Micha Hamel on his opera Caruso a Cuba: ‘Caruso is trapped in his star status’

(c) Petrovsky & Ramone, Origithing Photography

It all started at a book market during a holiday in Berlin, with the book Wo Aida Caruso fand. This German translation of Como un mensajero tuyo (As Your Messenger) of the Cuban author Mayra Montero at once triggered Micha Hamel’s interest: ‘The title made my antenna crackle. It was clever of the publisher not to choose a literal translation but to refer to the main characters: the historical figure Caruso and the opera heroine Aida’. Hamel read the book in one go and decided to turn it into an opera, Caruso a Cuba. It will be premiered on Sunday 3 March as part of the Opera Forward Festival, Otto Tausk conducting the Nederlands Kamerorkest.

The libretto starts from a historical fact – the bomb that exploded in the theatre of Havana while Caruso sang the role of Radamès in Aida in 1920 – the rest is fiction. ‘I had been talking to Pierre Audi for quite some time about a new production and now I knew: this story is an opera. Love and fate are the themes, it’s about opera and plays in an opera house.’ Hamel decided to deepen his bond with the opera tradition and at the same time write a work about unfulfilled love. ‘A difficult subject, which I have never worked out before in music theatre.’

Belcanto

From a very young age Hamel was inspired by the love for the belcanto of composers such as Verdi and Puccini: ‘My parents played a lot of recordings of opera, and I started composing after seeing the film Amadeus, I was fourteen years old. When the new venue of the Dutch National Opera opened I immediately took out a subscription. I visited all productions, until I went to study at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.’ Thanks to a Neapolitan lover he also learned to speak Italian fluently, the language of the libretto, which he wrote himself.

Act of love

The spirit of Verdi and Puccini can be heard in the score: ‘Without imitating I try to make my music sound as I hear theirs. Composing is always an act of love, an homage to the existing body of music that mankind has developed. For example, the orchestra plays a few bars from the Aida overture when the performance begins, and via audio fragments we twice hear the real Caruso as Radamès. There are also some style quotations, but with their own, contemporary colours.’

Musically, Hamel follows the story closely: ‘The protagonist Enrico Caruso arrives in Havana majestically and confidently, intent on shining as a star there. Towards the end he is completely wrecked and disillusioned, abandoned by all and every. My music starts melodiously and traditionally, but ends in grim atmospheres, with atonal fragments and radio noise.’

Baritonal tenor

The voice of Caruso still attracts admiration, also from Micha Hamel. ‘He does not really sound like a tenor but full and broad, also in the higher registers, more like a baritone. In his early years he even had trouble with the high notes, but when he mastered them technically, his career went fast. He always sings from the character, with small glissandi, sobs, accelerations and decelerations that logically sprout from the meaning of music and text, from what his character feels at that particular moment.’

In the tenor Airam Hernandez Hamel has found the ideal Caruso. ‘That role is quite a challenge because of the gigantic reputation of the historical Enrico Caruso. Also in terms of physical and appearance, the singer must be able to carry the role. As soon as I heard Hernandez sing I adapted my first sketches and I sculpted the rest of the part to his possibilities. He seems to love high notes, I love that.’

Doomed love

Hamel himself considers his chamber opera as one spun-out duet between Caruso and Aida. Their doomed love forms the dramatic core, around which the other figures circle. Aida’s mother and her godfather, the priest Calazán, try to turn fate away with rituals from their Lukumi religion. They represent the spiritual dimension. At some more distance there is Caruso’s manager Zirato, who also tries to protect him from evil.’

‘Caruso’s tragedy is that he is a world star, and is trapped in this role. He has no choice but to sing and earn money. He is obsessed with himself, he is the hero of his own life story. The explosion of the bomb may serve as a liberation: he escapes from his life and finds a great love. At the same time, raw reality knocks at the door: the mafia, his ailing health, the fact that he is married, even though his wife lives in New York.’

Caruso disrupts relationships

‘Aida’s tragedy is that she feels Caruso is her great love, but has to release him because he must return to New York. Spurred on by her love she helps him escape from the mafia, but at the same time she helps him escape Cuba – and her. She carries his child, but knows there will never be another man in her life. In a metaphorical sense, Caruso himself is a bomb: wherever he goes, he disrupts personal relationships. In this I see a similarity with Pasolini’s Teorema, in which the human is treated as a primal force that confronts us with our insignificance.’

‘It remains unclear whether the story actually takes place, or only in Caruso’s feverish dreams, floating between life and death. The opera is told from his perspective, his head is full of memories. When he sings we often hear a Neapolitan mandolin, as a melancholic touch. Moreover, an out of tune piano sounds. This reminds him of his youth, but also of the rehearsal room when praciticing an opera role.’

Death in Naples

Hamel once uses an Aida trumpetthe instrument Verdi had especially built for the triumphal march of this opera. It sounds during the ritual in which Caruso is immersed in a lagoon, to alleviate the chaos that his presence in Havana has created. Hamel:  ‘This forms the centre of the piece: in a vision Caruso sees his hometown of Naples; Calazán foresees that Caruso will die there – the latter is also historical.’

Towards the end of the opera, more and more noises creep into the sound image, via percussion and electronic soundscapes. ‘At a certain point there are no longer any stable chords, everything seems to happen randomly and accidentally. Rhythms get stuck, chords only consist of two notes. Caruso a Cuba ends with a high whistling tone. Perhaps this depicts the screaming sound of the falling bomb that Caruso relives in his head, or the tinnitus that the explosion gave him. Tinnitus, the death sentence of every musician…’

Caruso a Cuba runs from 3-9 March

#CarusoACuba #DuctchNationalOpera #MichaHamel #NederlandsKamerorkest #OperaForwardFestival #OttoTausk

Rob Zuidam zooms in on Joanna the Mad in his opera Rage d’Amours: ‘Joanna took me by the hand’

In 2005, Dutch National Opera and Holland Festival presented Rob Zuidam’s opera Rage d’Amours. Five years later, he received the Kees van Baaren Prize for this blood-curdling production about the life of Joanna The Mad. The award ceremony was part of the Festival Dag in de Branding, with a performance by Residentie Orkest conducted by Otto Tausk.

In its next edition on 10 April, Dag in de Branding will present a video recording of this performance from its archives. In 2005, I interviewed Zuidam about his opera for the programme book of Dutch National Opera. Below is an abridged version.

Amsterdam, June 2005, interview with Rob Zuidam on Rage d’Amours

Rob Zuidam (c) Maarten Slagboom

Rob Zuidam (1964) began his career in a rock band, but his interests did not quite run parallel to those of the other band members: ‘I wanted mainly to rehearse, preferably all day, but they were more interested in blowing and drinking than in making music. Besides, I soon felt the need to break through the usual rock schemes, but that required an alertness they couldn’t muster. So I started messing around with tape recorders myself.’

In the process, Zuidam became interested in all the music he could find in Rotterdam’s Central Discotheque, from Aboriginals and Eskimos via the usual classics up to and including the twentieth century: ‘Modern music particularly appealed to me, and through record sleeves I discovered new names all the time. When I read that someone had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, I suddenly realized you could apparently learn to compose. Shortly afterwards I went to the Conservatory in Rotterdam, where the doorman referred me to Klaas de Vries.’

Even though he was hardly technically gifted, he was accepted. He was taught by the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans and Klaas de Vries and soon developed into someone who, with flair, combined modern composition techniques with direct eloquence. In no time he became an internationally renowned composer.

In 1994 the Munich Biennale commissioned him to compose his first opera, Freeze. The libretto, written by Zuidam himself, tells the story of the millionaire’s daughter Patricia Hearst, who is kidnapped and joins the ranks of her captors. In this opera, Zuidam effortlessly combines juicy film music, cabaret and ripping guitar solos with the great intervals so typical of the post-war avant-garde.

Love beyond death

His second opera, Rage d’Amours, about the life of Joanna The Mad (1479-1555), followed in 2003 and was composed for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. ‘A friend once drew my attention to the wife of Philip the Handsome (1478-1506), who, after his death, dragged his corpse through Spain in the hope that he would come back to life. In the end they locked her up, after which she looked out from a dungeon on her husband’s grave for forty-six years.’

Joanna The Mad painted by Juan de Flandes

Zuidam was immediately captivated by her passion: ‘She asked nothing more of life than to be with her husband forever. I find this devotion both admirable and disturbing. Her love is truly imperishable: no matter what state Philip’s body is in, she continues to love him. This is contrary to our human nature, for which appearance is of great importance. We all have moments when we have to decide whether or not to give in to our impulses. Joanna decides to devote her life to her lover and does so with total abandon. That ecstasy fascinates me.’

For Rage d’Amours Zuidam again wrote the libretto himself, basing it on contemporary Spanish, French and Latin writings. ‘In a book about Joanna The Mad I found references to sixteenth-century sources. I came across the account of an anonymous chronicler, who describes Joanna’s life from the inside, in old French, the language of the court. It is a kind of fairy-tale French, so beautiful that I based a large part of the libretto on it.’

The reporting is detailed and straightforward, says Zuidam: ‘The author was clearly an intimate of the couple. He describes, for instance, how Philip slept with about every young lady that crossed his path, and the raging jealousy – ‘rage d’amours’ – this incited in Joanna. We also get a detailed description of how Philip’s corpse is cut apart and embalmed, and of how Joanna then travels across Spain with his coffin, neglecting her personal hygiene, not washing herself and peeing in her clothes.’

‘I have given these texts to the composer Pierre da la Rue, who acts as narrator’, continues Zuidam. ‘As a member of the Royal Chapel he was on intimate terms with both Philip and Joanna: they affectionately called him Pierchon. In the seventh scene, when Joanna kisses the corpse, I have quoted part of his motet Delicta juventutis, which he composed on the occasion of Philip’s death.’

Three Joanna’s

Interestingly the role of Joanna is divided among three sopranos. Zuidam: ‘The opera is set in a dungeon, which functions as a metaphor for her head. The three voices bring her obsession and torment to the surface. Joanna 3 has a solo in the second scene, in which she and Philip are threatened with shipwreck. While the bystanders scream murder, she remains deadly calm: she does not care if they drown, for after all, she is together with her husband. She is the unshakeable one.’

Joanna 2 represents her exalted side: while the monks dismember her husband’s corpse, she sings ‘mi amado’, my beloved over and over again. The carnal, necrophilic aspect is represented by Joanna 1, who embraces the corpse in the seventh scene. More often they are together Joanna, as at the beginning, when they sing a lament. I found that a moving image, three lamenters mourning over a coffin. Once I had the idea of having Joanna sung by three singers, inspiration started flowing immediately.’

The story of the Spanish queen’s life is indeed poignant, but it doesn’t generate much action. How has Zuidam created tension nevertheless? ‘I sailed by my inner compass. For example, in the intense fifth scene Joanna 2 sings her passionate declaration of love, and it wouldn’t be wise to continue with something laden after this. So I inserted a short scene in which a cleaning lady polishes the floor, accompanied by her own brushing and a contrabass clarinet. This is followed by the passage in which the coffin is opened so that Joanna can kiss the corpse.’

Rage d’Amours (c) Hans Hijmering

Philip, although already dead at the beginning of the opera, is sometimes shown alive. As in the eighth scene, in which he sings a heartrending love duet with Joanna 1, later joined by the other two Joanna’s. ‘I wanted to capture something of the first, happy period of the young couple. I searched for suitable texts for a long time, and finally found them in the Song of Songs. They have exactly the sublime purity that I was looking for.’

Although Zuidam did not consciously strive for local colour, the music of Rage d’Amours is very much in keeping with the Renaissance, with subtle references to Flemish polyphony and quasi-Gregorian chant. And some of the embellishments of the vocal lines sound unmistakably Spanish. The composer considers this inevitable: ‘Music and subject are interwoven. Freeze is set in 1970s California, so that opera is much poppier. Rage d’Amours is set in the sixteenth century, the pace is slower and the overall sound is different.’

‘In any case, I now have the idea I have come to the core of what I wanted to say. On the one hand because I have more experience, on the other because of the theme. Although I was fascinated by Patricia Hearst, deep down I still thought she was a silly rich girl, whereas Joanna touched me intensely: I really started to love her.’

This helped Zuidam while composing: ‘Take the fifth scene, for instance, which came about quite intuitively: everything was ready and waiting. Sometimes I wondered whether the music would become too exalted, but in those dark moments Joanna took me by the hand. Then the music wrote itself.’

My blog was named one of the 60 best classical music blogs worldwide on Feedspot.
If you’d like to support me: any gift is welcome through PayPal, or transfer to my bank account: T. Derks, Amsterdam, NL82 INGB 0004 2616 94. Thanks!

The scene picture shows the premiere in 2005, with from left to right: sopranos Young-Hee Kim, Barbara Hannigan and Claron McFadden. Reinbert de Leeuw conducted Asko|Schönberg, Guy Cassiers staged the opera. In 2019 a recording was released on CD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH2Wa8__2v4

#DagInDeBranding #DutchNationalOpera #JoannaTheMad #OttoTausk #PhilipTheHandsome #PierreDeLaRue #RageDAmours #ResidentieOrkest #RobZuidam