Popular songs are those written, published and sung, whistled and hummed by the great American unmusical public, as distinguished from the more highly cultivated class which often decries and scoffs at the tantalizing and ear-haunting melodies that are heard from ocean to ocean in every shape and form.
— CHAS. K. HARRIS, COMPOSER OF “AFTER THE BALL”
I just have to jump around when I sing. But it ain’t vulgar. It’s just the way I feel. I don’t feel sexy when I’m singin’. If that was true, I’d be in some kind of institution and some kind of sex maniac.
— ELVIS PRESLEY
We’re more popular than Jesus now.
— JOHN LENNON
What you probably didn’t realize, before you started this book, is that you already know a lot more about opera than you thought you did. Anyone who has ever seen Show Boat, The King and I, or Carousel has seen a form of opera; anyone who has ever enjoyed The Merry Widow or The Student Prince has come within striking distance of one. Is pop music more to your taste? Then what do you think Tommy, Quadrophenia, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita are? And Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods? That’s right: the O word.
This assertion never fails to stir controversy. I’ve already briefly considered Sondheim and Webber, the two leading exponents of what used to be called musical comedy in the late twentieth century, who for some reason are forever being pitted against one another by their advocates as if Broadway weren’t big enough for both of them. Is not! Is so! Is not! Is so! On such a level does the argument rage. But let’s look more closely.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s first show was a fifteen-minute children’s musical called Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A success almost from the first—especially when a London critic named Derek Jewell “discovered” the work in the pages of his newspaper—the little show has grown and grown over the years until it has last achieved its true, elephantine, Webberian incarnation in the Broadway productions of the eighties and nineties. Their next effort, called an opera from the beginning, was Superstar, followed by another opera, Evita, the third and final Lloyd Webber-Rice show. The audacity of the boys! To arrogantly invite comparison of their humble works with the very greatest of Verdi, Puccini et alia! Or so some of the critics wrote. And so many of the critics still think.
They think so because they are determined to maintain the almost entirely fictional split between high and low culture to which they have dedicated their lives. Sad to say, newspapers and magazines across America have subscribed to this fallacy, with the result that many of the most important new musical works get reviewed by drama critics who don’t have the slightest notion about the function of music on the stage (why do you think they call it “musical comedy”?) and insist on treating even the most through-composed musical (in which nearly every word is sung) as a kind of play that, unaccountably, has music going on all the time. And so we are presented with the sorry spectacle of Sondheim and Webber shows being discussed in the pages of the New York Times as if they were more akin to the plays of Eugene O’Neill or Athol Fugard than The Magic Flute and Carmen (each of which contains far more spoken dialogue than The Phantom of the Opera).
In other words, it’s a silly and arbitrary distinction, and it would simply be amusing were it not so deleterious to the health of the art form. In New York City, it is a popular sport to speculate on the reasons for the dearth of new musicals—or, indeed, the dearth of new anything—on Broadway. Economics, unions, the Times Square (yes, that Times Square) neighborhood—all are routinely blamed. Without ascribing too much power to the drama critic of the Times, I would like to suggest that if you were a composer, you too might be discouraged at the prospect of having your biggest and most important work reviewed by someone to whom the very presence of your score is either irrelevant or downright annoying.
The matter becomes even more ridiculous when you consider that once a Broadway show reaches a certain age, it often turns up a mile north, at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center, where the New York City Opera annually presents classic musicals. Then the music critics troop out and weigh in, two or three decades too late to make any difference.
Whence comes this foolish cultural division? From the time of the Minnesingers, there has always been high and low culture, apportioned along class lines. But composers certainly felt free to help themselves to material from both worlds. The multiplicity of Renaissance masses bearing the title L’Homme armé (The Armed Man) is a direct result of the incredible popularity of a vulgar song of the period, which even the highest-falutin’ composers managed to work into their carefully wrought contrapuntal homages to God. A rough equivalent today might be an outbreak of symphonies on the tune of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby; think of the howls that would bring.
Howls from the classical critics, that is; they (we?) are often their (our?) own worst enemies. For one of the reasons the whole classical music establishment has worked itself into such a pickle in the postwar period is the reluctance of many of the tribe to admit that the cozy little culture gulch of the 1950s is gone forever. In the vulgar, mean-spirited land of Roseanne, there’s no longer any room at the inn for Amahl and the Night Visitors. Laugh, clown, laugh at the spectacle of Pavarotti waving his hanky at a stadium full of howling drunkards, but in one sense the national and international culture has reverted to its early twentieth-century form, when Caruso was a celebrity pitchman and John McCormack became a zillionaire by singing treacly encores like “The Rose of Tralee.”
So do I think that much of today’s pop music can also qualify as art? Yes I do. I also believe that the best and the brightest examples of the Broadway show also qualify as opera, by whatever standard you choose to use. I even think that a show that was both a West End and Broadway failure qualifies as an opera, so if you will please bear with me, students, we will now parse the best darn flop that ever crashed and burned on the Great White Way. I refer, of course, to the Tim Rice-Boys of ABBA masterpiece, Chess.
Originally issued as a double album (remember those?) in 1984, the show was the brainchild of Rice, who had broken off with Lloyd Webber some years before, and Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the male half of the quintessentially seventies Swedish megagroup. It hardly seemed promising. ABBA was widely regarded as Euro-bubblegum, admittedly infectious but utterly devoid of content (certainly in comparison with the recently deceased, and immediately sainted, Beatles). Several years before, Rice had seen his lyrics for the song “Memory” turned down in favor of ones by director Trevor Nunn, ending his relationship with Lloyd Webber in a burst of acrimony, and many thought that without his songwriting partner he would fade from view.
Chess was Rice’s counterattack, his attempt to show that he could still have a hit without Lloyd Webber. The story was a cold war-era parable of two chess players, one American and one Russian, and their struggle not only for chess supremacy but for the love of the same woman, a Hungarian refugee named Florence. The ins and outs of the plot are not important, except insofar as they gave Rice a chance to comment poetically on circumstances that closely mirrored his own complicated love life: the Russian is not only the object of Florence’s affection but also that of his long-suffering wife, and in a duet remarkable for its poignant symphony, “I Know Him So Well,” both women sing of the impossibility of either of them ever making him happy. It was no secret that Rice was having an open affair with Chess’s (and Evita’s) leading lady, Elaine Paige, while still very much married to his long-suffering wife, Jane. Chess, then, was not only Rice’s bid for commercial success without Lloyd Webber, it was a glimpse into his own complicated, cynical, but still deeply humanistic psyche.
As luck would have it, though, Chess came to the stage in the same London season as The Phantom of the Opera, which wiped it out. From the outset, the show was dogged by bad fortune, including the illness and death of its director, Michael Bennett, just before the London opening. The omnipresent Trevor Nunn took over, maintaining Bennett’s you-are-there, media-rich conception in London but changing the show dramatically for its New York incarnation (new sets, new characters, new songs, new book, lots of new dialogue). Neither production adequately captured the show’s emotional center, and the Broadway version was widely panned. It opened and closed within a couple of months in 1988, and that was the end of Chess in the bright lights of the cruel big city.
A few months later I was visiting with Rice at his former country home near Cambridge and we got to talking about Chess. He admitted its flaws on the stage—flaws that may have been insuperable—but offered this epitaph: “It was a great album, though.”
And so it is—from its first Rodgers-and-Hammersteinian chorus to the last note of the final anthem, Chess is a brilliant achievement that will only grow in stature with the passing of the years. (Remember, you read it here first.) Its quotidian flaws, including the inadvertent competition with the Phantom steamroller and the unfortunate coincidence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika movement, which removed the Soviet Bogeyman from common parlance, will be forgotten in favor of its memorable melodies, its clever construction, its dazzling eclecticism (Benny and Björn’s range of styles is even wider and more accomplished than Webber’s in Phantom), and Rice’s bittersweet lyrics, all of which contribute to one of the most important scores of the eighties, a decade notable for its operatic/music-theater triumphs.
The show opens with the deceptively cheerful “Merano,” a wry ode to the joys of tourist fleecing in the picturesque South Tyrolean town that wound up in Italy after World War I. Rock score, my foot: the very first notes are played on the flute, soon accompanied by the horn. “Is this The Sound of Music?” asks the first stage direction. “Tyrolean hats, leather pants, yodels and dancing. Snowcapped mountain peaks and icy rivers. Grapes and the benefits of the spa.”
The music, for chorus and orchestra, continues along its merry path until the arrival of the American, whose bumptious drums and heavy guitar-lick entrance is one of the most striking on record. “It’s East-West, and the money’s sky-high,” he sings.
The Russian watches his opponent on television; his advisers try to convince him the American is Bobby Fischer-crazy, but he knows better: crazy like fox! He dismisses his handler, Molokov, in a bitter duet, and muses on his chosen profession: “Who needs a dream? Who needs ambition? Who’d be the fool in my position?” he sings in “Where I Want to Be.”
The tournament opens with the Arbiter’s caustic “The Opening Ceremony” number. “This is not the start of World War Three,” he sings, “no political ploys/I think both your constitutions are terrific so/Now you know—be good boys.” It continues as a chorus of Merchandisers plug their chess match spinoffs, hawking their T-shirts and chess sets with a callous verve that was farfetched in 1984 but which in our day of the disgusting “I’m going to Disney World” commercialism that has infected even the Olympics seems if anything underimagined.
The quartet that follows, “A Model of Decorum and Tranquillity,” is one of the show’s most elegant and intricate numbers, put together with an astonishing sophistication by the composers. The two camps argue over every conceivable aspect of the match, including where the wood for the chessboard should come from. Back at the hotel, the American’s assistant, Florence, berates him for his boorish behavior (“You want to lose your only friend?”). She then delivers herself of one of Chess’s show-stoppers, the unabashedly derisive aria “Nobody’s Side,” in which she vents her pessimistic philosophy that no one is to be trusted, ever. “Everybody’s playing the game/But nobody’s rules are the same/Nobody’s on nobody’s side.”
This song, sung by Paige on the record, sums up the sardonic spirit of Chess, and perhaps accounts for its failure. Who can love an opera in which each of the characters is a scheming, selfish son of a bitch? (Well, you loved Evita, didn’t you?) And yet the song is so potent, so full of defiant angst, that it makes the fabulous Florence an irresistible figure, a lonely woman who can never make a promise or a plan, and takes a little love where she can.
The first game is a silent-movie affair, told orchestrally in the eponymous number “Chess,” in which themes heard earlier in the show are combined and intertwined so that we can easily follow not only the match but the emotional resonance behind it. It is no surprise, therefore, that the next number finds Florence and the Russian meeting in a private room in a mountaintop restaurant. What began as a business meeting soon turns into something else, and the pair falls, tentatively, in love in “Mountain Duet,” a lovely ballad for two that captures the spirit of Amor on a shimmering moonlit Alpine night.
Florence comes back, and in “Florence Quits” abandons the American in favor of her new Russian lover. Her bitter confrontation with her erstwhile partner is one of the show’s great throwaway melodies, a rockin’, stompin’ chorus that will return in a similarly acerbic context in the second act.
Enamored of Florence, the Russian attempts to defect to the West, and in a comic number, “Embassy Lament,” a pair of contestants for the Upper Class Twit of the Year competition, otherwise known as British Civil Servants, complains of the increase in paperwork occasioned by defections. “Though we’re all for/Basic human rights it makes you wonder/What they built the Berlin Wall for.”
The first act ends with the stirring patriotic “Anthem,” in which the Russian sings that, while he may be defecting, no land will ever replace his homeland in his heart. The song is, probably intentionally, evocative of Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” and speaks to every man’s love of hearth, home, and country. Which, of course, left many puzzled about Chess’s true political leanings; despite perestroika, how could a show be so sympathetic to the bad guys?
But it is. The second act opens a year later, in Bangkok, where the victorious Russian is to defend his title against a new challenger from the Soviet Union. And there, of course, is the American, covering the match for television and hymning (and deriding) the fleshly joys of the Thai capital in the hit song “One Night in Bangkok.” Back in her hotel, Florence muses on her deteriorating relationship with the Russian in the tender “Heaven Help My Heart.”
Things immediately get worse when the Russian’s wife, Svetlana, flies in from Moscow to stand with her husband in his hour of need. In a nasty “Argument,” they split up, at least for the duration of the tournament. What follows, a duet for the two women called “I Know Him So Well,” is Rice’s finest accomplishment, a heartrending reflection on the inherent impossibility of human happiness whose harsh sentiments are underscored by a musical setting that unfolds from a simple beginning to a shatteringly bleak climax. “Wasn’t it good?/Wasn’t he fine?/Isn’t it madness/He won’t be mine?/Didn’t I know/How it would go?/If I knew from the start/Why am I falling apart?”
At this point, plotwise, the show bogs down into a complicated psywar exchange having to do with the American’s blackmailing of the Russian with negative information about Florence’s father’s activities during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. It doesn’t matter. (Nobody really knows what happens at the end of The Marriage of Figaro, either.) Suffice it to say that the American, frustrated by the loss of Florence to his archrival and unable to get her back either by hook or by crook, launches into the most moving aria of the show, the fierce “Pity the Child.”
This brilliantly constructed number examines the American’s unhappy childhood: a broken home, an absent father, an uncaring mother with a succession of interchangeable lovers, the loss of any kind of human contact that might have made him a rounder, fuller person. The Times critic sneered at the sentiments, but “Pity the Child” is an emotionally devastating song that builds in intensity until the American reaches the final, chilling realization: “Pity instead the careless mother/What she missed/What she lost when she let me go/And I wonder does she know/I wouldn’t call—a crazy thing to do/Just in case she said who?”
“Pity the Child” is the high point of Chess, at once its finest song—the concluding hostile rock guitar solo alone is worth the price of the album—and the summation of Rice’s bitter world view. The plot winds down in “Endgame” as the Russian handily defeats his challenger, but realizes that, in winning, he has lost both Florence and Svetlana. Nobody’s on nobody’s side: as the show concludes, the American is alone, Florence is alone, Svetlana is alone, and the Russian is alone. “You and I/We’ve seen it all/Chasing our hearts’ desire/But we go on pretending/Stories like ours/Have happy endings.” Yes, and have a nice day!
So maybe now it’s clear why Chess failed commercially, at least on stage. (The album was a big hit, and one of the songs hit the Top of the Pops.) With a cynicism worthy of Da Ponte, Rice tackled the thorny problems of modern love and relationships and came up with no solutions. Don’t trust love, because it is preordained to fail; don’t put your faith in other humans, because nobody’s on nobody’s side. It’s not a Barnum-and-Bailey world; it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and the sooner we all learn that the better we’ll all be. Such at least is Rice’s gloomy weltanschauung.
Is that, however, so very different from Così? The eighteenth century was no less contemptuous of the folly and impermanence of relationships, and Da Ponte’s tale about the pair of young men who switch lady friends on a dare and discover that it is just as easy to fall in love with one girl as the other is nothing if not skeptical. And Così is a comedy! We are supposed to laugh as the silly women fall for the patently transparent “Albanian” disguises donned by the lads and then are thrown into consternation at the end when the masquerade is revealed and they are supposed to return to their original partners as if nothing had ever happened.
Is Chess really that tragic? If you accept Rice’s premise, then what follows is unavoidable, the working out of a not-so-divine plan for human unhappiness that, when you stop to think about it, is comic in the humanistic sense. At the end of Chess each character has played his or her best gambit and either won or lost. The Russian has his ambition; the American has his misery; Florence has her uncertainty. And aren’t they each, in their own way, happy in their unique unhappiness?
This is where music enters the picture. Looked at coldly, on the printed page, Rice’s lyrics seem insupportably bleak: run, don’t walk, from this musical. But the Andersson-Ulvaeus score ameliorates them, bathes them in the balm of lyricism, makes them seem, if not universal, at least plausible—and not all that unhappy. The final song, “You and I,” which leaves all the principals as lonely as clouds, is disarmingly warm; outfitted with different words, the music might just as easily express the Triumph of True Love—not!
The fact is that “You and I” is the sadder-but-wiser lyricism of the last act of Figaro, or the celestial trio of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, not the comic concluding romp of The Barber of Seville. Indeed, the last notes are sounded on the horns, which opened the show in such bucolic splendor a couple of hours earlier. This is music of resignation and of acceptance; it is music for grown-ups, not children, in which “stories like ours have happy endings” only in fairy tales, and nobody lives happily ever after.
Is Chess, then, an opera? It certainly deals with classically operatic subjects, and does so in a classically operatic way. It forwards its plot through entirely musical means, offers each character one or more set pieces through which to express his or her inner nature. For all its dramaturgical flaws, which proved insuperable on stage, it communicates its fundamental message clearly. Its orchestral interludes are well crafted and affecting, its ensembles stirring. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a…
Well, who cares what we call it? The point of this chapter is that it doesn’t matter. We must judge any work that makes pretensions to art fairly and evenly, without worrying into which category it may ultimately fall. Is Chess an opera? I believe it is, but it’s not my job or yours to determine that. Instead, it’s up to us to listen to it with an open mind, to evaluate it on its own terms—does it succeed in what it set out to do?—and to send it packing off to posterity with our provisional value judgments slapped across its hindquarters, there for posterity to make up its own mind.
The operatic repertoire is littered with the corpses of once-esteemed works and composers (Giacomo Meyerbeer, take a bow!) that have fallen out of favor. Robert le diable was once the bee’s knees of opera, so famous that Liszt’s pianistic paraphrase was demanded as an encore at practically all of his concerts. Today, it nestles comfortably in history’s circular file, along with most of Meyerbeer’s other grand operas, including Le prophète, L’étoile du nord, and Le pardon de Ploërmel. Does that diminish Meyerbeer’s unquestioned dominance of the French operatic scene in the mid-nineteenth century? No? But neither does it make him a force to be reckoned with today, as Wagner (who, for jealously anti-Semitic reasons, came to despise Meyerbeer) continues to be.
I can’t predict the fate of Chess or any of the other Broadway scores with delusions of grandeur—or of any straightforward serious opera. Porgy and Bess seems to have shouldered its way into the repertoire, although I have never been a fan of that particular score, whose liberal good intentions sound today painfully contrived and obvious. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is another Broadway show that has made the transition to the opera house without much fuss, and yet, for all its huffing-and-puffing high spirits, it’s not half the effortless masterpiece that West Side Story is. Indeed, the latter show’s perfect book and apposite Sondheim lyrics complement the genius of Bernstein’s music in a way that ought to have been a model for every so-called serious composer of the time—but wasn’t, thanks to the “high-class-low-class” separation. In fact, it was just this separation that turned Bernstein from the correct career path of West Side Story to his “serious” works such as the Mass. Poor Lenny, so wise and wonderful about so many things musical, fell for the oldest trick in the book, and spent much of his compositional life trying to be something he was not.
It’s not that he didn’t have a model right before him in Jerome Kern’s magnificent Show Boat. This seminal 1927 show is not only the first great modern Broadway musical, it may well also rank as one of the first great American operas. (Its contemporaries in Europe included two masterpieces, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Puccini’s valedictory Turandot.) In scope and ambition, there is nothing quite like it; not even Porgy and Bess, which it superficially resembles, approaches it. Not only did Kern create ravishing standards like “Bill” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” for the show; in “Ol’ Man River” he wrote what is very likely the greatest song yet composed by an American, a Schubert-like strophic composition at once so simple and so perfect that it defies improvement.
What if Bernstein had stood by West Side Story? Might not the course of American opera have taken a vastly different turn? If composers younger than Bernstein had seen him take a courageous stand against the forces of false dichotomy and write the music his heart dictated, and not his head? We might have been spared twenty-five years of arid, academic claptrap from the likes of Leon Kirchner and the retro-neo-pseudo-Puccinisms of Gian Carlo Menotti. Alas, it was not to be, and the rock-influenced (and Indian-influenced, and Nadia Boulanger-influenced, etc.) revolution of Philip Glass had to wait until the 1970s.
So the next time you find the tune of “Maria” springing to your lips—not to mention “Pinball Wizard” or “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” or “Make Believe”—remember that what you are singing is opera. Don’t let that bother you. It doesn’t really matter what we call it, as long as we recognize it for what it is. As Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.