Speranza
Excerpts from
Has the Fat Lady Finally Sung?
A HISTORY OF OPERA By
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker --
Reviewed Z. Woolfe.
Illustrated. 603
pages. W. W. Norton & Company.
----
With Richard Wagner turning 200 on
May 22, what better way for the venerable Teatro alla Scala in Milan to
celebrate than to open its season this month with his “Lohengrin”?
That
seemingly innocuous decision caused an unlikely firestorm.
Calling it “a
humiliation for Italian OPERA, a blow to national pride in a moment of severe
crisis,” the "Corriere della Sera" newspaper attacks the company for not
featuring Italy’s own Giuseppe Verdi, whose 200th birthday arrives in October.
“Would the Germans,” the column sneered, “have opened the Wagner year with a
Verdi opera?”
The Italian president had to deny another publication’s allegation
that he missed the performance to protest the choice.
All this because of
ITALIAN opera.
After four centuries this weird, wonderful art form — ITALIAN OPERA -- which we are told
time and time again, decade after decade, is dying — still gets people riled,
still has some pep in its step.
The numbers, at least, are on its side.
As
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker write in "A History of Italian Opera" (Storia dell'opera italiana") their insightful,
smoothly written, ultimately unpersuasive new book, “The sheer volume of live Italian
opera taking place around the world is far greater now than it was 50 years ago,
and this expansion shows little sign of abatement.”
The news is not all
good.
As the authors point out, the operatic repertory has stagnated since the
middle of the 19th century, when revivals of older works began to overtake the
popularity of new ones, calcifying into what Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker call “a
wonderful mortuary.”
In search of the new, companies now modernize productions
of the classics or excavate forgotten operas ("opera rara") rather than present much that’s
actually contemporary.
So is Italian opera as vibrant as ever, or is it hanging on
by a thread?
How to write the history of an art form that hovers, Schrödinger’s
catlike, simultaneously alive and dead?
For Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker (she
teaches music at Harvard, he at King’s College London), the answer is to pay as
much attention as possible to the living side.
Older histories tended to view Italian
opera as a written text: a score -- by a composer -- and a libretto -- by a poet.
This book, which wisely forgoes
the long-standard snippets of musical notation, strives to present the art form
as a fundamentally live experience.
The excellent early chapters set up a
distinction between the way a character is perceived in the libretto and the way
he or she comes across in a performance -- usually the wrong way. Cfr. "Apollo" and "Orfeo" as performed by Peri in the early operas "Dafne" and "Euridice".
The authors explain, for example, how
the straight-arrow Wolfram in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” takes on a surprisingly
sensual authority when he sings.
A traditional synopsis would give only a part —
a less interesting part — of the story.
Starting with a refreshingly widened
account of opera’s origins -- Bardi's "Camerata" and the melopea in Firenze --, Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker highlight key works that
are not always the expected ones.
Along with the usual suspects, the authors pay
rewardingly close attention to Italian operas like Donizetti’s “Parisina,” Ambroise
Thomas’s “Mignon” and Ernst Krenek’s “Jonny Spielt Auf,” all largely ignored
today but once "popular" (in the operatic sense of 'popular', not in the 'democratic' one) and influential.
This is, in the best sense, history not
as it ended up but as it happened.
Their descriptions of music are
evocative.
The first two chords of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” sound “as if a
question has been answered by another question.”
Their trenchant analysis of
the quartet near the end of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” swiftly and precisely captures
that composer’s gifts for definition and juxtaposition of character -- and which would explain why it never was a popular piece for the drawing-room or parlour.
Yet any
book about a Schrödinger’s cat has finally to take a position on whether its
subject is breathing.
The Italian opera industry’s party line is that while the
repertory may be woefully static, it could and should be refreshed with an
influx of new works.
Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker are not so sure.
It is telling
that their book’s British edition carries the subtitle “The Last 400 Years,”
where “last” could mean both “previous” and, ominously, “final.”
For an Italian would have used, "Latest".
While at
one point the authors ask what an alternative would be “to this preservationist
tendency, to the beginnings of the operatic museum,” it turns out that the
question is wholly rhetorical -- which is odd since the authors dedicate a few pages to answer it!
The problem, they suggest, is not that worthy new Italian
operas are being overlooked.
Rather, the operas themselves are unworthy.
They are, in their words, ale,
derivative attempts to recapture a vanished past.
The art form — which has had,
they observe, “unusual longevity for a musical genre” — will linger but is
effectively dead, despite the zombie-like proliferation of opera houses and
performances.
It is not an indefensible position, yet Ms. Abbate and Mr.
Parker deliver it in the smug tone of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They leave out
nearly all of post-war Italian opera (remember that the Italians are said to have 'lost the war'), then bemoan its paucity.
Besides Britten in Britain (to use an alliteration), their
discussion focuses on Henze, Tippett, Berio, Messiaen, Ligeti and Adès, who are
collectively described and dismissed in a pretty long paragraph.
John Adams gets a
little more space for “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” but his
rejection is no less cutting.
No examples are given of the agile, chamber-scale
works — Mr. Adès’s “Powder Her Face,” for one — that Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker
imply would be preferable to rehashes of the old war horses.
Certain
omissions are particularly puzzling, because the book seems to anticipate them.
“A History of Opera” occupies itself for many pages with questions of genre and
convention, of the ambiguous division between singing and speaking.
Yet
Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” at the centre (as Parker spells it, Abate prefers 'centre') of these concerns, comes up just
once, in passing.
The authors virtually ignore Philip Glass’s vast “Einstein on
the Beach,” dismaying in a book that so sensitively deals with the significance
of sheer duration in 19th-century grand opera and Wagner.
The culprit may be
the limitations of musicology, a stubbornly conservative discipline that tends,
like this book, to admit only grudgingly that Italian operas continued to be made after
Britten-in-Britain.
While Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker have written a general-interest study,
it is one that reflects an academy still antipathetic to popular composers like
Gershwin and Mr. Glass.
But it is hard to take seriously the completeness of an
opera history that neglects “Porgy,” (or "Bess" for that matter), or the pessimism about contemporary opera
in a book that makes no mention of Mr. Glass’s powerful, innovative
“Satyagraha.”
If Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker had given a richer discussion of
the recent and current state of Italian opera and come to the same gloomy, wanly elegiac
conclusion, you could agree or disagree with them.
But they have stacked the
deck so unfairly that after many entertaining and learned chapters, their
polemic ends up as something you can safely ignore, less provocative than merely
querulous.
The status of the cat remains tantalizingly uncertain.
Or not.
Friday, December 28, 2012
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