- Good afternoon and good
evening to all of you in our audience in the US and the UK. I am Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Randy L. and
Melvin R. Berlin Family Lecture Series for 2021, a series sponsored by
the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities. Our acclaimed guest, the
renowned tenor and author, Ian Bostridge will spend today
and the next two Saturdays of April 17th and April 24th
exploring and evaluating some of the works at the very center of the classical vocal repertoire. He will ask how they construct identities, historically, poetically and musically, in lectures entitled Musical Identities. But before we introduce Mr. Bostridge, allow me briefly to mention how he comes to be with us today, not just as a guest of the University of Chicago,
but specifically as part of the Berlin Family Lecture Series. First, of course, I want
to thank most sincerely Randy and Melvin Berlin
for their generous support that makes this annual event possible. Randy is here with us today. Very sadly, Melvin passed away in 2019. Established in 2013, the
Berlin Family Lectures bring to campus individuals who are making fundamental contributions
to the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences. In addition to offering
a series of lectures, each presenter develops
a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press. With my friends from U Chicago Press among our attendees today, I will mention that Danielle Allen, Berlin Family lecturer in 2020, expects her book about democracy
in the time of coronavirus to be published in the fall of this year. We look forward to seeing Mr. Bostridge's lectures in print as well, preserving his words and
wisdom for generations to come. Today, I'm delighted to
announce that the poet Claudia Rankine will be the
2022 Berlin Family lecturer. A dynamic and award-winning poet, Claudia is the Frederick
Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. I invite all of you here
today to join us in 2022 and each year thereafter
for a lecture series that continually discovers
new ideas and delivers fresh perspectives about
our human condition. As a series and not just a single lecture, the Berlin Family Lectures
provide distinctive rewards for both speaker and audience. The presenters are given
ample time and space to develop their ideas and
supply the proper context for their evolving topics. At the same time, the audience can follow the speaker on an engaging
intellectual journey and absorb the presenter's
sustained argument during more than one presentation. For these reasons, I
encourage everyone here today to attend all three of
Mr. Bostridge's lectures. Although the series will demand
your all too precious time, in exchange, I can assure
you that you will reap the considerable benefit
of an enlightening and intellectually rewarding experience. I fully anticipate that
Mr. Bostridge will surprise and delight us with new
insights as he examines how classical music can construct poetic, historic and musical identities. Now, before Ian Bostridge
begins his first lecture, let me introduce you to Berthold Hoeckner, a renowned music
historian who will in turn introduce Mr. Bostridge. Born in Olpe, Germany, Berthold
came to the United States to earn his PhD from Cornell University. Since 1994, he has served
in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago,
where he is currently chair. Berthold has written
extensively about 19th and 20th century music. His 2002 book, "Programming
the Absolute: 19th Century German Music and the
Hermeneutics of the Moment," explores the dialectic between
absolute and program music written by 19th and early
20th century German composers, including Robert Schumann, whose music Mr. Bostridge
will discuss today. Berthold's latest book,
"Film, Music, Memory," combines perceptive readings of films with a novel argument
for the role of music as a prime vehicle of memory
in the cinematic art form. He is a beloved teacher of courses in all his areas of specialization, and he recently received
the Quantrell Award for excellence in teaching in our college. During a year that has
challenged all of us, Berthold helped create
a virtual concert series called "Sounds, Sights"
which combines music with architectural landmarks on the University of Chicago campus. He remarks that at a time
of empty communal spaces, this program shows how
accomplished performers can fill those spaces with music, emphasizing the deep
resonance between tradition and innovation that animates
the University of Chicago as a place of listening and learning. Now, please join me in
giving a warm welcome to my esteemed colleague,
Berthold Hoeckner. - I'm delighted to introduce Ian Bostridge to the first of his 2021
Berlin Family Lectures. Ian is a world renowned
tenor, a versatile performer, an extraordinary artist
with an unusual background. An Oxford trained historian of witchcraft, a writer, and more recently,
a public musicologist with a voracious interest, capacious mind, and critical imagination. Since Ian's lecture has an
autobiographical dimension, I won't recite biographical
details readily available elsewhere or review his
wide ranging discography. Instead, let me jump right into what we do at the University of
Chicago when we invite eminent individuals from
various walks of life; open up a space of reflection and inquiry, aiming at different
perspectives, new insights, novel understandings. Like Ian, who's about my age, I came of age in the last
quarter of the 20th century when the lied repertory
had been shaped for decades by the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau who seem to have recorded
every song in the repertory; Schubert, Schumann, Wolf,
Brahms and many others, often multiple times with
different accompanists for different labels. Fischer-Dieskau was everywhere
and his omnipresence had become arguably oppressive. In the 1980s, I had studied
with Fischer-Dieskau's last accompanist, Gerald Moore, who had himself trained with the legendary Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The prevailing aesthetic upheld the principles of classicism;
clarity and control, polish and perfection and
the triumph of technique all in service of the artwork, the score, the composer's intentions. But then in the 1990s, came Ian Bostridge, and opened the door to
the Ian Bostridge's. In the world of the lied recital, Ian's arrival was not just
a breath of fresh air, but a tornado that cleared the terrain with an ear popping
force still felt today. In 1993, he performed his
acclaimed "Winterreise" in the Purcell Room, sang at
the Aldeburgh Festival in 1994, and won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Debut Award with his Wigmore
Hall recital in 1995. He started touring in
Europe, Lyon, Cologne, the Alte Oper Frankfurt. And not before long, in the Fall of 2000, at University of Chicago's Mandel Hall. At that time, he came to a
seminar in the music department held across the street
at Regenstein Library. So, welcome back, Ian. In 2000, members of the humanities faculty met to start a new core sequence
called "Media Aesthetics." Its three quotas were
modeled on a book of essays by the French critic, Roland Barthes, "Image, Music, Text." One chapter became mandatory
reading for the sound quota or the music quota, "The
Grain of the Voice." In it, Barthes famously
described Fischer-Dieskau. "His total command of
communication as a singer, his absolute dominance of diction, his conquest of matter by technique." Yet such mastery lacked what Barthes heard in the Swiss baritone, Charles Panzera, whose voice had grain; an
audible element of physicality, corporality, body. Grain is matter asserting
itself in the means and medium of vocal production. The lie of the tongue,
the throat and teeth. Dieskau was all soul and spirit, Panzera, all body and matter. This is where Ian Bostridge comes in. If grain on not grain is
an either/or proposition, Bostridge has both, both
grain and not grain, both body and soul,
both spirit and matter, even when they are
orthogonal to each other. Bostridge inaugurated a
new generation of singers. He was and is at home in the recital hall, but he's also a recording artist. He's not only a master
of the presence effects of live performance, he's also
a singer who uses recordings as a medium to reconceive song. A recording artist is alive
in the artifice of recording, using the microphone like a microscope that magnifies every sonic nuance, amplified for audiences that
have become audio files. Old-school lied performance and listeners had been looking for singers
as actors going into character, like Schubert's "Erlkonig," the father, the son, and the Erlking. Ian does this well and we'll hear more about this in his first lecture. But Ian's voice is often pure matter. That is, pure voice or to use
a new critical term, vocality. Vocality is hearing a voice
break in passages of raw effect or dwindle in moments of asphyxiation. So, moving away from Barthes
dualism, grain or not grain, unruly singers like Maria
Callas and the book behind me, I couldn't help putting it out there, inhabit a third space,
the space of vocality. And I may ask a question about this later. Ian Bostridge precipitated
a reorientation to vocality in song performance that
was itself programmatic for unruly romantics like
Schubert and Schumann. A shift in aesthetic
sublimation to the rear, from the ideal of beauty
to matters of truth. Welcome, Ian, to the University of Chicago and to the Berlin Family Lectures. - I feel very honored to have been invited to give these lectures
and I'd like to start by expressing my thanks
to the Berlin Family and to the University of
Chicago for the invitation. It's a precious opportunity. As a singer, I've spent the
last year largely unable to perform live music due to the pandemic. To that extent, like all
performers worldwide, I've been forced to
question my own identity which has for the past 20
or 30 years been defined by getting up on stage
and communicating music in physical proximity and real time to audiences in concert
halls and opera houses. That personal note
must, I have to confess, be possible for what
subliminally, at least, lay behind my choice of musical identities as a title for this lecture series. I've had an unusual career
in that before I became a professional singer in my late twenties, I was an academic historian,
a fellow at Oxford University. The enforced silence of the last year has given me the opportunity to fall back on my identity as a
historian and to think. It's given me the chance to delve deeper than I might otherwise have
had the opportunity to do, to delve deeper into the backstories of some of the great
works of classical music that I've performed in the past or have been thinking about
performing in the future. Works by composers ranging from the Italian Renaissance
master, Claudio Monteverdi, to the 20th century British
genius, Benjamin Britten. In the lectures you're going to hear, I will be taking you on a journey under the surface of those works, to share my excavations and
to ask questions about them that are not usually
asked in the concert hall. And what I want to show
is that the tradition of Western classical music
far from being moribund or culturally authoritarian, continues to be alive
because it continually invites us to ask questions. The individual musical
works I will explore prove to be fluid and open-ended, while at the same time
making us emotionally engage with the conflicts and
contradictions of human experience, including pair relations,
whether gendered or colonial, and the way we confront the ultimate dissolution of identity, death, which has been at the
forefront of many minds during a period in which so many
have been lost to a pandemic. Music is unique among the
arts because at its best it embodies what the poet, John Keats, called negative capability; the creative ability to live
with doubts and with mysteries. It makes us think, and at the same time it takes us beyond thought. In all performance, identity is something that we performers have to confront. Each time we stand up on stage
to deliver, to reproduce, to transmit a text, be
it musical or literary, or a combination of the two,
we have a decision to make, conscious or unconscious about
the character of that text, and about the stance we adopt towards it. How are we quite literally to embody it? Do we take on the identity
of the text we have absorbed or does the text reconfigure
itself as it is molded to the identity of the performer? There are many ways of approaching
this and many orthodoxes which are sometimes unthinkingly lodged at the center of critical discourse. Central to much appreciation of the Western art music tradition is the idea of interpretation. It's a strange notion and
not really one which we would apply to the spoken theater. To talk about a great actor's
interpretation of Macbeth, Hedda, Hedda Gabler, Archie Rice, it doesn't sound quite right. We talk more readily of
his or her performance. The actor takes the text and runs with it. But in classical music, there
is also a paradox at work in which the ideal interpretation
is a non-interpretation. In classical music, there
has long been a tendency rather to privilege the text, in this case the musical score, a tendency which reached its apogee in 20th century abstract music with the notion that the performer is an ideally transparent individual. Composers like Stravinsky
hoped through notational exactitude to remove the
freedom of the performer. Not for nothing, did he experiment with the mechanical piano role in the 1920s as a way of escaping the painful necessity for the intermediation of a performer. Interpretation understood in this way is about taking the text
left behind by the composer and using it to intuit
an ideal performance which remains unachievable,
but nevertheless an absolute regulatory principle and an aspiration. Much time in rehearsal is spent arguing about what the composer meant, though in practice
quite often ignoring it. The ultimate expression of
this regime was articulated by the theorist Heinrich Schenker. And I quote to him,
"Basically, a composition does not require a performance
in order to exist. The reading of the score
is quite sufficient." There's something profoundly
theological about this as it reaches back to Renaissance debates about form and substance, but it's surely a kick in
the teeth for the performer. Thankfully, a new performative
turn in musicology has been recognizing that music
quite simply is performance, not just the written text. Music is a quintessentially
social activity. Of course in our highly literate tradition of classical music making, the composer has a unique
power, authority and charisma. And the technologies of music composition and the genius of the
composers who have used and developed them has created a tradition of extraordinary power and longevity. From Monteverdi via Mozart
and Beethoven to Ades. At the same time, performers, like actors, have to take the music and run with it. The text we have cannot
exhaustively encode all the parameters of
possible performances. And while the texts may
be the starting point and research into its meanings are useful and constraining discipline, in the end, what we have is a recipe
for making performances. Performances which in one way
or another move our audiences. This is in fact as much the
case for instrumental music as it is for vocal music
in the classical tradition. In a brilliant essay, the
pianist, Alfred Brendel, contends that in the
piano music of Beethoven over and above the analysis
and deployment of structure, and I quote, "it is the
interpreter's responsibility to play the roles of
different characters." If this is the case for abstract music of the highest intellectual charge, how much more so for sung music? For music which has a literary text and assumes if not a literal character, as in works for the theater, at least a persona as
in the world of song? This is how Edward T. Cone
puts it in his classic study, "The Composer's Voice." "If we take the art of song seriously, we must accord the same faith to the characters portrayed by singers. They are not mere puppets controlled by the composers strings, they are more like Petrushkas brought to life by the composer, but thence forth driven by
their own wills and desires. Thus, the vocal persona
adopts the original simulation of the poetic persona and
adds another of his own." "Not puppets," Cone says,
and I feel he's right. The adoption of character, the melting of the characters
of piece and performers, which performance
involves, can often take us a long way from what
the composer intended. At the same time, one of
the most powerful feelings one can have as a
performer is that in what feel like the best, the
deepest performances, deepest for the singer and by extension, we hope for the audience, in such deep performances,
the song sings the singer. This sounds slightly mystical and it's difficult to
describe at any length, but it is an idea which does
capture phenomenologically what it feels like to
deliver a work of art and to be swept along with it, taken by surprise by the way it seizes us and takes us unawares. Moments in life like this are rare, moments of uncanniness in
which parts of our life seem to connect in a
jolting and mysterious way, moments of what we might call epiphany. Art seeks out such epiphanies
and for the singer they come when the song sings the singer. I wanted to talk about this confrontation, this adventure with identity
because over the course of the past 30 years as a singer, I have found myself torn
between two approaches which seem at first sight
to be contradictory. Educated as a historian and having worked as a university based
historian until the age of 30, my musical life was always
outside this academic structure. I never learned to play an instrument. I never studied harmony and counterpoint. Singing the great romantic
songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, my self legitimation did not come from an academic understanding of
the poetical musical texts which I loved and sang,
but from a commitment to a sort of intensity of
utterance and that search to be so immersed in the music
that singer and song merge. My singerly practice was
never about transparency, but about merger and that
paradoxical escape from the self which a certain intensity
of performance can bring. At the same time I
recognized as a historian, the way in which the music
I was singing had emerged from different cultural
moments in the history of the Western classical tradition and that each perhaps deserved
excavation as to the way in which character might be understood. If one's first extensive
encounter with sung performance is the romantic lied, the romantic song, then the performative style
one adopts is all too likely of course, to be a romantic one. But recognition of the
historical roots of that style that one adopts doesn't disqualify it as an artistic approach. I'm reminded of the 20th
century British composer, Benjamin Britten, who declared
that if he'd been born 100 years earlier he would have
been writing romantic music. Something he meant not as
a statement of the obvious, but as a declaration of allegiance. It was Nietzsche who told us
that every song is a swan song. For me, every song is somehow romantic and involves an engagement
with the great themes of life which the romantics
explored and transmitted into the psychoanalytic tradition. Eros and Thanatos, love
and death, identity. But in these lectures, I
want to look at a selection of diverse pieces which
might benefit from having their presentation of identity problematized and historicized. It's my conviction that
this is both a practical and a moral issue. We owe it to both the
past and to the present to understand the context from which art, rather than the mere oral wallpaper, emerges as part of that
mysterious creative current which attempts to bind together
in cultural catholicity, the dead, the living,
and the as yet unborn. I want to examine
performative constructions of identity in music through
the lens of gender, politics, or the ultimate paradoxical grounding and denial of our identity, death. Works that seem difficult
for us to perform like Robert Schumann's
romantic song cycle, "Frauenliebe und Leben," can be refurbished by taking a
closer look at their origins. Works which have languished in
an ideological no man's land like Ravel's "Chansons madecasses" are not just aesthetic objects. Ravel's work exists in a historical matrix which both opposes and is complicit in the European colonial enterprise. In these lectures, I
will be looking at pieces which I've performed or
which I might perform. In doing so, I want to raise questions, questions which help the
past to inform the present, the present to inform the past, and which can enrich as well
as interrogate performance. I'm going to go on to discuss
three works in this lecture from three different eras, to look at the way in which
one aspect of social identity, that of gender identity, has
been creatively reconfigured by composers at different
historical moments. This suggests that questions
of gender have always been sites of complexity
in the Western cannon, or that musical works can
provide an open and fluid space in which societies can
pose such questions. I'll start in the late
renaissance with Monteverdi's short theatrical piece, "Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda." The fight between Tancred and Clorinda, in which complexities of
identity are presented through the telling of a
tale in which gender roles are blurred and challenged. I'll move on to Schumann's song cycle "Frauenliebe und Leben",
woman's love and life, in which the romantic and
romanticized presentation of a woman's life and love is complicated by the male identity of its authors, the composer and the poet. I'll end with Benjamin
Britten's music theater piece from the early 1960s, "Curlew River," in which the assumption of a
female role by a male singer broadens and deepens the
vein of tragedy in the piece. Monteverdi's musical theater works written in the first few decades
of the 17th century are now firmly lodged in the repertoire. But standing at the beginning
of the opera tradition before firm rules for
what an opera should be had been codified, they are fluid works, strange and unsettling
for a modern audience. They must've been strange and unsettling for Monteverdi's contemporaries. "L'Orfeo" written for the
Gonzaga Duke of Mantua in 1607 is more of a court
entertainment than an opera. Nowadays, it's usually in opera houses that it's to be seen and heard. Despite all the philosophical
and musicological conundrum and paradoxes of
what it is to recreate a work written four centuries ago, what is authenticity? How can we approach it? Despite that, "L'Orfeo"
does have that strange and amphibious quality of
seeming at one in the same time, alien and familiar. It mixes together emotions
that are recognizable and emotions that seem barely to engage with our concerns at all. This is what music of the
past seems to do for us, to bring the foreignness
and the humanity of the past to life with a visceral impact, far away from what some
theorists and commentators rudely dismiss as classical
music's museum culture. Monteverdi's Venetian operas, "The Return of Ulysses" 1639 to 40, and "The Coronation of Poppea" from 1643 are much more operatic in feel, much more obviously designed for a theater and for a public. Free wheeling with that
almost Shakespearean mixture of the serious and the unbuttoned, which reminds us that
these pieces were written for the carnival season
in which the social and ideological assumptions
of the Venetian Republic could be seen as it were through a gaudy theatrical kaleidoscope, the world turned upside down. Another carnival piece by Monteverdi is even more difficult to categorize, though it's increasingly a part of the post-modern classical repertoire. "Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda," the fight between Tancred and Clorinda was written to be performed as part of some evening entertainment
in the apartments of the Montenegro family in
the Palazzo Dandolo in Venice at the height of carnival time in 1624. The basic storyline is a simple one, while at the same time it challenges the tropes of heteronormativity. During the first crusade, the Muslim woman, Clorinda, a warrior, unusually a woman a warrior, finds herself trapped outside
the gates of Jerusalem where she is challenged by the
Christian knight, Tancredi, who takes her for a man. They fight. Tancredi demands to
know who his opponent is and she refuses, spurring
him to further combat. The fighting intensifies and Tancredi mortally wounds Clorinda. She asks him to baptize her. As he comes close to her to do so, he recognizes her as
Clorinda, the woman he loves. She dies. "Combattimento" has an
experimental quality about it. And at the time of that first performance must've packed an avant-garde punch, as a group of singers,
instrumentalists and actor-dancers started in the middle of
what was essentially a party to enact Tasso's story. The killing of Clorinda by Tancredi in a essentially domestic
setting, close up, must have lent the climax an
especially disturbing frisson. Here is Monteverdi's own
description of the evening. "Unexpectedly" and that's crucial I think, for the impact of the evening, "unexpectedly, Clorinda
enters armed and on foot. She's followed by Tancredi,
armed on a Marian horse," some sort of hobby horse. The narrator who's referred
to throughout the piece is testo or text begins the singing. "Tancredi and Clorinda will
perform steps and gestures in the way expressed by the
narration, nothing more or less. And they will observe
diligently those measures, blows and steps. The instrumentalists will
sound excited or soft, and the narrator will deliver
the words set to music in such a way that they
create a unified imitation." Monteverdi's setting of
this incident out of Tasso must have had a peculiarly
dissociated feeling. The narrator is designated testo, literally text but a common
label for a narrator or soloist in Italian music of the period. He spins his tail while two actor-dancers act out the combat. At four crucial points of the drama, Tancredo and Clorinda
themselves are given voice, but did the actors
sing, the actor-dancers? Or did they mime as some
singers sang the words as it were offstage? It's not clear from
Monteverdi's description or from the score. Monteverdi was especially
proud of his development of new musical means to
depict combat in sound, something he boasted off
in the preface to the work as published in 1639. Pizzicato, rapid repeated
notes, string tremolo. This was what he called in
that preface to the score, (speaking foreign language),
the aroused style, which imitates the sounds of combat. But what seems particularly
notable hearing and seeing the work today
is the sexual charge of the material from Tasso,
which Monteverdi set. The aroused style may originate
in imitations of the warlike but its signifying potential
can just as easily attach to a very different sort of arousal. In true Carnivalesque style, "Combattimento" plays
with notions of gender, emphasizing the fluidity and
performativity of gender roles. And the fight between the two combatants is full of erotic ambiguity. The viewers of the first
performance would have been well aware of Tasso's poem
and its complex presentation of the relationship between
Tancredi and Clorinda. Tancredi first sees Clorinda
earlier in Tasso's poem, falls in love with her
and refuses to fight her. Clorinda herself nurses a
secret desire for Tancredi. In an often overlooked
passage from slightly later in Tasso's poem, she is
presented as an active and almost predatory sexual actor, a challenge to the Renaissance norm, and one who concealed under the cloak of hate another passion. "Oh, that I might have that man captive and alive, not dead. Alive I want him for a sweet revenge, so my desires may yet be comforted." When the two meet again in Canto XII in the passage that Monteverdi sets, Clorinda has put on armor
which conceals her identity and her sex from Tancredi. And she fights him,
adopting a masculine persona which Tancredi fails to see through. But in this passage set by Monteverdi, the encounter is as much
an erotic as a martial one and combat is re-imagined as a display of sadomasochistic lovemaking. "Three times the knight
gripped the young lady hard in his muscular arms. And three times she slipped herself out of those tenacious knots. No true loves, but the bonds of an enemy." Here, Monteverdi's music
irradiates the words with a syncopated sliding love sickness. Could I have some music please? (classical violin music)
(singing in foreign language) When Tancredi comes to kill Clorinda, there is something almost
eroticized about Tasso's words, heightened by the simplicity
of Monteverdi's setting. "Into her lovely breast he
thrusts his blade, drowns it, eagerly drinks her blood. Her stole beneath the cuirass, sweetly lined with gold
that held her breasts with light and tender pull, now fills with a warm stream." The story ends with Clorinda
asking Tancredi to baptize her with water from a nearby stream. With his devastated recognition of her, a moment captured in
Tintoretto's magnificent painting of the subject, now in Houston, which I'm showing now, and
her reported redemption. Who is Clorinda? In a 17th century Venetian context, as the historian Wendy
Heller has explored, the role and character
of women was a matter for constant negotiation
and constant debate. Mostly of course, by men. This was a polity in
which women were excluded from political power even more resolutely than in other Italian States at the time, other States where the
institution of the court at least allowed for the play
of informal female influence. In Republican Venice,
there was no such court. The marriage customs of the Republic, designed to safeguard the
transmission of property, condemned many if not most
unmarried aristocratic women to an unwanted life encloistered as a nun. But Venetian women did
write about the constraints under which they lived, none more eloquently
than Lucrezia Marinella, 1571 to 1653, in her book, "La nobilta et l'eccellenza delle donne, co' diffetti et mancamenti
de gli huomini," the nobility and excellence of women together with the defects
and insufficiencies of men. "Oh, that God might
grant that in our times women were permitted to train
in arms and in literature, so that we would see such
wonderful and unheard of things in the preservation and
expansion of kingdoms. And who would be more
ready to make a shield with their fearless breasts in defense of the fatherland than women?" There were during the Renaissance rare, but notable examples of martial women, not all of them fictional. Elizabeth I confronting
the Spanish Armada in 1588 is perhaps the most famous. "Not so much a virgin as a virago," as one contemporary put it in, and not unlike the Amazonian
queen, Penthesilea. Tasso, in his epic, managed to include the Amazonian warrior, Clorinda, as Homer had not managed to
represent the Amazonian queen, Penthesilea in his "Iliad." And that's something
of which Tasso boasted. Yet at the same time,
the Amazonian Clorinda was a (speaking foreign
language), a marvel. And for Tasso in another work,
a prose work that he wrote, he saw that there were for
him, clear gender roles to which men and women ought to conform. Strength, commerce and combat for men. Modesty and household
management for women. In a sense, Tancredi's performance
of heteronormative gender is put question as much by
"Combattimento" as is Clorinda's. The erotic quality of the
combat is multilayered, tangled, perplexing. Clorinda loves Tancredi without
quite knowing how or why, and fights with him to the death in order, somehow to possess him. Tancredi is all unknowing of
Clorinda's identity as a woman, but joins in this sensual
combat with a feigning man. When Clorinda is revealed to
be a woman and what is more, the woman with whom he is in love, his sense of masculine
identity is cast adrift. As for Clorinda, her agency
is asserted by the piece. She insists on her
confrontation with Tancredi. She pursues him, but she is of course, punished by defeat and death. And her carnival existence
as a performative marvel is a licensed exception,
which only reinforces the mores and customs of Venetian society. What the gentlemen and
gentlewomen who watched the first performance
talked about it afterwards, we shall, of course, never know. We do know, however, from Monteverdi's own possibly self-serving
account, that tears were shed. Combattimento is rich,
almost too rich in its texts and contexts to contend
with as a performer. A scholarly literature of formidable depth and suggestiveness has grown up around it. The audience watching in
the 1620s would have been well aware from their steeping in Tasso, as a modern audience is not aware, that Clorinda, the white skinned Muslim, was in fact the child of black skinned Ethiopian Christian royalty. Another confusion of identity
which would have given her baptism a particular force, especially for Venetians,
who living on a boundary between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Think of Shakespeare's play "Othello," would of known stories of
Venetians brought up as Muslims and Ottomans brought up as Christians. The historian, Suzanne Cusick, to complicate things further, has uncovered fascinating possibilities of sexual double entendre
at work in the text, which Monteverdi sets. Creating the prospect of
layers of carnivalesque tension between the plains of battle,
of love, and of rivaled jest. How does "Combattimento" work
for performers in performance? I most recently sang it on tour in concert with the wonderful Italian
group, Europa Galante, under their director, the
violinist, Fabio Biondi. As is so often the case
nowadays, I sang the whole thing. The nameless narrator,
testo, Clorinda and Tancredi, not as Monteverdi originally arranged things for three voices. In this version, I'm a
ballad singer on stage, telling a tale, an age old tale, but entering seamlessly into
the roles within the story. Not only when I speak literally
for Tancredi and Clorinda with their words and their voices, but also in the course of the narration as the musical narration bodies out the experiences of the combatants. Aggression, desire, surrender. Clorinda's performativity
as she pretends to be what she is not is echoed in
the narrator's performance. It's a remarkably absorbing
piece for performers and audience given in this way. Belying its fractured structure
and the many commentators who see it as an aesthetic oddity. And in its exploration
of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, of its
fantastical imaginings, "Combattimento" is far more
interesting than Monteverdi told his public when he
boasted in the first edition of how cleverly he had
mimicked the sounds of war. So much more is going on. "Combattimento" ends on
a note of uncertainty. As she dies, in the narration,
Clorinda only seems to say "The heavens open, I go in peace." And this openness, this absence
of a conclusive happy ending is echoed in a fractured
cadence, a sort of disconnect between Clorinda's song ending and the played ending of the musicians, which arrives disconcertingly after her. You'll hear this in the musical example. (classical music)
(singing in foreign language) Robert Schumann's song
cycle for voice and piano "Frauenliebe und Leben," a woman's love and life,
is a very different beast from Monteverdi's "Combattimento." As is typical of the romantic lied, one of the most popular classical genres of the 19th century, piano
and voice conspire to present a psychologically convincing persona, one with psychoanalytical pre echos, as the voice speaks in conscious mode while the piano melds
together the external world and the unconscious in
waves of emotional yearning. It's a world away from the
performative identities of the late Renaissance. Here's the first part of the first song. (classical music)
(singing in foreign language) "Frauenliebe und Leben"
is an extraordinary, compelling and moving piece of music. In the course of seven
songs and 20 minutes, we are witness to the
experiences of a young woman who falls in love,
marries, falls pregnant, nurses her baby, and is widowed. If we only had a bare title for each song and no words to understand
the detail, no poems, we would nevertheless still feel the emotional compulsion of the work, as we do with Schumann's wordless, but literary piano cycles of the 1830s, the decade before Schumann
began writing songs, and the decade before
he wrote "Frauenliebe." The work closes with a meditative,
but devastating postlude in the shadow of the husband's death. The music of the first song of the cycle which you just heard, that first
encounter with the beloved, (speaking foreign language). Since I first saw him, it's
been like I've been blind, that music returns, but
with the vocal melody at first veiled, and then vanished, leaving only a memory in the mind, in the oral imagination of the listener. Charles Rosen, pianist and one of the great writers about music, has analyzed the subtle power
of this supreme advocation of memory and music. "The postlude is a memory and
part of the memory is missing. It has to be recalled, willed
to return as it inevitably is. Schumann has forced the
listener to acknowledge the eternal imperfection of
memory and to complete the song. The end of the cycle is not a return, but the ghost of a return, a fragment or shadow of the original. The voice no longer exists. And with it has died part of the melody." And can we listen to a small part? Well, we can listen to the
whole postlude, actually. (classical piano music) "Frauenliebe" remains one of
the most frequently performed of the song cycles of the romantic period, partly because of its
sheer affective power, partly because of its innovative
and compelling recreation of a domestic tragedy. But also because it's one
of the few song cycles with a poetic persona which
is definitively female. But "Frauenliebe" is also
something of an embarrassment today because of the nature of the texts, which seemed to inhabit a world
of 19th century paternalism, which 21st century
singers and 21st century audiences find uncomfortable. Because of the romantic
sincerity of the piece, it seems difficult to receive the songs as it were historically or dramatically as the presentation of
a world from the past or a set of sexist tropes which we resist. Singers and program notes in
the concert hall and reviews half apologize for the piece
as if it were a manifesto rather than a work of art from long ago. It is true that the
apparent submissiveness of the poems can be troubling. "Since I first saw him,
I believe myself blind. You may not notice me, a lowly maiden. How could he from among all of them have uplifted and favored lowly me? I shall serve him, live for
him, belong wholly to him. Let me in humility, bow down to my Lord." Two musicologists, Kristina Muxfeldt in her influential article, "Frauenliebe und Leben Now and Then," and Rufus Hallmark in his book length's study on "Frauenliebe," have attempted to contextualize
and to some extent rescue the program of Schumann's cycle and the poetry of Adelbert
Chamisso which it sets. Little known now except as
the author of "Frauenliebe," Chamisso was not a sentimental hack, but a poet whose reputation
stretched into the 20th century, a merited and admiring
essay by Thomas Mann. Chamisso wrote a great deal
of verse in a female voice. And in doing that, his aim
was not so much to impose an unthinking patriarchal ideology, as to make space for a female perspective in a poetic economy, starved
of female experience. And Chamisso did as an editor
also publish poetry by women. But of course the need to
ventriloquize the female voice in a cycle like "Frauenliebe"
is not a comfortable one for modern audiences. Nevertheless, many of the
tropes of "Frauenliebe," if we look at them are actually borrowed from the catalog of
male submission in love, something Schumann surely recognizes. We can see it in a song like
the second song of the cycle, "Er, der Herrlichste von allen," with its fanfare like
motif in voice and piano, chivalric rhetoric transferred
to the female voice. The sheer passion of
"Frauenliebe"'s rhetoric, musically and poetically is
a world away from the ideal of the sexless angel in the house. And could we please play
the next musical extract. (classical piano music)
(singing in foreign language) So, what we confront in
singing and playing and hearing "Frauenliebe" is a necessary complexity. The complexity of confronting
a passionate woman brought to life in words and music by two mid 19th century men. And in turn usually impersonated by a 21st century female singer. And the overarching theme of the cycle is surely not submission, but loss. Nevertheless, it's worth remembering the discomforted response of
even 19th century listeners to the submissive verses of "Frauenliebe." Theodor Sturm wrote to his
fellow writer, Paul Heizer, in 1874, Morike, Edward Morike, the poet, once told me how distasteful
all this was to him. And these are exactly my sentiments. But looking at how Schumann's
"Frauenliebe" came into being can I think deepen our response to it and further elaborate
the tensions of identity which give it life. Schumann wrote his
"Frauenliebe und Leben" cycle in the magical year of 1840, the year in which he wrote almost all of his famous song cycles; "Dichterliebe," the "Opus 24"
and "Opus 39," "Liederkreis," the poems by Heinrich Heine
and Joseph von Eichendorff, and the Kerner-Lieder Opus 25. Another one of the cycles, "Myrthen," was explicitly intended as a wedding gift, a garland of myrtles to
celebrate his impending union with the pianist and
composer, Clara Wieck. Robert had met Clara when
he'd lodged with her family as a piano student of her father's, the legendary great
teacher, Friedrich Wieck. Friedrich had raised Clara
to be a great virtuoso and he resisted and resented her marriage to Schumann to the bitter end. The 1840 flowering of song,
a genre which Schumann, the master of the piano
miniature had hitherto avoided, spoke to that sense of
elated productivity, which stemmed in turn
from the coming fruition of his struggle to marry Clara. In true romantic vein
and reflecting the legal and personal struggles
surrounding their union, these cycles are full of
feelings of love, jealousy, rejection, fury, frustration. All the feelings that it swelled
around in Schumann's head since he had first
committed himself to Clara. As the conflict reached
its apogee in 1839 to 40, Robert had threatened to
kill not only himself, but Clara too. "Frauenliebe" emerged from
this maelstrom in July, 1840. June, the proceeding
months had been a month of intense legal argument. And the marriage was to be
finally celebrated in September. "Frauenliebe" then reflects the
singular but vexed closeness which bounds together these
two extraordinary musicians. Robert, the creator of new forms in music, and Clara, one of the
greatest pianists of her day and a composer too. If anything is likely to
confirm that "Frauenliebe" is not a straightforwardly
soupy celebration of female subjection,
it's that it was written by Robert with Clara in mind. Clara was a potentially
brilliant composer. The current success of
her early piano concerto, which is being played a lot now is leading to a reassessment of this lost talent. And she gave up composing
not long into her marriage. As well as this she was one of
the star pianists of the day, a much bigger name than Schumann. Schumann's attitude towards his
fiance, soon to be his wife, remained highly conflicted. His admiration for her as an artist was profound and lasting. "My Clara played
everything like a master," he could declare in the
second year of their marriage. But at the same time, it
was compromised by a desire for her to give himself to him
as a wife and not an artist. A letter of September, 1838
could move within a few lines from a declaration that her
art was great and wholly, to an insistence that "My
Clara will be a happy wife, a contented wife, a beloved wife." Just a year later he was musing "about our first summer in
Zwickau as married folks. Young wives must be able
to cook and keep house if they want to please their husbands." A few weeks later, "you
shall forget the artist. You shall live only for yourself and your house and your husband." In the same year and who
knows if it was something of an insecure tease,
Robert had asked Clara to "trust and obey me. After all, men are above women." The reality of the Schumann's
marriage was a complex one, recorded in depth in
their marriage diaries. Continually reflecting the pull
between bourgeois convention and the life of the artist. Clara did cease composing,
but she continued her career as an internationally fated pianist, often to her husband's frustration, despite his admiration for
her superlative artistry. "Frauenliebe" seems to
encode Robert's desires and anxieties as much as
it speaks for the role of the woman who was to become his wife so soon after its composition. Here, for example, he is in
December, 1838, in a letter, prostrate before her,
abject and submissive. "It's from you that I receive all life, on whom I am wholly
dependent like a slave. I should often like to follow
you from afar at a distance and await your slightest bidding." Reading another passage from
a letter from Robert to Clara of 1838, two years before their marriage. It's difficult not to think
ahead to one of the most famous songs of the "Frauenliebe" cycle, "Du Ring an meinem Finger,"
you ring on my finger, in which the bride
apostrophes her wedding ring and sings affectingly of
her love for her husband. Here is the opening of
the poem of the song. "You ring on my finger,
my golden little ring. I press you devotedly
to my lips, to my heart" (classical music)
(singing in foreign language) And here is Robert's troubled letter. I think very troubling
also because it anticipates Robert's suicide some
many, many years later. "And now, since you
value my ring so little, I care no longer for yours. Since yesterday I where it no longer. I dreamed that I was walking by deep water and an impulse seized me and I threw the ring into the water. And then I was filled
with a passionate longing to plunge in after it." The deep identification which Robert felt between himself and Clara as
their marriage approached, is apparent in the envoy
to a letter of March, 1839, in which he seems to muddle
genders and blur identities. "Adieu, my heart of hearts,
beloved brother of my heart." This is Robert speaking to Clara. "Dearest husband," he uses
the masculine form of spouse, (speaking foreign language). "Adieu, I love you with all my heart." He signs off the letter
not as Robert Schumann, but as Robert Weick. So here are more layers
of complexity to add to our response to "Frauenliebe"
and to the construction of the identity of its
protagonist persona. Schumann's owning anxieties, his own ambivalences about
his relationship with Clara, his own deep identification with her. What then would it mean for
a man to sing "Frauenliebe?" There's a long tradition
of lieder in a male voice being sung by women from Schubert's day right through to her own. "Frauenliebe" is today
largely a female preserve, despite the recent intervention of some distinguished male
voices such as the baritones, Matthias Goerne and Roderick Williams. It's fascinating to note, however, that one of the earliest
concert performances of the whole cycle with Clara
Schumann herself at the piano was given by a man, the baritone
Julius Stockhausen in 1862. Our complex relationship
to this masterpiece, our recognition of its compositional and performative strata layer upon layer should surely now loosen
the straight jacket of gender normative performance
and allow us to react to the full range of the
possible worlds it creates. I look forward to performing
"Frauenliebe und Leben." Confusions of identity have
been longstanding features of the carnival in Christian culture. And the carnivalesque has gone
on to be a recurring feature of opera from its origins
through to the present day. Gender confusion of all sorts
as being as much a feature of opera as of Shakespearian comedy. And in far more avert, if
sometimes less tangled forms than in "Combattimento." The best known examples in the
canonical repertoire of today involve female to male cross-dressing. Cherubino, the pubescent boy of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" is played
by a female mezzo-soprano with a Shakespearian touch
when this feigning boy feigns to be a girl in order to avoid being sent away to join the army. In Strauss and Hofmannsthal's
decadent and titillating Mozartian homage, "Der Rosenkavalier," the opera opens with two
women in bed together, a soprano and a mezzo-soprano
playing respectively, The Marschallin and her
teenage lover, Octavia. Who then impersonates a maid, Marianne, in order to bamboozle
and eventually humiliate the oafish Baron Ochs. The era of the operatic castrato
stretching from Monteverdi through to the early 19th century, had earlier provided all
sorts of opportunities for gender confusion; castrated men with high voices, singing both female and male parts. And in the 18th century,
opera seria enthroned a counter-intuitive idea
in which the heroic male, Julius Caesar say, or Alexander the Great, was almost always played by a thrillingly and prodigiously voiced eunuch
with the power of a man, but the pitch and virtuosity of a female. Challenges to normative notions of gender in the licensed space of
the opera house continued into the later 20th
century, into the 21st. Yet, the work I'm going to look at now, Benjamin Britten's "Curlew
River" is remarkable for the way in which far from adopting
a pose of titillation or subversion, it uses
gender reversal to produce both musically and dramatically, an abstract supragendered portrayal of universal humanity transfigured. "Curlew River" was the
first of what Britten called his parables for church performance. The central role in the piece, the madwoman is played
by a male voiced singer. It was written for the composer's partner, the tenor, Peter Pears, in
the first production in 1964. I want to explore what
the casting of a man in the role of a mother
means for the piece and for our response to it. The first of three such works,
"Curlew River" was inspired by Britten's encounter with the Japanese Noh play, "Sumidagawa." Stylized in movement, with a
traditionally all male cast, "Sumidagawa" tells the
story of a noble woman who has been driven mad by
the loss of her only son. She comes to the banks of the Sumida River and while crossing it hears
a story told by the ferryman, who had been mockingly reluctant
to take her as a passenger. It becomes clear that the
woman's son had been kidnapped by a slave trader and sickening,
left to die by his captor alongside the river precisely a year ago. The villagers are even now commemorating the hideous event in prayer. The mother herself prays and the ghost of the boy appears to her,
but as she seeks to grasp it by the hand, the shape
begins to fade away, the vision fades and reappears and stronger grows her yearning. Could I have a picture here please? Here's a late 19th century
representation of part of "Sumidagawa," the Noh play. Britten on tour in Japan with
Peter Pears in February, 1956, was taken to a performance of "Sumidagawa" and here's his description of it. "The whole occasion made a
tremendous impression upon me. The simple touching story,
the economy of style, the intense slowness of the action, the marvelous skill and
control of the performance, the beautiful costumes,
the mixture of chanting, speech, singing, which
with the three instruments made up the strange music. It all offered a totally
new operatic experience. There was no conductor. The instrumentalist sat on
the stage as did the chorus and the chief characters
made their entrance down a long ramp. The lighting was strictly non theatrical. The cast was all male, the
one female character wearing an exquisite mask made no attempt to hide the male jowl beneath it." Seized by the power of "Sumidagawa," Britten and his collaborator
librettist, William Plomer, created a Christianized version. Almost identical in its plot
line and preserving many lines of dialogue apart from one crucial change. Noh plays typically had a happy ending, which the 15th century author of "Sumidagawa," Juro Motomasa, had subverted with that
tragic moment of loss. In Britten and Plomer's
Christian reworking, the appearance of the
spirit of the madwoman's kidnapped son at the climax of the piece, despite the tragedy of his death, effects a consolation
which allows her to join in a communal amen. "Go your way in peace,
mother," the boys sings, "the dead shall rise again. And in that blessed day
we shall meet in heaven. God be with you all. God be with you, mother." God's grace cures the
madwoman of her madness and atonement is achieved. The genesis of "Curlew
River" reflects not only the happenstance of
Britten's trip to Japan and experience of "Sumidagawa," but also his interest in
the theatrical experiments of the first half of the 20th century. The Noh tradition was first
co-opted into modernism by WB Yeats and Ezra Pound, who'd been close friends
in the years before and during the great
war, the first world war. Pound translated Noh
plays and both wrote plays in the Noh style. The young Britten himself
indeed was marginally involved in one of these Noh projects
helping to find a gong player for Pound's recitation of
one of his translations for the Mercury Theater in 1938. An early piece of Noh
derived music theater in the Western tradition was
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Der Jasager," the Yes Sayer of 1930. (speaking foreign
language), a school opera or (speaking foreign
language), educative piece based on Arthur Waley's
translation of the 15th century Noh play "Taniko," roughly contemporaneous with
"Sumidagawa," the Britten play. A boy hoping to obtain
medicine for his sick mother travels over a dangerous mountain pass with a group of students. Falling ill himself, he sacrifices himself to the common good and allows himself to be flung into the abyss. "Der Jasager" has none
of the populist qualities of the Brecht viral hit
masterpiece of 1928, "The Threepenny Opera,"
but both pieces spring from the same interest
in a didactic theater. Both were staging posts on
the way towards Brecht's fully developed ideas of epic theater and the so-called Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation or
distancing effect in which both audience and actors are prevented from losing themselves
completely in the narrative. The ideal is rather that of the conscious and critical observer. Classic Brechtian devices
to achieve this include direct address to the audience, interruption to the narrative, and more generally drawing attention to the theatrical process
itself in direct contrast to the fourth wall orthodoxy
of 19th century theater in which the audience
is supposed to imagine itself eavesdropping on reality. At first sight, Brecht
and Weill's "Der Jasager," an unforgiving exercise in
music theater as agitprop might seem a million miles
away from "Curlew River." And indeed, Britten's
theatrical affinities were more in the movement
theater of the 1930s or in the French tradition,
which for example, lies at the root of
his opera of the 1940s, "The Rape of Lucretia" based on a play in French by Andre Obey. Britten was actually unimpressed
by "The Threepenny Opera." And "Der Jasager" wasn't seen in the UK until after "Curlew
River" had been produced. Nevertheless, I think many
features of Britten's work echo the preoccupations
which produced "Der Jasager." The political message, the
political layman's structure may have been rendered religious, but many of the theatrical
aims remain the same; demolition of the fourth
wall, narrative interruption, a focus on theatrical process. Whatever Britten's own
religious leanings or beliefs he did repeatedly return to
the use of religious rituals, practices and formulas as a
framing device in his work. In that chamber opera, "The
Rape of Lucretia" from 1947, for example, the male and female choruses, Christian figures from
an unspecified future, comment on the pagan action
which takes center stage. But they're also drawn into the action, visibly and disconcertingly
blurring the lines between narration, commentary and action. But it was medieval religious
ritual that again and again supplied the framing devices
for Britten's vocal works, both the overtly theatrical
and pieces which are in one way or another more or less dramatic. Take an early masterpiece
like the Christmas favorite, "The Ceremony of Carols,"
a group of songs, settings of 14th and 15th century texts for boys choir and harp. Britten turned this set
of songs into a ritual by enclosing it within
processional and recessional chants in unison based on the Gregorian antiphon "Hodie Christus Natus est"
and also by significantly naming it "A Ceremony of Carols." Medievalism is also on display obliquely in the piece for two voices and piano "Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac," based on a medieval mystery play. And in its most developed form
to that date in his opera, "Noye's Fludde," an opera
for amateurs and children based on a text from the
same Chester Mystery cycle, as is "Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac." Britten's coup with "Curlew River," a coup which is Japanese enthusiastic librettist Plomer fully recognized. Plomer had lived in Japan in the 1920s. The coup was the decision
to refract "Sumidagawa" through the lens of the
medieval and the Christian. This avoided all Britten's
long nurtured worries in coming to terms with
"Sumidagawa" and setting it. His long nurtured worries
about having some sort of fake exoticism or superficial Japanese. But it preserved within
a European setting, all the performative
aspects of the Noh original, which made such an appeal to the modernist theatrical aesthetic. Instead of slavishly mimicking Noh music, Britten used a small
instrumental group inspired by the Noh ensemble to create a unique but equally austere sound world, melding together typically Western and typically Eastern musical practices, timbres and harmonic devices. It doesn't sound like
pastiche, but like a new and autonomous development
in Britten's quest for an authentic musical language. Could I have the next picture please? A group of monks processes
into the performance space, a church, singing the medieval plainchant, "Te lucis ante terminum". The presiding Abbott
announces that the community will enact a story of how a
woman was saved by God's grace. The theatrical frame of the
monastic community is paralleled and reinforced in the
musical sphere by that use of the plainchant. "'Tel lucis' is a
source," Britten tells us, "from which the whole piece
may be said to have grown." And the redemptive climax
is musically achieved by another plainchant hymn,
(speaking foreign language). The monks who ought to play
the three principle roles, the madwoman, the
traveler, and the fairy man are ceremonially prepared,
dawning costumes, and half masks. "Curlew River" is then a
very particular instantiation of that multifaceted 20th century re-invention of the theatrical. Anti-realism is thrust and
moral in its intention, presenting us with an exemplum
of Auden's parable art, that art which will teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love. That's W.H, Auden, Britten's great friend, and it's that parable
art matches Brecht's own parable drama from the East, "The Good Person of Szechuan." Returning then to the issue
of gender and identity, how crucial is the madwoman's femininity or femaleness to "Curlew River?" It's obviously a feature of
the theatrical conventions which Britten inherited from Noh theater and transformed into a
Christian mystery play. It's easy to be confused
by the whole business of sexual ambiguity in Britten's output, reinforced as it is by a
longstanding critical tradition of focusing on sexuality in writing about many of his pieces. Pieces like the Rimbaud
setting "Les Illuminations," sensuous and excitable. "The Turn of the Screw," his opera bathed like the James story on which it's based, in a murky half light
of sinister implication. Or his opera of the Thomas
Mann story, "Death in Venice," which is so often misconceived as a pederastic hymn come swan song. Humphrey Carpenter,
Britten's first biographer, writes that quotes "The
casting of a male singer was of course suggested by the Noh play, but like the use of a
countertenor as Oberon in Britten's 1960 Shakespearian opera 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' it's carries hints of
unorthodox sexuality." I think this is quite wrong. The casting of a male singer
was not of course suggested, but was actually a cardinal feature inherited from the Noh original. And the playing of the madwoman by a man has nothing to do with
unorthodox sexuality. And I think it's a
bizarre suggestion really. The gossip machine trivially did swell around the potential
camporee of "Curlew River," and the tenor who understudied
Pears in the first production as the mad woman, Peter
Pears, the late Robert Tear, he remembered a somewhat slightly bitchy put down by Britten himself, after Tears' first appearance in the role. "Lipstick, a little too white I feel." Friends of Britten were
concerned by Pears' casting as the madwoman. Worrying that the effect might be like that of a pantomime dame, something teetering over
into the ridiculous. And there was a precedent for this in Britten's writing for
Pears, a deliberate precedent. Only three years prior to "Curlew River," comical cross-gender casting
inherited from Shakespeare, enlivened the sorry tale
of Pyramus and Thisbe in Britten's opera of "A
Midsummer Night's Dream." The composer uses the faltering
falsetto of France's Flute, the bellows-mender played by Peter Pears, to trashy comic effect in his ludicrous performance of Thisbe. And looking at the photographs
of the first production, one can easily see that the
comedy of Pears' performance was grounded in a play with stereotypes of comic female impersonation. Next picture, please. The send-off of the
reigning Bel Canto diva, Joan Sutherland, was widely recognized. And the music itself underlines Sutherland's ghostly
presence with its echoes of Donizetti's heroines
and use of the flute as an indicator of mental distraction. That the defining instrumental
timbre of the Noh ensemble is the flute is a suggestive coincidence. But the madwoman in "Curlew River" is not a female impersonator. And there is nothing funny about
her or sexually unorthodox. Britten's fascination with "Sumidagawa" was above all a response
to its solemn dedication. A phrase he uses in that description of his first experience of the play. And he noted that "the
one female character wearing an exquisite mask
made no attempt to hide the male jowl beneath it." Noh theater, from which "Curlew
River" flowed is not Kabuki, the Japanese theatrical
form, perhaps most famous in the West for its central
female impersonator, the Onnagata. Kabuki and Noh are both highly stylized, but where Noh is austere and
still, slow and economical, Kabuki is glamorous and exaggerated. While Britten was excited
by his experience of Kabuki on that same 1956 trip,
which introduced him to Noh, he didn't use Kabuki influences
in his theatrical practice until the third of his parables, "The Burning Fiery Furnace," with its self-conscious
theatrical contrast between the extravagant and the austere. A Kabuki version of "Sumidagawa"
was presented in 1919, and it's here that the
cross-currents from West to East and East to West become a little dizzying. Pound's version of Noh
style was partly devised by a Japanese dancer, Michio Ito, who had studied with Dalcroze, the European inventor of eurythmics. Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, had his dancers prepared for Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"
by attending Dalcroze classes. And the Kabuki "Sumidagawa"
in 1919 was inspired by Diaghilev's Russian ballets, which was seen by a Kabuki actor touring Europe in that year. Britten's movement
coach for "Curlew River" was Claud Chagrin, trained
in the French mime school influenced by Dalcroze which
had itself been influenced by Japanese performance styles as well. The aesthetic which informs the creation of an essentialized and
exotic form of female identity and Kabuki has little or
nothing to do with the madwomen in either "Sumidagawa" or in Britten's church parable, "Curlew River." "Onnagata became highly
skilled at producing a high-pitched falsetto for many hours a day all their lives," writes one Kabuki
commentator, Ronald Cavaye. "And over many years and with
countless subtle alterations and refinements of technique,
the Onnagata developed a characterization that
while highly stylized, is convincing enough to be recognized," and here comes the killer
phrase, "as a real woman." In "Curlew River," the
playing of a grieving mother by an unmistakably male
voiced singer masked is part of Britten's participation in the desire of practitioners
in the 20th century to enhance the performativity of theater. To move away from realism
and embrace more generally the doctrines of formalism and a sort of emotional
detachment, a making strange. The roots of these trends
lie deep in 20th century musical and theatrical culture, and they twist and diverge
endlessly, much to our confusion. But if the impact of the first world war was to entrench a sort
of emotional reticence, which went together with a condemnation of the sentimentalism
of much romantic art, the disappearance of silent cinema and advent of the compelling
realism of the talkies was to put pressure on live performance to be more performative,
more strange, less real. Could I have my last picture please? In playing the piece
in the anniversary year of Britten's birth, 2013, some 50 years after the
premier of "Curlew River," we went maskless and gestureless. Noh theater free as it were. I played the madwoman as I
would have done any other part in classical music theater, with shifting gears between
the formal and the informal, the detached and the
engaged, the realistic, the expressionistic and the ritualistic. This is the modern way in
classical music theater, a healthy and omnivorous eclecticism, wary of any one dominating theory, while inheriting at the same
time the theories of the past. In the end, the madwoman
is not a lead tenor role which fits into the
hyper-masculine inheritance of the operatic mainstream. I think it's interesting that
the tenor inherits in a way, the hyper-masculinity of the castrato. A strange paradox here, I think. But neither as I played it
did questions of the play of gender identity cross my mind or inflect my voice or my movements. My costume was ungendered. Having a man play the madwoman
without all the Noh apparatus retains the crucial element of distancing while at the same time
broadening the appeal at the emotional core of the piece. This is not just a mother, but a parent. Not just a woman, but a human being. This is storytelling in the end and as such, all efforts to
restrain and contain emotion, like the casting of a man as a woman, these are means to amplify
the force of the story and carry the audience with us. I studied Brecht's great
play, "The Life of Galileo" as a teenage student of German, and I saw a great, great
performance of that role by a great stage actor, Michael Gambon. And ultimately, Galileo, despite
all Brecht's protestations to the contrary, moves us. Working through and
beyond Brecht's theories about epic theater. "Curlew River" is strangely
the same sort of piece and its origins in 20th
century experiments and Japanese influences
melt into the background as like all great works of art, it is set free from the
circumstances of its origin, from its creator and
his own preoccupations, to find its own life. The madwoman in "Curlew
River" is all of us. Thank you very much. - So, welcome to the live Q and A session with Ian Bostridge. I will serve as the moderator
today and ask Ian questions that have come from audience members. Some of you have already sent questions, but please send us more. And I hope we will enter into
an enlightening discussion that has been raising your curiosity. And we have about 15 minutes. Let me jump in right away. There are a number of
questions from the beginning. One factual question, let's
get this out of the way about the performers of the
"Frauenliebe und Leben," which was very interesting. - Oh, God, Elisabeth Schumann and I think it was Elisabeth Schumann. Yeah, it was all Elisabeth
Schumann, I think. Yeah, it was an old recording, in order to give this
sort of idea of how it used to be before it was, I mean, I think it was always problematic
for singers, this piece. I mean, during the 20th century. Yeah. - Yeah, it's a really fascinating cycle. And it's a staple of my own teaching of the 19th century.
- Yeah. - Juxtaposing different perspectives. Those of the presentests
critic who cringes for all the right reasons at the text and those of the historicist who- - Yeah.
- Who juxtaposed or who counted the presentests by saying, look, this was as you
point out in your lecture, much more progressive at the time, but we as historians today,
try to keep both of those in different corners of our eyes. There are a number of other questions that have to do with your
identity as a scholar, and academic, and your performer. How you integrate knowledge
you learned obtaining your DPhil and teaching
into your skill as a tenor, and how you decided to devote
your career to being a tenor after first pursuing an academic career. - I think I was first of
all inspired by someone, I mean in terms of feeding in
other material into singing. Inspired by a wonderful singer I met before I was a professional singer, the Swiss tenor, Hugues Cuenod, who lived at the age of I think 108. He taught me when he was in his 90s. He appeared in a Noel
Coward show in the 1920s. He was written for a lot by Stravinsky. Stravinsky wrote the "Cantata" for him. He wrote the role of Sellem
in "The Rake's Progress." He worked on the Monteverdi
revival in the 1930s. But he was always insistent on
bringing other things to bear on your singing and not
thinking only about singing. Going and looking at paintings, examining the cultural background
of what you were doing. And first and foremost, I
think feeding the imagination, which is in some sense not close to what I did maybe as a scholar. And I suppose my work as a
writer since I'd become a singer is I never think of it as
particularly scholarly. I was really surprised I wrote
a book about "Winterreise," which was a sort of
flight of fancy, really. I went off on all sorts of,
in all sorts of directions, talking about all sorts of things. And it did irritate
some people, but for me, there were some reviews
that said it was scholarly. And to me it was sort of, I
felt a bit guilty about that because I felt I hadn't
actually particularly exercised my scholarly credentials in that. But I think "Frauenliebe" is
a particularly good example of how to try and rescue a
work by looking at it in depth and looking at it actually
in a scholarly way, both in terms of performance,
previous performance practice, and also in terms of how the poems and the music was seen at the time. And as I mentioned in the talk
that the sort of biographical origin of the piece and
Schumann's experience of his relationship with
Clara Schumann, Clara Weick. Because I still find it odd that people, they feel compelled to perform the piece because it's a great piece. And it's really a piece about, I think it's really a
piece about loss primarily. That's what we really feel in the piece, but they still feel embarrassed by it. And it's almost as if because it's lied, they're unable to detach
in that way that people do when they have something that they really feel is theater proper. They can't feel when I'm performing a piece of the 19th century, look at this, maybe in some ways it presents things we're no longer comfortable with, but it gives us an
opportunity to observe those and understand them better. And I think that's something
I'd like to encourage in the way people perform
supposedly non-theatrical works, is to sort of see that
you're adopting a persona. Yeah. I mean, it's an old idea as well. It's in Edward Cone right back then when he wrote "The Composer's Voice." - I found it really
fascinating the passages that you quoted Schumann writing. And of course he was, and the romantics were familiar with role-play. Early romanticism especially, Schlegel and early romantic circle. And what's so interesting here is this kind of cross dressing
and cross role-play, especially female in male roles are common in a kind of theatrical space. So, this makes a lot of sense. And I think it's interesting
when you say that the role transcends as it were, the biographical persona
or even the gender, and what matters is more
like the story of loss that can be inhabited. Here's a couple of other questions. You speak about the song
singing, singing the singer, the song singing the singer and about breaking the fourth wall in this idea of Brecht. There was an interesting example. I was a boy, when I was in a school, we performed that play
and the different versions that Brecht laid out didactically. And so, how do you balance
these influences as a performer? I mean, do you break the fourth wall? - Yeah, I find it incredibly helpful. When I started out singing in opera... I mean, when I started out as a singer, one of the reasons I resisted
becoming a full-time singer when I was an academic
was because I'd been such a terrible actor at school. I've been told by people
that I was dreadful and I'd gone into directing instead. And then I worked with
a couple of directors, an American director called David Alden, and then particularly
over a long period of time with a British director, Deborah Warner. And they encouraged me
to see that singing songs was the same as singing
an opera and vice versa. And I also read a really
interesting book about Shakespeare by an Irish critic called Fintan O'Toole, who pointed out that Hamlet's soliloquies are not soliloquies, you're
not standing on stage talking to yourself. What you're doing is you're
confiding in the audience. It makes it so much easier. And I found it a real problem doing, working on Don Giovanni on Don Ottavio because he has these two beautiful arias. And if you don't think
about it carefully enough, they can just seem like, oh, now he stands up and
he has to sing an aria and be semi-heroic, with
his sword and so on. And I had to find a way of
not singing that to the space inside the four walls as it were, but breaking out and actually
addressing the audience. And that makes it so much easier. And it's actually, it's
interestingly the reverse of what Brecht said I think. It makes it more real. It makes it more moving. It goes against the sort
of ideological thrust of what Brecht is asking for and that's why it takes me right back to studying Galileo at school. And I think our line as a class, and our line with the teacher
having seen Michael Gambon play this role was, you know,
who cares about the theory? What matters is that this is an immensely moving piece of theater. - Yeah, this is interesting. I always feel like Don
Ottavio is totally trapped not just as a character,
but also the role. And this is a beautiful way of saying, you wanna break out of that role. Showing that you're
actually trapped in it. - Yes and he's also, he's a Hamlet figure. One of his big problems is
he can't decide what to do. Don Giovanni is for him
a bit like Claudius. Did Don Giovanni rape Don Anna? What did he do? Did he kill the Commendatore? Until he sure about it, he can't act. And by the time, unlike Hamlet,
he never makes a decision because the supernatural intervenes. And so he ends up looking
like the ultimate wimp. - But he's also a proxy for us. For example, when Don Anna tells
the story of being violated he's like keep telling what's going on. I think that's so interesting. Here's another question
that fits into this topic that we're talking about right now, asking you to tell us a little more about the recitalist's
relationship to the audience and how you negotiate
the recitalist's persona in relation to the poetic of a song. - I think in terms of the
recitalist's relationship with the audience, one of
the things that's difficult and at the same time thrilling
about the song recital genre is that you have to be intimate with and also threatening to the audience. And I know at the moment, song
recital is a genre which is in some places thriving and in
other place is under threat. And I think one of the
things that people both like about it and don't like
about it is that it has to be a little bit threatening. You can't sit back and
let it wash over you. I mean, maybe you can if it's
somebody with a glorious, one of the voices of the century singing waves of sound over you, but for me a lieder recital is
about addressing the audience and shaking them a little bit
with with things that have... I mean, last night I sang "Revelge" from the Knaben Wunderhorn in Barcelona. And it's a really, it's
shockingly sort of shaking its fist at God. And it's also laughing at
the nastiness that's going... I mean, it's a really shocking piece and that's what it should be. So, that's how I- - Yeah and I find these
Mahler songs actually more compelling almost as
piano accompanied songs, because they have that kind of intimacy and make the singer larger
than life in so many ways. There's actually a question
here in that relation, that moves us a little bit
along in that direction. Whether singers today, it's
more a question of musicians, but perhaps you can answer it for singers, whether they should be
trained in this more today. And that it perceives a difference between what's done in England
and Europe and the US. Is there something you
can, does it ring a bell? - I think I sense that
in terms of the training in the US, there's a lot of
concentration on the voice. I feel there's, and it's
probably something to do with the nature of the
business in the States. I mean, the theaters are very big. The productions tend to
be quite traditional. So, the emphasis is very much on... It's a vocal emphasis, which is great because that's important too. But I think there's a whole other side, which is the sort of the
smaller, the more intimate, where it doesn't matter. I mean, obviously as somebody without the most enormous voice, I feel
that size is not everything, but (chuckling). - Yeah, there's another, I mean, sort of the conservatory model versus the one that you represent
which is non-conservatory, you come out of a
different vocal tradition, vocal training tradition. - I'm now teaching in a conservatory. I mean, only online at the moment, but it's a fascinating thing to do and I'm really enjoying it. And I can really see the value of it. And it's a value that's a very broad value because it's not, you know, most people who go to
conservatoire, I should say most people won't become
professional musicians, but it's the most wonderful
training for life, both in terms of a resource
for non-working life, and also a resource for whatever else you do professionally in your life. In terms of concentrating on doing something very, very hard. - Two more questions, one very short, one slightly more involved and
then I have a final comment. So, one is when are we going to hear your "Frauenliebe und Leben?" - Well, I mean, part of
writing this was trying to persuade myself to do it. So, I'm looking at. It's interesting, my daughter's
14 and she's learning it. And I've gotta teach her
one of the songs tomorrow. - And the other one is yet another layer, with music that is about earlier music and all music is in some sense, but consciously so is like
Zender's "Winterreise." How do you see that
difference with the layers of if you want identities there? - Gosh, I don't quite
understand the question. I mean, as you say, I think
that the great thing about the classical music tradition,
this written tradition, I mean, it's unique in its degree of its sort of literate nature. The fact that somebody
invented a notation system back in the middle ages,
and as a result everything is commenting on everything else. That's a fascinating thing. And it does, I mean, I think
it works away from the notion that we should always be... I mean, I've been involved
a lot in early music, or the authentic movement,
whatever you want to call it. But I think in the end, we
just have to find for me, I'm always a romantic. We have to find something
emotionally that works. I think that's what I'd say, yeah. - Okay, let me make a final comment. This is not a question you
should ask because it's kind of a curved ball of
sorts, but it emerges from a lot of things that
you say in your lecture which I think is incredibly
thought provoking. I was harking back to when you spoke to Susan Sontag's 1990 book, "Gender Trouble," where she
says that gender identity is an effect of gender performance. And she points to drag,
performing anatomical sex, or gender identity, drag
reveals the imitative structure of gender itself and its contingency. But what has emerged in the wake of Susan's critical
intervention is an attempt to go beyond binary's,
open up other spaces, defined not by the
either of male and female or the both end of bisexuality. It's a third space, a
non-binary space of transgender and gender queer identity, which is also a realm of queer
epistemology and thought, and thinking around straight angles. There's a beautiful German word
(speaking foreign language). So, the social and political
power of non-binary thinking and identity has become
really palpable of recent in that it dislodges
more than anything else, I think the dualisms of Western thought and social organization
at its very foundations. And it seems, this is the
thought perhaps to end with, that music for all its participation in general construction
and general subversion, trouser roles, cross-dressing characters, cross voicing singers, castrati and all, is also a third space moving from gender bending to gender suspending. And one thing I take away
from your lecture today is that perhaps David
Bowie and Ian Bostridge both inhabit the same space. Singers were not just
transcending gender boundaries, but also trans-sounding them. So, in that sense, I wanna
thank you for venturing into that space not just as a
singer, but also as a thinker. - Thank you very much. - Okay, so thank you for joining us today and doing this wonderful discussion about Ian's first Berlin Family Lecture, identity and performance. We hope you can join us for a
second lecture on April 17th, Saturday at 1:00 p.m.,
central daylight time. And Ian will be discussing
hidden histories in Maurice Ravel's "Songs of Madagascar." Have a wonderful rest of your day.
