A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

OF ALL THE MUSICAL FORMS, opera is the most immediately sensitive to changes in political, economic, social, and general cultural conditions. Its very nature as a complex and costly public spectacle largely dependent on official patronage or private subsidy makes it especially vulnerable to political dictates and economic vicissitudes; its subject matter reflects, positively or negatively, current human preoccupations; its form, content, and idiom are all affected by changing ideals of dramatic and musical style. Two world wars, a worldwide economic depression, and the emergence of political systems committed to strict control of art in the interest of the state were the salient external factors in the first half of the twentieth century. Widespread emigration of authors and composers in the 1930s affected the development of opera in the United States and elsewhere. The passionately felt need of the artist to come to grips with contemporary issues in contemporary terms stimulated new uses of traditional techniques and experiments with new dramatic and musical means.

Technological developments throughout the century have also played a part: radio, television, recordings by way of the long-playing phonograph record, tape cassette, compact disc, and most especially the video taping of operas—all have immensely increased the actual and potential audience, bringing the traditional repertoire and style of opera within everyone’s reach and making it possible, to some extent at least, for the public to become acquainted with newer developments. As a result, opera has become of interest to a larger number of people than ever before in its history. Free pursuit of the new, together with an enlarged and diverse public, accounts for an unprecedented diversity of operatic styles in our time—the “polyphonic” or “many-voiced century,” as one writer has described it.¹

The most radical influence on musical style in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century was impressionism, which originated in France with Debussy and gradually made itself felt nearly everywhere from 1900 on. Another source of change was the development of the post-Wagnerian late Romantic style in Germany and Austria, evident in Mahler, early Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. A third set of influences came from composers who carried on with the national movements already begun in the nineteenth century. The effects of these forces appeared in varying degrees and combinations, but underlying all change was the conservative power of tradition, still inescapable and still respected: progress, not revolution, was the ruling ideal, and even “advanced” experiments soon slipped into the central current of evolution without causing too much disturbance.

Roughly speaking, the development of Western musical style since 1915 may be summarized in the following broad generalizations. A period lasting until about 1930 was marked by diverse experiments with all the elements of composition, including rhythm, but especially looking toward either a radical extension of the classical concept of tonality or the complete transcendence of that concept. After about 1930, two main directions were discernible. The first was toward a replacement of tonality by other systems of order, typically some form of organization stemming from the “twelve-tone” principles developed by Schoenberg in the 1920s. Composers who followed this direction generally retained some elements of traditional music, though in the more extreme manifestations connection with the past, as well as the idea of music as a sensuous language of communication, seems to have disappeared. The second aimed at a reconciliation with tonality in a modern musical idiom, moderation of extreme dissonance, maintenance of communication, and in general some degree of attachment to tradition. The composers who followed this direction sought inspiration largely from pre-Romantic Western art music. Of course, the two tendencies interacted in practice and moreover were accompanied by various experiments in timbre, rhythm, and form as well as by occasional exotic influences.

As in all periods, the subject matter of operas composed in the twentieth century has been drawn variously from imagined dramatic interactions of human personalities, from history, myth, legend, or folklore, or from the circumstances of contemporary life. Treatment has been serious or light, earnest, satirical, or playful, as of timeless significance or as applicable peculiarly to the present moment. The aims have been equally varied: mere amusement or entertainment (whether of a general public or of special groups, as, for example, opera for children); instruction and conversion—that is, propaganda; comedy with contemporary social application; or high tragedy in the Aristotelian sense—“the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself … with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions”²—the kind of drama that invites the audience to contemplate heroic greatness of deed or character, in some instances being more or less overtly directed toward confirmation of religious faith.

We may recall that the twentieth century inherited, along with the timeless and unchanging line of light or “entertainment” opera, two fundamentally contrasting conceptions of serious musical drama. Stated in simplest terms, these were (1) the Wagnerian drama of ideas, with personages primarily symbolical and with music in a continuous orchestral texture organized by means of leitmotifs, the vocal lines being of declamatory, or arioso, character, and (2) the Verdian drama of typical human beings in psychological interaction, with music in the form of distinct numbers connected by recitatives and a texture of emotionally expressive vocal melody sustained by orchestral accompaniment. By and large, composers at the beginning of the twentieth century adhered to one or the other of these two basic conceptions, even if with compromises or modifications. On the one hand, Richard Strauss in Salome and Elektra (and later in Die Frau ohne Schatten) was in the line of descent from Wagner, as was essentially also Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande despite its un-Wagnerian harmonies and dynamics. On the other hand, Puccini and the composers of the verismo school descended (in both senses of the word) from Verdi. Meanwhile, a new conception was growing up, or rather an old one was being revived: the eighteenth-century classical idea of an opera as primarily a musical entity, with poetry “the obedient daughter of music,” as Mozart had expressed it. This new-old conception involved, as a rule, the use of distinct musical numbers in definite form, objectivity of expression, and a tendency to let the music develop in its own way, following the dramatic action in broad lines but not attempting to mirror it in detail. This conception of opera, an early example of which is Strauss’s Ariadne, has influenced many twentieth-century composers—Falla, Ravel and most of the French, some Germans (notably Hindemith), and Stravinsky, especially in The Rake’s Progress.

“Comic opera,” in the twentieth century as in earlier periods, is a designation embracing many different types. At one end of the scale are frankly popular works—musical comedies, operettas, and the like—that seek to entertain a large public by means of (1) music in a style familiar enough to be enjoyed without much effort or close attention but containing some novelty in details, and (2) a dramatic content uncomplicated, superficial (in the sense of carrying no “message”), humorous or sentimental or both, and possibly enlivened by reference to current vogues or topics in the news. Other kinds of comic opera may be distinguished by music in a more advanced style, greater sophistication of plot and subtlety of characterization, or evidence of some aim (for example, satire) in addition to that of entertainment. Most successful writers of light popular works produce nothing of significance outside that special field. Examples of more sophisticated kinds of comic opera, however, have come from nearly every composer for the theater in the twentieth century, including some who are equally competent in the “serious” realm—Alfano, Poulenc, Britten, and Menotti, among others. Also included in the comic genre are the Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith.

One phenomenon of the period since 1920 has been the tendency to combine the traditional form of opera with certain features of the oratorio, such as a narrator or a contemplative or didactic chorus. Introduction of oratorio-like elements has occurred typically in large-scale works on historical or legendary subjects, such as Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, Milhaud’s Christophe Colomb, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Egk’s Columbus, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and Orff’s Antigonae. A like infiltration of oratorio or cantata technique is found in some stage works of smaller scale, such as Falla’s Retablo de Maese Pedro, Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. Forerunners of the opera-oratorio may be found in Wagner’s Parsifal and Pfitzner’s Palestrina, but the combination is especially characteristic of the mid-twentieth century.

Likewise characteristic of this period is the importance of ballet, especially ballet with dramatic elements (as created by Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev) and the incorporation of choreographic (often, also choral) spectacle in opera (as in many of the works mentioned above), or even a fusion of opera and ballet, as in Casella’s “choreographic comedy” La giara (1924) or Henze’s Boulevard Solitude (1952). Still another feature of the twentieth century is the unprecedented extent to which composers have worked in smaller forms—”chamber” or “workshop” opera, requiring few performers, sometimes written specifically for amateurs or for children. This movement, the result of special conditions, has been particularly prominent in England and the United States but is by no means confined to those countries. Also may be mentioned the rise of opera for radio and television, the writing of incidental music for films and stage plays, and the rise of electronic music, whose special possibilities for opera have been explored with considerable success.

The music composed in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s was, for the most part, anything but conservative. The composers whose names dominate that era were innovators, many of them self-consciously so and some to such a degree as to be quite incomprehensible to the vast majority of the music-listening public. To be sure, most of their music sounds less radical to us than it did to their immediate contemporaries, but the gap between some of those twentieth-century composers and the public is still wide. What resulted from their innovations, however, was an unprecedented diversity of operatic styles existing in one and the same period. In part, of course, that diversity may be an illusion caused by our nearness to events or our lack of historical perspective, but even discounting this (insofar as possible), the diversity remains. That same degree of diversity continued through to the end of the century, as exemplified in John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2.

The most important French opera of the early twentieth century was Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) on a text by Maurice Maeterlinck.³ It is the only work Debussy completed for the stage, with the exception of the miracle drama Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien (1911; based on D’Annunzio’s play) and an early cantata, L’Enfant prodigue, which has sometimes been given in operatic form. The first sketches for Pelléas et Mélisande are dated 1893, but Debussy revised the score continually. The first performance took place at the Opéra-Comique on April 30, 1902—“one of the three or four red-letter days in the history of our lyric stage,” in the view of Romain Rolland.⁴

It is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction from Wagner; but this opera is at the same time a focal point of French dramatic music, gathering up many essential national traits and giving them exceptionally clear and perfect expression, though colored by the individual genius of Debussy. The personal qualities of the music are so salient that they tend to usurp attention, and it is therefore well to emphasize that Pelléas is characteristic not only of Debussy but also of France.

Four things have marked French opera from the beginning of its history. First is the belief that an opera is fundamentally a drama in words to which music has been added; from this doctrine comes the insistence on clear and realistic declamation of the text. Both the contemporary admiration for Lully’s recitative and Rousseau’s later objections to it as “mannered” came from the same interest in the text as basic to the drama and hence to the opera. In no other country has so much attention been given to this issue. The flourishing of the opéra comique with its spoken dialogue was a constant witness that the French were willing to do without music rather than let it interfere with the understanding of the words. Pelléas et Mélisande conforms to this ideal. It is one of the rare instances of a long play, not expressly made for music, being turned into an opera with practically no rearranging.⁵ In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text. The orchestral background is shadowy, evanescent, almost a suggestion of sound rather than sound itself; and the voice part, with its independence of the bar line, narrow range, small intervals, and frequent chanting on one tone, adheres as closely as possible to the melody of French speech. Only in a few places, as in Mélisande’s song at the beginning of Act III or in the love duet in the fourth scene of Act IV, does the melody become really lyric. How typical this narrow melodic line is of French music may be realized by comparing the contours of French folksong melodies with those of German or English folksongs, the instrumental themes of Saint-Saëns or César Franck with those of a German like Richard Strauss, or French nineteenth-century recitative in general with the wide ranging arioso of Verdi or Wagner. The use of the Wagnerian type of melody with French words, such as we find in the operas of Chabrier and D’Indy (and, to a lesser extent, in Bruneau and Charpentier), was soon felt to be unnatural. In the return to a more natural declamation and in the damping of orchestral sonorities, therefore, Debussy was in accord not only with traditional French practice but with an even more ancient ideal, that of the early Florentine founders of opera, Peri, Caccini, and Gagliano.

The second historical feature of French opera is its tendency to center the musical interest not in the continuous orchestra or in the solo aria but in the divertissements—that is, interludes in the action where music might be enjoyed without the attention being divided by the necessity of following the drama at the same time. In the early days of French opera and throughout the nineteenth century, the common form of divertissement was the ballet with choruses. There are no ballets in Pelléas, and only one quite brief chorus, but the function of the divertissement is fulfilled by the orchestral preludes and the interludes that are played for changes of scene. Here, and here only, music has the foreground, and the full symphonic resources are employed. But the interludes are not independent of the action; rather, they continue in wordless and concentrated form what has just passed and by gradual transition prepare for what is to come. Thus Debussy combines the Lullian form of opera with the nineteenth-century practice of treating every detail as a means of accomplishing the central dramatic purpose.

Still another constant feature of French opera has been the deliberate choice of measured, objective, well-proportioned, and rational dramatic actions. The French have not been misled, except momentarily, either by the desire to be forceful at any cost or by the attractions of metaphysical speculation. Not that French opera is as direct and uninhibited in its approach as the Italian, but the French prefer to suggest a hidden meaning by subtle juxtaposition of facts, trusting to stimulate the imagination rather than overwhelm it with exhaustive details, as Wagner tended to do. The quintessence of this indirect, suggestive method in literature is found in the movement known as symbolism, of which Maeterlinck’s five-act drama Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) is an outstanding example. The story is purposely vague and seems slight indeed when reduced to a bare summary. But the whole effect is in the manner, not the matter. As Edmund Gosse has said:

Maeterlinck is exclusively occupied in revealing, or indicating, the mystery which lies, only just out of sight, beneath the surface of ordinary life. In order to produce this effect of the mysterious, he aims at an extreme simplicity of diction, and a symbolism so realistic as to be almost bare. He allows life itself to astonish us by its strangeness, by its inexplicable elements. Many of his plays are really highly pathetic records of unseen emotion; they are occupied with the spiritual adventures of souls, and the ordinary facts of time and space have no influence upon the movements of the characters. We know not who these orphan princesses, these blind persons, these pale Arthurian knights, these aged guardians of desolate castles, may be; we are not informed whence they come, not whither they go; there is nothing concrete or circumstantial about them. Their life is intense and consistent, but it is wholly of a spiritual character; they are mysterious with the mystery of the movements of a soul.⁶

Debussy’s music perfectly supports the mysterious, spiritual character of the drama, doing everything by understatement and whispered suggestion. The full orchestra is hardly ever heard outside the interludes. Instrumental doubling is voided; solo timbres and small combinations are the rule, while the strings are often muted and divided. There are only four fortissimos in the whole score. Debussy’s almost excessive “genius for good taste,” to use Rolland’s words again,⁷ is apparent if we contrast the wild greeting of the lovers in the second act of Tristan with the meeting of Pelléas and Mélisande in Act IV (example 25.1), or the touching scene of Mélisande’s death in Act V with Isolde’s “Liebestod.”

Soft music, however, is not of necessity better than loud music; restraint is of no artistic value unless we are made aware that there is something to be restrained. And here we come to the fourth and last quality characteristic of French opera, which Debussy carries to the ultimate degree, namely, a capacity for the appreciation of the most refined and complex sensory stimuli. In the quality of its acceptances as well as of its refusals, French opera has always tended to be aristocratic. The style of musical impressionism that Pelléas et Mélisande exemplifies is essentially one of aristocratic sensualism, treating sounds as of primary value for themselves irrespective of accepted grammatical forms, and creating moods by reiterated minute impacts of motifs, harmonies, and timbres. These elements in Pelléas sounded so completely unprecedented in themselves, and so completely detached from the familiar system of musical progressions, that audiences were at first bewildered; but they soon learned to associate the musical moods with those of the poetry and discovered a marvelous correspondence between the two. For as Maeterlinck’s drama moved in a realm outside ordinary time and space, so Debussy’s music moved in a realm outside the then-known tonal system; lacking any strong formal associations within the field of music itself, his harmonies were irresistibly attracted to the similarly free images of the poet. Never was there a happier marriage of music and verse.

The technical methods of Debussy are familiar to all students of music and may be only briefly indicated here.⁸ Modal, whole-tone, or pentatonic melodies and harmonies suggest the far-off, dreamlike character of the play. The free enchainment of seventh and ninth chords, often in organum-like parallel movement, and the blurring of tonality by complex harmonic relationships are also typical. Certain motifs recur and are transformed and harmonically varied, but they are not treated in the continuous symphonic manner of Wagner. D’Indy has well expressed their function by the term “pivot themes.”⁹

The influence of Wagner on Debussy is felt chiefly in a negative fashion—that is, by the care Debussy took to avoid writing like Wagner. In those days it was not easy. Debussy complained of his first draft of the duet in Act IV that “the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R. Wagner, keeps peeping out.”¹⁰ But the final score owes little to Wagner beyond the orchestral continuity, the use of recurring motifs, and the exclusion of all merely ornamental details; in technique, idiom, feeling, and declamation, it is Debussy’s own. Whatever he had learned from Tristan or from Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, from Massenet or Grieg, or from oriental music had been completely assimilated. So peculiarly was the musical style fitted to Maeterlinck’s drama that it is no wonder Debussy was never able to find another suitable libretto.¹¹ Pelléas et Mélisande, like Fidelio, remains an isolated masterpiece of its composer in the field of opera.

THE NEXT NOTABLE French opera of the twentieth century was Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) by Paul Dukas (1865–1935). Like Debussy’s Pelléas, this is the composer’s only opera and likewise on a symbolist drama by Maeterlinck.¹² The influence of Debussy is apparent in the declamation and in some details of the harmony, but the recitative is less supple and poetic than Debussy’s. The orchestration is sonorous, using the brasses with brilliant effect, and the musical style on the whole is anything but impressionistic. Dukas was a composer of great technical attainment whose strong point was the development of ideas in large symphonic forms. Unfortunately, his themes are too often undistinguished in themselves, and their development marked less by inspiration than by system and perseverance. For example, the constant practice of repeating the exposition of a theme immediately in a new key (compare the exposition in the first movement of César Franck’s symphony) becomes almost a mannerism. Dukas’s harmony is subtle, but here again one sometimes feels the absence of any compelling musical or dramatic reason for some of his complicated chord progressions. Another defect is the excessive reliance on the augmented triad in association with the whole-tone scale, a device that has lost the attraction of novelty since 1907.

Although much has been stated by way of negative criticism of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, this in no way should detract from the opera’s many excellences. The work is less an opera than a huge symphony with the addition of solo voices and choruses (essential to the drama, not mere embellishments). Cyclical recurrence and transformation of themes are used to create an architectural structure of grand proportions. The large coda that forms the end of Act III is particularly impressive, summing up with Beethovenian finality all the principal themes of the opera and rounding off the whole with the theme that was first heard in the opening measures of the prelude to Act I. Among the many fine details of the score is the song of the “five daughters of Orlamonde,” a folksong-like melody from which many of the motifs of the opera are derived (example 25.2). Altogether, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue is the most important French lyric drama of the early twentieth century next to Pelléas et Mélisande—important, that is, if measured in terms of artistic qualities rather than popular following. It is none the less significant musically for lacking those traits that led to the success of Massenet and Charpentier.

Several more operas of this period merit special mention, each being in its own way a distinctive contribution. Déodat de Séverac’s (1872–1921) Le Cæur du moulin (1909) is a simple and poignant love story in a pastoral setting about a young man who, upon returning to his birthplace, discovers the woman he loves is now married to someone else. Séverac has created a musical score in which the influence of Debussy is modified by an original gift for direct, spontaneous expression and a charming regional flavor of southern France, evident especially in the choruses. Although the opera’s individual features were acclaimed by critics, Le Cæur du moulin has not had any popular success. Other operas by Séverac include Héliogabale (1910), set in the decadent years of classical Rome during the tyrannical reign of the title character; La Fille de la terre (1913), a tragédie lyrique; and Le Roi Pinard (1919), an opéra bouffe. Héliogabale was designed as a regional work with some parts suitable for folk musicians and local villagers; it also introduces Hindu and Phrygian modes, and incorporates interesting juxtapositions of Christian hymnody with melodies sung by Roman courtesans.¹³

Le Pays (1913) by J. Guy Ropartz (1864–1955) is a dramatic and well-proportioned score with symphonic treatment of the orchestra, original in inspiration and evidencing the sound classical training its composer received from César Franck.¹⁴ One can detect a modified Wagnerianism in the opera’s melody and harmony, as well as the then fashionable obsession with the sound of the augmented fifth chord. Although Le Pays is set in Iceland, it draws from Celtic folklore: a Breton sailor has been shipwrecked in Iceland and falls in love with a native woman, but a conflict develops as he becomes overwhelmed with an intense nostalgia for his homeland where his love, whom he has left behind, is awaiting his return.

Better known are the two operas of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937).¹⁵ L’Heure espagnole (1911), a one-act opera buffa based on a comedy by Franc-Nohain, is a tour de force of rhythm and orchestration, varied and witty in declamation, with a libretto in which the art of the double-entendre is carried to a height worthy of Favart. The vocal lines are suggestive of Richard Strauss, while under them the orchestra carries on a suite of Spanish dances, ending with a mock “grand scena and habañera.” The scene, set in a clockmaker’s shop in Toledo, gives occasion for many charming and clever sound effects, among them the ticking of clocks, wherein the cuckoo motif is, of course, prominent. The strength of this opera is in just those qualities that Dukas’s Ariane lacks: piquant details and a sense of lightness, gaiety, and improvisation.

Ravel’s “lyrical fantasy” L’Enfant et les sortilèges, on a libretto by Colette, was first performed at Monte Carlo in 1925. It is a charming score, one worthy of the composer of Ma Mère l’Oye, lighter in texture than L’Heure espagnole but equally rich in ingenious orchestral and vocal effects. The principal character is a young boy whose mistreatment of the world around him, from animals to inanimate objects, is cause for a moral lesson to be taught by the very creatures and objects that he has harmed. Those that have been mistreated take on a life of their own and in their violent reactions to the boy cause their own bit of harm to a squirrel. When the boy comes to the aid of the squirrel, binding up its paw, the spell (sortilège) is broken; the opera concludes with the chorus singing an ode to love and kindness.

A special position must be assigned to the operas of Gabriel-Urbain Fauré (1845–1924),¹⁶ the most important of which are Prométhée (1900) and Pénélope (1913). Prométhée is a three-act tragédie lyrique that was designed for performance in an outdoor amphitheater. For that reason, the score calls for some two hundred singers and an immense orchestra, the size of which can be judged from the need for one hundred string players and a dozen or more harpists. Other features of Prométhée are the leitmotifs associated with characters (the “gods”), elements (fire), and concepts (hope), and the use of spoken and sung roles.

Pénélope, a drame lyrique, is a beautiful example of Fauré’s exquisite harmonic style, which lends to the classical subject matter an appropriate atmosphere of repose and remoteness, evoking the feeling of the antique world as no more-common idiom could. From the viewpoint of theatrical effectiveness, Pénélope is perhaps too refined; the slow tempo of the action (in Acts I and II especially) emphasizes the statuesque quality that is both the greatest musical beauty and the most serious dramatic weakness of this opera.

In sum, the dominant tendency of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century French serious opera mentioned above was idealistic; the noble, if somewhat vague, striving of D’Indy’s Fervaal and L’Étranger, the mood of meditation on destiny in Pelléas and Ariane, the naive religious faith of Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, the moral earnestness of Le Cæur du moulin and Le Pays, the serene, contemplative beauty of Pénélope—all show this. Even the so-called naturalistic operas of Bruneau and Charpentier used realism largely as a means of calling forth idealistic sentiment. Thus motivated, composers sought to bring into the theater the finest and most comprehensive resources of a highly developed musical art—resources enriched after 1900 by the new techniques of impressionism—aspiring toward universality of expression, freely using any and all means to which they found themselves attracted. Viewed from a later age, theirs seems an art of leisure and luxury, such as is possible only in a time of prosperity and peace. Leisure gave time for the unfolding of ideals, while luxury provided the material means for their realization on a scale that we have not seen since and probably shall not see again in the near future.

ERNEST BLOCH (1880–1959), a native of Switzerland who lived in France before establishing residency in the United States, completed only one opera, Macbeth.¹⁷ The libretto was fashioned from Shakespeare’s drama by Edmond Fleg, who was in Paris with Bloch in 1903. Efforts to have Macbeth brought to the stage initially met resistance from the music director of the Opéra-Comique, André Messager, but eventually a successful production was launched in 1910. This lyric opera had an initial run of thirteen performances and would have continued to hold the stage had not “jealousies among members of the cast caused its premature withdrawal.” With its fate sealed as far as additional performances at the Opéra-Comique were concerned, Bloch turned away from writing any more operas, even though he had planned one based on King Lear. In retrospect Macbeth is seen as one of the three most important operas performed at the Opéra-Comique at the beginning of the century—the other two were Pelléas et Mélisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue.

Macbeth consists of a prelude and three acts, each divided into two tableaux. The music, strongly influenced by Debussy, has declamatory vocal lines, much parallelism in the orchestral texture, and a monotonously constant use of the augmented V⁷ chord, which seems to have fascinated opera composers of this period as much as the diminished seventh chord had fascinated their predecessors a hundred years earlier. Macbeth, severely criticized on account of its “modernistic” harmonies and rhythms, has been occasionally revived.

Distinguished especially for works in a lighter vein was the oriental Mârouf, savetier de Caire (1914), a witty, brilliantly scored opéra comique by Henri Rabaud (1873–1949), which has become a favorite both in Paris and abroad. It is undoubtedly one of the finest modern comic operas, a worthy descendant of the long French line of works in this style and on similar subjects. Another oriental opera was Antar by Gabriel Dupont (1878–1914), finished in 1914 but not performed until 1921.

Similarly distinguished were the operettas of André Messager and Reynaldo Hahn (1875–1947). Messager, a pupil of Saint-Saëns and Fauré, was a well-known musician in Paris; in addition to being a composer, he was a conductor (the first to conduct Pelléas et Mélisande), pianist, music critic, and, most importantly, musical director, first of the Opéra-Comique and then of the Opéra. Several of his operettas, such as La Basoche, achieved an enthusiastic response not only in Paris but also in London.¹⁸ Hahn was born in Venezuela but lived almost his entire life in Paris, where he became a pupil of Massenet. Well received by Paris audiences were his operetta Ciboulete (1923), a light opera about young Mozart’s visits to Paris entitled Mozart (1925), and two operas composed in the mid-1930s in a more serious vein based upon Shakespearean dramas.

IT MUST BE REMEMBERED that throughout the period we have been considering, the semi-dramatic form of the ballet also occupied much of the attention of French composers. Lalo’s Namouna (1882) never received the recognition it merited, but in the early twentieth century the performances of such works as Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé (1907), Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), and Stravinsky’s Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring (1910, 1911, and 1913, respectively) were important musical events.

The combination of drama and choreography, so typical in the history of French opera, is illustrated in an important opera-ballet Padmâvati by Albert Roussel (1869–1937),¹⁹ produced at Paris in 1923. Roussel’s experiences as a naval officer and travels with his wife, especially to India and Southeast Asia, are reflected in this opera-ballet. Padmâvati is a large work, scenically splendid, with fascinating rhythms and beautiful choral writing. Roussel’s complex, highly refined harmonic style incorporates Hindu scales and melodic formulae so perfectly as to make the exotic quality an inherent part of the music, not a mere external adornment. In the same way, within a smaller framework, Roussel uses Greek scales in the one-act lyric opera La Naissance de la lyre (1925), on a libretto adapted by Theodore Reinach from Sophocles’ Ichneutai.

CONDITIONS AFTER WORLD WAR 1 were less favorable in France than in Italy for new serious operas in styles so closely related to tradition. Paris, the principal and virtually the only important operatic center, readily accepted new pieces in the lighter forms, but the public for serious opera either remained content with the standard old repertoire or centered its attention on composers of distinctly “modern” tendencies. Thus a quite exceptional event was the production in 1939 of Le Chartreuse de Parme by Henri Sauguet (1901–89), a work conforming in every external detail to the pattern of nineteenth-century singers’ opera and couched in a simple—though far from unsophisticated—musical idiom that might have traced its lineage from Erik Satie.

Among the composers of comic opera in France during the interwar years were Charles Levadé (1869–1948), with La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1920) and La Peau de Chagrin (1929), with a libretto after Honoré de Balzac’s work of the same title; Marcel Samuel-Rousseau (1882–1955), with Le Bon Roi Dagobert (1927); and especially Jacques Ibert (1890–1962), with Angélique (1927). This last-named opera is a one-act farce with spoken dialogue, the music scintillating and epigrammatic, using polytonal chords, dance rhythms, and conventional melodies dressed up with dissonant harmonies—a twentieth-century revival of the old spirit of the Paris vaudevilles. Later operatic works of Ibert were of a more serious nature and include Le Roi d’Yvetot (1930), an opéra comique in four acts; L’Aiglon (1937) and Les Petites Cardinal (1938), both in collaboration with Honegger; and a radio opera, Barbe-Bleue (1943). Other notable French comic operas were Sauguet’s Le Plumet du colonel (1924) and La Gageure imprévue (1944); Milhaud’s three opéras minutes (1927); and Honegger’s Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1930).

ARTHUR HONEGGER (1892–1955), Swiss-born but a resident in Paris most of his life, was a major composer of French opera, although he also wrote many ballets and much music for films.²⁰ He was a member of the group known as Les Six, which also included Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc.²¹ Honegger’s Judith (1926), rewritten as an opera from the incidental music to René Morax’s biblical drama produced in 1925, has the characteristic traits of his style at this period: fervid declamatory phrases in incisive rhythms over percussive harmonies, the progressions of which are actuated by contrapuntal, chromatically moving lines generally in contrary motion, with much use of ostinato figures. The chorus functions chiefly as a background for the soloists’ singing, except in the last scene, with its strong closing fugue, “Gloire au dieu tout puissant Jehovah des armées.” Honegger’s Antigone (1927), to a text by Jean Cocteau “freely adapted from Sophocles,” is a concentrated, continuous symphonic setting of the drama, without word repetitions, arias, ballets, or any other diversionary matter. The vocal lines are constantly in a type of recitative analogous to that of Lully (that is, deriving its pace, accent, and contour immediately and in detail from the words), but of course much more varied in rhythm and melodic pattern than Lully’s. An unusual feature of the declamation is the placing of first syllables on the accented beat instead of treating them in the usual way as anacruses, resulting in a singular vehemence of expression (example 25.3). The orchestral part is dissonant and percussive; the effect is altogether stark, quite in keeping with the grim, swift-moving text.

Honegger is especially notable as a composer of the typical twentieth-century combination form of opera-oratorio. His Le Roi David (1921) is a work of this type, as are also, in different ways, the “stage oratorio” Cris du monde (1931) and the “dramatic legend” Nicolas de Flue (1941). Most important in this category, however, is Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1938), on a text by Paul Claudel. As in all his serious dramatic works, Honegger is here concerned with basic social and moral conflicts in the modern world, dramatized in historic-legendary characters of heroic stature. Like a medieval cathedral, Jeanne d’Arc unites sacred and secular, great and small, ascetic and sensuous, the solemn and the grotesque, profundity and naïveté, in one vast structure of poetic and musical architecture. Solos, choruses, and ballets, Gregorian chants, dance tunes, and medieval and modern folksongs mingle in the complex, highly colored, music of Honegger; five speaking and five solo parts, a mixed chorus, and a children’s chorus are required, in addition to a full orchestra.

A minor but far from negligible French opera composer was Honegger’s pupil Marcel Delannoy (1898–1962). His most successful stage work, Le Poirier de Misère (1927), is a “Flemish legend” set to music in the restless, dissonant style of the time.

THE DRAMATIC WORKS of Darius Milhaud (1892–1974),²² most prolific of all the twentieth-century French composers, may be divided into three groups:

1. Opera-oratorios: a trilogy, Orestie (composed 1913–24), consisting of the operas Agamemnon (1927), Les Choéphores (1919 in concert form, 1935 on the stage), and Les Euménides (1927); Christophe Colomb (1930); David (1954); and Saint Louis, roi de France (1972).

2. Short operas, surrealistic, ironic, comic, or satirical, all composed in the period from 1924 to 1926: Les Malheurs d’Orphée (1926), a chamber opera lasting about thirty-five minutes;²³ the opéra bouffe Esther de Carpentras (1938); Le Pauvre Matelot (1927); the previously mentioned opéras minutes, with a total duration of approximately thirty minutes: L’Enlèvement d’Europe (1927), L’Abandon d’Ariane (1928), and La Délivrance de Thésée (1928); and Fiesta (1958).

3. Heroic operas: Maximilien (1932), Médée (1939), and Bolivar (1950).

To these may be added an early opera La Brebis égarée (composed 1910–15; performed, 1923), the scenic cantata La Sagesse (1945), the mystery play Le Jeu de Robin et Marion (1951), and the three-act comedy La Mère coupable (1965), based upon the third “Figaro” play in Beaumarchais’ trilogy. Milhaud also composed ballets, incidental music to plays and stage spectacles, and music for films.

Le Pauvre Matelot, Milhaud’s first big success, is a setting of a short three-act play by Jean Cocteau about a sailor who, returning home rich after an absence of many years, decides to test his wife’s fidelity by telling her he is a rich friend of her husband who, he says, is about to return home in utter poverty. The wife, not recognizing him, murders the supposed stranger in order to get his money for her husband. The peculiar unreality of Cocteau’s text is heightened by Milhaud’s music, which is in a half-serious, ironic manner, constantly tuneful with sophisticated dissonant harmonies (see example 25.4). Similar musical procedures, in a more mocking spirit, are evident in the three opéras minutes, parodies of Greek myths in the fashion of the old Théâtre de la Foire. Esther de Carpentras, a modern, lightly satirical version of the biblical Esther story, is especially remarkable for the comic ensembles of Act I and the vivid crowd scenes of Act II.

Of the operas of the Orestie trilogy (the dramas of Aeschylus in a translation by Paul Claudel), only Les Euménides is set entirely to music. All three include massive choral portions, constantly polytonal in a dissonant texture of blended ostinato figures. Extremely sonorous and effective are the places in Les Choéphores where the chorus, instead of singing, speaks in powerful rhythmic measures sustained by a large battery of percussion.

Similar technical procedures mark Christophe Colomb. Its two parts and twenty-seven scenes call for ten principal soloists, thirty-five other solo parts, three speaking parts, a chorus, and an orchestra reinforced by a special percussion section. Claudel’s drama is conceived in epic-allegorical form, with a narrator and other external personages, presented in a series of tableaux that are explained, commented on, and connected by choral and spoken interludes with percussion accompaniment. The mystical interpretation of Christopher Columbus is always at the forefront as the various scenes in his career unfold. The climax of Part I is a mutiny on board Columbus’s ship; this part ends with a gigantic setting (in Latin) of the Sanctus. Part II takes us back to the inn at Valladolid, where the action began after the prologue, and there is an epilogue ending with a choral “Alleluia.”

Much of the music is in planar polytonal harmony—that is, with free dissonance arising from superposing motifs (often chord streams) in different tonalities, though as a rule no one motif is completely in a single key. The usual method of construction, except in the longest scenes, is to introduce one theme, establish it by ostinato-like repetition, then add successively one, two, or more themes, each of which is also usually treated in ostinato fashion. The various planes of harmony are kept distinct to some degree by contrasting timbres; and there is compensation for the static harmonic effect produced by constant complex dissonance in the variety and vitality of Milhaud’s rhythmic patterns as well as in the monumental impression produced by this type of musical construction. Moreover, when the long-continued dissonance finally resolves to a simple chord at the end of a section, the intensity of the resolution is magnified. An example of this is the mutiny scene in Part I, where after a climax of four tonalities in the chorus and four in the orchestra (a total of seven different keys at once, one being duplicated), the whole resolves on a closing climactic triad of B-flat major.

Milhaud applied similar techniques to Maximilien, a historical opera based on a drama by Franz Werfel. Here, however, the degree of stylization surpasses that of any previous works: action, melodies, rhythms, all are ritualistic; even church hymns and military marches are indicated in formal, anti-realistic outline as parts of a tonal design rather than representations of actual happenings. But in Médée, his last opera staged at the Paris Opéra, there is less of the monumental, less dissonance, more lyricism, and more interest in the individual figures of the drama. The restrained dramatic force of the scene of the preparation of the enchantments is remarkable. Most expressive are the slow, melismatic, long lines in the soprano role of the suffering Creusa, innocent victim of Medea’s cruelty. Bolivar, with Christophe Colomb and Maximilien, completed a trilogy of operas on Latin American subjects. Like Médée, it concentrates on characterizing the persons of the drama, and it continues the composer’s gradual trend away from the revolutionary character of his earlier works. David was commissioned to celebrate the three-thousandth anniversary of Jerusalem as the capital of David’s kingdom; its music seems like a final summing up of Milhaud’s operatic development, a synthesis in which all elements of his style appear, now transfigured and calm, within the broad framework of this festival opera-oratorio.

ALTHOUGH BORN IN RUSSIA, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) composed his early operatic works in France. Those composed prior to 1926 include Le Rossignol (Paris, 1913–14), after a tale by Hans Christian Andersen,²⁴ Renard (1922), and Mavra (1922), a short one-act comic piece on a Russian text.²⁵ The score of Mavra is stylized almost to the point of burlesque, with puppet-like characters; the action runs from beginning to end in a single breath of swift song over continuous music, eccentrically rhythmic and brilliantly scored for a small group of solo instruments.

Stravinsky’s large-scale opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (in concert form, Paris, 1926–27; in a stage production, Vienna, 1928) draws from Greek mythology.²⁶ Its Latin text is a translation of Jean Cocteau’s French version of Sophocles’ drama. Oedipus rex is more oratorio than opera. All the “action” is narrated between the several “scenes,” which consist of stark, block-like solo and choral numbers that magically convey the feeling of the ancient tragedy—antique, impersonal, yet eternally significant. Stravinsky intended for the singers to be masked and mounted on pedestals, so they would appear as living statues. A chorus comments upon the action and the narrator, in modern dress, explains the unfolding of the story to the audience and therefore his is the only role that is in the vernacular.

In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Stravinsky left France and came to the United States. Almost a decade passed before he was inspired to compose his next work for the theater: the full-length opera The Rake’s Progress, set to an English-language libretto. The premiere, however, did not take place in the United States. It was an Italian opera company in Venice that agreed to bring the work to the stage.²⁷

ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING FRENCH OPERAS from the mid-twentieth century is Dialogues des Carmélites by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963);²⁸ it was first performed at Milan in January 1957 and then at Paris in June of the same year. In contrast to the composer’s earlier satirical, surrealist comic opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947) and his later tense one-act monodrama La Voix humaine (1959),²⁹ Carmélites presents no ostentatiously novel features either in subject, form, or musical idiom. The theme of its libretto—written by Georges Bernanos after a novella by Gertrude von Le Fort—is the conquest of fear by divine grace. The central personage is a timorous young Carmelite nun caught up in the religious persecutions during the Reign of Terror. She, along with an entire convent of nuns, defied the secularization decrees enacted in 1794 and willingly submitted to the guillotine rather than deny her faith.³⁰

The drama, developed with fine psychological perception and excellent balance between inner and outer action, had obvious and terrible implications for conditions in France in the 1940s, but its topical features are less important than its universal significance. The latter is powerfully communicated by Poulenc’s music, selflessly devoted to the text and bound with it in a union no less perfect than that accomplished by Debussy in Pelléas. These two operas are furthermore alike in the way they achieve profoundly dramatic results through restraint in the use of resources. Like Debussy, Poulenc connects the scenes within each act by means of instrumental interludes and makes unobtrusive use of recurring themes. The vocal solo lines, cast for the most part in quasi-melodic declamation (example 25.5), are kept in clear relief above the continuous, ever-changing, but always lucid and evocative orchestral sonorities. The chorus, used sparingly throughout most of the opera, comes into the foreground at the dramatically moving final scene. Altogether, Dialogues des Carmélites takes a worthy and, one may hope, a permanently honored place in the history of French opera.

Another French-language opera that had its premiere in Milan was Votre Faust (1969) by the Belgian-born composer Henri Pousseur (b. 1929). Votre Faust offers a different concept of creating a music drama in that it calls for a cast of five actors (the principal protagonists, Henri and Mephistopheles, have spoken roles), four singers, and twelve solo musicians for the orchestra. Also used are a series of tapes. The story concerns a composer who accepts a commission for a Faust opera as his pact with the devil. As the creative process unfolds, the audience becomes involved by voting on what they consider to be the preferred dramatic outcome of the opera.

FROM THE LATTER PART of the twentieth century comes Saint François d’Assise (1983) by Olivier Messiaen (1908–92).³¹ This is the only opera Messiaen composed in the course of his long and illustrious career, and it bears the unmistakable stamp of his style.³² His episodic retelling of the life of St. Francis takes more than four hours to perform and requires a large chorus and orchestra, the latter augmented by extra brass, woodwinds, and three electronic instruments called ondes martenot. Messiaen’s abundance of melodic motifs incorporating birdsongs and plainchant combines with rhythmically complex patterns to produce a serenely beautiful score that, nevertheless, is one of the most difficult to perform in the entire literature. That having been said, it is noteworthy that the opera has enjoyed additional performances, in whole or in part, staged and in concert form. The music for the monks, sung in chantlike fashion against an accompaniment of strings or winds, contrasts with that for the birds, which releases new and brilliant sounds from the orchestra in its depiction of nature. The chorus (numbering 150 voices at the premiere) has an extremely important role, acting as the voice of the unseen God or that of the heavenly realm. Messiaen also assigns choral voices to textless passages as a means of heightening dramatic tension. The central character, St. Francis, is given a wide range of emotions to express, from the gentle response to the needs of the Leper to the powerful embrace of his spiritual pilgrimage, which is manifested in the scene following the bird sermon. In this scene, he musically ascends the cross by vocally moving up to a very high note on the word “croix.”

Opera in Italy during the early 1900s continued without any noticeable break along the lines already drawn before the turn of the century. The leading composer at this time was Puccini, whose work has already been discussed (see chapter twenty-three). Along with the passing of the fashion for verismo, more and more Italian composers began to take an interest in other forms of composition as well as opera and to become more susceptible to the influence of current tendencies from abroad. It was a period of internationalism, even a certain amount of eclecticism. After Wagner came Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky in turn to stamp their impress, more or less distinctly, on Italian composers. Interest was aroused in symphonic and chamber music, as evidenced in the output of such men as Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909) and Giovanni Sgambati (1841–1914), while an important renewal of church music was led by Don Lorenzo Perosi (1872–1956) and Enrico Bossi (1861–1925).

Three Italian composers of the early twentieth century deserve particular notice: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948), Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944), and Italo Montemezzi (1875–1952). The special talent of the German-Italian Wolf-Ferrari was for comedy, with librettos either adapted from the eighteenth-century Goldoni or of a similar type.³³ These include Le donne curiose (Munich, 1903) and the one-act Il segreto di Susanna (Munich, 1909), his most famous work. Susanna’s secret is not that she has a lover, which is what her husband suspects because he is constantly smelling tobacco in the house; rather, it is that she is the one who is smoking tobacco. Wolf-Ferrari’s only tragic opera, an experiment with some of the methods of verismo, was I gioielli della Madonna (Berlin, 1911), a work strongly suggestive of Donizetti with modern trimmings in harmony and rhythm. The serenade in Act II, perhaps the best-known number in the opera, is a good illustration of the vivacity and rather superficial harmonic cleverness of the style.

Zandonai, a pupil of Mascagni, was one of the last composers of the verismo school, and his work is full of the old traditional Italian opera devices.³⁴ Of his nine operas, Francesca da Rimini (1914) is his most important; it has maintained a consistent presence in the repertoire of Italian companies and has even had international revivals.³⁵ The tragic thirteenth-century love story, retold by Dante in Canto V of the Inferno and dramatized by Gabriele D’Annunzio, was reshaped into a libretto by Tito Ricordi. Zandonai’s score is smoothly contrived as a mediant between symphony and theater, with its rich orchestration balanced by its reliance on highly skilled acting, and it is effectively designed to accentuate the passion and violence of the medieval romance. In an attempt to convey a sense of the historical past to the audience, Zandonai called for instruments of the period, the lute and viola pomposa, to be used onstage.

The decline of verismo and the effort to combine some of its features with the neo-romantic or exotic type of opera found in Puccini, Giordano, and others is one symptom of a new spirit in Italian musical life. Particular evidence is found in the operas of Montemezzi, especially L’amore dei tre rè (1913) and La nave (1918), where the influence of both Wagner and Debussy is blended with a native Italian lyricism to produce music that is sound in workmanship, rich in instrumental color, conservative in idiom though not merely imitative, and of enduring beauty.³⁶ L’amore dei tre rè is one of the best Italian tragic operas since Verdi’s Otello. Notable is the refinement of style: chromaticism is handled with intelligence and restraint, intensifying the expression of feeling by the very refusal to dwell on obvious tricks of theatrical effect. There are memorable moments of classic breadth, as at the end of the love duet in Act II (example 25.6). The voice line is an admirable adjustment of vocal melody to a continuous symphonic texture; recurring motifs and a carefully worked out key scheme make a formal whole of satisfying proportions. Altogether this opera—with its night-shrouded castle, its lovers swooning in sensual ecstasy, its tragic figure of the blind Archibaldo, its music that seems from beginning to end one low cry of voluptuous pain, delicately scented agony, and hopeless fatalism—is a work that exemplifies well the course of Italian opera at the end of the Romantic period: the ripe fruit of a dying age, the sunset of a long and glorious day.

Some less well known Italian composers of opera in the first half of the twentieth century may be mentioned here. Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936),³⁷ especially noted for his symphonic poems, wrote a number of operas in a neo-romantic idiom strongly influenced by impressionism. His first highly successful dramatic production came with La bella dormente nel bosco (1922), an opera for puppets that was an international triumph. His other works (with premieres in Milan, Hamburg, Venice, and Rome) include the comic and colorful Belfagor (1923); La campana sommersa (1927); the spectacular biblical ballet Belkis (1930); the mystery play Maria Egiziaca (1932), which was the most popular of his operas in Italy; and La fiamma (1934), with a sumptuous orchestral texture. Respighi’s last opera, Lucrezia (1937), was completed by his wife, Elsa, after his death.³⁸

Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882–1949) had some operas performed successfully at Rome, and his L’ospite inatteso (1931) was the first opera to have a world premiere broadcast by radio. One of the most prolific composers of this era was Lodovico Rocca (1895–1986). His works include Il Dibuk (1934), which at the time of its premiere was one of the biggest operatic successes since Puccini’s Turandot but has since been forgotten, and L’uragano (1952). Operas by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) composed prior to World War II include La mandragola (1926) and the marionette opera Aucassin et Nicolette (composed in 1938 but not performed until 1952 at Florence).³⁹ His later operas were composed, for the most part, in the 1950s, but were not staged until the 1960s and 1970s. They include some in miniature style, some that fall into the category of the scenic oratorio, and others that are full-length operas. To the last-named category belong The Importance of Being Earnest (after Oscar Wilde), a three-act comedy staged in English at New York in 1975 and in an Italian version at Florence in 1984, and The Merchant of Venice (after Shakespeare), produced in an Italian version at Milan in 1961 and in an English version in Los Angeles in 1966.

DESPITE MANY WELL-PUBLICIZED EXPERIMENTS and innovations, a large proportion of Italian operas produced after 1920—including some of the best as well as most popular works of this period—kept recognizably close to traditional forms and subjects and avoided any radical departure from accepted musical styles. In the favorable environment of Italy, the tradition was carried on by Franco Alfano (1876–1954), whose selection as the person to complete the unfinished score of Puccini’s Turandot was symbolical of his intermediary position in the history of Italian opera.⁴⁰ Alfano had become known as early as 1904 for his Risurrezione; his most significant later works were La leggenda di Sakùntala (1921), a heavily tragic work of grand-opera proportions, and the one-act neo-Puccinian lyrical comedy Madonna Imperia (1927), whose vocal lines, alternating smoothly between melodic phrases and a lively, expressive arioso, are supported by luscious harmonies in impressionistic orchestral colors—a perfect match for the voluptuous text.

The operas of Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), although somewhat less conservative in their harmonies than those of Alfano, are nevertheless rooted in a conservative tradition.⁴¹ In fact, Pizzetti, along with Zandonai and Respighi, signed and published in various newspapers a statement in which they condemned some of the more progressive musical styles prevalent in their day and advocated a return to tradition. Pizzetti’s operas have a continuous, full-bodied orchestral texture in a mosaic of recurring motifs. They are primarily lyrical in expression, with flexible speech-like vocal melodies and are characterized by extensive dramatic use of choruses (as in Act I of Dèbora e Jaéle) in a sensitive polyphonic style inspired by classical Italian models.

A particularly important work among Pizzetti’s early operas, and one of his best scores, is Fedra (1915), on a text by Gabriele D’Annunzio. A group of works to his own librettos include Dèbora e Jaéle (1922), Fra Gherardo (1928), and Lo straniero (1930). In all three of these operas, the dramatic action is conveyed by heightened declamation, the result of an almost perfect union of text and music. Little of any significance was produced by Pizzetti during the 1940s, but in the 1950s he came forth with several notable operas, among them Assassinio nella cattedrale (Milan, 1958) to his own libretto, fashioned from an adaptation and translation of T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, and Clitennestra (1965), his last opera. Although most of his operas were well received when first presented, interest in them soon waned to the point where few revivals, if any, occurred in Italy after 1980.

Comedy on contemporary subject matter was not a prominent feature of Italian opera under the Fascist government. Composers preferred to seek material in the safe and distant past, producing such works as Tre commedie goldoniane (1926) by Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973),⁴² which offers three short comedies after Goldoni in concentrated musical settings, for the most part in lively parlando recitative over a continuous orchestra, and La donna serpente (1932) by Alfredo Casella (1883–1947),⁴³ based on a tale by Carlo Gozzi. These operas exemplify well the Italian neo-classical movement. The trend away from operas of gigantic size and toward a revival of classical subjects, light ballet-like pieces, and eighteenth-century opera buffa is particularly evident in Malipiero’s trilogy L’Orfeide (1925) and Casella’s one-act La favola d’Orfeo (1932), both using the Orpheus theme. Malipiero’s trilogy is most interesting formally: the middle section consists of seven short detached scenes (sette canzoni), preceded by a prologue in the style of the opera buffa and followed by a semi-satirical epilogue, in which a puppet show is introduced. A similar technique of brief, concentrated action is found in Malipiero’s Torneo notturno (1930), seven night scenes that revolve around the two principal characters, Desperate Man and Carefree Man.

Expressions of the contemporary political milieu can be found in other operas by these same two composers. In Il deserto tentato (1937), a “mystery in one act” inspired by Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure, Casella aimed at reflecting the “poetic exaltation of the civilizing mission of a great nation” in music of a rather simple oratorio-like style with massive choral sections. Malipiero’s Giulio Cesare (1936), based on Shakespeare’s play, was also conceived, at least in part, as a gesture of acclaim to Mussolini. Its heroic subject and longer continuous structure are to be found also in Malipiero’s Antonio e Cleopatra (1938). His basically diatonic writing in I capricci di Callot (1942) contrasts with the more dissonantly complex sounds of his postwar Venere prigioniera (1957), reminiscent of the first phase of his works for the stage. In his final phase, Malipiero reviewed the varied styles of his operas in Gli eroi di Bonaventura (1969), an anthology of excerpts from earlier works, designed perhaps to signal the composer’s farewell to the theater. Other operas followed, however, and his stage career concluded with L’Iscariota (1971). His nephew, Riccardo Malipiero (b. 1914), has written several comic operas: Minnie la candida (1942); La donna é mobile (1954), a bitterly satirical television opera that incorporates twelve-note technique and Sprechgesang; and Battono alla porta (1961), which uses electronic effects. His most recent opera is L’ultima Eva (1995).

Adventurous were the politically motivated works. Intolleranza 1960 (Venice, 1961) by the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924–91) is conspicuous among postwar examples.⁴⁴ It is an azione scenica (scenic action) on a libretto that, while incorporating Communist quotations and slogans, is nevertheless conceived as a protest against authoritarianism rather than as party-line propaganda. The music, as is typical for Nono, includes various novel sound effects⁴⁵ and is in an “advanced” style markedly incongruous with the officially sponsored ideals of Moscow during that era. Nono’s use of slides projected onto a moving curtain to transform the stage area into what has been described as a “moving collage” was, in part, an adaptation of Josef Svoboda’s “magic lantern” technique. A decade later, Nono brought forth Al gran sole carico d’amore (1975; revised and definitive version, 1978); both versions had their premieres in Milan. Two literary works, Brecht’s Tage der Commune and Gorky’s novel The Mother, provide the basis for the libretto. Al gran sole is an azione scenica in two parts; both are centered around the theme of social justice: Act I is set in the Paris Commune; Act II concerns the 1905 revolt in Russia. Although both revolts were unsuccessful, they nevertheless provoked subsequent uprisings. Throughout the score, the orchestra and choruses assume prominent roles.⁴⁶

SINCE 1945 AN INCREASING NUMBER of composers in every country have adopted some form of twelve-tone technique, either using it as the basis of all their writing or blending and/or combining it with other techniques and styles. One of the most successful strict applications of twelve-tone technique to opera is heard in Il prigioniero (1950) by Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75)—successful, because the technical method is perfectly absorbed into the musical content: gradations of dissonance, with all the subtle sonorities, function for expressive ends; and the solo parts are conceived, in good Italian tradition, as singing human voices rather than as abstract contrapuntal lines. Four soloists, large and small choruses on stage, and a large orchestra (including saxophones, vibraphone, other “extra” woodwinds and percussion, brass, bells, and an organ) make up the performing forces. There are four scenes, with a prologue and two choral interludes on Latin liturgical texts. The drama centers around the condition of a Prisoner (nameless, like all the other characters) tortured by hope, “the ultimate torture,” but destined never in this world to escape. Dallapiccola’s thought was occupied with the same theme of imprisonment and escape in his Canti di prigionia (1941) and Canti di liberazione (1955).⁴⁷ The music of Il prigioniero makes use at times of fixed forms and often approaches the effect of conventional tonality (especially in the second choral interlude). An idea of the style can be obtained from a portion of the second “ricercare” from scene iii, based on a recurrent motif associated with the ironic word fratello (brother) by which the jailers always address the prisoner (example 25.7).

Among a younger generation of composers is Girolamo Arrigo (b. 1930), whose first opera, Orden (1969), was a very pointed critique on both the political and military aspects of the civil war in Spain and on General Franco. A second opera Addio Garibaldi (1972) also had political overtones, but in the 1980s Arrigo looked to Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Homecoming (based on the memoirs of Casanova) for the subject of his Il ritorno di Casanova (1984). Since this opera begins at the point where Casanova returns to Venice in 1774, it invites comparison with another opera based on the same episodes in Casanova’s life, namely Dominick Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming (1985).

Lucio Berio (b. 1925) produced in 1970 a work in three acts entitled Opera. Each of the acts begins with a different musical setting of words taken from the prologue to Monteverdi’s Orfeo; each act also includes a new setting of the solo sung by the messenger in that same opera. What Berio was bent on achieving with this retrospective glance at a seventeenth-century opera was an opportunity to equate the fate of twentieth-century opera with that suffered by Euridice, namely the demise of this particular art form. Far from its demise, the art form continues to flourish, with several more works by Berio contributing to the repertoire of new Italian operas: La vera storia (1982); Un re in ascolto (1984), one of his more successful works in which the audience is introduced to the inner workings of an opera house, even to the point of observing a chorus rehearse on stage; Outis (1996); and Cronaca del luogo (1999).⁴⁸

2. Aristotle’s Art of Poetry, trans. Ingram Bywater (1966 ed.), chap. 6 (1449b2o)

3. For studies of Pelléas et Mélisande, see a special 1977 issue of L’Avant-scène opéra; Abbate, “Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas”; Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande; Grayson, The Genesis of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande; and Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera.” See also Myers, “The Opera That Never Was”; Holloway, Debussy and Wagner; Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre; idem, “Debussy’s ‘House of Usher’ Revisited.”

5. The following scenes in the play are omitted in the opera: Act I, scene i;Act II, scene iv; Act III, scene i; and Act V scene i. There are many other small omissions, ranging from a single phrase to a dozen lines, and numerous alterations in wording, especially in Act III, scene i, where words have been added.

6. Gosse, “Maeterlinck,”in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed.), 17:299a. Quoted by permission.

8. See further Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande de Debussy: Étude et analyse, 97–114.

10. Letter to Ernest Chausson, quoted in Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music, 278. Cf. Abbate, “Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas.”

11. A case in point is Debussy’s incomplete setting of Catulle Mendès’s libretto, Rodrigue et Chimène, based upon the legend of El Cid. Mendès asked Debussy to set his libretto and the composer obliged by sketching out the entire work in the years 1890 to 1892. The opera, however, was never completed. All that remains is a short score of Acts I and III and a fairly complete vocal/piano score of Act II. Reportedly, Debussy did not like the libretto and this may account for his abandoning the project before its completion. Following performances at Paris in 1987 of excerpts from Rodrigue et Chimène, critics considered many passages within the score to have exceptional “dramatic breadth.”

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Debussy indicated that he planned to write two operas based on works by Edgar Allen Poe, and to that end he fashioned librettos drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry. On the basis of surviving fragments, the largest of which is a particella in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, it is possible to glimpse how the composer intended to fashion a score for La Chute de la maison Usher. Although Debussy wrestled with both of Poe’s works until the time of his death, neither opera was sketched out in as complete a form as Rodrigue et Chimène.

12. Béla Balázs’s libretto that was used for Dukas’s Ariane also served for Bartók’s Bluebeard’ Castle, with this important difference: Dukas’s opera ends with Ariane leaving Bluebeard’s castle and his other wives and coming out of darkness into light, whereas Bartók’s Judith is enveloped in the darkness along with Bluebeard’s other wives. See [Dukas], special issue of RM (1936); Favre, L’Oeuvre de Paul Dukas.

15. See studies by Roland-Manuel, Orenstein, and Marnet. See also [Ravel], special issues of RM (1925 and 1938) and a special issue of L’Avant scène opéra (1990) on L’Enfant et les sortilèges and L’Heure espagnole.

16. Biographical studies by Vuillermoz, and Orledge; [Fauré], special issue of RM (1922).

17. Bloch became a citizen of the United States in 1924. On the writing of Macbeth, see Cohen, “Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth”; R. Hall, “The Macbeth of Bloch.”

20. For more about Honegger, see his Je suis compositeur; see also Spratt, The Music of Arthur Honegger.

21. Tailleferre wrote a few operas, of which her four short comic operas written for French radio in 1955, Le Marin du Bolivar (1957), and Le Maître (1960; a chamber opera based on a play by Ionesco) were the most successful. Auric and Durey showed little interest in writing operas. Auric composed a short one-act, Sous le masque (1927), and Durey brought forth a monodrama for solo voice and piano, Judith (1918), and a comic opera, L’Occasion, first performed in 1974 for a radio broadcast.

22. Studies by Collaer, Beck, Palmer, and Roy; Milhaud, Ma Vie heureuse; idem, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand; Rostand, “The Operas of Darius Milhaud”; Rosteck, Darius Milhauds Claudel-Opern: Christophe Colomb und L’Orestie d’Eschyle.

23. This opera is made up of short scenes with set numbers (arias, duets, choruses), accompanied by thirteen instrumentalists.

25. Performances of Mavra were sometimes coupled with Hindemith’s Hin und Zurück. See Campbell, “The Marva of Pushkin, Kochno, and Stravinsky”;Taruskin, Stravinksy and the Russian Traditions.

26. On Stravinsky, see his Chroniques de ma vie; idem, “On Oedipus Rex.” See also E. White, Stravinsky; Griffiths, Stravinsky; Möller, Jean Cocteau und Igor Strawinksy: Untersuchungen zur Aesthetik und zu Oedipus rex.

28. Hell, Francis Poulenc; Poulenc, “Comment j’ai composé les Dialogues des Carmélites”; La Maestre, “Francis Poulenc und seine Bernanos-Oper”; Daniel, Francis Poulenc: His Artistic Development and Musical Style; Buckland and Chimènes, eds., Francis Poulenc: Music, Art, and Literature; Rauhut, “Les Motifs musicaux de l’opéra Dialogues des Carmélites.”

29. In La Voix humaine, Poulenc shows his dramatic skills by sustaining, for forty minutes, the wide range of emotions expressed by a single woman engaged in a “farewell” telephone conversation with her lover, who is leaving her for someone else. Cocteau wrote the libretto for this monodrama.

30. One member of the convent survived and wrote her memoirs, which, in turn, provided the material for Le Fort’s novella and the subsequent opera libretto.

32. Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen; Hold, “Messiaen’s Birds”; and studies by Bell, Johnson, and Nichols. See also Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language.

33. E. Bontempelli , “Il secreto di Susanna”; Pfannkuch, “Das Opernschaffen Ermanno Wolf-Ferraris.”

34. Chiesa, eds., Riccardo Zandonai; Dreyden, Riccardo Zandonai; Maehder, “The Origins of Italian Literature: … Francesca da Rimini.”

35. For a discussion of the 1983 revival at the Metropolitan Opera, see Opera News (March 1984).

37. Biography by E. Respighi; Rostirolla and Battaglia, eds., Ottorino Respighi; Bryant, eds., Il novecento musicale italiano tra neoclassicism e neogoticismo.

39. Castelnuovo-Tedesco emigrated from Italy in the late 1930s and took up residence in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1946.

40. Cinquanta anni di opera e balletto in Italia; Gatti, “Franco Alfano”; idem, “Recent Italian Operas”; Della Corte, Ritratto di Franco Alfano.

41. Biography by Gatti; [Pizzetti], special issue of Music moderna (1967), vol. i;Waterhouse, “Pizzetti in Perspective”; Maehder, “Die italienische Oper als ‘Fin de siècle’ als Spiegel politischer Strömungen im Ubertinischen Italien.”

42. M. Bontempelli, Gian Francesco Malipiero; Messinis, eds., Omaggio a Malipiero; Gatti, eds., L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero; Waterhouse, “The Emergence of Modern Italian Music”; idem, La musica di Gian Francesco Malipiero.

43. D’Amico and Gatti, eds., Alfredo Casella; see also Casella’s memoirs, I segreti della giara.

44. This opera was revised as a one-act opera with the title changed to Intolleranza 1970; it was performed at Florence in 1974. See Stenzl, eds., Luigi Nono: Texte: Studien zu seiner Musik and Taibon, Luigi Nono und sein Musiktheater. For a discussion of Nono’s second opera, Al gran sole carico d’amore, see Francesco Degrada’s introduction to the published edition.

45. A four-track tape was played through loudspeakers positioned around the auditorium, thereby enveloping the audience in the dramatic action.

47. Vlad, “Dallapiccola, 1948–1955”;Nathan, “The Twelve-Tone Compositions of Luigi Dallapiccola”; Dallapiccola, “The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and II prigioniero”; D’Amico, “Luigi Dallapiccola.”

48. Osmond-Smith, Berio; idem, “Nella festa tutto? Structure and Dramaturgy in Luciano Berio’s La vera stora”; idem, “Here Comes Nobody: A Dramaturgical Exploration of Luciano Berio’s Outis”