Physicality and Music

Patrick Kavanaugh has an interesting article up at NRO, in which he contemplates the current trend towards semi-nudity and sexual suggestion on classical album covers. Neither Kavanaugh nor I disapprove of any specific instance of this per se. She's hot, she's scantily clad, and her Beethoven will blow your socks off? What's not to like? It's the trend which disturbs us, not its lovely incarnations.

Artists' looks have always been an issue in opera, where audiences are generally encouraged to look at the performers rather than close their eyes and contemplate the music's abstract structures. The putative public, with unfeeling heart and shriveled imagination, is commonly perplexed by operatic heroes' love for their expansive sopranos. But with the help of costume, lighting, and some distance between the viewer and the stage, a good singer can easily hide her physical form behind the power of her vocal characterization*. In instrumental music, the problem should theoretically be nonexistent. Who cares if the soloist has a hump and a horn, if her playing brings tears to our eyes?

I do not wish to imply that only the imbecilic, Philistine masses have these sorts of issues, while I, the educated connoisseur, am quite beyond them. I must admit, in good candour with myself, that I too am somewhat distracted by the girths of (for example) Jessye Norman and Gary Lakes in my DVD performance of Die Walküre. But this distraction would be negligable in a live performance, where ample singers do not fill my television screen, but are instead dwarfed by the scenery. I place the blame here on the zoom lenses at live performances, and on the boudoir photographers employed by the record companies. We the audience were never meant to see the sweat on a violinist's grimacing brow as she plays a serene but difficult passage, and only the most narcissistic of artists would rob us of the serenity which the composer intended in order to spotlight her own exertions. Such focus on the physical act of music making, and the physical stuff of the music makers, exacerbates this tension between technical process and emotional product, and forces our eyes towards performers' bodies in a manner unprecedented throughout classical music's history.

The matter of sexy album covers is, of course, fundamentally a marketing issue, both for artists and record companies. As Kavanaugh points out, the world of classical performance is so fiercely competitive at present that even quite talented and generally respectable female performers can hardly afford not to take advantage of whatever fleshly beauty they are lucky enough to possess. As for the record companies, they are desperate for any marketing advantage which can justify charging eighteen dollars for a recital CD. All of the standard repetoire has been recorded, often in dozens of excellent competing versions. Modern digital recordings do not, in the ears of most listeners, sound consistantly better than remastered analogue performances, and one is not hard pressed to think of numerous records from the late fifties and early sixties which are still considered the benchmark recordings of indispensible works. With so many stunningly good old performances available for a fraction of the price of the renditions du jour, it's little wonder if the marketing executives are not particularly scrupulous as they try to draw our attention to new releases. Playing up the artists' 'personalities' and physical attributes is just an obvious means of boosting sales.

The most prominent victims of all this are the many talented young performers whose faces and other bits are not alone capable of selling records. But I fear that televised performances and close-up shots are also pushing rising stars into tackling difficult repetoire too early, while their youthful bloom yet lingers, and robbing older artists of the rewards for their years of effort (Convent Garden recently rejected Deborah Voigt as Ariadne, on the grounds that she was too fat). Life experience and maturity make a great deal of difference in interpretations of complex and subtle material. It's pleasant enough to look at a nubile twenty-two-year-old pretending to be Fiordiligi, Eva, Desdemona, or Arabella; but it's years of performance experience, of interpetation and re-interpretation which brings the greatness of these roles to life**. The same applies to the great instrumental repetoire, which is so often personal and painful at it's heart.

One of the great benefits of recorded music, in my mind, is that it saves us from the problems of physicality which plague live performances. I can listen at home to hours of Wagner in such comfort as is inconceivable in the opera house, stretched out on the sofa, refreshments at hand. I can imagine a Sieglinde who appears every bit as beautiful, as dignified in humiliation, as hopeful in sorrow, as a good soprano can sound but can hardly hope to look. And I can be spared nitwit post-modern directors' sophomoric production concepts (like Francesca Zambello's Les Troyens recently at the Met, in which Berlioz' Trojans are depicted as "Post-9/11, Pre-Gulf 2" American imperialists), which reduce timeless artistic grandeur to shallow and fleeting propoganda. But by emphasizing and exploiting performers' bodies and non-musical personalities the marketers are subtly robbing us listeners of these delights, robbing us of the joy of hearing a mature, seasoned artist set her ageing body aside and bring the conceptions of a long dead genius magically and sensuously to life.

*These vocal swords can cut many ways. It is absolutely a myth that all opera singers are fat. Take, for instance, Christa Ludwig as Fricka. It never ceases to amaze me how so tiny a woman can transform herself through singing into a terrifyingly imposing goddess, who quite believably demolishes Wotan's mighty will and reduces the chief of the gods to a despondent heap. And let's not forget the delicious irony in the anecdote (found here) about the tenor singing Don José in a modern dress Carmen in Mexico City, who went out for a beer during intermission and was arrested as a deserter from the army; only by singing Cette fleur que tu m'avais jetée could he convince the police that he was not in fact the character he was portraying.

**The role of the Feldmarschallin in Der Rosenkavalier embodies these questions. She is a woman who is only just passing her physical prime, who is coming to realize that flesh and beauty are fleeting, and therefore cannot define a person. Her Act I monologue on time would alone suffice to prove that opera can have great depth, and is not mere vocal showmanship. "One must take it lightly, with light heart and light hands hold and take, hold and relinquish... Those who are not like that will be punished by life" [trans. Walter Legge]. Obviously, older sopranos will bring greater depth and poignancy to such a role than younger ones, and audiences very often assume based on the performer's age that the character Marie Thérèse is much older than the libretto in fact indicates.