The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta. Michael White

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СКАЧАТЬ the post-Wagnerian empire, mention has to be made of Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whose ethereally vague Pelléas et Mélisande is like Wagner in a whisper – perfumed, rich in symbolism, but without the bombast. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the one opera of Béla Bartók (1881–1945), is another heavily symbolic score in serious debt to the master of Bayreuth.

      But the Wagnerian ascendency was finally (and ironically) ended by the intervention of one of the master’s most devoted admirers, Adolf Hitler, who single-handedly lost Germany its prime position in the mid-20th-century operatic league. The majority of the significant Austro-German composers went into exile as the Nazis came to power – usually with no choice in the matter – and their general direction was America, where Hindemith, Korngold, Weill and Schoenberg (among others) settled, assimilating with varying degrees of enthusiasm into the culture of their adoptive land and making their own contributions to the American musical melting-pot.

      It would be wrong to describe the America of the 1930s as an operatic wasteland. It had been importing European talent (not least, Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte) for more than a century and boasted flourishing lyric companies. But home-grown opera was a novelty, and native composers were struggling to find a native means of self-expression – something that wasn’t merely shipped in from the old world. Marc Blitzstein (1905–64) and Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) were early experimenters, but the breakthrough came with George Gershwin (1898–1937), whose Porgy and Bess realised the hopes and strivings of a whole generation of American composers in the way it so successfully transcended the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art: cultivated and vernacular. Gian Carlo Menotti (born 1911) has never been the showbiz figure that Gershwin was, and his Italian background tells in the Puccini-esque nature of his feel for melody and drama, but he was pushing at those high/low boundaries during the 1940s, with a succession of operas designed to play commercially in non-traditional Broadway-type venues. And with passing input from the racy Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) and the conservative but passionate Samuel Barber (1910–81), American opera has become a brilliantly hybrid industry, overflowing into transcendental events, such as those of Philip Glass (born 1937) and the very serious musicals of Stephen Sondheim (born 1930).

      Backtracking slightly, France has had a disappointing 20th century for a country whose national house was once the spotlit focus of the opera world. After Pelléas et Mélisande there hasn’t been much of stature apart from a couple of lightweight charmers by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and a religious drama by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).

      Russia has had an altogether more distinguished time with Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), whose combined works add a sharp, abrasive edge to the development of an operatic language that largely derives from Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky. The earliest operas of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) take their tone from the magic fantasies of Rimsky-Korsakov. But as Stravinsky became progressively less Russian and more cosmopolitan, so his music became less ‘enchanted’ and more austerely Neoclassical, reinventing the past and reaching back beyond Wagner to the delicate detachment of Mozartian and Baroque closed forms. Another displaced person in America, it’s significant that Stravinsky wrote his chief opera, The Rake’s Progress, to an English text provided by the poet W.H. Auden and set almost as though it were Latin, with wilful unconcern that the language should sound idiomatic.

      And that brings us, finally, to Britain, which, in the second half of the 20th century, became a serious creative centre for opera after two hundred years of producing almost nothing of significance. The English musical renaissance that began with Elgar produced a few attempts at music theatre that attracted passing fame, like Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, Delius’ A Village Romeo and Juliet and Vaughan Williams’ epic Pilgrim’s Progress. But the spark of genius didn’t quite ignite until 1945, when Peter Grimes put Benjamin Britten (1913–76) on the map as a figure of world stature. The thirteen original operas that followed built into a body of work unmatched by anybody of his generation. Their success inspired a torrent of work from other British composers that continues unabated, starting with Michael Tippett (born 1905) and William Walton (1902–83) and progressing down the years through the Mancunian duo of Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) and Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934) to Judith Weir (born 1954) and Mark-Anthony Turnage (born 1960). Turnage’s blistering adaptation of the bitter social satire Greek by Steven Berkoff has proved one of the most powerful and most-performed operas of the last decade or so, and it crowns a period of extraordinary productivity. With the possible exception of Finland – yes, Finland – where Aulis Sallinen (born 1935) has conjured a thriving opera industry out of nothing, it’s probably true to say that no country in the world could currently beat Britain’s ability to generate new opera. For a political culture which does as little as possible to encourage music in general and opera in particular, this is a pleasing but bizarre state of affairs.

      A POSTSCRIPT ON OPERETTA

      Unlike most aspects of opera proper, operetta was a French invention, derived from the mix of song and speech practiced by composers like André Ernest Grétry (1741–1813) and Pierre Monsigny (1729–1817). ‘Comique’ implied lightness though not necessarily comedy, and the boundary with serious opera was fairly loosely drawn, allowing figures like François Boïeldieu (1775–1834) and Daniel Auber (1782–1871) to cross it freely.

      But operetta finally came into its own in the French Second Empire with Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), whose career began on a small scale, writing for tiny Parisian theatres, but gathered international fame – which spread to Vienna in the 1860s and prompted Johann Strauss II (1825–99) to imitative action. Strauss’ waltz-based shows were softer in tone than the sometimes abrasive satire of Offenbach, and they owed almost as much to the native Viennese tradition of Singspiel (another mix of speech and song, often heavily sentimental) as they did to the French import. But the formula was unequivocally successful, and it was soon followed by Franz Lehár (1870–1948) who took the Viennese version of the genre to the point of no return.

      Meanwhile, the Offenbach phenomenon visited Britain in the 1870s and left its mark on the librettist/composer team of W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), whose Savoy Operas so insinuated themselves into English cultural life that its language and customs carry their imprint – not least the practice of queueing, which was introduced as a means of coping with the demand for G&S tickets.

      Offenbach and G&S between them then spread to America where, reinterpreted via European exiles like the Hungarian Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951), they laid one of the foundations for the American Broadway musical. But that’s another story …

John Adams

      (1947–)

       Nixon in China (1987)

      The Death of Klinghoffer (1990)

      I was looking at the Ceiling and then I saw the Sky (1995)

       According to official statistics, John Adams is the most frequently performed of living American composers – his fame founded on an accessible style of writing known as Minimalism which involves the repetition of small groups of notes to a point where listeners are either mesmerised or driven crazy. An essentially West Coast American phenomenon, it was adopted by Adams in the early 1970s in reaction against an East Coast academic upbringing and meant that he was automatically associated with older Minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But Adams has developed in a more eclectic way, providing himself with an escape route from what could otherwise be a restrictively dead-end musical language. Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer are striking examples of newsreel opera, their stories taken from real life and presented like televisual current affairs. Nixon deals with high-level politics; Klinghoffer (a treatment of the Achille Lauro hijack) СКАЧАТЬ