Dancing Through Opera History 1890-1949
Jan 28 '06 (Updated Feb 14 '06)
The Bottom Line And a one, and a two, and a one two three four.
As we enter the twentieth century, something extraordinary happened. Music literally exploded into dozens of different directions at once. Jazz begin to emerge from the American South, tonality started to break up entirely, the recording industry came about and a split began to appear- popular music and classical music were no longer one and the same.
Up until this point, opera history had been neatly chronological, but now more things started happening at the same time across Europe and, for the first time, across the Atlantic.
Linedance with Leoncavallo
The first important development in opera as the century slowly began to turn was the development of verismo, or, if you like, 'truth'. This was a brief and uniquely Italian style, but an important one. Strangely, we can actually give it a birthdate- May 17, 1890 in Rome. This was the premiere of Mascagni's (1863-1945) Cavalleria Rusticana ('Rustic Chivalry').
Cav, as it is eternally known, was the winning entrant for a competition of one-hour operas to inaugurate Rome's new opera house. It was the most hot-blooded opera Italy had ever seen which cranks up the tension in a steamy environment of lust and violence.
What gave Cav eternal glory was the inspired pairing with another one act verismo opera- Leoncavallo's (1857-1919) I Pagliacci in the duo Cav & Pag- and they're now inseperable. Whilst Cav had at least a thin veneer of realism to it, Pag pushed verismo to the extremes of emotion and its carnal violence in a strong production can still seem brutal to jaded modern audiences. Like Mascagni's Cav, Pag was Leoncavallo's only hit, amongst over a dozen other operas.
When Verdi wrote La traviata he didn't seem to fully realise he was writing the first (successful) opera set in the present. With verismo- every opera was set in the present.
Despite its definition, verismo opera is a lot like reality TV. We're told how realistic it is (was) but at the same time the drama (melodrama) is pushed to ridiculous degrees in much the same manner under the guise of reality a producer will put a pagan and evangelist on a date to see what happens. What separates Cav & Pag from the rest of the largely forgotten verismo repertoire are their sensational, if pulpy, stories and music that never fails to capture the heat of the moment.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
The big advantage of Cav & Pag from a lazy audio perspective is they're so snappy- both just over an hour. The big showtune is from Pag- the melodramatic Vesti la giubba. The grim finale to Pag is also gripping where in the midst of their carnival comedy, the touring clowns turn to deception and brutal murder. Cav is slightly more subtle, but has a very famous Intermezzo (orchestral interlude) and the lead character's goodbye to his mother (those Italian blokes and their mothers...) before he goes off and fights an ultimately fatal duel.
Polka with Puccini
Verismo's days were flash in the pan, but they did leave an indeliable mark on Puccini (1858-1924) who quickly realised good operas always had lots of gore. Quickly groomed as the natural heir to Verdi, Puccini's operas still form the staple of the repertoire of companies of all sizes, and his arias are some of the most memorable and beloved in the genre. Puccini was the twentieth century's first operatic superstar, even when he was blamed for the suicide of one of the family maids. He was a notorious womaniser, and his wife, Elvira, accused a young maid in the house of seducing her husband to the point that the hopeless maid was completely ostracised and killed herself- only for an autopsy to reveal that her virginity was well and truly intact (and Elvira went mad shortly after).
Puccini managed to blend hints of verismo with ideals of bel canto, usually in a relatively straight-forward romantic story where the heroine dies miserable. This is a running theme of Puccini's operas- his misogyny. His soprano heroines die of hari-kiri, stabbing, horrible illness from exposure, plunging from the Castel' Sant Angelo and so on. Where the story didn't give him a young soprano to bump off, he invented one (Liu in Turandot). This is not just politically-correct musicologists reading too much into Puccini's writing (women have always been more attractive victims on the stage) but Puccini himself often referred to his 'Neronic Impulses' in the brutal treatment he dished out to his leading ladies.
The scorecard runs as follows-
Manon Lescaut- death by exposure
La boheme- death by pneumonia
Tosca- death by plunging off a castle wall
Madam Butterfly- death by harikiri
La faniculla del West (Girl of the West)- girl ends up with the man, lives happily. Puccini must have been drunk.
Il Tabarro- woman lives, but witnesses her husband kill her lover
Suor Angelica- death by drinking herbal poisons
Gianni Schicchi- happy ever after (another drunken episode)
La Rondine- happy ever after. Also Puccini's worst opera. Coincidence? I think not.
Turandot- death by stabbing self, after torture.
His first success, Manon Lescaut came in 1893 but this was followed by perhaps the most popular opera in the world- La boheme of 1896, the evergreen doomed love story set amongst Parisian bohemians. Such was the mammoth hit this opera was, and still is, it was one of the very first operas ever to receive a full recording. To this day, when opera companies need a hit to support a lesser-known work, they undoubtedly turn to Boheme. The 'shabby little shocker' Tosca followed in 1900 and is almost equally beloved- but, apart from the creation of one of opera's most despicable villains in Scarpia, I've never liked it much. Its success however was indisputable- at the premiere, the entire third Act was encored in its entirety.
It is however also notable for one of the most enduring opera urban legends there is. At the end of the piece, Tosca throws herself off the Castel Sant'Angelo to a splattered death below. This is traditionally done by the soprano landing into a foam pit behind the scenery. The name of the soprano changes, but the story goes that she was being such a cow the stagehands replaced the foam pit with a trampoline, so when she plummeted to her supposed death, she bounced back up into view. Repeatedly.
Three monster hits in a row would be enough for most people, but Puccini was still in his stride, however he was increasingly being accused of being old-fashioned.
One of the biggest criticisms of Puccini at the time was that he was a weak Verdi, stuck in the past as music was moving forward faster than ever through the work of Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel and Co. Unfortunately, Puccini seemed to have countered this by having a strange bout of exoticism, moving his operas to strange locations- the American West (La fanciulla del West- and you haven't lived until you've heard cowboy slang sung a la Italian Opera, and it's also where Lloyd Webber nicked most of the Phantom from), Japan (Madam Butterfly) and China in his unfinished Turandot. Musically, these are also his most questionable operas, relying at times more on novelty (and in the case of the Asian operas a particularly weak ching-chong-chinaman style novelty) and when they're at their best- for example in the powerful despite use in years of advertising Nessun dorma- it's old-style Puccini writing in a vernacular he's familiar with anyway. One wonders if Puccini had lived a few more years where on earth he'd be going next in this operatic globe-trotting (a dooomed romance in the Amazon where the heroine dies of diptheria?). His only 'Italian' works from this period were the Triptych, of which Gianni Schicchi, as Puccini's only comedy, is the best and only one still performed (Il tabarro is good verismo but neglected, Suor Angelica is sickly sweet and overly pious and can induce diabetes in the listener). His attempt at a drawing room Viennese comedy, La Rondine, has deservedly slipped from the repertoire.
At his worst, Puccini would descend into a mawkish sentimentality but at his best he could be genuinely moving and heartfelt. His greatest contribution to opera though was his superb ear for a memorable tune and to this day, many of the greatest opera moments are by Puccini.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
Boheme has one of the repertoire's favourite love duets Che gelida manina and the seconda donna, Musetta, has a great waltzing flirty aria- Quando me'n vo. From Tosca, there is the powerful Te Deum that closes Act I, and Tosca's desperate plea Vissi d'arte and the romantic tenor aria E lucevan la stelle. From Butterfly, most of the music is twee orientalisms, however Un bel di is absolutely heart-meltingly exquisite. Schicchi is responsible for the very famous O, mio babbino caro (which amusingly is used in one of the Grand Theft Auto classical radio stations, providing a surreal ambience when committing hit and runs).
But Turandot has perhaps the grand-daddy of them all- thanks to the Three Tenors, Nessun dorma is probably the most famous operatic moment in the world.
Doppler Waltz with Debussy
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is generally regarded as the father of what is known as The Twentieth Century in music. He exquisite books of Preludes for Piano and his utterly sublime orchestral writing- his Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun is generally held as the first step of 20th Century Music- are all worth a good hard listen but his one opera- Pelleas et Melisande is one of the most unusual operas in the repertoire, a position it still holds in 2006, over a hundred years after its 1902 premiere. Whilst it was in rehearsal, the Paris Conservatoire banned it to the extent when a harmony pupil was found with a copy, he was promptly expelled. But this is not because of a smutty storyline, as would happen with Strauss' Salome, but because musically it was unlike any thing ever seen on the operatic stage before.
For a start, there is little that would be understood as aria or ensemble. Almost all the text is declaimed, in entirely naturalistic speech rhythms, there is not one note of ornamentation and the sizeable orchestra is intricately but always lightly scored to allow absolute clarity of the text. Characters are static, eerily shallow. Whilst Debussy freely adopted Wagner's leitmotif system, his style however could not be further removed- for example, in the three and a half hour opera it only gets really loud about four times, then only very briefly. In terms of action- not much. This is a world of memories and lack of incident. The shimmering score needs a listener to drop any preconceptions of opera and instead be completely eneveloped in it, where it can become, like, let's face it, a lot of Debussy, very sensual indeed.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
I think Debussy may be the only composer in this entire turgid series I'm writing who got his own mini-section. Pelleas on CD is not an easy work for a novice(largely because even on stage it is practically inert, so in French and in the sterile surrounds of a CD it is incomprehensible), so I'd recommend getting a taste for his orchestral and piano music first.
Salsa with Strauss
Every musicologist has difficult placing Richard Strauss (1864-1949). He is the last of the Great Germans (a fact he was only too, somewhat egotistically, aware of)- an unbroken line beginning with Bach, travelling via Mozart to Beethoven then, most of all, Wagner. Yet his musical career was beginning as Verdi's was ending, and he was ending his musical career after Berg and Schoenberg had completely disrupted the natural order of things. Even more so than Beethoven, Strauss forms a strange, slightly uneasy, bridge between two vastly different periods of musical history.
He came to opera in 1904 with the international success of Salome, a 90 minute opera based on Wilde's play (Strauss actually had two operas prior, but we consider this the beginning of his output proper). He was already a highly accomplished and regarded orchestral composer by the turn of the century, but from here on out his focus would be on the stage. Salome set the world on fire- Strauss wrote lyrical vocal lines over intensely chromatic accompaniment in his oversized orchestra to the end that the title role is one of the most challenging in the repertoire, needing the voice of a forty year old in the body of a nubile sixteen year old (few sopranos dance that particular dance of the seven veils themselves). However it was not so much on musical grounds but dramatic that the opera set off a furore across the world, being banned on both London and New York stages, as this was not just an opera about sex, but about necrophilia. At the dramatic crux of the opera, Salome is presented with John the Baptist's head on the platter and goes in for a big sloppy tongue kiss. All this publicity however made Strauss incredibly wealthy and set him up for life.
After this hit, another big smash Electra which pretty much repeated the formula but in Ancient Greece. However, along with his best librettist Hofmannsthal, Strauss, wicked, decadent and clever, tossed everyone around by writing a sentimental Old Vienna style love story in Der Rosenkalavier, which may very possibly be the most successful new opera of the twentieth century (premiere 1911).
This new style seemed to suit Strauss, because although his stories got darker and some of his music more tempestuous, he never went back to the fierce brutality of Salome and Electra. His other notables included Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), Arabella (another Rosenkavalier, entertaining in its own way but not nearly as good) and the intimate Capriccio, which came at the very end of Strauss' life.
Strauss actually adopted a lot of Wagnerian philosophy (on musical matters alone) in the ideas of total theatre and making the music work the drama and vice versa. However, luckily for us, he was able to do it concisely (Salome is 90 minutes, to Tristan und Isolde's four and a half hours) and without writing endless pages of boring essays about what he was doing.
Strauss was already an old man by the time World War 2 rolled around and his career never truly recovered after he was tarred with the Nazi brush by refusing to leave Germany, and even becoming the director of the Reichsmusikammer- officially, the head of Hitler's German Music bureau, though he resigned when they insisted he fire his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. Strauss' motives are still debated to this day- he had a Jewish daughter-in-law which confuses things considerably- but it is generally felt that he was first and foremost a supreme egotist who couldn't possibly perceive the trouble this would get him in in the years to come- he was, after all, R Strauss- the Last Great German Composer after Bach, Beethoven and Wagner. Though as far as PR moves go, being a favoured conducter at anti-Semite Wagner's Bayreuth at the height of its Nazi Propaganda days is pretty terrible.
Some Bits to Listen To:
Without a doubt, the place to start is the glorious final trio between three sopranos at the end of Der Rosenkavalier. After this though, I'm not a big Strauss fan- you really have to be in the right mental space for all the noise of Salome, for example, and I've never been a big fan of orchestral density either, always having preferred the clean and elegant lines of Mozart (or Debussy, or Ravel) over anything by Strauss. Ariadne auf Naxos has a beautiful opening Echo trio at the beginning of Act II, and Zerbinetta's big solo aria Grossmachtige Prinzessin is eleven minutes of possibly the most difficult soprano piece in the entire operatic repertory.
I have to admit though, Ariadne is growing on me, perhaps because it uses a smaller orchestra very cleverly. Plot-wise though, it's a stinker- nothing actually happens really and the characters are little more than cardboard cut-outs- but it's such pretty music (and experts more learned than I proclaim it Strauss' best).
Some Dancing Partners
Voice Types are explained in that handy-dandy link.
All Other Parts:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Five
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