For music any words are good enough.
— ARISTOPHANES, THE BIRDS
Where words leave off, music begins.
— HEINRICH HEINE
If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.
— NED ROREM
Practically from the beginning of opera, composers and audiences have been arguing over which ought to come first, the words or the music. Today, that may seem a silly question to which the answer is self-evident, but it wasn’t always so. The theoreticians of the Middle Ages posited a division between poetry and music; poetry, according to one, was “musique naturelle,” while song was “musique artificielle.” At several points in operatic history, pitched battles have raged over the issue, and at least twice a major reformer has come along to set things straight.
First it was Christoph Willibald Gluck, who together with his influential librettist Raniero de’ Calzabigi came down on the side of the text during a time of widespread musical abuses, largely perpetrated by show-off singers: “I sought to restrict music to its true purpose of expressing the poetry and reinforcing the dramatic situation, without interrupting the action or hampering it with superfluous embellishments,” he wrote, and certainly his heart was in the right place. For opera in the late eighteenth century was rife with what we would today call abuses—ever-fancier arias written on demand for singers, interpolated notes and runs not in the score, etc.—and Gluck was seeking to strip it down, returning to the impulse that had created it in the first place.
The second great reformer was Richard Wagner, who was not only one of the most influential figures in musical history but in Western cultural history in general. Wagner not only reformed opera, he transformed it, and arrogantly (the only way he knew how to do anything) “preempted to himself the very concept of opera,” as the eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote in his seminal study, Opera as Drama.
This whole discussion of words versus music really takes us back to some of the discussion in chapter one. What is opera? Why does it have the hold on our imaginations that it does? How does it manage its effects? And how can we learn to heighten our appreciation of it? Sure, you can listen to Pavarotti’s “Nessun dorma” until the neighbors call the cops, and you can enjoy it on a simple, tuneful level. But, believe me, it’s far more rewarding to understand Calaf’s Act III aria from Turandot in context, if only for the reason that then you might actually want to get to know the whole opera, instead of just three minutes of it.
So what is the essence of opera? What are those qualities that distinguish it from all other art forms and elevate it above them all? What has attracted to it all manner of talented mortals—not only those who made their living as composers but great authors (Thomas Mann comes immediately to mind, and Anthony Burgess), philosophers (Voltaire, who wrote many librettos for Jean-Philippe Rameau), and filmmakers (Coppola, Scorsese), whose works are either frankly operatic or contain elements of opera in them? (Who can forget Coppola’s staging of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana as the finale of his Godfather epic, or Scorsese’s use of the same opera’s famous Intermezzo to accompany Robert De Niro’s pugilistic exploits in Raging Bull? What is its most important element: the music or the words?)
Or maybe even something else? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in addition to being one of the eighteenth century’s most influential philosophers and worst human beings (see Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals for the gory details), was also a composer and theorist who wrote several operas and contributed articles on music to Diderot’s great Encyclopédie, which he later collected as his Dictionnaire de musique in 1768. Rousseau defined opera as “a dramatic and lyrical spectacle in which one endeavors to combine all the graces of the fine arts in the representation of a passionate action, with the intention of arousing interest and creating illusion by means of pleasant sensations. The constituent parts are the libretto, the music and the scenery…”
Wait just a minute, Jean-Jacques; the scenery? Well, yes. In the eighteenth century, spectacle was as much a part of the very notion of opera as it is of the Broadway/West End musical. When operas were planned, very often the last and least of the considerations was who was actually going to compose the damn thing. Far higher on the production food chain were the text, the casting of the singers, and the splendor of the sets. The composer, tagging along at the end, was expected to tailor his score to the capabilities of the singers and the resources of the theater, not the other way around. The very notion of a composer presenting a score for production, and refusing to alter a single note as if the very music were the blueprint of the entire event, would have been laughable. Imagine if, say, a famous contemporary musical got the same treatment:
TREVOR NUNN AND JOHN NAPIER
present
T. S. Eliot’s
CATS
starring
ELAINE PAIGE as GRIZABELLA
music by a. l. webber
Hard to imagine, isn’t it? And yet, even during Mozart’s prime, that was the way it was. Mozart’s operas exist in variant versions, according to the location of the performance and the lineup of singers he had to work with. One of the great mysteries of opera is why Don Giovanni, one of Mozart’s masterpieces and certainly a strong candidate for the mythical title of Greatest Opera Ever Written, contains no real arias for the title character: “Fin ch’han dal vino,” the so-called champagne aria, is over in a flash (the singer draws only one breath during its course). Mozart was taking a lemon (the limitations of the twenty-one-year-old Luigi Bassi, who created the role) and making lemonade. It is not until the end of Don Giovanni that the legendary rakehell is revealed as the tragic hero he is, standing up to the devil with head unbowed and being dragged down to perdition for his integrity. Why bother to have the Don explain himself when we get an even more rounded portrait from the other major characters (the three women, his trusty manservant), each of whom sees him in a different way?
Just how ironclad the importance of venue was in the eighteenth century may be inferred from remarks in a 1725 letter written by Giuseppe Riva, a representative at the English court, concerning the operas of George Frideric Handel, the German-born composer whose career in England was heavily occupied with Italian opera. To Riva, who hailed from Modena, “the operas that are given in England, however fine as music, are nevertheless ruined by their poetry. In England people like very few recitatives, thirty airs, and at least one duet, distributed over the three acts. The subject must be simple, tender, heroic—Roman, Greek or possibly Persian, but never Gothic or Lombard. For this year and for the next two years there must be two equal parts for Cuzzoni and Faustina [two famous leading ladies of the day]. Senesino [a castrato, or surgically altered male soprano] takes the principal male characters, and his part must be heroic…If the subject demands three women, a third woman may be employed, as there is a third singer here to take part.” In other words, there were plenty of prima donnas, tapping their toes and waiting for parts written to order.
My point is that the very notion of what constitutes opera is constantly in flux, which is the way it should be. Every age gets the kind of opera it wants—or maybe deserves. Through history, opera has reflected the society into which it was born, from the Greek-obssessed poesy of the courts of seventeenth-century Italy to the protocol- and position-conscious arias sung in the royal châteaux of eighteenth-century France and Austria, to the politically dominated choruses of nineteenth-century revolutionary Europe to the alienated, semipsychoanalytic interior monologues of our own time. Like the novel or the play, the opera is a mirror of the times and conditions prevailing at its birth, and the greatest operas offer a direct, emotional insight into the past.
By the time we get to Mozart, it’s clear that while performance conditions still count very heavily in the composer’s overall conception, a new, more independent streak of thought is beginning to creep in. Here is Mozart writing to his formidable Da, detailing the circumstances of The Abduction from the Seraglio. In a letter dated September 26, 1781, Mozart first comments on the ways he has modified Gottlieb Stephanie’s libretto:
“As the original text began with a monologue, I asked Herr Stephanie to make a little arietta out of it, and then to put in a duet instead of making the two chatter together after Osmin’s short song. As we have given the part of Osmin [the comic harem overseer] to Herr Fischer, who certainly has an excellent bass voice…we must take advantage of it, particularly as he has the whole Viennese public on his side. I have explained to Stephanie the words I require for [Osmin’s] aria—indeed I had finished composing most of the music for it before Stephanie knew anything whatever about it.”
Mozart, in other words, is already starting to alter the balance of power. A couple of weeks later, he writes to his father once more, and this time his attitude is quite clear:
“I am well aware that the verse is not of the best, but it fitted in and it agreed so well with the musical ideas that were already buzzing in my head that it could not fail to please me…Besides, I should say that in an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music. Why do Italian comic operas find favor everywhere, in spite of the miserable libretti? Because there the music reigns supreme, and when one listens to it all else is forgotten…The best thing of all is when a good composer, who understands the stage and is talented enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true phoenix; in that case no fears need be entertained as to the applause even of the ignorant.”
Mozart was not suggesting that the libretto was unimportant; he reserves most of his complaints in these letters to texts that (in his view) were needlessly concerned with rhyming for the sake of rhyming, prizing form over function; like playground basketball players, librettists of the day were more concerned with looking good than actually being good. “If we composers were always to stick so faithfully to our rules,” noted Mozart, “we should be concocting music as unpalatable as their libretti.”
Before anyone else, Mozart understood (why? how?) that in opera words and music formed a partnership, but that the music must needs take precedence when push came to shove. Mozart therefore is rightly regarded as opera’s first great composer-dramatist, and though he wrote his best operas on texts by an extremely able librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte (whose stature is such that people still honor his name), he was never in doubt that it was the music that was the engine of the opera, and nothing else.
The words, however, exist to supply the dramatic context that fires the composer’s imagination. I’ve already discussed the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which happens to be the very first bit of the opera the composer set to music. Tatiana’s passionate outburst of repressed love found a sympathetic breast in Tchaikovsky’s (the composer’s own necessarily repressed homosexuality tormented him all his life), and it is little wonder that the Letter Scene was the first thing he put to pen. But what if the words, instead of expressing a young girl’s first, mad love, were merely Tatiana’s to-do list:
The music would likely have been very different indeed.
It is said of some composers that they could set the telephone book to music—in Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss actually did set a stage direction in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto. The British composer Michael Tippett writes his own librettos, and perhaps a phone book would make more sense. But most composers need the stimulus of dramatic words and deeds to get the juices flowing, and if the best opera librettos are not likely to win any literary prizes (and, with the exception of those by Da Ponte and Hofmannsthal, they generally won’t), they do provide the launching pad for music’s highest flights of the imagination.
And while it is true that a great libretto does not necessarily ensure a great opera, it is equally true that a hopeless libretto will pretty much mean an opera’s downfall. Franz Schubert, a wonderful songwriter, tried his hand at opera many times but was always defeated by a lack of a decent libretto. Schubert has been dead since 1828, so the issue is moot, but the question remains open whether, had he had a libretto worthy of his talents, he could have written a great opera. Surely he could have done better than The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, Alfonso and Estrella, and Fierrabras?
Maybe not. Not every composer has the ability or the temperament to work successfully in opera. Beethoven, after several stabs at it, wrote only one, the flawed masterpiece Fidelio. The other two Bs, Bach and Brahms, wrote none. Gustav Mahler, a great symphonic and song-cycle composer, one of the greatest conductors in history, and the leader of both the Vienna Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, never tried his hand at opera, except to complete and edit Carl Maria von Weber’s lesser effort, Die drei Pintos. To write an opera demands a range of skills that are not limited simply to the musical. The opera composer must also be a judge of literary merit, able to work collegially if not congenially with a partner; a student of the theater, knowing exactly which effects are possible on stage; and an impresario, adept in the ways of money-raising and patronage.
The nineteenth century, which was dominated by the twin giants Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, also witnessed the triumph of the music over words. Curiously, though, words were of paramount importance to both Verdi and Wagner. Verdi, who was a very active collaborator, repeatedly got into trouble with the censors of his time over the often politically incendiary subject matter of his operas; both Rigoletto and Un ballo in maschera had to have their locations changed, since the assassination of a ruling monarch was not exactly a theme designed to find favor in whichever principality the opera was being premiered. And let’s not forget that, for his last two (and two greatest) operas, Verdi turned to none other than Shakespeare, whose plays Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor form the bases for the operas Otello and Falstaff; the librettist for both was a fellow composer, Arrigo Boito, another great wordsmith whose literary contributions to opera have kept his name alive.
Wagner, on the other hand, wrote his own texts. (He did not call them operas, and he hated the term libretto.) The composer himself prized his texts very highly, often entertaining, if that is the correct word, his guests with dramatic readings while he was at work on the music. (He wrote the poems first.) In his great Ring of the Nibelung cycle of four music dramas, Wagner went so far as to invent a whole new dialect of German, a kind of personal Ur-Deutsch in which he couched his characters’ motivations. Wagner also was a producer par excellence, who inveigled various crowned heads to give him money, finally erecting his own monument in the form of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth (say “BUY-roit,” not Beirut), Germany, where the first performance of the Ring was given in 1876. (To illustrate the unity of operatic history, the Ring was initially conceived as a festival piece along the lines of the celebration of Dionysus at Athens.)
The determination of even as great a melodist as Verdi to get the words right may be gleaned from the technical detail in a letter Boito wrote to him in 1881 concerning Otello. In the Verdi-Boito collaboration, nothing was left to chance; both men were conscious not only of serving Shakespeare well, but of creating something that, in many ways, would be an improvement on the sainted original:
The ensemble has, as we planned, its lyrical and its dramatic parts fused together. That is to say, we have a lyrical and melodic piece superimposed upon a dramatic dialogue. The principal character of the lyrical part is Desdemona; that of the dramatic part is Iago. Thus Iago, having been stunned for a moment by an event beyond his control…suddenly takes up all the threads of the tragedy with unequaled speed and energy, making the catastrophe his and using the unforeseen event to hasten the course of the final disaster. All this was in Shakespeare’s mind and is clearly expressed in our work.
Boito then moves on to a little shop talk:
We had agreed that the lyrical portion of the ensemble should have one meter and the dialogue portion (the chorus included) another. This I have arranged. The meter of the dialogue is endecasyllabic. You can break it up at your convenience; broken up, it resolves itself naturally into five-stress lines. You can employ both meters at your discretion. The device was called for because endecasyllabics, sustained throughout a lyrical movement, would appear too somber, and five-stress lines too frivolous. I did not want to mix the two meters visibly but have preferred the artifice just now explained to you. I am fully convinced it will produce the desired effect.
Whew! Pretty complicated stuff. But you don’t have to be an endecasyllabic scientist to realize that there is a lot more that goes into the creation of a singable, dramatic opera libretto than just picking up a play and slapping some music to it—although, in Wozzeck, Alban Berg did basically just that with Büchner’s play and in so doing created the greatest of all twentieth-century operas. The exception that proves the rule, as it were.
The composer-librettist correspondence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes fascinating reading today, and not just because the telephone has replaced the letter as the preferred medium of informational exchange. Whether the two colleagues were fast friends (not very often) or pitched enemies (more often than you might think), both parties to an operatic transaction were determined to get the technical details exactly right. As proud as Boito might have been about his own contributions, though, the sense of his letter cited above makes it clear that his words are meant to serve the composer, who, in turn, is serving the dramatic situation.
Which, in the end, is what opera is all about. Professor Kerman had it right when he titled his influential book Opera as Drama. The title was a reference to Wagner’s 1851 essay “Oper und Drama,” in which Wagner articulated his goal of a completely unified work of art—the Gesamtkunstwerk—in which poetic, musical, and scenic elements would be welded together. “The unified artistic form,” wrote Wagner in his turgid, pseudo-Hegelian prose, “can only be conceived as a manifestation of a unified content. A unified content can only be recognized by its being given an artistic expression that directly communicates with our feelings. A content that makes a twofold expression necessary—an expression, that is, which forces the author to turn alternately to reason and feeling—must likewise be divided and ambiguous.”
Got that?
Wagner went on to lay out his beef against traditional opera.
Up to now, the composer did not even try to achieve unity of form for his entire work, each single number having its independently filled-out form and being related to the other closed numbers of the opera only in point of external structure, but possessing no actual affinity based on subject matter. Incoherence was thus peculiar to operatic music…In summarizing, we designate as the most perfect unified form of art that in which the widest range of human experiences is conveyed to the feelings in so completely intelligible a manner that the manifestation of this content at every point of the action first arouses and then satisfies the emotions.
So don’t worry if you can’t follow Boito’s nattering about meter or Wagner’s Teutonic hair-splitting. The point is that, in creating their operas, the greatest composers have always sought to avoid answering the question posed by the title of this chapter. They may have thought that, like Gluck, they were serving the word by enabling the text to be projected clearly and intelligibly by the singers. Or they may have believed, as Verdi and Wagner did, that the real work of art lay in wedding the two together.
In the end, though, whether consciously or not, they all subscribed to Mozart’s famous dictum about poetry being the obedient daughter of music. Gluck’s Orfeo, Iphigénie en Aulide, and Iphigénie en Tauride live on today not on the strength of their texts but by the power and beauty of Gluck’s melodies. Verdi, in tackling Shakespeare, was sure setting himself up for, if not an invidious comparison, then certainly a fall. And yet the majesty of his music transforms his source into something even greater than Shakespeare himself could have imagined. And Wagner, for all his pride of authorship of the Ring’s poem, knew the text could never be understood until the entire cycle, in all its incredible glory, could be properly staged, in a theater he designed himself at Bayreuth.
My recommendation, therefore, is that you as a budding opera fan familiarize yourself with the libretto before buying a ticket to the Met or to your local opera house; that you read the text carefully, with a good synopsis at hand to help you sort out the various Marquis de This from the Barons de That (any decent recording will contain libretto, translations, and synopses, along with detailed program notes). Because without a grounding in the locale, action, and historical background of the opera, the tunes may register in your mind and on your tongue but they will lack the deeper level of meaning with which composer and librettist have spent so much time investing them.
Sure, it takes time. Sure, it smacks of study hall. Sure, trying to follow along in Italian, German, and Russian ain’t easy for those of us who never got past Mr. Cheswell’s first-year French course. But nobody ever said this opera stuff was going to be painless.
And once you’re past the basics—the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the setting—you’re free to sit back, relax, and let the fabulous music wash over you, secure in the knowledge that while the other guy may think “Nessun dorma” is something they sing at a soccer match in Italy, you know what it’s really all about. That’s when the real fun begins.
And, of course, the real work.