RECOMENDACIONES

Fado

Amarela - -

The final column of table three evidences the many different ways in which choral voices are deployed: textural, physical, sensuous, close-harmony, collage and noise (whispers, laughs etc.). These shifting functions are intimately related to vocal scoring, the four most important action sequences deploying the full complement of ten voices: the discovery of Lulu and Machado (no. 4a), Godofredo’s confrontation with Machado (no. 9), Godofredo's ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ (no. 14) and his reconciliation with Ludovina (no. 17). Even within these four, full choral scenes, the chorus is used in radically different ways:

- 4a. Tableau 1: seven voices vocalise on the syllables of Ludovina’s name (erotic);

- 9. Confrontation: seven voices interact with the scene as formalised chorus, amplifying Amarela’s observations (an opera chorus in the traditional sense which deteriorates into whispers, shouts and laughs);

- 14. Godofredo’s dark night of the soul. Three voices are in the scene but off- stage, six voices weave a collage of thematic reminiscences as Godofredo’s recalls recent events (dream-like collage);

By contrast, omnipresent choral resources also offer the score the possibility of more subtle, intimate vocal textures using smaller vocal ensembles. As in Of Water and Tears this often involves the polarisation of female and male voices. As Kemp established early on, The Yellow Sofa narrative is distinctly male dominated; as a result the opera deploys just four female voices to its six male voices. This female quartet gains a heightened significance as the action unfolds both theatrically and musically,

amplifying or universalising Amarela’s thoughts. In No. 5, the quartet taunts Godofredo with his own Fado in close harmony, a gesture they repeat at the climax of Godofredo’s nightmare (No. 14) where the intensity of their rendition (fortissimo, sempre marcato) creates the sense of a female last judgement on this sorry specimen of a man:

Example 6: Continued

By contrast, smaller ensembles of male voices are used to reinforce the male-dominated world of the narrative, often for comic effect. In No. 6, Neto’s shameless hypocrisy is exploited for comic effect by the use of a barber-shop quartet of voices who not only help to reinforce Godofredo’s male shame, echoing back the words of Ludovina’s love letter as Neto reads them out (fig. 42), but also an old-boy charm as he extols the virtues of an enforced summer holiday39:

39 _{The comic nature of this sequence allows Amarela to draw in the Fado register (fig.}

Example 7: Continued

However, perhaps the most important consequence of this choral approach is the emphasis it throws on the opera’s interior scenes. By animating a social context for the central action, the vulnerabilities of Godofredo and Ludovina are exposed in a more direct way. The scenes where the chorus falls silent – Godofredo attempting to talk to his wife (no. 4b), Godofredo arguing with Amarela (no. 8), Ludovina alone (no’s. 7 or

12), the reconciliation (no. 17) - can access a greater degree of intimacy not only because of the absence of the chorus but also the threat of its imminent return.

While the character of an individual voice rarely figures within the homogenised vocal sound of a main-scale opera chorus, in The Yellow Sofa each of the ten voices maintain their vocal and theatrical identity throughout generating a polyphonic rather than homophonic effect. As ever, the allocation of voice-types was arrived at through a push-and-pull between creative ideals and Glyndebourne’s own practical requirements. A list was circulated by email on the 9th January40, eventually followed up in detail by a meeting with Steven Naylor (Head of Music Administration) on the 24th April at which questions of casting were decided. Inevitably, while the Jerwood Chorus Development Scheme offered an ideal context for the development of a new opera, the varying experience of the singers participating created some difficulties, though more around questions of theatrical confidence than musical limitations. This soon manifested itself through the rehearsal process; chiefly that the opera’s aesthetic approach required a high degree of alert responsiveness from its cast. In the rehearsal room, The Yellow Sofa revealed itself to be a ‘chamber’ opera more in the spirit of ‘chamber music’ than a scaling down of main-scale opera, and this demanded close ensemble work throughout. Freddie Wake-Walker had repeatedly voiced anxieties about how achievable this was with the limited rehearsal time available; as it turned out, extra calls were indeed required, squeezed in the gaps of Glyndebourne’s complex production schedule.

Admittedly, the defining quality of this new opera’s development process was its context; driven both by research (the Creative Residency) and by Professional Development (Jerwood Chorus Development Scheme); intriguingly, the tension between the two manifested itself most at the level of characterisation in The Yellow Sofa.

As Chapter Three demonstrated in its discussion of the vocal language of Eötvös’s Love and Other Demons, operatic characterisation is often built very directly on the

performance traditions surrounding a specific voice-type, or a specific performer or the interaction between the two. Like Eötvös’s opera, at the outset the strongly drawn

characters of Eça de Quieróz’s novel were re-imagined within the conventions of the operatic vocalisation:

Amarela a yellow sofa mezzo soprano

Godofredo Alves a small businessman high baritone

Ludovina (Lulu) his wife soprano

Margarida their maid mezzo soprano

Machado Godofredo’s business partner tenor

Neto Ludovina’s father medium baritone

Teresa Ludovina’s sister soprano

Medeiros) friends of Godofredo bass

Carvalho) low baritone

Nunes Vidal Machado’s second tenor

While there was a clear need to ensure an array of ten voices that would work effectively as a musical ensemble, there was also a strong need to use every means available to focus and differentiate each of the opera’s ten characters. One of the attractions of the original novel as source-material was Eça de Quieróz’s unique approach to characterisation where whole personalities are imagined at a deep level in appearance, gesture and outlook. Godofredo’s friend, Medeiros is a case in point:

From the shade of the bed curtains, Medeiros’s ill-humoured voice demanded to know what sort of invasion this was; and when they opened the curtains, he cried out, buried himself in the sheets, unable to bear the bright morning light. But at last he showed his sleep-drenched face; then he roused himself, raised himself on to his elbow, and took a cigarette from the bedside table41

This kind of focus on character, particularly in such a short novel with such a slender plot, generates a palpable sense theatre. The awakening of Medeiros described above is a theatrical performance – the (bed) curtains, the unseen voice, the old rake finally revealed, the cigarette. Furthermore, Eça de Quieróz’s habit of accumulating seemingly insignificant details around a character in order to communicate a deeper psychological message enables his characters to be re-imagined operatically in an analogous way. The manner of Medeiros’s introduction, dishevelled and hung over, with all the scatology of his morning ritual, might serve Eça de Quieróz’s comic purpose – the cuckold

consulting the womaniser – but provides strongly resonant material for an operatic reinvention of his character. One detail proved the key:

And he withdrew into a little cubicle, where they heard him cleaning his teeth, rinsing his mouth, making a noise in the wash basin42

It is the voice of Medeiros that Eça de Quieróz introduces first, a voice he associates with animalistic grunts and gurgling and out of this emerged the decision to colour Medeiros’s vocality in the opera with analogous extended techniques. In the Trio (no 13), he first appears with ‘a tumbler of something…he appears to be swilling round his mouth’ and for nearly twenty slow bars, his only vocal contribution is a sequence of incoherent gargles which interrupt Carvalho’s attempts at a serious conversation:

Although the surrounding colour of Eça de Quieróz’s scene has gone, the notion of an old rake pulling himself together is maintained, encapsulated in a vocal transition from these nonsense gurgles to almost an aria (fig. 102). By controlling the pitch element of these gargles and tuning them into the instrumental texture, the whole scene becomes a Medeiros fantasy, its entire pitch content built around the possibilities of alternating between open strings and harmonics to enable the bariolage effect that instrumentally mimics Medeiros’ vocality. This mimicry is maintained right through to the scene’s final suave exhortation – Place your honour, in our hands – with Medeiros’ gargles coalescing into orchestral rocking semiquavers:

This translation of a novelist’s eye into musical sound was the guiding principle for vocal characterisation in The Yellow Sofa. With the exception of Godofredo, Ludovina and Amarela, the vocal quality of the seven other characters was created in an

analogous way - Machado a lovesick tenor stuck in a bel canto tessitura; Nunes a pedantic and fussy coloratura tenor who guilds fugues with trills (fig. 133); Carvalho a suave, Verdian baritone, who repeatedly attempts to raise the tone (fig. 109). Naturally, such specific musical detail can only lay out a field of possibilities for the creation of an operatic character; it is in the interface between the musical score and the performance realisation that remains key. As director Freddie Wake-Walker repeatedly observed, operatic characters often emerge from a process of negotiation between the parameters of the performance material and the realities of what a specific singer can achieve. In the case of Medeiros, the Romanian bass Ciprian Droma - who was identified as ideal for the role in April 2009 - continually struggled with the musical material, coming with little or no experience of contemporary music performance. Although this created very real difficulties through the rehearsal process, both singer and director were able to mould this sense of ‘struggle’ into the character so that what might have been

experienced as musical insecurity amongst the cast, could be read as Medeiros’ scatty mind by the audience.

The vocality of the opera’s three central characters, however – Amarela, Godofredo and Ludovina – was approached in an entirely different way, chiefly because they embody the heart of the narrative. While the other seven voices were highly stylised and characterised, often in close connection to Eça de Quieróz’s narrative detail, the material for these three characters is driven by deeper musical concerns.

As discussed above, Amarela’s vocal character is Fado itself, and her vocality was arrived at through a painstaking process of Fado transcription carried out in order to research the most effective way of capturing this aural tradition within the specificity of a score. In a sense, the challenge here was analogous to Eötvös’s engagement with the possibility of African musical elements in Love and Other Demons, though here the juxtaposition was between Western high art values and Western folk traditions. The difference of approach in The Yellow Sofa is that Amarela’s music was developed out of close study and analysis of Fado models, supported by the inclusion of two guitars in the score – one Portuguese, one Spanish in line with standard Fado performing

traditions, pizzicato double bass standing in for the bass guitar43. While the risk here was free of the sensitivities that surround any engagement with colonial history (Love and Other Demons), the notion of trying to capture the flexibility of Fado within the constraining boundaries of opera presented very real challenges. Fado itself is

characterised by a highly sophisticated rhythmic suppleness – often compared to jazz – whose accompanimental texture, conceptually at least, is spontaneously realised and whose vocal style depends on the singer’s mastery of Fado coloratura traditions. To transplant such a rich performance culture into opera is fraught with difficulty; after all operatic voices are very specifically trained; beauty of sound, clarity of diction far more important than the ‘grain of the voice’.

Regarding Fado’s rhythmic character, a decision was made to achieve this through careful rhythmic transcription; a number of Fados by the contemporary Fado composer Jorge Fernando were analysed closely44_{, particularly with regard to how the voice}

‘escapes’ the oom-cha regularity of the accompaniment. From an operatic perspective, the resulting material invites the singer to learn a set of irrational rhythms accurately and then own them in performance as spontaneous gesture:

43 _{These instruments are deployed quite systematically for all of Amarela’s Fado}

numbers.

44 _{Albums by the acclaimed young Fadista Ana Moura, particularly the albums Para}

além da Saudade 06025-1733898-2 (Portugal, 2007) and Guarda-me a vida na mão, 067 923-2 (Portugal, 2003).

The young mezzo-soprano Martha Bredin who first tackled the role found this kind of notated vocal freedom counter-intuitive, her own ingrained educational culture fighting with this pattern of freedom through accuracy. In the longer term, the role arguably needs a rather different stage performer, one for whom opera and perhaps cabaret are equally familiar. Amarela’s final vocal gesture presents an example of the tensions generated by the conflicting performance traditions of Fado and Opera. Sung

operatically, the coloratura smacks of nineteenth century bel canto; sung in the spirit of Fado and the coloratura is about the grain of the voice. Without this ‘grain’, a relishing of raw vocal timbre, the role all too easily falls into generic gypsy music:

Godofredo and Ludovina are arguably the only characters whose vocal material was not generated either out of a pre-existing musical style or Eça de Quieróz’s narrative detail. From the outset, it was clear that Godofredo would carry the story – he leads all the opera’s ‘cardinal functions’ listed above and is on stage almost continuously, the developmental progress of the narrative impacting heavily on his vocalisation. All the action pivots round him, presenting a variety of theatrical and sonorous landscapes which he is forced to navigate while crucially, both he and his wife are changed by the course of events. Clearly a strategy was required that would enable Godofredo’s through line to be clearly articulated throughout this operatic sequence, enabling the final reconciliation to feel like a genuine culmination.45

The solution lay in adopting Eötvös’s respelling of a name from words into music; just as Sierva Maria de Todos Los Angeles is spelled out as a line of pitches, the name Godofredo Alves proved to translate itself elegantly into a hexachord:

Example 12: Godofredo’s hexachord

45 _{Early on, Kemp questioned the opera’s deeper intentions behind this final}

reconciliation (email 4/10/08) but it was strongly felt to be genuine, even if only in the moment itself.

However, whereas Eötvös’s line is a theme of reminiscence, Godofredo’s hexachord is his DNA; it generates his entire musical material in both line and harmony, first

introduced as a mysterious chorale in the Prologue – all six chords generated by transposed inversions of the basic hexachord – it then informs his entire musical discourse; in structural terms, he is a theme and variations, the idea of ‘variations’ allowing for genuine musical development in line with the action. This was achieved broadly in a number of ways. Firstly, the ‘mysterious chorale’ chords are used to heighten his most profoundly existential moments:

Prologue: the chorus chant Godofredo’s chorale chords;

Tableau 2 Godofredo’s chorale is softly enunciated in the orchestra as he attempts a conversation with his wife;

Another Finale an unseen chorus sing Godofredo’s chorale ‘hushed and mysterious’ as a blessing on his reconciliation with Ludovina.

Secondly, this ‘existential’ treatment of Godofredo’s hexachord is playfully mimicked by the chiming clock, which presents his cipher harmonised in parallel major sixths:

Example 13: The clock chimes Godofredo’s name

But thirdly, and perhaps most critically, the developmental process of these hexachordal variations is pinned down to a tonal scheme which screws the harmonic tension into his ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ (no. 14). This was achieved by multiplying the Godofredo hexachord against itself at an intervallic distance that gradually decreases as the action develops, creating an ever-darkening harmonic language as his world collapses. As bi- products, these multiplications lead to an increasing harmonic complexity, whether the laughter climax at figure 84 or the confused density of figure 110, anticipating the chromatic passacaglia that underpins Godofredo’s nightmare (no. 14).

Of course, as Amarela’s Fado points out, Godofredo is a ‘someone who is no one’; as a consequence, the notion that his identity is located more in the fabric of the music than his own voice, seems fitting. As a consequence, his vocality lacks the melodic grace that many other characters evidence. Much of his vocal material is sentence-like, often

with the feel of accompanied recitative, largely ‘tune-less’ in fact46. This enables him to slip easily into spoken dialogue in number 8 or to achieve expressionist declamation in his nightmare, desperately calling out his wife’s name:

46 _{This tuneless quality to Godofredo’s role was much commented on by the cast, not}

least out of admiration for baritone Michael Wallace’s extraordinary achievement in mastering the role so completely.

The only moment where Godofredo comes close to achieving a melodic grace comes in his final reconciliation with his wife, Ludovina (no. 17). Ludovina’s music is

constructed out of another hexachord, not derived from the letters of her name but the complement to her husband’s (i.e. the six remaining pitches from the complete 12 note set). The resulting hexachord – very much a modal fragment – generates her main thematic material, introduced as sensuous chords in tableau 1 (No. 4a), as an orchestral line in the ‘sea interlude’ (fig. 50 – 52) and then explored in her aria (fig. 61) where a sequence of hexachordal rotations of her cell provides an analogue to her repeated questions:

Unlike her husband, the scalic nature of Ludovina’s hexachord ensures that her vocality is highly lyrical in a thoroughly conventional operatic sense; her material strives to achieve a traditionally operatic lyric fervour, but reanimate it through context, control of pitch (her hexachord) and delicacy of orchestration. This ‘grace’, which so defines her, comes to the fore in the couple’s final reconciliation. Here, as they sing instructions of how to re-wind the clock, their twin hexachords are conjoined within an

accompanimental texture which mimics the clock chimes that have so tormented Godofredo. What were two separate hexachords become one modal pool; both voices achieving a ‘traditionally operatic lyric fervour’, both released into song:

Taken out of context, this final duet might seem tinged with a reactionary operatic aesthetic in its thoroughgoing lyrical sweep. However, in a theatrical form, context is all; this release has been earned, all the strands of the operatic structure – Fado, mobiles, tableaux, hexachords are pulled towards it, generating a moment of

‘sentiment’, a held image of human vulnerability and love which lies so strongly at the heart of the Eça de Quieróz story, and which opera is uniquely placed to explore.

Conclusion

How then has the creative experience of The Yellow Sofa advanced this project’s central questions – how to develop a new thinking around narrativity and voice in opera as a