This little glimpse of Enrico Caruso donning the motley is eerie, ghostly, and somehow oddly real, making a legend/disembodied voice into an actual person. Almost.
Showing posts with label Enrico Caruso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enrico Caruso. Show all posts
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Enrico Caruso: "Over There" by George M. Cohan
Pretty strange stuff! I woke up with a song from the '70s Broadway musical George M! in my head. It was called All Our Friends, and so far I haven't been able to find lyrics or a performance other than a hideous rendition by an amateur group that can barely stand up, let alone do an awkward kick-line and sing wildly off-key. But I do remember some of it: "Half a ton of them, every one of them, all our wonderful friends. . . the line of them never quite ends!" This of course reminded me of the definition of "friend" on Facebook. In most cases you have never met or spoken to, nor will you ever meet or speak to, these people. I encountered a gushing new page by someone who had "omigosh, already exceeded the total on my page (5000 friends, all close, personal and intimate, of course), and have to start a new one just for fans of my writing." Already it was up to 1500. I don't know how this happens. Most of these friend-laden people aren't famous, and you cannot tell me (and no one will even talk to me about this - everyone goes silent) that they really do have thousands and thousands of "wonderful friends. . . The line of them never quite ends!" So instead, here is Enrico Caruso singing George M. Cohan's patriotic World War I anthem, Over There, perhaps in French towards the end (? French?) The line of them never quite ends!
(Oops, just found a fantastic version, probably sung by Joel Grey - even with a repeat, it lasts only one minute, so it took me several tries to transcribe the words. They are pretty much as I remember them. The link below may or may not work - I hope so, because it's a kick-ass performance.
http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=George+M.+Cohan+All+Our+Friends
All Our Friends
George M. Cohan
All our friends, every one of them, they’re
All our friends, wonderful friends
All our friends, wonderful friends
Dozens and dozens, a regular throng
Simply besiege us and follow along
Because they’re all our friends
Half a ton of them, the line of them never quite ends!
They come in groups and troops, invited or not
Uptown, downtown, right on the spot
I must confess I guess I worship the lot –
Yes every mother’s son of them
Every one of them
All our wonderful friends!
(Da-da, da-da-da, da – LIKE!)
Bonus Joel Grey. I can never get enough of Joel Grey.
The only one who could keep up with Cagney. Who was the only one who could keep up with George M. Cohan.
GEORGE M!
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Just in time for Halloween. . . creepy, icky gifs!
The rotten skulls and hanging strips of flesh make this mini-version of Murnau's Faust especially icky. In a previous post I compared this snippet with a similar bit from Disney's Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia. The ghostly horsemen images are practically identical. Disney only stole from the best.
From Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Everything is more-or-less OK until she opens her eyes.
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Here you have to ask yourself: why? Why would a giant bottle of castor oil chase two characters (cats?) around and around the moon, until the cats jump off?
You know I hate clowns. I even wrote a poem about it once. I was going to include that master of the macabre, Milky, but somehow this tiny clip of Enrico Caruso performing Pagliacci was creepier. I have it on reverse here to make it extra creepy. What's really weird is that he's singing it silently.
I want you to pay close attention to this one. It's the "reveal" from the Lon Chaney silent version of Phantom of the Opera. It reverses, so that in a couple of seconds he's "unrevealed", which is the important part. Just before she puts the mask back on, for a nanosecond you see that Chaney's face looks completely normal. This means that almost none of the macabre effect is done with makeup. It's all done from the inside.
I don't understand this - any of it - and it's so bizarre and grotesque as to be almost unbelievable. It's a pig dance, but the pig looks carnivorous, or perhaps rabid. Where did this come from? The devil knows.
I wasn't going to post two from the same source, but you have GOT to see this.
It's Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met! This is an unfortunate mistake Disney made in the 1940s. Willie has his mouth where his belly button should be (if whales have such a thing - hey, they're mammals, so maybe they do). This means he has a giant head that careens around like one of those bulky 1940s cars going out of control. Bambi he ain't. Nor Pluto. He looks like a foam rubber toaster. Here he combines TWO of my creepy fetishes - make that three, I don't like foam rubber toasters much either - clowns (especially sperm whale clowns) and Pagliaccio. The outfit is a bit femme, too, don't you think? Maybe he's Pagliaccio's girlfriend Gnocchi or something.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Silent night (at the opera)
Mark Twain once said about Wagner's Gotterdammerung: "Some music is better than it sounds."
To illustrate his statement, let's NOT hear some of the world's greatest tenors.
You can dress 'em up, but you can't take 'em out.
The resemblance to Al Jolson is purely coincidental.
I'm not sure, but I think he likes her.
Keep practicing, maybe you'll get it right. . .
What can I say but. . . Bravo!
Monday, April 29, 2013
Laugh, laugh, I thought I'd die
Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,
non so più quel che dico,
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati!
Bah! sei tu forse un uom?
Tu se' Pagliaccio!
Vesti la giubba,e la faccia in farina.La gente paga, e rider vuole qua.
E se Arlecchin t'invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà !
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il
pianto;
in una smorfia il singhiozzo
il dolor, Ah!
Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor!
To recite! While taken with delirium,
I no longer know what it is that I say,
or what it is that I am doing!
And yet it is necessary, force yourself!
Bah! Can't you be a man?
You are "Pagliaccio"!
Put on the costume,
and the face in white powder.
The people pay, and laugh when they please.
And if Harlequin invites away Colombina
laugh, Pagliaccio, and everyone will
applaud!
Change into laughs the spasms of pain;
into a grimace the tears of pain, Ah!
Laugh, Pagliaccio,
for your love is broken!
Laugh of the pain, that poisons your
heart!
POST-POST. This is a strange one, a discovery that happened late
at night. I
NEVER used to stay up so late, so I'm not sure what's happening to
me. I get a
little delirious.
Clowns obsess me, and most of them creep me out. His Milks, Milky
the Clown, has to be the creepiest, in part because he wears a traditional
Pagliaccio white ruffled costume with a pointy hat that reminds me of
nothing more than a KKK uniform.
While dredging through old files to see what might be worth
resurrecting, I came across a strange thing: the Italian words to Vesti la
Giubba (perhaps the
best-known operatic aria, sometimes known erroneously as Laugh,
Clown, Laugh) down the left side of the page, with a line-by-line English
translation
on the right.
I was struck by the symmetry of it, and the startling nature of
the literal
translation. "Recitar!" literally means
"recite", or in a broader sense, "tell
it" or "perform it" (a "recital" isn't reciting,
after all, but a public
performance). Put it out there, not just the clown show, but -
tell them, or
perhaps (I don't know enough Italian) "tell them your story,
you cowardly
bastard (referring to himself). I may be way off in all this, of
course, in
which case "recitar!" says it all.
I decided to dig up some old footage of Caruso, if it existed, and
hit pay dirt
right away, with an eerie clip of him performing Vesti in full
Milky the Clown
garb. This footage has a dreamlike quality that I played around
with, reversing
the video in places to make a sort of loop. Then I thought of the
heartbreaking
performance of Placido Domingo, who stages it the RIGHT way for
once.
Instead of coming onstage already wearing his "motley",
he picks up the limp rag of costume and looks at it in loathing, nearly
tearing it apart at the end before dragging it offstage behind him like
chains. While he sings, he looks at himself in the mirror and smears white
greasepaint on his face in despair. Though my Italian is limited to three words
(amore, Lamborgini and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee), even Ican tell that "vesti la
giubba" is in the imperative: "put on the costume, you idiot,
it's time to get out there again even if your heart is falling out of
your chest". This betrays, heartbreakingly, Pagliaccio's
self-loathing and despair.
This is a slightly different version of Vesti. It's silent. Well,
why not? Why
can't we have a silent aria? Because it's idiotic, no doubt. The
music is
everything. So here, I present the Other Side.
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