Brownbag Concerts | Program Notes

Program Notes

October 15, 2003

Gioacchino Rossini is reported to have exclaimed at one point in his career, "Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!" (echoed closely by Claude Debussy's jibe, "In opera, there is always too much singing.")

These, of course, are the exasperated remarks of composers who had to deal with impossible divas and their male counterpoints (remember also The Metropolitan Opera's long-time general manager, Rudolph Bing, who, in a reference to Helen Trauble, titled his autobiography 'Nobody knows the Traubles I've seen' .

Without singers, what would be left in opera? Well, the orchestra for one thing, which has a quite wonderful role to play in the repertory, whether it's setting the scene with an overture, playing ballet music, providing entr'acts, spacing out the story with interludes or (in the case of Wagner, whose approach to the overture is quite different from Mozart) establishing the whole emotional context of a large dramatic work to follow.

In the last century, the organ moved away from its role as a self-contained orchestra capable of mass entertainment (consider the crowds who came to hear the Public Hall organ in the 1920's) through its brief excursion into giving voice to the silent movies, to its more sober role as a church instrument and, most recently, was reinvented as an academic instrument designed through replicas of historic organs as a vehicle for rediscovering the very special repertory of the 17th & 18th centuries.

It may be time to get back a bit into the business of playing tunes everybody knows. Thus the genesis of today's program, which offers you the audience transcriptions (in many cases done by the player) of operatic music originally written for orchestra. I avoid (except in the case of Nabucco) playing vocal music without the voices (the approach which leads to purely orchestral recordings of Puccini--and Nes'sun dorma without the tenor may be refreshing, but it ain't really opera!)

We begin with Mozart's bright and peppy overture to The Marriage of Figaro (based on the play by Beaumarchais also set as an opera by Rossini).

The grand opera seria by Gluck on the Orpheus and Euridice legend can be a bit static and ponderous, but the lovely Dance of the Blessed Spirits with its haunting flute solo provides a refreshing interlude.

Bizet's Carmen is surely one of the great operas of all time (although underappreciated during the composer's lifetime). Two orchestral suites have been extracted from the score, and the one you hear today is a third collection of Bizet's colorful and characteristic orchestral interludes.

The chorus Va pensiero from Verdi's Nabucco became the national anthem of Italy after the unification of its many constituent city-states in the 1870's.

Mascagni's famous one-act Sicilian village opera Cavalleria Rusticana features a lovely intermezzo, played by the orchestra while the villagers are attending a wedding in the church.

Finally, Wagner's Mastersingers conjures up the world of Medieval Nuremberg. Its overture previews the plot to the waiting audience 'in music splendid and sonorous, lavishly melodious, rich and warm in harmony' (Richard Aldrich).