6

Singing and speaking before 1800

The rivalries between Italian and French opera, and then later between Italian and German opera, are age-old, but the tales told about them have a persistent appeal. In his treatise Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, 1851), Richard Wagner professed to dislike all three national schools, calling the German a ‘prude’ with little sensuality, the Italian a ‘coquette’, always tormenting her besotted suitors (the audience) with flightiness and temper, and the French a ‘courtesan’, soulless and only in it for the money – he avoided the more explicit and at the time unprintable term he doubtless had in mind.¹ However useful it may sometimes be to draw distinctions between the three traditions, we need to bear in mind that such separations made themselves felt in different domains at different times, and that the aesthetic precepts and musical devices that flowed between the three dominant operatic traditions could often erase their differences. In the eighteenth century, composers from the German states and the Austrian empire wrote operas in Italian and French: Gluck’s career is a good example. Italian composers often made their livings in foreign courts. In 1776 Giovanni Paisiello left Naples for Russia to become maestro di cappella at the court of Catherine II and write operas for the prestige Italian company she financed in St Petersburg. French composers and men of letters (most famously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) often championed the cause of Italianate opera. All three national styles constantly flowed in and out of each other, just as coaches laden with performers and composers and musical materials endlessly crisscrossed the continent.

Mozart is the most famous case. From an early age, as a child prodigy and object of exhibition, he travelled often to Italy, to France, to England, to the minor German principalities. As a nine-year-old, one of his party pieces was to improvise an Italian recitative and aria, transforming into words and music whatever operatic passion might be suggested from the audience. The fact that he could do this off the cuff may amaze us (as it amazed his eighteenth-century audience); but we cannot doubt that he would already have had the necessary schooling. Everywhere he went he heard opera, in Italian, in German, in French. In Paris he sampled the repertory of tragédie lyrique at the Opéra (which his father Leopold disliked) as well as less austere opéra comique. In later life he could hear both opera seria and opera buffa in Vienna, sometimes in the same theatre. But his experience was hardly unique; even amid the nationalism and emerging states of the nineteenth century, bi- or tri-lingual opera composers were not uncommon. Almost every nineteenth-century opera composer, Wagner no exception, aspired to write a work in French for the Paris Opéra. Who, after all, would disdain this Nobel Prize of the operatic world, with the best singers and orchestra in the world, and with a budget for décor and costumes that could rise to the challenge of even Wagnerian fantasy?

However, one important difference sets apart the dominant forms of eighteenth-century French and German comic opera from Italian opera buffa (at least in its later and more elevated forms), and that is the presence of spoken dialogue. In France, opéra comique emerged over the first half of the century. Its main antecedents were comic plays, often performed in makeshift stages set up at fairs, into which were inserted pre-existing songs. Gradually this type of entertainment crossed the border from ‘play with songs’ to ‘opera with spoken dialogue’, the new genre being given various labels, most commonly comédie mêlée d’ariettes, something that obeyed the rules of spoken drama (the comédie) but would periodically break into music and, increasingly, employed musical numbers more complex than the ‘little arias’ that its title might suggest. After around 1750, this new form of opera became enormously popular and, like opera buffa, took on a broader range of subject matter, favouring sentimental or fantastic plots. In particular it became the genre of choice for French composers who supported Italian opera’s simpler phrases and periodic melody.

French comic opera was, in short, typically seen as the opposite of or alternative to tragédie lyrique. German-language opera, on the other hand, had virtually no serious tradition; it thus came very early to comedy, and remained during the eighteenth century largely comic, even farcical. It was generally called Singspiel, a word that puts singing and ‘play’ into one (Schauspiel, a spoken-theatre piece, combines ‘looking’ and ‘play’). When we talk of Singspiel today, we generally mean German comic opera with spoken dialogue. But the word had been used since the seventeenth century to cover a wide range of theatre with music, including German-language performances of Italian or French operas, and German plays with incidental music. Teutonic dictionary makers have had a field day with its definitions and nuances. As so often, Mozart is the pivot point, and specifically his last opera, Die Zauberflöte (1791), still called a Singspiel. This Janus-faced work, which started life as part of a rather humble tradition, was a critical force in helping turn German comic opera into the more elevated and aspirational romantische Oper of the nineteenth century. Thanks to its composer’s gathering reputation as an instrumental composer, Die Zauberflöte, in spite of its origins, at last succeeded in fuelling ambitions (always thwarted in the eighteenth century) for a tradition of serious opera in German.

But to isolate eighteenth-century German comic opera as a merely local genre, a patois distinct to the lower tiers of German courts or public theatres, is to downplay its relationship to French comic opera: crossovers between the two were always common, and were obviously helped by the fact that spoken dialogue can translate much more simply than sung recitative. Some beautiful (and too little-known) examples come from Georg Benda (1722–95), who in 1750 was appointed Kapellmeister at the court of Friedrich III of Saxe-Gotha and who experimented with elaborate, Italian- and French-influenced Singspiele such as Romeo und Julie (after Shakespeare, 1776). What is more, the idea of rigidly distinct national schools also glosses over the schism Singspiel shares with opéra comique. This schism is the moment when talking, the everyday language of the spoken theatre, gives way to music, when characters stop speaking their thoughts and begin to sing them. It marks an acoustic and aesthetic shock that gets replayed over and over in any performance, and all operatic genres that mix spoken dialogue with singing – later there would be operettas and later still musicals – had to work with and around it. Admittedly, the shock was not equal in all genres. In some early cases, for example, the words may have been delivered in a comparatively stylized manner, and the songs delivered with comparative naturalism, thus lessening the gap between them. But the movement between one and another was nevertheless an irritant in theoretical writings, and became more pronounced in the later years of the eighteenth century. In 1775, Christoph Martin Wieland, in his Versuch über das deutsche Singspiel (Account of German Singspiel), argued for the elimination of spoken dialogue: to have music all the time was clearly superior. Parts of the French critical fraternity were also voluble on the topic. By the early nineteenth century, the shock seemed intolerable to many. E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote in 1816 that ‘opera rent asunder by dialogue is a monstrous thing, and we tolerate it merely because we are used to it’.²

It makes sense for this reason to talk about ‘dialogue opera’ as a broad and unruly genre, and to keep in mind the flow between the French and German varieties, which persisted into the nineteenth century. Some time before then, the comic element of dialogue opera was fading or changing in some types, with libretti that included spoken dialogue becoming more sentimental or serious (Romeo und Julie is a good example). Beethoven’s stately operatic experiment, Fidelio (whose first version was performed in 1805), has impeccably high – if notoriously simplistic – philosophical aspirations and much ecstatic music; it boasts many serious sentiments about conjugal love and political freedom; but it also has spoken dialogue. Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), a great model for Beethoven, had attempted similar feats in the 1790s; his Elisa, ou Le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St-Bernard (Elisa, or The Voyage to the Glaciers of Mont St Bernard, Paris, 1794) features star-crossed lovers, one of whom is swept away by an avalanche but miraculously survives to celebrate a happy ending. In 1875, Georges Bizet wrote an opera that ends tragically, indeed with a violent onstage murder. There may be comic, even farcical elements in Carmen, but Bizet called it an opéra comique because it has speech as well as song.

THE ACOUSTIC SHOCK

Operetta, musicals and their Hollywood progeny from the beginning of the sound era had to negotiate the border between talking and singing. They often did it via the time-honoured practice of making the musical numbers realistic in terms of the plot: we’re dancing and singing because we’re putting on a show right here in the barn; we’re singing and dancing because we’re auditioning for a role in a musical; we’re dancing because the hotel orchestra is playing in the background and we’re singing along because the bandleader wants us to. As historians of musicals have pointed out, the moment of transition from speech to musical number has long been recognized as dangerous – as a juncture likely to disturb audience absorption. All kinds of devices evolved to smooth it over, including the desperately literal one of having speech spill over into the sung number and then creep into song by becoming gradually more rhythmic or more intoned. Film critics sometimes call the transition from one to the other a ‘suture’: one mode is stitched to another in such a way that the seam is less noticeable. These speech/music sutures were mostly inherited from opera. But as we might expect – film is always burdened by its comparative realism, and opera is spectacularly not thus burdened – opera makers have tended to be brasher and more daring about simply letting music appear, without explanation or preparation.

A notorious example can lead the way. In Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782), the most exalted character is impersonated not by a singer but by an actor: Pasha Selim, an enlightened despot (albeit tending to the despotic rather than the enlightened until the opera’s finale), sings never a note. This all-speaking Pasha eventually releases the heroine Konstanze (soprano), whom he has imprisoned, and after whom he has long languished, to her questing fiancé Belmonte (tenor), offering as explanation for his beneficence that he despises Western cruelties far too much ever to imitate them. But at a critical point in Act 2 he is markedly less conciliatory. Tiring of Konstanze’s constant rejection of his advances, he threatens a change of tactic, a turn to something altogether more robust. He will force the issue ‘not by killing you! But through torture – torture of every conceivable kind!’ (Martern aller Arten). The actor can snarl or shout, whisper or croak this last phrase; some, perhaps ambitious for greater roles, use a combination of all four. But whatever these Pashas do, the orchestra strikes up with wind and drum, and with a six-note melodic motif that re-speaks his tag line in instrumental form, Mar-tern al-ler Ar-ten. So far, so good: the menace, the shock of the words, has been transformed into the shock of sudden instrumental noise: the orchestral introduction to Konstanze’s aria, which she will sing in defiance of the Pasha’s threat, is under way.

Incidentally, this introduction goes on and on and on, with substantial and intricate contributions from no fewer than four soloists drawn from the orchestra, flute, oboe, violin and cello. In effect we get a whole ‘verse’ (sixty bars) of the aria before Konstanze starts to sing. For Mozart it is likely that the long, concerto-like introduction was dramatically meaningful, a sign of the heroine’s dignity and social position, as well as adding emphasis and weight to her impending defence of chastity. But in modern times this potential is drowned out by the question of what everyone on stage is supposed to do in the meantime. One can often judge the directorial style of a modern-day Seraglio by attending to this moment. One recent commentator on the opera describes ‘Martern aller Arten’ as ‘show-stopping’, and we can assume this is meant both ways. If the orchestral soloists and soprano do their business, then applause will stop the show when the aria ends: it’s one of the most taxing in the operatic canon.³ But ‘Martern aller Arten’ also quite literally stops the show (or at least its action): as far as stage business is concerned, nothing happens for an alarmingly long period. Directors these days tend to dislike such elaborate musical outpourings. They get nervous; worse still, they feel redundant. This is often bad news for the aria. In a recent Royal Opera House production,⁴ constant Konstanze used the orchestral introduction to show more than a second thought for the attractions of the cruel Pasha. His attempted embrace at the start lingers meaningfully; by the time the flute, oboe, violin and cello have done their business, Konstanze is kneeling before him with a cheek lovingly pressed to his doubtless-quivering thigh. Then she sings the aria. Then we get on with the action.

As well as presenting a dilemma for stage directors, ‘Martern aller Arten’ illustrates the problem of speaking versus music in Singspiel and opéra comique. What motivates the presence of music? What border have we crossed when we go from the sound of speaking to the sound of music? What does the music represent? In this sense, dialogue opera continually re-poses that central operatic question about verisimilitude and levels of reality, issues about the motivation for music that were a defining theoretical and dramaturgical problem from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards. The first comic operas in French, the comédies-ballets of Lully and Molière in the 1670s, mostly confined music to realistic situations: someone within the fiction had to call for a song or a dance. But as audiences got used to the genre, this rigid restriction was inevitably challenged in both Singspiele and opéras comiques. Breaking into unmotivated song could and did serve as a parody of the more elevated forms of tragédie lyrique or opera seria, and such inversion was common so long as comic opera was conceived as a kind of anti-opera. The theoretical unease remained, but it was a losing battle.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) wrote a number of Singspiel libretti, and found the rationale for music’s presence a perpetual conundrum. In a letter to the composer Philipp Christoph Kayser in 1779, written while working on his libretto Jery und Bätely (a text intended for Kayser), Goethe gave voice to anxieties about the motivation for music on the stage. Real music within the drama – ‘songs, which one supposes the person singing has learnt by heart somewhere, and now introduces into this or that situation’ – is unproblematic. But the other operatic music, either arias that express passions or ‘rhythmic dialogue’ in ensembles, needs a reason for being there. In arias, the music flows from the heart of the character, therefore expresses something words cannot. For Goethe, the dialogue scenes require music to give them tempo, they are ‘a smooth, golden ring on which the songs and arias sit like precious stones’.⁵ In other words, they are half-music, a way of speeding up or slowing down speech, and so not far from plain, Italian, recitativo.

The debate about dramatic reasons for music in Singspiel, and how music should be classified according to its rationale for existing, constituted a minor thought-experiment among eighteenth-century German essayists such as Goethe. But after about 1780 the debate took place in the abstract, since the day-to-day practice of Singspiel was going its own way, in particular becoming more Italianate. And the theorizing mostly took place in north and central Germany. Singspiel in Vienna, the type Mozart inherited, was produced in an environment that, judging from his correspondence, was less burdened by intellectual manias. Mozart wrote many detailed letters while composing Die Entführung, but none of them has a hint that he anguished over the issues that preoccupied Goethe or any other Singspiel warrior. And as if to demonstrate his lack in concern, unmotivated music is everywhere in Mozart – even in his very first German opera, Bastien und Bastienne (written when he was twelve, in 1768). Operatic music in the Italian sense – opera seria with its never-ending cascades of anti-verisimilar music – had been common in German-speaking lands since near the start of the eighteenth century. But, as if in stubborn refusal, the idea of real song remained critical to Singspiel and opéra comique, and was a model for a particular aria form, the strophic song in imitation of folk or simple singing; the parallel for ensemble singing was a ‘vaudeville’ (a lovely example ends Die Entführung), in which each character sings a simple verse rounded off by a group refrain.

As it happens, the second scene in Act 1 of Die Entführung blends the three potential registers of dialogue opera – operatic music, song-in-the-play and spoken text – into a single, overflowing number. The harem guard Osmin (bass) appears at the wall of the seraglio and sings a strophic song about the frailties of women and the need to protect them from amorous young men; Belmonte, who is lurking below, shouts up spoken questions in the pauses between verses, questions that Osmin ignores. In the end, Belmonte gets Osmin’s attention by stealing the melody, and singing it back at him: ‘Verwünscht seist du samt deinem Liede!’ (A curse on you and your song!). At this point realistic singing is over: the two characters exchange further insults in music and suddenly we’re in opera in the more modern sense, in a duet that ends with simultaneous singing for the two male voices. But the brilliant, subtle way in which the passing from one register to the other is made seamless bears witness both to the continued force exerted by the gap between them, and of course to the poet’s and composer’s thoughtfulness about how to bridge it.

One can even see how the problem of acoustic shock shaped plots in German Singspiel. Most accounts in the latter part of the eighteenth century stress its literary differences from opera buffa, in particular its taste for Oriental or exotic characters confronting Europeans, or its fairy tale and folk tale plots. To some extent, opéra comique shared these fictional preferences (as in André Ernest Modeste Grétry’s fairy tale piece Zémire et Azor, 1771), while also embracing sentimental fables (Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s Le Roi et le fermier – The King and the Farmer, 1762 – has a monarch in the obligatory enlightened despot role). In Singspiel, though, libretti involving magical or farcical musical instruments were in some places – Mozart’s Vienna for one – almost the norm. Die Zauberflöte was, in its early years, just one in a long tradition that included works such as Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Die Liebe im Narrenhause (Love in the Madhouse, 1787), in which a madman, believing himself to be Orpheus, carries around a violin and plays magical music on it.

Such libretti furnished numerous possibilities for motivated music making. Exotic people tend to have exotic instruments and can be represented by the strange sounds they make: particular favourites were ‘Turkish’ instruments such as piccolo, triangle, cymbals and bass drum. Nor did rustics lose any of their utility as creatures who are naturally tuneful or prone to break into song. Finally, magical stage instruments can introduce tuned sound into the musical silence that otherwise reigns during spoken dialogue, or can even be played over spoken text. In Die Zauberflöte, we hear enigmatic brass fanfares offstage during especially solemn moments in the dialogue, and the hero Tamino is several times directed to play on his flute.

COMIC VOICES

As we have seen, comic opera evolved in the eighteenth century as a pendant – often an overtly ironic pendant – to serious opera: a less expensive and simpler form whose production involved fewer demands. Singspiel, for instance, particularly in the north German provinces, was often produced in public theatres by actor-impresarios. In Paris, the acting talents of the singers were as important as their vocal talent. And, as in Italian opera buffa, there were no castrati. Their training made them too expensive to waste on comedy and they were anyway indelibly associated with the fundamental artificiality of opera seria. The roster of voice types we now tend to imagine as standard in opera – soprano heroine, tenor hero, with lower male and female voices parcelled out to the supporting cast – arose in French and German dialogue opera, and was normal by the time Mozart wrote Die Entführung. Osmin, the comic buffoon, has a low bass voice that is played against the high soprano of Blonde, the English servant girl who scorns his affections. But the singers at the premiere were hardly simple, natural talents. Blonde ascends to high E in her aria, and Konstanze’s part, as we have seen, demands virtuosity every bit as strenuous as that in opera seria.

Die Entführung was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II, who had established a court National-Singspiel in 1778 to encourage the composition of new German operas – a project that struggled to find a sufficient roster of works and more or less collapsed in 1783, when an opera buffa company took its place. Mozart’s singers were thus court performers trained in the Italian repertory, and included Catarina Cavalieri, for whom Mozart wrote Konstanze. While working on the opera, he admitted to his father that he had ‘sacrificed’ some of his own ideas for the first aria – ‘Ach, ich liebte’ – to Cavalieri’s ‘flexible throat’, an anatomical phrase with undertones.⁶ Being able to draw on singers of this rank had a profound effect on the music of Die Entführung, which, like all Mozart’s later operas, is not tied to any one operatic type but presents a disorientating mélange. There are the long, elaborate ensembles of opera buffa; the extended set-piece arias of opera seria; simple, folk-song-like ditties; blissful Orientalist nonsense such as ‘Vivat Bacchus’, a drinking song with Janissary orchestration; and arias that are serious in mood but have none of the elaborate virtuosity and archness of the seria types – moments whose emotional candour trumps Gluck even at his most passionate.

Konstanze’s second aria, ‘Traurigkeit’ (Sadness), a minor-key essay in pathos with the orchestral sound darkened by basset horns (low clarinets), is a wonderful example of this last type. It plays with the libretto cliché of the wind that carries the lover’s sighs by inverting the image in the second verse:

   Selbst der Luft darf ich nicht sagen

   Meiner Seele bittern Schmerz,

   Denn, unwillig ihn zu tragen,

   Haucht sie alle meine Klagen

   Wieder in mein armes Herz.

[I cannot even speak to the air / the bitter pain of my soul, / because, unwilling to endure it / the air blows all my laments / back to my poor heart.]

This is about not being able to speak: about a woman who, if she confides to the wind, will have the breath with which she spoke, along with the pain she expresses, simply pushed back into her throat. There are strange silences built into the musical setting, tokens of muteness, and these pauses are always followed by a single, low woodwind blast, a blast of wind sending voices back where they came from. Yet Konstanze’s most searing vocal line comes after these woodwind tones, and accompanies the very line that describes her muteness, how the wind ‘blows all my laments’ back into her heart.

We stressed the importance of the voice types for dialogue opera in part because Mozart’s two great Singspiele – Die Entführung and Die Zauberflöte – involve elaborate acoustic symbolism across the range of natural voice types. This is especially true in Die Zauberflöte, whose libretto has firm ideas about good and evil, light and dark, day and night, and whose ranks of characters Mozart organizes – with the exception of the central pair of lovers, Tamino and Pamina – according to voice registers. The Queen of the Night is introduced to us as a kind and sorrowing monarch whose daughter Pamina has been abducted by a wicked magician called Sarastro. Tamino, a questing prince, is sent to rescue her by the Queen and her three attendant Ladies; he is accompanied by Papageno, half bird, half man, a natural-magical creature of small intellect but large appetite. Midway through Act 1, though, Tamino discovers that he has been deluded. Sarastro is in fact the benign ruler of a Temple of Wisdom, and has merely been protecting Pamina from the Queen, who seeks the downfall of the Temple. A minor character, Monostatos the moor, defects from Sarastro to the Queen and is promised Pamina for his treachery. In the end, goodness prevails. The lovers are united, and the Queen, her Ladies and Monostatos are banished to the depths. In Mozart’s palette for the opera, high voices become the sign of decadence and fury. The Queen’s Ladies, who pose as sirens in the first scene, when they are wooing Tamino to the Queen’s cause, are by Act 2 merely pecking, chattering and hooting. Monostatos has a high, quavering tenor, an unflattering parody, perhaps, of a castrato past his prime. The Queen of the Night, famously, has the highest notes in the operatic repertory, reaching the F above high C in both her virtuoso arias. Sarastro is her polar opposite, a deep, reassuring bass.

Among this small army of theatrical eccentrics, what does a simple, unschooled voice in a normal human pitch range come to mean? Papageno’s part was written for Mozart’s librettist, Emmanuel Schikaneder, an actor-impresario of a type familiar in the history of eighteenth-century dialogue opera, for whom, like the actors in opéra comique, delivering spoken text was important and whose singing (he was a baritone) was distinctly on the sub-virtuoso level. But this simplicity, which was always of course artful, was now not just a consequence of economics or audience preference, and no longer just a by-product of Singspiel’s distant origins in rustic improvised comedy. Simplicity had become another convention to be manipulated to dramatic ends.

REAL SONG

By the later eighteenth century, conventions for what we earlier called ‘real song’ in opéra comique and Singspiel had been long established. Real song is announced and prepared by spoken dialogue and/or the dramatic situation, often involves a prop instrument and is invariably strophic. The same (or very similar) music repeats for each stanza of text – in the simplest cases the number can be written out with several stanzas under a single musical verse, as in a hymnal or folk song collection. Precisely because the notion is so straightforward, the potential for elaboration – for song to spill out with implications beyond its border – is significant. One famous instance of overflow is the romance, ‘Une fièvre brûlante’ (A burning fever) from Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-Lion (1784). In Act 2, the troubadour Blondel (baritone) wanders into the vicinity of the tower where Richard the Lionheart (tenor) has been imprisoned. Accompanying himself on his violin, he sings a song that Richard had long ago composed for his beloved Marguerite. Richard, recognizing both the song and the performer, joins in; Blondel discovers his lost master by means of locating his voice. The overflow in question involves elaborate anticipations of this music in Act 1. Blondel, in conversation with Marguerite (soprano), plays the romance on his instrument in between lines of their spoken dialogue, Marguerite exclaiming, ‘O heavens! What do I hear? Good sir, where can you have learned the melody you are playing so well on your violin?’

Grétry lingered on this pivotal theme in his Mémoires (1797), demonstrating in the process his own peculiar preoccupations about speech and song:

Never was a subject better suited to music, it has been said, than that of Richard Cœur-de-Lion. I share that opinion with regard to the main situation of the play, I mean that in which Blondel sings the romance ‘Une fièvre brûlante’, but one must admit that the subject as a whole does not call for music more than any other. I will go further: the drama ought really to be spoken; for, since the romance needs by its very nature to be sung, nothing else should be except that number, for then it would produce an even greater effect. I remember I was tempted not to let it be preceded by any other music in the second act, solely for that reason; but reflecting that in every situation during the first act there had been singing, I gave up my first idea, never doubting besides that the spectators, through the power of illusion, would listen to the romance as if it were the only piece of music in the whole work.⁷

Grétry goes on to explain that he also took pains to make ‘Une fièvre’ musically distinctive, writing it in an ‘old style, so it would stand out from the rest’: again experimenting with the boundaries between song and ‘real song’. But whatever his hesitations, music is a critical element in the fiction, having been ascribed powers both of reviving memory and of salvation. As Grétry proudly proclaims, it turns up no fewer than nine times in the opera, each varied slightly to suit the dramatic situation. And if all this sounds uncannily proto-Wagnerian, we might recall that Grétry advocated a concealed orchestra and a theatre that was largely devoid of decoration (a kind of Bayreuth-in-the-making). As with Wagner, the very simplicity of the outer trappings was meant to encourage a new seriousness of purpose, and a new sense of absorption in the emotional and moral truths depicted in the drama.

‘Une fièvre brûlante’ is deliberately simple, both rhythmically and melodically. As Grétry knew well, it needed to be immediately recognizable to play its role in the drama, to absorb the weight of reminiscence ascribed to it. That simplicity is not a prerequisite of real song. At the other end of the scale is Mozart’s romanze for Pedrillo in Act 3 of Die Entführung (‘Im Mohrenland’), which is one of the most mysterious and musically disorientating pieces he ever composed. The tale it tells – of a pretty, white-skinned maiden who is imprisoned in Moorish lands and rescued by a gallant young knight – clearly retells in miniature the plot of the opera, but its reassuring strophic form is set askew harmonically and melodically: so much so that it seems to begin in the middle and trail off at the end without closure, its fleeting, exotic harmonies acting as trapdoors for our assumptions about Mozart’s so-called ‘classical’ style. Again, there is a dramatic explanation. Pedrillo’s romanze is mysterious because it is shrouded in nocturnal uncertainty; the young men are anxiously waiting for the coast to clear so that they can rescue their beloveds from the harem. The moment is, then, as full of anxiety as is the music; eventually it fizzles out as Pedrillo sees Konstanze’s window opening and knows they can proceed.

The strophic arias written for Papageno in Die Zauberflöte take us nearer conventional territory, indeed they have always been thought the epitome of straightforwardness, and are often said to be direct expressions of a kind of Rousseauvian noble savage. This may be particularly true of the first of them, ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’ (I’m the birdcatcher), which happens early in Act 1. It is punctuated by pan-pipes and the violins double the voice throughout. But Papageno’s second-act aria, ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ (A sweetheart or a little wife), may carry a more complicated message: with its accompanying magical Glockenspiel there are hints (found elsewhere in the opera) of frozen mechanism and unnerving, obsessive repetition. And when Sarastro, the noble character, is given simple strophic arias to sing, the convention has clearly transcended its origin. While it may be possible to read too much into Sarastro’s musical humility – the leap from Sarastro singing in strophic form to universal enfranchisement, the French Revolution and principles of human equality has often been too short and too easy – there is nonetheless something striking about Mozart’s decision to give him such simple music, not least because it mimics Masonic hymns whose overt sentiments were in tune with such lofty sentiments.

This simplicity is certainly evident in his second aria, ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ (In these sacred halls), sung in Act 2 to comfort Pamina after she has seen her mother’s true colours. But taken as a whole, the aria is nevertheless extraordinary. The text of the first verse makes the kind of vague, sententious statements that are characteristic of the opera:

In diesen heil’gen Hallen

Kennt man die Rache nicht.

Und ist ein Mensch gefallen,

Führt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht.

Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand

Vergnügt und froh ins bess’re Land.

[In these sacred halls / one knows not revenge. / And should a person fall, / love will guide him to duty. / Then he travels, hand in hand with a friend, / cheerful and happy into a better land.]

The musical setting seems at first merely to support this tone, with simple, chordal accompaniment, each phrase rounded off by a flourish in the woodwind, and no obvious word-painting. But when Sarastro gets to the final two lines, with their image of the repentant sinner who travels to a better land, the musical shapes and the accompaniment enter into a more complicated relationship with the words. These two lines are repeated three times by Sarastro, each time differently. In the first statement, the ‘travel’ is clearly expressed in the chugging inner strings and the purposeful rise of Sarastro’s line. However, in a very strange orchestral texture, he is shadowed by the first violins a full two octaves higher; and when he reaches the top of his register and gracefully descends with a flourish, the violins continue ever upward, as if their ascent has taken over the burden of the word-painting, as if they themselves are the traveller, looking for that better land and giving a sigh figure as they reach the peak. The second and third repetitions then perform a remarkable exchange. In the second, Sarastro sings the melody, now again simpler, but with echoes of those ‘travelling’ violins; then in the third he assumes the role of accompanist (or rather, of bass part) while the melody is taken by violins and solo flute. By the time the aria comes to a close, there is thus some considerable doubt about who is in charge musically, even a sense in which the orchestra, and particularly the violins and flute, have taken over. To use terms introduced long ago in this book, ‘voice-Sarastro’ has in some way disappeared into the background, with a speaking orchestra taking his place.

MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Perhaps in that aria for Sarastro, and certainly elsewhere in Die Zauberflöte, Mozart reveals the influence of a bolder, more complex form of spoken opera, one that came to prominence in the later eighteenth century. In its pure manifestation, this form was bolder in that it proposed a combination of spoken dialogue and instrumental music as the basis for an entire theatrical work. This new kind of music theatre was given a cavalcade of names, as was usual in the genre-obsessed eighteenth century; but eventually it became known as mélodrame in France and Melodram in German-speaking areas (terms not to be confused with the Italian melodramma, which is simply another word for opera, or the English word melodrama, which describes a sensational form of spoken theatre that flourished in the nineteenth century). Mélodrame is usually said to have started in France with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (words written by him in 1762, set to music by various composers) and then to have spread all over Europe in the following decades. Rousseau described his aim as ensuring that ‘the spoken phrases are in some way announced and prepared by the musical phrases’,⁸ and the genre became particularly popular in German-speaking lands, where such ‘speaking’ instrumental music was in vogue.

The master of the form was acknowledged to be Georg Benda, whom we met earlier as the composer of Romeo und Julie, and whose most famous examples of Melodram were Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea, both 1775 and both composed for a German theatre troupe at the court of Gotha. These two works were commissioned as vehicles for the flamboyant, emotionally explicit acting styles of two leading German actors, Charlotte Brandes (the first Ariadne) and Sophie Seyler (Medea). As in Rousseau’s Pygmalion, not a note was sung. Consisting largely of dramatic monologues in a Shakespearean style, the texts provided ample opportunities for Brandes and Seyler to chew the scenery and die violently; meanwhile, the orchestral music rendered even more vivid the text images, as well as underpinning the actors’ physical gestures and changing emotional states. Musical ideas rarely last more than a few seconds before breaking off for the next verbal interjection, changing when required to paint a sigh, or a sunset, or a bolt of lightning, or a shift from hope to despair. With continuity thus challenged, Benda resorted in Medea to methods of creating purely musical coherence. He attached melodic ideas to characters or concepts, and modified them according to developments in the drama. Rousseau’s ambition in creating the genre was thus preserved: nowhere, not even in the old recitar cantando of the very first opera composers, was music more intimately connected to the representation of a character’s inner life and particular mode of expression.

Despite Benda’s achievement, and perhaps not surprisingly, the genre had its own problems of verisimilitude. Music generally ebbs and flows at a much slower pace than spoken words; the time required to present even a small melodic fragment is significant in terms of the time that reigns in spoken drama. This is one of the reasons why pantomime became so important. As in that Royal Opera House production of Die Entführung, having the actors gesture meaningfully overcame the dramatic lull resulting from musical development. Critics of the genre, though, felt that the Melodram music replaced formal exposition and thematic development with mere accumulation and sequence. Faced with such challenges, composers after Benda resorted either to stretches of simultaneous music and text or to the familiar operatic trick of introducing ‘stage music’ to allow lengthier musical sequences while remaining within the rhythms of spoken drama. Offstage military bands became virtually a necessity. And as Melodram turned more operatic, so composers of opera took notice of its dramatic potential by replacing recitativo secco – increasingly felt to be opera’s great tedium – with orchestrally accompanied recitative (so-called accompagnato) and, just as important, by bridging the gap (the acoustic shock) between spoken words and aria in opéra comique and Singspiel.

These last developments will be the topic of the next chapter. Whatever the attractions of Melodram in the eighteenth century (and in its purest form it was relatively short-lived), the genre has proved difficult to revive as live theatre in recent times: the loud, rhythmicized elocution required to intone lines over the noise of instrumental accompaniment is often unpalatable to modern ears – it can seem merely pompous and contrived, accustomed as we are today to actors’ less self-consciously melodious speech and to nuance conveyed sotto voce. There are a few famous twentieth-century examples (Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat come to mind), but in each case the fact that the spoken voice is that of a narrator rather than a character seems important, as the spoken voice is then immediately distanced from the musical narrative. A primary reason for our current unease is surely that Melodram’s present-day technological form – background music on a film soundtrack, where modern technology can ensure that a whisper is heard over a brass band in full flood – has now become standard. Modern Melodram is, in other words, now so completely normal that its original form is proportionately exotic.

One brief admirer of Melodram was the youthful Mozart. Significantly, though, and despite the fact that he tried a few examples of characters speaking over orchestral commentary, his encounter with Benda’s Medea caused him immediately to make an imaginative leap into operatic practice. As he wrote in 1778, after hearing Benda: ‘I think most operatic recitatives should be treated in this way – and only sung occasionally, when the words can be perfectly expressed by the music’.⁹ In the world of opera buffa or opera seria, this aspiration was utopian – to do away with secco recitativo would have been to break with a tradition that was now a century and more old, and also to risk revitalizing those verisimilitude problems that had dogged opera from its beginnings. But of course in spoken opera there was no such barrier: the normal words could be spoken, and then – for special effect – a new, more musically substantial recitative could emerge, one that rivalled Melodram in its passionate resonance between verbal and musical gesture.

The clearest Mozartian example of this new style comes in an episode of speech and elaborate orchestral accompaniment in Act 1 of his unfinished Singspiel called Zaide (1780), in which the harmonic experiments are among the strangest of his entire career. But his most daring adaptation of the technique comes at the crux of Die Zauberflöte, the moment in which Tamino sees the light – when he realizes that his quest to rescue Pamina has led him not to an evil tyrant, but to a Temple of Wisdom. This critical scene is set as elaborate, orchestrally accompanied recitative, quite unlike the usual opera seria type. Tamino attempts to enter the Temple and is repulsed at two gates; but at the third, the Gate of Wisdom, he encounters an Old Priest, usually these days called the Speaker (bass), who informs him of Sarastro’s true nature. The scene starts simply, with routine orchestral interjections, but as it develops it takes on a startling variety of musical moods, orchestral sounds and tonal excursions. The tempo fluctuates wildly: Allegro and Allegro assai as Tamino tries the gates; Adagio for a solemn moment as the Speaker appears; Andante and then Adagio for their lengthy dialogue; finally Andante again as Tamino is sent on his way. Most surprising is the way musical motifs in the orchestra so minutely follow the progress of the words. Sometimes this is obvious, as with the two-note idea that both accompanies and mimics rhythmically the command ‘Zurück!’ (Go back) when Tamino is turned away from the first two gates; but other moments, such as the delicate, syncopated figure in the violins that begins to lure Tamino into changing his mind (it first occurs after Tamino’s despairing ‘So ist denn alles Heuchelei!’ – So everything is false!), may suggest that, as in Sarastro’s aria discussed above, the orchestra is the primary ‘speaking’ voice, and that its music leads the conversation onwards.

At the end of this extraordinary scene the Speaker departs, leaving Tamino to his new quest with a solemn couplet:

So bald dich fürht der Freundschaft Hand

In’s Heiligum zum ew’gen Band.

[As soon as friendship’s hand has led you / into the shrine of everlasting union.]

The tonality settles to a portentous minor; regularly phrased melody, with prominent dotted rhythms, takes over in the bass. It is as though the musical spirit of Sarastro (whom we have not yet seen in the opera) is already in the air. Tamino briefly injects more recitative, asking, ‘When will my eyes find the light?’; offstage priests reply, ‘Soon, soon, young man, or never!’, with that same bass melody plodding along underneath, repeated yet again as the voices tell Tamino that Pamina is indeed alive. This melodic stability proves lasting: Tamino celebrates his release by playing a melody on his flute; soon the tune is picked up by Papageno’s pan-pipes and leads into his duet with Pamina; and then we are plunged into the first-act finale, with its continuous music. It is as if, with the gradual turn-around in Tamino’s quest, the gradual emergence of Tamino’s enlightenment, Mozart has also plotted the emergence of music: from speech, to Melodram-like accompanied recitative, and then to fully fledged song. But this particular progression from speech to music doesn’t create the usual problem. Instead, Mozart has wrapped the transition around the turning point of the plot (Tamino’s realization of his true quest) and also tied it to the governing metaphor of the entire opera, that of enlightenment, of finding illumination on the true path. The problem of music’s voice in a spoken world has suddenly been put to remarkable, unprecedented operatic use.

It is in this context no surprise that the Speaker scene has been one of the most elaborately praised passages in Die Zauberflöte, indeed in all operatic Mozart. Put simply, the unusual fluidity with which music and words combine has often been called a glance into the future, a hint of the kind of ‘musical prose’ that will finally be consecrated (no less) by Richard Wagner and will lay to rest the whole gaudy edifice of arias and vocal display that had sustained opera for so long. Those who single out the Speaker scene for special praise have, in other words, a distinctly forward-looking agenda, and would be likely to profess dismay at Konstanze standing there with the Pasha listening to an immense orchestral ritornello and then warbling through the hundreds of bars of ‘Martern aller Arten’. On the other hand, an eighteenth-century opera advocate might suggest that the Speaker scene, although it has moments of great effect, also has moments that are, frankly, rather dull – passages in which Mozart’s enthusiasm for the novelty of an abstract concept obliged him to resort to the old clichés of recitative, of simply declaimed text with basic accompaniment, but which then placed these clichés in a musical context that encouraged or even necessitated ponderous delivery. Forward-looking, proto-Wagnerian this scene may be; but – as is often said of Wagner – few have wished it longer.

There are, what is more, moments in Die Zauberflöte when this basic sense of music aspiring to Rousseau’s idea (music announcing and preparing for the words) are managed differently. One of them again involves Tamino, and occurs in his first aria, ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’ (This picture is enchantingly beautiful), which he sings in wonder at the portrait of Pamina that the Queen’s perfidious Three Ladies have presented to him. The text is itself a kind of object lesson in Enlightenment rational progress:

Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön,

Wie noch kein Auge je geseh’n!

Ich fühl’ es, wie dies Götterbild

Mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt.

Dies’ etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen,

Doch fühl’ ich’s hier wie Feuer brennen.

Soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?

Ja, ja, die Liebe ist’s allein.

O, wenn ich sie nur finden könnte!

O, wenn sie doch schon vor mir stände!

Ich würde, würde, warm und rein,

Was würde ich?

Ich würde sie voll Entzücken

An diesen heissen Busen drücken

Und ewig wäre sie dann mein.

[This picture is enchantingly beautiful, / as no eye has ever beheld! / I feel it, how this heavenly picture / fills my heart with new emotion. / This something can I indeed not name, / yet I feel it here like fire burning. / Can the feeling be love? / Yes, yes, love it is alone. / Oh, if only I could find her. / Oh, if only she were standing before me! / I would, would, warmly and chastely, / what would I do? / I would full of rapture press her / against this warm bosom / and then she would be mine for ever.]

There’s a steady, patient logic by which plot-Tamino makes sense of his feelings. First come the facts, then the analysis, then the conclusion: this picture is beautiful (lines 1–2); it makes me feel something new (3–4); I don’t know what this feeling is, but it’s very strong (5–6); could it be love? (7); yes it could (8); if I could find her (9–10); what would I do? (10–11); I’d press her to me and make her mine for ever (12–14). Enraptured though he is, plot-Tamino knows the rules of logic and follows them impeccably.

The musical setting of ‘Dies Bildnis’ is as radical as that of the Speaker scene, but this time the argument is firmly embedded within an aria. It is, though, an aria in which strange voices compete. We get a hint at the very beginning, in which the ‘acoustic shock’ of moving from spoken words to song is managed through the orchestra. The strings surge forward in two gestures that then seem to erupt into Tamino’s first utterance, as if the instruments in some way represent his inchoate emotions, his feelings before they receive verbal and vocal substance. This is explored more teasingly when those feelings are forensically examined. Tamino sings the words ‘ich fühl’ es’ (I feel it) to a distinctive three-note musical shape, but the rhythm of this shape has sounded in the orchestra twice already, and is then teasingly echoed by the strings in dialogue with the voice. Other moments continue this process: Tamino’s fifth line, ‘Dies’ etwas’, introduces a new stage in his argument, and the change is formally introduced, as it were, by a new key and a new orchestral melody played by two clarinets, almost as if another character has entered the scene. Later still, Tamino discovers that the emotion he feels is indeed love, ‘die Liebe’, and to make the connection musically explicit the three syllables of ‘die Liebe’ are sung to a return of that three-note figure, now inverted to become a statement rather than a question, and again teasingly placed in dialogue with the orchestra.

Moments such as this – moments in which the play of musical motifs between voice and orchestra is constantly changing as Tamino’s argument progresses – continue throughout the aria. Most radically of all, there is an entire bar of silence after his final question, ‘Was würde ich?’ (What would I do?). So strange and musically disorientating is this silent bar that hardly any performance dares observe it to the full: the tension of silence (in the end, the most disruptive gesture any composer can make) is just too great, the conductor is compelled to forgo his rhythmic sense and bring the orchestra in with premature sound. Of even greater reach is what we might call the aria’s afterlife, the way that resonant fragments of it disperse across the opera. One tiny example occurs in the very next aria. The Queen of the Night is in full flood, persuading Tamino with alarming flights of coloratura that he must rescue Pamina from evil Sarastro. And the last line of her aria is a subtle echo of Tamino’s aria. He sang ‘Und ewig wäre sie dann mein’ (And then she would be mine for ever); the Queen now promises ‘So sei sie dann auf ewig dein’ (May she then be for ever yours). And just before she sings the line, in the second phrase of her final peroration, Tamino’s ‘die Liebe’ motif sounds repeatedly in the violins. A ghostly (or is it magic?) echo, the speech of the orchestra offers him a reminder; his courage is bolstered by hallucinatory reminiscences of past emotions.

There is, as always, so much more to say about Die Zauberflöte, Mozart’s last opera. It will be clear already that, although it is written in an overtly popular genre, its experiments with how orchestral music, vocal music and words might interact are very different from those in the Italian operas, where a greater weight of tradition meant that the relationships between these mediums remained relatively stable. In this sense, and in many others – its use of motifs, its periodic solemnity, its moments of extended musical prose, and so on – it had a profound effect on nineteenth-century German culture. Beethoven thought it was Mozart’s greatest opera and wrote some delightful variations for cello and piano on the Papageno–Pamina duet; we shall see some more direct examples of Zauberflöte’s operatic effects on him in the next chapter. At the other end of the century, Freud mentioned it in The Interpretation of Dreams and, although he was not sure about the music, found the lyrics profound (unfortunately he didn’t go into detail). In between come innumerable acts of homage and imitation. Goethe, as we have seen no stranger to more modest forms of Singspiel, even wrote a libretto sequel. But he should have guessed – no composer would take it on, the comparisons would have been too cruel. And so Die Zauberflöte stands alone, the greatest instance of what could be achieved in a century and more of experiments with speaking and singing.