Music As Cultural Catalyst

Not only art and music create the richness of cultural life in our region; the circulation of ideas plays an equally important role. Organizations such as Crescendo, Bard College and Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) go to great lengths to educate their concert audiences as well as to give them satisfying music. The Salisbury Forum and similar speakers’ series promote political and cultural discussion.

 

Last Sunday, Nov. 12, it was CEWM’s turn, with the first of two “Conversations With” programs, a presentation on “The Politics of Opera” by Mitchell Cohen, a political science professor and author of a book of the same name. The talk, at St. James Place in Great Barrington and generously illustrated with recorded musical examples, was fascinating and ear-opening.

 

Cohen’s focus was on opera’s early centuries, from its beginnings in late-Renaissance Italy of the 1500s through Mozart. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the art form emerged in step with “modern” politics and Machiavelli. Questions of power and statehood were no longer only the realm of Christian belief, but were being rapidly secularized.

 

To this potent brew arrived Claudio Monteverdi, the great Italian Baroque composer of what are the first fully documented operas. As heard in his “ravishing” music, as Cohen called it, Monteverdi confronted questions of law, governance, power and authority head-on in operas such as “L’Orfeo” (Orpheus) and “L’incoronazione di Poppea” (The Coronation of Poppaea).

 

The latter consists of an extended debate between the Roman Emperor Nero and the philosopher Seneca pitting impulse and emotion (Nero’s desire to wed Poppaea) against reason and fairness toward Nero’s subjects. Nero wins in the end, having killed off Seneca and exiled many of his former allies, and the opera ends with a “happy” wedding. “But Monteverdi’s audience would have known that the story did not end well,” said Cohen. “Nero killed Poppaea a few years later.”

 

By the time of Mozart and his landmark opera “The Marriage of Figaro,” the composer and his librettist were almost openly thumbing their noses at rank and aristocracy, and what the censors banned Mozart subtly reinstated through the music, Cohen said. “The opera ends with the Count on his knees,” begging forgiveness from his scandalized wife.

 

CEWM has its typical cornucopia of concerts in the current 2017-2018 season, its 26th, as well as the second of its “Conversations With” in Apr. 2018, on the cross-influences between Russian and Soviet-era music and Hollywood. In the nearer future, Dec. 9, 2017, will bring “Souvenir de Florence — An Italian Holiday Celebration” to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. It features the Amernet String Quartet and others (including CEWM artistic director Yehuda Hanani) in a program of delights by Italian and non-Italian composers, capped off with Tchaikovsky’s delightful string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence.”

 

The first 2018 concert, on Feb. 24 at St. James Place, will showcase countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in mostly Baroque music. Later spring concerts will include the Ariel String Quartet, Piano Trios, the “Acronym Baroque Band,” and a celebration of “Lenny at 100 — Feel the BERNstein!”

 

For more information, go to www.cewm.org or call (800) 843-0778.