Praeterita

Karita Mattila as Salome I’m still immersed in a Richard Strauss phase, my current obsession being “Salome”, his 1905 opera of sexual perversion, murder, and necrophilia. I love his music for the rich, lush sound, the continuous flow of music, revolving around simple motifs that ebb and flow and build to powerful endings. Particularly in “Salome”, you can hear the influence of the Wagner of “Tristan und Isolde”, but with the advantage, in my opinion, that Strauss’ material is more grounded in reality, and is not as long-winded and exhausting as Wagner’s. Yes, it’s hard to believe that a story about Herod, John the Baptist, a suicide, lust, a naked dance, a beheading, and a heroine who sings her final love aria to the severed head before kissing it on the mouth, could be described as “grounded in reality”, but I mean it. Compared to Wagner’s six hour operas about mythical heroes, magical beings, and Very Significant Meaning, Strauss keeps you compelled by his dramatic intensity (th...

Faith Puleston is a person who has recently become a follower of this blog. When I emailed her to thank her for doing so, I discovered that Faith had a career as an opera singer for many years from the 1960s to the 1990s, mainly in Germany. If you follow this link, you’ll see some great photos of her taking the lead in some pretty impressive roles (Amneris from ‘Aida’ at Covent Garden; Waltraute in ‘Gotterdammerung’; Octavian in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’): http://faithpuleston.net/html/ _stage.html I’ve loved opera all my life, and the voices that are required to sing opera (and Liede) are still my favourite kinds of voices (note to reader and bluegrass fan Ted Dawson: Sorry, Ted). Whenever anyone in the art world talks excitedly about multimedia art as if it’s the great new frontier, I always point out that opera was the first and is still the greatest multimedia art, combining singing, instrumental playing, acting (sort of), and all the arts of staged theatre. And almost all of it is the...