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.