Welcome to 2009! I hope you all had a fun holiday period and are geared-up for a year of great opera.

In the run up to the forthcoming production to Benjamin Britten's The Turn of The Screw I thought I would occasionally feed you some little tidbits that I hope may whet your appetite for this most remarkable opera. This week's offering concerns parts of the libretto that are nowhere to be found in Henry James's original novella. These are all passages in latin. Until recently these seem to have escaped an analysis by musicologists and/or historians of Britten. Now Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English at Oxford University, has written a fascinating piece for the Guardian newspaper in England revealing hitherto unrealised depths to the character of the boy Miles. In the original novella we learn that he has been expelled from high school but we never learn why. Neither do we find out precisely the nature of the relationship between Miles and Quint, a man whose ghost returns to reclaim Miles. If Professor Cunningham is correct in his view of the use of latin text then Britten was, in code, telling us a whole lot about Miles - and about Britten himself - that previously we could only have guessed at. The article is here. I found it totally absorbing but I should warn you, do not follow this link if you would rather not read lots of dirty words and some rather outré ideas about what Britten had in mind when he had his librettist Myfanwy Piper include these references.

Now we all know that sequels of books and movies very rarely come close to the quality of the original. Friday The 13th spawned no less than ten bastard offspring, Jaws 2?-meh. And don't start me on Star Wars! Godfather II rocked but that's the exception and rules thing right there. Imagine then, gentle reader, my horror upon reading this week that Andrew Lloyd Webber has announced that "the button has been pushed" on a sequel to Phantom of The Opera. It is scheduled to open at the end of 2009 simultaneously in London, New York and Shanghai. I have never seen the original show but my very clear understanding is that the Phantom is no more at the end of the musical. So what are we talking here: Phantom of The Phantom of The Opera? Apparently it is to be called Phantom: Love Never Dies (Oooooohhhhh, I see...) and will be set - where else could it possibly be - on Coney Island. Excuse me for a moment; I need to go to be violently ill but I will return.

I'm back. Regular readers will have gathered by now that I enjoy musical trivia. Those of you who know me in person are well aware that my love of trivia extends well beyond the boundaries of music and into, well, just about anything including sports. This being National Football League playoff time I thought I should drop this little gem onto you combining as it does elements of football, history and music. Adam Vinatieri is a kicker in the NFL. A very successful kicker whose career has spanned twelve seasons during which time he has played in five Super Bowls, winning in four of them. "Okay" I hear you say "So far so boring". Here's the fun bit: Vinatieri's great-great-grandfather, Felix Vinatieri, was bandmaster for General George Armstrong Custer. On the day the hapless General C. went off to go and teach the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne a lesson or two at the Little Big Horn. He told his bandmaster to remain behind on that day so he would be ready to welcome the victorious Seventh Cavalry back to the fort that evening. And we all know how that went. Irony being in plentiful supply if you are looking for it, Adam Vinatieri having played for many years with the New England Patriots now plays for the Colts who were soundly beaten yesterday in the wild-card playoffs by the Chargers.

Every now and again I run into a clip on Youtube which I find myself compelled to watch a number of times in succession. This is one such clip. The barihunk in question is Erwin Schrott, fiancé of Anna Netrebko and father of their baby boy. The aria is from Mozart's Don Giovanni and the vid was made to promote Schrott's latest album of Mozart arias. It's perhaps a bit over the top but,man, does he have star power or what?

When I was growing up in the wilds of rural England in the 1950's and 60's just about every village had a branch of the Women's Institute. This was a club for ladies who would get together on a weekly basis, knit, gossip, bake cakes and plan their next annual Bazaar at which they would gossip with ladies from other chapters of the WI while selling their knitted goods, cakes and preserves. I don't intend this to be in any way a demeaning description of what they did. That's just how it was - safe, cosy and very conservative. Until the year 2000 that is when the ladies of the Rylstone and District Women's Institute in Yorkshire decided to spice up the WI annual calendar with photographs of some of the members in the all-together. It was a huge hit (as in, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies and led to a movie - Calendar Girls). Profits from the sale of the calendars went to support leukemia research. Not surprisingly the idea spread and there have been a number of such productions. The most recent: A World Stage Revealed 2009 this year's calendar from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden featuring twelve guys and twelve ladies from ROH all appearing in the buff. They include musicians (two of them shown above), dancers and production staff. Lookie here. I wonder whether the Board of Directors of Portland Opera has given any thought to this as a fund-raising measure. Just askin'....

Well, here we all are back again. I hope you all managed to weather the storms with the minimum of disruption and that you had a marvellous holiday.

Had we gone to press last Monday you would have read of a couple of important musical anniversaries and though the actual date may have gone by I shall mention them here anyway, albeit briefly. 22nd December 1858 saw the birth of Giacomo Puccini. While still in his twenties he wrote two short operas which garnered him some small amount of attention, particularly and importantly from the publishing house of Ricordi. It was his third opera, Manon Lescaut which was his first major critical and commercial success. In this he had collaborated with the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa and deciding, one supposes, that there was little point in messing with a wining team Puccini retained them to write the libretti for his next three operas La Boheme (1896) Tosca (1900) and Madame Butterfly (1904). And we all know how those turned out.

While it may be that Puccini is not musically the most important operatic composer in the western canon I don't think there is much of an argument against him being the most important opera composer as far as the General Directors of opera companies world-wide are concerned. While they may have to struggle to fill seats to see Lulu or Die Tote Stadt, slate a Puccini opera - virtually any Puccini opera - for your season and you know you have a hit on your hands.

I'm sorry but I have nothing for you today.  I have been pretty sick and confined to my bed for the whole of the last eight days and though I am a tad better now I still don't have the energy to be all fun and informative for you.  So, if you had come here expecting lots of comfort and joy you may want to try the holiday web sites of Andy Williams or Pat Boone or some other relentlessly cheerful soul.

Ahead of the first performance tonight of the current Met production of Massenet's Thaïs, Peter G. Davis in the New York Times embarks upon a re-appraisal of Massenet in general and Thaïs in particular. I won't regurgitate it all in this post as, should you wish, you may read it here. The pith of his assessment is that it is high time Massenet was rehabilitated in the mind of a modern audience and that Thaïs is more than the oft-played and almost-as-oft murdered Méditation, an interlude played immediately before Act II and featuring a solo violin. Indeed Mr Davis is sufficiently enthusiastic about the piece to declare "Perhaps the time has come at last to accept Thaïs for what it is: a sophisticated human comedy and one of Massenet's most probing, subtly composed and deeply unsettling operas." I don't know the work at all so perhaps like many of you I shall be getting my first taste of it when it is broadcast in high definition to the movies on Saturday 20th December. The cast includes Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson.

As I have squandered the posts of the last two weeks discussing but two operas I think it may be time for me to give you a quick precis of news from around the opera world so you will have matters of great pith and interest to drop into your dinner or cocktail party conversation after you have quite exhausted the gripping topics of exotic financial derivatives and the benefits or otherwise of Hillary Clinton being the next Secretary of State (sidebar: How about appointing Bill Clinton to her Senate seat? It would give him something to do other than hover at her shoulder and I think he'd be rather good at it. But I digress.)

So. If someone writes a story and it is set to music in order that people can sing the story and then you put the characters in costume and make-up and give them some structured direction as to how they should move around the stage while the singing is going on, then you have opera, right? Well, not necessarily is the answer to that question. I realised this as I was watching Saturday's HD transmission from the Met of Berlioz' Le Damnation de Faust. This is not a piece I was in any way very familiar with. It would seem to be a work which gets its fair share of concert performances but is rarely seen on the stage. Perhaps this should have been a hint. I have heard extracts from it being played on the radio from time to time but I think that's about it. I hadn't even bothered to read up on it at all before I went to the movie house. I know the Faust legend from the play by Goethe and I am familiar with all the Berlioz concert hits so I knew what to expect in a musical sense; I have seen the opera Faust by Gounod and I assumed - quite wrongly as it transpired - that I had a better than fair idea of what I was going to see.

The Scene: A garret in Vienna in 1814. It is morning. The composer Ludwig van Beethoven sits by a desk at which he has apparently just awoken . The door opens and a servant enters. It is Ernst Jeeves, Beethoven's manservant and confidant. His clothes have seen better days but he is obviously anxious to remain as presentable as his penury will allow. He places a cup of coffee on the desk next to Beethoven.

Beethoven(yawning): Morning, Jeeves.

Ernst Jeeves: Good morning, Sir.

Beethoven (cupping his ear with his hand): What? Speak up man!

E.Jeeves (raising his voice): Good morning, Herr Beethoven!

Beethoven: Mmm. Yes. Well.. No need to shout, Jeeves. Another fine day, is it? Lark on the wing, snail on the thorn and all that nonsense?

E.Jeeves: Quite so, sir.

Beethoven: What have we got on the agenda for today?

E.Jeeves: This morning, sir, you told me you planned to write an overture for your opera Fidelio.

Beethoven: What? Another one? I thought I had written three of the blighters already!

E.Jeeves: As I understand you to have told me,sir, none of the others was quite...umm..satisfactory, sir.

After a fitful night wherein I managed to cram only about four hours of solid shut-eye I arrived shortly before 9am at the Lloyd Center Regal movie house for saturday's showing of John Adams' Doctor Atomic. You may have gathered from my previous posts that this was not at the top of my list of things I really wanted to do today. As I slouched unwillingly across the parking lot I was not encouraged by there being only one - count 'em - one person in line waiting for the doors to open. Normally there would be around fifty patrons waiting their opportunity to grab their popcorn and coffee before stampeding the auditorium to grab the prime seats. As I chatted with the theater manager while I set up my table he informed me that they had pre-sold around two hundred tickets and by the time the lights dimmed there were probably about three hundred bottoms in seats. Many of these were people I see at almost every Met show. We have come to know each other a little now and I enjoy seeing them and discussing with them what they are about to see.

Let me admit forthwith that my lack of enthusiasm for this performance was based on my prejudice against John Adams and his body of work which I considered dull, repetitive and bland.

I am sure that pretty much all of you will at one time or another have read the phrase just under my picture on this page "cries easily and frequently at opera performances". And so I do. I don't often cry at election results be they Presidential or otherwise but this week, you may have noticed, was special. I cried on Tuesday evening as I sat with my 'roomie' and a friend of his watching MSNBC on my computer when Barack Obama's delegate count in the electoral college passed the all-important 270 mark. There were actually many reasons I wept but chief among them was that at long, long last, for American children of whatever ethnicity or skin colour in one triumphant moment in time the phrase "Yes, we CAN!" suddenly really came to mean something. I understand that to realise that dream a potential candidate must still be born in the USA and that we are not any time soon going to have to become accustomed to the term "President Schwarzenegger" but given all the other ramifications of the election result I can live with that.

I have been in bed most of the last three days with a rather miserable cold.  I'll try to have a post up here tomorrow but in the meantime it's lots of hot soup and sleep for Operaman.