Nutcracker Season

The opera season just ended, and San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle won't come around until next summer. I'll be spending the next six months looking behind the scenes when I can, and watching other music, theater, and dance performances. There are wonderful overlaps in the arts, especially in the Bay Area. But this post may be the first time anyone has linked the fearsome Richard Wagner with the Nutcracker.

That's because my French-horn-playing friend Bill performs with both the SF Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras. Two days after the season-ending opera, he began playing for the ballet's beautiful Nutcracker, which runs through December 27. I see it, live or on public television, almost every year.

I first met William Klingelhoffer when I went to the opera house to ask him about playing Wagner, whose operas are the world's longest (see August 3, 2010 post). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. As I explained a while back, Wagner demands eight French horns for the Ring--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos.

But a ball player sits in the dugout a lot. With Wagner, the horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "You have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You need something in reserve; I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes by itself."

So the two-hour-long Nutcracker is a piece of cake or candy (easy for me to say), although Bill knows how to challenge himself. "You know how a baseball player hits 'for the cycle,' meaning he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game? Last year I played Nutcracker for the cycle: I played all four horn parts--first, second, third, and fourth--on various days in the same run!"

Bill says he's up to about 700 performances of Nutcracker all told. And you gotta keep things interesting. But he's sticking with first horn this year. "I'm imagining a more Zen approach: Nutcracker as meditation. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm....."




Nutcracker photo c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet
Photo of Bill: me

The Music Goes Round and Round

It seems a little oxymoronic, putting Richard Wagner's name in front of a brass instrument associated with marching bands and Octoberfest. But as the people at wagner-tuba.com will tell you, the name of "one of the least well-known orchestral instruments in the world today" is "colourful yet ambiguous and causes confusion as to its true identify." In his operas, Wagner wanted to hear something bridging the tone between a French horn and a trombone, a smaller tuba that would integrate with the new (1835) bass tuba and better blend the sounds of the brass section.

When I tell you the Wagner tuba uses a French horn mouthpiece, you may--if you've been reading this blog and have a good memory--think of Bill Klingelhoffer, the San Francisco Opera's co-principal horn player (see August 3 post), who's the reason I'm writing this.

When a company performs the four operas in the Ring Cycle over the course of seven days, as SFO is doing next summer, the demands on the musicians seem almost unbelievable--especially when you multiply it times two more weeks. So you can imagine my lack of surprise when Bill told me that when he performed the Ring here before, the principal horn players divided the work. Bill played Das Rheingold, the other principal played Die Walkure, and they split up Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.

These days, though, Bill's co-principal is 20-something Kevin Rivard, who's so excited about playing his first Ring, says Bill, he wants to do the whole thing, with only an assistant to help out by...well, that's something I plan to talk to Kevin about. What will Bill be doing? Yep, he'll be on Wagner tuba.

So I guess you've figured out what's in the photographs. In the big one, you're looking at the intricate valve section with its seven tuning slides, each needing a separate adjustment. You have to take the whole thing apart to overhaul and clean it, and each tuning slide needs to be labeled first. The orchestra's two Wagner tubas have been getting spiffed up lately at A and G Music/Best Instrument Repair Co., "which, from its popularity over the years," the SF Chronicle noted a few years ago, "apparently lives up to its name." When Bill drove over there to pick them up, I went with him, and it was an unexpected glimpse behind the scenes.

Background music: Das Rheingold, Prelude-Act I

Unforgettable

The first time you see any great opera is memorable, I think. It's like coming into Paris or Stonehenge or the Andes for the first time. No matter how often you return, how much you feel your love or admiration deepen, you can only experience that initial reaction once.

And sometimes, not often, it makes a story worth telling. Andy Ross, an Oakland-based literary agent, told me, "I'm the perfect Wagnerite." He's seen Wagner's operas countless times, and that includes five complete Ring Cycles. But his favorite production of any Wagner opera was his first. "It was Die Walkure at the Met in 1966 or '67," he says. "My uncle gave me a ticket. It turned out I was in the front row, center, about eight feet from the conductor, Herbert von Karajan. All the Wagnerites were offering to pay me for my seat. I found out why when someone told me that the elderly woman sitting next to me was Madame Maria Jeritza, the greatest Sieglinde of the 1920s [pictured above in her prime]. She whispered along with the role and was very impressed with the production."

Sieglinde is a big, expressive role: She must convey resignation and fear (of her husband, Hunding), dawning hope and love (for Siegmund, that opera's hero), strength and fortitude as she learns she carries Siegmund's child and must carry on without him. It's so moving to picture the aged soprano, so many years after the spotlight dimmed, singing in a whisper with Regine Crespin, one of the reigning sopranos of her era. Many consider Crespin the greatest French Wagnerian soprano of the century. The other outstanding Wagnerian sopranos were from Scandinavia--like Birgit Nilsson, whom Andy saw as Brunnhilde--Germany, Austria, or the U.S.

No wonder Andy never forgot his first Die Walkure. What I want to know is, what is the difference between a Wagnerian and a Wagnerite?

Background music: Regine Crespin as Sieglinde.