Once or Twice A Fortnight

This weekend is Mother’s Day, and if you visit my Pod-O-Matic podcast, you will find an encore issue of my Mother’s Day montage from last year. Acting as bookends for music about flowers, you will find some selections about Mothers in Opera. I hope you take the time to visit!

Continuing on our theme of flowers, and wanting to provide a more light-hearted opera selection for this weekend, let me turn to this 1956 “reference” recording of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.
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Related Threads:
Bravo! Calgary Opera marks 40th anniversary
Contemporary Opera

As a lead-in to today’s OTF post and featured opera, I wanted to put this question to you - as it has been in one way or another elsewhere in this forum – what makes an opera work? What is it about this or that opera that makes it resonate with you, that allows it to make a lasting impression? ...

Now that the music of Lent is behind us, we should go back to more topical musings, meaning opera…

Related Articles and Threads:
Poll: Overtures to Fidelio - so many to choose from...
OTF – Opera Podcasts
What made Beethoven dislike Fidelio so much?

My musing and musical selection for this fortnight is Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio.
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To close out my Lenten series contributions on OTF, I thought I would do something different, and propose an overview of the recordings I own of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. I’m sure many of you have a copy in your collection (I own 4), so feel free to add your thoughts to this article!
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For this Good Thursday, which launches the traditional time when the darkest moments of the Passion of the Christ take place, I thought I would pass this link to an openly-available vintage performance of Bach’s St-Matthew Passion.
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Today is Palm Sunday, and launches Holy Week, fast approaching the high point of the liturgical calendar, and an appropriate time to dig into some of my old podcasts.


Music helps provide the right atmosphere, as we use this time for introspection and reflection on the events of Holy Week and Easter, what they mean and what we all need to do personally to prepare ourselves spiritually.
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This week, more lenten music and I thought I would provide an interesting (and surprising) link to some very good semi-professional performances emanating from the Church of St-Agnes in St-Paul Minnesota.

Monsignor Richard J. Schuler (1920-2007) was pastor of St. Agnes Church for thirty-two years (1969-2001). He held a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1950) and in 1954, he spent a year of study of renaissance music manuscripts at the Vatican Library on a Fulbright scholarship, after which he taught music and theology at the College of Saint Thomas for fifteen years. He received a doctorate in musicology from the University of Minnesota in 1963.
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This installment of OTF will focus on Beethoven’s sacred output, with a special emphasis on his only oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ at the Mount of Olives). This oratorio, along with two masses (his Mass in C and the Missa Solemnis) form the complete set.


Christus am Ölberge, is all about the anguish and despair felt by Christ on the eve of his crucifixion, as he reflects in the Mount of Olives during a sleepless night. The oratorio ends with Christ accepting his fate, rather than in a resignation of sorts, choosing his sacrifice of his own free will.
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To continue of series of OTF posts on the music of Lent, I wanted to discuss an event that took place at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 27 January 1951, 50 years to the day after Giuseppe Verdi’s passing.

On that evening, the NBC Radio Network presented a one-time performance of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem with soloists Herva Nelli, Fedora Barbieri, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Cesare Siepi, the Robert Shaw Chorale and the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini.
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Related Articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Eve_(Gogol)
http://www.tchaikovsky-research.net/...008/index.html
http://telasiado.suite101.com/rimsky...mas-eve-a38511

(No, I DON’T speak Russian…)

For my OTF contribution today, I wanted to discuss a work by the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852). Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, his early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore.
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My next few posts under the OTF monicker will depart somewhat from Opera, and will address works that I feel are appropriate for the Lenten season. I consider myself more spiritual than religious (if that makes any sense at all…) but Lent is usually when my Catholic roots take hold, and I turn to the sacred and spiritual titles of my music collection to set the mood for relection and quiet, pensive time.

Today’s post focuses on the sacred and secular works of spiritual inspiration by French composer Francis Poulenc. Poulenc’s life has its many paradoxes – Poulenc is an early 20^th century “born again Catholic” who happened to live an openly gay lifestyle in a rather liberal Parisian artistic entourage. This paradox leads, in my personal opinion, to some inner turmoil which also manifests itself in Poulenc’s output; something critic Claude Rostand coined in the expression «moine ou voyou» (monk or punk).
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To complete our Terrible Twos segment on OperaLively, the second of our pairing of late 19^th century verisimo operas, Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. Like its often paired opera, Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci is also a tale of adultery, deceit, jealousy and it too has a dramatic climax involving the death of a major character, but this time on stage.
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Before we begin, a few topics of note.

First, my thanks to the OperaLively team, and especially to Almaviva, for giving OTF a place of privilege amongst the “Articles” section. From now on, my OTF posts will be found at http://operalively.com/forums/conten...ce-a-fortnight, in one convenient place! I hope you will check it out, and catch up with some of our past OTF’s.

On a somewhat related topic, I am sad to report that one of my favourite Public Domain resources, the Japanese site Public Domain Classic, is no longer responsive (see post). This means that a few of my OTF and other opera contributions on this site now have “obsolete links”. Do not despair, however, as I have found some alternate links and intend to upload some of these Public Domain treasures to the Internet Archive. I hope to have some of these links resolved between now andf the end of February – at least, that’s my plan.
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I consider it the mission of Once or Twice a Fortnight to not only provide musings and musical illustrations on a given topic, but also to promote music that is openly, freely and legally available for streaming and/or download on the web. I have, in past articles, pointed out Public Domain performances of opera and other musical genres, and there is a substantive ongoing thread on operas found on YouTube.

For this instalment of OTF on OperaLively, I wanted to start a discussion on opera podcasts – who does them and where to find them.
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Here is my second of two musings on piano transcriptions of Opera and Lyric music. After Liszt, we now turn to another important pianist-composer of the mid-19th century.
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For my next couple of OTF posts, I wanted to discuss piano and opera in the form of “opera transcriptions” (this lines up well to my pianothon theme for January on my other platforms). For this installment, let’s focus on Franz Liszt’s paraphrases and transcriptions either meticulously or loosely using operatic themes.

After hearing Paganini work the audience to a frenzy at a concert in Paris in 1832, Liszt decided then and there that he wanted to become the “Paganini of the piano.” So, he practiced 4-5 hours per day for at least a month and began devoting himself to piano virtuosity and showmanship, which he began displaying in extensive concerts throughout Europe from 1839 through 1847. Since Liszt often appeared three or four times a week in concert, it could be safe to assume that he appeared in public well over a thousand times during this eight-year period.
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What if you had to go to jail on New Year's Eve - what would you do?


Party, of course!

That's essentially the plot for the Johann Strauss operetta DIe Fledermaus (The bat). There's of course love, flirtations, drinking and the great music of Strauss! What else could you ask for?
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In-keeping with the Opera In-Depth project on La Traviata, I thought I would share a Public Domain link to a complete performance of the opera:

http://www.archive.org/details/Tosca...stOfLaTraviata

This is a link to Toscanini’s NBC radio performance of La Traviata, done over two Sunday afternoons, December 1 and 8, 1946: The cast for this radio production:
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That's how often I plan on posting an original musing on OperaLively;

That's also the unofficial name I will give to this blog-of-sorts.

We all read Alma's declaration of prnciples for this new site - I hope I can live up to those lofty goals and expectations... My aim is to start some discussions, and illustrate some of my musings through openly-available musical selections (YouTube, other open-source material...). These musings will be in English (to reach as many of you as I can), though I don't exclude the odd post in French. (I already have...)
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