18
Modern
In the autumn of 1910, without much sense that he was doing anything particularly novel, Richard Strauss started writing his second opera to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They had decided on a comedy, a period piece set in eighteenth-century Vienna, and Hofmannsthal wrote the text directly as an opera libretto. This would not be a matter of adopting a pre-existing play, as with Elektra a few years earlier. To understand the opera that emerged, Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose, 1911), we need to get a sense of the tone that pervades Hofmannsthal’s comedies for the spoken theatre, pieces that were not intended to metamorphose into libretti and never did. This tone is more complex than simple nostalgia, but any attempt at evocation or précis seems to make such works sound like mere kitsch.
Der Schwierige (The Difficult Character, 1921) is set in near contemporary times – Vienna during the First World War. The protagonist is Count Kari Bühl, a diffident, whimsical character who finds it hard to say what he thinks. One of his whims in Act 1 is to declare that he will visit the circus rather than attend the soirée demanded by social duty. In Act 2, having arrived at the soirée after all, he discusses the circus and its famous Italian clown, Forlani, with Countess Helene Altenwyl (he loves her, but cannot bring himself to declare it). The conversation demonstrates their apartness and grace at a gathering in which the vulgar and arriviste prefer to discuss Goethe and other heavy cultural fare. Hofmannsthal’s tongue-tied hero and heroine are delighted by a clown, and this illustrates – as does their airborne disquisition on his performance – what is to be mourned about their kind vanishing for good. The dramatic means are small and indirect, but the sadness is sharp. Hofmannsthal’s gift was to make stage characters, whose travails can engross us for a few hours, and whose voices and bodies are so obviously present, seem at the same time to be already lost and gone.
For decades, the reception of Der Rosenkavalier was characterized either by naïve enthusiasm or the disdain of avant-garde purists. Enthusiasts saw the opera as a guidebook to a lost civilization. The forgotten tribe in question was distant not geographically but temporally: they were the charming (and not so charming) nobility of Imperial Austria, around the time of Maria Theresa, as updated by Hofmannsthal. For the disdainful, the problem was summed up by the opera’s starring prop, a fake silver rose drenched in oil of roses to disguise its metallic tang. The central plot rigmarole – that, among the nobility of eighteenth-century Vienna, before a bridegroom could show up for a first meeting with his fiancée, the latter had to be formally presented with a silver engagement rose by a high-born emissary – was all fabricated. Enthusiasts have to maintain a suspension of disbelief that joins hands with the false authenticity of the opera’s exotic milieu. The disdainful can nurse Puritan discomfort at such fakery and silliness, or even at the idea that aristocrats can be interesting. And then, to complicate matters further, there is Strauss’s music: some of it surpassingly (or dangerously) beautiful and famously (or shamefully, or notoriously) easy to listen to.
Artifice, which makes Der Rosenkavalier unusual for its moment in 1911, can give us an avenue into the operatic years from 1910 to the Second World War – years that marked the genre’s wildest efflorescence at the moment it was becoming a thing of the past. Horticulturists will recognize the phenomenon. In the spring of the year in which a tree is stressed, there are hundreds of blossoms; in the autumn the branches bend under the weight of fruit. The tree is reacting to the fact that it has no future, and the unnatural abundance marks this self-knowledge. As one of the first works of this late, terminal operatic efflorescence, Der Rosenkavalier is in many ways a landmark in German opera. It is funny, artificial, alternately conveying self-consciousness about history (using musical pastiche and parody as a reference to the past) and achieving a paradoxical state of ironic bliss.
Der Rosenkavalier also raises questions about opera in the twentieth century, specifically about how opera – an extraordinarily long-lived genre – remade itself by means of modernist idioms and ideologies. How many other musical genres originating in the early seventeenth century were still active, creative magnets in the early twentieth? The instrumental genres that rose up in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that were opera’s great musical rival, were comparatively easy to modernize: symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas could be made pleasingly up to date with novel harmonies, complex rhythms and ingeniously fragmented forms. But updating opera could not rest solely on musical manipulations. Up to and including the early twentieth century, opera remained a fundamentally expressive art: characters had feelings and they uttered them; the music was there to help get the message across. Everything happened in the present, right there on stage. This was the case even in operas proclaiming themselves at the vanguard of musical progress. When the tortured, psychotic heroine of Schoenberg’s notoriously dissonant, free-form Erwartung sang fractured successions of intervals rather than beautiful melodies, the expressive means and ends create a calculus that says dissonant expression equals tortured heroine. The sound may have shocked many, but the correspondence, even the redundancy, between musical mood and character’s condition were essentially no less conventional than, say, Puccini’s La bohème. In Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier this alignment – and with it, the very idea of sincere, unmediated expression in opera – starts to fragment.
Hofmannsthal’s self-consciously fictional eighteenth century was the perfect place to begin the experiment. Mozartian prototypes and authentic eighteenth-century theatrical characters lurk behind each person. The opera involves a romantic triad: in Act 1, we meet the Marschallin (soprano), who as the curtain rises is in bed with – indeed, if the whooping horn calls in the Prelude have told us anything, was just a moment ago having sex with – her many-years-younger paramour, Octavian. Octavian is cast as a mezzo-soprano playing an amorous boy, a type best known as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786). What is more, the Marschallin, in both her time-obsessed melancholy and her weakness for adolescent males, strongly evokes Mozart’s Countess Almaviva.
The Marschallin and Octavian are, however, designed to confound the audience in excess of their Mozartian prototypes. Yes, the plot says they are opposite sexes. But given the in flagrante opening tableau, most performances will invite another view, one based entirely on our consciousness of the singers. Beyond the woman and the young man, we’re seeing a more interesting and, for 1911 at least, more scandalous union between two women. In Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949), Simone de Beauvoir devoted several long passages to this kind of older woman plus younger man-or-woman amorous pair. What stands out about her heterosexual examples is that they all derive from the Enlightenment, even though she is making no particular historical point. It’s as if, by the 1940s, the eighteenth century has unconsciously become the assumed natural habitat of such beings, the Cherubinos of history. Moreover, Beauvoir moves between matron-male and matron-female pairs without hitting a single speed bump:
Her attitude toward women was precisely that of Rousseau with Mme de Warens, of the young Benjamin Constant with Mme de Charrière: sensitive and ‘feminine’ adolescents, they also turned to motherly mistresses. We frequently meet with the lesbian, more or less markedly of this type, who never identified with her mother … but who, while declining to be a woman, wishes to have rather the soft delight of feminine protection … she behaves like a man, but as a man she is fragile, and this makes her desire an older mistress; the pair will correspond to that well-known heterosexual couple, matron and adolescent.1
At that point, Beauvoir’s English translator notes the Marschallin and Octavian as a further example. In one sense they are the ultimate example of Beauvoir’s ideal type, since, embodied in a performance, they represent both cases at once.
In the original 1911 Dresden production, the bedroom set was permitted, but in the Berlin premiere of the opera (also 1911) any combination – matron plus boy, matron plus girl, bedroom – was deemed too risqué, so the set for the opening act was changed to the Marschallin’s dining room. For the London premiere, the Lord Chamberlain instructed Thomas Beecham that either the bed had to be taken out of the set, or the text had to be rewritten to remove all references to it, and the singers forbidden to approach the offending object.2 The 1925 silent film of Der Rosenkavalier went ever further. The part of Octavian was given to a young male actor, Jacques Castelain, and his interactions with the Marschallin include a decorous tête-à-tête on a park bench. Indeed, in Hofmannsthal’s original script for the film – which was almost entirely set aside by the filmmakers – Octavian pursues the Marschallin, but she being a married woman rejects him. So much bowdlerizing, taking so many forms, suggests at the very least that every single scandalous implication of the opera’s opening tableau was evident right from the start.
Hofmannsthal’s plot motor is the silver rose, which lends its name to the opera’s title. In Act 1, Octavian jokingly agrees to act as the Rose-Bearer for the Marschallin’s distant relative, the distinctly oafish Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau (bass), who blusters his way into the Marschallin’s boudoir. The threat of discovery necessitates a quick change into servant girl’s clothing for Octavian, who will, like Cherubino, spend some of the opera disguised as a bashful country lass, here called ‘Mariandel’. Ochs is an elderly aristocratic vulgarian aiming to shore up his finances by marrying a rich young girl, Sophie von Faninal (soprano) – for this, read Doctor Bartolo and young Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816). In Act 2 Octavian presents the famous fake rose to Sophie in the magnificent setting of her father’s town house, and they fall instantly in love. The remainder of the act shows us Sophie’s horror at her boorish fiancé, Octavian’s embroilment in the matter and the beginnings of a plot to unseat Ochs. Octavian as ‘Mariandel’ sends him a letter suggesting an assignation in a cheap hotel: when, Octavian reasons, the Baron is discovered in flagrante, the scandal will annul his engagement. Most of Act 3 (set in a private room at the hotel) is pure farce: drunkenness, slammed doors and mistaken identity. But at the point of greatest chaos, when everything threatens to unravel into hopeless misunderstanding and shame, the Marschallin appears like an Enlightenment deus ex machina. She sets everything right, renounces her claim on Octavian and sadly ushers him into Sophie’s arms. The scene in which this happens is among the most formally conservative in the opera: Sophie, Octavian and the Marschallin converse in recitative and, when the time comes for them to react to their dilemma, they pour forth their feelings in a set-piece trio.
In a 1927 essay on the libretto’s genesis, Hofmannsthal described how his text was conjured in an instant, during conversations with his friend Count Harry Kessler. He makes it clear that the idea began as a set of operatic archetypes – whom he and Kessler initially referred to simply as ‘the Buffo’, ‘the Lady’ and ‘the Cherubino’ – and how ‘the plot per se arose out of the eternal and typical relationships of such characters to one another, without our precisely knowing how it happened’.3 In reviving Mozartian characters, in inventing the ritual of the rose, in having Enlightenment aristocrats talk like Viennese nobility circa 1910, Hofmannsthal set up conflicting time lines, in a drama where anachronism is not (as in most opera libretti) an error to be tolerated, but an aesthetic device. The strata of anachronism have a distancing effect, one that in turn has musical consequences. Characters so elaborately layered cannot inhabit the usual operatic aesthetic of immediate, sincere expression. Another kind of music is required. As with that closing formal trio in Act 3, part of Strauss’s solution was to make self-conscious reversions to ancient operatic patterns and devices. But he also evolved a musical flavour that was every bit as complex as Hofmannsthal’s idiosyncratic evocation of present loss, or of the present as past.
The music Strauss invented for Der Rosenkavalier, since in part it involves creating distance through pastiche, is necessarily tied to farce and comedy. In Harry Kessler’s diaries, we glimpse a contemporary analysis of that music from George Bernard Shaw, whom Kessler visited in London in 1912. Shaw is quoted:
About Mozart, Shaw said he had kept his music flowing by little impulses, sforzando passages, ‘little kicks’. When the completely different broad melodies of Beethoven and Wagner arose, the directors played Mozart as well in this style and killed him. Only Richard Strauss, whose style is related to Mozart’s, rediscovered the correct style to present Mozart.4
Note the matter-of-fact claim that Strauss’s style derives from Mozart’s, and is far removed from Wagner’s. But the truth is more complex: the origins of the Rosenkavalier sound were too many for its music to be tied to any one past master.
DISTANCE, THE NEW MOOD
Der Rosenkavalier’s new operatic aesthetic seemed to appear simultaneously in German and French comic opera. Strauss’s opera depends on musical devices that include tricks with time, an embrace of artifice, and layering musical pasts over the musical present. L’Heure espagnole (Spanish Notions of Time, 1911) by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) is in this sense Der Rosenkavalier’s French companion. In Ravel’s opera, Concepción (soprano), wife of the clockmaker Torquemada (tenor), has to juggle the visits of her two lovers – the banker Don Iñigo Gomez (bass) and the poet Gonzalve (tenor) – while her husband is out of the shop. She stuffs them into grandfather clocks to hide them from one another, and orders a brawny muleteer, Ramiro (baritone), to haul the loaded clocks from room to room as extra insurance against discovery. Gonzalve expresses himself in proper poetic verses, and Ravel sets them to musical Iberianisms that pour forth in opium-dream cascades. Ramiro’s usual mode is huffing, accompanied by horns and trombones thumping in imitation of his heavy tread.
Much of the dialogue in L’Heure espagnole is free-form, orchestrally accompanied recitative. But in one scene Ramiro finds himself alone among the ticking clocks, which appear to him as lullaby-singers promising bliss and peace. He becomes lyrical and the orchestral accompaniment pours forth with unironic generosity. The sad jest is in the reversal. The automata, the clocks, offer forms of solace and sympathy lacking among the human characters. Ravel and his librettist, Franc-Nohain (Maurice Étienne Legrand), were among the first operatic modernists to revive the eighteenth-century moralizing coda, the final number in which characters comment on what has happened in the drama – as they do at the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (albeit in that case minus the protagonist, who is otherwise engaged). The modern difference in L’Heure espagnole is that the characters have disappeared altogether. The five singers who gather for Ravel’s commentary refer to the parts they have played in the third person, unmasking, demonstrating the artificiality of their stage personae. What is interesting – and this remains a central precept in such codas – is that the mask is not taken off in musical terms. The music doesn’t suddenly convey sincere expression or apparent guilelessness. The moralizing quintet is done as an Introduction-and-Habañera that combines the Iberian with the fantastic to make for unalloyed musical joy. But first, before the Habañera begins, the five principals are silent for a moment. The sustained high string chords that accompany this pause, and precede the Habañera’s first loud stamp, produce a complicated effect. On the one hand, this is a clichéd orchestral signal for transfiguration and here marks the singers’ unmasking. On the other, it is simply a pause that promises fun, like a drawn-in breath before laughter.
COMEDY IN LAYERS
Comedy, then, freed both Strauss (experienced opera composer) and Ravel (operatic novice), allowing them to restore to opera fixed forms and stock genre pieces. But these devices are not as they were in earlier opera: to compose a recitative and trio in the nineteenth century was still a compositional given, business as usual, just as to cite an exotic sound – like Spanish-ness or antique charm – was limited to local colour, often in a performance-within-the-opera. There are good examples of the latter in the mock-Mozart pastoral opera performed in Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, or in the gypsy numbers that turn up in a romantic tragedy such as Verdi’s La traviata (1853), or in countless bewigged musical episodes in Massenet’s Manon (1882) or Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893). But in operas like Der Rosenkavalier and L’Heure espagnole, the fixed forms are not business as usual but markers for artifice and manner; the exotic sounds have been liberated from their cages to become pervasive, in the process also becoming a form of melancholy.
There was one imposing nineteenth-century model for a self-conscious reversion to musical formality. This was Richard Wagner’s only mature comedy, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), which – as well as leitmotifs, long orchestral interludes and free-flowing sound-webs – has arias, chorales, strophic songs and even a full-scale, justly famous quintet. But what makes Die Meistersinger rather simple, whereas Strauss and Ravel are intricate, is that Wagner’s reversion to operatic numbers does not entail any departure from conventional operatic expressiveness: when the characters in his quintet sing out their innermost feelings, the impression of unmediated and directly expressed emotion is no different from that in, say, Les Troyens (1856–8) or Il trovatore (1853). In other words, Die Meistersinger is conventional in the sense that its old-fashioned operatic numbers are marked and symbolic rather than simply a compositional given. To make the most obvious point, their elaborate formality harmonizes with the morals of the plot. They remind us that tradition and innovation combine to form high art; that there is value in antique art forms; and, incidentally, that older, experienced men – the hero, Hans Sachs – are not without their romantic attractions. Wagner’s comedy is typical of its operatic era in that the genre pieces are not ironic: they produce no sense of estrangement, and do not complicate the sincerity-and-authenticity effect that is the hallmark of nineteenth-century opera.
Strauss and Hofmannsthal nonetheless drew on Wagner’s comedy for subtle touches. For one thing, the erotic triad is similar – older, wiser man/woman painfully renouncing younger girl/boy and facilitating her/his nuptials with more appropriately aged ingénu/ingénue. In both, the big number that follows the Act of Renunciation is a formal ensemble in Da that begins with a solitary soprano holding forth; in Der Rosenkavalier it is the favourite excerpt in an otherwise rather dense opera, not without its wordiness and longueurs, and at times rambling on without sharp edges. What is more, the very fact that Strauss and Hofmannsthal left space for the conjuring up and citation of earlier operas suggests a central dilemma in the era of opera’s last efflorescence: the history of opera is no longer irrelevant when you come to write one yourself. Musical gestures towards that past create the same effect as Kari and Helene’s conversation about the clown: although the material is present, placed before us, it has also already disappeared.
There are some passages in Der Rosenkavalier that sum all this up in grief-stricken accents. In Act 1, the Marschallin delivers her most famous monologue, a long, unflinching meditation about the passing of time. She is talking to Octavian: ‘Between you and me, Quinquin, time flows again, soundlessly, like an hourglass.’ For her, Octavian is young enough to be an unchanged, beautiful image. The wording is strange, and seems to refer not so much to a human being as to something in the memory. As you age, you leave objects further and further behind; they remain in existance, but eventually they become so distant as to be almost invisible. Strauss’s music for this monologue gestures towards two different dances, like a double exposure. One is a waltz, the typical Viennese dance of the nineteenth century, but slow and in a minor key. Of course, waltzes have no business in an eighteenth-century plot – the dance hadn’t yet become popular. And of course waltzes were old-fashioned by 1911, the time of the opera’s first performance. But this is precisely the point: there is a multiple timeline in the music, a future-plus-past that disorientates the listener and muddies the chronology. The second dance type, which is laid over and under the waltz, is a siciliano, something associated with the eighteenth century. Indeed, the siciliano had acquired a rich history in operatic parlance: Mozart used it especially in tragic situations, as in Pamina’s mourning aria (‘Ach ich fühl’s’) in Act 2 of Die Zauberflöte. So the Marschallin’s monologue exists in multiple periods: both literally, in waltz-time and siciliano-time, and figuratively, since its music combines the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
But the amalgam sounds nothing like the eighteenth or nineteenth century in the end, since the layering effect – which includes strange harmonic slides away from and back to the home key – is contemporary. The same could be said about an aria inserted into Act 1, sung by an Italian Tenor who has been sent, peruke, brocade and all, to entertain the Marschallin while her hair is being arranged. This aria (which the Tenor is ‘reading from a sheet of music’) was, from the first, intended to be a rare, alien jewel. Its text is in the florid Italian libretto-speak of the old Metastasian school:
Di rigori armato il seno
Contro amor mi ribellai,
Ma fui vinto in un baleno
In mirar due vaghi rai.
Ahi! Che resiste puoco
Cor di gelo a stral di fuoco.
[With a heart armed by severity / I rebelled against love, / but I was overcome in a flash / by gazing on two lovely eyes. / Ah! A heart of ice cannot / resist that fiery flash.]
Over an orchestra reduced to chamber size, Schubertian lyricism collides with late-Italian bel canto (there are shades of ‘Già nella notte densa’, the love duet at the end of Act 1 of Otello), with some intricate rhythmic sleight-of-hand involving displaced downbeats making an exquisite walled garden in sound, out of time or place. Although you can visit such gardens, you will always be forced to leave, probably sooner than you might wish. Strauss underlines the point by having a second verse sung as background while Ochs argues sotto voce with the attorney negotiating his marriage contract. Ochs finally shouts out and bangs a table with his fist; this instantly cuts the aria off, in the process fashioning a little acoustic parable about beauty’s defeat by noisy philistinism.
One way to judge the avant-garde quality of Strauss’s layered time is by the howls it drew from those who had loved him in his Romantic era, as the composer of Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration, 1890) and other such massive tone poems. Invective along these lines is not hard to find, comparing Old Strauss with New Strauss:
The one had a burning and wonderful pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, Handel in ‘Josephslegende’, Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’. He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Wagner himself, even. His insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks with his art.5
Pranks. This resistance to frivolity is a symptom. In the Weimar era, the notion of ‘divine frivolity’ – which was Nietzsche’s comment on Offenbach in The Will to Power – was imbued with positive value, as a bulwark against the deadly Teutonic gravitas associated with, among others, Richard Wagner.6 And it was exactly this frivolity, the very wit embodied in opéra comique or Offenbach or Hofmannsthal, that became anathema in Germany: especially so after 1933, once the regime had changed.
MOZART PRANKS
One of the most layered and in some ways disquieting musical gestures in the score of Rosenkavalier is attached to Ochs. He is a difficult character to nail down. He’s not the most appalling person in the opera – that prize goes to the two Italian intriguers, Annina and Valzacchi, as full of guile as they are empty of loyalty. But he is hard to place because Strauss wasted very few beautiful phrases or turns of poignant harmony on him. He comes closest to amiability at the end of Act 2 when, slightly tipsy and cocooned in one of the Ländler (rustic waltzes) that Strauss devises for him, he almost – almost – starts to seem like a welcome antidote to the high-minded aesthetic delicacy everywhere else on display. In 2001, those waltzes ended up in the film score for Steven Spielberg’s fantasy A.I. Artificial Intelligence – where they accompany the main characters’ visually dizzying entrée into Rouge City, capital of worldly delights. Is there, then, something to be said for Ochs as the personification of Dionysian directness? This effect is strongest when Ochs is played by a singer whose other roles might run to Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte or King Philip in Don Carlos: a bass, that is, with significant pulling-power. One early Viennese critic caught this when he called Ochs ‘a Falstaff of the manure heap, a Don Juan of the cesspool’.7 Until quite late in the genesis of the opera, Strauss and Hofmannsthal used the working title Ochs auf Lerchenau. If they had kept this title, might the whole affair suddenly seem quite different? Where would we look, with whom would we sympathize, with what special attention?
The disquieting musical gesture, which is a very big Mozart prank, involves Ochs’s personal leitmotif (such as it is): the music heard when he first waddles onstage in Act 1. It’s a bluff-sounding, C-major march theme, with timpani quietly thumping the bass, some not-too-loud brass chords and low strings playing a simple melody that just goes up the C-major scale, C-D-E, then E-F-G; the first note in the pattern is ornamented by a little ‘turn’, a filigree winding over and under, a bit of eighteenth-century frou-frou. But if you listen carefully – and mentally transpose the low string melody into a solo flute, keep the muffled timpani on the bass notes, keep the quiet brass – you realize you’re hearing a sly reference to one of the most exalted, most solemn moments in German operatic history: the strange C-major march that accompanies Pamina and Tamino as they undergo their ultimate, perilous Trials by Fire and Water in Act 2 of Die Zauberflöte.
This musical jest seems to drag Mozart into bad company, and in doing so brings back everything one might want to purge from his late masterpiece: its low origins, our knowledge that its composer enjoyed scurrilous, vulgar jokes. But it also does something opposite. By placing Die Zauberflöte in the vicinity of Ochs, we are reminded not to over-value the fastidious gallantry of the other main characters, and to recall that humane empathy for the unlovable is the most rare form of nobility. It may even be – as Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s endlessly fascinating correspondence suggests – that the composer wanted to assert his own terms as distinct from those of Hofmannsthal, and to pour musical cold water on any impulse to sentimentalize. Make sure, the composer tells us, that your heart will retain the severity it needs, to rebel against impossibly beautiful people and overwhelmingly beautiful sounds.
Strauss’s Mozart prank is indeed what has come to be called an ‘estrangement effect’. Pervasive effects like these became the fundamental building material in the works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), as they were in his musical-theatre pieces with Kurt Weill almost two decades after Der Rosenkavalier. It was Brecht who coined the term by which they are known in German theatre, Verfremdungseffekte. In Brecht’s theory, the playwright or composer should strive constantly to remind the audience that it is seeing a fiction or construction, whether through elements of staging or performance style, or through literary means such as inserted commentaries on the action and characters. There should be musical means to enforce that edict as well, and Weill, for instance, used harsh mock-ups of popular song styles to that end. If the characters are so patently artificial, if the actors make it clear they are not the persons they are enacting, then the audience cannot be bamboozled into sympathy or identification or other forms of delusion. A sceptical, thoughtful and above all teachable observer can thus be produced by a theatrical experience. Anything further from Wagner’s or, for that matter, the later Verdi’s ideal of an absorbed and enchanted listener is hard to imagine, and that was the point.
There are, however, some knowing quotations, some self-conscious anachronisms, that simply cannot be estranging. The most celebrated piece in Der Rosenkavalier is that set-piece trio near the end of Act 3, in which the Marschallin ushers Octavian into the arms of Sophie. ‘Hab’ mir’s gelobt, ihn lieb zu haben in der richtigen Weis’ (I have chosen to love him in the right way): the Marschallin sings this to herself, and then the other two sopranos join in, each musing privately and thus creating that world of shared soliloquy so emblematic of ancient operatic ensembles. While the formal setting and frozen manner are archaic, the musical substance is poised between contrasting styles. In some ways, as we have said, the trio gestures towards its Wagnerian model in Die Meistersinger: the clear tonality (and the shared key of Da), the waves of sound, the climactic overlapping voices. But the combined sound of three sopranos, that monochrome embarrassment of lyrical riches, also transports us to the pan-soprano world of eighteenth-century opera seria, a world of obvious make-believe. And then, at the end, as tonal closure seems inevitable, Strauss injects the trio with one of his trademark chromatic uplifts, a precipitate burst of bright E major (with soprano high Bs ringing repeatedly), an overwhelming harmonic contrivance that would have been unthinkable before the twentieth century.
The Marschallin exits, leaving the stage to Octavian and Sophie. Their ensuing duet, which closes the opera, has always been controversial. Discussing an earlier moment for the two lovers, Hofmannsthal had been nervous about what style of music might emerge: ‘What I should wish to avoid at all costs is to see these two young creatures, who have nothing of the Valkyries or Tristan about them, bursting into a Wagnerian kind of erotic screaming’.8 He need have had no fears in this instance. The closing duet is one of the opera’s most unambiguous turns to Mozartian language: the two lovers warble together in parallel intervals and predictable phrases, accompanied by disarmingly simple orchestration. ‘Ist ein Traum, kann nicht wirklich sein’ (It is a dream, can it really be true), sings Sophie, and the conventionality of the sentiments is equalled in the music.
But then something extraordinary happens, a little interruption from another world. Faninal re-enters with the Marschallin on his arm; he pats Sophie’s cheek, uttering a friendly homily to the Marschallin: ‘They’re always the same, aren’t they, the young people?’ ‘Yes, yes’, she responds very quietly. She sings music heard before, notably at the end of Act 1 when she dismissed Octavian, for the moment, and told him what her day will be: ‘Now, I am going to church, and afterwards, I’ll go over to Uncle Greifenklau’s, he’s old and lame, and that will cheer him up. And in the afternoon, I shall send a footman to you, to say whether I’ll be driving in the Prater. And if I am, and if you would like to, you can come into the Prater too, and ride next to my coach.’ The turn to minor at ‘in the afternoon’, the long falling interval in the voice, the music setting those chained subjunctives of a happiness known to be fragile and finite – this is what returns when she says, ‘Yes, yes’ in Act 3.
Before and after this interruption the orchestra has returned to its Straussian harmonic and melodic range, and when Faninal and the Marschallin depart there emerges one of the largest and most expansive orchestral climaxes of the entire evening. The lovers, as if oblivious, then settle down to what becomes the second verse of their little Mozartian duet; but now their phrases are fragmented and interrupted by the brittle, chromatic motif that had earlier characterized the presentation of the rose, a litany of unconnected triads glitteringly high in the orchestral register on celesta, harp, flutes and solo violins. Mozart is getting further and further away: he had reappeared in the wake of Strauss’s huge orchestra but is now retreating into the distance, seen through increasing layers of acoustic frosted glass.
The music that begins with the long recitative-like scene before the trio, and ends here, used to occupy Side 8 on most LP recordings of the opera. Both its cumulative effect, and the knowledge that this very effect is suspect, is summed up in a 1957 New Yorker cartoon. We see a husband sick in bed, bags under his eyes, saying to his ministering spouse, ‘I know the doctor said this is only a bad cold, but in case he’s mistaken I’d like to hear side eight of “Der Rosenkavalier” one last time.’
OFFENBACH PLUS LULLY, BAD TASTE BY WHOSE ACCOUNT
Strauss’s next opera with Hofmannsthal was Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos, 1912; revised and expanded 1916). It was clearly part of the same project as Der Rosenkavalier and its plot was briefly outlined in Chapter 5, since one if its funnier moments involves the horror a dedicated opera seria composer feels on being told that he has to make room for comedy. Ariadne started life as an ‘intermezzo’ during a performance of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670), but was then revised into a full-scale piece comprising a Prologue and then the Opera. The action occurs in the house of ‘the richest man in Vienna’ during the nineteenth century. A magnificent banquet is taking place, due to be followed by a series of entertainments: first a serious opera called Ariadne auf Naxos, then a comic divertissement, then fireworks. In the Prologue the Composer (mezzo-soprano) fusses about the fact that a commedia dell’arte troupe, led by Zerbinetta (soprano), will follow his solemn work of drama; Zerbinetta mocks the seriousness of the Composer’s art. Pandemonium is caused when the Major-domo announces that, because of time pressures, both the opera and the commedia must be played simultaneously. The Opera is set on the island of Naxos. Ariadne (soprano) has been abandoned by Theseus and longs for death. Zerbinetta, Harlequin (baritone) & Co. periodically invade and lampoon her sentiments. The god Bacchus (tenor) arrives and, in a passionate duet, he and Ariadne declare their love. Just before their closing peroration, Zerbinetta appears from the wings, points to Bacchus and Ariadne, and says, with enigmatic grace: ‘When the new god approaches, we surrender without a word’.
As with Der Rosenkavalier, the musical options are astonishingly broad. At the start of the second part, the opera seria proper, there are styles from and allusions to virtually all of operatic history. Three nymphs sing a nature-music trio (‘Ach, wir sind es eingewöhnet’) with elaborate coloratura, close in style to Wagner’s Rhinemaidens yet interweaving that recent model with an earlier prototype proper to the eighteenth-century frame narrative, the trio of sirens in Handel’s Rinaldo. Harlequin sings a neo-classical pastiche, complete with wrong notes and over-mechanical accompaniment, as if he’s a serenade-singer out of Mozart with a few quite audible twentieth-century quirks. Or, maybe he’s Cochenille, the comic valet from Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, whose little Act 1 aria seems close at hand. Echo, the mythological nymph belonging to the opera seria, develops an inappropriate liking for Harlequin’s singing and at one point decides to repeat his refrain. Strauss lunges into the grand symphonic style and manages the trick of over-doing the Wagnerian motivic development without falling into parody. And finally, Ariadne’s intense, almost atonal opening soliloquy flirts with Viennese modernism, a grave gesture that gets deflated when her backing group (the nymphs) repeat Ariadne’s dissonant, advanced melodic intervals perhaps once too often.
The use of various aspects of Wagnerian language, all bordering on irony in the mock-serious operatic context, suggests that Strauss, who is often accused of passively remaining Wagnerian while other, truer moderns managed to escape, may have come to terms with the looming past more successfully than is usually granted. As we have seen, in Salome and then in Der Rosenkavalier he proved himself more than adept at dealing inventively with that central pillar of the late Wagnerian stylistic edifice, the leitmotif. But here in Ariadne he goes even further. One illustration comes in the opening of the Prologue, which was written for the second version and thus when many of the motifs of the opera proper (mostly taken over from the original version of the score) were already intact. It is certainly a complex orchestral exposition of some of the main motifs of the work, but is presented in the most un-Wagnerian way possible; each motif gives way to the next by means of a precipitate cadence, more in the manner of a Verdian potpourri overture than a Wagnerian prelude. This has a complicated effect later in the drama, when those same motifs are used in a more conventional Wagnerian manner, in a sense serving subtly to undermine (or at least ironize) the entire Wagnerian project from within.
Theodor Adorno would have been appalled by our approving gestures towards the composer as, at least in some ways, a progressive. Adorno (the pupil of Berg, the defender of Schoenberg) had to disapprove of Strauss, and argued strongly that his art, especially in the post-Rosenkavalier works, had lost its way:
Strauss’s turning towards Hofmannsthal marks the caesura of his development. Although in terms of content it bound Strauss even more intimately to the art of his era, which was directed towards mere life, the encounter with Hofmannsthal defines the moment at which the artist Strauss came up against an outer threshold of life that he hesitated to push back down into it, even though he experienced it in an aesthetically veiled, mild form embedded in convention.9
But the last part of the essay is curiously ambiguous, especially when it talks of Ariadne:
Zerbinetta … is finally right about her new god, since the world of Bacchus, as a world of mere sensuous ecstasy, is just as much appearance as the buffo world above which it wishes to elevate itself. … [Strauss] has collected all the brilliance of temporal life and makes it shine forth out of the mirror of his music; he has perfected appearance in music and made music transparent as glass.10
For Adorno this transparency was, ultimately, Strauss’s great failing. It was proof that he was not in the vanguard. But his sympathy with Zerbinetta’s final comment puts him in a difficult position, as it is clear that ‘the mirror’ effect of Strauss’s music was something he understood. Whatever one’s conclusions, the final duet in Ariadne is a luminous example of Strauss’s achievements under these restraints. The orchestra is little larger than that used by Mozart and his contemporaries, albeit with the addition of harmonium, celesta and piano. But it is used with such extraordinary skill as to seem authentically of the early twentieth century. In some ways, as befits the solemn close of what is, in the larger fiction, a serious opera, the final stretches of Ariadne are openly Wagnerian. When we hear a full orchestra in crescendos and decrescendos on a final chord, departing softly, we’re hearing exactly the effect of the sound waves that end Tristan und Isolde. But in the end there is only a seeming openness in the homage. The celesta stands sentinel over the reference. Celestas are never heard in Wagner, and they have a time-honoured operatic function of referring to the magical and the illusory. The celesta’s timbre, the delicacy of Strauss’s trompe l’oreille orchestration, reminds us that layers of frosted glass stand between transfiguration here and now and the version we were allowed to enjoy without irony in the past.
WOZZECK, LULU AND THE ART OF NOSTALGIA
The severe aspect of the modernist avant-garde in Germany and Vienna was embodied in expressionist atonality. Schoenberg’s operatic experiment Erwartung (1909), discussed in Chapter 17, exploits atonality’s sounds and fundamental psychological effects – high anxiety and intimations of wrongness or madness – to underpin the drama. Erwartung is a masterly, free-flowing collection of musical shrieks and groans, with both the orchestra and the singer doing the shrieking and groaning, since Schoenberg wrote for the voice as if it were little more than another instrument. Occasionally resurrected, the opera sounds as strange and unapproachable as it did when first performed more than a hundred years ago: a formidable passage of incomprehension, which might be a prime exhibit in the argument that the kind of expressionism and atonality explored in pieces like Erwartung simply doesn’t work when applied to the necessarily long stretches of time and narrative development that opera requires. However, such conclusions are strongly challenged in two operas written by Schoenberg’s prize student, Alban Berg (1885–1935). Although based on similar compositional techniques, they are so different that their origins, and the shock of their unexpected beauty, can seem perpetually mysterious.
Berg was Schoenberg’s student, but also his protégé and disciple. In public he praised his teacher in lavish terms. In an essay in 1912, published in a Gedenkschrift (commemorative volume) for Schoenberg, Berg called him ‘the teacher, the prophet, the Messiah; and the spirit of language which understands the essence of the genius far better than those who abuse it, gives the creative artist the name “Master”, and says of him that he created a “school” ’.11 Naturally the real relationship was more ambivalent. Berg’s modest family wealth meant composition was not his entire livelihood. He inhabited a cultivated artistic milieu in Vienna, and was tall and handsome. He wrote only around twenty works in the course of his life. The first handful – during his apprenticeship with Schoenberg – were journeyman pieces, albeit remarkably accomplished ones, couched in a highly unstable tonal idiom. Much of his career was spent in illness, service in the Austrian army during the First World War, romance, melancholy, infidelity and just sheer existence. His overwhelming gift was for dramatic music, for the pacing and variety of music appropriate to the theatre.
He wrote two operas that are among the greatest produced in the twentieth century, Wozzeck (finished 1922, premiered 1925) and Lulu (left largely finished, but with its third act un-orchestrated, at Berg’s death in 1935). Berg followed one trend of the time by himself adapting both libretti from previously existing spoken dramas. Wozzeck is based on an 1879 edition of fragments of a play entitled Woyzeck, which the great German playwright Georg Büchner left incomplete at his death in 1837. In fifteen scenes over three acts, the opera depicts miserable vignettes from the life of Wozzeck (baritone), a poor, tormented soldier enlisted in a nameless army in a nameless town, and his common-law wife, Marie (soprano). He eventually murders Marie in a jealous fit, and drowns himself in madness and remorse. In a desolate final vignette, Marie’s little son (treble) is left riding his hobbyhorse, seemingly indifferent to taunts that his mother is dead, singing ‘hopp, hopp’ to himself.
Lulu was adapted from a recent two-part play by Frank Wedekind. Set in fin-de-siècle Vienna, it traces the rise and fall of Lulu, femme fatale and Earth Spirit, as men and women fall in love with her, are murdered and ruined by her, and die for her. In the final scene she has been reduced to prostitution and is murdered by Jack the Ripper. The opera’s most disquieting literary feature is the disappearance of any frame. The libretto (like the source play) begins with an allegorical prologue in which a circus ringmaster invites the audience into the Big Top and describes the wild animals they will see. Each animal is a character in the plot. Lulu’s lovers are the ape, the tiger and the camel. Lulu is the snake (‘created to make trouble’) and the singer playing her is actually carried on by assistants and exhibited. However, no circus master returns at the end to tell us that what we have seen was ‘just a story’ – we are drawn in, the fiction becomes real and we are left at the end staring at a windowless garret with no survivors. This kind of apocalyptic ending is characteristic of twentieth-century operatic tragedy, often (as in Wozzeck) with one disquieting voice left in the wilderness. Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust (unfinished at Busoni’s death in 1924), an erratic, ambitious opera, ends this way in some editions. Mephistopheles, posing as a nightwatchman, strolls the deserted streets at midnight and proclaims the approach of winter. He stumbles on Faust’s body, and makes a cold little joke: ‘Sollte dieser Mann verunglückt sein?’ (Has this person come to grief?).
One way to understand Berg’s genius, and his operatic accomplishment, is to say that while he embraced compositional techniques and sound worlds acquired from Schoenberg, he never used them to exclude or banish listeners. While Schoenberg founded a Society for Private Musical Performance in 1918, and could be dogmatic about suppressing musical ideas, particularly harmonic ones, familiar from the musical past, Berg never was. Both his operas contain expressive tonal music from time to time, and both thread in dance hall music, cabaret idioms, marches and songs, all composed to sound as if heard through a disorientating haze, moving in and out of focus. In Act 1, scene 3 of Wozzeck, Marie comforts herself and her child by singing a lullaby. It is a strange one, whose subject is Marie’s own wretched life (‘Mädel, was fangst Du jetzt an?’ which roughly translates as ‘Girl, what are you thinking of?’). Berg re-imagines the traditional, slow 6/8 lullaby metre in snappier form, and the accompaniment has a few wrong notes; yet it retains a lullaby’s lilt, the rocking quality intact. When Marie gets to the refrain, ‘Eiapopeia, mein süßer Bu’ ’ (Lullaby, lullaby, my sweet child), everything slows down, her voice opens out into lush, full-voiced consolation. The second verse then appears, unsentimental and brisk again, as if returning her to reality.
Both Schoenberg and Berg adored classical instrumental forms – sonata, fugue, passacaglia, theme and variations – as organizational aids in a new world unanchored by tonality and its points of departure and arrival. But the message each delivers by means of these techniques is very different. Schoenberg deploys them to impose order, but also in a bid for cultural prestige: a way of positioning himself as the inevitable successor to those German masters who used them before, above all to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. It’s a way of saying: You see? This music may sound strange, but it has age-old musical credentials. For Berg, the fixed forms demonstrate nothing. When used thus unsentimentally, they are simply a good way to parcel out and organize operatic scenes, similar in that sense to the old slow movement plus cabaletta or the strophic song or the ‘da capo’ aria.
Wozzeck, then, wears its learning lightly; but it is still a hyper-structured piece, ordered and symmetrical on many levels. Each act has five scenes, and each has its own internal progress. The first act is a series of five character pieces (suite, rhapsody and hunting song, march and lullaby, passacaglia, rondo); the second is a symphony in five movements; the third is a set of inventions (or pseudo-improvisations) on very basic musical elements. Berg plays games with symmetries around the exact centre of the fifteen scenes, which is Act 2, scene 3. That scene takes place on a gloomy day in the street outside Marie’s house. It is an existential confrontation between Wozzeck and Marie, and is scored for a small chamber orchestra whose instrumentation – in another homage to the master – exactly matches that of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. The second and fourteenth scenes, equidistant from this centre (that is, Act 1, scene 2 and Act 3, scene 4) are uncanny twins. The imagery of Act 1, scene 2 (rhapsody) derives from one of Büchner’s strangest notions, that the earth had only a very thin crust, a thin skull over an incalculable morass. Wozzeck, in a field outside town, hallucinates: he hears noises from beneath the earth, and whispers, ‘es wandert was mit uns da unten!’ (something is shadowing our steps, down under there!) A sunset is burning the world. In Act 3, scene 4 (invention on a six-note chord) Wozzeck returns to the scene where he murdered Marie, a pool in a forest, obsessed with finding the knife he used as a weapon. Moonrise appears as blood, and he wades into the water (‘I must wash the blood off’) and drowns.
What are all these instrumental forms doing in the theatre? The answer is that we hardly notice them. What Berg instinctively realized was that opera had always done well on brevity and musical containment: on what is in effect a series of ‘numbers’ of modest size. He was (unlike so many of his operatically inclined fellow travellers during the period) aware that the new, tonally unmoored language could not sustain a lingering narrative: he knew that individual scenes should be short and well contrasted, and should come to a decisive end.
He was canny in other ways. Even though, like everyone else of his generation, he used recurring motifs freely – it was the Wagnerian given – his command of musical recurrence, both of motifs and what he came to call Leit-sektionen (best translated as ‘recurring sections of music’) rarely sounds routine, and can make for powerful, moving effects. In the Lulu prologue the Ringmaster addresses the Lulu-figure, ‘My sweet beast, don’t be offended: you have no right to spoil the primordial image of Woman with hissing and meowing’. Berg sets these lines to a gorgeous sequence, pairs of downward shifting chords that end when the Ringmaster’s voice breaks out into a bel canto peak and cadence at ‘Urgestalt des Weibes’ (primordial image of Woman). The words are cynical and mocking, but the music is heartrending. Berg then keeps this idea in his pocket through most of the opera, saving it for moments that require an embodiment of longing, and rely on the music’s beauty in ways that complicate its dramatic meaning.
A good instance occurs in Act 2. A silent-film interlude shows how Lulu (soprano) has been incarcerated for murdering her third husband, Dr Schoen (baritone), and how Countess Geschwitz (mezzo-soprano), infatuated with Lulu, takes advantage of a cholera outbreak to switch places with her in the isolation ward of the prison. Lulu returns home, walks through the door, and the Ringmaster’s rhapsody suddenly pours forth from the orchestra: but what Lulu sings, at the bel canto moment, is ‘O Freiheit! Herr Gott im Himmel!’ (Oh freedom! God in heaven!) So the music’s effect now also refers to something at once human and abstract, the blessing of liberty, a sentiment as moving as the Prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio. The final recurrence of the motif is at the very end of the opera. Lulu and the remains of her entourage have landed in London. Lulu is a fledgling prostitute, and the clients that appear are doubles of her dead husbands. Last of all comes Jack the Ripper reincarnating Dr Schoen. She is desperate that he should not leave: ‘ich habe Sie so gern. Lassen Sie mich nicht länger betteln’ (I adore you. Don’t make me beg any longer). Now the words are sordid, but that heartrending music appears again. What is its effect this time? Since Lulu and Jack are symbolically re-enacting a traumatic past in which Dr Schoen (so she claimed) was Lulu’s only true love, the music functions as a memory. But Berg may also be showing us that Lulu is the Earth Spirit, beyond morality, whom men love no matter what she is, or does, or says. Both Wozzeck and Lulu favour musical recurrence and reminiscence to enhance the particular effect of conjuring up longing, nostalgia, memory.
In both works another distinct operatic quality involves the way in which the numerous fixed forms and technical devices interact with the conversations and confrontations – the unfolding story of human interaction and reaction. The virtuoso showpiece in this regard is Act 3 of Wozzeck, written as a series of inventions. Berg-style inventions are a difficult musical trick – a self-contained segment is composed around one simple musical element presented in various forms and disguises. The musical element is an idée fixe, something that remains fixed and omnipresent; everything else is draped around it. The dramatic match in Act 3 rests on the obsessive quality of invention as a musical process, and on the fact that each scene depicts obsession: Marie’s guilt over her infidelity (3/1), Wozzeck’s murder of Marie (3/2), a crowd in a tavern staring at blood on Wozzeck’s hands (3/3), Wozzeck’s search for the knife, his compulsive washing and suicide (3/4), and finally Marie’s son’s dissociative, repetitive skipping and singing (3/5). These inventions have been lending libraries for film composers ever after (Hitchcock’s most celebrated film composer, Bernard Herrmann, seldom saw water without hearing the six-note chordal waves of the drowning scene). Berg’s virtuosity, as ever, lies in how much can be invented out of so little.
The first scene, featuring Marie’s remorse, is an invention on a melody, a relatively conventional process resembling theme and variations. But the second, the murder scene, is a tour-de-force, an invention on a single pitch, B. The pitch is always present, sometimes as a stratospheric high note like ringing in the ear, sometimes growling in the lowest registers, sometimes hidden in plain sight as a middle-register note surrounded by lush string chords. Wozzeck sings it alone, without accompaniment and to the word ‘Nicht’, just before the moon rises. As the disaster approaches, the pitch becomes more prominent, louder and less hidden within the musical texture. For the transition to scene 3, Berg simply has the orchestra freeze twice on B, the second time with everyone in crescendo. The crescendo effect is famous, but the first freeze on B is stranger: starting from a single horn, the instruments individually add their voices, as if in acoustic analogy to heads turning one after the other to stare at something horrible.
The scene-change passages in Act 3 are mute expressions of feeling – mute in the sense that no singing occurs, and yet a collective voice (the orchestra) gives expression to the pity and empathy that characters in the fiction seldom receive from their companions. They also involve a technical trick: in each transition, the musical idea from the previous invention overlaps with the upcoming idée fixe, so for example between the orchestral Bs at the end of the murder scene a bass drum beats out a rhythm that is the basis for the tavern scene that will follow. The only exception is the longest and most mysterious scene-change interlude, that between Wozzeck’s death and the final epilogue. Its importance is marked out by Berg, who spells out that it alone constitutes a further invention, this time on a key, D minor. This interlude has always been taken as a musical microcosm of the opera, since it piles up reminiscences of important leitmotifs and relives the horrendous twelve-note chord that had marked Marie’s death. But what seems more transfixing about it is a harmonic power out of the past, a key centre used both as a bludgeon at top volume and, rather like the Ringmaster’s bel canto, an expression of enormous loss. As so often in Berg, the most effective moments entail distorted references to the musical past.
THE RAKE’S PROGRESS
Throughout the time that Schoenberg and Berg were plotting their radical course, their great antagonist was Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). His position as their antithesis, equally self-consciously maintained, led him for most of his career to be programmatically opposed to opera, a form that represented everything most to be avoided from the past, not least the emotional outpourings of Wagner and his followers. After the shockingly daring ballet scores of Stravinsky’s early years, he turned in the 1920s to a style that has become known as ‘neo-classicism’, an attempt to banish the excesses of the nineteenth century and return to a cooler, more supposedly objective musical stance, one in which Bach and Mozart were the restored heroes. His only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), was written very late in life (he was nearly seventy when it was premiered in Venice), and was deeply embedded in a neo-classical aesthetic that, after the Second World War, seemed increasingly to belong to an earlier age. Almost immediately after its composition, quite possibly influenced by the fact that his sojourn in Europe for the premiere (his first since 1939) had demonstrated that the current avant-garde were turning to Schoenberg and his school for inspiration, he began to move away from his neo-classical style and towards Schoenbergian serialism. Perhaps aided in no small way by this sense of untimeliness, The Rake turned out to be an operatic tour-de-force: a work that, although utterly different from either Der Rosenkavalier or Wozzeck, managed like them to harness a general sense of operatic nostalgia to remarkable dramatic ends.
Even though Stravinsky remained a staunch, vociferous Wagner-phobe, he followed in Wagner’s footsteps in at least one obvious respect, by producing a steady stream of words to accompany his music. Anyone familiarizing themselves with The Rake will be bombarded with Stravinskian hints about its genesis and lineage. In the very first paragraph of a programme note written in the mid-1960s, more than a decade after the premiere at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice, and with the composer deep into his last, serial period, he confided that:
Rather than seek musical forms symbolically expressive of the dramatic content (as in the Daedalian forms of Alban Berg), I chose to cast the Rake in the mould of an eighteenth-century ‘number’ opera, one in which the dramatic progress depends on the succession of separate pieces – recitatives and arias, duets, trios, choruses, instrumental interludes. In the earlier scenes the mould is to some extent pre-Gluck in that it tends to crowd the story into the secco recitatives, reserving the arias for the reflective poetry, but then, as the opera warms up, the story is told, enacted, contained almost entirely in song – as distinguished from so-called speech-song, and Wagnerian continuous melody, which consists, in effect, of orchestral commentary enveloping continuous recitative.12
Later still, he recalled that he and his chief librettist, W. H. Auden (1907–73), had interrupted their first, concentrated days of work together on the opera (which took place at Stravinsky’s Californian home) by attending a two-piano performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, then by no means a classic repertoire piece. The event was, he said, ‘an omen, perhaps, for the Rake is deeply involved with Così’.13
As always, we can enjoy these scraps from the composer’s table; but caution is required. Stravinsky was, with or without his latter-day amanuensis Robert Craft, as formidable a shaper of his own biography as was Wagner, and rarely wrote of himself without some obvious agenda. In this case he positions The Rake as part of (perhaps even the culmination of) his neo-classical phase by stressing the traditional, eighteenth-century aspects of opera; but the references to Berg (now, to 1960s Stravinsky, central to the reformed canon of twentieth-century modernism), and then to Gluck, Mozart and Wagner, suggest a high-culture, reformist attitude to the genre, one in which German-speaking composers have elevated an art form that might otherwise be dangerously, damagingly popular. Admittedly, the final caution about ‘speech-song’ makes it absolutely clear that, even when the opera ‘warms up’ (as Stravinsky puts it, with a nice show of populism), Wagnerian temperatures will never be aspired to. Intriguing, though, is the fact that Wagner remains the bête noire when by 1951 he had been dead for much more than half a century. Why was he still a problem?
There are numerous answers to this, but the most important is that Wagner’s influence on twentieth-century music had, among modernists such as Stravinsky, consistently been seen as baleful. When Stravinsky was enjoying his first successes with the Diaghilev ballet company in the Paris of 1910–13, it was a commonplace among his circle to consider that opera was worn-out: too thoroughly tarnished by the past to be able to renew itself, above all too overblown and emotionally overt. Small surprise, then, that arch-modernist Stravinsky shunned the genre, his only stage pieces – works like L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale, 1918) or Oedipus Rex (1927) – making a point of declaring themselves non-operatic. By the 1920s and 1930s those gloomy prognostications about opera’s demise seemed to have come true. An ‘opera crisis’ was repeatedly declared: fewer and fewer new works were entering the repertory; impresarios and others increasingly looked to opera’s past in order to fill their theatres. There had been countless attempts to revive the medium, innumerable calls to order, earnest pleas for a new kind of musical drama. Wozzeck had seemed to some like a new beginning, and although Berg himself, in an influential essay entitled ‘The Problem of Opera’, denied that he was a reformer, he still, as did many others, called for a return to simpler, more immediately effective theatrical music.14 But the old operatic machine was frustratingly intractable. What is more, and to the dismay of many, the despised, hyper-emotional works of the nineteenth century, Wagner included, remained the mainstays of the repertory, showing themselves remarkably able – now with the help of enterprising stage directors, who could add a modern patina to the old threads – to change with the changing times.
By the late 1940s, when Stravinsky started on the Rake, these battles had for the most part lost their energy. In straitened, post-war circumstances it became impossible even to imagine contemporary works that might compete with the warhorses of the now-distant past. The operatic juggernaut continued on its way, increasingly displaying a museum culture. But now, with new historical additions to the repertoire, at least there was a variety of styles from which to choose. Revivals of Gluck’s and, in particular, Mozart’s operas (which, with the exception of Don Giovanni, had largely disappeared from nineteenth-century stages) began to make opera newly respectable among those of elevated taste, connecting the genre securely to the great Austro-German symphonic tradition, which still retained cultural prestige among modernist generations. In this context, it was small surprise that the operatic Stravinsky would declare himself foremost a Mozartian, and decidedly German-master-inclined for the rest of his canon (Gluck, Wagner, Berg) when it came to matters operatic.
The idea of basing an opera on William Hogarth’s series of engravings (1735) was Stravinsky’s, but soon took on shapes characteristic of Auden and his collaborator, Chester Kallman. The action takes place in eighteenth-century England. Tom Rakewell (tenor) is engaged to Anne Trulove (soprano). The mysterious Nick Shadow (baritone) arrives to announce that Tom has inherited a substantial fortune and must immediately depart for London. Once in town, and aided by Nick, Tom indulges himself extravagantly, then becomes bored, then – to demonstrate his freedom from ‘those twin tyrants of appetite and conscience’ – marries a bearded lady called Baba the Turk (mezzo-soprano). Tiring of her, he becomes caught up in a reckless financial scheme and is ruined. Nick declares himself a Mephistopheles and demands Tom’s soul as wages for his service. They play a game of cards to decide Tom’s fate. Tom wins, but Nick’s parting gesture casts him into insanity. The final scene takes place in Bedlam. Anne, still loyal, visits Tom, who thinks himself Adonis to her Venus. She lulls him to sleep and departs. He wakes up to find her gone and dies of grief. The opera ends, Don Giovanni-like (and L’Heure espagnole-like), with an epilogue in which the characters come to the front of the stage and explain the moral message of what has transpired.
The opera’s very first scene demonstrates its Mozartian allegiance. The pastoral ambience of the opening trio, ‘The woods are green’, makes obvious gestures, even an obeisance, to Mozart, especially to the outdoor, wind-instrument-laden Mozart of Così fan tutte. The similarity to Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s opening scene in Così, ‘Ah guarda, sorella’, is unmistakable: not only do the numbers share the same key and orchestral sonority, but snatches of Mozart’s melody, harmony and accompaniment continue to surface unexpectedly in Stravinsky’s spiky version of pastoral. This well-behaved, eighteenth-century operatic brand is also, of course, present in those ‘secco’ recitatives that Stravinsky drew attention to in his programme note. Although his first idea for The Rake had been to use spoken dialogue (perhaps a look back to his old, anti-operatic days), he soon, and enthusiastically, embraced the ancient division between action (recitative) and reflection (arias and ensembles), an economy that Wagner and others in the nineteenth century had done so much to undermine. Indeed, the very first recitative tells us that we are in a determinedly non-epic world, as far as possible away from the mysterious Wagnerian mists: with a flourish of arpeggio on the antique harpsichord, Anne’s father calls for his beloved daughter and tells her, in unfussy declamation, ‘Your advice is needed in the kitchen’.
As we move further into the opera, the stylistic picture becomes more complicated: once Tom has been ejected from Arcadia, the operatic borrowings proliferate. Mostly, as Stravinsky suggested in his programme note, these reach even further back in time, with gestures to Purcell and to the folk idiom of The Beggar’s Opera. But in Act 1, scene 3 something quite different happens. Anne has been left alone in her country retreat, with no word from Tom. An orchestral introduction full of sharp woodwind sounds seems to lead us back into the Mozart-tinged pastoral world of the opera’s beginning, if with sparer, more mournful overtones. After indulging this for a time, though, Anne launches into a two-movement aria of startling stylistic disparity. The slow movement, ‘Quietly, night, O find him and caress’, features a severe canon with the bassoon; the wind-instrument sounds that had previously adorned the ‘budding grove’ and ‘pliant stream’ of scene 1 are now more sinister, encircling presences, and the overall effect is closer to Bach at his most penitential. The mood is then interrupted by a ‘voice off’, Anne’s father calling for her, which precipitates her closing aria and her sudden decision to go to London and seek out her lover. ‘I go to him. Love cannot falter’, she sings, and although the first melodic ideas again gesture towards Mozart, the mood is emphatically different, much closer to a nineteenth-century idiom. Indeed, this act-ending unmistakably invokes an old-style cabaletta of the Donizetti or early Verdi school. After the requisite two verses that all cabalettas boast (perhaps ornaments should be improvised second time around? the composer sketches a few, but no one dares add more) the aria and the act end with a breathless climax and a resounding high C for the soprano.
What are we to make of this? As some have suggested, the sudden change of musical atmosphere, the excursion into un-Mozartian territory and the swerve towards a new, much more popular operatic sound, may well have had something to do with Auden and Kallman. Although Auden, in his very first letter to the composer, had taken the trouble to insist that ‘it is the librettist’s job to satisfy the composer, not the other way round’,15 his influence on the general tone of The Rake (and not just the literary tone) was considerable. In this case, for example, we have documentary evidence that the high C was added at Auden’s request (Stravinsky altered Anne’s line at a late stage to incorporate it). A famous Auden essay on opera ends with what seems an explicit justification of this type of vocal excess:
The golden age of opera, from Mozart to Verdi, coincided with the golden age of liberal humanism, of unquestioning belief in freedom and progress. If good operas are rarer today, this may be because, not only have we learned that we are less free than nineteenth-century humanism imagines, but also have become less certain that freedom is an unequivocal blessing, that the free are necessarily the good. To say that operas are more difficult to write does not mean that they are impossible. That would only follow if we should cease to believe in free-will and personality altogether. Every high C accurately struck utterly demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.16
This is a far cry from Stravinsky’s careful laying out of his operatic progeny in that 1960s programme note. Although Mozart is still central, Auden’s is a credo that freely embraces the popular, and indeed insists that the fulcrum of ‘our’ opera is the nineteenth century, when the high Cs the poet found so inspiriting were flowing in such abundance. We might also recall that, as The Rake was in the making, Auden and Kallman, a pair of unashamed opera buffs of the old school, sent Stravinsky, whose previous severity in writing for the human voice was well-known, an LP collection of their favourite divas and divos, hoping that the composer would use these golden-age singers as, literally, role models.
The injection of new compositional blood into Anne’s scena ed aria has been recognized and celebrated by posterity in the most obvious way. This number is by far the most popular in the opera, finding its way into numerous vocal recitals and competitions. An impressive array of divas from the last fifty years have asserted their free will and personality by trumpeting that high C at the close. There’s even a recording of the very first Anne, none other than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, singing the aria in 1951 at the Teatro La Fenice under Stravinsky’s baton. The orchestra is distinctly tentative and the tempi are slow, but the sound of Schwarzkopf negotiating the part has many resonances. We might recall immediately that the great German diva was famous for her Mozartian roles, and thus an obvious choice as Stravinsky’s lead soprano. But there is no little irony in the fact that she was also much associated with Strauss’s operas (she was for many years the European Marschallin of choice), operas that Stravinsky hated with a passion and refused to consider part of the operatic canon (‘I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punished triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today’17). Most revelatory, though, is the response of the live audience at La Fenice. As soon as Schwarzkopf detonates that final C, there are murmurs of approval, and the moment she finishes it there’s a storm of applause, uninhibitedly drowning out Stravinsky’s carefully crafted final cadences. One wonders: how many other times has a Stravinsky composition been thus invaded with ‘premature’ applause? It’s not, after all, how you’re supposed to treat an earnest, modernist work. But that high C was simply too visceral an effect: the Italian audience knew immediately that, rather than attending the prestigious world premiere of a modern masterpiece, they were, for a moment, just at the opera.
Of course, there are many more twists and turns in The Rake’s Progress after that triumphant high C. The work’s principals continue to swing violently between various operatic modes, some of them quite severe. Auden and Kallman’s largest hint towards operatic camp, the appearance of the bearded lady, Baba the Turk, was an invitation largely ignored by Stravinsky: far from indulging in bel canto, she has some of his spikiest, most difficult music. But Anne, her musical personality tinged by her great moment of vocal extravagance, proves forever prone to nineteenth-century operatic idioms: there are obvious strains of Donizetti’s Lucia in several places; and her great arioso in Act 2 (‘How strange. Although the heart for love dare everything’) is preceded by a trumpet solo uncannily reminiscent of one that introduces the lovelorn tenor in Act 2 of the same composer’s Don Pasquale (‘Cercherò lontana terra’). We have, it seems, travelled a great distance from the austere list of German opera reformers that Stravinsky quoted in his programme note. What’s more, it is in large part by means of such bel canto music that, in spite of her continued submissiveness and lack of agency, Anne invariably collects around her the greatest audience sympathy: if we care about The Rake, we surely care above all about Anne.
However, Stravinsky began vocally with Mozart, and with Mozart he winds towards a close, this time with gestures to the composer’s one opera that had survived in the nineteenth century. As Nick Shadow shows his true stripes at the climax of the card-playing scene, we hear the angry dotted rhythms of a famous stone guest, dragging Don Giovanni irresistibly downwards. In one sense this revenant marks the fact that Mozart’s operatic genius was for Stravinsky not just a dramatic starting point: that it could provide material for the most grandiose moments. But then, with yet another twist in this infinitely surprising opera, eighteenth-century tidiness and wit are re-established in the Rake’s final moments; as mentioned earlier, the characters shed their masks and, with a blatant imitation of the closing ensemble from Don Giovanni, address the audience directly.
The history of opera after 1945 is a strange tale indeed, and one we will pursue in the last chapter of this book. In one sense it was in the rudest of health, with more live (and recorded) operas available than ever before, and with the rediscovery of Mozart’s operatic genius, and then Handel’s, vastly enriching the fare on offer. In another sense, though, with so few new works taking their place beside the monuments of the past, opera was caught in a continual loop, one in which ‘death’ was routinely pronounced and then vehemently (too vehemently?) denied. There is little doubt that The Rake’s Progress was intimately involved in this quandary. In many ways it was a valedictory work for Stravinsky. His trip to Europe for the premiere was publicly triumphant but privately traumatic. He was goaded by the changes he saw all around him in post-war Europe, in particular by a new generation of avant-gardists who saw as their spiritual fathers Schoenberg and Webern, and who as a result no longer thought of him as the embodiment of musical modernity. In response, he spent the remainder of his life trying to restore his eminence by embracing a neo-Spartan serialist idiom. But The Rake, unlike virtually all other ‘avant-garde’ operas, stubbornly remained in the repertory. Equipped with its parade of curious reliquaries (musical and otherwise), it has always been open to new interpretations. The gestures it makes to the great past of opera, Mozart above all, but high Cs and other nineteenth-century accoutrements included, keep it alive, indeed have made it part of the history it set out to explore.