I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand.
— SIR EDWARD APPLETON IN THE OBSERVER, 1955
The Opéra is nothing but a public gathering place, where we assemble on certain days without precisely knowing why.
— VOLTAIRE
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
— H. L. MENCKEN
The operatic repertoire is fundamentally the creation of Dead White European Males, and if you don’t like it, tough. The opera house is no place for political correctness (come to think of it, what is?), so I must warn you from the outset that this discussion of opera’s origins is irrevocably bound up with culture. To be sure, singing is a universal impulse, and vocal music is found in every society, but for the purposes of this discussion, we will be tracing opera’s development from its origins in Renaissance Italy, to its spread across continental Europe and Britain and, finally, to its extension to the Americas. Most of the important figures are male, and most of them white; that’s the way it is.
We know that some form of music theater has been around since the ancient Greeks; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the others were declaimed to the accompaniment of winds and strings, and the chorus was an integral part of the drama, commenting on the action. Greek theater, so powerful even in the reading today, was a tribal—what we might call a “community”—event of overwhelming power and significance. The Athenians did not attend the theater in order to relax after a busy day inventing philosophy and squabbling with the Spartans. They assembled in their open-air theaters the way eighteenth-century New England Protestants gathered in their houses of worship, as a form of religious ritual that had something important to tell them about how they should, and should not, live their lives.
It is this liturgical quality that, even today, distinguishes opera from the other arts. Painting has long since lost its connection to religion, and nobody makes illuminated manuscripts anymore, but in order to experience an opera, we must make a pilgrimage to the place of worship, take off our hats, and sit quietly during the service. Although we are removed from the Greeks by millennia, the religious resonance lingers on.
In the mid-sixteenth century, when the intellectuals of Europe were rediscovering the humanistic values of Greek civilization by filtering Greek culture through the lens of their own desires, composers and other artists deliberately sought to return to some of the Hellenistic ideals. Opera, which first appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, was thus part of a generalized European cultural revolution against what we have conveniently tagged the Middle Ages, as modern secular Europe began to emerge from the Latin Gothic dominance of the Church.
Musically, the revolt was against the complex, text-obscuring polyphony of the early Renaissance that was threatening to tie music into knots. In such music, the five, six, or even seven voices (whether vocal or instrumental) twined and intertwined so contrapuntally that music was becoming almost too dense to be listened to. It needed clarification, simplification, a return to first principles, which music does every hundred years or so. Indeed, a pendulum swing between simplicity and complexity is one of the hallmarks of music history. Gregorian chant to motets; early opera to baroque opera; the classical style to the late romantic and the twelve-tone school; minimalism and—well, who knows what will follow?
Anyway, along came a man named Jacopo Peri, born in August of 1561, probably in Rome. Like all musicians of the day, he began his career as a singer (tenor) and keyboard player in the churches—in his case, in Florence. Peri’s first composition was one of the intermedi, or musical numbers between acts of a drama, for Giovanni Fedini’s court entertainment, Le due Persilie in 1583, and six years later he participated in the big blowout that celebrated the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine. That wedding changed the course of musical—and, for that matter, political—history.
The Medici court gathered to it an extraordinary group of artists and thinkers. One of them was Jacopo Corsi, the city’s leading patron of music, who in turn was influenced by the theories of the so-called Florentine camerata led by one Giovanni de’ Bardi. Both groups unfavorably compared the state of the arts in their day with what they imagined was the much higher standard that obtained during the classical period of Greece and Rome. Corsi encouraged Peri and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini to reinvent a kind of musical theater the Greeks might have admired, and the fruit of their collaboration was the first opera, Dafne, premiered in 1597.
Only bits and pieces of Dafne survive (another famous Dafne, by Marco da Gagliano, was composed in 1608), some of them written by Corsi, but these are sufficient to demonstrate that a new, simplified, more direct musical style had come into being—something that was made clear in Peri and Rinuccini’s next work, Euridice, first performed on October 6, 1600, at the Pitti Palace in Florence to celebrate another wedding, that of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV of France. Like Dafne, Euridice took its inspiration from Greek mythology. Peri himself sang the title role, but in case you have the idea that he was accompanied by a symphony orchestra à la Verdi or Puccini, the musical accompaniment consisted of a harpsichord (played by Corsi), a chitarrone, a lirone, and a lute.
What do these early operas sound like? You may be disappointed to know that, although they contain arias, choruses, and instrumental interludes, they consist largely of recitatives. There are no “greatest hits” from these early Florentine operas, no arias that pop up on television, no anthems that have found their way into commercials. Instead, they sound almost as if the characters are speaking to us in the rich vowel sounds of the Italian language. The music is fluid and flexible, existing to serve the text and put across the story. (For a chicken-and-egg discussion of the function of words and music in opera, see the next chapter.)
Very quickly, opera got its first great composer and its first great masterpieces. The composer was Claudio Monteverdi, born in Cremona and, at the time of his first opera, Orfeo (1607), working in the Duke of Mantua’s court. (Centuries later, Giuseppe Verdi would make a sixteenth-century duke of Mantua the villain of Rigoletto.) Orfeo was in part a competitive response to the burgeoning Florentine operatic scene. The lead role was sung by Francesco Rasi, who had also performed in Peri’s Euridice (where Monteverdi very likely heard him), but otherwise Monteverdi’s work marked a distinct advancement over the Florentine school. For one thing, it was explicitly divided into acts (even if they were probably played without a break). But even more important, it wedded the best of the old madrigalian technical complexity with the new ideal of limpid expression to give the fledgling art form a depth and seriousness that won for it a permanent place in European art.
Monteverdi followed Orfeo with masterpiece after masterpiece, including The Combat Between Tancred and Clorinda, The Return of Ulysses and, especially, The Coronation of Poppea (1642), the oldest opera still in the current repertoire. Yes, the patrimony of Poppea is in question: some of it, as it has come down to us today, was clearly written by other composers (in fact, the opera was not attributed to Monteverdi until 1681). But with its forward-looking emphasis on tuneful arias, Poppea not only pleases modern audiences, it also paved the way for the development of the art form in the baroque period.
By the time of Poppea, something else had happened of crucial importance: opera had come out of the royal courts and into the public theaters, the first of which, the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, opened in 1637. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized, especially when you consider that the institution of the public piano recital, for example, didn’t begin until Liszt in the nineteenth century. And here we are, in seventeenth-century Venice, on our way to the opera.
And not just Venice. Opera spread widely and quickly, although in each country it was tailored for local consumption. Sometimes it took and sometimes it didn’t: in England one major native opera, Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, appeared in 1689, following which the form went underground for almost three hundred years. Dido, which contains the famous aria for the heroine, “When I Am Laid in Earth” (and which has given rise to much risible comment among singers ever since), is a real opera, unlike Purcell’s other works, which are “semi-operas.” In such works as King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, the composer combined the English passion for the theater with the new techniques of opera. Would that he had lived longer: Purcell died in 1695, at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven, and England would not see his equal, either as a musician or as a setter of the English language, until Benjamin Britten in the twentieth century.
In France, opera flourished with the coming of the baroque. If the English wanted their operas to be more like plays, the French wanted operas that looked and sounded like ballets. Composers such as André Campra and Marc-Antoine Charpentier perfected the form of the opera-ballet in works like L’Europe galante and Le malade imaginaire. Later, composers like Lully and Rameau created more sophisticated musical edifices, although their works, like most early French opera, have not really caught on with the wider, non-French public. They seem somehow too precious, too delicate, too French for consumption outside their native land and, without prejudice, we will pass over them lightly.
Oddly, the high point of Italian baroque opera took place in England, where it was composed by a German who went by the anglicized name George Frideric Handel. We tend to think of Handel today as the composer of Messiah and other oratorios, but he primarily made his career in opera, both as a composer and as a producer. Between 1710 and 1740, Handel dominated the English operatic scene, composing new operas at the rate of more than one a year. Handel was a great synthesizer, adopting and adapting not only the Italian form of opera but also the French and creating a body of work probably unequaled in terms of its quality.
Unfortunately, Handel’s operas are now almost wholly out of favor, thanks to the style in which they are written. By the time of Handel, the battle between aria and recitative had been decided in favor of the former, and Handel’s operas consist of long, long, long stretches of what are called da capo arias. A da capo aria consists of an endless A section, followed by a contrasting but interminable B section, followed by a recapitulation of the A section, at the conclusion of which suicide seems a viable option—on the part of the listeners, that is. Another strike against Handel is the necessity of using castrato singers in the leading roles, of which there are no more; sopranos and countertenors just don’t make the same effect. A third strike is Handel’s penchant for opera seria, a parade of serious, mythology-based operas that seem stodgy and humorless, especially when compared with the works of Mozart, who was born three years before Handel died.
Handel also suffered from a sea change in the taste of the London public, which was partly occasioned by the infighting and rivalry that went on among the producers of Italian opera. Then as now, opera was something of a shoestring affair, at least as far as profit margins went, and Handel’s opera companies were always struggling with debt. The fact that they were for a time extremely fashionable didn’t necessarily help; in the fickle world of opera, you could become yesterday’s news with alarming speed. Nor did bad management help; one of Handel’s administrators at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, the aptly named Owen Swiney, fleeced the immigrant a year after Handel had settled permanently in London, absconding with the money in 1713. Handel was named master of the orchestra at the newly established Royal Academy of Music, but its operatic activities went under in 1728, partly due to a fierce battle between the company’s two leading ladies, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. Rival companies, such as the Opera of the Nobility, sprang up in 1733 and quickly won control of Handel’s theater (now called the King’s Theatre) in Haymarket, which it held until the company’s collapse in 1737.
In the meantime, something else had happened. In 1728, John Rich and John Gay presented the first and best “ballad opera,” called The Beggar’s Opera, and it was a sensation. Using existing English, Irish, and Scots folk tunes—and brazenly helping themselves to a tune from Handel’s Rinaldo—to support a topical text of pointed political satire, Rich and Gay created a wholly new form of popular opera that seriously dented Handel’s increasingly archaic concoctions. Tastes changed; bowing to the inevitable, Handel by 1741 abandoned Italian opera in favor of English oratorio.
So are Handel’s operas worth hearing? While I don’t recommend them for beginners, in the hands of an audacious director like Peter Sellars, whose Boston production of Orlando was set in the space age, they can still hold the stage given enough expertise on the part of the performers and enough patience and goodwill on the part of the audiences. There are zillions of them—Rinaldo, Teseo, Silla, Radamisto, Ottone, Flavio, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano, Scipione, Berenice, Serse, Semele, and many, many more—and you could spend your whole life in the major opera houses of the world and never encounter one. The best way to sample Handel is in small doses, on records, armed with a libretto and, preferably, a score.
Another opera composer honored more in memory than by performance is Christoph Willibald Gluck, who is notable for being the first great operatic reformer, rebelling against the excesses of Handelian opera and attempting to restore the form to its Florentine origins; the music, Gluck felt, should support the text, and not vice versa. We’ll discuss Gluck in more detail in the next chapter, but it is worth observing that, like Handel, Gluck was a Germanic composer who achieved his highest fame writing operas in other languages, in his case, French. The nascent German language, which had achieved its standard written form only with Luther’s translation of the Bible, was still regarded as inferior to the romance languages, French and Italian, and good Germans who wanted success in the wider world had better learn a civilized language fast.
Which brings us to Mozart. I generally abhor and eschew superlatives when it comes to composers, but I do believe that Mozart was the greatest composer who ever lived, and naturally wrote the greatest operas as well. A famous child prodigy, the Salzburg-born Mozart traveled widely as a boy, learning French and Italian on his travels in those countries and getting as far as England. He was, in other words, an internationalist from the get-go, and the depth and breadth of his experience are evident in every note he wrote.
Mozart wrote, by one count, twenty-one operas, three of which were composed before he was twelve, and six or seven of which not only remain in the repertoire, but form its core. Mozart was a child of his time and wrote his share of opera seria in the Italian style; two of the best are Mitridate and Il sogno di Scipione (Scipio’s Dream). The first major opera, Idomeneo, still widely performed in our day, was written 1780–81. Like any good opera seria, it takes place in the classical world, in this case Crete after the Trojan War, and while its libretto seems arch and stilted to us, the music is so fresh in conception and so vivid in characterization that it sweeps everything else before it. (Both Pavarotti and Domingo sing this opera, which ought to tell you something.)
And then, in succession, came masterwork after masterwork. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a comic German singspiel, or opera with spoken dialogue; The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte are the three ineffable Italian-language operas to librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte, works so rich in beauty and insight as to form the base of every other work in the operatic repertoire. Near the end of his life, Mozart turned again to singspiel in The Magic Flute and then topped off everything with a valedictory return to opera seria in the formerly underrated (but not anymore) La clemenza di Tito. Mozart’s contribution to opera is far more than a simple catalogue of standard works or collection of hit tunes. What Mozart did was nothing less than to realize opera’s full potential as a mirror of the human condition; everything, and everybody, after him is gravy.
For proof, look at Beethoven. Beethoven wrote one opera, Fidelio (although he wrote it several times; in earlier versions it was called Leonore), and nothing could illustrate the influence of Mozart more dramatically than this work, conceived just fourteen years after Mozart’s death. Fidelio is a “rescue opera” of the kind then very much in vogue in Vienna; Luigi Cherubini, an Italian-born composer of French operas and one of Beethoven’s influences, wrote several of them. And, of course, the music of the French Revolution was very much in the air, especially with the Napoleonic campaigns raging across Europe.
Fidelio, the story of a political prisoner named Florestan and his wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as the youth Fidelio in order to free him, begins very much in comic-opera style. (There is a subplot about the infatuation of Marzelline, the jailer’s daughter, for the in-drag Leonore.) But gradually it turns into something far more serious and universal, a full-fledged romantic opera that, for all its many dramatic difficulties and vocal infelicities, has a secure place on the roster of every opera house in the world. Fidelio is a miracle, a magnificent opera by a composer never very comfortable with vocal music, a thrilling ode to love and freedom whose own genesis was so checkered and difficult that a sense of struggle and triumph seems hammered into every note of the score.
With Fidelio we are now well and truly into the romantic period, from which comes most of what we think of today as “opera.” If Beethoven’s masterpiece was influenced by the French composers, they now came into their own once more, led by the formidable figure of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German-born Jewish composer (his real name was Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer). Meyerbeer is not much performed today, but in his own time he was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the music theater. Spectacle was the operative word for Meyerbeer; in such works as Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Meyerbeer tackled huge and fantastic subjects, whose productions were very much the talk of le Tout-Paris. So famous was Meyerbeer that a young, ambitious German composer journeyed to Paris to enlist his aid in furthering his fledgling, and up to that point, checkered, career. His name was Richard Wagner.
Wagner is so very much the dominant musical figure of the nineteenth century that he tends to obscure almost everyone else, with the exception of his chief contemporary Giuseppe Verdi. At the height of Meyerbeer’s fame, there were also significant operatic developments in Italy—namely, the bel canto school of Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti, which shared with Meyerbeer a love for extravagant vocalism. Rossini’s frothy comic operas, such as The Barber of Seville (oddly, William Tell, perhaps his finest, is very much a serious work), Bellini’s exaggerated emotional dramas, such as Norma and I Puritani, and Donizetti’s somewhat abler blend of comic and dramatic elements (The Daughter of the Regiment, Lucia di Lammermoor) all maintain firm places in the international repertoire today, although their entertainment value as singers’ showpieces is superior to their intrinsic musical quality, if you ask me. This is very much my pet peeve, but I find the bel canto operas, with their simple harmonies and rum-tum orchestral accompaniments, almost wholly devoid of musical interest and a chore to sit through. But you may not.
Which, thankfully, brings us to Wagner and Verdi. Both men were born in 1813, and both dominated the rest of the century (Wagner died in 1883, Verdi in 1901). One was a volcanic revolutionary, whose range of thought—and deed—extended from music and drama to philosophy and politics; the other, owing to his artistic stature, found himself symbolizing the hopes and aspirations of the Italian people in their drive for political unity. Between them, they created the heart of the modern operatic repertoire, reinvented the form twice over, perfected it, and handed it off to the next generation.
Trying to choose between them is impossible, although it was a choice that you practically had to make if you lived during the last century. They appeared to be polar opposites: Wagner, the radical inventor of “The Music of the Future,” as opposed to Verdi, the conservator of the Italian vocal tradition. To root for one marked you as either a right-thinking progressive or a dangerous anarchist; to cheer the other signified your utter musical conservatism, or your respect for the creative uses of tradition.
Verdi was a slow starter; of his twenty-eight operas, the first dozen or so remain fairly obscure, being revived more in honor of the later works than through any particular merit of their own. And yet, through this long and painstaking process of musical discovery, Verdi was not only able to create the masterpieces of Don Carlos (originally composed in French, for the Paris Opéra, as a kind of Meyerbeerian sensation), Otello, and Falstaff, he was able to bring his large and devoted audience with him nearly every step of the way. Everybody knows the famous story of Verdi’s withholding of the aria “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto until the last minute because he knew that as soon as it was heard in rehearsal, folks would be singing it in the streets. That’s how acute Verdi’s sense of the popular taste was.
Nobody ever sang Wagner in the streets. (Can you imagine ambling along the boulevards with a merry “Ho-yo-to-ho” on your lips?) His music, composed in a declamatory style that takes some getting used to, saves most of its good tunes for the orchestra. But what Wagner was after was nothing less than the transformation of the operatic form into something that would encompass the entire range of knowledge and experience. If Verdi was the great humanist—and the composer’s feelings for his characters are always fully in evidence—Wagner was the great arbiter of the unconscious, probing deeply in the wellsprings of emotion and memory. In his mammoth Ring of the Nibelung cycle, he created what was probably the most ambitious single work in the history of art, if we don’t count Chartres Cathedral; in the sunny Die Meistersinger he looked at love with wisdom and affection, while in the brooding Tristan, written at the same time as Meistersinger, he explored the darker nature of eroticism. Nobody was, or could be, neutral about Wagner, which is exactly the way he wanted it.
If the race between Verdi and Wagner (a race Verdi certainly did not participate in) was to see who would have the greater influence on the coming twentieth century, then Wagner wins in a walk. From about the middle of the nineteenth century on, the German school came to dominate nearly every creative aspect of music. Up to this point, the Germans had been fairly quiet. Handel, as we saw, made his career in England, writing in the Italian style; Mozart was an Austrian, born and raised in Salzburg, the German-speaking world’s most Italianate city. The first prominent composer of wholly German opera was Carl Maria von Weber, one of Wagner’s major influences; his Der Freischütz (1821), a spooky tale of the supernatural, continues to be popular, especially among German audiences.
After Wagner, however, came the deluge. His most important successor was probably the Bavarian composer Richard Strauss (no relation to the Viennese “Waltz King” family of the same name), who presents an interesting study in reverse motion. Strauss, the son of a famous horn player, first burst on the scene as a composer of brilliant orchestral tone poems—single-movement works of so-called program music, which tell a story. Among them are Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Ein Heldenleben, and they remain staples of the orchestral repertoire.
Basically, Strauss wrote almost his entire run of superb tone poems before he struck paydirt with his first major opera, Salome, in 1905. (Like Wagner, whose Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot antedate his first triumph, Rienzi, Strauss wrote two earlier works—Guntram and Feuersnot—that have never quite stuck.) He followed up the shocking Salome with the even more powerful Elektra, on which he collaborated with Sophocles by way of the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This was the first Strauss-Hofmannsthal joint venture, a partnership that bore fruit most famously in Der Rosenkavalier.
After Rosenkavalier, which surely must be judged the high-water mark of romantic opera, the bloom went off the Straussian rose (double-pun alert: the German word Strauss means, among other things, “bouquet”). Ariadne auf Naxos is certainly very fine, although its German-language spoken dialogue can be rough sledding for those who don’t understand it, and Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) has its moments—as well as its long half hours. After that, though, it was pretty much all downhill for Strauss, operatically speaking (morally, too, since he became the head of the Third Reich’s music organization), and most of the rest of the Straussian operatic output is pretty grim—tonal music without melody.
If Strauss is Wagner’s most important descendant, then Giacomo Puccini is Verdi’s. Puccini has, for some reason, come in for a good deal of critical drubbing in our time, and some drama critics obviously think the adjective “Puccinian” is a term of opprobrium, so often do they apply it to Broadway shows like Aspects of Love in order to call attention to the fact that one can actually hum the tunes. But Puccini’s abilities as a musician far outstrip his admittedly fabulous gift for melody. Listen to any Puccini score—La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Turandot to name the most famous—and you will be amazed at his sure-handed technical grasp, his exquisite orchestration, and his all-around good sense in choosing subjects that brought out the best in him; you won’t hear me uttering a disparaging word about Puccini in this book. Puccini (along with the one-shot verismo twins Mascagni and Leoncavallo, of Cav ’n Pag fame) was the last elevated exponent of Italian opera, and with Turandot, which the composer was working on at his death in 1924, the line that began with the Florentine camerata and Peri comes to an end.
A brief word about our old friends, the French. Unlike French wine, French opera tends not to travel, but this period saw the creation of one of the finest and most popular operas of all time, Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Like The Magic Flute, Carmen was composed with spoken dialogue instead of recitatives, which made it somehow not “serious” enough; after the composer’s untimely death at thirty-six, it was tricked out with recits by another composer. It is only lately that we have been permitted to hear Carmen the way Bizet conceived it between 1873 and 1875.
The other French repertoire masterpiece is Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, probably the finest wedding of text and music in operatic history. Maeterlinck’s recondite drama found its perfect musical realization in Debussy’s languid, elliptical music. Not that the two men were anything like friends. The poet clashed with the composer openly over the casting of Mary Garden in the title role—Maeterlinck wanted his mistress to get the part—and went on record as saying he hoped the opera would fail at its premiere in 1902. Vive la France!
Before we advance too far into the twentieth century—and Strauss lived until 1949—I should mention a couple of the Slavic national schools. The Russians are best represented by Tchaikovsky, of course, and by Modest Mussorgsky, whose epic Boris Godunov is a must for all opera lovers. In sweep and scope it surpasses even Verdi’s Don Carlos, and few climaxes can rival the death of Czar Boris as he topples from his throne in terror and remorse. The last scene, in which the character of the Fool bewails the fate of Mother Russia, should have been required listening for the Bush and Clinton administration State Department officials who botched the chance to bring the former Soviet Union into the fold of modern nations after its collapse.
The Czechs also developed a formidable domestic opera industry, led by Leoš Janáček, whose first major success, the masterpiece Jenůfa, was produced when he was sixty-two years old and brought him “overnight” fame. Janáček was a friend and student of Antonin Dvořák’s, whose own Rusalka is full of lovely things, and living proof that if you stick with something long enough you’ll eventually succeed. Up to Jenůfa, a frank and passionate depiction of the fate of an unwed mother in a provincial Moravian village, Janáček wrote almost nothing that is still performed today. After it, he embarked on an astonishingly prolific decade that saw the creation of the operas Katya Kabanova, The Makropulos Affair and From the House of the Dead, as well as the Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass. Each work is composed in Janáček’s wholly original style, influenced by the (to our ears) strange cadences of the Czech language and based on an otherworldly sense of harmony that is at once fresh and invigorating.
Which brings us, more or less, to that dreaded creature, twentieth-century opera. Considering that the twenty-first century is almost upon us, there hardly seems any good reason to continue to skulk about in fear of modern music, and yet twentieth-century opera is still considered a money loser and a room emptier by many unenlightened opera company managers, who apparently feel the “ugly” sounds of our century might grate upon the dainty ears of their genteel patrons.
Right. Never mind that both Der Rosenkavalier and Turandot are twentieth-century operas. No, what they’re thinking of is something like Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, premiered in 1925, just a few months before Turandot. We’ll discuss both Wozzeck and Lulu in greater detail in chapter five, but suffice it to say that they are superficially a world removed from the late-romantic musings of Strauss and Puccini. Wozzeck is, by and large, atonal, meaning it has no clearly defined home key, while Lulu is unquestionably the outstanding example of the twelve-tone system in opera. For these technical reasons, audiences have had a hard time catching on to them—until they encounter a first-rate production, which renders all the alleged musical difficulty moot. Let me explain.
There is no intrinsic reason why anyone should walk out of Wozzeck or Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung or any of the other avant-garde operas of the expressionist period. No reason, that is, except ignorance. Believe it or not, the boogeyman Wozzeck originally was a hit. The opera was a succès de scandale at its premiere in Berlin and quickly entered the repertoires of opera houses all over Austria and Germany; it was even given its American premiere, in Philadelphia, in 1931. What dented Wozzeck’s rise was not its idiom but its politics; the Nazis trashed it as an example of “decadent music” and, bereft of its huge performance base in central Europe, it stood outside the standard repertoire by the time sanity, and the Allies, prevailed.
In other words, had music been allowed to taken its natural course, we would easily see that Wozzeck, brilliantly original though it is, stands squarely in the same Mitteleuropäisch mainstream that we otherwise find so appealing. The postwar conservatism that engulfed the American musical scene didn’t help matters. In fact, the musical history of the twentieth century, in a nutshell, is that public tastes never quite caught up with what composers were doing, thanks in part to the extreme dislocation of the war years.
Luckily, the past decade has seen a demystification of modern opera, and today not even small children are frightened of it. Works like Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Death in Venice seem positively stodgy. I remain utterly resistant to the putative charms of Sir Michael Tippett’s quirky operas, such as The Midsummer Marriage, but find the music of his German contemporary Hans Werner Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, We Come to the River) both arresting and compelling. But the real action today comes from the pens of younger composers such as John Adams, whose Nixon in China was a dazzling first foray into opera, William Bolcom (the eclectic McTeague) and, in Britain, Harrison Birtwistle (Gawain). And, of course, Philip Glass, the man whose reputation among those who loathe him has gone directly from far-out radical to old-hat conservative. The fecund Glass, however, is the author of at least two indubitable masterpieces, Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha and may be busy writing another right now, for all we know.
Back in his fire-breathing days, the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez opined that we should blow up all the opera houses, since they were useless anachronisms. A couple of years ago, I witnessed one of the most stirring operatic performances of my life, a production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Paris. The conductor was…Pierre Boulez.
So maybe there’s life in the old grande dame yet. As this brief survey shows, the form of opera has changed and mutated over the centuries, lurching from lavish spectacle to dark psychological drama and back again. It has been denounced as a frivolous and expensive plaything of the idle rich and praised as the most democratic of all the arts.
Certainly, in our day opera has staged an impressive comeback. Since Glass and his librettist Robert Wilson took New York by storm with Einstein in 1976, the best and brightest musical minds have headed for the opera house. It’s the best place for them to be—and for us as well.