It's News to Me

Janos Gereben on July 14, 2015
Rubens painted "Death of Semele" shortly before his own demise in 1640
Rubens painted "Death of Semele" shortly before his own demise in 1640

A New Semele from Three Centuries Ago

Semele, princess of Thebes and the only mortal who gave birth to a god (Dionysus), went up in smoke after insisting on seeing lover boy Zeus, not to be laid eyes on by humans, even during his amorous outings.

The story is best known to music lovers as a 1743 opera by Handel. What will be new to pretty much everybody around here is the American Bach Soloists' North American premiere of Marin Marais' 1709 Sémélé (with the proper French accent aigu). Performances are Aug. 13-14, at the S.F. Conservatory of Music, during the 2015 ABS Festival and Academy, "Versailles and the Parisian Baroque."

Except for a few Baroque music specialists, Marais himself would be largely unknown today if not for the wonderful film Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World), in which Marais (his old self played by Gérard Depardieu) tries to become a pupil of Sainte-Colombe — with Jordi Savall's viola da gamba soundtrack.

ABS promises that "the amorous tale of Sémélé abounds in soaring melodies, exquisite dance music, and some of the composer’s most impressive writing in an exciting earthquake scene."

ABS Music Director Jeffrey Thomas leads Sémélé and the festival, which also features:

  • Opening night concert of works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jacques Aubert, and Jean-Féry Rebel.
  • Bach's Mass in B Minor, Aug. 9 and 16.
  • John Thiessen's Baroque trumpet concert, Aug. 15.
  • Master classes, lectures, and student concerts throughout the festival.

No vocal cast information is available other than "soloists from the ABS Academy."

Max Richter: out of focus when asleep (Photo montage by Yulia Mahr)
Max Richter: out of focus when asleep (Photo montage by Yulia Mahr)

Eight-Hour Long Lullabye Hopes to Put Audience to Sleep

Yes, that's the purpose of Max Richter's new work, called — wait for it! — Sleep, scheduled for a world premiere in Berlin. Richter, whose "recomposition" of Vivaldi is a lively affair, says sleep is one of his favorite pastimes, and he wants to share the experience with 400 audience members who will have beds prepared for them in an abandoned power station to sleep through the work, scheduled to run from midnight to 8 a.m.

The British composer and a small ensemble, playing in shifts, will perform the work, as illustrated in a Deutsche Grammophon introduction.

A report on the venture in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens quotes Richter:

The piece is structured so there's a coming and going on and off the platform, not everyone plays all together at the same time and people get breaks.

[The work is a respite from the information universe], a kind of gigantic pause, a moment to reflect. We have a lot of information coming at us in our time but we don't really have the time to engage with it properly, it's a little bit one-dimensional, I think it's because everything is going so fast. Sleep is, in some ways, a point of repose, an empty space, a quiet space to just reflect on the material.

As It Happens is one of my favorite radio news sources, so it's very disappointing to read this about Sleep: "a world-record length for a classical piece of music." Eh? Frederic Rzewski's The Road takes about 10 hours, for starters, and there is a long list, but it's all dwarfed by the John Cage Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible), a performance of which started in Germany in 2001, expected to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640. Rip Van Winkle's favorite music.

Pope Francis: people should not waste time on soap operas, but no objection to Italian operas... or Wagner
Pope Francis: people should not waste time on soap operas, but no objection to Italian operas... or Wagner

No Pontification from Pontiff About Opera

It's old news, but maybe getting lost in the many stories about Pope Francis: He is a voracious and knowledgeable classical-music fan.

The Pope told America magazine:

Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The "Et incarnatus est" from his Mass in C Minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler.

And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the "Erbarme Dich," the tears of Peter in the St. Matthew Passion. Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s Ring by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the Parsifal by Knappertsbusch in 1962."

In the interview, when talking about the Church and dogmas, Francis returned to Parsifal to say the hero's path to compassion and understanding can be a metaphor for the Church. "The thinking of the Church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the Church’s teaching," he said.

Turandot is one of his favorite operas, and when Francis was once asked about optimism, he illustrated his point that optimism is a mere human emotion "while God offers a higher and more holy virtue, namely hope" with the example of the Act 2 Riddle Scene. There, the question is what dies every morning and is reborn each night, and Calaf's correct response is "hope."

San Francisco 1851: music education in public schools and Bellini’s La sonnambula
San Francisco 1851: music education in public schools and Bellini’s La sonnambula

Musical Miracles of the Ancient City by the Bay

If you peruse local history with music in mind, you'll find some amazing facts about this city of ours. San Francisco's population explosion went from 50 (yes, a head count of 50) in 1844 to 5,000 in July 1849, and then to 25,000 in December of the same year (something about gold), but the city still had fewer than 60,000 residents in the 1850s, and yet:

  • In 1851, music education was introduced in the public school system here and in Cleveland (pop. 17,000) for the first time in the U.S.; and Bellini’s La sonnambula became the first complete opera performed in the city by a traveling Italian troupe. (Keep in mind that travel was different back then, taking months from the East Coast overland or by sea.)
  • In 1852, the first Cantonese opera performed in the U.S. premiered in San Francisco, performed by the Hong Took Tong Chinese Dramatic Company. The Bostonian Eliza Biscaccianti and the Irish-born Catherine “Kate” Hayes are the first in a series of star singers to make the fledgling San Francisco opera tradition among the most prominent in the country.
  • In 1853, a local Italian opera company forms, performing 14 operas (!) in the city’s first season, seven works by a promising, 40-year-old Italian composer, one Giuseppe Verdi.
  • In 1854, the English singer Anna Thillon stars in a series of opera performances in San Francisco.
  • In 1860, there were 145 opera performances in San Francisco, with an estimated 217,000 seats sold. Population: 56,802.

Hard to believe, but there are scores of reliable sources for all this and more, including Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life: A History and Wikipedia's Timeline of music in the United States (1850–79). Extrapolating the data to now, there should be... never mind.