Modern music, a language a thousand times richer than the language of words, is to speech what thought is to utterance; it arouses sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in each of us. That power over our innermost being is one of the grandest facts in music.
— HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Song that is well and artificially made cannot be well perceived nor understood at the first hearing, but the oftner you shall heare it, the better cause for like you will discover: and commonly that Song is best esteemed with which our Eares are most acquainted.
— WILLIAM BYRD, ENGLISH COMPOSER (1543–1623)
Opera, n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but attitudes.
— AMBROSE BIERCE, THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY
From the beginning of operatic history until about forty years ago, the way most everybody enjoyed opera was to go to the opera house, buy a ticket, take a seat, and pay attention. Sounds simple enough, and by and large it was. One’s operatic expertise was pretty much limited to the number of performances one had seen, and even the most dedicated operagoer (or theatergoer, or concertgoer) could only see so many performances in the course of a lifetime. Verdi not only did not expect that you would become an aficionado of, say, Un giorno di regno, he would have been astonished if you had heard it twice—maybe even once—in your life.
For opera, like all other forms of music before the advent of recordings, was meant to be more or less disposable: performed once (or, more exactly, given one run of performances) and then thrown away. On to the next opus! Wagner, probably the most egotistical, solipsistic composer who ever lived, admonished his legion of acolytes, who were circling the Great Man even before the body was cold, to “make something new.” He meant this in two ways. One: don’t just imitate me, write something different, something that reflects your own voice. And two: keep on chooglin’. Wagner may have consciously intended each of his music dramas to be an enduring masterpiece (well, perhaps not Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot), to be studied as long as men and women shall stage opera, but he was also remarkably productive. During the course of his nearly seventy years on this planet, Wagner not only composed thirteen operas, most of which are of formidable length and proportions, he also wrote all his own librettos, as well as dozens of pamphlets, books, articles. In addition, he found time to carry on various love affairs, become involved in the disastrous German political uprising of 1848, run an opera house or two, build his own Festival Theater, travel around Europe, and generally keep busy. (Once, in conversation with the brilliant British polymath Jonathan Miller, whose own purview extends from medicine to writing to directing, I wondered aloud how Wagner and the other nineteenth-century geniuses accomplished so much. “They didn’t waste their time watching television,” he replied.)
Back then, no one could have imagined that someday otherwise perfectly sensible people would sit around arguing whether Adelina Patti in her prime was greater than Joan Sutherland in hers, or whether Gigli really might have been superior to Enrico Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti, and Placido Domingo, and whether maybe, just maybe, the Swede Jussi Björling was the greatest Italian tenor of them all. Fans of the day did have their favorite singers, and the opera claque, a group of fans whose zero-sum-game view of the operatic universe meant there could be no success for their favorite without a corresponding disaster for his or her rivals, was an entrenched institution. Crowned heads and titles often attended the opera either in the company of their mistresses (some opera houses, such as the Paris Opéra, even had special antechambers attached to the boxes so that when Cupid called, the demands of Amore could be satisfied privately and discreetly—and you could still catch the third act), or with their opera glasses trained on the heaving breasts and swelling bosoms of their beloveds upon the stage. Meanwhile, the hoi polloi savored the latest tunes, admired the scenery, and debated, often lustily, the merits of both composer and performers.
But to be able to compare singers from vastly different eras had to wait until our own time. And it is no accident that the rise in “singerology” corresponds almost exactly with the rise of the long-playing record and the precipitous—if, thankfully, temporary—decline of the opera as a living art form, both of which occurred just after World War II. Indeed, it has been only in the past decade or so that new operas have begun to win favor with a broad public again; and, naturally, there are complaints that the current vocal talent cannot hold a candle to the stars of the most recent vocal golden age, which ended roughly in the mid-sixties. (This ignores both Pavarotti and Domingo, both of whom rose to prominence in the seventies, but nobody ever said opera fans were consistent.)
This, then, is as good a place as any to dispose of one of the most pernicious myths about opera—that it is about singers. Canary-fancying (as the obsession with singers is sometimes called) is not only not the point of going to the opera, it actively hinders the enjoyment thereof. I know of no true opera fan who goes to the Metropolitan primarily to cheer on his or her favorite singer. Such people may appear to be aficionados or connoisseurs, but they’re not; no matter how well or poorly their favorite sings, they are going to act in the same embarrassing way, ruining the dramatic and musical progression of the evening with their selfish desire to show off.
In fact, not so very long ago, demonstrations were actually organized ahead of time. The demonstrators were organized into claques and assigned to boo or cheer a certain singer on stage. Callas, for example, had her claques, and her great rival, Renata Tebaldi (for the record, a much better singer and a much worse actress), had hers. When Rudolf Bing, amid much fanfare, unceremoniously fired Callas from the Met in 1958 over a contract dispute, he quietly tried to pave her way back by organizing claques to boo her replacement!
Which brings us back to the question with which we opened this chapter: how do we listen to an opera? And what do we listen for?
As we’ve seen, opera is a multifaceted theatrical form made up of elements of music, drama, dance, and design. There are many places to which to direct one’s attention, but it is primarily the musical aspect that we are concerned with here, since music (as we’ve also seen) is the engine that drives the show.
When we’re listening to opera on the radio or on recordings, then clearly it is the music that engages the senses. The art form is stripped of its visual component; bereft of scenery and costumes, it stands alone, naked, before the listener. Much as we all agree that opera is a synthesis of the arts, there is no question that, today, it is primarily as music that it reaches its largest audiences.
There is some debate over whether listening to opera on recordings is really “opera” at all, but for our purposes the question is no longer moot. Millions of people experience opera almost exclusively as audio, not video, through the weekly live Met broadcasts that have been winning new adherents for decades and from the widespread availability of CDs.
This is where you’ll most likely begin, too. Granted, it can be intimidating walking into the classical section of a record store and picking your first opera out of what seems like the world’s largest hat. There are scores of recordings of hundreds of operas, but don’t let that stop you. One of the saddest stories I’ve heard was that of a British acquaintance, who told me that he wanted to learn to like opera but that when he went into a record shop, he was made to feel so out of place by the snooty salesman that he walked out, never to return. So march smartly up to the salesman and either ask for help and get it, or take your business elsewhere. Most classical salesmen, however, are only too happy to win another convert and will usually bend over backward to steer you to an opera you can handle.
Even better, know what you want. Chapter 5 of this book will give you a number of suggestions about where to begin, although soon enough you’ll be striking out on your own. In the end, however, there’s no trick: listen to the opera and decide whether or not you like it. If you do, great; if not, try another until you either find one that speaks to you or decide this opera stuff is not for you. There’s never any need to feel ignorant or stupid when it comes to opera; like wine connoisseurship, it is just a matter of time and experience (and, yes, cash), not any innate or inbred talent or predilection.
Remember, though, that opera on disk is projected entirely through the sounds of the human voice and the orchestra. In the theater, we have the acting of the singers, the sets, the costumes, the choreography, etc., to complement and enhance the music—or, to look at it another way, to be complemented and fulfilled by the music. But on radio or records, opera demands the utmost concentration and study when you’re just beginning.
Concentration? Study? In an age of ten-minute attention spans? (Actually, attention spans are probably even shorter now, thanks to the remote control and the phenomenon of “channel surfing”—ten-second attention spans are more like it.)
You’ll have to do your homework. There’s no substitute for it. If you’re new to opera, read the libretto, read some critical commentary, including your local newspapers’ reviews if you’re going on a second night, get a friend to explain to you what’s going on—anything so that you don’t approach it cold. There is no better way to learn to hate opera for life than by walking into, say, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Wagner without having the slightest idea that it’s (a) long, (b) set in medieval Franconia, (c) sung in German, and (d) supposed to be funny. As you sit there, utterly mystified at David’s apprentice song, you’ll hear the forced guffaws of those in the crowd who, if not fluent in German, at least know where the laugh lines are supposed to be, and you’ll pass through various stages of bafflement, hostility, and anger until, at last, another opera hater is born.
So don’t do that. Do this instead:
Pick an opera. I’m not going to insult your intelligence or taste by advising you to pick something conventionally tuneful (e.g., La bohème, La traviata) or otherwise undeniably Italian. Start with anything you like, as long as it appeals. If you’re interested in German culture, give Wagner or Weber a go; if it’s melody you want, go for Puccini or Verdi; a Francophile might want to start with Massenet, a Russophile with Mussorgsky or Tchaikovsky. It doesn’t matter. Just start with an artifact from a culture you don’t already despise.
Read up. Libretto, reviews, books, commentary. Once you begin getting into opera, you’ll find an enormous amount of helpful material to guide you through its mazes. And, in fact, the deeper you get into opera the more you’re going to want to know about it, so don’t be surprised if, some time after your first exposure to Bohème, you’re not only singing along with Rodolfo or Mimi but you’re reading biographies of Puccini and checking out Murger (the French author on whose novel the book is based) in translation from the library. The path from novice to expert in opera is not very long.
Listen up. You may be able to enjoy Prince (although I have no idea how, or why) by listening with only one ear, or half your brain, but opera is sterner stuff, and it demands that you pay it full and complete attention. Knowing the libretto, then, is not incidental to your enjoyment of the piece, it’s crucial. Since the music is almost completely context-driven, it’s important to know what, dramatically, is going on while the orchestra is raging, or going rum-tum-tum. Knowing the dramatic situation—where you are in the piece—is indispensable to appreciating the music in all its glory, not just in all its tunefulness.
Which is why, in the end, opera is not about melody. For all its ravishing melodic moments, opera must be fashioned out of something sturdier in order for it to carry the burden of dramatic action and narrative for two, three, or four hours.
Let’s start by taking an example from a world that might be more familiar: Broadway. When people complain about the lack of “hummable-mummable melodies” in the work of a composer like Sondheim, for example, what, exactly, are they complaining about? To paraphrase Mark Twain, Sondheim’s music is neither as bad as it sounds, nor as sophisticated as the New York Times’s invariably unmusical drama critics think it is. What it is, is a supporting framework for the composer-lyricist’s dazzling word play, in which the arias are constructed along the same lines as the recitatives (a sort of sung speech), which is why it takes a brilliant arranger such as Jonathan Tunick to make it come alive.
In this constructive sense, Sondheim’s music is quintessentially “operatic”—far more so than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s, which is often accused of being “operatic” (as if that were a sin in a venue that has seen the world premieres of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide). Webber is a far more accomplished tunesmith than Sondheim, and in works like The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love—not to mention Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, both of which are called operas by the composer—he spins out tune after tune after tune, with no reliance on spoken dialogue and precious little recitative, which is Sondheim’s stock in trade. Instead, Webber composes his non-aria material in a semituneful way, often with echoes or forecasts of the show’s big melodies, which makes it appear to the ignorant that his musicals are nothing but a series of unrelated melodies strung together.
So which is the real “opera” composer? The answer is: both. It is probably only in the late twentieth century that we would even ask such a question, or think of separating “pop” from “high” culture. Verdi was no ivory-tower egghead, but a passionately popular composer who wrote with the audience in mind; Mozart aimed The Magic Flute directly at what we might consider today a “Broadway” audience, just as Bernstein did a couple of centuries later with West Side Story (story by W. Shakespeare, lyrics by S. Sondheim, by the way). When Webber says Sunset Boulevard is an opera, should we believe him? When Sondheim’s biographer, Martin Gottfried, says the composer writes shows, not operas, should we believe him? What is the difference, anyway?
In other words: how do we listen to opera?
Here we go again. We listen by first understanding what the role of music is, so we know what to listen to and for. The big arias, or tunes, will come and go, but if you sit around looking at your watch, waiting impatiently for “Di quella pira” from Il trovatore by Verdi, and thinking everything else inferior or boring, you’re going to be pretty unhappy. (“Parsifal,” quipped one wag, “is the kind of opera that starts at six o’clock. After it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says six-twenty.” That’s the wrong way to listen.) But if you understand that the opera’s entire score is, especially after the middle of the nineteenth century, a more or less seamless structure designed to deliver the music-drama in the most striking and efficient way possible, then you will be able to endure the longest, most arid stretches of operatic recitative with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.
But what about arias, duets, trios, quartets, ensembles, choruses, etc.? Shouldn’t a discussion of how to listen to opera tell us what all these mysterious things are? Surely, there’s more to opera than understanding the function of the music.
Well, yes. But not much more.
Once you understand your first opera, you’re well on your way to understanding them all; the key is to know what makes them tick, how they’re put together. But if we were to make a gross generalization (is there another kind?), we might break down opera, especially eighteenth-and nineteenth-century opera, into the following two components:
1) Arias, duets, and other moments of Big Melody that declaim the big emotions, the internal struggles, and the passionate feelings of the main characters, including the chorus, which often functions as a single entity.
2) Recitative, Sprechstimme, and other song-speech devices (including Wagner’s “endless melody,” which of course isn’t) that move the story along until it’s time to call a time-out, and have an aria, duet, etc.
And that’s about it; as Ross Perot might say, it’s that simple.
To put opera back into its theatrical context, think of “recit” as the dialogue of a play, the repartee between and among characters, the author’s delivery mechanism of his plot. The arias and ensembles, on the other hand, are the speeches, the monologues, that allow us to peer inside the character’s head and heart. Duets and the larger ensembles, right up to octets, offer us the opportunity to get to know multiple characters simultaneously, allowing the composer to heighten and intensify the relationships in a way denied a mere playwright.
So recits are about plot; arias are about emotions.
Okay, okay, you say: I know all about arias. They’re what Pavarotti sings at soccer games. But what is this recit stuff?
It’s the abbreviation of the word recitative (pronounced “re-che-ta-TEEVE”). Early operas consist almost entirely of recit (inconsistently, we say “reh-sit” when we shorten the word), which made sense, given the primacy of the words at that time. By the time we get to Handel and Mozart, though, arias and ensembles have become far more prominent, which is why some people get the idea that you have to suffer through the recit vegetables in order to get the arias for dessert.
Ahh, but you already know that’s not true. You already understand how music underlines the drama, how scores by geniuses like Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner have an internal unity and cohesion that add up to more than the sum of their parts, that you can’t have an opera made up exclusively of arias. So think of the recits as the bridges between arias and ensembles, the connective tissue that binds an eighteenth-century opera together. They are the sinews that allowed composers like Mozart to achieve an unprecedented psychological flexibility in their writing, and to bring to life such diverse, and deeply human characters, as Figaro, Don Giovanni, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, Tamino and Pamina.
Now, about those arias…
They’re not just what Pavarotti sings at soccer games. Nor are they merely the “greatest hits” from each opera, the tunes the fans have been waiting for, patiently enduring those darn recits until they get to the good stuff. The arias, and their larger cousins, the ensembles and choruses, are the emotional centers of opera, the moments when the characters get to tell us how they feel about what is going on. It’s easy to make fun of the worst excesses of arias—the ten-minute death scenes, in which the tenor or soprano pours out his or her soul while endlessly expiring—but folks who point to the “unreality” of such scenes simply don’t know what they are talking about. And here’s why:
As we’ve seen, opera is essentially about understanding emotions through the preternatural medium of music. When Tristan spends the first half of Act III of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde dying from the wounds he received in his fight with Melot, he is of course suffering physically. (You would be, too, if you’d had a sword run through you.) But, far more important to the meaning of the opera, Tristan is suffering emotionally—suffering from the frustration of his interrupted love scene with Isolde, and suffering even more from her absence. His death is a foregone conclusion—so was Wagner supposed to have him simply drop dead at the end of Act II? Of course not. The raving Tristan must sing before he dies—sing with the clarity born of insanity, sing of his unrequited passion for Isolde, of his fear of the coming of the day, of his love for the night, which embraces and protects him. Without Tristan’s long final aria, there is no closure to his character: he must stay alive long enough for Isolde to join him at his castle in Brittany, for him to breathe one last breath and collapse dead in her arms.
Just as important is Isolde’s final scene (the famous “Liebestod,” or “Love Death”). She, too, has unfinished business; she, too, must resolve her feelings not only toward Tristan but toward her husband, King Marke, as well. This she does in a final “aria” (if such a word can do justice to Wagner’s most poetic triumph) that embraces the spectrum of earthly love in a way unequaled before or since. Yes, Isolde sings for a very long time before she sinks slowly to the ground, lifeless; yes, it doesn’t make any “sense” for her to die suddenly for no apparent reason. No sense, that is, to an operatic ignoramus. But once we understand the context of the last act of Tristan, it makes perfect sense. It is the only possible ending. And it is every bit as “realistic” as a drive-by shooting.
What makes some people so uncomfortable about Tristan is not the violent and gloomy action but its alarmingly unambiguous subtext—sex, of course. Tristan und Isolde is permeated by sex, and especially by sex in its conjunction with death: Eros and Thanatos, together again. From the revolutionary opening bars of the famous Prelude (which, when combined orchestrally with the “Liebestod,” offers the listener a kind of Reader’s Digest version of the opera), the scent of a woman is in the air; the Act II love duet is the most explicit depiction of coitus interruptus in musical history. The frustrated orgasm the lovers experience, when their tryst in suddenly adjourned by the arrival of the king, must find an outlet, and that outlet must and does occur at the very end of Act III. There would not be a franker discussion of sexuality in music until Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
So now, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart—or maybe the root—of the matter. However you slice it, so to speak, opera is about sex. Not tawdry, dirty, physical sex, necessarily, although it can be about that too. (James Joyce’s Ulysses has nothing on, say, Mozart’s Così fan tutte.) Rather, opera concerns itself with the fundamental facts of our existence on the planet, which is why it is at once so sexy and so violent. Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death. When you strip opera naked, this is what is left. Opera is the most profoundly human art form yet invented.