Opera

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OPERA.

THE OLD AND THE NEW
FINDING AN AUDIENCE
A PARTING OF THE WAYS
OPERA AS THEATER
A NEW SYNTHESIS?
BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the prospects for opera as a viable twentieth-century art form looked bleak. The climate of sweeping political and cultural change brought about by the desire for postwar renewal and reassessment looked set to consign opera to Europe's imperial and monarchist past. Opera's spectacular combination of media (theater, music, dance) had always equipped it to mirror the status and ambitions of the European centers of power. Privileged as one of the pillars of official culture in the nineteenth century, opera evolved into ever grander proportions, partly in response to the growing prestige of the cities and nations in which it was performed. This excessive cultural artifact, together with the grandiose theaters built to present it, stood as a monument to a now discredited past. Opera, in short, was tainted by its political legacy.

There were other ominous signs for opera. How could Europe's wrecked postwar economies afford this most lavish of cultural traditions? And how would this multimedia art form compete against the emerging technology of cinema, which, in its "silent" era, closely resembled opera by combining dramatic narrative with live music? The message from commentators, historians, critics, and practitioners seemed clear: the era of opera, which had begun in a spirit of theatrical experimentation in the Italian courts of the early seventeenth century, had come to an end. When in the 1920s the theatrical director and reformer Bertolt Brecht singled out opera as synonymous with the old order, he arguably spoke for many.

Powerful factors, however, would weigh against this predicted decline. Among them was a creative tradition, rooted in prewar culture, which did not lightly discard its inheritance. For composers and directors who had learned their craft at the turn of the century, opera represented one of the pinnacles of personal achievement: an opera premiere in Paris or Berlin was a highly public and widely publicized event with the potential to establish or seal a reputation. Another factor was the institutional legacy of opera. Too much had been invested in the operatic infrastructure (theaters, management, publishing) to allow it to disappear meekly from the scene, while opera audiences included a core of loyal devotees. That these audiences often represented the most powerful and wealthy elements of European society meant that opera could depend on a degree of financial support even in the absence of sufficient government funding or wider public interest. And finally, technology, far from sealing opera's fate, would soon make it available to an audience unimaginable in the nineteenth century. Through sound recording and later video, opera freed itself from its dependency on the theaters of the large metropolitan centers and became a mass-media phenomenon. The century that should have witnessed the demise of opera actually gave it new life.

THE OLD AND THE NEW

If any event symbolized the transition from the old to the new order in opera, it was the premiere of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot at Milan's Teatro alla Scala on 25 April 1926. Puccini had died before completing the final act, leaving the relatively unknown Franco Alfano to set the final scene to music. The La Scala production was to feature Alfano's completion, but the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, planned a special gesture for the opening night. When the performance reached the end of Puccini's music, Toscanini put down his baton, bringing the performance to an abrupt end. It was a mark of respect from a longtime colleague and a moment of supreme theater in its own right. It also seemed to signal, nostalgically, the end of an era, leaving only a reverent silence in its wake.

Yet something new had also been heard, for Puccini's score pointed to a musical language that had not been heard in his earlier work. The soaring lyrical lines audiences associated with Puccini were still to be heard—the tenor aria "Nessun dorma" proved an immediate success—but this traditional Puccini sound was supplemented by echoes of a more dissonant and fractured music reminiscent of contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. In Turandot a composer of the operatic mainstream had embraced, if only guardedly, the sounds of modernism. Other composers went much further, challenging traditionally conservative opera audiences with new musical idioms and hitherto unthinkable dramatic material. In the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) and the Austrian composer Alban Berg's Lulu (1937), sex and death, long staples of the operatic stage, seemed more graphically represented than ever, while the music shocked early audiences.

FINDING AN AUDIENCE

The real creative shift of the interwar years, however, is not to be found in the rise of the modernist avant-garde. Radical operas attracted headlines but did little to persuade opera audiences to forgo their established diet of Mozart and Verdi. Premieres were one thing, repeat performances quite another. A more influential trend can be seen in subtle shifts toward the new by creative figures who, like Puccini, could appeal to the opera houses of Europe and North America. Richard Strauss, whose Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) had scandalized prewar audiences with lurid subject matter and gargantuan orchestral forces, now turned toward a more restrained, often neoclassical musical language and more intimate themes. Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; revised 1916) summoned the spirit and language of the eighteenth century, while the comedy Intermezzo (1924) offered a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait of the composer's domestic life. Strauss's new sphere formed part of a broader shift away from the grand musical forces and epic subject matter of nineteenth-century opera. The neoclassicism of Ariadne returns as at he me inmuch of the new repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in Paul Hindemith's Cardillac (1926) and Stravinsky's Oedipus rex (1927). Equally, the celebration of the everyday in Intermezzo returns in a variety of forms, most famously in the so-called Zeitoper (opera of the times), in which modern urban life found musical expression in the sounds of the city, contemporary dance music, and jazz. Although the embrace of popular music is often superficial and even condescending, operas such as Jonny spielt auf (1927; words and music by Ernst Krenek) gave the impression that the gap between opera and contemporary life had all but collapsed.

More genuinely infused with popular culture is the work of Kurt Weill, whose collaborations with Brecht challenged many of the traditions and assumptions of opera. With its popular-style songs written for singing actors rather than opera singers, The Threepenny Opera (1928) represents a kind of antiopera. But, like the more intimate theatrical works of prominent composers such as Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, it is also a gesture toward a new kind of music theater that would ultimately extend the idea of opera in the latter half of the century. What the interwar decades showed was that the term opera was more flexible than had been imagined. Alongside the new intimacy, grand opera survived: the French composer Darius Milhaud's Christophe Colomb (1930) is a multimedia epic that requires film projection and simultaneous staging on separate platforms. And while contemporary life was a popular theme in opera of the period, the mythical and fantastic proved an enduring fascination, one that opera's resources seemed tailored to explore. Sergei Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges (1921) presents a vivid fairy-tale world brought to life in part by a musical language of extraordinary energy and color. The combination of the mundane and unreal can even be found clashing within individual works. In Leoš Janá?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), the animals of the forest are given operatic voice with a vocal style that accentuates the patterns of earthy everyday speech in the composer's beloved Czech language.

If developments in repertoire shaped opera's reputation, so too did the phonograph. Although complete operas were available, the 78 rpm record required no fewer than fifteen disks (with thirty sides) for a two-hour opera, while the multimedia dimension of opera was reduced to sound alone. Excerpts suited the gramophone record better, and a market emerged for individual arias sung by the most celebrated singers. The reputations of the singers Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Beniamino Gigli, Richard Tauber, and Tita Ruffo were greatly enhanced by, if not dependent on, the dissemination and commodification of their recorded voices. It was a market that would survive into the era of the compact disk, when these early-twentieth-century singers would be joined by Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Maria Callas, and Jessye Norman. Whatever else opera has been about in the twentieth century, it has always been about the voice.

A PARTING OF THE WAYS

That all of these singers strenuously resisted twentieth-century music only serves to highlight the tension in opera between the popular demand for established classics and the development of new repertoire. By the 1950s it was becoming increasingly obvious that the generation of twentieth-century composers whose work could still find at least some favor with opera audiences was dying. In its place came a generation whose musical education had been less steeped in opera and who were determined to distinguish themselves sharply from their predecessors. Tellingly, some of the most important premieres of the decade—Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (1957), Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957)—introduced work by composers whose reputations had been formed largely or wholly in the interwar years. There were exceptions, of course. The decade marked the emergence of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, and Hans Werner Henze, composers whose creative energies were heavily, and successfully, devoted to opera.

But more than ever opera was characterized by a split between conservative audiences and a modernist creative agenda that found its most extreme form in the composer Pierre Boulez's polemical call to burn the opera houses to the ground. While many of the leading figures of postwar music were drawn to the idea of musical drama, their work did not take a form that opera audiences tended to welcome. Composers and their collaborators took their cue, rather, from the antiopera of Brecht/Weill and the music theater of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The 1960s, in particular, saw the emergence of radical ideas that seemed set to reshape the very notion of music for the theater. For his Aventures and Nouvelles aventures (1966), the Hungarian composer György Ligeti developed a "language" of affective vocal utterances that attempted to bypass traditional language barriers while maintaining a semantic ambiguity not unlike music itself. Presented in combination with Ligeti's vivid music and a carefully choreographed set of gestures, the works successfully construct a narrative that lacks specific content but remains nevertheless meaningful and theatrically effective.

The British composer Peter Maxwell Davies offered another kind of experiment in his Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969). Here the language is English, but the singer/actor is required to deliver the text (a poetic arrangement of the words of King George III of England during his bout of mental illness) with a range of advanced vocal techniques. The result is a disturbing theatrical exploration of insanity. As late as the 1970s it seemed that music theater of this kind might form a viable alternative tradition in musical drama, but, as with the most uncompromising operas of the interwar years, sustained public support failed to materialize, and its subsequent decline seems in retrospect inevitable. That music theater often took opera as its subject—Opera (1970), by the Italian composer Luciano Berio, and the set of five Europeras (1985–1991) by the American experimental musician John Cage, dismantle the tradition from within—served to confirm its status as the outsider looking in.

The decline of music theater needs to be viewed, however, in the context of a broader shift in contemporary music. The radical polemics of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to a more conciliatory approach. Alienating dissonance and rhythmic fragmentation tended to give way to more familiar and comprehensible sounds, a trend best illustrated by the rise of a musical language with American roots: minimalism, as the term implies, plays with the repetition and subtle manipulation of brief melodic and rhythmic ideas. Two of its most successful practitioners, the American composers Philip Glass and John Adams, have demonstrated that a mediation can be found between the opera house and the contemporary composer. Glass's Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Adams's Nixon in China (1987) marked the beginning of each composer's ongoing commitment to opera. While they do not quite challenge the place of Carmen or La traviata in the operatic repertoire, minimalist operas have been embraced with some enthusiasm by European audiences: in 2004 alone Glass's operas were staged in five European cities.

Even a number of the composers associated with radical music theater have maintained links with opera. Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the leaders of the postwar avant-garde, has invested much of his career in the mammoth Licht cycle of seven operas (1977–2004), while Maxwell Davies, Ligeti, and Berio have all written more traditionally conceived operas. Even Boulez has ultimately spent a great deal of time conducting opera in the very institutions he once condemned. In part, the once angry young men of music have simply responded to shifting ideas about culture and experimentation. The more conciliatory path of the last decades of the century was in part a reaction against the perceived excesses of postwar radicalism. But there was something else that brought contemporary composers back into the opera house.

OPERA AS THEATER

For all the enthusiasm twentieth-century composers demonstrated toward the most radical developments in theater, the conservative tastes of opera audiences and administrators tended to stifle the introduction of new ideas about direction and staging. The demands of singing had always imposed limitations on directorial choice, leading to an approach best captured by the phrase "stand and deliver." It would be misleading to tar all of opera with this brush (clearly there have always been singers who are also talented actors), but the ability of directors to impose a particular theatrical vision on a production has often been hindered by the star status of lead singers, who see no reason why their performance (with all its mannerisms) should be subject to interference. The problem was made acute in the twentieth century by the celebrity that leading opera singers enjoyed thanks to the medium of recorded sound, and tales abound of divas storming out of rehearsal when asked to alter their gestures or timing.

What is telling in accounts of early-twentieth-century productions is that the one figure deemed capable of competing with the singer's authority is the conductor. Director and designer were comparatively low in the pecking order, suggesting that the performance was construed in large part as a musical, rather than theatrical, event. Set designs adhered to naturalistic and pictorial principles: locales tended to be represented in a literal fashion, with often clichéd imagery painted on flats, perspective effects achieved through light and paint, and foliage and decoration in abundance. Signs of change were slow in coming, especially in relation to developments in spoken theater. The carefully considered, eclectic vision of the Austrian director and impresario Max Reinhardt was instrumental in establishing a stronger role for director and designer in opera. Reinhardt drew in part on the theories of the Swiss theorist Adolphe Appia, who proposed new approaches to the staging of the operas of that towering figure of nineteenth-century opera, Richard Wagner. In place of the detailed naturalism espoused by Wagner and adhered to by his successors at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Appia imagined abstract spaces in which light, rather than props and backdrops, would summon an atmospheric and dreamlike space in keeping with Wagner's spacious and moody music. Yet the approach was emphatically rejected by Wagner traditionalists, who insisted that Wagner's own detailed directions and descriptions should be observed almost literally.

It was only after the war that broader change became apparent, and it was the Bayreuth festival, oddly enough, that served as a catalyst. Wagner's grandsons had now taken charge and introduced sweeping reforms of the staging of Wagner's work. Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner argued that Wagner's stage directions were essentially historical relics that no longer bore any relevance to the meaning of the music. In place of these directions they offered an abstract vision of the psychological, rather than pictorial, truth of Wagnerian drama.

A quite different vision emerged from the work of Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper in Berlin beginning in the late 1940s. Emphasizing the actor's rigorous immersion in the psychological state of the character and the need to avoid allowing the act of singing to detract from the gestural communication of the actor's body, he established a new theatrical intensity and focus in operatic staging. His East German successors—figures such as Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer—would fuse these ideas with the acute contemporary social and political awareness foregrounded in Brecht's theater. The results were not always coherent or convincing, but the impact of these ideas and practices on the staging of opera in Europe is difficult to overestimate. Direction and design were increasingly being taken seriously in the opera house, and directors such as Patrice Chéreau, Alfred Kirchner, David Pountney, and Peter Sellars began to attract the sort of attention previously granted only to singers and conductors.

So complete was the transformation that a backlash was inevitable. Critics and audiences who viewed the operatic score as an almost sacred text resented what they saw as directorial intrusion. In Germany the term "director's opera" was applied to the new trend, implying that directors had taken possession of opera at the expense of composer, librettist, or musicians. The charge was not completely unfounded: there was often an indulgent aspect to the productions of the 1980s, as though directors viewed the opera as a vehicle for their own ideological message, regardless of its own connotations. But "director's opera" matured. Directors are now more subtle in their interpretation and realization, and only the most hardened traditionalists would deny that their work has revitalized opera. Perhaps attracted by opera's considerable resources and its fertile recent history, directors and designers from stage, film, and the visual arts now regularly accept invitations to work in the opera houses of Europe.

A NEW SYNTHESIS?

It is this new creative vitality that has opened the door for contemporary composers to return to the opera house. The core repertoire is as limited and old as ever, but it is interpreted with thoroughly contemporary theatrical means and it is now occasionally supplemented by new work in which contemporary musicians and theater practitioners join forces. In a way the story of twentieth-century opera comes full circle in a production of Turandot at the Salzburg Festival in August 2002. Featuring an imaginative production team including the director David Pountney and the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, this was the sort of collaboration of equals that now characterizes the best opera productions. Not least, the production was released on DVD, a technology that, with its multilingual subtitles and high-quality image and sound, seems tailor-made for opera. But there was a place here, too, for the contemporary composer. Luciano Berio had been invited to replace Alfano's completion of the opera with one of his own. Consulting the original sketches, he promised a completion that would incorporate Puccini's plans, but, importantly, he did not erase his own compositional voice in the process. Rather than complete the score as though he were Puccini, he allowed his own sound-world to come through, thus acknowledging the historical and cultural gap separating the two composers. The juxtaposition, though unsettling, is a vivid symbol of the journey opera had taken in the twentieth century and a reminder of its double existence as historical artifact and living tradition.