“Barcelona – La musica vibró”: Montserrat Caballé (1933-2018)

Like so many of you, I am eagerly awaiting the release of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the upcoming 2018 biographical film about the British rock band Queen, focusing on lead singer Freddie Mercury’s life.

Each of us will have a favourite (or more) of his songs. For some of us, that list may include the 1987 song that has been described as the “a rare textbook example of a combination of pop and opera singing which accentuated their differences”: ‘Barcelona’, the single released by Mercury and operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé.

It became one of the biggest hits of Mercury’s solo career, and such a sensation that it, for better or worse, defined Caballé as “the opera star who duetted with Freddie Mercury on Barcelona” even when the press worldwide broke the news of her death on 6 October 2018.

Mercury’s affinity for classical music in general and for opera in particular is well known. One would need to have a strong classical music background to be able to conceive and write a song as complex as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ It has been dubbed a “mock opera”, following “a certain operatic logic: choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.”

In the Queen song ‘It’s a Hard Life’, he opens with the ‘Vesti la giubba’ (‘Put on the costume’) theme from Leoncavallo’s opera ‘Pagliacci’. In the music video, the sets borrow heavily from the world of opera.

In 1979, he performed ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ with the Royal Ballet. He had never done any ballet before, but it was something he had always wanted to try.

In the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’, he emulated famed ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in the legendary Ballets Russes production of Debussy’s symphonic poem ‘Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune’ (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun).

He was especially fond of the singing voice of Montserrat Caballé and said so on Spanish television in 1986. They met the following year in Barcelona, Caballé’s home city. When she was asked to produce a song for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, she roped him in. The idea excited her so much that it was decided that rather than just a single, they record a whole album together.

Caballé’s tight schedule complicated the planning of recording sessions, so Mercury recorded the song, with him singing her part as well, in falsetto, and then sent a tape to her to prepare her for the joint studio sessions.

During those sessions, Mercury was reportedly amazed at Caballé’s voice control; in the fadeout of the ‘Barcelona’ song, he had to step away from the microphone to decrease his voice intensity, whereas “she didn’t move at all”.

Merury’s own voice range was quite phenomenal for a ‘non-classical’ singer. Although his speaking voice fell in the baritone range, he sang most of his songs in the tenor range. He could sing a vocal range from bass low F (F2) all the way to soprano high F (F6).

He certainly impressed Caballé, who said that “the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice”.

She elaborated, “His technique was astonishing. No problem of tempo, he sang with an incisive sense of rhythm, his vocal placement was very good and he was able to glide effortlessly from a register to another. He also had a great musicality. His phrasing was subtle, delicate and sweet or energetic and slamming. He was able to find the right colouring or expressive nuance for each word.”

The music video that plugged the song was unforgettable, and broke new ground with the conductor wielding a light-sabre as baton, and the audience waving shimmering lights in a pre-mobile phone era.

Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé was born into a family of humble financial circumstances in Barcelona.

She graduated with a Gold Medal from the Liceu Conservatory in 1954 and then moved to Basel, Switzerland, where she made her professional debut in 1956 as Mimi in Puccini’s ‘La Bohème’.

A succession of roles in operas by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gluck, Massenet followed, taking her to Bremen, Lisbon, and as far as Mexico.

But her big international breakthrough came in 1965, when she stood in for an indisposed Marilyn Horne in a semi-staged performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ at Carnegie Hall New York, at which she deservedly received a 25-minute standing ovation. It was her first bel canto opera role which she learned in less than a month, and her achievement created waves in the opera world.

Subsequently she was invited to all the world’s opera capitals, singing a wide range of roles. She is best remembered as an exponent of the works of Verdi and of the bel canto repertoire, notably the works of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.

A 1994 review in the Independent gushed:  “Caballé is one of the last of the true divas. Callas is dead, Kiri Te Kanawa is busy making commercials for Sainsbury’s, and Mirella Freni has never really risen out of the narrow confines of being an opera lover’s opera-singer. Caballé, on the other hand, has always had an enormous following, and it’s still with her today.”

In 2003, Gramophone magazine declared that “no diva in memory has sung such an all-encompassing amount of the soprano repertory, progressing through virtually the entire range of Italian light lyric, lirico-spinto and dramatic roles, including all the pinnacles of the bel canto, Verdi and verismo repertories, whilst simultaneously being a remarkable interpreter of Salome, Sieglinde and Isolde.”

Her voice was described as “pure but powerful, with superb control of vocal shadings and exquisite pianissimo.”

Paying homage to her after her death, tenor José Carreras said the world of opera had lost its “best soprano”, adding, “Of all the sopranos that I have heard live, I have never heard anyone like Montserrat.”

Queen guitarist Brian May in an Instagram tribute wrote: “RIP dear Montsy – inspiration to us all but especially to Freddie. Your beautiful voice will be with us forever.”

It will indeed. Those interested could visit YouTube not just for her ‘Barcelona duet with Freddie Mercury, but for so much of her operatic oeuvre. You can listen to a very young Caballé singing the aria ‘Al dolce guidami’ from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, to which inevitable comparisons have been made to the great Maria Callas herself.

Or ‘Casta Diva’ from ‘Norma’ (Bellini)

or ‘Com’é bello’ from ‘Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti); ‘Caro nome’ from ‘Rigoletto’ (Verdi);

‘Un bel di from ‘Madame Butterfly’ (Puccini).

She lives on, immortal in cyberspace and in our hearts.

(An edited version of this article was published on 14 October 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

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Active Listening

A year ago, I had written an article titled “How should we Listen?” in this Sunday column. I’d like to resume the discussion and build upon some ideas from there.

In this relatively ‘new’, 21^st century, music is statistically more accessible and available to the public than it has ever been before. Looking back to the time of my own childhood, one couldn’t have dreamt of the portals available today: YouTube, Spotify, internet radio, and so many others that I haven’t even sampled yet. Just a few decades ago, this would have been outlandish, far-out science-fiction territory. But it is a reality that this generation takes for granted, as they perhaps should.

A 2013 survey of Global Recorded-Music Sales by Genre indicated that pop music accounted for 30.6%; rock 26.1%; and classical music a meager 4.9%; with “others” making up the remaining 38.4%.

Such statistics have been brandished time and again, as yet further proof of the moribund state of classical music. People have been sounding its death knell for at least the last two hundred years.

The British commentator (and author of the widely-read if often-controversial classical music blog ‘Slipped Disc’) Norman Lebrecht has in his writing, notably his 2007 book ‘Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry’, (marketed in the US under the title ‘The Life and Death of Classical Music’) lamented the decline and demise of the classical recording industry, if not of the genre itself, although his book expectedly raised hackles everywhere for different reasons.

But music education, especially for classical music, has been under attack for decades now, especially in the Western world, where one would imagine it to be nurtured the most; it is a soft target for cuts in funding whenever governments consider it necessary to do some financial belt-tightening.

Part of the problem with the failure to appreciate the importance of classical music is that we aren’t being taught how to listen well to it anymore, which contributes to the notion that it is “boring” or difficult to follow” or enjoy.

When I was a young child and began exploring my father’s bookshelf, one of the books that caught my attention was “William Shakespeare: The Complete Works”, which as you can imagine, was a weighty tome and difficult going for someone my age. But over time and keeping at it, I gradually began to unlock its secrets, and the process still continues. But the first time I cracked open the book’s spine, had I been daunted by the (then, to me) near-incomprehensible prose, the number of characters, the tangled plotlines, I would have been much the poorer for it, and a whole exciting world close off to me, merely for want of a sporting chance.

It is the same with classical music: one has to give it a chance, and repeated listening reaps huge rewards.

If one reads online forums devoted to music, and music listening comes up, often the well-intentioned advice is “Let the music just wash over you”, sometimes with the implied idea that the listener is passive in the process.

I submit that listening to classical music differs from many other genres of music in that to get its full benefit, one has to be an “active” listener. Be it a Mozart sonata, Beethoven symphony, Chopin waltz or even a Kreisler bonbon, one has to actively follow its musical “argument” and emotional “journey”, which is impossible to do if one is distracted and not giving it one’s fullest attention.

It is then that one better appreciates the beauty, the power and emotional intensity of the music. It helps us to become more intimately connected with the music, and it will stir emotions within us in ways that a cursory, distracted, “passive” way of listening to the same work never could.

In some ways, it is like reading a novel by a really good author. One has to follow the storyline, what happens to the protagonist(s), the villain(s) in the piece if any, but also the clever use of language, the painting of word-pictures, and so much more. The obvious difference of course is that one can put a bookmark in a book and take a break before returning back to it, whereas a piece of music needs to be listened from beginning to end. A possible exception could be the interval between Acts of an opera, or the gap of a few seconds between movements of a sonata, concerto or symphony, which are the equivalent of a ‘bookmark’, a pause before returning to the musical action.

Without meaning to denigrate pop music, which I love and enjoy as well, generally in pop music a much shorter attention span is necessary, with three-minute songs, with emphasis quite often on the lyrics and/or repetitive chord sequences and beats.

Listening to classical music is a different kind of experience which requires more “work” in comparison, but the rewards are huge. But active listening is an acquired habit that, like anything else, gets better and better with practice.  It is this discipline of active listening which dictates much of the concert etiquette: maintaining silence so that you focus completely and do not disturb others who are doing the same. It is courtesy and respect for others in the audience as well, to say nothing of the performers and the music as well.

It is so easy to begin practicing “active listening”, with the wealth of choices, from CDs (with the additional advantage of so much information available on the booklet that often accompanies CDs, although today anything can be Googled as well) to MP3 to all the internet options as well. Over time, one may (or not) gravitate to ‘favourite’ performers, composers, or even recording eras. Getting used to a new style or ‘musical language’ requires repeated acquaintance through repeated listening before one is really familiar with it and how it works.

Although one doesn’t need state-of-the-art music equipment, listening through decent speakers or headphones and at a reasonable volume is important.

Coming back to giving classical music a chance: it applies to composers as well. There were composers I initially disliked, or whose music left me cold or unstirred, but over the years, with repeated listening and understanding more about their lives, the background to those works, and what motivated their writing in the first place, I have come to really love them and install them among the ever-growing pantheon of my demi-gods of music.

(An edited version of this article was published on 07 October 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

“Music is medicine”: Robert Vijay Gupta

I had heard of and read about Robert Vijay Gupta perhaps about two decades ago. His is a remarkable story on so many levels.

Gupta was born in 1987 in Walden, New York State, to first-generation emigrés from India. In a recent interview with Dateline NBC, he described his parents’ struggle in their adopted country. His father Vivek worked in kitchens all over New York, as a baggage handler in JFK airport, eventually becoming a travel agent while his mother Chandana worked as a bank teller.

He began playing at age four. “I don’t remember a time without playing. Music has always been a part of my life”, he said in that interview.

Gupta described the initial years as “painful”. “The motivation wasn’t mine.” He acknowledges that his parents lived vicariously through their children, fulfilling their own dreams through them.

When Gupta’s parents took him aged four to a music teacher, he was offered a choice of either piano or violin. The size of the piano was too daunting, so he chose the violin instead.

His trajectory since then was nothing short of meteoric: a successful audition aged just six at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music’s pre-college program; a solo debut with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Zubin Mehta at eleven.

However, despite these incredible achievements, the family still felt that a medical career would ensure a more secure future. A tug-of-war began between music and medicine; while Gupta di have both the aptitude and interest in medicine, music was far more important, “like oxygen”.

At 16, Gupta accepted a research assistant position at Hunter College where he studied spinal cord repair. He graduated with a pre-med biology degree at 17 at Marist College. Gupta then accepted a research position at Harvard University, where he studied Parkinson’s disease and the effects of pollution on the brain.

Around this time, Gupta met with Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the pre-eminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard.

Schlaug is one of the proponents of what is called the ‘melodic intonation therapy’, which has become very popular in music therapy today. Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, and couldn’t form three- or four-word sentences could still sing the lyrics to a song.

After intensive hours of singing lessons, the music was able to “literally re-wire” the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech centre in the right hemisphere to compensate for the damage inflicted by the stroke on the left hemisphere of the brain.

In a 2012 TED talk, Gupta describes what he learned regarding some leading research on music and the brain when he visited Schlaug’s lab: how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians; how just listening to music could just “light up” the brain, “from our pre-frontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum”; how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality, to help children with autism, to help people struggling with stress, anxiety and depression; how advanced Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music; and how late-stage Alzheimer’s patients whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children.

But Gupta had come to meet Schlaug for a much more personal reason: “I was at a crossroads in my life”, he said at the TED talk, “trying to choose between music and medicine.” He had “fallen in love with neuroscience; he wanted to be a surgeon; to be a doctor who would go far afield doing humanitarian life-saving medical work, a “Red Cross doctor, doctor without borders.”

But on the other hand he had been playing the violin his entire life. “Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession.”

Gottfried Schlaug was perfectly placed to empathise with Gupta and offer advice based upon his own life. Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine.

That afternoon of their meeting, Guptaasked Schlaug, “How was it for you, making that decision?’

Schlaug responded that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to. He told Gupta that for him, “medical school could wait, but the violin simply would not.”

Gupta must have decided to take Schlaug’s advice seriously. In the TED talk, he elaborated, “After two more years of studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr Gupta,” to much laughter in the audience.

He auditioned for a position as violinist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. His parents were, perhaps justifiably, skeptical of his chances of securing a place in this, one of the world’s top orchestra. It was his first-ever orchestral audition.

But, “after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week”, he was offered the position, edging out the competition, some of who had decades of experience more than him. He still remains th youngest-ever to enter the hallowed ranks of the LA Phil, and if I am not mistaken, must be the only South Asian-origin person ever to do so.

A year later, Gupta met another musician, one who had also studied at Juilliard; Nathaniel Ayers (whose life-story inspired the book and the movie “The Soloist” featuring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.) was a double-bassist at Juilliard, but had suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early twenties, and eventually ended up homeless thirty years later on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

Gupta became his friend and violin teacher. “Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, because now it was about communication, of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel’s psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me.”

Gupta’s experience with Nathaniel opened his eyes to how many tens of thousands more like him were homeless or neglected due to mental issues. “In the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me that if I was truly passionate about change, if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it”, said Gupta in his TED talk, gesturing to his violin. “Music was the bridge that connected my world and his.”

Gupta quotes the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann (who himself suffered from schizophrenia and died tragically in an asylum): “To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts, such is the duty of an artist.”

Nathaniel Ayers inspired Gupta to launch Street Symphony (www.streetsymphony.org), “bringing the light of music into the very darkest places,” performing for the homeless and mentally ill; for combat veterans with PTSD, anf for the incarcerated and those labeled “criminally insane.”

Gupta has found that, “away from the stage, footlights, out of the tuxedo tails”, musicians “become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access” to it.

He ended his TED talk with a quote by the Romantic English poet John Keats (who had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry): “Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”

At Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org), we too can attest to the healing power of music in our children’s lives, many of whom have undergone traumatic upheavals no child should ever have to suffer.

I am most grateful to Gavin and Joanne Pearce Martin, who not only hosted my visit to Los Angeles in 2012 and let me sit in on rehearsals of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but when I expressed an interest in meeting with Robert Gupta, invited him over so we could discuss ideas at length.

(An edited version of this article was published on 23 September 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

 

 

Dance in Music: the Bourrée

Like many of my generation, I was introduced to the bourrée through my study of violin. I came across it as an exam piece, a simplified version for violin and piano of the Bourrée from George Frideric Handel’s Water Music Suite no. 1 in F major HWV 348.

 

In the early 1970s, the only access to recorded music was through the record-player (45s and LPs), and cumbersome spool tapes; the audio-cassette changed all that a few years later. But it was still difficult to get hold of classical music, especially to specific works. But fortunately for me, in my dad’s record collection that he brought back from Germany, there was an LP, containing Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and the Water Music Suites, Lorin Maazel conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded on the Philips label, 1966.

So I recognised the Bourée melody, and it gave additional impetus to my wanting to learn to play it.

The bourrée appears in music for students today as well; one common example that comes to mind is the Bourrée, also by Handel, in the Suzuki Violin Book 2. It is a simplified arrangement of the bourrée from his Flute Sonata no. 5, opus 1 in G major, HWV 363b.

(The Bourrée commences at 6:21 in the above video)

 

And in Suzuki Violin Book 3, one encounters   Bourrée I & II, arranged for the violin from the fifth movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s third Cello Suite in C major, BWV 1009.

And of course, there’s the famous Bourrée from Bach’s Partita no. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 for solo violin,

and also in his first Partita in B minor, BWV 1002. The bourrée appears also in his fourth cello suite (E flat major, BWV 1010).

The Bourrée is a lively dance of French origin, dating to at least the mid-sixteenth century.

It is in quadruple time, with a characteristic upbeat. In this sense, it is similar to the gavotte in that both are French in origin, and both have an upbeat. But the bourrée is quicker, and has a quarter-bar anacrusis (upbeat or ‘pick-up’), whereas the gavotte has a half-bar anacrusis.

Let us look more closely at Bourrées I & II from Bach’s third cello suite. A suite is a loosely structured collection of dance movements. Bach begins all his six cello suites with a dramatic, virtuosic prelude, followed in sequence by (as the name suggests, German in origin) allemande, and then two French dances the courante and the sarabande. The fifth movement varies from suite to suite, but they are either of the following three French dances: minuet, gavotte or bourrée. These are sometimes also called galanterie movements of a Baroque dance suite. They are considered “not vital” to the composition of the suite, but optional, and included to add variety. And all Bach’s cello suites end with a gigue. We shall examine all these dance movements in turn in future columns, but let us return to this galanterie movement, the bourrées in this suite.

The Bourrées I & II have asymmetry, in the sense that both have two unequal sections. The first section in both cases is an eight-bar phrase. The second section is twenty bars long in Bourrée I and sixteen in Bourrée II. Typically each section is played twice, except when returning at the end to Bourrée I, when each section is played just once. So the sequence is Ia (x2) Ib (x2) IIa (x2) IIb (x2) Ia Ib.

The contrast between the two Bourrées is well-established; Bourrée I is in a major key (C major in the original cello suite, G major in the transposition for violin), while   Bourrée II is in the minor key (C minor in the cello suite, G minor in the violin transposition).

Bourrée I opens with an energetic 2-quaver upbeat figure, ascending up the scale to a crotchet G (D in the violin transposition) on the downbeat of the first bar and setting the rhythmic pattern that unifies the movement: the alternation between double quaver on the ‘weaker’ beats (second and fourth) and single crotchet on Bourrée the ‘stronger’beats (first and third), interspersed with flowing bars of ‘dancing’ quavers between these rhythmic figures. Bourrée I has brightness and verve, all the hallmarks of a dance tune.

Bourrée II, although it begins with the same rhythmic figure, has a completely different character, introspective and sombre. And the longer quaver passages are much more eloquent phrases. Together,   Bourrées I & II complement each other perfectly.

The bourrée has entered popular culture as well. The British rock band Jethro Tull released its second studio album, ‘Stand Up’ (1969), containing a track titled ‘Bourée’, (with a single r) which is in fact a jazzy reworking of the  Bourrée from J. S. Bach’s Suite no. 2 in E minor for Lute, BWV 996.

That same year, the English heavy blues-rock trio Bakerloo released their single, ‘Drivin’ Bachwards’,

an arrangement of the very same Bourrée. Coincidence? But for some reason, this particular melody is a particular favourite for jazz improvisations. And although you wouldn’t guess the origin from the finished version of the Beatles classic ‘Blackbird’, there is video footage of Paul McCartney demonstrating on his guitar how the first few bars of this Bach Bourrée morphed into the opening riff of the song as we know it today.

 

(An edited version of this article was published on 16 September 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin (1942-2018)

What does one do when the King of the high Cs of Opera is suddenly indisposed, almost literally at the last minute before a major performance? Getting the Queen of Soul to step in might not seem the most likely resort, but it worked, and how!

In 1998, Luciano Pavarotti abruptly had to cancel a performance at that year’s Grammy awards at the Radio City Music Hall. Aretha Franklin, a personal friend of Pavarotti, agreed to sing in his place. However, rather than performing one of her own hit songs, Franklin opted instead to sing Pavarotti’s own signature aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot that he was scheduled to sing, and about which I had written just a few columns ago.

With just twenty minutes to spare, there was certainly no time to rehearse with the live orchestra. However, she used the time to listen twice to a recording of the orchestral accompaniment, and then, quietly, confidently, said “I can do it.”

Her “cross-over” performance was watched by more than a billion viewers on television in addition to the Grammy audience, which included several other artists such as Celine Dion. At the aria’s climax, she hit the top note, a high B gracefully and effortlessly.

As her biographer David Ritz put it, “It was as though Puccini had been brought up in the black Baptist church.”

She would sing ‘Nessun Dorma’ again in 2015 at an event for Pope Francis in Philadelphia.

Since her passing on 16 August at the age of seventy-six, through to her elaborate funeral on 31 August, lasting over seven hours, much has been written and said about her extraordinary career spanning several decades.  The Queen of Soul – who sold over 75 million records worldwide – became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

As music historian Paul Gambaccini said in an interview “Four Top 10 albums, and nine Top 10 singles, in just a year and a half! What a thrill it was, to be young and listening to music in that eighteen month period!”

But it is her track record of civil rights activism, her lending a voice to the oppressed, which impresses me even more than her enormous singing voice.

Franklin was quite literally born into activism, the daughter of prominent African American preacher Clarence LaVaughn “C.L” Franklin (who organized the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom ahead of his close friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington) and his wife Barbara Siggers.

It was her father (a very good singer himself, who Aretha would later say could have been a professional singer himself had he wanted) who encouraged her to sing, as he recognized her potential. She began singing at the New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father was pastor.

When her biographer David Ritz asked her to describe what was going through her mind when she stood in for Pavarotti, she replied ““I thought of church. When I was a little girl and asked to sing in front of a big congregation, I was never afraid. I felt everyone pulling for me. I felt the support of my father. I felt the support of God almighty.”

C.L. Franklin was nicknamed “the man with the Million-Dollar Voice” for his emotionally charged sermons, the most famous ones being “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” (the recording of which was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011) and “Dry Bones in the Valley.”

In her youth, Aretha was mentored by “Queen of Gospel” Mahalia Jackson, also a noted civil rights activist and also good friends with Dr. King.

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, a great single by Otis Redding, was transformed by Franklin into an anthem for women’s rights and African-American civil rights.

Released by her in 1967, it became her signature song. In her memoir “Aretha: From these Roots”, she wrote: “It [reflected] the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher—everyone wanted respect…..It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.”

“You Make Me Feel (Like A Natural Woman)” similarly became another emblem for justice.

Her championing of the civil rights movement dictated her professional and personal life, touring several cities in the US with Dr. King and Harry Belafonte, performing without charging a fee.

In 1968, Detroit mayor James Cavanagh declared 16 February Aretha Franklin Day. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew in to attend the ceremony. While Dr. King was leader of the civil rights movement in America, Aretha Franklin had become the inspiring symbol of Black Equality.

That evening in Detroit, when King and Franklin were together on the same stage, was a moment of inspiring history. It would also be the last time she saw Dr. King. Two months later, she sang for him one last time, at his funeral. She sang a gospel hymn made famous by Mahalia, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

When revolutionary activist and scholar Angela Davis was arrested in 1970, Franklin offered to post bail for her.  “Angela Davis must go free,” she said at the time. “Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people — they’ve made me financially able to have it — and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”

Franklin also strongly supported Native American rights, First Nation cultural rights and indigenous People’s struggles worldwide.

Would that more of us, all over the world, took a leaf out of her book, and had the courage to risk everything to speak up for what we believe to be right and just and true, in the face of the might of the establishment. God knows we need people with her grit and guts, certainly here in India today.

(An edited version of this article was published on 09 September 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

Jacques be nimble, Jacques be quick!

One of my violin students has just begun to work on the famous Mazas studies for the instrument, and is quite excited about it.

Many students and teachers of the violin will be familiar with these studies. A closer look at the author of these études would be worthwhile.

Jacques Féréol Mazas (1782-1849) was a French composer, conductor, violinist and pedagogue. He is remembered in history for his technique-building studies, etudes and duets for young string players of all abilities that constitute methods for both violin and viola.

Further information about him is rather sketchy, but one gets a fair idea of his ‘musical tree’, by which one is able to trace his pedagogical lineage all the way to Corelli and before; his music is therefore the distillation of the French school of violin playing and teaching.

To elaborate this lineage: Mazas was the pupil at the Paris Conservatoire of French violinist-composer Pierre Marie François de Sales Baillot (1771-1842),

contemporary of two other great French violinist-composers Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (1774-1830)

and Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831),

also professors at the Conservatoire de Paris; the études of Kreutzer are just as familiar and revered to advanced violinists and deserve examination in their own right in another column. All of these three were in turn taught by Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824),

influential Italian violin virtuoso, teacher and composer whose twenty-nine violin concertos were an influence on Beethoven. Beethoven was in personal contact with all three of Viotti’s famous pupils Baillot, Rode and Kreutzer which acquainted him with the high standard of violin virtuosity of the French school, and with the style of the so-called French Violin Concerto.

Baillot was one of a handful of violinists who played Beethoven’s violin concerto publicly before its revival by Joseph Joachim.

Beethoven dedicated one of his violin sonatas (no. 9, opus 47) to Kreutzer, who haughtily expressed a dislike of the work and refused to perform it. Yet ironically, if posterity remembers Kreutzer at all (apart from the violin fraternity for the afore-mentioned studies), it is because of the nickname “Kreutzer” that has still stuck to this Beethoven violin sonata, a formidable work. Some of you will remember it played here some years ago by the excellent violinist Hadar Rimon.

But to continue with the pedagogical lineage: Viotti was the pupil of Italian violinist-composer Giulio Gaetano Gerolamo Pugnani (1731-1798)

and toured Europe with him. Viotti was one of the first great violinists to begin usage of the newly-designed Tourte bow, which obviously had an impact on the type of sound he produced from his instrument and the compositional style that resulted from it. The Tourte family was in the bow-making profession, among whom François Xavier Tourte le jeune (1747-1835)

has often been referred to as the ‘Stradivari’ of the bow for his significant contribution to the development of the modern bow, not just for the violin but for all bowed stringed instruments of the orchestra. In particular the concave stick now allowed more expressive bowing by making it easier to control dynamics and execute a wider variety of bow strokes, especially “off the string” bowings. We find all manner of these bowings in the Mazas études.

Pugnani in turn was taught by Italian Baroque violinist-composer Giovanni Battista Somis (1686-1763),

himself the founder of the Piedmontese school of violin playing. Somis also taught other famous violinist-pedagogues, among them Jean-Marie Leclair the Elder (1697-1764),

considered by many the founder of the French violin school. Somis is thus seen as the connecting link between the classical schools of Italy and France.

And Somis was the pupil of Italian Baroque violinist-composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713),

a key figure In the development of the sonata and concerto as we know them today and in the development of violin technique, even though his works never ranged beyond the third position.

It is possible to trace the lineage back even further, to Corelli’s teacher the Italian composer, organist and violinist Giovanni Battista Bassani (c. 1650-1716).

His two sets of violin sonatas, though rarely played, are admired for their dignity of style and “excellent musical basis.”

Bassani was the pupil of Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690),

one of the most influential composers of his time in Venice. Here the pedagogical trail gets a little blurry, although it is thought that Bassani was taught at home by his father, a professional violinist.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate how much history is embedded in even a book of violin études and instill a sense of awe in everyday practice.

Such a huge debt is owed to this “French School” of violin playing.  The Franco-Belgian School of Belgian violinist-composers Charles-Auguste de Beriot (1802-1870)

and later Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)

is an offshoot of the French School—indeed even the Russian School is related to the French School, as both Rode and Baillot spent years in Russia, Rode from 1804 to 1808 and Baillot from 1805 to 1808.

Sadly, although the violinist-composers of the French School wrote so much music, especially concertos, posterity has not been kind to them: scores of their music are relatively hard to acquire, and their concertos seldom receive public performances or recordings, with the possible exception of Viotti’s Concerto no. 22 in A minor,

even though so many of his other concertos have equal, if not more, merit.

Playing études or studies are vital to the development and maintenance of technique. Too few violin students or even those more advanced devote much attention to them, sadly.

Mazas opus 36 consists of 75 progressive studies divided into three parts. The first part (Special Studies) includes 30 studies suitable for the intermediate students.

The second (Brilliant Studies) and third (Artists’ Studies) parts get progressively harder and resemble the concert etudes for advanced violinists.

As the preface to the first part, written by German violinist and conductor Walther Davisson explains, “The fundamentals and technical requirements of violin technique have been handled with distinct musical charm and sense of melodic shape….The study of these pieces will be found to be of immense benefit in matters of tone and technique; power and impetus of bowing should develop side-by-side with ease and grace of performance.”

My trusty personal copy of Mazas is well-worn from decades of use, and I still dip into it “to stay in shape.” Just as at the gym, one should undertake weight training with a clear idea of which muscle group(s) you wish to develop, these studies can help tone up areas of violin playing and technique, and “ease and grace of performance” to fit one’s current requirement. May the study of the studies never ever stop!

(An edited version of this article was published on 19 August 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Carmen for children, and Wind-Up Penguin!

It’s been two weeks since our annual Child’s Play ‘Take a Stand’ Monsoon concert on 28 July, and the heartwarming messages of appreciation continue to pour in.

As many of you will be aware, we restarted our children’s choral project earlier this year with choral director Claire Hughes (UK); in a few weeks we will be joined by a choral director from Portugal, and we all look forward eagerly to welcoming and working with her.

Currently we have Abigail Kitching, also from the UK, who has got our children, in the Child’s Play project and in the wider community, all excited about opera.

The opera she has chosen is Carmen by the French composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875). To call it a groundbreaking work would be an understatement. Carmen must have shocked its audience at its first performance at the Opéra-Comique Paris in 1875. What would they have made of its fiercely independent, extremely ‘un-lady-like’ eponymous leading lady, tossing social conventions contemptuously into the air and scandalizing purists in the process?

Perhaps understandably for its time, the four-act opera was not well-received initially; the chorus and orchestra of the Opéra-Comique after a few rehearsals threatened to go on strike, deeming it “unsingable and unplayable.” The reception in general threw Bizet into a deep depression, and he would die just three months after the premiere performance, on the day of its 23^rd performance, of a massive heart attack, aged just thirty-six. Carmen would only achieve international fame in the decade that followed Bizet’s death, and today ranks among the most often-performed and popular operas of all time.

Its libretto, in French, was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, and is based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. Set in southern Spain, it is the story of the moth-to-flame attraction of naïve soldier Don José to femme fatale Carmen. José jilts his childhood sweetheart and deserts from his post to follow her, but in vain; she is drawn instead and unapologetically to the charismatic matador (toreador) Escamillo, filling José with such jealous rage that he stabs Carmen. Love, jealousy, death… all potent operatic ingredients.

Bizet, who had never been to Spain, admirably imbues the opera with Spanish flavor and a host of memorable tunes, which along with the sizzling sexual tension between the two leading roles, have ensured its immortality.

That tension obviously has to be sensitively handled in a production for children. And the lyrics have been translated into English. Kitching chose three scenes and arias from the opera: the Habanera (L’amour est un oiseau rebelle; Love is a rebellious bird) from Act I;

and the Toreador song

and the Flower song (La fleur que tu m’avais jetée; The flower that you threw at me), José’s plaintive love song from the second Act.

The children are thoroughly enjoying the over-the-top drama of it all as they sing and enact the scenes. Opera when being described to an Indian audience has often been likened to Bollywood, as there’s the same exaggeration of emotional highs and lows, and the breaking into song and dance at the drop of a hat (or a flower, as in Carmen). When the children were introduced to the character of Carmen, someone who can light up a room and make heads turn and jaws drop at her mere presence, were asked to name a contemporary icon who would have such an effect today, almost all chose some Bollywood star or the other, with just a few citing a pop sensation as well.

It is the children’s first introduction to opera, and will hopefully dispel the fuddy-duddiness that usually accompanies the genre. They will ‘stage’ their three scenes as part of the opening act to our next concert featuring the Wind-Up Penguin Theatre Company (UK) on Saturday 18 Augut 2018 at 6 pm, Menezes Braganza conference hall. Passes are available at Furtados Music stores and will be available at the door just before the event.

Several of you will have attended our past presentations of the Wind-Up Penguins. Child’s Play has partnered with them every year since 2015. Wind-Up Penguin Theatre Company is a children’s musical theatre company, made up of a group of creative people, musicians, singers, actors and technicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), London.

“We come together to create pieces of children’s musical theatre and then take our shows to developing countries, where we perform to children in schools, hospitals, orphanages and slums, or anywhere we can find them! We then work with the children, showing them the instruments and giving them the chance to experience live music, an opportunity many have never had before”, wrote Abi Heath, one of its members to me during our initial correspondence.

It was founded in 2012 by Elisabeth Swedlund and her classmate at the Guildhall School from Romania, Ioana Macovei-Vlascceanu. She had been running a summer camp for children in a very poor, very isolated village in Romania for five years, and had always profoundly wished to be able to bring something more artistic to children who lived in places where they have practically no access to culture, art, and multiculturalism – often in less affluent parts of the world. Ioana’s parents run a school which is in contact with many charities, and they organised their first project – performing in hospitals, orphanages, and rural schools around Bucharest. The experience was life-changing for the nine students involved – they went back to Romania (with eight extra Guildhall students, so seventeen of them), the next winter. Once they realised it was relatively easy, in this day and age of internet communication, to arrange performances around the world, they started to extrapolate to countries they really wanted to work and perform in. Several years later, they have conducted more than 13 projects, and performed to over 10000 children in more than 150 different places all over the world. The Wind-Up Penguin theatre company has so far visited Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Lebanon, India, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. They create professional-standard musical theatre performances which they have then taken into refugee camps in Europe resulting from the current crises in the Middle East, and to hospitals, schools, orphanages and special needs centres in the countries they have visited.

If their past performances are anything to go by, we are assured of a high-class interactive entertainment act for children (of all ages!),  incorporating a cappella singing, musicians, comedy theatre, balloons and puppets.

So let the show begin. Just don’t let Carmen flutter her eyelashes at you. You’ve been warned, José!

(An edited version of this article was published on 12 August 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

“Behind every successful man….”

A recent soprano-and harp concert on 19 July 2018 at Menezes Braganza showcased, as the performers titled it, “A Musical Marriage”, the compositional output of a husband and wife.

Many of us will have heard of the husband-and-wife composer pair Robert and Clara Schumann; equally many will know of the Italian operatic composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), probably one of the most popular opera composers in history. But few will have heard of his first wife Isabella Angela Colbran (1785-1845), opera singer and composer of four collections of songs.

As her name might suggest, she was Spanishby origin, born in Madrid. She studied with voice teacher Girolamo Crescenti in Paris, and by the age of twenty had caught the attention of most of Europe with her singing.

Some accounts describe her as a dramatic coloratura soprano, while others peg her as a mezzo-soprano with a high extension, a soprano sfogato.

Her career spanned the Teatro della Scala Milan, the Teatro Comunale Bologna, and the Fenice Venice, before arriving in 1811 at Naples.

Naples then was the centre of the opera world, and Colbran quickly established herself as prima donna of the Bourbon monarchy’s Real Teatro di San Carlo, home to all the famous singers of her generation, including the celebrated castrato Farinelli.

Her fan base included the King of Naples, Charles VI himself; she was believed to be his mistress as well of the theatre’s impresario Domenico Barbaia. Her romantic dalliance with the latter was her introduction to, and her fatal attraction for gambling, as Barbaia was also in the gaming parlour business.

Her addiction to gambling would eventually see her squander off not just her enormous professional income, but her sizeable family inheritance as well.

Perhaps it is a good thing she never got into a time machine and teleported herself into 21st century Goa; she would probably have spent all her time literally ‘out at sea’ at gaming tables in offshore casinos rather than actually hitting the high Cs on land for us. Which would have been unfortunate, as her vocal range in her prime is documented as extending from F-sharp below the treble staff to the E above the staff, sometimes extending to the high F as well. Some accounts even credit her with a range of three octaves at the height of her powers.

 

It was with Colbran’s prowess in mind that Barbaia signed Rossini onto a seven-year contract in 1815, to compose operas for his company. The position would make him musical director of two Neapolitan theatres, the Teatro di San Carlo and Teatro del Fondo, with the proviso that he would write an opera each year, for each of them. Oddly enough, in addition to his salary of 200 ducats each month, he was also to receive “a share” from the gambling tables set in the Teatro di San Carlos’ ‘ridotto’ (private room), amounting to an impressive 1000 ducats each year. If Rossini too fell prey to the temptations of chance, posterity hasn’t recorded it well.

But the composer certainly was taken by Colbran, who was seven years his senior. In 1815, he wrote the title role of ‘Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra’ (Elizabeth, Queen of England) especially for her. She sang the role of Desdemona in his next opera, ‘Otello, ossia il Moro di Venezia’ (Othello, Moor of Venice, 1816), which turned out to be particularly popular.

Other roles written by Rossini in his Neapolitan operas with Colbran in mind: Armida (in the eponymous opera, 1817); Elcia (Mosè in Egitto; Moses in Egypt); Zoraide (Ricciardo e Zoraide); Ermione (Ermione); Elena (La donna del Lago); Anna (Maometto II); and Zelmira (Zelmira).  The lines that he wrote for her hint at the vocal acrobatics she was capable of: trills, half-trills, staccato, legato, ascending and descending scales, octave leaps.

 

Somewhere along the way, the two got romantically involved, and were married in 1822 after their move to Bologna. Colbran’s voice was beginning to show signs of strain and decline; in Venice the following year, Rossini created the title role of his opera Semiramide for her, writing her part so as to camouflage the deficiencies in her capabilities. Nevertheless, although the opera itself was a success, the audience could hear that Colbran was past her prime. Rossini wrote a total of ten operas for her voice.

Her reprise as Zelmira in the eponymous opera in 1824 was also a disappointment, and Colbran perhaps prudently retired from the stage aged just 42.

The couple separated in 1837. Around the same time, Rossini began seeing Olympe Pélissier, an artist’s model, in Paris. She had sat for the painter Émile Jean-Horace Vernet for his picture of ‘Judith and Holofernes’. Was she the cause of the separation? Some accounts indicate that they became close after Rossini and Colbran separated, not before.

Whether it was out of consideration for Colbran’s feelings, or for appearances, Rossini and Pélissier were only wed in 1846, a year after Colbran had died in Bologna, aged 60.

That Rossini genuinely respected Colbran is indisputable. All his life, he maintained that she was the greatest interpreter of his music. Indeed, one of Rossini’s nicknames was ‘Signor Colbran’. In their heyday, they were the ‘power couple’ of opera.

When she was devastated by the death of her father, he commissioned an elaborate sculpture for the Colbran family mausoleum, depicting a woman weeping at the foot of her father’s tomb.

In her final years, Colbran’s health declined (some speculate that this was almost certainly due to pelvic inflammatory disease contracted from venereal diseases from her flagrantly unfaithful spouse) and her finances dwindled, compelling her to sell off parts of her family estate. Rossini sent her monetary support to the end.

Although Colbran’s compositional output seems to have been four song collections (with text by the librettist Pietro Metastasio and scored for voice and piano or harp, and dedicated one each to the Empress of Russia; her teacher Crescenti; the Queen of Spain; and the Prince Eugène de Beauharnais), elements of her style were emulated by the likes of Vincenzo Bellini.

Although the actual marriage between Colbran and Rossini could perhaps itself constitute the plotline of a tragic opera, their “musical marriage” left us an enduring legacy, with some of the greatest operas in the repertory that might never have seen light of day had it not been for the inspiration embodied in Isabella Colbran, perhaps one of the most ‘unsung’-about singers in music history. Her story deserves to be better known.

(An edited version of this article was published on 29 July 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Bach in the saddle again!

From the time I heard Winston Collaco’s violin pupil Anthea Luna-Marie Dias when she played in our ensemble Camerata Child’s Play India at our Christmas concert in 2016 (she was just ten then), I’ve wanted to give her an opportunity to make a concerto debut. And I’m glad to announce that the moment is finally here: on Saturday, 28 July at Menezes Braganza hall, at Child’s Play India Foundation’s annual monsoon concert, she’ll be playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s lovely violin concerto in A minor, BWV 1041, leading from the violin the musicians of Winston’s Escola Amadeus String Ensemble (E.A.S.E.) and Camerata Child’s Play India, as part of Child’s Play’s ‘Young Performers’ series. This is literally music to Goa’s ears, and a huge milestone in Goa’s music history. I don’t think a 12-year old home-grown, locally-trained Goan child has ever played a whole concerto in public here ever before. My only regret is that we didn’t do this even earlier.

I have myself been Winston’s student back in the 1980s (it seems like another lifetime!) even though I am younger than him by only just a couple of years, and watching him work with Anthea and the rest of his students took me back to those days. My own students think I’m a bit of an intonation policeman, but he’s even fussier about intonation than me, which validates my own obsession even further. And he will persevere for ages at rehearsal to clean up the minutest details, sometimes in just a bar or two, until it is sorted.

And there was another surprise for me: the return to musical action of another old friend, taking up double-bass for the demanding basso continuo line that runs right through the concerto: Edgar Mendes, whose musical history with me precedes even my friendship with Winston, going back to our days together, first at St. Cecilia musical school, and later at Academia da Música (today’s Kala Academy department of Western Music). All three of us have played in the orchestra led by Fr. Lourdino Barreto in Goa, and were in the Goan contingent of the Bombay Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s and 1990s.Today’s generation get paid airfares for such excursions, but you really haven’t lived if you haven’t hurtled down the Goa-Bombay highway in an interstate Kadamba bus that is trying hard to cross the sound barrier (and sometimes succeeding!), while you hug your instrument-case in your lap for dear life!

What a difference a double-bass makes, especially in this composition! It gives the whole work so much more body, texture and grounding.   For the most part, our Camerata Child’s Play India has largely performed without double-bass since its inception in 2013, so it is really wonderful, and gives a delicious vibration to the core of one’s being to have it on board.

It feels so good, the three of us from an earlier generation reuniting to make music and create opportunities and platforms for GenNext that we didn’t ourselves always receive.

If one considers that Johann Sebastian Bach fathered twenty children (he became a daddy for the first time aged 23, and the last was born when he was 57! Sadly only ten survived into adulthood), one wonders how he ever found the time for his duties as an employed musician and teacher, let alone his prodigious output of compositions. It also left the thorny issue of how his musical legacy would be divided among his heirs after his death. Most of his compositions were divided between his two oldest living sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. While the latter son took good care of his share of the legacy, Wilhelm Friedemann, despite showing great musical promise, fell into hard times and sold some of his father’s masterpieces to pay off debts, and these are deemed ‘lost’ to posterity. Bach almost certainly wrote many more than the three violin concertos we know about today; some still survive in other forms, such as harpsichord concertos, while individual movements have probably been incorporated into the body of Bach’s cantatas. One lives in constant hope that an exciting discovery could still be made on some dusty library shelf or attic. Stranger things have happened; if works by Vivaldi could surface in our time, so could those by Bach.

Musicologists aren’t unanimous about when this particular concerto, in A minor, was written: while it was “generally thought” that Bach wrote it while he was Kapellmeister at the court of Anhalt-Köthen (1717-23), it now seems more likely he wrote it during his Leipzig period, sometime in the 1730s.

In his Weimar years (1708-1717), Bach encountered concertos by his Italian contemporaries such as Albinoni and others, but Vivaldi proved the biggest influence upon Bach’s own concerto writing. This ‘Venetian’ or Vivaldian model gives this concerto its three-movement (fast-slow-fast; Allegro – Andante- Allegro assai) formal layout, the basic ritornello (the “little return”) structure of an alternating pattern of solo and tutti (ensemble) episodes, seen most strikingly in the first movement.

But although the mould may be Vivaldian, Bach transcends it, taking it to a completely new level as only he could: the ostinato (insistent, persistent) bass motif in the beautiful second movement is a particularly Bachian fingerprint, something that he seems to use in some shape or form in the second movements of all his violin concertos. The final movement is in the metre and rhythm of a gigue, the lively Baroque dance which was inspired by the Irish jig. Even here, Bach innovates by introducing subtle counterpoint in the accompaniment, with the main theme presented by the first violins, then followed in turn by the seconds, violas and bass. He writes a virtuosic bariolage passage for the soloist in its climax. The term bariolage comes from the French ‘barioler’, “to streak with several colours”. It is a term easier demonstrated on the instrument than explained in words; but essentially involves rapid alternation of a static note (usually an open string) with changing notes on an adjacent string above or below, that form a dazzling melody. The device exploits the contrast between the timbre of the open string and the stopped string.

Johann Sebastian Bach is associated so much with the keyboard because of his formidable legacy for that instrument that it is easy to forget he was a highly skilled violinist as well. This is amply evident in his sublime writing for solo violin in the six works (three sonatas and three partitas) for solo violin, and another good example of bariolage is to be found in the Preludio to his third Partita in E major.

The monsoon concert will also feature the Child’s Play Chorus with an array of songs ranging from Africa to Hollywood; and the junior Camerata Child’s Play with a Latin American orchestral suite, a medley of Goan dulpods, and a kaleidoscope of other works by our violin, viola, cello and flute students. Donation passes at Furtados Music stores in Panjim and Margão.

(An edited version of this article was published on 22 July 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

None Shall Sleep

 

I think that’s a fair prediction? No football-crazy person with access to live coverage of the FIFA World Cup matches will sleep very much this week, just as so many of us haven’t  ever since it all began.

“None Shall Sleep” is the literal translation of “Nessun dorma”, the title of possibly the best-known and loved operatic aria on the planet. And it owes its popularity to football as well.

The great Italian operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti’s 1972 recording of it was used as the signature tune of BBC television’s coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. It caught the public imagination, climbing to #2 on the UK Singles Chart.

Pavarotti went on to sing Nessun Dorma at the first Three Tenors concert (also featuring the Spanish tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, with Zubin Mehta conducting the orchestras of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma at the ancient Baths of Caracalla) on the eve of the 1990 World Cup final. He sang it again as an encore at the concert, taking turns with Carreras and Domingo.

 

 

The album of the concert outsold all other classical music recordings worldwide, and Nessun dorma became a regular feature at subsequent Three Tenors concerts. It has since become a football anthem in its own right.

So what’s the aria all about anyway, and where’s it from?

It is taken from the final act of the opera Turandot by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924).

The creative cascade is an interesting one. Puccini first read an adaptation by German poet, playwright, philosopher and historian Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

of the commedia dell’arte play Turandot by Italian playwright Count Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) who based it on a story from the collection Les Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days) by the French orientalist François Pétis de la Croix (1653-1713).

But the original story is based on one of the seven stories in the epic Haft Peykar (The Seven Beauties)

by 12^th-century Persian Sunni Muslim poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209),

considered the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature. Nizami aligned his seven stories with the seven days of the week, the seven colours and the seven corresponding planets.   

The story of Turandot is the story of Monday (“moon day”) with the protagonist identified in the very first line of the story as a Central Asian princess. Turan-dokht (daughter of Turan or “land of Tur”, Persian term for a region in Central Asia, formerly part of the Persian empire, in which the Turanians, or an Iranian tribe of an Avestan age were thought to have settled) is a common term used in Persian poetry for a Central Asian princess.

But Puccini’s operatic version of the story transplants the setting to China and has Calaf, il principe ignoto (the unknown prince) fall in love at first sight with the beautiful but cold-hearted princess Turandot. Any suitor wishing to marry her has to solve three riddles, and a wrong answer means death.

The three riddles are: 1. “What is born each night and dies each dawn?” Answer: Hope

2. “What flickers red and warm like a flame, but is not fire?” Answer: Blood
3. “What is ice which gives you fire and which your fire freezes still more? What is the ice that makes you burn?” Answer: Turandot herself.

Calaf answers all riddles correctly, to cheers from the crowd. But Turandot still refuses to marry him. He strikes a deal with her, offering her a counter-riddle:  “You do not know my name. Tell me my name before sunrise, and at dawn, I will die.” She accepts.

All this has transpired in Act 2. Act 3 opens with a night scene in the royal palace gardens, with heralds proclaiming Turandot’s command to her people:  “This night, none shall sleep in Peking! The penalty for all will be death if the Prince’s name is not discovered by morning”.

Calaf’s aria echoes the edict “None shall sleep” (Nessun dorma), and then adds “Not even you, o Princess, in your cold bedroom, watching the stars that tremble with love and hope.”

He ends the aria with the certainty of his victory, which makes it in that sense apt as a football anthem: “All’alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!” (At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!)

Puccini began writing the opera in 1921 even before his librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni had written the libretto. But he died of a heart attack in 1924 (he had been diagnosed a month before with throat cancer) before he could complete it, fuelling much confusion and controversy on who would finish writing the opera. Franco Alfano was chosen because his own opera La leggenda di Sakùntala (The legend of Shakuntala) matched to some extent the setting and heavy orchestration of Turandot. Nevertheless, at its premiere, conductor Arturo Toscanini dramatically laid down his baton at the point to where Puccini had reached in writing the opera, turning around to announce to the audience “Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died”.

The opera suffers from the orientalist clichés of its time, and its performance was forbidden by the People’s Republic of China for its unfavourable portrayal of China and the Chinese people. Can one blame them? The choice of names for three character roles (Ping, Pong and Pang) seems designed to poke fun and ridicule. Gilbert and Sullivan did the same thing in their 1885 operetta The Mikado, set in imperial Japan, with names as farcical as Nanki-Poo, Pooh-Bah, Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, Peep-Bo. It was meant to satirise British politicians and institutions, but it would, and still does offend sensibilities even today.

Turandot was only performed in China in 1998, running for eight nights as Turandot in the Forbidden City as an international collaboration with Zubin Mehta conducting, with lavish sets, and even with soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army as extras.

“Nessun dorma” is the setting for an action scene in Mission Impossible 5 Rogue Nation, when the assassin is programmed to execute her target at the literally high point of the aria, the final “Vincerò”. The melodic material of ‘Nessun Dorma’ appears quite a few times later in the film, even being intertwined with Lalo Schifrin’s signature “Mission Impossible” theme.

Which country has its own Mission Impossible, Will a Rogue Nation prevail? Whatever happens, it is clear that None shall sleep this week. May the best team win!

(An edited version of this article was published on 8 July 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)