Metropolitan Opera Research Articles

Enrique Granados: poet of the piano

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) is one of the most compelling figures of the late-Romantic period in music. During his return voyage to Spain after the premiere of his opera Goyescas at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1916, a German submarine torpedoed the ship on which he and his wife were sailing, and they perished in the waters of the English Channel. His death was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic as a stunning loss to the music world, for he had died at the pinnacle of his career, and his late works held the promise of greater things to come.Granados was among the leading pianists of his time, and his eloquence at the keyboard inspired critics to dub him the poet of the piano. In Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano, Walter Aaron Clark offers the first substantive study in English of this virtuoso pianist, composer, and music pedagogue. While providing detailed analyses of his major works for voice, piano, and the stage, Clark argues that Granados's art represented a unifying presence on the cultural landscape of Spain during a period of imperial decline, political unrest, and economic transformation. Drawing on newly discovered documents, Clark explores the cultural spheres in which Granados moved, particularly of Castile and Catalonia. Granados's best-known music was inspired by the art of Francisco Goya, especially the Goyescas suite for solo piano that became the basis for the opera. These pieces evoked the colorful and dramatic world that Goya inhabited and depicted in his art. Granados's fascination with Goya's Madrid set him apart from fellow nationalists Albeniz and Falla, who drew their principal inspiration from Andalusia. Though he was resolutely apolitical, Granados's attraction to Castile antagonized some Catalan nationalists, who resented Castilian domination. Yet Granados also made important contributions to Catalan musical theater and was a prominent figure in the modernist movement in Barcelona.Clark also explores the personal pressures that shaped Granados's music. His passionate affair with a wealthy socialite created domestic tensions, but it was also a source of inspiration for Goyescas. Persistent financial difficulties forced him to devote time to teaching at the expense of composition, though as a result Granados made considerable contributions to piano pedagogy and music education in Barcelona through the music academy he founded there.While Granados's tragic and early demise casts a pall over his life story, Clark ultimately reveals an artist of remarkable versatility and individuality and sheds new light on his enduring significance.

Where Did Porgy and Bess Come From?

In 1924, Metropolitan Opera board chairman Otto Kahn proposed that the yet-to-be-written Great American Opera might well be a “jazz opera.” Eleven years later, George Gershwin's engagement with Kahn's idea came to fruition in Porgy and Bess (1935), set to a libretto by DuBose Heyward, based on Heyward's novella Porgy (1925) and his play of the same name staged in 1927. Several months before Porgy was published, Gershwin had already decided that a work of Kahn's description would have to be written for a black cast. Gershwin and Heyward, two white men, revealed through their collaboration not an exploitative impulse but an understanding that the wellsprings of an American operatic art might lie as much with the performers as with the creators.

Metropolitan Opera versus Vienna State Opera: A Comparative Study of their Cultural and Management Policies

Metropolitan Opera versus Vienna State Opera: A Comparative Study of their Cultural and Management Policies

William Lichtenwanger, Reference Librarian

Readers of second series of are doubtless appreciative of Herculean efforts of its of early years, Richard S. Hill. But many may not be aware of prodigious labors of Hill's longtime coeditors, William Lichtenwanger and C. Campbell. Both toiled faithfully in various subsections and interconnecting pathways of each issue of Each participated for more than seventeen consecutive years; that is, more than seventy consecutive issues. Lichtenwanger was guest editor who wrote for Notes when Hill could not, who became acting during Hill's final illness, who was for eight issues after Hill's death, simultaneously continuing his previous duties as associate editor. It was a killing task from which he sought relief. He resigned both aspects of work prior to publication of vol. 20, no. 4 (Fall 1963). That issue carries his name as editor, but unsigned for Notes mentions the regretted resignation of Bill In fact, Frank Campbell [associate editor] ... out of goodness of his heart ... finished volume twenty of Notes. (1) Thereafter Lichtenwanger contributed infrequently to journal, focusing his efforts on editing, Henry Cowell catalog, Star Spangled Banner research, and other projects. William John Lichtenwanger was born in Asheville, North Carolina, 28 February 1915, only child of John Matthew and Lelia Gertrude (Williams) Lichtenwanger. (2) His parents were originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, to which they returned when Bill (3) was two-and-a-half years old; his father worked as a bookkeeper. When Depression hit Knoxville in 1930-31 his father lost his just as it was time for Bill's college years. Paul Wentworth Matthews, Bill's high school music teacher, was very influential in Bill's musical education. Matthews took special interest in Bill and invited him to his house to hear records. Bill began study of clarinet at age thirteen. He played in both high school orchestra and band--which was much better than that of University of Tennessee, located in Knoxville. So high school band played at university's football games, both home and away. By time he was a senior in high school Bill knew he wanted a career in music. He listened to broadcast concerts from Interlochen Center for Arts in Michigan, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestras, and later, Metropolitan Opera. He requested brochures from University of Michigan and Interlochen, and selected university for his academic career. To no avail! His parents were determined against a musical life. The plight of musicians during Depression exacerbated their opposition. His father advocated a business career, perhaps as a certified public accountant. His mother favored preacher or medical missionary as suitable careers for her son. In face of parental opposition to University of Michigan, Bill was obliged to spend his freshman year at hometown University of Tennessee, 1933-34. Summer 1934 Bill played tennis all morning, then drank gallons of liquids, even though I knew better, even then. (4) The combination caused a severe illness during which he became delirious at times. While delirious he was very vocal about how much he hated Tennessee and how much he wanted to go to University of Michigan that his mother relented and found a way to send him. (5) In 1928, her maternal aunt had left her a legacy of $30,000, of which only interest on $20,000 could be spent. That was enough to get Bill to Ann Arbor fall of 1934. (6) In Ann Arbor Bill, who wanted to enroll in musicology program, consulted Dr. Earl Moore, a professor in School of Music, who advised he enroll in undergraduate program in music education, so you can get a job, and consider musicology later on graduate level. The music education program required rudimentary skills on many instruments, which was quite easy for Bill. …

Boston & New York: Harbison, Wuorinen, Ueno and Sanford

The last two of the works commissioned by the Boston Symphony to celebrate the first season of James Levine as its Music Director were unveiled by Levine and the orchestra in Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York in April. John Harbison, whose The Great Gatsby was written for Levine and the Metropolitan Opera, had been working on an opera based on Lolita by Nabokov. He eventually decided that the problems presented by the staging of the work were insurmountable, and has, at least for the moment, abandoned the project, which he now considers misguided. He made the same decision in regard to the Fitzgerald novel about ten years before actually completing that project, so in the future this opera may also eventually see the light of day. Meanwhile, just as Harbison's aborted first attempt at Gatsby produced his ‘fox-trot for orchestra’, Remembering Gatsby, the work at Lolita has resulted in his most recent work for the BSO, a seven-minute overture based on material intended for the opera, entitled Darkbloom. Harbison's program note for the work does not name either Lolita or Nabokov, but speaks only of ‘a famous and infamous American novel’ in which Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) ‘is a just a secondary character’. Harbison chose Darkbloom as a title for the work ‘because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture’, and ‘serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragic-comic spirit of the story and its author’. Darkbloom itself is attractive and skilfully wrought. A balletic section which portrays two young women playing tennis is the most memorable music in the work.

Otto Kahn and Americanism at the Metropolitan Opera

Otto Kahn and Americanism at the Metropolitan Opera

Dancing at London's Pantheon, 1790 and After

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth‐Century London, Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath, 1789–1795 By Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume. xxviii + 883 pp. Illustrated....

Porgy and Miles

Miles Davis traced his rising fame in the 1950s to changes taking place in society. “There was a new mood coming into the country,” he stated in his autobiography. “Black and white people were starting to get together, and in the music world Uncle Tom images were on their way out.” Describing himself as a “nonconformist”-“cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean”-Davis identified with others in that period who were breaking barriers and challenging authority: Martin Luther King leading the Montgomery bus boycott, Marian Anderson appearing as the first black singer at the Metropolitan Opera, Marlon Brando and James Dean gaining popularity as actors by portraying rebels (Davis 1989:197-98). Davis’s bold, brash persona earned him a special degree of respect from black Americans. Writer Amiri Baraka considered the trumpeter his “ultimate culture hero,” someone who embodied “a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the 1950s-defiance” (Baraka 1996:41, 48). Given Davis’s affiliation, first with a group of postwar jazz musicians carving out a new identity for black artists, then with a larger movement engaged in transforming the nation’s cultural and political landscape (including the Beats, Civil Rights activists, Abstract Expressionists, and others), it is remarkable that in 1958 he teamed up with arranger Gil Evans to record an album devoted to Porgy and Bess. Ever since its premiere, the opera by the Gershwins and Heyward had sparked controversy and caused Mrican Americans to speak out in protest.

A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movie Moonstruck, we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera. Parsifal (not Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.

A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movieMoonstruck, we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera.Parsifal(not Giacomo Puccini'sLa Bohème, as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.

More Than A Modest Subculture

Virgil Thomson's Nearly Perfect Music Criticism In his first appearance in the New York Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson ripped the opening concert of the New York Philharmonic's ninety-ninth season. October 11, 1940, review, entitled Age Without Honor, read in part: connect as a whole, in fact, both as to program and as to playing, was anything but a memorable experience. music itself was soggy, the playing dull and brutal. As a friend remarked who had never been to one of these concerts before, I understand now why the Philharmonic is not a part of New York's intellectual life.1 For fourteen years at the Herald Tribune, Thomson rightfully challenged the comfortable, jaded, bourgeois illusion that music was immune from the dynamics of the larger aesthetic culture. From 1940 to 1954, he constructed an agenda that served his musical and journalistic purposes equally well. As a composer, he wanted to demonstrate, that contrary to the beliefs of those who managed and controlled musical institutions, musicians wanted popular success but on their own creative terms. That is, the challenges of contemporary music should not be foolishly viewed by the musical establishment as attempts by composers to bypass the mass public for a limited audience of genuine classical music lovers. Thomson also set out to clear up the misunderstanding about the public's taste for classical music. Simply, it was not difficult music to which serious music lovers objected, but those compositions that were not familiar. Second, in the wake of growing commercialism where radio stations and recording companies decided which music was listener friendly, he wanted to show that music was not a modest subculture in which different segments were defined along the lines of the popularity charts. Rather, music transcended the technical and theoretical ambitions of art as mere entertainment. As for serious music lovers, he wanted to show that they did not fall neatly into demographic categories. They were represented across society's many diverse boundaries. Thomson desired an American musical culture free of the contaminating influences of commercialism, oldfashioned music universalism, and stale European imports. He wanted to show readers a dynamic music culture radically different from the safe halls of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. A financially strapped composer, he fled Paris in 1940 just before the Nazi occupation and faced an uncertain fudge upon his return to the US. Much of his music was not widely performed and he believed that a prominent newspaper post might stimulate interest in his compositions. Not bothered by the fact that he would continue to be active as a composer and conductor, his bosses concluded that Thomson's professional artistic partiality would not compromise his capacity for fair-minded musical analysis. Thomson also was allowed to travel freely and send in his reviews. He covered music in San Francisco, Boston, Dallas and Pittsburgh as well as South America and Europe. He was a frequenty lecturer and conductor. The paper liked all the, activity because it kept my name before the public. Anthony Tommasini, in his authorized biography ol Thomson, noted that Geoffrey Parsons, his editorial superior, never seemed to challenge the composer in regard to his most glaring offense: conflict ol interest. Thomson's new prominence was winning him new champions.3 Thomson's Herald Tribune writings deserve serious examination as an important fragment of intellectual history. While reviews of concerts and recordings might attract readers with specific musical interests and training, Thomson's articles are valuable because they reflect a musical insider who was sensitively attuned to the needs of composers and to the desires of audiences within the larger discourse of ideas. He wisely used preciously rationed newspaper space to describe new musical works to skeptical audiences and to publicize composers and musicians who experimented with new idioms or creative musical enterprises. …

African-American Women Singers at the Metropolitan Opera before Leontyne Price

African-American Women Singers at the Metropolitan Opera before Leontyne Price

Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

Orchestra pit acoustics: From Bayreuth to Broadway

The design of orchestra pits for opera, ballet, and multiuse halls is examined from an historical perspective. The earliest orchestra pit designs for early European opera houses were open or ‘‘bathtub’’ pits holding few musicians on a single level. Pits remained similar until 1872 when Wagner’s Bayreuth pit changed the musician/vocalist orientation by extending the pit below the stage edge in stepped tiers. Modern pit designs have varied from large ‘‘bathtub’’ pits (the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco) to ‘‘modified Bayreuth’’ pits (Houston, Seattle, etc.) with varying degrees of success. Issues concerning musicians’ comfort, loudness levels, and hearing loss are discussed along with ways to improve acoustics in the overhung area. Finishes and materials for walls, ceilings, and floors are discussed as well as adjustable acoustic panels, drapes, and walls that can be used to tune the pit for varying programs. Finally, solutions to the dilemma of Bayreuth versus Bathtub pits will be discussed.

Sign-off for the old Met: the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, 1950-1966

Sign-off for the old Met: the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, 1950-1966

The Metropolitan Opera stories of the great operas, v.2

The Metropolitan Opera stories of the great operas, v.2

‘TB sheets’: Love and disease in La traviata

One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimì's unexpected death, which takes her by surprise, even though the explanation by her friend Ronny (Nicholas Cage) reveals that she suspects its cause. Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer's ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’). But we might pause for a moment on a more intriguing twist in Loretta's surprise at Mimì's death – the fact that our antibiotic age has largely forgotten the devastating epidemic formerly known as phthisis or consumption.

Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931-1950

Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931-1950

The Metropolitan Opera guide to recorded opera

The Metropolitan Opera guide to recorded opera

Remembering Helen Tamiris

In March of 1936, when I was still known as Pauline Bubrick, I joined the Dance Project of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project and was assigned to the group directed by Helen Tamiris. I had been a student of Martha Graham since I had turned up at her studio the day after I first saw her perform in 1934, but in the depths of the Depression a paying job as a concert dancer was not easy to find-while bills had to be paid and food put on the table. Thus it was that I had the opportunity to work for more than three years with one of the remarkable women of American dance, and one whose full contribution has yet to be acknowledged. Although Graham remains my greatest inspiration, my regard for Tamiris has grown immeasurably through the years. Helen Tamiris was born Helen Becker in New York City on April 23, 1902, into a poor but cultured family whose social values were to be a dominant influence on her life as a dancer and choreographer. Recognizing her enthusiasm for dance, the family registered her for classes in Duncan-inspired movement at the Henry Street Settlement, located in her neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. Tamiris went on to study Italian ballet at the Metropolitan Opera, where she became a member of the corps de ballet, and Russian ballet at Fokine's studio. Her training was as intensive as her per-