A Short History of Opera [fourth edition] 9780231507721

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE TO THE 4TH EDITION
INTRODUCTION
PART 1: Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century
Chapter 1: The Lyric Theater of the Greeks
Chapter 2: Medieval Dramatic Music
Chapter 3: The Immediate Forerunners of Opera
PART 2: The Seventeenth Century
Chapter 4: The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua
Chapter 5: Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome
Chapter 6: Italian Opera in the Later Seventeeth Century in Italy
Chapter 7: Seventeeth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands
Chapter 8: Early German Opera
Chapter 9: Opera in france from Lully to Charpentier
Chapter 10: Opera in England
PART 3: The Eighteenth Century
Chapter 11: Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century
Chapter 12: Opera Seria: General Characteristics
Chapter 13: Opera Seria: The Composers
Chapter 14: The Opera of Gluck
Chapter 15: The Comic Opera of teh Eighteenth Century
Chapter 16: The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries
PART 4: The Nineteenth Century
Chapter 17: The Turn of the Century
Chapter 18: Grand Opera
Chapter 19: Opera Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera
Chapter 20: Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocento: Rossini, Doizetti, Verdi, and Their Contemporaries
Chapter 21: The Romantic Opera in Germany
Chapter 22: The Operas of Wagner
Chapter 23: The Later Nineteeth Century: France, Italy, Germany, and Austria
PART 5: Other National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeeth to the Early Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 24: National Traditions of Opera
PART 6: The Twentieth Century
Chapter 25: Introduction/Opera in France and Italy
Chapter 26: Opera in the German-Speaking Countries
Chapter 27: National Opera in Russia and Neighboring Countries;Centeral and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, Spain, Portugal and Latin America
Chapter 28: Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
Chapter 29: Opera in the United States
Appendix
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Sources and Translations of Musical Examples
Index

Citation preview

A

SI,0rt History of OpEra

Columbia UniVerSity Press

Publishers Silue 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

© 2003 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grout, Donald Jay. A short history of opera / Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams.-4th ed. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

IS BN 97&-o-231-II958-o (alk. paper) I.

Opera. I.WilIiams,HermineWeigel, II.Title.

ML1700.G83 2003 7 82..J'09--dc21

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6

In memory of Donald Jay Grout and Margaret Dunn Grout

Contents

List if Illustrations ix Prcfoce to the Fourth Edition

.XI

Introduction r PART 1

N\ustc and Dram" to the End of the Sixteenth Century

The Lyric Theater of the Greeks 9 Medieval Dramatic Music 13 3 The Immediate Forerunners of Opera

2

PART 2

21

The Seventeenth Century

The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua 41 5 Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome 60 6 Italian Opera in the Later Seventeenth Century in Italy 83 7 Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands 107 8 Early German Opera 121 9 Opera in France trom Lully to Charpentier 132 IO Opera in England 147 4

PART

3 The Eighteenth Century

Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century 165 Opera Scria: General Characteristics 203 13 Opera Seria: The Composers 225 14 The Operas of Gluck 253 II

12

viii

Contents

]5 r6

PART

4 17 I8 I9

20

2I

22

23

PART

The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century 272 The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries 305

The Nineteenth Century The Turn of the Century 335 Grand Opera 353 Opera Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera 369 Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocellto: Rossini, Donizetti,Verdi, and Their Contemporaries 383 The Romantic Opera in Germany 417 The Operas of Wagner 436 The Later Nineteenth Century: France, Italy, Germany, and Austria 473

5 Other National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeenth to the

24

PART

6

25 20 27

28 29

Earty hventieth Centuries

National Traditions of Opera 507

The Twentieth Century Introduction I Opera in France and Italy 577 Opera in the German-Speaking Countries 6rr National Opera in Russia and Neighboring Countries; Central and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America 662 Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand 708 Opera in the United States 729 Appendix: Chinese Opera (Xiqu) 787

List ofAbbreviations 795 Bibliography 797 Sources and 'Hansiations of 1WlIsicai Examples 897 Index 911

Illustrations

Scene from Sant' Alessio 65 Scene from I1fuoeo etemo

II2

Scene from II tri01ifo del/'onore 167 Scene from 1amerlano 196 Teatro San Bartolomeo, Naples

226

Scene from The Beggar's Opera 294 Scene from Love in a Village 295 Riot protesting increased prices for Artaxerxes 297 Stage mechanism for L'Africaine 360 Scene from lWacbeth 405 Two scene designs for Die Walkure 448-49 Scene from The Golden Cockerel 523 Scene from Frallcesca da Rimini 602 Two scene sketches for rVozzeck 635-36 Scene from Kul/ervo 700 Scene from The Mother of Us All 736 Scene from Lizzie Borden 759 Scene from Of Mice and Men 763 Scene from Central Park: Strawberry Fields 779 Scene from Europeras

1 [rr 2

783

Preface to the Fourth Edition

EARLY IN THE

19405, Donald Grout recognized the need for a book that

had "for its purpose to offer a comprehensive report on the present state of our knowledge about the history of opera."! He filled that need with the 1947 publication of A Short History qf Opera. A second, revised and expanded, edition was published in 1965.2 After retiring from Cornell University as Given Foundation Professor of Musicology Emeritus, Grout prepared several more editions of his History qf I/f.1?stem Music and edited for publication a representative sample ofAlessandro Scarlatti's operas. He also kept alive a deep desire to bring forth a third edition of his opera history. Unfortunately ill health prevented him from undertaking that project, and although his name appears along with mine as a signature to the preface of the third edition of the opera history, the responsibility for the writing of that I988 edition was mine alone. Grout did not live to see the third edition in print; he died in March 1987. The present volume has been greatly revised and expanded in light of scholarly research of the past fifteen years. PartVI has been reorganized to conform to the pattern established for the other sections of the book, with its five chapters devoted to particular geographical regions as viewed from a perspective of the entire twentieth century. Greater emphasis has been placed on material related to national traditions other than those of France, Germany, and Italy, and an entire chapter is devoted to opera in the United States.The section on Chinese opera previously included in PartY is now in the appendix. To preserve a degree of continuity between the third and fourth editions, ------------~

............

~-

Grout, "Preface to the First Edition," reprinted in A Short Hi,wry '!IOpera ([988 edition), xvii. 2. The 1947 and 1965 editions were issued in both a two-volume format with illustrations and a one-volume format "ithout illustrations. They also appeared in several foreign language editions. I,

xii

Heface to the

Edition

musical examples of the former have, for the most part, been retained; several new examples have also been added. Dates of operas refer to first performances unless otherwise specified. Places of performances are indicated sparingly. With few exceptions, translations of French, Italian, and German opera titles have been omitted from the text; they now appear only in the index. Opera titles in other languages, however, are translated in the text and are included in the index as well. 3 The bibliography is limited to works mentioned in the footnotes. Books that cover more than one chronological period are listed in the general section of the bibliography and in the section where they are cited in the notes. I am indebted to friends and colleagues for help at various stages in the preparation of this edition. Particular thanks are due to Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, president of G. Henle Verlag; Ilkka Kalliomaa and the Finnish Consulate in New York City for information about operas by Finnish composers; MiIja Kiiveri of the Savonlinna Opera Festival and Hanna Fontana of the Finnish National Opera for photographs; Michael Willis of Glimmerglass Opera for providing several photographs of twentieth-century opera productions; Wendy Hillhouse for a photograph of a 1982 production of Scarlatti's The Triumph of Honoy; Joan Wolek and the staff of the Hamilton College Library for securing interlibrary materials; Anne R. Gibbons for her careful editing of the manuscript; members of the editorial staff at Columbia University Press for their guidance and encouragement; and my husband, Jay, for his unfailing support of my musicological endeavors. Permission to print music examples is acknowledged in the section "Sources and Translations of Musical Examples." Special acknowledgment, however, is made here to the following publishers for permission to use copyrighted material for new examples in this edition: G. Henle Verlag, Munich (Ex. 16. I), Warner Bros. Publications (Ex. and European American Music Distributors LLC 26.8a). Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the following for permission to use copyrighted material for the illustrations: Ron Scherl; George Mott and Glimmerglass Opera; Mara Eggert and the John Cage Trust; Kari Hakli and the Finnish National Opera; and Kuvasuomi Ky Matti Kolho and the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Hermine Weigel Williams Clinton, New York January 2002

3. There are, however, a number of titles for which a suitable translation could not be provided. given the idiomatic nature of the original.

That day the sky was cloudless; the wind blew softly where we sat. Above us stretched ill its huge/less the vault and compass

cif the TMJrld; around us

crowded in green newness the myriad tribes cif Spring. Here chimed aroulld us every music that can soothe the ear; was spread b~fore us every color that can delight the eye. Yet we were sad. For it is so with all mm: a little while (some by the fireside talking of homely matters with theirJriends, others by wild ecstasies oj mystic thought swept Jar beyOlld the boundaries oj carnal life) they may be easy alld Jorget their doom. RHt

SOOIl

their Jancy strays;

they grow dHll and listless, Jar they are Jallen to thinking that all these things which so mightily pleased them will in the space things

cif a nod

be old

(353

C.E.)

of yesterday. WANG XI-CHI

Introduction

in connection with dramatic presentations is universal. It is found throughout the history of all cultures. This is perhaps because the desire to add music to drama is really part of the dramatic instinct itself and may have as its end either edification or entertainment. An opera, briefly defmed, is a drama in music: a dramatic action, performed on a stage with scenery by actors in costume, the wont> conveyed entirely or for the most part by singing, and the whole sustained and amplified by orchestral music. It is conditioned poetically, musically, scenically, and to the last details by the ideas and desires of those upon whom it depends, and this to a degree and in a manner not true of any other musical form. The opera is the visible and audible projection of the power, wealth, and taste of the society that supports it. Thus, study of its history is of value for the light it sheds on the history of culture in generaL One of the earliest examples of the term opera used as a descriptive subtitle for a "drama in music" can be found in the first volume of Racco/ta de' drammi, a collection of Venetian librettos that includes Malatesta Leonetti's La Deiallira, subtitled Opera recitativa ill musica (r635).1 Another example can be found in both the libretto and scenario of Orazio Persiani's Le IlOzze di Teti e di Peleo (1639).2 In the mid-seventeenth century, Blount's Glossograplzia included the term opera and defmed it as "a Tragedy, a Tragi-Comedy or PasTHE CUSTOM OF USING MUSIC

I. Leonetti's dedication for La Deianira is dated September 8, 1631, but the printed libretto, intended for a production in Venice. is dated 1635. The Raccolta de' dramm; is a collection of I,28b opera librettos held by the University of California, los Angeles. See Pirrotta, Music and Clllillre ill Italy, 317. 2. Grout. A Short History of Opera (1947 cd.), 3.This libretto was set to music by Francesco Cavalli.

2

Introduction

toral which . . . is not acted in a vulgar manner, but performed by Voyces in that way, which the Italians term Recitative, being likewise adorned with Scenes by Perspective and extraordinary advantages by Musick."3 From that time forward, the term came into general use in England, and in the next century was adopted by France and Germany. Its use in Italy, especially in the period prior to the nineteenth century, remained relatively infrequent because descriptive subtitles such as favola in musica,favola pastorale, dramma per musicaJeste teatrale, tragedia, tragicommedia, and the like were preferred. Even though the term opera was not readily adopted in seventeenth-century Italy as a subtitle for dramatic works with music, it nevertheless seems to have been used there in common parlance during that era. Evidence for this comes from two entries in a diary kept by John Evelyn during his travels in Italy. When he was in Siena, he wrote the following on October 13, 1644: "There is in this Senate-house a very faire hall, where they sometimes recreate the People with publique Shews and Operas, as they call them.,,4 A month later during a visit to Rome, his entry for November 19 reads: "The Worke ofCavaliero Bernini,A Florentine Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet: who a little before my Comming to the Citty, gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind) .,,5 Opera is an art form laden with certain conventions, which people agree to accept while at the same time acknowledging them to be unnatural or even ridiculous. Take, for example, the practice of singing, instead of talking. Nothing could be more "unnatural," yet it is accepted as a matter of course, just as the equally "unnatural" blank verse is accepted as the form of speech in Shakespeare's tragedies. Not only are there such timeless conventions in opera, but every age has a set of them peculiar to itself, which the second or third generation following begins to find old-fashioned and the generation after that finds insupportable. It is not that the music of these operas is inferior; rather, it is bound up with a hundred details that interfere with our understanding of it-operatic conventions that, passing out of knowledge, all too often carry the music with them to oblivion. All of this points to the necessity for approaching the study of an opera, particularly one of a past period, with especial care. An opera score must be studied with imagination as well as attention. It will not do merely to read the music as if it were a symphony or a series of songs accompanied by an orchestra. One must also imagine the work as it appeared in performance, with the stage action, the costumes, and the scenery. One also must be aware of the operatic conventions by which librettist and composer were governed, so as not to judge them according to the conventions of a ditferent period, com-

3. [Blount], Glossographia (1656). 4. Evelyn, TIze Diary ofjohn Evelyn [first published in 1818], 2:202. 5. Ibid., 261. For other entries where Evelyn uses the word opera, see 2:229,449,503.

Introduction

mitting the absurdity, for example, of condemning an opera ofLully or Handel merely because it is not like an opera ofVerdi or Wagner. There is an essential difference between a good opera libretto, as the words of the action are called, and the script of a good play. A play centers about characters and a plot; it may contain episodes that could be omitted without damaging its unity or continuity, but if this is the case, it is, strictly speaking, a defect in the structure. An opera libretto, however, may almost be said to center about the episodes; at the very least, it admits and even requires many portions that contribute little or nothing to characterization or to development of the action, such as dances, choruses, instrumental or vocal ensembles, and spectacular stage effects. Even the solo songs (arias) are often, from the dramatic point of view, mere lyrical interruptions of the plot; they correspond, in a way, to soliloquies in spoken drama. All these things, which (on a comparable scale) would be out of place in a spoken drama, are the very lifeblood of opera. Composers may accept them frankly as episodes or may try to make them contribute in a greater or lesser degree to the depiction of character or the development of the dramatic idea, but they are so much a part of opera that it is difficult to find an example that does not include them to some extent, even among the so-called realistic operas of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Plot and characterization in an opera libretto are likely to be sketched in broad outline rather than in detail. The action is usually simpler than in a play, with fewer events and less complex interconnections among them. Subtle characterization, if it exists at all, is accomplished by means of music rather than dialogue. Most important of all, the entire dramatic tempo is slower, so as to allow time for the necessary episodic scenes and especially for the deployment and development of the musical ideas. There is another kind of difference between a play and a libretto, one which has to do with the poetic idiom employed, the choice of words and images. It is a commonplace that not all poetry is suitable for music; it would require a composer of genius equal to Shakespeare's to add music to such lines as The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. But consider the following: When I am laid in earth, [may] my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.

1-

Judged merely as poetry, this passage from Nahum Tate's Dido and Aeneas could hardly merit high praise.Yet it is excellent poetry for music. It suggests in simple terms the image of a woman desolated by an emotion that the words by themselves cannot completely convey, an emotion so overpowering that only with the aid of music can it be given full expression. Moreover, the passage has a maximum of the appropriate dark vowel sounds and liquid consonants, with few sibilants. The important words (laid, earth, wrongs, trouble, remember, fate) not only are well adapted for singing but also are full of emotional suggestion. The very imperfections of the passage considered purely as poetry are its great merit for singing, so strongly do they invite completion by means of music. Making due allowance for the special requirements of the form, an opera libretto will usually reflect the prevailing ideas of its time with regard to drama. Similarly, opera music will be, in general, very much like other music of the same period. It must be remembered that in an opera, music is only one of several factors. It is necessarily always a kind of program music, in that it must (even if only to a slight degree) adapt itself to the dramatic and scenic requirements instead of developing in accordance with purely musical principles. As a rule, it is somewhat simpler, more popular in style than contemporary larger forms of nondramatic music, more tuneful, more obvious in its rhythms, less contrapuntal in texture-though there are some exceptions to this, notably the music dramas of Wagner. On the other hand, an opera score is apt to be more varied and original in instrumental color, partly because an opera is so long that more variety is needed, and partly in consequence of the composer's constant search after new dramatic effects by means of instrumentation. Thus trombones had been used in opera two hundred years before they were admitted to symphonic combinations; the devices of string tremolo and pizzicato were first used in dramatic music; and Wagner introduced a whole new group of instruments, the so-called Wagner tubas, in his Ring. Neither the poetry nor the music of an opera is to be judged as if it existed by itself. The music is good not if it happens to make a successful concert piece but primarily ifit is appropriate and adequate to the particular situation in the opera where it occurs, and if it contributes something which the other elements cannot supply. If it sounds well in concert form, so much the better, but this is not essential. Similarly, the poetry is good not because it reads well by itself but primarily if, while embodying a sound dramatic idea, it furnishes opportunity for effective musical and scenic treatment. Both poetry and music are to be understood only in combination with each other and with the other elements of the work. True, they may be considered separately, but only for purposes of analysis. In actuality they are united as the elements of hydrogen and oxygen are united in water. "It is not simply the combination of elements that gives opera its peculiar fascination; it is the fusion

Introduction

5

produced by the mutual analogy of words and music-a union further enriched and clarified by the visual action."r, Throughout the history of opera, in all its many varieties, two fundamental types may be distinguished: that in which the music is the main issue, and that in which there is more or less parity between the music and the other factors. The former kind is sometimes called singer's opera, a term to which some undeserved opprobrium is attached. Examples of this type are the operas of Rossini, Bellini,Verdi, and indeed of most Italian composers. Mozart's Die Zaubeiflote also is a singer's opera, in which a complicated, inconsistent, and fantastic libretto is redeemed by some of the most beautiful music ever written. The latter kind, represented by operas such as those of Lully, Rameau, and Gluck, not to mention the music dramas of Wagner, depend for their effect on a balance of interest among many different factors of which music is only one, albeit the most important. Theoretically, it would seem that there should be a third kind of opera, one in which the music is definitely subordinated to the other features. As a matter of fact, the very earliest operas were of this kind, but it was found that their appeal was limited and that it was necessary to admit a fuller participation of music in order to establish the form on a sound basis. Consequently, an opera is not only a drama but also a type of musical composition, and this holds even for those works that include spoken dialogue. The exact point at which such a work ceases to be an opera and becomes a play with musical interludes is sometimes difficult to determine. No rule can be given except to say that if the omission of the music makes it impossible to perform the work at ail, or alters its fundamental character, then it must be regarded as an opera. Throughout its career, opera has been both praised and censured in the strongest terms. It was lauded by its creators as "the delight of princes," "the noblest spectacle ever devised by man.,,7 In contrast, Saint-Evremond, a French critic of the late seventeenth century, defined an opera as "a bizarre affair made up of poetry and music, in which the poet and the musician, each equally obstructed by the other, give themselves no end of trouble to produce a wretched work."s Opera has been criticized on moral as well as on aesthetic grounds; the respectable Hugh Haweis in I872 regarded it "musically, philosophically, and ethically, as an almost unmixed evil."g Despite both enemies and friends, however, it has continued to flourish and indeed shows

6. Cone, "Music: A View from Delft;' 447. On this whole subject. see also the introductory chapter in Kerman, Opera as Drama. 7. Marco da Gagliano, preface to Dajile, in Solerti, compo dnd ed., Le {)YI;~jllj del meiodramma, 82. 8. Saint-Evremond. (Euvres mesU:es, 3:249. 9. Haweis, AJu5ir and Morals, 423.

6

Introduction

every sign of vitality at the present time; there is every reason to expect that opera, in one shape or another, will be with us for a long time to come. Like all other forms of art, it contains many things today that cannot be understood without a knowledge of its history. It is hoped that this book will not only serve as an introduction to the opera of time past but also may contribute to an understanding of the opera of the present.

Part 1 Musk and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century

Chapter 1

The Lyrk Theater of the Greeks

IT IS INDISPENSABLE for a student of the history of opera to know something of the history, literature, and mythology of the ancient world, if only because so many opera subjects have been drawn from these sources.The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been used for more than thirty operas, the story of Iphigenia (fIrSt dramatized by Euripides toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E.) for at least fifty, and the myth of Hercules for probably twice that number. Of the ninety-four operas by the eighteenth-century composer Johann Adolph Hasse, half are on classical themes. Berlioz's masterpiece, Les 7i-oyens, is an outstanding nineteenth-century example. Since then, there have been such works as Richard Strauss's Elektra (I909), Faure's Penelope (I913), Wellesz's Alkestis (1924), Milhaud's Medee (1939), Malipiero's Ecuba (I941), Ortf's Antigotlae (1948), Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus (1985), and Turnage's Greek (1988),1 though on the whole the preference for classical subjects was much less pronounced in the twentieth century than in former times. 2 Greek drama, however, is of particular interest to us because it was the model on which the creators of modern opera at the end of the sixteenth century based their own works; it was the supposed music of Greek tragedy that they sought to revive in their "monodic style." Unfortunately, they did not know (nor do we) just how this music sounded. There are a few surviving specimens of Greek dramatic music, including a very short mutilated

1. Mark Anthony Turnage's (b. 1960) two-act opera is based on Steven Berkoff's play Greek. The libretto and play represent a reworking of the Oedipus myth, situating it in the East End of London during the late twentieth century. 2. See Zinar,"The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of Opera."

10

The Jixteenth Century

fragment of unison melody from a chorus of Euripides' Orestes (408 S.C.E.),} but these were not known to the early Florentine opera composers. That music did play an important part in Greek tragedy we may learn from Aristotle's definitions in the Poetics, written about a century later than the works of Sophocles and Euripides, which still served as models: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of some action that is important, entire, and of a proper magnitude--by language, embellished and rendered pleasurable, but by different means in different parts. . . . By pleasurable language, I mean language that has the embellishments of rhythm, melody, and metre. And I add, by different means in different parts, because in some parts metre alone is employed, in others, melody.4 The last sentence of this passage would seem to indicate that the tragedies were not sung in their entirety, as has sometimes been stated. It is believed, however, that some kind of musical declamation was employed for at least part of the dialogue, and the fact that the plays were given in large open-air theaters makes this probable on acoustical grounds, if for no other reason, Such declamation may have been a kind of sustained, semi-musical speech, perhaps like the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg's Pierrot LUllaire or Berg's Wozzeck, but moving within a more limited range of pitch. It is also probable that regular melodic settings were used in certain places. Whatever may have been the manner of performing the dialogue, there can be no doubt that the choruses were really sung, not merely musically declaimed, When Greek drama developed out of the earlier ceremonies of Bacchus worship, it took over from them the choral group (dithyrambs) and solemn figured choral dances that have such an important place in the tragedies. 5 The role of the chorus in these works is largely that of the" articulate spectator," voicing the audience's response to the events portrayed in the action, remonstrating, warning, or sympathizing with the hero, Formally, the choruses are generally so placed as to divide the action into parts, similar to the division of a modern play into acts or scenes, resulting in an alternation of drama with the comparatively static or reflective choral portions. It is significant that this same formal arrangement is characteristic of

3.A reproduction of this papyrus fragment (A/Wn: G 2315), which dates from about 200 B.C.E., is in The New Grove Dictionary oj A1IlS;( (1980),6:295. A transcription of the melody is in Sachs, Die 1Hmik der Alltike, 17-18. See also Mountford, "Greek Music in the Papyri"; Richter, "Das Musikfragment"; Mathiesen, "New Fragments of Ancient Greek Music." A fragment from a late tragedy of Euripides was discovered in 1973 and may constitute the earliest specimen among some forty extant examples of Greek music. 4. Aristotle, Poetics, I449b20. 5. See Webster, The Greek Chorus.

The Lyric Theater of tl1e Greeks

11

opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its clear distinction between the dramatic action (recitative or spoken dialogue) and the lyrical or decorative scenes (arias, choruses, ballets) to which the action gives rise. The typical use of the chorus in Greek drama is best seen in the tragedies of Sophocles (495-406 B.C.E.) and Euripides (484-407 B.C.E.), the choruses of the latter's Iphigenia in TauTis being particularly beautiful examples. In Aeschylus (525-456 B.C-E.) the choruses are more numerous and sometimes serve to narrate preceding events (Agamemnon) or take a direct part in the action

(Eumenides) . All the actors in Greek tragedy were men, and the chorus was no exception. Although in later ages it numbered no more than twelve or fifteen singers. in Periclean times it was undoubtedly larger; the chorus of Furies in Aeschylus' Eumenides numbered fifty, and their singing and dancing were said to have had such a terrifYing effect that children in the audience were thrown into convulsions from fright. 6 The leader of the chorus (choregos, choryphaios) was chosen from among the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of the community. The position was regarded as a distinction, but since the leader had to train and equip the chorus at his own expense he sometimes found himself ruined by the honor, which the satirist listed among the possible calamities oflife, like lawsuits and taxes. 7 The choral songs were unison melodies (like all Greek music), one note to a syllable, with accompaniment of instruments of the kithara or aulas type. The kithara was an instrument like the lyre, the strings being plucked either with the fingers or with a plectrum. The aulos was a reed-blown instrument, the tone of which probably resembled that of the oboe but with a more piercing character. These instruments may have played short introductions and interludes to the cboral songs. The "accompaniments" either doubled the voices at the unison or embellished the vocal melody, a practice known as heterophony. Theorists prescribed certain modes or types of melody as appropriate for certain kinds of scenes, the Dorian being generally favored for majestic verses and the Mixolydian for lamentations in dialogue between the chorus and a soloist. Such dialogues are quite frequent. There are also dialogues between the choregos and one of the actors; occasionally (as in the Alcestis of Euripides), various members of the chorus have short solo parts. In some cases the choruses have a refrain, a passage recurring several times in "ritornello" fashion (as in the Eumenides of Aeschylus).

6. Cf. H"milton, "The Greek Choru5." 7. The Latin word choraglls, derived from the Greek chor(gos, usually referred to a person associated with a theatrical troupe whose job it was to oversee the props and costumes. The Italian derivative noun corago was used to describe the director or impresario of a theatrical performance. For more about the role of the fOrago, chapter five.

1£

Jixteenth Century

No composers are named, but poets are sometimes mentioned as having composed the music for their own plays. This does not mean as much as it would in the present day, for it is probable that the declamatory solo portions of the drama were for the most part improvised, only slight general indications of the rise and fall of the voice being given by the poet. The choruses may possibly have employed certain standard melodies (nomoi), though on occasion new melodies might have been composed. The Greek comedy assigned to music a much less important role than did the tragedy, although Aristophanes (c. 448-385 B.C.E.) had choruses of Clouds, Wasps, Birds, and Frogs. In keeping with the general satirical spirit of the comedies, the chorus was dressed in fantastic costumes and indulged in imitation of animal and bird sounds. There was probably very little if any solo singing in the comedies. By the second century B.CE., the chorus had disappeared from Greek drama altogether. As early as the fourth century, Aristotle had spoken of its decline and complained that the poets of that day introduced choral songs that "have no more connection with their subject, than with that of any Tragedy: and hence, they are now become detached pieces, inserted at pleasure."s Solo singing remained a feature of the Roman drama, as we learn from a passage in Lucian's dialogue "On the Dance," written about 165 C.E., describing an actor in a tragedy "bawling out, bending forward and backward, sometimes actually singing his lines, and (what is surely the height of unseemliness) melodising his calamities. . . . To be sure, as long as he is an Andromache or a Hecuba, his singing can be tolerated; but when he enters as Hercules in person and warbles a ditty. . . a man in his right mind may properly term the thing a solecism."Y There are still many unanswered questions about the way in which Greek drama was performed, but we may be certain that, although it was not precisely like a modern opera, neither was it entirely in spoken dialogue like a modern play. The function of music was that of an embellishment, though a very important one.1(l It was this conception that Gluck expressed as his theory of the relation of music to drama. namely, that its purpose should be to "animate the figures without altering their contours."

8. Aristotle. Poetics, 1456a25. 9. Lucianus, Lucian, 5:24°. 10. "Music . . . of all the pleasurable accompamments and embellishments of tragedy. the most delightful." Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b15.

Chapter 2 Medieval Dramatic Music

THE HISTORY OF THE THEATER during the Middle Ages is obscure. Ancient drama seems to have disappeared, although it is possible that traces of Roman comedy may have been retained in the popular farces and other pieces performed by strolling bands of pJayers and (later) by the jongleurs. So far as our actual knowledge goes, however, the significant theater of the Middle Ages is religious. 1 It develops within the liturgy and emerges only partially from the church in the fifteenth century. In the West, two stages of this religious theater are to be distinguished: the liturgical drama (from the eleventh to the thirteenth century and later) and the mysteries (chiefly from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, with later revivals).2 We shall give first a brief summary of their course and then a somewhat more detailed description of the features of each. The origin of the religious theater appears to have been the practice of performing certain portions of the service dramatically-that is, the officiating priests actually representing the characters rather than merely narrating the events. This technique was first applied to the story of the Resurrection, and soon after to that of the Nativity. Around the original kernel there was a steady growth by accretion: in the Resurrection dramas the episode of the two Marys at the tomb of Christ (Matt. 28:1-7) was preceded by the scene of the buying of the ointment and followed by scenes representing the appear-

1. Leading works in English on this period include Chambers, TI,e Medieval Stage; Young, TI,e Drama of the ['vIedieva! Church (on liturgical drumas only); Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama; Srnoldon, TI,e Music oJ'the Medieval Church Dramas; Collins, Medieval Church l'vfusic·Dramas. See also Simon, ed., T1Je TIteatre '?i'll/Iedieval Europe: New Research in &rly Drama; Dunn, ed., The .Medieval Drama and Its Claudelian Revival; Mantzius,A History of Theatrical Art, vol. 2. 2.. cr. Stevens and Rastall, "Medieval Drama."

14

J'ixteenlh

ance of the risen Christ to the women and later to the apostles; the story was then extended backward to include the Crucifixion, the trial, and eventually all the events of Passion Week. Similarly, in the Nativity dramas the scene of the shepherds worshiping at the manger was expanded by taking in the Annunciation, the flight into Egypt, the Massacre of the Innocents, and so on. Before this process of accretion was completed, the drama had been removed irom its primitive position as part of the church service and reserved as a special feature of feast days, often coming as the climax of a procession and being performed on the church porch or steps--still, however, with priests and derics as the actors, though the people might take part as a chorus. Next, the vernacular began to replace Latin; stage properties and costumes grew more elaborate; and with the constantly increasing size of the spectacle, the of the performances was finally given over to guilds of professional actors, and the arena of the action changed from the church to the marketplace. This transformation of the liturgical drama from an ecclesiastical to a municipal function was completed by about the middle of the fourteenth century and led into the mysteries, a typical late medieval form of sacred drama. But alongside the latter, the tradition of the older, simpler form survived; its traces are to be found in such works as the "school dramas" (plays on sacred subjects performed in schools and colleges), the oratorio, and certain aspects of opera in the seventeenth century, especially in Rome and northern Germany.

The £itur!jica! 'i) rama Like Greek tragedy, the liturgical drama grew out of religious ceremonies. 3 The origin of the principal group of these, the Resurrection dramas, is found in the Quem quaeritis dialogue, of which the earliest surviving examples come from the tenth century: Interrogatio: Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, 0 Cristicolae? Responsio: Jhesum Nazarenum erueifixum, 0 eelicolae. Responsio: Non est hie, surrexit sicut praedixerat; ite, nUllciate quia surrexit. 4

3. It has been suggested that the term liturgical drama is not appropriate when applied to plays developed from paraliturgical material and tropes (passages added to the regular liturgy); however, since this term is well established, there seems little point in attempting to replace it by the more accurate designation of "ecclesiastical drama" or "church drama." 4. Question: Whom do you seek in the tomb, 0 followers of Christ' Response: Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, 0 dwellers in heaven. Response: He is not here, he has risen as was foretold; go, make known he has risen. In some manuscripts. de sepulchro (from the tomb) is added after surrexit (he is rilen). See, tor ample, the St. Gall MS. 339.

ex~

Medieval Dramatic i\~USk

15

This dialogue seems to have constituted an independent ceremony, for it is not uncommon to find it associated with more than one liturgical situation within the Easter rites. In one tenth-century manuscript, for instance, the Quem quaeritis dialogue appears as part of the Callceta ceremony; in another, it occurs at the end of Matins, just before the Te Deum laudamllS. 5 The Quem quaeritis dialogue was sung, not spoken. In fact, in the earliest liturgical dramas, everything was sung, but the further these plays grew away from the church, the more speaking and the less music they included, thus approaching in form the later mysteries. The music of the liturgical dramas is of two kinds. One involves nonmetrical plainsong of a simple though not purely syllabic type. For texts taken from the liturgy or the tropes, the existing melodies were usually retained, either intact or in a "mosaic" made by selecting and combining fragments of the traditional chants. For the added portions, other melodies were selected or composed. The other kind has songs of a more or less distinctly metrical character, either hymn melodies or perhaps tunes of popular origin. These are less common, but they tend to occur more frequently in the later dramas. Their rhythm is not evident from the original notation but is apparent from the metrical form and presence of a rhyme scheme in the texts. The latter are usually strophic, with two to fifteen or more stanzas, and may be either in Latin or in the vernacular. Some of these songs may have been sung by the congregation. There are songs for both soloists and chorus. In the earlier dramas they may have been accompanied by the organ; occasionally other instruments are mentioned, and it is probable that instruments of many kinds were used much more extensively in performance than the manuscripts themselves indicate. Most of the music is written as single-line melody, though there are occasional passages in two or more parts. The term condHctus, which sometimes occurs, refers not to a musical form but to the procession from one part of the area where the drama is staged to another, marking the division of the drama into scenes. More than two hundred liturgical dramas have been preserved, many of them available in modern editions.6 The subjects of these cover a wide range: --------------------------_._-5. McGee, in "The Liturgical Placements of the Quem quaeritis Dialogue." 5-dding q( 1589, II. These intermelii were also staged in conjunction with two other dramatic productions presented during these same festivities.

from a number of sources, among them a publication of the vocal and instrumental parts with performance directions, engravings of the principal scenes, and descriptions of the costumes designed by Bernardo Buontalenti. 12 These intermedi were planned by Count Giovanni Bardi deVernio (r534-r6I2), and both he and Emilio de' Cavalieri (1550-160r), who had recently arrived from Rome to take up his duties at the Florentine court, had responsibility for their production. Many of the texts were by Ottavio Rinuccini and are based, for the most part, on classical myths related to the power of music. 13 For example, the first intermedio concerns the "music of the spheres"; the sixth depicts the descent of the gods on clouds bringing "the gifts of harmony (song) and rhythm (dance)" to mortals on earth.The musical portions were by several different composers. Cristofano Malvezzi (1547-99) provided most of the music for the fourth, fifth, and sixth intermedi, with Luca Marenzio (c. 1553-(}9) doing the same for the second and third intermedi.Among the other contributors were Giulio Caccini (1546-1618), Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), Bardi, and Cavalieri, with the last named composing and choreographing a spectacular choric dance as the concluding element of the sixth intermedio, 14The text that appears with this finale was added by Laura Guidiccioni after the music and choreography were completed. ls Included in this set of intermedi are five- and six-part madrigals, double and triple choruses, and a final madrigal that calls for seven different vocal ensembles with a total of thirty parts. These songs are accompanied by various groups of instruments that also are called for in a number of interpolated sinfonie. Three of the six vocal solos are in ordinary madrigal style, with the lower voices played on instruments. The others exemplifY the florid solo style of the sixteenth century, the voice ornamenting a melodic line that is given simultaneously in unornamented form in the accompaniment. This can be seen in example 3,2, which Cavalieri scored for soprano with the accompaniment of a chitarrolle. Some of the most celebrated musicians of the time took part in the I589 l2. The music was originally printed by Malvezzi in Venice. l591, Cf. us Fetes du maria,l!e, All six of the engravings are reproduced in Pirrotta. with Povoledo, Music and Theatre, plates 34-39, and in Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrnme11fatio/l, Several of these engravings are also in Wolff. Oper: SZetlC rmd Darstellrmg, and in Donington, The Rise of Opera, 13. The text for the fourth illtermedio was by Giovanni Battista Strozzi iI Giovane (1551"'1634), who also wrote a treatise on how to construct illtermedi, This treatise has been translated as "Prescriptions for Intermedi" and is included in Palisca, ed" TIre F/,>rentine Camerata, 218-25, r4, The harmonic-bass progression of the music for this ballo, which is known as either "L'Aria di Fiorenza" or "Ballo del Gran Duea," forms the basis of a number of other compositions in the seventeenth century. See Kirkendale, VAria di Fiorenza, 15. In his essay '''0 che nuovo miracolo!':A New Hypothesis about the 'Aria di Fiorenza,'" Hill discusses his discovery of a religious text in the Palatina, collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence. that has the same incipit as the secular text of this finale. He concluded that the 1589 text is a parody of the Palatina text.

27

The Immediate Forerunners of Opera

performance. The orchestra included organs, lutes, lyres, harps, viols, trombones, cornetts, and other instruments arranged in different combinations for each number. 16 Since there was not enough space on, above, or in front of the stage to accommodate the forty-one musicians who took part in the production, much of the instrumental accompaniment was performed from behind the scenes or behind an object on the out of view of the audience. The stage design for the second intermedio offered a solution for bringing the instrumental sound closer to the singers; it included niches in which the musicians could be positioned. With intermedi on such a scale as this, we can well imagine that the audience must have had little attention to give to the play itself, and this was no doubt often the case with such performances in Italy in the sixteenth century. "For the majority of the audience the dances and pageants formed the chief attraction. It is therefore no marvel if the drama, considered as a branch of high poetic art, was suffocated by the growth of its mere accessories.,,17 As a forerunner of opera, the intermedio is important for two reasons: first, because it kept alive in the minds of Italian poets and musicians the idea of close collaboration between drama and music, and second, because in these works, as in the French dramatic ballet, the external form of the future opera is already outlined-a drama with interludes of music and with dancing, splendid scenery, and spectacular stage effects. As soon as the drama itself

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could be set to music and sung instead of spoken, opera would be achieved. The advent of this new artistic form, however, did not at once put an end to the intermedi and similar spectacles. On the contrary, the intermedio remained popular at Italian courts well into the seventeenth century. The theater music of the sixteenth century, far from being a mere tentative and imperfect experiment, was a well-developed, essential feature of the entire Renaissance movement. The academies ofItaly and France quite naturally interested themselves in music as one aspect of their interest in the revival of ancient art and letters. The texts of the ballets and intermedi imply a degree of familiarity with Greek mythology on the part of their audiences that is hardly conceivable in this day and age. Mingled \'lith this, as a heritage from the Middle Ages, is a pervasive, subtle use of allegory and personification; yet these works were not intended only for the erudite. They were a common part of the luxurious, pleasure-loving court life of cultivated persons. Princes and nobles, poets, painters, and musicians, amateur and professional alike, all participated in their composition and performed in them side by side. The music itself, as has been said, was not dramatic; all the action and passion of the drama were in spoken dialogue, leaving for music only the adornment of the spectacular, reflective, or lyrical scenes. But in these, the important musical forms of the sixteenth century found their place: instrumental dances, airs, madrigals, choruses, chansons, canzonets-everything that music had to offer, with one notable exception: the learned contrapuntal art of the Netherlanders. By the last decade of the sixteenth century, Europe was on the verge of opera. It remained only to transform the relation between drama and music from a mere association into an organic union. For this end, two things were necessary: a kind of drama suitable for continuous music, and a kind of music capable of dramatic expression. The former was found in the pastorale and the latter in the monodic style of the Florentine composers ]acopo Peri and Giulio Caccini.

The Pas torale Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, the pastorale began to displace all other types of dramatic poetry in Italy.18 So complete did its dominance become that Angelo Ingegneri, the foremost writer on the theater in the latter part of the century, remarked that "if it were not for the pastorales, it might almost be said that the theater was extinct." 19 A dramatic pas--------------~.-----

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IS.Three works dealing ·with the history of this genre are Guarini, Campendio della poesia tragicomica; Crescimheni, Commentarii intomo all' Istoria della poesia italiana; Greg, Pastoral Poetry. See also Harris, Handel and the Pastora/'Fradition. 19. Ingegneri, Della poesia mppresentativa, 8.

30

0ixieenth Century

torale is a poem, lyric in substance but dramatic in form, intended for either reading or stage presentation, with shepherds, shepherdesses, and sylvan deities for the chief characters, and with a background of fields, forests, or other idyllic and pleasant scenes of nature. The dramatic action is restricted to mild love adventures and a few incidents arising out of the circumstances of pastoral life, and it usually ends happily. The attraction of the pastorale consisted, therefore, not in the plot but in the scenes and moods, the sensuous charm of the language, and the delicately voluptuous imagery; at which the Italian Renaissance poets excelled. The sources of the pastoral ideal lay partly in literary studies (Theocritus, Virgil), but it was redeemed from affectation by the sincere and profound Italian feeling for the beauties of "nature humanized by industry." The vision of a Golden Age idealized man's actual enjoyment of the country, and hallowed, as with inexplicable pathos, the details of ordinary rustic life. Weary with courts and worldly pleasures, in moments of revolt against the passions and ambitions that wasted their best energies, the poets of that century, who were nearly always also men of state and public office, sighed for the good old times, when honor was an unknown name, and truth was spoken, and love sincere, and steel lay hidden in the earth, and ships sailed not the sea, and old age led the way to death unterrified by coming doom. As time advanced, their ideal took form and substance. There rose into existence, for the rhymesters to wander in, and for the readers of romance to dream about, a region called Arcadia, where all that was imagined of the Golden Age was found in combination with refined society and manners proper to the civil state. 20 Music forms an integral part ofAngelo Poliziano's Lafabula d'Otjeo, one of the earliest pastoral plays and one of the first Italian secular dramas to be written wholly in the vernacular.21 Based upon Ovid's Metamorphoses, this play was performed at Mantua (c. 1480) with music consisting of at least three solo songs and one chorus, interspersed with the spoken dialogue. 22 It is a - - _..._ - 20. Symonds, Renaissallce in Italy, 2: 196-97 (paraphrased in part from the dosing chorus of Act r of Tasso's Aminta, which in turn is paraphrased from Ovid's Metamorphoses I, verses 85)-112). 21. See Poliziano. Oifeo; idem, Le stanze. l'Orfeo e Ie rime, 369- 507; Symonds. Renaissance ill Italy, 1:4°9-15. See also Maniates. Mannerism in Jralian Music and Culture. 153tJ-1630, chap. 23. 22. Ovid (43 B.C.E.-17 C.E.). a Roman poet, wrote MetamorpllOses between J and 8 C.E. It is a long poem subdivided into a series of stories suitable for dramatic presentation. The Ovidian story of Or· Jeo forms the basis for many opera librettos. beginning with Rinuccini's Orfeo of 1600. Four possible dates for performance--1471. 1472. 1474. and 1480-.re mentioned by Pirrotta. Ii due Orfei. ). Donington, TIle Rise of Opera, 32, writes that Orfeo was performed "probably in 1478 (rather than in 1472 as previously supposed but certainly no later than 1483)," Sternfeld, TIle Birth of Opera, 57. states that Poliziano's Orfeo was performed first in 1480. printed in 1494. and reprinted up until 1600.

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when needed for musettes, horns, and clarinets (from 1749). The three main types of instrumental pieces in Rameau are the overtures, the descriptive symphonies, and the dances. The overtures of the earlier operas are in the conventional form, but in certain cases Rameau, unlike Lully, connects the overture with the particular opera for which it is written. Thus the opening theme of the overture to Castor et Pollux, in G minor, reappears in the finale in A major for the scene of

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the apotheosis of the two heroes. Zoroastre has a program overture aiming to summarize the main outlines of the plot of the opera. In his later works, Rameau experimented with different overture forms: that of Zoroastre, with its three sections (fast-slow-fast), approaches not only in general outline but also in many details-the texture of the music, the nature of the themes, the form of the last two movements, the rhythms, the methods of motivic development, and the use of devices like parallel thirds, unison passages, and echoes-the style of the early classical symphony. The descriptive symphonies are short instrumental pieces intended to depict in music certain scenes or happenings on the stage. They are typical of an age whose music aesthetic was based on the ideal of imitation of nature, thus leading to a whole conventional language of musical images for conveying landscapes, sunrises, babbling brooks, thunderstorms, earthquakes, or other natural phenomena. 77 Rameau never wrote a piece of music that was more perfectly expressive of pastoral tranquillity than the slumber scene in Lully's Armide, but he excelled in more violent episodes, of which the earthquake in the second entree of Les Indes galantes is a good example. There are in his operas also many short symphonies for filling awkward pauses in the action (such as the descent of celestial beings) or suggesting offstage battles. Most numerous of all are the dances; they comprise all types, from the simple minuet to the elaborate chaconne, with an astounding variety, freshness, and fertility of rhythmic invention. These are a noble flowering of the oldest instrumental tradition in France, a line descending from the sixteenthcentury ballet through Lully, Jacques Chambonnieres, Franc;:ois Couperin, and many other distinguished composers. In Rameau perhaps more than in any of his countrymen the music has the strange power of vividly suggesting the movements of the dancers; it is in truth "gesture made audible."The common dance types in duple meter are gavotte, bourree, rigaudon, tambourin, and contredanse; in triple meter: saraband, chaconne, minuet, and passepied; in compound meter: loure,Jorlane, and gigue; others, variable in meter and form, such as musette, march, entree, and air (the last usually qualified by a descriptive term, as air majestueux or grave, air pour les fleurs, pour les ombres, and so on). The principal forms are two-part, rondo, and chaconne. Many of these dances are sung by solo, ensemble, or chorus as well as played by the orchestra. Examples are too numerous and varied to warrant mention of any in particular. Only a study of the scores can give an idea ofRameau's inexhaustible richness in this field. Rameau is not to be regarded as a mere way station between Lully and Gluck; any conception of him as no more than a composer of graceful dance trifles is completely false. On the contrary, he is one of the very few first-rank 77. DuBas, Critical Riflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, part

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composers whose work happens to fall largely in the realm of opera. If he is less consistently a dramatist than Lully, the fault is that of the age in which he worked; as a musician, he is by far Lully's superior. His limited success in France is to be attributed to the poor quality of his librettos (for which his own indifference was partly responsible) and to the fact that in his day the old French opera itself, encumbered by so many conventions of a bygone era, was on its way toward decline. Rameau's music went down to obscurity with it. For a number of years, Rameau's operas were classic examples of great music forgotten. Today that has changed. His operas are receiving attention from scholars and performers who, on the basis of the requisite knowledge and imagination, not only appreciate their greatness but also breathe new life into scores that once delighted Paris under the ancien regime.

Chapter 12 Opera Send: General Characteristks

WE HAVE SEEN HOW, from its earliest beginnings at Florence and Rome, Italian opera in the course of the seventeenth century passed out of the experimental stage. Radiating from Venice with its public opera houses, it established itself on a firm basis of public interest and support that made it by the end of the century the most widespread and most popular of all musical forms. We have also seen how, in the course of this development, three important national schools of opera rose outside Italy. One of these, the French, maintained its existence and individuality; the English school died with Purcell, while the German gradually lost its identity by absorption into the Italian style. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, it is possible practically to perceive one single operatic type that dominated all western Europe except France-a type that, despite variations in different countries and composers, showed certain fundamental common features everywhere. From the standpoint of the libretto, we identify this type as the opera of moods or affects. Its intention was to present a series of discrete expressive moments, each devoted exclusively to a particular mood. In order to call forth the necessary variety and intensity of moods, situations were contrived with little attention to unity or consistency of plot and with corresponding indifference to realism either in subject matter or in details of dramatic development. The form in which this intention was realized was one that we may call the "aria opera"; musically speaking, that is to say, it consisted of a series of arias separated by passages of recitative. Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, the tendency had been more and more to differentiate these two styles and, in general, to concentrate the musical interest more and more on the aria. Ensembles, ballets, and instrumental pieces were of only incidental importance.

20+

The Lishteenth Century

Within this general type of Italian opera, two distinct directions were perceptible by the beginning of the eighteenth century, corresponding to common divisions of music history, as the "late Baroque" and the "pre-classical" styles of opera. The distinction involves many criteria, applying to both libretto and music. 1 The aim of Baroque opera had been to excite admiration and astonishment, to overwhelm,for stupirc, hence the machines and marvels, the multitude of characters, the sensational disorderly plots, extravagant language, and comic episodes. The newer style came to be refined, polished, regulated; poets envisioned the drama as a school of virtue, teaching devotion to duty and loyalty to the higher impulses of man's nature. They eschewed supernatural interventions and miracles; comic scenes were abolished; the cast was reduced to six stereotyped personages; plots became orderly and formalized, emotions restrained, language conventional and courtly. No less sweeping were the differences in the music. In the older style, the harmony was comparatively rich and changeable, the bass lines fairly active, the melody spun out in long phrases of variable length (except in pieces based on dance rhythms), and the forms still somewhat free despite the tendency toward exclusive use of the da capo pattern. In the newer style, harmony was simplified to a few fundamental chords with the bass changing relatively seldom and the whole texture functioning solely as a support for the melody; the latter came to be organized in symmetrical short phrases, though with considerable variety of rhythmic patterns within the phrase. Variety of form gave way to the almost exclusive dominance of the full five-part da capo scheme. 2 The older style admitted the orchestra as a more nearly equal partner with the voice, aiming at a contrapuntal kind of bass and, in the case of composers like Steffani, Keiser, or Handel, sometimes interweaving the vocal line with one or more strands of instrumental melody; the newer style tended to relegate the orchestra to a subordinate position, with a bass whose ,function was entirely harmonic, concentrating all musical attention on the singer. Mattheson remarks on the contrast in this respect between his own time and the seventeenth century: in the earlier period "hardly anyone gave a thought to melody, but everything was centered simply on harmony.,,3 Quantz laments that, though most Italian composers of the day (that is, 1752) are talented, they start writing operas before they have learned the rules of musical composition; that they do not take time to ground themselves properly; and that they work too fast. 4 To these criticisms, with their implications

I. See Downes, "The Operas ofJohann Christian Bach;' which includes a survey of Italian opera seria between 1720 and 1730. 2. This scheme will be described later in the chapter. 3. Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte, 93. 4. Quantz, Versuch, XVIII. Hauptstiick, par. 63.

Opera Seria: General Characteristics

£05

of frivolousness and lack of counterpoint in Italy, may be opposed, as representing the Italian viewpoint, Galuppi's classic definition of good music: "Vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione," which Charles Burney translates "beauty, clearness, and good modulation," though there are really no words in English capable of conveying the exact sense of the original. 5 The older style of opera was. represented by Legrenzi, Steffani, Keiser, Handel, and, to a considerable extent, Scarlatti; the newer tendencies were developed in the works of most Italian composers after 1700 and became dominant by 1720. One way to illustrate the distinction is to consider the contrasting types of operatic overture associated with each of the two schools. The older type was the French ouverture, first outlined by the early Venetians, given definitive form by Lully, and adopted in its essential features by Steffani, Keiser, and Handel; the newer type was the Italian sinfonia, first established by Scarlatti about 1700, and gradually ousting the French overture everywhere as the eighteenth century went on. 6 The difference between these two kinds of overture is usually stated in terms of the order of movements-the French beginning (and often also ending) in slow tempo, whereas the Italian began fast, had a slow movement in the middle, and ended with an allegro or presto. This distinction, however, is superficial; the essential difference was a matter of musical texture. The French overture was a creation of the late Baroque, having a rich texture of sound, some quasi-contrapuntal independence of the inner voices, and a musical momentum bound to the non-periodic progression of the bass and harmonies. The Italian overture was a characteristic pre-classical form, light in texture, with busy activity of the upper voices accompanied by simple, standardized harmonic formulas. The French overture looked to the past, the Italian to the future; the latter represented those principles of texture, form, nature of thematic material, and methods of motivic development that were to lead eventually to the style of the classical symphony. 7 Both the older and the newer type ofItalian opera existed in the early part of the eighteenth century, but the former was obviously on the decline as far as popularity was concerned. The general change in the language of music that took place in the middle of the century and that led through the rococo or galant style to the later classical idiom was evident in opera as it was everywhere else. The growing taste for simplicity, ease, lightness of texture, tuneful

5. Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 377. 6. For modern editions of representative overtures by A. Scarlatti, see Grout, ed., The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, and Brook, ed., The Symphony 1720-1840. 7. This trend can be observed in the opera overtures of Francesco Conti, especially those exhibiting the basic elements of sonata forms. See Brook. ed., The Symphony. ser. B, vol. 2, for examples of his music. On the early history of the Italian overture, see Heuss, Die Instrumental-StUcke die venetianischen Opern-Sinfonien, 88-92.

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melody, and facile ornamentation brought to the fore a kind of opera, Italian in origin but international in practice, that heretofore was referred to as Neapolitan, a descriptive term that came into use because many of the composers associated with early eighteenth-century opera lived or were trained in Naples. s One division within the general field of eighteenth-century Italian opera, however, must be kept in mind, namely that between the serious opera (opera seria) and the comic opera (opera buffa). The latter is, at least in the beginning, a quite distinct form that will be treated later. At present we are concerned exclusively with the opera seria, the characteristic type of the age, cultivated in all countries by imported Italians as well as by native composers and singers imitating the Italian style, maintaining itself throughout the eighteenth century and continuing its influence far into the nineteenth. 9 We shall attempt first to give a general idea of this operatic type and to dispose of certain misconceptions regarding it; afterward, we shall study the music of particular composers. The latter undertaking is still hampered by the paucity of available scores. Almost none of this music was printed. Hundreds of manuscripts have been lost; hundreds of others exist only in rare manuscript copies, and of these, only a small percentage is accessible in modern editions.

The foundation of the eighteenth-century opera seria rests upon a literary reform movement that developed at the end of the seventeenth century.1O The principal target of this reform was the eroicomico libretto that had dominated the Venetian stage throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Led by Gian Vincenzo Gravina (r664-r708) and supported by other members of the Arcadian academy in Rome, this reform movement sought, among other things, to reduce the multiplicity of arias and to eliminate the intermingling of tragic-heroic and comic elements-characteristics of the librettos of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and his contemporaries. First steps toward the reform were taken by Silvio Stampiglia (r664-r725).11 He tight-

8. See Downes, "The Neapolitan Tradition in Opera," and Hucke, "Die neapolitanische Tradition in der Oper."The implications of Neapolitan, when used to denote a certain type or style of opera, can lead to confusion; it therefore seems best to discontinue the use of the word as a descriptive term. 9. It should be noted that opera seria does not appear as a title on librettos until the latter half of the eighteenth century. Prior to that time, the most commonly used term to denote a "serious" text was dramma per musica. For a discussion of the use of these terms, see Strohm, "Towards an Understanding of the Opera Seria." 10. Giazotto, Poesia melodrammatica; Burt, "Opera in Arcadia";Vetter, "Deutschland und das Formgeftihl Italiens"; R. Freeman. Opera without Drama; Strohm, Die italienische Oper im 18.Jahrhundert. II. Cf. Giornale de' lelterati d'Italia, vol. 38, part 2, II7-34; Giazotto, Poesia melodrammatica; Kanduth, "Silvio Stampiglia, poeta cesareo."

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ened the structure of his librettos by limiting the number of acts, scenes, and characters, and he heightened the dramatic action through a more creative use of language. Stampiglia was reluctant, however, to eliminate the servants and their integral comic scenes, to discard the happy ending, and to reverse the dominant role of music over poetry. As a result, he succeeded merely in remolding rather than reforming the eroicomico libretto, replacing it with his tragicommedia. In so doing, he kept alive a type of libretto that was to remain in vogue for several decades in the eighteenth century, most especially in Vienna, where Pietro Pariati (1665-1733) was active as court poet. 12 The two poets chiefly associated with actually enacting the "reform" as set forth by Gravina were Apostolo Zeno (1688-1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782).13 Zeno, under the influence of the French dramatists, favored historical subject matter and sought to purge the opera of erratically motivated plots, supernatural interventions, machines, irrelevant comic episodes, and the bombastic declamation that had reigned in the seventeenth century.14 This movement was brought to fulfillment by Metastasio, the guiding genius of eighteenth-century Italian opera and a literary figure of such stature that his contemporaries seriously compared him with Homer and Dante. Metastasio became court poet at Vienna in 1730, succeeding Stampiglia and Zeno, who had held that position since 1705 and 1718, respectively. His twenty-seven drammi per musica and other theater works were given more than a thousand musical settings in the eighteenth century, some of them being set to music as many as seventy times. The composers chiefly associated with his works were Leo, Vinci, and Hasse. A modern reader is apt to find Metastasio's plays mannered and artificial, elegant rather than powerful; his characters seem more like eighteenth-century courtiers than the ancient Romans they were supposed to be; "sentimental quandaries" make up most of the situations in these dramas of amorous and political intrigue; there is almost always a happy ending (lieto fine), and the stock figure of the magnanimous tyrant is often in evidence. Yet in spite of all this, if one is willing to allow for the dramatic conventions of the time, some of Metastasio's plays may still be read with pleasure. His achievement consisted in the creation of a consistent dramatic structure conforming to the rationalistic ideals of the period, but incorporating lyrical elements suited for musical setting in such a way as to form an organic whole. A representative example of a Metastasian libretto is Attilio regolo (1740). I2. See Campanini, Un precursore del Metastasio; Williams, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, I30--37; Seifert, "Pietro Pariati, poeta cesareo." I3. On Zeno, see Fehr, Apostolo Zeno,166iT1750, und seine Reform des Operntextes. On Metastasto, see

Muraro, ed., Metastasio e il mondo musicale. I4· Metastasio, letter of Fabroni, December 7, I767, in Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writing of the Abate Metastasio, 3:19. See also Wellesz's introduction to Fux's Costanza ejortezza, DTOe, 37:xiii.

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Attilio, having been taken captive by the Carthaginians, is offered his freedom if he will use his influence with the Roman Senate to obtain certain advantages for Carthage. Under parole to return if unsuccessful, he is permitted to go to Rome, but once there, he urges the Senate to stand firm, scorning to purchase his own life by betraying the interests of his country. Resisting the entreaties of his friends and family, of the Senate (which is willing to make national sacrifices to save him), and of the entire populace, he voluntarily boards the ship that will take him back to captivity and death. This tragic ending was something of an innovation with Metastasio; it had appeared in only two other works of his, Didone abbandonata (1724) and the original version of Catone in Utica (1728; revised in 1729), and is exceedingly rare in earlier Italian opera-Busenello's Didone of 1641 (music by Cavalli) being one instance. One may well ask where, in such a drama as this, there is any place for lyricism. The answer is to be found in the peculiar construction of the scenes. In seventeenth-century opera, recitatives, arioso passages, and arias were intermingled according to the composer's fancy or the requirements of the action. There was no standard procedure; very often a scene might end with a recitative. Metastasio standardized the form. In his operas, a typical scene consists of two distinct parts: first, dramatic action in recitative, and second, expression of sentiments by the chief actor in an aria. In the first part of the scene, the actor is a character in the drama, carrying on dialogue with other actors; in the second part, he is a person expressing his emotions or conveying some general sentiments or reflections appropriate to the current situation-not to his fellows on the stage but to the audience. While this goes on, the progress of the drama usually comes to a complete stop. Consequently, the play is made up of regularly alternating periods of movement and repose, the former representing the rights of the drama (recitative) and the latter the rights of the music (aria): the former occupying the larger part of the scene in the libretto, but the latter far exceeding it in the score, by reason of the extended musical structure of the aria, usually built on only two stanzas of four lines each. There results from this scheme an endlessly repeated pattern of tension and release, each recitative building up an emotional situation that finds an outlet in the following aria. "The recitative loads the gun, the aria fires it.,,15 This is the classical compromise of operatic form, in which drama and music each yield certain rights and thereby find a means of living together compatibly. It permits free development of both elements within conventional limits. So long as these limits were tolerable (as they were to the early and middle eighteenth century), the form was found satisfactory; it lost favor only when othI5. Flemming, ed., Die Oper, 58. See also the admirably clear exposition of this aesthetic in Grimm, "Poeme lyrique."

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er ideals of drama began to prevail. Moreover, the stiffuess of the scheme was mitigated in Metastasio's operas by the naturalness of the transition from recitative to aria, by the musical quality of the language in the recitative, and by the variety of verse forms in the aria. It may be remarked that, whereas with respect to the dramatic action tension is greatest in the recitative and least in the aria, with respect to the music the exact opposite obtains. Musical tension is at a minimum in recitative and becomes strongest in the aria. Thus the two forces, drama and music, tend to "cancel" one another and the result is a certain neutrality, a remoteness or generality of expression in these works, which agrees well with the highly formal pattern of their design. One paramount fact emerges: the central position of the aria as a musical unit. Musically speaking, that is to say, an opera is a succession of arias; other elements-recitatives, ensembles, instrumental numbers-are nothing but background. From this fact stem certain consequences: (I) the variety and degree of stylization of aria types, (2) a corresponding looseness of structure in the opera as a whole, and (3) the importance of the singer not only as an interpreter but also as a creative partner of the composer.

011ria

Types

Eighteenth-century writers on opera classified arias into certain well-defined types, having distinct characteristics. For example, the Englishman John Brown mentioned five traditional varieties:

Aria cantabile--by pre-eminence so called, as if it alone were Song: And, indeed, it is the only kind of song which gives the singer an opportunity of displaying at once, and in the highest degree, all his powers. . . . The proper subjects for this Air are sentiments of tenderness. Aria di portamento . . . chiefly composed oflong notes, such as the singer can dwell on, and have, thereby, an opportunity of more effectually displaying the beauties, and calling forth the powers of his voice. . . . The subjects proper to this Air are sentiments of dignity. Aria di mezzo carattere. . . a species of Air, which, though expressive neither of the dignity of this last, nor of the pathos of the former, is, however, serious and pleasing. Aria parlante--speaking Air, is that which. . . admits neither oflong notes in the composition, nor of many ornaments in the execution. The rapidity of motion of this Air is proportioned to the violence of the passion which is expressed by it. This species of Air goes sometimes by the name of aria di nota e parola, and likewise of aria agitata. Aria di bravura, aria di agilita-is that which is composed chitfiy, indeed, too

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The Lishteenth Century often, merely to indulge the singer in the display of certain powers in the execution, particularly extraordinary agility or compass of voice. 16

A less scientific tabulation is given by the Frenchman Charles de Brosses, writing from Rome around 1740: The Italians . . . have airs of great agitation, full of music and harmony, for brilliant voices; others are of a pleasant sound and charming outlines, for delicate and supple voices; still others are passionate, tender, affecting, truly following the natural expression of emotions, strong or full of feeling for stage effect and for bringing out the best points of the actor. The "agitato" airs are those presenting pictures of storms, tempests, torrents, thunderclaps, a lion pursued by hunters, a war-horse hearing the sound of the trumpet, the terror of a silent night, etc.-all images quite appropriate to music, but out of place in tragedy. This kind of air devoted to large effects is almost always accompanied by wind instruments-oboes, trumpets, and horns-which make an excellent effect, especially in airs having to do with storms at sea. Airs of the second kind are madrigals, pretty little songs with ingenious and delicate ideas or comparisons drawn from pleasant objects, such as zephyrs, birds, murmuring waves, country life, etc. . . . As to airs of the third kind, which express only feeling, Metastasio takes great care to place them at the most lively and interesting point of his drama, and to connect them closely with the subject. The musician then does not seek for embellishments or passage-work, but tries simply to portray the feeling, whatever it may be, with all his power. . . . I should also place in this class the airs of spectres and visions, to which the music lends a surprising power.17 It goes without saying that these and similar classifications cannot always be applied in all their details to the actual music, but their very existence is of interest as showing the high degree of organization-of stylization-that the aria reached in this period. There were other conventions as well, notably the one that decreed that practically every aria must be in the da capo form. Even the order and distribution of the different types were prescribed: every performer was to have at least one aria in each act, but no one might have two arias in succession; no aria could be followed immediately by another of the same type, even though performed by a different singer; the subordinate

I6.]. Brown, Letters on the Italian Opera (2nd ed .• I79I), 36-39. I7. Brosses, Lettresfamilieres sur I'Italie, 2:348-5I (translation by Grout).

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singers must have fewer and less important arias than the stars; and so on. 18 At first glance, the whole system seems artificial to the point of absurdity; later in the century, in fact, it was attacked on this very ground. Yet given the postulates of early eighteenth-century opera aesthetic, it was quite logical, and justification could be found for every rule. (Moreover, the composers did not hesitate to break the rules if it suited their purposes to do so.) It was one of the secrets of Metastasio's success that he could construct a drama that met these rigid requirements without being too obviously constrained by them.

The Pasticcio A second consequence of over-concentration on the aria was a certain looseness of structure in the opera as a whole.With few exceptions, the composer's responsibility for formal unity was limited to each single number. Apart from the libretto, there was nothing to bind these into a larger musical unit except the general requirements as to variety and the custom of placing the two most important arias at the end of each of the first two acts. To use familiar analogies, the arias were not like figures in a painting, each fulfilling a certain role in the composition and each in some measure conditioned by the others; rather, they were like a row of statues in a hall, symmetrically arranged but lacking any closer bond of aesthetic union. The conception corresponded to the Baroque ideal of dynamics, where the various degrees of loudness or softness were distinct, without transitions of crescendo or diminuendo; or to forms such as the sonata and concerto, in which each movement was a complete, thematically independent unit. The arias were like Leibniz's monads, each closed off from the others and all held together only by the "preestablished harmony" of the libretto. Thus their order could be changed, new numbers added, or others taken away, without really doing violence to the musical plan of the opera as a whole-though, needless to say, the drama might suffer. Composers therefore freely substituted new arias for old in revivals of their works, or for performances with a different cast. A composer at Rome, for example, who had orders to revise aVenetian opera to suit the taste of the Roman singers and public, would have no compunction about replacing some of the original composer's arias with some of his own, perhaps taken from an earlier work where they had been sung to different words. Indeed, it was exceptional for an opera to be given in exactly the same form in two different cities. This working of new materials into old garments, if carried far enough, resulted in a kind of opera known as a pasticcio--literally, a "pie," but perhaps 18. Hogarth, Memoirs if the Opera, vol. 2, chap. 3; Goldoni, Memoires, chap. 28. See also the letter of Ginseppe Riva to Muratori in '725, on the requirements for a London libretto, qnoted in Streatfeild, "Handel, Rolli"; Hucke, "Die neapolitanische Tradition," 262ff.

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translatable more expressively for modern readers as a "patchwork." There are several kinds of pasticcio. One is illustrated by the opera Muzio Scevoia (London, I72I), the first act of which was composed by Filippo Amadei (c. I665-c. I725), the second by Giovanni Bononcini, and the third by Handel. 19 A second type of pasticcio was the result of a more haphazard process; it was an opera or intermezzo that had migrated from city to city, undergoing patching and alteration at every stage, until it might one day arrive at London (its usual final home) with a libretto in which Metastasio shared honors with "Zeno, Goldoni, Stampighia, Rossi, and other librettists," while "Gluck, Ciampi, Galuppi, Cocchi,Jommelli, Latilla, Handel and several more might be pasted together" in the same musical score. An example of this type is Orazio, an opera originally composed solely by Pietro Auletta for Naples in I737, but then drastically transformed over the course of the next twenty years (I740-58), with the substitution of arias by Jommelli, Pergolesi, and Leo, among others. 20 A third type is represented by a composer creating a new opera by drawing upon material from his own previously completed works. Handel was known to have done this for several of his operas staged in London, among them Oreste (I734). Although the pasticcio was a very popular form of operatic entertainment, especially in London throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, its manner of composition was sometimes derided, as in these words taken from the "Critical Discourse on Opera's and Musick in England," appended to an anonymous English translation of Franc;:ois Raguenet's Paralele des Italiens et des Fran(ois, en ce qui regarde ia musique et ies operas (I709): "Pick out about an hundred Italian Airs from several Authors, good, or bad, it signifies nothing. Among these, make use of fifty five, or fifty six, of such as please your Fancy best, and Marshall ' em in the manner you think most convenient. When this is done, you must employ a Poet to write some English Words, the Airs of which are to be adapted to the Italian Musick."21

19. Another example of a pasticcio in which composers were responsible for specific parts of the operatic production is L'Atenaide (Vienna, 1714):Act I, M.A. Ziani;Act II,A. Negri; Act III,A. Caldara; intermezzos, F. B. Conti; ballet music, N. Matteis. 20. See Walker," Orazio: The History of a Pasticcio"; Strohm, "Handels Pasticci"; Lazarevich, "Eighteenth-Century Pasticcio:The Historian's GOldian Knot." 21. [Galliard (?), trans.]' A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Opera's Translated from the French; with Some Remarks. To which is added A Critical Discourse upon Opera's in England, and a Means proposed Jor Their Improvement. A work that may have prompted these remarks by the anonymous author and translator (believed to be J. E. Galliard) is Thomyris, Queen of Scythia, performed at Drury Lane in 1707. It was fashioned by the impresario J. J. Heidegger, who selected arias by several different composers (Scarlatti, Gasparini, Albinoni, Bononcini, et al.) and then presumably had J. C. Pepusch weave them together with newly composed recitatives. Although Pepusch wrote several masques that were performed at Drury Lane between 1715 and 1716, it is not possible to confirm that he indeed was the person who arranged the airs for either Thomyris or TI,e Beggar's Opera by John Gay. See Cook, "The Life and Works ofJohann Christoph Pepusch."

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The J'insers A third effect-which operated at the same time as a cause-of the importance of the aria was the glorification of the singer. The virtuoso singer was to the eighteenth century what the virtuoso pianist was to the nineteenth, or the virtuoso conductor to the twentieth. The operatic songbirds of that age have been so often and so unsparingly condemned that it seems worthwhile to try to correct this judgment by quoting a passage from Vernon Lee's Studies if the Eighteenth Century in Italy, a book naive in many of its musical opinions and perhaps too uncritical in its enthusiasm for everything Italian but that nevertheless states the case for the singer with sympathy and insight: The singer was a much more important personage in the musical system of the eighteenth century than he is now-a-days. He was not merely one of the wheels of the mechanism, he was its main pivot. For in a nation so practically, spontaneously musical as the Italian, the desire to sing preceded the existence of what could be sung: performers were not called into existence because men wished to hear such and such a composition, but the composition was produced because men wished to sing. The singers were therefore not trained with a view to executing any peculiar sort of music, but the music was composed to suit the powers of the singers. Thus ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when music first left the church and the palace for the theater, composition and vocal performance had developed simultaneously, narrowly linked together; composers always learning first of all to sing, and singers always finishing their studies with that of composition; Scarlatti and Porpora teaching great singers, Stradella and Pistocchi forming great composers; the two branches. . . acting and reacting on each other so as to become perfectly homogeneous and equal. The singer, therefore, was neither a fiddle for other men to play upon, nor a musical box wound up by mechanism. He was an individual voice, an individual mind, developed to the utmost; a perfectly balanced organization; and to him was confided the work of embodying the composer's ideas, of moulding matter to suit the thought, of adapting the thought to suit the matter, of giving real existence to the form which existed only as an abstraction in the composer's mind. The full responsibility of this work rested on him; the fullest liberty of action was therefore given him to execute it. Music, according to the notions of the eighteenth century, was no more the mere written score than a plan on white paper would have seemed architecture to the Greeks. Music was to be the result of the combination of the abstract written note with the concrete voice, of the ideal thought of the composer with the individuality of the performer. The composer was to give only the general, the abstract; while all that depend-

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The Lishteenth Century

ed upon individual differences, and material peculiarities, was given up to the singer. The composer gave the unchangeable, the big notes, constituting the essential, immutable form, expressing the stable, unvarying character; the singer added the small notes, which filled up and perfected the part of the form which depended on the physical material, which expressed the minutely subtle, ever-changing mood. In short, while the composer represented the typical, the singer represented the individual. 22 We read much about abuses on the part of the eighteenth-century opera singers, but we are seldom told why these abuses were tolerated, being tacitly allowed to infer that audiences and composers were either blind to the evil or too supine to resent it. This was not so. The abuses were recognized, but they were endured because they seemed to be inseparable from the system out of which they grew and because, on the whole, people liked the system. The principle of absolute dominance of the aria in the form entailed the absolute dominance of the singer in performance, and in their submission to this principle, audiences, composers, and poets alike allowed excesses on the part of the singers that would not have been endured in another age. Only rarely was even an autocrat like Handel (who had the incidental advantage of combining the offices of composer and manager in one person) able to control them, and then only by an extraordinary combination of tact, patience, humor, personal force, and even threats of physical violence. But usually the singers reigned supreme. Metastasio might insist all he pleased that poetry should be the" dictator" in opera, and complain of the mutilation of his dramas by "those ignorant and vain vocal heroes and heroines, who having substituted the imitation of flageolets and nightingales for human affections, render the Italian stage a national disgrace," but he was powerless to alter a situation that his own works had contributed so much to bring about. 23 A lively, though unquestionably exaggerated, picture of the singers may be drawn from the critical and satirical writings of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 24 The most famous satire was II teatro alia moda, by Benedetto Marcello (r686-r739), himself a composer.25 Marcello's work is in the form of ironically worded counsels to everyone connected with opera,

Lee, Studies. II7-18. 23. Burney, Memoirs, 2:325; 3:43 24. Muratori. Della peifetta poesia, 2:30-45 (but see the refutation in Mattheson, Die neueste Untersuchung); Rosa, "La musica";Adimari, "Satira quarta"; and the memoirs ofDa Ponte and Goldoni. See also Goldschmidt, "Die Oper und ihre Literature bis 1752," in his Die Musikasthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts, 272-87; Cametti, "Critiche e satire"; Frati, "Satire di musicisti." 25. See Pauly, "Benedetto Marcello's Satire." Modern editions of II teatro alia moda are available in' Italian (E. Fondi, I913;A. D'Angeli, 1927), French (E. David, 1890), German (A. Einstein, 1917), and English (R. Pauly, 1948); selections also in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 518-31. 22.

Opera Seria: General Characteristics

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from the poets and composers down to the stagehands and singing teachers. The composer, he says, "will hurry or slow down the pace of an aria, according to the caprice of the singers, and will conceal the displeasure which their insolence causes him by the reflection that his reputation, his solvency, and all his interest are in their hands.,,26 As for the director, he "will see that all the best songs go to the prima donna, and if it becomes necessary to shorten the opera he will never allow her arias to be cut, but rather other entire scenes.,,27 If a singer has a scene with another actor, whom he is supposed to address when singing an air, he will take care to pay no attention to him, but will bow to the spectators in the loges, smile at the orchestra and the other players, in order that the audience may clearly understand that he is the Signor Alipi Forconi, Musico, and not the Prince Zoroaster, whom he is representing. . . . All the while the ritornello of his air is being played the singer should walk about the stage, take snuff, complain to his friends that he is in bad voice, that he has a cold, etc., and while singing his aria he shall take care to remember that at the cadence he may pause as long as he pleases, and make runs, decorations, and ornaments according to his fancy; during which time the leader of the orchestra shall leave his place at the harpsichord, take a pinch of snuff, and wait until it shall please the singer to finish. The latter shall take breath several times before finally coming to a close on a trill, which he will be sure to sing as rapidly as possible from the beginning, without preparing it by placing his voice properly, and all the time using the highest notes of which he is capable. 28 The cadenzas and ornaments to which Marcello here alludes were carefully prepared beforehand: If [a singer] have a role in a new opera, she will at the first possible moment take all her arias (which in order to save time she has had copied without the bass part) to her Maestro Crica so that he may write in the passages, the variations, the beautiful ornaments, etc.-and Maestro Crica, without knowing the first thing about the intentions of the composer either with regard to the tempo of the arias, or the bass, or the instrumentation, will write below them in the empty spaces of the bass staff everything he can think of, and in very great quantity, so that the Virtuosa may

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harmony. In the harmonic idiom itself, Verdi never went to Wagnerian lengths of chromaticism, though no composer was more alive to the effectiveness of a few judicious chromatic alterations. He was also aware of the broadening conceptions of tonality that prevailed at this time, as witness the freedom of his harmonic vocabulary and the range of his modulations. 52 Inasmuch as it has been claimed that Verdi in his later operas was imitating the Wagnerian music drama, it may be well not only to emphasize again the continuity of the musical style of Otella with that of Verdi's preceding works but also to point out certain fundamental differences that remain between the two composers. In the first place, Otella and FalstaIr are both singers' operas; in spite of the greater independence of the orchestra, it is never made the center of the picture, and the instrumental music does not have either the self-sufficiency or the symphonic range of development that it has in Wagner. Second, Verdi never adopted a system of leading motifs; the formal unity of

52. See, for example. the tonal. scheme of the duet at the end of Act I: G-flat-F-C-E-D-flat.

+14

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his operas is like that of the classical symphony rather than the Romantic tone poem, that is, a union of relatively independent individual numbers with themes recurring only in a few exceptional cases. Third,Verdi's operas are human dramas, not myths. Their librettos have no hidden world, no symbolism, no set of meanings below the surface. They are free of any trace of the Gesamtkunstwerk or other theories. And finally, there is about Verdi's music a simplicity, a certain Latin quality of serenity, which the complex German soul of Wagner could never encompass. It is a classic, Mediterranean art, self-enclosed within limits that by their very existence make possible its perfection. As Otello was the climax of tragic opera, so Falstaff (1893) represented the transfiguration of opera buffa. Written on a libretto arranged by Boito from Shakespeare's Merry Wives if Windsor and the Falstaff episodes from the two parts of Henry IV, it is not only a remarkable achievement for an octogenarian but a magnificent final crescendo of a great career. 53 Excelling all earlier works in brilliancy of orchestration, wealth of spontaneous melody, and absolute oneness of text and music, it is a technical tour de force, abounding in the most subtle beauties, which often pass so quickly that only a close acquaintance with the score enables the listener to perceive them all. Because of this very fineness of workmanship and perhaps also because of the profound sophistication of the ideas underlying the music, 54 Falstaff has never become so popular with the public as any of the other three comic operas with which alone it can be compared-Mozart's Figaro, Rossini's Barbiere, and Wagner's Meistersinger. Faist,!!! is the kind of comedy that can be imagined only by an artist who is mature enough to know human life and still be able to laugh. The score is a blend of traditional forms and free structures, with the musical design governed solely by the demands of the drama. The vocal lines consist oflively tunes, devoid of melismas; the orchestration is light and delicately colored. Throughout the score, various operatic traditions are parodied. Interestingly, the composer parodied himself in the conspiracy scene at the end of the first part of Act III. Verdi took his leave of opera with a jest at the whole world, including the art of music: Falstaff ends with a fugue, that most learned of all forms of composition, to the words "Tutto nel mondo e burla" (All the world's a joke). At the beginning of the opera, Falstaff is alienated from society; at the end, he

53. Following the premiere in Milan, the La Scala opera company took Falstaff on the road with performances in Genoa, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Berlin. The opera, in a French-language version, was also presented in Paris, presumably in the spring of I 894. In the course of all these productions, Verdi made a number of significant changes to the score, with most of them designed to improve the pace of the dramatic action. Ricordi published several versions of Falstaff, including a French version, but no one version takes precedent over the others, for each has its merits. 54. Cf. Noske, "Ritual Scenes in Verdi's Operas." See also Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff.

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becomes an accepted part of the social structure, with a reunion of all the characters mirrored in the polyphonic equality of the fugue.

-J]oito and Ponchie[U Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) was more than a librettist; he was also a novelist, composer, and critic. 55 In his writings, he was extremely outspoken about the degree of conformity within the Italian operatic tradition; at the same time, he expressed interest in a type of opera that would permit a union of the arts. Boito admired Wagner and had been one of his ardent Italian disciples but in later years was converted to Verdi by the music of Aida and the Requiem. The precepts of operatic composition advocated by Boito in prose did not find manifestation in his own opera, Mifistofele, of which he wrote both libretto and music. The premiere of Mifistofele at La Scala in 1868, which he himself conducted, was a disastrous failure. His score was the target of criticism from the traditionalists, who were determined to thwart the aspirations of one whose sympathies were with the Scapigliati, an association of musicians, artists, and other intellectuals who in the mid-186os and 1870S focused upon freeing artistic creativity from the shackles of tradition. Seven years later, Boito brought forth a revised score of Mifistofele, one in which the portions that caused a furor in 1868 were eliminated. Other changes that showed Boito finally gave in to the traditionalists included the recasting of the role of Faust from a baritone to a tenor and the addition of a few numbers, such as the duet "Lontano, lontano, lontano."This new version of Mifistofele, consisting of a prologue and four acts, was first staged at Bologna in 1875, to considerable acclaim. With it, Boito presents a score that he has painted with bold strokes of originality, showing little dependence on what had become the conventional fourfold structure (tempo d'attacco, cantabile, tempo di mezzo, cabaletta) for operatic scenes. Mifistofele holds much closer to the model of Goethe's Faust than either Berlioz's or Gounod's settings. The score includes many marginal Wagner-like disquisitions on the characters and events of the drama. Boito 's music is interesting and original in many respects but Mifistofele, although still fairly often performed, has never become as great a popular success as Gounod's more conventional work. Mifistofele was the only opera Boito completed. Nerone

55. For an overview of Italian operas that had successful premieres in the twenty-two-year period hetween Verdi's Aida and Falstaff, see Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 1871-1893. On Boito, see biographies by Nardi and Mariani; Nicolaisen, Italian Opera (chap. 4). See also Boito, Tutti gli scritti; Scarsi, Rapporto poesia-musica; Smith, The Tenth Muse. An important collection of letters is contained in Medici and Conati, eds., Carteggio Verdi-Boito.

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was left unfinished at his death but was given in 1924 in a version arranged by Arturo Toscanini and Vicenzo Tommasini. 56 Whereas Boito was a leader among the "advanced" Italian composers of the 1860s, the chief figure among the "conservative" group, which found its ideal in the operas ofVerdi's middle period, was Amilcare Ponchielli (183486).57 He had several operas produced prior to making a successful debut at La Scala with I Lituani (1874). Antonio Ghislanzoni, author of the text for Verdi's Aida, was the librettist. Ponchielli's score was acclaimed for its orchestration, its large scale choral numbers, and especially for the instrumental music of the overture and the lengthy ballet, a feature that is also prominent in his La Gioconda and II figliuol prodigo. In I Lituani the duet prevails, not the aria (of which there are only two in the opera), as the primary vehicle for advancing the drama. La Gioconda (1876), with libretto by Boito, is Ponchielli's most famous opera and it still holds the stage in Italy and elsewhere. It is an old-fashioned melodramatic work, in which the heroine commits suicide as a way to help two lovers escape. Although La Gioconda achieved considerable success at its La Scala premiere, the opera was nevertheless revised by the composer for each of its subsequent productions in Venice (1876), Rome (1877), and Milan (1880), this last providing the definitive version. Several aspects of the Gioconda score deserve special notice. One can be found in the contrapuntal writing that pervades many parts of the score. Another occurs in the finale to Act III: the orchestra concludes the act with a fortissimo and largamente restatement of the main melody that prevails in the preceding vocal number. Use of recurring thematic material in this manner to conclude a major structural division of an opera was to become a feature of works by Italian composers who succeeded Ponchielli.

56. In both Mtifistofele and Nerone, there exists a struggle for supremacy between opposites (the dualism of good and evil, God and the Devil) that defies resolution. See Borriello. Mito, poesia e musica nel Mefistofele. 57. See De Napoli, Ami/care Ponchielli: La vita, Ie opere; Nicolaisen, Italian Opera, chap. 3.

Chapter 21 The Romantic Opera in Germany

in music, one of the outstanding features of the nineteenth century, is nowhere more striking than in the rapid growth of the Romantic opera in Germany.l Before 1820 German opera was known outside its own country through a very limited number of Singspiele, of which Mozart's Die Zaubeljlote was the principal example. With the performances ofWeber's operas, especially Der FreischiUz at Berlin in 1821, German Romantic opera became fully established and its ensuing developments culminated in the worldwide triumph of Wagner's music dramas fifty years later. Since Germany displays more clearly and completely than any other country the effects of the Romantic doctrines on opera, it will be convenient to summarize here those features of German Romanticism that came to light particularly in German opera between 1800 and 1870. If we were to search for the most general principle of difference between the opera of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century, we should probably find it in the contrast between the idea of distinctness on the one hand and that of coalescence on the other. The contrast begins with the relation of the composer to his music. The eighteenth-century composer was a craftsman who stood outside the artworks he created; the nineteenth-centuTHE RISE OF NATIONALISM

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of this opera is original in style, of remarkable rhythmic vitality, varied in color, and admirably adapted to the stage~qualities that have assured its survival to the present day. Three other French composers of the late nineteenth century should be mentioned in passing, though their work is less important than that of Saint-Saens or Lalo: Emile Paladilhe (1844-1926), with Patrie! (r886); Benjamin Godard (r849-95), a composer of facile and pleasing mel-

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odies whose Jocelyn (1888) was long remembered because of one number, the "Berceuse"; and Isidore De Lara (1858-1935), English by birth and residence but most of whose operas, including the successful Messaline (1899), were written to French texts and produced in France. The outstanding French opera composer of this era was Jules Massenet (1842-1912),23 an exceptionally productive worker whose music is marked by characteristic French traits that we have already noticed in earlier composers such as Monsigny, Auber, Thomas (Massenet's teacher), and Gounod. First among these is the quality of the melody. Massenet's melody is of a highly personal sort: lyrical, tender, penetrating, sweetly sensuous, rounded in contours, exact but never violent in interpreting the text, sentimental, often melancholy, sometimes a little vulgar, and always charming. This melody determines the whole texture. The harmonic background is sketched with delicacy and a fine sense of instrumental color, and every detail of the score shows smooth craftsmanship. With no commitment to particular theories of opera, Wagnerian or otherwise, Massenet within the limits of his own style never hesitated to make use of any new device that had proved effective or popular, so that his works are not free of eclecticism and mirror in their own way most of the successive operatic tendencies of his lifetime. The subjects and their treatment also show the composer's sensitiveness to popular taste. Thus Le Roi de Lahore (1877) is an oriental story; Le Cid (1885) is in the manner of grand opera; Esclarmonde (1889) is Wagnerian; La Navarraise (1894) shows the influence ofItalian verismo; and Cendrillon (1899) recalls Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel. With Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1902) and its all-male cast, Massenet explored a different kind of opera. It is a miracle play, based upon a medieval legend, for which there could have been no public demand but which the composer treated with special affection and thereby created one of his best operas. Le Jongleur, in particular, should lay to rest the suspicion that Massenet's choice of subjects, as well as his use of certain fashionable musical devices, was motivated by a desire to give his audiences what he knew they wanted rather than by any inner impulsion. But there is no sacrifice of musical individuality in all this, and in the case of a composer whose instincts were so completely of the theater, who always succeeded in achieving so neatly and spontaneously just the effect he intended, it seems a little ungracious to insist too strongly on an issue of artistic sincerity. Massenet excelled in the musical depiction of passionate love, and most of his best works are notable for their heroines-unforgettable ladies all, of doubtful virtue perhaps, but indubitably alive and vivid. To this gallery belong 23. Biography by Harding. See also Massenet, Mes Souvenirs, and Salzer, ed., The Massenet Compendium.

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Salome in Herodiade (1881), the heroines of Manon (1884), Thais (1894), Sapho (1897), and Charlotte in Werther (1892). With these works should also be mentioned Therese (1907), one of the last operas of Masse net to obtain general success. 24 In Manon the melodramatic scenes (of which there are eighteen) are a prominent feature. Similarly styled scenes dependent upon this musical technique can also be found in several other Massenet operas and are noteworthy for demonstrating the degree to which he focused on this dramatic device. Although Massenet's preoccupation with melodrama was a prevalent feature of his scores, this style of dramatic composition ultimately exerted a substantial influence on operatic works composed in the twentieth century.25 Massenet traveled the main highway of French tradition in opera, and his natural gifts so corresponded to the tastes of his day that success seemed to come almost without effort. Nor was his style without influence, direct or indirect, on later French composers. But he was the last to produce operas so easily. Changing musical idioms and new literary movements had their effect on the next generation, giving its work a less assured, more experimental character. One of these literary movements was that known as naturalism. The word naturalism and the related word realism, however useful they may be in the study of literature or the graphic arts, are exceedingly vague when applied to music. Unless they refer to the unimportant practice of imitating everyday sounds by voices or instruments in a musical composition (as, for example. the bleating of sheep in Strauss's Don Quixote), it is difficult to see what meaning they can have that is related directly to music itself. What some writers call "realistic" or "naturalistic'" music is simply, in effect, a certain kind of program music; the realism is deduced not from the music but from an extra-musical fact (such as a title) about the composition in question. When we speak of realistic or naturalistic opera, therefore, we have reference primarily to the libretto; we mean that the opera presents persons, scenes, events, and conversations that are recognizably similar to the common daily experience of its audience, and that these things are treated seriously, as becomes matters of real moment, not with persiflage or fantasy as in an operetta. Such tendencies in late nineteenth-century opera grew out of earlier tendencies in literature. Thus Bizet's Carmen, the first important realistic opera in France and one of the principal sources of the Italian verisimo, was based on Merimee's story. The chief disciples of realism in later nineteenth-century French literature were Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola. The latter found

24. Several issues of L'Avant-scene opera are devoted solely to Massenet's operas. See, for example, nos. 61 (1984), w"rther; 63 (1986), Don Quichotte; 109 (1988), Thais; and 123 (1989), Manon. 25. See Branger, "Le MeJodrame musical dans Manon de Jules Massenet."

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a musical interpreter in Alfred Bruneau (1857-1934),26 Massenet's pupil and rival, the librettos of whose principal operas were either adapted from Zola's books or written especially for the composer by Zola himself. To the former group belong Le R~ve (1891) and L'Attacque du moulin (1893); to the latter, Messidor (1897), L'Ouragan (1901), and L'Enfant roi (1905). These works were concerned with current social and economic problems; presented in compact, tense situations with symbolical overtones, and in prose instead of the customary verse. Unfortunately, the rhythm ofZola's prose did not always inspire Bruneau to achieve correspondingly flexible rhythms in the music; the melodic line is declamatory rather than lyrical, but the regular pattern of accentuation indicated by the bar lines becomes monotonous. The music is austere; it is especially apt in the creation of moods through reiterated motifs, but with all its evident sincerity and undoubted dramatic power, the important quality of sensuous charm is often lacking. Nevertheless, Bruneau is significant as a forerunner of some later experiments in harmony and as an independent, healthy force in the growth of modern French opera, counterbalancing to some extent the Wagnerian tendencies ofD'Indy and the hedonism of Massenet. A fuller measure of success in the field of operatic naturalism was granted to another pupil of Massenet, Gustave Charpentier (1860-1956).27 The "musical novel" Louise (1900), his most important opera, exhibits a strange but successful combination of several distinct elements. 28 In scene, characters, and plot, Louise is realistic. Charpentier, writing his own libretto, has almost gone out of his way to introduce such homely details as a bourgeois family supper, the reading of a newspaper, and a scene in a dressmaking shop; many of the minor personages are obviously taken "from life," and sing in a marked Parisian dialect. The melodramatic closing scene recalls the mood of the Italian verismo composers. Charpentier, like Bruneau, touches occasionally on social questions: the issue of free love, the obligations of children to their parents, the miseries of poverty. But along with realism there is symbolism, especially in the weird figure of the Noctambulist, personification of "the pleasure of Paris." Paris itself is, as Bruneau remarked, the real hero of this opera. 29 Behind the action is the presence of the great city, seductive, mysterious, and fatal, enveloping persons and events in an atmosphere of poetry like that of the forest in Weber's Freischiitz. Its hymn is the ensemble of street cries, running like a refrain through the first scene of Act II and echoing elsewhere throughout the opera. To realism and symbolism is added yet a third 26. Biography by Boschot; see also Bruneau's own writings.

27. Delmas, Gustave Charpentier; Himonet, Louise de Charpentier. 28. Many of these same elements can be found in Charpentier'sJulien (I9I3), with its mixture of realism and regional color. 29. Bruneau, LA Musiquefranfaise, '54.

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factor: sentiment. The dialogue between Louise and her father in Act I is of a convincing tenderness, while the love music of Act III, with the often-heard "Depuis Ie jour," is not only a fine scene of passion but also one of the few of its kind in late nineteenth-century French opera that never reminds us of Tristan und Isolde--or hardly ever. It was the achievement of Charpentier to take all this realism, symbolism, and sentiment, holding together only with difficulty in the libretto itself, and mold them into one powerful whole by means of music. The score reminds one in many ways of Massenet: there is the same spontaneity and abundance of ideas, the same simple and economical texture, obtaining the maximum effect with the smallest apparent effort. The harmonic idiom is more advanced than Massenet's but less daring than Bruneau's. The orchestral music is continuous, serving as background for spoken as well as sung passages, and is organized by recurring motifs. A number of standard operatic devices are cleverly adapted to the libretto: Julien's serenade with accompaniment of a guitar, the ensemble of working girls in Act II (where the tattoo of the sewing machine replaces the whirr of the old romantic spinning wheel), and the ballet-like scene where Louise is crowned as the Muse of Montmartre in Act III. On the whole, it will be seen that when this opera is cited as an example of naturalism, the word needs to be taken with some qualifications. In any case, it is not the naturalism that has caused it to survive, for this was but a passing fashion. Louise remains in the repertoire for the same reason that other successful operas do: because it has melodious and moving music wedded to a libretto that permits the music to operate as an effective partner in the projection of the drama. Fashions in opera might come and go, but the operetta and kindred forms went their way unperturbed. 30 The line of French light opera, established in the nineteenth century by Auber, Adam, and Offenbach, was continued after 1870 by Charles Lecocq (1832-1918), whose best work was La Fille de MadameAngot (1872);Jean-Robert Planquette (1848-19°3), whose sentimental and still popular Les Cloches de Corneville came out in 1877; Edmond Audran (1840-1901), with La Mascotte (1880); and Louis Varney (1844-1908), with Les Mousquetaires au couvent (1880). Soon thereafter began the long series of popular operas and operettas, in a straightforward, attractively melodious vein, by Andre Messager (1853-1929),31 a distinguished conductor and facile composer. The first of Messager's many successful operetta productions occurred in 1890 with La Basoche, which enjoyed a run of some two hundred performances at the Opera-Comique. The libretto relates how a student is crowned "king" of an ancient law guild (the 30. For a definitive history of the operetta, see Traubner, Operetta:A Theatrical History.

3I. See Auge-Laribe, Messager, musicien de theatre; Wagstaff, Andre Messager: A Bio-Bibliography.

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Basoche), but in the process is mistaken for King Louis XII by none other than Princess Mary of England. La Basache, in an English translation, received rare reviews when it opened in 1891 at the Royal English Opera in London and it engendered a similar response two years later when it was performed in New York. From the 1890S until the 1920S, Messager created many memorable operettas, with some approaching the sophistication of aperas camiques: three of his greatest "hits" were Les P'tites Michu and Veranique, produced at Paris in 1897 and 1898, respectively,32 and Mansieur Beaucaire, at London in 1919.33 His works are distinguished by their superior craftsmanship. Exceptionally lively finales, replete with one melody following close upon another, clever orchestrations,34 and well-wrought duets (especially the "Donkey" and "Swing" duets in Veranique)-combined with excellent librettos-insured that Messager's music would long be remembered in Paris, London, and New York.

As Italians in the eighteenth century would have nothing to do with Gluck, so in the nineteenth they cared little for Wagner. It was not until the eighties that even Lahengrin began to be accepted. With the exception of Boito, no important out-and-out Wagner disciples appeared in Italy. There was considerable talk about Wagner and considerable skepticism as to the future ofItalian opera, but the only result of any consequence was to call forth a vigorous national reaction, of which the greatest monument is Verdi's Otella. Italian opera was too secure in its traditions and methods, too deeply rooted in the national life, to be susceptible to radical experiments, especially experiments resulting from aesthetic theories of a sort in which Italians were temperamentally uninterested. A mild influence of German Romanticism, but hardly more, may be found in a few Italian opera composers of the late nineteenth century. Alfredo Catalani (1854-93) is the most distinguished of this group. His principal operas are Loreley (189o--a revision of his Elda, which had appeared in 1880), Dejanice (1883), both in the grand opera tradition, and La Wally (1892), his masterpiece. 35 This last named opera reveals the

32. After the Paris performances, this operetta enjoyed an exceptionally long run in London (1904) before being staged in New York on Broadway in 1905. 33. All three have been recorded, but they have had few recent revivals. 34. The London Times took note of Messager's instrumental combinations in Monsieur Beaucaire, citing, in particular, "his dramatically effective use of a pair of clarinets backed by light pizzicato strings and an arpeggio on the harp." 35. See Gatti, Catalani: La vita e Ie opere; Pagani, Alfredo Catalani; Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 1871-1893.

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depth of Catalani's personal style. The libretto for La VVcilly is based upon Die Geyer VVcilly, a novelette by Wilhelmine Hillern, which appeared in an Italian translation in 1887. Although the score has arias and duets, La Wally is not structured along the lines of a number opera. Its seamless quality of composition blurs the divisions within a scene, even within an act. Guiding the musical shape of the whole opera is the motivic design-motifs linked with characters, with emotions, or with dramatic situations; their impact upon the audience is significant as the tragic events of the opera unfold. Catalani has a refined melodic style, nearly always free of exaggerated pathos, with interesting harmonies, and a good balance of interest between voice and orchestra. Along with traces of "Tristanesque chromaticism" are experiments in harmony and texture that anticipate some of the favorite devices of Puccini. The robust rhythms are notable, especially in the choruses and dances of La VVcilly, a work in which the lovers, La Wally and Hagenbach, perish in an avalanche. Of particular interest are the well-orchestrated instrumental passages that occur as music for the dances, preludes to Acts III and IV, or as moments of scene-painting. Unfortunately, Catalani appeared at a time when the Italian public was being seduced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo, which resulted in his reserved and aristocratic music being drowned by the bellow of verismo. Some influence of Wagner also seems to be present in the harmonies and the important position of the orchestra in the operas of Antonio Smareglia (1854-1929), whose chief work, Nozze istriane, was performed in 1895. Smareglia lacked the convincing popular touch in his melodies and therefore his operas were not greatly successful. Alberto Franchetti (1860-1942) has been called "the Meyerbeer ofItaly" because of his fondness for massive scenic effects, but his music, on the whole, is undistinguished. His principal operas were Asrael (1888), Cristoforo Colombo (1892), and Germania (1902). None of these composers was attracted by the verismo movement of the 1890s, which was the popular trend in Italy at that time. The most explosive reaction against Wagner was launched with the performance of Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) in 1890 and I pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1858-1919) two years later. Neither composer was ever able to duplicate the fantastic success these two works achieved, though Mascagni approached it with L'amico Fritz (1891) and Iris (1898),36 while Leoncavallo's Zaza (1900) became fairly widely known. 37 Mascagni and Leoncavallo, both small-town musicians, might never have had

36. Iris, considered to be a finer work than Caval/eria, may have served as a model for Madama Butterfly. See Mascagni, Mascagni parla, and studies by De Donna and Jeri. 37. Leoncavallo wrote his own librettos and shared in the writing of Manon Leswut and La Boheme for Puccini.

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their names grace the pages of opera history had they not won an opera competition. As prize-winners, their names soon became known in opera houses around the world and their one-act operas-Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci-continue as repertory works to the present day, usually given on the same evening as a "double bill." Cavalleria rusticana is fashioned from a story of the same title included in a collection of stories about the harsh realities of peasant life in Sicily, written by Giovanni Verga in 1880 and then transformed into a play in 1883. The opera takes place on Easter Day in a nineteenth-century Sicilian village, where Santuzza has been seduced by Turiddu, who also continues to express his love for a former girlfriend, now the wife of Alfo. When Alfo learns from Santuzza that he is being cuckolded, he challenges Turiddu to a duel and mortally wounds him. Separating the scene in which Turiddu's escapades are revealed to Alfo from that in which the duel takes place is an instrumental interlude that, in essence, is an aria for the orchestra. Pagliacci, a play within a play, is set in a southern Italian town and centers on a troupe of strolling players, one of whom plans to run away with her lover. Canio and his wife, Nedda, assume similar husband and wife roles in the play that they, as members of the troupe, are performing, but as the plot begins to mirror all too closely the real-life drama Canio suspects is taking place within his own marriage, he steps out of his role, stabs Nedda, and then, as her lover tries to come to her rescue, also kills him. Cavalleria and Pagliacci are the classics of verismo. 38 This typically Italian movement resembles French naturalism in the use of scenes and characters from common life, but the French naturalists used these materials as a means for the development of more general ideas and feelings, idealizing both scene and music, whereas the goal of the Italian realists was simply to present a vivid, melodramatic plot, to arouse sensation by violent contrasts, to paint a cross section of life without concerning themselves with any general significance the action might have. Verismo is to naturalism what the "shocker" is to the realistic novel, and the music corresponds to this conception. It aims simply and directly at the expression of intense passion through melodic or declamatory phrases of the solo voices, to which the orchestra contributes sensational harmonies. Choral or instrumental interludes serve only to establish a mood that is to be rent asunder in the next scene. Everything is so arranged that the moments of excitement follow one another in swift cli38. Verismo (truth) is a term applied to a phase of naturalism in literature and music, emerging in the late nineteenth century and characterized by the projection on stage of true-life realism-fierce passions, violence, and death. The relatively few operas that fall into the verismo category tend to be in one act so that a singleness of mood and situation can be presented without interruption. Verga's Cavalleria rusticana initiated the verismo movement. See Lang, The Experience of Opera, chap. 9, and Rinaldi, Musica e verismo.

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The Nneteenth Century

mactic succession. It cannot be denied that there was plenty of precedent in Donizetti and the earlier works ofVerdi for melodramatic situations in opera, but by comparison, the action of the veristic operas takes place as in an atmosphere from which the nitrogen has been withdrawn, so that everything burns with a fierce, unnatural flame, and moreover quickly burns out. The brevity of these works is due not so much to concentration as to rapid exhaustion of the material. Much the same is true of the verismo movement as a whole, historically considered. It flared like a meteor across the operatic sky of the r890s, but by the end of the century it was practically dead, though its influence can occasionally be detected in some later operas. in Italian opera of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century was Giacomo Puccini (r858-r924), who resembles Massenet in his position of mediator between two eras, as well as in many features of his musical and theatrical style. 39 Puccini's rise to fame began with his third opera, Manon Lescaut (r893), which is less effective dramatically than Massenet's opera on the same subject (r884) but rather superior in musical interest-this despite occasional reminiscences of Tristan, which few composers in the nineties seemed able to escape. The libretto for Manon was fashioned by Giuseppe Giancosa and Luigi Illica, in close collaboration with the composer. This same collaboration extended to Puccini's next three works on which his worldwide reputation chiefly rests: La Boheme (r896), Tasca (r900), and Madama ButteJfiy (r904). La Boheme, considered by many to be his finest work for the stage, is a sentimental opera with dramatic touches of realism, on a libretto adapted from Henri Murger's Scenes de fa vie de Boheme, which had been dramatized in r849 under the title La Vie de Boheme. Tasca, taken from Victorien Sardou's drama of the same name (r887), is "a prolonged orgy of lust and crime" made endurable by the beauty of the music, and Madama ButteJfiy is a tale oflove and heartbreak in an exotic Japanese setting. In all four of these operas, the heroines-Manon, Mimi, Tosca, and Butterfly-are doomed to death. Another characteristic these operas hold in common is the "sensuous warmth and melting radiance of the vocalline.,,40 It is like Massenet without Massenet's urbanity-naked emotion crying out, and persuading the listener's feelings by its very urgency. For illustrations the reader need only recall Rodolfo's aria "ehe gelida manina" and the ensuing duet in the first scene of La Boheme, the closing scene of the same work, or the familiar arias "Vissi d'arte" in Tasca and "Un bel di" in Madama ButteJfiy. The history of this type of melody is instructive. It will be remembered THE LEADING FIGURE

39. See studies by Carner, Ashbrook, and Osborne (the last with a synopsis of each opera). 40. Carner, Puaini, 273. Here Carner offers an excellent analysis of the composer's melodic and general musical style.

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+91

that in Verdi we encountered from time to time a melodic phrase of peculiar poignancy that seemed to gather up the whole feeling of a scene in a pure and concentrated moment of expression, such as the "Amami, Alfredo" in La traviata, the recitative "E tu, come sei pallida" of Otello, or the "kiss" motif from the same work. Later composers, perceiving that the high points of effectiveness in Verdi were marked by phrases of this sort, became ambitious to write operas that should consist entirely (or as nearly so as possible) of such melodic high points, just as the verismo composers had tried to write operas consisting entirely of melodramatic shocks. Both tendencies lead to satiety of sensation. These melodic phrases in Verdi are of the sort sometimes described as "pregnant"; their effect depends on the prevalence of a less heated manner of expression elsewhere in the opera, so that they stand out by contrast. But in Puccini we have, as an apparent ideal if not always an actuality, what may be called a kind of perpetual pregnancy in the melody, whether this is sung or entrusted to the orchestra as a background for vocal recitative. The musical utterance is kept at high tension, almost without repose, as though it were to be feared that if the audiences were not continually excited they would go to sleep. This tendency toward compression of language, this nervous stretto of musical style, is characteristic of the fin de siecle period. 41 The sort of melody we have been describing runs through all Puccini's works. In his earliest and latest operas it tends to be organized in balanced phrases, but in those of the middle period it becomes a freer line, often embodying a set of recurring motifs. These motifs of Puccini, admirably dramatic in conception, are used either simply for recalling earlier moments in the opera or, by reiteration, for establishing a mood, but they do not serve as generating themes for musical development. Puccini's music was enriched by the composer's constant interest in the new harmonic developments of his time; he was always eager to put current discoveries to use in opera. One example of striking harmonic treatment is the series of three major triads (B-flat, A-flat, E-natural) that opens Tosca and is associated throughout the opera with the villainous Scarpia (example 23.2) The harmonic tension of the augmented fourth outlined by the first and third chords of this progression is by itself sufficient for Puccini's purpose; he has created his atmosphere with three strokes, and the chord series has no further use but to be repeated intact whenever the dramatic situation requires it. One common trait of Puccini's found in all his operas from the early Edgar (1889) down to his last works is the "side-slipping" of chords (example 23.3). Doubtless this device was learned from Verdi (compare the passage "Oh! come e dolce" in the duet at the end of Act I of Otello) or Catalani, but it is 4I. The compression is also characteristic of Puccini's librettos; they often eliminate subplots entirely and usually observe the classical unities of time, place, and action.

The Nineteenth Century

192

EXAMPLE 23.2

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based on a practice common in much non-European music and one going back in Western musical history to medieval organum and ji1Ux-bourdon. Its usual purpose in Puccini is to break a melodic line into a number of parallel strands, like breaking up a beam oflight by a prism into parallel bands of color. In a sense it is an effect complementary to that of intensifYing a melody by duplication at the unison and octaves-an effect dear to all Italian composers of the nineteenth century and one to which Puccini frequently resorted. Parallel duplication of the melodic line at the fifth is used to good purpose in the introduction to the third act of La Boheme to suggest the bleakness of a cold winter dawn; parallel triads are employed in the introduction to the second act of the same opera, for depicting the lively, crowded street scene (a passage that might have been in the back of Stravinsky's mind when he wrote the music for the first scene of Petrouchka); and parallelism of the same sort, ex-

The Later Nineteenth Century

493

tended sometimes to chords of the seventh and ninth (as with Debussy), is found at many places in the later operas. The most original places in Puccini, however, are not dependent on any single device. Consider, for example, the opening scene of Act III of Tosca, with its broad unison melody in the horns, the delicate descending parallel triads over a double pedal in the bass, the Lydian melody of the shepherd boy, and the faint background of bells, with the veiled, intruding threat of the three Scarpia chords from time to time-an inimitably beautiful and suggestive passage, technically perhaps owing something to both Verdi and Debussy, but nevertheless thoroughly individual. Another device used most effectively is silence, the dramatic pause that heightens tension without words or music, as in the silence that follows Scarpia's murder in Tosca. An important source of color effects in Puccini's music is the use of exotic materials. Exoticism in Puccini was more than a mere borrowing of certain details but rather extended into the very fabric of his melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation. 42 It is naturally most in evidence in the works on oriental subjects, as in Madama Butteifly, with its authentic Japanese songs and pentatonic melodies, and Turandot (1926), Puccini's last opera. Turandot is set in China; it is based on Turandot, a tragicommedia of the eighteenth century by Carlo Gozzi and was completed after Puccini's death by Franco Alfano (1876-1954). The story concerns a legendary tale of a princess who requires men wishing to win her hand to solve three riddles. Failure to solve them brings immediate death. Prince Calef solves the riddles, and then he poses one for the princess, asking her to discover his name. If she does, he promises to give his life so that she will not have to marry him. So desperate is the princess to learn his name, she tortures the slave girl (who is in love with the prince) in hopes of learning his secret. The slave girl dies without revealing the name and the opera concludes with the union of Turandot and the prince. The score shows harmonic experimentation (for example, the bitonality at the opening of Acts I and II), the utmost development of Puccinian lyric melody, and the most brilliant orchestration of any of his operas. Puccini did not escape the influence of verismo, but the realism of his operas is always tempered by, or blended with, romantic and exotic elements. In La Boheme common scenes and characters are invested with a romantic halo; the repulsive melodrama of Tosca is glorified by the music; and the few realistic details in Madama Butteifly are unimportant. A less convincing attempt to blend realism and romance is found in La fanciulla del West, taken from a play by David Belasco and first performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910. Though enthusiastically received by the first American audiences, La

42. See Carner, "The Exotic Element in Puccini," with musical examples.

494

The Nineteenth Century

fanciulla did not attain as wide or as enduring a popularity as the preceding works. 43 His next opera, La rondine (1917), was even less successful. A return to works that were universally applauded was made with the trittico, or triptych, of one-act operas first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1918: II tabarro, a veristic melodrama involving adultery and murder; Suor Angelica, a miracle play; and Gianni Schicchi, the most popular of the three. In Gianni Schicchi, a delightful comedy in the spirit of eighteenthcentury opera buffa, the title character is asked by relatives to impersonate a dead man so that a new will can be drawn up, but in the process he manages to circumvent their wishes and becomes the beneficiary of the inheritance. Puccini's comic skill, evidenced also in some parts of La Boheme and Turandot, is here seen at its most spontaneous, incorporating smoothly all the characteristic harmonic devices of his later period. Only the occasional intrusion of sentimental melodies in the old vein breaks the unity of effect. Puccini was not one of the great composers, but within his own limitsof which he was perfectly aware-he worked honorably and with mastery of his technique. Bill Nye remarked of Wagner's music that "it is better than it sounds." Puccini's music, on the contrary, often sounds better than it is, owing to the perfect adjustment of means to ends. He had the prime requisite for an opera composer, an instinct for the theater; to that he added the Italian gift of knowing how to write effectively for singers, an unusually keen ear for new harmonic and instrumental colors, a mind receptive to musical progress, and a poetic imagination excelling in the evocation of dreamlike, fantastic moods. This instinct for the theater may have been inherited from his grandfather Domenico Puccini (1772-1815), whose operas-Il trionfo di Quinto Fabio (1810) and Il ciarlatano (1815)-also exhibit an exceptional sense for the dramatic and have remained popular to this day in Italy. Apart from these operas, Domenico holds special interest for his possible influence on the opening scene of Tosca, which is based upon a historical event that occurred at Lucca, an anti-Bonaparte city, in 1800. In that year Domenico was asked to compose a Te Deum to commemorate what was then believed to be a defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Marengo. Only after the Te Deum was performed was it revealed that Napoleon had prevailed after an initial setback. A scene based on this same event and its erroneous news occurs in Act I of Tosca, suggesting that the Te Deum performed in this scene may have been inspired by that of his grandfather. 44 of Puccini was Umberto Giordano (18671948), whose Andrea Chenier (1896) is the only one of his ten operas that is

A YOUNGER CONTEMPORARY

43. On this opera, see also chapter twenty-nine. 44. See Weaver, "In Tosca, a Touch of Family History."

+95

The Later Nineteenth Century EXAMPLE

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still accorded frequent performances. 45 It is like a rescue opera of the French Revolution period without the rescue: both plot and music show the influence of verismo in the exaggerated emphasis on effect at all costs (example 23.4). Luigi Illica's dramatically intense libretto relates the story of a poet who initially champions the French Revolution and then falls victim to the guillotine, along with the woman he loves. The score offers a number of notable lyric passages in the vocal parts, and some local color is provided by the incorporation of revolutionary songs ("

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Although A Life for the Tsar was more popular, the significant musical foundations for the future were laid in Glinka's second and last opera, Ruslan i Lyudmila (Ruslan and Lyudmila, 1842).10 The libretto is a fantastic and incoherent fairy tale adapted from a poem by Pushkin; the music, in spite of some traces of Weber, is more original than that of Glinka's earlier opera, and the musical characterizations are more definite. The system of recurring motifs here is almost nonexistent; the one important trace of it is the recurrent descending whole-tone scale associated with the wicked magician Chernomor and the forces of evil (example 24.2), possibly the earliest use of the wholetone scale in European music. But at least five distinct styles or procedures characteristic oflater Russian music appear in Ruslan: (I) the heroic, broad, solemn, declamatory style, with modal suggestions and archaic effect (introro. See Frolova-Walker, "On Ruslan and Russianness."

51 £

Other National Traditions

duction and song of the Bard in Act I); (2) the Russian lyrical style, with expressive melodic lines of a folk-like cast, delicately colored harmony featuring the lowered sixth or raised fifth, and chromatically moving inner voices (Finn's ballad and Ruslan's first aria in Act II); (3) depiction of fantastic occurrences by means of unusual harmonies, such as whole-tone passages or chord progressions pivoting about one note (scene of Lyudmila's abduction, toward the end of Act I); (4) oriental atmosphere, sometimes using genuine oriental themes (Persian chorus at opening of Act III), sometimes original melodies (Ratmir's romance in Act V), but always characterized by fanciful arabesque figures in the accompaniment and a languorous harmony and orchestration; and (5) the vividly colored choruses and dances, with glittering instrumentation and often daring harmonies (chorus in honor of LeI in the finale of Act I; Chernomor's march and the following dances, especially the lezginka, in the finale of Act IV)-models for similar scenes in Borodin's Prince Igor, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko, and even Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps. The first important Russian opera after Ruslan was Rusalka (1856) by Aleksandr Sergeyevich Dargomlzhsky (1813-69);11 the libretto is likewise on a text from Pushkin and somewhat similar in subject to Glinka's work. That Pushkin's writings so frequently form the basis for operatic compositions should come as no surprise to those familiar with his work. One person phrased his high regard for the author with these words: "Composing an opera on a subject by Pushkin-what an inviting idea; what a temptation that is for a Russian musician."12 Musically, Rusalka spoke a language intentionally different from Ruslan, for Dargomlzhsky sought to develop the dramatic rather than the lyric aspects of a national Russian style. Rusalka achieved an important first step in that direction with its realistic declamation of the recitative, a style of declamation Dargomlzhsky proceeded to develop to the highest degree in his last opera, Kamenni'y gost' (The Stone Guest). This work was completed after Dargormlzhsky's death by Cesar Cui, orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, and first performed in 1872. The libretto for The Stone Guest is, quite remarkably, nothing less than a word-for-word setting of the actual spoken drama of the same title by Pushkin, which is partially derived from the Don Juan story.Although this opera is no masterpiece and had little popular success, it influenced later Russian opera because of the composer's attempt to write the entire work (except for some songs near the beginning of Act II) in a melodic

II. See Pekelis, A. S. Dargomyzhskii i ego okruzhenie; Serov, Rusalka, opera A. S. Dargomyzhskogo.; Baker, "Dargomlzhsky, Realism, and The Stone Guest." 12. Quoted from Campbell's translation of Laroche's "Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in the Conservatoire Production," in his Russians on Russian Music, 245.

National Traditions of Opera

S13

recitative, a vocal line that would be in every detail the equivalent of the words. The result, though accurate in declamation and dramatic on occasion, lacks sharp characterization or melodic interest, and there is no compensation for the melodic poverty in the orchestral part, which is conceived as accompaniment rather than as continuous symphonic tissue. In his repudiation of set musical forms and his high respect for the words, Dargomlzhsky had arrived in his own way at certain features of the Wagnerian music drama, though there is no trace of Wagner in the musical substance. Harmonically, some interest attaches to Dargomlzhsky's use of whole-tone scale fragments as motifs for the Statue; some passages are constructed entirely on this scale. One of the more explicit and self-conscious disciples ofWagner in Russia was the critic and composer Alexander Nikolaevich Serov (1820-71),13 whose works add significantly to an understanding of that enigmatic period separating the T830S and 1870s. Yudif (Judith, 1863), Rogneda (1865), and Vrazhya sila (The Power of Evil),14 completed by his widow and Nikolay Solovyov and first performed in 1871, are three quite different expressions of Serov's operatic style. Judith, based on a story from the Apocrypha, was Serov's first successful opera. The musical material, fashioned to complement scenarios rather than specific words, achieves a continuous flow of emotions through a flexibility of forms and tonal centers. In short, the opera shows the composer's admiration for all the methods of grand opera of the Meyerbeer and early Wagner type. Rogneda was even more popular than Judith. It concerns the historical Vladimir the Great and his jealous wife, Rogneda, who is sentenced to death for attempted murder but, through the intervention of a chorus of Christian pilgrims, has her life spared. This is grand opera with a new and different degree of operatic realism, one that brought historical realism into the social realm of the theater. In Serov's final work for the stage, there emerges yet another manifestation of realism-the incorporation of folk music as the vehicle of the musical drama. The Power of Evil is derived from Don't Live as You'd Like To, But Live as God Commands, one of a group of plays from the I850S by Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky. In this play, Ostrovsky used folksongs to clothe the dramatic events with an aura of national identity. Serov's opera carries forth this nationalistic realism, combining authentic folksongs (mainly those found in Ostrovsky's play) with adaptations of folksongs fashioned to meet the artistic needs of the score. 1S Although Serov's operas won little regard from musicians and critics during his life13. Abraham, "The Operas of Serov"; Gozenpud, Russkii opernyi teatr; Taruskin, Opera aHd Drama in Russia; biography by Khubov. 14. Vrazhya sila has been variously translated as Hostile Power (see Abraham's "The Operas ofSerov"), The Power of Evil (see Grout, 3rd ed. of A Short History of Opera), and The Power of the Fiend (see The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. "Solov'yov"). 15. For a table listing these folksong sources, see Taruskin. Opera alld Drama in Russia, 171.

514

Other Nationa[ Traditions

time,16 they were nevertheless popular enough with the public to remain in the repertoire of Russian opera companies until World War I. From about the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian musicians were divided into two groups. In one were the professional, foreign-trained, and officially supported composers who were not primarily interested in musical nationalism but wished to see Russian musical life develop along the same hues as in Western Europe, particularly Germany. The head of this school was Anton Rubinstein (1829-94),17 a famous pianist and the founder and first director of the Imperial Conservatory at St. Petersburg. Of Rubinstein's nineteen operas (eight on Russian and eleven on German texts), Demon (1875) had a considerable success both in Russia and abroad. Its libretto strongly recalls Wagner's Fliegende Hollander, but the forms are conventional and the musical style is that of pre-Wagnerian Romanticism mingled with some oriental elements. Musically more interesting, though less popular, was Kupets Kalashnikov (The Merchant Kalashnikov, 1880). Rubinstein's biblical operas, or rather stage oratorios, such as Die Makkabaer (The Maccabees, 1875), which had successful performances in Russia and abroad, are remembered now only for a few separate numbers. The leading composer of the non-nationalist school was Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840-93), in whom Slavic temperament and German training were leavened by lyrical genius and a lively appreciation of Italian opera and French ballet. IS Reckoned by bulk, if not also by musical excellence, Tchaikovsky's achievement is as important in the field of opera as in that of the symphony. In three early works, he experimented with the then-fashionable nationalism- Voyevoda (The Provincial Governor, 1869),19 Oprichnik (1874), and Kuznets Vakula (Vakula the Smith, 1876), his only comic opera. Tchaikovsky composed Vakula the Smith for a competition and although he won, the opera did not fare well when produced. Tchaikovsky thought enough of the score, however, that he revised it in 1885 as Cherevichki (The Slippers, 1885) and in this version it has had numerous revivals. At Moscow in 1879, Tchaikovsky produced his masterpiece, Yevgeny Onegin (Eugene Onegin).20 With respect to both the libretto (after Pushkin) and the musical style, this is an old-fashioned Romantic opera, but the music is in Tchaikovsky's happiest vein, with graceful melodies, expressive harmonies,

16. One of his critics wasVladimirVasil'evich Stasov (1824-1906); see note 30 below. 17. Biographies by Alexeyev and Barenboim. 18. D. Brown, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study; Warrach, Trhaikovsky; Abraham, ed.,

Tchaikovsky: A Symposium; Iarustovskii, Opemaia dramaturgiia Chaikovskogo; Mllzykal'noe nasledie Chaikovskogo. See also Tchaikovsky, Diaries; Zagiba, Tschaikovskij; Al'shvang, l' I. Chaikovskii; Berliand-Chernaia, Push kin i Chaikol'skii. 19. Abraham, "Tchaikovsky's First Opera." 20. Gozenpud, Russkii opemyi teatr XIX I'eka, 3:152-68.

National Traditions of Opera

515

transparent and imaginative orchestration-trite and living in expression without the hysterical emotionalism of some of the later symphonic works. The ballet music (particularly the waltz in Act II) is tuneful and charming, as are also the choruses in Act 1. The character of the heroine, Tatyana, is delineated with especial sympathy, and that of Onegin himself is scarcely less vivid. Nowhere is this more evident than in the famous letter scene, the first section of the opera that Tchaikovsky composed. Here Tatyana reveals to Onegin her innermost thoughts and feelings. Tchaikovsky's next three operas were in a more heavily dramatic style. Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans, r88r), with a libretto after Schiller, was less successful than Mazepa (r884), from a poem by Pushkin. 21 The real Ivan Mazeppa, a Cossack overlord, lived from r640 to r709. During Peter the Great's campaign to reunite the Ukraine under Russian rule, Mazeppa considered the monarch an ally. That relationship changed some years later when Mazeppa decided he would usurp the leadership of the Ukraine by ousting the Russians from his native soil. He attempted to do this with the help of Sweden, but failed; Peter became so enraged with Mazeppa that he routed the Swedes and caused Mazeppa to go into exile. Mazepa is a dark and brooding historical opera that contains two of the composer's finest dramatic moments: the monologue ofKochubey and the extremely pathetic final scene in which Maria sings a lullaby to the dying Andrei, whom she has mistaken for a sleeping child. Charodeyka (The Enchantress, r887) had such a disappointing reception that Tchaikovsky returned to his more characteristic lyrical style for his last two operatic works: Pikovaya dama (The Queen of Spades, r890), his most popular opera next to Eugene Onegin, and Iolanta (r892). In The Queen of Spades, based on a melodramatic tale by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky attained a more nearly perfect balance among dramatic declamation, lyrical expressiveness, and divertissement music (see especially the ballets in Act II) than in any of his other operas. 22 The struggle for Russian national music, begun by Glinka and Dargomlzhsky, was carried on after r860 by a group of five composers: Balakirev, Cui, Musorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. 23 All were amateurs; only Rimsky-Korsakov-and he only at a comparatively late stage of his careerever had a thorough conventional technical training in composition. Balakirev wrote no operas. Cesar Antonovich Cui (r835-r9r8) wrote ten, but

2I. Portions of Pushin's verse-tale, Poltava (from which the Mazepa libretto is derived), are based upon letters exchanged between Mazeppa and Maria (his young lady friend) that were newly discovered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 22. See Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music; L'Avant-scene opera, no. 43 (1982) on Eugene Onegin and nos. II9-20 (1989) on The Queen of Spades. 23. Livanova, Stasov i russkaia klassicheskaia opera; Seroff, The Mighty Five.

516

Other National Traditions

most of them are not Russian in subject or musical style. 24 Of these ten, the most interesting is the intensely romantic Vilyam Ratklif (William Ratcliff, r869), the first opera by one of "the Five" to be staged. Initial reactions to Cui's opera were decidedly unfavorable and the work was withdrawn from production. The Russian national opera in its highest development, therefore, is the work of only three of these five composers. The lack of the usual technical musical education (which meant, at that time, a German conservatory training) had the effect of turning the nationalist composers to the resources of their own country for dramatic and musical material, and to their own instincts and national traditions for the means of shaping this material into operatic form. These conditions were especially important for Modest Petrovich Musorgsky (1839-81),25 the most original of the group, who in Boris Godunov (St. Petersburg, 1874) created one of the great masterpieces of nineteenth-century opera, a monument of much that is most typical in Russian musical drama and at the same time an absolutely personal, inimitable work. Boris was first composed in 1868-69 and then this seven scene version was rewritten in 1871-72 and performed in 1874. In 1896, Rimsky-Korsakov prepared a thoroughly revised version with "corrections" of the harmony, improvements in the orchestration, a different order of scenes, and many cuts; the deleted portions were restored in a second revision (1908), and in this form the opera made its way into the repertoire offoreign opera houses. After the revolution of 1917, the composer's own score was revived for performances in Russia, and this original version was published in 1928 .

The libretto of Boris Godunov was prepared by Musorgsky himself, using as sources Pushkin's drama of the same title and N. M. Karamzin's History oj the Russian Empire. The character of the half-mad emperor Boris (reigned 1598I605), especially as sung and acted by Fyodor Shalyapin, is one of the most vivid in all opera. An equally potent force in the action is the cruel, anonymous mass of the Russian people-a force visibly present in the mighty crowd scenes but also invisibly working like the relentless pressure of Fate at every step toward the catastrophe of the drama. With grim poetic vision, Musorgsky set this primeval force in the closing scene of the opera over against the figure of the Idiot Boy, who, left alone at the last on a darkened stage, keens his lament: "Weep, ye people; soon the foe shall come, soon the gloom

24. Cui, La 1'vIusique en Russie (1880), is the source of many misconceptions concerning the Russian national school. See Taruskin, Opera a",1 Drama in Russia, for a discussion of Cui as opera reformer, critic. and composer. See also Abraham, "Heine, Qucuille, and William Ratdiff'; Kyui, Izhrannye stat'i. 25. Biographical studies by Seroff and Orlova. See also M. Brown, ed., MusorJisky: In JlIemoriam, 1881-1981; Leyda and Bertensson. eds., The Muso~~sky Reader; Godet, En marge de Boris Godounof; Taruskin, ;1Alisorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue; idem, "Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky:The Versions of Boris Godunov"; Szabolcsi, Bausteine zu einer Gesellicllte der Melodie.

National Traditions of Opera

517

shall fall; woe to our land; weep, Russian folk, weep, hungry folk!,,26 One senses in such scenes the influence of the democratic ideals emerging in Russia during the sixties and seventies following the liberation of the serfs under Alexander II, ideals so eloquently expounded in the writings of Tolstoy. In comparison to the elemental power of most of Musorgsky's opera, the love episode (Act III) seems both dramatically and musically a pale diversion-as does most of the love interest in Russian opera generally. In form, Boris Godunov is a series of detached scenes rather than a coherently developed plot, thus illustrating the Russian habit, in both musical and literary creation (compare Tolstoy's War and Peace), of complete absorption in the present moment, leaving the total impression to be achieved by the cumulative impact of many separate effects. A striking feature of Musorgsky's music is the way in which, in the declamation, the melodic line always manages to convey the emotion of the text in the most direct, compressed, and forcible manner imaginable (example 24.3). Perhaps the best examples of this are the two most familiar scenes of the opera, the last part of Act II (including the "clock scene") and the farewell and death of Boris in Act IV Here Musorgsky realized the ideal of dramatic, semi-melodic recitative that Glinka had foreshadowed in Ruslan and Lyudmila and that Dargomlzhsky had sought in The Stone Guest. Much of the same gloomy power, though with less violence, is displayed in the monastery scene at the beginning of Act 1. A more songful idiom, equally characteristic of the composer, is heard in the first part of the inn scene (Act I, scene ii). Still more characteristic are the children's songs in the first part of Act II-examples of a psychological insight and musical style in which Musorgsky is almost unique and which he had demonstrated in his song cycle Detskaya (The Nursery, composed 1870--72). In all these songs, whether declamatory or lyrical, the melodic line is the guiding factor. It is a style of melody that, with its peculiar intervals (especially the falling fourth at cadences), monotonous reiteration of patterns, irregularity of phrase structure, and archaic modal basis, has grown most intimately out of Russian folksong. To this melodic line the harmony is generally a mere added support, but it likewise is of a strongly personal type, blended of modal feeling, impressionistic-often childlike-fondness for the mere sound of certain combinations, an unconventional harmonic training, and (one suspects) the happy outcome of improvisation at the piano. The harmony remains consonant and tonal; nevertheless, any effort to analyze a typical passage of Musorgsky according to textbook principles will show how completely foreign his methods were to the conventional practice 26. References are to Musorgsky's 1874 version, a piano-vocal score published by Chester (London, I926).

24.3 Boris Godunov, Act II

EXAMPLE

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National Traditions

01 Opera

519

of the nineteenth century. Not unrelated to the naivete of his harmonies is Musorgsky's reveling in raw, massive color effects. This trait is seen most clearly in the great crowd scene of the coronation, the orchestral introduction of which is also an example of the Russian mannerism of alternating chords pivoting on one common tone. The chorus itself in this scene is built on the same traditional tune that Beethoven used in his second "Razumovsky" Quartet. In r868, besides beginning the composition of Boris Godunov, Musorgsky also completed the piano-vocal score for Zhenit'ba (Marriage), an experimental chamber opera based on Gogol's comedy of the same title. In his setting of Gogol's colloquial prose, Musorgsky's cardinal aim was realistic expression at all costs: truth before beauty, melodic recitative "true to life and not melodic in the classical sense. . . a sort of melody created by (human) speech. . . intelligently justified melody.,,27 To this end, he avoided conventional formulae, evolving a style as restrained, economical, and incapable of successful imitation as that of Debussy. Of Musorgsky's other operas, the principal one is Khovanshchina, a "people's drama" on which he worked devotedly but spasmodically from r873 until the end of his life, leaving it unfinished after all. Completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, it was performed at St. Petersburg in r886. Musorgsky here took for his subject the conflict of the old feudal regime and the sect of the Old Believers with the new westernizing tendencies in Russia during the first years after the accession of Peter the Great (r689). Both libretto and music are as intensely national as in Boris, but the drama moves less vigorously and the musical style in general is less well sustained. 28 Nevertheless, the best numbers-including the prelude, the crowd scenes, Shaklovity's aria in Act III, and especially some of the choruses of the Old Believers, where Musorgsky seems to have distilled the very spirit of ancient Russian church style-are equal to anything elsewhere in his works. By temperament, Musorgsky was inclined to depict predominantly that side of the Russian character that gives itself over to gloom and mysticism, to the emotions of violence, brutality, and madness that predominate in Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina. A different, though no less normal, aspect of the national personality comes to life in Knyaz Igor (Prince Igor), an opera by Alexander Porfirievich Borodin (r833-87) that had been in the making for at least eighteen years but was left unfinished at the composer's death. 29 The li-

27. Letter to Stasov, December 25, r876, in Leyda and Bertensson. eds., The Musorgsky Reader, 353. 28. See Emerson, "Musorgsky's Libretti on Historical Themes." 29. See Dianin, Borodin; Kuhn, ed., Alexander Borodin; Bobeth, Borodin und seine Oper Furst Igor; Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia; Robinson, "If You Are Afraid of Wolves, Don't Go into the Forest: On the History of Borodin's Prince Igor."

520

Other Nationa! Traditions

bretto is by the composer, after a plan by the critic Vladimir Stasov;30 the score was completed by Alexander Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and orchestrated by the latter, and was first performed at St. Petersburg in 1890.The story is taken from a medieval Russian epic (apparently genuine, though long suspected to be an eighteenth-century forgery), but the central plot is of little importance except to give occasion for the many episodic scenes that make up most of the opera. Some of these scenes are comic, others are love scenes, but a large place is also reserved for spectacle, dances, and choruses (for example, the well-known Polovtsian dances in Act II). The musical ancestor of Prince Igor is Glinka's Rusian, and its principal descendant is Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko. The style of Prince Igor is predominantly lyric, with many of the arias in conventional Italian forms; there is some arioso writing, but little dramatic recitative in the manner of Dargomizhsky. Indeed, the music is not dramatic at all in the sense in which Boris Godunov is dramatic; it does not so much embody a drama as present a series of musical tableaux to accompany and complete the stage pictures. In technical details also it is less unconventional than Musorgsky's music; the most original portions are the oriental scenes, for which Borodin evolved an idiom partly based on Central Asian themes but fundamentally an outgrowth of an eighteen-year-Iong absorption in the subject and his study of all available musical and historical material. His ancestry (he was the illegitimate son of a Caucasian prince) may also have given him a particular bent toward this style, which, with its persistent rhythmic patterns, chromatic intervals, and melodic arabesques, dominates the second and third acts of the opera. Prince Igor, like Boris Godunov, makes some use of recurring motifs, but a more important source of unity is the derivation, unobtrusive but unmistakable, of many of the themes of Acts II and III from phrases in the melody of the first Polovtsian chorus. 3! If Boris Godunov represents a darkly fanatical aspect of the Russian character and Prince Igor a cheerful, hearty one, then the picture is completed by the works of Nikolay Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908),32 whose most characteristic operas reflect a fairy-tale world of fantasy, romance, and innocent humor. This individual musical and dramatic style ofRimsky-Korsakov 30. The important role played by Stasov in the shaping of cultural ideas in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century is explored in Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasov and Russian National Culture. Borodin did not fully complete the libretto before his death, thereby making the task of completing the score all the more difficult. 31.Abraham, Studies in Russian Music, '}2-41. 32. Seaman, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov: A Guide to Research; Gozenpud, N A. Rimskii-Korsakov; Hofmann, Rimski-Korsakov; Uvarova et al., eds., Opery N A. Rimskogo-Korsakova: Putevoditel [A Guide to Rimsky-Korsakov's Operas]; Abraham, Essays on Russian and East European Music (with reprints of his "Satire and Symbolism in The Golden Cockerel"; "Rimsky-Korsakov's First Opera"; and "Rimsky-Korsakov's Gogol Operas"); Griffiths, A Critical Study of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov.

National Traditions of Opera

5£1

was not arrived at without some experimentation, and even after it had been achieved, he still continued to experiment. 33 His first two operas, the grand historical drama Pskovityanka (The Maid if Pskov, r873) and the peasant-life comedy Mayskaya noch (May Night, r880), show the influence ofDargomrzhsky and Glinka. 34 The Maid of Pskov is in four acts made up of through-composed scenes. Especially noteworthy is the crowd scene of Act II, considered by many to be one of the most effective ever achieved in a Russian opera. In this Rimsky-Korsakov was following the somewhat radical ideas of a group of Russian composers known as "the Five;' who rejected the prevailing Italian opera styles and advocated the adoption of a vocabulary dependent on dramatic realism and nationalistic elements. In this Pskov crowd scene, the people are divided musically into five groupings, each simultaneously reacting to the events at hand. As the words and musical themes of these groups, expressed in choral recitative, clash, they generate the necessary dramatic tension that the scene requires. In May Night there are some obvious parodies of music in operas by Glinka and Musorgsky; for example, the village band recalls music from the finale of Ruslan and the chorus recalls choral music from the prologue to Boris Godonuv. Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden, r882), an opera based on a fairy legend with vaguely symbolic touches, was more spontaneous and original than the first two operas mentioned above, an indication that Rimsky-Korsakov was exploring new directions. Mlada (r892), in which some traces of Wagner may be seen, was adapted from a libretto that was to have been collectively composed by Cui, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin twenty years before, but this joint undertaking was never completed. Noch pered rozhdestvom (Christmas Eve, r895) was, like May Night, taken from a story by Nikolai Gogol. Both these works are village tales, with love stories and comic-supernatural additions; in both, folksongs play an important part in shaping the musical material. 35 In r898 appeared Rimsky-Korsakov's masterpiece, Sadko,36 an "opera legend," a typical combination of the epic and fantastic in a libretto adapted jointly by the composer and V. 1. Bielsky from an eleventh-century legend and drawing much of the musical material from Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic poem of the same title (r867, with revisions in r869 and r89r).The score is rich

33. Rimsky-Korsakov's operas fan into several distinct categories: historical/realistic; fairy tales; Gogol related operas; epics; and experimental, in which he explores non-Russian styles, as in the Chopin-styled Pan Voyevoda and the Italian-styled, Motsart i Sal'yeri. 34. There are three versions of The Maid of Pskov, with more than twenty years separating the first (1873) from the third (1895). See Abraham, "Pskovityanka." 35. The subject of Christmas Eve is the same as that ofTchaikovsky's vakula the Smith. See Taylor,

Gogolian Interludes. 36. See Tsukkerman, Sadko: Opera-bylina NA. Rimskogo-Korsakovo.

5££

Other N,/iona! Traditions

in orchestral and harmonic effects, with the instrumental evocation of an undulating sea and the whole-tone leitmotif for the sea-king's daughter offering two examples. Sadko was followed by several experimental works: the one-act Motsart i Sal'yeri (Mozart and Salieri, J 898), Boyari"nya Vera Sheloga (T71e Noblewoman Vera Sheloga, r898), and Tsarskaya IlCl'csta (The Tsar's Bride, I899), the last a real tragedy with arias and concerted numbers in the Italian style, "the old operatic convention of the first half of the nineteenth century decked out with Wagnerian leitlllotif~ and Dargomizhskian 'melodic recitative' and mildly flavoured here and there with the Russian folk-idiom.,,37 Skazka 0 Tsare Saltane (The Tale if Tsar Saltan, I900), another fairy story, returned to distinctive national traits in both libretto and music. Serviliya (I902) and Pan Voyevoda (1904) were unsuccessful essays in more dramatic plots, with Wagnerian influence in the music. Kashchey bessmertni"y (Kaschey the Immortal, 1902) was also Wagnerian in technique, with declamatory lines and constant use ofleitmotifs, as well as in the redemption idea woven into the legendary story; the music represents Rimsky-Korsakov's extreme excursion in the direction of chromaticism and dissonance. His last two operas were Skazanie 0 nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fellronii (Legend of the Inllisible City of Kitezh and The Maiden Fellroniya, J907) and Zolotoy petushok (The Golden Cockerel, 1909). They were written in the shadow of the Russo-Japanese War, during a period of intense political and revolutionary turmoil, the effects of which weighed heavily upon the composer's career. In 1905, when students (including those at the St. Petersburg Conservatory) protested against government policies and pressed their demands for reform, Rimsky-Korsakov openly endorsed their actions. This anti-government stand cost him his teaching position at the conservatory, but it did not silence his opera productions. Kitezh has been called "the Russian Parsifal," because of its mystical and symbolical story, based on two ancient legends. But beyond an evident aspiration to combine features of pagan pantheism and orthodox Christianity in the figure of the heroine Fevroniya, the symbolism is vague and not of fundamental importance. The Golden Cockerel, from a humorous-fantastic tale of Push kin, is more objective and ironic than Kitezh, even satirical, but equally unclear as to the detailed application of its moral. Other than a gradual growth in complexity of idiom and an increasing skill in the fabrication of piquant harmonic and coloristic effects, there is little that can be called an evolution in Rimsky-Korsakov's musical style through his fifteen operas-nothing remotely comparable to the change in Wagner from Die Feen to Parsifal. Rimsky-Korsakov was a lyrical and pictori37. Abraham, Studies in Russian Music, 248.

National Traditions 01 Opera

523

Scene from The Golden Cockerel by N . A. Rimsky-Korsakov. (FROM DESIGN IN THE THEATER)

al composer, resembling Mendelssohn in exquisiteness of detail as well as in the absence of strongly emotional and dramatic qualities. The realism of Musorgsky, found only in The Maid of Pskov, was not for him. Art, he once said, was "essentially the most enchanting and intoxicating of lies"-a statement that doubtless explains much in his own music. 38 The dramatic force of the last act of The Maid of Pskov and the serious musical characterization of Fevroniya in Kitezh are exceptional in his work; his most original, personal contribution, however, lies in another realm.

38. Quoted in Calvocoressi and Abraham. Masters of Russian Music, 4IT.

5£1

Other National Traditions

[He] must be granted the quite peculiar power of evoking a fantastic world entirely his own, half-real, half-supernatural, a world as limited, as distinctive and as delightful as the world of the Grimms' fairy tales or as Alice's Wonderland. It is a world in which the commonplace and matterof-fact are inextricably confused with the fantastic, naivete with sophistication, the romantic with the humorous, and beauty with absurdity. He was not its inventor, of course; he owed it in the first place to Pushkin and Gogol. But he gave it a queer touch of his own, linking it with Slavonic antiquity and hinting at pantheistic symbolism, which makes it peculiarly his. And musically, of course, he reigns in it undisputed. He invented the perfect music for such a fantastic world: music insubstantial when it was matched with unreal things, deliciously lyrical when it touched reality, in both cases coloured from the most superb palette a musician has ever held. 39 For Rimsky-Korsakov, an opera was primarily a musical rather than a dramatic-literary work; hence the importance of musical design, which frequently dominates both the poetry and the scenic plan (for example, the rondo form in the fourth tableau of Sadko). Along with this there is usually a definite association of certain keys with certain moods and, in most of the operas, a consistent use of recurring motives. These are not, as in Wagner, the material out of which a symphonic fabric is developed but rather are melodic fragments (sometimes only a phrase from a large theme) or even inconspicuous harmonic progressions, woven into the opera in a kind of mosaic pattern; they are as often given to the voices as to the orchestra. In the harmony, two distinct idioms are usually found in each opera: one chromatic, fanciful, cunningly contrived, for the imaginary scenes and characters (example 24-4); and the other diatonic, solid, often modal, for the "real" world. The vocal parts, as usual in Russian opera, alternate between melodic recitative and closed aria-like forms. In his lyrical melodies, Rimsky-Korsakov owes much to the model of Glinka; his own melodies are elegant and graceful, though marked by certain persistently recurring formulae. An important factor in his style is the extensive use of folk tunes and of original tunes of folksong type; the source or inspiration for many of these was his own collection of Russian folksongs, made in 1876. Church melodies are also occasionally used, notably in Kitezh. The oriental idiom, however, is much less extensive and less significant in Rimsky-Korsakov's music than in that of either Balakirev or Borodin. Like all Russian opera composers, he excelled in the depiction of crowd scenes, especially in The Maid if Pskov (Act II), Sadko, Kitezh (Act II and finale), and the humorous ensembles in May 39. Ibid., 422. Quoted by permission of the publisher.

EXAMPLE

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pression (example 25.3). The orchestral part is dissonant and percussive; the effect is altogether stark, quite in keeping with the grim, swift-moving text. Honegger is especially notable as a composer of the typical twentiethcentury combination form of opera-oratorio. His Le Roi David (1921) is a work of this type, as are also, in different ways, the "stage oratorio" Cris du monde (1931) and the "dramatic legend" Nicolas de Flue (194J). Most important in this category, however, is Jeanne d'Arc au bacher (1938), on a text by Paul Claude!. As in all his serious dramatic works, Honegger is here concerned with basic social and moral conflicts in the modern world, dramatized in historic-legendary characters of heroic stature. Like a medieval cathedral, Jeanne d'Arc unites sacred and secular, great and small, ascetic and sensuous, the solemn and the grotesque, profundity and naivete, in one vast structure of poetic and musical architecture. Solos, choruses, and ballets, Gregorian chants, dance tunes, and medieval and modern folksongs mingle in the complex, highly colored, music of Honegger; five speaking and five solo parts, a mixed chorus, and a children's chorus are required, in addition to a full orchestra. A minor but far from negligible French opera composer was Honegger's pupil Marcel Delannoy (1898-1962). His most successful stage work, Le Poirier de Misere (1927), is a "Flemish legend" set to music in the restless, dissonant style of the time. THE DRAMATIC WORKS of Darius Milhaud (1892-1974),22 most prolific of all

the twentieth-century French composers, may be divided into three groups:

22. Studies by Coliaer, Beck, Palmer, and Roy; Milhaud, Ma Vie heureuse; idem, Elltrrtirns aI'f( Claude Rostand; Rostand, "The Operas of Darius Milhalld"; Rosteck, Darius Milhauds Claudcl-Opem: Christophe Colomb und L'Orestie d'Eschyle.

59+

The Twentieth Century

Opera-oratorios: a trilogy, Orestie (composed I9I3-24), consisting of the operas Agamemnon (I927), Les Choephores (I9I9 in concert form, I935 on the stage), and Les Eumenides (I927); Christophe Colomb (I930); David (I954); and Saint Louis, roi de France (I972). 2. Short operas, surrealistic, ironic, comic, or satirical, all composed in the period from I924 to I926: Les Malheurs d'Orphee (1926), a chamber opera lasting about thirty-five minutes;23 the opera bouffe Esther de Carpentras (I938); Le Pauvre Matelot (I927); the previously mentioned operas minutes, with a total duration of approximately thirty minutes: L'Enlevement d'Europe (I927), L'Abandon d'Ariane (I928), and La Delivrance de Thesee (I928); and Fiesta (I958). 3. Heroic operas: Maximilien (I932), Medee (I939), and Bolivar (I950). 1.

To these may be added an early opera La Brebis egaree (composed I9IO-I5; performed, I923), the scenic cantata La Sagesse (I945), the mystery play LeJeu de Robin et Marion (I95I), and the three-act comedy La Mere coupable (I965), based upon the third "Figaro" play in Beaumarchais' trilogy. Milhaud also composed ballets, incidental music to plays and stage spectacles, and music for films. Le Pauvre Matelot, Milhaud's first big success, is a setting of a short threeact play by Jean Cocteau about a sailor who, returning home rich after an absence of many years, decides to test his wife's fidelity by telling her he is a rich friend of her husband who, he says, is about to return home in utter poverty. The wife, not recognizing him, murders the supposed stranger in order to get his money for her husband. The peculiar unreality of Cocteau's text is heightened by Milhaud's music, which is in a half-serious, ironic manner, constantly tuneful with sophisticated dissonant harmonies (see example 25.4). Similar musical procedures, in a more mocking spirit, are evident in the three operas minutes, parodies of Greek myths in the fashion of the old Theatre de la Foire. Esther de Carpentras, a modern, lightly satirical version of the biblical Esther story, is especially remarkable for the comic ensembles of Act I and the vivid crowd scenes of Act II. Of the operas of the Orestie trilogy (the dramas of Aeschylus in a translation by Paul Claudel), only Les Eumenides is set entirely to music. All three include massive choral portions, constantly polytonal in a dissonant texture of blended ostinato figures. Extremely sonorous and effective are the places in Les Choephores where the chorus, instead of singing, speaks in powerful rhythmic measures sustained by a large battery of percussion. Similar technical procedures mark Christophe Colomb. Its two parts and 23.This opera is made up of short scenes with set numbers (arias, duets, choruses), accompanied by thirteen instrumentalists.

Introduction / Opera in france and Italy

EXAMPLE

595

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twenty-seven scenes call for ten principal soloists, thirty-five other solo parts, three speaking parts, a chorus, and an orchestra reinforced by a special percussion section. Claudel's drama is conceived in epic-allegorical form, with a narrator and other external personages, presented in a series of tableaux that are explained, commented on, and connected by choral and spoken interludes with percussion accompaniment. The mystical interpretation of Chris-

596

The Twentieth Century

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top her Columbus is always at the forefront as the various scenes in his career unfold. The climax of Part I is a mutiny on board Columbus's ship; this part ends with a gigantic setting (in Latin) of the Sanctus. Part II takes us back to the inn at Valladolid, where the action began after the prologue, and there is an epilogue ending with a choral "Alleluia." Much of the music is in planar polytonal harmony-that is, with free dissonance arising from superposing motifs (often chord streams) in different tonalities, though as a rule no one motif is completely in a single key. The usual method of construction, except in the longest scenes, is to introduce one theme, establish it by ostinato-like repetition, then add successively one, two, or more themes, each of which is also usually treated in ostinato fashion. The various planes of harmony are kept distinct to some degree by contrasting timbres; and there is compensation for the static harmonic effect produced by constant complex dissonance in the variety and vitality of Milhaud's rhythmic patterns as well as in the monumental impression produced by this type of musical construction. Moreover, when the long-continued

Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

597

dissonance finally resolves to a simple chord at the end of a section, the intensity of the resolution is magnified. An example of this is the mutiny scene in Part I, where after a climax of four tonalities in the chorus and four in the orchestra (a total of seven different keys at once, one being duplicated), the whole resolves on a closing climactic triad ofB-flat major. Milhaud applied similar techniques to Maximilien, a historical opera based on a drama by Franz Werfel. Here, however, the degree of stylization surpasses that of any previous works: action, melodies, rhythms, all are ritualistic; even church hymns and military marches are indicated in formal, anti-realistic outline as parts of a tonal design rather than representations of actual happenings. But in Medee, his last opera staged at the Paris Opera, there is less of the monumental, less dissonance, more lyricism, and more interest in the individual figures of the drama. The restrained dramatic force of the scene of the preparation of the enchantments is remarkable. Most expressive are the slow, melismatic, long lines in the soprano role of the suffering Creusa, innocent victim of Medea's cruelty. Bolivar, with Christophe Colomb and Maximilien, completed a trilogy of operas on Latin American subjects. Like Medee, it concentrates on characterizing the persons of the drama, and it continues the composer's gradual trend away from the revolutionary character of his earlier works. David was commissioned to celebrate the three-thousandth anniversary of Jerusalem as the capital of David's kingdom; its music seems like a final summing up of Milhaud's operatic development, a synthesis in which all elements of his style appear, now transfigured and calm, within the broad framework of this festival opera-oratorio. ALTHOUGH BORN IN RUSSIA, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) composed his early operatic works in France.Those composed prior to 1926 include Le Rossignol (Paris, 1913-14), after a tale by Hans Christian Andersen,24 Renard (1922), and Mavra (1922), a short one-act comic piece on a Russian text. 25 The score of Mavra is stylized almost to the point of burlesque, with puppet-like characters; the action runs from beginning to end in a single breath of swift song over continuous music, eccentrically rhythmic and brilliantly scored for a small group of solo instruments. Stravinsky's large-scale opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (in concert form, Paris, 1926-27; in a stage production,Vienna, 1928) draws from Greek mythology.26 Its Latin text is a translation of Jean Cocteau's French version of Sophocles'

24. See Albright, Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale, chap. 4. 25. Performances of Mavra were sometimes coupled with Hindemith's Hin und Zuruck. See Campbell, "The Marva of Pushkin, Koehno, and Stravinsky";Taruskin, Stravinksy and the Russian Traditions. 26. On Stravinsky, see his Chroniques de rna vie; idem, "On Oedipus Rex." See also E. White, Stravinsky; Griffiths, Stravinsky; M6ller,jean Cocteau und Igor Strawinksy: Untersuchungen zur Aesthetik und zu Oedipus rex.

598

The Twentieth Century

drama. Oedipus rex is more oratorio than opera. All the "action" is narrated between the several "scenes," which consist of stark, block-like solo and choral numbers that magically convey the feeling of the ancient tragedyantique, impersonal, yet eternally significant. Stravinsky intended for the singers to be masked and mounted on pedestals, so they would appear as living statues. A chorus comments upon the action and the narrator, in modern dress, explains the unfolding of the story to the audience and therefore his is the only role that is in the vernacular. In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Stravinsky left France and came to the United States. Almost a decade passed before he was inspired to compose his next work for the theater: the full-length opera The Rake's Progress, set to an English-language libretto. The premiere, however, did not take place in the United States. It was an Italian opera company in Venice that agreed to bring the work to the stage. 27 ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING FRENCH OPERAS from the mid-twentieth century is Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963);28 it was first performed at Milan in January 1957 and then at Paris in June of the same year. In contrast to the composer's earlier satirical, surrealist comic opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1947) and his later tense one-act monodrama La Voix humaine (1959),29 Carmelites presents no ostentatiously novel features either in subject, form, or musical idiom. The theme of its libretto-written by Georges Bernanos after a novella by Gertrude von Le Fort-is the conquest of fear by divine grace. The central personage is a timorous young Carmelite nun caught up in the religious persecutions during the Reign ofTerror. She, along with an entire convent of nuns, defied the secularization decrees enacted in 1794 and willingly submitted to the guillotine rather than deny her faith. 30 The drama, developed with fine psychological perception and excellent balance between inner and outer action, had obvious and terrible implications for conditions in France in the 1940s, but its topical features are less important than its universal significance. The latter is powerfully communicated by Poulenc's music, selflessly devoted to the text and bound with it in a union

27. For a discussion of The Rake's Progress, see chapter twenty-nine. 28. Hell, Francis Poulenc; Poulenc, "Comment j'ai compose les Dialogues des Carmelites"; La Maestre,

"Francis Poulenc und seine Bernanos-Oper"; Daniel, Francis Poulenc: His Artistic Development and Musical Style; Buckland and Chimenes, eds., Francis Poulenc: Music, Art, and Literature; Rauhut, "Les Motifs musicaux de I' opera Dialogues des Carmelites." 29. In La Voix humaine, Poulenc shows his dramatic skills by sustaining, for forty minutes, the wide range of emotions expressed by a single woman engaged in a "farewell" telephone conversation with her lover, who is leaving her for someone else. Cocteau wrote the libretto for this monodrama. 30. One member of the convent survived and wrote her memoirs, which, in turn, provided the material for Le Fort's novella and the subsequent opera libretto.

Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

599

no less perfect than that accomplished by Debussy in Pelleas. These two operas are furthermore alike in the way they achieve profoundly dramatic results through restraint in the use of resources. Like Debussy, Poulenc connects the scenes within each act by means of instrumental interludes and makes unobtrusive use of recurring themes. The vocal solo lines, cast for the most part in quasi-melodic declamation (example 25.5), are kept in clear relief above the continuous, ever-changing, but always lucid and evocative orchestral sonorities. The chorus, used sparingly throughout most of the opera, comes into the foreground at the dramatically moving final scene. Altogether, Dialogues des Carmelites takes a worthy and, one may hope, a permanently honored place in the history of French opera. Another French-language opera that had its premiere in Milan was Votre Faust (1969) by the Belgian-born composer Henri Pousseur (b. 1929). Votre Faust offers a different concept of creating a music drama in that it calls for a cast of five actors (the principal protagonists, Henri and Mephistopheles, have spoken roles), four singers, and twelve solo musicians for the orchestra. Also used are a series of tapes. The story concerns a composer who accepts a commission for a Faust opera as his pact with the devil.As the creative process unfolds, the audience becomes involved by voting on what they consider to be the preferred dramatic outcome of the opera. of the twentieth century comes Saint Franfois d'Assise (1983) by Olivier Messiaen (1908-92).31 This is the only opera Messiaen composed in the course of his long and illustrious career, and it bears the unmistakable stamp of his style. 32 His episodic retelling of the life of St. Francis takes more than four hours to perform and requires a large chorus and orchestra, the latter augmented by extra brass, woodwinds, and three electronic instruments called ondes martenot. Messiaen's abundance of melodic motifs incorporating birdsongs and plainchant combines with rhythmically complex patterns to produce a serenely beautiful score that, nevertheless, is one of the most difficult to perform in the entire literature. That having been said, it is noteworthy that the opera has enjoyed additional performances, in whole or in part, staged and in concert form. The music for the monks, sung in chantlike fashion against an accompaniment of strings or winds, contrasts with that for the birds, which releases new and brilliant sounds from the orchestra in its depiction of nature. The chorus (numbering ISO voices at the premiere) has an extremely important role, acting as the voice of the unseen God or that of the heavenly realm. Messiaen also assigns choral voices to textless passages as FROM THE LATTER PART

31. Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music rifTime. 32. Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen; Hold, "Messiaen's Birds"; and studies by Bell,Johnson, and Nichols. See also Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language.

EXAMPLE

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Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

601

a means of heightening dramatic tension. The central character, St. Francis, is given a wide range of emotions to express, from the gentle response to the needs of the Leper to the powerful embrace of his spiritual pilgrimage, which is manifested in the scene following the bird sermon. In this scene, he musically ascends the cross by vocally moving up to a very high note on the word "croix."

ltaUan Opera Opera in Italy during the early 1900S continued without any noticeable break along the lines already drawn before the turn of the century. The leading composer at this time was Puccini, whose work has already been discussed (see chapter twenty-three). Along with the passing of the fashion for verismo, more and more Italian composers began to take an interest in other forms of composition as well as opera and to become more susceptible to the influence of current tendencies from abroad. It was a period of internationalism, even a certain amount of eclecticism. After Wagner came Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky in turn to stamp their impress, more or less distinctly, on Italian composers. Interest was aroused in symphonic and chamber music, as evidenced in the output of such men as Giuseppe Martucci (18561909) and Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914), while an important renewal of church music was led by Don Lorenzo Perosi (1872-1956) and Enrico Bossi (1861-1925).

Three Italian composers of the early twentieth century deserve particular notice: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948), Riccardo Zandonai (1883-1944), and Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952). The special talent of the German-Italian Wolf-Ferrari was for comedy, with librettos either adapted from the eighteenth-century Goldoni or of a similar type?3 These include Le donne curiose (Munich, 1903) and the one-act II segreto di Susanna (Munich, 1909), his most famous work. Susanna's secret is not that she has a lover, which is what her husband suspects because he is constantly smelling tobacco in the house; rather, it is that she is the one who is smoking tobacco. Wolf-Ferrari's only tragic opera, an experiment with some of the methods of verismo, was I gioielIi della Madonna (Berlin, 1911), a work strongly suggestive of Donizetti with modern trimmings in harmony and rhythm. The serenade in Act II, perhaps the best-known number in the opera, is a good illustration of the vivacity and rather superficial harmonic cleverness of the style. Zandonai, a pupil of Mascagni, was one of the last composers of the veris-

33. E. Bontempelli," II secreta di Susanna"; Pfannkuch, "Das Opernschaffen Ermanno Wolf-Ferraris."

60£

The Twentieth Century

Scene from Francesca da Rimini (Turin, 1914) by Riccardo Zandonai. (FROM

DAS 'IHlOATlO},

[1914J, 5:415)

mo school, and his work is full of the old traditional Italian opera devices. 34 Of his nine operas, Francesca da Rimini (1914) is his most important; it has maintained a consistent presence in the repertoire of Italian companies and has even had international revivals. 35 The tragic thirteenth-century love story, retold by Dante in Canto V of the Inferno and dramatized by Gabriele D'Annunzio, was reshaped into a libretto by Tito Ricordi. Zandonai's score is smoothly contrived as a mediant between symphony and theater, with its rich orchestration balanced by its reliance on highly skilled acting, and it is effectively designed to accentuate the passion and violence of the medieval 34, Chiesa, ed., Riccardo Zartdonai; Dreyden, Riccardo Zandortai; Maehder, "The Origins ofItalian Lit. Franccsca da Rimini." 35. For a discussion of the 1983 revival at tlie Metropolitan Opera, see Opera News (March 1984),

erature: .

Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

603

romance. In an attempt to convey a sense of the historical past to the audience, Zandonai called for instruments of the period, the lute and viola pomposa, to be used onstage. The decline of verismo and the effort to combine some of its features with the neo-romantic or exotic type of opera found in Puccini, Giordano, and others is one symptom of a new spirit in Italian musical life. Particular evidence is found in the operas of Montemezzi, especially L' amore dei fre re (1913) and La nave (1918), where the influence of both Wagner and Debussy is blended with a native Italian lyricism to produce music that is sound in workmanship, rich in instrumental color, conservative in idiom though not merely imitative, and of enduring beauty.36 L' amore dei tre re is one of the best Italian tragic operas since Verdi's Otello. Notable is the refinement of style: chromaticism is handled with intelligence and restraint, intensifYing the expression of feeling by the very refusal to dwell on obvious tricks of theatrical effect. There are memorable moments of classic breadth, as at the end of the love duet in Act II (example 25.6). The voice line is an admirable adjustment of vocal melody to a continuous symphonic texture; recurring motifs and a carefully worked out key scheme make a formal whole of satisfYing proportions.Altogether this opera-with its night-shrouded castle, its lovers swooning in sensual ecstasy, its tragic figure of the blind Archibaldo, its music that seems from beginning to end one low cry of voluptuous pain, delicately scented agony, and hopeless fatalism-is a work that exemplifies well the course of Italian opera at the end of the Romantic period: the ripe fruit of a dying age, the sunset of a long and glorious day. Some less well known Italian composers of opera in the first half of the twentieth century may be mentioned here. Ottorino Respighi (18791936),37 especially noted for his symphonic poems, wrote a number of operas in a neo-romantic idiom strongly influenced by impressionism. His first highly successful dramatic production came with La bella dormente nel bosco (1922), an opera for puppets that was an international triumph. His other works (with premieres in Milan, Hamburg, Venice, and Rome) include the comic and colorful Be!fogor (1923); La campana sommersa (1927); the spectacular biblical ballet Belkis (1930); the mystery play Maria Egiziaca (1932), which was the most popular of his operas in Italy; and La fiamma (1934), with a sumptuous orchestral texture. Respighi's last opera, Lucrezia (1937), was completed by his wife, Elsa, after his death?8 Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882-1949) had some operas performed suc-

36. Tretti and Fiumi, eds., Omaggio a Italo Montemezzi. 37. Biography by E. Respighi; Rostirolla and Battaglia, eds., Ottorino Respighi; Bryant, ed., 11 novecento musicale italiano tra neoclassicism e neogoticismo. 38. Elsa Respighi also wrote two operas: Aleesti (1941) and Samurai (1945).

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Introduction / Opera In France and Italy

605

cessfully at Rome, and his L'ospite inatteso (1931) was the first opera to have a world premiere broadcast by radio. One of the most prolific composers of this era was Lodovico Rocca (1895-1986). His works include II Dibuk (1934), which at the time of its premiere was one of the biggest operatic successes since Puccini's Turandot but has since been forgotten, and L'uragano (1952). Operas by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) composed prior to World War II include La mandragola (1926) and the marionette opera Aucassin et Nicolette (composed in 1938 but not performed until 1952 at Florence).39 His later operas were composed, for the most part, in the 1950S, but were not staged until the 1960s and 1970S. They include some in miniature style, some that fall into the category of the scenic oratorio, and others that are fu11length operas. To the last-named category belong The Importance if Being Earnest (after Oscar Wilde) , a three-act comedy staged in English at New York in 1975 and in an Italian version at Florence in 1984, and The Merchant of Venice (after Shakespeare), produced in an Italian version at Milan in 1961 and in an English version in Los Angeles in 1966. and innovations, a large proportion ofItalian operas produced after 192o-including some of the best as well as most popular works of this period-kept recognizably close to traditional forms and subjects and avoided any radical departure from accepted musical styles. In the favorable environment ofItaly, the tradition was carried on by Franco Alfano (1876-1954), whose selection as the person to complete the unfinished score of Puccini's Turandot was symbolical of his intermediary position in the history ofItalian opera. 40 Alfano had become known as early as 1904 for his Risurrezione; his most significant later works were La leggenda di Sakuntala (1921), a heavily tragic work of grand-opera proportions, and the one-act neo-Puccinian lyrical comedy Madonna Imperia (1927), whose vocal lines, alternating smoothly between melodic phrases and a lively, expressive arioso, are supported by luscious harmonies in impressionistic orchestral colors-a perfect match for the voluptuous text. The operas of Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968), although somewhat less conservative in their harmonies than those of Alfano, are nevertheless rooted in a conservative tradition. 41 In fact, Pizzetti, along with Zandonai and Respighi, signed and published in various newspapers a statement in which DESPITE MANY WELL-PUBLICIZED EXPERIMENTS

39. Castelnuovo-Tedesco emigrated from Italy in the late 1930S and took up residence in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1946.

40. Cinquanta anni di opera e halletto in Italia; Gatti, "Franco Alfano"; idem, "Recent Italian Operas"; Della Corte, Ritratto di Franco Alfano. 41. Biography by Gatti; fPizzettij, special issue of Mus;c moderna (1967), vol. I;Waterhouse, "Pizzetti in Perspective"; Maehder, "Die italienische Oper als 'Fin de siecle' als Spiegel politischer Stromungen im Ubertinischen Italien."

606

The Twentieth Century

they condemned some of the more progressive musical styles prevalent in their day and advocated a return to tradition. Pizzetti's operas have a continuous, full-bodied orchestral texture in a mosaic of recurring motifs. They are primarily lyrical in expression, with flexible speech-like vocal melodies and are characterized by extensive dramatic use of choruses (as in Act I of Debora eJaele) in a sensitive polyphonic style inspired by classical Italian models. A particularly important work among Pizzetti's early operas, and one of his best scores, is Fedra (1915), on a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio.A group of works to his own librettos include Debora eJaele (1922), Fra Gherardo (1928), and Lo straniero (1930). In all three of these operas, the dramatic action is conveyed by heightened declamation, the result of an almost perfect union of text and music. Little of any significance was produced by Pizzetti during the 1940s, but in the 1950S he came forth with several notable operas, among them Assassinio nella cattedrale (Milan, 1958) to his own libretto, fashioned from an adaptation and translation ofT. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, and Clitennestra (1965), his last opera. Although most of his operas were well received when first presented, interest in them soon waned to the point where few revivals, if any, occurred in Italy after 1980. Comedy on contemporary subject matter was not a prominent feature of Italian opera under the Fascist government. Composers preferred to seek material in the safe and distant past, producing such works as Tre commedie goldoniane (1926) by Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973),42 which offers three short comedies after Goldoni in concentrated musical settings, for the most part in lively parlando recitative over a continuous orchestra, and La donna serpente (1932) by Alfredo Casella (1883-1947),43 based on a tale by Carlo Gozzi. These operas exemplifY well the Italian neo-classical movement. The trend away from operas of gigantic size and toward a revival of classical subjects, light ballet-like pieces, and eighteenth-century opera buffa is particularly evident in Malipiero's trilogy L'Oifeide (1925) and Casella's one-act La Javola d'Oifeo (1932), both using the Orpheus theme. Malipiero's trilogy is most interesting formally: the middle section consists of seven short detached scenes (sette canzonO, preceded by a prologue in the style of the opera buffa and followed by a semi-satirical epilogue, in which a puppet show is introduced. A similar technique of brief, concentrated action is found in Malipiero's Torneo notturno (1930), seven night scenes that revolve around the two principal characters, Desperate Man and Carefree Man. Expressions of the contemporary political milieu can be found in other

42. M. Bontempelli, Cian Francesco Malipiero; Messinis, ed., Omaggio a Malipiero; Catti, ed., L'opera di Cian Francesco Malipiero; Waterhouse, "The Emergence of Modern Italian Music"; idem, La musica di

Cian Francesco Malipiero. 43. D'Amico and Gatti, eds., Alfredo Casella; see also Casella's memoirs, I segreti della giara.

Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

607

operas by these same two composers. In If deserto tentato (1937), a "mystery in one act" inspired by Mussolini's Ethiopian adventure, Casella aimed at reflecting the "poetic exaltation of the civilizing mission of a great nation" in music of a rather simple oratorio-like style with massive choral sections. Malipiero's Giulio Cesare (1936), based on Shakespeare's play, was also conceived, at least in part, as a gesture of acclaim to Mussolini. Its heroic subject and longer continuous structure are to be found also in Malipiero's Antonio e Cleopatra (1938). His basically diatonic writing in I capricci di Callot (1942) contrasts with the more dissonantly complex sounds of his postwar Venere prigioniera (1957), reminiscent of the first phase of his works for the stage. In his final phase, Malipiero reviewed the varied styles of his operas in Gli eroi di Bonaventura (1969), an anthology of excerpts from earlier works, designed perhaps to signal the composer's farewell to the theater. Other operas followed, however, and his stage career concluded with L'Iscariota (1971). His nephew, Riccardo Malipiero (b. 1914), has written several comic operas: Minnie la candida (1942); La donna e mobile (1954), a bitterly satirical television opera that incorporates twelve-note technique and Sprechgesang; and Battono alla porta (1961), which uses electronic effects. His most recent opera is L'ultima Eva (1995). Adventurous were the politically motivated works. Intolleranza 1960 (Venice, 1961) by the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-91) is conspicuous among postwar examples. 44 It is an azione scenica (scenic action) on a libretto that, while incorporating Communist quotations and slogans, is nevertheless conceived as a protest against authoritarianism rather than as party-line propaganda. The music, as is typical for Nono, includes various novel sound effects 45 and is in an "advanced" style markedly incongruous with the officially sponsored ideals of Moscow during that era. Nono's use of slides projected onto a moving curtain to transform the stage area into what has been described as a "moving collage" was, in part, an adaptation of Josef Svoboda's "magic lantern" technique. A decade later, Nono brought forth Al gran sole carico d'amore (1975; revised and definitive version, 1978); both versions had their premieres in Milan. Two literary works, Brecht's Tage dey Commune and Gorky's novel The Mother, provide the basis for the libretto. Al gran sole is an azione scenica in two parts; both are centered around the theme of social justice: Act I is set in the Paris Commune; Act II concerns the 1905 revolt in Russia. Although both revolts were unsuccessful, they nevertheless provoked 4. This opera was revised as a one-act opera with the title changed to Intolleranza 1970; it was performed at Florence in 1974. See Stenzl, ed., Luigi Nona: Texte: Studien zu seiner Musik and Taibon, Luigi Nona und sein Musiktheater. For a discussion of Nono's second opera, Al gran sale carico d' amore, see Francesco Degrada's introduction to the published edition. 45. A four-track tape was played through loudspeakers positioned around the auditorium, thereby enveloping the audience in the dramatic action.

608

The Twentieth Century

subsequent uprisings. Throughout the score, the orchestra and choruses assume prominent roles. 46 SINCE 1945 AN INCREASING NUMBER of composers in every country have adopted some form of twelve-tone technique, either using it as the basis of all their writing or blending and/or combining it with other techniques and styles. One of the most successful strict applications of twelve-tone technique to opera is heard in II prigioniero (1950) by Luigi Dallapiccola (I904-75)-successful, because the technical method is perfectly absorbed into the musical content: gradations of dissonance, with all the subtle sonorities, function for expressive ends; and the solo parts are conceived, in good Italian tradition, as singing human voices rather than as abstract contrapuntal lines. Four soloists, large and small choruses on stage, and a large orchestra (including saxophones, vibraphone, other "extra" woodwinds and percussion, brass, bells, and an organ) make up the performing forces. There are four scenes, with a prologue and two choral interludes on Latin liturgical texts. The drama centers around the condition of a Prisoner (nameless, like all the other characters) tortured by hope, "the ultimate torture," but destined never in this world to escape. Dallapiccola's thought was occupied with the same theme of imprisonment and escape in his Canti di prigionia (1941) and Canti di liberazione (1955).47 The music of II prigioniero makes use at times of fixed forms and often approaches the effect of conventional tonality (especially in the second choral interlude). An idea of the style can be obtained from a portion of the second "ricercare" from scene iii, based on a recurrent motif associated with the ironic word fratello (brother) by which the jailers always address the prisoner (example 25.7). Among a younger generation of composers is Girolamo Arrigo (b. 1930), whose first opera, Orden (1969), was a very pointed critique on both the political and military aspects of the civil war in Spain and on General Franco. A second opera Addio Garibaldi (1972) also had political overtones, but in the 19805 Arrigo looked to Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming (based on the memoirs of Casanova) for the subject of his II ritorno di Casanova (1984). Since this opera begins at the point where Casanova returns to Venice in 1774, it invites comparison with another opera based on the same episodes in Casanova's life, namely Dominick Argento's Casanova's Homecoming (1985). Lucio Berio (b. 1925) produced in 1970 a work in three acts entitled Opera. Each of the acts begins with a different musical setting of words taken

46. Electronic resources are also drawn upon for this score. 47.Vlad, "Dallapiccola, 1948-1955"; Nathan, "The Twelve-Tone Compositions of Luigi Dallapiccola"; Dallapiccola, "The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and II prigioniero"; D'Amico, "Luigi Dallapiccola."

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Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

635

From a set of sketches for VVilzzeck by Alban Berg.

Berg's music has become more familiar and Wozzeck is now recognized not only as a powerful drama in music but also as one of the few really successful masterpieces of the twentieth century. Berg's second opera, Lulu, was completed in substance before the composer's death in 1935, but the orchestration had been finished only through the first two acts and a small part of the third. 47 The first two acts, and two fragments of the third, were performed in 1937 in Zurich, and frequent revivals 47· See Perle, 771e Operas of Alban Berg: Lulu;Jarman, Alban Berg: Lulu; P. Hall, A View of Bergs Lulu through the Autograph Sources; Ertelt, Alban Bergs Lulu: Quellenstudien und Beitrage zur Analyse.

636

The Twentieth Century

From a set of sketches for Wozzeck by Alban Berg.

of this truncated version appeared for several decades. Berg's widow possessed a reconstruction of the third act, but it was withheld from the public until her death in 1976. The first complete production of Lulu took place in 1979 at the Paris Opera, and in this form it has now come into the repertoire of the world's major opera companies. Although the addition of the reconstructed third act lengthens the performance to four hours, it nevertheless restores a requisite balance to the opera and clarifies the inner motivations of the drama itself. Berg created his libretto, with some cuts, from two plays by Frank Wedekind. The central personage, Lulu, is conceived as the incarnation of the "primal woman-spirit," and the drama is concerned with the fatal effects of her attraction for various lovers, finally ending with her own doom. Although

Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

637

externally occupied with the most realistic details, the work is not essentially realistic but rather expressionistic, sometimes grotesquely and extravagantly so. The drama is in two parts, the division occurring between the rigidly symmetrical first and second scenes of Act II. Separating parts I and 2 is a musical interlude (built on the principle of a crab canon) paired with a threeminute silent film that portrays the intervening action-the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of Lulu and her subsequent escape from a hospital where she had been confined because of illness. The close relationship between the two parts is underlined by the dual roles assigned to three of the singers: Lulu's murder victims in Act I become her clients in Act III. Both musically and dramatically, the opera is notoriously complex. Notwithstanding this complexity, Lulu is marvelously effective in the theater. The changing flow of the drama and the intensity of its emotional expression are always controlled by the composer's intellectual power in wielding musical forms. 48 Certain motifs, harmonies, tone series, and combinations are associated with particular characters and scenes. The opera is not, as has often been stated, based throughout on a single tone row, but its felt musical unity is the result of interconnections among the different formal elements. Such subtle relationships may be no more consciously grasped by the audience than are the comparable relationships in Wozzeck, but the formal unity and the dramatic import of both works can be sensed in the theater without a knowledge of their technical construction. FOUR COMPOSERS WHO CONTRIBUTED SIGNIFICANTLY to the revitalization of German opera during the Weimar Republic (1919-33) are Ernst Krenek (1900-91), Kurt Weill (1900-50), Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), and Max Brand (1896-1980). They wanted to make art more relevant to the general public and expressed this interest in their writings, compositions, and promotional activities. Weill's contribution to this cause initially focused on promoting concerts of "modern" chamber music by American, French, Eastern European, and German composers, including his own works and those by Hindemith and Krenek. By 1925 Weill and Krenek had started publishing essays in which they suggest how opera might be brought to a wider audience. Weill urges composers to draw inspiration from Mozart rather than from Wagner, and he views Busoni's Doktor Faust as "the starting point for the formation of a golden age of opera," contrasting it with Berg's Wozzeck, which he considered to be a culmination of the Wagnerian ideal of music drama. 49 Krenek blames the "head-in-hands" type of cerebral music created by

48. Although the score is conceived as a number opera, Berg superimposes a specific musical form upon each act: sonata (I), rondo (II), theme and variations (III). See Perle, "Alban Berg." 49. See Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 464-67, for a translation of the entire essay from which this quotation (p. 466) is taken. Weill's essay, "Die neue Oper," was originally published in Der neue Weg (January 16, 1926),24-25.

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Schoenberg and his followers for the rift between "serious" and "light" music that was unique to Central Europe. He champions French culture as a model for composers, having experienced firsthand during his stay in France (1924-26) how art was able to forge a compatible relationship with its community. Weill and Krenek also wrote about the influence popular dance music and jazz could exert on modern music. Hindemith made his views known primarily through his musical scores and through his organization of music festivals designed to educate and entertain a new public. In a 1929 essay Hindemith shows his concern for the future of music when he writes: "The old public is dying off. How and what must we write in order to get a larger, different, and new public; where is that public?"sO Seven years earlier he made an initial attempt to answer that question with his incorporation of popular American music idioms, such as the foxtrot, in Kammermusik NO.1 (1922).All three composers ultimately found opera to be an excellent medium in which to put their ideas to the test.

Arenel Krenek began his remarkable career at Vienna in the composition classes of Franz Schreker, and when, in 1920, Schreker assumed the directorship of the Academy of Music at Berlin, Krenek followed him there to complete his education. While still a student, Krenek brought forth the first of his twenty operas, Zwingburg (1922). Its political implications are immediately apparent: a tyrant rules from within a castle (which looks suspiciously like a factory) unseen by his subjects, who, with jerky gesticulations, execute monotonous routines to the musical accompaniment of an organ-grinder, who is cursed to play unceasingly. For one day only, the tyrant offers release from this mode of mechanical existence. To bring about this liberation, the organgrinder is tied to a pole to prevent him from playing. As the people move about in a trance-like state enjoying themselves, they take pity on the organgrinder and untie him so that he, too, can enjoy freedom. Unfortunately, his freedom means a return to the status quo: the music resumes and the people are once again under the tyrant's spell. The problem of personal freedom with its attendant autobiographical overtones became, by Krenek's own admission, a dominant theme in his works for the stage. S1 Beginning with Der Sprung aber den Schatten (1924), he sought to bridge the divide between elite and popular musical entertainment. After the successful production of this satiric farce, with its variegated

50. Hindemith, "Uber Musikkritik;' 106.

5I. Krenek, Horizons Circled, 37. See also the composer's other writings, especially Music Here and Now and Exploring Music (Zur Sprache gebracht) , and Rogge, Ernst Kreneks Opern.

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musical styles-including jazz elements-integrated into an atonal structure, Krenek brought forth a conspicuous "hit," one that contrasts the lifestyle of an intellectually restrained Central European composer with that of a carefree American jazz musician, and in the process makes a statement about the current problems of the artist and society. Jonny spielt auf (I927) represents a combination of fantasy and gross realism set to exuberant rhythms and catchy tunes in jazz style with just enough dissonance to give the impression of daring "modernism.,,52 Considerable variety of mood was achieved within this general idiom, from the gaudily vulgar strains of a restaurant orchestra to romantic expressiveness and the final apotheosis of Johnny, the black band leader, symbol of the vigorous optimistic new world "conquering Europe with the dance." Krenek intended Jonny to be taken seriously, but audiences for the most part regarded it as a comedy or satire, and-whether or not owing to this misunderstanding-it had a brilliant though short-lived success. Jonny spielt auf is among the finest examples of a Zeitoper, a genre that achieved considerable stature during the Weimar era. Zeitoper has been loosely defined as a work in a comic vein based upon social satire and parody, situated in a contemporary setting, with plot and characters reflecting various aspects of everyday life. 53 The action is meant to take place in ordinary places-a kitchen, an automobile, an office, a cabaret, an elevator-and the musical score usually embraces popular American dance music and jazz. 54 Krenek's Jonny spielt auf exemplifies this definition well: the setting is Europe in the I920S; the scenes take place in a hotel lobby, a home, a police car, and a train station; and the score embraces instruments (banjos and saxophones) and jazz-related styles (blues, shimmy) of the popular music realm. Not long after Krenek returned to his native Vienna (c. I928),Austria's independence began to be undermined by Nazi aggression in the guise of a new nationalism. His response to the impending crisis was made in Karl V, a grand opera commissioned by the Vienna State Opera House. It proved to be one of his most important works for the theater, remarkable for a nobility of style well suited to the grandeur of the subject. The libretto focuses on the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century, Charles V, in the period following his abdication of power; the dialogue between Charles and his confessor-monk provides Krenek with an appropriate forum in which to raise questions of current interest, in particular the issue of an individual's freedom to choose allegiance to God and the church universal instead of 52. Initially, there was some resistance to this opera, but it soon became an international success, with performances at major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 53. Strauss's Intermezzo, discussed above, also fits this description of a Zeitoper. For an in-depth study of Zeitopern from the Weimar Republic era, see Cook, Opera for a New Republic: TIle Zeitopern rf Krenek, I#ill, and Hindemith, which includes an extensive and topically organized bibliography. 54. Cook, Opera for a New Republi(, 4.

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fealty to a nation. Using the twelve-tone technique, Krenek created an opera that was "explicitly anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian, and Catholic."ss For obvious reasons, it was banned from Vienna during the preliminary rehearsals in 1934. The message intended for his fellow Viennese was heard first in Prague at the 1938 premiere; shortly thereafter, Krenek immigrated to the United States. Except for a few chamber operas, Krenek did not return to writing a fullscale work until Pallas Athene weint (1955), which presents scenes of the war between Athens and Sparta, with application to the modern issue of how to defend freedom without succumbing to tyranny; the music is based on an adaptation of the twelve-tone technique. A somewhat similar technique is used in Bell Tower (1957), an expertly wrought, dramatically and musically satistying setting of a libretto by the composer based on a story by Herman Melville. He followed this one-act opera with Der goldene Bock (1963), which shows his preoccupation with serialism and the theater of the absurd; two operas written specifically for television; and Sardakai (1970), a farce of mistaken identities and disguises that pokes fun at some of the sacred conventions of his generation.

Weil! In 1920 Kurt Weill began a three-year period of compositional studies with Ferruccio Busoni. Shortly thereafter, his interest in writing for the theater came to fruition when he and Georg Kaiser, one of the most popular German dramatists of the day, collaborated on several projects. Their first successful venture was the 1925 production at Berlin of Der Protagonist, a one-act opera that takes place at the time of Shakespeare: a traveling troupe has been rehearsing a rather bawdy entertainment, but when it is learned that a bishop will be attending the performance, the duke orders the troupe to substitute a tragedy for the comedy. Sections of pantomime are used for the "rehearsals" of both the comic and the tragic versions of this "play" within the opera. At the very moment in the tragic version of the "play" when the protagonist should be killing his rival, he becomes enraged at the sight of his sister with her lover and steps out of character, fatally stabbing her. This gripping piece of theater engendered an enthusiastic response from audiences wherever it was staged and paved the way for Weill to find support for a Berlin premiere of his second one-act opera, Royal Palace (1927). Incorporated into the score of Royal Palace are jazz idioms, as defined by dance forms (the foxtrot and the tango) and instrumentation (the solo piano and saxophone). The opera also includes film sequences-after Dejanira is given an airline ticket, she is shown, on film, going to the airport and boarding the plane-the first time cinematic interludes are known to have occurred in an 55. Krenek, Horizons Circled, II4·

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operatic production. 56 Royal Palace was staged as part of a triple bill, along with Weill's Der neue Orpheus and Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera EI retablo de Maese Pedro. Unfortunately, Royal Palace received unfavorable reviews, primarily because its appearance in so short a time after the premiere ofJonny spielt aufinvited immediate comparison with what unquestionably had been a theatrical triumph. Weill's contribution to the Zeitopern repertoire came in 1928 with Der Zar liisst sich photographieren, which he subtitled an opera buffa. The opera takes place in a female photographer's studio in Paris, where a czar has come to have his photograph taken. The czar, however, is unaware that the studio has been taken over by anti-czarists who plan to assassinate him with a gun concealed inside a camera. What the would-be assassins had not anticipated was having the czar fall in love with the female photographer, who was impersonating the owner of the studio. When the czar decides to take her picture with the rigged camera, she and her fellow conspirators hasten to escape before they are apprehended by the police. One of the interesting features of Der Zar is Weill's positioning of a male chorus in the orchestra pit, where it serves as an intermediary between the characters on stage and the audience. According to Weill, the chorus was expected to "emphasize the opera buffa character of the work" by voicing their opinions to the audience in a "somewhat improper way" (etwas unpassender Weise) on what has been taking place on the stage. 57 The comic role assigned to the chorus was further heightened by the manner in which they were costumed: long white beards, mustaches, dark dress coats, and top hats. 58 This same sort of attire was frequently used for groups of men in expressionist plays of the period. 59 The chorus performs in various formats ranging from unison to four-part harmony, singing a text or humming, and performing unaccompanied or accompanied by the full orchestra. Jazz is also a distinguishing feature of this opera, but the instrumentation for the jazz sections of Der Zar is limited to piano, percussion, brass, and woodwinds, except for the "Tango-Angele," which is accompanied by a gramophone recording that introduces the traditional "big band" sound. 60 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, operas were used in schools 56. The idea for the use of film sequences in Royal Palace came from the director of the Staatsoper, Franz Ludwig Harth, who had seen film used in a similar fashion in a Volksbiihne production in 1927. See Taylor, Kurt Weill,A Composer in a Divided WiJrld, 94. 57.Weill made these remarks about the chorus in an interview with E.T. Krojanker, published in the February 18, 1928 issue of the Leipzig Neueste Nachrichten. 58. See Cook, Opera for a New Republic, 133, for a photo showing the chorus, dressed in the manner described above, for the premiere of Der Zar at Leipzig. 59. Examples cited by Cook, Opera for a New Republic, 132, include plays by Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller. 60. The actual recording was made by the Dobbri Saxophone Orchestra under the supervision of Weill and is available, on rental, for productions of the opera.

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for teaching moral and religious doctrines; in like manner, some twentiethcentury operas provided a means for communicating left-wing political doctrines. In both cases, the method was to clothe the teachings in easily understood, popularly accessible music. The principal early twentieth-century examples stem from the "epic theater" movement in Germany, headed by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).61 Foremost among them were two settings by Weill of Brecht's librettos: Die Dreigroschenoper and Aufitieg und Fall dey Stadt Mahagonny, with premieres at Berlin in 1928 and at Leipzig in 1930, respectively. Both operas remain popular in spite of political changes that have made many parts of their original librettos outdated. Die Dreigroschenoper was molded from The Beggar's Opera, an eighteenthcentury social and political satire by John Gay and John Pepusch. Even before Elizabeth Hauptmann started to translate Gay's text into German, European interest in the 1728 work had been sparked by a very successful 1920 revival of The Beggar's Opera in England. As early as 1925, for example, a German publisher had suggested to Hindemith that he create a modern version of the ballad-play, a suggestion he declined. 62 The libretto for Die Dreigroschenoper represents the collaborative work of Hauptmann, Brecht, and Weill. 63 It retains the basic outline of Gay's text; the setting is located in the Soho district of London during the late Victorian period. Mackie, the gangster-hero, secretly marries Polly, whose father, Peachum, is the Mafia-styled boss of London's professional beggars. When Peachum discovers what has taken place, he is furious and decides to reveal Mackie's whereabouts to the police, for Mackie has long been on their "most wanted" list. Polly warns Mackie of the impending crisis and he tries to escape, only to be betrayed by some prostitutes in a brothel he has visited. Mackie is condemned to hang, but before the fatal act occurs at the gallows, Peachum comes downstage to tell the audience that a happy ending is obligatory in opera and that the Queen of England has provided it by pardoning Mackie, elevating him to the peerage, and giving him a sizable annual allowance. Peachum then turns to the characters on stage and cautions them to be mindful of the fact that "happy endings" are seldom the lot of the poor. For the first number ofAct I, the "Morgenchoral des Peachum," Weill used the very same music that Pepusch had written to open The Beggar's Opera,

61. See, in addition to Brecht's own writings, Schumacher, Die dramatischen Versuche Bertolt Brechts; Hartung, "Zur epischen Oper Brechts und Weills"; Drew, "Topicality and the Universal"; articles in The Score (July 1958), no. 23; Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe; Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World. 62. Taylor, Kurt Weill, 131. 63. Brecht also drew his text from Kipling and Villon wherever he needed material to supplement that provided by Gay. For a thorough discussion of the genesis of Die Dreigroschenoper, see Hinton, ed., Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, chap. 2.

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making only a few adjustments to accommodate the German text. 64 From that point forward, Weill composed new music, with some numbers similar in style to the opening folk tune, and others exploring the blues, tango, and foxtrot rhythms of the jazz medium. 65 Thematic material from no fewer than six of the opera's songs is incorporated into the final chorale. Satire underlies the musical conception of the opera, with Weill creating sentimental tunes for portions of the text that are anything but sentimental, and injecting into the seemingly stable triadic harmony unexpected jolts of chromaticism. The instrumental accompaniment for the premiere was entrusted to the sevenmember Lewis Ruth Band, which was adept at playing the many different instruments required for the production. For example, the banjo player also played the parts for cello, bandoneon, and guitar, and the alto saxophonist played those for flute, clarinet, and baritone saxophone. 66 The juxtaposition of the derivative styles from Baroque opera and the 1920S cabaret produced a unique form of entertainment-spoken dialogue and songs-that Brecht and Weill were never again to equal in their collaborations. 67 Aufitieg und Fall dey Stadt Mahagonny grew out of an earlier work by Brecht and Weill entitled Mahagonny Songspiel, performed in July 1927, a few months after these two artists had met and found common ground on which they could build a working, albeit brief, relationship.68 The Songspiel consisted of Weill's setting of Brecht's five" Mahagonny" poems, which were linked by musical interludes and bounded by an instrumental prelude and postlude to create a dramatic whole. The stage design for this Songspiel-a boxing ring in which six singers stand as if giving a concert version of the work-elicited protests from some in the audience and cheers and wild applause from others. Similar pros and cons were expressed by the professional critics. This 64. Weill's incorporation of Peachum's song ("Through all the employments of Life") remained in the score through the dress rehearsal for the initial production, but was cut from the opening night performance. 65. Since the music was meant to be sung by actors, not professional singers, Weill often had to alter the vocal parts to suit the abilities of the performers. Noone version of the opera (neither the full score nor the published piano-vocal score) replicates exacdy what was heard on opening night in Berlin (1928), for the score was subjected to numerous changes thereafter. In fact, a "final" version of the opera was never sanctioned by either the librettist or the composer. 66. The band parts used for the original production, recordings, and even for the film have been preserved. For a list of instruments assigned to the seven players, as well as the obbligato use of these instruments in the opera, see Abbott, "The' Dreigroschen' Sound." 67. The success of Die Dreigroschenoper was nothing short of astounding for the German theater of the 1920S. The opera also proved to be of immediate appeal to audiences around the world and was translated into many different languages to accommodate those productions. For a discussion of The Threepenny Opera in America, including Marc Blitzstein's adaptation, see chapter twenty-nine. Two of the most famous songs from this score are "Moritat" and "Pirate Jenny." For Benjamin Britten's adaptation of The Beggars Opera, see chapter twenty-eight. 68. Brecht and Weill collaborated from 1927 until 1930 and again in 1933 for Die Sieben Todsunden, a ballet.

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mixed response did not deter Brecht and Weill from pursuing their intention to write a full-length three-act opera based on the same "Mahagonny" theme of a "Paradise City," where inhabitants are free to enjoy themselves to the fullest so long as they can pay for their life of pleasure. Failure to pay one's debts, however, brings one face to face with death. When Jim Mahoney falls into this predicament, he is sentenced to die in the electric chair. No one comes to his rescue and his execution provokes a riot. As the city burns, the crowd chants: "Can't help ourselves or you or anybody."This opera, an anticapitalist satire set in America in a newly established city, is scored for a very small ensemble consisting of piano, banjo, bass guitar, zither, accordion, and saxophone. It is a very complex work and was considered by contemporary critics, such as Theodor Adorno, to be exemplary of that era's concept of the avant-garde, even though its musical language reflects the traditional tonal and melodic style of the late nineteenth century.69 At the premiere and at subsequent performances in Germany, groups of "brown-shirted" Nazis protested both outside and inside the theaters, for Weill was not only a Jew but also a left-wing sympathizer. Somehow the performers usually found a way to continue to the final curtain, despite these attempts at disruption. Similar in political aim were Weill's school opera DeyJasager (1930) and Die Burgschaft (1932), his last opera to be presented in Germany before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime came to power in March 1933?O Burgschcift represents Weill's most ambitious work for the stage and once again the libretto, by Caspar Neher, sounded a warning about the tragic consequences that come from a civilized society invaded by a tyrant intent upon ruling by the laws of money and power. Musically, Weill enters a new phase of his career with this score, a fact that he himself acknowledged in a statement made after the successful Berlin production of the revised Mahagonny in December 1931 at the Theater am Kurftirstendamm. Gone is the pseudo-jazz flavoring of his earlier works; a neo-classical style prevails, reflecting the influence of Stravinsky's Oedipus rex. Here a full orchestra is used, while at the same time the piano is given a very important role. Arias, recitatives, and ensembles (some of them in a contrapuntal style) are designed as well-defined numbers. Central to the work are the two choruses-one represents an oppressed people; the other communicates the opera's message to the audience. Following this production and the staging of Der Silbersee (1932), a threeact play with music, Weill decided he could no longer live in Germany, for by 69.Adorno, Gesammelte Schrifien, vol. 19, 193. 70. When Weill departed from Germany, he left behind a number of scores, including that for Die Burgschaft. Since he was never able to recover these materials, he assumed they were destroyed by the Nazis and went to his grave with this assumption. The original version of the score, however, not only survived but upon its recovery in the I990S was once again performed, with a production in Europe in 1998 and another in the United States at the Spoleto Festival in 1999.

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the beginning of 1933 the Nazis had banned all performances of his stage works. 71 He initially settled in Paris, where Die Sieben Todsunden, a balletSongspieZ in nine scenes (written for one dancer and one singer), had its premiere in June 1933. Two years later, he was invited to come to the United States, where he embarked upon a second career as a composer of works for Broadway, off Broadway, and the cinema.72

,J-{inJemith The satirical tendencies fashionable in Germany during the late 1920S are well illustrated in the comic operas of Paul Hindemith (18951963).73 Hin und Zuruck (1927) is a one-act tour de force in which the second half reverses the action of the first, so that at the end the situation is exactly the same as at the beginning; the music correspondingly reverses the order of its themes and movements, though without going into the intricacies of strict retrograde canon. The work is scored for an orchestra of seven wind instruments and two pianos; the music, in various styles by turns but unified in effect nevertheless, is decidedly clever and successful in performance. This chamber opera (of ten minutes duration), Hindemith's first attempt at writing a Zeitoper, parodies the marital problems that arise in domestic life, but does so in the context of a comic presentation. Neues vom Tage (1929; revised, 1953), the last opera of Hindemith to be produced in Germany before the war, is also a Zeitoper and, like Hin und Zuruck, is a comedy constructed in the manner of an eighteenth-century number opera. It is a longer work, a witty revue about a married couple who, through their efforts to obtain evidence fora divorce, become "the news of the day," with characters so firmly established in the minds of their public that they no longer have any right of private action and cannot even drop their divorce proceedings, although they wish to. On this plot are strung several amusing episodes, including a bathroom scene and a chorus of stenographers performing to the rhythmic accompaniment of clacking typewriters. This opera also follows the circular structure of Hin und ZUrUck, with one of the couples, who contemplated divorce, deciding to stay married, and the other couple, who did obtain a divorce, deciding to remarry. In other words, these two couples at the end of the opera are in the same marital state as when the opera began. The music, like most of Hindemith's in this period, is linear in texture and strongly rhythmic, well suited to the lively action. There is also a jazz scene, and the final chorus is a fugue. 7'. For a study of eight composers who lived and worked under the Third Reich or who were driv-

en into exile by the Nazi regime, see Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. 72. This second phase ofWei!l's career is discussed in chapter twenty-nine. 73. Hindemith, A Composer's World. See also biographies by Strobel, Kemp, Briner, and Skelton.

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Several other important works by Hindemith date from the 1920S, among them the full-length opera Cardillac (1926; revised, 1952), on an excellent tragic libretto by Ferdinand Lyon. 74 No opera of this period more clearly exemplifies the classical principle of separate musical numbers and the "new objectivity" (neue Sachlichkeit) that was then in vogue. 75 Moreover, each number is constructed according to purely musical laws, the themes being straightforwardly developed in the manner of a concerto, undeflected by any attempt to illustrate mere details of the text: music and drama run parallel but without interpenetration. The "absolute," instrumental character of the music is reinforced by the prevailing texture, highly rhythmic and contrapuntal; the voice is treated in the late Baroque manner as one melodic line among concertizing instruments. In addition to this characteristic linear style, two other idioms are occasionally used: a kind of accompanied recitative in which the vocal declamation is set against a single rhapsodic line in the orchestra; and a quieter, chordal, neo-romantic style that foreshadows some aspects of Hindemith's later development (for example, the recitative and aria "Die Zeit vergeht," in Act I, scene ii). Hindemith gives the saxophone a central role in the accompaniment of Cardillac's arioso "Mag Sonne leuchten!" (Act II) and introduces elements ofjazz in the tavern music of Act III. The chorus writing is vigorous, idiomatic, and effective, especially in the closing scene. Lyon's libretto is an expressionist drama, in which an artist's role in society is explored: it tells of a goldsmith (Cardillac) who feels compelled to kill the buyers of his creations in order for him to repossess that which he has crafted. Hindemith's score, however, is in a style that is unrelated to expressionism. Resolving this dichotomy proved to be a remarkable achievement on the part of the composer, who skillfully "reconciled the Baroque aesthetic with the demands of an expressionistic dramatic subject.,,76 Hindemith began as an iconoclast but later modified his style, softening harmonic asperities and clarifying tonal relationships. Such changes were incorporated into the revised versions of Cardillac and Neues von Tage. They also influenced WiY bauen eine Stadt (Oxford, 1931), a children's opera written in a straightforward, simple melodic style, and Mathis dey Maler (1938),77 an operaoratorio. Mathis der Maler is a long and complex work embracing a great variety of musical styles, among which suggestions of medieval modality are

74. Willms, Fuhrer zur Oper Cardillac. 75. Neue Sachlichkeit is a term that was applied first to art and photography and later to music and literature. With respect to music, the term was used to describe an approach to form and content that embodied a renunciation of expressionism. 76. Quotation from Ian Kempe's article, s.v. "Hindemith, Paul," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musidans (1980). 77. The premiere, planned for Berlin, was canceled by the Nazis and hence the work was first staged in Switzerland where Hindemith fled in 1938 before coming to the United States in 1940.

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prominent. (The most familiar portions of Mathis are those arranged by Hindemith as an orchestral suite.) Hindemith's libretto is based on the life of Matthias Grunewald, the sixteenth-century German painter who became famous for his Isenheim altarpiece. Matthias, torn between allegiance to his art and support for the peasants' revolt and subsequent war of 1525, has reason to question the efficacy of artistic creation as a meaningful response to the call for social and political action. Convinced by Paul the Apostle of the immortality of art, Matthias allows his canvas to become a powerful weapon of protest. The libretto for Mathis represents Hindemith's first literary effort and is one that has been viewed as an autobiographical response to the environment in which he found himself in the mid-1930s.Just as Mathis is taunted in the opera with the pointlessness of art in a time of war and political turmoil, so too was Hindemith haunted by this same question. The neo-Baroque trend in Hindemith's music culminates in Die Harmonie der J#lt, a work similar to Mathis but on an even grander scale that was first staged at Munich in 1957. 78 There are eleven solo roles, in addition to choruses; a full orchestra is supplemented by a second orchestra on the stage; and many of the sets require a divided stage. Each of the fourteen scenes in the five acts represents an episode in the life and philosophy of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the title of whose treatise Harmonices mundi (1619) Hindemith adopted for his libretto. Whereas the drama of Mathis der Maler dealt with the position of the artist in society, Die Harmonie der J#lt was conceived as an exemplification of Hindemith's views-going back to medieval teachings-of the order in a work of music as being symbolical of an all-embracing order in the physical and spiritual universe. Consequently, the events and characters have a symbolic function as well as a dramatic one, and this entails both a certain static quality in the development of the drama and an occasional impression that some of the persons are more like allegorical figures than real human beings. The monumental, oratorio-like character of Die Harmonie der J#lt, in addition to the enormous resources required for its presentation, will doubtless prevent it from ever becoming fixed in the operatic repertoire-which is a misfortune. A richly polyphonic orchestral texture is the basis of the musical structure. As in many twentieth-century operas, classical instrumental forms playa large role in the musical development. Examples are the "scherzo" in 7/8 time in Act II; the "variations on an old war song" in Act V; and especially the closing scene, reminiscent of the grandiose finales in Baroque opera, which introduces the earth, sun, and planets (each represented by the personage who was its mystical incarnation in the drama)

78. Briner, HEine Bekenntnisoper Paul Hindemith."

648 EXAMPLE

The Twentieth Century 26.6 Tones of the passacaglia theme from Die Harmonie derWelt

r.-. II

HINDEMITH

_ bTb1

in a magnificent apotheosis, to a sonorous, orchestral-choral passacaglia on a theme made up of the tones shown in example 26.6.

~ranJ Perhaps it was sheer coincidence that in the year Henry Ford's essay "Machinery-The New Messiah" was published Max Brand brought to the stage Maschinist Hopkins (1928), a Zeitoper that explores the impact of technology on factory workers-an issue of capitalism versus labor that is as relevant today as it was in the 1920S and 1930s. 79 The opera takes place in America, with scenes located variously on the factory floor where huge machines are displayed, in a bar where workers meet with their foreman to discuss problems, and in a night club where the tensions of a love triangle (Bill, Nell, Hopkins) unfold. The machines represent progress and the promise of new jobs, but they also symbolize destruction and depersonalization-two of the principal characters meet their deaths on the factory floor, having been pushed into the revolving wheels of the machines. For the bar and night club scenes, Brand incorporates American elements of jazz, dance, and popular song (the last named to be performed on stage by "six black singers"), but for the factory scenes, he uses film to suggest the machines becoming animated objects, with an offstage chorus simulating their voices. His projection of film on stage marked an early example of a composer using this medium in an operatic production. 8o Especially effective is Brand's handling of the chorus, as a choir of machines or as a choir of workers. In the final scene of the opera, as the dawn of a new workday unfolds and the machines on the factory floor are activated, the choir of workers rhythmically chants in a Sprechstimme manner the words "Arbeit, Arbeit, Arbeit" (work, work, work), the incessant repetition suggesting that the workers themselves have become mere machines. Maschinist Hopkins hit a responsive chord in audiences attending the more 79. Ford's essay appears in TI,e Forum (March 1928),363-64. 80. For another example, see Weill's Royal Palace discussed above.

Opera in the German-Speakins CountrieS

649

than two hundred performances this opera enjoyed, for its staging occurred during a period when very high unemployment and runaway inflation in Germany were adversely affecting people's lives. The prospect that advances in technology could somehow bring a brighter future for the average worker provided a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak environment. The Third Reich, however, viewed Brand's opera quite differently, deriding it for its references to America and condemning it as "degenerate art.,,81 GERMAN-LANGUAGE OPERAS based on Greek mythology continued to be written in the twentieth century. Those by Strauss have already been discussed, but a number of others deserve to be mentioned. Within the general orbit of the Schoenbergian musical style was Alkestis (1924) by Egon Wellesz (1885-1974),82 a one-act setting of a text by Hofmannsthal (after Euripides) that unfolds in a series of broad tableaux in a rather austere, monolithic idiom. The important position of the chorus in this work was emphasized even more in the composer's later opera Die Bakchantinnen (1931). Krenek's Leben des Orest (1930) is also related to Greek mythology. This "grand opera" takes place in pre-Christian Greece and requires a large cast. The score is infused with jazz dance idioms. Carl Orff (1895-1982) added to this repertoire with his Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus dey Tyrann (1959), both settings of Holderlin's translations from Sophocles. s3 In these, there are five gradations of vocal delivery for both soloist and chorus: (1) ordinary speech, (2) rhythmic semi-speech, similar to Berg's Sprechgesang, (3) a form of stylized speech consisting of rhythmic chanting centered on one tone but punctuated by melodic deflections to nearby tones and occasional wide leaps, (4) the same, but expanding into a longer quasi-melodic chant, and (5) a combination of (3) and (4) with sweeping stepwise, fast, and impassioned melismatic outbursts, characteristically placed at the beginning of a phrase (example 26.7).The voices may be either unaccompanied or accompanied by ostinato rhythmic patterns in many different combinations of percussion, either without fixed pitch or in static harmonies. The chorus constantly participates in the action and each scene is in a clearly outlined musical form. No description can do more than suggest the unique effects produced by the composer's peculiar choice of means. Music, reduced nearly to the primal elements of rhythm and single tones, enters into a union with language that conjures up for the imagination a far-off mythical stage in the history of hu-

8r. For an excellent discussion of this opera, see Mehring," 'Welcome to the Machine!' The Representation of Technology in Zeitopern." 82. Beer, "Egon Wellesz und die Oper"; Redlich, "Egon Wellesz"; Schollum, Egon Wel/esz. 83· See Klement, Das Musiktheater Carl Oiffs; W. Keller, Karl Oiffs Antigonae.

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Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

651

man speech. The variety of sounds and the varying degrees of dramatic tension that Orff manages to achieve within his self-imposed musical limitations are remarkable; nevertheless, the very intensity of the idiom tends to limit the length of time for which it can be effective, and for this reason perhaps Oedipus, being shorter than Antigonae, is the more successful of the two works. Orff continued with this style of writing for the theater in Prometheus (1968) and De temporum fine comoed{a (1973), the latter with a text in Greek and Latin. 84 Early in his career, Orff's move toward radical simplification in the face of the general tendency toward sophistication or massiveness in opera music of the 1930S aroused comment, favorable and otherwise, concerning the resulting works, none of which happened to be operas in the traditional sense of the word. One such work is the semi-dramatic cantata Carmina burana (1937) that has maintained its popularity to the present day. Another is Der Mond (1939), which is closer to being an opera in the ordinary sense of that word, though it would perhaps be more accurate to designate it as a "folk play with music." In these and his later works, his musical style anticipated the "accessible" postmoderism and minimalism of the late twentieth century, for it reflected Orff's contention that music was an art form that could and should communicate with adults as well as with children. A Bavarian contemporary of Orffwas Werner Egk (1901-83). His Columbus, originally written for radio broadcast in 1933 and frequently performed since then on German stages in a revised version dating from 1942, is a rather static combination of opera and epic. A later and possibly better mixture of these elements is found in Irische Legende (1935; revised, 1970). Die Zaubergeige (1955), also designed for radio broadcast, immediately preceded the most memorable ofEgk's operas, Peer Gynt (1938), a straightforward human drama adapted from Ibsen, with a musical score of considerable variety, color, and melodic interest. One of the notable Swiss composers of the early twentieth century was Hans Huber (1852-1921). In addition to his Festspiele and similar works composed for the theater, Huber brought forth several operas, all of which were steeped in the Romantic tradition. They include Kudrun (1896), Die Simplicius (1912), and Die schone Belinde (1916), his most well known of the three. Unlike Huber, whose career was primarily centered in Basle, many other Swiss composers lived abroad or, at the very least, sought venues for the premiere productions of their operas in cities such as Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. One of these composers was Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957), distinguished especially as a songwriter. He composed several operas, with Penthesilea (Dresden, 1927) 84. See Thomas, Carl Orff: De temporum fine comoedia; Liess, Zwei Essays zu Carl OtjJ, De temporum fine comoedia.

65£

The Twentieth Century

his most successful. Another was Frank Martin (1890-1974), who spent the early part of his career in Switzerland but then in 1946 took up residence in the Netherlands. 85 Not until he was sixty years of age did he turn his attention to the writing of opera. The first of his three works in this genre was Der Sturm (1956), a three-act German-language adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest that premiered in Vienna. The other two operas were set to French-language librettos. Le Mystere de la Nativite, first performed at Salzburg in 1960, is adapted from a medieval mystery play and depicts heaven, earth, and hell on three separate levels of the stage. The music associated with each of these levels is similarly distinguished, ranging from very simple music for heaven to twelve-tone technique and a full orchestral timbre for hell. Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1963), which did have a premiere in Geneva, is a close adaptation of Moliere's play of the same title. From a younger generation of Swiss composers come Heinrich Sutermeister (1910-95), Klaus Huber (b. 1924), and Rudolf Kelterborn (b. 1931).86 Sutermeister became committed to the idea that composers should write music that appeals to the widest audiences possible but without compromising one's principles. His music shows the influence of three composers:Verdi, Debussy, and his teacher, Orff. In the tragic opera Romeo und julia (Dresden, 1940), he combines a pleasing melodic style with a good sense for the dramatic. In his Raskolnikcff(1948), adapted from Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, he calls for two separated orchestras to represent inner and outer realms of the world. Of particular interest are Suter meister's works designed for television productions, of which Seraphine (1959) and Das Gespenst von Canterville (1964) are representative of his work in this medium. 87 His last opera was Le Roi Bfrenger (1985). Whereas Klaus Huber has to date contributed only one opera to the Swiss repertoire, namely, jot, oder Wann kommt der Herr zUrUck (Berlin, 1973) in which avant-garde techniques are prevalent, Kelterborn has produced several, all with German texts. Serialism plays an important role in his conception of the musical scores, from his earliest opera, Die Errettung Thebens (1963), to his most recent, julia (1991). The last-mentioned work is a chamber opera, based in part on Shakespeare's Romeo and juliet and in part on Gottfried Keller's novella, which concerns the fate of a young Israeli woman Oulia) who is living in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine and is in love with a young Palestinian (Romeo).

85. See Billeter, "Frank Martins Biihnenwerke." 86. See Briner, ed., Swiss Composers in the 20th Century, for biographical profiles of these and other prominent Swiss composers. 87. Birkner, Heinrich Sutermeister: Der Weg des Buhnenkomponisten.

Opera in the Gertw'\n-Speakins Countries

653

the continuing central tradition in opera in the German-speaking countries at the beginning of the post-World War II era is an Austrian, Gottfried von Einem (1918-96). In his music, piercing harmonic dissonances and sharp variegated rhythms are contained within an essentially tonal and Romantic-styled framework of expression that has singable melodic lines, the whole enlivened by original thematic ideas and handled with a natural flair for stage effect. Von Einem's early works for the theater include, in addition to ballets, two operas: Dantons Tad (1947), on a libretto adapted from Georg Biichner's drama of the same title, a work notable for its tumultuous crowd scenes; and Der Prozess (1953), based on Franz Kafka's novel, a score in which each scene constitutes a musical unit with its own characteristic and formal pattern. Among his later works are Der Zerissene (1964); Der Besuch der alten Dame (1971), a neo-classical Singspiel; Kabale und Liebe (1976); the very controversialJesu Hochzeit (1980); and Tulifimt (1990). Der Besuch der alten Dame, based on Friedrich Diirrenmatt's play with that title, concerns a very wealthy lady who returns to her hometown in Switzerland and offers the townsfolk huge sums of money if they will murder her former lover; her offer is accepted and the repulsive deed is accomplished. The horror of the crowd's willingness to comply is skillfully communicated by Von Einem's score. 88 Von Einem's composition teacher and librettist was Boris Blacher (190375), a prolific and popular composer in his own right. 89 Blacher's music is as varied as the many styles with which he experimented, including folk, jazz, and electronic. Three of his best-known operas are Preussiches Miirchen (1952), a comedy; Abstraktc Oper NO.1 (1953), on a text of meaningless syllables in a lightly satirical vein; and Romeo undJulia (1947), a work that foreshadows the type of chamber opera written by Britten. A more broadly conceived use of the twelve-tone technique can be found in the operas of many German composers of the second half of the twentieth century. The leading composer and teacher of this generation was Wolfgang Fortner (1907-87), distinguished for symphonic and choral works as well as operas. His best-known opera is Die Bluthochzeit (1957), a melodious, cleantextured setting of Federico Garcia Lorca's tragedy Bodas de sangre. His other works for the stage include In seinem Garten lieht Don PerlimpUn Belisa (1962), also based on a play by Lorca, and Elisabeth Tudor (1972).91l Other composers in Germany who have attracted particular notice for THE COMPOSER WHO PROBABLY BEST REPRESENTS

88. See Stuckenschmidt, Die grossen Komponisten; idem, "Von Einem's Der Besuch." 89. Blacher, "Neuland Rhythmus"; Stuckenschmidt, Boris Blacher. 90. Fortner's association with the summer symposiums on contemporary music at Darmstadt brought him to the attention of many of Germany's younger composers. See, in particular, Fortner's writings on his own music.

654-

The Twentieth Century

their operas include the Swiss-born Rolf Liebermann (191Cl-99), Paul Dessau (1894-1979), Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), Bernd Alois Zimmermann (191870), and Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926). Liebermann, in Lenore 40/45 (1952) and Penelope (1954), juxtaposed contrasting musical styles for a novel treatment, half realistic and half fantastic-satirical, of contemporary subject matter. His School for Wives (1955), with music in a tonal style, is a witty modern version of Moliere's comedy.91 Eisler, an East German composer who lived in the United States from 1933 to 1948, is best remembered for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, including the opera Die Massnahme (1930). Two other plays by Brecht, Die Verurteilung des Lukullus and Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, were given musical settings by Dessau: Das Verhor des Lukullus (March 1951; revised as Die Verurteilung des Lukullus for an October 1951 production) and the comedy Puntila (1966). Questions of moral responsibility pervade the material Dessau brought to the stage, a reflection of his intense involvement with political and social issues. For example, his internationally successful opera Lukullus focuses on the career of a Roman general whose acts of brutality, committed under the cloak of military expediency, are judged to be crimes against humanity, punishable by banishment into eternal "nothingness." Omitted from the orchestration are instruments such as violins, clarinets, oboes, and horns that would lend an expressive quality to the score. Einstein (1974), Dessau's last opera, addresses the question of a scientist's responsibility to society for his inventions; a biographical sketch of the title character is supported by a mixture of musical styles ranging from electronic tape to quotations from]. S. Bach's works, and from jazz to twelve-note technique.92 A powerfully expressive score composed during the post-World War II era is Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten (1965), a Janus-faced work that looks back to Berg's fM>zzeck and points forward to Henze's We Come to the River.93 The story of Die Soldaten comes from an eighteenth-century play by Jakob Lenz, whose depiction of the military "establishment" in Prussian society can be read as an indictment of the military in the twentieth century as well. Zimmermann mirrored this conception by positioning the audience in a circle on swivel chairs surrounded by multiple stages. The revised designs, reflecting his submission to practicality, call for a multilayered set consisting of five levels, on which simultaneous staging of scenes can take place. The dramatic possibilities of this set are exemplified in the layered staging of three 91. Klein, "Rolf Liebermann als dramatischer Komponist"; Glanville-Hicks, "Some Reflections on Opera." 92. Hennenberg, Paul Dessau; idem, Dessau-Brecht musikalische Artbeiten; Schaefer, "Paul Dessaus Einstein Oper." 93. Zimmermann composed the score for Die Soldaten, including the revisions, between I958 and 1964. See Seipt, "Die Soldaten."

Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

655

scenes, involving different times and places, in which (I) Stolzius receives Marie's letter of rejection, (2) Marie's grandmother sits weeping, anticipating her granddaughter's downfall, and (3) Baron Desportes seduces Marie. This collage of time, space, and action is reinforced by Zimmermann's score, with its variety of instrumental groupings, such as the reduction of instruments to a solo guitar at the end of Act III, scene iii, and the combination of organ and percussion for the interlude that opens Act IV, scene ii; its pluralism of musical material, such as the introduction of jazz in Act II, scene i; the use of the Dies irae and Bach chorales; and the incorporation of film footage, prerecorded tape, and offstage voices in the final scene of Act IV; and its structural design, wherein each scene in this four-act opera adheres to a specific musical format-the four scenes of Act I, for example, are subtitled, respectively, "Ciacona," "Ricercari," "Toccata," "Nocturno." From the loud crashing tone clusters in the overture (example 26.8a) to the introspective recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the concluding scene (example 26.8b), Die Soldaten makes its moral statement in a unique manner that has been imitated but seldom duplicated. In sharp contrast to Zimmermann, who composed only one opera, Hans Werner Henze can be counted among the more prolific opera composers of the second half of the twentieth century.94 From his one-act comedy Das Wundertheater (1948), which reveals his serialist training with Wolfgang Fortner and his association with a like-minded group of composers in Darmstadt, to Venus und Adonis (1997), he has been engaged with a wide variety ofliterary and musical materials. In Boulevard Solitude (1952), he presented a realistic adaptation of the Manon Lescaut story, in which each of the separate scenes is accompanied by a stylized modern dance. He next produced Das Ende einer Welt (1953), composed for radio broadcast, and Ein Landarzt (1951), a radio opera based on Kafka's story, with music that reflects the musical style of Berg's Lulu. In the mid-1950s Henze left Germany and settled on an island in the Bay of Naples; he also left behind a style of composition championed by the Darmstadt composers, with whom he had previously been associated. This physical detachment from his native soil allowed Henze to acquire a new perspective on the ingredients that help create successful compositions for the stage. Two major operas are associated with this Italian sojourn. The first is Der Konig Hirsch, a fairy-tale opera with a long, elaborate, and variegated score that confirms Henze had indeed broken free from serialism. The significance of this stylistic change, however, could not be fully appreciated until

94. See Flammer, Politisch engagierte Musik als kompositorische Problem, dargestellt am Beispiel von Luigi

Nono und Hans lterner Henze; Rexroth, ed., Der Komponist Hans ltemer Henze; Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography.

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658

The Twentieth Century

1985, when the original version of this five-hour opera was performed in its entirety at Stuttgart. 95 The second is Dey Prinz von Homburg (1960), a fullscale grand opera with choruses; it is adapted from Heinrich von Kleist's drama on the subject of a military officer whose insubordinate actions on the battlefield cause him at first to be sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted. From grand opera, Henze turned to composing a twelve-tone score for Elegy for Young Lovers (1961).This chamber opera, with a libretto in English by W H. Auden and Chester Kallman, centers on an egotistical poet whose artistic inspiration comes from anxieties experienced by others. In order to create a situation that would produce this kind of inspiration, the poet kills his stepson and the stepson's girlfriend (the "young lovers" in the title of the opera). A full-scale comedy, DeyJunge Lord (1965), appeared next, followed by a one-act opera seria, The Bassarids (1966), an adaptation by Auden and Kallman of Euripides' The Bacchae. The score of The Bassayids is structured as a four-movement symphony, with a specific form for each movement: sonata, scherzo, adagio and fugue, and passacaglia. 96 In the ten years between The Bassarids and Vlie Come to the River (1976), Henze became increasingly involved as a left-wing political activist, but his writings and music of this period show that his advocacy of world revolution was tempered by a strong defense of artistic individualism. 97 Vlie Come to the River, on an original libretto by Edward Bond, explores the conflict between authoritarian power and personal freedoms. This antiwar opera makes its attack on the militaristic values of a capitalistic society with the harshness of an atonal score and the weight of more than one hundred roles accompanied by three orchestras positioned on three separate stage levels. 98 Two markedly different operas are Henze's The English Cat (1983), a twoact comedy of manners written in the style of a number opera, and Venus und Adonis (1997). The latter, a "dance drama," is an opera about an opera; it calls for three dancers-Venus, Adonis, and Mars-whose vocal parts are taken by three singers positioned near them on the stage. In addition there are six or more singers who, for most of the opera's duration, remain invisible to the audience. Their contribution consists principally of singing a cappella madrigals. The dancers become embroiled in a fateful love triangle, and eventually the three singers representing them fall into a similar fateful relationship. In the epilogue, one of the madrigalists portraying a shepherd asks the dead 95.A shortened version of Konig Hirsch was produced at Berlin in 1956 and a revised version, entitled II re cervo, or The Errantries of Truth, was performed at Kassel in 1963. 96. Griffiths, "The Bassarids"; D. de la Motte, Hans Werner Henze: Der Prinz von Homburg; Geitel, Hans Werner Henze. 97. Henze, Essays; idem, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953-1981. 98. The American premiere of this opera took place at Santa Fe in 1984.

Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

659

Adonis if he is "lonely among the stars." Adonis's reply is that he had been lonely while he was alive but now he is "a star among stars." Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) has been preoccupied with the creation of LICHT: Die sieben Tage der TtOche, an opera cycle consisting of seven music dramas related to the seven days of the week. 99 In Robin Maconie's exceptionally perceptive discussion of LICHT, he explores the implications of the title: "As the light of Newtonian rationalism can be split into seven spectral colours, so the seven days of LICHT are interpreted as partial refractions of a total spectrum.,,100 There are, of course, many other levels of interpretation of the title, not the least of them the religious symbolism of equating goodness with light, evil with darkness. This, in turn, suggests that LICHT continues in the tradition of religious drama, while at the same time pushing the limits of opera as a genre to the point of disintegration. The first opera Stockhausen completed for the cycle was Donnerstag aus LICHT (1981). It is in three acts, bounded by a "greeting" and a "farewell," and has as its principal characters Michael, Eva, and Luzifer, the very same characters, together with their generative melodies, who are to appear in the remaining six operas. Michael represents the hero figure; Eva is his consort and also his mother; and Luzifer plays the role of the antagonist. Uniquely, Stockhausen has designed the casting for these three roles in such a way that each can be represented by either a singer (tenor, soprano, bass, respectively), an instrumentalist (trumpet, basset horn, trombone), or a dancer. Precedent for the use of the mime-instrumentalist can be found in several of Stockhausen's works, such as Harlequin (1976), which is to be performed by a dancing clarinetist. Donnerstag consists of scenes and acts from previously commissioned works, precluding any attempt on the part of the composer to weave them into a unified whole. What guides the structural design is not narrative but ceremony. Upon entering the theater, audiences are "greeted" by an instrumental prelude played in the foyer; upon leaving the theater, they are bid "farewell" by five trumpets that signal to one another from the roof of the theater or from some other elevated position outside the building. The overall plan of the seven music dramas is as follows: Donnerstag is concerned primarily with the life of Michael, the musician who brings a cosmic message to earth. Samstag (1984) and Montag (1988) are focused on the characters ofLuzifer and Eva, respectively. Dienstag (1992) embodies DerJahreslauJ (The Course if Time), a commissioned work written for the Japanese Imperial Gagaku Ensemble in 1977, in which the role of temptation is explored in

FOR THE PAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY,

99. Stockhausen had plans to complete the cycle in 2002. lOO. Maconie, The U0rks of Kar/heinz Stockhausen, 263.

660

The Twentieth Century

connection with the character of Luzifer as he and Michael come into conflict. Mittwoch dwells on the cooperative actions of the three characters; Freitag (1996) reveals how Eva is tempted by Luzifer; and the seventh opera, Sonntag, is to make manifest the mystical union of Michael and Eva. 10! Three composers who have had a number of works come to the stage since the early 1980s are Argentinian-born Maurice Kagel (b. 1931), Siegfried Matthus (b. 1934), and Udo Zimmermann (b. 1943). Kagel has lived most of his adult life in Germany, where he has worked as a filmmaker, a dramatist, and a composer. Early in his European career he succeeded Stockhausen as director of the Cologne Course for New Music. Kagel's works for the theater include the multimedia Staatstheater (1971), consisting of nine vocal, instrumental, and scenic sections that can be performed in any order desired. The work, at first glance, appears to embrace the standard components of any opera production, but it is in the handling-or rather the intentional mishandling-of these components that Kagel succeeds in negating the essence of the very medium in which he is involved. Among his later works are Die Erschiipfung der Welt (1980), Aus Deutschland (1981), and Tantz-Schul, which was performed at the Vienna State Opera in 1988. Tantz-Schul takes its title from a 1716 treatise on dance written by a Venetian choreographer who served the court in Dresden for more than thirty years. 102 The treatise is unusual in that the author not only wrote about various types of dances but also included illustrations, for which he supplied a brief melody for each entry. Kagel took these melodic fragments and wove them into an operatic score. Matthus has been exceptionally successful with his operatic productions, not the least of them being his ninth opera, Farinelli, or the Power if Singing, first staged in Dresden in 1998. The opera centers on the life of Farinelli, a famous castrato who studied with Nicola Porpora and whose career took him first to Naples, then to London where he competed with Handel's singers, and finally to Spain where he served King Philip V This king was prone to having nightmares and periods of deep depression. To alleviate these maladies, Farinelli was hired to gladden the king's spirits through music. The plot is a retrospective of Farinelli's life but it also includes a romantic subplot that concerns Farinelli's love for the court's prima donna, Maria. To lend an air of authenticity to some of the scenes, Matthus moves through a wide variety of styles: he parodies the Baroque bel canto, quotes musical material from Mozart, and mimics the operatic palette of Hindemith and Berg. Udo Zimmermann's career as a composer owes much to Henze and to

lOr. Ibid. For the most recent bibliographic material on LICHT, s.v. "Stockhausen," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (200I), 24:4I3-I4. 102. Gregorio Lambranzi's treatise, Nuova e curiosa scuola de' balli teatrali / Neue und curieuse theatricalische Tantz-Schul, was reprinted in I975 and therefore would have been readily available to Kagel.

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several Polish composers. Long before the Berlin Wall was dismantled, he had earned the respect of both East and West German audiences. One of his most successful operas is Die weisse Rose (1967; revised, 1986), a chamber opera for two singers and an orchestra of fourteen instrumentalists. The title refers to the anti-Hitler White Rose student revolt that occurred in 1943, led by a brother and sister. For their crime against the Hitler regime, the Nazis condemn them to death. Wolfgang Willaschek imagines the thoughts of these two young people as they await their fate and captures these emotional moments in a series of texts that are then set to music by Zimmermann, who weaves them into a cycle of sixteen songs. Among his other operas are Levins Mahle (1973), a grand opera after the novel of the same title by Johannes Bobrowski, Die wundersame Schusteifrau (1982), and Gantenbeim (1997). From the youngest generation of composers comes Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971). His Thomas Chatterton, based on the life of the seventeenth-century poet of the same name, premiered at Dresden in 1998 to mixed reviews. The musical language that he embraced in this, his first opera, is atonal expressionism, no doubt a suitable choice to convey the gloominess of the subject at hand. A second opera entitled Heliogabal was commissioned for performance at Salzburg in 2001.

Chapter 27 National Opera in Russia and Neighboring CountrieSi Central and Eastern Europei Greece and TurkeYi the Netherlands! Denmark! Sweden! and Enlandi Spain! PortugaL and Latin America

Russia and Neish60rins Countries RUSSIA

In the Soviet Union during the 1920S, two principal kinds of new operas were being performed: the traditional, conservative works supported by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, and the progressive, avant-garde works promoted by the Association for Contemporary Music. The former group included operas commemorating battles and revolutions (e.g., For Red Petrograde, 1925, and The Storming of Perekop, 1927) and operas from the international repertoire revised to capture the revolutionary spirit (e.g., Tosca revised as The Struggle of the Commune, 1924). The latter group involved works by Soviet composers who were truly innovative and by outstanding non-Soviet composers, such as Berg and Krenek. An opera that certainly moved away from any traditional mold was Nos (The Nose) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75),1 first performed at Leningrad onJanuary 18, 1930. 2 This satirical comedy, based on a story from Gogol's St. Petersburg Tales, concerns a government official who has lost his nose. In its detached state, the Nose assumes an elusive identity, appearing in the most improbable situations. Ultimately, the Nose is caught, returned to its owner, and restored to its proper position. The score conveys the witty and eccentric

1. See Fay "The Punch in Shostakovich's Nose"; idem., Shostakovich: A Life; Norris, "The Operas." See also Norris, ed., Shostakovich: The Man and His Music; Shostakovich, The Power of Music; M. Brown, ed., Russian and Soviet Music. 2. This city has been variously named Leningrad or St. Petersburg, depending upon the political powers in control. In the period being discussed, the city's name was Leningrad.

National Opera tn Europe and the Americas

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text, with its fast-paced recitatives, angular and rhythmically complex vocal material, and sparsely scored music for the orchestra that explores the extremes of range and timbre, and harsh dissonances. Although recent performances of The Nose have shown it to be a brilliant theatrical entertainment, the initial performances of the opera met with mixed reactions, causing it to be eliminated from the stage until the Moscow revival in 1974. The formation of the Composers Union in 1932, essentially a merging of the two organizations mentioned above, allowed the Soviet Union to exercise the ubiquitous power of the state on behalf of certain kinds of music and opera. 3 This influence, together with the manner in which the musical life of the country was organized, tended to produce a body of Soviet music cut off from, and apparently largely indifferent to, the various contemporary "advanced" currents in western Europe and the Americas. The officially promoted ideals required, among other things, that music should be treated as the possession of the entire people rather than of a musical elite only; that its material should be sought in, or shaped by, the music of the people of its own country or region; that it should emphasize melody and be written in a style not too difficult for general comprehension; that it should be "optimistic" in spirit; and that its subject matter-where a text was involved-should affirm socialist ideals. This policy naturally encouraged production of a great many symphonic poems, ballets, choruses, and operas distinguished rather for massive size and suitable political intentions than for musical vitality. At the same time, this official policy also aimed at stimulating the development of popular and, most especially, of regional musical life within the Soviet Union, thereby enriching the musical language of the country from genuine Eastern folkloristic sources. A work long regarded as a model for Soviet opera was Tikhy Don (The Quiet Don) by Ivan Dzerzhinsky (1909-78), first performed at Leningrad in 1935 and subsequently with great success all over the country. This work appears to hold a position in the history of Soviet opera comparable to that of Moniuszko's Halka in Poland or Erkel's Hunyady Laszl6 in Hungary. Its patriotic subject is treated in accordance with Dzerzhinsky's conviction that "everything that is lived by the people" can be expressed in opera, but that this must be done "in artistically generalized, typified figures, avoiding the pitfalls of naturalism.,,4 The music is technically naive, simple in texture, predominantly lyric, containing many melodies that suggest folksong without 3. General works on music and opera in the Soviet Union are Sovetskaia opera; Kulikovich, Sovetskaia opera na sluzhbe partii; Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers; Laux, Die Musik in Russland; Moisenco, Realist Music; Olkhovsky, Music Under the Soviets; Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 191'j-1970. See also books published in the Russian Music Studies Series of the UMI Research Press. 4. Remarks from a symposium on Soviet opera published in Sovetskaia muzyka (May I939), quoted in Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers, 82.

The Twentieth Century

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actual citation and having a few "modern" touches of harmony and rhythm. A similar work, once even more highly regarded by Soviet critics, was Dzerzhinsky's second opera, Podnyataya tselina (Virgin Soil Upturned, 1937). Dzerzhinsky's early works were representative of a trend in the 1930S toward the Stalinist "song opera," of which one of the best examples is V buryu (Into the Storm, 1939) by Tikhon Khrennikov (b. 1913). The "song opera," as a type, was subject to certain inherent weaknesses, principally the lack of clear, individual characterization through recitatives and ensembles, and the general absence of sharply defined dramatic contrasts. Into the Storm has been classified as a "socialist realist" work, primarily because of its focus on melodic and rhythmic material related to folk and urban songs. One unusual aspect of this particular opera is the inclusion of a brief speaking part for the character representing Lenin. Other notable operas by these two composers include Dzerzhinsky's Sud'ba cheloveka (The Fate if a Man, 1962) and Khrennikov's Mat (Mother, 1958). Mother was performed for the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The libretto is drawn from a story by Maxim Gorky that tells of an earlier revolution, namely that of 1905; to accentuate the revolutionary atmosphere, the composer introduced some old revolutionary songs. Stalin's pointed approval of The Quiet Don coincided with a blast of official wrath at Shostakovich's second opera, Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth if the Mtsensk District). 5 When this tragic-satirical opera in four acts was presented at Leningrad in 1934, it was praised at home and soon made its way abroad (being staged, for example, at Cleveland in 1935 and at London in 1936). Initial comments about the opera ranged from "a work of genius" and "high artistic worth" to "a reflection of correct Party policy" and "a creation that surpasses art in capitalist countries."6 Two years later, following a performance of Lady Macbeth attended by Stalin, an article in Pravda denounced this opera as "confusion instead of natural human music;' unmelodic, fidgety, and neurasthenic, and moreover bad in that it tried to present a wicked and degenerate heroine as a sympathetic character. What had apparently shocked Stalin was the sexually explicit language and equally explicit music. Needless to say, Lady Macbeth promptly disappeared from Soviet theaters. The libretto for Lady Macbeth if the Mtsensk District comes from an 1865 novella of the same title by Nikolay Leskov. The central character, Katerina Izmailova, is a merchant's wife whose frustrations with Russian provincial life 5. See Shostakovich, "My Opera, Lady Macbeth

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