APRILE MILLO, SOPRANO

Aprile Millo performed Tosca in Cincinnati recently to packed and enthusiastic houses. Since her debut in New York in 1984, Millo has sung 157 performances at the Metropolitan, always in the big girl Italian repertoire including: Aida, Trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, Andrea Chenier, Luisa Miller and Tosca. There was a falling off of appearances in the mid 1990s but lately Millo has triumphed at Carnegie Hall in concert performances of La Gioconda, Adriana Lecourvreur and The Girl of the Golden West. Twenty years ago she was resolutely touted by press and public as the new-last member of the old school style of Italian singing. Her Met performances are rare these days, but they always attract the full houses and the "buzz" one heard on nights Tebaldi was singing. We spoke on June 20, 2006

CP: I talked with some young people at your Tosca last week, and they hadn't heard the Italian style before. They hadn't heard capital R Real opera

AM: They heard exalted Broadway...

CP: They didn't know Tebaldi...

AM: Oh, my God!

AM: And I told them, well she's in heaven but you'll hear Millo

AM: Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you for that. That's so nice.

CP: When you open a score to Tosca or Trovatore and you look at this character, and you learn the words and the notes, then what?

AM: Well, that's saying a mouthful, because the score is the blueprint for humanity. Not only of the composer but of the character that you're singing. There was a wonderful interview years ago where the great Maria callas said, you look at something with a straight jacket. That's a wonderful expression. You do it exactly as it is written. In the hands of a great master, it generally is exactly the character's state of mind. So you try it first very stiff, very ...exactly as written. Then of course, inperceptively your own personality is going to find resonance with what you're hearing and what you're saying, and then it takes off from there.

CP: And that must happen, right? Your own personality to some extent must get in there?

AM: Well, I think that's the only salvation at all, because if you look at how many great singers have already sung this music, the best has already been done in my mind. All you can bring to it in all humility is your soul, and how it will color that particular kind of music.

CP: And what about the people to whom and with whom you are singing? The people on stage? What do you need from them?

AM: I wouldn't dream of naming names! What I hope for on stage is a feeling of religiosity for the music. That it isn't something where you wear leisure suits to come to rehearsal. I am sort of young enough to have been a bridge to the old school, like with Bergonzi, with Fiorenza Cossotto, and then with the younger older school, with Domingo and Pavarotti, and now of course the current stars. And you look at them and you say, My God, no one used to come to an opera house without being fully dressed suit and tie.

CP: It must be seen as being very important to you, what you are doing

AM: ..what they are trying to reduce opera today to is exalted Broadway.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Broadway. The kind of Broadway I would have preferred, I was too young to have seen was Mary Martin and Ethel Merman...Gertrude Lawrence, or something of subtlety and beauty that used the natural voice to project. What we're finding in opera is that they want that same thing now. They want the body looking perfect. The don't care if you can hear it, and I'm sure we'll be into miking before the end of the next fifty years, which will then deprive us of the last bastion of real, authentic sound. The way the oboe, the viola, the clarinet sounds, that is how you hear it in the theater. When the body, which is the human Stradivarius, is singing without amplification on stage is the last true human experience in so grand a setting.




CP: Do you have to decide who Tosca is? She lives in a specific time and there are historical persons and events mentioned and it's even supposed to take place at a specific date and place (Rome, June 15, 1800) Do you decide what kind of a person she is?

AM: I think Puccini decided it first. Then I try to wed myself as much as I can to what he asks for. But again, your own personality will peep through. I made sure that
I was always backed by people who lived closer to the time when it was written, like Magda Olivero or Renata Tebaldi.. I made sure to speak to these people to say look, in your experience would this be acceptable? Direct from the line of the composer, especially with Madame Olivero who actually actually know most of these people

CP: Do you remember the first time you heard operatic singing, live?

AM: It took my breath away. I remember exactly. It was listening to my mother and father singing the Cavalleria duet. And I kept thinking where did my mother and father go, because they were no longer themselves, they seemed to go into another world. My mother said oh,no that's just opera. When you are singing opera you go to another world. Later on in life whenever she would hear a piece of music, her face would leave and she would be in a sort of exalted state, like a trance. It sounds stuffy, but if you've ever seen a parent look at something with a sense of transfiguration, you want to know why.

And as I sing now I know exactly what my parents were talking about, I think it's a direct line to another world. Some people want to call it heaven, or another dimension. However you call it, it is a better and more beautiful world, and so now because I just lost Mom in June of last year and my Dad a few years ago, now when I sing I'm talking to them. It's my only time to be with them. Now, I'm truly gone!

CP: How do I get young singers to listen to the older recordings?

AM: I think you just have to expose them and I think the evening they're exposed has to be incredibly fun. People come to my performances because they know it's a free for all in the theater. People are cheering and stamping on walls..it's very exciting. Whereas if you come into the theater and you're taught like we are in the rest of life we're taught to not make a sound, to be adult children...don't speak unless you're spoken to...don't try to be original...but don't be yourself. So in a theater it's a victory in a way that a woman is singing over an eighty piece orchestra and you can hear her. Then, people go nuts! They're screaming and it's so exciting.

CP: Who are the singers who were your role models?

AM: No question, Claudia Muzio, a fabulous Italian soprano. No question Zinka Milanov. And of course my great friend Renata Tebaldi- and Rosa Ponselle without a doubt, an absolute God of vocality.





CP: What is your hope for opera in the future?

AM: That it doesn't sell out.

CP: In what way?

AM: That it doesn't try to be all things to all people. If you look at the Mona Lisa in a fantastic museum, she does not try to be The Last Supper. She does not try to be the Transfiguration in the Papal residence. She is what she is. You are ennobled by looking at her...there's an enigma, blah blah blah. What opera does not need to do is to make itself over. It is already very timely, it is already very accessible. It's big, it's grand, it's triumphant. It is a human being singing directly to you. And now they say they have to look like movies stars. No, they don't...What's annoying is that several of the ballerinas who are singing today, there's nothing wrong with it if you're up close, and ah yes, it's an intriguing smaller voice and how lovely and sometimes they do something with the text. Most times they don't. And so you say okay, okay, okay. If you're sitting further back what you notice is the annoyance in the audience that they can't hear!

CP: And lastly, what is meant by style? The Italian style, the French style? Are these viable phrases today?

AM: Yes...for me when you sing in the French style you sing as a French person would speak with music. If you sing in the Italian you're singing an Italian thought which means you really have to know how they think...if it's a good composer they are going to express it to you in a particular kind of line, or utterance that is exactly how they speak. If you listen to the real Italian literature, a true Bellini phrase is very different from Verdi and Mozart. There's a longer, longer bow used in the bel canto; then it's transferred into what I call verismatic bel canto, which is Verdi, and then of course Puccini takes it further and it becomes absolute conversation. Through it all there's a sense of legato that is completely missing today. Completely missing! ...I heard recently at a very highly touted evening in which we were to be unbelievably blown away by some piece...but it had to have a bel canto phrasing. And you heard two or three notes and you thought oh good, good, good, they're going to go ..it's going to be magnificent. And then all of a sudden it got chopped, or they used a consonant to destroy the line. It doesn't have to be a robot, but it has to vibrate, like Fritz Kreisler on a violin. It has to breathe , it has to be elastic, but it does have to have the legato, and I think that's one of the great things missing today, is a sense of really beautiful expression within the sound.
We want an athlete on stage just throwing out high notes, but those notes are sometimes wed to emotion.

CP: And they're connected to other notes

AM...of course!

CP : There's a whole string of pearls there in connecting the notes you want to go for. If anyone heard Callas sing Norma you know...

AM: And look..the conductor Tullio Serafin taught Rosa Ponselle. He then updated or adjusted it to the Callas Norma. He then updated and adjusted to Joan Sutherland. Those three giants he taught Norma. Yet they all have the absolute requisite legato and Bellini style. It proves it can be done.
The problem is that today we have many lovely voices who are used up by the recording companies. And they are also in the hands of maestri who want to be symphonic conductors. And there's not enough symphonies for them. So they "settle." That's a key word, they "settle" on opera. And they know nothing about voice...so then you have these young babies in the hands of babies, and no one really understands the style. Or they think they're going to "re write" it, as if they have a direct line. Tradition is important to observe.
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Aprile Millo sings Tosca, La Gioconda and Maadalena in Andrea Chenier at the Metropolitan Opera during the 2006-2007 season.

PATTY DUKE on mental illness

Actress Patty Duke was born Anna Marie Duke and was taken from her parents at a very young age to be raised by a theatrical agent couple, the Rosses, who developed a young girl into a meal ticket. Miss Duke won an Academy Award at sixteen for her portrayal of Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker", a film shot during the day while she played the role nightly on Broadway. "The Patty Duke Show" is an icon of the bubble gum sixties; its long run made her a household name. Her career in TV and films has continued since then, with a number of ups and downs, notably a diagnosis of bi polar disorder over twenty years ago. Today, Patty Duke has reclaimed her name Anna. She's the author of two books, "Call Me Anna" and "A Brilliant Madness".
Her TV and film roles run from Martha Washington to Neely O'Hara in
"Valley of the Dolls" to Annie Sullivan in a TV remake of "The Miller Worker".
Today, Anna Marie Pearce aka Patty Duke is happily maried to Mike Pearce, and is the mother of 17 year old Kevin. One of her older children is movie star Sean Astin.
She lives in Idaho. We spoke by phone on June 14, 2006 for a planned broadcast special on mental health issues.

CP: In one of your books you wrote that as a young child you were told by your guardians, "Anna is dead. You're Patty now." To say that to a child made my flesh crawl...

PD: Isn't it astonishing, no matter how stupid somebody is, they gotta go pretty far to come up with that one!

CP: The thrust of my program, which I hope will air later this fall is the lack of any kind of safety net or any kind of care for a kid with mental illness after he ages out of his parents coverage. You're on your own.

PD: Yup

CP: At least you are here in Ohio...

PD: Everyhere!

CP: That's what I want to dig into...

PD: It seems to be that in the 17-18-19-20 area, it seems to be the most intense and with the least available help.

CP: Do you mean the disorder becomes more intense then?

PD: I think so. In my twenty three years of being what I call an expert patient, its just been my personal observation. Its also the toughest time to make the diagnosis, in the teenage years, because when we're teenagers we do outrageous things
..so to sort it out from being a wacky teen to being a chemically imbalanced person, is really tough.

CP: In reading about your life and your own childhood, there was a lot of horror that went on, and at the same time you won an Academy Award at sixteen..so I'm trying to make sense of that level of accomplishment coming out of that much horror-

PD: ...I know that I was born with a chemical imbalance. I didn't know what it was until much later, but I was also born into a family with at best severe emotional problems, in New York, in the lower class neighborhood, and there's almost a street fighter in me, which I notice when I watch The Miracle Worker...

CP: That's interesting because when you have been written about about as an actor, the word "powerful" is usually attached to your name. She's a powerful actor.
She's a strong actor

PD: Honest to God I think it is that incredible spirit to survive, whether it takes anger or charm, or ocassionally grace, whatever it takes not go down. I think that those things might have existed without the illness...

CP: Do you think you would have been the same powerful actor with a safer Mom and Pop type upbringing?

PD: No, I don't. But that bothers me because then I'm saying that you have to have some torturous life in odrer to be creative and powerful. And I don't really believe that. I've worked with people all my life who didn't grow up in dysfunction and severe rage in their lives, and they're really solid and inspired. But I've also worked with at least as many who come from my kind of background.

CP: You write very poignantly of how when you were very young you were cast in a film with Judy Garland, and you wound up taking care of her. And the irony of that was not lost on you, even then

PD: No, it was not. And again, I had yet to be diagnosed. But there was a simpatico.
First of all she was JUDY GARLAND. Also, that fragile wounded bird like character that she was, it was like the strongest magnet I've ever felt

CP: Was she attracted to you in the same way?

PD: I believe so. Yet neither of us would drop our pride long enough, or knew enough about ourselves to know that we were two peas in a pod.

CP: You were born with a chemical imbalance, you came out of the web with a physical problem, but you also had that street fighter smarts, were you born with that or did you learn that as a survival technique as a little kid?

PD: Both.

CP: They do go hand in hand. That may be why you're still here and still working.

PD: Exactly. Yes, because who was my own worst enemy all those years?...the self sabotage was at least as bad as the cruelty as I experienced.

CP: Did you ever have a light bulb moment as a kid when you said, Not everybody lives this way?

PD: I don't know if I'd call it a light bulb moment..because for that the light goes on and you see in the light and you move in a direction. I do remember when I was about 16 realizing that hey, this isn't how people live. How come I don't see other kids like this? And unfortunatley I turned it in, because the fear was still greater than anything else. The fear of this unknown that the Rosses held over me over all those years...

CP: And until you were a legal adult it was in noone's best interest to get you help.
You were earning money. You were a big star. So by the time you didn't legally need to be attached to anyone any more it was totally up to you to get help for yourself, or to know you needed help, and that's a problem hat persists today. A lot of these kids turn 18 or 21 and you are on your own even if you have the best parents in the world in terms of The System....

PD: Exactly.

CP: ...but just he money to pay for the medications...

PD: One of the great tragedies of these illnesses and whether or not people get care ie economic. People tell me things. My response is You know there are people that have studied these illnesses who can be helpful, and just beause they are psychiatrists doesn't mean we should avoid them. And I go into this whole long soulful thing...describing help that is available and by the time I get to the end of it the person says, I have no money. I have no insurance.
It stops me in my tracks. I am beginnig to learn through my travels, that there are indeed some frail systems available for people without money, but its the best kept secret in America...

CP: Well its been kept from me, this is good to know.
One of my goals for this program is to piss people off so they turn on their elected represetives and demand some changes

PD: I have been deficient. In all of my work and it hads been really diligent,
I have not gone to-probably because of fear-I have not gone to the most powerful resource, which is-piss 'em off. To actually gather folks, and remember we are allegedly by the people, of the people, for the people...

CP: Do you think pissing them off is what its going to take, both the people affected and our legislators, to get some laws enacted to protect people who can't protect themsevles?

PD: I'm afraid we're going to need a healthy portion of that. The other thing is to turn on the light bulb and show that we've been in the dark and we've been terrified. And I firmly beleive ...fifty percent of our crime would stop.

CP: Pete Earley, you blurbed his book, "Crazy"..

PD: Oh! I'm telling you...!

CP: Here's this man and the authoriites say to him well, if your son tries to kill you or kills himself, bring him back...they literlly said that to him!
Because he's past legal age and they can't admit him involuntarily

PD: That book had for some of the missing elements we've talked about this morning. It had for me that impetus that rage can give you. That you can use in a healthy way. It was also such a source of information. I'm someone who thinks I live in the mental health community, and there was so much I didn't know about legislation, about care, about the lacks thereof!

CP: Does that get tired for you, to be know as the mental health advocate rather than the the actor, the mother, the wife?

PD: No. You know I'm about to start a low budget film. A friend of mine wrote it. We're going to get some drapes and paint the barn and make a movie. So I have an emotional investment. And yet, the closer the time comes to starting the more it seems alien to me. It's been true for a while. As uncomfortable as I was when I started publically talking about mental illness and mine in particular, it is now where I live. It's where I'm comfortable. It's where I get the most satisfaction. There isn't glory all over it, and nodody rolls out a red carpet

CP: The payback-spiritually-must be intesne.

PD: And it takes so little for me. It take sme telling my story, telling what I'v e learned over these twenty some odd years and being willing to be truly naked so that others can say, Oh she has the same thing I have..Its strange to me about our society that celebrities can have such an impact and when it dawned on me
I siezed the moment...

CP: Well, I went to school with litle girls who had Patty Duke lunch boxes

PD laughs

CP...they went out AS you trick or treating. The boys would go as John Glenn.
The girls went as Patty and Cathy and the boys went as John Glenn...

PD: Oh my God! You have just tickled me so!

CP: You've said you've been taking lithium twice a day for years.
A lot of people don't get a drug cocktail that works. Did you luck out?

PD: Number one I lucked out. I don't have any noticeable side effects.
Other people unfortunately may over long term use have very severe side effects. Kidneys, liver, weight gain...Nowadays there are a good 60 to 150 types of drugs available, each very specific and each an alternative for something that was prescibed that doesn't work. But I also say to people, sometimes we do not give it a chance. One of the things we're working with is that we're new to the idea that we have this illness and we're new to the idea of side effects, and sometimes we program these. I urge people to please give whatever medication they're prescribed a chance and know that there are alternatives. And sometimes its a hunt and peck...

CP: Lithium takes time to kick in...Do you remember the first day you woke up and felt different after being on lithium?

PD: I do. I remember there as nothing dramatic. I just remember after being up for a couple of hours I actually noticed an absence of the motor running, and the fidgety kind of behaviors that I had besides the behavioral crazies. I noticed it but I didn't trust it. It took a couple of days more for me to really start to believe, maybe its these pills I'm taking. The building of the trust in it takes a while.

CP: It's a long habit to feel bad, so you have to learn to feel good.

PD: You develop certain habits that you are now accustomed to, and when the feelings that provoked those are gone, you have to relearn habits. You get to invent
new habits, positive and negative!

CP: That's a a gift of getting older. You can screw up in a different way

PD: It is! Its a compensation. I'm going to be sixty this year...I have found when I stop the superficial railing at aging, there really are compensations-separate from a clinical diagnosis. There are differences that happen and the wisdom really does come!..I'm vey lucky. I accidently on purpose surround myself with young people.
We have a 17 year old son. He has about six buddies who are habitiual weekenders here, and now one of them has a girlfriend and now she's become part of the group.
And I'm just, I try really hard not to be obsessive and possesive but I find that there energy is tremendously helpful...

CP: There are a couple of websites for you and there's a fabulous blog on it www.pattyduke.net

PD: I read every single e mail. They all get answered by me.

CP: It doe sa lot of good, and I thnak you again for your time and your enoristy

PD: Oh Chrisotpher,I've had so much fun

CP: And I wish I had that lunch box to send you...it'd be worth a lot of money now on EBAY!

JOSEPH VOLPE and THE TOUGHEST SHOW ON EARTH

The following is a tracnscript of a telephone conversation I had with Joseph Volpe,
General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, on June 1, 2006

Joseph Volpe went to work at the Metropolitan Opera over forty years ago as a carpenter, and this year he retires as the Company's General Manger,
which means he is the boss of all bosses at the world's most famous opera house.
His new book is called The Toughest Show on Earth.
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CP: Your book is called Toughest Show on Earth...so what's so tough?

JV: The job itself, the way I did it. It was the focus of my life. I was hands on in everything. I needed to see everything first hand. I'd go in at 9 or 10 in the morning and still be there after the evening's performance, close to midnight.
It ends up being your life. Anytime there were problems it always came first. I just thought it was a catchy title-Toughest Show on Earth-but the job gave me such great pleasure. I'm going to miss it.

P: If I were a kid and I wrote you a letter asking you, what do I have to learn in order to run the Met someday, what would you tell me?

JV: I'd first say you should learn everything you can about opera and theater.
You can do that anywhere. Any small opera company. But truly devote yourself to learning...you have to dedicate yourself to learning everything you want to do.
Even after a late performance, when I was master carpenter I would take the train home after the performance and I would be constantly reading about different aspects of it. Really dedicating yourself to learn everything you can, so you are prepared to run it if you get that opportunity.

CP: That is the school, just going and doing it.

JV: Absolutely!

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NOTE: Volpe's first boss at the Met was Rudolf Bing (1902-1997).
Bing ran the Met from 1950 to 1972. He was not known for personal warmth.
Check out his memoir '"5000 Nights at the Opera"
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CP: You began there during the days of Generl Manager Rudolf Bing.
The great Brigit Nilsson said of him, "When Bing retires he'll be missed, even if people don't like him now." You have some very interesting stories about him and especially about a confrontation with a stage director.

JV: I felt he was a wonderful general manager, he was very hands on. Yes he was aristocratic in a sense, and probably very imperial in the way he did things, but he really was a wonderul fellow. The stage director happened to be Franco Zeffirelli. I didn't know who he was. I was trying to make a production work of (Samuel Barber's new opera) Antony and Cleopatra, and Zeffirelli saw that I was really throwing out, disposing of some of his scenery, and he was taken aback. He said, What are you doing? And I responded, I'm trying to make this show work. We have some wacko designer here...and the next morning Mr. Bing called me into his office to introduce me officially to Franco Zeffirelli...and the funny thing Christopher was that at my Gala concert a few weeks ago, there's an interview with Zeffirelli and he talks about it-and he's very charming.
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NOTE: The Gala Concert honoring Joseph Volpe was given at the Metropolitan Opera house on May 22 2006 and later televised throughout the country on PBS.
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NOTE: Soprano Renata Tebaldi (1922-2004) was a beatiful woman with a glorious voice. She was the artist most beloved by the New York audiences from her debut in 1955 to her retirement in 1973. If you don't know her recordings, go to the library.


CP: Recently a colleague of yours, the soprano Loretta di Franco, was interviewed
and she mentioned Renata Tebaldi coming onstage in "Adriana Lecouvreur" and she said this was one of the great moments, it was great for the audience and for di Franco herself. Did you have moments like that with artists?

JV: Well Renata Tebaldi, I remember when she did "La Gioconda" and I was just so taken by her. I didn't think of the audience (laughs) it was very personal with me, and I just flipped, she was so wonderful...When she stopped singing, she was under the impression that she would receive a pension from the Met and of course the star singers did not, and I was the one who had to tell her the bad news. She was very upset about that. Years later she came back to New York to visit. We had a big luncheon for her, and we had a wonderful time, she was a singer that set me and so many others on my ear. She was just incredible.

CP: Even when Tebaldi wasn't singing, she WAS the show

JV: Yes! She walked down the aisle at the Met druing her visit many years after she had last sung here to her seat before a peformance and the audience was just so excited Renata Tebaldi was there!

CP: You write in your book that one of your favorite Met productions was of Kurt Weill's "Mahagonny" staged by by John Dexter....

JV: Right. Well, John was a really man of the theater. He was a believer that you do productions with less scenery and less clutter because then the singers would act more. And of course it starred Teresa Stratas and she is a favorite. I was so enamored with the entire cast and the way John directed. It was one of the best productions I've ever seen. And Teresa was a large part of that.

CP: She's a little woman, maybe 90 pounds wringing wet and she's a huge artist

JV: Oh...

CP: I remember back in the 70s when the courtain went up on John Dexter's staging of "Dialogues of the Carmelites", no one knew what this was...

It was a broadcast, the house premiere, and there was a gasp before the opera even began

JV: Do you remember the opening scene? When the nuns lie there outstretched, cruciform..John was just an incredible director

CP: He was a Brit, from the spoken theatre, well known for "Equus"
You have a lot of strong personlities at the Met. How-er, dynamic can it get?

JV: With strong personalities there are always differences of opinion, and one needs to work them out. I find that's one of the biggest responsibilities, being supportive to the performers, to the artists, so that they can perform in an environment when they can do their best work, so you have to find ways to do that. It's been said Christopher that I have a strong personlity

CP: No! Who said that?

JV: (laughs) Well its been said but it only helped me with everyone else. You cut through all the negotiation and get down to the real facts because they knew I wasn't going to fool around and have long discussions. If there was a problem they knew we'd look at it and we would resolve it. Period. And we got on with things. But no, over the years, I must say I will miss the artists greatly, the artists and the company members, because that is what the Metropolitan Opera is about..it's the Company, the performers, that's what the Met is.
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NOTE: One of the most controversial moments in Volpe's Met career came shortly after he was given the title General Manager in 1994. He fired the soprano Kathleen Battle for "unprofessional behavior" during rehearsals. An exquisite vocalist, Battle had reportedly long shown disdain for her colleauges and a temeperament thought to be counterproductive and destructive. She has not appeared in opera since 1994, but continues a hghly successful concert and recording career. Battle's firing from the Met was front page in the New York Times.
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CP: Is it your job to be proactive in the care of artists? I do have to bring up the Kathleen Battle situation because you devote an entire chapter to her in your book..
You said that was one of your great regrets, that it couldn't have been resolved

JV: I was very active in helping artists, and being supportive. But it is a big regret. Obviously Kathy had a lot of probems. And it got so I had to make the decision I did to fire her, but it was unfortunate. In a way, that was a failure of mine. I tried very hard to work it out so she could perform, but I wasn't successful, and I don't know what more I could have done...

NOTE: In the book Volpe reports on a heated exchange with Battle's manger. He said, "Bing was known as the man who fired Maria Callas. Do you want to be known as the man who fired Kathleen Battle?" To which Mr. Volpe replied, "Kathy Battle is no Maria Callas."



CP: She is an extraordinary artist

JV: Yes, absolutely.

CP: What do you want the Met's future to be?

JV: My hope is that the Met and opera in this country will continue to flourish, even though certainly the economy and 9/11 and the war in Iraq have kept people from going out and spending money. My hope is that we protect the wonderful art form that it is. What concerns me is that when there are new works and composers write works that require amplification, I do want to make sure that opera does not go the way of Broadway. Years ago Broadway was wonderful and you had people who could really sing. Now with the amplification, that's no longer so important...Well, its not opera, and it can't be great opera or grand opera if we amplify. That's one of my biggest concerns.

CP: How about your own future? You're going to work for Rudolph Giuliani

JV: Yes, I'm going to work with Rudi and we''ve got a lot of projects I'll be involved in and managing. I said I wanted to do something completely different before I retire for good and working with Rudi in this way is a great opportunity. I don't know what Rudi will be doing as far as his political career, but I'm not going to get involved there. I couldn't be elected dog catcher, nor help anyone, so its better I stay away from that front!

CP Oh come on!

JV: No, I'm not!

THE TOUGHEST SHOW ON EARTH by Joseph Volpe

Intrerview with Pete Earley, author of CRAZY

CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
by Pete Earley
c.2006 G.P. Putman and Sons

READ THIS BOOK! IT IS HORRIFYING AND RINGS ALL TOO TRUE!

see also www.peteearley.com

This is a transcript of a phone conversation between myself and Mr. Earley as I prepare a broadcast on the problems in safely and effectively treating those with mental illness. Mike is Mr. Earley's son. He was diagonsed five years ago-at 22- with bi polar disorder.

PE--Pete Earley
CP--Christopher Purdy

RAW TRANSCRIPT

PE: Mike is my son, when he was in college he developed a mental illness, bi polar disorder. I rushed him from New York where he was attending school to Virginia, where I lived, and during that four hour trip, it was unbelievable. His moods would shift. At one moment he'd be laughing, the next minute he'd be sobbing. It was very difficult to watch. And then he said to me, Dad how would you feel if someone you loved killed himself. So of course I rushed him to an Emergency Room to get him some help. And the intake nurse rolled her eyes when he told her that he believed pills were poison, and that he was God's messenger. We waited for four hours, and then a doctor came in and I'll never forget, he came in with his hands raised, as if he were surrendering, and he said, Look I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to help your son. And I said, You haven't even examined him! He said, it doesn't matter, the nurse told me your son believes that pills are poison, he doesn't seem to me to be in any iminent danger, either to himself or others, and under Virginia law he has either to be hurting himself or hurt someone else, in order for me to forcibly treat him. So take him home, and if he tries to kill himself or kill you, then bring him back and we'll try to do something.

C: He actually said that to you, we can help him if he tries to kill himself or you?

PE: That's right....I took him home and for the next forty eight hours I watched him sink into this mental abyss. At one point he had tin foil wrapped around his head and he was watching TV because he thought the CIA was trying to penetrate his
thoughts through the airwaves. He slipped out of the house. He broke into a neighbor's house, luckily they weren't home. He went in there to take a bath, and he did quite a bit of damage in the house, and then the police came. It took five of them to drag him out of there, and they took him to a mental health center. And I thought, Good! Now he'll get some help. When I got to the Center the police said to me No, he's still not considered a danger to himself or others, so unless you go in there and tell people he threatened to kill you, we'll take him to jail and you don't want that.

So I went in and I lied. I said, My son has threatened to kill me. That got him in the hospital...then I was told no, he STILL didn't seem to be a danger, so he would be released unless he became violent. Then the police called to tell me he'd been charged with two felonies. I was so frustrated because here the law had kept me from getting him help, and now the law wanted to punish him for a crime he committed when he was obviously ill.

CP: In your book you mention "the crimilaztion of the mentally ill"

PE: That's exactly right. That's what's going on right now. Jails and prisons have become our new mental asylums. 700,000 people with severe mental illness go through the justice system each year. The largest mental facilty in the United States is not a hospital, but the Los Angeles County jail.

We are turning those places into our new asylums. That's where people end up when they need help with their mental illness, and that's not right.

CP: You book, CRAZY focuses on your son Mike and also the mental health system and lack of any safety net for the mentally ill

PE: I wanted to put a human face on this story, so with Mike's cooperation I decided to tell his story. But I interwove it with the bigger story. I went to Miami where 9% of the population has mental illness, and I wanted to see how that community deals with persons with mental illnesses. And what I found out is rather typical. They either end up in jail, they end up eating out of garbage cans in the streets, OR some with chronic diseases end up in assisted living facilites. Boarding homes that the state pays for. There are 4500 people in Miami who live in 647 of these homes, 400 of them can't even pass minimun safety standards. They're slums.
In Washington there was a recent expose telling how many patients in facilities like these were murdered, actually murdered by caregivers, they were starved to death, they were abused. A Milwaulkee newspaper just did a series on the mentally ill and how people were being mistreated there. So its grim all the way around. There's a tremendous lack of services in communities and some of the laws in place are throwing up roadblocks instead of helping us get people help.

CP: We can help you if you kill somebody, but if you don't kill somebody we can't help you.

PE: Exactly.

CP: A lot of people do well on medications, but some seem not to do well; it's also an issue of getting people to take their medicaitons

PE: That's right. You know it takes more than just sticking a pill in someone's mouth. A lot of these mental illnesses are biological problems, they are chemical imbalances which affect how nerve cells send and receive messages. So medicaton can help, it is effective in about 80% of severe mental illness, the trick is 1. getting the right medicaitons and getting people to take it.

My son was on probation for two years, took his medication every day, did a great job
with it, six months later he stopped. Two weeks ago he was forcibly hospitalized. This breaks your heart, but it seems to be part of the cycle you go through.

CP: Often there are devastating side affects to medications, even if they keep you relatively safe...

PE: The first medication my son was on made him gain forty pounds, made him lethargic...he looked like a zombie. None of us were happy with that. A lot of folks with mental illness struggle to find the right balance.

CP: What is Mike's life going to be as far as you can tell? How old was he when you took that four hour ride?

PE: 22 years old. He's now 27.

CP: Did you have any hint of this?

PE: One year before he had had some problems, some bizzare behavior, and we sent him to a psychiatrist who said he might have bi polar disorder. We were all in denial. It was such a devastating diagnosis. He would stay up for five days and we said, Oh well, its stress, and it's not going to come back. And it does come back.
The sad thing about mental illness is that it's a lifetime sentence. You can be treated, but for a severe illness like bi polar disorder or schizophrenia, those are awfully tough to cure. That's what we're living with now. It's really tough. You want to say to somebody who is now 27 years old, well its up to you, your fate's in your hands, take your medications and you'll be fine. But sometimes medications don't work. It's like asking someone with 2 broken legs to run a marathon.
If you have a disease, when does the diesease kick in, and what do you blame on someone being irresponsible. It's tough call.

CP: What has to change so that Mike and everybody else can have a better quality of life, and not be blamed for something in their brains they can't control?

PE: That's the key point. We have to stop making persons with mental illness into criminals. My son now faces a double stigma, both being mentally ill and now having a criminal record. Jails and prisons can't be part of the care process. We have to provide better community sevices, and we must get rid of a lot of the stigma. We have to realize that people who have a mental illness are sick. If your heart gets sick, your brain can get sick. We don't like to do that. We want to blame people for their mental illness. It's not something they did or a weakness in character. If we don't do this we realize it could happen to us, and that's scary.

CP: Would you describe Milke's life now at 27 as 2 steps forward 3 steps back?

PE: I was very optimistc. He was on 2 years of probation. He went to work, had a job. No one would have guessed he had a mental illness. He stopped taking his medication. I can't explain why. Then you watched him decompensate, and then 2 weeks ago he had to be forcibly hospitalized, its a reminder that this is what our life is going to be like, until he either reaches a point where he stays on the medicaiton or he gets worse. Each time you have one of these breakdowns, you do know that it's harder to come back from them.

June 5, 2006

FAREWELL MET...IT WAS GREAT!

I did the second of my two annual Metropolitan Opera intermission feature gabfests this past weekend. The opera was Wagner's Lohengrin, in a controversial staging by Robert Wilson. There were no sets. The stage cyc was lit blue, white or -very briefly green. There were beams of light at right angles. Stage movements were stylized slo-mo. Costumes were plain, in blues, dark wine red for Ortrud, gray for the men. And I loved every minute of this. I found it very moving, focusing entirely on Wagner's magnificent music, with the light washes and movements filling in just enough to tell the story. I expect this was my last Met broadcast. The management is changing. The production team, my second, that invites me is being replaced. But what a twenty plus year ride I've had! I met great people and I heard performances from the best seats in the house I will never forget, and got lunch, yet! Some of these people made ME seem shy.

I got smashed at an RCA "do" in 1983 held to celebrate the Metropolitan Opera's 100th anniversary. RCA producer Richard Mohr was hovering near the bar. He had hired most of the famous, now elderly (most in heaven today) opera stars in the room. Richard had recently been named Producer of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They had been on air since 1931. He said to me You look like you're under 100, do you want to be on the air? If you can speak I'll take you. At that point I nearly couldn't speak. I was fascinated by a well preserved diva, sixty if she was a day, in a red dress slit up to were you could count her...never mind. Anyway, I said yes and a few weeks later there I was.

The panel on that day (the opera was Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin') included of George Jellinek, President of WQXR in New York, author, teacher; and Alberta Masiello, a Met pianist and conductor who counted Maria Callas among her pupils.
Then there was me, who sold records at Barnes and Noble. And I went back every year.
My mother in Boston was hysterical. She kept calling my answering machine: "Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I had no idea what the hell you were talking about but it sounded wonderful I just wish those people would stop singing! Your Aunt Mary called me and said for chrissakes my kids barely speak English!" Ma heard one more broadcast and passed away.

Richard Mohr was a curmudgeonly type who liked his gin and tonic and who had spent fifty years as a record producer for RCA and felt that in his old age he could finally say whatever the hell he wanted to about any bloody artist living or dead, and did! I was asked to write an obit for him and the Met broadcast it a few years ago. It's somewhere on this blog. Richard's assistant was the great Miss Vinnie Volpe, a diminutive Italian lady from New Jersey who knew where all the bodies, fictional and real were buried. She weighed ninety pounds and was somewhere between seventy and ninety and feared no one. If you hadn't finished your lunch before the opera began she would wrap the leftovers in the the Met's best linen napkin and you could take your chicken hash right into the the center box, the best seats in the house. People like Leontyne Price, Cesare Valletti, Donald Trump and Rudi Giuliani would sit in those seats, along with Christopher who sold records at Barnes and Noble. God forbid you were in the wrong seats. She told the CEO of Texaco to move and he did. One day a large group of beefy men in Armani had the adjoining box. Miss Volpe said, Oh look there's John Gotti! He smiled and bowed to her.

I cried when Miss Volpe died. She would tell Richard to have me on a lot "because he can't afford good seats and he needs a meal." Nobody, but nobody else in my entire life has ever looked at me and said I needed a meal.

Richard would go on about his departed favorites, whose recordings he had produced: Stokowski, "the best ears in the business, ever".
Toscanini "A pussycat, he never gave me a bit of trouble" unlike that maestro's reputation for a Vesuvian temper. He got a kick out of soprano Zinka Milanov. "Zinka would go into this dive opposite the old Met on thirty ninth street just before a performance and she'd bark "Gimme a sviss cheeeeese on rye vit plenty moooostard!" and then damned if she wouldn't cross the street and sing an Aida to knock you out! "

Richard had flashcards which he waved at us during the-live-in-front-of-a-studio-audience broadcasts. They said, longer, shorter, five minutes, stretch and shut up. Period. You would look at these cards and try not to giggle. Once in a while he'd let me host the panel. His stage whispers on live radio were terrifying. "What an asshole this jerk is" he'd hiss at me between clenched teeth 10 inches from the mikes.



And the guests! I grew up with Miss Masiello, who shed tears on cue at any mention of Callas ("Onassis, he keeel her, he murder her") and who was a chain smoker and would light right up in her wheelchair and cough and growl away. She switched to Nicorette but it was too late and she died. Ma in Boston would complain, why did they let that man talk so much. I still miss Alberta. Father Owen Lee, August Professor of Classics at University of Tornoto was one of my favorites and what a privilege to know him! He'd laugh at my Boston Irish funeral stories
("Grammy was laid out for three days until the bootlegger called and said he couldn't make it! Grampy almost had a stroke") and he would explain Wagner, Nietzsche, Sophocles and basketball in a way that would have you enthralled and begging for more. Albert Innaurato, playwright and commentator shocked audiences by saying "Years ago the nuns in Philly told me, Oh dago boys don't go to college" Edward Downes would be gracious and polite to all and sip his light seven n seven and invited me to his home in the Dakota upstairs from Yoko Ono and dictate his memoirs. They are also on this blog!

Richard died. Vinnie died. Miss Masiello died. Mr. Jellinek retired. Edward died. Later on the broadcasts became more professional, more polished and not quite so warm or exciting. It was run by professionals who treated us all with class and respect. No gossip. No more gin at lunch. Sigh. I was cast as the brat and ran with it. Why not? I had enough good stuff to say that I got away with mistakes, like confusing a canon and a fugue, and this past weekend I went on about American Idol when clearly my co guests had no clue what I was talking about. That's okay. America knew.

If I never go to New York again, I have twenty years of memories of fantastic people
to keep me company. Miss Masiello found Callas in heaven. Edward Downes is talking to Wagner, in perfect German no doubt. Miss Volpe is telling God that her cloud is too damned crowded, and she's crying for joy at the sight of Renata Tebaldi singing in heaven. Richard Mohr is rolling his eyes and holding up his SHUT UP flashcard.

I heard tremendous performances: Leonie Rysanek as the Kostelnicka in Jenufa; Domingo and Voigt in Die Walkure, Pavarotti's final-ill advised-Radames in Aida-Renee Fleming as Violetta and Rodelinda. She made a believer outta me.
War and Peace. Christa Ludwig as Klytamnestra in Elektra, one of her last performances. Thomas Hampson and Susan Graham in Werther; Dimitrova in Turandot-whew! And I will never forget what a compliment from Miss Masiello or a hug from George Jellinek meant to me.

I began attending performances nearly thirty years ago, in standing room. Very top of the house. You could get vertigo but oh my you could hear. Standing room was $2 back in 1979. Today its $20. And last Saturday, after seeing this marvelous Lohengrin from the best seats in the house, seats I could never afford, I came back a few hours later for Tosca, not because I really needed to see Tosca but because I wanted to be closer to heaven to thank a lot of old ghosts, and to say goodbye...from standing room.

WE DID DICHTERLIEBE!!!!!

Ben and I performed Dichterliebe the other day in toto for the Ladies (capital L)
of the Worthington-Columbus Symphony Support Unit.
Our hostess, Mrs. Hamilton said to me, "I'm on the young side of this crowd, and I'm seventy-nine. The last time you spoke to us was it Liselotte's house. She died, you know. Went in with an aneurysm poor soul, they were working on her and she said Leave me alone! I'm ninety-two and I want to watch my soap operas. So they left her alone and she passed away watching The Young and The Restless in intensive care! Do you want another brownie?"

Ben and I went up there and did thw whole thing, soup to nuts.
The Ladies, over 30 of them in one living room! made cooing noises
and the terms "adorable" and "too fat" were muttered beneath the smiles.
Ben was adorable. I was...

Even with some adjustmeents for hearing aids and the plethora of Breck and
Alberto VO 5, it was a lovely morning.
Ben and I worked hard. My German wasn't awful, and if I didn't sound like Dieskau I still made music and told the story. Unrequited love and the war between our physical and spiritual natures. I came into my own telling The Ladies: "Listen for the words HERZ, SCHMERZ and GELIEBTER. There's the whole friggin' history of music right there!"

After this, how about the Hermit Songs or Fiancailles pour rire?
I'm bitchin' to go on, and The Ladies will always be with us,
even Liselotte --in heaven watching The Edge of Night.

DICHTERLIEBE DIARY 15

Ben and I are preparing for an actual performance next week for The Ladies, God bles them, well to do matrons who have supported the local symphony-indeed, founded it, for fifty years. There'll be a lovely suburban living room filled with spring suits,
VO-5 hairspry and great grandmother's cocktail time jewlry. There'll be plnenty of smiles, a few naps and a table filled with lime gren jello molds, french water biscuits and fresh fruit. Not a chocolate cake or pastrami sandwich in sight.

(Years ago I spoke to some such gruop and was offered a sherbert vegetable concoction and The Head Lady said, "For God's sake Helen, you can't give that to a MAN!" And out came a large greasy roast beef sandwich. I tried to demure, but no, the roomful gasped in delight as I wolfed down every bit of the thing ("God love him, they don't pay him mch and he probably never gets a real meal"...I weighed 220 lbs at the time!)

(And if you think I'm making fun of The Ladies I'm the first to tell you that without Ladies anywhere in this country there would be no performing atrs. Local societies always start there, and grow because of their generoisty and devotion and because wisely the husbands do as they're told)

Back to Dichterliebe: Ben and I have been preparing for this since last fall.
I never wanted to do an actual performance because I don't want to judged as a singer. As an amatuer in the best sense of that word: for love, yes-okay. The rehearsal process has been lively and instructive. It's been a special oasis for me in the midst of writing scripts, ducking managment, school work and watching too much TV. And again, the cycle is a gift as is all music. The more you hear the newer it all gets. Small things were not obvious to me. Holding notes for their full value, especially when they are set against dissonant chords. Making the words "shmerz" "Engel" "Rhein" "Blumen" "Herz"-words used so often by Heine- have a different meaning that matches the musical setting. Expressing the WHY even when there's nothing to sing, especially in the pauses between songs. Patrick Woliver, my patient and fantastic teacher reminds me: Remember you are the face of this work even when you have nothing to sing. There's no time off here until the cycle ends."

I don't regret not being a singer. I don't regret that finding an instrument to express what I know to be true of Dichterliebe, based on music and text-has taken so long. Music at its best is always a journey.

Onto The Ladies, then.

SARAH CALDWELL

It never occurred to me that Sarah Caldwell would die and I doubt it occurred to her either.

Die she did, last week at her home in Maine, age 82.

Sarah was the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera (1975).
She was the founder and artistic director of the Opera Company of  Boston (1958-1990).
She had no theatre to call her own. She staged operas in hockey rinks, in a cyclorama building in a seedy part of Boston, she staged operas in an outdoor flower market, and later made do with an abandoned movie house with sticky floors and you don't want to know the rest.

Out of nothing, on a stage no more than thirty feet deep, with half the floorboards missing, Sarah staged-brilliantly-and conducted-poorly-the American stage premiere of Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens-an operatic retelling of the Trojan War deemed unperformable because of its length and scenic demands by Berlioz himself. Sarah did the whole thing, complete with Trojan horse. I was a teen aged chorister and one of several who popped out of the horse's rear end to cry 'Italie! Italie' and hurl myself onto a nest of Athenian maidens. Two of them had been classroom teachers in Lexington, Mass.,  so it got a little awkward. Sarah's production of War and Peace had you honest to God believing yourself in the grandest ballroom in St. Petersburg or the most desolate steppe in all Russia. Napoleon himself-the wonderful late Donald Gramm-strutted across the creaking stage, two cannon from the local army base museum following him. Sarah's producing of Don Quichotte came complete with windmill, which Don Quixote himself, a wonderful 7 foot basso called Noel Tyl, rode fearlessly.

Sarah gave the American premiere of Verdi's five act french version of Don Carlos, complete with-lamentable-ballet-and you weren't in a theater on the edge of Boston's combat zone, you were in Imperial Spain five hundred years ago, a dangerous place ruled by an unforgiving church.

How did she do all this? As to assembling the actual productions I don't know.
She only rehearsed at night, leaving off at around 6 a.m. She lived on coffee, donuts and burgers and had the 300 lb girth to show for it.

Her stage directions were simple and clear. Her rehearsal techniques were a disaster and her administrative gifts non existent. Boston Edison shut the power off before more than one opening night, but on would go the lights and somehow, magic happened. It really was a miracle.

Sarah never understood the word NO. Lack of funds, hurt feelings, ethics, whatever were little part of her. She would have found a way to stage 'strategic planning' to Berio or Shostakovitch but she'd make no other sense of such concepts. She was the show, hers was the vision and even today there are bodies for miles. But at least she HAD a vision, and everything she did as an artist came exactly from the score.
I'm glad I no longer have to work for her. I'm sorry the company self destructed and closed in 1990.
When it was great it was great.

Sarah 's up moving around the clouds in heaven and probably dodging her creditors, God bless her.

OPERA COMPANY X COLLAPSES

This is a rant.
I know you know I seldom rant. (Don't start).
But I want to get some sort of conversation going with top artists and
administrators about this:

Opera X was in its twenty fifth season, serving a community of just over 1 million, with three performances each of four operas per year. The venue had recently been changed from a centrally located 1920s movie house riot with no stage to a 1950s university campus municipal auditorium with no charm but at elast some sort of backstage.

Front of house there is no ambience.
Think 1956 high school auditorium. The campus neighborhood of bars, pizza places and tatoo parlors with or without pain offer little to the opera's rather well heeled core audience.

Strong marketing and development have never-except for a fabulous marketing director long departed-been in place. In recent years the comanpy was run by an administrator who chanelled Diaghilev, only Diaghilev didn't answer back. Lots of expensive trips, lots of money spent, lots of panache, nothing translated to quality of product on stage.

The company is now in the toilet. Maanger has left with a lot of nice trips and perks on the company tit which has gone down a number of cup sizes.
Now this is a football oriented community. If it doesn't fart and wear cleats
most people aren't inertested. OTOH, the community supports a fine full time sypmhony, wonderful theatre and ballet, fine schools of music and the arts and a 24/7 all classical radio network. There's a thriving gay community-good news for arts administrators of every stripe and if you haven't figured THAT out yet, go to your room.

What went wrong? The promise of operatic sophistication resulted in a move to a hall the audience hated. There was a fine production of Aida and a good Hansel and Gretel.
Threepenny Opera was done in by a horrible production, simulated fellatio and the F word crowed at every opportunity including on the projected titles. The core audience walked out and the young people on a campus of 50,000 stayed away because noone knew or cared how to market to them.

The board is made up of nice people who don't know Bellini from Blowjobs.
A production of Floyd's "Susannah" was discouraged because "We don't want that modern music". Board memebers liked the IDEA of supporting opera without understnading what opera is, or only if they could consider the product a decoration to their own social lives.. Most of them are generous, smart and charming. They bought into the argument that if you throw money at it, it will thrive. Look at your public schools. Levies are voted in all the time. Are your kids being better educated? Money has little to do with creative progrmaiming and opera production. Aside from paying the best people to do the work. Creativity and ingenuity coupled with financial need and lots of hard work can produce fantastic opera. I was raised by Sarah Caldwell. There was no one so fiscally impossible and so creative. Remind me to tell y'all about Prokofiev's War and Peace on a twenty foot stage that made the Kirov look like Ted Mack's amateur Hour.

But now, in this electronic age is the time to use music and drama, to use stories, as tools to reach people, to make them think about this crazy world, to offer them a look at sensitivity, beauty teach all of us the perils of violence and greed (The RING anyone?), let us laugh at ourselves, get a look at how people lived two centuries ago and prove that then and now we all laugh and cry at the same things (women, men, sex and money) La boheme, Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Aida, Carmelites, all of their messages resonate today. And they all offer bloody good tunes.

How to revive an opera company.

1. The current board moves to Florida and stays here.

2. The new board is formed because the need to prudce opera is in their blood, and they understand WHY they are doing it and what it will do for the community

3. Insist on toal creativvity. Encourage risk.

4. Cheap affects deos not equla creativity. The public ssees thorugh them and is turned off. Lose the sex acts and cursing.

5. MARKETING MARKETING MARKETING...Knowing how to SELL and understand completelty what the product is and WHY

6. Board meembers and paid staff not buying into this should stay home and watch Larry King Live.

7. Be preapred to talk to anyone who will listen of the importance of what the comany is trying to do. Speak in context of struggles, worldview, joys, sorrows, fun. And learn how to tell a dirty joke.

8. Insist on complete fidelity to the score and text. Mozart and Verdi don't need help.

End of rant.
Arts administrators need to motivate funding sources and beguile the public.
Humor and passion are important.
Passivity is not.

CP

still bummed about Anna Moffo.....

HOW NOT TO STAGE AN OPERA

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO AT THE MET or
WHO THE HELL SPIKED THE AMYL NITRATE!

I try to be as tolerant as the next guy and I realize I'm sitting here in Ohio and nobody is beating down the doors asking me to take over the veil of tears that is opera,but Jeez Louise when Leonora is dressed like Scralett O'Hara's first communion with seventy pounds of shmatte shlepping around when she is suposed to be eloping in secret and its SPAIN for chrissakes and presumably above 80 degrees F and then the tenor Licitra who is a nice young kid with a good voice comes strolling on like he's looking for a place to pee...you know you are in trouble.

The sets were large, brown, ugly and claustrophic.
And dear God, don't run the English titles...Io muioio! Giustio cielio! and all that shit doesn't translate. The audience Saturday afternoon was trying not to giggle and failing. Up in the box with Father Lee I stifled a belch from the prime rib lunch and death by chocolate and thought, why are all these people screaming. I especially loved Don Carlo or whoever the hell it was lurching around and taking his godammed time to die, thank you very much. What was he gonna do? Moon the audience? It would probably have been a better show, not that you would have seen anyone's golden globes because it was dark, dark, dark and dark! No sun in this Spain. It looked more like Manchester, New Hampshire. The ticket they gave me cost $320 that's WITHOUT lunch but you do get a semi private loo at least. And the whole thing was like watching the Marx Brothers. There was nothing moving or magisterial about it at all...singers wandered in and out like waiting for the bus. Nobody looked at any one else. It was Oh fuck WHERE is the next note going to come from. Even Ramey, who still has the vocal presence should let me cherish my memories!

Like I said kids, ain't nobody asking me. FORZA is the bad luck opera. Leonard Warren died in the midst of it. My buddy Albert Innaurato wrote hysterically of a Forza production at La Scala in 1997..look for it in Opera News, LA SCALA TEMPLE OF DOOM 1997...check the archives at the Opera News web site. Close your eyes and listen to Tebaldi and Del Monaco or Price and Beronzi and use the $320 for choclate or zoloft.

ANNA MOFFO

I don't usually weep for deceased opera singers but the death of Anna Moffo reminds me that nobody stays young forever.
Moffo will be remembered primarily I suspect as a very beautfiul woman, which indeed she was. Her death last week at age 73 came thirty years after the short lived prime of her voice. Her career began in Italy in the mid fifties, and there were still some good performances to be heard until around 1975. After that it was chancy at best and horrible at worst. Those of you born after 1975 would not have heard her at her best, but her many recordings still offer a lot of pleasure.

Traviata-Violetta was her signature role
La rondine
Madama Buttefly
Luisa Miller
Villa-Lobos, Canteloube, Rachmaninoff with Stokowski
Rigoletto
Marriage of Figaro
Falstaff

these recordings and many more are all available and have been catalogue favorites for forty years. There's a reason for that. She had a lovely voice with a lot of warm, sort of dark rose colored overtones. She was a terrific actress. She sang WITH the music, using text and notes to create character. (The old fashioned way!)
She meant what she sang.

Anna Moffo was born in Wayne, PA . She trained at Curtis, and made her mark first in
Italy. Her earliest recordings were with Karajan, Callas, Giulini, Schwarzkopf and Colin Davis. There are also a number of beautiful opera films with her: Lucia di Lammermoor, Daughter of the Regiment and Madama Butterfly among them. She had a brief "nudie" phase in Italain cinema in the early sixties, but by the mid seveties, though her voice was suffering she settled down to a long and happy marriage with RCA Chairman Robert Sarnoff. He died in 1997.

My own favorites would be the Rondine with the famous "Sogno di doretta" and the even more beautiful "Ore dolce e divine", Luisa Miller (Verdi) and Butterfly. I last saw her on stage as Violetta, in Providence RI in the late 70s and there were still some good notes left. I last saw her in person at Carnegie Hall last year, she was in the audience. I went up to say hello to her and got a hug, diamonds and all.

The collpase of her voice has never really been explained. She "owned" it and blamed it on exhaustion and too much work and she may have been right. But when it was good, it was splendid. Go find her recoridngs and films in the library. Enjoy, and say a prayer for her. In the era of Callas, Tebaldi, Milanov, Price, Corelli, Merrill and Siepi, Anna was a class act.

CROSSOVER: THE OTHER "WHITE MEAT?"

Opera magazines put Andrea Bocelli on the cover and reprimand complaining readers. The Metropolitan does a glitzy produciton of "The Merry Widow" an operetta they denied Joan Sutherland with two admired singers and casts it with young cuties when the stars depart. Peter Gelb, the new GM of the Metropolitan Opera makes no secret of his insistence on "singers who look the part" not singers who SOUND the part. The Columbus Symphony back in 2000 engages Charlotte Church for a benefit. I complain to the board. I call it musical kiddie porn on air and am reamed out for weeks. "She sold out the house in three hours" I'm told. I could go on and on. So could you.
Classical radio rejoices in musical sound bites, copy readers and visuals that look like the Halloween candy dispalys in a Wal Mart.

The point is that no one in a ticket buying data base for a classical concert for the past two years in the "target audience". Classical presenters, opera, symphony, dance, theater, radio have seen the future and its the people who used to kvell over a pre pubnescent Charlotte Church or a violinist in a wet T shirt or a baritone hunkmeister. Like titles in the theater twenty years ago, this trend is here to stay. Marketing Directors and Executive Directors who don't know Beethoven from Bocelli are making the important decisions around programming geared to the increasing dumbing down of the public. Cocnert halls and opera houses are now amplified. My fear is that clarinets, horns and violins will become irrelevant in the age of synthesizers and digital sound. This mechanization deadens the souls of people who deserve to hear a live performance, who deserve to know that all of arts are live and growing over time.

The potential new younger audience is large and it is time to tap into their energy. Bridging the gaps between people used to elcetronically processed sound, to video imagery, to "sound enhancement" towards people who can listen to voice and feel for the great stories is the new challenge. The schools, a point of entry for so many of us, drop music right and left. We are not primed to appreciate anything not offering immediate return. Old farts like me should still be tolerant of those who come to opera via Charlotte or Michael or Andrea. We don't have to buy it. But we should welcome and encourage those who do.

RICHARD TUCKER AND RENATA TEBALDI in 1970

I have a lot of broadcasts of Tucker and Tebaldi together; thrilling performances of Manon Lescaut, Andrea Chenier and Tosca among them.






I've been listening to a La boheme, broadcast from the Met in April, 1970.
This was towards the end of Tebaldi's career-she was done by 1973.
Tucker was always in prime voice. When he bothered to sing and not bellow he was wonderful. I remember hearing this broadcast as a kid. I taped it on a battery operated reel to reel tape recorder off of a transistor radio. The old tapes are probably still in my uncle's basement in Arlington, Mass.
And you know what kills me? Two days after this broadcast Tebaldi sang Mimi in Boston with my favorite tenor: Carlo Bergonzi. I could have gone. Good seats were $5!

Tebaldi finds a lot of Act III rough sledding by 1970-and she was younger than I am now-but for sometimes the years fall away and you can hear a lot of the old velvet. There are plenty of broadcasts of Tebaldi in her absolute prime (1950s) and this is not one of them, but this late performance I find very moving. I sometimes find Tucker hard to take, though his vocie never fails him for a second. What I love is how he really listens to Teblaldi and molds his singing to her so musically. I wish all young singers would listen to this and pay attention.

Tebaldi and Tucker may never have looked like starving Bohemians but together in 1970 they ARE music.

Richard tucker 1913-1974
Renata Tebaldi 1922-2004

It's nice to think of them both in heaven, sap that I am.

GETTING RENEE

I've never been a Renee Fleming fan, call me crazy, but I've always needed more bite from my sopranos.

It takes a lot these days to get this fat middle aged fella out of his barcolunger after 7 p.m. and away from reruns of Law and Order and my favorite pizza. Last night Miss Fleming was in town. Because I couldn't go and hear Renee with the Columbus Symphony last night I crashed the rehearsal on Wednesday.

"All I can say is WOW!"

What struck me on record as bland and pretty is in person intelligent and gorgeous.
You could die from this voice.
She did the Strauss 4 Last Songs and you wonder why the fuck he didn't write four more? (He wrote one more 'Malven' for Maria Jeritza, another hottie, but I digress)

Anyway, Fleming sat on stage with her bottle of water and let fly with some of the most gorgeous middle voice singing in "Beim schlafengehen" I've ever heard.
Then she does, get this! the trash arias from "Adriana Lecouvreur".
The musicians among you will say "What the fuck the Adriana Lecouvruer" but its actually "WHO the fuck is Adriana Lecouvreur" and if you have to ask...and no, Renee ain't Tebadli though she is as beautful, and she gets all chesty and intense at e finito and sings the low passages of the Strauss with a fully supported tone. No forcing. Always beautiful. I surrender I capitulate I'm done It's over at last I'm ready to board the Renee Express.

DICHTERLIEBE DIARY 13

If you're just tuning in, check the archives for Dichterliebe Diary 1, etc.
It's cheaper than Xanax.

Today Ben announced that we need to schedule an actual date to have at least a run through in front of an audience.

I said, who do we hate enough? He said it's only twenty minutes and I'll make a cake.
But its still a few weeks off thanks be to God.
At today's rehearsal we did the entire work straight through.
We'll need to do this several times per week, or at least I will--for the stamina.
Rule #1 don't jump a two foot wall before you can jump a one foot wall.
In my case, my tummy gets in the way of my looking at my feet so the height of the wall doesn't matter but you get my drift.
The gift of this cycle remains with me. Everytime I turn a page I'm astonished and thrilled all over again. Ben is good at micro details.
Hold that note three beats, as Schumann wrote. This is not the palce to get artsy.
I play a chord on the second beat dissonant with what you are doing and we have to bring that out. Stop putting umlauts on every vowel except the ones that have umlauts.

For myself, I notice that my German often has a faux French or Italain accent.
I was pretty shocked when stoped at the first word: "IM wunderschoenen monnat Mai...
since I was singing "EEM wunderschoenen..." Other great words like 'stumm' and 'fluss'get the same treatment. About the only accent I can't muster, besides German is Boston Irish, and you'd think at least that I'd get right.

I was looking for an experience from which to learn and grow and boy have I found one. An honest and lengthy study of the lied forces introspection and self examination, in addition to developing musicianship. Since I am often asked to help young singers I'm getting a real idea of what I ask them to do, how difficult and exhausting it is, and how they need to be loved a bit more.
The problem is still to do the music and text as written while being a musician, linguist, actor interpreter and techniian. Sometimes I can manage one or two together, but no more so far. It is an exhausting challenge, and I suspect even the greatest artists, when they finally felt they were getting it right, had sung themselves out!

But its a helluva great way to go!

TOUCHSTONE PERFORMANCES

My cyber buddy Steve up in Cleveland-never met him-trades CDs with me of favorite broadcast performances. Recently he sent me a 1937 broadcast of "Lohengrin" from the Met in New York, with Kirsten Flagstad and the Belgian tenor Rene Maison. We were both trying to come up with performances we heard live or on record that really stayed with us.

My love for opera was nurtured by the Met broadcasts, so my earliest memories were heard not seen. Chief among them was the Norma broadcast in 1970 with Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne and Carlo Bergonzi (my favorite tenor).
I have this on CD and need to be in the right mood, but thirty six years later I can still kvell to those voices. Yes, I'd like a firmer conductor, and yes I'd like a bit more bite in the attacks, but if you want it "like buttah" this is it.
I will never forget -at 13!-hearing this broadcast live and am grateful to still be able to enjoy it.

The March 30, 1940 broadcast of "Die Walkure", with Marjorie Lawrence, Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior was way even before my time, but to me the excitement leaps through the speakers two generations later. All of the artists are completly "into" their roles. Lehmann's ecstasy in Act I and her fear and hysteria throughout the opera are riveting...nearly X rated. Melchior sings the music with a wonderful, arrongant disdain for the composer's markings, but he is immensely moving in the Todesverkundingen scene. Marjorie Lawrence was 31 for this broadcast. A few months later she would contract polio and spend the rest of her life, she died in 1979 in a wheelchair. She is a fearless, radiant Valkyre.

I did hear a Rigoletto broadcast in 1968, with Robert Merrill, Carlo Bergonzi and Anna Moffo. This was my first Met broadcast. Bergonzi is the prince among tenors.
Merrill made me cry. Still does, God rest his soul.

Also broadcast, a Tristan und Isolde with Birgit Nilsson and Jess Thomas, back in 1971. My first Wagner.
The recent (2005) boradcat of Wozzeck was another high point for me. I listened to it on a five mile walk thorugh my neighborhood. Beethoven and Brhams strolled the Prater listneing to the birds. Me, I'm hoofing thorugh Columbus Ohio listening to Wozzeck. Go figure.

On stage, Sarah Caldwell's 1972 production of Prokofiev's War and Peace was a miracle; all of Russia on a postage stamp sized stage. Had there been a greater
orchestra and conductor it might have been too much to bear. Sarah is elderly and retired now. A book needs to be written about her astonishing productions. Beverly Sills as Violetta convinced you that this big hearty lady really was dying of consumption. Birgit Nilsson's Met comeback in 1979, all Wagner. I got the last standing room place. The guy took my $2(!) and slammed the box office window shut.
Nilsson began with Dich teure Halle-it twenty minutes for the audience to calm down BEFORE she began to sing-what is it A flat at 'du, teure HAL-le' faltered a bit then recovered and shook the walls.

Peter Sellars's moving production of Handel's Giulio Ceasare' set in the Beirut Hilton, with Casesar a Ronald Reagan lookalike.

I'm excited about where we are with opera today.
The recent successes of Margaret Garner-deliberatley written in a populist style,off putting to some-and An Ameicna Tragedy are comforting. Peter Lieberson is writing magnificent arts songs. So would you if you were married
to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and young tenor Juan Diego Florez has reminded us that singing should above all be a joyful act, for artists and audiences.

DICHTERLIEBE DIARY 12

Ben and I have begun working again, under the eye of a superb vocal technician who is taking us-me-through the twenty plus minute cylce note by note.
I'm not a micro detail oriented person at all, far from it.
I don't pick up socks, I leave underwear on the floor and drink out of the milk carton. Not good when you are trying to communicate the secret locked into music and German poetry. So being stopped every three notes is new to me. To my relief,I'm far from rattled by this. It seems a note by note approach is the way for me to go to embrace this work in a technical sense. "More space... Breathe lower.. Why are your larynx so high...you are getting too edgy..stop it...Oh your epiglottis is wrapped around your neck-I had look this one up...Then there's the b flats in the middle of the page. Piece cake note, right? Middle of the register, yes? No.
Get a good breath under those middle notes. Voices can be naturally weaker in the middle range and that is the heart and meat of any voice. Forget the high notes
(I don't have them anyway) and stop growling your low notes. Und so weiter.

But I finish these session with a stronger feeling throught. What I still can't do consistently is support the tone enough to give off a long line of decent sound.
It's usually "Aus meined tran--WHEEZE--nen SPREEsen-gapsp--etc.
Not away to sing of the flow of one's tears to the beloved.

I never had a flippant attitude when Ben and I took on this project last fall. (
(See the archives). But if you spend your time listening to recordings it all sounds much much easier than it ever is. They should publish Wunderlich's rehearsal tapes (they probably sound fantastic, sigh) I have not a natural vocie but a manufactured one, note by f----ing note. Thank God I don't really have talent as a singer, and that the passion for musick has an outlet in radio, writing, comedy and pre concert talks, or all of the above.

Stay tuned.

DICHTERLIEBE DIARY 11

One of the reasons I haven't posted here in a month is that until last week I hadn't opened the score of Dichterliebe since pre Christmas. If you don't know what I'm rambling about, go seach the archives. I'm too beat and others too bored to go over it again. Ben and I did manage a rehearsal last week...I had no balance with the piano at all. By the fourth song I was either shouting or croaking. In voice lessons I'm taken up to High C, and you know what? A lot of it has ring, and juice and squillo! It's like there's a real vocie there.
My life as a singer, though, is firmly anchored in fanatasy-land. I can picture myself as Vickers or Domingo or Tamgano onstage as Otello but I open my eyes and there I am sweating like a pig on my new elliptical machine, reading sweaty back issues of Opera News. I tried to listen to cds. Do not do this. I nearly nodded off during a Parsifal...

Back to Dichterlibe. You know, this is music I respect and admire but do not love.
It's a bit like kissing your sister.
But if I had several weeks to do nothing else but dig into this score, and sing chunks of it every day, no doubt I'd be happier with it and making better progress.
Ben and I really have to work on balance. I have to apply the new techincal points I am learnig. A good sound is possible. But God, what you have to do to make music...I know exactly what the music is telling me but getting it outta my throat is a real struggle.

No one said it would be asy. Lieder ain't for wimps.

KLEMPERER JOKE

The post on Otto Klemperer brings this note from Bob Gartside, melodie-ist and singer extraordinaire. And a sweet guy.

Fischer-Dieskau was doing one of the Bach Passions with Klemperer and was dying at the slowness of the tempo, he aked the maestro if they could go faster. "Vell Fieskau" growls Klemperer, who always said 'Fieskau', "ve'll tink about it." Dieskau comes back the next day and says, "Maestro I had a dream that I met Bach and he agreed the tempi are too slow." "Oh", replied Klemperer, "Ve vill tink about it a little more." The next day at rehearsal, Klemperer calls Dieskau over and says, "Fieskau, I too dreamed I met Bach. He said he never heard of you!"

BIRGIT NILSSON

Sad news that soprano Birgit Nilsson has died at 87.
She was buried earlier today near her home in Sweden.
Without question, hers was the loudest and most impressive voice I ever heard close up.

Nilsson had left the US in the 1970s after a dispute with the IRS.
She returned in 1979.
I was a grad student then, living across from Lincoln Center, in the West Side Y!
I was on my way to a statistics study group on a Sunday morning when I saw the line snaking down Columbus Avenue. They were waiting for standing room tickets for Nilsson's "comeback" concert at the Met that evening, with Levine conducting. I got on line only because some of my buddies were there. The study went to hell. I got the very last standing room place. When the box office guy handed me my ticket, ($2!) he slammed the window down and left about 100 pissed off people behind me.

That night, from the third rail of standing room, I heard Nilsson.
The applause at her entrance was incredible. She was crying.
Levine was crying. The orchestra was crying. I was crying.
The first piece, "Dich teure Halle" did not go well, the A wobbled and she backed off. But it was wonderful when she opened her arms at the lines 'du, teure Halle!" (You, beloved hall!)She pulled herself together-and she was in her early sixties then-and went on. The inhalation Scene. Saloon finale. Brunnhilde's Battle Cry. All was well. It was a mighty wave of sound; a tsunami, hitting you right between the eyes. I actually felt my bones shaking. The applause lasted longer than the program. The lady was back.

I saw her again, as Elektra and the Farberin in 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'.
There wasn't much tone left by then, but there were volume and musicianship.
All the power was there, and there was plenty to enjoy.
Her recordings and broadcasts give a hint what hearing that voice 'live' was like,
that huge silver knife of a voice, that she could whittle down to a piano in the Liebesnacht, or as Lady Macbeth.

Even at the end, she was somethin'
I'll never forget her.
God rest her soul.

COLUMBUS SYMPHONY MOZART ARTICLE

You'll find the article on this blog in the September, 2005 archive.
Scroll on down.
Problems with access?
Let me know.
Thanks!
CP

MOZART AND OTTO KLEMPERER

Recordings of the Mozart-da Ponte operas recently crossed my desk; two of them are long out of print and the remaining, Don Giovanni, is hard to find. These were recorded in London in the early 1970s, toward the end of the extraordinary life and career of their conductor, Otto Klemperer. Today they are considered old hat, unfashionable. I doubt these operas would be sung today in performance as Klemperer conducts these recordings. Why unfashionable? We'll get to that. First things first.

Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) was a German with a self destructive streak fueled by
bi polar disorder. In his manic moods he would take off, wander the earth, set himself on fire, sleep around, alienate musicians on and off the stage and generally be uncontrollable. His condition worsened after surgery for a brain tumor left half of his face paralyzed. He was quite the ladies man: his elopement with the married prima donna Elisabeth Schumann scandalized Germany eighty years ago. He had a long suffering wife and two children: His son Werner became famous as Colonel Klink in "Hogan's Heroes"-there was a lot more to Werner Klemperer than that, but I spent some time with him about ten years ago and he always spoke of "HH" with affection. Klemperer's daughter Lotte spent her life taking care of Papa; without her he might have been institutionalized, much less been able to work.

Werner and Lotte have since died. (Klemperer also founded the Kroll opera, one of Europe's most important companies, in Berlin in the 1920s: here he introduced new operas by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Weill and Janacek. Put me in a time machine and take me back there; I would have loved to have experienced the Kroll opera.)

Klemperer came into a golden period in the early days of stereo, when he made a large number of recordings with the magnificent Philharmonia Orchestra, in London. Most of these are now available on CD; everything from Bach's B minor mass to symphonies of Bruckner and orchestral works of Richard Strauss. Klemperer's style is large, just short of ponderous, and intensely dramatic. His Bach and Mozart can sound overwhelming and too, well, too too...to today's ears. Repeated listening will reveal as much orchestral detail as today's historically informed peformances. Mozart and Bach as played today give us the lighter textures and greater clarity we think the composers intended. Certainly we have performances of great beauty-and most importantly-great energy from conductors like Jacobs, Herreweghe,Rifkin, Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner. Klemperer can be thought simply....slow. Even Werner Klemperer told me "Father's Cosi fan Tutte really is very slow."

Yes, maybe it is. The fizz and wit in all of Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte are harder to find in Klemperer's recordings. Some think with today's ears he has loved the music into stasis. I just obtained these recordings and cannot stop listening to them. Finding a balance between joy and sorrow is a terrible burden, and is critical, especially in Cosi fan Tutte. I expect Klemperer did not understand casual listening. He was working for audiences who listened over and over, who paid attention, and who allowed his performances to really get under the skin. The Cosi fan Tutte has an exquisite cast: the soprano Margaret Price (Fiordiligi) sings with a warmth and a glow recalling Eleanor Steber
(you voice students should know Steber) Teresa Berganza, Lucia Popp, and the wonderful tenore di grazia Luigi Alva, and Geraint Evans-too little recorded-all sing for the beauty of their own voices and they allow Klemperer's loving approach to the music to tell the story. This is a case of "just sing" but what singing!
This Cosi sounds to me both romantic and sad, but never slow.

The "Figaro" is on the heavy side even for me; but after all not much of this show should be played strictly for laughs. The irony and yes, some of the cruelty is more forward in this approach. I can still marvel at the simple beauty of the finale ("Contessa, perdono") but for the first time we get the hint that all will not end well(and it doesn't). Another great cast, especially one of my favorite artists, the soprano Elisabeth Soederstroem (Countess--voice students write that name down) Geraint Evans (Figaro) Reri Grist (Susanna) and Gabriel Bacquier (Conte).
There's a lovely story told about these recording sessions. The first scene, with Susanna and Figaro had just been recorded. Klemperer lit is pipe and was content. The recording producer, Suvi Raj Grubb asked that the scene be repeated. Klemperer was surprised. "Vy repeat?!...Miss Grist, are you satisfied?" "Yes, maestro" replied Reri Grist. "And Mr.Evans, are you pleased?" "I am maestro." Klemperer then turned to the orchestra and said "I too am pleased, but since Mr. Grubb is not pleased, we will do it again."

I haven't heard the Don Giovanni yet, but stay tuned.
These recordings have been a joy with which to launch this Mozart year.

And let's all read up on the Kroll Opera. REALLY stay tuned!

2005: MUSIC HAS LOST

It must be the Boston Irish in me, but my first view of any newspaper in any city is The Irish Sports Page, so called by my mother and grandmother. You know it as The Obituaries. Sadly, and with respect and gratitude, we have lost:

VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES, age 82, the magnificent Spanish soprano whose repertoire embraced Provencal Chanson and Xavier Montsalvage and everything in between. Her many opera recordings will have you in tears: Don't miss her Madama Butterfly and Carmen; and of course in Spanish song she was peerless.

PIERO CAPPUCCILLI aged 76; Roman baritone, a smooth and elegant artist,he was made for the big baritone roles of Verdi which he sang beautifully.
Simon Boccanegra is a must have.

GHENA DIMITROVA, Bulgarian soprano, 63; A huge voice, memorable as Santuzza, Gioconda, Turandot. She was HOT when she came to the States just over 20 years ago. A huge American career didn't happen for her-but she was hardly unemployed. I saw her most recently as Eboli, in Pittsburgh a few years ago.

DOROTHY DOW- 85, American soprano. Sang premieres by Virgil Thomson and dramatic roles at La Scala. Made a wonderful recording of Schoenberg's ERWARTUNG with
Dimitri Mitropoulos over fifty years ago. She's still hard to beat.

CARLO MARIA GIULINI, 91; Italian conductor, He conducted Callas at La Scala, I think of him as a Mozartean for his superb recordings of Figaro and Don Giovanni and for his Brahms Symphonies, recorded in LA when he was music director there. Reinvented the use of cantabile for instrumentalists. One of the greats.

JAMES KING, 80; American tenor. Memorable as Siegmund, Walther, Lohengrin and Parsifal. Later taught at Indiana University. He was also a superb Florestan.

THEODORE UPPMAN, 85; American baritone. Created Billy Budd for Benjamin Britten. It's on recording. Get it. Uppman was also a superb Pelleas and Papageno, and did lot for American song. He was part of the great generation of American born singers that included Eleanor Steber, Robert Merrill, Richard Cassilly, and Phyllis Curtin. Upppman was an American original.

MARCELLO VIOTTI, 50, Italian conductor, collapsed in performance in Zurich. Much too young.

BEVERLY WOLFF American mezzo, 77; A leading artist of the New York City Opera, she was Sesto in the famous production of Giulio Cesare, with Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle. She created Douglas Moore's Carrie Nation-she had been a fine trumpet player before she took up singing!