America: Open Skies or Crowded Streets?

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to another episode of Vocal Reckoning. I'm your host Ailop Pon coming to you for one of the last times from New York City's hell. And I'm not referring necessarily to Mamani's warmth of collectivism, but rather to the heat wave that is affecting us right now. So if you see me sweating profusely, please have a little understanding. There is no central air conditioning in this old brownstone. Anyway, without further ado, I will continue with our exploration of great American operas in honor of this country's 250th anniversary. And the next opera in line is Aaron Copeland's 1954, The Tenderland. Now, The Tenderland is a frustrating opera because the best things in it are so beautiful that one wants the whole piece to be better than it actually is. And I believe that any serious defense of it has to begin with that admission. The dramatic engine of the opera is just not strong enough. The libertto does not always create enough pressure. There are moments when the piece seems to hover between opera uh and you know staged coral canata and the result can feel dramatically underwhelming.

[00:01:10]However, I still love it and I love it for reasons that have nothing to do with the nostalgia or obligation towards, you know, patriotism because I'm not even an American citizen. Copeland gives us something rare in American opera, a sound world of plainness that is not stupid and sincerity that is not sentimental. Here, rural life is not treated as a joke or as a museum piece.

[00:01:36]The score just exudes it. It has space around the phrases. The it has the unmistakable characterness and the openness of Copelan's harmonies. But when the opera is at its best, it's like very atmospheric. The story is very simple. It's about a young woman in a Midwestern farm, and it mostly just depicts all the characters around her.

[00:02:06]That is a weak subject for an opera. The problem, however, the main problem is that the piece does not always press hard enough on its own material. Lor's leaving should feel like the inevitable breaking point of the whole evening, and sometimes the opera arrives there more gently than the drama would require.

[00:02:30]Still, Lori is one of Copelan's most touching creations for the soprano voice. Her music needs youth, but not childishness.

[00:02:39]It needs freshness, but just not to be pretty.

[00:02:44]Once I thought I'd never grow tall. It's not a showpiece in the vulgar sense, but it gives a singer something far more valuable, a moment of private awakening.

[00:02:54]The Arya has to be sung as though the character is discovering her own inner life while she sings it. If the soprano treats it merely as sweet Americana, the music becomes bland. If she lets the line breathe and keeps her words alive, Lori suddenly becomes much more than an innocent farm girl standing at the edge of the story. That is where Cop Copelan's vocal writing is most successful. The English sits naturally.

[00:03:22]The phrases do not make the singer fight the language and the line can be sung honestly without turning emotion into grand operetic rhetoric. There is real craft in that and a composer like Copeland who can make plain speech sing without making it sound either inflated or flat has accomplished something very special and very difficult. The promise of living is the heart of the opera and frankly it is the reason the piece will always deserve a place in American vocal music. It is one of those rare ensemble pieces that can sound almost embarrassingly simple on paper and then become overwhelming in performance. The power is the accumulation. Voices joining, gratitude widening, ordinary labor being given a kind of ceremonial dignity. Copeland does not need to complicate the moment in order to deepen it.

[00:04:22]Earth and peace with us.

[00:04:34]The proise of living.

[00:04:38]The proise of growing.

[00:04:43]The proise of his sharing.

[00:05:03]He trusts the harmony, the text, the communal breath. And it is exactly what many composers no longer know how to do.

[00:05:11]They distrust simplicity so much that they cannot distinguish between simplicity and emptiness. Copeland could. He understood that a direct musical gesture if it is placed correctly and carried by real vocal line can gather tremendous force. The promise of living works because it is not ashamed of thanksgiving. That alone makes it almost radical. Now the opera's weakness is not its sincerity. People who sneer at the tenderland because it's openhearted are telling on themselves.

[00:05:42]Actually the weakness lies in the dramatic pacing. The music often knows more than the theater around it. One feels that Copelan had access to the emotional world of the piece, but not always to the theatrical knife that would have made the conflict sharper.

[00:06:00]Martin and Top are especially important for that reason. They bring the outside world into the farm, and the opera depends on their arrival disturbing the household's sense of order. Martin, in particular, has to be more than a handsome drifter with a lyrical line. He has to represent possibility, danger, escape, and the first at all disappointment of Lor's life. If he's too bland, the whole center of the opera softens. And the piece needs to understand that Lori is drawn to him, but they can also they should be also able to understand that attraction in and of itself does not constitute a plot.

[00:06:40]Ma Moss also needs a little bit more attention than she sometimes get gets.

[00:06:46]She can easily become a generic worried mother, but the role is more interesting than that. She represents that world that Lori is leaving and she has to carry both love and limitation. She's not wrong to fear the outside world.

[00:06:59]She's not wrong to protect the house.

[00:07:01]But the tragedy, or at least the sadness, is that protection can become confinement even when it begins in love.

[00:07:09]And that is a quiet center at the center of the tenderland. The ache between gratitude and departure. The opera loves the home that Lori must leave. It does not mock the farm, the family, the work, or the rituals of ordinary life. But it also understands that a young person cannot remain inside gratitude forever.

[00:07:29]At some point, the blessing becomes a boundary for Lori. And this is why the opera should not be dismissed as just merely naive because after all naive is not stupidity necessarily. Beauty is not a lack of sophistication. And Copelan's best music here has the courage to stand undefended.

[00:07:52]It does not protect its emotions with irony and it risks being simple because the world it depicts requires simplicity. A great performance of the tenderland has to resist therefore two equal dangers to not be too treated too sentimentally but also to not be treated with too much distance. The singers have to believe in the plainness but without flattening it. Copeland's opera may not be the strongest drama in the American repertoire but it preserves something precious. A vision of American lyricism rooted in land, labor, youth, gratitude, and departure. Sometimes the great subject is simply the moment when a young person looks at life and she realized that what formed her, what she loves and what she knows has to go.

[00:08:50]Quick interruption. If you like videos like this, please don't forget to like and subscribe and to share the video.

[00:08:58]Next in line is Kurt Vile's 1947 street scene. It is one of the essential American stage works because it understands something that should be obvious, but it is apparently not.

[00:09:09]Serious American musical theater production could not come into being by simply imitating European opera with an American sort of address pasted onto the scenery.

[00:09:22]Vile knew that the musical language had to change. And once again, this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely adamant about not translating opera. The rhythm of speech had to change. The the relationship between area, song, scene, and ensemble also had to change. A New York tenement could not sound like Vienna, Paris, or Milan. It needed the pressure of the street, the vulgarity of the heat like the one that we're going through right now, the impatience of people who live too close to one another. The sentimental song drifting out of a window, the argument overheard by everyone and the private humiliation that becomes public before the person suffering. It has time to close the door. That is what makes street scenes so important. It does not treat New York as a backdrop. It treats New York as an acoustic condition. Everyone hears everyone. Everyone watches everyone.

[00:10:15]Privacy exists only in theory. A marriage collapses within earshot of the neighbors. Children play next to adults who are quietly falling apart. People flirt, complain, dream, judge, gossip, and make little speeches about life because there is nowhere else for all that human pressure to go. The piece sit sits uneasily between opera, Broadway musical, and on and spoken theater. And that uneasiness is part of its truth.

[00:10:44]Vile was not trying to make opera respectable by adding popular material.

[00:10:48]Nor was he trying to make Broadway more serious by dressing it in some sort of oporatic clothing. He was trying to find a musical language of its own for the people on that street. And those people do not all sing in the same idiom because they don't all live in the same emotional and artistic and cultural world. That is why the score keeps shifting. It needs operatic expansion for the moments when feeling becomes too large for ordinary speech. But it also needs song because the characters live in a city already saturated with popular music. It needs ensembles because the tenment itself is a chorus. It needs dance rhythms, fragments, interruptions, street noise and lyric release because New York Life does not wait for one genre to finish before another one begins. Lonely House remains one of the great American tenor araras because it names a very specific kind of loneliness.

[00:11:46]>> I hear a neighbor snoring.

[00:11:53]Sometimes I hear a baby cry.

[00:12:00]Sometimes I hear a staircase creaking.

[00:12:08]Sometimes a distant, not the loneliness of the desert, not the loneliness of the exile, but the loneliness of being surrounded by people who can hear you and still not know you.

[00:12:26]That is a devastatingly urban human condition. Sam Kaplan is not alone here because there's nobody around him. He's alone because there are too many people around him and no one or none of them actually can enter the room where he actually lives.

[00:12:43]The area has to be sung with line but also with restraint. If the tenor turns it into a generalized outpouring, it loses its ache. The beauty of the piece is that the loneliness is contained inside a young man who still has manners, still has hope, still has enough self-comand not to collapse in public. The singer has to give us a wound without making Sam look pathetic.

[00:13:06]He's not begging the audience to feel sorry for him. He's simply discovering the shape of his own isolation. Rose is just as crucial, and she's often the real test of the piece. She cannot be played as a generic nice girl trapped in bad in a bad neighborhood. She has to carry intelligence, exhaustion, decency, and a kind of weary emotional independence. Her music needs warmth, but it also needs spine. Rose understands more than what she says, and the singer has to let that knowledge color the line without turning her into a modern psychological case study. Anna is one of Vile's most heartbreaking creations because her tragedy is domestic, ordinary, and therefore almost unbearable.

[00:14:10]That way somehow I never could believe is not a grand operatic confession in the old sense. It is the sound of a woman trying to account for the disappointment of her life without having the language to truly be able to dignify it fully. The role needs a singer who can make plain sadness sound compelling. If she overplays it, Anna becomes a victim in quotation marks. If she underplays it, the opera loses its emotional core.

[00:14:51]Frank is also a dangerous character, but for familiar reasons. He cannot be turned into a stock brute. The violence is absolutely there obviously and the role must not be softened into some sort of undue respectability. But vile and rise give Frank the recognizable ugliness of a man who feels his authority slipping away and has no inner resources beyond resentment, suspicious and force. That kind of man is not exotic. Every society has it and knows it. The singer has to make him human enough to be frightening, but not theatrical enough to be safely dismissed.

[00:15:35]What I admire in Street Scene is that the crowd is never just scenery. The neighbors are funny, irritating, sentimental, cruel, kind, vulgar, frightened, and even bored in ways that feel theatrically very much alive. Vile understands that a crowd is made of private disappointments. The score can widen into the whole block and then suddenly narrow into one person's shame, one person's longing and one person's panic. That is also why the chorus and ensemble uh matter so much. If the ensemble is too polished, the street sort of evaporates. But if it is too messy, the music also then loses shape. The performers have to find the exact point where stylization and life meet, where the audience feels the chaos of the tenement without losing the architecture of the music that Vile wrote. The danger about performing street scene is one of anxiety. Opera companies sometimes make it too heavy as though they are, I don't know, embarrassed by the Broadway blood running through it. And then by the same token, musical theater productions can make it a little too light as though the operatic writing in it where some sort of inconvenience to be minimized. Both approaches miss the point. The piece needs singers who can sustain line and actors who can handle the text. It needs musical discipline, theatrical speed, and a refusal to apologize for its mixed inheritance.

[00:17:13]wrapped in a ribbon and tied in a bow.

[00:17:16]Moonface stare eyed. The children's music, the neighbors interjections, the love music, the violence, the heat of the street, all of it belongs to the same theatrical organism. Vile is not lowering opera by allowing popular forms into the room. He's admitting that the room is New York and New York has never ask anyone's permission to mix languages, classes, accents, desires, and noise.

[00:17:42]That is why stream scene street scene remains such a crucial bridge between opera and American musical theater. It takes ordinary urban life seriously enough to let it sing. But it also knows that ordinary urban life does not always sing in the same style. Sometimes it sings like opera, sometimes a little bit like Broadway. Sometimes it almost talks. Sometimes it erupts. And at its best, street scene gives us one of the clearest answers to the American question of what opera could have become. A theater of voices rooted in speech, place, popular song, and real human pressure.