The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.
— CLEVELAND AMORY
Opera is like an oyster; it must be swallowed whole, or not at all.
— SPIKE HUGHES AND BARBARA MCFADYEAN, NIGHTS AT THE OPERA
Acting is very, very important in opera. But, of course, it is just as well if you also have a voice.
— OPERA SINGER TITO GOBBI
Let’s start with what opera is not. It’s easier that way.
Opera is not, as Dr. Samuel Johnson famously, if perhaps apocryphally, noted, an “exotic and irrational entertainment.” Nor is it, in the immortal wisecrack of Mark Twain, “as bad as it sounds.” (He was speaking of Wagner, but he could have been thinking about anybody.)
It’s not boring. It’s not just for rich people, or society people, or gay people. It’s not just for the middle-aged or the middlebrow. It’s not just something you trek up to the Metropolitan Opera or the San Francisco Opera or the Lyric of Chicago or any of the many other fine American opera houses to see, witness with awe, and then head home again to forget all about it.
Even though you thought it might be all of the above, in fact it’s none of those things. What opera is, beyond dispute, is:
Imagine a combination of golden song, magnificent symphonic music, riveting theater, and brilliant dance, and you will come up with…opera. From the beginning, opera was meant to be a glorious synthesis of all the arts, and over the course of centuries, it has developed into all that and more. I don’t think it’s too much to say that opera is the monarch of all the arts, the highest and noblest artistic endeavor.
If that sounds a little extravagant, as if I’m overstating the case, let’s consider the facts. From its birth in late-sixteenth-century Italy, opera was intended to be the art form to end all art forms, to combine the best features of each of the performing arts into one seamless, exciting whole. Opera combines the drama of the theater with the emotional power of music and the grace and beauty of dance. Until it came along, you had to buy each element separately; once it was up and running, one-stop shopping was evermore the rule.
A common criticism leveled against opera is that it’s not realistic, that we don’t conduct our lives in song, that people normally don’t go around giving voice to their innermost thoughts (in opera, these are almost always about sex) or singing for ten minutes despite just having received a fatal stab wound or gunshot, or falling down dead of a broken heart just as the curtain is coming down.
Well, excuuuuuuse me! Of course opera’s artificial and stylized: that’s just the point. Since when is that a crime? As Goethe noted in a letter to Schiller (amazing, when you think about it, that the two greatest German dramatists were living and working in the same small city, Weimar): “Opera is free from any servile imitation of nature. By the power of music it attunes the soul to a beautiful receptiveness.” The fault lies not in opera but in ourselves.
Conditioned by the movies, television, and an increasingly stupid popular culture to prize and expect “realism”—indeed, to confuse realism with art—American audiences have been losing the capacity to separate art from artifice for the past three decades or so. The triumph of the moving image over the written word, which is really the triumph of brute empiricism over the imagination, has resulted in a culture that cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.
And so we get, often within months of their real-life manifestations, quickie made-for-TV movies about the crime or scandale du jour: Amy and Joey (surely last names are not necessary here); homicidal Texas cheerleader moms; and stranglers, murderers, and rapists of every description. One can practically sense criminals lining up, a blackjack or a bomb in one hand and their agent’s beeper number in the other; the real way crime pays today is in selling the book, television, and movie rights. Not only lawyers chase ambulances these days; producers are right behind them.
A hundred, even fifty years ago, few were disturbed by opera’s flagrant inattention to “realistic” detail because they knew there was more to opera than simply watching human beings on stage. On the contrary, opera is rich in realism, and in a way that predates Freud. Opera’s reality is not that of the streets, the byways, and the gutters, but that of the emotions and the mind. Once we have that straight, all else follows.
If this book can teach you one thing, it is that opera is not about extravagant plots and elaborate sets, although it certainly has these. It is not about cult of personality that has always surrounded the art form’s biggest (in more ways than one) stars, from Patti to Pavarotti. It’s not about having a box at the Met—although the Met was founded because a group of Manhattan society swells were stuck in the cheap seats at the old Academy of Music—or wearing a monkey suit or a new evening gown on opening night. It’s not even about singing, although singing is certainly one of its most important components.
It’s about music and how, through music, we examine our common humanity.
Amazingly, many people miss this salient aspect of the operatic experience. They go for any or all of the reasons listed above, but they miss the deeper—and more important—level upon which opera exercises its hold on our imaginations. Sure, it’s fun to yell “Bravo!” or “Brava!” at the latest vocal wonder, to tear up your program into little strips and rain down homemade confetti on the heads of those sitting in the orchestra seats, or stalls (as the British call them, as if the folks there were horses), or the parquet, as the main floor of theaters in Paris is called (and the basketball court at the Boston Garden). Sure it’s fun to debate the relative merits of conductor, stage director (increasingly important today in what Huizinga or Spengler might have called the late-crystallization phase of our musical culture), set designer, and cast after the show is over.
None of this, however, is what opera is all about. Instead, opera is about the exploration of the heart and soul, about how our deepest desires and longings influence and affect our behavior and touch the lives of the people around us. Through the medium of music, opera reaches us on a level that theater, which is bound to the spoken word and the representative action, can only dream about. In opera, there are always two levels of meaning going on simultaneously, and don’t think the best composers aren’t aware of it. Take this example:
In the great Letter Scene from Act I of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin [say oh-NYAY-gin], which is based on the poem by Pushkin, the most beloved of Russian poets, Tatiana pours out her emotions in an extraordinary epistle addressed to the man, the cold and remote Onegin, who has suddenly come into her well-ordered life and turned it totally upside down. This young woman, so full of repressed longing, is incapable of duplicity; she is, in every sense, a virgin, and in the letter she entrusts her heart to Onegin. Anyone who has ever felt the grip of mad passion, and put pen to paper to express it, will know exactly how she feels, how excited and vulnerable she is.
I should note here that Onegin is not a typical opera in that neither of the leads ends up committing suicide because the object of his/her affections doesn’t or can’t respond in kind. (That’s Werther by Massenet.) Or that one of them is killed by a jealous spouse or lover or lover wannabe. (That’s just about every other opera, especially Italian opera.) No, both principal parties survive in Onegin—survive in misery, with the horrible realization that what might have been can now never be.
For, incredibly, the blasé playboy spurns Tatiana; country life bores this city lad, and she’s only a silly country girl. “If I had wished to pass my life within the confines of the family circle,” he tells her, “and a kindly fate had decreed for me the role of husband and father, then, most likely, I would not choose any other bride than you. But I was not made for wedded bliss.” Thanks a lot.
Years later, when he meets her again as the Princess Gremina at a ball in St. Petersburg, Onegin realizes why his existence has been so unhappy all these years—killing his best friend Lensky in a duel hasn’t helped his quality of life—and now writes her a letter. This time, it’s her turn to spurn him; she’s a married lady now, her husband, the prince, dotes on her. Who can say what might have been? The opera’s last image is that of the wiser-but-sadder Onegin, hat in hand, lamenting the hash he has made of things.
All of these developments are adumbrated in the Letter Scene; those with an ear to hear can appreciate how expertly Tchaikovsky realizes Tatiana’s uninhibited passion—the music clutches at the listener’s heart so forcefully that one is almost embarrassed to witness Tatiana’s agonies. “Don’t do it!” we want to shout. “He’ll only break your heart.” But she falls for him anyway.
When she’s finished the letter, the orchestra thunders forth with her main theme, punctuating every word she has written. And then the dawn breaks, and we hear the jaunty tune of a shepherd’s pipe in the distance, as indifferent to Tatiana’s tremendous emotional rite of passage as Onegin will be in the very next scene. It’s a brilliant masterstroke, and sums up perfectly the way opera functions on a deeper level than any other art.
The role of music in opera, in other words, is not merely to supply the vehicle by which the action takes place. It does that quite well, and the number of famous tunes from operas is legion. But music also does more: it comments on the dramatic situation from the perspective of third-person omniscience, sometimes sympathetically, sometimes ironically. In order to achieve this effect in the theater you would need to have a commentator standing in the wings, tossing out observations whenever he could get a word in edgewise. In opera you have the commentator sitting in the orchestra pit, and he never shuts up. You just have to pay attention.
Which leads us to another advantage opera has over the theater: the ability to have several conversations going on at once. Try this in a play and you’ve got the Tower of Babel; the ear simply cannot distinguish among so many words simultaneously. You can prove this for yourself, the next time you are in a large group. When the conversation splits in two, as it eventually does, try to follow both dialogues at the same time. Yes, you can switch back and forth, but to hear and understand every word is impossible.
In opera, it’s not. The medium of music makes it possible. In fact, opera goes further: in opera, it’s possible to follow four (a quartet), five (a quintet), or six (a sextet) monologues simultaneously—even interior monologues, in which the person is only thinking. Take the great sextet in Act III of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Each of the characters on stage is in the grip of a strong emotion. Born out of wedlock, Figaro has just learned the identity of his parents, Dr. Bartolo and Marcellina, who stand revealed, and somewhat embarrassed, before him. The count, who was hoping to make Figaro marry Marcellina to pay off an old debt (and thus make it possible for him to have the delicious Susanna, Figaro’s fiancée, to himself), is angry because this is obviously now impossible. The lawyer, Don Curzio, is understandably baffled. Meanwhile, Susanna comes running in with money and finds Figaro in Marcellina’s arms, and it is only when the whole affair is explained that she joins in the fun.
Pretty complicated, huh? Not in opera, and not in the hands of a master like Mozart. Even if you don’t understand a word of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Italian-language text, it doesn’t matter, for the composer guides the listener through the intricacies of the various relationships so seamlessly, so affectionately, that not only is it clear what’s going on, it’s also clear how we are supposed to feel about it. Mozart has left us a guide to his characters’ feelings right there in the music.
And that, in the end, is what makes opera so great. Opera is a window into the soul, which allows us to examine the personality and motivations, the innermost thoughts and dreams, of the characters in a way given to no other art form except the novel. When we look at a painting we can only guess at what might be going on in the hearts and minds of the subjects. Can Cranach’s Lucretia really be killing herself with so much equanimity? Is Rubens really as pleased with himself and his bride as their portrait suggests? And just what is the Mona Lisa smiling about, anyway? Emotional ambiguity is one of painting’s great strengths and attractions, but the answer to our implied questions will forever be silence.
A movie can go a little deeper into motivation and thought. Even though he is dead at the beginning of the movie, William Holden’s character in Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard is perfectly able to speak to us, in order to tell us the story of how he died. That, however, requires a tiresome device known as a voice-over, which I personally find invariably jarring. Think of the famous movies that employ it: Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Scorsese’s Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Scott couldn’t wait to get rid of Harrison Ford’s flat narration when it came time for him to release his director’s-cut version of the cult film, and there is little doubt that Apocalypse Now would have been better minus Martin Sheen’s voice and, indeed, very presence. However essential, voice-overs almost always slow things down and divert attention from the filmmaker’s primary responsibility, which is to tell a story with moving pictures; a movie, after all, is not a lecture.
Opera, as I’ve noted above, doesn’t need a narrator because it already has one. Everybody in an opera is a player, including the orchestra. But it is given to the orchestra to be able to do two things at once: to provide the musical underpinning for the singers (they’d sound pretty silly all by themselves up there) and to comment on the action through musical means.
Mine may be a minority view, but years of experience have taught me that the best way to understand opera is to get at it through the music and not the lore or lure of the sets, stage direction, costumes, or singers. After all, singers come and go—if you listen to any opera fan over fifty, you’ll get the impression that they mostly go—conductors are variously prized or vilified. The music, however, endures.
And endures and endures. When we talk about opera, we’re talking about an art form with a history that is four hundred years old. As the arts go, this is not antiquity; literature is far older, as is the theater, whose repertoire extends back to the ancient Greeks. (Opera, as we’ll see later, came about in part through the Renaissance intellectuals’ attempt to recapture something of the spirit of Greek theater, which blended poetry and music.) And painting is at least as old as the cavemen, er, cavepersons.
Still, it’s a pretty fair chunk of history we’re considering here. Which is why I think it’s important we go into this with a very clear understanding of what opera can be, what it is supposed to be, and what, at its best, it is.
The point is that no matter what your background, opera is for you, too. Far from being a social butterfly, the true opera fan is in for the music, for the world of experience that opera can give to him. The real opera fan is not satisfied with a steady diet of Bohème and Tosca; the true opera fan does not live to spend her nights sitting around discussing the relative merits of Callas and Tebaldi with other nerds, digging out old recordings to prove a point. That’s the kind of behavior that gives opera a bad name; that’s what opera isn’t.
On the contrary, the true opera fan is always open to new experience; has well-developed tastes but is willing to be convinced should new evidence come along; and is always on the lookout for new or unusual works that enlarge and expand the repertoire—and in so doing, enlarge and expand our appreciation of what it means to be alive. The true opera fan loves Mozart for his sympathetic insights, Verdi for his humanity, Puccini for his lubricious, unadulterated passion, and Wagner for his courage to hold up the darkest and most perverse secrets of the heart and make us see that we all harbor them.
My theory of the nature of opera may not be original with me—and people have been arguing about the fabulous beast practically from the day it was born—but I came to it on my own. Growing up at various U.S. Marine Corps posts around the country as I did, I had little or no chance to encounter opera as a boy. In fact, I didn’t see my first opera—which, if memory serves, was a performance of Pagliacci with Franco Corelli, on tour with the Met—until I was well into my teens and living in the Washington, D.C., area. The second opera I saw, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, I was in.
Yes, in. At the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where I went to college, opera was not part of the curriculum for composers. I suppose that Eastman officials, like almost everybody else at the time, figured that the only good opera composer was a dead opera composer, so why bother? Besides, the mid-1960s were the high-water mark of the twelve-tone school in the groves of academe and, by and large, dodecaphonism and opera just didn’t mix. In Lulu, Berg had proved that in the right hands they could, but in those days the opera’s third act still lay unheard in the composer’s archives, and it was not until the late seventies that Berg’s great masterpiece could be appreciated in all its glory. We were all learning to write not like Berg, but like Schoenberg, like Webern, like Boulez, like Charles Wuorinen (the old serious Wuorinen, not the frisky Wuorinen of today) and all the other radical serialists in vogue at the time.
The opera department at Eastman, while active, seems in retrospect to have been very much a lesser part of the school. Unless you were a voice major or singing in the chorus, you almost never came in contact with it. My one onstage operatic adventure came about when the school chorus was dragooned into the Prokofiev; I think I played the part of one of the (Kennedy-assassination buffs, please note) Umbrella Men who storm around in the piece’s first moments demanding a real opera instead of the fairy tale that ensues and then mercifully disappear.
At Eastman, in fact, singers were considered by the rest of us to be—how shall I put this?—not quite musicians. Instead, they were widely and, in retrospect, snobbishly regarded as vain, silly creatures who placed more importance on looking smart than on having good chops. (“Chops” being the musician’s term for technical ability.) The voice majors, especially the girls, would come down to breakfast with not a hair out of place, makeup just so, dressed to kill.
Even when you couldn’t see them, you could hear them. A singer testing his or her voice for the first time each day warms up by making a sound like someone falling off a cliff, hitting a medium high note and then swooping rapidly downward to the bottom of the range. Something like this:
This is the equivalent of cold-booting your computer, a kind of vocal diagnostics test to make sure everything is in working order. So there would be all these good-looking folks, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at seven o’clock in the morning, parading around in their finery and making strange, hawklike noises in their throats. No wonder the rest of us thought they were a little weird.
And not very bright. This is, I know today, a canard, a calumny, an insult, and a damn lie. Nevertheless, it seemed true at the time. On the Eastman School of Music Evolutionary Scale (pat. still pending), the hierarchy of musical types looked like this:
Composers and musicologists
Pianists
Violinists and cellists
Flutists and violists
Clarinetists, oboists, bassoonists
Double-bass players and percussionists
Brass players:
Trumpeters
Tubists
Trombonists
[empty space]
[empty space]
[empty space]
[empty space]
Singers.
The point is, we didn’t have much contact with singers, and they didn’t have much contact with the rest of the school. Until the day when you, as a composer, had to round up one or two to perform your new song cycle. Why then, you couldn’t be nicer, or have more respect for singers. Which I soon did.
My friend Julia, for example. In addition to being a fine soprano, she was an excellent pianist who could accompany herself as she learned her roles, and was game to try anything. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was people who said singers were stupid.
“Why don’t you try it?” was the challenge she issued one day to an uppity instrumentalist. “Why don’t you try to memorize every note you play”—orchestral musicians never play from memory—“while moving around a stage? Why don’t you try not only to memorize every note, but to know your part in two or three different keys, and be ready to transpose at a moment’s notice? Why don’t you try to play while wearing several pounds of makeup and stitched into a costume? Try that, and then come and tell me singers are stupid.”
I had to admit, she had a point. For not only do singers have to know all their roles by heart—can you imagine Musetta reading from the score in the middle of Act II of La bohème?—they have to know them in a variety of languages as well: Italian, German, English, French, and Russian. At least they did then: today, with the near-universal acceptance of projected surtitles, one is far less likely to encounter Mozart in English than twenty years ago. A singer’s repertoire, however, is not bounded by nationality but by vocal type, or Fach, to use the German term that everybody employs, and music for, say, a tenor comes in all national shapes and sizes, from Puccini to Mussorgsky.
When I left Rochester to join the staff of the San Francisco Examiner in 1977, I was leaving a city of symphonic and chamber music for one whose passion was opera. And I do mean passion. The San Francisco Opera, under the late Kurt Herbert Adler, had become one of the country’s greatest houses, and everyone in don’t-call-it-Frisco, it seemed, was an opera fan. The announcement of the fall season is eagerly awaited each year, and when opening night arrives, the city puts on the dog and goes to town. Straight and gay, young and old, rich and semirich, they gather at the War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness Avenue for the traditional Friday-night opening festivities, then repair to Golden Gate Park the following Sunday afternoon for the traditional Opera in the Park free concert. The news media goes wild; it is at once the musical and social Event of the season, annually confirming San Francisco in its high opinion of itself.
So I knew that if I were to do my job, I had better be up to the task. Accordingly, I pored over the score and the libretto to each of the operas scheduled for performance that first season. One of them, I recall, was Verdi’s Don Carlos, a long, flawed, but magnificent work that poses particular problems for performer and critic alike in that it exists in different four- and five-act forms, different editions, and even different languages.
I read everything I could about Don Carlos, including and especially the critic Andrew Porter’s researches into the score, during the course of which he discovered much music that Verdi had composed for the opera’s premiere in Paris, but cut before the first performance and had never published. By the time Don Carlos rolled around my first season, I was ready for it.
My time in San Francisco also provided me with a memorable insight into the psychology of the opera singer. The occasion, which happened to be opening night, was a new production of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, starring Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto. Or maybe we should make that, starring Scotto and Pavarotti; it was my billing that got me into trouble.
Scotto sang the opera, but bowed out of the Golden Gate Park concert, which left Pavarotti as the headliner. The Examiner, which sponsored the free event, doesn’t have its own Sunday edition, and the Saturday version of any newspaper is a pale imitation of its weekday self, so we went big on Friday afternoon with our opera package—featuring, naturally, Pavarotti’s appearance in both Gioconda and Opera in the Park.
Just before Gioconda began, I was approached in the opera house’s press room by one of the opera’s public relations staff. “Signor Soandso would like to see you,” she whispered apologetically. She took me by the hand and led me into the hallway, where I was introduced to a fine-looking Italian gentleman whose name I missed but whose profession—Renata Scotto’s husband—soon became clear.
“There’s only one star in La Gioconda!” he shouted at me, “and thatsa”—he really did say “thatsa”—“La Gioconda!” Having delivered himself of this stunning syllogism, he went on to repeat it several times for my benefit, until even the dumbest Irishman (in this case, me) could figure out that he was shouting about the play Pav got in the paper that afternoon at the expense of the Gioconda herself, Madama Scotto. I muttered some vague words of assurance, excused myself, and headed for my seat. And with the cool professionalism for which I am justly renowned, I didn’t even hold it against her when I sat down to write my review later that evening.
When I came to Time magazine in 1981, then, I was ready for anything. Time, like most magazines, is heavily picture-driven, which is to say that a story with strong illustration possibilities generally has a better chance of getting in the makeup than one without. The managing editor in those days, the brilliant, saturnine Ray Cave, was just beginning to shove the magazine into the era of all color, and in all the sections he demanded the best pictures money could buy. During the Cave years all the editors spent hours screening and selecting pictures to present to the boss, and while a story was always sold on its own merits, the fact that it had good pix to go with it certainly never hurt.
Opera, as you may imagine, has better picture possibilities than, say, symphonic music. Seen one orchestra, seen ’em all; a hundred penguins with musical instruments commanded by some little European fella waving a skinny stick. But opera! Costumes! Sets! Spectacle! Time was not only opera-ready, it was opera-friendly.
It also didn’t hurt that the company’s editor in chief, the top editorial position in what used to be Time Inc., was Henry Anatole Grunwald, himself a former managing editor of Time. Grunwald had emigrated along with his family from Vienna to New York as a young boy; back in the old country, his father had been an operetta librettist for the likes of Emmerich Kálmán, and Grunwald retained a love of music, and especially opera, throughout his career. When I was being interviewed for the job, a number of my future colleagues stopped by to say hello.
“You poor son of a bitch,” was the unanimous sentiment.
“Why?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way,” they said, to a man. “The Time music department has one of the highest rates of turnover on the magazine for a reason. You’ve got one of the toughest senior editors on the staff in Martha Duffy, who eats young writers like you for breakfast. She’s a ballet fan, an opera buff, and probably knows more about your subject than you do. The other cultural senior editor, Christopher Porterfield, is a former clarinetist and arranger and, indeed, the former music critic of this magazine, so don’t think you’re going to get away with anything with him. Then you’ve got a managing editor, Cave, who couldn’t seem to care less about culture and probably wakes up each morning wondering why he has to have the damn stuff in his magazine. So good luck trying to get your stories in the book with any regularity.”
“Gee,” I said, or words to that effect.
“Finally,” the collective colleagues would say, “you’ve got an editor in chief who cares passionately about music, who is a personal friend of Beverly Sills, and who will read every word you write so critically and take it so personally that you’re going to wish you’d never been born when those memos signed HAG start raining down from the thirty-fourth floor.”
I took the job anyway and here I am, thirteen years later.
Cave questioned my judgment (to my face, at least) only once, and of course it had to do with opera. Now, you need to understand that, especially in those days, the managing editor of Time was like God: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and Cave was about as terrifying an apparition as could be imagined. In story conferences, senior editors would cringe whenever he would stroke his beard and cast a basilisk glare at them for one inanity or failure or another.
One day I got word from his secretary that Cave wanted to see me. I had been hearing rumblings that the boss wanted to do a cover story on the New Zealand–born soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, whom he had apparently met at a tennis match; when my opinion on the worthiness of such an idea was solicited, I rejected it.
So there I was, in the Presence. “What’s this I hear about you not wanting to do a cover on Kiri Te Kanawa?” asked Cave in his Tidewater accent. His voice, as it always was until he got mad, was low and controlled.
I explained politely that while Ms. Te Kanawa was certainly a leading soprano of her time, I felt there were other musical personalities more worthy of the honor of being on the cover of Time.
Cave replied by pointing out the nonmusical facets of Te Kanawa’s interesting life—her half-Maori parentage, her adoption by another mixed-race couple, her sensational London debut, etc.
I countered by observing that I personally was not terribly fond of her singing, that in my opinion her lack of a strong musical foundation was a crippling interpretative handicap, and that experience showed that, unable to fall back on the score for sustenance and inspiration, she generally got worse in a role instead of better. And then I shut up.
Cave fixed me with the death stare. Lowly associate editors were supposed to roll over and play dead, not stand up on their hind legs. “All right,” he said, his voice slowly rising. “All right. But you’d…better…be…goddamn sure that we’re not missing a good story here!” And that was the last I heard about a Kiri Te Kanawa cover.
Of course, he never did run my cover story on Philip Glass.