Opera

No piece of music is ever just “about” any one thing. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni stands beneath Donna Elvira’s window and sings the aria Deh vieni alla finestra, “Come to the window, O my treasure.” It’s a serenade, a love song, and a very beautiful one. But there’s one big problem: it’s a fake.

The da capo aria, which I talked about yesterday, was a form that by 1750 had begun to lose its once enormous popularity. It was a form that was essentially killed by excess. The reign of the da capo aria coincided with the reign of the castrati as the stars of Italian opera.

For about a hundred years, roughly from 1650 to 1750, the principal type of aria in opera, and also in the oratorios and cantatas of such composers as Bach and Handel, was the da capo aria.

The aria - a musical form that’s a kind of song, but more elaborate and vocally demanding than the pieces we usually call songs. The development of opera in Italy in the 1600's is what brought the aria to glory.

Here are the names of seven composers of Italian opera who were contemporaries of Giuseppe Verdi:

Filippo Marchetti, Errico Petrella, Pietro Antonio Coppola, Luigi Ricci, Federico Ricci, Antonio Cagnoni, and Giovani Pacini. Ever heard of them? Neither had I. 

One of the reasons Mozart’s operas seem so profound to us is because they’re so true to life, and perhaps especially true to life’s complexities and contradictions. 

In August of 2013, Walter Edgar's Journal featured a conversation with Maureen D. Lee, about her biography Sissieretta Jones, "The Greatest Singer of Her Race," 1868-1933 (USC Press, 2012), which told the forgotten story of the pioneering African American diva whose remarkable career paved the way for many who followed her.

John Kennedy talks with Jeanette Guinn about the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, and about the U.S. Pemiere of the opera, Tree of Codes.

Australian composer Liza Lim dissolves boundaries to create holes in the world—perforations in which audience members might encounter more than one existence. Two-headed birds and layers of light conjure a magical world under Director Ong Keng Sen (Facing Goya; 2014) in this dramatic work inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s art book by the same name. 

Lidiya Yankovskaya is the music director of Chicago's Opera Lyric Theater. At Spoleto Festival USA she is  conducting the U.S. premiere and Spoleto production of Donizetti's Pia de Tolomei. She talks with Jeanette Guinn about the opera, its production, and about learning her craft, as well as the joy she finds in opera.

John Kennedy is a familiar face at Spoleto Festival USA. As Resident Conductor and Director of Orchestral Activities, John has a pivotal role some of the festival's biggest performances. He talks with Bradley Fuller about the opera Quartett, Mahler's 4th Symphony, his love of Charleston, and the atmosphere of Spoleto USA.

The iconic opera of the Jazz Age, Porgy and Bess, by George and Ira Gershwin with DuBose Heyward, returns to Charleston, its city of origin, in a Spoleto Festival USA production. David Herskovits, whose 1998 production of Mamba’s Daughters by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward won an OBIE award and sold out at Spoleto Festival USA in 1999, returns to direct. Celebrated Lowcountry artist Jonathan Green is Visual Designer, creating the fictional "Catfish Row," based on the actual "Cabbage Row."

  A native of Charleston, Edmund Thornton Jenkins was the seventh son of Reverend Daniel Jenkins, who, born a slave, founded the Jenkins Orphanage on King Street; the Jenkins Orphanage Band accompanied every Broadway performance of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, the play on which Porgy and Bess was based. Edmund was the Ross Scholar at London’s Royal Academy of Music, winning awards in performance and composition before his premature death in Paris at age 32.

Cabbage Row, in the Charleston of the 1920s, was the inspiration for "Catfish Row" in DuBose Heyward’s novel, Porgy​, and is the setting for Porgy and Bess​. The opera by George and Ira Gershwin with a libretto by Hayward, is brought to life on the new Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall stage, just blocks from the historical Cabbage Row.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s sobering tale, Helmut Lachenmann's opera, The Little Match Girl, explores the character's last moments as she gazes into the dreams and memories conjured by the flames of the matched she lights in a vain attempt to keep from freezing to death. Working in collaboration with visual artists, Blind Summit Theatre and Improbable theater company, 106 members of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra perform this astonishingly evocative score, full of clicks, crackles, knocks, and hisses, under the baton of John Kennedy.

    Dianne Richardson has been vocal coach for Spoleto performers since the beginning. She began her work, playing piano at rehearsals as well as coaching, at the invitation of festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti. In the early days, productions performed at Spoleto Festival USA would finish their run, then move to the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

Richardson says that, of all the wonderful productions on which she has worked at Spoleto, including Elektra, Salome and Die Meistersinger, Porgy and Bess is her favorite.

Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl tells the tragic tale of a young girl trying to survive in the bitter cold, striking matches for warmth and reflecting on her life’s memories. Composed from 1990 to 1996, Helmut Lachenmann’s opera of the same name uses two singers to play the match girl. 

  Soprano Heather Buck describes George Crumb’s 1970 composition Ancient Voices of Children as a “hyper-colored world” of sound. With a score that includes tongue clicks and other extended techniques for the voice plus unusual instrumentation, the work has remained at the forefront of 20th century vocal chamber works. The performance is part of Spoleto Festival USA’s Music in Time series on June 1st.