by Daniel Hathaway
Welcome to the federal holiday established in 1968 by Congress that wrapped Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays into Presidents Day.
Today’s events:
Two broadcasts (Erik Charnofsky’s Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, and Les Délices’ SalonEra Circa 1500) visit Presidents Day, Andrés Segovia, and the music world at the beginning of the 16th century. And a University of Akron percussion concert can be heard in-person or on the web. Go to our Concert Listings page for details.
Interesting Read:
The scene in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio when political prisoners are briefly let out of their dungeon into the sunlight and fresh air is one of the most moving moments in opera. New York’s Heartbeat Opera has updated the story.
Heartbeat’s co-founder Ethan Heard writes, “I revisited the story and was just so struck by the idea of a wrongfully incarcerated man and this amazing woman, his wife, who infiltrates the prison where she believes he’s been kept. And it felt like an opera we could really update for a contemporary American version.”
In its version, performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the main character is Stan, “a Black Lives Matter activist who has been thrown into solitary confinement. His wife, Leah, tries to rescue him.”
The production is bilingual, with the music sung in German, but the dialogue of the opera, which is a Singspiel, spoken in English. The orchestra has been reduced to two pianos and a pair each of horns and cellos, plus a percussionist. Read the NPR article, “Prison choirs sing in a reboot of Beethoven’s opera about unjust incarceration,” here.
Today’s Almanac:
There’s a wide choice of historical events to raise up on February 21. Among the births, French composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor (1844, in Lyon, author of the famous Widor Toccata), English bandmaster Kenneth Alford (pen name of F.J. Ricketts, in the hamlet of Ratcliff in London in 1881, a good time to whistle the Colonel Bogey March), guitar master Andrés Segovia (1893 in Spain), and poet and lyricist W.H. Auden (1907 in York, who provided so many words for Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky to set to memorable music).
As for events that took place on this date: In 1925, The New Yorker first hit the newsstands with its extended essays on music, in 1944, New York City Opera began its dappled history with Tosca at New York’s City Center, and in 1961, Marilyn Horne and Joan Sutherland launched their careers with Bellini at New York’s Town Hall. Also in the news, on this date in 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York, and in 1972, President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China.
Click here to watch England’s Voces8 perform Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecelia unconducted, with text by W.H. Auden.
And here to watch a ten-minute excerpt from John Adams’ opera Nixon in China in a production by Peter Sellars at the MET.
Adams and Sellars talk about the opera here during a scene change in the MET’s HD production of La fanciulla del West in 2011. To bone up on Nixon’s famous visit, watch a PBS documentary here.
