ENRICO CARUSO: "Vesti la giubba" (Rare, surreal old film fragment)

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.

Opera fails: world's WORST singers!

There's not much to say about singing like this - not even words to describe it, but I'll try. Most of these are "vanity" recordings, kind of like self-published books, and thus are a whole new definition of awfulness. But at some point, these people must have thought they could sing. Who told them that? Whoever it was should be incarcerated. At very least, there should be a stiff fine.

Ah! Emanuele Bucalo. You may ask - who is he? You will know even less about him after you hear this. But I will say, it's funny. There used to be a Hanna-Barbera duck character named Yakky Doodle, and this is who he reminds me of. Not even as tuneful as Donald Duck.

Sirach Van Bodegraven is another infamously un-famous singer who deserved his reputation. He has a way of blundering through the classics in hell-bent fashion, singing so badly that it's often hard to tell what the hell the song is supposed to be. Here he eviscerates Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci with true operatic gusto. Or is it gutso?

Encore, encore! To thunderous applause (or is that a thunderstorm? Can't tell, my ears just went blank), Sirach treats us to his inimitable rendition of that other opera standard, Nessun Dorma. This is only marginally worse than listening to those fat adolescent boys in spandex body suits butcher it on America's Got Talent. Note to the audience: LOUD singing isn't GOOD singing.

Now, here we have "The Highest Voice". That is the title of the video, so that is what I am going to call it. It is the highest voice, I suppose, if screeching at the top of your lungs and "sort of" hitting the note counts. I had to read the YouTube description to find out who this was. It's Susie Summers! Sounds like someone from a Gidget movie, or maybe one of those dolls with hair you can pull out of its head so it reaches the floor. Anyway, Susie Summers is singing The Doll Song (appropriate!) by Offenbach, whom I don't believe for a minute wrote it the way she is singing it.

Adele's Laughing Song! But we're not laughing.

Thomas Burns may just be the Michelangelo of bad singing. The piano introduction seems to be preparing us for singing that is romantic and tinged with melancholy, and instead we get a constipated Elmer Fudd. I have heard that Burns was a close friend of that other scion of bad singing, Florence Foster Jenkins (badly portrayed by Meryl Streep, whose performing is now so weighed down by mannerisms that she looks like a candidate for Dr. Nowzardan). Maybe not, though - I think he was just added on to a CD of Jenkins' recordings to pad it out a bit. Florence only recorded a dozen or so arias, or perhaps the others just exploded into bits. When Burns sings, "O, Margarita", though. . . do I even need to finish that sentiment?

I shouldn't include this one, and I feel a little ashamed of myself, but here it is anyway because it is just so horrendous. It's not just bad singing - it's drunk singing, from a soprano who should know better. What's both touching 

and cringeworthy about it is how the tenor just keeps on valiantly singing, not trying to carry her but just keep his head barely above water. What else can he do - escort her off the stage? Really, someone should have, if only for her own sake. I had to look up her name - she's a well-known singer, when sober, with the incredible handle of Dragana Jugovic del Monaco. Yikes!

Natalie de Andrade. I can't find out anything about her. Obviously she must have performed somewhere, or her puss wouldn't be plastered on this programmy-looking thing. But she is awful. Simply awful. This sounds like a rehearsal, but of what, I can't say.

My head has wings

Brünnhilde

(springs shouting from rock to rock up
the height on the right)

Hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!
hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!
hojotoho! hojotoho! hojotoho! hojotoho!
heiaha ha! hojoho!

(On a high peak she stops, looks into the gorge at
the back, and calls to Wotan.)

Take warning, Father, look to thyself;
storm and strife must thou withstand.
Fricka comes to thee here,
drawn hither in her car by her rams.
Hei! how she swings the golden scourge!

The wretched beasts are groaning with fear;

wheels furiously rattle;
fierce she fares to the fray.
In strife like this I take no delight,
sweet though to me are the fights of men;
then take now thy stand for the storm:
I leave thee with mirth to thy fate.

Hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!
hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!
hojotoho! hojotoho! hojotoho! hojotoho!
heiaha ha!

(Brünnhilde disappears behind the mountain
height at the side.)

The face in the middle: or, am I clowns?

This picture reminded me of a certain non-joke I kept hearing a few years ago, mainly because I heard it wrong. The original was quite poignant, but it was hashed or rehashed in one of those dystopia/sci-fi movie things that I hate so much, the Watchmen or something.

After Robin Williams died, it became apparent to most people that this sad-clown joke kind of explained the whole thing. To paraphrase it badly:

Doctor, Doctor, I have this unbearable existential pain. 

Then go see this fantastic clown, he will cheer you up. 

But I AM this fantastic clown! 

This was supposed to explain the death of Robin Williams.

Robin Williams died because he had something called Lewy Body Dementia which is far worse than Alzheimers and slowly eats its victims alive. He was a wraith, a shell of himself, and his "suicide" was his way of taking a final bow after his life had already come to a close. Could he have gone on? There was no "on" to go to. People have chosen physician-assisted suicide for less.

Though his Parkinson's disease is very rarely mentioned, no one ever says anything about the Lewy Body because it came out in the autopsy results a few weeks later. By that time, everyone had lost interest. He was a tragic clown, that's what he was, it was all settled, and besides, what the hell is all this Lewy Body stuff? He was romanticized as a tragic victim of Hollywood and his own excesses. The truth is, he died of a horrible disease.

Thus, yet another opportunity for the public to learn something landed in the sewer.

The famous picture of Chaplin and Einstein at the top of this post surfaced today as I perused the Weekly World News - oops, I mean The Vintage News, my current favorite source of internet comedy. There was a caption featuring a supposed conversation they had. Something like this:

Einstein: Must be nice to have the whole world love you when you never say a goddamn thing.

Chaplin: Nobody knows what the hell you're talking about, so would you please shut up?

I am sure they never had this conversation! I am making it up out of whole cloth.  But I did find many, many versions of it in many languages on internet memes with photos of the two of them together, two stuffed shirts, one the Stuffed Shirt of Physics and the other the Stuffed Shirt of Silent Comedy. So I guess it brought back the clown thing, the bad joke endlessly replicated and memed to death.

But that's not why I'm posting this.

As usual, the comments section in The Vintage News is the best part (especially that guy who always strenuously defends Hitler. His Facebook page has all sorts of war medals and shit on it.) There were the expected comments about what beloved figures Chaplin and Einstein were, along with people telling each other to fuck off (for no reason at all except that they could), and then someone said, "wait. What is that creepy face in the middle?"  

Can you see it? It seems to be peeping over Chaplin's shoulder.

Good question! Secret Service? I wondered. These guys may or may not have been wearing bulletproof vests under their tuxes. But maybe not! Einstein kept trying to work out how he could make himself into a time traveller, while Chaplin wanted to dominate whatever time he had here and now. Meantime, here is this guy! This mysterious figure - in dark glasses, is it? And on the left, you see more shadowy figures. I keep thinking I see Don Corleone of The Godfather.

These are either beings from another dimension, or - time travellers. 

I also want to set something straight that everyone gets wrong. The joke about the clown - they always call him Pagliacci. That means "clowns". So the punch line is, "but Doctor, I AM clowns." Unless you're making one of those wretched unfunny jokes about "schizophrenia", it makes no sense. "Pagliaccio" would be closer, but it means "Clown". "I am clown". The main character in the opera Pagliacci is called Canio, but no one would say, "I am Canio". Sounds like a dog or something. 

Another thing. I don't know how many times I've heard Leoncavallo's opera called I Pagliacci.

That means something like "I clowns", which is worse than "I am clowns". I'm not sure where this got started, but there are even excerpts from the opera posted on YouTube labelled WRONG, and it  just pisses me off. 

The aria posted above isn't from Pagliacci and it isn't by anyone alive. But it is my favorite aria, and by one of my favorite singers, who did not survive long enough to prove his true greatness. As a tenor, his voice would have bloomed some time in his late 40s, so he had all his best years ahead of him.

nza died suddenly the morning of October



,



, whenhe was justthirty-eight years old. The particular physicalcatastrophe responsible for silencing forever a voice judged“black and warm and dead on pitch,”

1p249

“a voice such as isheard only once in a hundred years,”

1p20

will never be known.What remains of Lanza’s medical record is far too meager toreveal the secret of his premature death, and an autopsy wasnot performed. All we know for certain is that his health wasalready unraveling when he entered the Valle Giulia Clinic onSeptember



,

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, to rest and lose weight. The day beforehe died he was fit enough to sing “E lucevan le stelle” from

Tosca

for the clinic staff, and the next morning to conversewith his wife and his agent on the telephone. Shortly after thetelephone calls, he was found “reclining on the divan [in hisroom], motionless, extremely pale and with his head bent to

YouTube at the opera: the bad, the good and the sublime

The things you find while snooping around YouTube. This morning for some reason, maybe because it's Monday and awful out, I found myself digging around in videos of operatic bloopers - just an awful thing to do, sadistic, for opera is like figure skating: one slip of the blade and you're spinning around on your ass.

There were several categories. Quite a few, actually. An obvious one was singing off-pitch, invariably flat, and usually all the way through the piece. One wonders how someone with a trained singer's ear can do such a thing, but there they were (professionals, I mean, like Pavarotti, Roberto Alagna, and even the legendary Callas), slipping farther and farther off the wire like some floundering Wallenda.

There were the gargled or yodelled high notes, usually afflicting tenors who probably should have realized they were off their game. Sometimes that little bit of muscle at the back of the throat just won't cooperate, and can't be coerced.  Sopranos tended to shriek like squeezed chickens. There were elaborate choruses which were completely incoherent: SOMEONE had started off on the wrong foot, thus making proper entrances impossible while the conductor tried frantically to get everyone back on board. In one case, I swear I heard him skip several bars, but to no avail. 

There were complete silences. I mean, stunned and stunning silences in which the singer just stopped what they were doing in total disorientation. In a couple of cases the tenor (it was always a tenor) would shout out an excuse to the audience, something like, "Don't blame me, blame Puccini!" Almost worse were the "saves", the singer deciding to skip the triple-axel and sing something far less challenging.

The lyrics to these disasters all translated to approximately the same thing: "I should have cancelled, I should have cancelled. . . " Knowing when to cancel is a fine art in itself, but too many performers seem to want to go on with the show even as the ship sinks under their feet.

Though the videos contained their usual near-complete lack of information (where, when, even WHO), you could sure tell what theatre you were in. It was not hard to get the good folks at La Scala going, not just shrill whistling and booing but standing up and yelling things like, "Dog!", "This is murder!" and "Off the stage, charlatan!" North American audiences seem to be a little more restrained, but there is something limp and even baffled about the applause after such a fiasco. And definitely disappointed.

Having said all that, I'm not posting any bloopers today. I've had enough of them and felt a high degree of schadenfreude (thank you, Matt Paust) while listening to them. I suddenly thought of the glorious Flower Duet from Lakme by Delibes, once worked to death on airline commercials and elsewhere, but now beginning to heal and regain its lustre. And I found this one, and within two seconds I was crying, all thought of bloopers erased.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

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.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met: Part 1

Beniamino Gigli - E lucevan le stelle 1938

Okay then. So, singers. We've been talking about, thinking about singers, some unusual singers from the past, and some strangely beautiful contemporary singers who seem to grasp and pull the distant past back into the present moment. But this is even more immediate. Gigli. I don't have Gigli recordings, though perhaps I should. When you hear him, you know where Domingo and Pav and the gang get all their tricks (and also from Mario Lanza, the most underrated tenor of all). But no one else could express the exposed, terrifying vulnerability of the human soul in quite this way. This is my favorite tenor aria, and he sings the hell out of it. The haunting stare from the portrait and the slightly broken translation only enhance the performance. Exceptionally beautiful voices make me cry: I once sobbed my way through an astonishing concert by Renee Fleming, Michael Maniaci's unexpectedly vibrant male soprano recently made me burst into tears, and this - oh, this - this Gigli! When I discovered and played it, I was reduced to rubble. The great singers are instruments that express human pain as nothing else can. Yes, joy - rapture - all these things too, but it's the pain we really need them to express, because we can't - can't even find a word for it, though if we try to escape it, we leave an arm or a leg behind.

Gilded and gelded: giving your all for art

Of all the weirdnesses I’ve produced on this blog, this may be the weirdest. I don’t know what got me onto this, and it was not even a new topic, but it was the first time I’d explored it to this depth.

There was a time, and thank God it’s over, and a place, now more enlightened, when little boys who sang well were altered so that their voices would never change. Sounds innocent enough, until you realize that this was the kind of alteration farmers did to bulls to fatten them up and render them docile.

Yes. These little boys, usually on the verge of puberty, were subjected to the most barbaric procedure imagineable, all in the name of “art” (or, more likely, commerce). There was money to be made in transforming your innocent little choirboy son into . . . a castrato.

An awful word, isn’t it – though it does sound a bit like Capistrano, where the swallows come back to. Awful because this took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in Italy and other parts of Europe, when surgery involved a belt of whiskey and (if you were lucky) a sharpened knife. (Actually, the instrument, still in existence as a Medieval-looking artifact, resembles the jaws of a shark or a bizarre pair of scissors. Even I have limits here, and won't include a photo.)

The child probably wouldn’t get the whiskey because it wasn’t good for him. After the surgery, once he could walk again, he would be subjected (again, without his consent: “please, Daddy, may I have my testicles removed so I can be a great singer?”) to many hours a day of rigorous vocal practice.

From what I can gather from my usual ghoulish research, the boy would retain his small childlike vocal cords, but grow in stature and lung capacity so that giant gusts of air would be forced through tiny little reeds. Same principle as an oboe, really: and oboeists tend to go crazy and have strokes later in life from all that forced air.

This wasn't the only physical peculiarity of the castrato, who was quite literally emasculated, a eunuch with a permanently arrested sexual identity. The burst of testosterone responsible for beard growth, broadening of shoulders, deepening voice, and all the other yummy things that happen to men at puberty (excuse me, I forgot myself) just didn't happen. Joints didn't fuse and harden, with grotesque consequences: arms and legs grew unnaturally long, as did the ribs, resulting in a barrel chest. Good for singing, bad for looks.

The castrato's body was kind of like a fat woman's, with broad hips and enlarged breasts. Combined with long spindly limbs and a soft, rounded, beardless face, they must have looked Halloweenish, but the funny thing is, women loved them. Loved the androgynous look, and swooned when their operatic she-males sent their voices soaring into the stratosphere.

I try to imagine it in my mind, but it's not easy. A gorgeous soprano sound, stoked and pumped up by huge lungs, the volume sufficient to shatter glass. And then there was that legendary ability castrati like Farinelli had to sustain a note for a full minute. Like slowly letting the air out of a very large balloon.

We'll never really know what this freak voice sounded like, but we have an approximation. Just listen to Alessandro Moreschi, if you can stand it. He looks soft-featured, round-faced, almost childish, though in his photo he is well into middle age. All the portraits of famous castrati that I found look the same, as if they’re all genetically related. Some of them look more like multiples, hatched out of the same egg.

Actually, they are related, not just by vocal brilliance but by mutilation. Moreschi is called the “last” castrato because he was the only one whose voice was ever recorded. His singing gives you a tantalyzing taste of what audiences seemed to crave a few hundred years ago. The impression I get here is a voice desperately trying to be tenor. The “attack”, the interpretation, the way he puts the song out there, all have a masculine sensibility, like a tenor’s (and believe me, being a tenor isn’t just about singing).

Then, suddenly and without warning, it swoops into the stratosphere, throbbing for just one instant with beauty and glittering with overtones that somehow come through even on the most primitive recording equipment.

We do have countertenors today who can sing a kind of mezzo-soprano. But their voices tend to have a “hooty” quality, a falsetto which is, let’s face it, false: a man’s voice forced up through the nose into the various vibrating cavities of the sinuses. It's a little like Curly of the Three Stooges (and I have nothing against Curly - I think he was a genius - but that wasn't his real voice. He had a normal male register which he seldom used on the screen.)

Moreschi sings in a “true” voice, which, while technically weak, mannered and likely ridden to death by too much performing (like a race horse being forced to run on shattered tendons) is capable of an awful kind of beauty. Awful, because a man who isn’t a man can’t live in any way except through his music. Conventional intimacy would be impossible, and he’d appear and sound freakish.

Castrati were celebrated and petted like lap dogs, even rumored to be great lovers (which was not very likely), but were never considered normal men. This is a tortured sound, reminiscent of bound feet in gorgeously-embroidered Chinese slippers. Mutilated into beauty. I know I should, but I just can’t turn away.

CTV "First Look" at Olympic Village condos

These last 2 posts represent a couple of generations: my daughter Shannon Paterson, illustrious reporter for CTV News in Vancouver; and Caitlin Paterson, her daughter, my illustrious granddaughter, performing The Turkey Song from La Traviata.