Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel-pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest.
— JOHN RUSKIN, ON DIE MEISTERSINGER
We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree—otherwise an opera—the one called Lohengrin. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.
— MARK TWAIN, A TRAMP ABROAD
If an opera cannot be played by an organ-grinder, then that opera is not going to achieve immortality.
— SIR THOMAS BEECHAM
I suppose this is the part you’ve been waiting for. I am looking forward to telling you all about my favorite operas, why they’re my favorites, and why I think they are likely to become your favorites too. (Not your only favorites, of course.) And we’ll get right to the honor roll in just a minute. But first, a word on the selections.
Let me state my prejudices right up front. I have two of them. As mentioned, I do not much care for the bel canto operas of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini; in fact, I find them nearly impossible to sit through, for reasons already explained. Neither am I a big fan of baroque opera as exemplified by Handel, although I understand and respect the enthusiasm of its admirers. On the other hand, I utterly reject as ignorant and crabbed of soul the fashionable disparagement of Puccini as a cheap sensationmonger.
Other than that, I am a model of open-mindedness. When people ask me which is my favorite opera (or, worse, my preferred composer), I am hard pressed to answer, as any right-thinking individual of catholic and sophisticated taste should be. The reason is that I don’t have one. I am an impartial arbiter, wholly lacking in any particular ideology or political agenda. Although my list is comprehensive, it is by no means deliberately inclusive; there are no operas by Aleutian Islanders, Eskimos, Filipinos, Arabs, or Native Americans. There are, on the other hand, works by Germans, Austrians, Italians, Frenchmen, Czechs, Russians, and Americans, both white and black; there are operas written by straights and gays, Jews and goys; there are operas written by both the quick and the dead. There is, however, not a single opera by a woman, for the simple reason that none has yet made its way into the repertoire. (Sorry, ladies.)
As you cruise the list, you will encounter some familiar standard works from all periods of operatic history and a couple of oddball choices written within living memory. The dreaded twelve-tone system will raise its ugly head, as will the controversial minimalist school. There are operas based on Pushkin and Goethe, and there is an opera based on an episode in the life of Richard and Pat Nixon; there are operas sung in the usual foreign languages, as well as in plain English, of both the British and the American varieties, and there is even one sung in Sanskrit. Historical personages such as Saint Francis make an appearance, as do Henry Kissinger, a Russian czar, Don Juan, and the Mahatma Gandhi. Some of the operas take place in palaces, others in prison camps. Some of the characters have sexual intercourse with each other, usually illicitly; some get pregnant; some commit incest; some are pederasts and rapists; some are murderers. A few die of deadly infectious diseases; others commit suicide by shooting themselves or jumping into rivers. One even pulls down the entire universe around her shoulders. All, however, are human—all too human.
Which is, as I’ve noted, the essential condition for opera—that it be about real people (no matter how extravagant or exotic their predilections), and that it have something to say to us about the way we live our lives, and the social and moral circumstances in which we find ourselves.
You won’t find much in the way of plot summaries here. Nothing is more boring than a précis of an opera you don’t know and perhaps never heard of. Instead, what I’ve tried to do is to lead you into the opera by discussing its place in history, as well as salient aspects of its composition and the techniques the composer has used in constructing it—how it fits in, in other words, with the issues I’ve raised in this book. In this way, I hope you’ll find the operas interesting to read about both before you listen to them and again after you get to know them. In fact, I hope you do come back to the book after you’ve become an expert on, say, Così fan tutte or Wozzeck, to argue with me or to add your own observations to my brilliant analyses.
And so, without further ado, and in the order it pleases me to present them for your consideration (yes, there is an internal logic at work here, as you will notice eventually), here they are: The Basic Opera Repertoire for the Waning Days (thank God) of the Twentieth Century.
Béla Bartók: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára). Dark, dark, dark. Gloomy, even. Depressing. A two-hander. And sung in Hungarian to boot. Not your basic Barber of Seville laugh riot. So why is this opera listed first?
A number of reasons, most of them for your own good. It’s a twentieth-century work, composed in 1911 and first performed in Budapest in 1918. It’s short (less than an hour in duration, which makes it easy to absorb but difficult to program—what do you do for a second act?). It’s written in a “modern” but eminently approachable tonal idiom that should pose no problems for a listener of even modest sophistication. It is a near-perfect marriage of text and music by two of turn-of-the-century Hungary’s most adventurous artists. And yet, it’s a deep, dense, challenging work that plumbs the psyches of two archetypal characters, and one that will keep you up nights thinking about what it means. In short, it’s an ideal example of all the issues we’ve been discussing up to now.
The opera begins with a spoken prologue, which is almost always omitted in performance (except in Hungary, of course). One of its stanzas says explicitly:
Enter! A realm awaits you that without you
Cannot come into being; the realm of myth!
Still thinking of your lives? Find them here with
New meanings, for our story is about you,
Ladies and gentlemen.
In other words, what we are about to see is not the fairy tale of Bluebeard and his nosy wives—or rather, not simply that story, but something more. True, the “plot” conforms to the familiar tale: Bluebeard takes a new wife, Judith, and brings her home to his drafty, sepulchral castle. At first, the place seems pretty grim, but as Bluebeard gradually unlocks the secrets of his fortress, it becomes ever grander until, at the fifth door, his entire kingdom is revealed. But Judith, being Woman, wants more. (What do women want?) The sixth door exposes a vast lake, watered by tears, while behind the seventh lie imprisoned Bluebeard’s three previous wives. Now Judith must join them; the door shuts and Bluebeard is alone once more, this time forever.
Not exactly a bedroom farce, eh? Well, it’s not supposed to be. Instead Bartók and Béla Balázs, the librettist, are attempting nothing less than the exploration of the human soul. The opera begins in blackest night; as the various doors—revealing the torture chamber, the armory, the treasury, the garden—open, each one streaked with blood, the dismal castle grows brighter until the climactic opening of the fifth door (in a resplendent blaze of C major). Each of the five rooms conducts us a step further into Bluebeard’s heart, but not even the magnificence of the fifth door is immune from the “blood motive” in the music, a minor second—play any two adjacent black and white notes on the piano simultaneously to see what I mean. Bluebeard’s agony is always close to the surface, and when Judith pushes him beyond the point he cares to go, she finds only the Lake of Sorrow and, in the end, the same imprisoned fate his other wives found earlier. The last scene in the opera belongs to Bluebeard, who sings passionately about each of his loves, who represent the morning, noon, and evening of his life. Now Judith, the night, and the most beautiful of all, has to take her place with them, and Bluebeard must remain, alone, in the endless darkness of solitude.
Bluebeard’s Castle is not only a splendid example of twentieth-century opera, it can stand for all opera in its melodic urgency, its subtle, penetrating harmonies, the efficiency of its construction, the melding of its words and music (Warning: Do not try to translate this opera into English or any other language, or its warranty immediately expires), and, most of all, the sheer beauty of its music. Bartók was just beginning his pioneering researches into the wellsprings of Hungarian folk music, which were to have such a large effect on his subsequent compositional style, and the first fruits of this labor are evident in Bluebeard. Also audible is the composer’s fascination with Debussy, whose opera Pelléas et Mélisande dates from 1902.
The composer never wrote another work like Bluebeard’s Castle (indeed, he never wrote another opera, and more’s the pity); his other stage works—The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin—are ballets. No doubt the enormous obstacles placed in his opera’s way—Bartók entered it in a Budapest competition, but the jury rejected it as unperformable—had much to do with his reluctance to continue with the genre. But Bartók said all he had to say in Bluebeard’s Castle, and said it in the unmistakable accents of genius.
Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann (Les contes d’Hoffmann). Stella! You never know where the next masterpiece is going to come from. And who would expect it to be from the pen of a composer best known for his frothy comic operas, the can-do author of the can-can, and the man who put the oo-la-la in the Second Empire? But, then, almost nothing about Offenbach is what one might have expected. A German Jew, the second son of a cantor whose surname originally had been Eberst (Offenbach is the name of a town outside Frankfurt), young Jakob was a cello prodigy whose skill got him shipped off to Paris, where he eventually found his way into the cello section of the Opéra-Comique.
Offenbach’s reputation in his own time was almost entirely as a composer of comic operas and operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld, the first full-length operetta ever written, La belle Hélène, Barbe-bleue (that pesky Bluebeard again), La vie parisienne, The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein and La Périchole. Who, then, would have thought that his masterpiece would have been The Tales of Hoffmann, a sprawling five-act opera that is as tuneful as anything Offenbach ever wrote, but which is far from comique?
The plot, based on various fantastic and grotesque stories by the German romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, is picaresque. Hoffmann, a poet, describes his three lost loves—Olympia, who turns out to be a mechanical doll; Antonia, an intense young woman who literally sings herself to death before Hoffmann’s eyes; and Giulietta, a faithless Venetian courtesan. The action is framed by two acts (or a prologue and an epilogue) in which we see Hoffmann and his companion, Nicklausse, in a tavern, musing on Hoffmann’s real love, an opera singer named Stella. Every step of the way, his footsteps are dogged by various incarnations of his rival for Stella’s hand, the councillor Lindorf. Operatic tradition dictates that the same bass-baritone take the roles of Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Dapertutto; less often, the three heroines are sung by the same soprano.
There are some operas that, for various reasons, have never achieved a final form. Boris Godunov is, famously, one such; Hoffmann is another. That is to say, no one can quite agree on what the composer meant the work’s ultimate shape and content to be. Bits and pieces of the opera were intended at first for other works, and then dragooned: the famous Barcarolle originally was composed for an ill-fated serious opera, Die Rheinnixen (The Rhinemaidens). In the case of Hoffmann, the arguments concern not only the ordering of the acts but the ending as well, since Offenbach passed away before completing much of the fourth (Venetian) act, and the end of the fifth; additionally, the orchestration was left unbegun.
When Offenbach died in 1880 during rehearsals (in order to support his family, he had also been frantically composing other operettas at the same time), the composer Ernest Guiraud took Hoffmann under his wing. Guiraud dropped the Venetian act and shortened the mezzo-soprano role of Nicklausse because the singer wasn’t up to the demands of the part; thus began the “tradition” of doing pretty much anything to poor Hoffmann. Mahler, for example, chucked the first and fifth acts, which depict Hoffmann drowning his sorrows over his love for Stella in Luther’s tavern in Nuremberg. In 1977 the musicologist Fritz Oeser published a critical edition that, most likely, is the closest approximation to the composer’s intentions we’re ever going to have.
It doesn’t matter. Hoffmann is a masterpiece just about any way you care to perform it. And thus we come to a conundrum that was best articulated by Jonathan Miller in his book Subsequent Performances. Discussing what he calls a work’s “afterlife,” Miller argues that we would not, for example, prize the Belvedere torso so highly if the figure had its head, arms, and legs restored; likewise, the Venus de Milo. We have transformed those sculptures into works of art, “creating” a new entity unimagined and unintended by its author. The work of art thus exists at least partly in the eye of the beholder.
So—so what if the Venetian act (often known as the Giulietta act after the name of its heroine) comes before or after the Antonia act? Or whether the Barcarolle was written for a failed opera? Or whether Hoffmann is performed with spoken dialogue or recitatives (a problem that also plagues another great unfinished French masterpiece, Carmen, as we shall see)? What we treasure about Hoffmann is not only the great melodic set pieces, such as Olympia’s birdsong and Dapertutto’s “Diamond” aria, but the opera’s overall air of romantic menace and mystery.
And its ending. Part of Hoffmann’s afterlife is its quintessentially bleak conclusion. After regaling the students in Luther’s tavern with his hard-luck tales, and winning their sympathy, Hoffmann is too drunk to care when Stella leaves on Lindorf’s arm. The Muse of Poetry claims Hoffmann for herself; suffering, she says, will make him a greater poet. But will it? Or is the whole tale merely the self-justifying delusion of a talentless drunkard—a hack who imagines himself an artist? It seems a particularly apposite lesson for our century.
Modest Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov. Speaking of the afterlife, there is no better illustration of its power than Boris Godunov, by common consent the greatest of all Russian operas and one of the towering artistic masterpieces in any genre. And speaking of drunkards, Mussorgsky was a heroic one who drank himself into an early grave and left us with a mess—not only in Boris but in other works as well.
The story concerns the late sixteenth-century usurpation of the throne by Czar Boris, who (in this version) has murdered the legitimate successor, the young boy Dmitri. Boris, however, is haunted by his deed and when a “false Dmitri” arises in the hinterlands, and eventually raises the Polish army to march on Mother Russia, he is stricken by his conscience. In one of opera’s most magisterial scenes, Boris collapses on the throne and dies as the country goes to hell in a handbasket.
That’s about all that happens. What makes Boris so great, however, is its pitiless examination of the character of each of its principals: the driven (but sympathetic) Boris; the scheming Dmitri; the ambitious Polish princess Marina; the slippery adviser Prince Shuisky. Last but not least is the character of the People, as represented by the chorus, which in this opera assumes an importance hitherto unprecedented in operatic history. From the very first scene, where the suffering Russian masses comment cynically on the machinations going on behind the walls of the Novodevichy monastery and the Kremlin, the chorus is very much a key player in everything that follows.
(This innovative use of the chorus set a pattern for later Russian opera—and also, oddly, for American opera. Because the opera that most closely resembles Boris is, of all things, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Gershwin’s father was from Russia, and Porgy is essentially a Russian opera in blackface.)
Bartók’s problems in getting Bluebeard’s Castle produced were nothing compared with what Mussorgsky had to go through. And this accounts, in large part, for the many different versions in which Boris exists. The first version began when the composer abruptly abandoned his work on what otherwise would have been his first opera, a setting of Gogol’s comedy The Marriage, and took up Pushkin’s historical drama. (Where would Russian opera be without Pushkin?) He worked at fever pitch, fashioning the libretto himself and starting the music in October of 1868; it was finished the following July and the orchestration was complete by December. Brilliant it was, but the opera was nevertheless rejected by the Maryinsky Theater for a variety of reasons, both practical and political.
Chief among the practical reasons was that the opera lacked any love interest, or indeed any lead female role. So, in Version II, completed in 1872, Mussorgsky composed an entirely new third act (the Polish act), in which Princess Marina appears prominently. He also threw out a scene near the opera’s end, set in front of the famous Saint Basil’s Cathedral just outside the Kremlin, in which the troubled Czar Boris confronts his disaffected populace and encounters the Simpleton, who predicts a grim future for the Motherland. (Anyone who has ever spent any time in Russia knows this prediction is always safe.) He replaced it with the Kromy Forest scene, in which the people embrace the false Dmitri and the Simpleton is left alone to lament the fate of his country. And he revised the remainder of the opera pretty thoroughly, adding here and cutting there, enriching everywhere. The first performance was a success, largely due to the efforts of Julia Platonova, the first Marina, who demanded that it be staged as a benefit for her. The public loved it, but critics hated it, and by 1882, Boris had been dropped from the repertoire.
Enter Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who in 1896 (Mussorgsky had died in 1881) revised and completely rescored the piece, making some cuts and composing some new material to fill in the gaps. The Rimsky version was adopted by the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin, who became identified with the title role. Still unsatisfied, Rimsky made a second performing version, in which he restored the cuts but kept his own additions, and it is this edition that most of us know today. In 1940, Shostakovich made his own edition, which reached back to Mussorgsky’s first version for its inspiration.
Which is preferable? The answer is: all of them. Because the ideal version of Boris is really None of the Above; it ought to comprise both the St. Basil’s Cathedral scene and the Kromy Forest scene. It ought to have the splendor of Rimsky’s admittedly superior command of orchestration instead of Mussorgsky’s dour little noodlings. It ought to have the stark power of Mussorgsky’s first, brutal version instead of the prettifications of the Polish act. It ought to have the lyric beauty of the Polish act instead of the relentless gloom of Version I. It ought to have, in short, everything.
Lately, the trend has been to stage one of the two Mussorgsky versions (real purists eschew the Polish act altogether), but the Rimsky incarnation has achieved a legitimacy in its own right. My advice to the novice is to get to know the Rimsky version, then dig deeper into the composer’s original thoughts. Either way, you can’t go wrong. And before long, you’ll be a Pushkin fan, too.
If Boris appeals, you might want to investigate some other Russian operas from the same period: Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and, perhaps more approachable, Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor, another opera left incomplete at the composer’s death and finished by the ubiquitous Rimsky-Korsakov (with help from another prominent Russian composer, Alexander Glazunov, who reconstructed the overture from his memory after hearing Borodin play it on the piano—yeah, right). One excerpt from Prince Igor you might already know are the Polovtsian Dances; if you don’t know them, you certainly know some of the pop tunes that have been fashioned from them, such as “Stranger in Paradise.”
John Adams: Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Operas about historical personages are nothing new. (See above.) What is new are operas about real people who were still walking among us at the time of the opera’s composition. Such a work is John Adams’s groundbreaking Nixon in China, the first result of a remarkable artistic collaboration among Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and director Peter Sellars. Based on the late president’s epochal 1972 visit to Red China, the opera was premiered in Houston on October 22, 1987 (the same week as the stock market crash)—a mere fifteen years between deed and drama.
Everyone feared the worst. Sellars, the puckish director who had made a name for himself with his radical restagings of various opera and theater classics, was a known firestarter, and Adams was a confessed minimalist; Goodman, for her part, was an American expatriate living in London, which made her loyalties suspect as well. Surely, these three lefties would use the opportunity for a searing indictment of Nixon, one of the least beloved of all American presidents; of his wife, Pat, one of the least beloved of all First Ladies; and Henry Kissinger, one of the least beloved, period.
Well, surprise. What emerged was a finely wrought inner drama of not-quite-great men caught up in great events. Here was Tricky Dick, nervous and insecure, and given a magnificent closing monologue (that is actually part of a larger, complex ensemble). Here is the erstwhile Plastic Pat, trembling like a dewy schoolgirl in her ravishing aria. Here are formidable Mao, Tse-tung and Madam, part icons and part charlatans. Only with Kissinger were the authors unable to resist the temptation to portray the man as a clown and a buffoon.
Nixon in China is filled with dazzling operatic set pieces, beginning with the landing of the Nixons’ plane on the tarmac in Peking. The first act ends with a magnificently constructed banquet sequence, while Act II contains a parody performance of the propaganda ballet “The Red Detachment of Women,” during which Kissinger becomes so excited that he storms the stage. The final act consists of six intertwined soliloquies, as the principals reflect on the peculiar circumstances of their lives that have led them to this crossroads of history.
Musically, Adams combines his minimalist inclinations with a broader palette that affords him complete command of the drama. There were those in attendance at the premiere who heard nothing but needle-stuck-in-the-groove music (as minimalism was widely described at the time), but sharper ears detected an exciting synthesis of traditional forms with minimalist usage; aside from the idiom, Nixon is very much a traditional opera in the same way that, say, Verdi’s Don Carlos is, and no less remarkable.
The same trio struck again in 1991 with The Death of Klinghoffer, once again based on an episode from recent history. This time the subject was the 1985 murder of the wheelchair-bound American Jew Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists aboard the hijacked ship Achille Lauro. The premiere was in Brussels, but as with Nixon the production was shared by a number of international opera houses and the work quickly made its way around the world. Klinghoffer is less successful than Nixon, and not because of Goodman’s guaranteed-to-offend-everyone treatment of the subject matter. (The opera was a signal failure in New York, where some members of the city’s large Jewish community were outraged by Goodman’s sympathetic treatment of the Palestinians, who were actually represented as human beings.) What Klinghoffer lacks is Nixon’s high drama; the later work is much closer in spirit to an oratorio than to opera, a feeling emphasized by Sellars’s static staging.
Both scores, however, repay home listening. Your chances of encountering Nixon or Klinghoffer in the opera house, while not exactly nil, are still lower than your chances of catching Rigoletto. So buy the CDs, lean back with Goodman’s moving librettos, and settle in for two of contemporary music’s most satisfying listening experiences. This is not just new music: this is your new music, something that will long outlive Nirvana and Pearl Jam (whoever they are—or, by the time you read this, were). So, as the old Trickster might have said: get a mitt and get in the game. You’ll be glad you did.
Giuseppi Verdi: Don Carlos and Otello. Thought I’d never get to an opera you’d heard of, right? Well, wait no longer, because here comes Mean Joe Green himself, the apotheosis of the Italian operatic tradition (in fact, the inventor of much of it), the composer whose works lie snugly at the center of the repertoire, ladies and gentlemen, Giuseppe Verdi.
I am not an unreserved Verdi fan. Too much of his music (and not just the earlier operas), to my ears, is content with organ-grinder accompaniments; too many of his famous melodies content themselves with mediocrity by relying on the most banal sort of sequences. (Think of Count di Luna’s “Il balen” from that most ridiculous of Verdi’s operas, Il trovatore.) In short, too much of early Verdi is too close to Bellini and Donizetti for my money.
Back when I was at the Eastman School of Music, the eminent musicologist Charles Warren Fox used to tell his students that, with maturity, would come love for Verdi. These words naturally fell upon deaf ears as we know-it-all undergrads gleefully ripped to shreds what we perceived as Verdi’s primitive compositional techniques, especially compared to Wagner. More than twenty years later, however, I’m beginning to think at least some of our mirth was displaced.
Certainly, it cannot be directed at either of the operas under discussion here. Don Carlos continues the noble operatic tradition of existing in multiple editions; there are no fewer than eight different versions of the score (and two different ways to spell the title), although for our purposes we might reduce the count to three, any one of which you might confront in the opera house.
Verdi wrote Don Carlos for the Paris Opéra. Ever since the death of Meyerbeer, the French had been trying to entice Verdi back to the house for which he had written Jérusalem and The Sicilian Vespers; finally, with Schiller’s dramatic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien as the lure, they succeeded.
The first version of 1867 was in five acts and sung in French. Even before the premiere, however, the composer had to cut certain sections of this enormous historical grand opera, cuts that were not “opened” (in the hideous operatic parlance)—or indeed even discovered—until the critic Andrew Porter found the missing music pasted down in the orchestral parts stashed away at the Paris Opéra. Further whittling down ensued after the premiere and as the opera made its way to Italy.
But by 1884 it was clear that Don Carlos was not going to fly, operatically speaking, so Verdi revised it extensively, slicing away almost all of the first, or Fontainebleau, act, preserving only Carlos’s aria, and translating it into Italian (thus: Don Carlo); it is in this form that the opera is probably best known. A compromise edition of 1886, known as the Modena version, restores the missing first act, but nowadays the trend, as noted above, is to return to the composer’s first intentions, and the five-act French version is making a comeback.
Any way you do slice it—and in this case the original way is the best—Don Carlos is an epic masterpiece that ranks atop Verdi’s finest work. The story concerns the Spanish prince (or Infant, in several Romance tongues) Carlos, grandson of the emperor Charles V, whose love for Elisabeth of Valois is unfortunately frustrated by her engagement, and later marriage, to his father, Philip II, the king of Spain. The opera explores a number of rich, complex themes, including the nature of friendship (between Carlos and Posa), the nature of love (between Carlos and Elisabeth, Elisabeth and Philip, Philip and Carlos, and Princess Eboli and Carlos, among others) and the nature of duty (the function of the Grand Inquisitor). Its centerpiece is a spectacular auto-da-fé scene that, alas, does not quite reach the heights of musical invention it should, being defaced by an incredibly stupid little brass tune at its midpoint.
Otherwise, no problems. Philip’s battle of wills with the Inquisitor, in which public responsibility triumphs over personal feelings, is one of the opera’s high points, as is the king’s sorrowful aria, “Elle ne m’aime pas!” (“She never loved me after all!”), when he realizes that Elisabeth and Carlos still have a thing for each other. The Carlos-Posa “buddy” duet is a melodic bench mark (and it comes back poignantly at Posa’s death), as are Eboli’s big show tunes, the “Veil Song” and the aria “O don fatale.”
Even the cop-out ending somehow seems to work. At the climax of Schiller’s poem, Philip hands his renegade son over to the Inquisition; in the opera, Carlos seeks shelter from his father’s vengeance in the monastery of Saint Just, where his old gramps had gone to spend the last of his days. Just as the soldiers are about to grab him, out shoots an arm from Charles V’s tomb—is it a monk? the ghost of Chuck V himself? an outtake from a Brian de Palma movie?—which pulls Carlos to safety, or perdition, or wherever. Everybody is mystified, not least the audience.
With Otello, written between 1884 and 1886 (basically, the same period as the revisions of Don Carlos), Verdi raised his game to the next level and created an opera so perfect in form and function as to be the despair of all later composers. The mystery of Otello is one of the greatest in music history. Verdi felt he was washed up—too old, he said, too tired to compose anymore. But a bright young man named Arrigo Boito, a fine composer (Mefistofele) in his own right, kept knocking at the door, with a temptation that Verdi ultimately could not resist: a magnificent libretto based on Verdi’s favorite playwright, Shakespeare. Boito’s genius, no less than Verdi’s, helped determine the outcome; reducing the play’s 3,500 lines to something under 800, he nevertheless managed to preserve intact both the letter and the spirit of the play (proving once again that everybody can use an editor, even the Bard). The action is swift and to the point; scenes flow into each other with nary a break (there is only one onstage scene change, in Act III); nothing impedes the opera’s forward motion to the final tragedy.
Verdi lavished upon this timeless material his most dramatic, affecting, and compelling music. From the Moor’s blood-chilling cry of victory—“Esultate!”—to the final recollection of the first-act love duet, heard as Desdemona and the Moor lie dead and dying, Otello is a work of such majesty as to occupy, practically alone, a plane above all its rivals. Verdi’s Iago is a sinister creature with his own villainous internal logic, and his “Credo” is a masterpiece of evil justifying its baleful existence; Desdemona is perhaps the loveliest creation in the Verdian pantheon, while the Moor dominates the stage in all his guises, whether as conquering hero or prostrate lover, cursed with jealousy.
Listen carefully to the end of Act III and, in a few bars, you will hear why Otello is so great. Otello lies on the floor, reduced to a writhing hunk of protoplasm by the schemes of Iago. Outside, the people are cheering his name; inside, he’s a wreck. “Ecco il Leone!” exults the triumphant Iago, and the orchestra thunders out a dastardly cadence: E major to C major. This implicit clash of tonalities perfectly sums up the conflicting dramatic situations; rarely is a C-major ending less “happy” than this one. And what happens in the last act, we know too well: “I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee; no way but this, killing myself to die upon a kiss.” Otello is, indeed, an opera to die for.
Georges Bizet: Carmen. And speaking of not-so-happy major-key endings—and unfinished masterpieces that exist in various versions—how about this one? Bizet’s saucy little señorita is rightly accorded a place as the world’s most popular opera (and a French opera at that), but that reputation has partially obscured what a wonderful work of art it is. Based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, the opera was composed for the Opéra-Comique in Paris, where it bombed, at least as far as Bizet’s expectations were concerned, in March of 1875, perhaps precipitating the composer’s untimely death at the age of thirty-six a few months later. Actually, Carmen got thirty-five performances that spring and thirteen more the next season, more than any of his earlier operas, such as The Pearl Fishers, had received, but the tale of Carmen’s hostile reception makes a nice story for those who believe in the starving-artist theory of cultural history.
Amazingly, the score was perceived by critics—those perspicacious critics again—as “scientific” and “Wagnerian” (the latter adjective was also applied to Verdi’s Aida and Otello, for what it’s worth), while the plot was deemed “immoral.” Some of the musical numbers were certainly admired, but folks were understandably puzzled by a tragic opera at the Opéra-Comique (“No, Georges, it’s supposed to be funny”), and a complex one at that. What was the Paris bourgeoisie to make of it?
Good question. Shortly after Bizet’s death, Guiraud (the same guy who was to fix The Tales of Hoffmann a few years later) composed recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue, and it was in this form that Carmen eventually made its way around the world. (Had he lived, Bizet apparently was going to do the same thing.) Naturally, today the “correct” way of performing Carmen is to eliminate the recits and perform the dialogue; the 1964 critical edition by Fritz Oeser also restores material that Bizet cut before and during rehearsals. Once again, though, the problem of the afterlife pops up: just as the Rimsky version of Boris may, in fact, be the more effective way of presenting Mussorgsky’s vision, so Carmen is probably better—and, in a way, more “authentic”—with its recitatives instead of its dialogue. Another consideration that argues in favor of the recits is the difficulty of finding singers who know and can pronounce the French language convincingly. It’s hard enough to find international singers at home in the French repertoire; it’s almost impossible to find singers who can speak the words. The best solution is to mix bits and pieces of the original and Oeser versions and then make the best artistic case you can in performance.
By now, you may see a pattern emerging: why can’t composers simply write down the notes they want performed and then leave the damn thing alone? Some contemporary creators do just that (which may be why their operas don’t last very long), but to an experienced theater composer, it’s just not that simple. You can propose, but performers and circumstances dispose. Arias have to be rewritten or cut entirely, ensembles rejiggered, choruses added or subtracted. Rarely is there a “definitive” edition of an opera or, for that matter, a Broadway show. (Think of Show Boat, which has more variant editions than Boris Godunov.) A musical, whatever its venue, is the product of trial and error, and undergoes constant revision. Tenor can’t sing “Il mio tesoro”? Then write “Dalla sua pace” and get on with the show; if that way of working was good enough for Mozart, it’s good enough for everybody. Eventually, if the opera or musical is successful, it finds a more or less final form. Subject to change without notice, of course.
What is it we love about Carmen? The many hit tunes, of course, such as the “Habañera” and the “Toreador Song,” which are familiar to nearly everyone, no matter what his or her level of cultural sophistication. Carmen is one of the most melodically profligate scores in the history of opera, a succession of hit tunes the likes of which one would be hard pressed to discover in any other work.
But more than its airs, what we love about Carmen is its drama. Bizet and his librettists, Meilhac and Halévy, improved on Mérimée in many ways, not the least of which was by staging the final Don José-Carmen confrontation outside the bullring where Escamillo is fighting, instead of on a lonely road. They also invented the character of Micaëla, the stereotypical good-girl-next-door, as a foil for the feisty gypsy wench. Although lengthy, the opera moves swiftly from scene to scene, and there is hardly a note we would gladly do without. Bizet’s music never merely ornaments the words, it drives them; from the first note of the famous overture to the last (very unhappy) major-key sonority, Carmen captivates us every bit as much as the title character enchants poor, luckless Don José.
Sopranos and mezzos love this part, and every great one has given it a shot. The list is nearly endless, but among the greatest interpreters of the roles have been Emma Calvé (maybe the sexiest Carmen in history), Mary Garden, Geraldine Farrar, Risë Stevens, Grace Bumbry, and Leontyne Price. The character is nearly inexhaustible—if ever there was a female Don Giovanni, who dies unrepentant for his or her life-style, it is Carmen, one of opera’s great tragic heroines. She’s the bad girl our moms warned us about, the one we—thank God—can’t resist.
Alban Berg: Wozzeck and Lulu. And speaking of bad girls, how about that little tart Lulu, the heroine of a couple of Frank Wedekind plays and the eponymous Venus’s-fly-trap of Berg’s second and last opera? She’s bad news, that’s for sure, dragging every man she meets down to perdition until she gets her just deserts (from Jack the Ripper, no less!) at the opera’s end. In Wozzeck, meanwhile, the hero is a card-carrying member of the lumpen proletariat, a miserable sod who is abused by the Captain, tortured by the Doctor, beat up by the Drum Major, and cuckolded by his girlfriend, Marie (by whom he has an illegitimate child), all of which mistreatment finally drives him to murder and suicide.
Sounds like just the kind of operas you might want to stage for, say, Jesse Helms and the Family Values Coalition, right? Which brings up the question: how come opera concerns itself so often with the lowest sort of behavior: rape, murder, incest, etc.? Why can’t there be “nice” operas about, well…about nuns? There are. Puccini’s Suor Angelica is about a young girl who gives birth to an illegitimate child, enters a convent, and then, overcome with remorse after she learns of the child’s death, kills herself by drinking poison. (But it has a happy ending: the BVM herself appears to lead Angelica to heaven anyway.) Oops! Well, how about Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, which takes place during the French Revolution: at its climax the members of the order—an amazing assortment of unhappy, maladjusted, dysfunctional women—are guillotined one by one. Okay, maybe not nuns then…
The point is, goody-two-shoes subjects are not exactly catnip for composers. (For the same reason that good-news newspapers don’t sell.) Maybe Tolstoy was right: all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The whole point of art—which has totally escaped the morons behind NEA bashing—is to examine the deepest nature of human beings, which may or may not be good, or may or may not be base. But opera composers and other creative artists know something that those whose weltanschauung seems to have been formed by Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet do not: that at its root, the human character is fundamentally amoral. Please do not take this as a plea for perversity. But perversity is, to a large extent, in the cultural context of the beholder.
Which is why we have so many apparently amoral characters in opera. I say apparently because in opera these rape survivors, child molestors, incestuous siblings, et alia are not bad people. They are, in fact, a lot like you and me; they are, in fact, perfectly normal, within the operatic context. That’s why we find them so fascinating.
A word about operatic context. Obviously, opera is not meant to be about “real life.” Today, we no longer seem capable of understanding something that used to go without saying: “It’s only a movie” (or an opera, or a play, or a musical). Just because Show Boat originally opened with the line “Niggers all work on de Mississippi” doesn’t make it racist; if anything, Show Boat is profoundly liberal on the subject of racism. But to go to the trouble of listening to it carefully is clearly too much work for knee-jerk reactionaries, who would condemn a classic of American musical theater on the basis of one word of the libretto. (Have they listened to the dialogue in Menace II Society, one wonders.) It’s probably only a matter of time before the same Kultur Nazis discover that The Marriage of Figaro is about an aristocrat who demands the right to sleep with the new wife of his manservant, or that The Magic Flute portrays a black character unsympathetically.
In the same way, those who would censor art on the basis of its content are out to lunch. Art is supposed to deal with tricky matters of manners and mores; that’s its job. Art is not supposed to be comfortable; art is not something that is supposed to make you feel better about your raggedy-assed, miserable, no-good, worthless self. Instead, it’s supposed to make you examine the reason why you’re miserable, no good, and raggedy-assed, and to understand it.
Thus Wedekind, Berg, and Lulu. If Wedekind, an outrageous avant-gardist with whose attitudes and presentation Karen Finley would feel right at home, were to have come before the Endowment seeking support for his work, he would never make it in today’s climate. And yet his plays, Pandora’s Box and Earth-Spirit, not only provided the substance for Berg’s masterpiece, they also provided the vehicle for a memorable Louise Brooks-G.W. Pabst cinematic collaboration. Are Wedekind’s plays “immoral” (the same adjective, recall, that was applied to Carmen and, even earlier, to Mozart’s Don Giovanni)? If they are, can moral works of art (Berg’s opera, Pabst’s film) emerge from them? If so, how? If not, why not?
Tough issues. But that’s another of the things we love about opera.
So let’s get down to cases. Lulu is that operatic staple, the femme fatale. Everybody who comes in contact with her—including Alwa the composer; his father, Dr. Schön; a doctor, a painter, Schigolch (who or may not be her father), the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, the Athlete, and the Schoolboy—falls in love with her and, one way or another, most of them wind up being destroyed by her. (In a nice twist of the doubling of roles, the actor who takes the nonsinging role of the doctor comes back at the end as Jack the Ripper.)
Wozzeck, the put-upon soldier, similarly wreaks havoc, although it is limited to his own immediate circle. Tortured beyond endurance, both psychologically and physically (the libretto is based on the extraordinary play by Georg Büchner, an early-nineteenth-century German playwright), he eventually turns not on his tormentors but on his own, slitting Marie’s throat with a knife and then drowning as he wades into a lake, insanely seeking to recover the murder weapon.
Berg’s musical language in these two operas is quite different. Wozzeck, the earlier of the two, is more or less atonal—that is, it has no fixed key center—but when discussing Berg, “more or less” are always the operative words. Berg was a student and disciple of Schoenberg, and revered his master, but was a far greater humanist—and a far greater composer. Schoenberg’s operas are abstractions: Erwartung (Expectation) is a symbolist one-acter; Moses und Aron a stylized, undramatic lecture. Berg’s are about real people and his art, however intellectually based, is always at the service of emotion. For the final orchestral interlude (between Scenes 4 and 5 of Act III), Berg unabashedly adopts the key of D minor in which to compose his threnody on the deaths of Wozzeck and Marie; few moments in all opera rise to the emotional heights of this passage, one of the most renowned and affecting in contemporary music.
In Lulu, Berg adopted Schoenberg’s famous (or infamous) twelve-tone system. Berg had composed one of Wozzeck’s scenes with the twelve-tone system; now, in Lulu, he employed it on a massive scale. Twelve-tone music is commonly adjudged to be “difficult” but, oddly, Lulu has proven to be a more popular work than Wozzeck, for reasons I am at a loss to explain. Lulu is far, far longer and much denser, but its story line is clearer (and less German expressionistic), and everyone seems to identify with the story of an amoral temptress who finally gets her well-deserved comeuppance in the end.
Both operas repay careful listening and careful analysis. Berg was a numerologist, and he peppered his music with hidden structures, references, and meanings. He was also obsessed with form: Wozzeck’s three acts are divided into “Five Character Pieces,” a “Symphony in Five Movements,” and “Six Inventions,” one of them being the famous D-minor interlude. Lulu shows a similar eye for internal structures.
Lulu is also—to pick up another theme of our discussion so far—unfinished. Or, rather, was. On Christmas Eve, 1935, Berg died of blood poisoning, caused by complications of a bee sting, and although he left the opera substantially complete in what composers call the “short score” (that is, a piano score with some orchestrational details), most of the orchestration of the third act was still to come. There should have been little problem in preparing the opera for performance, but by 1935 Berg was already on the Nazis’ anathema list as a composer of entartete Kunst (decadent art). Later his widow, Helene, actively obstructed all efforts to get at Act III, possibly because she felt Berg had squirreled away some secret references to a love affair he was having at the time. (Berg’s Lyric Suite, we now know, is a secret ode to his mistress, so Helene may have had good grounds for suspicion.) Lulu was therefore heard in a truncated version (the first two acts and a bit of the third) until Frau Berg died in 1976, after which the Viennese composer Friedrich Cerha finished the orchestration and the full score was finally premiered in 1979 in Paris by Pierre Boulez. Today, the full three-act Lulu is the only way the opera is—or should ever be—staged.
Pretty intimidating, you say. So why should you trust your tender ears to Berg’s acerbic sonorities, just on my say-so? You don’t have to, of course. And I would be very surprised if 10 percent of the readers of this book eventually come to love either of Berg’s naughty problem children. And yet, just as much as Mozart or Verdi or Wagner, Berg is a part of the operatic continuum, and his operas—both indisputable masterpieces—will be performed as long as opera still holds the stage. You may have to stretch your ears a bit to wrap them around some of the music, but the effort will be more than amply repaid. In the end, you’ll be glad you did.
Scott Joplin: Treemonisha. Why isn’t this fine work from the pen of one of America’s most famous, and least-understood, composers better known? Perhaps I am about to engage in some special pleading for a flawed, inexpert work; so sue me. But I would be remiss were I not to bring Treemonisha to your attention, and not just for its wonderful finale, “A Real Slow Drag.”
Joplin is, to my mind, the greatest of all nineteenth-century American composers, both for the magnitude of his achievement and the scope of his effort. (You who scoff: name the competition. MacDowell?) You undoubtedly know him as the King of the Ragtime Writers (as he was called in his lifetime), and the composer of the “Maple Leaf Rag.” But Joplin was far more, and far greater. He was an American archetype, the first great synthesizer of the European classical- and American popular-music traditions, the haphazardly educated son of a freed slave who welded the music and dance of black America to the simple European forms (march, two-step, waltz) that had found wide popularity across the country in the late nineteenth-century and so created the country’s first great vernacular music.
Joplin’s success with the “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899—unlike most composers, who sold their works outright, Joplin received a one-cent royalty on each copy sold—gave him a measure of financial stability that was welcome after his years laboring in the demimonde as a bordello pianist. (The young Brahms was a whorehouse “perfesser” for a time, as well.) In the first decade of the new twentieth century, he turned out classic rag after classic piano rag, including the “Gladiolus Rag,” which may be his finest piano work.
But Joplin longed for more. His ambition was nothing less than to be taken seriously as a serious composer. What a preposterous notion! A black man, whose formal musical education consisted of some courses at the George R. Smith College for Negroes in Sedalia, Mo., presuming to exalt himself to a level reserved for White Europeans. Surely he jested.
Surely, not. With the encouragement of Alfred Ernst, a German conductor resident in America, he set out to compose an opera. As Monroe H. Rosenfeld, a popular composer of the day, wrote in a 1903 newspaper article about Joplin:
Joplin’s ambition is to shine in other spheres…To this end he is assiduously toiling upon an opera, nearly a score of the numbers of which he has already composed and which he hopes to give an early production [in St. Louis].
The opera in question was not Treemonisha but something called A Guest of Honor, and it makes a tantalizing story. It was apparently performed once, in St. Louis; according to Arthur Marshall, one of Joplin’s fellow ragtime composers and friends, “It was taken quite well and I think [Joplin] was about to get Haviland or Majestic Producers to handle or finance the play, also book it. I can’t say just how far it got.”
Nowhere, is how far. Although the opera was registered at the Library of Congress, no copy of the score was ever received, and A Guest of Honor has seemingly vanished. From time to time, rumors of its existence crop up—found in a bank safe in Carson City, or Nevada City, or the Emerald City—but no one has ever actually seen a copy. I have a theory, though: what if Joplin gave a copy of the score to Ernst (not unlikely); what if Ernst took it back to Germany with him (ditto); what if he stored it with his papers at his home in Halle (a certainty, given points one and two); and what if it survived the wartime bombing of the East German city (debatable)? Is it possible that A Guest of Honor might turn up in Halle? I think it’s our best bet.
Joplin returned to writing rags, but the opera bug never left him. After his move to New York City in 1909, he set about working on Treemonisha, and by 1911 the score was ready. Unfortunately, no one wanted to publish it, not even Joplin’s longtime publisher John Stark, who had folded his business on Tin Pan Alley the year before and returned to St. Louis. So Joplin published Treemonisha at his own expense, an act of folly that finished him financially and emotionally.
No one wanted to perform it. Treemonisha was not the first opera on a black subject by an African-American composer—that honor belongs to The Martyr by Harry Lawrence Freeman, which was produced in Denver in 1893—but it was the most significant, and Joplin knew it. In 1913 he and his wife, Lottie, moved uptown, to Harlem, where he worked on revising some of the numbers (not for the better, it should be noted) and organized the opera’s one and only performance, a costumeless run-through that took place in a rented Harlem hall, called the Lincoln Theater, in 1915. Unable to afford the services of an orchestra, Joplin himself played the piano.
It was a flop, and it killed him. (Shades of Bizet, only this time with more historical accuracy.) Joplin was dying from tertiary syphilis, and the failure of Treemonisha drove him over the edge, into madness; he died at the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, in the East River, on April 1, 1917. Our story, however, has a happy ending. In 1975, Treemonisha was finally staged, in Houston, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music that year.
The plot concerns the efforts of Treemonisha, a foundling girl child, to lead the recently freed slaves in the area of Texarkana, Arkansas (near where Joplin grew up), out of ignorance and superstition and into the light of education and reason. The libretto was Joplin’s own, and it reflected his beliefs. Only through education, he felt, could the Negro take his place alongside the white man in America, and Treemonisha’s battle with the wicked conjurers was his vivid image for the struggle for the soul of black America.
Joplin was an inexperienced stage composer—his earlier folk ballet, The Ragtime Dance, had not been a success, and Treemonisha is an admittedly difficult proposition to stage. For one thing, the original orchestrations are long since lost, and most performances have used those of Gunther Schuller. The libretto strikes us today as inexpert and naïve. A more serious flaw is the work’s reliance on picturesque scene painting at the expense of real dramatic engagement.
Still, it hardly matters whether Treemonisha ever enters the repertoire, for the music lives on. “A Real Slow Drag,” the final celebratory dance, is one of Joplin’s most inspired compositions, as well as one of the most effective and uplifting operatic finales ever written, but many of the other numbers are equally fine, including the rousing “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn”; the amazingly avant-garde ensemble called “Confusion,” with its chorus of indeterminate pitches depicting the lamentations of the plantation women; and the radiant anthem “We Will Trust You as Our Leader.”
Treemonisha deserves an honored place in American music history—not for any fuzzy reasons of affirmative action, but because it is an astonishing masterpiece that has no counterpart elsewhere. You owe it to Joplin to seek a score for which he literally gave his life, but more important, you owe it to your country and yourself.
Leoš Janáček: Jenůfa. With Verdi, we saw that very great operas could be written by very old people. Surprise, surprise. But with the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, we see something far more noteworthy: that one’s first great work could be written very late in life. Talk about the Golden Years; Janáček (say YAHN-na-check) is their embodiment.
Before we get into Jenůfa proper—if you really want to show off, give it its real title, Její Pastorkyňa (Her Foster-Daughter)—a few words are in order about Janáček’s particular, and peculiar, sense of harmony and melody. Janáček, who was born in Moravia in 1854, was a dedicated Czech patriot who battled fiercely against German cultural hegemony, explicitly ignoring Prague’s German-language theater in favor of the theater that performed in Czech. (The Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia traditionally have been heavily influenced by their powerful neighbor.) Most of his works have something to do with Czech history or folklore, but even more important, they partake part and parcel of the rhythms and inflections of the Czech tongue. Indeed, they are unthinkable without it.
So what? Can’t operas be translated easily from one language into another, the same way novels can? Ignoring the issue of whether novels can make a seamless transition from, say, Russian to French (they can’t), the answer is unequivocally no. The way a composer sets the words of a libretto—and in opera there is no question that, unlike the way some songwriters work, fitting a melody to newly cobbled lyrics, the words come first in order of creation—is determined (if the composer is any good) by the natural inflections of the language itself.
Let’s take an example. In Hungarian, for example, the stress is quite regular, since every word is accented on the first syllable. French, on the other hand, has a high percentage of words whose accent falls on the last syllable, while German and English are all over the map. It may seem like a small thing, but over the course of a four-hundred-page score, the displaced accents, false stresses, and other horrors that attend opera in translation add up.
So the best way to listen to Janáček (or to any opera, for that matter) is in the original. For Janáček, like his fellow Slav Mussorgsky, was incredibly conscious of composing melodic lines that fit the natural shape of his native speech; in fact, one way to look at his music is as a highly developed alternative form of the Czech language.
Harmonically, too, Janáček is unusual. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but two minutes of listening to a Janáček score and you will understand what I mean. Maybe it’s because he found his mature style so late in life (the bulk of his famous works were composed after he turned sixty-five), or maybe it’s simply because he was a genius, but Janáček’s music sounds as if a Martian was trying to write nineteenth-century tonal music. It’s right—but not quite right. There is just enough “wrong” to set it apart from the run of the mill. Janáček’s chord progressions never seem to go where you expect them to; what may start as a conventional harmonic rhythm will suddenly veer off into something totally surprising and original. Janáček’s music demands attention—not because it’s so innately complicated but because it’s so delightfully quirky. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It sounds too flippant, as if Janáček were humorous. Strange his music sometimes is, but it is far more: deep, heartfelt, passionate.
In Jenůfa, his first great opera (and his first performed opera, for that matter, although he had written others), Janáček found a story worthy of his talents. The plot concerns the title heroine, a rural girl who has been made pregnant by her cousin, the toper Steva (say SHTAY-va). But her stern, pitiless stepmother, called the Kostelnička (the title—Ko-stel-NITS-ka—means a female sacristan), frowns on the union; meanwhile, Steva’s half-brother, Laca (pronounced LAT-sa), who is also in love with Jenůfa, is jealous and, as the first act ends, he slashes the beautiful Jenůfa’s face with a knife, disfiguring her.
Act II begins five months later. The unmarried Jenůfa has given birth to a son in secret, and is now sleeping. The Kostelnička tries to get Steva to make an honest woman of Jenůfa, but no dice. The next visitor is Laca, who still loves her (although he certainly has a funny way of showing his affection), but he is so alarmed when he learns Jenůfa has had a child that the Kostelnička hurriedly tells him that the child is dead—a statement she makes come true after he leaves by throwing the baby into the nearest icy stream. When Jenůfa wakes up and wonders where her son is, the Kostelnička tells her the child has died of a fever. The mollified Laca returns, proposes, and is accepted without enthusiasm. The last scene of the act belongs to the Kostelnička; as an eerie wind howls outside, her conscience begins to afflict her and the evil woman cowers in terror before the elements.
The last act opens with the preparations for the Jenůfa-Laca nuptials, which are quickly spoiled by the discovery of the little frozen corpse. The open-minded villagers are about to lynch poor Jenůfa when the Kostelnička suddenly ’fesses up and gets dragged away to justice. It is left to Jenůfa (apparently, the only intelligent person in the village) to forgive her wicked stepmother and to come to terms with her love—such as it is—for Laca, and the opera ends.
A strange, equivocal story, but rendered incredibly powerful through the force of Janáček’s innovative inspiration. For it is the composer who gives moral shape and meaning to the story through his marvelous music; it is the composer who tells us how we should feel about the characters; it is the composer who makes us care about these unlovely, bigoted people; it is the composer who makes sense of their (to us) alien universe; it is the composer who, in the end, makes convincing Jenůfa’s almost incredible magnanimity. In short, it is the composer who makes the story—human.
Dmitri Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Which brings us to another opera about exotic and naughty Slavs, one that offended the most powerful man in the evil empire. Talk about bad reviews: Dmitri Shostakovich’s second opera enraged no less a critic than Uncle Joe Stalin his own bad self, a notice that changed the course of the composer’s life and, perhaps, that of modern operatic history as well.
What frosted the Leader and Teacher so badly that Pravda (the Russian word for “truth”) carried an editorial in 1936 that denounced the opera as “Muddle Instead of Music”? What didn’t? Almost everything about Lady Macbeth was, intentionally or not, sure to offend the stuffy Soviet hierarchy. The story concerns a frustrated housewife, Katerina Ismailova, who cuckolds her boring husband, Zinovy, with the day laborer Sergei; poisons her suspicious, meddlesome father-in-law with a dinner of lethal mushrooms; and beats Zinovy to death with a candlestick. She and Sergei are about to marry when hubby’s body is discovered rotting away in the cellar by a local drunk. Under arrest and on the road to Siberia, she is betrayed by Sergei, who takes up with another woman; enraged, Katerina pushes his new girlfriend into a river, and then jumps in herself.
In other words, just another day at the beach in old Mother Russia.
Here again, we are confronted with a singular cast of non-role models. And yet, as we’ve noted before, not only are we not supposed to condemn these people for their behavior, we are supposed to be sympathetic to them and their problems. Because the composer wants us to.
In Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 short story Ledi Makbet Mtsenskovo uyezda, the protagonists are treated ironically; Katerina is a cruel bitch with no redeeming social values. Shostakovich, however, saw the material as an opportunity to make a larger moral—and political—point. “As a Soviet composer,” he wrote in 1934, the year of Lady Macbeth’s premiere, “I determined to preserve the strength of Leskov’s novel, and yet, approaching it critically, to interpret its events from our modern point of view.” The mid-1930s were perilous times for all Soviet citizens, but in particular for Stalin’s opponents, whether real or imagined. The midnight knock at the door and the muffled pistol shot in the back alley were things to be feared; no one knew when disfavor might arrive. Artists were especially wary, since they were expected to carry on the fight for Soviet communism through their works: “formalism” was out; “socialist realism” was in.
Now, what were formalism and socialist realism? Basically, they were anything the Soviet censors said they were. The list of no-nos included anything that smacked of the twelve-tone system, of course, and most of the other advanced techniques of Western composition at the time. At the same time, good socialist art was supposed to reflect the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the People. Operas that depicted various lowlifes involved in adultery and murder were very definitely not what Marx and Lenin had in mind, and how Shostakovich could have thought they were is one of opera history’s little mysteries.
The strange thing is that it took almost two years before anyone figured that out. At first the opera was a hit, considered not only a worthy successor to the composer’s first opera, the satirical The Nose, but a distinct improvement on it. Lady Macbeth was produced across the Soviet Union and outside the country as well. Then Stalin happened to attend a performance in December 1935 and that was the end of that; the next month the infamous editorial appeared—unsigned, but everybody knew who was calling the shots—and Lady Macbeth vanished from the repertoire overnight. “Is its success abroad not explained by the fact that it tickles the perverted bourgeois taste with its fidgety, screaming, neurotic music?” wondered Pravda. You bet!
The effect on Shostakovich was profound. The gentle, reclusive composer was shattered. In fear for his life, Shostakovich abjectly apologized by not only yanking Lady Macbeth but his new Fourth Symphony as well; the celebrated Fifth Symphony of 1937 was subtitled “a Soviet composer’s response to just criticism.” Nearly thirty years later, well after Stalin was six feet under, Shostakovich revised his problem child, issuing a bowdlerized version of the score as Katerina Ismailova, and it was in this form that the opera was most often performed until after the composer’s death in 1975.
So here we have both our main issues: culpable characters and alternate performing editions. As to the latter, it is no contest: Lady Macbeth can truly be said to exist in only one version, the first. There are some who admire Katerina, but she came to life only under duress, a nice-Nancy version of her older, hotter sister.
Regarding the former, we note the irony that lumps together murderous godless Communists and the Moral Majority in their distaste for matters sexual—strange bedfellows indeed! When Shostakovich, faced with a force majeure, revised his opera, he tossed out the most offending passages, including the extremely explicit depiction of Sergei and Katerina’s first coupling (the detumescent trombone licks never fail to elicit titters from the audience). But to remove those is to cut out the heart of the opera, which is, after all, about the consequences of sexual frustration and unbridled passion.
Once again, it’s important to understand that Shostakovich is not necessarily arguing in favor of licentiousness. Instead, the artist is forcing us to examine these appetites in light of our own moral codes. They may be strange and evil, or appealing and seductive, but however we choose to see them, they are a part of our world. The real artist subscribes fully to the old Latin motto, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” Lady Macbeth forces us to look at our own passions and wonder whether we might be capable of the same excesses as well. And if not, why not.
Richard Strauss: Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier. And speaking of excesses…
Richard Strauss was one of the most important composers and musical figures of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth (he died in 1949), and in these operas he contributed to the repertoire three of the most thrilling works ever written.
He wrote much more, of course, and you can get into a fight with Straussians if you offhandedly dismiss most of the operas that came after Ariadne auf Naxos—with Die Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella, and Capriccio as possible exceptions—as second rate. However, they are, so there’s no point in wasting time with the likes of The Egyptian Helen and Daphne and other such dreck.
Instead, let’s get right to the good stuff. Strauss was already a renowned composer of tone poems by the time he turned his attention toward opera in his two warmups, Guntram and Feuersnot. Then he got his hands on a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s French-language drama Salome, and the rest is history. Adapting the play himself, Strauss fashioned a full-length, one-act opera of such seething sexuality and raw passion that it was informally banned for a time in both Britain and, after its premiere at the Met, in the United States as well. (Artur Rubinstein recounts in his memoirs that he used to play the forbidden score on the piano privately for Edward VII.) “I like this fellow Strauss,” said the kaiser, “but Salome will do him a lot of damage.” To which Strauss retorted that the opera had allowed him to build his villa in Garmisch.
Strauss followed up the scandal of Salome with another shocker, Elektra, which also represented the beginning of an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration with the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal had adapted Sophocles for his own dramatic version of the Greek tragedy, and when Strauss came calling he had just the ticket for another one-act opera.
I assume that everybody knows about John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter and what happened to the House of Atreus after Agamemnon took that darn bath. Suffice it to say that the plots adhere closely to the famous stories. But Strauss did not merely set them to music: he transformed them into higher beings through musical means. From the outset of both operas, he ratchets up the tension, both musical and dramatic, with his edgy, darting music: the lascivious clarinet lick that opens Salome, the thundering “Agamemnon” motif that kicks off Elektra. Once you start either work, you have to listen straight through to the end: the seamlessness of their construction—the only “stop-the-opera” showpiece comes in Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils”—makes it impossible to stop.
Up to this point in his career, Strauss had been a relatively well-behaved representative of late romanticism. Even his huge orchestral works, like the Symphonia domestica and An Alpine Symphony, conformed to Wagnerian models. But in Salome and Elektra something happened; these are works that angle toward the harsh expressionism of Schoenberg and Berg without ever quite getting there. It is a cliché to say that Strauss approached the abyss of atonality and flinched, and maybe he did. But so what? Atonality would not have made these two miracles one whit more powerful than they already are.
And then he stepped back—all the way back to the spirit of eighteenth-century Vienna, with Der Rosenkavalier. Surely the best-loved German opera in the repertoire, it is also one of the most perfect operas ever composed. Hofmannsthal’s libretto may be too good for its own good, but its wordplay is piquant, especially if you understand German, and in the characters of Octavian, the young knight of the Silver Rose; Sophie, the ingenue; and the Marschallin, the wife of a field commander with whom Octavian is having an affair, he gave us three operatic immortals.
Rosenkavalier was a deliberate throwback, even down to the casting of a mezzo-soprano as Octavian (one of opera’s so-called pants roles). The sexual byplay in this opera is something to behold; at one point the girl singing the boy Octavian must dress up as a girl, so she/he/she can be ogled by Baron Ochs. Such confusion or masking of sexual identity has been a staple of opera since its origins: in opera, some really do like it hot, and obviously Strauss and Hofmannsthal numbered themselves among them.
Musically, the opera is far more approachable than either of its fiery sisters; the anachronistic waltzes (the waltz was not invented until the nineteenth century) long ago became concert favorites, and the final trio attains heights of tonal-based expression and emotion that were never to be reached again. The whole work is nothing but artifice and yet it moves us every time, thanks to Strauss’s skill in finding exactly the right musical means with which to tell his story. No one can come away from Der Rosenkavalier without a tear in the eye or a catch in the throat, and even a century of saccharine Germanic sentimentalization—come on, the Marschallin is not seventy-five years old—has not ruined its appeal. German opera doesn’t come any friendlier than this, even if it is in drag.
Claudio Monteverdi: The Coronation of Poppea. Return with me now to those glorious days of yesteryear, to the moral Golden Age of Imperial Rome, when men were men but sometimes they dressed up like ladies and…
No, stop! Don’t tell me you’re going to recommend yet another opera about transvestites and perverts!
Sorry, Charlie, but we’re going to have a closer look at the earliest opera in the standard repertoire, to put these thorny questions of moral fiber and alternative editions to rest once and for all.
Poppea, Monteverdi’s last opera, was premiered during the Venetian Carnival season of 1642 or 1643. It was frankly written to attract an audience, being presented in a theater and not at court. It is also the first opera to use a historical subject, set in Rome in the year A.D. 62. Poppea is a woman of uncommon charms, who has attracted the attentions of no less a personage than Emperor Nero himself. As the opera begins, Poppea’s former lover, Ottone, returns from the wars to find his best babe shacked up with the boss. Ottone curses Poppea for her fickleness, and his complaints are echoed by the soldiers who stand watch outside Poppea’s house, guarding the emperor while he fiddles with his new love. Poppea, realizing her hold over Nero, asks him to ditch the empress, Octavia, but the statesman Seneca counsels him against it. For his troubles, he is condemned to commit suicide at the behest of Nero, who is naturally encouraged in this decision by Poppea. Ottone has been thinking about murdering Poppea, but decides instead to take up with her friend Drusilla, who is secretly in love with him. Then Octavia summons Ottone and commands him to kill her rival, Poppea, but in order to do this he has to dress up as a woman, so naturally he goes to Drusilla to borrow her clothes and of course she readily agrees. Meanwhile…
Enough, already! It sounds less like an opera plot than an average episode of Baywatch or As the World Turns. Monteverdi’s audience, however, would have been quite familiar with the story and would not for a minute have been put off by its shocking immorality. Nor would they have objected to the fact that the virile Nero was probably portrayed by a castrato. Indeed, back then, men commonly took women’s roles, and women took men’s; Monteverdi’s audiences wouldn’t have worried at all about the complex issues of transvestism and sexual identity, over which modern society expends so much energy.
The only two extant scores of Poppea are remarkably bare-boned: just the voice parts and a single bass line, sometimes with a so-called figured bass indication, the implication being that singers and a small continuo of organ, harpsichord or harp, and gamba basically would be enough. (Figured bass is musical shorthand, a bass note with two numbers written above it, usually 6-4 or 6-3, indicating the intervals that the player should fill in above the note.) For years, everyone assumed that Monteverdi must have meant for Poppea to be played with more instruments, and revivals were often outfitted with strings and trumpets. Recent scholarship, however, tends to believe that for economic reasons Monteverdi called for much smaller forces than would have been at his disposal thirty-five years earlier at the Mantuan court: Poppea was created for the public theater and reflected the need to cut costs and make a profit. There is also the issue of how much of the music was actually composed by Monteverdi. Baroque experts have divined the presence of material by Cavalli and Francesco Sacrati.
Whatever the case, though, what we have in Poppea is opera’s first great masterpiece, and for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is ravishingly gorgeous. Don’t be put off by the lack of familiar nineteenth-century guideposts—how was Monteverdi to know that Puccini would be coming along?—but listen instead to the purity and beauty of the melodies, and how they reflect the emotional states of the characters. This is an opera about the triumph of Love, and indeed the goddesses Fortuna, Virtù, and Amor, along with Pallas Athena, Mercury, and Venus, all play leading roles in the action; Monteverdi’s music leaves no doubt as to whose side the composer is on. The final Nero-Poppea duet, a shameless ode to the joys of physical love, is one of the most ecstatic in operatic history.
All the other reasons, including its place in music history and what it tells us about the tastes of the seventeenth-century Italian audiences, are secondary. Listen to Poppea for its celebration of Eros, and not as a moral cautionary tale. For yes, the bad guys win: Ottone and Drusilla are banished and Octavia is driven into exile. As the opera ends, Poppea weds Nero as Amor and Venus look on with satisfaction. Love, or at least Lust, really does conquer all, whether you like it or not.
Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice. Benjamin Britten’s valedictory work, and his greatest. League of Decency Alert: the dreaded homosexuals are about to come out of the closet and get up on the stage, singin’ ’n dancin’.
Britten, of course, was one of Britain’s leading composers—and gay. In a country where homosexuality at the time was (a) widespread and (b) traditional but (c) illegal and (d) severely punished, Britten lived quite openly with his longtime companion, the tenor Peter Pears. Just as openly, his operas and other dramatic works reflected his predilections. Peter Grimes, his first great stage masterpiece, concerns a funny old East Anglian fisherman whose boy assistants have a way of perishing; Albert Herring is about a greengrocer’s lad who is crowned Queen of the May; Billy Budd, a kind of warmup for Death in Venice, is a frankly eroticized portrait of Melville’s beautiful sailor lad; Gloriana is an opera written for the coronation of a queen (Elizabeth II) about a queen (Elizabeth I).
And yet “dear old Ben” was something of a beloved figure in Gay Old England and in fact became an institution in his later years. To this day, he is venerated by the British—consult any recent opera book published in England and the Britten chapter is as long as those on Verdi or Wagner—who, having relatively little to boast about musically, have taken to exaggerating the modest talents of composers like (for example) the pretentious and opaque Michael Tippett.
Britten is more than a cut above Tippett, and in his best operas—Grimes, Billy Budd, and Death in Venice are the three most likely to survive—he achieves real greatness. And of the three, his swan song, based on the novella by Thomas Mann, is the best. Written in 1971–72, when the composer was already seriously ill (he died in 1976), the opera was intended as a tribute to Pears, and although Britten was too sick to attend the premiere in 1973, he did finally manage to hear his friend in the role of Aschenbach two years later.
The libretto, by Myfanwy Piper, is a brilliant reduction of Mann’s emotionally and morally complex story, and Britten responded to it with a depth of feeling and consummate command of musical technique. Like Hoffmann, the opera has multiple roles for a bass-baritone, representing the various nemeses Aschenbach encounters on his literal journey from Munich to Venice, and his moral journey from bourgeois morality to unfettered hedonism, which results in his symbolic journey from health to sickness to death. (Surely some enterprising stage director is even now planning a reinterpretation in which Aschenbach succumbs not to cholera but to AIDS.)
Britten pulls out all the stops. The moody Sea Interludes of Grimes are evoked in the music that accompanies Aschenbach’s boat trip across the lagoon to La Serenissima, while the dance music that accompanies Tadzio, the Polish boy with whom the writer falls in love, evokes the spirit of earlier works such as Gloriana and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Aschenbach’s own music—tremulous, hesitant, insecure, troubled at first, then becoming more passionate and finally, resigned—is Britten’s most effective dramatic creation.
Just as Janáček does in Jenůfa, Britten works the operatic miracle of making all of us—straight or gay—care about the feelings of his central character. Aschenbach’s lust for Tadzio seems not at all perverse or perverted, but natural and, while pathetic, rather sweet. Few images are more striking than that of the freshly rouged and barbered Aschenbach trying desperately to catch the eye of a boy who couldn’t care less whether he even exists. At this point, the story transcends its literal homosexual tendencies and becomes the universal story of a man (Aschenbach, Don José, Hoffmann, Werther, et al.) who destroys himself for love, and steps lively to his doom.
Pietro Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana; Ruggiero Leoncavallo: Pagliacci. Fools for love that we are, so are we often killers for it as well. The famous coupling of Cav ’n Pag offers two object lessons in why not to get carried away by mad passion.
Both one-act operas are also, despite the best efforts of their otherwise obscure composers, one-shot successes. Pietro Mascagni and Ruggiero Leoncavallo labored mightily to overcome the curse of their early success, to no avail. How often do you hear (or have you ever heard of) such Mascagni wonders as L’amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Iris, Le maschere, Isabeau, Parisina, Lodoletta, and Il piccolo Marat? (Only the first on this list of losers is performed at all.) As for Leoncavallo, he went on to write La bohème (yes, the same story as Puccini’s—how’s that for a suicide mission?), Zazà and Edipo re.
So let us give thanks for the two operas that did go right. The stories are familiar: an affair, a pregnancy, and a fatal duel of honor in Sicily and some extra-marital hanky-panky in Calabria add up to textbook illustrations of the short-lived operatic movement known as verismo (realism) that flourished toward the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, these two operas pretty much are verismo, and we couldn’t ask for two finer, or more enjoyable, examples.
Cavalleria came first, composed by the young Mascagni as his entry in the publisher Sonzogno’s second opera-writing contest. He wrote it quickly, but got cold feet when it came time to submit it and decided to send in the fourth act of Guglielmo Ratcliff instead. Fortunately, his wife had more sense, and it was she who entered Cavalleria.
It won big. With amazing speed, the opera rocketed around the globe, making the name Mascagni an operatic household word. First performed in 1890, the opera was heard in the United States and Britain the following year. Mascagni was the John Grisham of his day, the indifferently talented artist whose one genuine inspiration created a genre, and all of a sudden everybody had to have a verismo opera. Of the scores of imitations, only Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892) came up to the original.
Of the two, I much prefer Cavalleria and so will dwell on it here. Pagliacci’s well-known Prologue and “Laugh, clown, laugh” aria are more instantly recognizable, especially since Caruso made the latter a hit, but I find the Harlequin-Columbine stage show (the pagliacci are a group of traveling players) tiresome and can’t wait for Canio, the aggrieved tenor, to off his faithless wife, Nedda, and her wimpy lover, Silvio.
Cavalleria, on the other hand, offers beauties from start to finish. (Amazingly, Mascagni lived long enough to record his opera in 1940 with Gigli in the lead role.) It also provides the enterprising stage director with a magnificent setting—a Sicilian village square, dominated by a church—on which to work his magic. Small wonder that the most musical of movie directors, Francis Ford Coppola, selected the opera as the musical analog and backdrop for the final Corleone tragedy—The Godfather, Part III. (The opera is practically a movie score all by itself.) What better counterpoint to an epic of love, death, betrayal, and revenge than an opera about love, death, betrayal, and revenge?
Cav, based on the short story by Giovanni Verga, is something of an odd duck, for during its first ten minutes or so it is less an opera than an orchestral tone poem with offstage voices and, later, a chorus. Far more effectively than Leoncavallo, the twenty-six-year-old Mascagni establishes a sense of time and place through purely musical means. You can almost feel the heat rising from the dusty streets of the remote village, and with the heat of the day comes the heat of the heart, which must find its fullest expression in blood.
As in all great operas, the orchestra is a fully fledged actor in the drama. This is not the orchestra of Wagner, brimming with leitmotifs; nor is it the rum-tum-tiddle-tiddle band of the early Verdi. Imagine the orchestral writing of Otello combined with the flexible lyricism of Puccini and you will have some idea of what a miracle Mascagni has wrought. For his particular genius in this opera was not to home in too closely on the lethal love triangle of Turridù, Santuzza, and Alfio, nor on the Turridù-Mamma Lucia relationship. Instead, he draws the whole town into the drama; it’s no accident that the first we hear of the main character is his offstage voice. Similarly, the duel between the two men takes place offstage as well. In other words, it’s not what happens that’s of the highest importance, it’s the effect it has on the community. We don’t see Turridù being killed by Alfio; instead, the opera’s last image is of the scorned and vengeful Santuzza, who has egged on Alfio, collapsing in shock at the news of her lover’s death. Fittingly, the last words are sung not by one of the principals but one of the townspeople, who screams that Turridù has been killed.
The highlight, of course, is the illustrious Intermezzo, which arrives two-thirds of the way through the drama as a brief moment of repose before the storm. Santuzza has just informed Alfio that Turridù has been keeping company with Alfio’s wife, Lola. What happens next is a foregone conclusion, but just before it does, the stage clears and the Intermezzo sings out. Is there a more perfect three-minute orchestral interlude than this? All aching strings and comforting harps, it sums up not only the hopelessness of Turridù’s position, but that of all the villagers. Far from a prettified, irrelevant bit of extraneous lyricism, the Intermezzo is the fulcrum on which the opera turns, and it packs a wallop all out of proportion to its size. Which may be why Coppola chose it to illustrate the lonely death of Michael Corleone.
There’s nothing to be ashamed about in liking Cavalleria rusticana. It can be a Guilty Pleasure, but it can just as easily, and with total justification, be a Desert Island Disc. I can think of few works in the repertoire to equal it in the freshness of its inspiration; though at first it may seem a conventional Italian romantic opera, that’s only because it’s so familiar—and in this case familiarity has bred disdain if not contempt. It shouldn’t.
Jules Massenet: Werther. Another opera in which love must end in death, and a Guilty Pleasure par excellence, is Massenet’s masterpiece. For some reason, it has been left to French composers to tackle the masterpieces of German literature: Gounod set Goethe’s great poem Faust, Part I, while Jules Massenet went for the same author’s influential novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which so affected young male readers of the late eighteenth century that a rash of copycat suicides broke out in its wake. (“This book ought to be banned. It’s encouraging our young people to blah, blah, blah…”)
The Germans haven’t taken too kindly with this messing with their cultural totems. In Germany, Gounod’s Faust is sometimes presented as Marguerite—just so nobody gets any idea that it does justice to the sacred Goethe. Werther ranks a little higher on the evolutionary scale, but the fact remains that, to Germans, Goethe is best left read and unsung, whereas to the French (and the rest of us) he works much better with a little music to deflate his insufferable pomposity and opacity. (Have you ever tried reading Part II of Faust? I thought not.)
Once again, we have the eternal triangle: Werther is in love with Charlotte (accent the second syllable of both their names), but she is inconveniently engaged, as such women invariably are, to a boring bourgeois clod named Albert (Al-BEAR). Of course, she’s crazy about Werther, but the problem is that he’s arrived on the scene (old Frankfurt) just a little bit too late; she promised her late mother that she would get hitched to Al, and a promise is a promise, especially when you’re a German, even if you’re singing in French.
Werther is of course devastated and spends most of the rest of the opera moping around. He bumps into Albert and Charlotte coming out of church one fine September afternoon; Albert, a sport, says, basically, hey, pal, no hard feelings, okay? and suggests that Werther might settle for Charlotte’s spunky little fifteen-year-old sister, Sophie, instead. Charlotte appears and hints coyly that maybe they can meet again at Christmas.
In the third act, they do just that. Werther had been writing mad passionate letters to Charlotte, who returns his feelings in spades (well, she has been married for several months): now he shows up at her door, on Christmas Eve. They embrace, but Charlotte breaks away, unable to handle the guilt. Distraught, Werther hurries off, but sends a note to Albert asking to borrow his pistols. Wonder what he means by that…?
The fourth act, which is really the second scene of the third act, finds Werther sprawled on the floor of his study, dying of a gunshot wound. Charlotte, in whose head the light bulb has finally gone off, has rushed to his side, but it’s almost too late—almost too late to hear him sing his last aria, that is. Sad songs, they say so much: as Werther dies, Charlotte confesses her love for him—now she tells him—and the last words of the opera are “Noël, noël,” sung by the oblivious neighborhood children. (Wozzeck ends with a similar scene, except that in Berg’s opera the kids happily inform Marie’s child that its mother’s body has just been found.)
Werther is one of the most affecting operas around, and you will never get tired of it. The title role offers the tenor an unending embarrassment of melody, including Werther’s great invocation of nature in the first act, and his lovesick outburst that closes the same act; has the sweet agony of infatuation ever been better expressed musically? The opera demands a first-rate lyric tenor in the title role—Alfredo Kraus was masterful—and a sympathetic, attractive soprano as Charlotte. But most of all it requires a conductor who is not afraid to let the agonizing passion of the score shine through. Anyone who has ever felt the desperate pangs of love will find those emotions mirrored in the Werther score. More than any other composer, Massenet in this opera captured the pain of impossible and unrequited love—not just once, but again and again, in every note. Werther’s suicide seems less a selfish way out than the natural outgrowth of his feelings. His love for Charlotte could not be purer or more intense, and so at the end there is nothing left for him to do except die. What in Goethe seems weak, silly, and self-indulgent becomes, in Massenet’s musical analysis, almost heroic. Werther and Charlotte cannot live happily ever after; instead, each is condemned to his and her own private hell, he in death, she in a loveless marriage. There is no happy ending here; in fact, there is not even the possibility of one.
But is that so bad? Our self-indulgent age demands happy endings the way small children do—we find it hard to conceive that lovers should remain apart, or that a silly little abstract concept like wedding vows should prevent a dysfunctional marriage from breaking up, or that one’s word might be one’s bond, even to (or perhaps especially to) a dead person. But the late eighteenth century was a different time and a different place, and honor mattered. It was unthinkable that Charlotte should run off with Werther; far better for her immortal soul that she suffer in this life, to be rewarded in the next.
Seen this way, the love story between Charlotte and Werther thus becomes a profoundly moral tale, not an immoral one. And this is precisely the point I have been trying to make throughout this chapter: that while opera plots may seem to be about a bunch of disreputable outlaws and sexual brigands, they are in fact offered to us as Christian morality plays. An opera about a bunch of saints would not be interesting; it is far more instructive to examine the lives of the least and last among us. Jesus said let him who is without sin cast the first stone, and in opera, no stones fly. But many souls are saved.
Olivier Messiaen: Saint François d’Assise (Saint Francis of Assisi). Well, here’s an opera about a saint—maybe the saintliest saint of them all. And does it work? You bet it does.
Saint François was premiered on November 28, 1983, in Paris, and I was lucky enough to be present. It is an enormous work, lasting nearly five hours, and scored for huge forces, including a gigantic orchestra and a chorus of 150. Not everyone thought it was wonderful; as we left the house after the first performance, an experienced and respected colleague of mine in the music business remarked that the evening was the most loathsome she had ever spent in the theater.
That was her opinion. Mine is that Saint François is a magnificent, dramatically stagnant, probably unperformable, and certainly damned difficult work of genius that we will simply have to live with. (Another such is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.) Yes, it’s more oratorio than opera; yes, it ought to be performed in Chartres Cathedral instead of the Paris Opéra. Yes, it will very likely never enter the repertoire—although it did get a second production in the early nineties at the Salzburg Festival, which is a good sign. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t wonderful.
Messiaen’s particular style is hard to describe, mostly because it is sui generis; nobody else’s music sounds anything like his. Part birdsong, part modal, part acerbic modernism, part French lyricism, it is a highly individual synthesis that also derives in part from Messiaen’s experience as a church organist. Like his fellow organist Anton Bruckner, Messiaen goes in for massive sonorities that rattle your fundament; the Turangalîla-Symphonie is one of the twentieth century’s most original symphonic works, and probably the best introduction to Messiaen’s mature style.
Still and all, Saint François is a masterpiece from start to finish, the opera (he wrote only one) its composer spent all his life working toward. Messiaen, who died in 1992, was a lifelong devout Catholic whose other great passion was the study of birds and birdsong; in Saint François he found a natural subject—yes, there is a scene of Saint Francis preaching to the birds—that combined both his enthusiasms.
The plot, if you’ve read your Lives of the Saints, you already know. The work consists simply of eight tableaux, charting the salient stations on Francis’s road to salvation. Its highlight is Tableau Five, subtitled “L’ange musicien,” or “The Angel of Music.” In this blinding bit of musical revelation, a viol-playing angel appears to Francis and reveals unto him a profound vision of the power of music—a vision so strong that Francis says it would have torn the soul from his body had he not fainted dead away. There are few scenes in contemporary opera more powerful, or more beautiful.
But what makes the opera germane to our theme is the second scene, “Lauds,” in which Francis realizes that while God made all that is lovely in the world, He has also created all the ugliness. And though Francis may feel revulsion at the horrors and sins of this imperfect world, he must also come to terms with them as part of the natural order. This realization leads in turn to his embrace of the Leper in the next scene—the exact moment when he becomes a saint.
So are we saying, with typical twentieth-century sophistry, that Bad is Good? (It is my contention that the entire history of our century may be viewed as an idiotic attempt to prove that up is down, black is white, and that your mother really didn’t know what she was talking about.) Not at all. On the contrary, the point is that it is only by examining evil, by understanding the nature of Wrong—and embracing it, the way Francis does the Leper—that we learn about goodness and define for ourselves what is Right. But just as virtue does not exist in the abstract, neither does sin. It is impossible to disprove a negative, so it is only by holding the negative up to the light—of both reason and emotion—that we discover what it is that we really do believe in.
If that philosophy was good enough for Saint Francis, it ought to be good enough for us, too.
Philip Glass: Satyagraha. This is another saintly, philosophical opera, this time on a non-Christian subject. Satyagraha was the name Mohandas Gandhi gave to his political and ethical movement of nonviolent resistance. Contrary to what you may think, Satyagraha was first tried out not in India but in South Africa, where Gandhi spent time before returning to his homeland.
Glass had had a remarkable succès d’estime with his and Robert Wilson’s epochal Einstein on the Beach in 1976. But after all the fuss over Einstein subsided, he was still broke and had to go back to driving a New York City taxicab. For the second installment of what eventually proved to be a trilogy of operas on the subject of great men, Glass worked with a libretto—drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, and sung entirely in Sanskrit—by Constance DeJong and himself that, like the later Saint François, is less a narrative than a series of tableaux vivants depicting various scenes from the life.
A bald retelling of the plot would make this opera seem little more than a fashionable concept upon which the composer hung some of his trademark chugga-chugga minimalist music: Gandhi gets outraged over the second-class citizenship afforded to South Africa’s large Indian community and organizes a peaceful protest. The end. But it’s hardly that simple. Each scene is carefully calibrated and expansively realized; in Satyagraha, premiered in Rotterdam in 1980, Glass was already moving away from the strict repetition of his earlier music to a freer, more flexible style that allowed him to reach considerable heights of expression.
To me, Satyagraha represents the high-water mark of minimalism. Glass would go on to write another masterpiece, the gloomy Akhnaten, a few years later, but the earlier opera is, I believe, superior, if only for the sheer sense of transfigured ecstasy the composer achieves in the remarkable final scene. An illustration of the aftermath of a protest march against discrimination that ended violently, the scene consists of a single musical line for Gandhi—the scale E to E, played on the white keys of the piano—sung slowly and lyrically and repeated over and over and over and over. Nothing could better sum up the budding Mahatma’s iron determination coupled with his inner serenity; he has moral force behind his philosophy, before which the British oppression must surely fall, first in South Africa—ever notice how the Brits always seem to tiptoe away from the colonial disasters they leave behind them, and then blame the resulting fiasco on the natives?—and later in India.
Glass has proven to be a remarkably prolific artist, a throwback to the old days when composers (Haydn, for example) didn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to conk them on the head, but instead went about their business, writing every day and usually with a specific performance in mind. The once-scorned Glass has become an honored figure on the international operatic scene—something of an elder statesman, even, much to the former hippie and countercultural revolutionary’s chagrin. Yet we should honor Einstein, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten not for their musical politics, but for their stunning beauty.
Each work contains a moment that ranks with anything in opera. The ending of Einstein, for example, when one of the speakers intones Samuel M. Johnson’s “Two Lovers” text, is heartrendingly gorgeous, an epiphany made all the more concentrated by its position at the end of a very long and challenging work. Akhnaten, for its part, contains the pharaoh’s radiant “Hymn to the Sun,” which is enough to make even the most pagan Egyptian sign up for monotheism on the spot. But the concluding scene of Satyagraha has a special place in my heart, as I hope it will in yours.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin. You knew I was going to get to this one eventually. In the first chapter we discussed the piece in the context of how music functions in an operatic context. Now, let’s look more carefully at the work itself.
Onegin was not the famed Russian composer’s first opera, but it was his first great one. Tchaikovsky was notoriously insecure, and had a habit of destroying pieces that had failed or somehow displeased. His maiden voyage, The Voyevoda, ran for only five nights at the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1869, and Tchaikovsky trashed it. (The opera was reconstructed from the parts later.) He also consigned to the flames his next work, Undine, which was rejected by the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg the same year. Material from both works eventually found its way into other scores.
Two more operas preceded Onegin. The first, called The Oprichnik, was something of a hit, and ran for fourteen performances at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, but the composer grew to dislike the piece and refused to revive it after he became famous. The second was Vakula the Smith, a comic opera based on Gogol, which was well received, although not well enough to suit Tchaikovsky; he later revised it extensively, and renamed it The Slippers, but it never became the success he had hoped for.
But in 1877, two things happened to change Tchaikovsky’s life. Out of the blue arrived a passionate letter from a young woman named Antonina Milyukova, who informed the confirmed bachelor that she was madly in love with him; at the same time, a singer suggested Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin as a subject for an opera.
He began by composing the scene that had long been his favorite: Tatiana’s passionate epistle to Onegin, in which she confesses her love. In the middle of his labors came another letter from Milyukova, and Tchaikovsky naturally associated the events of his real life with the fictional circumstances of his characters. Determined not to make the same mistake Onegin does, he agreed to meet her and—incredibly—proposed marriage. By late summer, he was making wedding plans and working hard on his opera.
The marriage, of course, was an immediate disaster; Milyukova was an immature and unstable woman and Tchaikovsky was an inveterate homosexual. By October the composer had already attempted suicide, and fled to the home of his brother, Anatoli, who took him abroad to recover. This brief taste of marital bliss was enough to knock Tchaikovsky off his compositional stride, and the opera was not ready for performance until March of 1879. Tchaikovsky’s intention was that it should be performed by conservatory students, and it was not until 1884 that Onegin got a big-league production in St. Petersburg. That was all it needed, and it quickly became the most popular and beloved of all Russian operas.
And with good reason. Onegin has everything going for it. Begin with Pushkin’s story, a case study in pigheadedness that has universal resonance. How many of us, faced with the opportunity of a deep and satisfying relationship, pass up the chance, only to rue the day weeks, months, or even years later? The plot has some similarity to Werther except that Onegin’s fate is far crueler: Tatiana may be condemned to a loveless marriage, but Onegin does not take the easy way out as Werther did; instead, the haughty man is humbled by the blinding realization of what a fool he has been, and must live out the rest of his days with that knowledge staring him in the face every time he looks in the mirror.
Then there is the music. Tell Tchaikovsky the news: it is customary to dismiss him as a second-tier composer who relies primarily on pretty tunes and flashy orchestration. But I defy anyone to show me why Onegin is not one of opera’s most psychologically penetrating and emotionally affecting works. The Letter Scene, Lensky’s pathetic aria before his duel with Onegin, the rousing polonaise, and even Prince Gremin’s last-act aria, in which he, all unawares, tells Onegin how much happiness Tatiana has brought him—all these moments add up to an overwhelming operatic experience, one that never fails to move us because it is so profoundly humanistic.
Tchaikovsky may not have been physically able to appreciate heterosexual love, although he tried, but he was certainly able to convey it through musical means. There is not a cardboard character in the opera—not Olga, Tatiana’s airhead sister; not Lensky, whose aria in the first act is a model of youthful passion; and not even Gremin, who could have been merely a Russian version of Massenet’s old-fart Albert. The composer took each one seriously and lavished his most beautiful music on them all. There are no deviates here, no home wreckers, no homicidal maniacs or suicidal basket cases. Just real people, caught up in real emotions, hampered by an iron caste system, but not crushed by it. Instead, they are done in by their own stubborn pride. And what could be more natural than that?
Giacomo Puccini: La bohème, Tosca, and La rondine. Another composer whose reputation has suffered at the hands of his popularity is Giacomo Puccini, who more or less closed the book on the era of the classic Italian opera. Puccini is a crowd pleaser, and thus easily attacked for being a panderer of cheap, meretricious sentiment, but such criticism seems to me profoundly wrong, and certainly demeans Puccini’s indisputable accomplishment as a vocal-music composer and orchestrator.
A problem with Puccini is that his operas are so popular they practically define the term opera itself, at least in the public mind. Few opera companies can manage a season without at least one Puccini staple, for the simple reason that they are as good, and as beloved, as advertised. Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, and I suppose the sophisticates can say the same of the death of Mimi in La bohème as well. But so what? The scene sends chills up and down the spine every time.
And don’t think Puccini didn’t know it. Few composers were as careful to calibrate their effects as Puccini; in his operas, nothing is left to chance. He had a keen eye for the suitable subject—even when, as in the case of David Belasco’s English-language play Madame Butterfly, he could barely understand a word of it—and knew exactly how to get his librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica to whip the material into operatic shape.
One of the most remarkable things about Puccini, and a quality that is often overlooked, is the consistently high level of his inspiration. Unlike, say, Verdi, he did not begin his career with a string of duds or lesser works. As with Richard Strauss, there were two false starts, Le villi (which is an opera, literally, about the willies) and Edgar, and then—bang! Manon Lescaut. After which followed Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), La rondine (The Swallow), Il trittico (three one-act operas, including Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi), and, finally, Turandot. That’s an amazing percentage of winners that few other opera composers can match.
I guess what I’m saying is that one of the things I admire most about old Giacomo is his professionalism. Opera composition in our time has become the province of amateurs and first-timers, composers who labor mightily on their masterpieces, then drop the scores on conductors’ desks and in performers’ laps and say: just do it. No matter that their lack of experience may necessitate revisions, the fixing of unsingable passages and impossible high or low notes, the adjustment of some orchestrational faux pas that interferes with the vocal line. Puccini, however, was a man of the theater down to his toenails.
The three operas I’ve singled out should just be the beginning. Once you’ve discovered mature Puccini, I guarantee that you will like nearly everything else he wrote, with the possible exception of La fanciulla del West and the middle installment of the trilogy, Suor Angelica, although both have lovely moments.
But nobody doesn’t like La bohème, the opera for lovers everywhere. (Remember the movie Moonstruck?) Puccini’s freshest and happiest music suffuses the score, and each scene is practically its own highlight film: Rodolfo and Mimi, falling in love while searching for her key on the floor of his freezing garret; the bohemians on the town in Act II, reveling to the strains of Musetta’s Waltz; the inevitable reality check of Act III; and Mimi’s death of consumption in Act IV. Every note is a joy, every emotion one that is familiar to each member of the audience. Rodolfo and Mimi, Marcello and Musetta, and the rest of the gang may be, when considered in the cold light of day, a bunch of silly, self-indulgent poseurs, eternal graduate students who really ought to grow up and get a life. But they are also our friends.
Tosca, on the other hand, is high drama—Sardooodle-dum, as Shaw called it, punning on the name of the playwright Victorien Sardou, whose play La Tosca forms the basis of the libretto. Tosca is a fiery opera singer; her lover Cavaradossi is a firebrand revolutionary; her tormentor Scarpia is the fire-breathing chief of the secret police. From the beginning, the emotions of Tosca are pitched high, and the opera features one coup de théâtre after another. The first act ends with a magnificent procession in the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle; Act II contains Tosca’s dramatic murder of the lecherous Scarpia and her famous aria, “Vissi d’arte”; while Act III has the opera’s most beloved tune, “E lucevan le stelle.” From start to finish, the action moves swiftly toward its appointed tragic conclusion, and we love every minute of it.
La rondine (say La RON-dee-nay) may be lesser Puccini, but it contains some of his most ravishing music, and I cannot understand why it is not programmed more often. Perhaps the opera’s checkered history is partly to blame—it had the bad fortune to be scheduled at the same time as World War I—but more likely it is the clumsy libretto, which is a kind of La traviata Lite. Still, I urge you to get to know it. The central character of Magda is given one gorgeous tune after another, and overall Puccini displays a deftness and understatement that is largely absent from his other works.
Whichever Puccini you fall in love with (and you will fall in love), please keep in mind that what you’re reacting to, once again, is the humanity of the characters. Even the flamboyant Tosca touches us; she seems a bitch right up to “Vissi d’arte,” but in the aria, in which she explains how she lives her life and why, she reaches out and touches us, a larger-than-life woman in a heap of trouble who is no less real than any of us, watching her from the safety of our seats.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro; Così fan tutte; Don Giovanni; The Magic Flute. Which brings us to the greatest humanist of them all, Wolfgang Amadé (he never signed himself “Amadeus”) Mozart. I have chosen his four best-known operas to talk about here, but please take this merely as the beginning of what should be a lifelong investigation, on your part, of all his musical-theater works, from the youthful Il sogno di Scipione to the last opera, La clemenza di Tito.
Each of the four universally acknowledged masterpieces—the first three with Italian librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the fourth a German-language singspiel—has won a permanent place in the repertoire. In a sense, the modern opera hit list begins with Mozart since few of Handel’s many operas are staged today, except by specialty companies, and Haydn, for all his manifest accomplishment as a symphonist, was not able to bring the same level of inspiration to his operas.
Why not? It’s a good question. Mozart admired Papa Haydn above all other composers, a feeling richly reciprocated by the much older Haydn, who in a letter to Mozart’s real papa, the formidable Leopold Mozart, wrote of Wolfgang that “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me.” Few musicians would care to choose between Haydn’s 104 and Mozart’s 41 symphonies, and the chamber music of each composer, particularly the string quartets, exists on a similarly exalted level of inspiration.
And yet, the operas…The authoritative Complete Opera Book by Gustav Kobbé deems not a single Haydn opera worthy of inclusion in its 1,400 pages. And yet Haydn wrote many operas—twenty-one between the years 1762 and 1783 alone—and operatic composition dominated his life from 1776 to 1790. Haydn thought very highly of his operas, many of which were composed for the court theater at Esterháza, his prince’s rural retreat. But he could be more than a little defensive about them: “I assure you that no such work has been heard in Paris up to now, nor perhaps in Vienna; my misfortune is that I live in the country,” he wrote to his publisher in 1781 about his latest work. Few others felt the same way, however, and by 1787 Haydn was gradually coming to the conclusion that it was pointless to compete with Mozart. Offered a commission to write an opera for Prague, he turned it down, observing that “no man can brook comparison with the great Mozart.”
On the surface, there is not a great deal of difference between the musical styles of the two men. So what is it that separates them? Why so wide a gulf between the achievement of Mozart and Haydn? The answer is simple: Mozart’s characters are real people.
We keep coming back to this, but it’s worth repeating because humanism is the key to understanding and loving opera. Opera must be about real people, with real emotions we all can share. Haydn’s operas such as Il mondo della luna (it used to be translated as The Man in the Moon but a better rendering is The World of the Moon), Armida, and L’isola disabitata (The Desert Island) have many lovely musical passages, but they remain just that—musical passages without dramatic substance or significance.
Mozart, on the other hand, is nothing but substance. From the first masterpiece, Idomeneo, to the mature works of his last years (remember, he died a month short of his thirty-sixth birthday), Mozart is first to last a composer of overwhelming humanity. There are no abstractions in the mature Mozart, no cardboard characters that stand in for lofty philosophical ideals. There are only breathing, sweating, fighting, loving human beings, living their lives in the best way they know how, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but always trying.
In Figaro we have a stock situation: the Count wants to sleep with the serving girl Susanna on the night of her wedding to his valet, Figaro, and he must be outwitted. Mozart turns this Beaumarchais bedroom farce into a work of deep sympathy for all the players—not just Figaro and Susanna, but for the lusty page boy, Cherubino, and, most of all, for the regal Countess (who turns up as Rosina in Rossini’s “prequel,” The Barber of Seville), whose magnanimity closes the opera on a note of forgiveness and love.
Don Giovanni, considered by many to be the greatest opera ever written, presents the familiar rakehell for our inspection, and a very bad fellow he is indeed. As the opera opens, he is attempting to rape Donna Anna; discovered by her father, the Commendatore, the Don challenges the older man to a duel and kills him. It is this sin, not his relentless, compulsive conquest of women (documented so brilliantly in Leporello’s “Catalogue” aria), that eventually condemns him to hellfire and damnation. Date-rape activists are going to hate this opera: Donna Anna, his putative “victim,” seems attracted to the Don, while the seduced-and-abandoned Donna Elvira is obviously crazy about him. Zerlina, the peasant girl, goes off with him willingly. There’s something about a man in a codpiece…
The funny part is, the Don strikes out with every one of them, a point the feminists will probably ignore. He is interrupted in his conquest of Anna, Elvira is an old flame he cannot quite rekindle, and Zerlina is rescued by her boyfriend, Masetto. The Don is strangely impotent for such a stud; in the end it is the murder—in fact, it is the murder victim—that comes back to haunt him. When Giovanni rashly invites the statue of the Commendatore, which stands over the grave of the dead man, to dinner, it accepts. The penultimate scene, so chillingly forecast musically by the magnificent overture, shows the Don refusing to renounce his lascivious ways; if he must go to Hell, at least he’s going to go as a standup guy.
Nowadays, of course, the Don would either cop a plea or mount an aggressive victimization defense. He had an abused childhood; he had a repressed memory; his grandma wouldn’t bake him his favorite cookies. Maybe he would blame it all on Leporello, or on the women. He would probably have to do some time, of course, but if he went before the Kultur Nazi tribunal, confessed that he was a sex addict and promised to sin no more, a book deal and an appearance on Donahue would be waiting for him on the other side. And you know what? Women would throw themselves at him.
PC types beware: Così fan tutte is just as likely to frost you as Don Giovanni. Even the title is guaranteed to get your goat: it means, roughly translated, “That’s the way all women are,” or, “What do you expect from a broad, anyway?” In this opera, the women are bona fide sex objects. An old roué named Don Alfonso wagers a couple of wet-behind-the-ear swains named Ferrando and Guglielmo that their girlfriends, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella, would be unfaithful to them should they ever let them out of their sight. Oh, yeah? say the boys. Yeah! says Don Alfonso, who enlists the saucy little serving wench Despina (female characters in Mozart whose names end in “ina” must invariably be described as saucy) to help him prove his point.
The boys march off, allegedly to war; the girls are heartbroken. The boys march back, disguised as “Albanians,” and each promptly sets out to woo the other’s lady. Ferrando heads for Fiordiligi (tenor and soprano) and Guglielmo for Dorabella (baritone and mezzo). Although the savvy opera fan can deduce from the vocal categories that these are the correct pairings, the remainder of the opera focuses on how the new couples fall in love. At the end, the cruel jest is revealed, and the lovers are supposed to return to their original betrotheds. But we wonder…
It’s a cold, calculating, and very schematic (and very eighteenth century, for that matter) libretto that Da Ponte concocted—far better literarily than the untidy Don Giovanni, where it’s clear the poet ran out of ideas for Act II—but once again Mozart humanizes it with his music. Così is no rationalist tract, but a richly nuanced road map of the human heart; while the words may be cynical, the music is definitely not, and in many ways I prefer it to all other Mozart operas. The six characters (there aren’t any others, just a small chorus) are each painstakingly individualized, and by the opera’s end there can be no question that Ferrando and Fiordiligi really have fallen in love. Dorabella capitulates much earlier than her sister, and her freshly minted relationship with Guglielmo seems less secure. But having watched Fiordiligi struggling to choose between fidelity and nascent love, we believe her emotions are deeper and more genuine.
The ending of Così is one of opera’s great and-then-what-happens? Surely, we say, these couples can’t pretend the last three hours never occurred. Surely, they can’t be expected to fulfill their prior engagements. But what if they are part of a society that prizes duty over temptation, that eschews an if-it-feels-good-then-do-it ethos in favor of a more stable social philosophy? The close of Così is ambiguous, and probably in a way that Mozart and Da Ponte, who could not have foreseen the sexual revolution or the Playboy Philosophy, would never have imagined. This, too, is part of the work’s afterlife, and we will continue to debate it as long as opera houses are still around.
The last of the quartet, The Magic Flute, stands apart from its siblings not only by virtue of its language but by its intention. Flute was written for the popular theater, not the opera house: think of it as a kind of off-off-off-Broadway show. Mozart was frankly trying to write a crowd pleaser, and, in the few weeks of life he had left after the premiere, it tickled him to no end that he succeeded.
The libretto was by one Emanuel Schikaneder, a singer, playwright, composer, and producer who had played Hamlet and arrogated the role of Papageno in Flute for himself. Like Mozart, Schikaneder was a Mason, and the naïve-mystical libretto is rife with Masonic symbolism. Once again, this is an opera calculated to outrage feminists: the women, led by the Queen of the Night, are the bad guys, while the men, whose leader is Sarastro, are good. Of course, it takes the hero Tamino a while to figure this out, since it is the Queen who enlists him on his quest to find and rescue her lovely daughter Pamina from Sarastro’s putative clutches.
Even with a cartoon story like this, Mozart could not resist humanizing it. The Caliban-like birdman Papageno and his mate Papagena represent the common people, while Tamino (a Japanese prince) and Pamina stand for the nobility. Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, of course, are the higher (or lower) powers. And yet Mozart poured out his heart in his music: the poignant duet for Pamina and Papageno that celebrates the love of man and woman; the Papageno-Papagena duet at the opera’s close, a hymn to the joys of procreation; Tamino’s “Portrait” aria, in which he glimpses Pamina’s beauty in a cameo and immediately falls in love. Despite the heavy symbolism of the story, the characters are never archetypes.
If it seems that I am emphasizing Mozart’s humanism, I am. The eighteenth century was a periwigged and peruked era, but it was also the wellspring of all the civil liberties we hold dear today: a profound understanding of the nature of love, a sympathy for mankind’s foibles, a desire for political freedom (the hidden agenda of The Marriage of Figaro), a recognition of the rights o’ man. What does our allegedly enlightened century have to offer besides these virtues? Fascism, Nazism, and communism all posited the essential worthlessness of the individual; psychiatry, at least the way it has been perverted by the legal system, seeks to absolve the individual from responsibility for his or her actions; the twelve-tone system, which seemed as invulnerable as communism until its collapse in the late 1970s, sought to remove inspiration as the operative principle of composition and replace it with a schematic intellectuality that appealed to almost no one.
This is why Mozart still speaks so strongly and clearly to us. He is every bit as revolutionary today as he was two hundred years ago. Nay, more so, for it is not too hard to imagine some politically correct cretin or moral-majority moron raising objections to the content of Mozart’s operas—don’t laugh, they’ve already attacked Show Boat and Peter Pan. Mozart’s operas are declarations of independence—independence from cant, hypocrisy, and conformism. They should be treasured not only for their musical content but for what they tell us about ourselves.
Richard Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen; Tristan und Isolde; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. And so we come to an end of our little survey, and what better way to conclude than with the Wizard of Bayreuth, the most influential composer of the nineteenth century and, it might be argued, of all time?
Wagner is such a mighty phenomenon that we can only touch on a few salient issues in this short discussion. It has been said that more has been written about Wagner than about anyone else with the exception of Napoleon Bonaparte and Jesus Christ; that’s how important Wagner was, and is. But we’re not interested here in Wagner’s credentials. Instead, we’re trying to understand exactly why we’re expected to sit through the four-day-long Ring cycle—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung—or why the five-hour music dramas of Tristan and Meistersinger are worth our time.
If there’s one thing most of us don’t have these days, it’s time. Wagner, however, will transport you to a timeless world you didn’t even know existed. Hell, he probably didn’t even know it existed, except in his unspoken subconscious. For if you thought Puccini & Co. reeked of primitive emotions, then what will you make of Wagner? Beyond the incestuous relationships of the Ring, beyond the illicit love affair of Tristan and Isolde, beyond all the various other couplings that lie at the root of Wagner, there is a fundamental sense of sex and sexuality that pervades all of Wagner’s music. More than any other opera composer, Wagner communicates directly with our deepest natures.
And that’s why he’s such a fascinating fellow. Unlovable in real life—to the usual tiresome catalogue of marital infidelity and habitual impecuniousness you can add slavish sycophancy to anyone he thought could finance his projects (such as Bavaria’s famous Mad King Ludwig, who made Wagner his personal guru) and, in general, a feeling that the world owed him a living—Wagner was nevertheless a genius who created a universe and invited to us become a part of it.
In the Ring, Wagner attempted nothing less than a grand musico-philosophical synthesis of the known universe and essentially pulled it off. The Ring has offered endless food for thought from its first performance as a cycle in Bayreuth in 1876—Shaw, for example, saw it as a socialist commentary on the evils of capitalism—and a new Ring production is an automatic highlight of any opera season. In tracing the story of Wotan’s fateful bargain for the Rhinegold and the Ring that was fashioned from it Wagner created a metaphor for society and social disintegration that is even more potent today than it was a century ago.
How potent? Let me tell you about the most impressive audience reaction I have ever heard. It came during the production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth in 1983. Bayreuth is the small city in northern Bavaria where the great composer founded and built his own theater, and to this day the local populace retains a proprietary interest in matters Wagnerian. That year, the artistic team included conductor Georg Solti and director Peter Hall, both knights of whatever’s left of the British Empire. Anticipation was high, not because of Hall particularly, but because of Solti, whose groundbreaking complete Ring on records in the late fifties and early sixties made phonographic history.
For various reasons, however, the production was a fiasco. For one thing, the weather was unbearably hot (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) in a country manifestly devoid of air conditioning, or even fans, and conditions inside the Festspielhaus during the four performances of opening week were almost intolerable. Gentlemen doffed their nearly obligatory tuxedo jackets and sat sweltering in shirtsleeves; the ladies, meanwhile, quickly abandoned the brocade evening gowns they wore on the first night, and started showing up in what appeared to be their nighties and their underwear. It was quite a sight.
Artistically, matters were even worse. Sir Georg and Lady Solti seemed to go out of their way to annoy the locals with what was widely viewed as their fancy-pants ways, and the Bayreuth Orchestra, one of the finest in the world, frankly sabotaged the conductor in retaliation, delivering one of its technically poorest performances in memory (in music it can play in its sleep).
Worst of all, though, was Hall’s contribution, a badly conceived and hideously executed production that was neither avant-garde nor traditional but simply inept. Aside from one delightful touch, the Rhinemaidens frolicking stark naked in the water as Das Rheingold opened—envied by one and all in the sweltering audience—the conception was an arrogant disaster, and sitting through it was the severest test of patience I have ever experienced in any theater.
By the end of the week (the Ring consists of three full-length, i.e., incredibly long, operas plus a Prelude which runs more than two hours all by itself) it was payback time. The cast was cheered for its forbearance, and Solti was received tepidly. Then everyone waited to see whether Hall and his production partner, William Dudley, would emerge for their solo bow. They did not. When they finally did appear, they were surrounded for protection by Solti and the entire cast. Nevertheless, the audience found them and, almost as one, roared its disapproval. The demonstration went on for several minutes, to be repeated when Hall and Dudley finally summoned up the courage for a joint bow. Never was booing more richly deserved.
(Naturally, the chauvinistic British press didn’t see it quite that way. Noting that many of the production principals were British, either by birth or adoption, the lickspittle minions of Fleet Street all week had been proclaiming the “English Ring” as a great day for England.)
So you see that folks take opera seriously. In Bayreuth’s case, the reaction sprang from a deep and abiding knowledge of Wagner. It was not that the audience was resistant to change or reinterpretation: Wolfgang Wagner, the festival’s director, is the composer’s grandson (of a man born in 1813!) and, together with his more creative brother Wieland, he led the Wagner Festival out of its post-Hitler ashes and into the twentieth century. The Hall Ring was quickly scrapped in favor of a new production by the German director Harry Kupfer, whose view of the piece was far more ambitious, outrageous, and intellectually challenging than Hall’s. It met with some token resistance at first (more pro forma than anything, I suspect) but quickly won over critics and civilians alike through the sheer dramatic power of the director’s vision.
The enormous effort in composing the Ring demanded some surcease, and so, between Acts II and III of Siegfried, Wagner took a break and wrote Tristan and Meistersinger, two complementary works. Tristan is highly chromatic; Meistersinger is diatonic. Tristan is an illustration of the intimate relationship between Eros and Thanatos; Meistersinger dwells on the vitality of young love, and how age must make way for youth and beauty.
In his works, Wagner does more than humanize his characters: he makes us humanize them. Wagner was a consummate man of the theater, but once you enter his enchanted world the proscenium arch disappears and you are sucked into the vortex. Tristan, Eva, Walther, Siegfried et alia are not characters anymore, they are more real than you are, and you exist in their world at their sufferance. So watch your step.
In the great Act II love duet from Tristan, for example, we are made to feel as much an intruder on an incredibly intimate love scene as King Mark and the rest of the troops when they come crashing in; the music practically screams at us to get out. The finale of Meistersinger, a pageant in which the medieval town of Nuremberg turns out for the great song contest, brings to life the Middle Ages in a way that mere literature or even painting cannot. This is how those people feel, we think, as if we were somehow inside their skins.
What Wagner does, in essence, is to put us on the stage along with his principals. No other composer can make this claim, which is why no other composer can touch Wagner in the power of his music or in its effect on the psyche. Wagner is that most dangerous of artists, the subversive who is able to defy any form of censorship because he has eliminated the middle man and taken his argument directly to the hearts and minds of the listeners. “Here time and space are one” remarks Gurnemanz in Parsifal, and the same may be said for all of Wagner’s great works. They exist on a separate plane, in a parallel universe, and we privileged few are given entry, through some kind of musical warp drive, and allowed to stay awhile. After a performance of Wagner we may leave the theater and go home, but the theater will not leave us.
And there you have it—a basic repertoire that you can be proud to share with family and friends. Obviously, there are many, many other operas that you will want to get to know, and over the course of time, you will. Who knows, someday you may even want to add Rinaldo and Norma to the list, which is fine with me.
But this selection has been designed to do two things. The first is to give you an overview of operatic history, as well as an appreciation of its fundamental unity. From the time of Monteverdi to our own day, plus ça change has been the byword; the same moral and spiritual issues that occupied the earliest opera composers continue to obsess contemporary artists and are reflected in their work. The common thread running through all the choices has been how the characters deal with the extreme psychological, emotional, and physical states into which their creators have plunged them, and what meanings we, the audience, can derive from their experiences.
The second purpose has been to provide you with the building blocks for the creation of your own, personalized basic repertoire. In opera, as in so much of life, there is no one right way to do things; instead, the art form admits of many possibilities, and while I personally may have rejected some of them (and, in these pages, I have), you are free to do what you like. So go ahead: charge into baroque or bel canto; become a vocal nut or an old-recording freak; fixate on the life and times of a single singer and become an expert. Become an opera nut, for that matter. Be my guest.
Just don’t blame me when it happens.