If you did watch the Japanese video extract above, the moving and tragic soprano aria from the last act of Verdi’s opera Don Carlos and stayed with it beyond the tape damage and weren’t put off by the Japanese subtitles, you would have heard one of the great soprano voices that Britain produced in the 20th. Century which, sadly, in my opinion at least, became painful to listen to later in her career when she took on heavier roles.

I heard Gwyneth Jones, now of course the grandly titled Dame Gwyneth Jones, in those early days at Covent Garden in the big-voiced, the so-called spinto roles, in two of Verdi’s mature operas, Il Trovatore and Don Carlos. In both productions I was taken by surprize and then blown away by the combined power and beauty of her voice. It was an early experience of the excitement that a big, well-controlled Verdi soprano voice could bring – something that has become a rarer experience recently.

The production of Don Carlos, by the late Italian film and opera director, Luchino Visconti also starred one of the undisputedly greatest singers of our age, the Bulgarian bass, Boris Christoff in the central role of King Philip II of Spain.

If I have to decide on a “favourite opera” then it might well be this and, if so, it would have been thanks to that astonishing performance of so long ago. I have finally reached it in my chronological journey through classical music where I have only been listening to music composed in my chosen year and before, so I have been looking forward to this moment, 1867, for, maybe twelve years now.

The opera, based on an epic play by the German Romantic playwright and poet, Schiller, concerns six main characters whose lives intermingle in the brutal, rigid and tragic world of Sixteenth Century Spain at the time of the Inquisition. The king, a bass role, isolated, unloved and whose total power is only limited by the ferociously blinkered and literally blind 90 year old Grand Inquisitor, another bass in this dark, brass dominated score, who is a vicious portrait of Verdi’s much-loathed Roman Catholic Church. Philip has married the Princess of France, Elizabeth, our spinto soprano, who had previously been engaged to his son, Don Carlos, a cruelly difficult role for the tenor whose is often placed awkwardly and precariously high. Elizabeth and Carlos fell in love before the change of plan and, consequently, all three lives were propelled into unhappiness and despair. There is also the beautiful but vengeful Princess Eboli who lives to curse her own beauty and who hurries the drama to its tragic and inevitable end whilst giving Verdi the opportunity to write one of the most exciting roles in the repertoire for the Italian contralto voice. His writing here foreshadows the voices he was thinking of when writing the spectacular Requiem Mass a few years later. The sixth part is for Verdi’s favourite voice, the high baritone, Rodrigo, the young passionate Romantic idealist of Schiller’s imagination who is Carlos’ friend and protector and would do anything for him, even die for him in the cause of liberty.

Verdi sneerers quote the highly romantic friendship duet between Rodrigo (Thomas Hampson) and Carlos (Roberto Alagna) as one of the examples of Verdian lack of taste when the provincial Italian town band overwhelms the great artist. If anything, I have always found the earthiness of Verdi’s inspiration all the more powerful in an operatic context. The ground moves for me every time I hear the pomp and circumstance of the passage that interrupts the duet with the arrival of the King, Carlos’ father, and Elizabeth, his love and now step-mother accompanied by Dominican friars and music that shows us how the unbalanced young man’s passion is going to be crushed under the feet of the state. The writing for the voices vividly captures their desperation.

These characters are all drawn with a depth that involves us intimately with their fate which, as can be foretold by the opera’s first chord, is going to be an unhappy one.

This is Verdi’s great Grand Opera written for the home of grand opera, the Paris Opera House in 1867 and superseding any grand opera before or after it. It was then revised a number of times, in French and Italian until no one can really tell which is the best version.

Even though the words undoubtedly fit better to the notes in French, all versions work in the right hands and with the right voices. Verdi is burning with passion and sympathy for these people with their overwhelming sense of love which can never be consummated and that is repressed but never destroyed even after it is crushed by church, fate and state.

Only Rodrigo finds true happiness and that is achieved by dreaming of sacrificing his life for his friend and the people of Flanders who are suffering genocide at the hands of Philip’s generals.

We are held in the grasp of Verdi’s unrelenting inspiration with music which boils beneath the majesty and solemnity of Philip’s autocratic court.

I showed you Elizabeth’s aria from the last act of the opera at the top of this blog where she acknowledges her love for Carlos and also realizes that there is nothing more for her in life apart from a frail agnostic thought that “if they still weep in heaven, weep over my sorrow”.

Her grief is the mirror of her husband’s, the unloved monarch himself who sings his solo at the beginning of the fourth act just before his almost literally terrifying encounter with the Grand Inquisitor and what is possibly the greatest act in any of the Verdi operas.

If you have the time, play this clip from the modern Paris opera production (1996) which restored as good a version of the French opera as we are likely to get. Here Phillip (José Van Dam)is asking for the Church’s approval of him handing over his son to the Inquisition and the Inquisitor (Eric Halfvarson) in return demands the life of Philip’s only confidant, the young idealist, Rodrigo:

No matter how many productions of Don Carlos I see, there will always be one performance which will tower above all others and that has to be the King Philip of Boris Christoff. I was fortunate enough to see him in the later days of his career, he died in 1996, and some of the very last airings at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of Visconti’s pioneering production which, some years earlier had almost single-handedly fueled the opera’s popularity when previously it had been ignored as a difficult to produce, over-blown oddity.

If the opera is about love, regret and repression, no one better captures the darkness and bitterness of unrequited passion than Christoff whose voice, one of the greatest of the 20th. Century, is indelibly imprinted in my memory. His delivery of “Ella giammai m’amò!” (“She never loved me!”) still sends a chill down my spine. Here the king, having been up all night in his study grieving for his lot, finally opens his heart. Christoff dominated the stage with just the slightest of body movements, his powerful charisma, ability to project inner feelings and his peerless, if not gigantic, bass voice with its controlled pianissimo high notes, athletic breath control and its uniquely melancholy timbre. I have never been more impressed by any other performance on the opera stage.

If this is my favourite opera then maybe it is because that clash between idealistic passion and dark pessimism chimes with something deep inside my own subconscious – something, you will be pleased to know, I mostly keep to myself. When I am feeling more cheerful I turn to one of my other favourite operas, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, for its more balanced view of humanity’s darkness and light.

This video, I think, with, sadly, the first part of the aria omitted, was taken in 1979…I would love to have seen the rest of the act with the scene with the Grand Inquisitor. Underneath I have printed the words in Italian and English so that you can hear just how important the linking of music and words is in opera and in Christoff’s art.

Dormirò sol nel manto mio regal,
I shall sleep alone in my royal mantle

quando la mai giornata è giunta a sera,
when I attain the evening of my days,

dormirò sol sotto la vôlta nera,
I shall sleep under the black vault,

là nell’avello dell’Escurial.
there, in my tomb in the Escurial.

Se il serto regal a me desse il poter
If the royal crown could but give me

di leggere nel cor
the power to read human hearts

che Dio può sol, può sol veder,
which God alone can see!

Ah! se il serto regal a me desse il poter
Ah, if the royal crown could but give me

di leggere nel cor
the power to read human hearts

che Dio può sol, può sol veder,
which God alone can see!

Se dorme il prence, veglia il traditore;
If the prince sleeps, the traitor watches;

il serto perde il re, il consorte l’onore!
the king loses his crown, the husband his honour!

Dormirò sol nel manto mio regal etc.
I shall sleep alone in my royal mantle etc.

Ella giammai m’amò!
She never loved me!

No, quel cor chiuso è a me,
No, her heart is closed to me,

amor per me non ha?
she feels no love for me!

The post Don Carlos – is it my favourite opera? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

At the moment I have been playing R.E.M.s mavellously electric guitar based album Monster which I first got to know sitting on a hotel balcony in Richmond Virginia when it first came out. I was using what seemed to me at the time another wonderful piece of gear, my first and only Sony Discman. Now whenever I hear this album, I am transported to a Virginian high summer and an edgy American city which matches the music quite perfectly.

I am having a party on Friday and, to prove that I am no old fogey as far as music is concerned, I will use my iPod for the party music and I will shuffle my way through my albums hoping that Mahler Three doesn’t emerge unexpectedly.

So it is great downloading songs from the internet, playing them on my iPod and disgarding anything that disappoints. Here I am totally at one with the new age but……..

I have been listening to one of my favourite operas, Verdi’s Don Carlo or Don Carlos depending on which language version I happen to be playing. On my chronological progress through the history of classical music, I have reached 1868 but I have stayed stuck in 1866 as far as this opera is concerned.

I have owned and played the great Carlo Maria Giulini recording (EMI 7243 5 56152 2 0 ) on vinyl and on cd and went straight to it as soon as my strict regime allowed it. It was great to discover that I loved it just as much as I always have even after such a long time away. As the project has now been running for twelve years, I am really missing some of my late Nineteenth Century favourites to say nothing about all that exciting music from the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Now comes the annoying part.

I had been preparing myself for this moment. Reading Julian Budden’s definitive books on the Verdi operas (The Operas of Verdi by Julian Budden, three volumes Published by Clarendon Paperbacks, Reprinted 2002) and the powerful original play by Schiller (Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller in a new version by Mike Poulton, Nick Hern Books, 2005) and I had also ordered the cds of Verdi’s excellent original French version of the opera in the recording by Antonio Pappano (EMI 7243 5 67401 2 9 ).

Volume Three of the Julian Budden book arrived last week after I had ordered a secondhand copy over the internet. My excitement at the thought of this next installment of Budden’s magisterial account of these great operas was slightly diminished by the discovery that the first seven pages had been ripped out. I kept my patience however, wrote a complaining email and got my money back. Impressed by my own self-control, I looked up those seven pages in the library.

So, as you can see, I was taking this seriously. I have seen several productions of this opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden over the years including, most memorably a classic performance by the sensational Russian bass Boris Christoff as the troubled King Philip the Second with the then vocally flawless Gwyneth Jones as Elizabetta.

I have known it and loved it in its five act Italian version for all of my adult life but I had never got round to listening to it in its original French as Verdi first conceived it for its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1866. In one stroke, this Italian genius wrote the greatest of all French grand operas and I have always wanted to hear it.

So this was the time if there ever was to be a moment in life when I could sit down and study this quite amazing piece with its marriage of politics, religion and passion portrayed by some of Verdi’s most psychologically complex characters.

I had ordered the box set of cds from America and they were sitting in my study awaiting this long expected moment.

That time finally arrived last week, so I sat down with my nicely brassy hi-fi system, pressed the remote button and the music began. For all the joys of my iPod, there is nothing quite like sitting back in a room with a good acoustic listening to epic music on an impressively sonorous sound system – call me old-fashioned if you will.

All was well until the end of the first cd when an ominous click turned into a sound jump and then aural chaos. Thanks American CD company – you sent me a bummer! My first attack of hi-fi rage got worse as I tried all known ways of removing the scratches from the surface of the cd. Each time, there was a moment of hope followed by the same disaster. I left the whole thing and walked away.

I went back the other day, thinking passive thoughts about wanting to hear the rest of the opera and at least the other two cds were probably fine.

So I sat down again, carrying on where I had left off and the room filled with sound.

Then there was a bit less sound and then a few crackles and my amplifier decided to have one of its intermittent faults. Usually the odd kick, shake and a bout of cable fiddling does the trick but not that day. Grand Opera on half cock is just not my thing so the hi-fi rage returned with more vengeance than Verdi’s Grand Inquisitor. Fifteen years of this technician-defying fault finally decided me on ruthless action. I would replace my amplifier and not listen to any music until the system was working again. Well, no music apart form R.E.M on my i-Pod that is.

And here it is, my new piece of equipment, it arrived this morning, bought on-line via E-Bay, my new, well secondhand, Kenwood 3020 Second Edition integrated amplifier. It is sitting in the hall but I am not sure if my hi-fi rage has subsided enough for me to risk opening and installing it. What if it doesn’t work? Could I be sure that I would not act like a pampered, drug-crazed rock star, and throw the whole system out of my window onto the street below?

Maybe I should just move on, download it onto my iPod but, no, Verdi’s opera has a powerful draw and it needs that acoustic punch. I think I will go and plug in the new amp, see you all later.

The post My technology problems and Verdi’s Don Carlos. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.