Believing in Opera Tom Sutcliffe

Published by Princeton University Press

Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Course Book ed. Princeton University Press, 2014. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33772. https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/33772

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 16 21st-century opera - going for a song Richard Jones's 1991 English National Opera staging (at the London Coliseum) of Die Fledermaus designed by Nigel Lowery: Vivian Tierney as Rosalinde in extravagant disguise as a folksy Hungarian countess lets fly with memories of 'her homeland'. Photograph © Robbie Jack. The 20th century has been good for opera in many ways. Opera has become a familiar household product on television and on compact disc. It is used and appreciated by - or, rather, its best, most memorable musical moments are familiar to - a wider pub­ lic around the world than ever before. It has been well funded - both by generous rich patrons and out of state subsidy. It may be an exclusive, demanding and elitist art-form - as its enemies fre­ quently say - but it continues to mobilize a public that has grown more passionate about its virtues and attractions as the century wears on. It is controversial and often in the news. People care when opera-houses burn down, which unlike churches and cathe­ drals they are very prone to do. Opera-houses have been built and old stages have been refurbished. The opera-house in Sydney is an icon of modern architecture, an acknowledged thing of great beauty, though as a practical opera-house it is very far from ideal. The opera-house in Zurich caused violent riots, when plans for its costly reconstruction were announced. Despite being commer­ cially exploited on record and on television or film, opera has not been tamed or reduced by or made the servant of those media. It has stubbornly remained what it always was: words and music in dramatic context, assembled with all sorts of elusive intriguing ideas that matter enormously. The musical language preferred by serious modern composers, artists who are expected to survive the eventual judgment of his­ tory, without doubt became increasingly unvocal after 1945. There are now very few song-writers of originality or lyrical facil­ ity who can marry their skill to good present-day dramatic poetry. Are there any serious composers at all who are really worthwhile and distinctive song-writers now? The heart of the operatic con­ vention is the necessity of song, the acceptance that what is being said needs to be sung. But sequences of notes which together do not amount to a musical statement that people want to hear (uttered by a voice they like) can scarcely claim necessity. That is the central fallacy of many attempts at modern opera. Song may come in many different shapes. The order of notes offered may never before have been considered lyrical or telling, Believing in Opera

but the authenticity of operatic or lyrical utterance lies in the fact that an audience will hang on this sung music. Their concentration and responsiveness are willing and therefore pleasurable and affec­ tionate. They can listen to the words, and the relationship of pitches carrying those words, being simultaneously qualified in a coherent syntactical sense - just as they hear them. Song is not only words attached to a musical shape of notes - it is an organic relationship between different notes and words. There can be an infinite variety of musical languages and images, but they have to be apprehendable. Many musical traditions seem to have vanished over the last five decades which formerly provided useful tools for opera com­ posers: symphonic argument, choral coherence, for example. Some of these elements have migrated to pop music and jazz, from where they might well in theory be borrowed back. But it is of great significance that the pleasure principle no longer seems to apply in opera. What worthwhile serious music being written today offers anything to listeners in the way of simple pleasures? Pleasure has given place to effort and duty for those still taking the art of music and opera seriously. Modernism is not a phenomenon that can be disregarded, or that any serious enthusiasts can turn their back on and ignore. It remains unavoidable. The operatic future cannot lie in writing down to the taste of the public, or compromising. In any case, the breaking-up of the 19th-century musical conventions - including the logic and decorum of the dia­ tonic system - has in effect expanded the possibilities of expres­ siveness. Sounds that would have seemed meaningless a century ago are now potent with significance and dramatic consequence. But composers have to reacquire the confidence to be simple as well, especially in dramatic music and opera. Timing and a sense of dialogue or rhetoric are absent almost entirely from most of the more distinctive and memorable serious composers of the last 30 years. Harrison Birtwistle's operas, since the extraordinary achievement of his Punch and Judy, evoke various impressive musical landscapes during their sometimes over-extended courses. But the music that he gives to the voices has little light and shade, small rhythmic interest, scarcely any of the rhetoric that marks his orchestral writing. To regard opera as a museum art, or even a dead art, is to ignore the changing circumstances of operatic life. Musical invention has not stopped. What has become problematical is song. It is true that 21st-century opera: going for a song opera cannot remain for ever on a treadmill of historic revalua­ tions. But the fascination with new and altered theatrical styles in the opera-house over the last twenty years has proved how worth­ while and resilient the art-form remains as a resource worth per­ forming and interpreting. And there has been plenty of basic material to concentrate on - quite apart from the established pan­ theon. Works that are being dug up from the distant past, or from the forgotten and neglected 1950s or 1930s, may not be in unlim­ ited supply. Yet fresh ears and eyes are exploring what may have seemed less than successful when first exposed to public view. And repetition does not dull the masterpieces in the repertoire that go on attracting audiences reliably, almost however they are staged. In an age when people read the same books and see on videotape the same films over and over again, the opera audience is evidently in no danger of crossing a boredom threshold, of becoming too familiar. Musical taste which used to be ephemeral, and therefore prone to boredom, is now infinitely various. Taste which rejects much that is new, or suspects it will not even be worth consider­ ing, is truly catholic as, nowadays, it ventures into the past. The breach between the composers and the public which has got wider in the course of the century is a fact of life, and it is prob­ ably an advantage that the growth of the repertoire has as a result slowed down. It amounts to a pause for breath, a long slow back­ wards survey, made easier by the availability of recording - which increasingly encourages the modern mind to think of and look to the past. Composers who should have the skills and inclination to write operas for today's audiences seldom provide what audiences want to hear. The dreams they have are too challenging. The sounds they want do not support an exchange of words between singer and audience. The harmonies and melodies they give singers are neither emotionally true nor reward their performers' wish for coherence and accomplishment. The operatic past is still not properly in focus. The aesthetic character of 17th- and 18th-century opera has proved far more elusive than its mere notes and words suggested. In the relation­ ship of dramatic poetry and melody, the balance of interest and energy associated with either words or tunes has varied radically over the few centuries since opera started. The view from the 21st century will be distorted even further by the gradual acceptance of the complexity of Berg and Schoenberg - and perhaps eventually Stockhausen - into the popular arena. We look back at history Believing in Opera

from the vantage point of the present, a present where Puccini still reigns supreme and where melody is the key to attention and emo­ tion. The challenge of difficult operas in the 20th century has been musical, not dramatic or verbal. But one should think of these new works as software with which audiences must become familiar if they are to operate them. The same goes for performers. Can new music be properly tuned, even, before its singers know where the lines are going and how they relate harmonically? Every note in an opera depends for its sense on context. Its value relates to the attitude and direction of the line of which it is part, and where that line is taking the music as a whole. Listening leads to hearing and making sense, but so much modern art of any sort seems to need decoding before it can be used. The emphasis in this book on making different kinds of sense through re-interpretation will be taken by some as proof of the degeneration of opera. Theatre and opera-house have indeed been more than just a discipline and filter. They have levelled out the high aspirations of the modern artist and composer. It is extraor­ dinary and should give us pause - that, after all, Puccini remains the sure-fire product of which opera audiences never tire: the cen­ tenary of La bobeme finds it still one of the most popular works of all. Its longevity and the permanence of the musical language it uses are unprecedented in musical history. The operatic past is becoming increasingly distant but its masterworks seem impervi­ ous to fashion. Or rather the natural ebb and flow of aesthetic taste has been arrested by the mechanization of memory. Performers no longer require new material to arouse the interest of their public. Chereau's Ring at Bayreuth in 1976, a landmark production in the history of opera staging, was launched in the year Benjamin Britten died - the last composer of musical distinction to gain entry to the operatic pantheon, and Britten was criticized (and almost silenced) by the censorious modernists for writing in a too conservative manner as the 1950s wore into the 1960s. The many 20th-century operas amount to few classic masterpieces. Richard Strauss, Puccini, Janacek, Britten, and Berg will count as the pro­ fessional opera composers of the century, though Wozzeck and Lulu are atypical. It is a line that has temporarily come to an end. The well-made standard good opera for audiences to enjoy, with­ out being a masterpiece, has vanished. Attempts in the media to greet efforts by distinguished serious composers as the towering masterpieces of the age convince nobody. 21st-century opera: going for a song

Instead, the 20th century offers a catalogue of special cases: Ravel's L'heure espagnol and L'enfant et Ies sortileges, Pfitzner's Palestrina, Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges and Betrothal in a Monastery, Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and The Nose, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Poulenc's Dialogues des carmelites and Les mamelles de Tiresias, Tippetts Midsummer Marriage and King Priam, Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and Yan Tan Tethera. Few are genuine popular hits in the Puccini mould. But that is unsurprising, for most would-be 20th-century opera composers have had to re-invent the ground rules of composition, and sought untried tales for each new work, devising a personal language specially for the job. Can theatrical opera survive for ever on revivals that only ring superficial stylistic changes? Can a fresh musical voice immediately fit into a vernacular framework as Peter Grimes did in 1945? Audiences in America and Holland can be primed to welcome the works of Philip Glass and John Adams, though their arias (such as they are) cannot survive lifted out on their own. Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles found an audience at the New York Met in 1991. But these have been cases of tolerable music, not compulsive. Operatic music may be popular, and may attract listeners on radio and television. But if there is to be a future for opera, the tradition of music for singing has to be respected by composers and served. The trouble with television, film, and mod­ ern methods of recording and reproduction is that they have homogenized standards and tastes. However, there are signs that opera is not doomed to a museum existence or obsolescence. There are composers like Oliver Knussen, Gerald Barry, Judith Weir and Param Vir (in the British Isles) who have found recipes that work or who have musical (lyrical even) voices of individual­ ity and genuine distinction. Neo-classicism in the manner of Stravinsky and Prokofiev cannot be expected to work again. The burden on composers is to find a new kind of song, a new way of expressing lyrical energy. There has to be a new form of colour­ ing, or coloratura, that is worth the effort of singing. Live performance of classic opera is also being served by an encouraging new interest in adaptation and performance on the intimate scale, either with piano accompaniment or re-scored for just a few instruments - which also happens to be more econom­ ical, even perhaps commercially viable. Britten's experiments with Believing in Opera

chamber-scale operas at Glyndebourne and in Aldeburgh gave him the control over how they were first performed which he felt essential. He was a man of the theatre, and it is unlikely that a com­ poser who does not write for specific circumstances and the artists he knows and has chosen to work with (as Verdi did) will ever become operatically fluent. Britten disliked the backstage politics that afflicted the launch of Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells, Billy Budd and Gloriana at Covent Garden, and The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring at Glyndebourne. But these five operas all emerged within a span of eight miraculous years. That required an interested audience and managements eager to furnish produc­ tions. Until a similar kind of support is given to talented com­ posers who want to serve both drama and singers, and who have something real to say in their music, new operas will not happen. A new aesthetic, a new expressive language in the musical theatre, will require confidence and patience. In order to go forward it may be valuable to go backwards, to mix music and words as they were in the distant past of Purcell or of the earliest opera seria when the music served the text and found its function in a secondary, more discreet role. The audience may have to be weaned with a differ­ ent mixture, a different kind of novelty. Nobody can say that there is a lack of interest in musical shows in the West End or on Broadway - where the theatres are full of the popular equivalent of opera. The appetite for musical theatre at the end of the 20th century seems to be more insatiable than ever before. Meanwhile, ironically, spoken theatre ii,i London and New York is as comparatively specialized as modern opera. Something is wrong somewhere. The wider public in the age of Andrew Lloyd-Webber is deeply interested in the musical and theatrical elements from which opera also can be built. The taste for unpre­ tentious musicals is well attested. The phenomenal interest in music theatre scarcely looks like circumstances amounting to a crisis for opera. The taste for music generally should represent an opportunity. But serious composers still refuse to adapt to the new realities. Fashion continues, but opera temporarily has removed itself from that world. Might not a composer with some sense of Baroque shape and the melodic and rhythmic imaginativeness to be able to stop and start in the inner structures of his music-drama one day resuscitate the Singspiel? Comedy and spoken text could move abruptly but without strain into song and back again. The lack of likable new operas might be solved by recourse to the dif- 21st-century opera: going for a song ficult Purcellian field of semi-opera. Less music, more text - per­ haps more satisfaction on the part of the audience and tolerance of awkward kinds of experimental musical expressiveness. An understandable reason for the operatic public's old-fashioned taste is the unstoppable, oppressive volume and density of so many modern attempts to write opera by serious (often serial, or post-serial) composers. If audiences were given a break and offered inviting, witty and truthful dramatic material, they might more rapidly familiarize themselves with the structural dynamics of new operas. Theatrical conviction cannot be compromised. The versions of Carmen and Pelleas done by Peter Brook, David Freeman's best productions of chamber operas, or chamber adaptations of origi­ nally more grand operas with Opera Factory, and Graham Vick's adaptations with English Touring Opera and City of Birmingham Touring Opera have proved over and over again the effectiveness of a whole-hearted concern with theatrical values. There are alter­ natives to the tyranny of big stages, inflexible stars, and the estab­ lished tradition of undying masterworks at the New York Met, La Scala, the Bastille, or Covent Garden. Arena opera too has given a hint to thousands at Earls Court or Verona of the continuing allure and genius of Verdi in Aida, Bizet in Carmen, and Puccini in Tosca. But consumerism only keeps the taste ticking over, reminds the public where those favourite bits belong. It cannot be the answer to the theatrical future. Opera on the epic scale with electronic amplification is too coarse to involve minds in the com­ plex passions and politico-philosophical agendas embedded in these musical classics. Opera is essentially about acting and singing, making narrative and music speak in particular context. It is about prompting the imagination of the audience not swamping and directing it. There is a large television audience for opera. Could the future of opera be on television? The economy of scale that television allows makes the grandest artists affordable - and a few broadcast performances do amount to something artistically. Television is building opera audiences; it is a popularizing force. Videos are an important utility and learning tool. Productions of opera for video such as Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute have been very engaging - suggesting there might somehow be a bridge between opera and film. But opera on television is not the same art. Bergman devised a context for his Drottningholm Magic Flute of an audience Believing in Opera

shown reacting. He framed a live performance on film. The truth is that opera, live, means singers delivering physically - almost like athletes. If sport were edited, it would be a cheat. On television the audience has to watch close-up from camera positions that focus and interpret the sequence of actions for them in a version of tun­ nel-vision. The emphasis is invariably too visual for an art that must command the ears, and in the hierarchy of seeing and hear­ ing seeing almost unavoidably takes precedence. Only in the live opera-house can there be the right balance between the visual con­ text and the aural events. Of course, the serious effort to create bespoke operatic work expressly for the box has been helpful to and profitable for the cre­ ators. Actors appreciate making a living from television drama, but know that the real place for acting is the live theatre. Yet tele­ vision commissioning editors and programme makers are tanta­ lized by opera. It must mean something that the general producers of both London opera companies in the mid-1990s were former television executives. The fact that opera in the flesh can draw vast crowds, and combine glamour and serious artistic quality, indi­ cates to those who control television that it is a natural art for what has become the most powerful and profitable medium of the day. Television can even appear to preserve what in the theatre is ephemeral - though that in fact is an illusion, since what is pre­ served is not the real thing. Hence the speed with which Peter Sel- lars's Mozart productions or Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, based on actual theatrical performances, were consigned to tape. Hence the bizarre experiment of the 'real place' (if not 'real time') Tosca and the friendly spectacle of the three competing tenor-glad- iators serving their popularity. But most television opera contin­ ues to be live relays - performances overlooked by the cameras, but missing the magic of live performance. In 1951 Gian-Carlo Menotti wrote Amahl and the Night Visi­ tors for NBC. In 1971 Britten wrote Owen Wingrave for the BBC. More recently the BBC did Mark-Antony Turnage's Greek, a ver­ sion of Oedipus by Steven Berkoff. In the cinema Les parapluies de Cherbourg with its sentimental romantic singing of everyday inconsequential dialogue seemed musically thin and dramatically bizarre. The history of cinema includes important musicals writ­ ten expressly for film. But the issue always must be why the char­ acters sing rather than speak - in so naturalistic a medium, even more than within the conventions of live theatre. In the theatre 21st-century opera: going for a song

and opera-house that game with convention and realism is never so artificial. The BBC in 1992 showed a version of Marschner's The Vampire turned by Nigel Finch into a 'soap-opera' series updated to the present: but the style of the music and the aria form did not suit such self-conscious treatment. Channel 4 in 1993 invested £3 million in six newly commissioned 50-minute televi­ sion operas, declaring that the visual approach rather than the music had been the starting-point in choosing the six composers. Only The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit by Gerald Barry had the originality to survive. A former pupil of Kagel, with a flair for col­ oratura excess, dramatic dialogue, situation and character, Barry's step-dancing robustness amd harmonic coherence were dramati­ cally potent. In none of the 160 or so necessary operas that form an intelligent operatic repertoire for responsible opera companies (not all masterpieces) does music have second place. Opera, on the brink of the 21st century, is certainly music-led. Royal Opera and ENO workshops for operatic experiment were thoroughly tried out, and not the answer to the creation of new British works either - to judge from the Royal Opera's Gar­ den Venture, and ENO's Contemporary Opera Studio, though the latter under the control of David Pountney engendered Param Vir's Snatched by the Gods and Broken Strings, which made a remarkable impression at Hans Werner Henze's month-long music-theatre festival in Munich in 1992, staged by Pierre Audi in restrained, carefully focused productions. Almeida Opera in Islington presented a few works of promise: including Wolfgang Rihm's Lenz, John Casken's The Golem, and Gerald Barry's The Intelligence Park staged by David Fielding, about a castrato elop­ ing with an heiress in Handelian Dublin with good roles for coun­ tertenors. Stephen Oliver's Mario and the Magician, based on the Thomas Mann story, and the joyfully unpretentious, musically accessible and effective adaptation of Ostrovsky's bubbling A Family Affair by Julian Grant were among the successes there. London has tasted a great deal of brand new opera. With the exception of a few individual items, such as Tippett's first three operas (The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Knot Garden), some of Harrison Birtwistle's, and the work of Judith Weir, it is true that most - like the suitors of Turandot - have been found wanting. Both Covent Garden and ENO have done Weir's work proud. Her first opera - A Night at the Chinese Opera - was a real draw for the public in 1987 staged by the now disbanded Believing in Opera

Kent Opera. The Vanishing Bridegroom, written by Weir for her native Scottish Opera in Glasgow in 1990, toured to Covent Gar­ den. ENO's spring repertoire in 1994 included Weir's new full- length opera, Blond Eckbert, staged by Tim Hopkins with designs by Nigel Lowery (see pp. 256-59). Weir, whose works have also been heard in the United States, could well become the first woman composer to enter the operatic pantheon. She combines theatrical vision with firm musical control and economy, though the language of her music is not assertive or enormously striking. The issue in 21st-century opera will be the musical discourse, not the manner of staging the material. The existence of the cin­ ema would seem to preclude a return to simple narrative form. Editing disparate elements together, overlaying narrative with dis- cursion, a conscious playing with sub-text: all these methods are so much part of the subtlety of film and of video treatments of song material for rock musicians that the theatre and opera are unlikely to be strait jacketed, simplified and purified. What is there after post-modernism? Will there be a rejection of complexity? Will popular taste become alienated from history, from an aware­ ness of previous models? Will there be a renewed confidence about the present and distaste for the past? Will the whirligig of fashion slow down, or even stop? Musical language is bound to change. It will only take a few suc­ cesses in a particular style for a different language to become really popular. If audiences can once again enjoy voices in new melodies and a different musical language, one perhaps capable of embrac­ ing both dramatic crises and comic revelations, there will be no problem renewing the repertoire - adding to it, even. Yet it is hard to imagine, after the building of the classic operatic pantheon over the last 200 years, that there will ever be a real reversal of taste - unless there is a radical change in the nature of Western culture. Singers in the 20th century, despite the conservatism of their profession in musical taste, have shown themselves very adaptable - highly sophisticated and adept at learning to manage and make elegant the widest variety of musical languages. Music that sounded awkward if not impossible to sing, when it was first com­ posed by Schoenberg or Boulez, after a few decades has appeared completely within the normal capacity of a considerable range of different performers. Familiarity has made music approachable that at first seemed meaningless. But song is the real issue. The through-composed opera has 21st-century opera: going for a song been far harder to write and to listen to - because the kind of musi­ cal language found among respected and worthwhile serious mod­ ern composers has provided no structural assistance to listeners or to the composer struggling to honour some kind of graspable shape in the narrative. Song remains what draws the public to an interest in operatic material. Song is what is memorable. Song is the means whereby the themes and ideas of past operas are brought to life. Song is the essence of the drama that producers and designers are reacting to as they prepare to mobilize the work on stage. Poetry must sing. Poetic drama must sing. When it can once again, opera will have found a voice for the new millennium. It was not modernism itself, or serial composition, that silenced song in contemporary music: it was a kind of rhetorical exhaus­ tion. The language of the songs to come, and of the operas that such language will make possible, will not need to reject mod­ ernism in its various guises - but will go beyond it, no doubt exploiting the hints of a fragmented linguistic structure in the writing of Janacek and Britten as well as in the angular paeans of Berg. The subjects of those operas to come will also be different. Perhaps for a time it will even be better if the poetry of the new operas seems more important than the music - or as important. Drama in music does not mean the music must always be pre­ dominant, especially if the shaping of the discourse allows the words to tell more effectively. But music, wherever it is applied in opera, will have to be authentic and fresh, good enough to stand alone sometimes, good enough to be wanted and popular. Such music is certainly kicking in the womb of the 20th century.