If I had my way, a young man beginning to compose would never think about being a melodist, harmonist, realist, idealist, musician of the future, or whatever other pedantic formulas the Devil may have invented. Melody and harmony should be simply the means in the hand of the artist to make music.
— GIUSEPPE VERDI
A composer’s first responsibility is, and always will be, to write music that will reach and move the hearts of his listeners in his own day.
— RANDALL THOMPSON
The fact is, there are no rules, and there never were any rules, and there never will be any rules of musical composition except rules of thumb; and thumbs vary in length, like ears.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
There was a running gag about Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco on the old Saturday Night Live show segment “Weekend Update.” The joke was that General Franco was still dead. Week in and week out, the Fascist general, who had seemed to take forever to die, was, thank God, still dead as a doornail. Stiff. Cold. Six feet under. Pushing up daisies. History.
Not so long ago, the same might have been said about opera. Through a coincidental conspiracy of opera haters and fans, the art form, like classical music in general, appeared to be, if not deceased, then certainly on its last legs, a terminal, superannuated exemplar of a dying culture, a prime candidate for the slag heap, the next guest to check into the morgue. Opera’s enemies saw it as an outdated, Eurocentric, elitist, and expensive art that (somehow) by its very existence was an affront to the People everywhere. The fans, dwelling in the Neverland memories of their fifties’ childhoods, declared that all of modern opera—works, singers, conductors, set designers, and directors—was manifestly inferior to the golden age of their youth; without Callas, life was no longer worth living. At once politically incorrect and artistically moribund, opera was on its way to the glue factory.
What a difference a decade makes. At this writing (1994), opera is without a doubt the most vital performing art around. What once seemed almost ludicrously old-fashioned—fully deserving of its merciless parody by the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera—has now become the people’s choice, the art form with the widest attraction, and the most appeal to younger people. Opera is back, with a vengeance.
Why? What happened? After all the talk about the death of high culture in general and classical music in particular, what has occurred to pick opera up off the mat and send it back, fighting, into the ring? There are probably dozens of reasons great and small, but if you ask me they all boil down to one: composers again started writing music audiences wanted to hear.
By this I do not mean that composers were merely giving people what they wanted to hear. This is what we might call the Pollsters’ Fallacy, in which the populace is surveyed as to its tastes, or lack of them, and then presented with precisely what it has just said that it wants. For some reason, the circular reasoning behind this logic has never really been examined, but the baleful results are all too apparent. People know what they know, and they want to know more of the same. It’s sequelitis run amok, the substitution of rote for thought, the replacement of intellectual adventure with the safe, dull repetition of experience. As long as we continue to have government by popularity poll, we’re going to have presidents like George Bush and Bill Clinton, watching the weathervanes of public opinion in order to “lead.” Remember back in your high school elections how the teachers used to say, “It’s not a popularity contest”? Well, now it is. And it’s just as dumb.
Luckily, music didn’t fall into that trap. Once the twelve-tone commies had driven away audiences that had formerly encountered new music not only with tolerance but active enjoyment, they were able to look around and proclaim the unworthiness of the very patrons they had just sent packing. See? I knew you’d hate me sooner or later if I just kept beating you. And like their fellow travelers in the political arena, the “modern music” school then issued edicts akin to the Brezhnev doctrine, which stated that henceforth there was to be no backsliding. The twelve-tone method, also known as serialism, was (like communism) the end result of civilization, the best of all possible worlds, and, once achieved, could never be supplanted. Any hint of revanchism, and tanks would roll.
Well, you know what happened. Serialism is just as dead and discredited as communism, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys. (For a fuller discussion of the modern-music problem, please see Who’s Afraid of Classical Music?) Despite the dire warnings of (among others) college composition teachers across the land—academe, not patriotism, is the last refuge of a scoundrel—what succeeded it was not rewrites of Beethoven and Brahms. At first, maybe: when George Rochberg, a serialist apostate and a pioneer in the humanistic counterrevolution, quoted from earlier composers and then actually knocked off Beethoven in his String Quartet No. 3, it seemed like the Marxist-Leninists might be right. Was this what lay beyond the thorny thickets of dodecaphonism? Traditional harmony? Back to the future? Not exactly. What the naysayers missed was that Rochberg’s music was only the beginning; to create a meaningful new tonal system, we had to cleanse our ears of the entire Darmstadt school. We had to return to the market economy in new musical ideas we had so thoughtlessly chucked two decades earlier. Maybe white is white after all.
So ha, ha, ha—composers didn’t want to return to writing like Dvořák, and audiences didn’t want to hear that anyway; one Dvořák is plenty. What both composers and audiences were longing for was music rooted in their own experiences, but with a twist. Something familiar, yet unfamiliar. They didn’t want their noses rubbed in intellectual fascism, but neither did they want the same old pabulum.
And along came Philip Glass. With Einstein on the Beach he and Robert Wilson burst into opera-house prominence—much to the dismay of not only the twelve-tone hardliners but also the traditionalists who couldn’t make hide nor hair out of the strange new creature called minimalism. Was this opera? Was this music?
A few years later, Glass struck again with Satyagraha and created what I guarantee you will be one of opera’s enduring masterpieces. Far more conventional than Einstein, Satyagraha welded both minimalistic and traditional musical elements into one radiant whole. Yes, the opera wasn’t “about” anything. (Actually, it was about a lot, although, since it was sung in Sanskrit, it was hard to tell.) Yes, some of the melodies were simple scales, repeated over and over. (If it was so simple, how come nobody thought of it before?) Yes, yes, yes.
Satyagraha, as I read the history of the eighties, is the single most important work in the revival of new operas in the United States, and maybe worldwide. The hardliners and conservatives might both have hated him, but Glass had a powerful ally in time: he had come to artistic maturity not in the thirties, forties, or fifties, but in the sixties, and he knew everything from Nadia Boulanger and Stravinsky to Ravi Shankar and rock and roll. The opening of Satyagraha may have seemed unusual to the fogies, but every kid in the audience heard a standard rock chord progression—albeit played by the string section of a symphony orchestra. And it said: don’t be afraid, you’re going to like this. There’s nothing to it, really, just sit back and enjoy it the way you would any of the other music you like to listen to. They did, and the rest is history.
I spent the eighties based in New York but traveling around the country and the world, and I suppose that if I go back over all the pieces I wrote for Time in that decade, maybe half of them had something to do with opera. As I explained earlier, the magazine is predisposed to like opera, but I found myself attending opera on its merits, not because it made for good photographs. Not just new operas, of course, but daring and innovative productions of old ones. All of a sudden, opera was attracting the best and the brightest talents in all its various aspects: singers, conductors, composers, designers, directors. Opera was not only hot, it was sexy; it was where the action was. And it still is.
The past few years have even seen new opera crack the Met. Glass and Wilson had to rent the house themselves when they staged Einstein in 1976; in 1992, it was the Met who invited Glass as it premiered his specially commissioned opera The Voyage. That same season, it also offered John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, and had a hit with both. In Chicago, the Lyric Opera began an ambitious program of new American works with William Bolcom’s McTeague. That premiere attracted critics from across the United States, lured not only by Bolcom but by the opera’s director—the canny old Player himself, Robert Altman.
There’s still plenty of grumbling, of course, about “distortion” and “trendiness” and other assorted ills. And it’s true there have been excesses, especially on the part of producers. I found Sellars’s Don-Giovanni-in-Spanish-Harlem more amusing than inspired, for example, and there are far more egregious examples of a director’s yanking a work from its original time and place and transporting it elsewhere. Beam me up, Scotty! Some things, however, just don’t fly.
And yet, the renewed sense of excitement that now attends opera has rubbed off on more conventional opera productions. A 1994 Otello at the Met, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, was emblematic. Outwardly, it might have passed for a staging from twenty, forty, or even sixty years ago. The sets were representational, not abstract; the period was clearly the fifteenth century, not the twenty-first; and Otello was definitely black, not Chinese or Aleutian Islander.
That said, the production could not have been more up to date. Moshinsky knew from the start that this opera, more than most, is about psychological states, and he made sure that the characters reflected their inner lives in deed and gesture. He set up Otello’s final collapse in the first act by having the battle-weary Moor hold his head in agony, his guard down, his emotions on his sleeve. Even without overtly signaling that his Otello was rethought and reinvented for a late-twentieth-century audience, Moshinsky reinterpreted the opera as surely as if he had transposed it to the moon.
And don’t think the performers don’t respond. For a production in Bonn, Ken Russell, the outrageous British film and opera director, set Richard Strauss’s Salome in a Victorian brothel with playwright Oscar Wilde as one of the onlookers; the first music the audience heard was not by Strauss, but by Scott Joplin (the “Palm Leaf Rag,” as I recall). At one point, the soprano (Emily Rawlins) singing Salome was raped by the tenor singing Herod, and there was a brief flash of nudity. My, my. And how did you feel about that, Miss Rawlins?
She loved it. Not the nudity per se but the sheer vitality and the originality of Russell’s ideas, which infused the whole cast with a sense of purpose and—dare one say it?—a sense of amusement. This is not brain surgery, after all: it’s opera, and opera is supposed to be (pick one) shocking, enjoyable, moving, vulgar, snobbish, outlandish, unconscionable, unholy, and downright naughty. All of which Russell’s Salome was.
Because it’s okay to have fun at the opera. Groucho did, but he was having fun at opera’s—and Margaret Dumont’s—expense. When Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of Hollywood, was cleaning up the Marx Brothers’ act—he wanted their movies to be tighter and funnier—he insisted the boys retain their madcap ways but that they act out against the stuffiest background George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (the head writers) could think of: the opera, of course. And so when Otis B. Driftwood tangles with the snooty Mrs. Claypool at a performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore, hilarity is the result.
Our kind of fun is different. No one ever said—no one ever should have said—that opera requires some kind of IQ test before you can enjoy it. All you have to have is the price of a ticket (unfortunately, not in reach of everyone) and an open mind. Sit back and relax; this won’t hurt a bit.
For opera is wasted on the opera fans. Why should they have all the fun? Let them parse performances until they drop; you know what you like. Let them debate the relative merits of Madam Tessitura’s Tosca until the good lady finally hangs ’em up; what do you care? In the end, the only question that really matters is: do I like this? Is this for me?
With experience comes connoisseurship. All those people chattering mysteriously about spinto roles and head voices and the “break” and so forth—soon enough you’ll be able to join them, if you wish. (Frankly, I don’t recommend it.) After a season or two at your local opera house, prolonged exposure to your favorite recordings, and maybe a bout with the Met’s Saturday-afternoon live broadcast now and then, you’ll be well on your way to being an expert.
The point being that opera really should be available to everybody, and if opera is to have a future, it has to be. I’m not so idealistic as to think that if only our citizens were exposed to opera and “good music” at an early age they would all be rabid fans by now. While I deplore the nearly nonexistent state of arts education in this evermore-philistine society of ours, I don’t believe that people find their way to the arts through education alone. A love for the arts is very much like love for a person; you know more or less right away whether this relationship has any future.
So what ought to happen for opera to march smartly into the twenty-first century? Here are my recommendations:
That ought to do it. Opera hasn’t lasted this long by remaining hidebound. Upon close inspection, many of its most cherished “traditions” (like fat singers) are nothing more than occasion-specific events that have somehow stuck around. Maybe tradition really is just the memory of the last bad performance; in any case, it should never circumscribe the creative efforts of those who have dedicated their lives to put opera on the stage.
In the end, isn’t this what opera—or any living art—is all about? Musicians are not priests, docilely reciting a canon. Instead, they ought to be revolutionaries, playing and singing and composing because they have something to say about music. Something to say about the human condition, and how to improve it. Something to say about our society’s role in the art form’s ongoing history. Something to say not only to our generation but, if they’re lucky and good, to future generations as well. Something, in short, to say.