The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta. Michael White

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СКАЧАТЬ grounding in earthy humour, it became known as opera buffa, and in its genial way it was on the attack.

      REFORM

      In fact, the excesses of opera seria and the singers who performed it prompted counterattacks in many quarters. In England they came with ridicule, through parody pieces like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In German-speaking countries the response was more earnest: a considered call for reform. The most celebrated reformer was Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) who, with his librettist Calzabigi, published a manifesto for the cleaning up of operatic malpractice and propagandised the ideal of ‘beautiful simplicity’. No more over-decorated da capo arias. No more deadening rules to govern how a score must be constructed. Just a broad intention towards elegance and modesty.

      Between them, Gluck and the Italian intermezzi shifted opera’s goalposts at a crucial time, because around the corner, ready to exploit the consequences, was a youthful genius.

      WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–91)

      Making an early start in opera, at the age of twelve, Mozart understandably began to write according to the conventions of opera seria, complete with all their formal requirements and high tone. But he soon broke free into a less prescribed world, coloured generally by comedy and infinitely more than an embellished string of arias. The list of everything he brought to opera would be long and headed, no doubt, by his matchless gift for melody. But of hardly less significance was a dramatic energy and intelligence that rarely failed him. He created characters who lived and breathed, whose actions were dictated not by artificial rules but by the natural consequences of their situation. They are truly human (for the most part) and they truly interact, with vocal lines that interweave and build into astonishing ensembles. It’s still ‘number’ opera, capable of analysis in terms of arias, recitatives, choruses and so on, but the numbers often merge, accumulating into long, near-seamless tracts of music like the massive finale to Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro, which begins about a third of the way into the Act and just rolls on – brilliantly – with barely a pause for breath.

      The genius of Mozart is essentially comic, indebted to the tradition of Italian opera buffa, and most of his mature stage works explore some aspect of comedy, from the knockabout humour of Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the ideological pantomime of Die Zauberflöte. Even Don Giovanni is a comedy of sorts, described by the author as a ‘dramma giocosa’. But Mozartian high spirits marked an end rather than a beginning in the history of Austro-German opera, not to say the whole history of Europe, because Mozart’s death coincided with the French Revolution.

      ROMANTIC IDEALISM

      The French Revolution (1789–99) fed a new and very serious Romantic idealism into Western European consciousness. In the new France, opera was uncomfortably associated with the old order and had to reinvent itself in radical, politically high-moral terms to survive. Rescue operas involving the righting of wrongs and epic libertarian themes became the Paris fashion, championed by Cherubini and Spontini, and the fashion spread to Germany, where Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio, adopted a politically-driven rescue plot already set to music by the Frenchman Pierre Gaveau.

      But by then, the centre of gravity in the opera world had shifted once again to Italy. The great Austro-German composers of the 19th century looked to the concert hall rather than the opera house, and those that did dream of operatic success, like Schubert, generally failed. The major exception was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), whose fireside horror-story Der Freischütz became the definitive statement of German Romanticism – and, like Fidelio, it was written to be sung in German.

      The one supreme reason for Italy’s return to the top of the operatic pile in the early 19th century was Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), whose fame through Europe was so all-embracing that it left little room for any would-be German rivals to raise their heads. Rossini was not untouched by Romanticism, and much of his work sets grand, quasi-historical stories adapted from authors like Sir Walter Scott, whose novels had a fervent international following. But the Rossini operas that survive in repertory and are deemed his best are comedies; and they exemplify a kind of singing loosely called bel canto. What the term means is a matter of debate, but it implies the decorative virtuosity of coloratura singing, highly embellished with (in Rossini’s case) a steely glitter that tends to prize exquisite technique above spontaneous emotion.

      Of Rossini’s two heirs and successors, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) is arguably the closest in spirit, with a brilliant light-comedic touch balanced by moments of pathos, most obviously the famous (and fashionable at the time) Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti set derangement so effectively that his own subsequent descent into madness was poetically appropriate.

      But the master of bel canto emotion was the other heir, Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), whose truly passionate writing found a middle way between virtuosity and expressivity that would influence Verdi and Puccini decades later. In a short life he managed to produce a body of powerful work (no comedies) that climaxed in Norma, and their truncated potential for development make him one of the great what-ifs of music history. Had he only lived to fifty, Italian opera might have taken a very different direction.

      GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813–1901)

      As it was, the mantle passed to a composer who emerged as the supreme figure in Italian opera of the later 19th century and with no rival of quite such exalted stature anywhere in the world apart from Richard Wagner. He was Giuseppe Verdi. Unlike Wagner, Verdi was not a theorist, a proselytiser or a visionary. During the 1840s his operas were read as a call to battle for the unification of Italy, but beyond that he did not write to advance radical ideas or debate abstract issues. He was a practical, straightforward man of the theatre whose work was direct and assertive, accepting sometimes crudely improbable plots for the sake of the dramatic situations they set up, but otherwise emotionally true and with a predilection for certain themes that related to his own life and about which he spoke from the heart. One of them was father-child relationships, and it’s no coincidence that early in his life he lost two children and a wife in traumatically rapid succession.

      The breadth and compass of Verdi’s work is so great that it resists summary, but in the broadest terms he introduced a new dimension to the catalogue of opera voices. Vivid, strong and sometimes as rough-edged as they are eloquent, his characters fill the ever-larger space that 19th-century opera came to expect as appropriate for its activities, following the irresistible lead of what was happening in Paris.

      FRENCH OPERA

      Nineteenth-century opera may have been dominated by Italian composers, but the Paris Opéra still somehow remained the Gold Standard venue from which universal trends and fashions flowed and to which everyone aspired. Wagner’s early failure to be taken up by Paris was a humiliation he never forgot, generating a lifelong grievance against the man who was the undisputed monarch of the city’s operatic life – Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Meyerbeer was an expatriate German who mastered the art of monumental spectacle beloved by Paris audiences and whose works, with their Cecil B. de Mille expansiveness and crowd-pleasing ballet sequences, defined the term ‘grand opera’. They set the tone, and the scale, of French stage music for decades to come, and they played their part in encouraging the massive enterprise that was Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz (1803–69), although Berlioz raised the artistic stakes of grand opera with elements of idealism and subtlety that were beyond Meyerbeer. Above all, Berlioz was a maverick, always his own man and never in thrall to fashion. When he wrote big, it was to please himself.

      More fashion-conscious figures on the Paris circuit were Charles Gounod (1818–93), whose lighter, easier lyricism won him the fame and fortune that eluded Berlioz, and Jules Massenet (1842–1912), of whom much the same could be said. But the outstanding French opera composer of the later 19th century was Georges Bizet (1838–75) who only managed СКАЧАТЬ