Carnival of Music #13

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of The Carnival of Music.

Opera and sports, fans and snobs: See why Sarah at A Glass of Chianti says, "Basketball is the Cosi fan tutti of sports." Sarah's also got an intriguing idea for a new opera of her own (but which sport will it be?). Thanks to Don at Mixolydian Mode for nominating these posts...

Palliative music: ...and more thanks to Don for the pointer to this fascinating article on harpist and soprano Therese Schroeder-Sheker's pioneering work in music-thanatology.

It's so funny how we don't sing any more: The self-titled "Headmistress/Zookeeper" of The Common Room asks the excellent musical question: whatever happened to singing in daily life?

Music out of chaos:  For a couple of teeth-chattering tales of gigs gone wrong, here's a sad saga from Melinama of Pratie Place about the bad things that happen when a performer can't be in two places at the same time, and the behind-the-scenes history (found via be.jazz) of the making of Charles Mingus's The Complete Town Hall Concert.

Remembering Robert Moog: Noteworthy remembrances include this tribute by Keith Emerson (found via Colby Cosh) and this post by Mr. Sun (including a link to his earlier post featuring the Bob Moog action figure).

And now, a bit about the snapshot at the top. It's the poster-within-a-movie for the opera-within-a-movie "Carnival," whose music was composed by Oscar Levant for the movie Charlie Chan Goes To The Opera.

According to Levant's memoir A Smattering of Ignorance: "This epic in abnormality brought together Warner Oland, as Chan, and Boris Karloff as a Mephistophelian Bing Crosby, for the first time in pictures. The producer's blind instinct, coupled with a limited budget, had sought me out to compose the opera." (Karloff is quite the good sport in this movie, hamming it up with gusto, in a sibilant baritone speaking voice that is unnervingly reminiscent of Jeremy Irons.) Levant's influences? Not Schoenberg, and not Beethoven: "Having had little experience in writing opera, I asked Schönberg for some advice. He advised me to study the score of Beethoven's Fidelio. Since this is one of the most unoperatic of all operas it was just what I didn't need."

You're the Piano Man: Charlie Chan At The Opera opens with a scene that takes place on a dark and stormy night in an insane asylum, where an amnesiac whose identity has been a mystery for seven years is engaged in his nightly ritual of playing the piano and singing an operatic aria in a foreign language in the sanitarium's rec room...not unlike this summer's "Piano Man." More on this summer's now-solved mystery is found On An Overgrown Path. Here, Karloff is the baritone Gravelle, who escapes the sanitarium in order to take the stage again in his signature role. Levant describes the aria (sung here and in the pivotal scene of the opera) as "a potent mingling of Moussourgsky and pure Levant." Boris Badanoff, er, Karloff plays the role of Mephisto in "Carnival."

Frankenstein: Before Charlie Chan At The Opera, Boris Karloff had already achieved fame and notoriety for his role as the Monster in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. (In this scene, William Demarest, playing a police detective assigned to assist Chan, which he does with all the sputtering, indignant cluelessness that he will have honed to perfection as Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons decades later, is informed by the opera's stage manager that "This opera will go on tonight even if Frankenstein walks on stage!")  Dr. Frankenstein created his monster by grafting together parts from body-snatched remains, but a project with much happier results is Dynamite Ham's "I Believe In You", a unique Frankenfusion of songs of Dr. Frank and Frank Loesser.

Costumes from hell and heaven: Levant recalls that "Twentieth Century-Fox had just completed an elaborate spectacle with Lawrence Tibbett, of which one of the high spots was a Faust scene in which the star wore a magnificent Mephistophelian costume. [....] One of our first problems arose when the costume was assigned to Charlie Chan at the Opera, with instructions for us to put it to work. I had heard of music being written around a singer, but never for a costume. Nevertheless, determined to become a cog in the wheel, I set myself to writing an operatic sequence in which the big aria found a baritone wearing this elegant Mephistopheles costume." (Surely you jest, Mr. Levant.) For a costume for the opera that truly is to die for, let's look in on Anne-Carolyn as Lucia di Lammermoor at the concert.

The Valhalla Effect: That's the name given to the unusual transfiguring phenomenon that occurs (only?) in The Fredösphere, applied here to Madame Lilli Rochelle, the soprano in "Carnival."

Before                            After 

Credits:

Thanks to those who submitted posts, and also to those who may be waking from innocent slumbers to find that their posts are unwitting (but, I hope, not unwilling) participants in this week's Carnival.

Special thanks to TexasBestGrok's JohnL, The Carnival of Music's creator and impresario.

Music is timeless, and so is the Carnival: visit the Carnival of Music page for links to prior Carnivals, to volunteer to host a future Carnival, or to submit entries, and be sure to join the Carnival again next week when it appears at Owlish Mutterings.

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