Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

Definitively so? By virtue of its openness, the British realization of
/&/ is often described as [a] even if Wells' MA thesis writes it as
Sampa 'ae'. On the IPA chart, [E] is halfway between [e] and [a].

The halfway point between Wells' measurement of British [a] and a
Iivonen's measurement of stressed German [e:] would have an F1 of
(748+349)/2 = 548.5 Hz. Wells' measurement of British [E] has an F1 of
569 Hz. So, passing over recordings of IPA sounds, British [E] is
almost exactly halfway between British [a] and German [e:], i.e., just
where the IPA vowel chart puts its [E].

References:
RP English vowels by Wells
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/formants/table-2.htm
German stressed vowels by Iivonen
http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html

This from the fellow who claims he can't tell [E] from [&], or
something like that.

There isn't any <ick> in "syntymäpaikka", so I'd guess that your
<syntymapicka> would come out as something a Finn wouldn't understand.
(I'm surprised that no Finn seems to have found this thread yet.)

Americans melded the operetta form (Rudolf Friml, Victor Herbert) with
vaudeville and produced the Broadway musical; even most of the few
American operas that have securely entered the repertoire, such as
Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and a few of Menotti's -- were first produced
on Broadway but later moved to the opera stage. The striking similarity
of the Lyric's production of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress and
Bernstein's Candide suggests that the former might have better been
done as a Broadway show -- indeed, the original cast (in Venice) paired
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, then near the beginning of her career, with
Robert Rounseville, who was a Broadway star, not an opera singer.

I'd already left Chicago when Lyric did Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and A
Little Night Music -- both are largely through-composed, but I doubt
they would be enormously successful under operatic treatment.

In recent years, the Lyric and the Met have teamed for several
commissions, including Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles (intended to
complete the Mozart/Rossini Beaumarchais trilogy), Bolcom's View from
the Bridge, and something of Harbison's; I don't think Previn's
Streetcar Named Desire has been seen in such a major house.

City Opera puts on a Broadway musical almost every year (among its 12
or so productions each season), usually unjustly neglected works like
Frank Loesser's Most Happy Fella, but they bring in Broadway personnel
rather than opera singers/directors/designers/conductors to do it. A
few years ago they even included Britten's Paul Bunyan, which was an
attempt by two Englishmen (Auden was the librettist) to create a show
in the New York style. (As another emigre, Kurt Weill, had already
successfully done; but Paul Bunyan was given just a few times in one
week at Columbia University and had no chance to prove its commercial
viability).

The "etc." would include English and Italian; Poland is not famous for
operatic culture.

Sorry, that's how obscure Dvorak's operas are -- of a dozen or so, I
can't think of a single title.

Andrew Porter argued vigorously for performing opera in translation (he
produced singing translations of Wagner and Verdi -- is the translator
for the Ricordi-Chicago critical edition of Verdi) but too much is
lost, especially, as he noted, with Janacek, whose melodies are so
specifically attuned to the Czech libretto that much is lost with
translation.

And, as has been noted, it's difficult to understand sung texts anyway,
and that for perfectly good physical reasons -- as the fundamental tone
reaches higher pitch, the acoustic space available for the formants to
resonate diminishes, so vocalic differences are obscured.

Hardly ...

IIRC, the American operatic debut of Pavarotti (this was back when he
could still sing, 1971 or 72) was at Lyric Opera ...