Celebrating fat men in tights and call of angels
NOBODY I know apologises for loving opera. Why should we? We have heard the call of angels, felt the thrill of heroism, and shared in griefs and loves vast beyond our knowing; we have eavesdropped on the gods and heard the march of history.
That is to say, we have sat, enthralled, while portly men in purple tights pretended to be princes of Chinese legend or knights of the Holy Grail. We have swooned over mature divas presented as Japanese maidens or vestal virgins.
We have submitted to armies of choristers, extras and instrumental musicians, and been beguiled by excessive and costly stage artifice.
More than any other art form, opera embraces the ludicrous along with the sublime.
Production standards have improved, and tales of camel droppings on the stage (Aida), and large sopranos bouncing back into view after their suicide leap from the battlements (Tosca), may belong to another era, but they persist as legend — retold with glee by the very people who will be moved to tears by Wotan, as he surrounds Brünnhilde with a circle of flame, the pathos enhanced by the mild risk of the theatre burning down (Die Walküre).
For the thousands of devotees who will read Carolyn Abbate’s and Roger Parker’s thoughtful and illuminating history, suspension of disbelief is not a problem.
It is odd, therefore, that the authors should start on the defensive, saying that opera is unrealistic, may seem exotic, strange or ridiculously expensive, and has become a museum art. This is not the talk one heard at the Albert Hall this summer, when five thousand people raised the rafters for John Adams’ Nixon in China; nor did one hear much despair in Dublin, some weeks later, when Wide Open Opera had a triumph with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Abbate and Parker are setting up a straw man to knock down: both are academics with distinguished track records in this field, and unlikely to lose sleep over the alleged ‘strangeness’ of sung dialogue. They build up the anti-opera arguments as an academic trick, an editorial device to unify the book by casting it as a riposte to the doubters.
Once into its stride, in descriptions of key works and key moments from the past 400 years of opera, the real strength of this history becomes apparent.
There is not a stave in sight: the authors risked the disapproval of the purists by not including musical examples — and wrote without consulting the opera scores.
The result is an expert account that relies less on musicological analysis and more on memories of operas — operas as events rather than as texts, described in terms that will evoke our own musical and theatrical memories.
The authors were disciples of Joseph Kerman, and pay rich tribute to his Opera as Drama (1956), describing it (rightly) as the operatic book for the post-war generation. In it, the 32-year-old Kerman notoriously dismissed Tosca as a “shabby little shocker”.
To my knowledge, he has never fully repented, but by the 1980s he had mellowed and was calling for a new, more flexible and broader approach to the study and evaluation of works of music. The so-called ‘new musicology’ that followed is reflected in the work of Abbate and Parker, their disinclination to rush to judgement, and their willingness to describe rather than prescribe.
Their discussion of Tosca tellingly makes no mention of Kerman or his mischievous phrase, but dwells on the great noise of Puccini’s first-act conclusion as a herald of radical ideas about the place of music in operatic spectacle. Such sober and considered writing will never displace Kerman in the dictionary of outrageous quotations — but it is no less valuable for that.
The ‘new musicology’s’ openness to other departments of academe is also evident: gender studies leave their mark on the treatment of Wagner, Verdi and Richard Strauss, and there are constant references to cinema — both authors have written or lectured on music and film. Few readers are likely to object to opera being considered in a wider context, but it is frustrating when the wider frame of reference is confined by the structure of university disciplines or the limits of the authors’ extra-musical study.
The film references, from A Night at the Opera to The Shawshank Redemption, in the absence of a wider discussion of opera and popular culture, hang awkwardly in the text, which might more usefully have extended itself to popular musical theatre. (There is no West Side Story here; no Kurt Weill after he went over to Broadway.)
There are other omissions, easily forgiven. The book is a history, not an encyclopedia, and influence has been the criterion for inclusion. It matters not that an opera may have succeeded brilliantly on its night or in its time; if it has not left its mark on those that came after, it has no place in the narrative.
So the works of William Vincent Wallace (to name one close to our heart) are forgotten, allowing the story of English opera to skip two and a half centuries, from Henry Purcell to Benjamin Britten. (Britten would not object.)
And the straw man? At the end, do Abbate and Parker emerge victorious over opera’s notional enemies? Alas, anyone who skips to the final pages to see the sceptics put to flight, or opera’s bright future predicted, will be disappointed. The historical threads, so clearly traced from the 17th to the 19th centuries, inevitably become lost in the 20th.
After Puccini, only Britten is accorded real stature, and for the end of the century the narrative descends into a tepid listing of candidates (Henze, Tippett, Berio, Messiaen, Ligeti, Adès and Adams), none of whom receives a clear endorsement. It is an anti-climax, but it scarcely matters, because the enthusiastic reader who has followed the story from the beginning will already, with faith renewed, be heading back to the opera house ... there, with luck, to encounter the kind of affirmation no book can deliver.
Karlheinz Stockhausen does not figure on the Abbate-Parker list; in their terms, his Mittwoch (1997) might not even be an opera, because it has no conventional dramatic plot or structure.
However, it is operatic: in its scale, in its working of music and spectacle and — as we discovered at its world premiere in Birmingham this year — in the directness of its engagement with the audience. In its glorious absurdity, also, the avant-garde finds common ground with the so-called ‘museum’ art of opera, allowing us vantage points that are denied to our more sensible selves.
Long years of tenors in purple tights have prepared us for Mittwoch’s various joys: musicians suspended from the ceiling, virtuoso trombonist prone in a paddling pool, string quartet playing in four airborne helicopters and (shades of Aida) pantomime camel-defecating planets.
Deranged? Perhaps — but deeply serious, too, and culminating in a sense of shared experience as profound as that offered by Wagner’s Parsifal.
On this evidence, the history of opera is not nearly at an end.
Apologise? Never.
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