21

We are alone in the forest

The Second World War was not far distant and opera was entering old age when René Clair’s film comedy Le Million (1931) appeared. To appreciate its homage to opera, we need to know the plot. An Italian tenor has purchased a jacket from a second-hand shop. Unbeknownst to him, in the jacket pocket is a winning lottery ticket belonging to Michel, a poor artist whose girlfriend, Béatrice, a ballet dancer at the Opéra Lyrique, gave Michel’s jacket away. Michel thus has an excellent reason for being very angry indeed with Béatrice. The two temporarily estranged lovers, together with others eager to acquire the winning ticket, end up at the opera, where the Italian tenor, donning the jacket as his costume, has been quarrelling backstage with his nemesis, a large blond soprano. The curtain goes up. Standing around in a forest are brigands, led by the head brigand, the soprano’s admirer (baritone), who objects to the soprano’s liaison with his arch-enemy. The brigands clink goblets, and sing the melody of the Soviet national anthem to the words, ‘À nous l’ivresse! / à nous les caresses / d’une ravissante maîtresse!’ (Give us drunkenness! Give us the caresses of a ravishing mistress!) At the end of this chorus, tenor and soprano stroll onto a scene in which brigands are in plain sight everywhere. The tenor launches into a recitative, announcing ‘Nous sommes seuls, bien aimée! Viens avec moi dans la forêt parfumée!’ (We are alone, beloved! Come with me into the scented forest!) ‘We are alone’ is priceless: brigands a couple of feet away look at him in bewilderment, as well they might (see Figure 45).

There is, in the entire corpus of cinema, no greater or more delicate expression of affection for opera, of delight in its absurdities and faith in its transformative powers, than Le Million. The powers are demonstrated most obviously by a love duet heard just before the brigand scene, a number in which the warring tenor and soprano are united in the temporary bliss of singing together. It also cures once and for all the anger and resentment between Michel and Béatrice, who have become accidentally trapped behind a piece of scenery just as the curtain rises for the duet, and thus are forced – cold and distant at first – to stay in place and listen. Tenor and soprano seat themselves on a rustic bench, and begin: ‘Nous sommes seuls enfin, ce soir!’ This evening we are alone at last! At last we are free to speak openly! Far from the world and its agony! The tenor begins a solo passage: what sorrow clouds thy sense? What, my love, is my offence? And Michel, hearing this, gestures silently with the same message to Béatrice. The heroine demurs in song, Béatrice demurs in pantomime. The hero entreats vocally, Michel entreats silently. The tenor’s voice soars, the soprano competes, Michel mimes eternal devotion and Béatrice at last smiles. The duet ends ‘nous sommes seuls dans la fôret’ (we are alone in the forest), and both couples embrace. A stagehand, a busy working man, one of the small army needed to create this onstage magic, throws rose petals down from the catwalks, but this unmasking of artifice does nothing to dull the effect. Whether or not the lottery ticket is retrieved, we are morally certain that all will be well with Michel and Béatrice. We know this because opera has done its work.

From the 1930s through to the 1950s, at a time when writing a new opera for the theatre would become an ever-harder task, the institution of opera was so high on the popular radar in America and Europe that it was thought completely reasonable to make and expect profit from opera-themed movies. In 1930, the American baritone Lawrence Tibbett starred in The Rogue Song, the first of several films built around his sublime voice and not inconsiderable masculine charm. The film’s plot (drawn from a Léhar operetta) is idiotic but, as one contemporary review put it, ‘When Mr Tibbett sings, one cares not why.’¹ In 1935, Tibbett would star in Metropolitan, a comedy about a vengeful diva who, scorned by the Metropolitan Opera, decides to open her own opera company on a shoestring. In Maytime (1937), Jeanette MacDonald plays a glamorous opera singer whose love is divided between her career and Nelson Eddy, and who makes the wrong choice (career). The same year saw Hitting a New High, starring the coloratura soprano Lily Pons as a nightclub singer who dreams of performing opera and who is willing, clad only in feathers, to impersonate a primitive diva from the South American rainforest to further her cause. The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935), mentioned in Chapter One, casts opera in a double light. Opera going clearly represents stuffy high culture, the province of the rich and privileged. But operatic singing is a joy that can be experienced by anyone, by those doing it as well as those hearing it, and in whatever venue.

As if to demonstrate that truth, the great Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior appeared in two feature films, Two Sisters from Boston (1946) and Luxury Liner (1948), both of which include movie-star ingénues (Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell respectively) whose characters’ governing passions are to become opera singers. Melchior is seen recording the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the former and performing the Spring Song from Die Walküre in the latter. In Mad About Opera (Follie per l’opera, 1949), set in post-Blitz London, a roguish Italian named Guido Marchi wants to rebuild a church, and decides that organizing an opera gala is his best chance of funding the enterprise. A Disney cartoon short from 1946, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met (voice work by Nelson Eddy), shows that in the century past young children were assumed to be connoisseurs of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Tristan und Isolde, tragedy, comedy and Moby-Dick all at once. Nor should we forget Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951), and especially in Serenade (1956), where – just to heighten already fraught clashes between high and low, Italian and Aryan, poor and rich – his character performs the Italian Tenor’s aria from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

The social role played by opera in such concoctions was not entirely straightforward. Opera could stand for cultural hauteur, set in opposition to the more down-to-earth future, the nightclub music in Hitting A New High or the smoky music-hall joints that Kathryn Grayson must work in to finance her singing lessons in Two Sisters. But operatic singing was another matter, and it invariably had the magical force it was given in Le Million: to assuage ill, for a few moments to enchant and transform ordinary existence into paradise. That the glorious singing is often done by silly people, perhaps too old or too fat, perhaps with eccentricities that somehow set them apart, is a feature of its spell. Opera appears in almost completely positive forms, as something that – even when stuffy – is a source of delight.

After the 1950s, the commercial film industry largely stopped producing humane comedies that took grand opera and opera singers as prime subject matter. After that point, when commercial cinema did (and does) make films about opera, the art form, along with operatic singing, is often no longer endearing and benign. In extraordinary ways, to track ‘opera’ in cinema over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is to see a kind of seismographic trace of its place in culture. The seismograph shows opera’s fates and fortunes in modern society, marks the periods in which it was ordinary and unexceptional to know and care about opera, and those – nowadays – in which ‘opera’ is often seen as a bizarre object from dubious and dying places, above all a representative of European-based elitism. This is what happens in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in a scene where Ripley, a novice murderer, attends a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin in Rome. The opera-house scene underlines Ripley’s newly acquired fondness for expensive European high culture: he has just murdered a friend to provide himself with the wealth necessary to indulge his new appetites. At the same time, ‘opera’ is not purely ornamental in Ripley. It adds psychological intensity, since the extract we see performed – Lensky’s death by Onegin’s bullet – becomes for Ripley a traumatic reminder of the murder. A tear of regret descends his cheek as he watches Lensky expire. This is a relatively nuanced deployment of ‘opera’, which is once more assigned the power to move its listeners, even (or perhaps especially) when they are otherwise deemed unmovable. In worst-case scenarios, and there are many from the 1980s and 1990s, opera simply defaults into the reliable cinematic signifier of kitschy decadence, or a cliché of gay-ness – as in Patrick Conrad’s 1987 film Mascara, which features scary transvestites who do opera karaoke for fun; or Philadelphia (1993), in which Tom Hanks does tragic-opera karaoke to a recording of Maria Callas.

Films in which opera and operatic singing are friendly elements gave way to those in which opera-house scenes become ornamental places to conjure up alien grandeur. This says something important about attitudes towards the genre, as well as the audience it is imagined to address, and the news is not good. The movie seismograph whispers to us that there were several decades earlier in the twentieth century when large numbers of ordinary citizens were familiar with opera, felt positive about its value, supported its consumption and continuation. It would be extraordinarily bold to claim, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that this is still the case. Indie cinema occasionally delivers a throwback to the old ways, as does István Szabó’s Meeting Venus (1991), a backstage drama depicting a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser rescued from disaster, or Dustin Hoffmann’s comedy Quartet (2012), which features endearing opera-singer oldsters making mischief in a retirement home. But the newer truth was exemplified as far back as Federico Fellini’s The Ship Sails On (E la nave va, 1983), set on the eve of the First World War, which features a ship of fools peopled by opera singers and aristocratic fanatics, benighted and mad on the whole; it has a scene in which a famous Russian bass demonstrates the magical power of operatic singing by hypnotizing a chicken with his low notes.

THE PARADOX OF EASY ACCESS

If the movie seismograph is correct this falling-away on the part of the general public has been going on for more than fifty years. But, in one specific sense, a decline in knowledge and affection for opera is paradoxical. Popular regard for opera has shrunk during the very years in which experiencing opera – in the form of recordings – has become more and more effortless. We now have an unparalleled archive of operatic performances from the past and present at our disposal – compared to the 1950s the treasury is vast and ridiculously easy to access. If there is no longer widespread general knowledge about opera, this is not because it has become more difficult to find or more expensive to consume. Indeed, the operatic experience now involves not so much live performance (still costly to attend, still a rare thing for most), not recordings that we have had to buy and can then hold in our hands (a dying technology), as it does extraordinary online collections like the streaming services offered by large opera houses or the free mass archive of YouTube, an ever-growing repository. In one of YouTube’s many rooms, we can see and hear operas otherwise virtually unknown, assessing for ourselves whether they might one day find a place in the repertory. In another we can be taught that opera in performance is a constantly changing art. We can now easily compare legions of singers from the distant past: not only hear their voices but in some cases also see how they acted, assess their body language and gestures, thus appreciating how operatic ‘realism’ constantly changes with the changing times. The Comments facility on YouTube additionally acts as a barometer of the obsessions and passionate identity-formation that opera so often inspires.

An example, taken virtually at random from among countless thousands, can demonstrate what has been gained. The great French tenor Georges Thill (1897–1984), whose 1932 recording of ‘Unis dès la plus tendre enfance’ from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride is posted several times, offers an object lesson in a kind of French diction that has all but disappeared (numerous modern renderings, both amateur and professional, can serve as ready comparison, and we can even compare and contrast with Fritz Wunderlich’s German-language version). We may also discover something about the mutability of early recordings as they are now passed down to us: the CD transfer is, it seems, at a different speed from the original 78, which makes for a noticeable modification of effect. This last snippet of information comes via the Comments facility, where we can learn from and, if the spirit so moves, participate in a multi-lingual celebration of Thill and this recording, a carnival that is mostly joyous but can on occasions be testy in the extreme (the operatic Internet, with all those passionate identities in dialogue, can be a surprisingly angry place). In short, YouTube enables and then gives voice to a new operatic community, one that may have started life in a public forum but that can now make use of the archive for many intimate functions, not least providing a means by which opera lovers can share links privately among themselves, conversing through music even when separated physically.

Another form of mass sharing for the operatic community has come into being with the phenomenon of HD opera broadcasts, pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera in late 2006 and now imitated by numerous companies across the globe. These provide, via a network of participating cinemas, ‘live’ or delayed transmissions of real-time performances. There is no doubt that the total audience for opera in the theatre could in theory be markedly increased by such broadcasts. But has this been the case? Are there droves of new recruits – people who come into the HD cinema broadcast not knowing about opera and who leave eager to find out more? Or is it rather that a slice of the public already consuming opera has merely discovered a less expensive and easier-access form? That the latter situation prevails is suggested not just by the demographics of the HD audiences (which seem largely to match those of opera-house audiences), but by the fact that HD cinema audiences typically observe the protocols of theatrical attendance: silent attention, a prohibition against coming and going in mid-performance, the interval drinks, even the persistence of cathartic applause at the end. The suspicion arises that ever-easier access to opera may do little to ameliorate an overall attrition in the numbers of those who care whether opera exists at all.

THE CINEMATIC TURN

For any account of opera that poses difficult questions about its consumption and dissemination in recent decades, the issue of opera and video recording is critical. The presence of opera within film, which has been going on for more than a hundred years, has been joined by a newer counterpart, the wholesale conversion of opera into an audio-visual media phenomenon, consumed via screens both small and large. Besides HD broadcasts of live events, and the DVD performance archive, there is the strange case of studio-filmed opera. The heyday of studio-filmed opera came in the 1970s and 1980s, and it has since largely disappeared. This eccentric byway in the history of opera and modern media nonetheless includes several classic films by fabled directors, among them Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute (1975), Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Otello (1986). In all such films, the singers (or sometimes actors) lip-synch to a studio recording of the piece. Studio-filmed opera of the 1970s and 1980s looked back to two foundational works, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), and (discussed in Chapter 15) Clemente Fracassi’s Aida (1953), which starred Sophia Loren as Aida-on-screen, with Renata Tebaldi supplying the voice. Tales of Hoffmann remains, with Bergman’s Flute, the most visually imaginative instance of the form.

There is a sense in which the true history of opera in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is not in a roll call of new works and their parade of styles, nor even an account of the evolution of their staging by strong interpretative moves; it is rather in opera’s ever-more-intense dance with recording and media culture. This new pattern of consumption, which began with recordings and radio broadcasts – sound-only media – and culminates today in HD broadcasts and a DVD recording culture, has upended the practices of opera-going and the acquisition of operatic knowledge, but it has also had profound influences on opera’s visual manifestations. With mounting sophistication, staging is now often conceived with the cameras in mind, and sometimes privileges the camera above the view from Row M in the stalls. One recent example: the Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring staging (2010–12), widely disliked, sometimes placed singers downstage in a shallow trench, a design element that, to those in most parts of the theatre, made them appear cut off at the knees. But this in-house experience was not the point. Hidden cameras for the HD broadcasts could do artful up-angles from within the trench, so that cinemagoers could see entire figures dramatically framed and foreshortened.

To take another obvious example, video recording has made newly problematic opera’s traditional generosity about some singers’ lack of conventional physical beauty. Opera may remain, as we put it in our first chapter, one of the few contemporary spectacles in which what you look like counts for less than how you sound, a marvellous exception to the tyranny of gorgeousness. But the constraints are narrowing because the close-ups made possible by camerawork are unforgiving. The more we consume opera on screen, in forms that are shaped by cinematic techniques such as elaborate micro-acting with eye movement and facial gestures, the more we expect operatic experience to conform to the terms of mainstream cinema.

Nowadays, when we see a video recording of a performance such as the Metropolitan’s 1982 Lucia di Lammermoor (which even then was a time capsule from the 1960s: Joan Sutherland and Alfredo Kraus were the stars), we are struck by the artifice. There is a blissful insouciance with regard to acting (the occasional glare will suffice), a noble disregard for moving around on stage. Singing – focused musicality emerging directly from the human body – carries the day completely. We are left with a kind of hyper-consciousness of the performance: put in positive terms, a consciousness of our distance from the plot, and freedom from being absorbed by it. The media era in which we now reside forces us to confront anew some fundamental questions about the source of our pleasure in opera. When we experience an opera, are we to be – should we strive to be – absorbed in the fictional world, suspending disbelief? Or is part of opera’s bliss a consciousness that art is being performed – often with great virtuosity, but sometimes with tongue in cheek even in the most tragic works – by real human beings?

BURN EVERYTHING

The vast YouTube archive, opera houses’ recent efforts to record and then disseminate their every product, the pileup of artefacts in opera’s living museum – all these things can be celebrated, but they do also have a disquieting underside. As the archival tonnage increases, there is a sense in which its contents can become an obsession and a distraction. Repeated visits to the treasury of recordings are, as a gesture, analogous to our museum-like approach to the operatic repertory, in which the old is fervently and lovingly preserved, and far more often performed than any new work. But beyond this, ever-evolving recording technologies may lead to the impression that nothing operatic need be ephemeral: that everything can be and should be preserved, for repeated enjoyment and, we might fondly imagine, for the edification of future listeners. This new sense of all-encompassing permanence is of course comforting, but it encourages us to forget that ephemerality is in some ways the essence of the theatrical. It is the forest fire that clears the terrain for new growth, a purging that even ancient practices constantly need. As we have noted throughout this history, new operas appeared in dazzling profusion precisely in those eras when the past was utterly fungible and when the ephemeral held no terrors. Opera’s survival in the era of recordings turns out to be full of strategic complications.

Richard Wagner, although certainly not lacking a lively sense of his own world-historical importance, nonetheless considered as early as the 1850s the possibility that permanence and ephemerality could become entwined in a dance of death. In those years, in exile from Germany, he was at work on the four libretti of what would become Der Ring des Nibelungen; by 1856 he had finished the music for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. The epic scope of the Ring was now clear, but Wagner found himself in the alienating position of working entirely in the abstract. There was no foreseeable opportunity for a performance: indeed, there would be no staging of the entire Ring for a further two decades. Being no stranger to the consolations of a sudden philosophical impulse, he turned necessity into virtue, and began to imagine radical alternatives to the drear weight of conventional operatic production. In 1850, writing to Theodor Uhlig about Siegfrieds Tod (a libretto he had yet to set to music), he proposed a kind of temporary, one-time-only event:

Here, in Zurich, where I now chance to be, and where many conditions are far from unfavourable, I should erect a rough theatre of planks and beams, according to my own plans, in a beautiful meadow near the city, and furnish it merely with the scenery and machinery necessary for Siegfried. Then I would select the best available artists and would invite them to come to Zurich. I should go about selecting my orchestra in the same way … When everything was in order, I should give three performances of Siegfried in the course of a week; after the third, the theatre would be pulled down and the score burned.²

In 1855, he conceived of a Ring taking place on Lake Lucerne, to be staged on an archipelago of barges strung together especially for the performances, which would be dismantled and floated away afterwards.³ A threat to burn the Ring scores, with allusions to their transcending normal performance standards, recurs through the 1850s and 1860s, as in this letter to Franz Liszt from March 1855:

What I am creating at present shall never see the light except in perfectly congenial surroundings; on this I will in future concentrate all my strength, my pride, and my resignation. If I die before having produced these works, I shall leave them to you; and if you die without having been able to produce them in a dignified manner, you must burn them: let that be settled.⁴

Much of this was, of course, posturing mingled with self-pity. Wagner would not seriously have advocated that his work be consigned to oblivion, and the only reply open to his interlocutors was immediate and rallying protest. Yet it is still worth pausing over Wagner’s radicalism, so contrary to the conservationist impulses already invading opera by 1850. As we have seen in earlier chapters, by this point in opera’s history a repertory of past works in present performance was starting to be established. The idea of unassailable operatic masterpieces from the past – by Mozart and Beethoven in certain areas (especially where German was spoken), by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi everywhere else – was taking hold.

So Wagner’s proposal calls forth a question: was there some alternative to this preservationist tendency, to the beginnings of the operatic museum; and if so what might it be? Wagner’s al fresco Ring that would float away on the gentle swells of Lake Lucerne, his threats to burn scores rather than see them realized imperfectly, are fantasies. But there is a salutary irritant embedded in them. The optimism of earlier operatic eras, the practitioners for whom impermanence held few terrors: were they on to a strange truth? By the mid nineteenth century, that optimism was disappearing. By the mid twentieth century, halfway between Wagner and today, it had all but vanished. We live nowadays in an operatic time that is culturally pessimistic, one symptom of which is that transmission of works from the past is central to the enterprise.

Besides tending an ever-larger archive of video recordings and sound documents, curatorial fervour also manifests itself in the continuing industry of scholarly editions (of Handel, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner and many others). There are, admittedly, good arguments in favour of these editions. Occasionally they resurrect operas – or parts of operas – that were simply not performable before, because no scores were available (Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, for example, or the original French version of Verdi’s Don Carlos). And even when new editions do little more than lightly inflect the texts of works that have long been part of the repertoire (perhaps with new performance instructions or adjusted instrumentation), they may nevertheless suggest bracing new approaches. The irony is that the ancient operatic practice these editions purport to make available was often close to the opposite of careful and preservationist: it could be thrillingly lax and last minute, with a ready indulgence of cuts, re-scorings and pragmatic accommodations that would be unthinkable today. This chaotic situation is, after all, why so many operatic classics come down to us in such a messy, inconclusive state: why there can be no single authentic or definitive Carmen or Don Carlos or Boris Godunov or Les Contes d’Hoffmann; why these and many other operas – indeed, most other operas before the twentieth century – exist in competing versions, presenting a surplus of authorial and other intentions. The question then arises: to what ideal should authenticity be directed? To an ideal version of an opera, established through modern musicological methods of sifting and editing? Or to the original spirit of the enterprise?

Our desire to cling to the operatic past, finally, is not limited to mere revival of past works. We could even say that this particular conservatism is neither the most pervasive nor the most influential aspect of operatic nostalgia. What stands out even more dramatically is a ritual aspect in the ways and means by which new operas are commissioned by major houses in Europe and America, the rhetorical armament that surrounds the idea of contemporary opera. This ritual is full of irony. Those involved in opera production, as well as critics whose livelihood depends on novelties being steadily supplied, tend to preach that such activity is essential to opera’s future, its very lifeblood, a matter of survival. Simple contentment with the repertory and its treasury is, they assert, insufficient. But the metaphorical field we encounter in talk about new operatic composition is strangely antique, or at least constantly gestures back in time: we must encourage the next Mozart, the next Verdi. On 3 January 2014, the New York Times music critics published a collective article about the most successful contemporary operas of recent decades; it bore the headline ‘Tomorrow’s Valhalla’ – as if aesthetic achievements might be measured by residence in the Care Home of the Gods, with proximity to Richard Wagner a prime marker of desirability.⁵ In this context, today’s prestigious operatic commissions could be seen less as the necessary road to the future, more as yet another attempt to hold on to the past – not this time in the form of its products, but rather in the form of its rituals and behaviour, its aura. In 1831, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala commissioned Bellini’s Norma, now a stalwart of the operatic repertory; 150 years later the same theatre commissioned Luciano Berio’s La vera storia (1982). What continuity! What noble lineage!

But the endlessly repeated question – posed at the opening of the New York Times ‘Valhalla’ story – remains the same: ‘Will it find a place in the repertory?’ That question is a prime example of using the past as a measuring stick, even a cudgel. Another, more brutal form of it would be: ‘Will it find a place of permanence, as Figaro, or La traviata or Die Meistersinger have?’ The answer will in almost all cases be a resounding ‘no’. But is joining the repertory the only exam worth passing? For long stretches of history, operas were written to be enjoyed for a season and then cast aside to make way for other and possibly better ones. Operas were disposable, and that very disposability was a sign of fervency and creativity.

CURATORSHIP BY THE NUMBERS

The last fifty years have actually witnessed a global increase in numbers of opera houses, with new institutions springing up in many venues that, while they may have had such theatres in the nineteenth century, then lost them in the early twentieth. This has been the case in the UK and the USA, with revived regional opera houses in the former, and newer institutions such as Santa Fe Opera or Glimmerglass in the latter. Opera is also renewing its global reach, spreading again (as it did in the nineteenth century) in newly prosperous Asian countries – as evinced by the Guangzhou Opera House, which opened in 2010. Asian film nowadays features opera in much the same way as Western film did in earlier times, as a source of emotional openness and a setting for romance. In Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires, 2001), the Hindi-speaking hero and heroine visit the Sydney Opera House and swoon to an opera especially invented for the film but seemingly in imitation of French tragédie lyrique.

This fresh globalization of opera, the increasing numbers of opera venues around the world, has been accompanied by an expansion of the repertory. But the ‘new’ operas that have been thus assisted into the repertory are typically works rescued from opera’s past. The database at operabase.com provides invaluable numbers – inevitably incomplete but the best we have. During a recent five-year stretch (from the 2009/10 to the 2013/14 seasons), there were c. 18,500 opera productions globally (a third of them in Germany), in c. 750 cities (Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Moscow at the head; neither London nor New York, let alone any city in Italy, can at present compete with these elite four) in around sixty countries. The picture is clear: the primary creative energies of this global industry were dedicated not to creating new works; they were to interpreting masterpieces from the past. The top three composers (again measured in numbers of productions of their operas rather than total numbers of performances) are Verdi (3323), Mozart (2386) and Puccini (2322); Wagner (1170), Rossini (1086) and Donizetti (1058) are the next three. These are the bedrock of the present-day operatic repertory, and they constitute a large proportion of the total (far more than half). The first living composer to enter the list, Philip Glass with seventy-nine revivals, comes in at 40th and he is way out in front among the race of the living: next – at joint 73rd – come Jake Heggie (b. 1961) and Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934), both with twenty-nine revivals. True, there were around 300 world premieres during the five-year period, and around 500 living composers saw their operas performed; but the vast majority of these composers had only one or two premieres or revivals. As we saw in Chapter 20, when a recent work like George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is taken up by multiple theatres in a very short space of time, the phenomenon makes headlines.

Many people whose business is opera, and who thus make their living from its present, history-soaked existence, find it tragic, even morally reprehensible, that new operas do not compete successfully with Verdi’s, Mozart’s and Puccini’s. Here is David Pountney, a distinguished opera director of the last thirty years, speaking at the dawn of the new millennium:

Those who do nothing more than live like parasites off the past I cast into a particularly unpleasant circle of hell. There is no greater betrayal of custodianship than that. Therefore, the future of opera for me is not about how many more performances of La Bohème there will be in the next century, nor about whether this Bohème is dressed up as something else. It is about which stories we would like to tell in our new century, and what music we will tell them with, and which audience will we find to listen to our stories … I am talking about new work. I am talking about a hard and rigorous truth that unless you are feeding the new, you have no right to live off the old. Sadly, there are very few opera houses anywhere in the world who could hold up their hands and claim to fulfil that condition. So let me say it again, loud and clear: what we inherit is an incredible cornucopia. Those who exploit it without adding to it are betraying the heritage of which they purport to be the custodians, and they should be cast out!⁶

There are strong words here, but the remedies Pountney suggests later in his piece have a familiar ring. Embracing ephemerality as a positive phenomenon is too radical to make even the tiniest appearance. Instead, we find suggestions for guaranteeing popularity and endurance. Composers should espouse more approachable idioms, divesting themselves of modernist sympathies and a love of complexity. Theatre managements should be tougher, insisting on works the public will enjoy. Above all there should be much more subsidy: governments, regions, cities and private institutions should pay generously and often, ensuring that every theatre can provide the elaborate life-support systems new operas require.

What Pountney does not face is that one aspect of the operatic industry – its affection for the past in all its forms – is self-evidently a blockade of sorts, even in the most physical sense. Our newest opera houses are impressive indeed, but like almost all those that have survived from the past they are overwhelmingly geared towards the consumption of certain kinds of now-ancient opera. Their auditoria suit nineteenth-century works with large orchestras and with singers powerful enough to penetrate to the furthest reaches. New creations, written to be premiered in these spaces, are thus pre-ordained by architecture to attempt the same manner, a task for which few composers have immediate models, and in which their past experience (almost inevitably with ‘pure’ instrumental music of much smaller proportions) is often a hindrance. Several years ago, we talked to a composer who was about to complete a commission for a major US opera house. He freely admitted that he found many recent operas unbearable, and said straight out that works subjecting listeners to hours-long exposure to atonal idioms were doomed from the outset (he recalled how short Wozzeck is, how rapidly its scenes change). He was also aware that his particular enterprise had soaked up approximately $2m of other people’s money, and that he had no experience of writing extended works for the stage. He remained, though, optimistic: he passionately believed that his opera would be – must be – different from what had gone before; he was convinced that it would communicate to audiences when countless others had failed. His attitude was extraordinary testimony to the personal conviction required to undertake anything of this creative magnitude. Just as extraordinary, though, was the extent to which hope could triumph over the collective experience.

If the blockade-like force of the institutions and their attitudes, the rhetoric and the rituals, the scholarly editions, the treasury of recordings and all the other features of the museum, are given only negative value, what is the alternative? Would it be possible to imagine a future in which opera regained some form of cultural optimism? Perhaps the marvellous ‘operas’ yet to be written will be those that do not resemble any of its past forms, just as an avant-garde, all-staged, part-electronic, sung-without-vibrato wonder such as Glass’s Einstein on the Beach is interesting and engrossing precisely in being a non-opera. Perhaps such renegade pieces are the fireflies, the workshopped, performance-art operas that challenge the limits of the very word: Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales (2000) is another case in point.

The arch-radical Pierre Boulez, patrolling the streets at the high noon of modernism, would certainly have none of the past, even architecturally. In 1967, he despaired of the fact that

the new German opera houses certainly look very modern – from outside; but inside they have remained extremely old fashioned. It’s nearly impossible to produce a work of contemporary opera in a theatre in which, predominantly, repertory pieces are performed. It is really unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses up. Don’t you think that would also be the most elegant solution?⁷

The various air forces of the Second World War had of course made significant progress in that direction (see Figure 46), but – two decades later – Boulez wanted a more complete denouement. And he was surely right about one thing: that any new form of cultural optimism must be based on relinquishing at least some aspects of the museum. Insisting on the hoary ritual of commissioning new operas (works that are inescapably Grand Opera raised from the dead) would only be effective if it came with a corollary that virtually no one – perhaps these days not even Boulez – seems to want: the limiting or radically altering or simply forgetting of old operas, and of the spaces, mostly so redolent of the nineteenth century, in which they are performed.

Why is the operatic situation so different from the relatively buoyant one in sister arts? Think of the media frenzy and potential financial rewards circulating around the Turner Prize, or the brisk enterprise of new spoken drama in the West End or on Broadway. The answer is both too obvious and too fraught. By now, we have enough distance from 1945 to be able to look back at the postwar years and identify the main sustainers of the modernist repertory; several of them have been discussed in the previous chapters. But anomalies aside (the result of chronological oddity, such as Stravinsky or Poulenc writing opera late in life, or of geographical oddity, such as an English radical making his own operatic microclimate in chilly East Anglia), how many operas have ‘entered into Valhalla’ since the Second World War? It is much easier to make a list of high-profile ephemera between, say, 1950 and 1980. Here are ten, all by composers with formidable reputations, all premiered (or commissioned to be premiered) at the highest level, most with eminent literary associations:

L'incantesimo (Enchantment, 1943/1952) by Italo Montemezzi (1875–1952); broadcast premiere (NBC Symphony Orchestra) in 1943; stage premiere at the Arena di Verona in 1952.

Troilus and Cressida (1954) by William Walton (1902–83), based on Chaucer; premiere at Covent Garden, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent; US premiere (1955) at San Francisco Opera, then seen at New York City Opera (1955) and La Scala (1956).

Assassinio nella cattedrale (Murder in the Cathedral, 1958) by Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), after T. S. Eliot's play; premiere at La Scala.

Don Rodrigo (1964) by Alberto Ginastera (1916–83); commissioned by the city of Buenos Aires and premiered there at the Teatro Colón. Plácido Domingo sang the title role at the US premiere (New York City Opera, 1966).

Miss Julie (1965) by Ned Rorem (1923–), after Strindberg; commissioned by and premiered at the New York City Opera.

Antony and Cleopatra (1966) by Samuel Barber (1910–81), after Shakespeare, with a libretto by Franco Zeffirelli; premiered (enormous cast, enormous expense) at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House. It was dropped from the Met’s repertory after the initial performances and has had only sporadic revivals since.

Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady, 1971) by Gottfried von Einem (1918–96); premiered at the Vienna Staatsoper; German premiere at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (1972).

Yerma (1971) by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), after Federico García Lorca; written in 1955–6, premiered by the Santa Fe Opera fifteen years later.

Lord Byron (1972) by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989); commissioned by the Ford Foundation for the Metropolitan Opera, but never produced there; amateur premiere at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Paradise Lost (1978) by Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–), after Milton; premiered at the Lyric Opera, Chicago, then given at La Scala (1979).

Is it tragic or morally reprehensible that such works are not revived? There are doubtless beautiful moments in many of them; but they were brought into existence and then fell silent.

We have stressed that brief existence has been the absolute norm for operatic works throughout history, but the moment has come to tease out the more uncomfortable historical lessons from this fact. Even when the operatic repertory began to become fixed in the mid nineteenth century, a glance at (say) Paris Opéra posters will remind us that huge, dead-on-arrival hopefuls regularly littered the landscape. Louis Niedermeyer’s Marie Stuart, to take a random example from 1844, had a star cast, a fashionable plot and a hit song, and even earned for its composer enlistment in the Légion d’honneur; all to no lasting avail. Nor was this just at the hidebound Opéra: the repertory of the coming Parisian venue of the 1850s and 1860s, the Théâtre Lyrique, contains many now-forgotten premieres, mixed with a small number of new successes and revivals of legendary works like Don Giovanni.⁸ But, here and now, the moral to be taken from such historical givens becomes uncertain. For one thing, beginning in the later twentieth century, the numbers changed in significant ways. Nowadays the proportion of successful new arrivals in comparison with repertory revivals has grown so minuscule as to constitute an immense gulf.

We could, of course, use this circumstance as an argument for profligacy, suggesting that sheer numbers of trials form a necessary base from which the rare diamond will emerge, that we must continue to commission new operas because we seek a one-in-a-thousand hit. Instead, though, it might be salutary to confront a more difficult thought: the thought that opera’s heyday might be finite. Opera once flourished, and diamonds appeared in significant numbers; but that was in past times, in cultures that no longer exist. Why assume that our present times, which are so radically different, so alien to those of the past, will constitute equally fertile ground for this strange art?

The mystery of the rare diamond is complicated. At the Théâtre Lyrique, in among all the non-starters, there also occurred the premiere of Gounod’s Faust (1859), which would become over the next century one of the most often-played operas in the world. What’s more, Faust established itself as a repertory piece almost immediately; although it was certainly innovative, there was never a sense that the work needed time and effort on the part of general audiences. The Faust story has, then, a different moral to teach. It is that the works which persist – which stand out, are revived and repeated, recalled with relish, thought worth any expense – do so because they supply pleasure to the many, not just to the few. If this is the case, the statistics about contemporary opera tell us that many of the newest works fall down on that very specific job, while doing another – satisfying the elite and the insiders – quite well.

FRAGMENTS AND THE LOSS OF MEANING

After around 1950, repertory opera became a script for Regieoper, for a marvellous and entertaining parade of reinterpretations. As we have seen, it also had a complicated life as a theme and a source of musical material in films. There has also been a wide dissemination of opera into true mass culture, but this tends to involve particles, the tiniest operatic scraps, fragments from opera that have small shards of meaning. Do such fragments recruit anyone in the mass audience to the enjoyment of opera per se? In Pixar’s animated film Finding Nemo (2003), a clownfish searching for his lost son is urged on his way by mackerels who, by singing with vibrato and schooling to form the shape of the Sydney Opera House, tell him wordlessly where he needs to go. In 2010–11 the child phenomenon Jackie Evancho (b. 2000) made a fortune by holding a microphone very close to her mouth and using rolled ‘r’s and vibrato to imitate operatic singing. Evancho, the youngest solo artist ever to have an album go platinum, can be heard on her CD Dream With Me singing an eerie ‘Nessun dorma’. The version shows how far her vast audience is from worrying about Puccini’s last work. ‘Nessun dorma’ sexless? Recall the text: ‘Oh Princess … On your mouth I will whisper my name when dawn breaks, and my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!’ When this aria is sung, in only vaguely approximate Italian, by a prepubescent girl soprano wearing a white dress with sash, what’s bewildering is not the child performer or her profits, it is rather the burial rite for opera’s ground note of adult passion, the loss of meaning and context.

That question about potential new customers sounds a grim note. Although the second half of our last century saw new opera companies spring up in many parts of the globe, recent signs are not always cheering. As the second edition of this history goes to press, the New York City Opera has gone dark, lost to a bankruptcy that some blamed on its embrace of ‘difficult’ new operas. The Metropolitan is also facing serious financial troubles, awash in tickets it cannot sell (many blame the HD broadcasts for keeping the core audience away) and facing costs that were only appropriate to a Gilded Age when the cultural capital granted by opera was thought to be worth its high price. Lacking the government subsidies that cushion institutions through bad financial times, opera in America may be the canary in the global mine, its breath beginning to falter. The question is whether this predicts outcomes elsewhere in the world, particularly in Europe (still the overwhelming source of most operas and opera performances), where subsidies as well as a deeper cultural investment in high art might mean a different outcome.

EVOLUTIONARY TURN

Is there nevertheless some cause for optimism? As we said a little earlier, perhaps the most beautiful and transfixing operas still to be written might not be ‘opera’ at all in any previous sense of the word. There are many hybrids and new creatures we could consider. In this category fall many works by Glass (note the operabase.com statistics, quoted earlier, which make him by such a margin the most popular living opera composer), whose brilliance in writing music for drama extends to musical stage spectacles, multi-media theatre like Einstein on the Beach, and operas like Satyagraha and The Voyage (1992), with their hypnotic allure. Glass’s minimalism involves treating voices as chant, sometimes in repeated melodic cells, sometimes as solo voices but often as a vocal collective that seems like one voice multiplied into many. His harmonic idiom, those gradual changes rung on chord progressions, mysteriously and perpetually moving, conform to no previous historical operatic precedent; nor does his vocal writing. Both the present authors recall experiences of his operas as forms of acoustic delight that, in involving leisurely metamorphoses and frequent intervals of peace, were transfixing. But it may be important that Glass’s operatic music does not demand utter attentiveness at every moment. By allowing the audience the freedom to drift, such music recaptures a very ancient operatic virtue: the composer offers, if you will, an invitation to listen and be charmed, not an edict. It is in this sense no accident that Glass is also a successful film music composer. His music for opera and film, while beautiful and emotionally astute, is also modest in the sense that it knows how to make room for other theatrical components: for what is seen; for words, characters, their actions and mental states; for the listener’s participation. Good film music composers know when to be silent, when not to have music at all. One thing that good opera composers need to have is an analogous though not completely parallel wisdom about music – as a collaborator and not a dictator.

Indeed, it may even be that opera is undergoing a significant evolutionary turn via the ‘cinematic’, becoming a form of art-for-the-screen. This does not simply mean that the most common mode of operatic consumption in the twenty-first century is through Internet streaming of video clips, DVDs and HD broadcasts; or that the primacy of attendance at the theatre (rather than the cinema) has been challenged. Nor does it simply mean that – as mentioned a short time ago – the comforts and conventions of cinema and TV have begun to inflect its staging. More radical still is that this new evolutionary turn has begun to impinge on the basic conception of new operas. Screen media are entering the genetic makeup of the genre.

As a test case, we might reconsider Benjamin’s Written on Skin, discussed in terms of its operatic heritage in Chapter 20. What is immediately striking about its staging as manifested via DVD (a version released soon after the premiere, and based on that premiere’s staging) is the degree to which we see advanced cinematic vocabulary put to use in a live performance, creating a strange hybrid form, a new operatic flavour. There are carefully composed medium shots, in which the camera is positioned where no theatre-spectator eye could possibly exist, seeming to be right there among the characters on stage. There are shot/reverse shot edits. The singers have been coached to act with eye movements and glances, something that would not be legible from the usual theatrical distance. Most significant of all, there is a particular camera shot – the set and characters seen from above, in a bird’s eye view – that is Hitchcockian in its odd menace. In those shots the camera is far above the action, but the voices and orchestra are still heard as if one’s ear were down there in the house. This leads to a disquieting cognitive split between sight and hearing: it suddenly seems as if we are looking at a movie scene but hearing a separate opera soundtrack, an effect enhanced by the fact that in the bird’s eye view you see only the tops of the singers’ heads, not their mouths moving. The DVD is taping a live performance, but this staging has been imagined to create something chimerical specifically for the recording medium: a live movie.⁹

That’s merely the result of a too-artful DVD, one might say: it’s still a traditional opera. But then the libretto sometimes recalls clichés of serial-killer talk – dissociative addressing of one’s victim in the third person, for example – as in films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), not to mention woman-as-erotic-maniac and other cinematic treats. There is even a quality in the music’s frequent word-painting that aligns it with one of film and TV music’s great glories: so-called rendered sound, musical heightening of an image or noise. The difference is that in film we see what is being imitated in sound (trembling water becomes shimmering percussion), while in Written on Skin the objects imitated in music are verbally described. The alchemy is mysterious, but although the piece is conventionally modern-operatic in many respects, there’s a sense of a new species emerging: one for which the DVD, in using film techniques, becomes the work’s truest, best home. Only in the DVD do all the connections emerge. The package affirms the degree to which the new species has been shaped – in its use of music, in its ways of enticing an audience, by modern, non-operatic media.

THAT’S OPERA. JUST A LOT OF PEOPLE IN COSTUMES FALLING IN LOVE AND DYING

Opera has always been a peculiar form of drama, and will remain for ever so. It took shape gradually in the seventeenth century, and for around 200 years was a dominant – if not, by the nineteenth century, the most elevated – form of elite culture. The monuments of the operatic tradition continue to fascinate us, and have proved themselves remarkably well able to adapt to changed cultural and political circumstances; indeed, the fact that operas have continued to be composed for so long, and that the art form is expanding its global dissemination at a time when other types of ‘classical’ music are severely threatened, should surely be a cue for jubilation. Even if this particular form of drama with music is now mostly a museum of past musical works – as are the madrigal and motet, or for that matter the four-movement symphony – dystopian prognostications about its endurance are probably unfounded. And to take the longest historical views, far longer than opera’s last 400 years, is to realize that the arts in which actions and passions go hand in hand with music – with or without singing – have endured for millennia, and show no signs of present collapse. Drama has, at most times and in most cultures, always enjoyed more or less elaborate musical accompaniment – a circumstance that, as we saw many chapters ago, stimulated the first operatic experiments. As we write these lines, and as you read them, acres of music are being created around the world to accompany drama, whether in films or TV or for the stage or to underpin proliferating forms of virtual entertainment. Most of it will be transitory and soon forgotten. Sometimes even the media that stimulate it will disappear; this too has always been the case. Other technologies, other phenomena will replace them. Opera has been part of this larger history of drama and music, and a magnificent one – one that above all celebrates the human singing voice. So long as we have theatrical spaces suited to the purpose, and performers willing to devote themselves to realizing its complex glories, operas will continue to be performed, and will continue to articulate some of the drama and complexities of human experience in ways no other art form can match. Many of the trees in this vast forest are very old and very grand. Their beauty and the shadows they cast are immense.