Volume 27 Issue 3 - December 2021 / January 2022

clearly about a rite of passage – the change from girlhood to womanhood,
the leaving of childhood behind and moving to the unknown.
I’ve also found the music very dark, I tell her; it’s all those menacing
seconds, like Bluebeard’s Castle! And for women of the Balkans, and
many other places in the world, the wedding may or may not have
been a joyful event, depending on how they may or may not have been
treated by the new family. “I get that,” she says. “It’s that complexity of
feeling: the joy and the sadness. I mean, how do you explain the word
seta in English? Something like Portuguese saudade? Sadness, but of
a pleasant kind? There is no seta in Svadba I don’t think, but there are
ambivalent feelings.”
She pauses for a few beats. “It all probably comes from the
Mediterranean carnival. An occasion for ambivalent feelings, if there ever
was one! It’s the films of Kusturica, Fellini, Buñuel. You’re happy and
you’re sad.” Milica is not sad because she’s about to get married, but her
leaving is. “She is never going to be the same person. There’s a line in the
opera, ‘Your mother will cry.’ Of course. We cry at weddings. My mother
cried on my first day of school. A new chapter opens. It’s not quite clear
why we cry at rites of passage, but we do! And this speaks to people,
whether we get married or not, whether we are female or male.”
Doesn’t contemporary music have something of a PR problem,
though, I ask? It’s often dastardly to sing – some composers have no
interest in writing voice-friendly stuff. It’s unemotional (the worst thing
is to be a Puccini – like the well-funded American composers end up
being). It doesn’t see itself in the business of giving pleasure. It’s often
written by people who teach at universities and effectively compose for
tenure. Those who work in the tradition of serialism never see a second
performance – and probably for a good reason. Scratch that: most don’t
experience a second performance. I’ve been to contemporary music
concerts with four people in the audience; but as long as the grants
from peers are coming down, the small contemporary music organization
has nothing to worry about. Am I wrong?
“We are in 2021, though. A lot has happened and keeps happening
from the time that serialism, or dodécaphonie in French, was major
news,” she says. “There isn’t one thing, one school, with or against
which we all have to define ourselves. There are a lot of branches on the
tree. Schoenberg and Boulez had to exist. We are continuing on, but
in different ways. There is a divide in classical music in that there is an
audience that only listens to contemporary, and a usually older audience
which prefers the traditional works of the Western canon. But
imagine if there was a museum of anything that stops at the Romantic
Age. It would be a strange museum, no?” And the contemporary vs. the
traditional is a particularly sharp divide in music. In other art forms –
visual, theatre, novels – it’s much less present, she adds.
Are we talking about the modernists? I probe. Does modernism
Alexander Dobson and Krisztina Szabó in Ana Sokolović’s Midnight
Court – commissioned by Queen of Puddings Music Theatre and
premiered at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, June, 2005.
in music exist as a tradition now, or is it still a project? And does it
even matter – is this something that only interests academics and
critics, and the audience not in the least? Does Canada even have any
modernists? I love Harry Somers’ Louis Riel, which I presume is in
that tradition, but John Weinzweig, for example, is not performed any
more anywhere, and having tried some of the recordings, I can’t say
I’m too sad about it.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m one or not – most people
would say that I’m not,” she says. “But those boundaries are all
Continues on page 58
GREG REEKIE
PUCCINI
MADAMA BUTTERFLY
FEBRUARY 4–25
VERDI
LA TRAVIATA
APRIL 23–MAY 20
MOZART
THE MAGIC FLUTE
MAY 6–21
CELEBRATE
THE RETURN OF
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opera
Single tickets go on sale
January 11, 2022
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