DR. VON LYRIC – The Tristan Variations

Today, let's look at a few examples of how the story of Tristan and Isolde has been told across many genres of performance.

Tristan – Reduced



Tristan – The Musical



Tristan – Danced





Tristan – Another Opera



Tristan – For Orchestra



Tristan – The Film

LE VIN HERBÉ (THE LOVE POTION) — BACKGROUND STORY

By Magda Romanska, Ph.D., Boston Lyric Opera Dramaturg

Tristan and Iseult, as depicted by 
Edmund Blair Leighton (1853–1922).

Written by Switzerland’s greatest composer, Frank Martin (1890–1974), in the late 1930s, Le Vin Herbé was initially conceived as a 30-minute piece in response to Robert Blum’s commission for his Züricher Madrigalchor. Wanting to distance himself from Wagner and his operatic version of the myth (and, thus, also from the Nazis, who glorified Wagner’s music), Martin based the story instead on Joseph Bédier’s 1900 philological novel, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Bédier’s work was intended for general, not scholarly, audiences, and it drew on diverse medieval sources. In a short note following Gaston Paris’s preface to the romance, Bédier himself described his text as “très composite” (quoted in Gallagher 426). Readable and succinct, Bédier’s version provided the perfect blueprint for Martin’s opera, offering an alternative storyline to Wagner’s. In her book, Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, Karoline Gritzner notes that, “in the medieval novel, whose traces both Bédier and Martin follow, it is the love potion alone that awakens the love between Tristan and Isolde. This love does not already exist beforehand” (89). In this, Martin further departed from Wagner. “In Wagner, it is only the supposed death potion which makes possible the complete confession of love” (Gritzner 90).

This first, early version of the Le Vin Herbé (often called Part I) was titled Le Philtre, and it was first performed in concert version on April 16, 1940, by the Züricher Madrigalchor in Zürich, with Robert Blum conducting. The libretto focused on the love between Tristan and Iseult, steering away from the theme of death. Following the premiere of the first version, Martin decided to expand it further, and he included two more chapters of Bédier’s book (“La forêt du Morois” and “La mort”), which made the work fuller and more complex, while focusing on both the theme of love and the theme of death (Sealey). Martin finished the piece in 1941, and the first complete concert performance took place on March 28, 1942, at the same theatre, with Blum again conducting.

The staged premiere had to wait until August 15, 1948, in Salzburg (under the German title, Der Zaubertrank), conducted by Ferenc Fricsay, and with Julius Patzak as Tristan and Maria Cebotari as Isolt. Often called a “secular oratorio,” Le Vin Herbé has a musical score that resembles a chamber work, and the dramatic structure of a great Romantic opera. In writing the opera, Martin was also influenced, in addition to Bédier, by Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera by Claude Debussy, which was in turn based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play of the same title. Debussy’s opera premiered in Paris in 1902, and the music and story of a tragic love triangle made a great impression on Martin.

Since the premiere of Martin’s opera, its score has gained cult status. Ted Libbey, in The NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music, tries to explain the appeal of Le Vin Herbé, as a transitional piece in Martin’s entire oeuvre:

The music of Martin’s maturity, from Le Vin Herbé onward, is marked by elegance of gesture, an extraordinary formal command, remarkable grace, energy, and lyricism. Its emotion is restrained yet intense, at times even haunting, its scoring economical yet sensuous, reflecting Martin’s keen ear for sonority. Few composers of the 20th century succeeded so well at writing music that was suave, expressive, and modern, and at the same time, utterly original. (465)

Although the opera is rarely performed, it has had a couple of memorable stagings. Twenty years after its premiere, in April 1961, Frank Martin’s Le Vin Herbé received its first New York performance by Hugh Ross and the Schola Cantorum. In 1982, Le Vin Herbé received three performances by the Park Lane Music Players, conducted by Simon Joly, and in 1993, another performance by the Netherlands Radio Choir and Chamber Orchestra under Bernhard Klee. In 1985, the opera was staged by New York Lyric Opera Company. The New York Times critic at that time, Bernard Holland, wrote, enchanted:

That Le Vin Herbé was absolutely gripping in this setting—filled with dignity, mystery and a simplicity born of true sophistication—goes without question, though I am still not sure exactly where the impressive beauties of this evening had their roots.

In 2010, Ardente Opera staged Martin’s masterpiece in Hawksmoor’s St. George’s Bloomsbury church. Martin Kettle of the Guardian wrote of Martin’s score:

The fact that Martin should write a medievalist Tristan for an orchestra of just eight players and a chorus of 12, plus tenor and soprano principals, is a powerfully defiant statement of his individuality. In operatic historical terms, it’s a bit like standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.

In 2013, the opera was staged at Staatsoper im Schiller Theater in Berlin. Opera News reviewed the production, commenting on Martin’s score:

The score, a key work for the composer’s mature style, shows the influence of serialism, but Martin never abandons the tonal. Martin’s self-avowed wish was to become a master of tonal chromaticism, and in Le Vin Herbé, he succeeded in concocting a harmonically dense potion that, for all its dissonances, also goes down easy. The music unfurls with a hypnotic, often chant-like urgency. This arresting score was exquisitely served by director Mitchell and the fine ensemble of singers and musicians assembled by the Staatsoper.

Read more:

• Gallagher, Edward J. “‘This too you ought to read’: Bédier’s  Roman de Tristan et Iseut,” in  Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook, ed. Joan Grimbert Tasker. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013),  425–50.
• Goldmann, A. J. “Le Vin Herbé.” Opera News, June 1, 2013. http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2013/9/Reviews/BERLIN__Le_Vin_Herb%C3%A9.html.
• Gritzner,  Karoline. Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance. Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.
• Holland, Bernard. “Oratorio: ‘Le Vin Herbe.’” The New York Times, April 21, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/21/arts/oratorio-le-vin-herbe.html.
• Kettle, Martin. “Le Vin Herbé.” Guardian, January 11, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/11/le-vin-herbe-review.
• Libbey, Theodore. “Frank Martin,” in The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music. Valley View, CA: Expanded Books, 2006.
• Sealey, Mark. Le vin herbé [Review]. Classical Net, 2009. http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/h/hmu93536a.php.

OPERA ANNEX: THE LOVE POTION'S VENUE AND THE “PROBLEM” OF BOSTON

We are in the midst of “tech week” as the Company prepares for its upcoming Opera Annex production of Frank Martin’s The Love Potion at Brookline’s Temple Ohabei Shalom. Modeled on themes from Hagia Sophia and the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy, and featuring a stunning golden dome, the Temple is a strikingly non-traditional space for operatic performance.

In fact, Boston is an “opera venue-challenged” city, and BLO’s annual Opera Annex series was created, at least in part, to address that problem: the lack of conventionally appropriate playing spaces. For each of the past five Seasons, BLO has sought out unusual locales in which to stage chamber-scaled works, choosing operas which themselves might be characterized as somewhat atypical repertoire. As the Temple undergoes a dramatic transformation to prepare for performances of The Love Potion, pictured below, we also look at some past responses to the venue problem.



Esther Nelson, BLO General & Artistic Director, speaks to a group of community members, Adagio donors, teachers, and others about the designs and concept of The Love Potion, with David Schweizer, stage director, looking on.



The Temple Ohabei Shalom sanctuary, in transition, as The Love Potion stage and set loads in.

The Love Potion costume sketches by Nancy Leary, left, and inspiration research, right.



A Brief History of Opera Venues in Boston
In 1958, Boston lost to the wrecking ball its first and, to-date, only purpose-built home for opera, the Boston Opera House on Huntington Avenue. Ever since, would-be producers of opera have been scrambling to find suitable places in which to perform, presenting works in diverse spaces from theatres to outdoor parks, from churches to universities.

1958 also saw the beginning of the rise to prominence of Sarah Caldwell, someone who was destined to leave an indelible stamp on the field of opera production and interpretation with her Opera Company of Boston, and yet the first of many for whom the venue issue would loom large. Her very first professional production – Offenbach’s Voyage to the Moon in June of 1958 – was staged outdoors in the Public Garden as part of the seventh annual edition of the Boston Arts Festival. She spent the next ten years producing works in the now-defunct Fine Arts Theatre, on Norway Street near Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay, and in the larger theatre of which it was a part (variously named Loew’s State Theater, Back Bay Theater, Donnelly Memorial Theater). Then Caldwell and her company were physically on the move again, seeing performances at the Shubert Theatre; the Kresge Auditorium and Rockwell Cage, both at MIT in Cambridge; Tufts University’s Cousens Gymnasium in Medford; and the Cyclorama/Flower Market in Boston’s South End. She spent seven seasons at the Orpheum/Aquarius Theater before buying the Savoy/Keith Memorial Theater in 1979 and renaming it The Opera House. Ever pragmatic and adaptive, Caldwell made the most of the unique attributes of each venue in which her company performed, and some of her most notable work took place “on the road.”

This period also saw the establishment of several other small opera companies in Boston, each with its own mission and identity, but all alike in their determination to offer performance opportunities to local artists. These intrepid, young companies could not afford to perform in conventional theatres, so their usual performance venues included some of Boston’s venerable old churches (Arlington Street Church, Emmanuel Church, the First and Second Church of Boston), various locations at local colleges and universities (Loeb Drama Center and Lehman Hall at Harvard, Agassiz Theater at Radcliffe, Longy School of Music, Massachusetts College of Art, Wheelock College), and the occasional small auditorium, such as New England Life Hall.

In 1976, three of these companies – New England Regional Opera, Associate Artists Opera, and New England Chamber Opera Group – joined forces to create Boston Lyric Opera. The newly-formed Company had expected to take up residence at the National Theater on Tremont Street in Boston’s South End, but soon after the Company’s founding, that facility was closed indefinitely in anticipation of renovation and ultimately demolished, leaving BLO without a performance venue and causing it to begin life as a roving troupe.

BLO’s very first offering was a performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors on December 26, 1976, at Boston’s Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street. Other productions followed at Massachusetts College of Art, Wellesley College, Berklee Performance Center, Old South Church, Tremont Temple, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Brookline High School. BLO even performed complete operas in outdoor venues, twice on City Hall Plaza in 1980 and once at the Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade in 1981, long before its highly-acclaimed Carmen on Boston Common in 2002.

BLO took a large leap forward when it landed in its first permanent home and became company-in-residence at Northeastern University in September of 1981. Continuing artistic and institutional growth next brought the Company to the Majestic Theatre beginning with its 1988/89 season, and then to the Shubert Theatre, its current home since the 1998/99 season.

In a wondrous turn of events, since 2009, BLO has deliberately and actively sought out facilities for its Opera Annex productions that resemble the kinds of venues it and its predecessor companies in Boston had once been forced to accept for lack of other options. But the difference is one of profound proportion – BLO seeks non-traditional environments possessing qualities that will enhance the audience experience of its productions and that will challenge its creative team in exciting artistic ways. Thus the eerie Victorian interior of the Castle at Park Plaza mirrored the atmosphere of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and of Beeson’s Lizzie Borden, the two Annex productions BLO has presented there. The view of Boston Harbor from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum provided the perfect backdrop for Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. The Calderwood Pavilion of the Boston Center for the Arts was readily made to suggest the makeshift nature of a performance area in a concentration camp for Ullmann’s Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Quits. The multi-levels of the Artists For Humanity EpiCenter provided plural playing spaces of various configurations for MacMillan’s Clemency, as well as affording an opportunity for the young artists enrolled in programs at Artists For Humanity to participate in technical and artistic aspects of the production.

Now, as BLO once again strives to match the attributes of its performance space with the artistic atmosphere of its production, we eagerly await the unfolding of the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolt within the Byzantine-Romanesque splendor of Temple Ohabei Shalom.


A special thanks to Jane Pisciottoli Papa, member, Boston Lyric Opera Board of Overseers, for her contributions to this blog article.

BLO'S VERSION OF THE LOVE POTION

By Magda Romanska, Ph.D., BLO Dramaturg

Thalia, muse of comedy, holding a comic mask.
Detail from the “Muses Sarcophagus,”
first half of the 2nd century AD

One of the most prominent characteristics of The Love Potion is the opera’s structure: twelve singers tell the story, which is constantly flowing, while supported by haunting and almost hypnotic music. That type of dramatic structure closely follows the tradition of the Greek Chorus, in which the plot is driven by chorus members who assume different dramatic roles, while also providing background and commentary on the action of the story. Called a “sacred oratorio,” The Love Potion also alludes to the religious origins of the Greek Chorus and its format: at its beginnings, theatre was a sacred ritual performed to honor the gods, and it evolved into a dialogic format only when the first actor, Thespis, stepped out and engaged his fellow chorus member in direct dialogue. All of these elements combine to create a work that crosses the boundary between secular and sacred, while providing commentary on its subject matter: eternal love as a spiritual journey that doesn’t end with death, but continues throughout the otherworldly dimension.

The Marriage of Tristram and
Isoude Les Blanches Mains,
Sir Edward Burne-Jones,
stained glass window, 1862

Regardless of one’s religious orientation, anyone who has lost a loved one knows the spiritual feeling of longing and loss… But the mythology of eternal love that is also an erotic love is a complicated matter: love that has no bounds (not even death) is fundamentally self-destructive, but it is also, as poets have always claimed, a spiritual experience. The cult of such love has something that is both mythical and mysterious, but also seductive and dangerous. To lose oneself in such love can be at once the most engrossing and the most destructive experience of one’s life.

By staging The Love Potion at the Temple Ohabei Shalom, we tried to capture that grand, overwhelming, spiritual feeling evoked by boundless love that the opera explores. The spatial grandeur of the Temple, with its magnificent golden dome, is a fitting setting for Frank Martin’s music, illustrating and illuminating both the grandeur of the music and the complexity of the myth that the opera explores. Finally, it is also perhaps a fitting setting for another reason: one of Judaism’s most celebrated texts is Song of Songs, also known as Song of Solomon, which celebrates sensual love as the highest expression, culmination, and extension of a deeply spiritual experience.

DR. VON LYRIC – The “Other” Tristan

For at least the next few weeks (and at least in the Boston area), the "other" Tristan will be Wagner's long, overwhelming, and monumental (and even at times noisy) opera as it plays second fiddle to the subtle, refined, concentrated emotions and musical expression of Frank Martin's The Love Potion. It's a fascinating contest. Wagner's opera, "...is probably the most written-about opera in history...perhaps single-handedly changing the course of classical music, ultimately opening the door to the twentieth century and atonality." Martin's piece was not even written as an opera per se, and it speaks in a mostly quiet voice. He returned to an earlier version of the story, with the libretto taken from Joseph Bédier's retelling of the Tristan legend. Having begun in 1938, Martin, in the words of one critic, "sought to distance himself from Wagner, the ideological usurpation of whom by the rulers of the Third Reich made any point of contact impossible and to provide an alternative to the larger-than-life emotions and musical opiates on offer at Bayreuth."

Point taken. But let's take a moment and recall some of that indisputable Wagnerian grandeur before we encounter Martin's refreshingly "astringent" take in BLO's production of The Love Potion next week.

First, Lennie leads the hometown band in the Prelude:


Some excepts from the fascinating 1995 Bayreuth production directed by Heiner Müller, conducted by Barenboim and strikingly designed by Erich Wonder. This performance has a rapt, mystical, ritualistic tone that even seems to link it to some of the ideas behind the BLO production of The Love Potion.





Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers, two great Wagnerian performers, from a 1973 production:


And to end on a less ponderous note, here's a little amuse-bouche by Chabrier. Shall we dance?

THE MYTH OF TRISTAN AND ISEULT

By Magda Romanska, Ph.D., BLO Dramaturg

Tristan and Iseult as depicted by Herbert Draper (1863–1920).

The legend of Tristan and Iseult’s love is one of the founding and most enduring myths of Western culture. The exact origins of the legend are difficult to pinpoint, as the story appears in Celtic, Persian, Irish, French, German, British, and Welsh traditions. Over time, its appeal spread to Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. Norman French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle High German versions of the story appeared in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, written by four authors: Béroul, Eilhard von Oberg, Thomas of Britain, and Gottfried von Straßburg. Although each of these versions is slightly different, they all share a similar narrative about Tristan and Iseult, who fall in love after drinking a magical potion and who, despite their best efforts to remain true to their other marital commitments, are unable to conquer their passion for each other.

Throughout the centuries, the tale would take on different moral tones, with some emphasizing the transgressive nature of the relationship and others the power of their love. However, as the scholar Joan Tasker Grimbert puts it: “At the core of the legend as it evolved in the Middle Ages is a passionate love that is both fated and fatal, a mutual ardor so strong and exclusive as to override the most compelling family, social, and religious taboos. The potion/poison that is the source of this passion maintains the lovers in a constant state of unrest and drives them to a premature death” (xvi).

Although the later versions of the story emphasize the reciprocity of the lovers’ feelings and Iseult’s inability to refuse her father’s wish to barter her in marriage, in the early Celtic version Iseult is represented as goodness capable of magical power. She uses the potion to cast a spell over a male who would otherwise be indifferent towards her and thus chooses her own mate. In the later version, the lovers drink the love potion by accident; in the earlier version, it is Iseult who tricks Tristan into drinking it. Some scholars note that the changed story paralleled the emergence of patriarchal structures promoted by the emerging Church and State.  

The Poison and the Cure

The idea of a potion that is both poison and cure had its origins in Plato’s Phaedrus, a Socratic dialogue about aesthetics, madness, and the nature of erotic love. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida noted that in Phaedrus, Plato uses the word pharmakon to mean both poison and remedy. The Egyptian god of writing, Theuth, offers King Thamus writing as a receipt (pharmakon) for memory and wisdom. However, Thamus rejects the gift, arguing that it is merely a way of reminding, not remembering. Writing is thus a poison, not a cure. He says: “Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt (pharmakon) for recollection not for memory” (275b). 

As Derrida points out, the Platonic use of the word pharmakon questions the binaries of remedy/poison, good/bad, true/false, positive/negative. Derrida writes: “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance . . . It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced” (125–26). Pharmakon, the magic potion that is both cure and poison, erases the boundaries between the opposites that define our social and linguistic structures.

In the myth of Tristan and Iseult, the love potion is what incites the lovers’ passion, but also what, ultimately, brings their demise. The potion, with its ambivalent function, unravels the taboos and traditional boundaries between licit and illicit feelings and emotions. Contrary to medieval social customs that treat marriage as foremost a legal and business arrangement, the legend privileges physical attraction over all other considerations, thus pitting the needs and desires of the individual against the needs of society. Hence the potion brings both love and death.

Tristrem and Ysonde

Illustration from Legends & Romances of Brittany 

by Lewis Spence, illustrated by W. Otway Cannell.

Love and Marriage
In his book Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont points out that the myth of Tristan and Iseult emerged in opposition to the Christian emphasis on marriage: “The cultivation of passionate love began in Europe as a reaction to Christianity (and in particular to its doctrine of marriage) by people whose spirit, whether naturally or by inheritance, was still pagan” (74). Passionate love was seen as incompatible with marriage: “Whatever turns into a reality is no longer love” (34). The story also illustrated “a conflict between chivalry and feudal society – and hence a conflict between two kinds of duty and between two ‘religions’”
(33).

Rougemont argues that in Western culture, the motive of eternal love developed from Platonic love, which was the love of two souls joined together in spirit above and beyond the physical connection of two bodies. Indeed, in Phaedrus, Socrates argues that the greatest fulfillment for lovers comes not from the physical consummation of love, but from the conscious feeling of oneness and self-mastery they share. Platonic love is “‘a divine delirium,’ a transport of the soul, a madness and supreme sanity both. A lover with his beloved becomes ‘as if in heaven;’ for love is the way that ascends by degrees of ecstasy to the one source of all that exists, remote from bodies and matter, remote from what divides and distinguishes, and beyond the misfortune of being a self and even in love itself a pair” (61).

Read more:

• Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
• Eming, Jutta, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Kathryn Starkey, eds. Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
• Grimbert, Joan Tasker, ed. Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Hardman, Phillipa. The Growth of the Tristan and Iseut Legend in Wales, England, France, and Germany. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003.
• Plato. The Phaedrus. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Phaedrus. Translator: B. Jowett. Posting Date: October 30, 2008 [EBook #1636]. Release Date: February 1999. Retrieved from: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1636/pg1636.txt

DR. VON LYRIC – Frank Martin: “Astringent, vehement, elegant, eloquent”

I have been an admirer of Frank Martin for quite a while, and the quote above (from a review of Le Vin Herbé – The Love Potion, in BLO's translation) sums up for me the peculiarly attractive qualities of this somewhat overlooked composer. Born in 1890 in Geneva and the youngest of ten children of a Calvinist pastor, he showed musical talents early. Respecting his parents’ wishes, he studied mathematics and physics at university, but also pursued piano, composition, and harmony. Subsequently he lived in Zurich, Rome, and Paris, and his compositions from this period reflect his search for an authentic musical voice. In 1926, he established the Chamber Music Society of Geneva, where he conducted, taught music theory, and performed as a pianist. Le Vin Herbé was written in 1938. Throughout his long career he composed in a wide variety of genres – operas, symphonic and chamber music, choral music, and pieces for piano, organ, and guitar, some examples of which are linked below. There is much more on YouTube and there are many excellent CDs. He is worth exploring.

My friend David Schweizer is directing The Love Potion, and he reports that it is coming together well in rehearsal. It is a very unusual piece (not really written as an opera, but it has been staged), and its dramatic and musical riches seem to call out for a theatrical presentation. BLO's performances (in its Annex series) will take place in an equally unusual space – a soaring domed hall at the Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline – that seems right out of Parisfal, somehow appropriate for a telling of the Tristan story from the world of Arthurian mythology. It seems an event not to be missed.

We start with an interview:




…and then, as I indicated above, a few excerpts from Martin’s varied output:

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE LOVE POTION

This Season’s Opera Annex production of The Love Potion marks the work’s fully-staged Boston premiere. It also marks another important date, honoring the 40th anniversary of composer Frank Martin's death, on November 21, 1974, in Naarden, Holland. This spring, BLO General & Artistic Director, Esther Nelson, traveled to the Frank Martin House to research the piece and to meet with Martin’s widow, Maria Martin, and learn more about his work and life. Here, she shares some of the history of the opera, the legend behind it, and moments with Martin’s family.



Maria Martin (center), Frank Martin’s widow, and their daughter, Teresa (right), share memories of the composer with BLO General & Artistic Director, Esther Nelson (left). The three met in the Martin house in Naarden, Holland, during Mrs. Martin’s 99th birthday week, in the spring of 2014.

The best-known opera on the subject of Tristan and Isolde is by the German 19th-century composer Richard Wagner, written for a large orchestra and large voices. Frank Martin considered his version, Le Vin Herbé, to be the opposite of Wagner's 19th-century grand opera spectacle. Musically, it is completely different since it was composed for an intimate 12-person madrigal choir, where soloists blend in and out of a choral fabric. Martin has his own definitive, almost hypnotic and atmospheric musical language, which is polyphonic and harmonically dense with an air of the sacred and medieval. Le Vin Herbé is based on chapters of Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut, written ca. 1900, by the French medievalist Joseph Bédier. Bédier traced 12th-century French sources of the Celtic myth, which are earlier than the 13th-century poem by Gottfried von Strassburg, on which Wagner's opera is based.

In 1938, Martin immersed himself in the Tristan myth, particularly in Bédier's Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut, and the 1936 novel, Sparkenbroke by the English writer Charles Morgan, which is a contemporary version of the Tristan motive of love and death. It was at that time that Martin was approached by Robert Blum, Director of the Zurich Madrigal Choir, to write a piece for his choir of 12 soloists. While Martin worked on the initial version of Le Vin Herbé, a 30-minute tableaux on the "Love Potion" chapter of Bédier's book, two events profoundly overshadowed his life: Germany invaded Poland, reawakening Martin's horror from his days as a soldier during WWI, and his beloved young wife, Irene, suddenly became ill and died.

His second wife and widow, Maria Martin, describes this scene in her autobiography, Treasured Moments – My Life with Frank Martin, as he completed Le Vin Herbé, following the death of his first wife: "It was at night, in stifling hot weather, that Frank wrote those nostalgic last bars that incarnate the total surrender to fate, to the unknown aspects of his life, to love."

The original piano and the desk where Frank Martin composed Le Vin Herbé, while living in Switzerland. Pictured in the Martin home in Naarden, Holland.

Following the immediately-enthusiastic audience response at the premiere in 1940, Martin did not relinquish his fascination with the piece and expanded it to include two more chapters: "The Forest of Morois," and "Tristan's Death." The eagerly-anticipated premiere of the full version in 1942 was greeted with an equally enthusiastic reaction from the audience. The premiere featured internationally-celebrated Swiss tenor Ernst Haefliger, then an unknown young singer with the choir, as Tristan. Interestingly, Ernst was later a guest at the Boston premiere concert performance by the John Oliver Chorale.


Insights from BLO staff:
“I have included The Love Potion because it is beautiful music and fascinating theater,” notes Esther Nelson, BLO’s General & Artistic Director. “Frank Martin's opera is a truly timeless work, which is modern and old at the same time. It is music that is unfamiliar but quickly gets under your skin. It's not really an opera, nor an oratorio. It's neither atonal nor tonal. It's an intimate chamber work with a powerful sound. The soloists act and sing their roles while also blending in like a Greek chorus. It tells the story of ideal love that is pure but it is also deadly.”

Conductor David Angus observes, “This is the opposite extreme from Wagner’s extravagantly rich score—just 12 singers and eight instrumentalists—but it is still very powerful and atmospheric, and very much faster moving! In theory, it is complex and atonal, but in reality, it is much closer to the string quartets of Debussy and Ravel in instrumental sound, with beautiful songs for soloists or chorus and piano superimposed. The music has great beauty and drama, on an intimate scale in which every detail is very telling.”

Le Vin Herbé original score, Maria Martin's personal copy.

Boston Lyric Opera is very grateful to the Martin family for sharing its time, memories, and photos with us as we celebrate Frank Martin’s incredible work. To learn more, please visit us at http://blo.org/events/the-love-potion.

OPERA WEEK & BLO EMERGING ARTISTS

We celebrated National Opera Week by showcasing some of the 2014/15 BLO Emerging Artists on our Facebook and Twitter pages. BLO helps nurture these talented young singers through one-on-one coaching sessions, role and audition preparation, paid performance opportunities in fully-staged BLO productions as well as educational and special events, and professional mentorship.

Read on to learn more about these Emerging Artists and why they devote their passion and energy to the operatic art form!

Omar Najmi, tenor, remembers his first opera experience:

“When I was a kid, one of my parents' friends said they just must hear the music of Wagner, so they got a CD of the overtures and preludes to Wagner's operas. The heroic grandeur of this music was the soundtrack of my childhood. When I was taking piano lessons, I really wanted to be able to play Wagner on the piano, so I ordered the piano/vocal score to Götterdämmerung on inter-library loan. I think I didn't realize at the time what an opera was – that not only would it have vocal parts, but that they would be in a foreign language!”

Ben Gebo Photography

Mezzo-soprano Heather Gallagher relates to the character that is perhaps opera’s most famous mezzo-soprano, Carmen.

“I like her the best because she's totally fearless, honest, and always exciting to play and to watch.”

Heather is also BLO's Resident Teaching Artist! Here she is pictured leading a workshop for young singers at Wheelock Family Theatre.

Brad Raymond, tenor, loves opera’s universality.

“Opera combines pretty much every art form you can think of (maybe not sculpting, but sometimes!). If you love art, you have to love opera!”

R.B. Schlather, Emerging Artist Stage Director, tells us why he loves opera: 

“It's the most satisfying art form to me because it draws on so many other disciplines to produce it…Opera is everything.”

 
Bass-baritone David Wadden found his way to opera through the gateway of operetta! 

“My senior year of high school, I bailed on indoor track and instead joined my friends from the a capella group in our high school's production of The Mikado. Our music director, himself a former opera singer, heard me sing and though I might have a decent operatic voice. He created an a capella arrangement of Mozart's ‘O, Isis und Osiris’, and I sang it for a school concert. It's a piece I still offer for auditions now!”

  

 

Chelsea Basler, soprano, says, “I love opera because, to me, opera combines all of the great art forms to create an all-sensory experience. On an opera stage one would not only hear amazing vocal feats but also some of the most beautifully written instrumental music, combined with heart-breaking drama and  the visual splendor of costumes and sets. Some operas even have the element of dance. That hits all the high art forms in one experience. I ask, what's not to love!”

  





We also recognize and thank the two remaining Emerging Artists of the 2014/15 season, Rachel Hauge (soprano) and Jon Jurgens (tenor), for their work, talent, and commitment to opera.