Essay: OPERA: Con Amore

THE lady was suffering from a broken heart, and her doctor knew just what to prescribe: opera. He ordered an alcove constructed in her bedchamber, and there artists nightly performed excerpts from the operatic works of the great French composer Lully. Before long (as a music historian during the reign of Louis XIV tells it) the patient was cured of severe melancholia, which she had originally contracted when her lover jilted her.

Perhaps the treatment worked because it showed her that she was not alone; in opera, as in life, lovers frequently jilt their girls—if they don’t die first. At any rate, the case is probably the most spectacular instance of the curative powers of opera, although Voltaire later observed that attending it was good for the digestion. Otherwise, the great philosopher had no use for opera. “Anything that is too stupid to be spoken,” he said, “is sung.”

The lady and Voltaire are two archetypes that have been in conflict since opera was born. On the one side, there is the opera fan—emotional, sensitive, not only susceptible to the soothing charms of music but imaginative enough to see that, give or take a few embellishments, opera is life. On the other, there is the opera foe—the rationalist skeptic who thinks that life and art are subject to reason.

The Voltaires of the world have tirelessly inveighed against opera—with scarcely any result. Opera has been little damaged by open hostility or subtle ridicule, by intellectual snobbery or the distractions of TV, by war or revolution (these only furnished a chance for duets at the foot of the guillotine). For decades, Americans regarded opera more or less as the folk music of the rich—or, as Cleveland Amory put it, it was “like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.” Today Americans in vast numbers support— and understand—opera. The U.S. has more than 700 opera companies, nearly half of them at colleges and high schools. Really professional opera is still a rarity outside New York and one or two other cities. And financially, American opera is still precarious, compared with the government-subsidized houses of Europe; Austria, for instance, spends more on the Vienna State Opera than on its foreign service. But there is genuine popular enthusiasm in the U.S.—and New York’s Metropolitan is responding to it in launching its national touring company. Opera, says Conductor Thomas Schippers, is in the midst of a “wild renaissance.”

Like the Gods

Who is causing the renaissance? The English have a political rule of thumb that cricket fanciers are Tories, while soccer fans are Labor; in the field of music the distinctions are not as clear-cut. Opera fans are probably traditionalists, secretly perhaps even monarchists. They are probably less concerned with facts and figures than devotees of the symphony or solo instruments, who often glory in the mathematical aspects of music. Opera lovers are also apt to be more intellectual and less sentimental than ballet fans, who are satisfied with generally second-rate musical scores and graceful or athletic bodily gyrations.

Opera News conducted a far-from-conclusive survey and found that business and professional men form the largest bloc of the audience, while government officials, writers and editors, and clergymen hardly attend at all. The number of Ph.D.s in the audience is increasing while the number of high school degrees is declining — leading one analyst to wonder whether opera fans are high school dropouts with Ph.D.s. While most opera fans, like the best pilots and astronauts, are over 30, the young are clearly getting more interested. James K. Guthrie, of the California Arts Commission, observes that “boys and girls have suddenly found that progressive jazz, folk singing and rock ‘n’ roll aren’t enough. The blood and thunder of Salome and Elektra attract them; they like the wild rhythms of Rigoletto and Trovatore. And they are often impressed by skill and sheer stamina: ‘Man—did you hear that high B-flat knocked off!’ ”

Some opera fans still attend out of habit or as a means of social climbing; if they seem contemptible to the real opera lover, they are abundantly punished by having to sit through hours of music they don’t really enjoy. Some come as cultists: just as bullfight aficionados find macabre joy in waiting for the matador to be gored, operagoers can wait in horrible human fascination for the soprano to go flat at the end of Vissi d’arte or to fall downstairs in the mad scene of Lucia. In its own way, by the nearly impossible demands it makes on singers, opera, like the corrida, pits man against nature.

The Real Reality

Other fans find a reassuring permanence in the ever familiar opera repertory. Still others are attracted because in a mechanized, computerized world, opera offers escape into a realm of heroism—which is another way of saying individualism. Perhaps they come because, in the words of Langdon Van Norden, president of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, “they are madmen! Madmen all!” But the dividing line between madness and love is unclear, and they come, above all, because they love the musical form of poetry, the amalgam of arts, that is opera. By joining words and music, sight and sound, opera enables the audience, as Music Master Leonard Bernstein has put it, to “experience conflicting passions, contrasting moods and separate events. And because only the gods have ever been able to perceive more than one thing at a time, we are, for this short period, raised to the level of the gods.”

There is, of course, plenty of dissent from that view. Tolstoy failed to find opera godlike; in fact he found it downright godless. In his essay What Is Art? he gives a withering description of an opera rehearsal and rants against the absurdities he found onstage: “What they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas. People do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions.” In a similar vein, Dr. Johnson called opera “an exotic and irrational entertainment,” and it caused Charles Lamb “inexplicable anguish.” Says British Conductor John Pritchard: “There is a tremendous backlog of Puritan suspicion of opera.”

The basic complaint against opera is that it does not reflect reality, that “people do not converse in such a way”—that in real life, people do not sing. As a matter of fact, they sing more often than they recite Shakespearean verse or the kind of phony political speeches with which they harangue each other in the supposedly real theater of Arthur Miller. Of course people do not speak in asides (“I’ll have her yet!”), which were accepted on the stage for decades, nor in a Joycean stream of consciousness, which is accepted today. People do not mumble their disgust with the universe while sitting in ashcans, as do the characters of Samuel Beckett. Nor, Composer Gian Carlo Menotti has pointed out, do they have faces half a block wide, as they do on movie screens. In short, the complaint that an art form is unrealistic is the poorest and squarest of arguments.

Musical drama lies deep in the history of virtually every society. It is partly religious. Says Father R. L. Bruckberger, the unorthodox and literary French priest: “A solemn Mass in Latin—that for me is true opera.” Western opera was born during the Renaissance, probably as an attempt to recreate Greek drama with its choruses and chanted poetry. From the first, the creators of opera felt the urge to avoid artifice. Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) said that it was silly not to have “realistic” characters in opera—so he created Orfeo and Euridice, with their set, face-front arias. Bellini (1801-35) and Donizetti (1797-1848) thought Gluck’s characters were insufficiently real—so they created the stylized Norma and Lucia. Wagner (1813-83) avowed the same sentiment—and created Lohengrin and his swan. Puccini (1858-1924) proclaimed a brand of truthfulness he called verismo —and created Turandot, the princess of a China that could never have existed anywhere.

The point is that the reality of opera can never lie in naturalistic stories or settings, but in emotional reality uniquely aided by music. Playwright George Bernard Shaw knew the truth: though the theater could be proved logically to be more real than opera, he wrote, “the facts are just the other way—the superior intensity of musical expression making the opera far more real than the play.” In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, probably the greatest opera ever written, the Don, to judge from the text alone, could be just a playboy or an obsessive lecher. What gives him nobility and heroism, what defines him as not simply a lecher but a rebel against God, is Mozart’s music. “An F-sharp doesn’t have to be considered in the mind; it scores a direct hit,” Leonard Bernstein points out. “Think of King Lear in an opera. He’d be raging as no Lear could ever rage in a spoken play: in a great bass voice, with a frantic high G-flat, a howling chorus offstage, and 90 players helping him in the pit.”

Soprano Phyllis Curtin makes the same point in terms of everyday life by noting that “children sing when they really mean it: ‘You’re a dirty bul-ly.’ ” She even illustrates music’s power by citing, “Double your pleasure / Double your fun, / With Doublemint, Doublemint, / Doublemint gum.”

Task for Poets

Even opera’s passionate defenders must concede that the plots are often preposterous. Coincidence stretches the bounds of credibility (though critics might note that there is a lot of coincidence in life, too, and that its absence in a story can be more unrealistic than its presence). Typical is the moment in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, when Don Alvaro throws his pistol to the floor to show that he is above dueling with his sweetheart’s father, the gun goes off and fires a bullet right through Pop’s heart. Mistaken identity is rife; a girl who has spent the night with a man usually fails to recognize him next day if he changes capes. Every operatic boudoir seems to have a screen with someone hiding behind it, but the searchers never have the wit to look there. The hero or heroine is always good for at least 50 bars of song after having been fatally stabbed. One British opera buff, Henry Sutherland Edwards, wrote more in affection than in anger:

I’ve seen a herald sound alarms,

Without evincing any fright:

Have seen an army cry “To arms”

For half an hour, and never fight . . .

Such absurdities notwithstanding, the most enduring operas have very good plots indeed. The plays by Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas on which various Verdi operas are based are alive in their musical incarnations, though hardly bearable in the original. The fact is often missed because in the U.S., at least, opera is usually sung in the original language, and most members of the audience have little more than a basic vocabulary consisting of amore morire, andia-mo, bene, coraggio, preghiera; Götter, Liebe, Tod, Sturm, Blut; merveille, sourire, larmes, yeux. English-language performances usually do not help because the translation is too often done by journeymen rather than by competent poets. As it is, the operagoer has the simple duty, to himself and to the work, of glancing at a libretto before he attends a foreign-language performance.

Operas do convey a great deal of meaning, even in the unlikely areas of politics or sociology; Fidelia is a highly moving musical treatise on freedom, The Marriage of Figaro on the corruption of aristocracy, Don Carlos on the dilemmas of power. Opera plots and music are sexy. Most operatic heroines fail to wait for the wedding ceremony (Manon, Mimi, Tosca, Aïda, Carmen, Santuzza, Brünnhilde), and they (Norma, Marguerite, Sieglinde, Suor Angelica) have a lot of illegitimate children. Whatever one may think of the plots, one remembers the characters. Rigoletto may end up absurdly with the heroine killed by mistake and then carried in a sack by her own father, who thinks he is carrying the corpse of her traducer; but the bitter, malevolent jester excoriating the decadent court society of his day remains unforgettable.

A telling complaint about opera has to do with poor acting and staging. Mark Twain wrote that “there isn’t often anything in a Wagner opera that one could call by such a violent name as acting. As a rule, all you would see would be a couple of people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies.” And Critic Ernest Newman said of the typical soprano: “She looks like an ox; she moves like a cart horse; she stands like a haystack.”

Most of that is changing. There is a whole new generation of sopranos who are slender, pretty and can act. Three of them were on view at New York’s Met last week—Anna Moffo, Teresa Stratas, and particularly Mirella Freni, a new import from La Scala, who sang and acted the most enchanting Mimi in a generation. Some operagoers yearn for the glorious voices of yesteryear, but it is possible that voices are actually getting better; at any rate, thanks to the ear-sharpening influence of hi-fi stereo, fans are more critical than they used to be.

Opera staging, too, has improved, and the pioneer in that field is Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson. As a child, Wieland evidently felt the same way as Mark Twain, remembers how he could not bear to look at the old-fashioned productions and dreamed of doing it all differently some day. He did, having dematerialized the once-heavy Bayreuth sets into magical patterns of light and shade. This year, he streamlined the Valkyries in form-fitting leather and dehorned Valhalla’s gods. In Brussels, French Director-Choreographer Maurice Béjart went overboard this summer with a production of The Tales of Hoffmann in which Olympia arrived onstage in a glass sputnik, Daliesque watches floated through the air, and a burial procession crossed the stage during the famous Barcarolle.

The Met is not given to such experimentation, although under Rudolf Bing’s 15-year reign, it has become the world’s leading opera house. “We are not courageous,” admits Bing. “We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames.” Last week, opening its final season in its old home, the Met provided a magnificent new frame for Faust, fluidly and imaginatively staged by French Actor-Director Jean-Louis Barrault—a production marred only by an orgy-porgy of a ballet.

Does opera have a future, or is it only an art for museums? Even more than most modern music, contemporary opera is having its troubles. American composers are working somewhat fitfully in various traditions, from neo-Puccini to neo-Strauss, to American hymn tunes and folk dances, to dissonant echoes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. After a goat social or psychological themes, opera composers seem ready to escape into humor or the exotic. Many creators of modern opera seem afraid of melody (or so singers and audiences complain), of drama and of heroes. Few contemporary operas are loved.

And yet none of this proves that opera is finished. New works are almost never quickly accepted—even Carmen flopped at first. Singers complained that they couldn’t sing Wagner (some still do, and can’t), and again and again the end of opera was proclaimed. To many, the most recent “end” came with Richard Strauss, who died in 1949. When Alban Berg’s magnificent Wozzek was first performed in 1925, some people covered their ears in horror; today it is widely accepted as an almost mellow classic. Julius Rudel, director of Manhattan’s enterprising New York City Opera, receives and reads 50 new opera scores a year. All kinds of opera will still be written, even in an age which seems to many sadly unoperatic—perhaps about Marilyn Monroe, or about Cassius Clay, or the astronauts, or even James Bond. Before he died, Puccini made a prophesy to a friend: “Go to America—the future of opera lies there.” The prophesy has not yet come true, but it may—certainly if it is up to the “madmen” who are the lovers of opera.