In 1895, a French composer decides to write an opera…He has already finished one opera in draft form, a three-act giant in a historical-Spanish-chivalric setting. This fulfils any lingering grand opéra responsibilities that inhabit his nationalist conscience, and he becomes unhappy with it. One night he attends a spoken play by the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) and daringly decides to use this play as the text of an opera – without turning it into poetry, without even restructuring the sections he takes from it in any serious way, aside from some cutting and line editing. The play has only one brief passage that in any way lends itself to becoming an operatic set piece, a song for the heroine. Everything else is freeform conversation and random musing.
This is how Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker open chapter 17 (‘Turning Point’) of A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years. Immediately, we are pulled in by the paragraph’s pacing: not only is it talking about a form of drama, it is also structured like one, with questions advanced and unanswered. Who is this unnamed French composer? Why does he choose to lift a play wholesale from the page, which sounds, even to the most lay of readers, like a pretty radical thing to do. What happened next? Was it a theatrical success?
A History of Opera was lucky to be written by two academics who understand drama in practice as well as theory. Had I known what a thriller awaited me, I would have bought it one summer day in 2016 at a bookshop in St Boswells. Instead, I ordered it to Ravenna, Italy, some nine months later: in the lubricious thrall of a young relationship, I had booked two tickets to see Così fan tutte at the Teatro Alighieri, and thought that some heavily-worn knowledge could do no harm to my continued eligibility. The production itself was not exalting – I suspect that Così is not the best induction – and for my handful of nights at the opera since, I have less Mozart to thank than Abbate and Parker.
These are two people who have dedicated their lives to the art form, so we might not expect them to fully recognize, never mind revel in the absurdities of it. Yet they do. “Opera is a type of theatre in which most or all of the characters sing most or all of the time” is their opening definitional gambit – though they suggest that purely spoken theatre has, over the millennia of human civilization, been the exception rather than the rule. And as a chapter on German Singspiel highlights, it was singing most of the time, rather than all of the time, that caused the headaches, as composers contrived ways of softening the inevitably bumpy transition from speech to song.
A History of Opera is a history of tension, conflict and creative angst, though there seems to have been none on the part of the authors, whose prose styles blend fluidly and faultlessly (you can try to guess who wrote which chapters, but one instance of “pants” and another of “trousers” is really all you have to go on). There is an irony here, as operatic collaboration has rarely been a seamless enterprise. While divas and divos were making serious money – Abbate and Parker note that opera may have marked the first equal-opportunities moment in history, as far as fees were concerned – it wasn’t until the 1800s that the composer started to emerge from hired hackdom. Opera was a popular entertainment, after all, just one that somehow attracted high-art critique. “There is scarcely a decade in the eighteenth century that avoided some philosophical debate about opera’s ills – often, human nature being what it is, the ills of other people’s opera rather than one’s own.”
But though Abbate and Parker have the humour to laugh at these querelles and the prose to make us laugh with them, their book succeeds because it convinces us that all this agonizing mattered. Take Rossini, who until the late 1820s ruled the operatic world like a velveted Taylor Swift; Stendhal compared him to Napoleon. But he spent his last forty years producing nothing but genial anecdotes, a Missa solemnis and Tournedos Rossini, a recipe for fillet steak topped with foie gras and black truffle. The Rossinian brand of transportive vocal beauty, with coloratura lavished equally over all the characters at all their junctures, was blown away by a new breed of heroic tenor. Male singers in the 1830s, as the authors sartorially put it, “increasingly adopted the vocal equivalent of stovepipe hats and dark suits”, as “the centre of gravity of the Italian orchestra became lower”. In musical terms, “When this kind of tenor hits a high note – generally defined as anything higher than the A above middle C – and hits it in the chest voice…the resulting acoustic explosion is a force of nature that would come to represent overwhelming male passion.” These new vocal preferences, which saw the castrato ejected from polite society, were talismanic of a broader and deeper operatic sea-change, with the old structural forms found increasingly wanting.
Nobody, however, changed the rules of engagement more than Richard Wagner, who casts an iron shadow over the book’s latter half. Of course, the effect of Wagner’s music can only be experienced first-hand, but one cannot imagine a more exciting foreword to Tristran und Isolde:
It starts with a four-note melody played by the cellos. On the last note the cello is joined by other instruments, forming perhaps the most famous chord ever: starting from the bottom, F, B, D# and G#, scored for oboes, clarinets, cor anglais, cellos and bassoons. Ever since 1865 this collection of notes in this particular order has become instantly recognizable, peculiar and inimitable, notorious in its instability. It is dissonant and unstable, demanding resolution; but it resolves to yet another unstable chord – a more conventional dominant seventh – as if a question has been answered by another question…melodies end by beginning other melodies, harmonic resolutions are delayed or obfuscated or never arrive or are there only for an instant.
In its rolling instability, the Tristan chord offers a metaphor for the operatic terrain once Wagner had shaken it. “His operas resonated around Europe and beyond whether you shunned them or stared them in the face. They resonated even if you lampooned them”. It took something extraordinary to slip Wagner’s gravitational field; it took that young Frenchman we started with. Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande marked an epochal heave away from many Wagnerian norms, though Debussy was not the only one doing the heaving. One critic wrote that “after listening [to Pelléas] one feels sick…one is dissolved by this music because it is in itself a form of dissolution.” Abbate and Parker: “often the characters barely intone their lines, with music so austere as to be next door to silence.” Significantly, Debussy never wrote another opera, the subtext being that work so original comes at the price of unrepeatability.
Nausea seems to have been the order of the day at the turn of the century: perhaps an audience surfeited on Wagnerian and sub-Wagnerian leitmotifs needed to purge themselves. The propulsive thrill of chapter 17 still has me searching the calendars for Richard Strauss’ Salome, another libretto taken unaltered from a prose drama. The source text this time was by Oscar Wilde, so we can blame him that “insanity and perversion are presented for viewing pleasure…in flowery phrases full of highly perfumed poetic metaphor”. As for Strauss’ music, “unsavoury characters such as Herod quaver and pipe, shriek and snarl”, while the uniquely sinless Jokanaan/John the Baptist sings from his cistern in a warm, Lutheran baritone. Salome was a high watermark in what would come to be known as “expressionism”, where the artistic toolbox works both a microscope and a megaphone of the character’s inner life. Strauss’ “frequent lingering on extreme perceptions and mental states has a shattering effect on audiences…Even today, good performances of Salome tend to be received with moments of stunned silence.” On my third and latest reading of Abbate and Parker, who have been there themselves, I still got a contact high.
For an opera newbie like me, most of these highs are still waiting to be discovered. At present, I remain as much an armchair opera-lover as I am an armchair traveller, and the fact that many others are the same need not signal a decline. On the one hand, the caverns of Youtube have recordings from the most obscure corners of the globe, opening singers and composers to a potentially vast audience. On the other hand, the torrent of production has slowed to a trickle; it was already slowing in Verdi’s time. The modern renaissances enjoyed by Handel, Rossini and Donizetti are doubtless no more than their due, but such musical archaeology speaks of a museum culture with few new exhibits.
Apart from the towering exception of Benjamin Brittan, almost no postwar works have established themselves in the repertory. But, Abbate and Parker counter, “is joining the repertory the only exam worth passing?” Theatre design encourages us to think so: large orchestras and Valkyrian voices are needed to fill the modern auditorium. Composers and directors are forced to work on grand scales, not on modest ones, so they don’t realise that modesty can be liberating. Unlike most proposed remedies, Parker and Abbate suggest that we stop worrying about popularity and staying power, and start “embracing ephemerality as a positive phenomenon”. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, “operas were disposable, and that very disposability was a sign of fervency and creativity.”
It’s a lesson that opera could learn from literature. A century from now, will people still be reading all, indeed any of Sally Rooney’s novels? It’s not really a question that preoccupies us, or the reviewers. Opera, maybe because of all the money and man-hours sunk into it, is fraught with anxieties of permanence. A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years has its finiteness built into the title, and never do Abbate and Parker risk any grand prognoses of the next four hundred. Nothing ages faster than a confident prediction. But I will confidently predict that the book will reel in anyone who gives it a chance, however many or however few chances they’ve given opera.
by Harry Cochrane
A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years is published by Penguin and is available here.
