The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta

But by then, the centre of gravity in the opera world had shifted once again to Italy. The great Austro-German composers of the 19th century looked to the concert hall rather than the opera house, and those that did dream of operatic success, like Schubert, generally failed. The major exception was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), whose fireside horror-story Der Freischütz became the definitive statement of German Romanticism – and, like Fidelio, it was written to be sung in German.

The one supreme reason for Italy’s return to the top of the operatic pile in the early 19th century was Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), whose fame through Europe was so all-embracing that it left little room for any would-be German rivals to raise their heads. Rossini was not untouched by Romanticism, and much of his work sets grand, quasi-historical stories adapted from authors like Sir Walter Scott, whose novels had a fervent international following. But the Rossini operas that survive in repertory and are deemed his best are comedies; and they exemplify a kind of singing loosely called bel canto. What the term means is a matter of debate, but it implies the decorative virtuosity of coloratura singing, highly embellished with (in Rossini’s case) a steely glitter that tends to prize exquisite technique above spontaneous emotion.

Of Rossini’s two heirs and successors, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) is arguably the closest in spirit, with a brilliant light-comedic touch balanced by moments of pathos, most obviously the famous (and fashionable at the time) Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti set derangement so effectively that his own subsequent descent into madness was poetically appropriate.

But the master of bel canto emotion was the other heir, Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), whose truly passionate writing found a middle way between virtuosity and expressivity that would influence Verdi and Puccini decades later. In a short life he managed to produce a body of powerful work (no comedies) that climaxed in Norma, and their truncated potential for development make him one of the great what-ifs of music history. Had he only lived to fifty, Italian opera might have taken a very different direction.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813–1901)

As it was, the mantle passed to a composer who emerged as the supreme figure in Italian opera of the later 19th century and with no rival of quite such exalted stature anywhere in the world apart from Richard Wagner. He was Giuseppe Verdi. Unlike Wagner, Verdi was not a theorist, a proselytiser or a visionary. During the 1840s his operas were read as a call to battle for the unification of Italy, but beyond that he did not write to advance radical ideas or debate abstract issues. He was a practical, straightforward man of the theatre whose work was direct and assertive, accepting sometimes crudely improbable plots for the sake of the dramatic situations they set up, but otherwise emotionally true and with a predilection for certain themes that related to his own life and about which he spoke from the heart. One of them was father-child relationships, and it’s no coincidence that early in his life he lost two children and a wife in traumatically rapid succession.

The breadth and compass of Verdi’s work is so great that it resists summary, but in the broadest terms he introduced a new dimension to the catalogue of opera voices. Vivid, strong and sometimes as rough-edged as they are eloquent, his characters fill the ever-larger space that 19th-century opera came to expect as appropriate for its activities, following the irresistible lead of what was happening in Paris.

FRENCH OPERA

Nineteenth-century opera may have been dominated by Italian composers, but the Paris Opéra still somehow remained the Gold Standard venue from which universal trends and fashions flowed and to which everyone aspired. Wagner’s early failure to be taken up by Paris was a humiliation he never forgot, generating a lifelong grievance against the man who was the undisputed monarch of the city’s operatic life – Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Meyerbeer was an expatriate German who mastered the art of monumental spectacle beloved by Paris audiences and whose works, with their Cecil B. de Mille expansiveness and crowd-pleasing ballet sequences, defined the term ‘grand opera’. They set the tone, and the scale, of French stage music for decades to come, and they played their part in encouraging the massive enterprise that was Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz (1803–69), although Berlioz raised the artistic stakes of grand opera with elements of idealism and subtlety that were beyond Meyerbeer. Above all, Berlioz was a maverick, always his own man and never in thrall to fashion. When he wrote big, it was to please himself.

More fashion-conscious figures on the Paris circuit were Charles Gounod (1818–93), whose lighter, easier lyricism won him the fame and fortune that eluded Berlioz, and Jules Massenet (1842–1912), of whom much the same could be said. But the outstanding French opera composer of the later 19th century was Georges Bizet (1838–75) who only managed to produce one work of unarguable greatness during his brief life (another what-if?) but made it count. With a storyline of unadorned low-life realism, Carmen effectively invented verismo a decade-and-a-half before the Italians got there. In that sense it was innovative. But its opéra comique mix of arias and spoken dialogue was actually quite unsophisticated if you compare it with the truly epoch-making work that was emerging at the same time, across the German border.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83)

Born in the same year as Verdi, Wagner was the other supreme figure of 19th-century opera, and in many ways the magnitude of his achievement could be explained as a reaction against the two-and-a-half bad years he spent failing to establish himself as a young composer in Paris. French opera in general, and Meyerbeer in particular, became targets for attack, examples of the way opera had allowed itself to be debased from high art into entertainment. Wagner was to be a Messianic saviour, restoring the lyric stage to the status he imagined it once enjoyed as a temple of enlightenment – ennobling, spiritual, cleansed of all impurity – and by a stroke of luck it was during those bad years in Paris that he found solace in the German medieval myths that would prove the literary inspiration for his cultural campaign. Almost all the mature Wagner operas are based on these ancient legends, which Wagner advocated as ideal material for operatic treatment on the grounds of their timeless relevance and universality.

However ridiculous (and dangerous) some of his ideas turned out to be, Wagner was a truly revolutionary artist who changed not only the ideology of opera but its form and content. He once and for all got rid of the enduring operatic convention of ‘number’ opera, with the score broken down into units of aria, recitative, chorus and the like. Instead, his music was ‘through-composed’ in long, unbroken lines, with the vocal parts declaimed in a manner halfway between the decorative enlargement of aria and the direct narration of recitative. He set his own texts in a comparatively straightforward way, one note to a syllable. But his melodies were highly chromatic, weaving through myriad sharps and flats that undermine any clear sense of belonging to a specific key. He also set his singers the challenge of singing for long periods of time against a huge orchestra. And it’s in Wagner that the orchestra really comes into its own as a distinctive force to be reckoned among the diverse elements that feed into opera. In fact, it all but takes over, with the voices sometimes reduced to an accompaniment for what’s happening in the pit, rather than the more conventional reverse arrangement.

NATIONALISM

Thanks to Wagner, German was at last established as a major operatic language that could hold its own against Italian, and he spawned several generations of German disciples, starting with Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), who developed and refined the process of writing stage works for their own native tongue.

But there were sporadic outbreaks of nationalistically-inspired anti-Italianism in other parts of 19th-century Europe. Spain was an example, where a tradition of folksy light opera saturated with local colour called zarzuela was gathering ground and would, at the turn of the century, prove influential on Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). But the most significant nationalist activity was taking place in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904) took the lead in establishing a distinctive, folk-generated style of writing for the stage. What they began found its ultimate expression in the later, 20th-century works of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose skeletal, spikily compressed approach to operatic story-telling has come to be recognised as one of the most significant contributions to the modern history of music.

The chief centre of 19th-century nationalism, though, was Russia, a land which had only recently begun to develop a distinctive musical culture after years of French and Italian domination. The father of Russian nationalism was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), who set an enduring precedent for a grandly ceremonial kind of opera that mixed history with fairy tales but wasn’t terribly well crafted in terms of its structure. These were very early days for Russian music. Composition was a semi-amateur activity, and it remained so for the generation who came after Glinka, notably a group known as the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group’s leading member, Modest Musorgsky (1839–81), left mighty works of startling but rough-edged originality that his more craftsmanlike compatriot Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) subsequently tied up. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) completed the process through which Russian opera reached mature refinement, with works which tend to be considered more Western European than those of the ‘Mighty Handful’, although it would be more accurate merely to describe them as less inward-looking in their Russian-ness.

THE 20TH CENTURY

Summaries of 20th-century music are invariably messier than those of earlier periods, because composers fit less easily into territorial groups or ideological movements. They tend to make their claims as individuals and resist categorisation. But the century was ushered in by one conspicuously flourishing movement in Italy known as verismo, a school of low-life realism whose first champions, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), found instant fame with their respective mini-masterpieces Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, but were soon eclipsed in stature by a fellow Italian.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) emerged as the next great Italian composer after Verdi. In the history of music he doesn’t stand as a notable innovator, and his appeal is far from intellectual, but the strength and passion of his melodies, the quality of his orchestral writing, and his sheer theatricality (in both the best and worst senses of the word) have guaranteed his domination of the modern opera repertoire. And if Puccini doesn’t always ‘feel’ like a 20th-century composer, remember that the majority of his mature scores, from Madama Butterfly onwards, came after 1900. However, the other dominant figure of early 20th-century opera was a German.

Not to be confused with the Viennese king of operetta (no relation), Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was the successor to Wagner in much the same way that Puccini was to Verdi, adopting the master’s language, adjusting its parameters and, in the process, lightening its intensity. A young radical who, in archetypal fashion, grew into a middle-aged conservative, Strauss’ early works set out to shock the bourgeoisie, his later ones to charm them. But the Wagnerian inheritance was constant in the prominence and weight he alotted to the orchestra, and in the declamatory, through-flowing style of his writing for the voice, which commonly requires the power and stamina of Wagner’s helden singers. Through Strauss, a style of writing was fixed whose consquences can be heard today in the sometimes tough, politically driven but also sometimes romantic operas of Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) and the massively neo-Wagnerian project of Karlheinz Stockhausen (born 1928) to write an apocalyptic cycle of seven music dramas – one for each day of the week.

The excesses of Wagner and Strauss, though, led to an inevitable reaction away from opulent, well-upholstered writing on a grand scale and towards smaller, leaner alternatives. A changing world made the economics of large-scale opera harder to sustain, and while some German figures like the young Erich Korngold (1897–1957) clung to large forces and traditional trappings, more forward-looking ones like Kurt Weill (1900–50) were scaling down and rethinking the way in which opera addresses its audience. Weill’s collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht pioneered a new kind of music theatre, designed to be popular (with cabaret-style numbers), stripped of the top Cs and tiaras glamour of the opera house. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was also concerned with usefulness and, specifically, the relationship between the artist and society, although he gave operatic expression to it in a decidedly less radical manner than Weill and Brecht.

Meanwhile, the so-called Second Viennese School composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Alban Berg (1885–1935) had taken the Wagnerian message to its logical conclusions and beyond, with music that initially extended Wagner’s exotically free harmonies to a point where key signatures became almost irrelevant, and subsequently did away with any allegiance to a key centre altogether. The resulting serial or twelve-tone music proved more viable for instrumentalists than for singers, and it hasn’t found much of a following on the opera stage, even though Berg left two masterful scores of lasting importance in the modern history of the genre.

Before we leave the post-Wagnerian empire, mention has to be made of Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whose ethereally vague Pelléas et Mélisande is like Wagner in a whisper – perfumed, rich in symbolism, but without the bombast. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the one opera of Béla Bartók (1881–1945), is another heavily symbolic score in serious debt to the master of Bayreuth.

But the Wagnerian ascendency was finally (and ironically) ended by the intervention of one of the master’s most devoted admirers, Adolf Hitler, who single-handedly lost Germany its prime position in the mid-20th-century operatic league. The majority of the significant Austro-German composers went into exile as the Nazis came to power – usually with no choice in the matter – and their general direction was America, where Hindemith, Korngold, Weill and Schoenberg (among others) settled, assimilating with varying degrees of enthusiasm into the culture of their adoptive land and making their own contributions to the American musical melting-pot.

It would be wrong to describe the America of the 1930s as an operatic wasteland. It had been importing European talent (not least, Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte) for more than a century and boasted flourishing lyric companies. But home-grown opera was a novelty, and native composers were struggling to find a native means of self-expression – something that wasn’t merely shipped in from the old world. Marc Blitzstein (1905–64) and Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) were early experimenters, but the breakthrough came with George Gershwin (1898–1937), whose Porgy and Bess realised the hopes and strivings of a whole generation of American composers in the way it so successfully transcended the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art: cultivated and vernacular. Gian Carlo Menotti (born 1911) has never been the showbiz figure that Gershwin was, and his Italian background tells in the Puccini-esque nature of his feel for melody and drama, but he was pushing at those high/low boundaries during the 1940s, with a succession of operas designed to play commercially in non-traditional Broadway-type venues. And with passing input from the racy Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) and the conservative but passionate Samuel Barber (1910–81), American opera has become a brilliantly hybrid industry, overflowing into transcendental events, such as those of Philip Glass (born 1937) and the very serious musicals of Stephen Sondheim (born 1930).

Backtracking slightly, France has had a disappointing 20th century for a country whose national house was once the spotlit focus of the opera world. After Pelléas et Mélisande there hasn’t been much of stature apart from a couple of lightweight charmers by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and a religious drama by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).

Russia has had an altogether more distinguished time with Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), whose combined works add a sharp, abrasive edge to the development of an operatic language that largely derives from Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky. The earliest operas of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) take their tone from the magic fantasies of Rimsky-Korsakov. But as Stravinsky became progressively less Russian and more cosmopolitan, so his music became less ‘enchanted’ and more austerely Neoclassical, reinventing the past and reaching back beyond Wagner to the delicate detachment of Mozartian and Baroque closed forms. Another displaced person in America, it’s significant that Stravinsky wrote his chief opera, The Rake’s Progress, to an English text provided by the poet W.H. Auden and set almost as though it were Latin, with wilful unconcern that the language should sound idiomatic.

And that brings us, finally, to Britain, which, in the second half of the 20th century, became a serious creative centre for opera after two hundred years of producing almost nothing of significance. The English musical renaissance that began with Elgar produced a few attempts at music theatre that attracted passing fame, like Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, Delius’ A Village Romeo and Juliet and Vaughan Williams’ epic Pilgrim’s Progress. But the spark of genius didn’t quite ignite until 1945, when Peter Grimes put Benjamin Britten (1913–76) on the map as a figure of world stature. The thirteen original operas that followed built into a body of work unmatched by anybody of his generation. Their success inspired a torrent of work from other British composers that continues unabated, starting with Michael Tippett (born 1905) and William Walton (1902–83) and progressing down the years through the Mancunian duo of Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) and Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934) to Judith Weir (born 1954) and Mark-Anthony Turnage (born 1960). Turnage’s blistering adaptation of the bitter social satire Greek by Steven Berkoff has proved one of the most powerful and most-performed operas of the last decade or so, and it crowns a period of extraordinary productivity. With the possible exception of Finland – yes, Finland – where Aulis Sallinen (born 1935) has conjured a thriving opera industry out of nothing, it’s probably true to say that no country in the world could currently beat Britain’s ability to generate new opera. For a political culture which does as little as possible to encourage music in general and opera in particular, this is a pleasing but bizarre state of affairs.

A POSTSCRIPT ON OPERETTA

Unlike most aspects of opera proper, operetta was a French invention, derived from the mix of song and speech practiced by composers like André Ernest Grétry (1741–1813) and Pierre Monsigny (1729–1817). ‘Comique’ implied lightness though not necessarily comedy, and the boundary with serious opera was fairly loosely drawn, allowing figures like François Boïeldieu (1775–1834) and Daniel Auber (1782–1871) to cross it freely.

But operetta finally came into its own in the French Second Empire with Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), whose career began on a small scale, writing for tiny Parisian theatres, but gathered international fame – which spread to Vienna in the 1860s and prompted Johann Strauss II (1825–99) to imitative action. Strauss’ waltz-based shows were softer in tone than the sometimes abrasive satire of Offenbach, and they owed almost as much to the native Viennese tradition of Singspiel (another mix of speech and song, often heavily sentimental) as they did to the French import. But the formula was unequivocally successful, and it was soon followed by Franz Lehár (1870–1948) who took the Viennese version of the genre to the point of no return.

Meanwhile, the Offenbach phenomenon visited Britain in the 1870s and left its mark on the librettist/composer team of W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), whose Savoy Operas so insinuated themselves into English cultural life that its language and customs carry their imprint – not least the practice of queueing, which was introduced as a means of coping with the demand for G&S tickets.

Offenbach and G&S between them then spread to America where, reinterpreted via European exiles like the Hungarian Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951), they laid one of the foundations for the American Broadway musical. But that’s another story …