This superbly packaged
set taken from Radio France broadcast
tapes is a model in disseminating significant
broadcasts of the past; would that the
BBC Legends series had the impulse to
champion such repertoire, in such style.
Dallapiccola’s serial
opera was first produced in Berlin in
September 1968, conducted by Lorin Maazel
but sung in German (a performance available
on CD on Stradivarius STR 10063). It
was mounted the following year by the
BBC in London on Radio 3 (20 Sept 1969)
when, Maazel brought many of the Berlin
cast for a July pre-recording to sing
in English with the BBC Symphony Orchestra,
though with three new names: Günther
Reich as Ulysses, counter-tenor Paul
Esswood as Telemacus (sung by a soprano
at the first performance) and Gerald
English as Tiresias and the blind bard
Demodocus. The Berlin production was
repeated at La Scala conducted by Georg
Ratjen when one assumes it was sung
in Italian. Some lucky readers may have
come across the 1972 Italian Radio production
conducted by Zoltán Peskó
which was circulated on LP by RAI though
never commercially distributed. In the
late 1980s the BBC had another production,
this time in Italian, conducted by Andrew
Davis with Alan Opie as Ulysses, Phyllis
Bryn-Julson as Calypso and Penelope
and Sarah Walker as Circe, with a supporting
cast of similar starry quality. This
French Radio production is sung in Italian,
but it has to be said that this is a
work where understanding of the words
is essential, and I have relied on the
published vocal score (in Italian and
English) in getting to grips with it.
As a serial epic it
seems to me this complex music, which
nevertheless has a jewel-like lustre
and a quite beautiful surface allure,
needs to be put over with a romantic
freedom and strength of colour, though
its intrinsic inclination to be hard-edged
and crystalline works against that approach.
I have not been able to hear the BBC’s
first production but their performance
from the 1980s was sung in virile full-blooded
style. This fine Radio France production
from 1975 has been little known to Dallapiccola’s
British admirers, and it is good to
be able to welcome it now. In assessing
it I have been able to compare it with
Stradivarius’s CDs of the first production
and a tape of the BBC’s second broadcast;
it is remarkably consistent.
Dallapiccola composed
four sung works for the stage of which
by far the most familiar is Il Prigioniero
(Esa-Pekka Salonen with Swedish forces
is on Sony SK68323; there was also once
a Dorati version on Decca). The least
performed is Job, subtitled ‘sacra
rappresentazione’ (Hermann Scherchen’s
reading from La Fenice in September
1964 is also on Stradivarius CD – STR
10043). I have never come across a recording
of Dallapiccola’s pre-war first opera,
Vole di Notte (Night Flight)
after Saint-Exupéry, but it would
be a natural for compact disc because
of its simple set, the action being
completely placed within the office
of Rivière, the director of the
night flying company. Here at its climax,
in a touching preview of the final dénouement
of Ulisse, the doomed pilot reports
he has emerged into the starlit sky,
Dallapiccola exploring his moment of
ecstatic realisation as thirty years
later he has Ulisse contemplate the
infinite under the stars at the end
of the opera under review. Dallapicccola
also wrote an accessible 16-minute ballet,
Marsia, which is on AS discs
(AS 510), a live recording by no less
than the New York Philharmonic conducted
by Cantelli, a transcription from March
1954.
The producer André
Muzeau chose the sympathetic conductor
Ernest Bour for French Radio’s Ulisse
in 1975. A celebrated interpreter of
then modern music, Bour died in 2001,
but encompassed a remarkably wide range,
though specialising in more difficult
twentieth century scores notably with
his South West German Radio Symphony
Orchestra, where he reigned for nearly
twenty years in the 1960s and 1970s.
A pupil of Hermann Scherchen, who also
championed Dallapiccola, Bour manages
to integrate concerns for the structure
with detail of the complex orchestration
and the considerable demands on the
voices, as well as the stage images.
All in all it is remarkably well done,
a master at work.
So many composers have
seized on the character of Odysseus
or Ulysses for operas, from Monterverdi
to our own day, often centring on the
female characters – Penelope and Nausicaa.
My favourite is Britten’s The Rescue,
not an opera but a radio melodrama,
and, turned into a concert work by Chris
de Souza as The Rescue of Penelope,
available on CD. Almost all have been
derived from Homer’s Odyssey,
an epic that is universally familiar.
But here Dallapiccola crafts his libretto
through the filter of Dante, much less
well known to an Anglo-Saxon audience,
but giving us the central scene in Hades,
where Ulisse unexpectedly encounters
the ghost of his mother.
Not the least of Dallapiccola’s
structural conceits is the palindromical
form of the opera, which although ostensibly
in a Prologue and two Acts, actually
falls into 13 sections arranged in a
symmetrical arch. At its centre comes
Dallapiccola’s vision of Ulysses’s sojourn
to the underworld. The whole is based
on a related set of tone rows, which
would need much close analytical study
fully to identify; even so they give
the music a very ’sixties surface, but
also a remarkably beautiful quite luminous
sound. The Orchestre Philharmonique
de Radio France respond with remarkable
virtuosity to what, for the players,
is difficult and ungrateful orchestral
writing. Incidentally the composer’s
orchestral work Three Questions with
Two Answers (I have it by the BBCSO
and Zoltán Peskó on LP
- Italia ITL 70044) is thematically
related to the orchestral music in the
opera, very definitely a musical footnote.
You might want to give it a spin while
listening to the opera.
The Prologue, which
is only scored for a chamber orchestra,
consists of the first three scenes,
and the story opens with the nymph Calypso,
inconsolably sad as she looks out to
sea – disconsolate that Ulysses has
gone away. Poseidon calls up a brief
orchestral storm and Ulisse is shipwrecked
and cast on the shore of the island
of the Phaeacians (the cover illustration
for the vocal score), where he encounters
Nausicaa and her maidservants.
Dallapiccola’s vocal
writing is remarkably demanding and
tends to have a jagged profile – enormous
leaps often of difficult intervals and
a very wide tessitura and a habit of
asking for sudden extremely high notes
to be sung pianissimo. The first two
singers we hear – the rôles of
Calypso and Nausicaa - have to play
this trick, the first up to a top B-flat
the second with repeated hits on top
Ds or Cs, and generally these are supposed
to be floated ppp. Although very good,
in this performance, the late Colette
Herzog as Calypso, and Gwynn Cornell
as Nausicaa, do not give us quite what
Dallapiccola asks for. Comparing with
Annabelle Bernard as Calypso and Gatherine
Gayer on Maazel’s version (and doubtless
with the composer present) they give
us a much cleaner almost bell-like hit
on the high notes, but they still do
not sing it quietly enough, though we
have to remember they were in the theatre.
The BBC’s studio team of Phyllis Bryn-Julson
and Christine Whittlesey seem to get
nearer to what is written in the score,
though unfortunately that has never
been issued commercially.
The first Act proper
is set in the Court of Nausicaa’s father,
King Alcinous, and in the great hall
of his palace four celebrated episodes
from Ulysses’ long journey are recounted
to the assembled nobles. Each is separated
by an interlude for chorus and orchestra.
The Bard Demodocus sings of the heroes
of the Trojan wars (lots of high Bs
and As) and Ulysses hears the Bard describing
himself; when the King notes that the
stories have caused Ulisse to weep,
his secret is out. During the first
interlude the vocal score asks that
the sound of two choirs be relayed through
loudspeakers and spread around the auditorium
making the distinction between ‘high
in the dome’ – ‘low down in the auditorium
on the left’ and on the right. This
is not altogether apparent in a broadcast.
Ulysses tells stories
about himself and implicitly about the
women he has abandoned: the voluptuous
lotus eaters, and Circe, the woman who
gave him knowledge and hence a conscience
(the moment of his parting, mirrors
reflections of his inner self). Then
to Hades where he meets the shade of
his mother, whom he had fondly imagined
was still waiting ‘safe upon our island’,
but in fact is dead of a broken heart
because her son has abandoned her. In
a mood of passionate sadness Ulisse
leaves the court to return to Ithaca,
and Act II. His imminent conquest, Nausicaa,
willingly lets him go – wouldn’t you?
This is ideal music to get to grips
with on CD as you do need to follow
the words.
As Dallapiccola tells
us in his commentary, this is a portrait
of a man trying to find himself; of
his search for a woman and his uncertainty
about himself; about his abandoning
of women. (To add to the resonances
from beginning to end, there are three
deliberate doublings which Dallapiccola
asks for in his cast, and two of them
are female: Circe/Melanto; Penelope/Calypso).
Ulysses own uncertainty about his place
in the worlds he visits is underlined
when he arrives in Ithaca but is not
recognised. Now we have the most familiar
part of the story, the loutish suitors
for his wife Penelope, and we have a
British counter-tenor, Christopher Wells,
as his son, Telemachus, strongly sung.
The suitors are contemptuous
of the ragged stranger, but the prostitute
Melantha – who entertains the suitors
- begins to suspect something is up
- she has ‘never seen eyes like that’.
Here Dallapiccola does not achieve the
immediate realistic drama that Britten
and Sackville-West did in The Rescue,
but it is a key moment. Ulysses kills
the suitors to prove he is who he is,
though Dallapiccola does make a big
thing of it. But there is no reconciliation
with Penelope (Colette Herzog, who earlier
sang Calypso) and the opera ends (beautifully
caught, this) with Ulisse’s great scena,
as Ulisse at one with the sea and the
stars is still questioning. He finally
embraces his vision of God in his closing
words: ‘All highest! No more alone are
my heart and the sea’. In fact it is
the sea – and hence the orchestra -
which is the principal character of
this opera, the sea upon which Ulysses
has been carried round the known world
and on which, at the end, we find our
hero, alone beneath a sky of stars as
he ponders the ultimate questions: ‘You
stars: how many times, under how many
skies have I watch’d you, and ponder’d
your pure and tremulous beauty!’ It
is with this soliloquy that the opera
ends.
In the central rôle
of Ulisse, the baritone Claudio Desderi,
32 when he recorded this, so very much
in his prime, we find a singer who in
a broadcast is able to explore Ulisse’s
ambivalent character with some beautiful
quiet singing. Desderi succeeds in creating
the sense of quest, and he does not
fall into the trap of making Ulisse
too heroic. For me, in his final reverie
under the stars he does not quite deliver
the quiet beautiful high notes Dallapiccola
seems to have wanted, and his sudden
sprechstimme for ‘All-highest’
– ‘Signore!’ - fails to convey a man
who has suddenly understood – the vocal
score says ‘as if with sudden illumination’.
This is notably different to Erik Saedén
in the first performance, who managed
to give Ulisse overtones of some serial
Wotan, though for me preferable at the
end. Perhaps Olan Opie for the BBC most
successfully managed to embrace these
disparate elements. Yet overall Desderi
found a persuasive view of our hero
and it is good that this recording has
been made available for us all to enjoy.
Once you have absorbed Dallapiccola’s
sometimes elusive style, you will surely
find this a fascinating characterisation.
While it is perfectly
possible to run these CDs, mutter ho-hum
and place them on a shelf, I have to
emphasise that this is an incredibly
complex work, and the many rewards which
come from accessing it on CD with the
vocal score and a commentary are well
worth making the effort. I have spread
this review over nearly three months.
For those who speak Italian an 18 minute
interview with Dallapiccola about the
opera appears at the end of the Stradivarius
CDs and may swing the balance that way
if you only want one set, though the
sound is far less refined. I would not
have been able to write this review
without the vocal score which I strongly
recommend (Edition Suvini Zerboni of
Milan – get it through your local public
library). One small production quibble:
from time to time we seem to hear a
voice off-stage, could it be an inadvertent
feed of the prompter? This is a fine
performance of a notable monument of
mid-twentieth century music; thanks
to Naïve and Radio France for succeeding
in doing what their British colleagues
have failed to do and made it available
to us.
Lewis Foreman
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Ernest
Bour 