Italian opera shines in GKJ Int'l festival
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): One of opera's most enduring stereotypes is the rotund soprano whose physical form seldom matches the character she portrays on stage. However Nunzia Santodirocco is no such soprano. She may not be slim but she is sensual to look at with a voice that is capable of great dramatic power as well as delicate sweetness.
And last Friday when she appeared on stage for one of the last performances at the three-week-long International Festival 2000 organized by Jakarta's Gedung Kesenian to sing arias from Italian operas, she made the audience sit up and listen to her.
Further tribute was paid to her vocal beauty with a thunderous standing ovation. Playing the piano with her was Guido Galterio. The couple came all the way from Italy, the birthplace of the opera that has been telling stories by singing them for over four hundred years.
An amalgam of many arts, the opera has roots in ancient Greek theater. But opera as we know it today started in the 16th century in Florence by a group of intellectual artists attempting to recapture the glory of Greek drama in stories based on the lives of the gods and of royalty.
They performed only in royal palaces at first, delivering their lines halfway between speaking and true singing.
Popes and cardinals too began to commission operas, making them extravagant productions with spectacular stagecraft. Soon the popularity of the opera spread outward from Italy to every major European city where an opera house was built usually bang in the center of town.
"These were theaters with stage machinery so elaborate and theatrical effects so complex that much of today's theater technology seems primitive by comparison. They were the Stars Wars of their day," writes Roger Englander, a five-time Emmy Award winner who produced the first operas ever to be seen on television, in the book What's all the Screaming About?
When transported to Venice, the nobility allowed even ordinary people to sit in the audience. Gradually the lofty themes of royal productions gave way to less weighty subjects and comedy was introduced.
The 17th century composer Alessandro Scarlatti even developed new forms that were considered quite daring. It is also from the time of Scarlatti that the term aria, Italian for air, was used to describe an independent solo vocal piece within an opera, created to display the artist's vocal prowess.
The monodic style originally developed in Florence gave way to extremes in aria and recitative. Arias became longer and more complex and virtuosic singers began to dominate the state. Today opera lovers go to theaters mainly to listen to the world's greatest singers. It is the singers who are the stars of an opera performance and a soprano is the operatic canary who chirps most but to the uninitiated often seems to make little more than lots of highflying, meaningless sounds.
However what an opera singer does is to start with a melody and then ornament it from above, below and around to create various musical and dramatic moods. Most of the time the singer is dealing with basic human emotions like love, envy, jealousy, loyalty and hatred. In fact, the opera owes its magnificence to the soprano who ornaments the vocal lines and brings out the grandeur in the instrumental music. Great master composers use the aria through repetitions of motifs or more subtle echoes to keep an entire opera tied together.
In the first half of the performance Nunzia chose arias from brief compositions by Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Tosti and Benedict, some of which were jolly and festive while some others just emotional. After the intermission, Nunzia sang popular arias from the world's most frequently performed operas like La Traviata (Fallen Woman) which is one of the big trio after Rigoletto and Il Trovatore by Verdi. This is Violetta's final coloratura, when she reflects upon her past life, so full of frivolity. It is a slow piece that paints a psychological portrait of great vividness.
Of course the story of Verdi is the story of Italian opera itself as he revitalized Italian music at a time when Rossini had retired, Bellini was dead and Donizetti was locked up in a lunatic asylum near Paris, followed by the music of Puccini which is a natural tributary of the oceanic music of Verdi. From Puccini, Nunzia chose an easily recognizable aria with the fragile Mimi replying to Rodolfo's observation that, your tiny hand is frozen... in the highly sentimental and most dramatic opera, La Boheme (The Bohemians).
From Rossini who dominated the world of Italian opera earlier during much of the first half of the 19th century, was a piece from Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), the greatest of all comic operas whose three-hour score was composed in just two weeks. In this opera of unbelievable energy and volcanic creativity, Nunzia gives a firecracker of a coloratura that is sheer tunefulness. Thank you for passing by, Nunzia and Guido.