OPERAWISE: OPÉRA COMIQUE

Seattle Opera · OPERAWISE: Opéra Comique

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Opéra comique, a native French form of lower-brow musical theater, features spoken dialogue, catchy tunes with easy-to-sing refrains, and middle-class values. Many of the opéra-comiques still performed today (including Carmen, The Daughter of the Regiment, and Beatrice and Benedict, as well as opéra-comique derivatives such as Faust and The Tales of Hoffmann) deal, sentimentally or ironically, with a way of life and a value system which now belongs mostly to ancient history.

STAFF PICKS: Visual Arts with Catherine Merlo

Catherine Merlo is the Senior Individual Giving Officer at Seattle Opera. She is a Vermeer chaser, a 20th century architectural history buff, and an avid home cook. 

Here is what Catherine has been up to during Washington's "Stay Home, Stay Healthy" order:

• Planning her next trip to see Vermeer – one step closer to achieving her goal of seeing all 35 canon paintings by the age of 35 – next up: the UK. 
  

• Reading the LA Conservancy’s latest study on how preservation positively impacts affordable housing, sustainability, and our economy. 
  

Enjoy Seattle Opera Mornings on KING FM

Amid stay-home order, two companies team up to keep opera vibrant in the Pacific Northwest 

While McCaw Hall’s stage may be dark, opera music continues to reverberate in the Pacific Northwest and beyond: Starting every Saturday on April 25, enjoy Seattle Opera Mornings on King FM. Classical KING FM 98.1 will broadcast recordings of previous Seattle Opera performances including Tosca, La traviata, The Magic Flute, and Madame Butterfly. Broadcasts will be available on the radio and at king.org every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.

Christina Scheppelmann, General Director of Seattle Opera, explained that the broadcasts are made possible through a special agreement with the singers’ and musicians’ unions: the American Guild of Musical Artists and the Seattle Symphony and Opera Players’ Organization.

“Seattle Opera and KING FM are thrilled to be able to bring beautiful music and storytelling to our audiences’ ears,” Scheppelmann said. “Many thanks go to all the artists who make Seattle Opera what it is, and who have allowed us to share their talent with the airwaves during these unprecedented times.”

OPERAWISE: OPERA BUFFA

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Opera buffa, the beloved old Italian tradition of opera comedy, is what you get by adding music to the even older Italian tradition of improvised (artisanal) comedy, commedia dell’arte. The fools and buffoons of commedia—the sassy wenches, befuddled old professors, suicidal young lovers, dirty old misers, hungry Harlequins, arrogant soldiers, zany servants, and all the rest—found new ways of entertaining us once they began singing gloriously. And with the opera orchestra functioning as a laugh track and adding jokes of its own, opera buffa continues to disarm us and charm us while putting a big grin on our faces. The Barber of Seville and The Elixir of Love are great examples of the genre.

STAFF PICKS: Musical Theatre with Corrie Yadon

Corrie Yadon is the Patron Experience Manager at Seattle Opera. You likely know her from McCaw Hall where she acts as our House Manager and is never seen without a fabulous hat!

She went to school for Music Theatre and would CRUSH at pub trivia with this topic. Here is Corrie's list of things keeping her happy and singing along while working from home.

Photo Credit: ©  Philip Newton

• Marie’s Crisis Facebook Group. If you don't know Marie’s Crisis, then you are missing out! It's an NYC institution: A West Village dive located in the basement of where Thomas Payne wrote Crisis, this diamond in the very rough has a piano and all your friends new and old singing show tunes. Marie's Crisis offers daily live streams from their pianists' living rooms. Song after song allows you to be the star from your living room. Don’t forget to tip you pianist via Venmo!
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• Peter Pan Goes Wrong from the BBC.
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OPERAWISE: Verismo

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Verismo was a late nineteenth-century reaction against the excesses of the great tradition. The aim was immediate, powerful, realistic opera, with post-Wagnerian music of titanic passion setting stories about simple, everyday, relatable characters. The vogue for verismo dominated opera as the older art form gave birth to the cinema. Leoncavallo’s masterpiece Pagliacci (1892) serves as a well-known example of verismo; Il tabarro (1918), by Puccini, isn’t so well-known but is every bit as great.

STAFF PICKS: Choral Music with T.J. Callahan

T.J. Callahan is Seattle Opera's Programs Communications Coordinator. At Seattle Opera, he writes and edits content for the Programs and Partnerships department and helps with general operations. You might recognize him from events at the Opera Center and in Tagney Jones Hall.

Outside of the 9-to-5, T.J. is a freelance choral singer and early music vocalist. While staying home, he's been busy recording himself for "virtual choir" projects (listen to a podcast about the ones composer Eric Whitacre has been doing since 2010) and studying up for Zoom voice lessons.

Here's the music on his playlist this week:

• The Helsinki Chamber Choir's recording of Rautavaara's excellent All-Night Vigil, featuring Finnish basso profundo Tuuka Haapaniemi

• New York Polyphony's album Roma Aeterna, which features bass-baritone Jonathan Woody (who recently performed at Benaroya Hall with Byron Schenkman) on their recording of Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli

PUSHKIN, the Wellspring of Russian Opera

In this pair of podcasts, Dramaturg Jonathan Dean discusses the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin with Dacia Clay of the Classical Classroom Podcast. And here’s a list of (some) works by Pushkin (poems, plays, stories, novels, in the order he wrote them) that then inspired operas:

1820: Ruslan & Ludmila (Narrative Poem)
Made into Opera: Ruslan & Lyudmila (1842) by Mikhail Glinka

OPERAWISE: Music Drama

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Music Drama was the personal solution to the problems of presenting opera in nineteenth-century Europe developed by composer/librettist Richard Wagner, opera’s ultimate mad genius. These long, loud, big works challenge artists, audiences, and the art form itself. Their complex music and unique spins on old stories continue to attract, repel, and provoke all who encounter them. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) serves as an example of the genre, as does the Richard Strauss opera Elektra (1909).

OPERAWISE: BEL CANTO MELODRAMA

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Bel Canto Melodrama refers to for serious Italian opera from the first part of the nineteenth century, when opera singing was about dazzling trapeze acts and opera plots tended toward the wild, far-fetched, and grotesque. Inspired by their newfound obsession with Shakespeare, Europe’s Romantic generation created some of opera’s most enduringly popular works, including Verdi’s Rigoletto and Bellini’s Norma.