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The Art of the Acting Singer
illustrated by Rajisic's TV Opera Diary of a Madman
Nadezda Mosusova
(Belgrade)
Documentation et Art de
l'Acteur
Records and Images of the Art of the Performer
18ème Congrès
International, Stockholm 3-7 septembre 1990 / 18th
International Congress, Stockholm 3-7 September 1990
Editor: Barbro Stribolt (Drottningholms Teatermuseum).
Stockholm : 1992, p. 89-91
The beginning of
requests to the singer to be stage artist as well is
bound to creation of the music drama by Richard Wagner
and mostly to development of music drama in Russia. It
was rare in that time for singers to possess some scenic
talent. Anyway, testimony about their achievements came
to us through historic documents only. With appearance of
the phonograph this state was radically changed, and
after application of film, especially with sound, a new
era in opera performance was beginning, which was later
enhanced by television.
Regarding the art of singer's acting quite seriously
started at the beginning of our century with appearance
of exceptional scenic personality as it was the figure of
Fyador Chaliapin. He was born to embody all components of
musical, more precisely operatic realism, which was
strengthened on scene by Modest Mussorgsky through his
stage works. By bringing fame to Boris Godunov,
equally by his singing and scenic presentation, Chaliapin
became a symbol of the complete operatic artist. It is a
pity, not by his fault, that the opportunities were
missed to preserve on film tape for ever the magnificent
oeuvre of Mussorgsky, and in it his own art as well,
which would be one of the most precious documents of this
kind in the history of the theatre. 1 There remained a
considerable number of his gramophone records of arias
from Russian and other operas, and solo songs, that also
testify to his scenic talent, since it is essential to
apprehend that art of singer's acting starts from the
voice.
With appearance of the music film of the thirties, filmed
operettas or films where well-known singers perform as
actors, as in films with Martha Eggerth with Jan Kiepura,
Nelson Eddy with Jeannette MacDonald or Lawrence Tibbett,
norms posed to singers were equal to those that film
actors had to conform to. It was not only the voice that
was important, but also the appearance, the glamour. That
good appearance, dictated by Hollywood and by
Metropolitan Opera as well, that glamour already existed
both on European opera stages, and especially on Russian
opera and ballets scenes at the beginning of this
century. The leading figures were Fyodor Chaliapin,
Ljubov Andreyeva-Delmass. Marh Kuznetsova- Benois and
Alla Nazimova, to mention some of them. A good appearance
includes acting too, with interpretation which is close
to film, anyway without bad operatic manners.
Much later the similar interpretative approach was also
important for television, television film, opera filmed
for television and - of course, for TV opera, though
visual presentation of characters in grand scenes on
small screens
is not as discernable as on large screens. Composers who
decided to create TV opera, a genre scarcely spread till
now, but, nevertheless, present in music-scenic art, had
to conform to aesthetics of small and large screens
both in regard to operatic direction (the composer is the
first director of his opera) and operatic-filmic acting
based on music ('action does not mean acting'). It we
follow some simplified logic we may ascertain that 'grand
opera' is suitable for large screens, while small screens
are for small or chamber opera, which represents a phase
or genre in development of the old and the new music
theatre. Of chamber operas, monodrama or duodrama are the
most suitable forms for a (musical) teleplay.
One such chamber television opera, which I mentioned in
my papers at previous SIBMAS congresses, is Diary of a
Madman by the Serbian composer Stanojlo Rajicic.
Russian tradition of fantastic realism and specific
theatre of the
absurd was expressed in a peculiar way in Gogolj's work
and equally in Rajicic's opera. His Diary was
telecast on Belgrade TV 1981 (thirty years after the
performance of the first TV opera Amahl and the Night
Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti, world premiere NBC-TV
Dec. 24, 1951, staged in Bloomington Opera House Feb. 21,
1952).
As a matter of fact, Stanojlo Rajicic (born 1910), an
outstanding composer from the leading ones of Serbia and
Yugoslavia, turned to opera after the Second World War as
a mature and recognized artist. Otherwise, as an author
of numerous solo, chamber, symphonic and
vocally-symphonic works, incidental and ballet music,
Rajicic substantially contributed to small but imposing
operatic output of his country by composing four musical
dramas, the third of them being Diary of a Madman.
Rajicic's opera was not the first to be composed on
Gogolj's text Zapyski sumassedsago - the
Englishman Humphrey Searle and the Soviet Jurij Bucko had
already put their hands upon it, but Rajicic expressed
the text musically in a more intensive way.
At the time when Rajicic started his work on Madman
(1975) he was the first in Balkan who came to this medium
and, of course, with no experience with the screen at
all. He was only close to the problems of operas recorded
on film, singer's acting connected with operatic scenes
and the new phase of music films which were made in great
numbers from the fifties on: the public has the
possibility to see both on the scene and on the film
screen
Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Mario del Monaco, Anna Moffo
and many other brilliant acting singers whose appearance
on TV screen contributed to their popularity. In that
time many music experts were inclined to identify
television with film, while for the composer the problem
of the musical screen does not consist in comparison or
confrontation of film-television, but in relation
screen-literature, instead of hitherto opera-literature.
How to make a film or a teleplay from a novel? How to use
television as a dramatic medium? How to make theatre from
a diary literary form?
The composer preserved all of Gogolj's text, as well as
the way of first-person narration. The alienated I of the
first-person protagonist suits especially the genre of
the fictitious, 2 such as it is
Gogolj's miniature novel-diary, but Gogolj's work can
also be classified into drama works, and into the genre
of melodrama, not musical, though
Diary has also a musical-poetical form of its own,
but in the genre of literary melodrama in the best sense
of the word. Gogolj's Diary is a story of strong
feelings, extreme situations, on the theme of the
"little man", well known from Russian
literature.
According to some opinions, melodrama as a literary form
is a basis to the special form of melodrama in
television, a new kind developed on small screen in last
decades, 3 since television
"can help to ratify extravagant or intense emotions
that would seem far less credible in the theatre",4 or in the movies, but
therefore very credible in the opera and also in the
opera adapted for TV medium.
Nevertheless in such a form as TV opera, or precisely TV
music monodrama, the composer depends a lot on the art of
the acting singer, who must be really able literally to
carry out the burden of all moods expressed in a limited
space, in this case of Gogolj/Rajicic's tragedy of the
absurd. The authors, the composer together with the
writer, describe systematically the spiritual chaos of
the poor and lone clerk, which in the end, becoming king
for himself,
gets into mental hospital. Television acting is not a
common operatic acting, not even acting in a music drama
put on the stage or filmed, because it requires much more
intensified feelings with a pronounced economy of
artistic means.
If hitherto it was spoken about beauty and glamour in
opera, we may ask how to make a nondescript Gogolj's
scribe from an artist of marked appearance? If we compare
Gogolj's character with the type of the voice, l'emploi,
which was given by the composer to the writer's
character, then we arrive to contradiction: - how a
performer of the character singer's role is to be found,
a dramatic baritone in fact, small and stunted? As we
accept
reluctantly a stocky bass as interpreter of Boris,
similarly an imposing clerk Popriscin may be disturbing.
Therefore Nikola Mitic would not be suitable for the
character conceived by Gogolj, but it is important that
in his brilliant
creation of that role Mitic is convincing in such measure
that we believe him without reservation.
References
1 After nonrealized filmic Boris,
Chaliapin made the film Don Quixote after
Massenet's opera with the same name in Paris 1932. (back)
2 See Bruce Morrissette, Novel
and Film, Essays in Two Genres, Chicago, 1985, pp.
95, 101. (back)
3 See David Thornburn, Television
Melodrama, Television, The Critical View, Fourth ed.,
OUP, 1987, pp. 629-644. (back)
4Ibid., p. 639. (back)
18th Congress
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