Music Theatre

11 Music Theatre In the 1950s, when attention generally was fi xed on musical funda- mentals, few young composers wanted to work in the theatre. Indeed, to express that want was almost enough, as in the case of Henze, to separate oneself from the avant-garde. Boulez, while earning his living as a theatre musician, kept his creative work almost entirely separate until near the end of his time with Jean-Louis Barrault, when he wrote a score for a production of the Oresteia (1955), and even that work he never published or otherwise accepted into his offi cial oeuvre. Things began to change on both sides of the Atlantic around 1960, the year when Cage produced his Theatre Piece and Nono began Intolleranza, the fi rst opera from inside the Darmstadt circle. However, opportunities to present new operas remained rare: even in Germany, where there were dozens of theatres producing opera, and where the new operas of the 1920s had found support, the Hamburg State Opera, under the direction of Rolf Liebermann from 1959 to 1973, was unusual in com- missioning works from Penderecki, Kagel, and others. Also, most composers who had lived through the analytical 1950s were suspicious of standard genres, and when they turned to dramatic composition it was in the interests of new musical-theatrical forms that sprang from new material rather than from what appeared a long-moribund tradition. (It was already a truism that no opera since Turandot had joined the regular international repertory. What was not realized until the late 1970s was that there could be a living operatic culture based on rapid obsolescence.) Meanwhile, Cage’s work—especially the piano pieces he 190 Music Theatre 191 had written for Tudor in the 1950s—had shown that no new kind of music theatre was necessary, that all music is by nature theatre, that all performance is drama. Opera and ‘Opera’ Ligeti no doubt spoke for most of his colleagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he declared that ‘I cannot, will not compose a tradi- tional “opera”; for me the operatic genre is irrelevant today—it belongs to a historical period utterly different from the present compositional situation.’ No doubt he spoke for many, too, in going on to say that, nevertheless, ‘I do not mean at all that I cannot compose a work for the facilities an opera house offers.’1 (At this point he had written Aven- tures and its sequel Nouvelles Aventures, two pieces for three singers and ensemble that can be staged, though their fl ux of minuscule wordless dramas, careering from comedy to pathos, is freer and more immedi- ate without theatrical trappings. They show how he was able to profi t from his position as a mature student of the Western European avant- garde: by following his models—in this case, Kagel’s Anagrama—while at the same time exaggerating them, and bringing to them his own charm and perfectionism.) But by the time he came to write his ‘Opern- haus-Stück’, Le Grand Macabre (1975–76), there had been a change in his view, and a change too in the musical climate. The age of anti-opera had passed; the new work would have to be, as he said, an ‘anti- anti-opera’. During the decade or so before Le Grand Macabre opera had been the preserve of composers willing and able to deal in some way with the genre’s traditions, whether by following them (Henze and Zimmer- mann), by analysing them (Berio), by countering them (Kagel), or by seizing on the single truth that opera gives music a tongue with which to speak (Nono). Nono’s was a rare escape. Why the power of tradition should have been felt so much more strongly in opera than in, say, orchestral or piano music (there are no operatic equivalents to Gruppen or the sonatas of Boulez and Barraqué) is a complex matter, having to do, perhaps, with the rigidity and smallness of the standard opera repertory, and therefore with the costs of experiment (fi nancial and aesthetic costs) and the pressure to conform. The great lesson of the standard repertory is that the story is paramount, that the music should be in synchrony with the story’s narrative fl ow. Diatonic music, with its progressive narratives of harmonic movement and thematic trans- formation, is very good at that, which is why opera fl ourished during the era of diatonic music’s supremacy, from Monteverdi to Puccini and Strauss. Atonal opera is opera in crisis: Erwartung, Wozzeck. And crisis is 1. Ursula Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (Cologne, 1971), 43. 192 Modern Music and After hard to perpetuate. Hence the need for later composers either to ac- knowledge tradition in writing operas, or else to fi nd new forms and new kinds of narrative, whether in oriental theatre, in folklore, in con- temporary Western drama, or in unstructured ‘happenings’ of the kind enabled by Cage and the Fluxus composers. Henze, the most prolifi c and most performed opera composer since Britten, remained so by virtue of his warm, thorough-going acceptance of opera’s history and conditions. Where Berg in Wozzeck wrote a symphony at some ironic remove from the action, as if to suggest how the normal world of diatonic-thematic narrative was now broken and sus- pended, Henze’s symphony in The Bassarids (1965)—a reworking of the Bacchae of Euripides, for which W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto—is plushly in the foreground. As he has explained, the fi rst movement is a sonata which establishes the confl ict between the principals, Dionysus and Pentheus, as a musical confl ict between fl uid, unmeasured, ululating voice (the call of Dionysus, a tenor) and staccato trumpet fanfare.2 The second movement is a scherzo in the form of a suite of Dionysian dances; the third, incorporating Dionysus’s hypnotizing of Pentheus, is an adagio succeeded by a fugue; and the fi nale is a passacaglia. The Bassarids was the culmination of the sensuous, unashamedly nostalgic style Henze had pursued since moving to Italy a decade before. The symphonic structure, recalling not so much Berg as Mahler, is ample enough to include gestures made in diverse directions, from the knowing, deliberately vulgarized pastiche of Baroque French can- tata style in the intermezzo interrupting the slow movement to quotations from Bach, both as an earlier master of the siciliana rhythm on which the opera fl oats (Henze belongs squarely, even self-consciously, in the line of German artists rhapsodizing the Mediterranean) and as a source of references to support a parallel between the Crucifi xion and the sacrifi ce of Adonis. (Here is an example of how what are being treated here as separate waves—historicism, theatre, politics—were fl owing together and interpenetrating.) The integration of varied ma- terials and opposed themes, as displayed in the opera, is in Henze’s view a characteristic of the ‘segregated’ artist, the ‘outlaw’. Undoubt- edly he saw himself in this role, at odds with conventional society by virtue of his homosexuality, and artistically contrary both to tradition (though ever less so) and (ever more so) to the avant-garde, since he turned aside from the tentative approach to total serialism he had es- sayed in his Second Quartet (1952). His inclusion in 1958 in the issue of Die Reihe devoted to ‘young composers’—along with Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, and the rest—had already been an anachronism; by the time of The Bassarids the divide was absolute: Momente had already been 2. See ‘The Bassarids: Hans Werner Henze talks to Paul Griffi ths’, Musical Times, 115 (1974), 831–32. Music Theatre 193 written. ‘Never would he aim at an accord with the basic tendencies of his time’, Henze writes of his chosen type; instead he must devote himself to a minority ‘which merits his sympathy and which excites his sensual and spiritual substance’.3 Henze’s concern with the individual as a feeling being—even with himself as a feeling being—was part of his grand Romantic inheritance, and it inclined him, as it did the Romantics, to another genre in which these relationships with sympathetic minorities and uncomprehending masses could be played out: the concerto. The Bassarids was followed by a rush of such works: chamber concertos for double bass and for oboe and harp (several such works were written by various composers for the marital duo of Heinz and Ursula Holliger), and the determinedly autobiographical Second Piano Concerto. But then this absorption in his own personal and artistic situation was joined by a commitment to the interests of all those ignored or oppressed by bourgeois society. The darling of the Salzburg Festival, for which The Bassarids had been written, became a revolutionary; the poet of the soul began to shout about social iniquities. It was 1968. In the quasi-operatic oratorio Das Floss der ‘Medusa’ of that year, dedicated to Che Guevara, Henze dealt with the historical episode in which a group of shipwrecked men were abandoned to a raft by their offi cers, and left to face the perils of drowning and starvation. After the experience of its abortive Berlin première, lost amid struggles between police and left-wing students, Henze spent a year in Cuba, writing his Sixth Symphony, and expressing in that score his delight in the sonori- ties and rhythms of Cuban music, as well as reaffi rming his alignment with socialism by including in the elaborate polyphony quotations from Vietnamese and Greek protest songs.

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