Luigi Dallapiccola
            Ulisse

* Claudio Desderi (Ulisse)
* Gwynn Cornell (Circe, Melanto)
* William Workman (Antinoo)
* Denise Boitard (Nausicaa)
* Stan Unruh (Demodoco, Tiresia)
* Schuyler Hamilton (Eumeo)
* Colette Herzog (Calypso, Penelope)
* Jean-Pierre Chevalier (Eurimaco)

Choeur de Radio France, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Ernest Bour
Naive V 4960 Total time: 75:26 + 46:52

Summary for the Busy Executive: No tunes.

Dallapiccola finished his opera Ulisse (Ulysses) in 1968.  It had taken
him eight years.  The libretto, by the composer himself, is an amazing
piece of work, incorporating not only Homer, but Machado, Thomas Mann,
Cavafy, Shakespeare, and Dante - all the references I've identified so
far.  Consider what thought it must have taken to reduce all the books
of the Odyssey to two hours, or an evening in the theater, and then to
draw on an amazing reading list besides.  Dallapiccola's solution is
brilliantly poetic.

Among other things, Dallapiccola shows his connection to the Italian
operatic tradition, harkening all the way back to Monteverdi's Il ritorno
d'Ulisse in patria.  But he also represents a break with the Romantic,
bel canto tradition of Italian opera.  The emotions are less fundamental,
less raw, less immediate.  For those who need opera as pretty tunes,
scenery, costumes, and singers who can't act, Ulisse will never become
a favorite.  It's also not particularly theatrical - that is, certain
elements of it pose staging problems (the death of the suitors, as Ulysses
shoots his arrows into them, for example).  Unlike most opera, it doesn't
portray a conflict between characters, but a conflict within a character
- Ulysses himself.  Dallapiccola has created a "drama of the mind," but
drama nevertheless.  Furthermore, it's, in Monteverdi's terms, "drama
per musica." The drama occurs as much in the music as in the stage action,
although the music is not conventionally dramatic - no Verdian shouts,
no Puccini swells.  Most of it is fairly low-key.  Don't bother waiting
for a hummable tune - the sinful sweet of opera.  I love hummable tunes,
but often they obscure the drama, and opera, for me, means primarily
drama.  By this test, Dallapiccola has written a great opera.

Dallapiccola asks at the very beginning the central question, which
quickly turns existential: Why does Ulysses continue to wander?  The
Trojan War and the wrath of Poseidon - Homer's primary motivators of the
action - get short shrift.  Dallapiccola contends that Ulysses' wandering
comes from within.  We see this for almost the entire work not through
Ulysses himself, but through the women he meets and rejects: Calypso,
Nausicaa, Circe, Melantho, and even Penelope.  His restlessness is summed
up in the line "Guardare, meravigliarsi, e tornar a guardare" ("To gaze,
to marvel, and to return to gazing"), repeated throughout the opera.
That is, he cannot rest, but must continually move on to something else.
This, for Ulysses, is wisdom.  The sea he travels on represents both the
world and wisdom.  However, it teaches him at a price.  Calypso at the
very beginning of the opera tells him, "Son, soli un' altra volta, il
tuo core e il mare" ("Alone, once more, are your heart and the sea" - a
line from Machado, incidentally).  Ulysses gains his knowledge at the
cost of cutting himself off from those he loves.  The monsters he meets,
as Circe points out, are those found in his own heart, a notion also
found in Martinu's Ariane.  To know himself, he must travel.

Frankly, Dallapiccola hasn't made things easy either on the performers
or on the listener.  This performance comes from a Radio France concert
of 1975.  Here and there, one encounters some fluffs, but overall Bour
and his players let you in on the greatness of this work.  Bour gets
movement in a score often lacking obvious impulse.  The drama, rarified
as it is, nevertheless comes out due to the efforts of such wonderful
singers as Colette Herzog playing both Calypso and Penelope, Gwynn Cornell
as both Circe and Melantho, and Jean-Pierre Chevalier as Eurymachus.
Claudio Desderi comes over as a crude, stentorian Ulysses, but the
character throughout most of the opera does very little.  As I've pointed
out, we see Ulysses by the reactions of others, rather than by his own
words and deeds.  The exception to this comes at the end - the hero's
final (and only) aria.  Desderi does well enough, without actually
breaking through to the revelatory.  This is probably the only recording
of Ulisse for quite a while, and it will serve.

Steve Schwartz