My search on google proved unhelpful in locating where in Tristan this is located. It was recommended to my girlfriend and I'm trying to locate it so that when I can go to the library I'm not pawing through the score like an idiot. Can someone tell me Act and Scene and what the first line of this scene is?
Brangane's "Tower scene" (which is really only like a minute or two) is in the second scene of the second act of Tristan. Tristan and Isolde are in the middle of a love duet which lasts at least a full dryer cycle on permanent press. They are doing their thing and not really caring that they are being incredibly risky. They're outside and Brangane is keeping watch in the tower for anyone who might come up on them.
If you go to this link you'll have the entire second scene (with English translation!).
Brangane's warning starts with "Einsam wachend" and ends with "habet acht!"---do a search on the page, it's about half way down. On a PC, control+f will bring up search for, then put in "einsam" and it will come up. It comes in the middle of Tristan and Isolde's duet, they continue despite her warning for a good few minutes before they're caught.
Look, dude, I don't know anything about you or your woman. I'm not trying to pick on you, just to use your post as an example of how absurd this entire phenomenon is of singers either being stupid or lazy or both. You said this:
"My search on google proved unhelpful in locating where in Tristan Brangane's Tower scene is located. It was recommended to my girlfriend and I'm trying to locate it so that when I can go to the library I'm not pawing through the score like an idiot. Can someone tell me Act and Scene and what the first line of this scene is?"
Let's try to fill in the story here. This guy's girlfriend is presumably a singer. She knows someone who is either another singer, a teacher, a coach, or someone in the industry. This person said "hey, you know what you should try---Brangane's arioso, some people call it the 'Tower scene.' It's from Tristan und Isolde." Girlfriend is game.
What's her next step?
Well, if it's this guy's girlfriend, the answer is not to try google. It's not even to ask someone. It's not even to ask the freaking person who recommended it to her!!!!---"where in Tristan is that?" On top of that, not only does she not search it out herself, she asks HER BOYFRIEND TO FIND IT FOR HER. She asks him either to find out where it is, or to go the library and find it. He has no clue where it is. So he comes to NFCS and asks.
Wow. Really?
In theory, it's cool that he wants to help out his girlfriend, but I honestly don't see the difference between this and someone coming home from the office and throwing a bunch of files at their significant other and saying "do this for me." In fact, it's even worse. Either this person doesn't care enough to go look it up, doesn't think she CAN look it up, or thinks it's not her job. Or all of the above.
I've already gone into detail about not using basic internet functions to find incredibly easy stuff. The Fidelio example from earlier today was one of the most egregious examples of that. But this gets at the very root of the problem---people just being too damn lazy or not caring. Honestly, I don't really hear many "great" young voices lately. That's bad enough. But if you neither have a stunning voice NOR have good work ethic, your career is over before it starts. I can think of lots of singers who are famous and have decent voices but nothing to blow you away. But they worked hard, they studied, they sought out all pieces of knowledge of a given aria, piece, opera, whatever---and they earned that reputation and made their way up. What are you going to do when you have neither? even if your voice IS great, why would anyone hire you if you don't even care to do basic, basic, basic research? you can check your email a hundred times a day, you can burn DVDs and route networks, but you can't search for something on Google? and when you do have something you need to find out about, you pass it off to your boyfriend?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?!
I don't even know what to say. I'm hoping there is something going on here that makes this understandable (maybe his girlfriend is blind and can't figure it out on her own?), but even if this case is an exception, I hear things like this all the time and wonder who is going to be left to sing in ten or fifteen years.
Even though I, too, have my own semi-horrified reactions to not only this thread but the entire mindset that has been growing up (puns intended) over the past decade or two in the singing biz, I believe it's almost a cyclical-type of thing.
Granted, yes - the technology which CAN assist people in a nanosecond if they but use it wasn't around until relatively recently.
But I seem to recall my last voice teacher (who got 'discovered' by Merola himself back in The Last Century) had stories of how SHE had seen this same type of befuddlement/laziness/call it what you will starting back in the late 30s and early 40s.
What goeth around, cometh around, I guess.
My take is, it's the singing equivalent of Darwinism at its finest:
Come a few years down the road, only the fittest singers will be still standing and singing (and singing well), and with a bit of luck and perseverance, be transmitting the much-needed skills it takes to carve out a niche in this bidness.
Or I could be totally wrong about everything and live long enuf to see great art reduced to cookie-cutter sameness and everyone bewailing about how good things USED to be.
I'm seeing this from the other side, too. Of /course/ singers need to know how to do their own research. But, if there is a friendly group of folks on the interwebs who can tell me in 30 seconds what it might take me 30 minutes or more to find myself, what's the harm in asking?
I was recently sent a list of excerpts to learn for a chorus audition. Bits from 6 different operas and 2 choral pieces. I was given the list 9 days before the audition. I was working more than full-time at the time, and just couldn't get to the library quickly enough to get the music and learn it, so I asked for help here. I still spent about 2 hours just finding the right spots in the music.
It was especially time consuming, because some of them were referred to by the words they started with, and some of them were given colloquial titles, like "the wedding ceremony," which, when you're dealing with a language you don't know, takes a bit of work to figure out, i.e. find the synopsis, read it, figure out where in the opera the wedding takes place, then find the libretto, find the spot in the libretto, then go through the score until you find that same place. All this (plus learning and practicing the parts), and in the audition, I was never even asked to sing any of the $%$# excerpts!
You're right, I can't imagine the days before the internet. I can't imagine what I would have done if I couldn't have found synopses and libretti online. At one point, when I couldn't find a place to download one of the pieces I didn't have, I almost sent my husband to the library for it. Luckily, someone here was kind enough to point me to a place online that had it for sale as a download.
The amount of busy work that goes into singing astounds me sometimes. Is it really time well spent to go through and translate the whole opera myself? Really? Do I perform it better than if I found a translation online, made sure it matched up, and memorized that instead? Do I sing better because I went to the library myself instead of sending my boyfriend?
And finally, if you are so angry about people not doing their own work, why do you help them? I guess, to me, it sounds a bit like the old codger saying, "In my day, we had to walk through 5 feet of snow uphill to get to the music library. Then we had to use the card catalog, and we all had paper cuts on our fingers from using it. AND WE LIKED IT!"
Some of this is indeed generational snobbery. "These kids today just do not appreciate the real craftmanship of making a proper catapult."
I get that sometimes people are in a bind. You'll notice no one jumped on the poor woman whose mother died who needs the music ASAP. If I had the arrangement she needs and some way to make a pdf from home I would most certainly send it to her.
A few things...
For a scenes program etc it's perfectly reasonable to ask where you are going to start/stop the scene. If that's the question there is someone to ask and it's not random strangers on the internet.
But most importantly and the reason this irritates so many of us is that the knowledge we need is not easily required and it does involve listening to countless recordings and flipping through countless scores and I guess these days watching hours and hours of youtube clips (there's some good stuff on there and I'm jealous that wasn't around when I was in undergrad). People hae this knowledge to give because they didn't take the shortcuts (at least not most of the time). So why is it okay to ask for the knowledge gained from doing the work like looking at the whole score and not just the one aria you need for auditions.
No I don't have a lot of patience for people whose only interest in opera and music in general is their own tiny sliver of the reportoire. I'll admit to not being able to keep straight the titles of every soprano bel canto aria (people have to remind me of which one is from which opera) but then I don't expect coloraturas to remember the same info about the various Wagner excerpts either. It's okay not to know everything. Truth be told even Philip Gossett doesn't have ALL of this in his head (although he probably comes closest of anyone on the planet). But you should at least want to have some idea of what the rest of the role is like.
No one complains when someone asks what is the standard cut for auditions or where people tend to stop in modern operas where it's not perfectly clear. And it's a good thing there are people around who know that sort of thing. But you learn the repertoire by studying scores and listening to recordings, watching videos and going to live performances. There's no shortcut to this and the people who don't do it are pretty much always obviously shallow in their presentation. So no I can't respect that. I pity the people who only want the tiny bits of information they need right now. Yes we are always in a hurry but there's no shortcut to creating or in our case recreating great art.
Houndentenor
"Get the trash off the street and back on the stage where it belongs." -- Bette Midler
" Is it really time well spent to go through and translate the whole opera myself? "
YES, YES, YES and YES.
Sure, use libretti and cheat sheets to supplement (NOT replace) the dictionary as needed, but something about going through with a paper dictionary word for word is a different process. In all honesty, once I've done it "the hard way" in a language with which I have passing acquaintance (writing the key words into my score so I see it every time I go to sing it), I usually have it about 60-75% memorized by the time I'm done with the translation; singing it into my voice puts the music in my brain, so when I come to "final memorizing" 90% of it is already thoroughly in my head; far from taking extra time, it actually SAVES me time in the long run. I don't know why it seems to cement itself better that way, but it does - I'm guessing because it slows us down a little, and we pick up subliminal visual content as we leaf through the pages.
So yes, I DO think there is a case for translating a whole opera for oneself instead.
Regarding the other points, I think we have ALL had times when we need the information fast in any form available (eg your kibbles-n-bits audition example) and have taken shortcuts (or didn't have library or computer access and asked a friend to post online to help us out), but it often seems that these requests here at NFCS (especially when not backed by an explanation) come from folks who are only looking for the quick fix who really don't seem to grasp that this process is NOT "busy work", but an integral part of learning and preparing a role. It's not just about the mechanics of "learning the text" either, but about understanding - REALLY understanding - what one is expressing.
It kind of amazes me that people find working on this part of their music a chore - surely our task as expressive artists is to get inside the music, including the text which prompted the composer to WRITE the music, so that we can bring it to life?
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"If you only look at what you left behind youll never be able to focus on what lies ahead." - Gusteau
plus the more you translate word for word the easier it becomes TO translate word for word
July 5 2009, 1:33 PM
I'm not into the German rep as much.. so I don't know this to be true for translating Deutsch.. but in Italian opera?!?! How many times do you need to see "speranza", or "sorriso".. lol.. sure it's hard when you start, but, with time it gets easier because you already KNOW all the vocabulary.
The issue is when you want/need a translation RIGHT NOW.. then hell yeah, you gots to cheat! But I just find it so much easier to translate whatever I'm singing, a few pages a day, WELL in advance of when it's needed.. less stressful too.
You need time to eat the elephant, nicht?
"You can't always control how you feel.. but you can always control how you act!"
It is part of the process. More often than not we aren't just translating because very rarely do we find a simple word for word correspondence. The process of taking something from German or Italian or French (or Russian or Czech) into English requires us to interpret the meaning of the original text and turn it into words that resonate for us. That's a huge first step not just in knowing what we are saying but why we are saying it and what it means in a larger context. Nico is fine in a pinch but for the most part I find his translations to be written for people with no knowledge of the language. I'm happy I translated Walkure on my own. And I'm glad I bought the Ring Cycle because he does disentangle some passages that are very difficult for anyone, but I found that I got more depth from the original by looking up words and reading the whole entry (and occasionally talking to native speakers who can explain what the connotation of a word is, not just the most obvious definition).
btw, I have the same problem watching French films with subtitles. The translations are more often than not simplified (which is a nice way of saying dumbed down). That kind of superficial understanding is enough for the casual opera goer who will hopefully (although it's certainly not a given) get the nuance from the singer and the orchestral music, but it is not nearly enough for the performer.
Houndentenor
"Get the trash off the street and back on the stage where it belongs." -- Bette Midler
Let me take my time to fill you in on the situation at hand and why I came on here to ask for some aid. Both myself and my girlfriend are singers who just attended a vocal seminar for the week where yes, we did work with a coach who mentioned the aria in passing while we were out to lunch with her. We asked where it was from within the opera and we were told in the second act. Being that neither of us has ever sang any Wagner before we went home and listened to the entire second act trying to pin down where exactly it may be. The next step would be to go to the library and take out the score to locate exactly where it is, BUT I figured that it would save some time if I came on here and asked people who are generally kind-hearted enough to help out if anyone could further pin point the location of the scene for me, especially since the library is closed this weekend due to holiday. My girlfriend is planning for a large church seminar in which she has to teach at for the next two weeks and I thought that I would try to be helpful and pull out the aria from the library when I go this week to take out some of my own stuff. It has nothing to do with laziness as much as it does trying to be efficient. If no one had offered where the aria was located in the second act then I would have just taken out the score anyways and searched for it. I don't like to use up my time scouring a score for a particular arioso though when I can just as easily ask people more knowledgeable than myself for some guidance. Time is limited and I don't feel as though I or my girlfriend are being lazy, rather we are using the resources available to us (i.e. this forum). I apparently should not have done this as it has flustered you so, but resources are resources whether they are a library, a coach, or a form of informed singers.
That way if you are the type who doesn't have a problem answering questions for people or steering them in the right direction you can visit that forum to help and those questions wont appear on the Main Forum.
To be honest though I don't understand why if your time is so incredibly full with being a productive singer you would waste any of it by typing long snarky responses to people who you feel are wastes of space.
I would suggest that should you see a question in the Main forum that you find boring or ridiculous you simply don't give any kind of response. That way if the poster doesn't get an answer they are forced into doing their own research.
Although of course this means that you would have to be a gracious person and not a smug bastard.
