Storia dell'opera italiana

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.

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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.