Dancing Through Opera History 1837-1901
Jan 20 '06 (Updated Feb 14 '06)
The Bottom Line Doop de doo.
Waltz with Wagner
Whilst Verdi was doing his thing, a composer was coming to prominence north of the Alps in Germany who would completely alter the course of musical history.
This was, of course, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) who, among other things, was responsible for one of the pinnacles of human artistic creation with the Ring Cycle, more or less bankrupted the royal court of Bavaria and had an indirect role in the suspicious suicide of its ruler, the mad king Ludwig II.
Wagner created a concept known as Gesamtkuntswerk, the complete synthesis of music and drama- thus extending a concept originally expounded by those poncy artistes in Florence way back in the pre-natal stages of Opera circa 1580- but Wagner took this to absurdly elevated levels. He did this by taking absolute control of every facet of an opera and making sure they all related back to the single dramatic core- the sets, the costumes, everything- and musically his fanatical eye for detail. Musically, he took the ideas of tonality to the absolute brink (to this day, musicologists can spend hours arguing over exactly what type of chord opens the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, a prelude also notable for using all twelve tones in its opening bars- itself a small, but important step towards the breakdown of tonality).
He was an absolute vile man who referred to himself in the third person with an ego staggeringly large. He was an animal-adoring vegetarian like Hitler who would later idolise Wagner to the point that until very recently Wagner's music was banned in Israel. Despite the success of his compositions and the lavish attention paid upon him by poor King Ludwig II (who was secretly gay, openly mad and had a massive teenage crush on Wagner, which Wagner exploited to his advantage) his family was kept in perpetual debt due to his expensive tastes than included only wearing silk underwear. To Wagner, the idea that he should have to ever spend any kind of money was beyond his imagination as he truly believed that instead the world owed him anything he desired.
Yet, bizarrely, this was excused by many on the grounds that Wagner was so much a genius as to be removed from the general bounds of manners that apply to humans. If he slept with your wife it was considered an honour, not an insult. He had to have un-erring devotion from all around him and with King Ludwing firmly in his pocket (hello sailor), to criticise Wagner was indeed lese-majeste.
His first opera, Rienzi was written in a snappy (for Wagner anyway) three years and his first performance in Dresden, 1842. Interestingly, it was based on a story by Bulywer-Lytton who is credited with being the first author ever to pen 'It was a dark and stormy night...'. The only real link between this and his later works is its length- a herculean five hours- but it was during writing this work that Wagner became frustrated with opera, and Gesamtkuntswerk began to take root. His second was The Flying Dutchman, which took only one year to write and comes in at a whizzy 2hrs 45mins, but Wagner intended it to be performed without break- his revolutionary ideas were starting to take light in 1843. Instrumental to getting the Dutchman on stage was Meyerbeer, of the Paris Grand Opera, yet within a few years Wagner would be slagging off Meyerbeer at every opportunity, largely because Meyerbeer was a Jew. Tannhauser was next, for an 1845 Paris premiere and was a resounding flop- largely because Wagner had put the ballet in the wrong place, which was a horrible sin for the Grand Opera.
But with Tannhauser three important things happened. Firstly, Wagner, homesick for his native Leipzig, began to immerse himself in German lore and begin his musings on the importance of a German Art. Secondly, his work began to slowly crumble back the traditional meaning of opera as arias and ensembles started to become meaningless. Perhaps most importantly though, this opera saw the introduction of leitmotif. Wagner was beginning to stretch what you could do tonally in an opera and to still make sense he needed something to hold it all together. Leitmotifs are short musical soundbites, so to speak, sometimes a full phrase at other times merely a fluttering between two single notes which signal something or rather. Lohengrin followed, but then Wagner set upon The Ring Cycle.
Like it or loathe it (and it seems no one is in the middle ground) the Ring Cycle is undoubtedly up there with the Sistine Chapel in terms of the great pieces of mankind's artistic endeavour. It is a series of four operas, intended to be performed over four successive nights, each of around 4-5hours in length involving the trials and tribulations of Nordic gods. The first opera, The Rhinegold was started in 1851 and the last, Gotterdamerung was completed in 1874. The Ring is practically impossible to summarise in both plot and importance in a paragraph for consumer website (the reliable and concise A Night at the Opera takes around a hundred pages), but it completely altered the course of music history. Everything Wagner had played with- leitmotif, impressive orchestration, length, clarity of text above all- came to the fore and hit its peak in the Ring. For Wagnerphiles, attending the Ring is akin to a religious experience.
After the Ring (talk about a tough act to follow), Wagner wrote three more operas but failed to do anything as impressive again, which isn't that surprising. Tristan and Isolde takes Wagner's peculiar brand of symbolism to strange, ethereal places and leitmotifs become more abstract, starting to stand in for feelings and moods as opposed to things, as in the Ring. His one quasi-comedy The Mastersingers of Nuremberg has its moments but fails to be as convincing, perhaps because Wagner was singularly humourless himself. His last opera, of 1882, Parsifal is rarely performed for its rather uncomfortable moralising (Wagner insisted on a full scale communion before the first performance, and insisted that the conductor for the premiere, Hermann Levi, renounce his Judaism which to his eternal credit he told Wagner where exactly he could stick his opera. Wagner relented, which must have been a first) and in it displays a rather weird obsession with transfiguration and Christ's blood) and the fact that it was Hitler's favourite opera as he saw it promoting the Godly ideal of a pure race.
Wagner's influence in opera went beyond mere composition. He wrote all his own libretto in long, flowing poems (which sometimes sound amateurish in English, at best- Wagner's strengths were not in poetry) and when he built his personal theatre in Bayreuth he also altered the course of opera production. His theatre was built in Bayreuth because the village offered no distractions for worshippers at the Shrine of Wagner. He originally intended to have it burnt to the ground after the first full performance of the Ring, having fulfilled its sacrifical purpose. Wagner orchestras are absolutely massive, and even Wagner could recognise that the weak failings of the human race meant no singer could project over it, so his solution was to stick the orchestra under the stage- and the orchestra pit was born. Wagner also insisted on much of the concert protocol we have to today, for better or for worse- an utter ban on any noise from the audience. He was also the first mainstream theatrical producer to turn off the lights in the auditorium and he also demanded naturalistic sets, which in the Ring Cycle with its dragons, Rhine maidens and Valhalla exploding into flame, is enough to induce cardiac arrest in any set designer. Wagner insisted on naturalistic sets for Wagner, and it would still undoubtedly performed on naturalistic sets if a direct descendant, Wagner's grandson Wieland, hadn't been the first to dare tamper with the Master's wishes (not that he had much choice. In the lead up to World War 2, as Wagner's daughter-in-law, English born Winifred, more or less handed Bayreuth over to the Nazis for their own propaganda purposes- Wieland had some serious PR and purging to do).
Love him or hate him, Wagner is without any quibble of doubt the final of the 3 Great Men of Opera, joining the illustrious company of Mozart and Verdi.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
A lot of Wagner is quite heavy going and generally doesn't extract from the operas too well (being all unified). However, you'd already know the Ride of the Valkyries from the Ring Cycle, along with the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. If you have in your head the iconic image of an opera soprano- the size of a truck wearing a viking helmet and holding a spear- chances are she's singing Hojotoho from, again, the Ring Cycle. Wagner is a tricky dicky to get a handle on, but, who knows, you may be a closet Wagnerphile without knowing it.
Samba with Sullivan
Despite his unquestionable dominance of musical philosophy(Wagner probably wrote as many pages of treatise as he did musical score) across Europe, the rest of the opera world didn't just grind to a halt with Wagner throwing everything on its head and Verdi packing them in down south in Italy. Some rather interesting things were happening elsewhere.
The first of these was the development of operetta, a more lighthearted style of opera with tunes you can hum, usually a big dance number or two, generally some local colour and topical humour and instead of recitative, spoken dialogue (often packed with wit and double entendres). In France, this was typified by the urbane Offenbach (1819-1880), who wrote Orpheus in the Underworld with its famous Can-Can tune. In England, it was the team of Gilbert and Sullivan (1842-1900) with Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado whilst in Germany Johann Strauss (1825-1899) was doing more with the waltz form than anyone thought possible with Die Fledermaus.
Grand Opera was starting to slowly lose its importance as the centre of the operatic universe in Paris, thanks to the efforts of Wagner and Verdi. Saint Saens (1835-1921) and Gounod (1818-1893) were writing more lyrical works with an emphasis on drama over spectacle which whilst not exactly setting the world on fire were revolutionary in their own, quiet way. The opera-comique rose up, also in Paris. This is not, as the name may suggest, comic opera but rather opera that was performed at the Theatre Comique, which, whilst often lighthearted, also had spoken dialogue. Bizet (1838-1875) wrote the bodice-ripper Carmen for the Comique, and it scandalised and shocked all of Europe until, sadly, after Bizet had died when it suddenly became the resounding success it still is today.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
A lot of operetta is great fun, but quite often the fun is onstage, not in the music. Offenbach is perhaps the wittiest composer of the bunch, Orpheus is a riot of fun and sex, as opposed to the puritanical Victorians Gilbert & Sullivan. Though G&S are immensely popular and if you want to sing along to such favourites as I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General they're worth a look, but the allure is in the sensational text, as opposed to the rather oom-pah-pah orchestral writing.
If you don't have it already, you must rush out and buy a top notch recording of Carmen before Jennifer Lopez turns it into the movie that is currently being nutted out in Hollywood (sadly, I'm not making this up- and the hesitation on behalf of the studios is because they don't want J.Lo to be killed at the end). For a start, it's full of amazingly catchy arias like the Habanera, the Toreador Song, the Bohemian Dances and the Nocturne. It's a great story which literally pulses with Bizet's twittering and sexy Spanish music, all the more remarkable considering Bizet never actually went to Spain.
Tango with Tchaikovsky
The late nineteenth century saw opera spread its geographic wings from France, Germany and Italy. England and the USA would have to wait a bit longer, but opera quite literally flowered in Russia overnight and became increasingly popular in Eastern Europe.
Smetana (1824-1884) more or less founded opera in Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and his best is the exuberant The Bartered Bride which has one of the snazziest overtures you'll ever hear in the opera house. Dvorak (1841-1904) was also active in Bohemia, but of his handful of operas, only Rusalka is occasionally performed nowadays, though its Song to the Moon is one of the signature arias for Renee Fleming. Dvorak's other operas are rarely performed because they've dated badly (Dvorak's influences, pre-Ring Wagner mostly, are a bit too obvious and a pale imitation) and his characterisation is weak.
At the centre of the art music sphere in (western) Russia where 'the Mighty Handful' of Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Balakirev. They wrote assertively 'Russian' western classical music, rather obviously trying to prove that Mother Russia could produce anything as important as what was coming out of Germany, France and Italy. Of the Mighty Handful, Mussorgsky (1839-1881) and Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) wrote significant operas (though Borodin's Prince Igor is the home of the famous Polovotsian Dances).
Mussorgsky was a miserable sod with a dangerous love of vodka and spent more time drunk than sober. Remarkably, whilst drunk he never seemed to lose any of his musical faculties and would often accompany performers, transpose on sight and compose whilst thoroughly pickled. Like the rest of the Mighty Handful, he was entirely self-taught. Of his two operas, Boris Godounov is the more common- a sprawling, gloomy work with a killer leading role for a bass-baritone of certain age and volume. Boris is an opera that has a frightening depth to it- in that Mussorgsky's music is sort of like treading water in the middle of dark lake in the middle of the night. And I mean that as a compliment.
Rimsky-Korsakov's operas, including Sadko, The Snow Maiden and The Golden Cockerel, have disappeared from the stage but live on as concert works- the ballet music and orchestral interludes occasionally pop up in symphonic concerts. What RK really contributed to the genre however was really pushing the work of the Mighty Handful and securing performances and the like. His orchestration was (is) perfect- any list of music's top orchestrators has him right up the top, if not Number 1- and his books about the subject are still used by composition students today.
Much loathed by the Mighty Handful for writing tuneful European music and being gay, Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was unique in being Russia's first, fully-trained, fully-professional composer. He wrote ten operas, almost all of which have completely disappeared from performance except Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades (or Pique-Dame as it is sometimes known). Tchaik could write bombastic music as well as anyone (1812 Overture, for starters), his ballet music is superb (Swan Lake and the work he hated the most, The Nutcracker) but when he wanted to tug at your heartstrings he could do it like no man had done since- his operas and symphonies are the most likely to make you bawl like a little girl. A renaissance of Tchaikovsky's operas is long over-due, and it would be wonderful to hear his other eight.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
If you have a good constitution and a top notch sound system, check out the Coronation Scene from Boris Godounov. Turn it all the way up and watch the paint start to peel off the walls with all the bells and gongs and massed chorus and as much dark pomp and ceremony Mother Russia can throw at you. It is one of the most powerful scenes in all of opera. As Boris sinks further into madness, Mussorgsky has written some demonic music which is genuinely terrifying.
By contrast, the Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin is one of opera's most heartbreaking. Tchaik can also scare the beejesus out of you, as he does to great effect in the haunting Queen of Spades, which is probably my favourite Russian opera.
Some Dancing Partners
Voice Types are explained in that handy-dandy link.
The First Two Installments Are Here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Four
Part Five
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