tamino represent idealized female and male youth, and unite at the opera’s end as virtue and peace are established; Papageno the birdcatcher seeks his mate, as do the birds. These paired characters relate to one another in the horizontal direction of attraction or repulsion, and meet as peers; they also relate in a generational, vertical direction: as parents and children, whether

"Genius" in scare quotes - Spring 2011

Paula Higgins’ article "The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius" and David Brackett’s analysis (in Interpreting Popular Music) of James Brown’s music in performance dovetailed neatly on a trope which we are all familiar with in Western culture: the genius. With Higgins, the “genius” in question was mainly Josquin des Prez, but as we come to see, Josquin can hardly be seen these days without his accompanying successor-genius, Ludwig van Beethoven. James Brown hardly figures in the same narrative as these composers – at first blush – but the chapter invokes in the same breath his hard work and devotion to his art, and his “uncanny” talent and natural style. Complete this sketch with wildly flying hair, and an individualistic, “difficult” artistic personality, and you have Beethoven again. Why do we return to this archetype in so many different guises?


The modern notion of genius, as Higgins reminds us, is a modern notion, one which emerged from the Romantic era in which Beethoven, a child of the Enlightenment, found himself. Josquin’s era would not have called him a genius, because neither the concept nor the word existed yet in their modern senses. As for Brown, despite Brackett’s detailed analysis of his careful manipulation of rhythm and delivery of words, I will go out on a limb and say “genius” is not one of his most common titles. As a performer, his iconic personality – both on-stage and off – was magnetic, provocative, and energetic. These characteristics do not necessarily exclude genius, but rather redirect the audience’s admiration to the icon of the performer/performance, away from the usual material “genius” works on – invention, in a broad sense, and musical composition, in a more specific sense. Beethoven, Josquin, and Brown are all said to have been hardworking men, but the legacies of Beethoven and Josquin include, significantly, both printed and hand-written music. Brown’s music is realized, not printed (excluding the pop reprints one buys in a music shop, which ignore the fine details of rhythmic, vocal, and textual inflection which Brackett analyses) and our concept of genius relies on concrete achievement. Peggy Phelan (quoted in Stacy Wolf’s A Problem Like Maria) argues that “performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented […]: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” Brown’s music participates in this paradox and thus belies the typical study of “genius,” Brackett’s description aside. We are not accustomed to equating the genius of Brown with that of Einstein, even if they participate in the same archetype: Einstein stated theorems, wrote treatises, whereas Brown performed (and wrote) songs for an audience.


The Romantic era gave us the concept of genius, and genius can be seen as both a product of the age which first described it and an archetype which Western civilization needed even before it was articulated. Why do we need “genius?” Geniuses like Beethoven and Einstein – and Brown – play the hero role, whether it is to a civilization, ethnic group, or to one’s highly personal memories. Romantic-era conceptions of genius are often removed from society in some dramatic fashion: Beethoven’s deafness isolated him, and isolation (whether self-imposed or through an “act of God” such as deafness) is a theme which also typically accompanies the hero archetype. I feel that we hasten to draw Josquin in Beethoven colors, or lionize Brown’s image as the “hardest working man in rock n’ roll,” because we want to have heroes, who both share our troubles and exceed us in talent, and especially in this context – heroes who write timeless music. Beethoven was often painted in the colors of the most heroic genius archetype of Western history – Jesus, who is exemplified to us as the hero who feels human pain and can do godly things. It is no coincidence that the Romantics, whose fascination with mysticism and the sublime would emphasize the “divine” talent of their hero-composer; it is also no coincidence that Brown can be described in terms reserved for “genius” without naming the archetype. He, with Beethoven and Josquin, is a “hero” figure often imitated and never duplicated, and therefore (regardless of the relative merit of his music) a “genius” of the same rank.