# Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

This must be one of the most famous operas of all time, and Wikipedia has a very good article about it.

But how do you feel about it? Do you love it? If so, why? Or do you have reservations about it?

Recording recommendations will be very welcome!

(As in other threads like this one, I will quote posts from other threads that are relevant here.)


----------



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

I always felt that it spoils the happy ending of Rossini's Barber of Seville.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Fritz Kobus said:


> I always felt that it spoils the happy ending of Rossini's Barber of Seville.


That's the way everyone felt when Ricky and Lucy Ricardo got divorced in real life.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Figaro is one of the greatest of all operas, dealing with genuine human emotions on a real level. So what if it spoils the Barber story? This is real life, albeit with the facial elements of opera buffa, especially among the aristocrats of Mozart's day. Why this satire (based on Baumarchais) by da Ponte was considered subversive. It is all about the lower classes getting one over on the aristocrats! The servant trouncing his master. Unthinkable! But woven into the opera are real human emotions - the lovesick Cherubino, the heartbroken countess, the scheming and frustrated count, etc. All with music and drama which is so completely radical to just about anything that had gone before. Figaro perhaps represents the greatest advance in opera in a single jump ever made by a composer. Incredible. Sheer genius! Who wouldn't like it?


----------



## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

DavidA said:


> But woven into the opera are real human emotions - the lovesick Cherubino, the heartbroken countess, the scheming and frustrated count, etc. All with music and drama which is so completely radical to just about anything that had gone before. Figaro perhaps represents the greatest advance in opera in a single jump ever made by a composer. Incredible. Sheer genius! Who wouldn't like it?


Well said. Mozart manages to show their inner emotions through his music. These characters become three-dimensional. I mean, even in the first scene alone where they're just measuring the apartment, you know how Susanna and Figaro relate to each other. I'm not a fan of opera, but this is one always grabs my attention.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

It's ok. The overture is very good, and there's some very beautiful arias. I strongly dislike secco recitative, so I only like the recordings that are tracked to allow you to skip them--I think from the half dozen or so in my collection, the stereo Bohm permits the most aggressive track skipping, so that's the one I'd recommend. The ladies are quite good in that one. Or perhaps those highlights disks? Do they still sell them?

No criticism of you intended Manx, but I'm always a little amused when people talk about Mozart revealing emotions through music. In Shawshank Redemption, Red says he didn't know what those Italian ladies were singing in Sull'aria but he imagines it's about something so beautiful it can't be put into words. The song is actually about two ladies writing a letter to trick one of their duplicitous husbands to reveal his infidelity, so yeah, very good job revealing that emotion Wolfie.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

howlingfantods said:


> It's ok. The overture is very good, and there's some very beautiful arias. I strongly dislike secco recitative, so I only like the recordings that are tracked to allow you to skip them--I think from the half dozen or so in my collection, the stereo Bohm permits the most aggressive track skipping, so that's the one I'd recommend. The ladies are quite good in that one. Or perhaps those highlights disks? Do they still sell them?
> 
> No criticism of you intended Manx, but *I'm always a little amused when people talk about Mozart revealing emotions through music. *In Shawshank Redemption, Red says he didn't know what those Italian ladies were singing in Sull'aria but he imagines it's about something so beautiful it can't be put into words. *The song is actually about two ladies writing a letter to trick one of their duplicitous husbands to reveal his infidelity, so yeah, very good job revealing that emotion Wolfie.*


You have a point. In real life most women in that situation wouldn't be rhapsodizing about lovely soft breezes in the pine wood. But the imagery presented a temptation that Mozart the musician couldn't resist.

I don't think we should expect too much psychological realism from an 18th-century comedy of manners. DavidA might say that _Figaro_ deals with "genuine human emotions on a real level," but I think it's a good bit more porcelain-figurine decorous than that. That isn't a criticism;_ Figaro,_ like Mozart's other great operas, inhabits its own aesthetic world and fully justifies itself. But 18th-century operas, even those by a composer with as keen a sense of character as Mozart, must observe certain conventions and proprieties. Would you really prefer that Mozart and Da Ponte hadn't allowed these ladies their sweet pastoral reverie?


----------



## Guest (Jul 25, 2018)

Great music, insightful analysis of class in the 18th century, lightly left-wing but makes its messages more potent emotionally than politically. I love Mozart especially for his operas and especially for this one; he is, after all, one of my favourite composers in all of history.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Would you really prefer that Mozart and Da Ponte hadn't allowed these ladies their sweet pastoral reverie?


No of course not--Mozart played to his strengths, but his strengths have a lot more to do with the ability of writing fantastically pretty melodies than the ability to illuminate feelings through music (unless that feeling was the feeling of how pretty the world of light breezes might be).

Most non-opera fans who hear Der Holle Rache probably think it's a love song or something.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

howlingfantods said:


> No of course not--Mozart played to his strengths, but his strengths have a lot more to do with the ability of writing fantastically pretty melodies than the ability to illuminate feelings through music (unless that feeling was the feeling of how pretty the world of light breezes might be).
> 
> Most non-opera fans who hear Der Holle Rache probably think it's a love song or something.


Oh, come on. I think it's pretty clear that the woman singing _Der hölle Rache_ is a bit mad about something. You'd have to have a very weird idea of love to think it was a love song.

If Mozart's only talent was to write "fantastically pretty tunes" then I doubt his music would have survived as long as it has. Within its eighteenth century constraints, there is no doubt that his music can touch a deeper vein of feeling than almost any of his contemporaries. It is one of the things that singles him out, not only in his operas, but in his instrumental and orchestral music too.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

GregMitchell said:


> Oh, come on. I think it's pretty clear that the woman singing _Der hölle Rache_ is a bit mad about something. You'd have to have a very weird idea of love to think it was a love song.
> 
> If Mozart's only talent was to write "fantastically pretty tunes" then I doubt his music would have survived as long as it has. Within its eighteenth century constraints, there is no doubt that his music can touch a deeper vein of feeling than almost any of his contemporaries. It is one of the things that singles him out, not only in his operas, but in his instrumental and orchestral music too.


I may be exaggerating a bit for comic emphasis.... But I do bet if you pulled some randos off the street and played for instance Popp's version, very very very few would think that that was a supernatural creature frothing with rage.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

howlingfantods said:


> I may be exaggerating a bit for comic emphasis.... But I do bet if you pulled some randos off the street and played for instance Popp's version, very very very few would think that that was a supernatural creature frothing with rage.


Then maybe you should play them Edda Moser. We should of course remember that it was written for the stage and the stage setting and story would make a difference, not to mention the words. Mozart never expected people to just be sitting _listening_ to his operas.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

GregMitchell said:


> Then maybe you should play them Edda Moser. We should of course remember that it was written for the stage and that would make a difference. Mozart never expected people to just be sitting _listening_ to his operas.


True... but that still is a strike against the whole "Mozart illuminating the emotions depicted through music" argument that I see periodically. And I agree on Moser > Popp when it comes to this performance but a lot of Mozarteans sigh over Popp's version while still talking up the "illumination emotions" angle.

I'm probably overarguing the point--I actually think Mozart is quite good at this at times. The drag-him-to-hell part of Don Giovanni, many of the parts of the Requiem, and the sweetly pretty love songs that are intended to be sweetly pretty love songs.... I just think he's less exceptional in this regard than many of the Romantic era composers, but he is exceptional in this regard compared to other Classical era composers.


----------



## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

howlingfantods said:


> I may be exaggerating a bit for comic emphasis.... But I do bet if you pulled some randos off the street and played for instance Popp's version, very very very few would think that that was a supernatural creature frothing with rage.


Ditto for Rita Streich and Erna Berger. To my ears, both sound irrepressibly cheerful.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

howlingfantods said:


> True... but that still is a strike against the whole "Mozart illuminating the emotions depicted through music" argument that I see periodically. And I agree on Moser > Popp when it comes to this performance but a lot of Mozarteans sigh over Popp's version while still talking up the "illumination emotions" angle.
> 
> I'm probably overarguing the point--I actually think Mozart is quite good at this at times. The drag-him-to-hell part of Don Giovanni, many of the parts of the Requiem, and the sweetly pretty love songs that are intended to be sweetly pretty love songs.... *I just think he's less exceptional in this regard than many of the Romantic era composers, but he is exceptional in this regard compared to other Classical era composers.*


I've argued your very point, and I think your last sentence suggests the key to resolving this debate (if it is a debate). Two things: 1. to understand any music's expressive intent or accomplishment, we have to be able to hear it in the context of its era and style; and 2. every era and style has its own realm of musical possibilities, which are limited by the state of musical practice, the sensibilities of the times, and the imagination and purposes of the artists who live in those times, share those sensibilities, and write for their contemporary audiences (real or hoped for).

Viewed outside the context of these considerations, I agree that Mozart's ability to express a wide range of specific psychological states is not equal to that of Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, or Puccini. The musical resources available in his day - the variety of orchestral forces, the style of singing, the size of performing venues - along with then-current musical techniques and operatic conventions, imposed some limits on what an opera composer could do. But it's questionable just how much "psychological realism" would have been welcomed by audiences of the day. The "Enlightenment" concept of musical expression was different from the Romantic idea of personal expression, being more concerned with universal types. And in that context Mozart's strength of characterization can be appreciated as innovative and rather "modern": _Don Giovanni_ was actually thought to be a "Romantic" opera, and Mozart was called (by E.T.A. Hoffmann, if I recall correctly) a "Romantic" composer. With the music of Verdi and the rest behind us, we may have to exert a bit of imagination to hear Mozart that way now, but my guess is that audiences of the time were impressed by the emotional force of certain aspects of his music that largely escape us today.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

wkasimer said:


> Ditto for Rita Streich and Erna Berger. To my ears, both sound irrepressibly cheerful.


Most sopranos with good High Fs and coloratura facility have chirpy voices. Too bad Callas never sang the Queen (although I believe Eb was the highest she ever sang in performance). Birgit Nilsson apparently liked to sing the Queen's arias for fun, but we may be fortunate not to have recordings in her case. I guess there's always Florence Foster Jenkins for a really scary experience.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Fritz Kobus said:


> I always felt that it spoils the happy ending of Rossini's Barber of Seville.


Blame Beaumarchais! And if you think _Figaro_ is depressing, stay away from _La mère coupable_, the third part of the trilogy, operafied by Milhaud. Cherubino is dead; Figaro & Susanna have marital problems; so do the Count & Countess; and their illegitimate children.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

howlingfantods said:


> I'm probably overarguing the point--I actually think Mozart is quite good at this at times. The drag-him-to-hell part of Don Giovanni, many of the parts of the Requiem, and the sweetly pretty love songs that are intended to be sweetly pretty love songs.... I just think he's less exceptional in this regard than many of the Romantic era composers, but he is exceptional in this regard compared to other Classical era composers.


Not to knock Mozart, who is GREAT - but ... Gluck, Gluck, Gluck! (And Rameau, too.)


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> You have a point. In real life most women in that situation wouldn't be rhapsodizing about lovely soft breezes in the pine wood. But the imagery presented a temptation that Mozart the musician couldn't resist.
> 
> I don't think we should expect too much psychological realism from an 18th-century comedy of manners. DavidA might say that _Figaro_ deals with "genuine human emotions on a real level," but I think it's a good bit more porcelain-figurine decorous than that. That isn't a criticism;_ Figaro,_ like Mozart's other great operas, inhabits its own aesthetic world and fully justifies itself. But 18th-century operas, even those by a composer with as keen a sense of character as Mozart, must observe certain conventions and proprieties. Would you really prefer that Mozart and Da Ponte hadn't allowed these ladies their sweet pastoral reverie?


Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer. Of course they are within the conventions of what he was writing for but we can certainly identify with them. At least I can. The lovesick teenager? Or the betrayed wife? Or the frustrated husband looking for kicks? Or the feisty young fiancé? The whole effect is utterly miraculous. As to 'porcelain'? This is what the aristocracy tended to be like. The problem is that we can believe the lie that Mozart occupied a 'porcelain' world but this is the world of Salzburg tourism and sugar bon-bons not the world Mozart inhabited and wrote about in his somewhat subversive operas. Oh yes, the setting might be opera buffs but the emotions he portrays are as real as can be.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> No of course not--Mozart played to his strengths, but his strengths have a lot more to do with the ability of writing fantastically pretty melodies than the ability to illuminate feelings through music (unless that feeling was the feeling of how pretty the world of light breezes might be).
> 
> Most non-opera fans who hear Der Holle Rache probably think it's a love song or something.


Sorry but do you actually hear the same music as me? Der Holle Rache is a love song? What strange emotions you must have! :lol:


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

wkasimer said:


> Ditto for Rita Streich and Erna Berger. To my ears, both sound irrepressibly cheerful.


Gleeful really, especially the Streich. After listening to her version, I'm now convinced that this may not be a love song, but this could be the song that the romantic lead sings when she's just met her true love. She's lightly skipping as she walks home through a light rain in Central Park. A shift to a minor key when she's disturbed by thoughts that their true love has a girlfriend already, or if their lack of common social standing will prevent their union. Ending in a tone of determination, to push through those obstacles and win her true love's heart.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> *Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer. *Of course they are within the conventions of what he was writing for but we can certainly identify with them. At least I can. The lovesick teenager? Or the betrayed wife? Or the frustrated husband looking for kicks? Or the feisty young fiancé? The whole effect is utterly miraculous.


When you say that a composer "reveals" emotions, what exactly are you saying? Music doesn't "reveal" emotions; it imitates and evokes them. We can't regard the music of an opera as an expression of some emotion that has prior existence in a fictional character and judge its accuracy in doing so. What the music does is not _reveal_ the character's emotions but _create_ them: a character is only what the music and the staging say he is, and we understand that character only through those representations. Quite literally, the character _is_ those representations. So when you say that "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer," you must actually be saying that you think Mozart creates, in musical terms, "better" characters than any other composer. But what makes a character musically "good"?

You've listed characters - "lovesick teenager," et al. - only in terms of types that don't describe individual human beings with any personal specificity. What sort of person is a "betrayed wife"? What emotions does she have, how does she express them, and what kind of music gives us a convincing portrait of such a person? Mozart portrays a betrayed wife - the Countess - in one way; Puccini portrays one - Butterfly - quite differently. Is Mozart's portrayal more "true to type," or "better"? Is the Countess Almaviva a more distinctive individual, or a more memorable character, than Cio Cio San? You might find it hard to convince anyone of that.

If we must evaluate the ability of composers to portray human emotion and character, the important questions, to me, are whether the music given to the characters renders them distinctive, interesting, memorable, consistent with themselves, consistent with comprehensible human responses to the plot situations in which they find themselves, and consistent with the aesthetic universe created in the opera as a whole. That last factor is important: an opera's genre and overall artistic purpose will control to a great extent how character and emotion are presented. We expect the characters in a comic opera written by an Austrian in 1786 about the upper classes in 18th-century Seville to feel, act, emote, and speak differently, and in different musical terms, from those in a sentimental romance written by an Italian in 1895 about poor young artists in fin-de-siecle Paris, or a mythological epic written by a German in 1850 about a ring of power and the twilight of the gods. Mozart's aesthetic framework is quite different from Puccini's, Wagner's, Verdi's, Strauss's, Berg's, or Britten's, and all these composers (and others) have created aesthetic universes of great distinctiveness populated by strong, memorable characters - Don Giovanni, Scarpia, Wotan, Rigoletto, the Marschallin, Wozzeck, Peter Grimes - who are precise and convincing embodiments of the artistic milieus they inhabit.

I'm open to being shown that Mozart's Donna Anna or Donna Elvira are more musically subtle, varied, convincing, or "utterly miraculous" portraits of wounded, lovesick, vengeful aristocratic women than Wagner's Isolde. But frankly I can't imagine anyone actually showing it.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

howlingfantods said:


> I just think he's less exceptional in this regard than many of the Romantic era composers, but he is exceptional in this regard compared to other Classical era composers.


It sounds as if you're blaming him for being born in the wrong era :lol:


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

GregMitchell said:


> It sounds as if you're blaming him for being born in the wrong era :lol:


No…. I'm not sure what's unclear here. I'm not criticizing Mozart, I'm criticizing a particular talking point that some people in internet forums like to spout off about, that I think is a pretty silly when unqualified. For instance, I could say Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-blowingly harmonically advanced for his time, but it would be pretty silly to say it's mind-blowingly harmonically advanced full stop, considering the couple of centuries of music making that followed.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

_The Marriage of Figaro_ is REVOLTING, because it lacks a revolt.

Mozart and Da Ponte recognise the fundamental reality of class struggle: the patriarchal, entitled, titled plutocrat oppresses the working man (and woman).

But the opera is ideologically false. It ends with that most hackneyed of conventions: a happy ending, to lull the audience into acquiescence and false consciousness. The "marriage" upholds petit bourgeois moral values and heteronormativity.

The classes are reconciled, with no revolution in sight. This is false to the empirical truth of Marxism.

The opera should finish, like _Dialogues des Carmélites_, with the enemies of the people - the Count and Countess, and their lackey Don Basilio - guillotined!

This is typical of Mozart and Da Ponte's effete liberal Enlightenment ideology. (The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and tolerance, led directly to the gas-chambers of Belsen and Auschwitz.)

Worse, Figaro discovers that he is really a member of the bourgeoisie, the son of a property holder, and not a member of the proletariat.

Mozart and Da Ponte were class traitors, sycophants of the decadent imperialist Viennese court.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> It's ok. The overture is very good, and there's some very beautiful arias. I strongly dislike secco recitative, so I only like the recordings that are tracked to allow you to skip them--I think from the half dozen or so in my collection, the stereo Bohm permits the most aggressive track skipping, so that's the one I'd recommend. The ladies are quite good in that one. Or perhaps those highlights disks? Do they still sell them?
> 
> No criticism of you intended Manx, but I'm always a little amused when people talk about Mozart revealing emotions through music. In Shawshank Redemption, Red says he didn't know what those Italian ladies were singing in Sull'aria but he imagines it's about something so beautiful it can't be put into words. *The song is actually about two ladies writing a letter to trick one of their duplicitous husbands to reveal his infidelity, so yeah, very good job revealing that emotion Wolfie.*


I really dont think you understand what Mozart is doing in this duet. You ideally also need to see it performed too - as the countess dictates a brief letter to Susanah - they exchange amused glances and delight in the words and presumably the effect they will have on the count when read.

The music, in my view - interweaves two aspects - the poetic invitation to an erotic encounter (see below) - and the feminine exuberance of two women reveling in the act of laying a trap for a man who has been a heartbreak to one and a menace to the other.

the words of the letter are:

"A little song on the breeze" (the title)
What a gentle little Zephyr
This evening will sigh
Under the pines in the little grove.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> No of course not--Mozart played to his strengths, *but his strengths have a lot more to do with the ability of writing fantastically pretty melodies than the ability to illuminate feelings through music *(unless that feeling was the feeling of how pretty the world of light breezes might be).
> 
> Most non-opera fans who hear Der Holle Rache probably think it's a love song or something.


well - you are entitled to you view. But those people who have an ear for Mozart opera - love it because of his ability to convey real human emotions through the music. If he had no ability to do this - as others have said - his operas would be long forgotten.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> I may be exaggerating a bit for comic emphasis.... But I do bet if you pulled some randos off the street and played for instance Popp's version, very very very few would think that that was a supernatural creature frothing with rage.


I expect that if you played any piece to passers by 99.99% would have nothing to say at all.

You cant evaluate a piece unless you know the context and understand the words.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I've argued your very point, and I think your last sentence suggests the key to resolving this debate (if it is a debate). Two things: 1. to understand any music's expressive intent or accomplishment, we have to be able to hear it in the context of its era and style; and 2. every era and style has its own realm of musical possibilities, which are limited by the state of musical practice, the sensibilities of the times, and the imagination and purposes of the artists who live in those times, share those sensibilities, and write for their contemporary audiences (real or hoped for).
> 
> Viewed outside the context of these considerations, I agree that Mozart's ability to express a wide range of specific psychological states is not equal to that of Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, or Puccini. The musical resources available in his day - the variety of orchestral forces, the style of singing, the size of performing venues - along with then-current musical techniques and operatic conventions, imposed some limits on what an opera composer could do. But it's questionable just how much "psychological realism" would have been welcomed by audiences of the day. The "Enlightenment" concept of musical expression was different from the Romantic idea of personal expression, being more concerned with universal types. And in that context Mozart's strength of characterization can be appreciated as innovative and rather "modern": _Don Giovanni_ was actually thought to be a "Romantic" opera, and Mozart was called (by E.T.A. Hoffmann, if I recall correctly) a "Romantic" composer. With the music of Verdi and the rest behind us, we may have to exert a bit of imagination to hear Mozart that way now, *but my guess is that audiences of the time were impressed by the emotional force of certain aspects of his music that largely escape us today.*


I think that Mozart's use of music to express emotion in opera is far more subtle than most of what we hear in, for example, Verdi's soaring melodies and aggressive rythms - which I'm a great fan of by the way.
Some of us are well tuned in to Mozart's delicate style and some are not.
Those who are not dismiss him as emotionally cold and superficial which is a valid POV for those who feel that way.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

NickFuller said:


> _The Marriage of Figaro_ is REVOLTING, because it lacks a revolt.
> 
> Mozart and Da Ponte recognise the fundamental reality of class struggle: the patriarchal, entitled, titled plutocrat oppresses the working man (and woman).
> 
> ...


Le Nozze Di Figaro was never going to be about the struggle between classes on anything other than a micro scale and on one issue.

The count's plans are thwarted - one small step - that's all that matters.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

stomanek said:


> I expect that if you played any piece to passers by 99.99% would have nothing to say at all.
> 
> You cant evaluate a piece unless you know the context and understand the words.


If you need to know the context and understand the words, you can't really talk about that composer being a master of conveying emotion through his music alone.... you see the contradiction there?


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> If you need to know the context and understand the words, you can't really talk about that composer being a master of conveying emotion through his music alone.... you see the contradiction there?


Opera is like that though - mysterious and baffling the way music and words fuse to create meaning.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

stomanek said:


> Opera is like that though - mysterious and baffling the way music and words fuse to create meaning.


Yes, the practice of using words together with music to create meaning is totally baffling and mysterious, and completely unique to opera.


----------



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

howlingfantods said:


> Yes, the practice of using words together with music to create meaning is totally baffling and mysterious, and completely unique to opera.


It does seem that the words to pop music are meaningless.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Fritz Kobus said:


> It does seem that the words to pop music are meaningless.


When you can even make out what they are! Maybe that's why they repeat them endlessly - although I have to admit having got all the way through some pop songs without figuring out what they were saying over and over and over.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Fritz Kobus said:


> It does seem that the words to pop music are meaningless.


Some of them you have to sing backwards for the best effect.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Some of them you have to sing backwards for the best effect.


Backward music deserves no less.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> Yes, the practice of using words together with music to create meaning is totally baffling and mysterious, and completely unique to opera.


lieder? folk music? pop music? nursery rhymes

not quite unique then


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> When you can even make out what they are! Maybe that's why they repeat them endlessly - although I have to admit having got all the way through some pop songs without figuring out what they were saying over and over and over.


And when one does, one wishes one hadn't. I once worked for a brief but excruciating month back in uni packing shelves. The supermarket played the same song on a loop. Lyrics: "I want to love you all over the floor, yeah yeah yeah" - repeat.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

howlingfantods said:


> I may be exaggerating a bit for comic emphasis.... But I do bet if you pulled some randos off the street and played for instance Popp's version, very very very few would think that that was a supernatural creature frothing with rage.


Yes but how many random off the street would know anything about what is going on in an opera in a foreign language? :lol:

Your point appears ridiculous to me


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> When you say that a composer "reveals" emotions, what exactly are you saying? *Music doesn't "reveal" emotions; it imitates and evokes them.* We can't regard the music of an opera as an expression of some emotion that has prior existence in a fictional character and judge its accuracy in doing so. What the music does is not _reveal_ the character's emotions but _create_ them: a character is only what the music and the staging say he is, and we understand that character only through those representations. Quite literally, the character _is_ those representations. So when you say that "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer," you must actually be saying that you think Mozart creates, in musical terms, "better" characters than any other composer. But what makes a character musically "good"?
> 
> You've listed characters - "lovesick teenager," et al. - only in terms of types that don't describe individual human beings with any personal specificity. What sort of person is a "betrayed wife"? What emotions does she have, how does she express them, and what kind of music gives us a convincing portrait of such a person? Mozart portrays a betrayed wife - the Countess - in one way; Puccini portrays one - Butterfly - quite differently. Is Mozart's portrayal more "true to type," or "better"? Is the Countess Almaviva a more distinctive individual, or a more memorable character, than Cio Cio San? You might find it hard to convince anyone of that.
> 
> ...


To be honest I think the first point you're just arguing over semantics so I'll put that point aside.

You might not have met the characters I described but I have. They are real characters albeit tied into opera buffa conventions, although Mozart is not that conventional. Isolde never convinces me with her emotions as she is not a real person. She is someone tied into myth with complete disregard for reality. Anyway how I see it. They characters leave me cold.


----------



## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Fritz Kobus said:


> It does seem that the words to pop music are meaningless.


On the other hand, Da Ponte never won the Nobel Prize for literature.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

stomanek said:


> lieder? folk music? pop music? nursery rhymes
> 
> not quite unique then


You're right. I have no idea how I came up with such an wrong-headed take.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> You might not have met the characters I described but I have. They are real characters albeit tied into opera buffa conventions, although Mozart is not that conventional. Isolde never convinces me with her emotions as she is not a real person. She is someone tied into myth with complete disregard for reality. Anyway how I see it. They characters leave me cold.


What leaves an individual cold is really not the point, is it? Maria Callas found the role of Isolde interesting but wouldn't sing Mozart because "Donna Anna is a bore." I agree with her.

If "real" means "ordinary," or "looking like my neighbor," then Mozart's characters are of course more "real" than Wagner's. Count Almaviva may look more like my neighbor than Alberich does, yes; but that may be because my neighbor conceals behind his blandly pleasant demeanor the emptiness, resentment, rage, and dark ambition whch the music given to Wagner's little villain expresses to perfection, but which has no parallel in any music written by any earlier composer. Perhaps the "real" power of music lies in revealing the deeper states of mind and soul - the all-too-real but unadmitted motivations - which my neighbor keeps safely hidden beneath layers of Mozartean decorum. Surely it isn't a test of its trueness to "reality" whether a work of art depicts the villain as the handsome and tailored proprietor of a Spanish manor or as a misshapen dwarf ruling his fellow cave-dwellers with a ring of power (or, to make it all too "real," as the occupant of the White House).

It's nice if the characters in an opera are easy for us to understand and identify with. It's more interesting, I think, if they take us outside our everyday selves to experience perceptions of life we ordinarily would not, or aspects of our own nature with which we may have lost touch.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> What leaves an individual cold is really not the point, is it? Maria Callas found the role of Isolde interesting but wouldn't sing Mozart because "Donna Anna is a bore." I agree with her.
> 
> If "real" means "ordinary," or "looking like my neighbor," then Mozart's characters are of course more "real" than Wagner's. Count Almaviva may look more like my neighbor than Alberich does, yes; but that may be because my neighbor conceals behind his blandly pleasant demeanor the emptiness, resentment, rage, and dark ambition whch the music given to Wagner's little villain expresses to perfection, but which has no parallel in any music written by any earlier composer. Perhaps the "real" power of music lies in revealing the deeper states of mind and soul - the all-too-real but unadmitted motivations - which my neighbor keeps safely hidden beneath layers of Mozartean decorum. Surely it isn't a test of its trueness to "reality" whether a work of art depicts the villain as the handsome and tailored proprietor of a Spanish manor or as a misshapen dwarf ruling his fellow cave-dwellers with a ring of power (or, to make it all too "real," as the occupant of the White House).
> 
> It's nice if the characters in an opera are easy for us to understand and identify with. It's more interesting, I think, if they take us outside our everyday selves to experience perceptions of life we ordinarily would not, or aspects of our own nature with which we may have lost touch.


Bluntly I couldn't care less what Callas thought - or frankly whether you agree with her. It just shows how wise she was not to sing Mozart if she thought that. Leontyne Price sang brilliant Donna Annas, one of which I was listening to last night. This is, again, an example of subjectivity. I find that in general I cannot identify with the characters in Wagner but those in Mozart move me. Frankly it's not the setting either. I am vastly more moved by characters in the Flute despite its other-worldly setting than ever I am in Wagner's operas. To me Mozart puts real emotions into the characters - Wagner doesn't. Of course, this is subjective. If you like King Ludwig's castles in `the air you will probably like Wagner better. So what? I know what I like! :lol:


----------



## Dominic Erbacher (Jul 30, 2018)

This is undoubtedly one of the most loved classical opera buffas to this day. Mozart's characterization is flawless! As an example of Mozart's incredible characterization, here is a quick analysis I wrote of 'Cinque, Dieci' from Le nozze di Figaro.

In ‘Cinque, Dieci’ from The Marriage of Figaro, the characters’ personalities, emotions, and relationships are all effectively represented by the musical elements (expressive devices, pitch, texture, timbre, and duration). In this piece, Figaro is represented as a light-hearted, affectionate, cheerful, cheeky, charismatic husband-to-be. Susanna is represented as a fussy, superficial, excited, and slightly vain fiancée. As the piece begins, it can be seen that it is in the key of G major with Allegro, meaning lively and fast, as the tempo. By the major key we can tell that it is to be quite a joyful piece and the Allegro tempo greatly assists in presenting the comical theme to the audience. As Figaro is measuring out the room in deep concentration, Susanna begins distracting him, excited about her new bonnet. She begins begging Figaro for approval and attention. The tempo of Figaro’s melody is deliberate when he is counting. It consists of simple two-note phrases, which are crotchets, giving the illusion that it is slow, with a soft instrumental accompaniment, signifying his concentration. The metre of the piece is simple quadruple time. This creates a very steady rhythm, signifying Figaro’s counting. Susanna’s melody consists of quavers (creating a forward moving motion) in contrast to Figaro’s, which was using crotchets, and is in the high register (soprano), with a complex accompaniment of woodwinds, in a steady, simple rhythm, and strings, in much faster runs, in polyphony, signifying her excitement and vanity. Susanna then begins singing over Figaro’s part in bar 36 onwards as she is trying to get his attention. This creates a pleasant consonant polyphonic texture, introducing their comical relationship. As Figaro finally pays attention to her, he begins agreeing with her in his bass voice, complimenting her on the bonnet, but Susanna feels as though he is not really interested. They then begin to sing in homophony, Figaro complimenting her in accompaniment, almost as a response to Susanna and Susanna flattering herself as the melody. They begin to happily anticipate the wedding together, both very excited about it, as can be observed by the way they are both singing almost the same lyrics in homophony as a harmony of 11th’s (a third stretched out over an octave) together. The accompaniment in Figaro’s part is played by soft string instruments, emphasising his concentration on counting. Susanna’s accompaniments are played by woodwinds with frivolous strings playing fancy runs, signifying her vanity and excitement.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> What leaves an individual cold is really not the point, is it? Maria Callas found the role of Isolde interesting but wouldn't sing Mozart because "Donna Anna is a bore." I agree with her.


I disagree with both you and Callas here, I think both Isolde and Donna Anna are very interesting characters and actually have more than a little in common. Both characters can be boring if the interpreters singing them don't find and reveal the nuances of personality in the libretto and music. There is something ironic about Callas' comment as in the few excerpts we have of her in these roles she shows us the inner emotions of each in their own way and I don't think that anyone could say that her recordings of Anna's arias in particular are 'boring'. (You may be able to criticise them for other reasons of course.)

As for whether I know anybody like Isolde or Donna Anna, well, I've never met any Irish princesses or Spanish noblewomen, but as I said before they have something in common. Isolde and Donna Anna both start off very much angry and annoyed with Tristan and Don Giovanni, could it be that the ladies protest too much? I've known many a woman treat a male friend as if they were public enemy number one and this always ended up with them becoming an item, as the Italians say 'chi disprezza compra'. Furthermore whilst Wagner based his opera librettos on myth that doesn't mean that the characters aren't 'real'. Funnily enough Mozart's Don Giovanni is based on the Don Juan myth and Don Juan didn't exist, he is fictional, whereas Isolde may have been a historical person. Therefore quite literally Isolde is more real than Donna Anna!

It doesn't matter, though, whether these characters are based on people who actually existed or not, nor whether the librettos were based on something called a 'myth' or not, what matters is that these characters as they are portrayed in the combination of words and music display thoughts and actions that we recognise as those of people around us and I think most of both Mozart's and Wagner's characters fit into that category. If they didn't, then I wouldn't expect their operas would be performed anywhere near as often as they are.

N.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Well I suppose I should put in my tuppence worth on donna anna.

She has for a start - two superb arias to her name plus some great passages near the start in particular after discovering the corpse of her father - there is a gripping episode of recit which leads into a magnificent aria. She also has indispensable parts in several ensembles - notably the trio of masked guests and of course the finale, and the great sextet from act 2.

How could Callas have not relished the struggle to unmask her assailant and subsequent grief and vengeance duet with Ottavio I can't begin to fathom.

I think quite simply, in common with many verdi/bel canto singers - she just did not like Mozart that much.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Though I've heard the oft repeated quote that Callas found the music of Mozart boring, I've never come across anything specific to Donna Anna before.

That said, when she recorded _Non mi dir_ in 1953 (a test recording, never meant to be released, remember) she is far from boring. The aria itself is delivered meltingly, reminding us that this is an appeal to Don Ottavio, and the stunningly executed coloratura section still has a liquid softness we don't always hear, with all the notes cleanly articulated. By the time she recorded her Beethoven, Mozart, Weber recital in 1963, the voice had become far too unstable for the classical repertoire, though the recitative to Elvira's _Mi tradi_ crackles with drama.

One should also maybe put the above quote about Mozart being boring in context. I believe it was during the Juilliard masterclasses, during a session on one of the Mozart arias. She was discussing the way Mozart was usually sung as if the singer were performing on tip toes, when (and I'm paraphrasing of course) it should be sung with the same open frankness you would give to, say, Verdi's Leonora. I think both Anna and Elvira would have suited her very well, though probably not the Countess. She never had much sympathy for passive characters.

She did sing Constanze at La Scala in 1952 (in Italian), and if live accounts of the aria _Martern aller Arten_ are anything to go by, must have been absolutely fantastic in the piece.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> How could Callas have not relished the struggle to unmask her assailant and subsequent grief and vengeance duet with Ottavio I can't begin to fathom.
> 
> I think quite simply, in common with many verdi/bel canto singers - she just did not like Mozart that much.


I think it useful to look at the context of her statement. She was in talks with Bing over roles for her at the Met (where she was often if not exclusively given old revivals in old fashioned productions) Bing offered her Donna Anna (no doubt in an old Don Giovanni) and she said that if she were going to sing an Anna, then she would rather sing Anna Bolena (which would have been in a new production and allowed Callas an exciting collaboration with a director). Callas said that Donna Anna was a bore! Perhaps this was said in the heat of the moment and I don't think it was that she didn't want to sing Donna Anna, just that she would rather have sung something else.

Callas recorded almost an entire disc of Mozart late in her career and also sang Konstanze in Entfuehrung. Furthermore when she was giving masterclasses at Juilliard she had the following to say,
"Dramatically this aria is a simple, direct statement of Pamina's state of mind at this particular moment. Yet it must have expression. In Mozart, as in Bellini, anguish is anguish and the public must be made to feel it. But too many singers lose expression in Mozart because they overdo the pianos, overdo the style. They do Mozart an injustice. His music is not frilly lace; it is music to be felt as deeply as any other."

This doesn't sound like someone who didn't like Mozart to me.

N.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

The Conte said:


> This doesn't sound like someone who didn't like Mozart to me.
> 
> N.


One should also remember that Callas was an accomplished pianist, and had a book of the Mozart Piano Sonatas on her piano.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

GregMitchell said:


> *One should also remember that Callas was an accomplished pianist,* and had a book of the Mozart Piano Sonatas on her piano.


Really? I didnt know that.

BTW I'm a huge Callas fan. Outside of Mozart I cant listen to any other singer in the big 19thC roles.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

stomanek said:


> Really? I didnt know that.
> 
> BTW I'm a huge Callas fan. Outside of Mozart I cant listen to any other singer in the big 19thC roles.


She was a total musician, not just a singer. Having told Serafin she knew the role of Isolde, she sight sang the role for him at an audition. She almost got away with it as well, but Serafin was a wily old soul and cottoned on. Nevertheless he was mightily impressed that she managed as well as she did, and hired her anyway.

Victor De Sabata once said to Walter Legge, as quoted in Schwarzkopf's _On and Off the Record: A memoir of Walter Legge_



> If the public could understand, as we do, how deeply and utterly musical Callas is, they would be stunned.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer.


It seems that my attempt to challenge this assertion has ended in a discussion of Maria Callas. I would like to apologize for forgetting what inevitably happens when her name is mentioned. But perhaps I should also have some regrets about attempting to take that statement seriously, even seriously enough to refute it. It is obviously not based on anything more than personal taste and a compulsion to insist that personal taste entitles us to make pontifical claims to actual knowledge.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The Conte said:


> I think both Isolde and Donna Anna are very interesting characters and actually have more than a little in common. Both characters can be boring if the interpreters singing them don't find and reveal the nuances of personality in the libretto and music.
> 
> Isolde and Donna Anna both start off very much angry and annoyed with Tristan and Don Giovanni, could it be that the ladies protest too much? I've known many a woman treat a male friend as if they were public enemy number one and this always ended up with them becoming an item, as the Italians say 'chi disprezza compra'.


Isolde and Donna Anna are similar in that they've both had someone they love slain by a man, been angry, and sought revenge. Otherwise, Isolde's situation, emotions, verbal utterances, course of action, and ultimate fate are far more complex.

It's pretty hard to claim that a noble young princess and daughter of a sorceress/physician who is suffering the degradation of being abducted by the man who killed her betrothed and is now shipping her off to a foreign land to become the wife of his graybeard uncle is "protesting too much," especially since she is desperately in love with her abductor! The first act of Wagner's opera presents a subtle and exhaustive portrait of her conflicting and tortured emotions, and her sarcastic, cryptic and foreboding exchanges with Tristan, amounting to a suicide pact, are brilliant both textually and musically, as is the contrast with her total surrender to passion in act two and the triumphant/tragic illusion of love's omnipotence in her _Liebestod._

Donna Anna spends most of her time exclaiming over and over how devastated and mortified she is and how the rapist and murderer must pay, relieved only by a gentle aria addressed to her rather bland and hapless boyfriend Ottavio. But I wouldn't say that she protests too much either, given the seriousness of rape and murder. It's just a question of how interested we are in hearing her (and that whining enabler Elvira) complain. Of course Mozart gives her some dramatic recitative and a couple of fine arias, which bestow musical interest on a character who, as I see her, doesn't amount to much in the libretto.

Ultimately it's the music that matters in opera, and a libretto needs only to have enough interest and credibility to give music its head. Most operatic characters have little to them until the composer gives them individuality and life, and that isn't a fault of the genre but rather speaks to the nature of a composite art form in which music naturally wants dominance. Mozart is quite masterful at breathing life into characters who look unpromising on paper and could amount to no more than stock figures ("the betrayed wife") under lesser composers.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

howlingfantods said:


> No…. I'm not sure what's unclear here. I'm not criticizing Mozart, I'm criticizing a particular talking point that some people in internet forums like to spout off about, that I think is a pretty silly when unqualified. For instance, I could say Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-blowingly harmonically advanced for his time, but it would be pretty silly to say it's mind-blowingly harmonically advanced full stop, considering the couple of centuries of music making that followed.


Despite finding the Callas tangent interesting, now that this drifting thread has been pulled back on topic, I think this sums it up for me. Mozart's music is emotional and if the person who thinks that he just wrote pretty ditties or lyrical arias that are all about aesthetic beauty either hasn't heard the music sung by performers who can interpret or has a limited imagination. On the other hand to say that Mozart wrote the most emotional music in his operas is an exaggeration. Is it not enough to say that he wrote operas where the music matches the emotions of the characters more than any other composer of his time and perhaps before?

Of course, one can have a preference for Mozart over all other opera composers, but that's all down to personal taste and there's no point discussing that.

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> It's pretty hard to claim that a noble young princess and daughter of a sorceress/physician who is suffering the degradation of being abducted by the man who killed her betrothed and is now shipping her off to a foreign land to become the wife of his graybeard uncle is "protesting too much," especially since she is desperately in love with her abductor!


You've misunderstood my point here, I'm using the phrase "protesting too much" as in "the lady doth protest too much" from Hamlet. In other words Isolde says she can't stand Tristan, when in fact she is probably in love with him. Perhaps the reason that Donna Anna is so obsessed with Giovanni isn't because she feels that honour demands that Ottavio revenge her, but something else?

I agree with your general point, though. Da Ponte and Wagner are possibly the greatest opera librettists of all time and it's hard to imagine what they would have done if born in each other's eras. I would be suspicious of anyone who doesn't appreciate the work of both as writers in some way. Furthermore some would say that Mozart and Wagner are the greatest opera composers of all time, although I think had Wagner been writing in Mozart's day he would have anticipated Beethoven, whereas a nineteenth century Mozart would probably have been rewriting Fidelio in the style of Brahms.

Isolde is a more complex character than Donna Anna just in the libretto before even considering the music and whilst there is a certain amount of variety between Anna's two arias, she doesn't go through the different stages of emotion of Isolde. Wagner could have made Isolde a much more static character musically, but her act I narration and her Liebestod are worlds apart. Therefore I agree that Isolde is more interesting and her music reflects a wider range of emotions and in a way that not only shows us what she is feeling, but doesn't realise it herself, but also shows how her feelings relate to a higher spiritual power.

In conclusion, Wagner's principal characters (in the main), both in the libretto and in the music, are more complex, interesting and emotionally portrayed than Mozart's. However, that doesn't mean that Mozart's aren't complex or interesting and don't display a range of emotions. I think it fair to say that Mozart's music contains more emotional truth than most other composers before or at the same time as him, but he was surpassed after his death as opera evolved and became even more emotional in the romantic period.

N.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The Conte said:


> You've misunderstood my point here, I'm using the phrase "protesting too much" as in "the lady doth protest too much" from Hamlet. In other words Isolde says she can't stand Tristan, when in fact she is probably in love with him. Perhaps the reason that Donna Anna is so obsessed with Giovanni isn't because she feels that honour demands that Ottavio revenge her, but something else?


In looking at the libretto, I don't find any definite indication than Donna Anna's sexual encounter with Don Giovanni was in any way consensual, but that's a possibility, and I can imagine a stage director making that interpretation as she first appears grabbing Giovanni's arm and saying "I'll never let go of you unless you kill me!" She could be trying to keep him from fleeing while calling for help, or she might be saying that he has no right to toss her aside after she's just given herself to him. I don't recall any indications later in the opera that she has mixed feelings about him. Elvira, on the other hand...!


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> It seems that my attempt to challenge this assertion has ended in a discussion of Maria Callas. I would like to apologize for forgetting what inevitably happens when her name is mentioned. But perhaps I should also have some regrets about attempting to take that statement seriously, even seriously enough to refute it. It is obviously not based on anything more than personal taste and a compulsion to insist that personal taste entitles us to make pontifical claims to actual knowledge.


So which opinion is based on objective fact? I have made it quite clear before now much of what is expressed here is based on TC is OPINION! Your opinion, my opinion. It is my opinion that Isolde does not come over as a real character unless you inhabit Wagner's fairy tale world - but it moves you to tears. Such things are personal taste and opinion. Isolde never moves me at all. The Donnas in Giovanni do. The countess in Figaro does. Brunnhilde doesn't. I can admire the skill of the music but I am not moved by the character. This is called opinion and personal taste. 'You know - 'one man's meat.......' and all that!


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> In looking at the libretto,* I don't find any definite indication than Donna Anna's sexual encounter with Don Giovanni was in any way consensual, but that's a possibility, and I can imagine a stage director making that interpretation *as she first appears grabbing Giovanni's arm and saying "I'll never let go of you unless you kill me!" She could be trying to keep him from fleeing while calling for help, or she might be saying that he has no right to toss her aside after she's just given herself to him. I don't recall any indications later in the opera that she has mixed feelings about him. Elvira, on the other hand...!


Holton did a ridiculous basis on this theme when Don was performed last at Covent Garden. Anna was supposed to have been besotted with the Don. As a result the whole production was made ridiculous. As one member of the audience said to me afterwards: 'Typical ROH crap!'


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> So which opinion is based on objective fact? I have made it quite clear before now much of what is expressed here is based on TC is OPINION! Your opinion, my opinion. It is my opinion that Isolde does not come over as a real character unless you inhabit Wagner's fairy tale world - but it moves you to tears. Such things are personal taste and opinion. Isolde never moves me at all. The Donnas in Giovanni do. The countess in Figaro does. Brunnhilde doesn't. I can admire the skill of the music but I am not moved by the character. This is called opinion and personal taste. 'You know - 'one man's meat.......' and all that!


Yes, we know you like Mozart and don't like Wagner and as you say that is personal taste. I'm not particularly keen on Mozart, however I don't find the need to constantly find new ways of saying 'I prefer Wagner to Mozart' as I imagine that would bore other TC members. That said there are many interesting things that can be said about Mozart, how he set Da Ponte's texts and the different purpose and way that Wagner worked in comparison (or comparing other completely different composers). Therefore I find there are far more interesting topics beyond personal taste, which only interests me little.

Depending on the day I would probably prefer Bellini (with masterful singers) over both Wagner and Mozart, but I would never try to argue that Bellini was a more revolutionary and ground breaking composer than either of those two or that his (and Romani's) characters are more complex and experience a wider range of emotions. I can distinguish between personal taste and objective reasoning.

Opinion and personal taste are fine, but I'm not that interested in them and therefore I prefer the discussions that centre around intelligent appraisal and review of the various qualities of composers, librettists, singer and directors rather than the simple 'I like', 'I don't like' because personal taste doesn't start or develop a conversation.

N.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> So which opinion is based on objective fact? I have made it quite clear before now much of what is expressed here is based on TC is OPINION! Your opinion, my opinion. It is my opinion that Isolde does not come over as a real character unless you inhabit Wagner's fairy tale world - but it moves you to tears. Such things are personal taste and opinion. Isolde never moves me at all. The Donnas in Giovanni do. The countess in Figaro does. Brunnhilde doesn't. I can admire the skill of the music but I am not moved by the character. This is called opinion and personal taste. 'You know - 'one man's meat.......' and all that!


If what you mean to say is "Mozart's characters are more emotionally affecting to me than the characters of other composers' operas," the statement "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer" is not a way of saying it. This distinction, I imagine, seems elementary to most people.

By the way, I haven't said that Isolde comes over as a "real character" or that she moves me to tears. I've said that she's more complex and interesting than Mozart's wounded ladies, both textually and musically. I've also given some basis for that judgment. Taste is indeed personal, but there are some objective attributes of works of art that we can discuss. You prefer to make objective-sounding pronouncements, and when challenged protest that it's all subjective.


----------



## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> It seems that my attempt to challenge this assertion has ended in a discussion of Maria Callas. I would like to apologize for forgetting what inevitably happens when her name is mentioned. But perhaps I should also have some regrets about attempting to take that statement seriously, even seriously enough to refute it. It is obviously not based on anything more than personal taste and a compulsion to insist that personal taste entitles us to make pontifical claims to actual knowledge.


Apologies for any derailing. I'm glad to see we appear to be back on track.


----------



## gellio (Nov 7, 2013)

_Le nozze di Figaro_ was the fifth opera I purchased, after _Traviata_, _Turandot_, _Boheme_, and _Butterfly_. I hadn't really listened to any Mozart at that point, so I started my opera journey with Verdi and Puccini. Then, I saw Amadeus and purchased _Figaro_ - that changed everything. It was the first work, of any kind, that I fell absolutely and completely in love with. I must have listened to nothing but _Figaro_ for months and months and months. Then I purchased everything I could get my hands on by Mozart. He is my favorite opera composer by far.

I initially loved _Figaro_ because of the music. It was like one ingenious and magnificent idea after another. There was absolutely not one second of the recording I didn't love. For weeks, I didn't even bother learning the story, I just listened to it over and over and over and over. Then, as I began to learn the story, I fell completely in love with it. I has humor, sorrow, love, redemption. It has it all, and the score is fantastic. Hundreds of operas later, it still remains my most favorite.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> If what you mean to say is "Mozart's characters are more emotionally affecting to me than the characters of other composers' operas," the statement "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer" is not a way of saying it. This distinction, I imagine, seems elementary to most people.
> 
> By the way, I haven't said that Isolde comes over as a "real character" or that she moves me to tears. I've said that she's more complex and interesting than Mozart's wounded ladies, both textually and musically. I've also given some basis for that judgment. Taste is indeed personal, but there are some objective attributes of works of art that we can discuss. You prefer to make objective-sounding pronouncements, and when challenged protest that it's all subjective.


It really is funny how you use subjective argument to try to make your 'objective' points. Isolde might be more 'complex' (whatever that means) to you but complexity does not mean she is interesting. I have read complex books which I do not find the least bit interesting. In fact, the greatest art is the art that conceals art of which Mozart is one of the greatest examples. I find Mozart's 'wounded ladies' vastly more interesting than Wagner's wounded ladies. You might take a different view but please remember it is subjective not objective and that so-called complexity does not necessarily provoke interest.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> It really is funny how you use subjective argument to try to make your 'objective' points. Isolde might be more 'complex' (whatever that means) to you but complexity does not mean she is interesting. I have read complex books which I do not find the least bit interesting. In fact, the greatest art is the art that conceals art of which Mozart is one of the greatest examples. I find Mozart's 'wounded ladies' vastly more interesting than Wagner's wounded ladies. You might take a different view but please remember it is subjective not objective and that so-called complexity does not necessarily provoke interest.


If you think Donna Anna or Countess Almaviva more "interesting" than Isolde, perhaps you could say why? In general, complexity of personality and motivation in a person is what makes people call him or her "interesting," and so it's reasonable to say that a complex individual - and by extension a complex character - is more "interesting" than one with fewer facets or simpler, more predictable reactions and motives. Of course I would never presume to tell anyone who they should find interesting, so if you're fascinated by Donna Elvira or Fiordiligi I won't argue with your tastes.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> If you think Donna Anna or Countess Almaviva more "interesting" than Isolde, perhaps you could say why? In general, complexity of personality and motivation in a person is what makes people call him or her "interesting," and so it's reasonable to say that a complex individual - and by extension a complex character - is more "interesting" than one with fewer facets or simpler, more predictable reactions and motives. Of course I would never presume to tell anyone who they should find interesting, so if you're fascinated by Donna Elvira or Fiordiligi I won't argue with your tastes.


Certainly the countess reminds me of people I have met who have been wronged by men. Certainly Isolde is not interesting at all as she bears no resemblance to anyone I ever knew. If you know kidnapped witches you might find her more interesting. I mean, what does Isolde do? She is cardboard like many of Wagner's characters. As for Donna Anna, we don't have to find her particularly interesting as the flow of melody is so fantastic. What is interesting is the contrast with Elvira as Mozart deliberately has a very complicated woman with high emotions set against a relatively simple character. In the Don it is the way these characters react to the psychopathic character of the Don that makes the opera so great. Coupled with music that imo has never been matched in opera. In Tristan there are no such contrasts - to me anyway. For me I tend to listen to Tristan without the libretto as the action is so slow and the interest lies in the music. The words are to me pretty uninteresting as they are nowhere based in reality. But perhaps that's what makes some people think it's marvellous


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

I wish I could count myself among those who have experienced Tristan from start to finish. I have had it on some authority that it moves slowly and not much happens until the spectacular ending so I'm not missing much. I did spin the first side of the Flagstad LP and soon found myself floundering so it may be true.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> If you think Donna Anna or Countess Almaviva more "interesting" than Isolde, perhaps you could say why? In general, complexity of personality and motivation in a person is what makes people call him or her "interesting," and so it's reasonable to say that a complex individual - and by extension a complex character - is more "interesting" than one with fewer facets or simpler, more predictable reactions and motives. Of course I would never presume to tell anyone who they should find interesting, so if you're fascinated by Donna Elvira or Fiordiligi I won't argue with your tastes.


Perhaps he means musically more interesting. I personally find the music of the two sisters utterly enchanting - a delight - not least that Mozart has the knack of creating consistent and unique musical identities. Others have done it - notably Verdi and Puccini at their best. I dont know Wagner well enough to comment.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> Certainly the countess reminds me of people I have met who have been wronged by men. Certainly Isolde is not interesting at all as she bears no resemblance to anyone I ever knew. If you know kidnapped witches you might find her more interesting. I mean, what does Isolde do? She is cardboard like many of Wagner's characters. As for Donna Anna, we don't have to find her particularly interesting as the flow of melody is so fantastic. *What is interesting is the contrast with Elvira as Mozart deliberately has a very complicated woman with high emotions set against a relatively simple character.* In the Don it is the way these characters react to the psychopathic character of the Don that makes the opera so great. Coupled with music that imo has never been matched in opera. In Tristan there are no such contrasts - to me anyway. For me I tend to listen to Tristan without the libretto as the action is so slow and the interest lies in the music. The words are to me pretty uninteresting as they are nowhere based in reality. But perhaps that's what makes some people think it's marvellous


Mozart has her as a contrasting woman or Da Ponte? Actually most of the elements of the characters come from the original playwrights that Da Ponte took his story from (Tirso de Molina and Moliere). I have seen both plays in their original language and it's interesting to understand what Da Ponte took from each and how he used them to shape a new work. Is there evidence that Mozart wanted Da Ponte to concentrate on these two characters and he wanted them to contrast strongly? They are already very distinct in the source material.

I would have said that all your observations about the characters in Mozart's operas are there in the librettos and therefore are more Da Ponte's characters, Da Ponte's emotions and Da Ponte's 'real' situations. Where do you think Mozart's music adds something that isn't there in the libretto? What does Mozart's music tell me about these characters that Da Ponte's libretto doesn't?

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> I wish I could count myself among those who have experienced Tristan from start to finish. I have had it on some authority that it moves slowly and not much happens until the spectacular ending so I'm not missing much. I did spin the first side of the Flagstad LP and soon found myself floundering so it may be true.


You need a good recording, some time and you need to follow it with the libretto. Depending on your point of view there isn't much action in Tristan. However, the orgasmic passion of the love duet has never been surpassed in any other music I know. This is white hot ecstasy. Whilst not much happens the libretto (a poem in its own right) has many layers and much complexity. Extremes of emotion replace action, but that doesn't mean that nothing is happening. Even if you hate it, it's worth a listen just so that you've experienced it.

N.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Mozart has her as a contrasting woman or Da Ponte? Actually most of the elements of the characters come from the original playwrights that Da Ponte took his story from (Tirso de Molina and Moliere). I have seen both plays in their original language and it's interesting to understand what Da Ponte took from each and how he used them to shape a new work. Is there evidence that Mozart wanted Da Ponte to concentrate on these two characters and he wanted them to contrast strongly? They are already very distinct in the source material.
> 
> I would have said that all your observations about the characters in Mozart's operas are there in the librettos and therefore are more Da Ponte's characters, Da Ponte's emotions and Da Ponte's 'real' situations. Where do you think Mozart's music adds something that isn't there in the libretto? What does Mozart's music tell me about these characters that Da Ponte's libretto doesn't?
> 
> N.


In da Ponte Mozart found his perfect librettist. The libretti are brilliant and the characters superbly drawn. You could say that Mozart's music fills out the characters and reflects them in a way that almost defies belief. The only comparable combination is Boito / Verdi where Falstaff (almost) matches Mozart's great operas. It is genius responding to genius


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> You need a good recording, some time and* you need to follow it with the libretto.* Depending on your point of view there isn't much action in Tristan. However, the orgasmic passion of the love duet has never been surpassed in any other music I know. This is white hot ecstasy. Whilst not much happens the libretto (a poem in its own right) has many layers and much complexity. Extremes of emotion replace action, but that doesn't mean that nothing is happening. Even if you hate it, it's worth a listen just so that you've experienced it.
> 
> N.


Please no, not with the libretto! Just enjoy the music without having to endure Wagner's words


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> In da Ponte Mozart found his perfect librettist. The libretti are brilliant and the characters superbly drawn. You could say that Mozart's music fills out the characters and reflects them in a way that almost defies belief. The only comparable combination is Boito / Verdi where Falstaff (almost) matches Mozart's great operas. It is genius responding to genius


In your opinion of course. After all your comments are just your opinion, no?

I find it interesting that you don't think that Mozart's music adds anything to the characters as they appear in the libretto, however that doesn't surprise me from what you have been saying in this thread. Maybe that is why Woodduck says that Wagner (the composer) has more interesting characters than Mozart. Mozart's characters are as interesting as Da Ponte's, in other words had Mozart had a lesser librettist the characters wouldn't have been as interesting. Whereas Wagner's music _adds_ to our understanding of his characters. You can see Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla and you know all there is to know about the characters in Don Giovanni. There is very little that is new if you then read the libretto by Da Ponte and if you know the libretto of Don Giovanni the opera, you don't discover anything new about the characters when you hear Mozart's music.

Now, if we take Tristan, you can read the libretto by Wagner and you have quite different characters than had you just read the legend by Gottfried von Strassburg. In other words, Wagner the librettist has added significantly to the source material. One can enjoy Wagner's words or not, that's personal taste, however Wagner has added more to his source material than Da Ponte has to his, that's not taste, that's fact. But wait there's more (to quote more than one politician of our day!) Wagner's music tells us more about the characters. We can read the libretto, but we find out more about Isolde when we then listen to her music!

N.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

DavidA said:


> It really is funny how you use subjective argument to try to make your 'objective' points.


Yes, it really is funny how some people use subjective arguments to try to make their "objective" points.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Certainly the countess reminds me of people I have met who have been wronged by men. Certainly *Isolde is not interesting at all as she bears no resemblance to anyone I ever knew.* If you know kidnapped witches you might find her more interesting. I mean, what does Isolde do? She is cardboard like many of Wagner's characters. *As for Donna Anna, we don't have to find her particularly interesting as the flow of melody is so fantastic.* What is interesting is the contrast with Elvira as Mozart deliberately has a very complicated woman with high emotions set against a relatively simple character. In the Don it is the way these characters react to the psychopathic character of the Don that makes the opera so great. Coupled with music that imo has never been matched in opera. In Tristan there are no such contrasts - to me anyway. For me I tend to listen to Tristan without the libretto as the action is so slow and the interest lies in the music. The words are to me pretty uninteresting as they are nowhere based in reality. But perhaps that's what makes some people think it's marvellous


Well, you really haven't said what makes the ladies in Mozart intrinsically interesting _as individuals,_ but only what makes them appealing to _you_ (a distinction I've tried to make). Apparently that has mainly to do with how closely they resemble actual women you've met. So I guess that makes most of the world's most original literary characters uninteresting to you. Well, there's always TV.

I don't need art if I want to observe the common run of humanity. Journalism takes care of that. I find Oz more interesting than Kansas, and don't necessarily agree with Dorothy that "there's no place like home." I'm surrounded by millions of people exhibiting conventional, predictable behaviors, values and life situations. It's pleasant at best, but too often boring or worse. I'm sure that being unusual myself in various ways predisposes me to find Isolde and Brunnhilde more worth my time than Anna and Elvira. If you find a couple of hoopskirted society ladies standing around complaining about being raped by Donald Trump in ruffles and codpiece more interesting than a Medieval Celtic princess, proud daughter of a sorceress/physician, who tries to kill the slayer of her betrothed, falls in love with him because he looks up at her with tragic eyes, finds herself being carried off by him to marry his aging uncle, prepares a deadly potion which she knows he'll share with her because she knows he loves her too but also knows that they're forever forbidden to belong to each other in a world that crushes the individual under the dead weight of custom... Well, to each his own.

I agree that it's "the flow of music" that must ultimately persuade us in opera, and so my comments about Donna Anna are not really criticisms. She is what she needs to be in the opera in which she is found. But as a personality she is quite replaceable. Any of a number of hoopskirted society ladies would do; presumably, to the Don, "cosi fan tutte." Isolde is not replaceable; only a woman of her heritage, station, intelligence, passion and personal force could be Tristan's victim, healer, would-be slayer and lover-unto-death, capable of understanding fully the tragic soul in his eyes and the terrible weight of contradictory obligation which makes the soulless world of day so oppressive and the wondrous realm of night so necessary. All these aspects of her, and every shift in her mood and situation, are expressed in music of imaginative precision and visceral power.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Am I the only person here who has known both a wronged Countess AND a kidnapped witch?

Maybe David A just needs to get out more!

N.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

The Conte said:


> In your opinion of course. After all your comments are just your opinion, no?
> 
> *I find it interesting that you don't think that Mozart's music adds anything to the characters as they appear in the libretto,* however that doesn't surprise me from what you have been saying in this thread. Maybe that is why Woodduck says that Wagner (the composer) has more interesting characters than Mozart. Mozart's characters are as interesting as Da Ponte's, in other words had Mozart had a lesser librettist the characters wouldn't have been as interesting. Whereas Wagner's music _adds_ to our understanding of his characters. You can see Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla and you know all there is to know about the characters in Don Giovanni. There is very little that is new if you then read the libretto by Da Ponte and if you know the libretto of Don Giovanni the opera, you don't discover anything new about the characters when you hear Mozart's music.
> 
> ...


He would not doubt make the same claims for Wagner.

Mozart's music does add to what we know and feel about the characters - that is the whole point.

The libretto may indicate that a character has this or that feature of personality - the music tells you the exact nature and quality of this trait. For example - the Count's snarling rage in Nozze is underscored by music that boils with volatility. This is not a calm and calculating man - but a count unable to control his passions and inability to make sound judgements. 
The final scene of the opera - again - the music accompanying the countess's forgiveness - I believe she utters, in response to his begging for pardon "Più docile sono,
e dico di sì." - sounds like quite a banal reply - but the way it is sung and the way the music soars to heaven, as it were - illuminates the extent of her moral and human superiority over him (Salieri in the film/play Amadeus was impressed with the music of this scene - how it conveyed perfect forgiveness).

So sorry - Mozart's music very much adds to DaPonte's libretto. If it did not - there would be no need for the opera.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> In your opinion of course. After all your comments are just your opinion, no?
> 
> I find it interesting that you don't think that Mozart's music adds anything to the characters as they appear in the libretto, however that doesn't surprise me from what you have been saying in this thread. Maybe that is why Woodduck says that Wagner (the composer) has more interesting characters than Mozart. Mozart's characters are as interesting as Da Ponte's, in other words had Mozart had a lesser librettist the characters wouldn't have been as interesting. Whereas Wagner's music _adds_ to our understanding of his characters. You can see Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla and you know all there is to know about the characters in Don Giovanni. There is very little that is new if you then read the libretto by Da Ponte and if you know the libretto of Don Giovanni the opera, you don't discover anything new about the characters when you hear Mozart's music.
> 
> ...


Of course like most things on TC this is opinion. Of course Mozart's music adds to our understanding of the characters. For goodness sake. The music fills in the characterisation miraculously. I can't see just how Wagner's music adds to our understanding of the characters in a way Mozart's does not. Really seems a total contradiction you making that statement. Wagner wrote his own libretti which are pretty much inferior to either da Ponte's and Boito's imo. But to sensibly compare Mozart and Wagner you've got to compare what role the music plays. To me Mozart fills out the characters far better than Wagner does but of course that is my personal preference. I know others here prefer Wagner's way, but I find it becomes tedious after a time. Too much natter and not enough action.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Am I the only person here who has known both a wronged Countess AND a kidnapped witch?
> 
> Maybe David A just needs to get out more!
> 
> N.


Please tell us.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Well, you really haven't said what makes the ladies in Mozart intrinsically interesting _as individuals,_ but only what makes them appealing to _you_ (a distinction I've tried to make). Apparently that has mainly to do with how closely they resemble actual women you've met. So I guess that makes most of the world's most original literary characters uninteresting to you. Well, there's always TV.
> 
> I don't need art if I want to observe the common run of humanity. Journalism takes care of that. I find Oz more interesting than Kansas, and don't necessarily agree with Dorothy that "there's no place like home." I'm surrounded by millions of people exhibiting conventional, predictable behaviors, values and life situations. It's pleasant at best, but too often boring or worse. I'm sure that being unusual myself in various ways predisposes me to find Isolde and Brunnhilde more worth my time than Anna and Elvira. If you find a couple of hoopskirted society ladies standing around complaining about being raped by Donald Trump in ruffles and codpiece more interesting than a Medieval Celtic princess, proud daughter of a sorceress/physician, who tries to kill the slayer of her betrothed, falls in love with him because he looks up at her with tragic eyes, finds herself being carried off by him to marry his aging uncle, prepares a deadly potion which she knows he'll share with her because she knows he loves her too but also knows that they're forever forbidden to belong to each other in a world that crushes the individual under the dead weight of custom... Well, to each his own.
> 
> I agree that it's "the flow of music" that must ultimately persuade us in opera, and so my comments about Donna Anna are not really criticisms. She is what she needs to be in the opera in which she is found. But as a personality she is quite replaceable. Any of a number of hoopskirted society ladies would do; presumably, to the Don, "cosi fan tutte." Isolde is not replaceable; only a woman of her heritage, station, intelligence, passion and personal force could be Tristan's victim, healer, would-be slayer and lover-unto-death, capable of understanding fully the tragic soul in his eyes and the terrible weight of contradictory obligation which makes the soulless world of day so oppressive and the wondrous realm of night so necessary. All these aspects of her, and every shift in her mood and situation, are expressed in music of imaginative precision and visceral power.


I must confess I find your reasoning incredible. Because the greatest operas written deal with real human situations they are nothing to you because they are too much like real life? I just feel in talking about hoop-skirted ladies you are completely missing the point of what Mozart was doing. But perhaps why you find it 'pleasant at best but boring at worst'. You miss the point! I think you definitely have a blind spot there. I certainly do for Wagner's heroines. 
But then I am glad Isolde is not replaceable. To have two such would be a trial indeed! :lol:


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Because the *greatest operas* written deal with *real human situations* they are nothing to you because they are too much like *real life*?


You have a very limited and earthbound idea of what "real human situations" are. Reality doesn't have to be mundane and unimaginative. Donna Anna's "situation" is no more real than Isolde's; it is merely more ordinary - and so is she. It's your good fortune not to live in a rigidly hierarchical society structured on laws of fealty among men where women can be bought and sold, but such societies have existed and are perfectly real. Are you really unable, or merely unwilling, to project yourself into the mind of a young noblewoman being torn from her homeland and rightful status to be made the property of an elderly foreigner she's never met? Perhaps the additional factor of having fallen in love with her abductor is the stumbling block? Or perhaps it's their decision to die together rather than submit to their fates? Is this effort of imagining another time and place too much for you? Well, as I said, there's always TV, where "real human situations" abound, we are spoon fed the banalities of everyday life, and our imaginations can sleep undisturbed.

Last I checked, the "greatest operas" included such "real life" offerings as Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Mozart's Zauberflote and Cosi fan tutte, Weber's Freischutz, Rossini's Barber, most of Wagner, Debussy's Pelleas... Need I go on? Shall we discuss "real life" in plays and novels as well? Paintings, perhaps? How about the Sistine Chapel ceiling for "real life situations"?

Had it been left to you, I fear, art would have died before it was born.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> You have a very limited and earthbound idea of what "real human situations" are. Reality doesn't have to be mundane and unimaginative. Donna Anna's "situation" is no more real than Isolde's; it is merely more ordinary - and so is she. It's your good fortune not to live in a rigidly hierarchical society structured on laws of fealty among men where women can be bought and sold, but such societies have existed and are perfectly real. Are you really unable, or merely unwilling, to project yourself into the mind of a young noblewoman being torn from her homeland and rightful status to be made the property of an elderly foreigner she's never met? Perhaps the additional factor of having fallen in love with her abductor is the stumbling block? Or perhaps it's their decision to die together rather than submit to their fates? Is this effort of imagining another time and place too much for you? Well, as I said, there's always TV, where "real human situations" abound, we are spoon fed the banalities of everyday life, and our imaginations can sleep undisturbed.
> 
> Last I checked, the "greatest operas" included such "real life" offerings as Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Mozart's Zauberflote and Cosi fan tutte, Weber's Freischutz, Rossini's Barber, most of Wagner, Debussy's Pelleas... Need I go on? Shall we discuss "real life" in plays and novels as well? Paintings, perhaps? How about the Sistine Chapel ceiling for "real life situations"?
> 
> *Had it been left to you, I fear, art would have died before it was born.*


ouch ...............


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

stomanek said:


> ouch ...............


OOPS! Sorry. I thought my aim was more precise. :lol:


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> OOPS! Sorry. I thought my aim was more precise. :lol:


more than precise enough

I just imagined the impact


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> Of course like most things on TC this is opinion. *Of course Mozart's music adds to our understanding of the characters. For goodness sake. The music fills in the characterisation miraculously.* I can't see just how Wagner's music adds to our understanding of the characters in a way Mozart's does not. Really seems a total contradiction you making that statement. Wagner wrote his own libretti which are pretty much inferior to either da Ponte's and Boito's imo. But to sensibly compare Mozart and Wagner you've got to compare what role the music plays. To me Mozart fills out the characters far better than Wagner does but of course that is my personal preference. I know others here prefer Wagner's way, but I find it becomes tedious after a time. Too much natter and not enough action.


There are quite a few assertions made here without any examples or evidence to back them up. That doesn't mean that these opinions of yours are automatically incorrect, of course. However, taking, for example your assertion that I have highlighted above. I am ready to be convinced that Mozart's music adds something to the characters that isn't in the libretto, but you haven't persuaded me. What would help would be an example that backs up your assertion, otherwise it's just an opinion. If you can find some facts (which in this case would be an example or two from Mozart's operas where there is something in the music that isn't in the libretto) then it would make your assertion a lot stronger. In fact your opinion, if backed up might morph from a subjective, personal view to an objective, valid point.

N.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

The Conte said:


> There are quite a few assertions made here without any examples or evidence to back them up. That doesn't mean that these opinions of yours are automatically incorrect, of course. However, taking, for example your assertion that I have highlighted above. I am ready to be convinced that Mozart's music adds something to the characters that isn't in the libretto, but you haven't persuaded me. What would help would be an example that backs up your assertion, otherwise it's just an opinion. If you can find some facts (which in this case would be an example or two from Mozart's operas where there is something in the music that isn't in the libretto) then it would make your assertion a lot stronger. In fact your opinion, if backed up might morph from a subjective, personal view to an objective, valid point.
> 
> N.


You asked a question that really require the answer of a professional opera critic/musicologist.

I gave some examples above to the best of my ability.

Do you think Wagner, or perhaps Verdi's music adds to understanding of the characters over and above what is in the libretto?

You can either answer yes - and be obligated to prove it with examples - or answer no - and admit that wagner and verdi are therefore lesser composers.

Now give me your answer please.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

stomanek said:


> You asked a question that really require the answer of a professional opera critic/musicologist.
> 
> I gave some examples above to the best of my ability.
> 
> ...


It's hard to hold back, but since you've addressed The Conte, I'll wait my turn. :tiphat:

Only if you could hear the music I've composed to that statement, could you understand how patient and well-bred my character is.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> You asked a question that really require the answer of a professional opera critic/musicologist.
> 
> I gave some examples above to the best of my ability.
> 
> ...


Everybody here other than David A must be a professional opera critic/musicologist, then!

I will answer your question in due course, but first I would like David to answer my question to prove that he can do other than make assertions.

N.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Everybody here other than David A must be a professional opera critic/musicologist, then!
> 
> I will answer your question in due course, *but first I would like David to answer my question to prove that he can do other than make assertions.*
> 
> N.


No you cant put conditions on it.

You asked the question and if you cant answer it yourself you had no right asking it let alone taking advantage of DavidA because he didnt.

if you cant give me at least 1 quality example then I will assume you cant do it.

Woodduck I look forward to your input as clearly the Conte isnt able to provide anything.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> You have a very limited and earthbound idea of what "real human situations" are. Reality doesn't have to be mundane and unimaginative. Donna Anna's "situation" is no more real than Isolde's; it is merely more ordinary - and so is she. It's your good fortune not to live in a rigidly hierarchical society structured on laws of fealty among men where women can be bought and sold, but such societies have existed and are perfectly real. Are you really unable, or merely unwilling, *to project yourself into the mind of a young noblewoman being torn from her homeland and rightful status to be made the property of an elderly foreigner she's never met? Perhaps the additional factor of having fallen in love with her abductor is the stumbling block?* Or perhaps it's their decision to die together rather than submit to their fates? Is this effort of imagining another time and place too much for you? Well, as I said, there's always TV, where "real human situations" abound, we are spoon fed the banalities of everyday life, and our imaginations can sleep undisturbed.
> 
> Last I checked, the "greatest operas" included such "real life" offerings as Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Mozart's Zauberflote and Cosi fan tutte, Weber's Freischutz, Rossini's Barber, most of Wagner, Debussy's Pelleas... Need I go on? Shall we discuss "real life" in plays and novels as well? Paintings, perhaps? How about the Sistine Chapel ceiling for "real life situations"?
> 
> Had it been left to you, I fear, art would have died before it was born.


You do make me smile with your generalisations of what you assume other people think. Yes I read stories about princes and princesses to my children and continue to write them for my grandchildren - yes, some have found their way to the publisher. Yes and they fall in love too so I don't miss that part out. So I am making my own very modest continuation to art. Just don't like Wagner's take on the princess tale - I can't love her. Your assumption that art would die if left to me is a bit rich because I don't happen to care for Isolde! I really do find what you say funny :lol:


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Talking about making people laugh...

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> No you cant put conditions on it.
> 
> You asked the question and if you cant answer it yourself you had no right asking it let alone taking advantage of DavidA because he didnt.
> 
> ...


Excuse me, I asked first. It is you who is putting conditions on my question which was posed to another poster.

There are many examples of how Wagner's music adds to his librettos. The first that comes to mind is in Isolde's act one narration where she tells us how furious she is with Tristan and yet in between the dynamic, angry thrusts of her musical lines, there is music of a calm, pathos that tells us that she is in love with him. Wagner's music doesn't just add something here, the music tells us that Isolde is feeling the exact opposite of what her words are telling us. Without the music we have no idea at this point that she loves Tristan.

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> You do make me smile with your generalisations of what you assume other people think. Yes I read stories about princes and princesses to my children and continue to write them for my grandchildren - yes, some have found their way to the publisher. Yes and they fall in love too so I don't miss that part out. So I am making my own very modest continuation to art. Just don't like Wagner's take on the princess tale - I can't love her. Your assumption that art would die if left to me is a bit rich because I don't happen to care for Isolde! I really do find what you say funny :lol:


As per usual most of these assertions are just opinion (as you have said yourself, "Of course like most things on TC this is opinion"). I don't know whether most things on TC are opinion, I think that most posters have a lot of interesting facts and insights to share. That said, there is nothing wrong with opinion and that doesn't mean that your points are necessarily incorrect. However asserted opinions have little weight without facts, evidence and examples to back them up and therefore I'm afraid you haven't persuaded me of any of your opinions. It would appear that all it boils down to for you is your personal taste and that's fine, but I don't find that particularly enlightening or of much value.

N.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> You do make me smile with your generalisations of what you assume other people think. Yes I read stories about princes and princesses to my children and continue to write them for my grandchildren - yes, some have found their way to the publisher. Yes and they fall in love too so I don't miss that part out. So I am making my own very modest continuation to art. Just don't like Wagner's take on the princess tale - I can't love her. Your assumption that art would die if left to me is a bit rich because I don't happen to care for Isolde! I really do find what you say funny :lol:


I don't have to make generalizations about what you think. You're very clear about it. You think operas should represent "real life situations," and that Wagner's don't while Mozart's do. I think you're wrong about opera, that your idea of "real life" in opera is limited and literal, and that art is much bigger than your idea of it. Realism in art is a fairly modern invention.

Now, do you find that funny? Ha ha?


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The Conte said:


> Excuse me, I asked first. It is you who is putting conditions on my question which was posed to another poster.
> 
> There are many examples of how Wagner's music adds to his librettos. The first that comes to mind is in Isolde's act one narration where she tells us how furious she is with Tristan and yet in between the dynamic, angry thrusts of her musical lines, there is music of a calm, pathos that tells us that she is in love with him. Wagner's music doesn't just add something here, the music tells us that Isolde is feeling the exact opposite of what her words are telling us. Without the music we have no idea at this point that she loves Tristan.
> 
> N.


Wagner's orchestra is constantly illuminating the psychic life of his characters, but it often goes beyond characterization and tells us things not only we but the characters themselves are unaware of. A delightful example is the scene in _Siegfried_ where Mime is trying to get Siegfried to drink poison to quench his thirst after slaying Fafner. Having tasted the dragon's blood, Siegfried is able to hear the dwarf's true intentions despite his solicitous manner, and Wagner has Mime sing for us his shockingly murderous thoughts while the musical phrases to which he sings them are exaggeratedly sweet and cajoling. It's quite a piece of musical-dramatic virtuosity, and it expresses with hilarious precision Mime's weasely nature.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Excuse me, I asked first. It is you who is putting conditions on my question which was posed to another poster.
> 
> There are many examples of how Wagner's music adds to his librettos. The first that comes to mind is in Isolde's act one narration where she tells us how furious she is with Tristan and yet in between the dynamic, angry thrusts of her musical lines, there is music of a calm, pathos that tells us that she is in love with him. Wagner's music doesn't just add something here, the music tells us that Isolde is feeling the exact opposite of what her words are telling us. Without the music we have no idea at this point that she loves Tristan.
> 
> N.


women are rarely furious with men they dont love - if I was reading the libretto I would most likely deduce that. Not sure if that is a good example then.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I don't have to make generalizations about what you think. You're very clear about it. You think operas should represent "real life situations," and that Wagner's don't while Mozart's do. I think you're wrong about opera, that your idea of "real life" in opera is limited and literal, and that art is much bigger than your idea of it. Realism in art is a fairly modern invention.
> 
> Now, do you find that funny? Ha ha?


Piffle! I never said that. I said that the characters in Mozart's operas move me because they represent (to me) real characters. Of course the situation isn't real life. They are farces. You really need to stop these generalisations and interpreting people's thought through your own prejudices. You also need to allow people to have differing tastes from your own. I don't think it a crime! :lol:


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> There are quite a few assertions made here without any examples or evidence to back them up. That doesn't mean that these opinions of yours are automatically incorrect, of course. However, taking, for example your assertion that I have highlighted above. I am ready to be convinced that Mozart's music adds something to the characters that isn't in the libretto, but you haven't persuaded me. What would help would be an example that backs up your assertion, otherwise it's just an opinion. If you can find some facts (which in this case would be an example or two from Mozart's operas where there is something in the music that isn't in the libretto) then it would make your assertion a lot stronger. In fact your opinion, if backed up might morph from a subjective, personal view to an objective, valid point.
> 
> N.


frankly this appears to me at least a trite question by someone intent on out-Cleesing Cleese. . Asked of Mozart of all people. It is laughable that anyone with any knowledge of opera would ask it. You might just as well say Wagner adds nothing to the characters in his libretto. The fact is that in countless examples in Figaro Mozart fills in the characters and their emotions. Just listen to Cherubino's first aria the way it flutters with the longings of a teenage boy. But maybe you never felt those emotions? We could add to that just about every aria (and some of the recits) in the opera. For goodness sake, how on earth anyone can ask such a question beggars belief! Or perhaps your Mozart is on planet Jupiter and I haven't heard that one.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> frankly this appears to me at least a trite question by someone intent on out-Cleesing Cleese. . Asked of Mozart of all people. It is laughable that anyone with any knowledge of opera would ask it. You might just as well say Wagner adds nothing to the characters in his libretto. The fact is that in countless examples in Figaro Mozart fills in the characters and their emotions. *Just listen to Cherubino's first aria the way it flutters with the longings of a teenage boy.* But maybe you never felt those emotions? We could add to that just about every aria (and some of the recits) in the opera. For goodness sake, how on earth anyone can ask such a question beggars belief! Or perhaps your Mozart is on planet Jupiter and I haven't heard that one.


Sorry? I'm afraid I don't follow. I simply asked you whether you thought Mozart's music added anything to Da Ponte's librettos. There's no need to to be so indignant. I haven't really expressed an opinion either way. I'm not asking Mozart for anything, I'm asking YOU! You still haven't answered my question. Do you think that Mozart's music adds something that _isn't_ there in the libretto? (Cherubino's emotions in the aria you mention are already in the wonderful poetry of the libretto.)

I'm genuinely interested by what you mean when you say that you think Mozart's characters are more 'real'. Can you explain what you mean by 'real'? And please don't just give me a telling off because you don't think I like Mozart enough. I haven't expressed much of an opinion, I'm just asking questions.

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> women are rarely furious with men they dont love - if I was reading the libretto I would most likely deduce that. Not sure if that is a good example then.


You might guess that she's in love with him, but you wouldn't know. The music means that you know, she's in love with him even though she doesn't herself.

In any case I think we have drifted too far down this path. Note, I didn't say that Mozart doesn't add anything to the characters in his operas, I'm just trying to understand David A's position. However that is difficult as he responds with insults and groundless assertions made as if they were facts and then says it's just an opinon when challenged.

N.


----------



## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

The Conte said:


> You might guess that she's in love with him, but you wouldn't know. The music means that you know, she's in love with him even though she doesn't herself.
> 
> In any case I think we have drifted too far down this path. Note, I didn't say that Mozart doesn't add anything to the characters in his operas, I'm just trying to understand David A's position. However that is difficult as he responds with insults and groundless assertions made as if they were facts and then says it's just an opinon when challenged.
> 
> N.


Meh I don't think this music makes it so clear that she's in love with him in the first part of act I. I hear mostly unrelenting fury. It's one of the reasons I still have a hard time getting into Tristan und Isolde


----------



## Byron (Mar 11, 2017)

Sonata said:


> Meh I don't think this music makes it so clear that she's in love with him in the first part of act I. I hear mostly unrelenting fury. It's one of the reasons I still have a hard time getting into Tristan und Isolde


Do you follow along with the libretto as you listen?


----------



## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

Byron said:


> Do you follow along with the libretto as you listen?


Yes I have. Not always but on some listenings


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Piffle! I never said that. I said that the characters in Mozart's operas move me because they represent (to me) real characters. Of course the situation isn't real life. They are farces. You really need to stop these generalisations and interpreting people's thought through your own prejudices. You also need to allow people to have differing tastes from your own. I don't think it a crime! :lol:


Yes you bleeping _did_ say it! You said, _"Certainly the countess reminds me of people I have met who have been wronged by men. Certainly Isolde is not interesting at all as she bears no resemblance to anyone I ever knew." _You say the equivalent of this every time the subject of operatic characters comes up. Clearly you want characters that represent the kinds of people you see in everyday life; you believe that such characters are superior to those of a more unusual, exotic, fantastic, or archetypal nature, and that Mozart is the greatest opera composer, at least in part, because he effectively presents the kinds of familiar personages you prefer and can "empathize with." Your insistence on your inability to understand or appreciate the archetypal nature of Wagner's romances and myths, and to be emotionally affected by his characters and stories even while you claim to enjoy his music, makes this all the clearer. It's a narrow view of art.

I don't give a fig about your tastes. I don't argue with tastes. I argue with stated positions to which I take exception. You like to state positions, argue them stubbornly, and then retreat to "it's just my opinion." Don't double talk us. If you can't say what you mean the first time, if you insist on backing off of what you plainly did say, and you are unwilling to support your grand pronouncements about the "greatest" whatever with anything more than "I like A better than B," it's best to skip the grand pronouncements and just say "I like A better than B." It would save you and all of us time and trouble.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Yes you bleeping _did_ say it! You said, _"Certainly the countess reminds me of people I have met who have been wronged by men. Certainly Isolde is not interesting at all as she bears no resemblance to anyone I ever knew." _You say the equivalent of this every time the subject of operatic characters comes up. Clearly you want characters that represent the kinds of people you see in everyday life; you believe that such characters are superior to those of a more unusual, exotic, fantastic, or archetypal nature, and that Mozart is the greatest opera composer, at least in part, because he effectively presents the kinds of familiar personages you prefer and can "empathize with." Your insistence on your inability to understand or appreciate the archetypal nature of Wagner's romances and myths, and to be emotionally affected by his characters and stories even while you claim to enjoy his music, makes this all the clearer. It's a narrow view of art.
> 
> I don't give a fig about your tastes. I don't argue with tastes. I argue with stated positions to which I take exception. You like to state positions, argue them stubbornly, and then retreat to "it's just my opinion." Don't double talk us. If you can't say what you mean the first time, if you insist on backing off of what you plainly did say, and you are unwilling to support your grand pronouncements about the "greatest" whatever with anything more than "I like A better than B," it's best to skip the grand pronouncements and just say "I like A better than B." It would save you and all of us time and trouble.


Oh dear, how you get things round your head, you dear old thing! :lol:
Can't you just see that even though a figure is based in myth or farce they can resemble real people? You clearly have an problem seeing it. It's actually you who have the narrow view of art because you cannot see that what might move one person does not move another. You appear to think everyone should be moved by Wagner like you obviously are. This is a narrow view in that you never appear to allow that the tastes of others can be different. You simply cannot get that other people do not think like you. What's more, you cannot even relate to other people's arguments and tastes. No it appears to me you do suffer from a certain tunnel vision in this.
As for tastes, I couldn't care less what you think of mine. You appear unable to see that you continually make subjective statements 
that you appear to think are objective. We are talking about characters that move us and we can relate to not how complicated the music is or whatever. Will you please get it into your head that this is a matter of opinion and taste. You have every right to take objection to my opinion and I am flattered that you write so much in reply. But as I have said it i a matter of op-inion so you have yours and please let me have mine.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Sorry? I'm afraid I don't follow. I simply asked you whether you thought Mozart's music added anything to Da Ponte's librettos. There's no need to to be so indignant. I haven't really expressed an opinion either way. I'm not asking Mozart for anything, I'm asking YOU! You still haven't answered my question. Do you think that Mozart's music adds something that _isn't_ there in the libretto? (Cherubino's emotions in the aria you mention are already in the wonderful poetry of the libretto.)
> 
> I'm genuinely interested by what you mean when you say that you think Mozart's characters are more 'real'. Can you explain what you mean by 'real'? And please don't just give me a telling off because you don't think I like Mozart enough. I haven't expressed much of an opinion, I'm just asking questions.
> 
> N.


And I said it was perfectly obvious. But fine, just let's say that no opera ever adds anything to the characters and skip the music and just act out the libretto. If Mozart doesn't add anything Wagner certainly doesn't!


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> And I said it was perfectly obvious.


How bizarre, you have complained about others second guessing what you think and now you state that I should be able to guess what you think because it is 'obvious'. Well, I've tried to understand your points and see if you can develop them, but you either can't or don't want to and I suspect it is because your point amounts to little more than 'I like Mozart, I don't like Wagner'. There's nothing wrong with that and nobody has said there is, but you confuse that point with "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer."

I don't doubt that you like Mozart's music and you don't like Wagner's, but I think that is the extent of your point. Everything you have said about Mozart's characters actually applies to Da Ponte's characters and you have said little about his music. One of the reasons you have given for not liking Isolde is that she is a 'princess' or 'kidnapped witch', but is that who Isolde is, is that the character of Isolde? Isolde is a strong woman who finds herself in a dilemma. In a similar way one could say that Donna Anna, Donna Elvira or the Countess are Spanish noblewomen and therefore one can only be moved by their plights if one has met a Spanish noblewoman. However, that is not who these characters really are. As you have put it yourself the Countess is like many a wronged woman you have met. I'm sure if Wagner's music was more to your taste you would discover that you have known some strong women facing dilemmas.

At least we have discovered that when you make assertions along the lines of Wagner was a third rate librettist etc. what you really mean is 'I don't like Wagner' and that you don't have much more to say than that.

N.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> How bizarre, you have complained about others second guessing what you think and now you state that I should be able to guess what you think because it is 'obvious'. Well, I've tried to understand your points and see if you can develop them, but you either can't or don't want to and I suspect it is because your point amounts to little more than 'I like Mozart, I don't like Wagner'. There's nothing wrong with that and nobody has said there is, but you confuse that point with "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer."
> 
> I don't doubt that you like Mozart's music and you don't like Wagner's, but I think that is the extent of your point. *Everything you have said about Mozart's characters actually applies to Da Ponte's characters and you have said little about his music. *One of the reasons you have given for not liking Isolde is that she is a 'princess' or 'kidnapped witch', but is that who Isolde is, is that the character of Isolde? Isolde is a strong woman who finds herself in a dilemma. In a similar way one could say that Donna Anna, Donna Elvira or the Countess are Spanish noblewomen and therefore one can only be moved by their plights if one has met a Spanish noblewoman. However, that is not who these characters really are. As you have put it yourself the Countess is like many a wronged woman you have met. I'm sure if Wagner's music was more to your taste you would discover that you have known some strong women facing dilemmas.
> 
> ...


Well, I did give you an example which applies to the whole of Mozart imo. If you can't understand that then sorry, I can't think of a better way to explain it., You are of course completely wrong when you accuse me of liking Mozart but not Wagner. I do listen to Wagner when in the mood. Just that the characters don't speak to me like Mozart's do so I prefer Mozart. Must say I think it's a bit presumptuous to go on about other people's likes and dislikes. 
As I said, the point you make about Mozart's characters could well apply to Wagner's. We could have the characters without the music and they would still be characters. I just can't see what your obsession is in trying to argue a point which =should I thought have been perfectly obvious to any lover of opera. Anyway it is pointless prolonging this discussion as you don't appear to grasp what I am saying. 
I didn't say Wagner was a 'third rate librettist'. I did say they are not a patch on da Ponte's or Boito's. They are no worse than a lot of librettos but they are far too long for the subject materiual and allow too much time for longeurs in the music imo. The fact was, as most people outside the Wagnerian pale recognise, that Wagner was a vastly superior musician than he was a poet and writer. As someone has said, 'Wagner deserved a better librettist than Wagner'.

BTW you never answered my question as to who were the kidnapped witch and wronged countess you knew


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> As I said, the point you make about Mozart's characters could well apply to Wagner's. We could have the characters without the music and they would still be characters. I just can't see what your obsession is in trying to argue a point which =should I thought have been perfectly obvious to any lover of opera. Anyway it is pointless prolonging this discussion as you don't appear to grasp what I am saying.
> I didn't say Wagner was a 'third rate librettist'. I did say they are not a patch on da Ponte's or Boito's. They are no worse than a lot of librettos but they are far too long for the subject materiual and allow too much time for longeurs in the music imo. The fact was, as most people outside the Wagnerian pale recognise, that Wagner was a vastly superior musician than he was a poet and writer. As someone has said, 'Wagner deserved a better librettist than Wagner'.


Thank you, this is exactly the kind of response I was after. Leaving aside the quality of Wagner's writing (which I think differed depending on whether he was writing essays, poetry or opera libretti) as that could be a thread in itself, I agree with your points about Mozart and I think I understand what you mean.

Mozart's music _embodies_ the emotions of the characters. Cherubino's act one aria is a very good example of that. Da Ponte's poetry is superb here and the rhythms that the words on their own beat out represent Cherubino's breathless confusion. Mozart then amplifies this with the music and this is more the rule in his operas than an exception. There are also moments where the music _adds_ something that isn't in the libretto (such as the example of the Countess in act four when she forgives the Count, as Stomanek has pointed out). However, most of the facets of the characters in Mozart are already there in the libretto and they are almost as much Da Ponte's characters as they are Mozart's.

However, Wagner goes further. If the words of the libretto are what people are saying, the music embodies the emotions that they don't speak about. Sometimes this is because they aren't aware of their emotions or inner states and sometimes it's because they are aware, but don't want the other characters to know something. In Wagner the music in the vocal lines embodies the emotions contained in the words, however the orchestral writing embodies the emotions of the inner self, the soul of the characters and that's why I would say that when compared with most other opera composers - including Mozart - Wagner's characters are more complex, have more depth and we know them better than we can ever know someone in the 'real' world.

Of course, some may prefer the simple, what you see is what you get, of Mozart's approach and find Wagner's approach too complex and involved. That's fine, I don't think anyone here thinks you should change your tastes. However, I don't think a statement such as "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer." stands up to scrutiny. Perhaps Mozart's music embodies _conscious_ human emotions better than any other composer (although that's open to debate), but if any composer _reveals_ emotions then surely it is Wagner for the reasons cited above.

N.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Oh dear, how you get things round your head, you dear old thing! :lol:
> Can't you just see that even though a figure is based in myth or farce they can resemble real people? You clearly have an problem seeing it. It's actually you who have the narrow view of art because you cannot see that what might move one person does not move another. You appear to think everyone should be moved by Wagner like you obviously are. This is a narrow view in that you never appear to allow that the tastes of others can be different. You simply cannot get that other people do not think like you. What's more, you cannot even relate to other people's arguments and tastes. No it appears to me you do suffer from a certain tunnel vision in this.
> As for tastes, I couldn't care less what you think of mine. You appear unable to see that you continually make subjective statements
> that you appear to think are objective. We are talking about characters that move us and we can relate to not how complicated the music is or whatever. Will you please get it into your head that this is a matter of opinion and taste. You have every right to take objection to my opinion and I am flattered that you write so much in reply. But as I have said it i a matter of op-inion so you have yours and please let me have mine.


Let me put it to you in language anyone over twelve years old should understand:

*If you like A better than B or C, just say "I prefer A." Do not say "A is better than B or C" when you can't provide any evidence or comprehensible argument in support of your statement. 
*
It's a simple formula for not having people argue with you.

If you insist on making ex cathedra statements you can't support, people will challenge you, you will feel put upon, and the discussion will degenerate into ridiculous and insulting nonsense. It invariably does exactly that when people make grandiose statements such as _"Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer"_ or _"Isolde is cardboard like many of Wagner's characters,"_ and then, when others point out that those are not true or legitimate statements, stubbornly engage in hours of debate only to say "well I have my opinion and you have yours and if you don't leave me alone you're not respecting my opinion yah de yah de yah de yah..."

This perennial routine of yours is tiresome and a burden to anyone who wants to have a productive conversation. But as long as you continue to substitute insupportable pronouncements for informed judgments or the simple expression of preference, and continue to retreat when challenged into whingeing defensiveness and name-calling (I am not a "dear old thing"), you're likely to find yourself outmatched by the arguments of people who have actually done their homework and might teach you something if you were not too stubborn to learn.


----------



## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Thank you, this is exactly the kind of response I was after. Leaving aside the quality of Wagner's writing (which I think differed depending on whether he was writing essays, poetry or opera libretti) as that could be a thread in itself, I agree with your points about Mozart and I think I understand what you mean.
> 
> Mozart's music _embodies_ the emotions of the characters. Cherubino's act one aria is a very good example of that. Da Ponte's poetry is superb here and the rhythms that the words on their own beat out represent Cherubino's breathless confusion. Mozart then amplifies this with the music and this is more the rule in his operas than an exception. There are also moments where the music _adds_ something that isn't in the libretto (such as the example of the Countess in act four when she forgives the Count, as Stomanek has pointed out). However, most of the facets of the characters in Mozart are already there in the libretto and they are almost as much Da Ponte's characters as they are Mozart's.
> 
> ...


I think you are making a lot of claims here to support the supposition that Wagner's art is essentially superior to Mozarts and I am not sure if any of them are true as you are mostly asserting that they are true. You have Wooduck and provided one or two examples and I am afraid you are relying on your opponents struggling to produce examples to confound your points. I cant beieve that an opera of the stature of Nozze simply supports the libretto of an inferior artist. DaPonte was no Goethe - Mozart was - and the complexity and richness of the score alone tells me you are wrong, However - I will get back in due course with concrete examples to illustrate this.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The Conte said:


> Thank you, this is exactly the kind of response I was after. Leaving aside the quality of Wagner's writing (which I think differed depending on whether he was writing essays, poetry or opera libretti) as that could be a thread in itself, I agree with your points about Mozart and I think I understand what you mean.
> 
> Mozart's music _embodies_ the emotions of the characters. Cherubino's act one aria is a very good example of that. Da Ponte's poetry is superb here and the rhythms that the words on their own beat out represent Cherubino's breathless confusion. Mozart then amplifies this with the music and this is more the rule in his operas than an exception. There are also moments where the music _adds_ something that isn't in the libretto (such as the example of the Countess in act four when she forgives the Count, as Stomanek has pointed out). However, most of the facets of the characters in Mozart are already there in the libretto and they are almost as much Da Ponte's characters as they are Mozart's.
> 
> ...


Problem you have is Mozart does it better without the bombast. Sorry you can't see it!


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Let me put it to you in language anyone over twelve years old should understand:
> 
> *If you like A better than B or C, just say "I prefer A." Do not say "A is better than B or C" when you can't provide any evidence or comprehensible argument in support of your statement.
> *
> ...


Of course, if people disagree with you they are 'just too stubborn to learn. I mean, who can argue with that! You are obviously right every time on that reckoning! :lol:

It is amazing how you always project what you are doing on to other people. Just read your post again with its insulting implications. You are already allowing the discussion to degenerate. Please do not lower it any further. Look dear boy. We have different tastes. Just leave it at that. Please!


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

stomanek said:


> I think you are making a lot of claims here to support the supposition that Wagner's art is essentially superior to Mozarts and I am not sure if any of them are true as you are mostly asserting that they are true. You have Wooduck and provided one or two examples and I am afraid you are relying on your opponents struggling to produce examples to confound your points. I cant beieve that an opera of the stature of Nozze simply supports the libretto of an inferior artist. DaPonte was no Goethe - Mozart was - and the complexity and richness of the score alone tells me you are wrong, However - I will get back in due course with concrete examples to illustrate this.


No need to give examples. Let anyone just listen to the opera with anything but a closed mind!


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Of course, if people disagree with you they are 'just too stubborn to learn. I mean, who can argue with that! You are obviously right every time on that reckoning! :lol:
> 
> It is amazing how you always project what you are doing on to other people. Just read your post again with its insulting implications. You are already allowing the discussion to degenerate. Please do not lower it any further. Look dear boy. We have different tastes. Just leave it at that. Please!


I don't give a flying fig about your tastes or anyone's tastes.

"Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer" is not an expression of taste. Keep saying things like that and you'll be challenged every time.


----------



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

I would never put down Mozart. He was a colossal genius.

But,no ones characters are as deep and psychologically complex as Wagner's imo.
Books have been written about them.

And it's not "bombast", its brilliant, powerful, beautiful and always descriptive
of emotion, thoughts and personalities.


----------



## howlingfantods (Jul 27, 2015)

stomanek said:


> I think you are making a lot of claims here to support the supposition that Wagner's art is essentially superior to Mozarts and I am not sure if any of them are true as you are mostly asserting that they are true. You have Wooduck and provided one or two examples and I am afraid you are relying on your opponents struggling to produce examples to confound your points. I cant beieve that an opera of the stature of Nozze simply supports the libretto of an inferior artist. DaPonte was no Goethe - Mozart was - and the complexity and richness of the score alone tells me you are wrong, However - I will get back in due course with concrete examples to illustrate this.


The assumption that I think you're starting from to come to this reading of what Conte and Duck are saying is that music that depicts and reveals emotion is better than music that doesn't depict and reveal emotion. I certainly don't think that's true--what the hell emotion is depicted and revealed by Wohltempierte Klavier? I have no idea but it's still genius music.

Or on the other hand, late romantics like Strauss and Tchaikovsky frequently wrote complete schlock (just my opinion!) that depicts the hell out of many emotions, but that doesn't make it great music.

So I think one camp -- conte, duck, myself -- are making a descriptive and characterological point. You seem to be objecting on the basis of thinking that we're making a qualitative point. I don't want to speak for the others, but I certainly didn't mean my pithy and witty posts to imply that I'm rendering a judgment about the merits of Mozart's music, just about its character. I personally don't much care that much for Mozart but I certainly wouldn't claim that his music is better or worse than the music I prefer.


----------



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

A few posts that targeted other members have been deleted. Please return to discussing the operas and not each other.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I don't give a flying fig about your tastes or anyone's tastes.
> 
> "Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer" is not an expression of taste. Keep saying things like that and you'll be challenged every time.


You make it perfectly clear that you don't give a fig about anybody else's tastes. I believe that Mozart revealed human emotions better than any other opera composer. You can challenge it or do you like until the bell rings for doomsday but I will keep saying it because I believe it is right . The fact that people like you disagree with me will not prevent me from having my opinion. As I have said before these things are a matter of opinion and we are on the board to express our opinion and not to be inhibited.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

stomanek said:


> I think you are making a lot of claims here to support the supposition that Wagner's art is essentially superior to Mozarts and I am not sure if any of them are true as you are mostly asserting that they are true. You have Wooduck and provided one or two examples and I am afraid you are relying on your opponents struggling to produce examples to confound your points. I cant beieve that an opera of the stature of Nozze simply supports the libretto of an inferior artist. DaPonte was no Goethe - Mozart was - and the complexity and richness of the score alone tells me you are wrong, However - I will get back in due course with concrete examples to illustrate this.


Nowhere have I said that Wagner's music is superior to Mozart's, nor would I as I find that a meaningless idea. Nor have I said that Da Ponte produced inferior librettos. Perhaps you are confusing some of my posts with others or seeing in them only what you think you see.

As to the accusation that I am making assertions that rely on others to refute them, I take that as a compliment.

N.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

DavidA said:


> Problem you have is Mozart does it better without the bombast. Sorry you can't see it!


Most of the time when Wagner reveals the emotions of his characters that they don't know themselves it is in the quieter, more introspective moments of his scores, so I don't think you have thought this comment through. One example of this is in Meistersinger. The act three prelude starts with a theme that weaves through the next few pages of the score and underpins much of the first part of Sach's 'Wahn' monologue. It represents Sach's inner state and his feeling of sadness that humans can degrade themselves to the folly of the previous night's street fight. I think Sachs knows exactly what he is feeling here, however the theme first appears in the orchestra during Sach's street song in the previous act when he is trying to wind up Beckmesser. It is in total contrast to the bombastic popular melody of Sach's song (which is meant to be bombastic, to irk Beckmesser). Could part of Sach's later sadness be in part made up of regret at having been part of the previous night's folly?

Is there something comparable in Mozart where the music in the orchestra has a different emotional make up from the vocal line?

N.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> You make it perfectly clear that you don't give a fig about anybody else's tastes. I believe that Mozart revealed human emotions better than any other opera composer. *You can challenge it* or do you like until the bell rings for doomsday but *I will keep saying it because I believe it is right .* The fact that *people like you* disagree with me will not prevent me from having my opinion. As I have said before these things are a matter of opinion and we are on the board to express our opinion and *not to be inhibited.*


None of us will be "inhibited" here. Not you, and not me.

So you think tastes, opinions and factual statements all look the same... Well, "people like me" (btw, there _are_ no people like me) can tell the difference, and we _will_ challenge you. We will not be inhibited.

You may have noticed that although the operas of Wagner mean far more to me, and move me far more deeply, than those of Mozart, I have never claimed categorically that Wagner was a greater composer than Mozart, or that my emotional response to, say, _Parsifal_ gives me sufficient reason to say that Wagner is "better" at expressing emotions than Mozart. If I feel it necessary to compare them, I will do so with respect to specific qualities where I think a comparison is meaningful, and I will say why I think it's meaningful. _Parsifal _and _Figaro_, both works of genius, inhabit radically different worlds of aesthetic method and sensibility; each expresses things which the other does not, and there is virtually no meaningful basis for comparison. Realizing this, I'm not going to make categorical value judgments about their composers and try to pass them off as "opinion" or "taste." As to which of them "expresses emotions better," or better matches music to text and situation, I offer no opinion, partly because there is so little common ground between their musical styles and artistic goals, partly because concepts such as "emotion" in art are very complicated and slippery, and partly because my own tastes weigh so heavily in one direction that I would be duty bound to admit that I was not qualified to judge. Confronted with two masterpieces of opera, we should admit the limitations of our perceptions.

It is for reasons like these that your unqualified statement of Mozart's absolute superiority must strike any reasonable person as presumptuous and absurd, and so reasonable people will challenge your wisdom in making it.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> None of us will be "inhibited" here. Not you, and not me.
> 
> So you think tastes, opinions and factual statements all look the same... Well, "people like me" (btw, there are no people like me) can tell the difference, and we _will_ challenge you. We will not be inhibited.
> 
> ...


I assume your long and torpid answer was supposed to set up the last paragraph. I have stated all along that whatever I give is my opinion. I have also said that opinions are subjective.It may have escaped you in life that that opinions differ. I have travelled the world and met many different people and know that opinions differ and it is only right that we should allow other people to have an opinion without resorting to calling them 'presumptuous and absurd'.
It is my OPINION that Mozart was the greatest operatic genius who ever lived and that his operas move me more than anyone else's. Not seeing things in black and white monochrome as some do, I allow others to express their own opinions without resorting to saying they are 'presumptuous and absurd' because they happen to disagree with me..


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> *I assume your long and torpid answer was supposed to set up the last paragraph.* I have stated all along that whatever I give is my opinion. I have also said that opinions are subjective.It may have escaped you in life that that opinions differ. I have travelled the world and met many different people and know that opinions differ and it is only right that we should allow other people to have an opinion without resorting to calling them 'presumptuous and absurd'.
> *It is my OPINION that Mozart was the greatest operatic genius who ever lived and that his operas move me more than anyone else's.* Not seeing things in black and white monochrome as some do, I allow others to express their own opinions without resorting to saying they are 'presumptuous and absurd' because they happen to disagree with me..


This was not a "setup," and I apologize if it left you "torpid." What it actually was was an illustrated explanation of the difference between taste, opinion, and fact, which are three distinct things to be expressed in distinct ways. For example, it may be your _opinion_ that Mozart is the greatest opera composer, but it is not an "opinion" that he moves you more than any other. That latter thing would be a _fact._ Mozart either does or does not move you. Moreover, the statement, "Mozart's operas move me more than any others," in stating a _fact_ about your personal preferences, is an expression of _taste._

Taste. Opinion. Fact.

Three. Different. Things.

_Tastes_ are not open to argument; _de gustibus non disputandum est._ _Facts_ are arguable only until they've been understood and established. But _opinions?_ Those occupy a very slippery seat between taste and fact. Often "opinion" functions as cover for tastes masquerading as facts - we like to imagine our preferences have some objective status - and our failure to acknowledge our sleights-of-mind will stir up debates we neither expect nor want. That is pretty obviously the case here, where your taste for Mozart is expressed as a quasi-factual statement that he is superior to all other opera composers, a statement that no one can prove, and that no one with an inkling of the difficulties inherent in such a high-level aesthetic judgment would have the temerity to make. Resorting to "it's just my opinion" is an effort to evade the fact that some opinions are really beyond our competence and authority to entertain.


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Sigh.
> 
> This was not a "setup," and I apologize if it left you "torpid." What it actually was was an illustrated explanation of the difference between taste, opinion, and fact, which are three distinct things to be expressed in distinct ways. For example, it may be your _opinion_ that Mozart is the greatest opera composer, but it is not an "opinion" that he moves you more than any other. That latter thing would be a _fact._ Mozart either does or does not move you. You see the difference? Moreover, the statement, "Mozart's operas move me more than any others," in stating a _fact_ about your personal preferences, is an expression of _taste._
> 
> ...


Now I could say of you: 'that it is pretty obvious that your taste for Wagner is expressed as a series of quasi-factual statements that imply he is superior to all other opera composers, a statement (of course) that no one can prove, and that no one with an inkling of the difficulties inherent in such a high-level aesthetic judgment would have the temerity to make.' That's what comes across from your statements.


----------



## Guest (Dec 26, 2020)

What always amazes me is that various reviews talk about this opera having a happy ending. But this is not the case; the other two Mozart/Da Ponte operas do not have a happy ending either.

After the _"Contessa, perdono"_ the Countess answers not "Of course I forgive you" or "I forgive you" or "How could I be angry with you" (as is the case in some bad translations), but _"Più docile io sono e dico di sì."_ ("I am more docile [than you] and I say yes".)
This is not an affectionate or emotional answer, it is not a forgiveness, but a rather resigned answer, made out of prudence.

I also often read that the recitatives are perceived as boring. I can understand that, because what is still sold as recitative in many recordings (and live performances) has nothing to do with real recitatives.
The singing is mostly monotonous, the notes are sung as written in the score, while a harpsichord plays a chord or arpeggio now and then.

The notated note values hardly matter, however; a recitative should follow the speech rhythm (which is how it was taught in Mozart's time
Accompaniment on the harpsichord or pianoforte was also expected to be quite different. A musician accompanying recitatives at that time was expected to improvise and have new ideas, to comment artfully on or accompany what was happening on stage; the notes in the score merely provided the harmonic framework. 
Moreover, keyboard instruments were tuned differently in those days, in such a way that the keys sounded very different and each key had its own character. Mozart modulated, depending on the situation, very artfully through the different keys.
However, keyboard instruments today are tuned in equal tuning, in which each key sounds the same, making Mozart's modulations meaningless. If A-flat major sounds as clean as C major, then the recitatives no longer work and lose their expressiveness. 
As a listener, you should be able to tell if modulation is being done "by the book" or if there are big jumps that show, for example, that a character is lying or something is wrong.

A fine example is the recitative between Cherubino and Barbarina in Act 3. It begins in C major. When Cherubino speaks of his sorrows, Mozart modulates lower and lower to A flat major, which no longer sounds "beautiful. Then suddenly there is a great leap back to C major as Barbarina changes the theme. It seems that she also has no solution to the problem raised by Cherubino and quickly jumps back to happier themes. When she talks about her plans, the keys are cheerful (G major, C major).

I wrote down this dialogue in a literal translation including the keys used in the right places.

______

*Barbarina:*
(C major) _Let's go, let's go, beautiful page, at my house you will find all_ (C7) _the most beautiful girls of the_ (F major) _castle, and of all of them you will certainly be the_ (B major) _most beautiful._

*Cherubino:*
_Oh, if the count finds me, it's all over for me, you_ (Bb7) _know, that he believes I have left for Seville_ (E-flat major).

*Barbarina:*
_And if so, what's the big deal! If he finds you, it's nothing_ (A-flat major) _new. Listen ... we want to dress you_ (C major) _like ourselves; together we'll all go_ (C7) _and hand_ (F minor) _Madame the flowers; just let_ (G7) _Barbarina do it, dear Cherubin._ (G major) (C major)

______

If you mark these keys on the circle of fifths, you can clearly see how the mood becomes more and more somber, descending to A-flat major, of which Schubart writes in his description of the key characters from 1785:



> *A flat major*, the tone of the grave. Death, grave, decay, judgment, eternity lie within its range.











And that was only one example of many. There is much to discover in Mozart's recitatives, which, when played artfully on the right instruments, are anything but boring. (Recitatives, however, are also important because they develop the plot, while the arias serve the affective representation of the resulting emotions!)

Greetings,
Natural Horn


----------



## Guest (Dec 26, 2020)

At the beginning of No. 16, a motif appears in the 1st violins that is also found in Cherubino's _"Non so più"_.
It is an octave jump up and back down that looks like this:









(The pattern is always the same, only the pitch varies.)

No. 16 begins with the Count's angry demand that Cherubino come out of the cabinet immediately. It is striking that this motif appears only when the Countess speaks.

It first appears in measures 5-8, when the Countess sings:



> *La Contessa:*
> A signore, quel furore
> Per lui fammi il cor tremar
> 
> ...


and then again in measures 17-20, here to the words



> *La Contessa:*
> No sentite
> 
> *Il Conte:*
> ...


And it reappears a little later (m. 72-77), here to the words:



> *La Contessa:*
> Vado … sì … ma …
> 
> *Il Conte:*
> ...


In Cherubino's aria, it appears in measures 51-59, to the words:



> *Cherubino:*
> Parlo d´amor vegliando,
> Parlo d´amor sognando
> 
> ...


I wonder what this motif means. I can't really see a textual connection between the four quoted passages, so I suspect that these octave leaps are rather a kind of rhetorical motif. Mozart very often uses motifs that have a certain rhetorical meaning, much like the composers of the Baroque period. Or does Mozart want to establish a musical connection between the Countess and Cherubino here? If so, why only in these measures, to these words?

Greetings,
Natural Horn


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

The Conte said:


> I think had Wagner been writing in Mozart's day he would have anticipated Beethoven, whereas a nineteenth century Mozart would probably have been rewriting Fidelio in the style of Brahms.


I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.

"What then is "Romantic"? How far back should its beginnings, in music, be pushed? To 1793, when a review of a new work by "Citizen Méhul" described him as a Romantic? Or further - to year 1780-81, the year of Mozart's Idomeneo, a work whose use of orchestral colour for structural and psychological purposes anticipates nineteenth-century Romantic opera?" <Berlioz: The Making of an Artist 1803-1832 , By David Cairns , P. 193>

[ 8:00 ~ 12:00 ]
[ 26:00 ~ 32:30 ]
[ 1:23:30 ~ 1:28:30 ]
[ 1:44:30 ~ 1:50:00 ]
[ 2:01:00 ~ 2:06:00 ]
[ 2:21:30 ~ 2:27:30 ]



PlaySalieri said:


> I have had it on some authority that it moves slowly and not much happens until the spectacular ending so I'm not missing much.


Not only the liebestod and the love duet, I also like the wild-sounding moments such as "Wer wagt mich zu höhnen?", and also "Herr Tristan... trete nah!" and other moments in the work where its motif returns. Btw, I kind of miss you (and DavidA and also *MR*) these days, lol.



DavidA said:


> Mozart reveals human emotions better than any other composer.


LOL. 
(Not sure if the above statement is true, but) I love the way you stir up controversy in these situations, - reminds me of those zealously patriotic Texans who say "nothing is bigger than Texas!" LOL. Too funny



DavidA said:


> Look dear boy.


----------



## Guest (Dec 29, 2020)

PlaySalieri said:


> The final scene of the opera - again - the music accompanying the countess's forgiveness - I believe she utters, in response to his begging for pardon "Più docile sono, e dico di sì." - sounds like quite a banal reply - but the way it is sung and the way the music soars to heaven, as it were - illuminates the extent of her moral and human superiority over him


I do not find this answer banal at all, but meaningful! The Countess is referring to the scene before, in which the Count answers "No!" to all requests for forgiveness. Now she merely says "I am more docile [than you] and I say yes". In my view, this sounds rather resigned - which is understandable, since in the course of the plot (and, based on her remarks, presumably before) she has realized what her husband is doing, that he will not mend his ways, and that his apology is worth nothing.
She does NOT say that she forgives him, but only that she says "yes" in contrast to him

It is true that the music sounds superficially "heavenly," but it must be remembered that even in supposedly "beautiful" music Mozart likes to insert rhetorical musical motifs that call those sounds into question. At the end of _Così fan tutte_, the music seems joyful, yet Mozart builds in a motif that he often uses to represent doubt, uncertainty; this makes it clear that despite their kind words, the characters have now become suspicious, and their formerly ideal world has been compromised.

The music of the "Forgiveness Scene" might also sound only superficially heavenly. Perhaps the melody the Countess sings in response is a kind of parody of the Count's corny plea. Or this scene is drawn into ridicule by the fact that immediately afterwards the chorus rushes at a fast tempo towards the finale.

Speaking of which, this chorus is also interesting.

If one takes a look at Mozart's score, one notices that the composer contrasts female and male voices in two blocks, which one notices, for example, in the different entries of the voices. This can certainly be understood as an indication that the gender conflict at the end of the opera is by no means resolved and that the Countess's forgiveness was superficial. If you compare this passage with other choruses in this or other operas by Mozart, you will find that he certainly differentiates here.

The _"Son confusa"_ from No. 16 in Act II features a seven-part choral movement in which, in keeping with the plot, two blocks confront each other: Marcellina, Basilio, Bartolo and the Count on one side, and Susanna, Figaro and the Countess on the other.

Even in the finale of _Don Giovanni_, the male and female voices are not as conspicuously separated as in the finale of _Le nozze di Figaro_; Don Ottavio, for example, switches back and forth between the two blocks.

I'm not saying you're wrong or that I'm right, I'm just pointing these things out. 

Greetings,
Natural Horn


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

hammeredklavier said:


> I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.


Since I wrote that original comment, let me explain. Put in broad, simplistic terms there are two ways of becoming a famous composer: 1) Be very, very good at doing something new and creative; 2) Be very, very good at perfecting an existing style. I think Wagner came under category number one, whereas Mozart came under number two.

N.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

The Conte said:


> Since I wrote that original comment, let me explain. Put in broad, simplistic terms there are two ways of becoming a famous composer: 1) Be very, very good at doing something new and creative; 2) Be very, very good at perfecting an existing style. I think Wagner came under category number one, whereas Mozart came under number two.


I disagree; I think both Wagner and Mozart mastered both categories, 1, 2. (I think the effective use of counterpoint in Die Meistersinger proves Wagner also came under category 2, as well as category 1).

The following is an excerpt (pages 8~10) from < First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life from the Met > by M. Owen Lee:

[ 1:44:30 ~ 1:50:00 ]
Instead of the four long arias that, say, Handel would have given us, we hear, simultaneously, four voices blended, four characters in four different moods singing simultaneously: Idomeneo in despair over his rash vow; Idamante resolved to prove his manhood; Ilia comforting them both; and Elettra tormented by jealousy. Though there are similarly complex pages in Scarlatti and a few earlier composers, Mozart's is by common consent the first great ensemble in opera, a forerunner of the trio in Der Rosenkavalier, the quartet in Rigoletto, the quintet in Die Meistersinger.

The other advances Mozart made in Idomeneo, over a century of earlier opere sere, are-I should say-three. First there is a new musical continuity. Previous operas had been rigidly sectioned off into arias in which the soloists were given ample opportunity for vocal display and even more ample opportunity to acknowledge applause. In Idomeneo, the first aria melts into the following recitative, even as the overture had melted easily into it. This is an anticipation of the techniques of Wagner, but that apostle of musical continuity was well into his forties when he decided that this was the right way to write overture and aria. Mozart knew as much early in his twenties. 
The most famous of the Wagnerian methods of continuity is the leitmotif: the short recurrent theme that carries reminiscences and new implications with every new appearance. But a hundred years before Wagner's Tristan, Mozart, in Idomeneo, experimented with something quite similar, our second new advance over earlier operatic writing: the brief, recurrent phrase pervading the score, changing its form, instrumentation, harmonization, and rhythm as it develops its ever new-associations. On the first page of the overture we hear of these. It is a five-note descending figure:





​It soon comes to dominate the overture, depicting the Sturm und Drang, the storm and stress of the sea-music. A few pages later, it reappears in the recitative, as Ilia remembers the fall of Troy, and it appears again in the accompaniment to the aria that follows. Then when Ilia's beloved, Idamante, tells her that he will make her forget her past sufferings, it appears again, much brighter in color. It recurs quietly when King Idomeneo comes safely to land, and a moment later it accompanies his realization that now he will have to keep his vow to the sea god, and sacrifice to him the first living thing he finds on shore. It recurs once again when he looks fatefully on that victim, his own son, and the son doesn't understand why his father tears himself away from his embrace.

The English critic David Cairns has suggested that by this time the theme has come to bear associations both of nature's cruelty and of our own inner sufferings. In Act II it forms part of the musical line of the powerful aria "Fuor del mar," where Idomeneo sings of both the storm at sea and the storm within himself. It then hovers over the little duet of the two lovers in Act III. And it reappears when Idomeneo finally tells his subjects that he must sacrifice his own son. There it leads to a passage of more chromatic intensity than anyone had ever heard in an opera house before.
And finally, our melodic fragment leads gently into the last recitative, when Idomeneo turns over the kingdom to his son. There it is stated four times over, canonically, by the four separate string sections of the orchestra.

A third new element in Idomeneo is the wholly unprecedented attention to orchestral color. The young Mozart was excited that the finest orchestra in the world, the Mannheim ensemble, was following the elector to Munich for the premiere. It was a virtuoso ensemble. According to a description of the day, "Its piano was a vernal breath, its forte was thunder, its crescendo a cataract, its diminuendo a crystal stream murmuring as it evanesced into the distance." All of those effects Mozart wrote into Idomeneo, using muted tympani, muted trumpets, and massed trombones. The sea that surges and foams around the island of Crete is suggested, in the overture and the storm music, by swirling strings. The color conjured up in those passages is, for me, a kind of grayish green. But many more colors are suggested throughout the opera, especially by the woodwind writing. This was virtuoso music for its day, and music of a wholly new loveliness.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

The Conte said:


> Since I wrote that original comment, let me explain. Put in broad, simplistic terms there are two ways of becoming a famous composer: 1) Be very, very good at doing something new and creative; 2) Be very, very good at perfecting an existing style. I think Wagner came under category number one, whereas Mozart came under number two.


"Look at Idomeneo. Not only is it a marvel, but as Mozart was still quite young and brash when he wrote it, it was a completely new thing. What marvelous dissonance! What harmony!" -Brahms, 1896

View attachment PSN2011_Chueke.pdf

"Written between May and June 1785, Mozart C minor Fantasy KV 475 is a perfect illustration example of what Brahms had in mind when proclaiming Mozart as "a fellow modernist." ...
... Yes, the missing tonality was in fact C minor; "atonality" is of course not justified, but it was certainly hinted…Adorno's « hegemony of tonality» remains and Mozart's acquisitions anticipate those of Wagner, transforming musical language « only indirectly, by means of the amplification of the tonal space and not through its abolition»""









< The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought, by Josef Chytry, P. 291 >

Look at measure 18 in the slow movement of Mozart string quartet K.428: youtube.com/watch?v=bkNWCx-2AbU&t=14m38s









if you transpose this up a semitone to A major, it looks like this:








D -------------------------
---G#---A ---A#--- B --- C#
---B --- A ---G#-------
--------- F ---E ----------------

Now look at this passage in Wagner Tristan und Isolde Prelude:
youtube.com/watch?v=-QX7dgBqfgw&t=6m18s








D--------------------------
---G#---A ---A# --- B --- C#
B-------------
F--------------E--G#-B---- E

Also look at the ways to reach climax (before falling with arpeggios to the reprise of the initial material) in both Wagner and Mozart (sonata K.533), with a 7th chord built on F.
Wagner uses a half-diminished 7th. Mozart uses a dominant 7th.
youtube.com/watch?v=fRu5f7BzdR4&t=5m5s ( 5:05 ~ 5:35 )
youtube.com/watch?v=-QX7dgBqfgw&t=7m ( 7:00 ~ 7:30 )









youtube.com/watch?v=I0CzPGo9ZFg&t=5m22s


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

PlaySalieri said:


> Le Nozze Di Figaro was never going to be about the struggle between classes on anything other than a micro scale and on one issue.
> The count's plans are thwarted - one small step - that's all that matters.


"This also explains why Mozart was not a political animal: the state was of even less interest to him than society, with political theories belonging in the realm of abstraction, a world that could not be grasped through the senses and for which he therefore had no time. Here, as elsewhere, there was a vast gulf between him and his father, who was unusually interested in both the theory of practice and politics. For Mozart, conversely, political principles were a matter of almost total indifference and he had time only for the people who represented them, hence the fact that in his choice of friends he never allowed himself to be influenced by political considerations. Very rarely do we find sudden outbursts of the kind that occurred in 1782, following the British successes at Gibraltar, when he proudly called himself an 'out-and-out-Englishman.' But these were no more than passing moods and they fade into total insignificance beside the fact that the most important political event that he lived to witness, the French Revolution, receives not a single word of mention in his letters. Never once do we hear him speak of freedom, equality, human rights, and so on as universal demands. Whenever he came into contact with individuals who championed these principles, as occasionally happened in Masonic lodges, it was again the people who fascinated him, not the principles. As a result, readers will search his letters in vain for a political creed. Admittedly, we encounter the occasional democratic effusion of a kind regularly found on the lips of the bourgeoisie at this time: on one occasion we read, for example, that it is the heart that ennobles the individual, not his social standing. Elsewhere he writes that the well-to-do are incapable of friendship, that the German princes are all niggards and that he thinks little of the honor of serving the emperor. Nor did his inborn sense of self-awareness desert him in aristocratic houses. Indeed, he always felt at his ease in these circles, finding friends and warm admirers here. Above all, he was completely lacking Beethoven's demonstrative manner, a manner calculated to ensure that the aristocracy felt his superiority. Socially, too, he stuck to individuals, not to principles. He no more had it in him than Goethe to belong to a political party in the bourgeois sense of the term: here, too, the views that he held were emphatically his own. Striking, by contrast, are the frequent professions of Germanness that we have already encountered and that we shall encounter on many further occasions in the course of the following pages. In this, Mozart was markedly different from both Haydn and Beethoven. That these were not merely occasional outbursts is clear from their sheer number. Nor was this the egoistical patriotism of his father, a sentiment born of hatred and envy of the Italians, but the increasingly clear awareness that, thanks to the actions of Frederick the Great, intellectual forces were beginning to stir in Germany that he recognized as more closely related to his own view of the world than the spirit that blew in from abroad. As a result, he was not a patriot in the modern, middle-class sense of the term and was probably something more than this: he was pleased to have discovered new wellsprings of artistic strength on German soil and insisted on their exploitation in order to increase Germany's might and prestige. Even today, we may reckon this to his credit."
< W.A. Mozart , by Hermann Abert , P. 736~737 >


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

DavidA said:


> Figaro is one of the greatest of all operas, dealing with genuine human emotions on a real level.


""This completely shattered me, and destroyed most of my early gods."
Britten's diaries document this 'road-to-Damascus' moment. Although the overture to The Marriage of Figaro was one of his first miniature scores, it was on Wednesday 11 November 1936 that he was 'knocked flat' by seeing the opera at Covent Garden. 'It is without exception the loveliest thing I have ever seen on any stage', he wrote. 'This simple beauty (expressing every emotion) is withering to any ambitions one might have - & yet it is good to have lived in a world that could produce such perfection.' He decided to be extravagant and go home by taxi: 'You can't scramble on a 13 bus after Figaro!' Two days later he said the opera was 'haunting me beyond words. Wed night was a landmark in my history.' He bought a score of the whole opera, and then a complete recording 'which I play often later in the day, and adore more than I can say'.
He went to many performances thereafter, and wrote a press review after seeing it at Covent Garden in 1952. He said he left 'overwhelmed anew by the enchantment of Mozart's score'."
< Essential Britten: A Pocket Guide for the Britten Centenary / by John Bridcut / RA1-PA1919 >


----------



## Agamenon (Apr 22, 2019)

So, for 90 % of the replies, there´s no emotions and no real feelings in Wagner music dramas! 

This is funny and deserves a place among the most absurd affirmations in the web.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Agamenon said:


> So, for 90 % of the replies, there´s no emotions and no real feelings in Wagner music dramas!
> This is funny and deserves a place among the most absurd affirmations in the web.


I know. I burst out laughing madly whenever I see these comments:



DavidA said:


> Problem you have is Mozart does it better without the *bombast*. Sorry you can't see it!





SiegendesLicht said:


> Not bad. But compared to Tristan und Isolde it is kind of tame. It falls into the category of "*pretty*".


Hahahahahaha.. Too funny.. and cute



DavidA said:


> you dear old thing!





DavidA said:


> Look dear boy.


----------

