La virtù de’ strali d’Amore
Interview with music director and conductor Paul O’dette Interview with stage director Ronald Shields
Transcriptions by Marlayna Maynard, A.J. Stegall and Bryan Stanbridge.
Interview with music director and conductor Paul O’dette
Why this partnership?
This began with a collaboration two years ago with Cavalli’s earlier opera, Apollo and Dafne, and I was contacted by the music department at BGSU about the possibility of conducting Apollo and Dafne and also bringing in the specialist accompanists who are required for playing lutes and harpsichords and accompanying the opera. That was a lot of fun. It was a very successful project, and we decided to do it again two years later with another Cavalli opera, and at this point, having had the experience of doing it two years ago, we decided to expand the Eastman side of it to include all of the instrumental components, so that we’re involving the early music program from Eastman, providing the strings, the lutes, the harpsichord, the viola da gamba, the recorder, etc., and my students from Eastman, with the opera department and the theatre department from BGSU, and then to give performances not only in Bowling Green, but also at Eastman, so that we would be able to hear both sides of the collaboration in both cities. So that’s how it worked.
What are some of the hurdles you face by partnering this way?
I think one of the first hurdles was simply rehearsing the piece from hundreds of miles apart. The way we did it was that I have come in several times to coach the singers and to discuss with Ron Shields, the stage director, and Kevin Bylsma, the vocal coach, about the approach to the piece and making sure that we have the same ideas about how to shape the work. Then Kevin worked with the singers and we corresponded back and forth about questions of tempo and character and so on. I prepared the instrumentalists independently at Rochester based on the discussions I had with Ron and Kevin. So I’ve prepared the instrumentalists there, the singers have been prepared here with my visitation and we got together for the first time this week, which was very exciting and fruitful. Now, we’ll then put it all together during the performance week. Obviously in an ideal world we would all be in the same place for six weeks rehearsing every day, but I think that from the experience two years ago with Apollo and Dafne, we were able to start on a much higher level of understanding about how to work together and how to approach the piece, so it’s been a very smooth collaboration.
What is the educational value of staging this 400-year-old opera?
First of all, Cavalli is simply an outstanding composer. He’s been largely overshadowed by Monteverdi, who of course is the great Italian composer of the 17th century, but Cavalli was a colleague of Monteverdi’s, and wrote not only opera, but also sacred music of extraordinary beauty and variety, which isn’t as frequently performed today, because everyone performs Monteverdi over and over again, so Cavalli has been neglected to a certain extent. The other problem is that there is no modern edition of the Cavalli operas. So these pieces are inaccessible to a lot of people, because you have to go to Venice, to the Biblioteca Marciana, and get a copy of the original manuscript, which is written in old notation, and then try to decipher the text and the notes and your work has only just began because you have to get a hold of the printed libretto from the time, to see what information is left out of the score, because what exists in musical scores is the composer’s first thinking about composing, and a lot of the elements that were added later in performance, such as the prologue, the dance music, various insertions, various revisions, cuts and so on, you can only find by looking at the libretto. It won’t be in the musical score. And then, what you have is the melody for the voices with the text underneath and a bass line. With no indication of which instruments are to play the bass line and even what harmonies are supposed to be played. That requires a certain specialist knowledge to understand the harmonic conventions of the time as well as the conventions of performance practices in the selection of which instruments accompany the singers at any given moment.
The early attempts at performing Cavalli operas were quite unsuccessful—they were rather boring and tedious. Whereas with Monteverdi, since he was writing opera for the court in Montova, his Orfeo, for instance, of 1607, was published in a presentation publication, which details what instruments played when and indicates the harmonies that are to be played underneath, whereas Cavalli, writing a composer’s manuscript score to be fleshed out by his group of performers at a public theatre, and we don’t possess the performance material. We only possess his original composing score. That requires specialists’ knowledge, which hasn’t existed until maybe the last 10 years, and now that there are more people around the world who understand how to bring this music to life. Cavalli has become a very hot composer if you look on the internet there is a very good Web site called operabaroque.com and it gives a list of all the performances of baroque operas and you can see Cavalli is being performed throughout Italy, France, Germany, England, Japan and North America. And we’re now starting to discover these wonderful works, which haven’t been heard in 300 years.
What are some difficulties in teaching 17th-century opera to today’s vocalists?
Performing 17th-century Italian opera, which is so challenging today, is of course it was written for native speakers and unlike, say an opera of Puccini or Verdi where you might sing for five minutes on two or three lines of text, this is really like a sung play. The text is very dense and because of the amount of declamations in the work, which needs to go at the speed of a speaker in an opera, a native in a spoken drama I should say, that’s a huge challenge for a group of singers who don’t speak Italian. Even if you did have elementary Italian, being able to speak 17th-century Italian poetry at Italian velocity is quite a challenge and coordinating that with rhythms, pitches and acting on stage is indeed a daunting task.
What I do in coaching singers with this repertoire is to start with the text and speaking the text as if one were performing a play. Instead of thinking I’m a singer and I’m going to learn the melody first and then go la la la on the melody and then superimpose text underneath, that doesn’t work with this repertoire. You have to start with the text to get the natural flow and inflection of the language lingering on the important words and rattling through the unimportant words and that’s part of the structure of Cavalli’s musical setting as well.
So we start with the text and speaking the text in a theatrical way and then we put that together with the music, line by line, and then do bigger sections so that they can actually feel the context of all of it. It’s very challenging in this style in that again unlike 19th-century grand opera, the changes in character, in affect, in emotion happen in 17th-century music and poetry from one moment to the next. We don’t have five minutes of sadness followed by five minutes of happiness. But sadness and happiness can be from one note to the next, because in this very rhetorical style of the 17th century, the characters experience human emotions the way we ourselves do, where you go from one moment of anger to a moment of thinking tender feelings towards a beloved, back to rage about getting even with the guy that tried to do something to you and so its very, very rapid changes of character and that’s challenging, because people aren’t used to having to react that quickly and to make such rapid changes. But it’s very stimulating as well, because this music lives from these kaleidoscopic quick silver changes from one mood to the next. In that way, I think 17th-century music is much more like 20th-century music in the huge changes of dynamics, in color, and texture and so on from one moment to the next. So often people say “oh, I have to forget what I know about 19th-century opera, but if I think that I’m performing contemporary music then I can see how that approach to the music works very well for this.”
Can you describe the performance practice for instrumentalist in this piece?
We have the string ensemble, which functions like an orchestra in later opera, and they play the overture and the dance music and the little instrumental interludes in between the strophes of the arias. And then we have the accompanists, what were called continuo players, people who play chordal instruments, in this case various members of the lute family and harpsichord, who accompany the entire opera. So unlike 19th-century opera where you have the orchestra accompanying the singers all the way through, about 85 per cent of this opera is accompanied by lutes and harpsichords.
The strings accompany only a few very select vocal numbers and then play these interludes and dances and so on. So the strings have been rehearsed separately because their part in this is really separate and can be stirred in at the last moment, whereas the continuo players really have to know the entire show. They have to know every note, every syllable of three hours of music. So what I’ve done with them is exactly the same approach as coaching the singers, which is to go through one line of text at a time so that they know the character of this first sentence of this character is reflective and whistful and therefore we have to play a quiet chord with a slow arpeggio on the downbeat, and at this moment he’s saying “I’m going to wring this guy’s neck” and suddenly that chord has to be fortissimo with an accent on it and a bright timbre and so they know at every moment what that text means, because they have to accompany the words the same way the sings have to deliver the words. That’s very challenging in itself, because it means you’re not only reading to know what harmonies to play at any given time, that the composer hasn’t written, and so we have to make decisions about which harmonies to play when, but they also have to all the music the entire cast sings. It’s like knowing the parts of the entire cast of 20-some people, which no one else has to do.
The singers, even those singers in large roles, have a lot of music to sing, but the continuo players have to know everybody’s music from beginning to end. That’s the reason in original productions continuo players were there from the first rehearsal all the way through. And it’s interesting that Monteverdi said at one point, when he was asked by the Court of Montova when he was asked to present his new opera Apollo, he refused, because they were only offering to pay for four months of daily rehearsals after the singers had memorized the music. Now think about this—four months of daily rehearsal for native Italian speakers who were part of Monteverdi’s ensemble who knew his style and knew the texts and understood what they were supposed to do from daily experience and after they memorized the part, they would have four months of daily rehearsal an Monteverdi couldn’t cope with that because four months were insufficient for him. That gives you an idea of how high the performance standards were at the time.
Interview with stage director Ronald Shields
Why this partnership?
This is the second collaboration with Paul O’dette with the Eastman School of Music. The first one as you recall was two years ago when we did Cavalli’s Apollo and Daphne. At that time, we decided to collaborate on that unknown Cavalli score with a libretto by Busanello. It was the North American premiere of that work and because of the success of that collaboration it was decided that we would plan to do another and found a score another score that is rarely performed as far as we know this is the first staged performance of La virtù de’ strali d’Amore, the first staging of it in North America. We do know that there has been some performance of the music in some form in Europe in recent years, but as far as we know this is the first fully staged production.
The purpose of our collaboration is to explore the unknown, under performed operatic repertoire of the 17th century. Of course as you know Cavalli was one of the first opera composers to create smash hits in Venice in the 1640s and this work itself is significant is that it was his first collaboration with Faustini. It’s a comedy and as an operatic story it incorporates many of the plot devices that would later become commonplace on the operatic stage. I like to think of it as, if you are familiar with Shakespeare’s plays it’s sort of like The Tempest and Twelfth Night combined. There’s a good witch and a bad witch, there are star-crossed lovers there’s confusions and for all good stories on stage it ends happily with the couples united.
Why is there renewed interest in Cavalli?
There really is a renewed interest in the repertoire of this era. Many performances of unknown Cavalli scores have found there way onto the stage. Just recently, this summer, there was at the Edinburgh festival in Scotland there was another revival that’s usually very avant-garde theatre techniques some of the major houses as well in the off seasons are producing some of these works.
Why interest today? Well, I think the stories are relevant for a general population that is interested in the human foibles, it’s sort of like Desperate House Wives set to music in terms of dramatic values. That’s sort of the comic elements, the popular elements. At the same time they are high ideals worked out in these opera’s as well. I think that the stories themselves are rich they open themselves up to deep interpretations. I’m blown away at the beauty of the music; the fact that it’s not just a story, but a story set to music and the music is in Technicolor and is nuanced to the emotional give and flow of the characters in the scenes.
Why renewed interest in Cavalli? It’s good music, good stories, the theatrical values are high, there’s spectacle there’s people that you care about there are reflective moments there are fast moving actions. With my background in theater I answer this question from that point of view not from the point of view of a musicologist but from someone who is interested in doing production, these are operas worth doing because their fun to stage and I think audiences will like them.
What can you tell us about the setting and staging of this production?
The setting for this opera, La virtù de’ strali d’Amore, in Faustini’s original libretto, the story takes place in the island of Cypress and it’s on that location that a noble woman from Athens and a noble prince from Thrace work out their love intrigue, so Cypress is the classical location. It’s also the place where the gods and the goddesses can interact with human beings. Besides human characters in this opera, Faustini also gives us Amore, Venus, Mars and Giove these classical deities that interrupt and interface with humans that causes the conflict that has to be worked out in the plot.
Through our production here, I was intrigued with the idea that, within the story, several of the characters refer to specific locations in the Middle East, the Near East and in Asia. In fact Eraclea, the bad witch, the evil sorceress claims that she has dominion over all the princes of Asia. Meonte, one of the young lovers, he says that he felt love when he saw a picture of Cleria when he was traveling in Asia. So the story itself is filled with these references to exotic locations around the world.
So I was thinking, well for Cavalli and Faustini’s audience in Venice in 1642, how would the Venetian audience think of themselves? In that time, Venice was the crossroads of Europe, a major seaport. In the decade before the Portuguese had established a colony on what is now known as Macau in China and between 1530 and 1642, the year of the opera premiere, by that time, Macau, that specific location, had emerged as a crossroads—the major sea point, trade point of Asia. Many ways what was happening in Macao is how Venice saw itself.
So why don’t we play off the references in the libretto in the original setting these references to the exotic East, why don’t we make that the location of the story? So what we’ve done in our production is we set the action on the island of Macau. The humans are Portuguese colonists there, because there was a thriving colony set up like I said in the middle decades of the 16th century. In fact, if you know your world history at all, you’ll know the Portuguese maintained a presence there until modern times.
For our production, instead of the island of Cypress, we set the action on what is now known as Macau. The lovers are all Portuguese settlers. Evagora, the human ruler, is the head of the Portuguese colony. All the gods and goddesses that come to interfere in the love lives of our human characters we portray them as being mythic forces of Asian mythology, from China and Japan primarily, so it gives us an opportunity in our production to blur and merge two theatrical worlds—the 17th-century theatrical world of Venice along with the traditional Asian performance forms of the 17th century. In doing so, we’re able to pay special attention to spectacle in our production by pulling from those two visual grammars of practice in theatrical productions.
In summary, we chose the island of Macao in 1642 as our setting, because it seemed to fit the details of our story, number one, and number two, it was connected to references in the original text that I think open themselves up for theatrical interpretation and number three, that by doing so we’re able to bring more spectacle to our stagings.
What do you like about working with Eastman and Paul O’dette?
We’re fortunate in this partnership, this artistic collaboration, that the faculty and students of [BGSU] are able to collaborate with Paul O’Dette from Eastman School of Music. O’Dette is an international authority on Baroque performance. He’s a solo lute performer, a Grammy-nominated artist and co-artistic director of the Boston Early Music Festival for many years. In other words, for [BGSU] to attempt a work of this stature, we’re very fortunate to collaborate with an expert in the field who can bring artistry as well as first-rate scholarship to this task.
You may be interested also to note that, as in the first collaboration with Apollo and Dafne, and again with La virtù, our work on stage and in the orchestra pit is complimented by ground-breaking scholarship of opera scholars from around the world. Specifically, Wendy Heller from Princeton University was on campus two years ago for Apollo and Dafne and she’s going to return to Eastman to serve as respondent to our performance there of La virtù when we do our performance in Rochester on November 9. In addition, Jonathan and Beth Glixson from the University of Kentucky will also share their expertise; they’re historians in Baroque opera. Hendrik Schulze, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, will also come to the U.S. to participate in a symposium around this particular production.
So in short, I think it’s interesting to note that one of our goals is not only to produce the work as a theatrical, musical identity, but also to frame all of our work with the best scholarship we can have to understand the emergence of Venetian opera in this time. That underscores, I think the educational value of working in this repertoire, because it is an under-researched area of music history, and it gives us an opportunity to get our students into a process of discovery.
What are some of the hurdles you face by partnering this way? By moving the production from Bowling Green to Rochester in a very short time? How are you overcoming them?
Well there are hurdles in trying to move a production from one location to another. I think to answer this question I want to start back into some of the hurdles and challenges you face in doing this collaboration with artists and scholars that are in various parts of the globe. For this particular production Hendrik Schulze, from the University of Heidelberg, provided the copy of the archival score for me to use to even begin this production. He secured it from the library in Venice and shared the copy that he had with us as we started this project. And then Vince Corrigan, who’s a musicologist here at BGSU, and James Pfundstein, who teaches in the classics departments, in romance languages here at [BGSU]. Those two colleagues jumped on board from the very beginning and Vince started working out the modern performance edition of the score, because we had to go from the archival score from 1642 to a version of the score in a contemporary musical form so our student performers would have something to rehearse from. And James Pfundstein, from the two published libretti for this opera, the first from 1642, the second from a revival in Balogna in 1648, created the first translation into English of this libretto for our use.
So two years ago, we were starting this process and gathering materials and working through the translation. And O’Dette, we’d send the materials to him and he then would add his expertise as he worked through both documents. As far as the design of the production, the hurdles there we’d have to deal with the pragmatics of designing a show that can be staged at Bowling Green on our stage and then have it designed in a particular way that it can be packed up, loaded up and transferred in a six-and-a-half-hour drive to Kilbourn Hall. The opera itself has a cast of over 30 people. We have to coordinate our stage crew efforts with the union workers on the Eastman stage, so we had to work through those issues. The publicity for this event had to be coordinated between our marketing/publicity office at BG and the staff for publicity at Kilbourn Hall.
So from the first score, the first word translated to finally loading the truck with the costumes and the wigs and the makeup and getting the cast and crew, totaling about 42 people, going from Bowling Green over to Rochester. The logistics of that, raising enough money internally in both institutions as well as external donations, to help pay for this kind of project it’s a huge logistical effort. And all of those kinds of things have to go on while you’re dealing with the basics of teaching performance skills, teaching the music, teaching the staging. Working with student crews who would work with our faculty designers to actually build what our faculty designers here at BGSU actually designed. Margaret McCubbin, faculty member at Department of Theatre and Film, costume designer; Steve Boone, faculty member at theatre and film designed the set; Keith Hofacker, who is a staff member at the College of Musical Arts, is providing the lighting design for this particular production. Carl Walling, a doctoral student in theatre, is production stage manager for the production and tour manager.
The lead time for preparing the tour is not one of weeks, but one of months. So there are many hurdles: financial, artistic, questions of coordination and effort. As we’re nearing the opening night of this show, I have to say, from my point of view, all of the hurdles have not been insurmountable and so far so good. We’re looking forward to a sepctacular opening night and the excitement of the tour.