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Zlatica Hoke: Editor-in-Chief
Rafael Prieto: Design
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Dear members and friends,
Happy spring! I hope you are all enjoying the warm weather and your blooming trees and gardens.
Spring has always been a season of hope and new beginnings, so much so that some cultures still consider it a start of a new year. More than 300 million people around the world celebrated Nowruz, Persian new year around the first day of spring. March 21 was officially recognized as International Nowruz Day by the United Nations in 2010 at the request of countries including Afghanistan, Albania, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Turkmenistan. It can be celebrated for almost two weeks and the food is delightful.
Spring is also marked by spiritual awakenings. Jewish Passover began on March 27 and will end this Sunday when Christians celebrate Easter. Orthodox Easter falls on May 2 this year.
Muslims meanwhile prepare to start fasting for the month of Ramadan beginning on April 12 and ending May 12, with a large celebration called Eid al-Fitr. If the weather and the pandemic permits, we may be able to join our friends of various faiths to enjoy all of the upcoming celebrations al fresco.
Meanwhile, the Washington Opera Society is working hard to get ready to return to the scene. It is not an easy task, as you can see from the report by our Executive Director Michael Reilly.
In this issue we also give you an insight into what goes on during the process of reviving a rare old stage work, and what inspires creators to put extra effort to bring it back to life.
While we await to see the fruits of these special cultural developments, let’s enjoy some holiday music. I can’t think of a more beautiful Easter piece than the Ineggiamo chorus from Cavalleria Rusticana. Of course, there is Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and other lovely classical pieces, many of them made in our own country.
America has given the world one of the most beautiful Easter spirituals of all times, Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord), probably written by African-American slaves in the 19th century. But there is much more of the Easter music made in the USA. I hope you enjoy reading about it, and even more listening to those musical jewels on YouTube.
Zlatica Hoke
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Easter Music Made in the USA
by Zlatica Hoke
Throughout history composers have written music inspired by Christ's suffering on the cross, his death and resurrection. Some of the best Easter music has come to the United States from Europe. But Americans have been creating their own religious music from the earliest days, first imitating classical composers, but very soon finding their own expression.
Robert Saladini, former head of the music department at the Library of Congress tells us one of the oldest Easter compositions still recorded and performed is The Lord Is Risen Indeed by William Billings, who lived in the Boston area in the second half of the 18th century.
In the early years of American independence, itinerant singing masters flourished in New England. They are also known as New England psalmodists. Some of these singers composed their own songs.
"Their music was characterized by somewhat jagged melodies often times, and what a lot of musicians will call open fifths. So, you'll hear this almost primitive sound. At this time in Europe, of course, this sound would have sounded very old fashioned to a lot of the cultured ears," said Saladini.
Few of these New England musicians had formal music education and many had other professions. Billings, for example was a tanner, like his father. His knowledge of music probably came from a choral singing school, and he most likely taught himself composition by studying choral works of English composers. Many of his tunes have remained popular for more than two centuries. The psalm When Jesus Wept stands out for its simple beauty, noted Saladini.
"It is a round. It is probably one of the most well-known pieces of early American music, certainly a piece that was done throughout the 18th century and the 19th century, and is still performed by American school children, and sung in churches."
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New England musicians created sacred music intended for singing by their friends and neighbors. Their songs were widely popular. Billings is considered to be the foremost in the group, but works by many other composers also have survived. An example is Crucifixion, signed by M. Kyes, recorded in a late 18th century Connecticut tune book. The music is set to a poem by early 18th-century clergyman and poet Samuel Wesley.
Early American immigrants were primarily concerned with their daily survival in a new land so their celebrations were not as musically elaborate as those in Europe and other continents. Very few pieces were composed especially for Easter, and it is questionable whether all the New England religious sects even observed the holy day. Subsequent immigrant groups, including the Germans, Italians, Spaniards and Slavs, brought with them their rich Easter traditions. But we have African-American slaves to thank for some of the most beautiful religious songs, known as spirituals. Many of them, such as Were You There, remain popular not only in this country, but throughout the world.
"But we do see with the slave society, we see a lot of music that may be associated with the Lenten season or with Good Friday. I think a lot of the slaves could identify with Christ's suffering on the cross. We see pieces like He Never Said a Mumbling Word and they all sort of reflect the sadness of the crucifixion and it is something the slaves certainly could relate to," said Saladini.
By the end of the 19th century, almost every major church in the United States performed an Easter oratorio, or produced a similar music event for the season. But, Saldini said, most of the pieces performed were by European composers or had a distinctly European sound. It was only in the 20th century that American composers began incorporating new elements such as jazz and folk in their music, and creating a uniquely American sound.
Randall Thompson's Alleluia is one of the best known and most frequently performed 20th century sacred pieces in the United States. It has been called the bedrock of contemporary choral literature, said Saladini. The work was commissioned for the 1940 opening of the now famous Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. By that time, Thompson had established himself as a composer whose work is characterized by a harmonically simple, so-called American sound, that incorporates folk and popular themes. Alleluia is regularly performed on important religious occasions, such a Easter.
In the early 1960s, composer Ron Nelson presented his coral work Behold Man, set to words by contemporary American writer Albert van Nostrand. In this solemn religious piece, the poet and the composer remind Christians to "Behold man! God summoned yet God bound." Nelson has been described as quintessential American composer who moves easily between conservative and new styles. He has written many sacred as well as secular compositions.
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Several decades later, composer and organist Gerre Hancock of New York wrote a solemn composition for chorus and organ titled the Introit for the Feast Day. Like Randall Thompson's Alleluia, its text also consists of only one word - alleluia - and is often performed during Easter season.
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By the arrival of the 21st century, American composers have developed quite another idea of music. Some of the new styles embrace older music, such as Gregorian chant, and update it with jazz and other elements. Works of Frank Ferko from Chicago exemplify this trend.
But a growing number of new pieces in traditional style also are commissioned from contemporary composers. One example is The Passion and The Promise, an oratorio by Dan Gawthrop from Virginia. It premiered in 2001 in Idaho and was presented in Washington D.C. at Easter of the same year. After the performance Gawthrop told me in an interview that he was not afraid of being described as old-fashioned. He said he wanted both the performers and the audience to enjoy his music.
"I deliberately write in a style which a non-specialist can find approachable and enjoyable. I feel we've not yet exhausted all of the possibilities that tonality has to offer. So, my music always has a very clearly defined tonal center although that may shift quite frequently," said Gawthrop. "I am a great believer in melodies as a way of accenting a text and I love to explore harmonic things which people describe as fresh rather than off-putting."
Religious and cultural organizations like to commission new works for special occasions whenever possible. In 2018 Pamela Decker won Distinguished Composer Award for her composition The Seven Last Words and Triumph of Christ.
Perhaps the most original work comes from Missy Mazzoli. Titled Vespers for a New Dark Age, the composition commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, is a 30-minute suite for singers, chamber ensemble and electronics. It does not use a religious text, but deals with a sometimes disturbing intersection between technology and humanity. A similar theme is tackled in the latest best-selling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun.
So, if the sacred music composition had a slow beginning in the New World, it clearly is making up for it now.
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And You Thought Operetta Comes from Vienna?
By Dan Pantano
The word “operetta” usually conjures up tunes such as Dein ist mein ganzes Herz and Lippen Schweigen from Lehár’s works, or a boisterous "Champagne Finale" from the Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II. Some people may also think of Three Little Girls from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado or a love duet sung by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. French operetta by Jacques Offenbach may also come to mind, but a Yiddish operetta? What? That was my reaction when I first heard about it about five years ago.
When I founded Concert Operetta Theater (COT) in Philadelphia back in 2001, I realized I’d have to move beyond Lehár and Strauss and learn more about the genre. I started my education with Richard Traubner’s book Operetta, A Theatrical History, and cassette recordings sent to me from Germany by a colleague who had taken a job in the operetta house in Berlin.
I fell in love with the music and knew I was going in the right direction. Who knew that Franz Lehár wrote love-stricken stories like Giuditta, Fredericka and Land of Smiles? Most of the books on operetta I came across discussed the well-known pieces, such as The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus, which are probably the only operetta repertory performed today in the USA, with few exceptions. The COT’s mission is to explore all operetta genres for our audience.
Over the last two decades our patrons have loved and enjoyed our performances. Many come again and again to listen to the pieces they know from a concert presentation. Others like to explore works they have not heard before and see what marvels they may discover in them.
While I first fell in love and became familiar with Viennese and American operettas and produced almost two dozen of them, what really opened my eyes was the music by Hungarian-Jewish composer Emmerich Kálmán.
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He was born in what was then Austria-Hungary. Kálmán, a Hungarian Jew, incorporated distinctly Hungarian melody in his works. A touch of classical, with a hint of Hungarian folk and I was seduced. Still, I knew there was more out there. The next revelation was that of the zarzuela, the operetta of Spain, promoted internationally by star tenor Plácido Domingo. With my music director’s help, we produced the first ever performance of Federico Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda (1932) in Philadelphia.
In late 2014 I became aware of a Jewish theater company in New York City that was producing a Yiddish operetta. After some research I discovered the amazing history of the Yiddish theater in New York. It was as important as early Broadway and began in the 1880s, sparked by several developments. The main reason was the influx of immigrants from Central Europe to New York City. This was ‘their’ music and was a ‘touch’ of home in their new country. The other reason was that the Jewish population at that time was not accepted throughout the area, except on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
So, the Jews opened their own theaters, for their own people, in their own neighborhoods. In 2017, I contacted the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater, who produced The Golden Bride (Die goldene Kale), a 1923 hit, to see if we could rent the music for performances in Philadelphia, but wasn’t successful. With the help of my conductor Dario Salvi, who lives in Scotland, I mentioned that a Yiddish operetta might be something for us to think about for a future concert. A radical idea which we both loved! He subsequently came across a hundred-year-old piece that was to his liking, called The Broken Violin (Dos Tsubrochene Fidele). The music was by Latvian-born Joseph M. Rumshinksky set to a story by Ukrainian-born Boris Thomashefsky. Both were living in New York and working in Yiddish theaters.
I was happy with my conductor’s choice, but with the next layer of information, my excitement grew to a boiling point! Thomashefsky was one of two major producers of Yiddish operettas in his own theater in New York and the grandfather of internationally known conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Now the academic sleuthing began! Maestro printed vocal score and orchestra parts for the operetta, and we thought we were on a roll. The orchestra was more extensive than the regular pit orchestra, with 24 players, and the piece was larger than an average show of that time. It was a ‘grand operetta’. All went well until we realized that we did not have the spoken dialogues and we could not find them anywhere. Did we come to the end of the road?
During the time of our search in 2018, Maestro Tilson Thomas came from California to Philadelphia to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. One of the musicians invited me to the dress rehearsal the day before the opening. I asked him if he would give my letter of interest for his grandfather’s operetta to Maestro Thomas, which he did the day before the rehearsal. While waiting backstage, who walks in but Michael Tilson Thomas himself! I introduced myself and he said he was aware of my project and thought it was interesting. I mentioned that we could not find the dialogues for The Broken Violin, so he introduced me to his assistant back in California who would help look for the script in his personal collection and with the Thomashefsky Foundation. A few weeks later, I was informed that the text was lost.
What happened to it? When you think of theater productions of the early 20th century, you must keep in mind that many went on tour. An operetta by Victor Herbert might have toured 20 to 30 cities in the US, but the Yiddish shows generally toured only six - Philadelphia, D.C., Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburg, and Chicago. So, the companies did not print numerous copies of music score and dialogues, and the few they did were not always saved.
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During the continued search for the lost dialogue, Maestro Salvi found the printed narration from an original radio broadcast, most likely from the 1920’s. We will use that narration and rework it to produce a concert version of The Broken Violin. In 1917, going to the theater was a complete evening event. This operetta ran close to four hours, so we will have to shorten it to suit contemporary audiences. The sung portions will be in Yiddish and the narration in English.
Our research also revealed that the show had been staged at the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia sometime in the late 1920’s. Thomashefsky’s brother ran the theater before it was demolished, and the Yiddish operettas were bussed down from New York City.
The Broken Violin is a story of back-stage love and loss in Odessa, Ukraine. The star tenor falls in love with the star soprano, but she is married to the conductor who also owns the theater. The previous owner was now employed as an older character actor in the company and he wanted revenge against his successor. So he supports the love affair between the conductor’s wife and the tenor. The two lovers and the former owner decide to go to the United States and start a new life. But they must first perform their final opening night in Odessa. The soprano and the character actor show up for the opening night, but not the tenor. The soprano’s husband, who was the conductor that evening jumps in to sing the star tenor role instead.
The tenor and the soprano with her young son then make their way to New York and become stars in the Yiddish theater. Soon after their arrival, he leaves her for a new love interest. The soprano’s conductor-husband sends an actor from his Odessa company to retrieve his wife. When the actor fails, the husband travels to New York himself to find her. But the star singers reunite and the husband finds himself jobless in a foreign city. He becomes a violinist in a restaurant where his son now works. Realizing he has lost everything in life, one night he breaks his violin in desperation.
The ending is quite different than most operettas of that time. The audience finds out that this was all a dream! The wife did leave her husband, but not because of love for the tenor, but to destroy the tenor and his career. She even got him drunk in Odessa so that he could not perform in the opening night show. Unlike the lighthearted Viennese works, the Yiddish operetta contains as much drama as the Italian operas such as Cavalleria Rusticana and Tosca. Works such as Abraham Goldfaden’s 1878 The Sorceress (Di Kishefmakherin), and Thomashefsky’s Alexander, or The Crown Prince of Jerusalem were hits.
These companies also staged Shakespeare in Yiddish.
Our original plan was to perform a concert version of The Broken Violin this coming spring, but due to the pandemic, the earliest we can hope for is a spring 2022 premiere. A recording contract has also been offered by Naxos for a future CD release, but a final decision has not been made yet.
COT is proud to introduce Yiddish operetta to contemporary audiences. It is the music of Eastern European Jewish communities from many different countries. Much of their music was banned from the stages in their own countries, so they brought that musical genre to the New World and expanded on it in their own theaters. It was just as much part of the American music scene at the turn of the century as traditional Broadway. It deserves its rightful place in the history of operetta and we at COT are proud to help keep that part of Jewish culture and tradition alive.
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Once Upon a Time in Washington, DC
By Michael J. Reilly
Many Washingtonians may not know that there is a large bureaucracy that through its control of millions of dollars is literally able to choose winners and losers among the city’s arts organizations to determine which will flourish and which will not. More importantly, this agency has assumed the power to control what culture and music you will hear, what genre of music your children will hear, and whether only popular music or Mozart will be presented in the public forum. They can do this with tax revenues which we all pay and through contributions from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Did you know that the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) is the single largest supporter of the arts in Washington, with DC recently awarding grants of some $12.9 million dollars to over 134 organizations and individuals?
In January, arts groups throughout Washington eagerly awaited the release of the most important and largest annual grant solicitation by the DCCAH: The General Operating Support (GOS) grant allows for qualifying arts organizations to apply for many thousands of dollars in general support. The only expressly stated requirements for eligibility are that applicants must have IRS non-profit status, be able to demonstrate matching funds, and meet other city licensing and regulatory requirements. As the Washington Opera Society fulfills all these requirements, it naturally was prepared to apply for its share of this public largesse.
How stunned we were to learn that a newer recent restriction on eligibility had been proclaimed:
organizations and individuals who have not received a previous award were prohibited from applying. The Washington Opera Society, being only six years old has not received an award previously and was, therefore, summarily excluded from the competitive field!
At a January Webinar attended by hundreds of arts groups in Washington, DC, no mention of this restriction was made. In fact, the Webinar was a public relations extravaganza staged by the Executive Director of the Commission, Dr. Heran Sereke-Brhan, and members of her staff to vocalize their accomplishments with respect to arts programming in the city. They talked about “equity, diversity, belonging, and inclusion” and the establishment of a task force to ensure these standards, while blithely ignoring the blatant discrimination that the Commission was perpetrating by turning its back on relative newcomers to the field, such as the WOS. They expressed pride in having eliminated the matching funds requirements in grant solicitations. Bizarrely, they even announced that the “official state music of Washington, DC is Go-go,” a gratuitous edict which appears far removed from their grant-making responsibility.
In the Q&A segment which followed, I publicly asked about the disqualifying criteria for “newer” arts groups such as the WOS. David Markey, deputy director, answered as follows: “We like to have a history with our funders” (sic), but cited no legal basis for this sweeping pronouncement.
In a follow-up letter and subsequent telephone conversation with Markey, prompted by our letter of protest, he failed to produce any legal justification for the Commission’s restrictive approach, which by definition has produced an established circle of preferred groups to the detriment of other competitors for the city’s public funds. Equally disturbing, in the course of our conversation, was Markey’s admission that there might be an “inherent bias” by members of the selection committee for “an opera company performing in embassies”. In fairness to Markey, who expressed sensitivity to my argument, he also said that there are other more restricted grant possibilities in the spring months, with smaller awards for companies who have been left out of the original GOS process. The WOS certainly intends to pursue these more limited and restricted grant opportunities, but it is worth noting that last year the Commission never offered that round of funding after promising that it would do so.
The Washington Opera Society has written to Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, Council Chair Phil Mendelson, and the Office of the Mayor to report the Commission’s gross injustice—all without any response or acknowledgement of the receipt of our letters or follow-up phone calls.
The DC Arts Commission has been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. It has had four executive directors in three years. In 2019, the mayor and the Commission were locked in conflict over control of the Commission and its funds. In the same year, the Commission was made an independent agency with a budget of over $30 million dollars.
The WOS is proud to have taken the lead in bringing minority singers to our stages. In 2019, as an example, we featured five leading artist -- Lisa Chavez, Nicole Butler, Jonathan Tetelman, Brandie Sutton, and Kevin Short---all minority singers who have appeared at the Met or other world stages, in our production of Carmen for over 500 patrons in the atrium of the Embassy of France. Additionally, we featured 30 minority choristers from the Carter Legacy Singers, a group founded at Morgan State University. We featured the children’s chorus from the Rochambeau French International School. We regularly feature young artists who have yet to make their mark on the world stages, such as Michael Butler and Alexandra Razskazoff, who have won international prizes for their artistry.
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Carmen
23 June 2018
Featuring: Lisa Chavez, Brandie Sutton, Kevin Short, Jonathan Tetelman, and Nicole Butler
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Aida
17 May 2019
Featuring: Rochelle Bard,
Arnold Rawls, Lisa Chavez,
and Kevin Short
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The Land of Smiles
23 November 2019
Featuring: Alexandra Razskazoff, Michael Butler, Peter Joshua Burroughs, & Allysa Packard
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In 2021, assuming the pandemic is brought under control, we will introduce our Youth Initiative featuring master classes, concerts, and lectures at senior high schools and local universities in Washington, DC as we go about our Mission to bring the classics to our youth. We continue to bring rare operettas to our audiences such as Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin and Franz Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns. No other company is doing this. We appear at senior centers such as the McLean Senior Center and the Potomac Presbyterian Church, and we offer discounted or free tickets to seniors and students. We are performing a public good and not appealing to an elite class of opera lovers, who attend embassy parties. We have worked hard supporting an important musical genre and cultural heritage to citizens of the nation’s Capital.
The Arts Commission is clearly committing a discriminatory act though their unlawful restriction. They are on shaky ground in that there is no legal authority to support their actions. Furthermore, they are committing other misjudgments by eliminating the matching funds requirement. Any arts company should demonstrate community support through their contributions. Furthermore, the Arts Commission has no authority to be the judge of what constitutes “official music” of Washington, DC. What about jazz? What about blues? What about rock? Indeed, what about opera? What about the hundreds or thousands of young people in our city and nationwide, who are studying classical voice and opera? What about a legacy which was established hundreds of years ago and is cherished in every country in the world? Clearly, any arm of the city government has no business nor any right to be doing these things. They are self-appointed musical overseers.
Finally, in closing this tragic tale, we at the Washington Opera Society believe there is a viable solution: All arts organizations who have non-profit status and can prove that they have matching funds should share equally in all public funds up to the amount of their contributions to the extent these funds are available. This will remove discriminatory practices, prejudices, and biases on the part of bureaucrats who have admitted biases.
The Arts Commission was established by law to provide grants to aspiring arts organizations and to support arts education. This proposal aims to force them to do their job as written by law.
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