Letter from Chip Northrup

Looking Ahead to 2025 Festival

Opera appears to be in a demographic free-fall. At a mere 75, I was about middle-aged at a Glimmerglass performance of “Pagliacci.” The Glimmerglass Festival is trying to address the problem with discounted seats and a children’s opera, “Rumpelstiltskin.”

They might also reconsider their programming choices. A great opera can give you transcendent experiences. I remember vividly leaving a performance of “The Tales of Hoffman” on a freezing night with my beautiful young wife, with the “Barcarolle” playing in my head. Or, after our daughters had four granddaughters, realizing that “O Mio Babbino Caro” might be sung to me.

This season’s shows included the delightfully puerile farce, “The Pirates of Penzance,” which should appeal to younger audiences, and “Calisto,” a baroque gender-bender that didn’t play at La Scala until 2017, coincidentally the same year that “Elizabeth Cree,” an experimental whodunit based on Jack the Ripper, premiered.

“Pagliacci” is, in part, a retelling of the “Pygmalion” myth. The protagonist, Canio, says that he “picked his wife off the street, gave her his name and made her what she is.” “Pagliacci” in turn inspired “The Blue Angel,” which launched Marlene Dietrich’s career, who was, in turn, parodied by Madeline Kahn in “Blazing Saddles.” Much of this may be lost on younger audiences, but not on old liberal arts majors.

Leoncavallo was writing at a time when art was becoming, per Nietzsche, a substitute for religious experience. Wagner had written “Gotterdammerung,” the “Twilight of the Gods,” 16 years prior and “Pagliacci” is set during The Feast of the Assumption—a bit of non-Scriptural Vatican overreach. The contrast between the Virgin Mary, invoked by Canio, and his Earth Mother wife, Nedda, is truly operatic. The earthy reality of this slice-of-life may have informed Italian Neorealist cinema. Canio’s aria at the conclusion of the first act is one of those transcendent experiences that great opera was designed to deliver. With the first familiar introductory strains, I leaned forward in my seat and clenched my hands together. As if in church. Grazie mille, Glimmerglass. I look forward to next year’s “Tosca” and “The House on Mango Street.”

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown