Literature As Opera
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LITERATURE AS OPERA ----;,---- Gary ,c1)midgall New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1977 Notes to Pages 3-1 I Chapter One r. Joseph Desaymard, Emmanuel Charier cl'apres ses lettres (1934), p. 119. The letter was probably written in 1886. a. Michel de Chabanon, De la musique considerie en elle-meme et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poe'sie, et le theatre (1785), p. 6. 3. One good reason to avoid a law-giving approach to the question of what is operatic is simply that the legislative record of writers on opera is not very encouraging, even those writers who speak from practical experience. Con- sider these pronouncements: Wieland: "Plays whose action requires a lot of political arguments, or in which the characters are forced to deliver lengthy speeches in order to convince one another by the strength of their reasons or the flow of their rhetoric, should, accordingly, be altogether excluded from the lyrical stage." Tchaikovsky: "Operatic style should be broad, simple, and decorative." R. Strauss: "Once there's music in a work, I want to be the master, I don't want it to be subordinate to anything else. That's too humble. I don't say that poetry is inferior to music. But the true poetic dramas—Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare—are self-sufficient; they don't need music." Adorno: "It has never been possible for the quality of music to be indif- ferent to the quality of the text with which it is associated; works such as Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Weber's Euryanthe try to overcome the weak- nesses of their libretti through music but nevertheless are not to be salvaged by any literary or theatrical means." All these statements have at least two things in common. First, they have much truth in them. Second, they have all been ignored—sometimes with conspicuous success. One could easily point to well-known repertory works to prove as well as disprove each of the above attempts to legislate the mer- curial process of connecting words with music for theatrical purposes. In this realm of translation, as in other artistic realms, an aesthetic code is imprac- ticable and even undesirable. Shaw made this point in The Sanity of Art: "The severity of artistic discipline is produced by the fact that in creative art no ready-made rules can help you. There is nothing to guide your own sense of beauty and fitness; and, as you advance upon those who went before you, that sense of beauty and fitness is necessarily often in conflict, not with fixed rules, but with precedents." Gluck expressed a similar idea in his dedication for Alceste (1769): "I have not cherished the invention of novel devices except when they were demanded by the situation and the expression. There was, finally, no rule which I did not gladly violate for the sake of the intended effect." 4. The aesthetic of opera is remarkably like that of the modern Expres- sionist movement. If this passage on operatic style were not written by Diderot (in Rameau's Nephew), it could easily be taken as an Expressionist credo: "It is the animal cry of passion which ought to determine our course. These ex- pressions must press hard upon each other . The passions must be strong, and the tenderness of both poet and composer extreme. The aria is almost always the peroration of a scene. We need exclamations, interjections, suspen- sions, interruptions, affirmations, and negations; we call, invoke, shout, weep, 385 Notes to Pages 14-31 Notes to Pages 34-39 cry, and laugh copiously. No wit, no epigrams, no subtle phrases—these are opera in England: "In England people like very few recitatives, thirty airs, far removed from simple nature." and one duet at least distributed over the three acts. The subject must be Diderot is here echoing Rousseau, who specified this "Expressionist theorem" simple, tender, heroic—Roman, Greek, or possibly Persian, but never Gothic in his article on opera in the Dictionary of Music (1764): "The force of all or Lombard. For this year, and for the next two there must be two equal parts the emotions and the violence of all the passions are, then, the principal ob- for Cuzzoni and Faustina. Senesino takes the principal male character and his ject of the lyrical drama." part must be heroic." Giuseppe Riva, Modenese Ambassador in London, quoted 5. George Bernard Shaw wrote in a review: "There are two extremes. One by R. A. Streatfeild, "Handel, Rolli, and Italian Opera," Musical Quarterly, is to assume full dignity for the creative musician, and compose an independ- Vol. III (1917), p. 433. Stendhal gives a more elaborate description of the ent overture which, however sympathetic it may be with the impending opera seria formula in Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio (1814; 1972, tr. Richard drama, nevertheless takes the forms proper to pure music, and is balanced and Coe), pp. 234-35. finished as a beautiful and symmetrical fabric of sounds, performable as plain 3. Except perhaps for Benjamin Britten, no composer has served so suc- Opus r 000 apart from the drama, as satisfactorily as the drama is performable cessfully so many English literary figures as Handel: John Gay set the words apart from it . The other extreme is to supply bare milodrame, familiar for the exquisite pastoral Acis and Galatea (one of Handel's most popular samples of which may be found in the ethereal strains of muted violins which works in his lifetime); Dryden's poetry provided the text for Alexander's accompany the unfolding of transformation scenes in pantomimes, the ani- Feast and the Ode for Saint Cecilia's-Day; Pope and Arbuthnot collaborated mated measures which enliven the rallies of harlequinades, or the weird upon the words for the early oratorio Esther; Congreve wrote the libretto throbbings of the ghost melody in The Corsican Brothers." upon which Semele was eventually based; and Milton inspired two of 6. The desire to capture speech patterns in the vocal line is a typically Handel's supreme masterpieces, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and Samson. Eastern European trait (Mussorgsky's operas and those of Janacek especially) 4. Essays on Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind (3rd ed., 1779), and was of course important for the eighteenth-century traggdie lyrique in p. 56. "Musical expression was the expression of the passions of men, not of France (Rameau's operas in particular). And this was the stated goal of man. Hence the 'objectivity' that eighteenth-century musical expression, vocal Italian musical humanists—Monteverdi, Peri, Caccini. or instrumental, seems to have. The doctrine of music as imitation and expres- 7. Busoni wrote: "Goethe had thought of his second Faust half 'opera- sion reflected the generalizing and universalizing aim of neo-Classical thought tically.' He wished (it would seem from his communications) that the and art. The particular and the individual were to receive emphasis later, but choruses should be sung throughout, and he expressed the opinion that it for the time being the typical in human passion or even sentiment held full would be very difficult to perform Helena's part because it required a tragic sway." Herbert Schueller, "'Imitation' and 'Expression' in British Music Criti- actress as well as a prima donna." cism in the Eighteenth Century," Musical Quarterly, Vol. XXXIV (1958), 8. "Certain great musicians—Haydn and Beethoven for example—possess a p. 564. sense of drama, but they do not have a theatrical sense: sentiments quite dis- 5. Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the Uni- tinct and utterly different." Paul Dukas, L'Art de la musique (Paris, x961), versity (1716), p. 8; on Shaftesbury's ideas, see Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury's p. 403. Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (1967). 9. "Some Reflections on Music and Opera," Partisan Review, Vol. XIX 6. Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions 07371 Vol. I, p. 59. In (1952). This article is reprinted in Weisstein. this matter, see Donald Greene's "Augustinianism and Empiricism: A Note ro. Two instances of theory not coinciding with practice, in the cases of on Eighteenth-Century English Intellectual History," Eighteenth Century Wagner and Verdi, are explored by Jack Stein in Richard Wagner and the Studies, Vol. I (1967), pp. 33-68. The thesis of this article is "that the domi- Synthesis of the Arts (196o), and Philip Gossett in "Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and nant ethic of the intellectual life of eighteenth-century England . was Aida: The Uses of Convention," Critical Quarterly, Vol. I (December 1974), one of disinhibition, of the release of human potential, emotional and intel- PP. 291-334. lectual, for good, the freeing of the human spirit from the bondage of the self and its narrow lusts and fears, the growth of the human capacity for awareness and feeling, for love and understanding" (p. 67). Handel's art has Chapter Two much to do with this ethic. 7. "The critical standards that governed the painting of passions were 1. The finest book on Handel is Winton Dean's Handel's Dramatic Ora- roughly the same for each of the major arts, though of course special conven- torios and Masques (1959)• Dean's Handel and the Opera Seria (1969), the tions varied with the medium employed . Though there was no one offi- result of a series of university lectures, is naturally more cursory. A major cial name for the technique of painting the passions, it was perhaps most fre- study of Handel's operas, on which Dean is now working, has not yet ap- quently known as the Pathetic style; and its province was the whole scale of peared.