We're pleased to announce our 13/14 Season! This exciting season will include seven productions at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, including the Company premiere of Massenet’s Thaïs and the highly anticipated Los Angeles debut of the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson collaboration Einstein on the Beach.

Placido Domingo will conduct the season-opening production of Carmen and also perform the role of Athanaël in Thaïs. James Conlon, LA Opera’s Music Director, will conduct four mainstage productions as well as the world premiere of Alexander Prior’s community opera Jonah and the Whale at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

According to Christopher Koelsch, President and CEO of LA Opera, the season will include 42 performances presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as well as four LA Opera Off Grand performances taking place in other venues. The season opens on September 21, 2013, and will run through June 7, 2014.

For more information on the 13/14 Season, subscribe or renew your subscription, visit LAOpera.com.

Britten 100/LA: A Celebration, a year-long festival honoring the 2013 centenary of British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), officially launches on Saturday, February 23, 2013 with a conversation with LA Opera Music Director James Conlon. The free event begins at 4:00 pm and will take place at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. 

A master of orchestral writing, Benjamin Britten wrote some of the most appealing classical music of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his music for the voice – operas, choral works, songs and song cycles – and was as committed to writing music for children and amateur performers as he was for leading soloists of the day. More than 65 Britten 100/LA partners to date have come together to examine and celebrate this remarkable talent through a variety of performances, conferences and exhibitions.

James Conlon, whose lifelong admiration of Britten's artistic genius is reflected in his personal three-year performance cycle of the composer’s works in the United States and Europe, spearheads Britten 100/LA for LA Opera. In a presentation expanding upon the format of his standing-room only pre-performance talks, Mr. Conlon will discuss the music and artistic legacy of Britten, as well as introduce a number of exciting festival events happening throughout Southern California well into 2014.

The event will also include performances of Britten vocal works by members of LA Opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program and all attendees are invited to meet Mr. Conlon in person after the presentation.

The February 23 event is open to the public and free of charge. Reservations can be made by calling the LA Opera Box Office at 213.972.8001. Britten 100/LA: A Celebration will take place in Salon A, on the fifth floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, located at 135 North Grand Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90012.

Generous support for Britten 100/LA provided by the Britten–Pears Foundation. 

For more information on Britten 100/LA, visit Britten100LA.org

By Thomas May

Given the fundamentally hybrid character of opera, it’s not surprising that so many composers have needed several test flights before getting the balance right, let alone making an artistic breakthrough—even when the composer in question, like Richard Wagner, is the figure responsible for the whole package: the overall concept and libretto as well as the music.

Beethoven famously never found closure with Leonore/Fidelio, for all his attempts to wrestle it into shape; eventually he lamented how the project had turned into a “shipwreck.” At the start of his career, Puccini was fortunate to have earned the confidence of a powerful publisher who gave him the space he needed until victory arrived with his third try, Manon Lescaut. Verdi nearly decided to pack it in after his first two operas before he found his stride with Nabucco in 1842 – the same year Wagner was negotiating for the premiere of a recently completed work, The Flying Dutchman.

The ambitious young German had up to that point been as tormented by frustration as the weary mariner onto whom he projected his solitude, fears and longing. Wagner wrote The Flying Dutchman during one of his most dejected periods, while trying to make it in the opera capital of the time, Paris. Then, in the fall of 1842, just a half-year after Verdi’s breakthrough to the south, Wagner’s struggles as an emerging composer paid off, for the short term at least, when he enjoyed his own sweet experience of success for the first time, on a level that wouldn’t be repeated until 1868 with Die Meistersinger. But it hardly prepared the audience for what was to come in Dutchman.

The triumph in question was that of Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, set in late-medieval Rome, which premiered in Dresden in October 1842. In Rienzi Wagner had assimilated the model of grand opera in the French style evolved by such phenomenally successful composers as Giacomo Meyerbeer. When his concept of a revolutionary music drama later took shape, it was precisely this model that Wagner would vehemently denounce as the epitome of mindless commercial entertainment, “effects without causes.” Meyerbeer, who in fact had been responsible for arranging the premiere of Rienzi (and tried to do the same for Dutchman), became a particular target of his notorious anti-Semitic polemics as well.

Enormous in scale, full of pomp, and featuring a climax in which the Capitol is set ablaze and collapses, Rienzi was the third opera Wagner had completed. It followed two efforts written before the move to Paris: the Weber-inspired The Fairies and The Ban on Love, his take on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The former never had a performance in Wagner’s lifetime, and the latter proved an unnerving fiasco when the composer tried to introduce it in Germany. Remarkably, the work on Rienzi overlapped with his initial sketches for The Flying Dutchman, the last product of his self-imposed Parisian exile but a game changer in terms of his artistic self-understanding.

In his official memoirs Wagner later wrote that the inspiration for Dutchman originally came to him during the fraught voyage he made with his first wife, the actress Minna Planer, from Riga to Paris by way of London in 1839. The reason they were taking a circuitous sea route was because Wagner’s passport had been confiscated as a result of massive debts accumulated in Riga, where he had been posted as music director. Facing a small army of creditors, he and Minna beat a stealthy (and dangerous) retreat across an armed border. At the time the composer looked to Paris as the Mecca of the opera world, where he would at last find the recognition he longed for.

Smuggled aboard a schooner and hidden away, the Wagners then endured a terrifying tempest whose fierce winds made a “strangely demonic impression,” as the composer put it. The captain was forced to find shelter in the Norwegian fjords, where Wagner took note of a starkly different musical impression: “A feeling of indescribable well-being came over me as the granite walls of the cliff echoed the chantings of the crew as they cast anchor and furled the sails…[It] soon resolved itself into the theme of the Sailors’ Chorus in my Flying Dutchman, the idea for which I had already carried within me at the time….”

Wagner scholars have long since constructed a firewall of skepticism when it comes to the composer’s own accounts of the genesis of his works, well aware that he routinely spins the scenario in hindsight to fit seamlessly into the narrative of his evolution as an artist. They point to the fact that Wagner’s earliest surviving sketches for Dutchman date from the following year—he then composed the bulk of the opera in 1841—and that he retrofitted his setting for Dutchman from Scotland (where he had placed the legend in accordance with literary precedents) to Norway just before the premiere. Still, holding onto latent ideas for future operas—sometimes for decades—became Wagner’s modus operandi.

And the opera contains a deeper autobiographical layer, much as the legend’s storms are not merely literal but symbolic of the human condition as the composer understood it. In this sense he identified as a misunderstood artist with the Dutchman’s alienation as well as with the dynamic between the Dutchman and Senta. Wagner expert Thomas Grey suggests one potential reading of the work as an allegory of the artist’s endeavor, in which “the selfless, self-sacrificing, unconditionally yielding woman was thus also a figure for the ideal audience….”

Dutchman certainly bears out Wagner’s conviction that here, for the first time, he found his authentic voice, marking the start of “my career as a poet and my farewell to the mere concocter of opera texts.” It was a dramatic leap and, as Grey points out, it prefigures the even more extraordinary later leap between Lohengrin and Das Rheingold. And what makes Dutchman the vehicle for this achievement is the fact that with it Wagner at last found the material to convey his vision of life and a musical approach that could begin to do it justice.

But why this particular story? Wagner discovered in the Dutchman the first of his mythic figures, ambivalent in nature, who have the flexibility to accommodate multiple meanings. His (unnamed) hero acquires the resonance of an archetype or myth as timeless as the wandering Odysseus and that, according to the composer, expresses “the longing for peace from the storms of life.” Yet the legend itself seems to have been of relatively recent origin, a few centuries old at most. It initially spread as a colorful sailors’ folk tale but really took root in literary form, ranging from the likes of Coleridge, Poe and Walter Scott to countless retellings in popular culture of the time—in plays, cheap novels and the like.

Wagner had latched onto a topic that was genuinely fashionable as well. He even managed to sell his original prose treatment of Dutchman to the head honcho of the Grand Opera in Paris, who otherwise didn’t have the time of day for him and who handed it over to the composer Pierre-Louis Dietsch to use. (Dietsch’s librettists, however, ended up drawing on different sources for the opera, which was titled Le vaisseau fantôme.)

The storm-tossed captain who wanders about undead obviously struck a chord among those attracted to the darker, Gothic undercurrents of the groundswell of Romanticism. And a larger clan of similarly unhappy figures enduring a nightmarish existence was more recently emerging, from Lord Byron’s lonely, restless Manfred, suicidal but unable to die, to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s experimental rethink of Prometheus in Frankenstein—not to mention aspects of Goethe’s version of the Faust legend. In fact Wagner abandoned efforts to write his own Faust Symphony—he ended up producing only one movement and made it a concert overture—and channeled his thoughts into the new opera instead. In a letter, he remarked that he had “[broken] free from the mists of instrumental music and [found] a solution to the problem that confronted me in the specificity of the drama.” It’s worth recalling here Wagner’s famous interpretation of  Beethoven’s Ninth as a Columbus-like voyage from the restrictions of the instrumental symphony into a new world fusing music and word. The Ninth marks another profound discovery of his formative years, and its d-minor opening is to some extent echoed in the Overture and the “hollow fifths” outlined by the Dutchman’s theme.

Ironically, though, Wagner’s principal source for The Flying Dutchman came from an archly anti-Romantic account published in the early 1830s by the iconoclastic poet and critic Heinrich Heine. A fellow exile (from the Rhineland) in Paris, Heine welcomed the young composer into his circle. His retelling of the legend—which he incorporated into a larger narrative—contains many of the ingredients essential to Wagner’s scenario, most significantly of all the theme of redemption by the self-sacrifice of the captain’s lover. But this is how Heine describes the cynical “moral” of his story, in which he mockingly refers to “Mrs. Flying Dutchman” leaping from the cliff: “As far as women are concerned, they should be wary of marrying a Flying Dutchmen; and we men should learn from it that, at best, women will be our ruin.”

Among other things, the ironic tone Heine adopts indicates just how clichéd the legend had become by then—the equivalent of a thriller film franchise whose latest sequel causes eyes to roll. But by making it dead serious, Wagner discovered the template that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career: a drama rooted in the existential predicament of its hero and the search for redemption. The condition of a world out of joint, with the protagonist caught up in a dilemma of the highest stakes and with an unlikely hope for resolution, is the Ring cycle in a nutshell. “Die Frist ist um,” the opening monologue that gives us access to the Dutchman’s perspective, already looks ahead to the vision of existence itself as torment voiced by Amfortas in Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, while the Dutchman prefigures the time-traveling Kundry, whose curse also condemns her to an endless life (in the form of reincarnation). In both operas, another is awaited who has the capacity for compassion to break the cycle of suffering.

Another element of Wagner’s deep attraction to this material is suggested by Joachim Köhler, author of the provocative biography Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans. Despite the officially idyllic picture he later painted of life with his actor step-father, argues Köhler, the composer endured a traumatic childhood characterized by fear of punishment, and “found it hard to distinguish between real life and the world of his imagination,” while “the stage that was his family’s livelihood became a place of terror for him.” In the challenge the Dutchman poses to the “normal” community he infiltrates, Wagner “discovered his own spectral past” and could now set about trying “to exorcize ghosts.” Because of his newfound musical confidence as well—earned from his study not only of Beethoven but of French models, in particular the far-reaching experiments of Berlioz—“the ideas that seethed within him,” writes Köhler, “could acquire independent existence in the material world now that the archetypes of his subconscious had begun to speak for themselves….”

In The Flying Dutchman Wagner thus found a way to fuse his identities as both dramatist and composer into the creation of a more powerfully unified work. Although he retains the conventional genre name of “Romantic opera,” the guiding concept of the medium we experience here goes beyond “setting” a story to music or just adding atmosphere, color and heightened emotion to the mix. Words and music begin to coalesce into something more ambitious. It’s curious to recall that Wagner’s original plan was to have Dutchman produced as the “opening bill” at the Paris Opera, the curtain raiser to a full-length ballet. But the original intermissionless structure (which we hear in this production) also prompted him to condense his thoughts into a powerful whole made up of larger scenic units. Anxiety that his new opera, presented by itself, would fare better with intermissions led Wagner to adopt the latter for the premiere. When his widow Cosima introduced it at Bayreuth in 1901, she reverted to his original intention of performing the whole opera without pauses. Along with the uninterrupted momentum this allows, you can clearly hear how Wagner designed one scene to “fade” into the next, as in the transition from the masculine sailors’ chorus ending the first act to the cheerful humming and spinning of the women.

In other words, elements of the seamless music drama of Wagner’s maturity are at least foreshadowed—though not to the exclusion of the old-fashioned models from earlier Romantic opera, of set pieces and even of French grand opera “spectacle,” despite the composer’s retrospective emphasis on Dutchman as a harbinger of the “music of the future.” In fact, the contradiction between old and new gives a fascinating tension to the opera’s texture. It could even be seen to play a dramatic role, underscoring the conflict between the conventionality of the townfolk and the more unusual musical depictions of the Dutchman and his crew. The blithe four-squareness of Daland’s music introducing his daughter to the Dutchman, for example, almost sounds like a parody of the charming but bland music that could win Wagner’s peers such approval from their audience—especially considering the context of the character to whom he’s planning on marrying her off to. And despite his ardor, it’s no wonder Senta wants to escape the bourgeois, predictable life she would have with her suitor Erik, the safe but boring boyfriend. He changes his conventional tune only when he foresees her fate in his dream. Implicit in hyer choice, of course, is the very act of betrayal (of the mere mortal Erik, in this case) that the Dutchman assumes is in his despair is the pattern of every woman’s behavior. But Senta senses a doppelganger-like kinship with the mysterious stranger even before she meets him in person. Through her ballad, Wagner explores this aspect of her character, adding an uncanny dimension to their “love at first sight” that bypasses what could otherwise have been another operatic cliché.

Wagner’s score is often praised for its “realistically” stormy weather and tumultuous evocation of the elements. These do in fact mark the start of an impressive series of orchestral evocations of nature. But what’s even more impressive is Wagner’s musical characterization of the inner psyche of the Dutchman and of his encounter with Senta (a name the composer himself invented and which his champion-turned-enemy Friedrich Nietzsche lampooned with his reference to Wagnerian “Senta-mentality”). Wagner also returned to the score several times after the Dresden premiere to refine the orchestration (some of which Berlioz had found a touch crude and over “obvious”). Most significantly, in 1860, just after finishing Tristan und Isolde, he introduced a new motif of redemption to the end of the Overture and to the end of the opera itself, using a language of harps and lofty strings that is reminiscent of the later opera.

At the opera’s center is a duet between Senta and the Dutchman unlike any “love duet” that had come before. Here Wagner begins to expand our ordinary perception of time as he depicts these characters transcending the mundane pace of the world surrounding them, participating in a kind of shared hallucination, as if enfolded in each other’s dream. Whose dream, after all, is being dreamt? The question seems to be an open one. Wagner lays out the dream narratives of both Senta and Erik. Does his dream frame her own, or vice versa? Wagner even shows us the Steersman drifting into half-sleep – the epitome of the everyday world from which Senta wishes to stray. Could all that follows be his dream? Or are the whole proceedings a fever fantasy of the still-unredeemed Dutchman between one of his seven-year landings?

In The Flying Dutchman, Wagner adopts a strategy that’s also found in such works as Hamlet and Henry James/Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw: He draws us in with a thrilling ghost story that actually embeds a meditation on something far more profound. Wagner might Wagner might have settled for another supernatural, Gothic thriller like those of Heinrich Marschner and other contemporary composers who provided other models in these years. But through his identification with the Dutchman’s self-conscious suffering, the still-rudderless Wagner at last found a sense of artistic direction that he would follow hereafter with unwavering compulsion.

Thomas May writes about the arts and is a regular contributor to the LA Opera program.

We are pleased to announce that Music Director James Conlon has extended his contract with LA Opera through the end of the 2017/2018 season.

The news was made public by LA Opera’s President and CEO Christopher Koelsch at a special event honoring Mr. Conlon, held in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s Eva and Marc Stern Grand Hall. During the event, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky presented Mr. Conlon with an official proclamation from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors celebrating his ongoing and continued contribution to LA Opera and the City of Los Angeles.

Mr. Conlon joined LA Opera as Music Director at the beginning of the 2006/07 season. Since then, he has conducted a total of 33 different operas at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, including 18 company premieres and two U.S. premieres. To date, he has conducted 190 performances of mainstage LA Opera productions, more than any other conductor in the Company’s history. Additionally, his highly anticipated pre-performance talks continue to draw standing-room only crowds.

Mr. Conlon is currently prepping for the March 9 premiere of The Flying Dutchman followed by Cinderella on March 23. Tickets for both productions are on sale now. 

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

First days of anything always get me a little paranoid. Did I pack an extra pencil? Is my score with me? And for that matter, where on earth did my singing voice go?  This was me right before the first ensemble rehearsal of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Fludde (Noye's Fludde), this year's Community Opera. Heightening my nervousness, this was also the first time I had ever done this program. I knew a bit about it, though: it is a huge annual opera performed by adults, kids, teens and non-singers like me, as well as music professionals from the community.

Hopping from the car, I walked into our rehearsal venue, the spacious auditorium of East LA Performing Arts Academy. Immediately, all my apprehension went away. I started seeing people I knew from last summer’s Opera Camp, both staff and campers. How I have missed hearing director Eli Villanueva’s continued attempt to make the word “groovy” cool again!

Muse Lee in LA Opera's 2012 Opera Camp. Photo by Taso Papadakis.

At the beginning, we were given an overview of the program. On April 19 and 20, we will be performing at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels with choruses from all over LA, numbering around 200 people altogether. A community orchestra of 100 members, along with LA Opera Orchestra members, will accompany us, all under the baton of a certain Maestro named James Conlon.  If that's not the pinnacle of epic, I don't know what it is — especially since 2013 marks Britten's hundredth birthday!

We plunged right into rehearsal. The younger kids, the animals in the ark, went to a separate room to rehearse. As for the teens and adults, we stayed with assistant director Heather Lipson Bell. Bit by bit, we learned our motions in the opening scene; we pieced together our entrance, exit and the choreography in between. In this scene, we are congregation members searching for the Lord’s guidance. Eli encouraged us to go beyond this simplified sketch and develop individual identities. He asked us to think about who we are, why we're having this crisis of faith, and how this dictates even our subtlest movement choices. Each action we perform can be interpreted in many different ways, and the actions we settle on depend on our own character. I can't wait to get to know mine better!

After a short break, we began singing the lonely, searching melody of “Lord Jesus, think on me,” our voices floating through the space, the amateur voices supported and buoyed up by the resonant, trained voices. Noye's Fludde is based on the medieval Chester Miracle Plays, meant to be performed by townspeople and local choristers. Britten intended his opera version to be the same way: a community production with singers and non-singers, adults, children and everyone in between. The resulting sound is something so exquisitely pure and organic that I almost forgot I was actually singing. It just felt completely natural. I can only imagine how gorgeous it will be with 200 other singers and orchestra.

Our next task was to put the action together with the singing. This was easier said than done. Whenever I focused on the singing, I forgot my blocking, and whenever I switched my attention to the action, the words and music escaped me. I never realized how difficult onstage coordination can be—it really makes me appreciate performances more! Though it's challenging for some of us, the opening scene is already starting to solidify.

I left rehearsal brimming with happiness and anticipation. Everything around me looked infinitely more awesome. Now, the flood waters have come in and our ship is off and away. Our Community Opera expedition has begun!

By James Conlon

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau

Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The protagonist of The Flying Dutchman has led a (very long) life of desperation, but thanks to Richard Wagner, not a quiet one. He will go to his place in the universe (no grave) but, fortunately for us, will have left behind his “song.” His song is not just that of the protagonist of this opera, but that of one who will be omnipresent in the rest of all of Wagner’s music dramas: The Outsider.

This production marks LA Opera’s first tribute to the three composers who share an anniversary in 2013. They are, in order of their births, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten. The Outsider will be as ubiquitous in Wagner’s works as the plight of the tragic father in Verdi’s and the voice of outraged innocence in Britten’s.

Another key characteristic embodied in the Dutchman is that of “The Wanderer.”

I wander silently and am somewhat unhappy,
And my sighs always ask "Where?"
In a ghostly breath it calls back to me,
There, where you are not, there is your happiness.
(Translation by Paul Hindemith)

Franz Schubert’s rendition of this poem by George Philipp Schmidt (von Lübeck), from which Franz Liszt further developed his work for piano and orchestra, is a classic. Wagner draws from the ancient myth of the “Wandering Jew” and initiates a series of exiles who will appear in his subsequent music dramas: Tannhauser, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan (who will actually be renamed “The Wanderer” in Siegfried) and Tristan. Even Lohengrin and Elsa, despite their enormous dissimilarity with the Dutchman and Senta, also tell a tale of a distant “mythical” figure who exists first in the imagination of a young woman and then in reality. Lohengrin and the Dutchman enter the real world, the former from the realm of the grail and the latter from that of the devil. Both women lose their earthly existence, Elsa as a victim and Senta as the first in a series of self-sacrificing women.

Senta represents a third motif that will be repeated constantly in Wagner’s works: the redemptive woman, who teaches the world true love by sacrificing her own life to save a masculine soul imprisoned in emotional and metaphysical torments. Although criticized for its male bias, Wagner’s vision of this figure implicitly suggests that the man, wracked by his own conflicts and longings, can never achieve what the woman possesses by birthright. She incarnates infinite and redemptive love, and is the core of the universe.

I believe that the full power of the union of Senta and the Dutchman can be understood more completely if interpreted as the mythical (re)union of two parts of a common soul, man and woman, like Siegmund and Sieglinde. Viewed in this manner, Wagner steps into the world of myth for the first time, opening up the future to the Ring.

The Dutchman, who made his Faustian pact with the Devil, has been condemned to sail the seas for centuries, to be released from his curse and allowed to die only if he can find a woman who is faithful to him. He has lived on the sea, lonely and increasingly bitter, apart from any other society, unable to have a home, unable to rest, unable to find serenity.

Even in the most settled and stable of us, there is a part that has known that sense of exile and separateness on some level. The Dutchman embodies the 19th- century German concept of “Sehnsucht” (yearning). The painful perception of the distance between an ideal world and the realities of life is a staple in the artistic environment of the German-speaking world of that time. It fueled the poetry and literature of its time, impregnated the music of Schubert and Schumann, and eventually was projected onto a cosmic screen by Wagner.

This yearning exists not just in the Dutchman, but also in Senta, the young woman who has grown up obsessed with the legend of the Dutchman. She lives in isolation within her community precisely because she has been drawn to the fate of this mythical outsider, whose picture hangs on the wall and through whose agency she becomes an outsider herself. Perhaps she recognizes her status as outsider early on, and bonds with the myth in a mystical union that only she can understand.

Even Erik, the young man who believes himself to be betrothed to Senta, is an outsider. As a hunter living in a community of sea-faring men, Erik is subject to the cultural tensions between the men of the sea and those of the land. Like Senta, he suffers the disdain of his community. The Dutchman wanders, Senta and Erik do not, but all three are equally isolated.

Finally, the power of the sea, in both its real and symbolic forms, competes for the status of protagonist. A perfect medium to express the tempestuous, oceanic emotions that characterize so many operas, it serves Wagner here as it will again in Tristan und Isolde as a metaphor for colossal emotional, metaphysical and erotic forces. Verdi will use it as a metaphor of exile for the Doge in Simon Boccanegra, landlocked as head of state while his heart is at sea. Britten also lives in dialogue with the sea, from Peter Grimes through Billy Budd to the end of his life with Death in Venice.

Thoreau’s “quiet desperation,” or Puccini’s writing the “tragedies of little souls” are nowhere to be found in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. He casts the mythical dimensions of his protagonist onto a cosmic panorama. There is despair and desperation, but there is also devotion and that central theme to all of Wagner’s work: redemptive love.

By James Conlon

On the occasion of LA Opera’s production of Cinderella (La Cenerentola), and in a departure from my customary style, I am writing more personally; in particular, the story of my love for the music of Gioachino Rossini.

The bel canto operas (a term used to loosely denote the Italian operas of the first half of the 19th century) have an important place in the repertory of LA Opera. Every opera theater must produce works in many different styles, speaking to all tastes. It must offer a balance of known and unknown works in the Italian, German, French, Anglo-Saxon, English-American and Russo-Slavic repertories. It must include 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century works, along with contemporary opera. Beyond serving the public, we—all of us who are devoted to opera—are responsible in the long term for keeping the art form alive and healthy.

In the Italian repertory, the heart of the theater is a tripod consisting of bel canto, (Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini), Verdi and verismo (primarily Puccini). Whatever else is performed, any international opera company must be able to perform with appropriate stylistic sensibilities in each of these three categories.

I have been devoting myself to the bel canto repertory for the past several years, and will continue to do so. There are two reasons for this.

First, it is important that these operas be recognized as the great works that they are. The art of singing, conducting and playing bel canto operas must be learned and mastered.  Knowledge of both tradition and modern critical trends is necessary to conduct these works. The preservation of this now “classical” art and its style is highly important. For the orchestra, performing a Rossini opera demands the same elevated level of transparency, clarity and wit as a Haydn symphony. Whatever charms a theatrical production can provide for these marvelously entertaining and amusing works, nothing justifies mechanical or indifferent musical performances, whether emanating from the stage or the orchestra pit. No theatrical virtues can compensate for a rendition deficient in any of the demands of the bel canto style. Beauty of tone, limpidity of phrasing, brilliant fioratura and clarity of text are neither optional nor dispensable.

Second, in the many years of my professional life, I have largely missed out on the personal satisfaction of conducting much of this repertory. The fact is, at the tender age of 11, Rossini became my favorite composer after I saw The Barber of Seville. It was only the second opera I attended, but it, more than any other, was responsible for the rapid metamorphosis in my life, which drew me inextricably into the overwhelming embrace of classical music. To amuse myself in the summers, I twice organized little performances of the Barber with my friends.  Producing them with the limited means and abilities of youngsters, we made up in enthusiasm whatever else we lacked in ability and training (which was just about everything).

In the following years, as a sort of apprenticeship to learn the ropes in an opera theater, I volunteered to work backstage whenever the opportunity presented itself, including several bel canto operas: The Turk in Italy, Cinderella and The Elixir of Love. I came to know them from the inside out. I got my first opportunity to conduct Don Pasquale at the Juilliard Opera Theater when I was 22, and a year later, to my great joy, The Barber of Seville. My dream had come true, I was conducting the very opera that had set me on my path a little more than ten years before. Seven performances with a double cast (Frederica von Stade and Maria Ewing sharing the role of Rosina) in five days, conducting from the harpsichord at the Washington Opera, provided one of the high points in my life thus far. I thought to myself afterwards, “How wonderful, now that I know how to conduct The Barber, I can do so all of my life.” And then, irony of ironies… I never did again. In fact , until now, I had only conducted Rossini operas at 20-year intervals: Semiramide at the Metropolitan Opera (1990) with Marilyn Horne, June Anderson and Samuel Ramey, and LA Opera’s Turk in Italy (2011). Aside from the numerous concert performances of overtures, the Stabat Mater and the Petite messe solennelle, there were no more Rossini operas.

Spending so much time on the concert podium and plunging into “big” operatic repertory, the bel canto simply remained on the sidelines.  There were inevitable choices to be made: Boris Godunov or Norma? Pelléas et Mélisande or La Sonnambula? Tristan or I Puritani? The irresistible pull toward Wagner, Verdi, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Puccini had the effect of putting it all on hold.

Three seasons ago, when I conducted The Elixir of Love, I enjoyed myself so thoroughly, that I decided to personally oversee all the bel canto productions here at LA Opera. My decision, far from being merely practical, gave me the opportunity to reunite myself with several works that I have loved since childhood but never conducted. In doing so, I have rekindled a source of excitement and satisfaction within myself, a source neglected for far too many years.

To paraphrase Giuseppe Verdi, sometimes to make progress we have return to the beginning. I am, with Cinderella, reliving a part of my youth, and, who knows, maybe I will even conduct The Barber of Seville again.

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Recently, I heard a comic comparing a music rehearsal to the ER. Both are supposed to help you get better, both make you cry, and both are filled with excruciating pain. During Noah’s Flood rehearsal on Sunday, we experienced all three of these things.

For this rehearsal, only the animals, raindrops, waves, rainbows, and the raven and dove were called. I’m one of the fourteen waves. Basically, what we do is maneuver long strips of blue fabric, with two people per strip. I had a similar job during Opera Camp, so I thought I was prepared for this. However, I soon realized that there are two crucial differences between The White Bird of Poston and Noah’s Flood waves. Firstly, this wave scene goes on for 7 minutes, and secondly, while the Poston waves represented the Colorado River, these waves are supposed to make up a worldwide flood.

To help us achieve the desired effect, assistant director, Heather Lipson-Bell patiently and energetically taught us a bunch of different wave movements. I don’t want to give it all away before the performance, but I’ll just say that it involved incessant arm-pumping, duck-walking, and squats. Twenty minutes in, my wavemate and I were already hot and red-faced. By the end, we were ready to drown along with God’s condemned. I think my muscles hate me right now. 

After our exhausting wave movement session, we listened to the music for the storm and flood scene. When I heard the glorious, crashing music, it suddenly hit me: I’m actually in a Benjamin Britten opera. I’ll be singing something written by Benjamin Britten. Both that thought and the beauty of the music gave me chills. My eyes watered. There’s nothing like opera to bring on the tears.

Following this, we were released, but I didn’t want to leave yet. I’d been hearing the kids singing their animal parts upstairs, and I really wanted to get a glimpse of their rehearsal. Halfway there, I heard a huge, enthusiastic voice that almost sounded amplified. Turns out it was assistant director, Nathan Rifenburg – who happens to have twice the energy of an average human being.

When I walked into the classroom, he was animatedly demonstrating monkey movements, bouncing around and bending down to pick imaginary bugs out of a kid’s hair. I was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, but it was just too awesome not to giggle. The best part was that the kids weren’t laughing at all. They took it all so seriously. Whenever Nathan told them to stand up, they immediately sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes. And their ark entrance scene—wow. They were so focused, and even if I couldn’t immediately tell what animal they were, I saw that they believed in it, and so I did too. The rest of rehearsal was delightful: the best parts included an impromptu “Doe-A-Deer” and Nathan’s colorful description of well-supported singing as “throwing your guts on the table.”

The day ended on an exciting note: as we were leaving, we received Noah’s Flood posters. It includes the names of all participating choruses and orchestras. The fact that we’re on the same poster as James Conlon is way too awesome to handle. And I had no idea that Ronnita Nicole Miller will be Mrs. Noye. I started spazzing out. (download the poster here)

As for us ensemble members, though?  Improvement: check. Tears: check. Pain: double check. We know what that means: this production is on its way to becoming something incredible.

Numerous puzzle pieces of scenery for our new production of The Flying Dutchman are assembled to create one cohesive and spectacular vision. 

This is an early view from the auditorium looking through to the backstage. This bridge weighs nearly 5000 pounds and is an integral and dynamic element of the scenery. The bridge “flies” in and out on cue, controlled by a computerized chain motor console.

The deck is composed of hundreds of individual pieces of structural steel. When fully assembled with its mirrored surface, the deck becomes the playing area for dozens of cast members.  

The  scenery as designed is comprised of layers of vivid imagery  that only become apparent when completed with show lighting and effects. In this image, final preparations are made for the first onstage rehearsal.

In l987 I fell in love with a Californian and moved to the United States. We started living together and soon I realized I had no room of my own to write. It was impossible to tackle the long project of a novel, so I tried my hand at short stories, which I could write waiting for my lover in coffee shops and parks. I came up with 23 stories. Given my state of mind (or state of heart) at the time, they were all love stories. Most of them were timeless and located in unnamed places in South America.

One of the stories was called “Revenge” and it was the tragedy of a young woman called Dulce Rosa who spent years planning how to punish the man who had raped her and killed her family. It doesn’t sound like a love theme, does it? Trust me, it is. The story came to me whole, like a gift. I wrote it down in a sort of trance, in one sitting. It was published in a collection with the title Stories of Eva Luna. I did the required book tours and promptly forgot about it, never imagining that, more than 20 years later, Dulce Rosa would come back in a new form thanks to a couple of visionary artists. And what a delightful form it is indeed!

When Richard Sparks and Lee Holdridge first contacted me about transforming my story into an opera, I loved the idea but was quite skeptical regarding its feasibility. An opera is a very ambitious endeavor; in fact, it is so ambitious that it would be an endangered form of art without a handful of passionate lovers of the genre and idealists like Richard and Lee. I reread my story and realized that it lends itself well for the stage, so I accepted their proposal. However, I had little hope that it would ever see the limelight. They left and once again I forgot about Dulce Rosa. But they didn’t. For years they worked on the script, the lyrics and the music, they assembled a formidable team of musicians and singers, and they got Plácido Domingo to conduct. Deep thanks to Plácido Domingo, LA Opera and the Broad Stage for making these performances possible. Although some changes were necessary for the stage, they respected the essence of the story, and I believe that they also enhanced it. For example, they added new characters who were needed to make the plot clearer and they changed the ending. Richard explained to me that an open ending, like the one in the book, would not work in an opera, and I did not object because he has a lifetime of experience in this matters.

By the end of 2012 Richard and Lee came to my house in Marin County to show me on their PCs the result of all those years of dreaming and creating. I was able to hear the beautiful music composed by Lee, discuss the libretto written by Richard, hear most of the singers rehearsing, and see, in amazement, the fantastic sets that Yael Pardess and Jenny Okun imagined for this opera. I was very impressed. All that talent and effort invested in bringing my story to life! By the end of that unforgettable day I was on the verge of tears. Since then I have not been able to get the music and some of the scenes out of my head; they haunt me, as I hope they will haunt everyone who sees it.

Isabel Allende

Soprano Tracy Cox and bass Matthew Anchel have advanced to the final round of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, one of the most prestigious voice competitions in the world. The last stage of the competition will take place in New York on Sunday, March 10, 2013, at a Grand Finals Concert where the finalists will perform with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Tracy is in her third season as a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. She made her LA Opera debut in 2010 as Marcellina in The Marriage of Figaro and most recently performed the role of Pisana in the season-opening production of Verdi's The Two Foscari.

While spending the summer at the Music Academy of the West, she was named the 2012 winner of the Marilyn Horne Song Competition, and in 2012, she sang the role of the Second Lady in The Secret Kingdom, conducted by James Conlon at the Colburn School. A former member of the Wolf Trap Opera Studio, she will return to Wolf Trap later this year to sing the role of Alice Ford in Falstaff.

Matthew Anchel was a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program during the 2010/11 season. He made his LA Opera debut as the Fourth Noble in Lohengrin and went on to perform the role of Count Ceprano in Rigoletto, while also covering leading roles in The Marriage of Figaro and The Turk in Italy.

During his season in Los Angeles, he created the role of Dr. Chasuble in the world premiere of Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest at the LA Philharmonic. He subsequently joined the ensemble of the Leipzig Opera, where he performed numerous roles. Earlier this year, he made his debut with Opera San Jose as Ferrando in Il Trovatore. In April, he will debut with Knoxville Opera as Alidoro in Cinderella (La Cenerentola), and he will return to Opera San Jose next season as Leporello in Don Giovanni and as the Bonze in Madama Butterfly.

The Grand Finals Concert will be hosted by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a past National Council Auditions winner is returning to LA Opera in May in the title role of Tosca. Last year, soprano Janai Brugger, who was a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program at the time, was one of the winners of the finals.

The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, which are celebrating their 60th anniversary this year, have been an important stepping stone in the career of many of the opera world’s leading artists. Twenty gifted young singers from around the country arrived in New York on February 28 to prepare for a March 3 semi-final round, in which they sang on the Met stage for the first time in their careers before a panel of judges. After deliberations, the panel narrowed the field to ten singers who move to the final phase of the competition on Sunday.

This year’s finalists, all between the ages of 20 and 30 years old, will compete for individual cash prizes of $15,000 each. The finalists were chosen from nearly 1500 singers who participated in the auditions held in 40 districts and 13 regions throughout the United States and Canada, sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera National Council. Given the reach of the auditions, the number of applicants, and the long tradition associated with them, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions are considered the most prestigious in North America for singers seeking to launch an operatic career.

Soprano Kate Lindsey, who will be stepping into the title role of Cinderella later this month, stopped by this weekend's Opera for Educators session to talk to local teachers about her role in the Rossini masterpiece.

The award-winning Opera for Educators series explores opera from an interdisciplinary point of view allowing teachers to gain insight about opera and the historical context in which it was created.

From time to time, they are also treated with visits from the stars of the opera's they are learning about, rehearsals and recitals. 

Additionally, teachers recieve up to two LAUSD salary points for their participation in the program.

Visit LA Opera.com for more information on Opera for Educators.

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Tickets become available tomorrow, March 14 at 10am.
 

With five upcoming tests, an essay to write, and a lost hour of sleep, I really didn't want to go to Noah’s Flood rehearsal on Sunday. I’d spent the weekend studying, sneezing, and wallowing in self-pity. When I finally dragged myself out of the house, though, everything changed. The opera pixies took over: the moment I signed myself in, all the stress disappeared, and I was ready to sing.

Assistant Conductor Paul Floyd leads the adults in a music rehearsal.

The day started with a change of scenery. Instead of practicing in the auditorium as usual, we switched places with the children and went into the upstairs classroom. There, we reviewed the opening scene with assistant director Heather. Before I could get totally wrapped up in it, though, a few of us were pulled out for costume fitting. The group of us went into a small room, and we were greeted by costume designer Paula Higgins. After taking our measurements, she gave us costumes to try on. I loved mine immediately—it really looked and felt like water. I was reluctant to take it off, but I knew I’d see it a lot in the coming weeks, so I put it back on the hanger and returned to rehearsal.

Assistant Director Heather Lipson-Bell

When we got back, we practiced the choreography with the singing and moved onto the storm scene. We waves didn’t have to learn the movements, so we stood off to the side and observed. It was so cool to just watch the scene develop—it gave us an idea of how it'll look to the audience.

After trooping downstairs and refining the opening a little more, most of the ensemble took a break. Those of us working with props, though, stepped up to rehearse with Heather and director Eli. Eli distributed wave fabric to each pair and determined our positions and cues. Then, we went over our movements and practiced engulfing the doomed. My and my wave-mate’s “victim” is absolutely terrifying when she begins drowning. To me, it looked like something out of a horror movie. Eli’s take on it was much different: he told our drownee that she’s supposed to look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Whoever talks about opera and Star Wars in the same sentence is automatically my hero.

Director Eli Villanueva leads the adults in a staging rehearsal.

With Eli’s instructions in mind, we put it all together, running through the whole storm scene with music. Since my wave-mate and I are standing at the front, we could watch the entire scene unfolding behind us. The effect is just astonishing. Enraptured as I was, I wouldn’t have minded staying longer, but time was up. Rehearsal ended with a few final announcements.

I signed myself out and walked through the door. As I left, I started remembering all that homework that lay in wait, and all that studying that had to be done. Somehow, though, it no longer looked so bad. I guess the opera pixies hadn’t abandoned me.

LA Opera artists will collaborate with more than 300 members of the greater Los Angeles community for two performances of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood (Noye's Fludde) this spring at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Conducted by LA Opera Music Director James Conlon and presented as part of the Britten 100/LA celebration, the performances will take place at 7:30pm on Friday, April 19, and at 7:30pm on Saturday, April 20.

Thanks to generous longtime support from the Dan Murphy Foundation, LA Opera is able to produce Noah's Flood and offer it free of charge as a special gift to the community. Advance tickets are required for admission; there will be a $1 per order handling fee and a four-ticket limit per household. Tickets are available now and can be reserved online at www.LAOpera.com or by phone at 213.972.8001. But hurry, they won’t last long!

Noah's Flood is presented as part of Britten 100/LA: A Celebration, a series of events taking place to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). One of several Britten operas on Biblical subjects, Noah's Flood (Op. 59, 1958) is a colorful pageant where children play all the animal roles, parading two-by-two into the ark. Regarded as Britten’s most lovable work, the opera is based on one of the famous medieval Chester mystery plays, dating back to the 15^th century.

Scored for a combination of both student orchestra musicians and a professional chamber ensemble, the opera features inspired and delightful musical innovations; for example, the raindrops are represented by the sound of a series of mugs of varying sizes slung on string and struck by wooden spoons.

Bass-baritone Yohan Yi will perform the role of Noah and mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller will be Mrs. Noah. Mr. Yi and Ms. Miller are former members of LA Opera's Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. Actor Jamieson K. Price will be heard as the Voice of God. The orchestra will include musicians from the LA Opera Orchestra performing alongside the Hamilton High School Academy of Music Orchestra and the Celebration Ringers of Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. The performers will include teachers from LA Opera’s Opera for Educators program and students from LA Opera' annual Opera Camp, as well as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Choir, the Beverly Vista Middle School Choir, students from the East LA Performing Arts Academy, the Holy Family Filipino Chorale and Children’s Concert Chorus, the Mariachi Conservatory, Pueri Cantores San Gabriel Valley, the Sacred Heart School Choir and Schola Cantorum, and participants in LA Opera's Zarzuela Project.

The stage director will be Eli Villanueva. The scenic designer is Carolina Angulo and the costume designer is Paula Higgins. The lighting designer is Tantris Hernandez. The sound designer is Jon Gottlieb and the prop designer is Melissa Ficociello.

Noah's Flood is part of the LA Opera Off Grand initiative, dedicated to presenting a wide variety of artistic exploration throughout a broad geographical area.

This production made possible by a generous grant from the Dan Murphy Foundation.

Special production support also received from the Britten-Pears Foundation, the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph A. Saunders.

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Last week Friday, a miracle of biblical proportions took place: school finally ended. A long, glorious spring break stretched before me like the rainbow after the flood. The perfect way to celebrate its arrival was going to Noah’s Flood rehearsal stress-free.

And what a celebration it was. This was the most rewarding rehearsal yet: on Sunday, everything began to come together. For the first time, the ark was brought in. With it there, we went over our wave movements, and we confirmed our various cues. As we did, the “doomed” practiced getting engulfed. I said before that their drowning looked like a horror film scene, but during this rehearsal, director Eli changed it a bit. It just got a whole lot scarier. Now, it involves the drowned rolling around on the ground. I think the situation was summed up best by one of the victims: “I need a stunt double.”

While we worked the waves, the four guardian angels practiced maneuvering the ark for the first time. I almost lost focus on my movements because I couldn’t take my eyes off the ship. With our blue strips billowing around it, it sailed and rocked and veered. Later, I went up close to the ark, and I realized that it was only a frame with fabric. Though one of my fellow waves joked that we needed CGI, I heard one lady marveling at how incredibly well it worked. She was saying that this really shows the beauty of theater: the audience is not only given a story, but is also invited to fill in the gaps and complete it. It’s kind of like how when a tree falls in a forest, it technically only makes a sound if people are there to hear it. Or maybe it’s more like a coloring book. We provide the outline, and each audience member can fill the blank spaces with his or her own colors.

After a short break, Eli got us back on our feet. It was now time to start working on the final scene. We figured out our entrances and exits and got a rough idea of the music. As we practiced, the people manipulating the rainbow sent it streaking back and forth over our heads. It was absolutely gorgeous, but as a wave, I could only imagine their pain once we hit the forty-minute mark.

As usual, the three hours of rehearsal went by quickly, and before we knew it, it was time to go home. With rehearsal over, spring break officially began. I can’t ask for a more wonderful start!

During a field trip last week, I mentioned rehearsal to one of my teachers. She asked me what show I’m doing, and I told her that it’s Noah’s Flood. “By Benjamin Britten?” she asked. “I did that show about 20 years ago!” She went on to tell me about her experience. It’s almost scary to think that in 2033, we’ll be talking about our production like that.

However, I decided to slow down and take it one rehearsal at a time — I mean, we haven’t even started rehearsing in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels yet. Rehearsal #5 took place on Saturday, instead of our usual Sunday. Because of the wicked L.A. traffic, it took a while for all of us to get to East Los Angeles Performing Arts Academy. When almost everyone had arrived, though, we began rehearsal.

There was something new in the building that day: tape markings on the floor to delineate the Cathedral’s stage area. We knew what that meant. It was time to really get down to business. Sure enough, director Eli Villanueva announced that today would be our first stumble-through rehearsal, in which we’d put all the scenes we’d learned in sequence.

After some warm-up, we dispersed to our opening positions. All of us enter from different locations, and originally, a small group of us had to run halfway around the stage area to get to our initial positions.  A few injuries later, we found our number reduced to only two. Eli greeted us with the additional happy news that he had made an executive decision: by his decree, we now had to run around the entire stage. When we finally made it to our spots a geologic era later, we ended up gasping instead of singing. I didn’t know that I had signed up for operatic boot camp!  

After Eli worked with us on the physical, assistant conductor Paul Floyd gave us tips for the singing. He told us to really think about the verbs and to energize them. Now, it sounds less like a practiced mantra, and more like a sincere prayer. With all those repeating phrases, it’s easy to simply chant the words, but Paul helped us really find the color and intention in each one.

We transitioned from the opening scene to the ark entrance. The kids came downstairs to rehearse this, and since the adult ensemble isn’t in the scene, we got to sit down and watch. What a treat! Playing various types of animals, including birds, cats, and deer, the children paraded out, swooping, prowling, or prancing up the ramp and into the ark. My wavemate and I alternated between happily singing along with the animals and going insane because of the cuteness. By the time the mice came out, we were literally dying.

Luckily, break came next, so we had time to recover. We bonded over Shakespeare, dying oranges, and free verse about cement. As cheesy as it sounds, theater really brings people together and makes them bond over the most random things!

After break, we continued from right where we left off. With our animals in the ark, we proceeded to the flood scene. With all of us together for the first time, the power of the music ballooned us up, infusing the scene with an incredible collective energy. Instead of simply being the manipulator of a fabric strip, I keenly felt my own role in the drama. My wave and I had become a living, breathing character.

It’s really all coming together now. I can’t believe that we’re already halfway through the program, and only about three weeks away from the performance. And I can see it already—with each rehearsal, we’re also a little closer to 2033, when we’ll be talking on and on about Britten’s centennial year and that amazing production we put together.

Jay Hunter Morris, one of today's tenors in the Wagnerian repertory, will return to LA Opera to perform the role of Erik in the final two performances of The Flying Dutchman on March 27 and 30. Mr. Morris had originally been scheduled to appear as Erik, but was forced to cancel his appearance when a severe case of gastroenteritis made it impossible for him to begin rehearsals in February. Corey Bix subsequently replaced Mr. Morris as Erik for the first two performances of The Flying Dutchman, but has had to withdraw from the production himself due to illness; the role was performed on March 21 and 24 by tenor John Pickle, who will remain in Los Angeles to cover the role. 

Jay Hunter Morris has previously appeared with LA Opera in 2006 as Unferth in the world premiere of Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel and in 2008 as Marky in the U.S. premiere of Howard Shore's The Fly. After 2011 appearances in the title role of Siegfried with San Francisco Opera, he has since performed that role in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera. He will perform Siegfried again with the Met later this spring and he will appear in the 2016 Ring cycle at Houston Grand Opera.

He will reprise the role of Erik in The Flying Dutchman this summer at Glimmerglass Opera. He has previously performed Erik at Seattle Opera, Opera Australia, Arizona Opera and Atlanta Opera.  Other recent appearances include Captain Ahab in Jake Heggie's Moby Dick at San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera and at the Adelaide Festival, and Tristan in Tristan und Isolde for Welsh National Opera and at the Edinburgh Festival. For more information about Mr. Morris, please visit www.JayHunterMorris.com.

The final two performances of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman will take place on Wednesday, March 27, and on Saturday, March 30. Both performances will take place at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $19 and can be purchased in person at the LA Opera Box Office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, by phone at 213.972.8001 or online at www.laopera.com.

Crew View: Scenery Change-over from Flying Dutchman to Cinderella from LA Opera on Vimeo.

Using a time-lapse photography technique, our FOH (front of house) and backstage crewcams captured the scenery change-over from The Flying Dutchman to Cinderella.

Reposted from LA Weekly's Public Spectacle Arts & Culture Blog:

LA Opera's current production of Rossini's La Cenerentola (aka Cinderella) has no glass slippers, no coach that turns into a pumpkin, no evil stepmother and absolutely no bippity boppity boo. But it is a fun visual feast, a comic opera in cartoon colors, thanks largely to the work of set and costume designer Joan Guillén. Guillén, who has taught set design in Barcelona for 40 years, makes his LA Opera debut with La Cenerentola, which opened to a sold-out house at the Dorothy Chandler on March 23.

Gioachino Rossini, known especially for The Barber of Seville, was only in his twenties when he and his librettist pal Jacopo Ferretti cranked out La Cenerentola in three weeks, but he had already established himself as an innovative composer adept at mixing comedy with moments of pathos. Ferretti replaced the glass slipper with two sparkly bracelets and the fairy godmother with a Dumbledore-esque tutor/wizard. But otherwise, La Cenerentola, which premiered in 1817, has the catchy tunes and rapid-fire alliterative articulation for which Rossini is loved.Guillén, the LA Opera production's designer, is also a cartoonist, illustrator and sculptor, and he brought all of these sensibilities into play when designing the costumes and sets for La Cenerentola, incorporating animated colors and geometric forms into his pieces. He cites as influences Constructivism (an industrial, angular style with geometric elements) and, more recently, Minimalism (a design philosophy in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect).

In La Cenerentola, large bustles and wirework give the designs a sculptural quality, and bold, primary costume colors illustrate character. "All of my scenic work is characterized by the use of a rich palette," Guillén says in an interview, translated from Spanish. "As a viewer, I'm tired of the abuse of black and white in many of the productions I see. It seems that scenic designers have a fear of using color."

However, Guillén says he distinguishes "between the use of vivid colors that illuminate personality in the characters from the color that I utilize in the scenery. In La Cenerentola, the scenery is at first gray, and later the light transforms into color planes. That always makes it a neutral background for the vivid colors worn by the characters, since they are the real stars."

For example, the hammy evil stepsisters sport Marge Simpson hair in nearly neon pink and yellow, with tiny feathered hats perched comically on top. The prince's courtiers wear cobalt blue wigs, the hems of their multi-tiered, multi-colored coats held out in a circle with wire.

Inspired by the world of cartoons, he says, "I have incorporated in my scenic designs just the essential features needed to understand the character that's being portrayed or an element of the scene...In the operas of Rossini, the characters are direct, and show their souls as they appear. It's not a psychological theater, where you need to explain the whole opera to understand how a character is."My designs have to be clear and emphatic as they appear onstage," he adds. "For example, the use of the color violet to draw Don Magnifico [Cinderella's stepfather]: this color is a pale reflection of the former glory of another era, but shows he is still resisting fading away definitively."

As a reflection of her innocence, Cinderella is always clothed in pale, neutral colors, from her gray and beige rags to her shiny white ballgown, virginal veil and curled wig. Her only spot of color is her vibrant red hair, displaying that her "color" is a natural part of her, not an affectation like her garishly dressed stepsisters.

Although he says he gets "excited about any job," Guillén confesses that he would love to be able to apply his talents to a Wagner opera, with their drama and psychological complexity. "It would be a beautiful challenge."

Mezzo-Soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller is no stranger to LA Opera. An alumna of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, and with LA Opera appearances including Marcellina in The Marriage of Figaro, Florence Pike in Albert Herring and Flosshilde/Schwertleite in the Ring cycle, she has become a seasoned (and supremely gifted) member of the LA Opera family. Ronnita has the distinction of being in both Cinderella (La Cenerentola) as Tisbe and The Flying Dutchman as Mary at the same time! Not an easy task, but Ronnita makes it look effortless.  

We aksed Ronnita 10 questions about opera, life, and what's next on her busy agenda.  And in the process learned a lot about this talented singer. 

Who do you love more these days, Wagner or Rossini?

Well, I'm not sure. Mary is definitely a little more challenging; her character is a little more of a challenge vocally and dramatically. Rossini, and the other bel canto composers keep me honest. I have to say that so far, I'm digging Rossini, even though the part of Tisbe really scared me at first.

If you could keep one of the costumes from either production, which would you choose?

Honestly? Neither.  

Have you dreamt that Clorinda would appear in Dutchman?  Or that Mary would be Cinderella’s more morose sister?

I've never dreamt that either of these things would happen. But wouldn't it be hilarious if you saw one of the stepsister’s wigs ascending from the trap instead of Mary, coming in to wreak havoc?

What’s currently on your iPod?

There is A LOT of music on my iPod. Most of it is pop, jazz, and alternative music. I do have opera. But when I'm not working, I listen to a lot of pop music. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bob Marley are all favorites and had big influences. They didn't save anything when they stepped onstage. It still inspires me. Any artist that can be so amazingly talented, practice so thoroughly, and yet, achieve such total freedom onstage is magnificent. I'm also a big fan of Bruno Mars and Adele. They're on heavy repeat right now.

Have you and Stacy Tappan recorded ‘Sisters’ from White Christmas? 

We have not…yet.

Do you have a favorite moment in Cinderella?

Yes, the moment when Tisbe decides to not follow her older sister.  One can always choose to be a better person.

When you’re not onstage, what’s your favorite way to occupy your time?

During a show when I'm not onstage, I'm probably dancing in the hallway, talking to people, or playing with my iPad. If it's in rehearsal, I may even crochet.  When I'm not at rehearsal or onstage, I'm probably learning music, reading, or playing Tomb Raider on my PC or Just Dance on Wii.  I like video games a lot.

How/when did you decide to become an opera singer?

Well, being an extremely introverted and slightly shy person (no one ever believes that), I actually had a lot of trouble getting up and singing, much less speaking in front of people.  I joined chorus because there was this cute guy that I wanted to get to know.  I got in, but I never wanted to sing solos.  For some reason I decided to major in music with an extremely heavy science course load.  I actually cried the first time my opera director in undergrad asked me to sing.  I would cry at solo and ensemble competitions in high school when I would have to sing (I also played viola, with no problems).  I guess I was always afraid of my voice, afraid of people looking, watching me do something that was so vulnerable.  I think opera came as the result of two things, me being really shy but wanting to be able to express all the emotions I felt in some way and also because I was never really any good at singing gospel or jazz.  The ability to sing – that came later, through classical training, funny enough.

What’s your dream role?

In a perfect world, I would LOVE to sing Carmen and Amneris.  They have always been my two favorite ladies. Carmen, because she is so strong and beats men at their own game. She takes life as it comes and there is an incredible vulnerability in addition to her strength, which I think is why she's so incredibly irresistible. 

Amneris because, although she's typically classified as a villain (she is kind of a spoiled brat, she's never had to doubt anything could be hers as a princess), she is motivated by love.  Not in its greatest form, but it's the one thing she wants, that unfortunately, she can't have.  This, I can personally identify with. Everything she does is motivated by this fact.

Following your current run at LA Opera, what’s next for you?

 After my run with LA Opera, I go to cover Erda and the First Norn in Siegfried and Gotterdammerung at the Met, a concert at the Cincinnati May Festival, and then I prepare to move to Germany [to join the Deutsche Oper Berlin]!

LA Opera's April 3 performance of Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) marked the debut of a new singer in the title role—Georgian mezzo-soprano Ketevan Kemoklidze—as well as a special milestone for Music Director James Conlon: his 200th mainstage performance at LA Opera.

The performance was attended by Claudio Bisogniero, the Ambassador of Italy to the United States, and Giuseppe Perrone, Consul General of Italy in Los Angeles, who came backstage afterward to congratulate Mr. Conlon and to meet the members of the cast (which includes three Italian singers: baritone Alessandro Corbelli as Don Magnifico, baritone Vito Priante as Dandini and bass Nicola Ulivieri as Alidoro). Ambassador Bisogniero is currently visiting Southern California as part of an official mission in celebration of the 2013 "Year of Italian Culture in the United States." This initiative is a showcase of Italian culture and identity and what they mean to the American public.

In addition to 200 fully-staged productions at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mr. Conlon has also conducted six concerts for LA Opera, as well as six community opera productions at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and five Opera Camp performances of Hans Krása's children's opera Brundibar. Mr. Conlon became Music Director of LA Opera in 2006, and recently renewed his contract through 2018. 

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Early on in Sunday’s Noah’s Flood rehearsal, director Eli pronounced, “We really have to go overboard.”  Whether or not the pun was intended, I’d say that was the theme of the day: testing our limits. The thing is, we had everything in place, and our new job was to turn it up several notches and amplify it—even if that meant completely overdoing it and feeling so embarrassed that we’d never want to face Eli again.

With this objective in mind, we plunged right into rehearsal, running through the opening scene several times. After carefully observing us, Eli pointed to the open door, through which we could see a distant fence at the edge of the campus. He told us to keep in mind that there would be audience members that far away, and that we had to effectively convey the story to them. Therefore, it had to be bigger, louder, and way past the boundary of ridiculous. We had to shed the “armor of appropriateness” and “really explore what embarrasses you.” We took his words to heart and started translating them into action, elongating our bodies and stretching our arms as much as possible. We had extra motivation since he announced that the first person who touched the ceiling would get a thousand dollars.

Next, as the kids rehearsed their ark entrance, assistant director Heather took the “waves” and “doomed” outside to practice.  Since it was so windy, our fabric strips wouldn’t listen to us, instead flapping every which way and talking back. It was exhausting, but it actually added a splash of realism. Now, during the storm scene, I can truly imagine the wind whipping my wave and my clothes and my hair. And plus, my wavemate and I had fun pretending that our wave was a parachute and that we were going to fly away.

As we went back inside, my wavemate and I nearly got trampled by the animals, but we narrowly avoided this fate and got to watch the rest of their ark entrance scene. When working with the kids, Eli told them something similar to what he told us: he said that the scene felt a little tentative and that it needed to be bolder. He said to them, “I’m giving you permission to make mistakes.”

Once they had worked on the scene a little more, we waves stepped in and the storm began. With Eli’s words in mind, I threw myself so fully into the motions and the music that I don’t quite remember what happened. All I know is that my limbs are really sore and that, according to my wavemate’s mom, I had quite a lethal facial expression.

Together with the animals, we sang our parts, and then slowly exited the stage. However, assistant conductor Paul, who was accompanying us on the piano, didn’t stop playing. For the first time, he kept on going, right to the very last note. There were several moments of silence. Then, we burst into applause.

And that’s how our very last ensemble rehearsal ended. Next week, the principals and the community orchestra will join us, and then we’ll be moving to our actual performance venue, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Each rehearsal is more exciting than the last—who knew that embarrassing yourself can be this fun?

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

It’s really impossible to call Saturday’s Noah’s Flood practice a “rehearsal.” With all the hilarity, wonderful music, excitement, surprises, and star-struck moments, it had all the makings of a smashing party.

I arrived at the rehearsal venue, East LA Performing Arts Academy (ELAPAA), two hours earlier than usual—our rehearsal this time was five hours long. Before I even entered the auditorium, I heard the purr of strings and chatter of woodwinds. I stepped through the door and stared. For the first time, an orchestra was there. Rehearsal hadn’t even started, and I was already insanely happy and excited.

After several minutes, LA Opera staff member Anthony Jones began the opening announcements. He started by introducing the orchestra: the Hamilton High School orchestra and the Celebration Ringers, a 5^th through 8^th grade handbell ensemble. I never even knew that such a thing existed.  He introduced the stage managers and the principal kids and teens playing Noah’s sons and their wives, as well as the gossips. Finally, he introduced Noah (bass-baritone Yohan Yi), the Voice of God (actor Jamieson Price), and the pianist. I hope I didn’t scream that loudly when he said the name Nino Sanikidze.

We kicked off rehearsal by plunging immediately into wave practice, this time with the principals. We went over the drowning of the gossips and reviewed our positions.  After we had gone over the drowning a few times, the rest of the ensemble joined us to rehearse the full storm scene with the orchestra. I got my first glimpse of Mr. Yi, standing in the ark. When he started singing, I was completely star-struck—I couldn’t believe I was onstage with an artist like him. I just kept staring at him while I waited for the fact to register. It never really did.

At last, we got to see all the scenes between the opening and the ark entrance. The first in this sequence is the one in which God speaks to Noah for the first time. We were all excited to hear what God sounded like, but finding out was a little terrifying. Standing above all of us on the auditorium stage, Mr. Price spoke his opening lines into a microphone. There’s no one word that can adequately describe his voice except for summoning — put simply, it’s the perfect Voice of God.

The scenes after God’s address were of Noah’s children and their wives building the ark, of Mrs. Noah and the gossips laughing at them, and finally, of their  children dragging Mrs. Noah onboard right before the storm. It was great to finally see how our ensemble scenes fit into the big picture, and also, many of the principals were my Opera Camp friends, so I had a blast chatting with them and watching them rehearse. Plus, seeing Director Eli filling in for Ronnita Nicole Miller as Mrs. Noah was a real moment to remember.

After a break, we continued rehearsal. When my wave-mate and I walked back into the auditorium, Mr. Price was still onstage, towering above everybody. My wave-mate and I were a bit intimidated and avoiding eye contact, but he noticed the two of us and gave us a kind smile. That was one of the highlights of rehearsal. We proceeded to go around telling everyone that God had smiled at us.

Next we moved on from the ark entrance and began the storm. With the orchestra playing full-throttle, the whole auditorium seemed to expand. There was a new sense of hugeness and space to be filled, and this began to translate into our motions and singing.

When the storm was over, the teen and adult ensemble members got a chance to rest, since our only remaining scene to perform was the finale. It wasn’t a very relaxing break, though—every time Mr. Price uttered “Noah…” into the microphone, we all jumped. We eventually came to anticipate it, but the first time, everyone had a mini-heart attack and the guy next to me even screamed. We could only imagine how poor Noah must have felt hearing that voice from the sky.  With almost all the elements present, the performance became grander, bigger, fuller. I can hardly imagine where it’ll be by showtime.

It won’t be long before we find out. On Monday, April 15, tech week begins, and we’ll be in our performance venue, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. This was our final rehearsal in ELAPAA, and as we left the building, we bid the wonderful space goodbye.

Saturday’s rehearsal was quite a party: we’ve reunited with friends, sung glorious music, and received a smile from God. Something tells me, though, that the best is still ahead: the party has only just started.

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood.  Performances are April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

It’s official: Noah’s Flood has taken over my life.

Just look at my Monday, for example. For starters, on Sunday night, my dreams were all about the opera. Then, in school, I wasted my free time watching Noah’s Ark cartoons on YouTube. A little later, I headed to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for a three-hour rehearsal. Finally, when I got home at 10pm, the first thing I did was rush to the computer and start this blog post. So many exciting things happened that simply going to bed wasn’t even an option: Monday was equal parts rehearsal and adventure.

As Day 1 of tech week, Monday was a bit hectic. I had to squeeze all my homework into the two hours between school and rehearsal. However, it was “happy trouble.” I just couldn’t wait to be in the Cathedral, and the time finally came. As I walked to the entrance, I took it all in. The building jutted sharply up to the sky, cut out in slanting planes and stark angles. I was filled with awe and reverence. I signed in and entered the vaulted, mystical chapel at last.  

I soon found my wave-mate sitting in the choir pews, and I joined her. We spotted Noah (Yohan Yi) and for the first time, Mrs. Noah (Ronnita Nicole Miller) sitting in the pews. I found out that my wave-mate also loves her, and of course, we started “fan-girling” together. I’m Facebook friends with Ms. Miller, and I met her once backstage. However, I wasn’t sure whether she remembered me or not. My wave-mate and I decided that no matter what, we’d approach her and see what would happen.

We didn’t have time for that yet, though—Director Eli promptly got us on our feet to walk around the Cathedral and get a feel for the space. Then, after that, he had us go to our opening positions. There was some confusion about our places, since this was our first time in the Cathedral. Soon, though, we sorted it out. As I walked down the aisle to get to my position, I nervously passed by Ms. Miller and Mr. Yi.  Ms. Miller noticed me and broke into a huge smile, waving. She actually remembered me! Ecstatic, I waved back, and Mr. Yi also smiled and said hello. They began to feel less like celebrities and more like real people.

We proceeded to rehearse the opening scene. In the huge Cathedral, it was almost eerie to hear our own voices. However, singing the phrase “Lord Jesus, think on me” in a holy building added an element of raw sincerity and even fear to our words. Eli encouraged us to key into these emotions and to make our singing and our actions bigger and fuller. After we went over the opening scene several times, we ensemble members sat back down in the choir pews. Then, Jamieson Price, playing The Voice of God, spoke his first lines. I thought the huge Cathedral would make his voice sound scarier, but instead, it served as a natural vessel for the sheer gravity of his voice. Everything was really starting to fit into place.

From this time, we occupied ourselves with watching the principals. Seeing and hearing Ms. Miller so close up sent me back into fan-girl mode. I’d always seen her in LA Opera productions, and now, here she was, singing right in front of me. Better yet, we’d be singing with her. It was unbelievable.

Break time came. During the first half, my wave-mate, her sister, and I explored the vast outside area. Then, my wave-mate and I resolved to approach Ms. Miller as we had planned. We found her sitting in the pews with Mr. Yi, and I introduced my wave-mate to her. We had expected it to be a quick introduction, but to our surprise, Ms. Miller kept on talking with us, and Mr. Yi joined in. By the time rehearsal resumed, we had talked about chicken, brownies, and Björk. Since Ms. Miller will be covering Erda and singing the First Norn at the Met, she also treated us to her spin on Rheingold. I vote Ronnita Nicole Miller as the next Anna Russell.

We had to end the conversation when rehearsal started up again. In the final half of Noah’s Flood rehearsal, we went from the storm to the finale. We had trouble translating some of our movements to the Cathedral, since we’d been rehearsing in the East LA Performing Arts Academy auditorium all this time. However, when it finally began coming together, it really started looking and sounding spectacular. In a way that’s difficult to describe, the Cathedral setting has brought out shades and colors in the opera that would have been lost in a theater. Benjamin Britten intended Noah’s Flood to be performed in a church, and I think all of us are beginning to realize why.

The first day of tech week is down, and there are five more days to go. It won’t be easy, though—I have a feeling that if this adventure continues as it did on Monday, I won’t be getting to bed anytime soon. 

Muse Lee, our favorite high school blogger, has returned for a series on her participation in the Community Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood. Performances were this past weekend, April 19 and 20 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  This is her final post in the series.

Tuesday and Wednesday

I’ve been saying the word “almost” a lot: we’re “almost” there, it’s “almost” coming together, etc. During Noah’s Flood rehearsal on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, we finally abandoned “almost” and took that leap.

On Tuesday, we rehearsed the performance with the community choirs and orchestras for the first time at the Cathedral. Both elements added incredible majesty, grandeur, and energy. Still, the performance remained at the “almost” stage.

However, on Wednesday we added four main things: costumes, lights, the LA Opera Orchestra members, and most exciting of all, Maestro James Conlon.  And one that day, two things happened that completely changed the game.

The first of these things came in the form of a surprise visitor: a bespectacled man with a close-trimmed beard. Blinking, I whispered to Noah (Yohan Yi), “Is that Christopher Koelsch?!” It really was.  That’s when I really sank in that we were part of something so significant that it called for a visit by LA Opera’s President and CEO. My determination hardened. I would do all I could to help make it a great performance.

For me, that set the tone for the whole day. When the time came for rehearsal to start, we went to the halls flanking the sanctuary to review notes and warm up. As we did, we heard a murmur and applause from inside. Maestro Conlon had arrived.

I knew that the second I ran out into the sanctuary for my opening position, I would see him up there on the podium. My nervousness escalated, and the beatings of my heart hurtled to a peak. The thundering opening chords sounded. My running partner and I exchanged a glance; it was our cue.

At that moment, the second amazing thing happened. The moment I took off sprinting, my nervousness immediately converted itself to fear and anger. I ran down the aisle, bursting with desperation, searching everywhere for answers. When I skidded to a halt, it wasn’t me anymore, but at last, my character. For the first time, I carried my voice to the breaking point, singing on the edge of danger.

Throughout the program, director Eli Villanueva, assistant conductor Paul Floyd, and assistant director Heather Lipson-Bell have been urging us to realize our intention. Up until that point, it had been make believe. Now, one by one, we were all finding our own meaning in the words and actions.

We bumped through the rest of the opera, costume changes and Maestro Conlon and all. By the end of rehearsal, the only element left to add was an audience, which would come in during Thursday’s final dress rehearsal.

On the first day of tech week, Monday, I don’t think any of us could honestly say we were prepared to perform. By the time we hit Wednesday, we crossed the boundary between “almost” and “finally.” Thursday, Friday, Saturday, here we come. We couldn’t feel any more ready.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday

At this point, I began reflecting on all parts of my Noah’s Flood experience—the beautiful music, the friendships made with the ensemble members and principals, the number of times we imitated Jamieson Price (Voice of God)—and I keenly felt the fact that it would all be over soon. I knew that it wouldn’t end without a bang: the last three days would be a stunning finale. 

The first of these three days, Thursday, was our final dress rehearsal. For the first time, we had a handful of people in the audience. It went smoothly, and the audience loved the performance.

We still hadn’t endured the greatest test, though. On Friday, all of our emotions were at a peak. The stress from tech week had now accumulated, and it now aggravated by opening night nerves. It didn’t help that we were told that two thousand people were coming.

Downstairs, assistant director Heather Lipson-Bell led us through our warm-ups and review. Halfway through, Eli came in. He stood up on the platform and began to speak to us. “On Monday,” he admitted, “I was concerned.” He went on to tell us how we had then invested all that we had into the performance, and how it had now evolved into something truly beautiful. He concluded by saying, “Let your bodies and souls reach the heavens, and just do what you know to do.”

With his words in mind, we went upstairs to the sanctuary and got into our places. When we saw all the pews swelling with people, our hearts fluttered again. “This is what two thousand people looks like…” someone whispered. Eli’s words, though, repeated in our minds: “Let your bodies and souls reach the heavens. Just do what you know to do.”

And that’s exactly what we did.

Hearing the applause of thousands of people is a frightening, cathartic, overwhelming moment. We glanced around at each other, smiling uncontrollably. We had done it, and we felt fully confident to do it again on Saturday.

Saturday’s routine was the same as Friday’s: we brought our quick-change costumes upstairs, and then went back downstairs to warm up, review, and receive our final pep talk. Eli expressed how proud he was of us, and thanked us for giving our all. For the final time, we went to our opening positions.

Knowing that it would be my last time singing each number, I poured more than I ever had before into the performance. I tapped into my desperation during “Lord Jesus, think on me,” and let loose my fury in the storm scene. At last, we reached the finale. As we sang the soaring, wondrous melody of “What though in solemn silence all,” with the choirs and orchestra triumphantly accompanying us, I gazed out into the audience, and my throat constricted. When I sang the last “Amen” and slowly retreated offstage with the rest of the cast, there was no stopping it anymore. I sank down in the choir pews and wept into my sleeve.

The lights went back on, and audience swept us up in warm, rushing applause. We bowed and waved, still in disbelief. Then, when the audience began to disperse, I met up with my wave-mate. We went downstairs to hang up our costumes for the last time.

Muse and her "wave-mate" Ellie after the performance

There were still tears in my eyes as we went down the stairs and said goodbye to all the staff and ensemble members. That night, before and after, there were many incredible moments, but I think it’s best to end by relating a single incident.

Over the course of the program, I had become friends with a young man with an intellectual disability. He was always cheerful and bubbly, and whenever he saw anyone, he would break into a huge smile. That night, as I spoke with my wave-mate through tears, he walked in and noticed me. For a moment, he watched uncertainly. Then, he stepped forward and tightly wrapped his arms around me for a long embrace. When he finally pulled away, I looked up. To my surprise, there were now tears gathered in his eyes as well. Struggling not to cry, he hugged me and my wave-mate one more time, and shakily said goodbye. “Next year,” I managed to reply. He nodded, bravely smiled, and then slowly walked away.

I’ve covered this Community Opera program over nine blog posts. However, I think describing this one moment makes all of them unnecessary.

By William Berger

Tosca drives people crazy. The opera brings out venom in people—even in people who normally digest the outrageousness of other operas with ease. Composer Benjamin Britten said he was “sickened” by the music’s “cheapness and emptiness,” and the astute critic Joseph Kerman famously called it a “shabby little shocker.” Much of this has to do with the title character. Driving people crazy, as we’ll see, is sort of her job.

Beyond the classic denunciations, Tosca is routinely called out as “vulgar,” “sensationalist” and “overly emotional.” Indeed, it is standard—and even expected—to look down on this opera as if it were a bordello—or a telenovela. But while some people maintain a sense of shocked condescension toward this enormously popular work, the Hispanic world possesses unique tools to appreciate Tosca and to unpack its treasures with penetrating insight not readily available elsewhere.

Some of Tosca’s connection to Latinos abides in the importance of the city of Rome. Other operas happen to be set in Rome, but nowhere is the mythical power of the Eternal City more central than in Tosca. Latins are closer to the mythical fascination exerted by Rome (home of the original Latins) than Anglo-Saxons are: the name Anglo-Saxon recalls the Germanic tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire, while the term Latino claims an intimate relationship with Romanità (“Roman-ness”). Sancho Panza annoyed Don Quijote by constantly repeating the proverb “Bien está San Pedro en Roma”—my Mexican grandmother annoyed me too with that proverb, more recently. Spanish is a Latin language, but there’s more. There is the Roman Catholic heritage of Latin America.

An important part of that heritage is the “Quadriga,” the four-fold method of textual analysis that was (and officially still is) at the core of Catholic thought. This Quadriga is a system of reading a sacred text—and, by implication, everything else—on four levels: (1) literal; (2) allegorical; (3) theological; and (4) anagogical. To properly interpret a passage of scripture (or anything else), one should understand (1) that it actually happened; (2) that it has other meanings beyond the literal; (3) that it has moral implications; and, most important for our present purposes, (4) that it has an anagogical dimension. An “anagoge,” from the Greek word for “leading,” means something pointing to a future event. In Christian scripture, according to the Quadriga, the manna in the desert is important anagogically because it prefigures the bread of the Last Supper, another meal sent by God. An event, therefore, can exist in two (or more) moments in time.

The Protestant mind works differently, with no Quadriga, an emphasis on literalism, and a veneration of The Word. Eucharist, where it exists at all, is commemorative or symbolic of something that happened two millennia ago. And as with events, so too with objects. One thing cannot be another thing if it is literally that thing: that is, bread and wine, being bread and wine, cannot be something else (e.g. flesh and blood) except symbolically. But symbolism is something else—it is one thing standing for another. An anagogical interpretation means one thing can be itself and something else at the same time. Bread and wine can be flesh and blood without ceasing to be bread and wine.

The same pattern holds true for people as well as events. Eve is important as herself and as a prototype of Mary, and so forth. Folk traditions in Latin countries manifest this even clearer. In Las Posadas, people become the Holy Family and angels, shepherds and others around them. Protestants might sing about the Nativity or re-enact it in pantomimes, but they will not aim to become the Holy Family as in Las Posadas. The Hispanic traditions associated with La Semana Santa and especially Good Friday show how intensely carnal this association with sacred events can become. Archetypes can directly inhabit the very bodies in Latin communities. The man who is “being” Christ or Pilate in a Hispanic pageant does not cease to be himself. One can be two people at once, filtered through an anagogical mindset, and not only in religious areas. Thus a Latino can freely address someone who is not in fact a relation as “mi hijo,” “mamacita” or “papi.” This simply does not happen in English.

This permeates the literature of Latin America. The impossibly long-lived characters in Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction [e.g. El inmortal, et al.] are a form of anagogical type; so are the ghosts that recur in Gabriel García Marquéz’ Cien años de soledad, not to mention the ghost that makes love to his widow better than her new husband in Jorge Amados’ Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos. People exist in different times and places in the genre of magical realism, which flourishes in Latin America. And while magical realism exists elsewhere (possibly including Kafka et al., depending on who applies the labels), it is particularly at home throughout Latin America—perhaps owing to this background of Roman anagogical thinking. So being Latino is not only about how one conjugates a verb, or how (or if) one prays: it’s also about how one reads and relates to a text—and everything is a text.

Latins can easily see Tosca as a multitude of archetypes—and no less because she is also meant to be a real woman walking around a real city on the afternoon of June 17, 1800 (the date of the opera’s action). She is a “diva” and can be understood as a sort of Maenad (a follower of the god of wine called Dionysos in Greece and Bacchus in Rome) creating a healthy level of disorder amid the stifling Apollonian order of the overbearing state represented by Scarpia. She slices him up like a proper frenzied woman of Greek mythology when confronted by a minister of Apollo (Scarpia here, Pentheus in Euripides) who reject the divinity of chaos: Note Scarpia’s shocked comment when he enters the church (and the opera) and sees the kids having fun—of all things—in Act I: “Tal baccano in chiesa!” “What a bacchanalia (festival in honor of Bacchus, i.e., drunken, drug-ridden orgy) in church!” He is preternaturally opposed to anything Bacchic/Dionysian.

The character Tosca is a bacchanalia on two legs. For starters, she is a singer of opera, an art form invented as an attempt to recreate the spirit of the ancient Athenian Drama Festivals, the Dionysia, given in honor of Dionysos/Bacchus. And while Apollonians look down on Dionysians, the Maenads dismembered Apollonians at their drunken orgies. Tosca merely slices Scarpia with a knife and tells him to choke to death on his own blood… There are limits, even in this opera.

How appropriate, then, that María Guadalupe Jiménez López, the alleged drug cartel enforcer suspected of 20 murders who was apprehended last year in Monterrey, Mexico, is known as “La Tosca.” Tosca in Spanish means rude in a sloppy way – I remember that same grandmother telling me “No seas tosco!” when I knocked over glasses on the table – but there are many derogatory words for rude people (especially women) in Spanish. But since this woman is an enemy of the state, a subversive, and an agent of chaos as well as a killer, no name is better than La Tosca—whether anybody who named her was conscious of the opera or not. This Maenad roamed ancient Greece; she was in Rome in 1800; and she has recently been arrested in Monterrey. Borges himself couldn’t have made it any clearer.

Puccini’s original stage directions have Tosca leap to her death off the Castel Sant’Angelo at the climax of this intense opera. This is the final straw for many critics of the work. Yet it’s the perfect example of how a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon can see two disparate things in the same object. In this case, an iconic event from Mexican history would have informed a Roman audience’s understanding of this striking stage moment.

The Niños Heroes of Chapultepec are familiar inspirational figures throughout Mexico. The six cadets, ages 13 through 19, were serving in the Mexican military academy at Chapultepec Castle overlooking Mexico City when it was under attack from the United States Army in 1847. The cadets refused to retreat or surrender, and died defending the castle against hopeless odds. It is said that one of the cadets, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leapt to his death to prevent the flag’s dishonorable capture by the Americans. Newer scholarship has cast doubt on the historicity of this occurrence, but the legend continues, amplified by a searing overhead mural by Gabriel Flores at Chapultepec. Every year, six cadets are honored as the Boy Heroes, the Niños Heroes, wrapped in Mexican flags, and the names of the original six are called out as the crowd—in a ritual familiar throughout Latin American—responds “presente!” The Heroes are alive, and dead, again.

The martyrdom of the Niños Heroes seems to have echoed powerfully in Rome shortly afterward. In 1849, the Pope, ruler of the Papal State centered in the Eternal City, had fled Rome and been replaced by a short-lived republic. Garibaldi was among those fighting for the end of Papal rule in Rome and with the long-term goal of a unified, independent nation. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, also an important leader of this Italian “Risorgimento” movement, arrived in January to produce his new opera La Battaglia di Legnano. This was an incendiary work of thrilling choruses and patriotic rhetoric, commemorating a significant moment in Italian history in 1182, when Italians briefly put aside their differences and successfully fought the German-led forces occupying the country. The climactic moment of the opera is in Act III: the tenor has been locked in a tower to suffer the disgrace of missing out on the battle. Unable to bear this, he wraps himself in the red, white, and green Italian flag (an obvious anachronism for 1182, but a powerful symbol in 1849), cries “Viva Italia!” and leaps out the window. (A figure in the orchestral prelude gives us the hint that this tower is fortunately surrounded by a moat). He gets to Legnano and dies fighting for his country, praised by the crowds. The 1849 premiere of this opera at Rome’s Teatro Apollo was a sensation. In one performance, a man sitting in an upper balcony proscenium box was so moved to patriotic action that he wrapped himself in the Italian flag, cried “Viva Italia!” and leapt into the orchestra, unharmed. Or so the story goes….

Rome, with its busy diplomatic community (including a Mexican delegation) must have been aware of the tales of Chapultepec a year before. And the image of a doomed hero, fighting a Germanic (or Anglo-Saxon) invader, flying through the air wrapped in a red, white and green flag would have had inherent power for Latin audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The audience at Tosca’s 1900 Rome premiere would have had a collective memory of the Legnano premiere 50 years before—surely someone in the audience had been there. And its effect would have differed from its effect on the dismissive English-speaking critics who saw, and see, nothing in Tosca’s leap but a Roman diva over-acting one last time.

The music of the finale also confounds many: it’s a restatement of the big theme from the tenor’s aria earlier in the act, “E lucevan le stelle.” Kerman said the orchestra thunders out “the first theme that pops into its head,” which is truly unfair. Whatever shortcomings Puccini had from an academic point of view, no one can say he couldn’t come up with a new melody when he needed one. In fact, the reviewer for the Buenos Aires paper La Prensa wrote from the world premiere of Tosca in Rome that Puccini had written a more complex work than his previous operas, one which deftly managed “Italian melodic simplicity” (“sencillez melodica italiana”) so as not to “shut oneself up” (“encerrarse”) in the style of French and German modernists (La Prensa, January 15, 1900). It was an insightful and specifically Latin observation to see Puccini’s use of melody as an effective choice of directness, and a liberating rejection of inhibiting Northern European models.

The sort of theme Puccini uses in the tenor aria and then restates at the finale is called a slancio, which means many things: impulse, rush, outburst, leap or jump, even. The term also contains references to lanciare, to launch or hurl, and lancia, a spear. Spear in Latin is jacula, and to cast one is ejaculare, whose cognates in English and Spanish are obvious. Tosca’s final deed, therefore, is a leap, an act of love, and a climax. She cries out to her enemy Scarpia that she will meet him before God, and this calls forth the slancio in the orchestra. So this act is also a declaration that she, as a sexual being, has a right to stand in confidence before the judgment of God.

Perhaps much of one’s reaction to the finale of the opera has to do with one’s point of view toward sex, or at least its role in the opera house. Curiously, the critic reviewing the Montevideo premiere of Tosca singled out the tenor’s aria as “very elegant, and its melody is pure and spontaneous" (El Día, August 18, 1902), an assessment that would have surprised Kerman. But there is in Rome another work of art whose scandalous juxtaposition of genres helps put Tosca’s supposed blasphemies into clearer perspective.

Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652) in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria captures an extraordinary moment in the Spanish mystic’s celebrated Autobiography: her encounter with an angel who imparted the fire of divine love in her. She wrote: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails…. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it.”

The statue is frankly sensual. As a rakish president of France commented, on touring the church a century ago: “If that is ‘divine love,’ I know all about it.” Some recent commentary plays down the erotic aspect of the statue, but it is undeniable: Saint Teresa herself is frank about her experience, being neither sensational nor coy, and Bernini was pious rather than lurid. Carnality, however, is not really the point of either the statue or the scandal it causes. Sexuality and spirituality had been mixed before in many genres, and spectacularly in the poetry of Bernini’s own time (by Donne and Marvell in England, and especially by Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico). The real scandal of Bernini's statue is not in its eroticism but in its theatricality. It is set in an opera house, so to speak. Members of the Venetian Cornaro family who commissioned the statue are also represented by statues on either side of the chapel, sitting in theater-type boxes and leaning over as if watching something on a stage and commenting about it. “Theater” in 17^th-century Venice meant “opera houses” and the city had dozens of them. The operatic setting of the statue is what truly makes it a scandalous "baccano in chiesa." It recalls Garrison Keillor’s priceless line about the Lutherans in his home town frowning upon sex because it might lead to dancing. Yet Roman ladies pray in this chapel every day as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which, for them, it is. A Spanish saint has an orgasm for God on an operatic stage, and—in Rome—it makes perfect sense.

Bernini’s masterpiece makes it clear that what is vulgar to one culture could be sublime to another. A conception of mythological identity in everyday individuals, a sense of recurring archetypes in modern (and future) life, and historical moments of suicidal leaps as noble self-sacrifice will also influence what one sees in the opera known as Tosca. This opera will continue to divide audiences for ages to come. But experiencing Tosca through a Hispanic frame of mind—whether one is Hispanic or not—might allow audiences to see what Kerman, Britten and the others could not see: a vital and honest drama of an ageless heroine in a never-ending struggle that continues today and beyond.

A writer, lecturer and radio commentator, William Berger is the author of Wagner Without Fear, Verdi With a Vengeance and Puccini Without Excuses.  He is Creative Content Producer for the Metropolitan Opera.

On June 7, LA Opera will present An Evening of Spanish Zarzuela and Latin American Music, followed by the presentation of Hispanics for Los Angeles Opera’s annual Plácido Domingo Award. Plácido Domingo will perform as both singer and as conductor of the LA Opera Orchestra. Soloists include Janai Brugger, a former member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program who has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera as Liu in Turandot and with LA Opera as Musetta in La Bohème. In 2012, Ms. Brugger was a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and she also won three top awards at Operalia, the international vocal competition founded by Mr. Domingo. She will be joined by tenor Joshua Guerrero, a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, and by soprano María Eugenia Antúnez, who will create the title role of Dulce Rosa in May.  Spanish conductor Jordi Bernàcer will lead portions of the concert. Concert tickets start at $19 and can be purchased at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion box office, by telephone at 213.972.8001 or online at www.LAOpera.com.

The concert will be followed by the 15^th annual Plácido Domingo Awards Gala, chaired by HLAO founder Alicia Garcia Clark. The gala is presented each year by Hispanics for Los Angeles Opera to celebrate the accomplishments of Hispanic artists as well as those who contribute to the awareness of opera and its educational value in the Latino community of Los Angeles.This year’s award will be presented to soprano Ailyn Pérez, who last appeared with LA Opera as Mimi in La Bohème, as well as to Iberia Chairman Antonio Vásquez Romero and to the Lloyd E. Rigler – Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation. The event celebrates the accomplishments of Hispanic artists and all who contribute to the awareness of opera in the Latino community. For more information about the gala, please call 213.972.3664.

By John Caird

Tosca is one of the greatest works of music theater ever written and its importance is undiminished a century after Puccini wrote it. Its narrative is deceptively simple. It involves the lives of three principal characters. Cavaradossi is a talented young painter earning his living by creating ecclesiastical art in Roman churches. Floria Tosca, his lover, is a well-known classical singer, adored by her public. Baron Scarpia is the Chief of Police in a military state that is cracking down on all opposition together with the artistic freedom that sanctions it and draws support from it.

Cavaradossi hides a political friend who is fleeing for his life and gets himself imprisoned and tortured for his pains. The corrupt Scarpia attempts to seduce Tosca, offering to release her lover if she gives in to his demands. Faced with watching her lover suffer further torture, Tosca laments her powerlessness in “Vissi d’arte,” one of the most heartrending arias in the grand opera repertoire. In trying to protect Cavaradossi from further agony, she agrees to betray his political friends. Cornered and ashamed, Tosca kills Scarpia and attempts to outwit the police in order to secure Cavaradossi’s freedom. In the Castel Sant Angelo, surrounded by scores of other political prisoners, her plan fails and her lover is executed. Scarpia’s death is discovered and Tosca kills herself rather than yield to her captors.

The reason for the great popularity of Tosca is enshrined in its overwhelming musical, human, moral and religious powers.

Puccini’s score is utterly masterful. Its tightness of musical conception combined with the intimacy of its subject matter makes for extraordinary intensity, in orchestral color and sung line—in short, it is a musical masterwork.

The human drama that Puccini and his librettists have adapted from Sardou’s original play constitutes a timeless plea for artistic and political freedom. In a world of fundamentalist philosophies, religious intolerance and political tyranny, Tosca stands as a beacon of enlightenment, a passionate plea for freedom of speech, thought and artistic expression. In any country that values its political freedoms, Tosca reminds us of what we have to lose, and the terrible price in human suffering if we cease to value what we truly believe in.

The moral and religious aspects of the story are far harder to pin down. At the beginning of the opera, the painted image that Cavaradossi is working on is that of a Mary Magdalene—a complex woman whose sexuality and experience seem to be in conflict with the teachings of her Master and therefore the teachings of the Church. She is also, at least in part, an image of Tosca herself—and in this production the Magdalen’s face has been fractured by the effects of war on the structure of the building in which she is to hang. In this respect the image takes on a dramatic irony. Tosca becomes a fractured character in the drama—as does the man who has imagined her as a redeemed Magdalene. The picture will never be completed, just as Tosca’s and Cavaradossi’s lives will never be completed.

Floria Tosca’s genuine religious devotion to the other image in the church, the image of the Virgin, requires a director, a designer and, more importantly, a singer to build up a picture of the life of this complex character—from her earliest religious and artistic yearnings as a child right up to her sacrificial death as an adult. What was Tosca’s life like as a child? How did she develop as an artist? The original Sardou play gives us many of the answers. She came from a very poor background and was brought up in the church, the beauty of her voice redeeming her from a life of religious devotion. But as with many artists, the soul of the child has remained vividly alive in her. It is part of her artistry. Perhaps that is why she is so vulnerable to the corrupting demands of the real world. And so trusting.

The aspiration contained within the beauty of Cavaradossi’s ecclesiastical art is deeply envied by Scarpia and, like many an autocratic Philistine, his envy turns into a collector’s ambition. The palace from which he works is crammed with banned and stolen art. But his ambition goes beyond objects to include people. He has Tosca, too, in his sights. His inability to understand her beauty and artistry makes him want to control it and if he can’t control it, destroy it. In short, he wants to add her to his collection.

Like his two lovers, Tosca and Cavaradossi, Puccini himself had a deeply divided attitude towards the church. In moral terms he was a passionate Humanist, but like many men of his age, brought up in the faith of his forefathers, he could never completely escape from his feelings of religious fervor when faced with questions of belief or eternity. The evidence in this opera would seem to point to his Humanism and Catholicism being all of a piece, inextricably entwined with his passion and integrity as an artist. And he certainly imbues his two heroic characters with the same synthesis of beliefs.

Floria Tosca’s decision not to be controlled by Scarpia, that her integrity as a woman and an artist is more important to her than life itself, leads her and Cavaradossi to their deaths. But even in the hopeless confines of the Castel Sant Angelo, and in spite of everything he has seen, Cavaradossi still manages to believe in a future life of freedom and happiness for himself and his lover. The fact that he believes, against all the odds and all the evidence, is what makes his belief so moving. It is the same belief fuelling the same artistic passion that he uses to breathe life into his painted canvas characters.

After Cavaradossi has been executed, Floria Tosca goes willingly to her death. Willingly because she cannot imagine living on after the man she has betrayed but also because, in killing Scarpia, she knows or fears that she has become no better than him. She will meet him again before God. The God of her childhood faith will make the judgement, not them. In that sense she has become the Magdalene, trusting in the very faith from which she has never really drawn a benefit. Perhaps that is the meaning of true faith. And perhaps Puccini’s understanding of it can help us with our own faith in the limitless moral powers of artistic freedom.

John Caird is the director of LA Opera's May/June 2013 production of Tosca.

The Tosca scenery arrived from Houston in three 53-foot trucks in thousands of small pieces. It normally takes our stage crew two or three days to assemble all of the pieces into a full stage setting. With rental or incoming productions, minor repairs often have to be made due to the stress of shipping and handling. By the end of the third day, we have begun to make these minor repairs and scenic touch-ups.

Replica hand-carved foam sculptures were designed for this production. The sculptures are hard-coated with urethane foam and treated with scenic paint to look like stone.

Each act has a different silk curtain. These silk drops are weighted at the bottom with a drapery chain to keep them from fluttering around when the curtain flies in and out. Note that a small bit of drapery chain hangs below the curtain. This chain will be sewn back into the bottom of the drop. 

One of the final elements of the scenery to be assembled is the ceiling. The aluminum triangular trusses serve as a lightweight skeletal structure. The ceiling is attached and held in place by four batten pipes over the stage.

A scenic artist touches up the walls with gray paint custom-mixed to match the existing color. Note that the ceiling is now in place in the set.