Flashback, August 1876: Audience Stunned by Richard Wagner’s Epic ‘Ring’ Cycle

As the opening-night audience listened to the premiere of the latest works by Richard Wagner in mid-August 1876, they got what they anticipated, and then some with his “Ring Cycle": a totally immersive musical theater experience, requiring a maximum commitment of time and devotion.

I’m not sure you will find another cultural figure who created something so enormous, so innovative, or requiring so many resources. Drawing on Norse mythology, Wagner proposed o stage four operas connected by a symbol, to which he gave the name of the whole cycle: Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelungen”), totaling 15 to 16 hours.

Only one person he trusted to act as librettist, composer, overall artistic director, stage director, producer, prompter, and supervisor of his acoustic and seating innovations: himself.

Each of the four operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) needed not one, but two intermissions. And he wanted, and got, a theater built to his specifications in the city of Bayreuth.

Along the way, Wagner was unbelievably fortunate to have the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I don’t think I was the only tourist ever to view the latter’s castle, Neuschwanstein, and think, “This guy was crazy.” (In fact, he was sidelined for good—after all but sinking Bavaria into bankruptcy—in 1886, and died shortly afterward under mysterious circumstances.)

In some ways, Ludwig differed from the composer. He would have preferred Munich rather than Bayreuth as the site of the Festspielhaus; he upbraided Wagner for his antisemitism; and, when the monarch compelled his genius friend to turn over the scores of the first two parts of the “Ring,” Siegfried and Die Walküre, it led to a quarrel and a temporary construction halt until Ludwig extended a loan that allowed the festival to open.

Moreover, Ludwig believed in Wagner enough to support him financially when the composer sought to fend off creditors and keep his quarter-century dream of the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”

In short, it was inconceivable that Wagner would have realized his dream if not for the patron he privately nicknamed “Parsifal” after his pure, idealistic hero.

Not everyone was enamored with Wagner’s work or the mystique accruing to it. In this prior post, I noted that Mark Twain did not, contrary to belief, write that “Wagner is better than he sounds.”

But he did approvingly pass along that observation by someone else, and he did devote an extended essay, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” that took issue with Bayreuth’s cuisine and the composer’s songs (“Nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts”).

I have to admit feeling much the same as Twain. But it would also be impossible to deny that Wagner fundamentally changed musical theater—and, arguably, paved the way for so much in 20^th-century culture through his innovations, including:

*orchestral arrangements that incorporated new instruments;

*powerfully built singers who could make themselves heard over these 80-to-100 piece orchestras;

*signers as fully committed to naturalistic acting as to their vocals;

*pits covered, with orchestras unseen so audiences can concentrate on what is onstage;

*leitmotifs, or short, recurring instrumental cues associated with characters, objects, and themes, the better for audiences both to remember them over multiple hours and to subliminally signal emotions;

*continuous, “through-composed” music that blurred traditional distinctions between opera’s arias and recitative sections;

*seating “in the round,” with audience members seated democratically, without regard to pricing;

*theater lights darkened during performances so audiences would concentrate on the action and not on what others around them were doing;

*ambitious subject matter dealing with the most convulsive human emotions: greed, power, love, and salvation.

Even if you have never attended the performance of an opera, it is hard to miss the widespread influence of Wagner:

*films that either use his music directly (most famously, “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) or his leitmotif device (the scores of John Williams);

*J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which, despite the novelist’s denials, employed a similar plot as the “Ring Cycle”: the complications involved in possessing an object of miraculous power; and,

*most controversially, fusing romantic nationalism with antisemitism, leading to exploitation by one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler. 

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,’ on a Source of Opera Funding)

[Longfellow Deeds, suddenly inheriting $20 million from his uncle, finds himself besieged by the opera board of directors.]

Longfellow Deeds [played by Gary Cooper]: “Gee, I'm busy. Do the opera people always come here for their meetings?”

Cornelius Cobb [played by Lionel Stander]: “Uu-hum.”

Deeds: “That's funny. Why is that?”

Cobb: “Why do mice go where there's cheese?”—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), screenplay by Robert Riskin and Clarence Budington Kelland, directed by Frank Capra

In the last few weeks, at least as far as the Metropolitan Opera is concerned, the cheese moved. The agreement that the Met announced last fall for the Saudi Arabian government to provide more than $800 million over eight years came unraveled, just one more casualty of the Iranian War and the resulting Strait of Hormuz standoff.

What will the Met do now? Even looking to a misogynistic, authoritarian Mideast regime to keep it afloat was…a stretch. Now, the longtime cultural institution might be hearing more variants on this sharp rejoinder from Mr. Deeds: “I personally wouldn't care to be the head of a business that kept losing money! That wouldn't be common sense.”

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, Defining 'Italian Opera')

“An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.”—English man of letters Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), in Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) (“Hughes”)

Quote of the Day (Richard Morrison, on Staging Classical Music and Opera in Unusual Venues)

“Sad to say, many people are still put off by the rigmarole and ritual of classical concert venues and particularly by opera houses. For a hundred reasons, ranging from dress code and ticket prices to clapping etiquette and audience social mix, they feel out of place. So, a venue where everyone feels ‘out of place’—in a good way, because it’s never been a classical venue before—can be a good leveler.”—English music critic and cultural writer Richard Morrison, “Opinion: Can Classical Concerts in Unlikely Settings Attract New Audiences?”, BBC Music Magazine, June 2023

Quote of the Day (Jessica Duchen, on Librettists as the Unsung Heroes of Opera)

“We tend to credit opera composers ahead of their librettists. But can you imagine Mozart without [Lorenzo] Da Ponte [pictured]? Verdi without Piave? Strauss without Hofmannsthal? Our favourite operas, such as Le nozze di Figaro, La traviata or Der Rosenkavalier would be nowhere without their words and their drama – provided by the writer. Composers might grumble, cajole or bully their wordsmiths, but they know on which side their bread is buttered.”— British journalist, music critic, novelist, playwright, and opera librettist Jessica Duchen, “A Way With Words,” BBC Music, February 2025

This Day in Classical Music History (Ingmar Bergman Stages Mozart's ‘Magic Flute’ for Swedish TV)

Jan. 1, 1975—To celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Swedish Radio, Ingmar Bergman premiered his adaptation of The Magic Flute on Swedish TV, reaching an estimated one-third of the nation that night.

Though made on a comparatively modest budget of only $650,000, it was still technologically innovative, featuring the first soundtrack ever recorded in stereo for a television broadcast. And, running counter to the movies-to-TV model of the prior two decades, its premiere in U.S. theaters came 11 months after it was exposed to Swedish TV audiences.

I had heard before that a movie had been made of this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera, but I had never seen it before. And, I might as well confess now, I am hardly an opera aficionado, having attended less than 10 productions of any kind over the years.

But, when I saw that the movie would be played near me in northern New Jersey at the Barrymore Film Center over this past weekend, I was curious. The idea that Bergman, of all people, with his whole filmography of Scandinavian gray skies and gloom to match, might have tackled an opera—well, it struck me as a case of man bites dog.

In other words, this I had to see.

So, what was it like? As I watched, I thought that Bergman was mounting this production as a holiday from his usual anxiety and dread. And, with a new year around the corner, I experienced much the same thing—a revival of spirits that left me continually smiling.

The exterior establishing shot of a grassy outdoor scene led me to expect something naturalistic, shot on location. But those expectations were immediately overturned as the camera switched to the inside of a theater.

Instead of a long list of opening credits, the camera moves throughout the overture to close-ups of faces—and not to the conductor or orchestra musicians, but to featured audience members, especially a young blond girl continually highlighted.

To be sure, Bergman and cinematographer panned to audience members special to them, such as Bergman’s wife and son and actress-muse Liv Ullmann. But what was striking about this seven-minute sequence was the sheer variety of faces—men and women of all ages, ethnicities, and races, even individuals plucked off the street for the occasion.

By the end of the show, contemporary listeners would have appreciated that Mozart intended this work to be savored by people of all kinds.  In our time, with opera suffering from the perception that it caters to an aging, elite audience, the opening sequence can be read as a reminder of the genre’s fundamentally universal aspirations.

We see the cast and crew onstage and backstage, an injection of reality into a landscape of fantasy—with a singer, for instance, suddenly aware of his cue, rushing around, or performers reading another libretto (Wagner’s Parsifal) or far from it (a “Donald Duck” comic book).

How do you adapt a work meant for the opera house to very different audiences—television and movie theaters?

For starters, there is the matter of length. The Magic Flute has been known to stretch to nearly three and a half hours (counting intermission) in the opera house. Bergman trimmed it back to two hours and 15 minutes, including by omitting Act 2 trios and ignoring Mozart’s Masonic references.

As he recalled in Images: My Life in Film, Bergman was exposed to this opera as a child, when he "loved to roam around”:

“One October day I set out for Drottningholm (in Stockholm) to see its unique court theater from the eighteenth century. For some reason the stage door was unlocked. I walked inside and saw for the first time the carefully restored baroque theater. I remember distinctly what a bewitching experience it was: the effect of chiaroscuro, the silence, the stage. In my imagination I have always seen The Magic Flute living inside that old theater, in that keenly acoustical wooden box, with its slanted stage floor, its backdrops and wings. Here lies the noble, magical illusion of theater. Nothing is; everything represents. The moment the curtain is raised, an agreement between stage and audience manifests itself. And now, together, we'll create! In other words, it is obvious that the drama of The Magic Flute should unfold in a baroque theater."

In some ways, Bergman was like the title character in one of his films: “The Magician,” a manufacturer of illusions.  

He had hoped to film at Drottningholm Palace Theatre, one of the few surviving Baroque theatres in the world, but the scenery "was considered too fragile to accommodate a film crew.”

Upon learning this, the director set about meticulously reconstructing the stage—including wings, curtains, and wind machines—in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute. Moreover, the stage dimensions and the props color tones match the original 1791 premiere in Vienna.

In some ways, sound came in for as much care as image, with conductor Eric Ericson and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra recording the score in in an old circus building. Bergman used the “playback” method, scrutinizing prerecorded music so that lip synchronization and performers met his exacting standards.

Even with material that was already light and fluffy, Bergman was unafraid to poke viewers in the ribs. The creature who chases Prince Tamino, for example, may well be the most sorry, silliest dragon ever put on celluloid; the three spirits are borne aloft in a flying machine more out of 19^th-century sci-fi than 20^th-century aircraft; and periodically, singers hold up cue cards to prompt audiences to chant along.

Kenneth Branagh attempted his own interpretation of the opera in 2006, but it was widely regarded as inferior to Bergman’s. The latter won a BAFTA TV Award for Best Foreign Television Programme and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

That the great Scandinavian film director pulled it off is something of a miracle. His opera adaptation appeared in the same year as Ken Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. It’s hard to imagine more dissimilar approaches to the genre than these two men displayed. While Bergman’s was sprightly, Russell’s was positively surreal.

Quote of the Day (Monica Bellucci, on How Maria Callas ‘Created What She Wanted To Be’)

“She [opera singer Maria Callas] created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle.’ They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”— Italian actress Monica Bellucci quoted by Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Reviving the Aura of a Diva,” The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2023

I had become intrigued by this quote almost two years ago, but it’s come to the forefront of my consciousness now with the release of the Angelina Jolie biopic about Callas, Maria. If anyone understands the artistic creation of illusions in the manner described by Ms. Bellucci, it would have to be Ms. Jolie, I think.

(The image accompanying this post, of Maria Callas in her home in Milan, Italy, was taken in 1957 by Federico Patellani.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Barber and Menotti, on Why ‘Must the Winter Come So Soon?’)

“Must the winter come so soon?
Night after night I hear the hungry deer
Wander weeping in the woods
And from his house of brittle bark hoots the frozen owl.”—American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981), “Must the winter come so soon?”, from the opera Vanessa (1957), with English lyrics by Italian-American librettist Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
 
It seems like we were just making the acquaintance of the fall of 2024 when winter began blowing its icy breath on us. A lifelong resident of the Northeast, I expect as much. But this morning, a friend now living in Florida texted me that it was only 35 degrees down there.
 
Well, no bother. I can always wear a heavy sweater and pull a blanket tighter inside when it gets cold. On the other hand, when the temperatures turn subtropical, aside from cranking up the AC and staying indoors, there’s not much you can do on those muggy summer days.
 
For now, anyway, take what comfort you can in the lovely lyrics and music from Barber’s collaboration with Menotti.
 
I took the image accompanying this post, by the way, 14 years ago this month, only a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. It’s easy to imagine both “the hungry deer” that “wander weeping in the woods” evoked by Barber and Menotti, as well as the “hazy shade of winter” that Simon and Garfunkel sang about in the Sixties.

This Day in Opera History (Marc Blitzstein Adaptation of Hellman Drama Opens)

Oct. 31, 1949— Marc Blitzstein's Regina, premiering at Broadway’s 46th Street Theater, represented a cross-section of American musical influences: hymns, blues, foxtrots, ragtime, polkas, and field songs, as if trying to reach a mass audience.

But the masses didn’t turn out for this adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s hit 1939 drama The Little Foxes, about the deforming impact of greed on a woman and her siblings in turn-of-the century Alabama.

In fact, even in an era when quasi-operatic productions were created for Broadway by such ambitious composers as Kurt Weill (Street Scene), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Consul), Leonard Bernstein (Candide), and Frank Loesser (The Most Happy Fella), audiences did not warm to this material, with some attendees even demanding their money back because they were expecting a musical.

Even with a full-page ad in The New York Times signed by Bernstein and 11 other musical and theater luminaries that extolled the virtues of this production, Regina lasted just seven weeks—one-twentieth of the time it took to create this piece of musical theater.

My post from earlier this year, on a 1959 Blitzstein production, Juno, related how that show fell victim to misdirection and miscasting. The problem with Regina was simpler: After much back- and-forth discussion, producer Cheryl Crawford convinced the composer that this show belonged on a musical stage rather than in an opera house.

Blitzstein, longing for the kind of recognition then being given Rodgers and Hammerstein for South Pacific, went along with the idea. It was a mistake.

Some opera purists didn’t appreciate the show’s use of spoken recitative. But the principal cause of the truncated run were fans who, expecting a traditional brassy musical comedy, encountered a brooding opera about capitalistic excess—and demanded their money back at the show’s intermission.

Blitzstein’s lyrics drew heavily from Hellman’s dialogue from the original play—a convention often ignored in opera, whose creators adapt material to their own ends.

In what’s frequently considered the loveliest song in the show, “Birdie’s Aria,” Blitzstein affectingly depicts Regina’s sensitive sister, who mourns the gracious aristocratic manners that once held sway at the family estate, Lionnet, even as she drowns her sorrow in elderberry wine. Birdie becomes a sister under the skin to another lost Southern belle crushed by a rapacious age, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire (which itself was turned into a 1995 opera by Andre Previn).

Quote of the Day (Soprano Barbara Bonney, on How Mastering a Text Helps With Stage Fright)

"When you start to sing it after all this preparation, you have that wonderful deep memory; it’s like you’ve implanted it in the soles of your feet. So when you’re in a concert, let’s say you’re distracted by something and the words fly out of your head, there’s so much memory inside of you that you can quickly get back into it when you are about to completely fall apart. When I teach I find usually the first thing that goes when kids get nervous is their text; because they haven’t learnt the text—they’ve learnt the music and then sort of got the words along with it; that’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s much more fascinating and much more useful in life to have the words, because let’s say you’re driving along a country lane and all of a sudden the passage—not just the music, but the words—will come to you, and you make a connection in life as a poet would, and it’s so much more rich than just knowing words and knowing music, and performing them.” —American soprano Barbara Bonney quoted by Daniel Jaffe, “The Intimate Art of Barbara Bonney,” Classic CD, May 1999

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on the Need to “Leave Out the Vocal Parts’ in Wagner Operas)

“The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, of course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a [Richard] Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.”—American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), “Mark Twain at Beyreuth” (often called “At the Shrine of St. Wagner”), originally printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 6, 1891, included in Mark Twain’s Travel Letters From 1891-92 

Quote of the Day (Henry Alford, Imagining ‘Insomnia: The Opera’)

(10 P.M. A bedchamber, with a balcony overlooking a village square. Enrico is putting on pajamas. He sings at half voice.)

Enrico: “My raccoon eyes and zombie stare
Boldly sing the woes of bodily miscare.
O, hundred-dollar white-noise machine! O, yoga dude named Tevin!
Help me reverse twelve months of 24/7.
Collective woe has ravaged my breast,
America, you put the ‘un’ in unrest.”

(He parts his blackout curtains, opens the window, and addresses the villagers.)

“Hark, twentysomething coder! Hark, seasoned whore!
Tonight’s the night I finally snore;
When might turns to will, and is rises from seems.
I’ve reduced my caffeine and I’m ready to dream.”—American humorist and journalist Henry Alford, “Shouts and Murmurs—Insomnia: The Opera,” The New Yorker, Apr. 12, 2021

The image accompanying this post comes from the 2002 film Insomnia, where Al Pacino plays one of several characters afflicted with this sleep disorder.

Among contemporary practitioners of musical theater—including opera—Stephen Sondheim seems the lyricist-composer most likely to choose a daunting subject such as this—if anybody was drawn to the kind of tongue-in-cheek project that Alford has in mind.

This Day in Classical Music History (Mozart’s Marvelous ‘Marriage of Figaro’ Premieres)

May 1, 1786— Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), the latest opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, opened at Vienna’s Burgtheater to a more mixed reception than the 30-year-old composer might have liked, as the orchestra experienced problems with the technical demands called for by the piece.

But in Prague, with the 30-year-old composer conducting the orchestra himself, his four-act Italian opera buffa (comic opera) ended up performed before enthusiastic audiences for four weeks. Since then, it has become a standard part of the repertoire of opera companies around the world.

The theme of this piece of musical theater—class conflict—appeals to contemporary companies (including in a free 2019 adaptation, Figaro 90210!, by Chautauqua Opera). In Mozart’s time, that profoundly unsettled an Austrian monarchy that dreaded disorder.

But after speaking with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart glimpsed intriguing possibilities in characters created by the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (ones who would later also be used in Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville). The librettist removed the more explicit references to political revolution that had troubled France’s ancient regime, and which could have done the same in Austria.

It would, in truth, be hard to find musical partners more appreciative of worldliness, careening from one scrape to another, and surviving by the skin of one’s teeth than Mozart and Da Ponte.

Though Peter Shaffer unfairly caricatured Mozart as an “obscene child” in the 1979 play Amadeus, the composer’s letters do indisputably depict him as possessing a sense of the mischievous and an ever-pressing need to keep his debt obligations in check. And Da Ponte, who had been ordained a Catholic priest in 1773, was banished from Venice for having a mistress, and only ended up on his feet as librettist to the Italian Theatre in Vienna through the help of his friend Antonio Salieri.

Mozart and Da Ponte would go on to create Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte. Seldom has an opera collaboration proven so consistently daring and fruitful.

In a sense, The Marriage of Figaro is an attempt to wrest, from the kind of disorder these men experienced in their own lives, a redeeming harmony. It foreshadows the modern screwball comedy with its disguises, mistaken identities, trickery and outbursts of jealousy, but it observes one of the classical dramatic unities by setting all of this within a single day. Indeed, the satiric tension is heightened because of this compression.

Like the American musical-theater masters Oscar Hammerstein II and Stephen Sondheim, Mozart created his compositions for the stage organically, through the demands of the dramatic situation. The songs originate from a character’s particular psychology, or from the action of the play at that moment.

Mozart’s achievement in this form is all the more remarkable as a demonstration of his overall musical versatility. While other opera composers of his time preferred to specialize in this genre, his endeavors in this occurred in the same decade when he was also generating peerless symphonies, chamber music, and masses. He knew how to exploit the collective resources of an orchestra because he was a host in himself as a conductor, pianist, organist and violinist.

If the opera celebrates liberation from the constraints of class and convention, so has its use in film, most notably in the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd comedy Trading Places and in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where the doors of the factory are unlocked by playing Mozart’s masterful overture.

The creation of that overture itself manifested Mozart’s improvisational genius. Not only did it depart from the usual practice of overtures of including snatches from what will follow, but it was also finished on the fly—the very day of the opera’s first performance. 

Remarkably, these four minutes of whirling, frenetic joy have become among the favorite stand-alone pieces of classical orchestras worldwide, even when removed from the opera that Johannes Brahms had termed “a miracle.”

This Day in Art History (Death of Benvenuto Cellini, Celebrated, Scandalous Renaissance Man)

Feb. 13, 1571— Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, and musician who chronicled his multiple creative interests and tumultuous escapades in a frank and celebrated autobiography, died at age 70 of pleurisy in his native Florence.

“Renaissance man” has come to be shorthand for a prodigiously talented individual who engages in multiple pursuits. But, aside from Michelangelo, who wrote commendable poetry, and Giorgio Vasari, a pioneering biographer, no other great craftsman of the period besides Cellini left a literary record that could be mentioned in the same breath as his visual one.

Unlike Michelangelo (who wrote verses on an unnamed love) and Vasari (who focused on other artists), Cellini was a born raconteur, holding forth in characteristic hot-tempered, boastful, witty, and loyal fashion on himself and, to a lesser extent, his views on the theory of art. He vented about his adventures voluminously, over nearly a decade, in his La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini (“The Life of Benvenuto Cellini”)—and still hadn’t completed the project at his death, as he interspersed this with more than one hundred poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and several discourses on art.

Ironically, while defending his visual primacy among his peers (at a time when his contentious personality had sidelined him from new commissions), Cellini furnished a strong counterargument: that his real talent lay with the written word, rather than with his products as a goldsmith and sculptor.

In one chapter of his autobiography, Cellini catalogues his meticulous preparation for his bronze “Perseus” sculpture, followed by a description of how he save his creation from destruction by fire and was congratulated by his assistants for helping them to have “learned and seen things done which other masters judged impossible.”  

But the artist can’t leave it at that: he must also write how the two men he suspected of trying to sabotage his latest masterwork said “was no man, but of a certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.”

At this late stage of the Renaissance, readers are beholding a new kind of artistic consciousness: a man unapologetically basking in his personal glory. Cellini has presented not just an advertisement for himself in his own time, but for his undying fame in the eyes of posterity.

His autobiography offers up a new persona: a creator passionately committed to his art, cynical in his fashion (“When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs,” he recalled the wife of a rich Roman banker telling him), and defiant of conventional morality. He even surpassed Caravaggio, whose aggressiveness (hitting waiters, slandering rivals) climaxed in flight from Rome for killing a man in a street fight. Cellini openly admitted to three killings: of his brother’s murderer, a rival goldsmith, and an innkeeper. Only the protection of Popes Clement VII and Paul III saved him from punishment.

(There were some limits to Cellini’s alarming candor: contemporary mores meant that he could cop to vainglory and murder, but not to bisexuality, even though several indictments and even convictions for sodomy were path of his rap sheet in both Italy and France.)

Other Renaissance artists have inspired novels and/or films (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Caravaggio in Derek Jarman’s 1986 movie named for the painter). But how many such figures have become the subject of operas?

Yet Cellini has—not once, but twice, in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The dramatic, even over-the-top, elements of the artist’s personality lend themselves to the genre. Nevertheless, it would have disappointed the ego-driven Florentine that neither opera has entered the canon of musical theater (though the overture of Berlioz’s work is frequently performed in concert halls by orchestras, as seen in this YouTube clip).

For a fascinating overview of Cellini’s life, see Harold Sack’s November 2019 post from the blog SciHi (i.e., “Science, Technology and Art in History”).

(The self-portrait of Cellini in the image accompanying my post is a sketch now held in the Royal Library in Turin, believed to have been drawn sometime between 1540 and 1543.)

This Day in Cold War History (‘Porgy and Bess’ Staged in Leningrad, at Soviet and US Turning Points)

Dec. 26, 1955—In the first American theater troupe appearance in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, the international touring company of Porgy and Bess performed in Leningrad.

The massive company, nearly 100 strong, presented the 1935 “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin amid simultaneous watersheds in U.S. and Soviet history. In America, the civil-rights movement was picking up momentum with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott. In the U.S.S.R., Nikita Khrushchev, having been named secretary of the Communist Party, was gauging how to expose Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian abuses.

In this atmosphere, the production by the Everyman Opera Company became a vehicle for political controversy, as this work had been since its Broadway premiere 20 years before. Then, it was a matter of domestic dispute: How accurate was its depiction of African-American life? Now, many wondered if the Soviets would use the show to highlight American racial inequality as Marxism competed against the free-enterprise system in the postwar order.

So much intrigue and suspense surrounded the event that it received unusually extensive press coverage, including by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and Truman Capote, stepping away from novels, musicals and film scripts to venture into creative nonfiction for The New Yorker Magazine. Capote’s chronicle of the epic trip, The Muses Are Heard, became his first significant step into the genre that he would transform with In Cold Blood.

The all-black cast (insisted on from its Broadway premiere) of the Everyman group had already been touring for four years, including a triumphant stop earlier that year before a demanding Italian audience in Milan's La Scala to perform the theater's first American opera. But the stakes were far higher when Everyman director and co-producer Robert Breen led his company into Russia.

Throughout the international tour, the group had been sponsored by the U.S. State Department. But funding was denied for the Russian leg of the long tour because the State Department felt the Soviets would use this depiction of poverty in Charleston’s Catfish Row in its propaganda war against America.

Instead, funding was handled by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and as the Everyman group prepared for the show, they anxiously considered whether they were being watched by their hosts and how they should answer incessant questions about the civil-rights struggle going on back at home.

It is hard not to read Capote’s account without admiration for the intelligence, talent and dignity of its African-American cast, each member balancing fidelity to an imperfect country that could easily be embarrassed on the world stage with their commitment to truth and justice.

It is equally difficult to read Capote without rolling one’s eyes at State Department representatives addressing the cast in carefully calibrated terms, at other whites along for the ride (e.g., Ira Gershwin’s wife Lenore on rumors that their hotel rooms would be wired: “Where are we going to gossip? Unless we simply stand in the bathroom and keep flushing…”) and at Capote’s trip through a local department store.

Despite some jitters before and during the performance on how Soviet listeners were reacting (Bess’ adjustment of her garter upset some local prudes), the show moved audiences in Leningrad and, later, Moscow. It paved the way for later productions in Mother Russia of My Fair Lady, The Threepenny Opera, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, and Sugar.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ As Our Hero Calls in a Big Favor on Little Bro)

[Niles Crane refuses to sub as radio shrink during his brother Frasier’s vacation.]

Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer] [haughtily]: “Very well. You leave me no alternative but to call in my marker.”

Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce] [nervously]: “What marker?”

Frasier [lowering his voice threateningly]: “Oh, I think you know.”

Niles [gasping]: “You wouldn't!”

Frazier: “I would!”

Niles: “You can't!”

Frasier: “I will!”

Niles: “That was three years ago.”

Frasier: “I don't recall there being any statute of limitations. I distinctly recall that when you asked me to go out with Maris's sister, you said that you would ‘owe me one forever.’"

Niles: “But you only spent one evening with Brie. That hardly compares with what you're asking me to endure.”

Frasier: “Oh? Shall I refresh your memory? Midway through the opera, her ermine muff began to tremble. As it turned out, she had used it to smuggle in her adorably incontinent Chihuahua. Just as I thought we'd reached the low point of the evening, I suddenly felt a sandpaper tongue licking my earlobe. Alas, it did not belong to little Herve! Fortunately, my shriek coincided with the on-stage murder of Gondolfo!”— Frasier, Season 4, Episode 5, “Head Game,” original air date Nov. 12, 1996, teleplay by Rob Greenberg, directed by David Lee

Song Lyric of the Day (Adam Sandler’s ‘Opera Man,’ on Joe Biden’s Presidential Chances)

“Gropa gropa,

Sniffa sniffa,

Young or old-a

Make no diff-a

Joe, for this you

Won’t go far-o

To win White House

You need to

Bang porn star-o.”—Adam Sandler’s “Opera Man” skit (set to the tune of Amilcare Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours) on “Weekend Update,” Saturday Night Live, Season 44, Episode 19, May 4, 2019