The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta. Michael White

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СКАЧАТЬ made it count. With a storyline of unadorned low-life realism, Carmen effectively invented verismo a decade-and-a-half before the Italians got there. In that sense it was innovative. But its opéra comique mix of arias and spoken dialogue was actually quite unsophisticated if you compare it with the truly epoch-making work that was emerging at the same time, across the German border.

      RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83)

      Born in the same year as Verdi, Wagner was the other supreme figure of 19th-century opera, and in many ways the magnitude of his achievement could be explained as a reaction against the two-and-a-half bad years he spent failing to establish himself as a young composer in Paris. French opera in general, and Meyerbeer in particular, became targets for attack, examples of the way opera had allowed itself to be debased from high art into entertainment. Wagner was to be a Messianic saviour, restoring the lyric stage to the status he imagined it once enjoyed as a temple of enlightenment – ennobling, spiritual, cleansed of all impurity – and by a stroke of luck it was during those bad years in Paris that he found solace in the German medieval myths that would prove the literary inspiration for his cultural campaign. Almost all the mature Wagner operas are based on these ancient legends, which Wagner advocated as ideal material for operatic treatment on the grounds of their timeless relevance and universality.

      However ridiculous (and dangerous) some of his ideas turned out to be, Wagner was a truly revolutionary artist who changed not only the ideology of opera but its form and content. He once and for all got rid of the enduring operatic convention of ‘number’ opera, with the score broken down into units of aria, recitative, chorus and the like. Instead, his music was ‘through-composed’ in long, unbroken lines, with the vocal parts declaimed in a manner halfway between the decorative enlargement of aria and the direct narration of recitative. He set his own texts in a comparatively straightforward way, one note to a syllable. But his melodies were highly chromatic, weaving through myriad sharps and flats that undermine any clear sense of belonging to a specific key. He also set his singers the challenge of singing for long periods of time against a huge orchestra. And it’s in Wagner that the orchestra really comes into its own as a distinctive force to be reckoned among the diverse elements that feed into opera. In fact, it all but takes over, with the voices sometimes reduced to an accompaniment for what’s happening in the pit, rather than the more conventional reverse arrangement.

      NATIONALISM

      Thanks to Wagner, German was at last established as a major operatic language that could hold its own against Italian, and he spawned several generations of German disciples, starting with Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), who developed and refined the process of writing stage works for their own native tongue.

      But there were sporadic outbreaks of nationalistically-inspired anti-Italianism in other parts of 19th-century Europe. Spain was an example, where a tradition of folksy light opera saturated with local colour called zarzuela was gathering ground and would, at the turn of the century, prove influential on Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). But the most significant nationalist activity was taking place in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904) took the lead in establishing a distinctive, folk-generated style of writing for the stage. What they began found its ultimate expression in the later, 20th-century works of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose skeletal, spikily compressed approach to operatic story-telling has come to be recognised as one of the most significant contributions to the modern history of music.

      The chief centre of 19th-century nationalism, though, was Russia, a land which had only recently begun to develop a distinctive musical culture after years of French and Italian domination. The father of Russian nationalism was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), who set an enduring precedent for a grandly ceremonial kind of opera that mixed history with fairy tales but wasn’t terribly well crafted in terms of its structure. These were very early days for Russian music. Composition was a semi-amateur activity, and it remained so for the generation who came after Glinka, notably a group known as the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group’s leading member, Modest Musorgsky (1839–81), left mighty works of startling but rough-edged originality that his more craftsmanlike compatriot Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) subsequently tied up. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) completed the process through which Russian opera reached mature refinement, with works which tend to be considered more Western European than those of the ‘Mighty Handful’, although it would be more accurate merely to describe them as less inward-looking in their Russian-ness.

      THE 20TH CENTURY

      Summaries of 20th-century music are invariably messier than those of earlier periods, because composers fit less easily into territorial groups or ideological movements. They tend to make their claims as individuals and resist categorisation. But the century was ushered in by one conspicuously flourishing movement in Italy known as verismo, a school of low-life realism whose first champions, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), found instant fame with their respective mini-masterpieces Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, but were soon eclipsed in stature by a fellow Italian.

      Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) emerged as the next great Italian composer after Verdi. In the history of music he doesn’t stand as a notable innovator, and his appeal is far from intellectual, but the strength and passion of his melodies, the quality of his orchestral writing, and his sheer theatricality (in both the best and worst senses of the word) have guaranteed his domination of the modern opera repertoire. And if Puccini doesn’t always ‘feel’ like a 20th-century composer, remember that the majority of his mature scores, from Madama Butterfly onwards, came after 1900. However, the other dominant figure of early 20th-century opera was a German.

      Not to be confused with the Viennese king of operetta (no relation), Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was the successor to Wagner in much the same way that Puccini was to Verdi, adopting the master’s language, adjusting its parameters and, in the process, lightening its intensity. A young radical who, in archetypal fashion, grew into a middle-aged conservative, Strauss’ early works set out to shock the bourgeoisie, his later ones to charm them. But the Wagnerian inheritance was constant in the prominence and weight he alotted to the orchestra, and in the declamatory, through-flowing style of his writing for the voice, which commonly requires the power and stamina of Wagner’s helden singers. Through Strauss, a style of writing was fixed whose consquences can be heard today in the sometimes tough, politically driven but also sometimes romantic operas of Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) and the massively neo-Wagnerian project of Karlheinz Stockhausen (born 1928) to write an apocalyptic cycle of seven music dramas – one for each day of the week.

      The excesses of Wagner and Strauss, though, led to an inevitable reaction away from opulent, well-upholstered writing on a grand scale and towards smaller, leaner alternatives. A changing world made the economics of large-scale opera harder to sustain, and while some German figures like the young Erich Korngold (1897–1957) clung to large forces and traditional trappings, more forward-looking ones like Kurt Weill (1900–50) were scaling down and rethinking the way in which opera addresses its audience. Weill’s collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht pioneered a new kind of music theatre, designed to be popular (with cabaret-style numbers), stripped of the top Cs and tiaras glamour of the opera house. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was also concerned with usefulness and, specifically, the relationship between the artist and society, although he gave operatic expression to it in a decidedly less radical manner than Weill and Brecht.

      Meanwhile, the so-called Second Viennese School composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Alban Berg (1885–1935) had taken the Wagnerian message to its logical conclusions and beyond, with music that initially extended Wagner’s exotically free harmonies to a point where key signatures became almost irrelevant, and subsequently did away with any allegiance to a key centre altogether. The resulting serial or twelve-tone music proved more viable for instrumentalists than for singers, and it hasn’t found much of a following on the opera stage, even though Berg left two masterful scores of lasting importance СКАЧАТЬ