CHICAGO — So far, the 2024-25 music season here has been a delight, due in part to the American Musicological Society, which chose Chicago for its four-day annual gathering of musicians and scholars in mid-November, the third such AMS occasion here in recent decades. More than 1,700 historians, theorists, composers, and performing artists filled convention spaces throughout downtown Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton. Sessions focused on specific aspects of music history, theory, aesthetics, and practice for an international throng of wanderers who tried to take in as much as possible while making new contacts, checking in with fellow alums, and heading for the ticket line over at a concert hall, opera house, or theater.
There is something undeniably refreshing about the freedom to choose among a variety of topics as mixed as Global Keyboards, Modernism in Spanish Music, Handel’s Cosmopolitanism, Hip-Hop as Catharsis, Music in the Third Reich, Racial Politics on Broadway, and Twenty Years of Battlestar Galactica — not to forget that lofty puppy, A Titan in Battle with the Gods: Viennese Reception of Bruckner.
Between sessions, there was always the opportunity to peruse what publishers and record companies had done to transform the Hilton ballroom into a musicological sweet shop the size of a football field, where the latest in recordings, critical editions, performance and study scores, historical facsimiles, biographies, and pedagogical studies were on display.
Among the most engaging and provocative musicological presentations at the convention, the one that lingers strongest in memory is this brilliant analysis: Callas Athena: Greekness, Rebetiko, and the Unsentimental, by the University of Chicago scholar and cultural historian Martha Feldman. Consistent with her career-long enthusiasm for expressive dimensions of the human voice that go well beyond the usual operatic style, Feldman characterized Maria Callas as one who brandished her late-career imperfect voice as a choice fundamentally consistent with the tough, unsentimental rebetiko music of Callas’ upbringing in the poorer neighborhoods of Athens and New York. (The use of “Callas Athena,” channeling the warrior Pallas Athena, is of course intended.)
Feldman, a past AMS president, has taught at the University of Chicago since 1990, where she is a Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor and also co-editor of the essay collection The Voice as Something More, which is supplemented by audio and video clips sampling an astonishing range of vocal expression. My advice is to peruse the remarkable music clips that Feldman and co-editor Judith T. Zeitlin have assembled, featuring vocal modernisms by others that include wounded voices, scream lines, speech-song, and voice-gap crack breaks.
As for the new Callas movie, watch it if you wish, recalling the diva’s voice for all that it was, including its latter-day unreliability in the danger zones. Feldman relayed conductor Nicola Rescigno’s claim that he urged Callas not to risk trying to sing the high pianissimo at the end of Tosca when it became a problem late in her career and Callas’ rebetiko-like refusal in character: “I crack every night, but I’m dying, and that is the way it is going to be.” (For a sense of the rebetiko culture, catch this excellent UNESCO video shared via YouTube.)
The AMS Convention gave several nods to Chicago as its host city. British scholar and concert pianist Samantha Ege (pronounced eh-GEH) drew from her book South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene (at left), released recently by the University of Illinois Press, to trace the ways in which Chicago’s so-called Race women nurtured the Black classical-music community in the early decades of the 20th century. Ege focused not only on composers such as Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds but also on the training, institutional support, and audience building these remarkable South Side impresarios provided.
And across the four days of convention events that focused on theory, history, opera, philosophy, film, indigenous music, compositional process, and a dozen other categories, there was also a notable emphasis on various aspects of music in Chicago’s civic life. Among the Chicago-focused projects that were mentioned in the multiplicity of sessions, the last in the list below may well be ongoing: The following Chicago-focused papers were given (with the last topic likely an ongoing issue):
• The role of Chicago’s public parks in nurturing mass entertainment in the first half of the 20th century (Katherine Brucher, DePaul University)
• The Great Migration influx that led to the development of famous jazz clubs of the 1940s (Reed Alexis Williams, University of Chicago)
• The founding (1863) and colorful early history of Chicago Musical College by a 22-year-old immigrant from the Leipzig Conservatory called Florenz Ziegfeld (Nancy Newman, University at Albany-SUNY)
• The struggle of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to refine its own acoustical space, the famously dry Orchestra Hall (Natalie Farrell, University of Chicago)
Transfixing as this all was, the AMS convention hardly exceeded the enticements of a Chicago concert season already steeped in beguiling musicological projects of its own, among them two fully staged opera productions within a mile of each other that serendipitously zeroed in on the familiar Fidelio opera plot, as well as a wildly impressive new recording for the Chicago-based Cedille Records label that itself involved musicological happenstance:
For the Op. 5 Violin Sonatas of the Italian Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli, written in 1700, Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine was able to make use of her rare Nicolò Gagliano violin as well as her Nicolò Gagliano viola d’amore — period instruments from Corelli’s era, both in pristine shape, strung and pitched to their historic norms. Her viola d’amore is a terrific instrument, with an elusive, lingering aura emanating from its seven strings and seven sympathetic strings. She bid for it at a Tarisio auction ten years after acquiring her Gagliano violin, also at auction. The d’amore, she is now certain, was cut from the same tree. When she took her new instrument to Carl Becker & Sons violin shop in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building along Michigan Avenue, the owner said, “Oh m’gosh!”
The Cedille disc constitutes some of the earliest-known instrumental sonatas, which Pine has recorded with longtime continuo collaborators David Schrader on organ and harpsichord, John Mark Rozendaal on cello and viola da gamba, and Brandon Acker on theorbo, archlute, and baroque guitar. Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonata in D minor (No. 12, the so-called 23 Variations on the theme “La Folia”), is the disc’s highlight. (Pine, Rozendaal, and Schrader go way back; they founded Trio Settecento in the late 1990s, and their first hit recording for the Cedille label was a 1997 album of Handel sonatas for violin and continuo.)
As for Chicago’s coincident opera double dip of musicological significance earlier this season — two operas based on the same rescue theme, presented in overlapping runs — Chicago Opera Theater gave fresh recognition to Leonora, a rarely performed 1804 opera by the prolific Neapolitan composer of Austrian descent Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839), conducted by Jane Glover, at the same time Lyric Opera of Chicago was presenting Beethoven’s opera on the same theme, Fidelio, in its 1814 version, conducted by music director Enrique Mazzola. The two operas sound as if they are a good 10 years apart; in fact, Beethoven’s first attempt at an opera (titled Leonore) based on this story actually dates from 1805, just a year after Paër’s work opened in Dresden, and Beethoven’s early effort has more in common with Paër’s style.
By 1814, though, Beethoven had reconsidered his opera. He was onto something radically bigger, and darker as Napoleon raged across Europe; a prominent cry of misery for chorus was added that dimmed most of what little there had been of humor. It was this monumental 1814 Fidelio that played across town at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in Matthew Ozawa’s 2021 production, first seen at the San Francisco Opera and then at Canadian Opera Company. For nine solo singers and a full chorus, framed in a forbidding steel set evocative of a brutal surveillance state, the production underscored the gob-smacking psychological difference a decade of history can make. In contrast to “Paër’s” Leonora, Beethoven’s Fidelio seems modern, even now, with chilling effect.
The enticements of the simultaneous opera projects presented opportunities for the conductors of both productions — Glover and Mazzola – to dig into the overlapping complexities of the challenge in a lively conversation with Northwestern University musicologist Jesse Rosenberg, an Italian opera specialist, at a Chicago Temple session moderated by WFMT radio host LaRob K. Rafael. The best conductors are ferocious scholars and historians, and Glover and Mazzola dug in with relish.
“People today need to remember that opera in 18th-century Italy was everywhere,” Glover said. “Business was huge, and the best of the composers had enormous careers, churning out operas all the time. Everything that Paër composed is absolutely wonderful musically, but it comes from a different time. Paër was a court opera composer. He was an old fish by the first decade of the 19th century.” Glover nevertheless forcefully praised what Paër created within the context of the prevailing style: “These composers were so prolific that they would write an opera in a weekend, and then they were done. And then they turned to the next. But in 10 years already, an opera was old-fashioned.”
Although Paër’s charming Leonora treatment, along with his 54 other operas, seems today somewhat quaint and is largely forgotten, the Chicago performance revealed fascinating aspects of a history that pointed forward: Paër’s choice for leading man was a tenor — not a castrato, which was a fading custom — and there were touches of romantic playfulness that one finds in Donizetti and Bellini. At Chicago’s intimate Studebaker Theater, the delightful Peruvian and Mexican American soprano Vanessa Becerra starred as Fidelio in disguise, with Edgardo Rocha, a Uruguayan tenor with impressive facility and vocal heft, as her imprisoned husband. Emerging artists of promise, they lit up the stage in a performance artfully led by Glover at both the baton and the keyboard. One could imagine enjoying all this while sitting in the palatial playspace of a Napoleon friend.
Ozawa, Lyric’s artistic administrator, said he picked up on the idea that Beethoven spent nine years refining his sole opera at a time when millions of soldiers were dying in Napoleon’s continental rampage: “It was not a normal decade. At the time of the first premiere, in 1805, the soldiers were in town and everybody who was typically living there was gone. When the opera in its final version opened in 1814 [at the Kärntnertor in Vienna], it was really a different world. The role of the chorus became a voice of resistance. I’m not saying this is a contemporary American story, although it could be. It is modern in the sense that it could be anywhere.”
Ozawa’s production updated Beethoven’s setting to reflect a high-tech prison’s ominous realm. Cameras everywhere emphasized the limbo of prisoners in their massive cage, subject to the random harshness of the surveillance state. The impact of the chorus was as harrowing as the startling turns of soprano Elza van den Heever as Leonore, the terrified wife in disguise, and of tenor Russell Thomas as Florestan, equally riveting as the wretched prisoner marked for death.
It would be great to hear Beethoven’s earlier 1805 and 1806 versions of his own opera. We do know that Beethoven had a copy of Paër’s opera in his personal library and remained dogged about testing his options; three different librettists were ultimately involved in Beethoven’s prolonged project to create what became Fidelio — Joseph von Sonnleithner, Stephan von Breuning, and Georg Friedrich Treitschke. Two other composers also tackled the Fidelio story: Pierre Gaveaux and Johann Simon Mayr, whose takes both were based on the original 1798 libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly.
Perhaps the time isn’t far off when Chicago will get to hear these other settings of Fidelio as well. These remarkable American Musicological Society conventions tend to bring out the dreamer in all of us.
