朧夜や天の音楽聞し人
oboro yo ya ten no ongaku kikishi hito

“Hazy night–
People listening
To heavenly music.“
– Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶), born Kobayashi Nobuyuki (1763-1828)

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My husband’s family lives in the Salt Lake City area. The city and the general region have a great deal to offer. But if you’re familiar with the area’s history and traditions, you might understand why it’s not necessarily among my favorite places to stay, and especially at certain times of the year.

The last time I was there was over a Christmas. And for reasons I won’t go into, I rented a room at a nearly empty hotel adjacent to “Temple Square”, the central location for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, sometimes called the “Mormon Church”.

Temple Square is a beautiful and historical site, and I highly recommend visiting the location if you’re ever in the Salt Lake area. The grounds are also home to the Salt Lake City Tabernacle, the central venue for the “Mormon Tabernacle Choir”.  If you’re looking for something to put onto a bucket list, I’d highly recommend attending a performance by the choir. However, it’s worth mentioning that they take a break from performing during much of the Christmas season.

In fact, Salt Lake City pretty much closes down over the Christmas holiday. During perhaps a half-hour spent looking out at the main street from my hotel room window while drinking a (decidedly non-Mormon) morning coffee, I observed but a single jogger, a police car, and a lone stray dog. On a main road in a city of around 200,000 people, I could safely have taken a nap in the middle of the highway. Finding a place to get dinner that afternoon was… interesting.

Christmas Eve, however, was far more rewarding. The Tabernacle Choir may not have been performing. But there was another choir that night, just up the street at the Catholic, Cathedral of the Madeleine. The cathedral itself is another place worth a visit if you’re ever in SLC… a Romanesque cathedral constructed in 1909, with magnificent stained-glass windows and a colorful interior of painted columns and brightly colored frescoes. The cathedral choir, however, is simply astonishing.

I’m not a religious person. However, I’ll admit that the concept of “qualia”, the unfiltered experience of things does cause me to consider whether there might be some intangible reality to consciousness. Qualia are those indescribable and intangible characteristics of sensations, such as the experiences of a sunset red, lemon sour, ocean scent, warmth,…
or of the sound of human voices singing.

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People who don’t know me all that well can be surprised to find that I sometimes listen to Western opera.  I was raised on classical musical traditions, and my mom started me listening to opera when I was still very young.  I remember her explaining how the music could bring tears to adults, something that I understand far better all these years later.

Opera can be criticized for its stylized approach; but one could also make the same claim about today’s autotuned “vocals”.  And to say that all opera is performed in the same manner is almost as to compare Barbara Streisand to Madonna.  Still, I understand the cultural inaccessibility.

Classical “opera” has a long and varied history, originating at the end of the the sixteenth-century with Jacopo Peri’s, “Dafne”, in 1597. A member of the “Florentine Camerata”, a group of professional composers and musicians, Peri’s objective was the musical retelling of Greek drama.  This new form of storytelling caught on with the public almost immediately, resulting in a sort of schism.

On one hand were the wealthy patrons and royalty who sponsored the creation of new operas, while on the other were a broader public willing to pay for this new form of entertainment. Hence emerged opera’s two main divisions: the stately, formal and rarefied, “opera seria”, with stories about gods and aristocrats, versus the more comedic and broadly accessible, “opera buffa”, with stories centered on servants, peasants and commoners.

By the mid seventeenth-century, Baroque opera had exploded in popularity to become central to European cultural arts.  Performances became increasingly elaborate to the point where venues included grand sets and even moveable stages.  Troupes of professional opera performers toured these venues throughout Europe.  And some of their vocalists became the superstars of the era with singing styles that were over-the-top, highly ornamented and loud enough to be heard by large audiences.  However, this would change suddenly around 1750.

“Enlightenment” thinking, at the start of the Classical period, encouraged plots with fewer gods and more human interactions, and with less extravagant music and vocal display. This would produce works such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s , Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).  And then, the Romantic period of 1830 through 1900 would see a sort of stylistic split.

On one hand, opera again evolved into something increasingly loud and spectacular. “Grand opera” would result in the likes of the German, Richard Wagner’s, massive orchestral and operatic, 15-hour, “Ring cycle”, including, Die Walküre.   But in response, there also emerged the Italian, “bel canto”, or “beautiful singing” movement, which emphasized simple harmonics and ornamentation.  This would produce the realistic, (and usually tragic), Italian “verismo”, including, Madama Butterfly, by my personal favorite operatic composer, Giacomo Puccini.

Operas are still composed today, addressing more contemporary stories from politics to science-fiction.  And a few are even notable.    But there are some classics that stand as noteworthy examples from which to experience what opera is really all about… at least to me.  And to that end, I’ll conclude by throwing out a few links to some voci celesti, or heavenly voices…

Izumi Masuda – Nessun dorma (“Let no one sleep”)
This is an aria from the final act of Puccini’s opera, Turandot, completed posthumously by Franco Alfano in 1926.  It’s one of the best-known tenor arias in all opera, popularized by Luciano Pavarotti in the 1990s.  The part is sung by the character of, Calaf, il principe ignoto (the unknown prince), who falls instantly in love with the beautiful yet cold-hearted Princess Turandot.  But any man who wishes to wed her must first answer her three riddles… and those who fail are beheaded!

Izumi Masuda is a Japanese soprano born in 1978.  I chose this particular performance as she’s beautifully performing a traditionally male-tenor part in a style that’s rather her own.

Lei Xu & Guang Yang – Sous le dôme épais – (“Beneath the thick dome”, aka: “The Flower Duet”)
The Flower Duet is from the first act of, Lakmé, composed by Léo Delibes in 1882.  It was written for both soprano and mezzo-soprano parts.  It is sung by the characters Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika, as they gather flowers by a river.  If you’re old enough, you may know the part starting at about 1:30 from its use in a 1980s British Airways advertisement, or from some works by Yanni and Malcolm McLaren.

Lei Xu (right) is a soprano, originally from Nantong, China.  Guang Yang (left) is a mezzo-soprano from Beijing. I especially like this performance, not only because both are extraordinary vocalists, but because of the cross-cultural nature of the whole thing… a Chinese performance vocalizing two Indian characters… in French!

Sumi Jo – Ave Maria (This is a complicated attribution… The music is indeed Schubert, but I think the vocals may be Vladimir Vavilov’s 1970 version, sometimes ascribed to Giulio Caccini.

Sumi Jo is a well-known, Korean, “coloratura” soprano.  “Coloratura” refers to a vocalist who adds “color” to a part, singing it with trills, runs, or leaps; and Sumi Jo is renowned for her extraordinary vocal control.  I’ll post an English translation of her French preface to this performance in Paris below the video.  It adds something beautifully human to her presentation.

“My father left me forever a few days ago, and his funeral was held this morning in Korea. But I am here in Paris to sing before you. I am not sure if this is appropriate. But as a singer I thought I should be here. Also I strongly believe my father is happy to be watching me and you the audience at this moment from up above. Thank you for being with me today. I won’t forget this. I dedicate this recital to my father. Now, I will sing Schubert’s Ave Maria for my father. Thank you.“

Just for fun… Jane Zhang from Hong Kong, (“The Dolphin Princess”).  She’s a coloratura something-or-other (C3 – G5 – G#6)… tenor to… “whistle register”, and performs far more than opera.  Something more challenging than most classical opera and with a more contemporary flourish, this is the Aria and Il Dolce Suono (“The Sweet Sound”, aka: “The Mad Scene“) from the 1835 opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, by Gaetano Donizetti, followed by Éric Serra’s supposedly “unsingable”, Diva Plavalaguna’s Dance, from The Fifth Element.  She practiced the latter piece while performing planks.  She removes her ear monitor as the orchestral part of the Aria ends and she begins to demonstrate her extraordinary range.