| Long Bio | dab dad b. 1923 034126
Harold Blumenfeld is a composer given to language, languages and the human voice. Born in Seattle of musical parents, ,tudied at Yale with Hindemith, in Zurich, and trained with Leonard Bernstein and Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood. In t-rrc:! Sixties, from his academic base at Washington University, he launched the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, forerunner of the present company, focusing on the production of early and contemporary works.
During a 1970 summer residency at Yaddo he drafted the choral War Lament, converting the forceful World War poetry of Siegfried Sassoon into a polyphonic protest against the Vietnam war. Though still loosely anchored in a kind of "neo-classicism", this work, with its dramatic outbursts and moments of poignancy, engendered textural and coloristic choral procedures going materially beyond a capella norms. After a 1971 guest stint at Queens College, CUNY, Blumenfeld returned to St. Louis determined to withdraw from operatic production and immerse himself in musical composition. There resulted a series of works based upon Blake and Hart Crane, Rilke and Mandelstam, Baudelaire and Verlaine - and in their wake, awards from the American Academy and the National Endowment for the Arts.
His Rilke For Voice And Guitar, written in six summer days at Yaddo, was widely performed by soprano Rosalind Rees and guitarist David Starobin, who recorded it for VOX. Meantime, the composer had fallen hard under the spell of Hart Crane's luminously evocative poetry. On impetus from Starobin and with much audacity, Blumenfeld tackled Crane's vast Voyages cycle, setting it for baritone with guitar, viola and percussion. Part ofthe panoramic work was issued on a CRI American Academy LP disk in 1978.
In quick succession there followed La Voix Reconnue after Verlaine, for soprano, tenor and ensemble, and the Baudelaire-based cycle Vie Anterieure, set for three voices and ensemble. Later, coming to feel he had overreached in this latter work, the composer rewrote it for baritone, soprano and full orchestra in 1997, recasting it as Vers
Sataniques. The Seventies were rounded out with Silentium, after the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, for medium voice and piano and set in the original language (as is the case with all ofthe composer's vocal works.) The demanding cycle was recorded by ex-Soviet artists in Yerevan during 2000 for sUbsequent release in the U.S.
Then an epiphany. With shock, the composer discovered Arthur Rimbaud. The Eighties were now given over to an entire
Jence of works inspired by the surreal, explosive, transcendent writing of the teen-age genius who reinvented French and international literature. There are La Face Cendree (mezzo, cello and piano) and Ange De Flamme Et De
Glace (medium voice and seven players) - both gleaned from the "Illuminations"; and Camet De Damne, a verbatim setting ofthe "Adieu" from "Une Saison en enfer", in which the disillusioned young poet announces his renunciation of literature. Next, Meadows Of Emerald And Iron and Diluvia/, two ten-minute symphonic fragments for orchestra. All the above were issued by Centaur Records on CD CRC 2277, featuring the extraordinary singer, Christine Schadeberg. The composer's Rimbaud obsession culminated in the two-act opera Seasons In Hell - The Lives of Rimbaud, to a libretto by the composer's collaborator, Charles Kondek. Seasons premiered in 1996 to full houses with electrifying success in Cincinnati in an unbridled staging by Malcolm Fraser and under the galvanizing baton of Gerhard Samuel. The opera is recorded on a compact disk set by Albany Records, Troy 262/63.
As a counterpoise to Rimbaldian rigors, Blumenfeld and Kondek created Fourscore - An Opera of Opposites (1986) - a thickly ensembled operatic spoof involving the interaction of four families, each cast in one of the classic temperaments. Sanguine is pitted against melancholy, choleric versus phlegmatic, and all is spun out in dense, mUlti-layered intrigue modeled directly after Johann Nestroy's "Haus der Temperamente". [Nestroy was Vienna's hilarious answer to France's Beaumarchais.] En route there was also the mini- opera Breakfast Waltzes, a curtain-raiser farce in the manner of Molnar.
In 1990 Derek Walcott visited St Louis to offer readings of his work to a literary organization in which Blumenfeld was involved. The composer was swept away by the power of this poetry, and a friendship was forged over shared adoration of Rimbaud. Blumenfeld mustered three Walcott poems into the cycle Mythologies, scored for baritone, flute, clarinet, three celli and percussion - the work featured on the present disk.
A new opera, Borgia Infami, is greeting the new millenium. Initiated in 1998 at the Bogliasco Foundation, Liguria and brought to term in 2001 in St. Louis, the work is based upon German novelist Klabund's headlong Borgia expose and Victor Hugo's ultra-operatic drama, "Lucrece Borgia" . This latest collaboration deals with the obsessions, passions and crimes of r 'notorious Spanish Borgia clan and its action is ingeniously connected to the present. Next, in a 2001 Bogliasco ,~/dency of his own, Kondek develops the libretto for a full length chamber opera based on the extravagant little skits and playlets ofthe absurdist dramatist Jean Tardieu.
Blumenfeld's musical works are published by MMB Music, Inc, St. Louis. It is noted that during the Sixties the composer was also active as critic, having penned over a hundred feature articles on music and theatre for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch and, on occasion, the Los Angeles Times. This together with reviews of new operas for Opera News and Opera (Great Britain). In effect, it was through his adoration of Claudio Monteverdi that Blumenfeld's course was initially set. Fresh out of Yale, he musically engineered the first American stage production of the "Incoronazione di Poppea", produced in 1951 by his then mentor Boris Goldovsky at the New England Conservatory. Blumenfeld realized the work's
igured bass, converted cellists into gambists, made a singing translation of the Italian text, imported Suzanne Bloch and her lute, and helped officiate at the harpsichord. The spectacular young cast featured a teen-age Rosalind Elias in the title role. Monteverdi turned Boston upon its ear and pushed Blumenfeld further into opera. Soon he was staging and conducting everything from Gluck via Mozart and Verdi to Hindemith and Berg. When he withdrew from opera direction in 1972, it was with a new farewell production of "Poppe a" in and around St. Louis. ThLlls the first circle of his musical career was now closed, complete, freeing him to move forward in quest of music and operas he himself was to craft. |
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