Puccini soup
Dec. 12th, 2012 01:45 pmI wrote recently about discovering that the composer Daniel Catán had died over a year ago. Catán, who was born in Mexico but eventually became an American citizen, was best known for his operas. I've long been a huge fan of Florencia en el Amazonas and Rappaccini's Daughter, and since learning of his death I've been slowly absorbing the last opera he completed, Il Postino.
I've also been digging into the intertubes to try to find out more about him, and the deeper I dig the more I run into people who are at least mildly disdainful of his music. You can see the nature of the beast in a memorial article by LA Times music critic Mark Swed, "An Appreciation: Daniel Catán, caring composer":
You can probably already see where this is going:
There are a couple of things about this that strike me as hilarious. First, "Puccini soup' is a great phrase. But beyond that, and beyond the petty pathos of the betrayed avant gardist, when I look at the Seattle Opera's upcoming season, what do I see? Three works by Puccini. And so Swed goes on to remark:
"Too much pretty music." Heaven forfend! But there's another interesting aspect of this to me as well. Catán is compared to Puccini probably more than to any other artist, but to my relatively uneducated ear there's also a lot of Debussy in his music. This mostly has to do with the chromaticism and the swelling, upwelling dynamic structures, but I was reminded of something else when another critic said he wished Catán were in fact more like Puccini and less like Debussy. His complaint was that the arias, while extremely lyrical, are not something you can pull out as a single great song. Thus they are more like Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande where there isn't any recitative, but where there aren't really any arias either. Every vocal line is melodic, but never in a songlike, verse-chorus-verse structure.
Which I think exhausts my knowledge on this subject for the present moment. So far I'm not as keen on Il Postino as the other two Catán operas I've heard, but I'm still digesting it. The best parts (particularly the finale) are just as wonderful, and I'm fascinated by it as a work of adaptation as well.
I've also been digging into the intertubes to try to find out more about him, and the deeper I dig the more I run into people who are at least mildly disdainful of his music. You can see the nature of the beast in a memorial article by LA Times music critic Mark Swed, "An Appreciation: Daniel Catán, caring composer":
He had a sterling music education and received a PhD in music composition from Princeton University, where he studied with the ultra-Modernist master of complexity and taskmaster Milton Babbitt. Soon after, Catán returned to his hometown of Mexico City for a while and it looked as though that he might become a kind of Mexican post-Modernist. That certainly seemed the case in 1991 with his rhapsodic "Rappaccini's Daughter," his first opera. Based on the writing of the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, it heralded what many of us had hoped would be a much-needed new voice in Latin opera.
You can probably already see where this is going:
Catán had moved to the Los Angeles area by the time of his second opera, "Florencia en el Amazonas," written for Houston Grand Opera. After the 1996 premiere, a German colleague who had flown in from Frankfurt to cover it joined me for a drink in a Houston hotel. He was distraught. How, he bewailed, was he going to explain to his editor that he had spent all this money to come to Texas for what he called in English "Puccini soup."
There are a couple of things about this that strike me as hilarious. First, "Puccini soup' is a great phrase. But beyond that, and beyond the petty pathos of the betrayed avant gardist, when I look at the Seattle Opera's upcoming season, what do I see? Three works by Puccini. And so Swed goes on to remark:
Catán had changed. But despite a Magic Realist-manqué librettist and too much pretty music, this proved attractive and effective opera, fresh in its lack of cynicism, that resonated with audiences for a reason. Still, I figured "Amazonas" would be a slight detour demanded by Houston. Catán, after all, was a Princeton progressive with Milton Babbitt's stamp of approval. But what Catán later told me was that what Babbitt taught him was to be himself. With "Amazonas," Catán had achieved the courage of his convictions.
"Too much pretty music." Heaven forfend! But there's another interesting aspect of this to me as well. Catán is compared to Puccini probably more than to any other artist, but to my relatively uneducated ear there's also a lot of Debussy in his music. This mostly has to do with the chromaticism and the swelling, upwelling dynamic structures, but I was reminded of something else when another critic said he wished Catán were in fact more like Puccini and less like Debussy. His complaint was that the arias, while extremely lyrical, are not something you can pull out as a single great song. Thus they are more like Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande where there isn't any recitative, but where there aren't really any arias either. Every vocal line is melodic, but never in a songlike, verse-chorus-verse structure.
Which I think exhausts my knowledge on this subject for the present moment. So far I'm not as keen on Il Postino as the other two Catán operas I've heard, but I'm still digesting it. The best parts (particularly the finale) are just as wonderful, and I'm fascinated by it as a work of adaptation as well.