Ferdinand Hiller: Operette ohne Text, Op. 108; Ignaz Moscheles: Grande Sonate Symphonique No. 2, Op. 112. Stephanie McCallum and Erin Helyard, piano four hands. Toccata Next. $20.99.
Michael R. Jackson and Justin Vivian Bond: Complications in Sue. Opera Philadelphia conducted by Caren Levine. BCM+D Records. $25 (2 CDs).
Opera is all about singing. Yes, there are different schools of thought and composition when it comes to the relationship between vocal and instrumental elements of the form: in simplified terms, the Italian focusing more on the voice, the German more on the orchestra, the French tending to balance the two. But without some vocal material, opera is not opera; it is something else. And then we have Operette ohne Text by Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885), which really is something else. When Hiller created this fascinating curiosity in the early 1860s, the world of the piano was largely the province of hyper-virtuosic performers whose stock-in-trade was, to a great extent, opera. It is impossible for today’s audiences, accustomed to thinking of opera as a rarefied if not moribund form, attractive to the cognoscenti rather than the masses of music lovers, to understand and feel how compelling opera was at a time long before recordings, before electronics, even before widespread use of electricity. It was everywhere: even small tabletop music boxes were designed around opera tunes. And the great pianists of the day made much of their reputation by writing or improvising opera pastiches, fantasies and variations – Liszt being a dominating force but scarcely the only exemplar (think Thalberg, Alkan, Kalkbrenner, Pixis, Tausig, Anton Rubinstein, and others). In this world, in this context, Hiller came up with something genuinely unusual and remarkably engaging: an opera (or operetta, if you prefer) without voices, without text, without plot, but with all the elements that audiences in the 1860s would expect, recognize and enjoy. Operette ohne Text has it all – and has none of it, if by “it” we mean the outstanding characteristics of opera, which are plot and singing. Written for piano four hands, Operette ohne Text has never been recorded before, making the Toccata Next offering featuring Stephanie McCallum and Erin Helyard a genuine find. McCallum and Helyard, a highly skilled pianistic duo, throw themselves with relish (and near-abandon) into every operatic element that Hiller thinks up, from the extended Ouverture to the maidens’ chorus, the Jägerchor (the hunting chorus that would be expected in a world familiar with Weber’s Der Freischütz), the Trinklied (complete with the aftereffects of over-consumption), right down to the concluding dance and inevitable Schlussgesang to which the nonexistent singers exit the nonexistent stage. The work is great fun to hear, perhaps doubly so for today’s audiences, whose lack of familiarity with opera is irrelevant when there is music that invites all listeners to decide for themselves what may be going on as the music unfolds. A work like this would not occur to composers in the Italian or French schools of the time, given the comparatively subservient nature of the orchestra in their stage works – but for Hiller, the creation of an opera without words fit neatly into a compositional school in which orchestral material was prominent. To be sure, the “opera without words” notion exists today, but with a different meaning – it is a way for orchestras to present, in the concert hall, the music underlying existing operas. Hiller, however, produced in Operette ohne Text a piece that would work on stage only if someone chose to create a book for it – which the music invites all listeners to do on the stage of their own minds. To complement Hiller’s piece, McCallum and Helyard give a rousing performance – the first ever on a period piano, specifically an excellent 1853 Érard – of Grande Sonate Symphonique No. 2 by Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870). There is no Grande Sonate Symphonique No. 1 – the numbering refers to Moscheles’ second work in this sort of style rather than one with exactly the same title – and here too we have a work that looks askance at specific formal boundaries, in this case those of the piano sonata and orchestral symphony. Moscheles was certainly not the first to create a piece giving symphonic scope to the piano, but what makes his Grande Sonate Symphonique No. 2 interesting is the emphasis on getting the piano to produce orchestral effects. The piece’s thematic choices, developments and interconnections are symphonic, and Moscheles – whom Beethoven chose to create the piano arrangement of Fidelio – produces a series of orchestra-like effects from the very start, when listeners can practically hear brass and tremolando strings, to a concluding chorale-like movement that evokes not only traditional orchestral forces but also the organ. Taken together, these Hiller and Moscheles works constitute a fascinating aural journey not only to the composers’ time period but also to musical forms that, although they were clear in that era and remain in use today, are here shown to have boundaries that can be skillfully bent, if not broken, to produce fascinating musical blends.
Speaking of where the focus of opera lies, operatic works are almost always identified by their composers. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas are the exception that proves the rule, and the close three-opera collaboration between Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte strains it – although few audiences know that Da Ponte produced libretti for 10 other composers, and no one actually refers to “Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni” outside academia. Opera Philadelphia, however, bursts through this longstanding tradition with a work whose composers (plural) are secondary to librettist Michael R. Jackson and principal cast member Justin Vivian Bond (credited with giving Jackson the idea for the whole production). The piece is called Complications in Sue, its rather strained pun on “complications ensue” being indicative of its entire approach, which involves music by no fewer than 10 composers: Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nathalie Joachim, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Rene Orth, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen. Complications in Sue is a work that is exceptionally clever and utterly heartless, in the sense of lacking any emotional center. The idea is to progress through the life of one woman, with 10 short scenes from her 99-year lifespan created by the composers and sung by soprano Kiera Duffy, mezzo-soprano Imara Miles, tenor Nicky Spence, and bass-baritone Nicholas Newton. Given the many composers involved, there is of course no consistency of style and no sense of through composition at all: each scene is independent of all others, tied together by Bond, as Sue, progressing from birth to childhood to education to and through everyday life until eventually arriving at death. Insistent that it is meaningful, the work offers a “Sue’s Childhood” section is called Christmas Time, Somebody Kill Me, and there is a later scene called “Susan’s Imagination” with exclamatory prosaic expressions of mundane feelings such as disgust interrupting the sung material. The work pushes all the “today” buttons it can, with words about erectile dysfunction, suicide attempts and various concerns of the moment, some set to music and some delivered in prose (and prosaically). The singers do their best with what is given to them, and much of the music is in fact quite listenable – although some material is self-consciously modernistic. The audience heard in this live recording is clearly appreciative of everything happening on stage, and very much in tune (so to speak) with the formulaic progress of the story (the unkindness in “Sue’s Old Age Home” would be politically incorrect if applied to so-called “protected” groups, which aging people clearly are not as far as Bond and Jackson are concerned). In a visual presentation – say, as a DVD – Complications in Sue would likely be more effective than it is on an audio-only basis. It certainly merits a (+++) rating and an A for effort, specifically its effort to find new ways to reach out to audiences in a more-or-less operatic manner. And for the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, it is certainly an intriguing experiment and a worthwhile project. As a piece of theater shorn of its visual trappings, however, it is not especially convincing and not likely to be a work to which listeners uninvolved in its creation are likely to return. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein commented in a very different context – although her libretto for Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts possesses insouciance and verbal attractiveness to which nothing in Complications in Sue ever comes close.
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