20

Revenants in the museum

The mark of opera’s twentieth-century metamorphosis was the birth of self-consciousness. As we have seen often in the last few chapters, writing opera in its fourth century was rarely about just making music for a story. It was often about opera’s history, about its silliness or greatness or sheer longevity. Richard Strauss was the first laureate of this tendency, and – as we saw in Chapter 18 – Ariadne auf Naxos was its classic illustration. But Ariadne, which is a comic opera, doesn’t deal with a perennial staple of its tragic sister, which is Death. Death scenes, as it turns out, would become a test case for modernist composers’ attitudes towards the legacy they had inherited.

On-stage death had mostly been shunned for reasons of theatrical propriety in opera’s first 200 years and more. After that, though, an impressive tally of operatic characters start dying on stage; between (say) 1830 and 1900 they do so horribly or beautifully, quickly or slowly, from daggers or disease, sometimes courtesy of exotic exits via castle battlements or vats of boiling oil. But it is unusual for other characters to mourn these deaths extensively once they have occurred, to reflect by means of elaborate singing on the person just departed. For Don José, post-mortem analysis lasts around sixty seconds: ‘You can arrest me … it’s me who killed her. Ah Carmen! my adored Carmen!’ Rigoletto may even beat José to the tape: ‘Gilda! my Gilda! she’s dead! … Ah! the curse!!’

Among the exceptions, one is a stock in trade: the moralizing epilogue of eighteenth-century opera, most famously at the end of Don Giovanni. This is the kind of scene ironically revisited in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, in which a mixture of gloating and character analysis is directed at the departed villain. The nineteenth century, nearer our time and mood, started to see some exceptions on the tragic side, and several are famous. Isolde’s final monologue is Exhibit A, and, in Götterdämmerung, Siegfried’s death is followed by a famous orchestral funeral march. There are no voices or words, but leitmotifs take their place as a kind of aide-mémoire, encouraging the audience to reflect on the deceased. A parallel instance occurs in Act 4 of Verdi’s Don Carlos, but here the situation is a little more complex and needs further explanation.

Near the close of the act, the Marquis of Posa, Don Carlos’s baritone hero-in-waiting, is shot by a mysterious man, an emissary of the Inquisition. While dying he then charms the audience with a lengthy and beautiful romance. This singing-while-dying was of course a Romantic commonplace: Siegfried also indulges us; one of Verdi’s most famous early tenors was even nicknamed ‘il tenore della bella morte’ – the tenor of the beautiful death.¹ But Posa’s operatic death breaks from tradition in also being reflected upon immediately after it happens. The baritone’s last breath is followed by an elaborate mourning ensemble, a leisurely episode in B♭ minor, the dark key often favoured for mourning in the nineteenth century. This Trauermusik takes the form of a duet (with chorus) between King Philip and Carlos, and became a famous instance of operatic recycling. Verdi dropped the episode from Don Carlos some time before the work’s premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1867. It was jettisoned even before a notorious dress rehearsal in which – to get the work down to manageable length – he hacked various large and disturbingly beautiful chunks from the score. Its disappearance was perhaps hastened because the singer playing Posa, the great baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, objected to lying on stage pretending to be dead while two rival colleagues were having such a grand time pealing forth his noble qualities.² But whatever the reason, Verdi made no attempt to reinstate the ensemble in later revisions of the opera, nor is there any record of him complaining about its disappearance. His seeming indifference reinforces the point that long, leisurely reactions to death were not typical in opera of this period. Someone dies and we move on, or the curtain falls. When, some years later, Verdi found a new use for his discarded duet, it was outside opera altogether: he used the melody to launch the ‘Lacrymosa’ section of his Messa da Requiem (1874).

Soon after the turn of the twentieth century this once-rare phenomenon, the post-mortem commentary, experienced an upswing. The dead are more readily mourned in music, and the devastation of these modern funerary scenes – we will discuss some below – cannot be accounted for merely as sadness over a character’s demise. To be sure, there were still many quick and unelaborated deaths à la Carmen or Gilda, with certain schools of operatic modernism even making a speciality of brutal demises. Some are aestheticized via music, like those of the nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957): guillotined one by one, they go singing ecstatically to their doom. Other modernist operas greet death with brief emotional outbursts or psychotic indifference. In Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová (1921), the heroine’s body, having been dragged from the river where she drowned herself, is sobbed over for seconds only. In Busoni’s Doktor Faust (first performed 1925), Faust collapses in a snowy Wittenberg street and the only comment – from Mephistopheles – is an insolent enquiry, spoken not sung: ‘Has this person come to grief?’

But extended post-mortem elaboration now takes hold as a counterpoise. When a dramaturgical convention appears in this way, the question ‘why?’ cannot be answered simply. Large cultural shifts clearly played some role. In Europe in those early decades of the century there was widespread dancing on multiple political volcanoes, and elaborate theatrical reflections on endings and mortality might thus be thought an apt reflection of the circumstance. But the mourning scenes, viewed less globally, might also be connected to creative anxieties about opera’s very future: about whether it was itself a dying art form, ready for its own funeral. In this more local context, the phenomenon could clearly be allied to librettists’ and composers’ new self-consciousness about opera (we might also recall that in the earlier twentieth century operas about artists and composers in crisis became newly fashionable).

In certain instances, the metaphorical import of the funerary moment is obvious. Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, already mentioned in the previous chapter, has a scene in which the child’s ripped storybook comes to life; there had been a tale about a Princess, but it will never be finished now, because the pages have disappeared. The Princess materializes and sings to the child. At first we hear only her voice and a solo flute, weaving melodic lines around each other, perhaps in a distant gesture to the voice and flute duet from the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The orchestra returns towards the end as the Princess falls into conjecture: who knows what might have happened to me? She disappears and the child mourns her loss in an exquisite little aria, ‘Toi, le cœur de la rose’ (You, the heart of the rose), lamenting that only a scent, a trace, is left. Just as the Princess’s music toyed with past moments of operatic glory, so does the child’s song, in this case gesturing to Massenet’s wistful farewell aria, ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ (Farewell, our little table), in Act 2 of Manon. We have witnessed the sad futility of any attempt to gather the shards of an operatic tradition now irretrievably fragmented: as the child sings, there is nothing more than ‘les débris d’un rêve’.

A second example involves Puccini’s Turandot (premiered posthumously in 1926). Turandot’s penultimate scene contains the last music Puccini ever completed: he travelled to a Brussels cancer clinic with nothing more than sketches for the opera’s finale, and never finished it. In this penultimate scene, the slave girl Liù (soprano), unable to bear the pain of torture, directs a lament at Turandot, ‘Tu che di gel sei cinta’ (You who are girded with frost), then stabs herself and dies. Liù’s blind companion, Timur (bass), told of her death, lets out a savage howl of grief (one of opera’s greatest inarticulate cries) and takes up her lament in a funeral march. This desperately sad moment expresses the dull weight and grief of a great loss; to extend and deepen the pathos Timur is joined by the chorus. Onlookers who had, only moments before, been baying for Liù’s blood suddenly appear as inconsolable as the suffering bass.

What is striking is that a secondary, sentimental character assumes such symbolic force post mortem. The chorus’s final words make the transformation of the person into a metaphor for Art utterly explicit: ‘Liù, goodness, Liù, sweetness. Sleep! Forget! Liù! Poetry!’ During the world premiere of Turandot, at La Scala, Milan, in 1926, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, stopped the performance after Liù’s funeral dirge, turned to the audience and said something like (he has been variously reported): ‘The opera is ending here because at this point the composer died.’³ The closing minor triad of the dirge, played quietly but involving the extreme outer registers of orchestral sound, is repeated three times. These three chords resemble the solemn ending of La bohème, written thirty years earlier and so near the start of Puccini’s career. But for us now, looking back over all of operatic history, they might also invoke an ancient acoustic signal, the three loud knocks with which theatres of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries signalled the start of the entertainment: the omega referencing the alpha.

To these two instances could be added others: Countess Geschwitz’s rhapsody to murdered Lulu in Berg’s opera, for example, or the eerie chorus of planets that salutes Johannes Kepler’s passing in Hindemith’s Die Harmonie der Welt (first performance 1957). These episodes are like a colour change on litmus paper, a signal that something has come over opera as a genre and as an experience. That ‘something’ included the self-consciousness that began to flower before the First World War, which was closely tied to concerns about the burden of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, as well as to anxieties about producing (or not producing) Eternal, Enduring Operatic Works, or even about writing opera at all.

The sea changes that marked opera’s fourth century were many, and they mean that telling the history of opera’s latest decades requires a changed strategy. It would be wilful and blithely utopian to narrate a march of progress and revolutionary masterpieces. If we are to present the recent history of opera as it is, and not as we might wish it to be – to avoid telling that false tale of optimism and continual healthy expansion – we will need new strategies. We need to account both for the changed cultural circumstances under which new operas were, and are, created in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for the ways in which composers confront their legacies from an operatic past. The most sociologically significant change during this time has been what is probably an irrevocable mutation: the conversion of operatic culture into a species of museum.

THE LIVING MUSEUM: REPERTORY

For at least two centuries, while France and Germany and all the rest had their share of operas, Italy, only Italy, had Opera. As the Verdi scholar Julian Budden put it: ‘In Italy, empires might rise and empires might fall, but La Scala, Milan, and the Teatro la Fenice, Venice, still needed their two opere d’obbligo [new operas] for the winter season.’⁴ Italy alone retained for centuries the unproblematic sense of an unbroken, unending procession. Individual composers would come and go, leaving contributions large and small, noble and trivial. But even the greatest of them would eventually be absorbed, becoming a mere constituent in the larger, unceasing march of Opera. From the perspective of the here-and-now, with major Italian opera houses closing or curtailing their seasons for lack of audience interest or absence of state funding, this equivalence between Italy and Opera seems to be at a uniquely problematic moment. But it was almost a century ago when the compositional tradition was in collapse, when the supply of new Italian works began to seem so insignificant that the idea of an unbroken succession was unsustainable.

The death of Puccini in 1924 has often proved a convenient terminus. As we saw a moment ago, Puccini died leaving the final scene of his last opera as little more than scribbled-out tunes and fugitive harmonies. What he had always imagined as Turandot’s final, climactic love duet – between questing Prince Calaf and reluctant but finally yielding Princess Turandot – was still in tatters. At one crucial passage in these sketches, a moment that should have been the clinching musical event of the duet, notation breaks off entirely and, in poignant recognition of the looming classics of the past, Puccini simply wrote ‘poi Tristano’ – then Tristan. According to this version of the story, Italian opera’s great flow didn’t become gently interrupted, gradually sinking into the sand. Quite the reverse: it underwent a series of ever more infrequent but ever more violent convulsions. And then finally, as Puccini’s doctor said in that Brussels clinic where they tried vainly to operate on his throat cancer: ‘C’est le cœur qui ne résiste pas.’⁵ According to other interpretations, Italian opera’s convulsions continued on past Turandot. But perhaps it’s better to see those now-forgotten works by Mascagni, Respighi and others in the 1930s, with their grandiose, state-sponsored premieres and dictator-rich audiences, as already dead: inert presences whose inflated torsos and rouged cheeks lent them merely the simulacrum of vitality. By either account, sometime during these decades before the Second World War, Italian opera’s great procession fragmented irremediably.

Although this story is most poignantly told about Italy and its centuries-long operatic tradition, the same scenario played out on other international stages during roughly the same period. Everywhere the sheer difficulty of writing new operas – financial, musical, aesthetic – began to weigh on those whose business it was to keep the show moving. The crisis had been threatening for many decades, perhaps for as long as a century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost all opera was new – composed especially for the occasion. Revivals might occur, but it was more prestigious to have a brand-new work; what’s more, as we saw in the first chapters of this book, willing composers were on hand to produce them with unfailing regularity. Around the time of Rossini, though, this privileging of the new was slowly eroded by a body of works that travelled across Europe and beyond, being revived again and again, season after season, surviving changing fashions and serving as a forbidding benchmark for new creations. By the later nineteenth century, a large standard repertory was in place. Verdi had it just right when he boasted that Il trovatore would be seen ‘in the heart of Africa and the Indies’.⁶ What’s more, new print technologies and the success of the piano as a domestic instrument meant that the most famous operas invaded domestic as well as public life, taking their places in a broader cultural imagination. There is good reason why the Liebig Bouillon Company could from the 1890s onwards profitably market its products by means of opera-scene collector’s cards (see Figure 22).

At first, this standard repertory existed comfortably alongside newly composed operas, the latter still attracting greater cachet. But by the early twentieth century contemporary operas seemed less and less able to compete with older works for attention and funding. Reasons for such large-scale cultural shifts are always complex. The anti-hedonism of a certain strand of modernist music – mostly associated with Schoenberg and his followers – played a part. To write self-consciously unmelodious and difficult operas conferred a measure of prestige, but only a rare talent could make it work. Alban Berg’s creation of two now-standard repertory operas within this hyper-austere tradition remains a remarkable feat.

Another reason why repertory operas began to trump new commissions was simple economics, the fearful expense of producing an opera entirely from scratch. Money generated at the box office could not pay for the composer’s and the librettist’s time, as well as for the star singers and the chorus and the orchestra and the stage designers and the costume fitters and the marketing department and all the rest. Someone or something has to stand behind the enterprise financially, and be equipped with the deepest of deep pockets. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this ‘backer’ role would typically be taken by a king, prince or petty duke still hanging on to the vestiges of absolute power in Europe, a figure for whom the prestige of opera was worth the expenditure. Increasingly, though, such characters became merely one element within a mixed economy, their money often underwriting the losses risked by an entrepreneurial impresario. But a large contingent of this ruling class was permanently forced out by either by the 1848 revolutions or, two decades later, by the unification of the German and Italian nation states.

In America and other, newer operatic landscapes outside Europe, opera continued to be funded by a loose consortium of the wealthy, as a form of social capital; but in the European operatic economy the place of independent backers was usually taken by support from the public purse. Then as now, such subsidy was unpredictable, ultimately dependent on the goodwill of those who vote in elections. When times were good, the fact that public money sustained an entertainment now enjoyed only by a favoured few was tolerated. But in the twentieth century times were often not good; subsidy would be reduced, making the purveyors of opera cautious and adverse to risk. Given their proven failure rate for centuries, the most perilous venture of all was to commission a new opera. Why not stage Il trovatore instead? A living museum is safer.

THE LIVING MUSEUM: EXCITEMENT

At first sight a museum may seem inert, a place where relics are merely housed, a collection of gravestones. But the best museums have never been like that: they constantly evolve, moving with the times in the way they present their artefacts to an ever-changing audience. In the same way, the operatic museum has proved remarkably able to renew itself creatively. One significant sign of this renewal appeared in 1920s Germany, a prime location of what was increasingly referred to as the ‘opera crisis’. During that decade, many cities saw evidence of a ‘Verdi renaissance’: instead of, or by the side of, yet more revivals of the eight or so great Verdi warhorses, the thought came to explore anew some of his forgotten works.⁷ This was partly a reaction against Wagner, conventionally seen as Verdi’s antithesis; but more basically it reflected the fact that embarrassingly few new works were displaying any sign of longevity. People still wanted to go to the opera: radio and recordings, both of them routinely accused during the period of hastening the demise of the art form, were if anything expanding audiences.

What is more, spectators enjoyed novelty; they were committed patrons of newness in certain guises. But in general they found modern works uncongenial. So difficult and largely unperformed late Verdi pieces such as Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino and Don Carlos, and also – more surprising – a number of his long-dormant early works, were exhumed. Later still, spreading from Germany to elsewhere in Europe (Britain and Italy in particular), revivals of earlier nineteenth-century Italians (Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti) started to appear. This renewal of the repertory by means of digging into the past has continued inexorably: in the last few decades Handel’s operas have become commonplace, while Monteverdi, Rameau and others have all established a foothold. It is a story which parallels that of the ‘historically informed performance’ movement generally, and thus of classical music as a whole. Generated by impressive curatorial energy and often advocated with missionary zeal, it is nevertheless sustained by cultural pessimism – by a recognition of the fact that, musically, we now enjoy novelty principally when it comes from the past rather than from the present.

Along with this expanded historical repertory has come another symptom of our modern operatic condition: Regieoper, the German term for operatic productions whose excitement and sense of renewal are based on a strong (and preferably unprecedented) interpretation that rethinks an opera’s meaning via innovative staging and décor. This technology-fuelled movement started in the 1920s as an attempt to smooth the path during opera’s retreat into its past, to make newly revived works in outmoded idioms more relevant to audiences. Regieoper’s new visual habits were often influenced by modernist painting, or by innovative theatre producers such as Edward Gordon Craig (in Britain), Adolphe Appia (in central Europe) and Vsevolod Meyerhold (in Russia). It blossomed almost everywhere after the Second World War and has now become the default means of reinterpreting opera generally, giving new heft and relevance to repertory works otherwise thought too well known to communicate any contemporary message.

Regieoper can be wild and wonderful, upending expectations of what we thought we knew about plots and music that, through repeated performance, had become thirsty for renewal. A select few such productions have, via mechanical reproduction, recently formed into an alternative canon: Patrice Chéreau’s Marxist dystopian Ring (Bayreuth, 1976) is now a classic; others might include Jonathan Miller’s Mafia-themed Rigoletto (English National Opera, 1982), or Hans Neuenfels’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in which both a singer and an actor played each role (Stuttgart, 1998), or Robert Wilson’s slow-motion cerements-of-the-grave Aida (Royal Opera House, 2003). One of the present authors adored Peter Konwitschny’s Lohengrin-in-a-high-school (Barcelona, 2006); the other loved Stefan Herheim’s Les Vêpres siciliennes, in which ballerinas invaded not just the customary Act 3 divertissement, but also the gestural vocabulary of all the characters (Royal Opera House, 2013). Opera buffs of all vintages will have their favoured contestants saddled and ready, from any time up to yesterday.

With rare exceptions, Regieoper does not meddle with the musical text. The fact that music alone is assumed to be sacrosanct is a relatively recent philosophical judgement (up until the early nineteenth century, opera was more commonly thought a theatrical rather than a musical genre); but the new classification is now passionately felt. Whenever a director dares to change something in the musical text, curses will abound. When Konwitschny staged Don Giovanni in 2008 at the Komische Oper in Berlin there was critical outrage, not because of on-stage naughtiness (there was plenty) but because, at the very end, the orchestra gradually dropped out of the great moralizing finale, leaving the voices trailing alone in a vast void, by this means creating a profound disturbance that was in some ways magical. In a larger context the vehement critical reaction might seem odd. After all, any staging is ephemeral. It will not be there in the next town, and will anyway disappear when the production is replaced. Mozart’s work famously endures: you can see Don Giovanni elsewhere or at the flick of a button with the finale intact.

One indication that the stage director as auteur is now routinely at the centre of the operatic enterprise is newspaper reviews that relegate comments about the singers, the orchestra or its conductor – let alone any discussion of the work itself – to a brief addendum, the main agenda being to consider at length the directorial input, the staging, costumes, sets and lighting. Musical execution per se, it seems, cannot renew an antique work. But it is well to remember that one can make things new by performing them so differently in acoustic terms that they seem previously unheard. By the 1950s, ‘historically informed performance’ aimed to make ancient musical objects meaningful, adding to them a patina of cool modernity that, although it claimed authority from the past, was in many senses aligned aesthetically with the radical, modernizing stage directors.⁸ Every once in a while, a conductor will rethink so comprehensively the acoustic presence, instrumental balance, tempi and general sound of a famous opera that you feel you have encountered some alternative version, heretofore unknown. This was the case with Simon Rattle’s famed interpretations of Pelléas et Mélisande (performed in several opera houses, with different orchestras, in different stagings, beginning in 2007). The museum can pulse with excitement.

ENDURING MODERNISM: BRITTEN

In any long view of the operatic museum and opera’s history in the later twentieth century, Benjamin Britten (1913–76) is sui generis, since in terms of repertory presence he is such an exception among postwar composers as to be quasi-miraculous. At the website operabase.com, he is by an immense margin the most regularly performed opera composer born in the twentieth century. As we write, he ranks at 13th, between Offenbach and Humperdinck; the next composer born after 1900 is Shostakovich at 39th.

Britten began his career in the 1930s as a prolific and precocious composer in practically every field except opera. As he admitted, for an impecunious young composer trying to make his way in the world, an operatic project would have been the height of impracticality. In 1939 he went to the USA for a prolonged visit, possibly to emigrate; but in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, he and his companion Peter Pears decided to return home. By this stage Britten had an opera in mind based on a poem by George Crabbe (1754–1832) and set in a rough, seafaring community. This opera became Peter Grimes, premiered in London in 1945 with Pears in the leading role. It proved so successful that Britten was able to dedicate much of his future energy to opera – to make it, as he said at the time, his ‘real metier’.⁹ He was aware of the strangeness of this decision: the ‘professional’ opera composer, the specialist, had long since disappeared. As Britten reportedly said to fellow composer Michael Tippett: ‘I am possibly an anachronism. I am a composer of opera, and that is what I am going to be, throughout.’¹⁰

Between 1945 and 1954 Britten produced seven operas, two of which – Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) – almost rivalled Grimes in popularity. After that, he turned away from opera, at least on anything like the grand scale. As well as writing more instrumental and chamber music, he essayed genres such as ballets, ‘church parables’ and children’s pieces. His only return during the next fifteen years was for the Shakespeare adaptation A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). During the 1960s, as he became a national monument, various grand operatic projects were mooted, including a King Lear and an Anna Karenin, but they were left unrealized. Towards the end of his life he wrote the television opera Owen Wingrave (1970) and, at the last and plainly valedictory, an opera based on Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1973).

Grimes, though, was the breakthrough, and in retrospect becomes an ever more important moment in the history of twentieth-century opera. As with so many such works of that century, its possible place in history seemed immediately fraught. One of the most prominent aspects of the early Grimes reception is an anxious concern about the operatic past and Britten’s placement within it.¹¹ Was he a follower of Verdi or Wagner? How did he relate to modernism? What about his national roots? What about popular influences?

Answers came readily but were often contradictory. To the first question, the reply was emphatically the late Verdi of Otello and Falstaff, where only shards of arias, duets and ensembles could be found, yet where the orchestra generally deferred to the voice. Then again, Grimes also boasted recurring motives, and subjected them to orchestral development, so Wagner was not entirely absent. The question about his modernist credentials also generated confusion. Everyone could hear that Grimes was tonal and had few leanings towards the atonality or serialism then in mainland European vogue. On the other hand, aspects of the opera – not least its use of elaborate orchestral interludes, its grim subject matter and its unconventional, outsider protagonist – were clearly influenced by Berg and German expressionism. In the matter of Englishness the position was again not clear, mostly because there was virtually no operatic tradition to refer to. Britten’s harmonic idiom often seemed to veer into a modal writing that has resonances with British composers such as Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

But in terms of specific operatic models, Britten himself emphasized the national void preceding him: he even declared that part of his task was ‘to restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell’.¹² Thus the suspicion arose that a part of Grimes’s success derived from the fact that its composer was less encumbered by operatic tradition than were his contemporaries elsewhere, being free to indulge his eclectic tendencies. To emphasize this further, some of the public scenes in Grimes plainly evoked popular musical styles, perhaps filtered through Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or influenced by Britten’s early work in the film industry.

These varied musical influences were matched by a story that was hard to define and again proved resistant to easy interpretation. Crabbe’s original 1810 poem, called The Borough, had few such equivocations. The section devoted to Grimes presents a bleak portrait of a fisherman who murders three young apprentices through violence and neglect, and then dies delirious and terrified, pursued by their spirits. Britten and his librettist Montagu Slater fleshed out this tale, but in the process made Grimes (tenor) as much a victim as a villain. Although prone to violence, he shows a gentler, visionary side in his dealings with the retired sea captain Balstrode (baritone), with the schoolteacher Ellen Orford (soprano), and above all in his poetic reactions to the wild seascape that surrounds him. Fundamentally he is an outsider, and disliked as such by the pompous town worthies. After the death of an apprentice (accident, not murder), he is hunted by the townspeople; driven mad by their persecution he takes his boat out to sea to commit suicide.

Peter Grimes is, in short, a protagonist about whom we can never feel secure, and to project that insecurity in music demanded subtle treatment. In the opening scene, as he is sworn in at an inquest investigating the death of his first apprentice, his slow, gentle repetition of the oath is in stark contrast to the woodwind-rich, impatient chatter of the accusing townsfolk; this contrast has often been compared to the way Bach singles out Christ’s utterances in his passion narrative. The same gentle declamation on a reciting tone comes in Act 1, scene 2, in Grimes’s visionary aria ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’. But near the end of this lyrical set piece he erupts into shocking musical violence. What, then, is his true nature? The violence escalates at the start of Act 2, when he strikes Ellen and utters the lines ‘And God have mercy upon me!’ to a jagged motif that deteriorates into a bass-register growl.

The final scene of the opera is laid out as an old-fashioned set piece that, in Britten’s own words, can ‘crystallise and hold the emotion of a dramatic situation’.¹³ In this sense, it harks back to many an operatic mad scene of the past, as far distant as Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which it resembles in its play with distorted, half-remembered musical fragments from earlier scenes. The meaning of these remembrances is subject to a sophisticated game involving reality and delusion. In the previous scene, the townspeople had stoked their anger by repeatedly screaming out Grimes’s name. Now these cries, punctuated by a distant foghorn, resonate in the distance, but have mutated into a gentle tonal hum, outlining the sounds that had underpinned the protagonist’s first words in the opera. This parallel raises a question many opera composers have posed in writing music for distraught characters: where do such distant sounds come from? Are they real, or do they emanate from Grimes’s disordered mind? Ellen appears and tries to comfort him, and his last, lyrical re-voicing of the earlier music parallels a transformation of the townsfolk’s distant cries into a lamenting commentary on his tragic fall.

Britten might have taken Verdi’s Otello as his model and ended the opera there, with a broken hero singing to the last. But he evidently felt something more was needed. At the start of a coda, there is unadorned speech; Balstrode approaches Grimes and utters words that could hardly be more prosaic: ‘Sail out till you lose sight of land. Then sink the boat. D’you hear? Sink her. Goodbye Peter’. Then, according to a lengthy and elaborate scene direction:

Together they push the boat down the slope of the shore. Balstrode comes back and waves goodbye. He takes Ellen who is sobbing quietly, calms her and leads her carefully down the main street home. The men pushing the boat out has been the cue for the orchestra to start playing again.

Those two adverbs – quietly, carefully – deserve scrutiny. They seem to be telling the performers that no histrionics, nothing remotely attention-seeking, nothing operatic, should take place. Ellen and Balstrode should not claim too much of the audience’s attention because something far more evocative occurs at that point: a long reprise of the opera’s first orchestral interlude. This brilliant, shimmering seascape, uncannily realistic with its high, keening strings, harp arpeggios and low brass chords, signals the end. The townspeople give up their manhunt and begin their dawn routine. Some minor characters exchange desultory words about a boat out at sea – is it sinking? The chorus herald the cold beginning of another day. The orchestra sinks into a cavernous low register, where three deep punctuations signal the end.

After the success of Grimes, Britten’s operatic subject matter mostly continued in the same vein – personal, interior dramas featuring restraint and ambiguity, above all nothing epic (a problematic exception being his ‘coronation’ opera Gloriana, 1953). What is more, his love of letting the orchestra take the burden of communication at critical moments, as heard in those last minutes of Grimes, became a persistent impulse. In Billy Budd (1951) the central confrontation is the scene between the condemned sailor Billy Budd and Captain Vere, who announces to Billy his sentence of death. This confrontation is not sung at all, but represented entirely by means of the orchestra, which moves through a sequence of tonal and instrumental combinations in a succession of thirty-four chords. The Turn of the Screw (1954), like Grimes, gains much of its individuality from a series of orchestral interludes connecting an otherwise fragmentary succession of short scenes. If anything, Britten’s compositional range became more boldly modernist as time went on: the interludes in Turn of the Screw were even styled as variations on a twelve-note ‘row’, albeit one constructed and deployed in a way that maximizes its tonal possibilities.

What lesson is there to be read from Britten’s operatic popularity? He was born in 1913, but in the twenty-first century is more often performed than Bellini, Janáček, Massenet, Gluck or Weber.¹⁴ Are his operatic ways and means to be regarded as a model for success in the operatic future, with composers enjoined to think how Britten would have done it? Here it may be wise to remember Claude Debussy’s celebrated bon mot concerning the afterlife of Richard Wagner: Wagner, he said, was ‘a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn’.¹⁵ Debussy wrote this in 1903, and would probably have stood by it to his dying day. The operatic world – composers, performers, theorists and audiences – saw matters differently. Wagner may have made the writing of opera harder, the attrition greater, but a remarkable range of individual composers, Debussy included, were productive after the Wagnerian moment, and often precisely because Wagner had shown what really new things were possible. But sunsets and dawns can often look alike. Appearing just as the Second World War was coming to a close, Peter Grimes was immediately hailed as a new beginning, and the opera ends with a famous orchestral dawn, delicately poised (quietly, carefully) between weary acceptance and hope. But this time, even given Britten’s enduring success, the message has turned out to be mostly about sunset.

THREE LIONS

By no measure can Britten be deemed an avant-garde composer. Yet three recently deceased avant-garde lions of the postwar era, all of whom prospered into the twenty-first century, have also continued to figure in existential debates concerning contemporary opera, even though they are, like Britten, now part of history. Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) wrote more than twenty operas and is routinely proclaimed Germany’s greatest postwar opera composer; he is also one the most regularly performed, enjoying forty-one revivals in the five years from 2008/9 to 2012/13.¹⁶ Although he first came to prominence in the late 1940s in the avant-garde atmosphere of the Darmstadt New Music Summer School, his explicit rejection of this ambience is in one sense signalled by the fact that he wrote so many operas in the 1950s and 1960s – at a time, that is, when most card-carrying musical radicals saw the art form as desperately moribund.

In this and other ways, Henze might be compared to Britten; but there is little doubt that Darmstadt also left a considerable mark. His first great success came with Boulevard Solitude (1952), yet another remake of Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut story, which had engaged Massenet and Puccini more than half a century earlier. The Schoenberg lineage is declared in the twelve-tone harmonic idiom, and also in the use of vocal extremes, the post-Wagnerian surface of prevailing musical dialogue and the elaborate, attention-seeking orchestration. However, Henze’s sense of dramatic economy ensures that one scene follows another with brisk dispatch. What is more, and apart from the expressionist orchestral interludes with their obsessive rhythmic motives, he shows a willingness to respond creatively to nineteenth-century operatic manners, with vintage techniques like text repetition, duets in parallel intervals and even coloratura vocal delivery. Good examples of this response can be found in the exchanges between Manon and her brother. It may, though, be significant that whenever the siblings sing in concordance, they are at their most deceptive and oily within the plot – as if making a moral point that such echoes of the operatic past, hence of the pleasure it supplies, are highly suspect.

Luciano Berio (1925–2003) is in many ways a more typical product of the postwar avant garde. He was also connected with Darmstadt in his early years, and his musical-theatre works of the 1950s–1970s are aggressively ‘anti-opera’. But then, as part of what seems to have been a more widespread rapprochement with the ancient art form, he collaborated in the early 1980s with the novelist Italo Calvino, producing two much more conventionally shaped operas (La vera storia, 1981, and Un re in ascolto, 1984), albeit both of formidable postmodern credentials.¹⁷ The fact that Berio’s last operatic venture was a new completion of Puccini’s unfinished Turandot adds further weight to the rapprochement thesis, if also to the ambivalence routinely surrounding it. Berio, for example, proclaimed an immediate distaste for the brashness of Puccini’s planned ending, in which the proud, icy Princess is ‘melted’ by means of a violent kiss from virile tenor Calaf; still more did he castigate Franco Alfano’s ending (the one usually performed today), in which this kiss is celebrated musically by a huge orchestral dissonance and heavy bangs on the bass drum. In its place he wrote a complex orchestral interlude in high-modernist vein, complete with exotic percussion and quotations from Mahler and Schoenberg: an attempt, that is, to resituate the opera within a dominant instrumental tradition.¹⁸ Instead of Puccini’s idea of bringing down the curtain to triumphant reiterations of Calaf’s aria ‘Nessun dorma’ (which has, at least after ‘The Three Tenors’, become a brash symbol of opera’s flirtation with popular culture), Berio finished with yet more delicate orchestral filigree and fleeting leitmotivic reminiscences of past themes: as unemphatic an ending as is possible to imagine. It would be hard to think of a more pointed modernist commentary, in musical form, on the defects of the core operatic repertory.

The last of our already-historical postwar giants presents a similar trajectory to that of Berio. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006) also served his time at Darmstadt, and also avoided opera for much of his career. However, he too embraced the rapprochement, and in his fifties wrote Le Grand Macabre (1977; revised 1996), a work that relies extensively on the operatic past while projecting a devil-may-care attitude, injecting immense humour and energy into the programme. Set in ‘Breughelland’, with an expressionist/pantomime action, the opera mines what Ligeti called ‘deep-frozen’ music from history but – like Henze’s best work – benefits from a happy awareness that no scene or musical attitude should linger long.¹⁹ The sheer promiscuity of the musical borrowings is exhilarating – or bewildering. A staccato prelude for twelve motor horns (a perfect palindrome, hat tip to serialism, but also an obvious gesture to Monteverdi’s Orfeo) introduces the entwined lovers, Amando and Amanda (sopranos), who warble together with madrigalesque lasciviousness and ornamentation. They are interrupted by a drunken idiot shouting the ‘Dies Irae’; and so it goes on, with Britten-like trebles (or counter-tenors), wild coloratura sopranos bringing down the house, speaking roles, Beethoven pastiches, Offenbachian galops and much more. If this is the way opera ends, Ligeti seems to be telling us, it does so in ludic chaos. Or perhaps the whole idea of opera’s life versus afterlife is up for challenge: can we know the difference? Not for nothing is the character Nekrotzar, the nihilistic impresario whose name invokes Necropolis, given a knockout entrance, a cortège with blaring brass and a disquieting rhythmic energy that rivals Clytemnestra’s arrival in Elektra.

Le Grand Macabre has enjoyed several successful revivals in the last two decades. In 2010, for example, it was performed to tremendous acclaim by the New York Philharmonic, not in an opera house but – semi-staged – in Avery Fisher Hall. The multi-media effects, with video projections, entrances up the aisles and musicians scattered through the hall (one of the present authors found herself seated in proximity to several brass instruments) played to a younger audience ready to enjoy absolutely everything on offer. Perhaps one reason Ligeti’s opera has started to endure is that in some indefinable way it provides ample the room for glee. The openness of the 2010 production, the fact that the lights were up in the house, that one could read the libretto, drink bottled water and go in and out with (relative) freedom may have played a part in assuring the largely under-forty audience that this was something very far from their grandmothers’ operatic experience. Whether that assurance, along with the young audience it recruited, is transferable to conventional opera houses, with their different rules and habits, remains to be seen. But it is a lesson that could be learned.

BEAUTY AND/OR THE POLITICAL

These three lions, along with the tale of their operatic achievements, illustrate the degree to which opera had a troubled relationship with the postwar avant-garde. For many ‘serious’ European composers born in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, the idea of writing grand opera was only to be confronted with distaste, if not representing outright anathema. After all, one thing the Second World War was meant to have burned from the playbook was allegiance to regressive bourgeois genres. There is an oft-told tale that vividly illustrates the pattern. When the great French modernist Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) was approached at age sixty-three by the Paris Opéra, his initial reaction was to refuse instantly. Yet temptation had been offered, and over many years he produced Saint François d’Assise (first performance 1983), a speech-imbued opera with glorious, complicated instrumental sounds and a veritable catalogue of bells. The vocal writing, which relies on intonation more than melody, has far more liturgical than operatic sound in its DNA. What is, though, profoundly operatic about Saint François is the massive musical resources it requires, and the expense demanded by its production. In recent years it has, in recognition of its acoustic wonders and grandeur, been reappraised, with a handful of new productions mounted over the last decade.

The last thirty or so years have demonstrated that such visceral reactions against opera were generational and temporary. And while many operas written since 1980 are unmistakably the progeny of twentieth-century musical modernism, they exhibit different, more open attitudes to opera’s history, along with a degree of optimism about how heavily that history need weigh on the genre’s present-day viability. These are composers for whom a later birth has proven a liberating benison.

John Adams (b. 1947) remains a polarizing figure, whose immense popular success over decades has come about primarily with operas that are conspicuous for the immediacy of their subject matter. Nixon in China (1987), written in collaboration with Alice Goodman (libretto) and Peter Sellars (direction and ‘concept’), used as its source material the US president’s historic diplomatic mission to China, which had occurred less than two decades earlier. In taking the path of such actualité, Adams went against the grain of post-1945 operatic fashion. Of course, there had been up-to-date operas in the past, but almost all of them were comic. Opera buffa of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to be set in near-contemporary times (Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is a classic case, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore another), where social critique could function with maximum clarity. As we saw in the last chapter, the ‘opera-crisis’ of 1920s Germany also produced a string of Zeitopern, in which the machines – and attitudes – of modernity were defiantly paraded, again usually for comic effect. But Zeitoper was a short-lived fashion, perhaps because operas that celebrate the here-and-now would seem, at first glance, to invite their own datedness. Write a Zeitoper about current events and, pretty soon, you will not be current.

Given this circumstance, and also given the ignominy with which Nixon’s tenure as president ended, the fact that Adams’s Nixon treated the visit to China as an epic rather than comic encounter gave audiences and critics quite a shock – for some perhaps even greater than the extravagant sexual antics of Le Grand Macabre, premiered only a decade earlier. Opera, Adams seemed to tell audiences, does have a future, can address head on contemporary society’s concerns. On the other hand it is difficult, given the nature of his musical language, to imagine any aesthetic outcome other than epic, timeless distance. Adams used as his starting point the so-called ‘minimalist’ style of composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, a technique going back to the 1960s and 1970s, in which superimposed sequences of endlessly repeated musical figures form dense blocks of internally active sound, which shift gradually to other blocks over long stretches of time. Glass’s operas, perhaps particularly Satyagraha, shimmer somewhere behind Nixon. Adams imitates the block construction, but his blocks move more frequently, in the process varying in orchestration (sometimes piquant, Stravinsky-reminiscent combinations, sometimes big-band-inspired) and gaining harmonic direction (often with chord progressions a major or minor third apart). The effect is close to film music, especially the kind of film music that accompanies grand outdoor vistas. Characters and prominent choral groups declaim the text with rigorous fidelity to natural accentuation, but with melodic shapes that derive from the sonorous orchestral backdrop. There are even da capo arias – knowing gestures towards opera’s past. This warm bath of vast, slow-changing sound is no place to find comedy; even Richard Nixon becomes heroic by default, simply by being present in the soundscape.

The experience of seeing events within living memory, narrated in an unmistakably high style but wrapped in a familiar musical idiom, proved irresistible at the box office. Although some critics complained about the musical manners, and although more austere composers were predictably dismissive, Adams brought a new audience to the opera house, many of them visitors from cinema and other mass media. Small wonder that he and his collaborative team were soon commissioned again. The result, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), was even more up to date: it takes as its theme the 1985 takeover by Palestinian terrorists of an Italian cruise ship and the subsequent murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish-American passenger. Klinghoffer is, as one might expect, darker in tone than Nixon; but not much so. The outdoor music and epic stance are in many ways identical. The opera begins with a pair of choruses: first of Exiled Palestinians, then of Exiled Jews; the sense of a balanced, even-handed approach to the opposing forces is established by a detached, oratorio-like atmosphere that continues throughout. As with Nixon, Adams’s musical characteristics mean that onstage action is hardly possible; even the most obvious events have to be delivered through elaborate narration.

The perceived lack of musical differentiation – probably inevitable given Adams’s compositional style – caused a controversy. While few were concerned when Richard Nixon was ennobled by immersion in a minimalist hum, Palestinian terrorists were another matter. Accusations that the opera was anti-Semitic or condoned terrorism soon appeared, and have continued even decades after the premiere, reaching new levels of intensity when the opera was staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2014.²⁰ Adams was hurt by the controversy, and seemed surprised that his opera could have raised such passions. As he said in one interview during the 1990s: ‘All of us did a lot of research … I read a great deal of Edward Said’s writings. I know Alice Goodman [the librettist] read most of the Koran.’²¹

This reference to Said, a literary critic of great distinction and up to his death in 2003 one of the most powerful pro-Palestinian voices in the Israel–Palestine conflict, takes us back to issues aired in Chapter 15, in particular of opera playing a cameo role in what, in the wake of Said, has become known as post-colonial criticism. Adams seemed to be using Said as a kind of guarantor of respectability; it is thus worth knowing that Said himself, who had a significant second career as a music critic, wrote at some length about the opera. In general he found it even-handed; but, as he pointed out, that was because he judged the musical style incapable of taking any strong position, or indeed of expressing any meaningful dramatic contrast. As Said put it, ‘[the] music … frequently sounds strangely retrospective, vaguely or only partially convinced of where it’s going.’²² Famously, it is only with the final aria, sung by Marilyn Klinghoffer, that specific and personal grief breaks into a musical idiom that has otherwise distanced itself from events.

It is interesting – especially after the 2014 protests in New York City – to indulge in a thought experiment, an experiment that queries the role music plays in opera. Periodically through opera’s history we come across the phenomenon of substitute libretti being invented for existing musical scores. Political censorship could require retitling of operas, relocating their action and renaming their characters. Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera is an example: if the hero who gets murdered is the real King Gustav III of Sweden, and his presence is forbidden, then just move the plot to Massachusetts and call him Riccardo, Count of Warwick. The opera is marvellous in either circumstance; the frisson of depicting a real historical murder (or not) has no bearing on the composer’s ability to pack in the public and move them to tears, because the music has an alchemy that survives alterations to the libretto. If the libretto of The Death of Klinghoffer were changed, to become a story about – say – the murder of a longshoreman by Teamsters in the 1920s, would the music be able to recruit equally passionate attention for this less controversial plot? The very impossibility of the substitution suggests the degree to which contemporary ‘political’ opera can depend on its narrative – its topicality – to make a mark.

Adams can be viewed as a foundational figure for a new form of Zeitoper, with recent works such as Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2011) and Philip Glass’s The Perfect American (2013) all demonstrating how real-life scandal and celebrity make excellent operatic subjects. Yet in the wake of the Klinghoffer controversy Adams himself retreated for a time to instrumental music and oratorio. He has since returned, in particular with Doctor Atomic (2005), which features J. Robert Oppenheimer as its protagonist and involves the making of the first atomic bomb. Whether this will enjoy Nixon’s fate is a riddle for time to solve.

THE HERE-AND-NOW AND THE MYTHICAL PAST

In spite of the successes of Adams and others, most contemporary operas do not rely on real life or topical headlines, preferring to access a very different and venerable convention for operatic subjects: the world of myth and antiquity, the treasury of spoken drama from centuries past. The British composer Thomas Adès (b. 1971) wrote his first grand opera, The Tempest (after Shakespeare, but to a modernized English libretto by Meredith Oakes), in 2004. It was immediately hailed as a major event. Although adapting Shakespeare quite freely, Oakes kept the bare bones of one of his most famous inserted songs, which becomes a song-within-the-opera. Ariel (soprano) sings it to lure Ferdinand to Prospero’s shore:

Five fathoms deep your father lies,

Those are pearls that were his eyes,

Nothing of him that was mortal is the same,

His bones are coral,

He has suffered a sea change,

Into something rich and strange,

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:

I can hear them: ding dong bell.

Songs-within-the-opera are time-honoured, and are usually, as here, set apart musically and formally – simple and hyper-melodious in relation to the surrounding context. When such rules are adhered to, beautiful singing and well-formed melody become antiquated styles: inserted songs can, in other words, constitute a brief aesthetic vacation – for composers as well as listeners.

Although modernized in diction and vocabulary, Shakespeare’s poem remains basically intact, a precious object within a libretto that radically restructures most of its dramatic source. Adès responds by giving the song a colour apart. Elsewhere, the opera’s predominant musical ancestor is the expressionism of speech-opera c. 1930, a technique that originated in early twentieth-century modernism with roots in Wagner and Musorgsky. Prospero (baritone) often sings along these lines, tending to atonal anguish articulated atop loud, elaborate orchestral ideas. Ariel is a coloratura role with a tessitura so high as to seem physiologically dangerous, and when she’s in Prospero’s musical orbit she squeaks eerily in his image, as if she’s Lulu on helium.

But her real musical voice, as manifest in the song-within-the-opera, comes from the spirit world, which is evidently a quieter place. ‘Full fathom five’ was already an uncanny poem in its Shakespearean incarnation, with its image of a body under the water undergoing metamorphosis into nacreous matter and gems. On cue, several magical things happen in the music, the most audible of which is a strange low sonority – a kind of vibration made from strings and barely audible percussion – which conjures up the bells. We hear it tolling on ‘nymphs’, ‘[hour]ly’ and ‘knell’, a sound at the lowest end of the audible spectrum, contrasting across a voided middle with Ariel’s stratospheric vocal line. Since Ariel is mischievous, she sings the four syllables of ‘I can hear them’ as the Westminster chimes, as if she’s a miniature Big Ben. And three times, as foil to the three quiet knells, a single syllable is blasted out over dissonant orchestral wreckage for an alarming fortissimo instant, ‘fath[oms]’, ‘are [coral]’ and ‘[ding]-dong’.

Throughout the song, Ariel’s vocal line is suspended against pianissimo high strings shifting among beguiling orchestral sonorities. As well as the pleasure their beauty gives, another major departure from the opera’s standard musical progress involves its word–music relationship: Ariel intones each of her syllables slowly, lovingly, voice to the fore; and to a regular pulse, each syllable the same length, slow-motion steps in melodic arches adding up to regular phrases. This is powerfully unlike the staccato syllabic declamation elsewhere in The Tempest, which uses the metric-meander technique characteristic of speech-opera. In the song there is a sense that, within Ariel’s gentle pulse, we have gained a breathing space, a place of repose.

The end of The Tempest recaptures the otherworldly suspension that characterized Ariel’s song. This reprise is fitting, since Prospero cedes the stage (‘Farewell, farewell. / Now I’ve no art. / Pity, take my part’) and Caliban, shorn of darkness, is given the final lines. But Ariel remains as an invisible presence, her voice transformed into wordless sonority echoing Caliban’s singing:

In the gleam of the sand, Caliban,

In the hiss of the spray

In the deep of the bay,

In the gulf, in the swell, Caliban.

The opera ends on a single bass note held seemingly for ever, with a three-note motif (‘Ca-li-ban’) whispered between the siren voice, piccolos and flutes, celesta, harp – all instruments of the afterworld.

Although set apart from the often spiky musical exterior heard elsewhere in the opera, the ending of The Tempest does indeed belong to a type, but the tradition to which it gestures has a very different pedigree. The use of wordless female voice (or voices) is an ancient musical code for transcendence and transfiguration, as are immobile or slow-shifting sonorities. Whole treatises could be written on stasis and operatic choruses singing ‘Ah-ah’ or ‘Oh-oh’. Such conceits were much in vogue in Orientalist works of the nineteenth century, in the strange female Ah-ing of the ‘Immenso Fthà’ episode in Verdi’s Aida or the Indian dance scenes in Delibes’s Lakmé. Aida is also pertinent for pioneering a favourite type of late twentieth-century operatic finale, what we might call the blissed-out ending. The ‘Evening Song’ that ends Philip Glass’s Satyagraha (1979), with its endlessly rising Phrygian scales, is a numinous example. Harmonic activity ceases, tonal stasis sets in, everything becomes very quiet as lights and life flicker out; choruses (sometimes present, often offstage) reduce to a hum, and an assortment of old-world and afterworld instruments repeat melodic fragments, circling and circular, with lazy flutes, little bells chiming or harps pinging serenely. Such atmospheres imply that the music is not really ending, just departing into a faraway realm beyond the senses, like a ship disappearing into the mist.

L’Amour de loin (2000), a debut opera by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), generously distributes acoustic delights of this kind. The libretto by Amin Maalouf is assembled from mysterious vignettes centring on Jaufré Rudel (baritone), a twelfth-century French troubadour. Jaufré encounters a nameless Pilgrim (mezzo-soprano), who tells him of Clémence (soprano), a beautiful lady in Tripoli in the mysterious East, to whom Jaufré journeys, only to die in Clémence’s arms. This is French symbolist theatre for a new century. Saariaho writes soundscape or ‘spectral’ music (a technique in which compositional decisions are informed by computer analysis of timbre), massing rich sonorities – instrumental booming, ringing, apparitional chord clouds, trilling like birdsong – into a mutable acoustic tapestry. Jaufré’s music also channels medieval chanson or chant into triple-metre vocal phrases with simple accompaniment and small vocal ornaments against harp strokes. But ‘spectral’ is an apposite word in another sense, because his chanson is perpetually heard through a filter of distance, producing uncanny resonances.

At the beginning of Act 2, the Pilgrim travels back over the sea to Tripoli, and an interlude representing the journey and arrival at Clémence’s palace calls on wordless choruses for its power. Against low-frequency rumbles, harmonies that have no centre of gravity and a further collection of afterworld instruments, the chorus’s repeated ‘Ah-ah’ conveys pure awe, as if invisible spectators cannot remain silent in the face of some great mystery. It is a sound-world strongly resembling Bernard Herrmann’s extraordinary score for Henry Levin’s 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth: an acoustic of wonderment, with tremendous power to move the listener. The comparison might seem heretical to some. When quizzed publicly about her operatic genealogy, Saariaho referred to only two works, Messaien’s Saint François and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. This strikes a note of high-art authenticity, but the genealogy could in fact be writ much more broadly. Indeed, perhaps her soundscapes attract us and seem meaningful in part because they call up multiple memories of music that has referenced the otherworldly: certainly to earlier composers who translated the whispers of the natural world into musical form (Debussy); but also to popular evocations of distant planets (in classic science fiction films) and to other disquieting soundscapes (Brian Easdale’s score for Powell and Pressburger’s film Black Narcissus, 1947).

Written on Skin by the British composer George Benjamin (b. 1960) was also a debut grand opera. It appeared in 2012, has already seen multiple revivals and is programmed into several future opera seasons. Alex Ross in The New Yorker announced it as Benjamin’s ‘long-awaited masterpiece’, and ‘the work of a genius unleashed’.²³ Its libretto, by Martin Crimp, again retells a medieval story. A wealthy Protector (bass-baritone) employs a young man, here called simply the Boy (counter-tenor), to create an illuminated manuscript celebrating his family and achievements. The Protector’s wife, Agnès (soprano), becomes interested in the Boy, perhaps seeing him as a route to sexual awakening. The scene is thus laid for a classic operatic triangle in the manner of Wagner’s Die Walküre (Act 1), or Debussy’s Pélléas et Mélisande, or Puccini’s Il tabarro; perhaps a closer comparison, though, is to Britten’s Billy Budd (an older man, assailed with repressed homoerotic attraction to a pure youth who has entered his domain). The denouement, though, is more violent even than Puccini’s cadaver-under-the-cloak: the Protector, mad with jealousy, murders the Boy and forces Agnès to eat his heart; defiant to the last, she leaps to her death from the balcony of their house.

Crimp’s libretto language has many narrative quirks. The text is full of oblique gestures and distancing effects, in particular by having characters enunciate their own stage directions, typically set by Benjamin in rapid staccato asides, or refer to themselves and others in the third person. The action is set even further at a distance by being framed: a trio of Angels (mezzo, tenor and a counter-tenor who doubles as the Boy) comment on the characters from the perspective of the present day – as they say in the opening scene, ‘Cancel all flights from the international airport and people the sky with angels.’ The final grim pursuit and suicide is not sung and acted out by Agnès and the Protector, but rather described by the Boy-as-Angel, who makes it into an illustration in his book, ‘See how her body has dropped from the balcony – how I pause her in mid-fall – at the exact centre of the page.’

The musical language makes occasional gestures to medieval practice, hocket-like textures and other ars antiqua revenants, and the orchestra includes a viola da gamba: such borrowings from early music are yet another compositional device the opera shares with L’Amour de loin. But Benjamin’s orchestra responds with far greater alacrity – indeed, with startling, virtuosic invention – to images in the libretto. There is, for instance, a wonderful word-painting moment in Act 1, scene 4, when light shimmering through water is brought to our ears via a phalanx of percussion. Underneath these ornamental elements, however, the opera bears a rich resemblance to the hundred-year-old Erwartung/Wozzeck template, the gold standard of atonal modernist music drama. Erwartung is powerfully evoked by Agnès at moments (there are many) of expressionist angst and erotic sickness. One moment where the echo is loud occurs in the climactic penultimate scene. The heroine’s final words are ‘Nothing, nothing, not if you strip me to the bone with acid, will ever take the taste of that Boy’s heart out of my mouth.’ To match the horror vocally, her line has huge, angular leaps, with a prolonged high C on ‘mouth’ (her last utterance in the opera).

The Wozzeck model, which was mentioned by numerous reviewers, is obvious on many other levels: Written on Skin, like its famous antecedent, is made up of three roughly thirty-minute acts, each divided into five scenes; in spite of its largely atonal idiom, there are frequent pitch anchors (mostly in the form of pedal points in the orchestra) to orientate both singers and listeners; there are orchestral interludes between the scenes, forbidding any opportunity for applause that might break the dramatic flow, and also encouraging a sense that the work is at base an orchestral one with vocal accompaniment. These gestures to modernist tradition, the fact of their familiarity, surely contribute to the enthusiasm with which audiences have reacted. But there may also be a more uncomfortable reason: Written on Skin brings back once again a familiar modernist muse, a female protagonist whose released sexuality leads inexorably to her objectification and, ultimately, to retribution of extreme violence. Think of Salome, or of Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova. Watching women being represented as writhing sexual creatures, then watching them being punished, is something that – it seems – never fails to please a segment of the public.

There is, finally, another side to Ross’s bestowal of those epithets ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius’: the sense that, as loaded words, they lead us back to the comfort zone of the historical canon rather than propel us forward into the future. In this context, we might ponder the following distinction. Wozzeck and Written on Skin sound in many ways rather similar, even though separated by nearly a century. But Wagner in the 1850s was not writing operas that people extolled by saying they wonderfully evoked or significantly resembled works from the 1750s. Tristan does not sound like late Handel or early Gluck. The years 1759 to 1859 saw such a flow of invention, metamorphosis, formal earthquakes, expansions of operatic ways and means, that the end point, even if you substitute another composer for Wagner, bears but faint resemblance to the beginning. By the twenty-first century, the imagined possibilities and inventions, the acoustic surprises, the gorgeous variations on the past themes, are no longer proliferating in this way, so profusely and at such speed. Operatic time, so to speak, has slowed to lento.

The Tempest, L’Amour de loin and Written on Skin were all premiered within the last two decades and have all been revived many times – not just dutifully but with true enthusiasm. As so often in the past, the novelty of very new opera, the energy of the succès d’estime, itself generates elation and animation. The interesting question is whether these works will resonate when they are in a changed context and with an audience not yet born when they were premiered. That is a question about marvellous ephemerality and the entrance ticket to the museum, one that at present we cannot answer. What is clear, though, is that all these operas embrace an ambience at some considerable distance from our own, as do many recent works. One is also struck by some curious parallels. Why twelfth-century troubadours and artists (L’Amour, Written on Skin)? Why Mediterranean sea travel (Tempest, L’Amour)? Perhaps timelessness is alluring because there remains some pervasive uneasiness about opera’s fragile position in contemporary culture. But, that notwithstanding, all these living composers have given hope to those who believe that opera as a cultural institution can survive by means of new works, by transcending the museum. To assess how realistic or how pious that hope may be – indeed to investigate opera’s survival as the twenty-first century rolls on – is among the concerns of our final chapter.