Glitter and be Gay

The opera project is going remarkably well.  I am still combatting an unhealthy obsession with Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw, aided by a 1982 film version of the opera in which little Miles is quite clearly attempting to seduce the governess!  (Remember how I said that Britten wasn't on the opera project?  This was clearly unrealistic.  Not only have I been listening to Britten all week, but I've also been bothering everyone involved in my opera company to agree to perform an unstaged version of this opera.  I mean it!  It's amazing!)

I've finally gotten around to listening to an opera that's actually on the list: Leonard Bernstein's Candide.  (I like the 20th century.  I can't help it!)  Of course I've heard (possibly even played??) the overture; everyone has.  But I'm enjoying the heck out of the opera itself.

I made the mistake of pausing in my first listening session to attend a meeting.  The unfortunate consequence was that I spend an hour with the catchy part of "Glitter and Be Gay" stuck in my head.  Fast forward to 2:50 and observe:

(Note that my selection of the performance by Kristin Chenoweth is not at all an endorsement of her as a great coloratura soprano, which I'm not sure she is--I was just so deeply charmed by her jumping up and down mid-aria!)

What I find particularly fascinating is that Turn of the Screw was written in 1954 and Candide was written in 1956.  In spite of that--the instant I turn on a recording of Candide for the first time, I understand what's going on, I like the sound of the music, I enjoy listening to it.  Now, after a week of listening to Turn of the Screw for basically my every waking moment, reading the libretto, watching video--there are still some scenes where my musical brain totally rebels and doesn't understand in the slightest what's going on.

Everyone raised in an environment where he is exposed to western music, particularly western classical music, has this innate understanding of what music is supposed to sound like.  Particularly those of us trained as musicians since childhood can instinctively feel what's going on in a piece of music and where it's going to go.

Candide, despite having some dissonance and some rhythmic funkiness (that's a technical term!) that was presumably avant-garde in the 1950s, for me fits very easily within the same musical framework that centuries worth of classical music does.

Turn of the Screw, although it's far from the most unusual or out-there work, requires something different of me.  My conventional understanding of melody or harmony or the way a piece should fit together just doesn't apply, and I am left adrift--like I have to consciously work to do what my brain usually does unconsciously, which is to order noise into a musical framework.  I have a decent ear and I always hear the musical logic in, say, Mozart.  Britten sometimes still sounds like noise to me.

I rebel very strongly against the idea that simply because Bernstein is easy to listen to and Britten is difficult to listen to, Bernstein is somehow better music.  This way of thinking is prevalent among philistinesa surprising number of well-educated musicians--that the job of music is to be beautiful, pleasant, and emotionally stimulating.  I am a rather aggressive proponent of the idea that sometimes the job of music is to be ugly, challenging, and intellectually profound.

At the same time, I fight against my own (pretentious) assumption that because Bernstein is easy to listen to and Britten is difficult to listen to, Britten is better music.  Bernstein is brilliant, sophisticated, and awesome in his own way.  The question for me, I suppose, is--if it's possible for music to be sophisticated whether it's beautiful or ugly, how do I evaluate if music is sophisticated or not?  Even setting aside the question of historical context, how do I listen to an opera and determine for myself if it's 'good' and 'sophisticated' in a way that isn't pretentious--in a way that doesn't needlessly elevate difficulty and dissonance over ease and harmony?