What is music? The very existence of music is wonderful, I might even say miraculous. Its domain is between thought and phenomena. Like a twilight mediator, it hovers between spirit and matter, related to both, yet differing from each. It is spirit, but spirit subject to the measurement of time; it is matter, but matter that can dispense with space.
— HEINRICH HEINE
Music is well said to be the speech of angels: in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
— THOMAS CARLYLE
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
— BEETHOVEN
In 1986 I was lucky enough to visit the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in the company of Vladimir Horowitz. The occasion was Horowitz’s return to the land of his birth for a couple of concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, and Time decided the trip would make a terrific cover story, as indeed it did. Of course, the day I arrived the United States bombed Libya, which put a damper on Soviet-American interpersonal relationships, and two days before I left, Chernobyl blew up, which is why I glow in the dark.
Exciting stuff, to be sure, highlighted by the KGB break-in at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, and the vandalizing of the ambassador’s piano, so Horowitz couldn’t practice. But to me an equally memorable moment from that trip was my visit with the Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov, then the first secretary of the All-Soviet Composers’ Union, as well as a candidate-member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and thus one of the most powerful men in Soviet music. I had asked for an interview with Khrennikov because he was planning to make a trip to the United States for a Soviet-American music festival, and I thought I would get a jump on the competition. The visit was proving to be controversial: there had already been protests over Khrennikov’s participation from those who recalled his leading role in the Resolution of 1948, an official Stalinist denunciation of several prominent Soviet composers that proved a public humiliation for Prokofiev and Shostakovich in particular—by coincidence, Khrennikov’s rivals. I was granted an interview, subject to one condition: under no circumstances was I to ask him about that episode.
At the appointed hour, I showed up at the Composers’ Union building in central Moscow and was ushered into a large rectangular room dominated by a very long table, at which I took a seat. While I waited, I looked around. The room was plainly furnished, but on the walls hung portraits of several of the greatest figures in Russian music, including Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and Nikolai Miaskovsky. Hmmm…
The door to the room opened and in stalked Tikhon the Great, accompanied by a handful of henchmen, one of whom had a dueling scar running the length of his face; the music biz must be pretty tough here, I thought. Khrennikov turned out to be a short, bullet-headed Slav with tiny eyes that did not twinkle even a little bit. He seated himself opposite me and glared.
The interview was conducted in Russian. I asked first whether he spoke English, and he shook his head vigorously; Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” I then inquired, to which he replied vigorously, Nein! I turned to my translator and fired away.
It doesn’t matter what we talked about, because his answers were far from forthcoming—banal platitudes laden with Soviet baloney that were both worthless and trite. Khrennikov, interestingly, knew next to nothing about new-music trends in the West, although he did seem vaguely aware of minimalism and even expressed some interest in it. I found myself growing irritated.
“Mr. Khrennikov,” I said, “I notice that this room is decorated with portraits of some of the greatest Soviet composers.”
“Da.”
“Prokofiev, Shostakovich.”
“Da.”
“I also note that each of these men suffered greatly from the Resolution of 1948, had their careers spoiled, and were put in fear of their lives, partially by your actions.”
I could see the steam start to come out of his ears.
“What is your question?” asked Scarface, as if he didn’t know. I wondered if he was carrying a gun.
“My question,” I said, “is this: how do you, Mr. First Secretary, have the gall to sit in this room in front of the men whose work you denounced and whose lives you tried to ruin and talk about how great Soviet music is?”
Silence. My official translator was trying to disappear into the back of his chair.
“Go ahead,” I urged him and, grudgingly, he did.
The effect was electric. Khrennikov leaped to his feet and started pounding the table. “How dare you talk to me like that?” he shouted in Russian, for which no translation was necessary.
He glared at me from his full five-foot six-inch height. Would he storm out? Hit me? Call the KGB and have me clapped into Lefortovo prison posthaste? But no, he was waiting for an answer.
“Because,” I said as slowly and calmly as I could, “when you come to the United States, that is the first question you are going to hear, and I thought I would prepare you for the persistence of American journalists in advance.”
Khrennikov stared at me for a while, and then sat down—and broke into a big smile. “Da!” he said, or words to that effect.
Suddenly, I was his favorite guy. I would of course come to lunch the next day at the Composers’ Union (and an excellent lunch it was, too). And I would of course be his guest at the performance that same evening of his famous opera…well, I forget which one it was. It might have been One Hundred Devils and One Girl, or maybe White Night. Whatever it was, it was pretty boring, and my memory of it has largely been reduced to a bunch of peasants in folk costume hopping about.
The point is, you never know when your next operatic experience is going to come around the bend, and you’ve got to be ready for it. On that same trip, I visited Leningrad and during one of the Horowitzian off-nights, decided I would visit the famous Kirov Theater that evening. I consulted the Intourist lady in the lobby of my hotel, who informed me there was nothing interesting at the famous Kirov that night. Tomorrow, La traviata, but tonight, zip.
“What’s this, then?” I asked, pointing to what was obviously the name of something going on at the Kirov.
“Nichevo,” she said; nothing.
“No, it’s something,” I persisted.
“Nothing,” she said. “Russian opera.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Which Russian opera?” I inquired.
“I dekabristi,” she said, which means The Decembrists. “Not interesting.”
“Gimme ticket,” I said, and that evening I found myself sitting next to my esteemed colleague John Ardoin from Dallas, who was also in town covering the Horowitz magical mystery tour. Ardoin, who is one of the most operatically knowledgeable daily newspaper critics in America, was at the Kirov that night for the same reason I was: to actually see and hear this legendary opera, which to this day has never been produced outside Russia.
John didn’t know any more about the opera than I did, but we both sat there entranced. Dekabristi, which concerns an 1825 anticzarist revolt in St. Petersburg, was Yuri Shaporin’s one and only opera, on which he worked from 1920 to 1953, when it was premiered. The very long gestation period may be explained by the fact that every time the poor son of a gun was ready to bring out his work, along would come another Stalinist blast, like “Muddle Instead of Music” or the Resolution of 1948, and he would hurriedly withdraw it and wait for a more propitious, or at least less dangerous, moment. It was finally premiered in June 1953, three months after Stalin (and Prokofiev) died.
Dekabristi is a big, bold, opulent work that would please any crowd anywhere: imagine a combination of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian and you will have some idea of its musical style. Why some enterprising opera company—New York City Opera? English National Opera?—hasn’t gotten its hands on the score by now is beyond me.
Two weeks, two new operas. Once the bug bites, it doesn’t stop, and I often go out of my way to catch something new and exotic. Once in Zurich I stumbled across a performance of Heinrich Marschner’s spooky Hans Heiling, which one certainly doesn’t encounter every day. (Marschner is a now-obscure German composer who flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century with such works as Der Vampyr and Der Templer und die Jüdin, the latter based on Ivanhoe.)
Opera has also become a cross-cultural worldwide phenomenon. I have seen Verdi’s Macbeth staged in a medieval Finnish castle, and Wagner’s Tannhäuser presented in the giant NHK Hall in Tokyo. In the 1980s I also participated in several U.S.–Japanese music seminars, in both New York and Tokyo, and so it was that I found myself conducting a public interview with the avant-gardist Meredith Monk on the stage of a Tokyo music school prior to one of her performances. On that same trip, I and some colleagues presented a series of lectures on American music theater, a subject the Japanese seemed to find fascinating, and we were treated to several performances of new Japanese stage pieces during our stay, a subject we found fascinating.
Far more than contemporary symphonic music, opera is the best introduction to the world of serious music. Its repertoire encompasses all periods of Western music history, and its creative quotient has not been so high since the late nineteenth century. It attracts some of the finest directors in the world, not to mention the best singers. It takes place in venues that are either opulent and historic, or simply extraordinary—the Finnish castle mentioned above is the home of the annual Savonlinna Opera Festival in northeastern Finland. And of course it is at home in the best cities: London, Paris, Venice, Milan, Munich, Moscow, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Buenos Aires…
If I seem enthusiastic about opera, I am, and I want you to be as well—that’s the whole point of this book. What I’ve tried to show in these pages is that opera may or may not be for everybody, but that’s only a matter of individual taste. Once you get past your preconceptions, you’ll find there’s nothing intrinsic or congenital about loving opera. The operas themselves are so universal in appeal, and speak to such fundamental issues of life, that anyone who chooses to can become an opera fan—in the opera house, if you can afford it and have the opportunity, or at least through recordings. You don’t have to be a college professor or a UN translator to love opera. You don’t have to know how to read a score—why should you? many famous singers don’t—and you don’t have to know every word of the libretto.
All you have to do is bring an open mind to the subject. Those of you who read Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? know that I was raised far from the madding opera crowd and had to work hard to come up to speed. But if I could do it, so can you. It’s not that difficult; all it takes is desire.
What I hope you have gleaned from this book, then, is an awareness of the breadth and depth of the operatic repertoire, as well as an understanding of the inner nature of opera. Before we started, you may well have wondered why the tenor takes so long to die, and why everybody always seems to be in love with the wrong person, and why the baritone is always so angry with the soprano. You may have thought that operatic conventions were irredeemably silly, that opera plots were unrealistic and risible, and that the whole idea of listening to someone singing out his or her innermost thoughts was a complete waste of time and money.
I hope by now you’re starting to change your mind. Reading this book is only the beginning. Now comes the hard part: going out into the trenches and getting to know the works we’ve been discussing, and others, and deciding for yourself what opera has to offer you. You really will be glad you did.
A New Yorker cartoon comes to mind. (I think it was by Chon Day.) A middle-aged man is lying in bed, the covers tucked neatly and protectively under his chin. He is obviously ill, and his wife is leaning over him solicitously. The caption reads: “I know the doctor says it’s only a bad cold, but just in case, I’d like to hear Side Eight of Der Rosenkavalier one last time.”
Those of you raised on CDs may miss the reference, but Side Eight on any old LP recording of the opera contained the magnificent final scene, from the discomfiture of Baron Ochs through the achingly beautiful final trio and the opera’s quicksilver conclusion. “From track ten of CD number three” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
That poor suffering creature is right: opera is the balm that heals our souls.