Summary: As events in music history go, July 9 is definitely on the lighter side. (Although, for me – personally – it is an important day, and I would use this opportunity to wish the happiest of birthdays to my beautiful daughter Rachel Amy, who was born in Berkeley, California 32 years ago today!)<br> But back to musical business. We will indeed recognize the birth on July 9, 1879 – 139 years ago today – of the Italian composer, musicologist, and violinist Ottorino Respighi in Bologna, the city of lunch meat and red sauce fame. Respighi’s fame as a composer rests on four works: his three orchestral tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals; and the eighth of his nine operas, a work entitled La fiamma (meaning “The Flame”), which received its premiere on January 23, 1934 in Rome.<br> Fancy that: an Italian composer writing opera! In fact, there’s nothing more natural in the world. Opera was invented in Italy for the same reason that surfing was invented in Hawaii: Hawaii is surrounded by warm ocean water and perfect waves and Italians are surround by the musical warmth and beauty of the Italian language: that seemingly perfect amalgam of vowel and consonant.<br> Oh opera! How we love thee! As I pointed out in last week’s Music History Monday, opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a courtly, aristocratic entertainment. And though it quickly became a popular entertainment in Italy, it remained, for many years – particularly in France and England – an aristocratic entertainment.<br> <a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/course/how-to-listen-understand-opera/"></a>An “aristocratic entertainment.” Again: <a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-jean-jacques-rousseau-and-enlightened-opera/">last week’s post</a> observed how the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau disparaged French court opera in the 1740s and 1750s for the elitism he believed it represented. And according to various arbiters of PC today, the great bulk of the operatic repertoire should be rejected as being irrelevant, as it represents an antiquated, elitist Euro-world at odds with the global equality and diversity of the twenty-first century.<br> Oh. My. God. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard some version of this screed, I’d be a very wealthy person. Twenty-one years ago – in my Great Courses/Teaching Company survey entitled “How to Listen to and Understand Opera” – I ranted about this. I have updated that rant, because it is even more relevant today as it was in 1997. The rant was triggered by the introductory paragraph of a proposal for a world music course that I received from a high-end violinist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here is that paragraph:<br> “The ‘classical’ tradition in Western music, in Eurocentric culture, is a dying if not dead tradition. The musical style of the standard repertoire grew out of a relentlessly dominating minority culture known as imperialist Europe. Audiences and players are drawn to this essentially dead tradition as an escape from interactive values, interactive values which can properly be found in popular and world musical cultures. We must reject the dead tissue of our elitist past and embrace the living traditions of the present if we, as musicians and audiences, are to be relevant to our times.”<br> Okay; this is complete nonsense.<br> Questions<br> <br> * When we marvel at the Parthenon in Athens, do remind ourselves that it is a product of a patriarchal, femaphobic, faux-democratic boys club regime?<br> * When we stand, awestruck, before Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s in Rome, do we ruminate upon the elitist, oppressive, Machiavellian robber-baron mercantilist ruling class that commissioned it?<br> * When we move and groove to really good, down and dirty rock ‘n’ roll, do we pause to reflect upon the grimy, stinking, tattooed, psycho-sexual drug-inspired environment that was its original milieu?<br>
