So, um, whatever happened to renaming the Opera House at Kennedy Center after Melania Trump? Last year, Rep. Michael Simpson (R-Idaho U. S. House District 2) proposed that the opera house at the Kennedy Center be renamed after Melania Trump.
This raised several questions, the most important one perhaps being: How does this help Simpson’s constituents? Don’t automatically assume Idahoans don’t like opera. But then we also have to ask: Does Melania Trump even like opera? What opera would she attend a performance of at the Kennedy Center?
But if there is one event that she would attend at the Kennedy Center (now illegally renamed after her husband) it would be a screening of her vanity documentary Melania. “Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” she says in the trailer released last year. From the reviews I read, I surmise that whatever questions you have about Melania Trump will remain unanswered if you watch the documentary.
I’m still curious about her taste in opera, or music in general. Instead of a snippet from any opera, the trailer used a pop-ified version of Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G minor, Opus 33, a choice I described as a “deep cut.” Even if it is true that Melania Trump was very involved in the selection of music for this documentary, she might have had nothing to do with the music in the trailer.
We can classify the pre-existing music in the documentary into two broad categories: classical and popular. The popular choices seem to be what ChatGPT would choose for a documentary about any first lady. According to USA Today,
The film features an original score by composer Tony Neiman, whose work includes TV series "The Gifted" and "People Magazine Investigates." There are also orchestral pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ennio Morricone and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sprinkled throughout.
So no opera. Some people say that of course Melania Trump doesn’t like opera. I’m not so sure. It could be that her taste in music is so personal that it would conflict with her desire to be a blank slate onto which her fans can project what they want.
I feel much more confident asserting that Donald Trump wouldn’t be able to pay attention to an entire opera, not even P. D. Q. Bach’s half-act opera The Stoned Guest. The oaf would fall asleep probably a couple of minutes into the overture.
Not every opera has an overture. The difference between overtures, prologues and preludes kind of depends on which specific music drama we’re talking about. Quite generally it has to do with when the curtain rises.
An overture is usually purely instrumental, and the curtain doesn’t rise until the orchestra have finished playing the overture, or maybe slightly before.
Thus in the overture the composer is free to use music to paint a mental picture of something that would be difficult to put on the stage, like a storm at sea. Then the curtain rises and the survivors of the shipwreck sing to fill in some details the music could not. That example is drawn from Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri, which inaugurated the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1778 and was rescued from its undeserved neglect at that opera house’s 2004 grand re-opening.
Typically, if an opera has overtures at all it is only one overture, played at the beginning. However, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote four different overtures for Fidelio, and a curious tradition emerged of playing the overture designated “Leonore Overture No. 3” in the middle of Act II, functioning as an extended orchestral interlude.
Beethoven was unusual as an opera composer in several ways. One of those ways is that many opera composers, such as Gioaccino Rossini and the aforementioned Salieri sometimes wrote one overture for multiple opere, instead of multiple overtures for one opera.
A prelude is usually also purely orchestral like almost all overtures, but is expected to follow more directly into the music with singing. An opera can have as many preludes as it has acts, and so when excerpted for orchestral concerts it’s necessary to specify, for example, Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin by Richard Wagner.
The curtain should be up during the playing of a prelude in the context of the whole opera. For example, during the Prelude to Act III of Siegfried you should see Wotan onstage climbing up the mountain where one of his daughters sleeps in a circle of fire. It’s the same mountain where Erda also sleeps. The prelude follows immediately into Wotan singing for Erda to wake up.
An opera can have both an overture and an Act I prelude. An example eludes me at the moment. As for prologues, it seems that you have to go back to very early opera to find examples. Atys is one, but I’ve only listened to excerpts in connection to my research into the movies of Robert Bresson.
Aeneas in Carthage, with music by Joseph Martin Kraus, apparently has preludes designated as overtures, introductions and prologues. I have listened to those, but not in the context of the whole opera. Of his Olympie, I’ve only heard the overture, though in two different performances.
For some reason I thought Les Danaïdes starts with a shipwreck, like Europa riconosciuta, but now I’m not so sure. The overture starts in D minor, sullen at first, then it switches to D major, so I imagined the ship’s passengers expect a smooth landing. Then there’s a chord, I believe Salieri wanted a very rough, ugly sound here. Not quite what you get in this performance, but overall the performance is intense and gripping.
In this unstaged performance it’s very hard for me to tell how the overture fits with the rest of the opera. The story is a total bummer, and that’s why they call this thing a T-R-A-G-E-D-Y. At this point, I wanted to embed the introduction to Oedipus Tex by P. D. Q. Bach.
It should be noted that sometimes these overtures have their endings changed slightly for concert use. The first time I listened to an entire performance of Carl Nielsen’s Maskarade, I was shocked by a Brucknerian digression. This is marked as a “stage ending” in the score (I’m linking to it starting at letter K, just before the less familiar ending). The following concert performance has the ending more familiar to those of you who have only heard the overture in a concert context.
I really like the Prelude to Act II of Die Walküre. I’ve been wanting to do an arrangement for use in orchestral concerts, but it’s just one of those projects in the farthest reaches of my backburner. This YouTube video is all of Act II.
The open thread question: What’s your favorite overture to a musical drama or comedy, or prelude to an act of a musical drama or comedy?
