[Dixielandjazz] Editing The Muisc - What about This?

[Stephen Barbone]

WARNING NOT OKOM FOR ALL:

However, if you have the music in your soul, you have to love this. We
might have a little trouble with folks who edit records, but what about
folks who are editing Opera to the point of morphing it into something
else? Is it a world turned upside down, or a world where the "audience"
wants Music/Opera they can understand.

If you know "Tosca", you have to love "Act I" as described below several
paragraphs into the story, or the final act also described below.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

May 31, 2004 - NY Times

Roll Over, Puccini: 'Tosca' Has Been Pumped Up and Plugged In

By JASON HOROWITZ

       ROME, May 30 — Tosca has not been her old self lately.

       One Saturday night in Milan she needed the help of a microphone
in her tragic songs. And instead of following a conductor's baton, she
grooved in stiletto heels to a recorded soundtrack. She even looked
different, trading in her usual operatic corpulence for showgirl curves
and skimpy outfits.

More than a 100 years after the debut of this Puccini opera, audiences
are seeing a Tosca very different from the traditional one. The heroine
is still lovelorn and troubled by similar suitors, but she prefers
belting out show tunes.

"Tosca" the musical? "This is a modern opera," said Lucio Dalla, the
composer and creator of "Tosca: Desperate Love," who is best known as an
Italian soft-rock star. "After 100 years you need to change. My Tosca
sings normally. The audience can understand her without having its nose
stuck in the libretto."

Pop and opera have already collided in the United States, where Baz
Luhrmann put a popular touch on Puccini's "Bohème" on Broadway and Elton
John replaced the score of Verdi's "Aida." But this is Italy, the cradle
of lyric opera, and some aficionados are troubled that a pop version of
"Tosca" will trespass in opera's hallowed halls and sully their sacred
stages.

"I am worried about this production," said Pino Castagnetti, the
secretary of Friends of the Gallery, a national association of opera
lovers. Mr. Dalla, 60, is itching to take his opus out of arenas like
the Mazda Palace in Milan and into places where audiences are, he
contends, "sick and tired" of traditional performances.

"Opera in Italy is very fragile and feeble at the moment," said Fred
Plotkin, a former performance manager at the Metropolitan Opera who
studied at La Scala as a Fulbright scholar.

Many theaters destroyed by fires are yet to be rebuilt, and government
money has been severely cut to many of the houses that are still
standing. Radio has largely abandoned sweet arias for sugary pop, and
the country's home-grown opera stars often go unnoticed.

When Luciano Pavarotti, who is a friend and sometimes duet partner of
Mr. Dalla, took his final bow after a performance of "Tosca" at the
Metropolitan Opera in March, Italian opera came a step closer to losing
its most recognizable ambassador.

"Now it's rare to see a page in Italian newspapers about an opera
singer," said Franco Moretti, the general manager of Italy's annual
Puccini festival. "The space is given to pop stars or musicals." But
"Tosca: Desperate Love" has been getting plenty of press here.

That publicity and the more than 200,000 people who have paid to see the
show since it opened last year have led some opera houses to invite Mr.
Dalla and his cast to perform on their stages.

A scaled back version of "Tosca: Desperate Love" played with an
orchestra at Bologna's Teatro di Opera in March and is scheduled for
Vienna's opera house this summer. Mr. Dalla said he had his eye on La
Fenice in Venice, while officials at Italy's most revered opera company,
La Scala, are considering it for the Teatro degli Arcimboldi, their
temporary dwelling during restoration of their famed theater. "The line
is blurring," Mr.
Plotkin said. But hardly anyone believes that opera has run its course
or that its theaters should embrace musicals. La Scala's conductor,
Riccardo Muti, has already taken a defiant stance against what some have
called the dumbing down of lyric opera.

In a newspaper interview in Corriere della Sera this year, Mr. Muti
lamented pop stars taking their chances with lyric scores. He has a long
running dispute with La Scala's manager, Carlo Fontana, over whether the
company's offerings should include more popular fare to bring in more
money.

"I think that the musical is the opera for our times," Mr. Fontana said.
"La Scala is a great museum of opera. It's like the Louvre. But it has
to decide if it wants to open up to contemporary repertory, this is the
issue. This is the great question."

One major concern to opera cognoscenti is the introduction of
microphones in the opera house. Mr. Dalla's singers are amplified,
leading some to worry that a new generation of operagoers, hooked on
musicals like "Tosca: Desperate Love," will become accustomed to
artificial voices and feel disappointed when they hear natural tenors.

But Mr. Dalla does not seem to have a problem with departures.

In Act I of "Tosca: Desperate Love" nuns strip down to red lingerie, and
priests partake in prurient embraces. Then there are the new characters,
including a sort of singing soothsayer.

The roots of the show, which was commissioned by Rome's leading opera
official, Francesco Ernani, are unorthodox. Mr. Dalla said his
inspiration came during long nights of listening to Puccini to get in
the mood for a mob movie he was scoring.

Even open-minded opera experts like Mr. Moretti, who said he would
welcome Mr. Dalla's Tosca at his annual Puccini festival, wondered what
the composer would think. "I don't think Puccini would make it through
the show," he said.

Cast members do not see why not. Rosalina Misseri, the 24-year-old who
plays Tosca and who is one of the brightest stars in Italian musicals,
said that the spirit of the character remained intact. She admitted,
however, that her knowledge of Tosca was largely intuitive, as she has
never seen a staging of the opera.

Despite or perhaps because of all its poetic license, Italians cannot
get enough of the show. In Milan an enraptured audience rushed the stage
after the final scene.

Just as in Puccini's version, the drama ends with Tosca leaping over a
parapet to her death offstage. But this time Mr. Dalla had an added
touch: a muscular angel in black jockey shorts and white wings carries
her back up.

"My `Tosca' is not destined to become a classic," Mr. Dalla conceded.
"But there are people who have come to see it 10 times, and for them
this is `Tosca.' "