Forgotten Beatitudes

For most of my teen years and about three years in college, I thought I was going to be an opera singer.  I took all sorts of music lessons, got some shockingly bad vocal training, worked my ass off in college to overcome it and then, ultimately, realized I hated opera.  Actually, I liked the arias, but not the bits that linked them together.

This was a problem.

After a sit down with Dr. Anne DeLauney, my most wonderful college voice professor, I decided that classical vocal performance was just not for me.  I’ve retained the love of the arias, though, or at least certain ones.

I think number one on my list is one of the more instantly recognizable:  Calaf’s act III, scene I,  “Nessun Dorma” (”Nobody Sleeps”) from Turandot, the last work by Puccini, my favorite operatic composer.

For those of you who don’t know, Turandot is all about a ancient Chinese princess named, unimaginatively enough, Turandot.  She’s got a bad attitude, but can get away with it because she’s, you know, a princess and she cute.  Seriously, this chick’s stacked and packed in front and back and when Calaf, the hiding Prince of Tartary, knicknamed “The Unknown Prince”, gets an eyeful of her cool Asian disdain, he totally drops what he was doing and wants to get all up in her dumpling.  Incidentally, what he was doing was helping some old guy on the street, Timur, who, through the magic of L’OPERA! just happens to be his long-lost father, the deposed King of Tartary, accompanied by Liu, Doormat…er, Serving Girl to the King.  Calaf doesn’t know it, but Liu the Doormat is in love with him.

Yeah, this.  This bit right here?  Yeah, this is why I hate opera and many musicals.

Anyway, you may be wondering why a chunk of ass so fine that it makes you drop yo’ daddy and…well, no one very much cares whatever happens to Liu the Doormat…is walking around without an ancient Chinese ring on her ancient Chinese finger.  Ah, grasshopper, that is Ancient Chinese Plot Contrivance.
Whoever wants to wed and bed Turi must first answer three riddles.  That’s just the way the Ancient Chinese rolled, dig?  Get them right, and Turi’s womanflower is all yours.  Get them wrong, like the Prince of Persia, and you lose your head.  Literally.  *snick*  *plop* *blaaaaah*

Not even the Sands of Time can save that bitch.

It’s not a complete loss for the Prince of Persia, though.  Even though he dies, like, right off the bat and off-stage (seriously, I don’t know who the tenor was who pissed off Puccini, but they parade his ass across the stage and then, only when he’s off, do they let the bitch sing…harsh), he goes down in history as having the shortest tenor roll on record, only getting to sing “Toooooraaaaaandaaaaaaaah-”.

15 minutes was a lot shorter in Ancient China.

Calaf, though, is all, “Sucks to be you, but I gotta invade that like a Mongolian horde,” and is about to bang the gong to announce he wants to…well, bang the gong, when some vaguely annoying secondary characters get in the way and slow shit down to a crawl.  I can say that because I played one of them (I played the SHIT out of Pong).  They do have a pretty trio in Act II (”Ola Pang!” and “Ho una casa nell’Honan”), where they go on about the good old days and how Turandot is, frankly, a bitch.  Ultimately, they’re about as useful as a hat to one of Turi’s exes.

Anyway, Calaf wades through the bombastic singing of the secondary characters, including Liu the Doormat and her unrequited love which no one much notices or cares about, and bangs the gong anyway.  Some rather unimportant shit happens and suddenly we’re in the court of Papa Turi and Baby Dot.  Papa preaches a bit and then Turandot finally gets to sing.  First thing bitch does is go on a rant about how her ancient, ancient ancestor was raped and murdered so she hates men because that shit runs deep and she will never let anyone go balls deep in her beef curtains.

Lesbian!

Next comes a big important moment where Turi sings the riddles at Calaf and Calaf sings the answers back at her.  It’s not really a duet because it’s very competitive and, seriously, to get out over a Puccini orchestra takes a certain aggressive approach to singing that’s sort of akin to using a falling U.S. spy satellite to swat a fly.  After everyone’s ears stop bleeding, Calaf has answered the riddles and Turi sings, “Mother fu…daddy, I don’t wanna!”  Daddy says, “Tough titty, you’re out of my house to get hitched, bitch!”

Calaf, because he’s a pussy and there have only been two acts so far, sings, “Look, if you can figure out my name before sunrise, then you don’t have to marry me.  In fact, I’ll die.  But if you can’t find it, you have to marry me.”  Turi sings, “Damn bitch, you crazy, but whatevs. Hot diggity I get to keep my maidenhead!” and it’s off to the races.
Finally, we get to the good stuff.  Everyone’s running around looking for his name, so Calaf takes a moment to sing
about it.  “Nessun dorma, nessun dorma.  Tu pure, o Principessa…” “Nobody sleeps, nobody sleeps, even you, Princess.”

Well, how the hell could anyone sleep with all these damn chorus people and tenors caterwauling the night away?

It’s an incredibly hard aria, although it sounds deceptively simple.  You have to fight your way out over a Puccini orchestra, which is never easy at the best of times, and you have to do it at the beginning of Act III after a whole lot of prior singing.  When done right, however…shivers.

For an example of how to do it wrong, let us turn to Luciano Pavarotti.

Blech.  Pavarotti has a good voice, but it’s tiny and has no business singing these bigger roles, even in concert.  The last passages should nail you to the back of the theater with the final sustained B5 being the operatic equivalent of the face melting from Raiders of the Lost Ark.  He’s just not there.

So now a better version.  Jussi Bjorling!

The problem with the big voices of the older days is that recordings rarely capture the true power of the voice.  Instead of drilling a hole straight through your soul, they sound raw and edgy because of the squillo.  What made them famous in live performance, makes them damn near unrecordable.  This one, however, is pretty damn good.  Hear the difference between this and Pav?  The rush up in the “Dilegua, o notte!  Tramontate, stelle!” is enough to put tears in my eyes and make me slap my momma.

For my money, though, the definitive recording of this aria goes to Franco Corelli.  The looks, the voice, the power, the package.  The diction is sort of sloppy, but with money notes like that, who the hell cares?  Plus, it has all the “Oh holy fuck, is he going to make it, is he going to make it, Holy shit, he made it!” tension of the best Maria Callas recordings.

And remember, this is a live recording with Corelli as Calaf and Birgit Nilsson as Turandot.  That’s power, baby.  Power.

Sometimes you find things you wouldn’t expect:

I declare this to be a little bit of wonderful.

Then, there’s the flip side…

Crazy Bitch Part I

W. T. F.  BITCH, GET SOME CONSONANTS!  There is nothing good about you or what you do.  At one point, it’s like she’s the fourth wise man who got lost, got addicted to crack and had to blow someone in a back alley for a rock.
Crazy Bitch Part II

Oh, fuck me dead.  My throat is bleeding.  Seriously, this shit is like a great big fuck you to vocal cords everywhere.  And, apparently, to go by 1:33 this is an aria about the non-sugar sweetener, Splenda.  Maybe that’s only to be expected since he evidently has no earthly idea what he’s singing about.
Stick with what you do best, Michael.  Banging Nicolette Sheridan and being a douche.

Anyway, after this aria, it’s time to wrap this shit up.  Timur and Liu the Doormat are roughed up by police and Liu sings about knowing the Prince’s name and how she’ll never reveal it.  So Turandot goes all Gitmo on her and, overwhelmed by people actually paying attention to her, Liu sings about how even Turi will know love.  Realizing this is pretty much the peak experience of her life, Liu the Doormat pulls an Ophelia and becomes Liu, nee the Doormat, Everyone’s Best Friend.

Timur gets all pissy, saying the Gods will punish everyone for being mean to Liu.  The townspeople are all contrite.  Really, though, what was anyone expecting of a girl who hangs around with an old blind guy, is really into S&M and who’s name rhymes with, “Who?”

Calaf himself gets into the act, throwing another aria at Turi, calling her the Princess of Death.  Mind you, his woodie for her hoodie is as big as ever and really Liu is just a sort of speedbump on the road to Turi’s mound of Venus.

Pucinni died while composing Turandot and had only orchestrated and written up through Liu’s death.    It is theorized that, had he lived, he might have written one of the best love duets of all time.

But he didn’t, so that’s that and Franco Alfano completed the rest of the opera, which, frankly, isn’t very good.

Calaf gives Turandot his name…blah, blah, blah…Turandot falls in love…blah, blah, blah…when asked for his name, Turandot sings, “Love!” and the opera, mercifully, ends.

According to the annals, when conducting the premier performance of Turandot in 1926, Toscanini stopped the performance after Liu’s death, laid down his baton, said “At this point, the maestro laid down his pen,” and left the stage, leaving the performance incomplete.

Frankly, after hearing Alfano’s stuff, who could blame him?