Another underrated opera by a not particularly underrated composer....
Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko is just one of a dozen magnificent operas by the composer Richard Taruskin calls the most underrated composer in music history. And this is one of the greatest opera recordings ever made. The postwar Bolshoi at its absolute height, conducted by the great and alost forgotten Nikolai Golovanov, whom Stalin would soon ban from the opera house. Every singer on this recording, every orchestral player, every chorus member, every engineer, had a dozen stories of unbearable loss and grief, and as with so many mid-20th century recordings, you feel desperation of their lives in the visceral relish with which they tear into every bar, even in this relatively light opera.
There are some operas that, when you hear them on record, you cannot for the life of you understand their lack of popularity. Rimsky-Korsakov is one of the most beloved composers in the world, but the love he generates is almost entirely for three pieces: Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol, and the Flight of the Bumblebee. Why is that? Almost all the music Rimsky wrote is as beautifully magnificent as those three famous pieces, and yet it's almost never played outside of Russia.
Rimsky wrote fifteen operas, most of which contain music as consistently beautiful and exciting as that of Verdi and Puccini. Why are they never played? It's not because the Russian language barrier, opera companies put on Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov all the time. No, that's not the reason....
The reason is because the plots are incredibly stupid. Eastern archetypes about Islamic and Indian kingdoms with captured princesses and princely suitors. I won't even try to explain it. Is anything in Rimsky any stupider than the plots of Il Trovatore or Turandot or Salome? Well, no. But even if one thinks, as I do, that the current mania for seeing orientalism in every Western artistic representation is a colossally dangerous conceit that could lead us right back to book banning and burning, one is left with the fact that when you try to perceive the world through people you do not understand as well as the people you know best, your representations of them will be far more simplistic, and the results can be pretty dumb.
Nevertheless, we're already in an artform in which we have to suspend disbelief for a world where everything is sung, and where people not only sing simultaneously to each other, but sing with each other in perfect harmony. If you're already looking for veracity in opera, you'll find no more here than you will in superhero movies or singing cats.
The way great opera is made is almost the exact opposite of the way great movies are made, and is perhaps therefore the only artform that can match movies in their universality. Movies point the camera in a direction, and the viewer can register every emotional nuance as they happen. The greatest movie makers (make your own list....) generally do not let their characters rage as though this is a theater where they have to emote to the back row. They simply let the camera happen to their actors and sets, and we, the viewers, let the nuances of behavior and story register to us as they will. Think of how little happens in so many of the greatest movies of all time: Vertigo, Tokyo Story, Rules of the Game, Persona, Sunrise, 2001, Breathless, Late Spring, In the Mood for Love, Andrei Rublev, Shoah, Bicycle Thieves, Pather Panchali, Playtime, La Jetee, The Leopard, Barry Lyndon, Sherlock Jr, Children of Paradise, Nashville, Aguirre, Madame de... etc. etc. etc. Nothing happens in so many of these movies, and yet most of us don't notice because we adjust so easily to the timetable of the camera.
But since we live in a cinematic age, we are not well disposed to understand the world of opera, which is precisely the opposite. Singers of the greatest possible projection project primary emotions at us, one emotion at a time, from a great distance. In an age of therapy and the freest expression the world has ever seen, it's very difficult for people to see the necessity of expressing in that manner. We, the Westerners among us circa 2020, can give voice to our primary emotions all too well and have very little to no trouble externalizing them. Freedom is not our problem, we have nearly all the free expression we could possibly need and then some. What we lack understanding of is the context of emotions, why one emotion gradually gives way to another, and why all of our freedom has not made us fulfilled. So therefore, it's much easier for movies to provide the catharsis we need than it is for opera to provide the catharsis it once did (and does) for so many more buttoned up societies.
In every writing class any of us has ever taken, we're endlessly told that the more specific the situation and the character, the more universally the reader shares in the experiences. It's incredibly counterintuitive, but the more specific a situation becomes, the more points of reference the reader can find to the situations of their personal experience. In the same way, the ridiculousness of opera is part of its specificity.
In a relatively repressive society, which most 19th century countries were in comparison to those we've experienced, it's very difficult to create scenarios that did not have potentially subversive implications in the plot, and so many operas had to be cast afar in distant situations that in no way resemble the conflicts of their day.
Paradoxically, it's their very distance that make so many operas universal in their appeal. When all these characters have in common with us is the same human heart, it's very easy to understand their emotions. We've all been in love, we've all felt rage, we've all experienced tragedy, we've all felt heartbreak, and everyone in that period knew what it was like at times to experience a tyrannical society.
No matter how far removed opera was from contemporary situations, audiences picked up potentially subversive implications. When Verdi's Nabucco spoke of the suffering of Hebrews under Babylonian reign, everyone picked up on the implication of Italians captive under Austrian rule. When Wagner's Ring spoke of ancient German heroism, everyone picked up the implication of the necessity to reunite Germans in a single country. When Mozart wrote about the abuses of the Spanish nobility, everyone knew he was really speaking of the French ancien regime where a revolution would soon explode.
This is opera's power, and short of cinema, there is no artform in all the world that can move people with such seizmic, tectonic internal explosion. This is why the world forgets its operatic heritage at its peril, and why a new incarnation of opera may return opera to us, with audiences unfamiliar with its power and unable to take it with a grain of salt, and yet again, it may help turn the world upside down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMq87z_ZkPc&
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