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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1997

Copyright © 1997 Michael White and Elaine Henderson All rights reserved.

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

How to Use this Ebook

Introduction

John Adams

Nixon in China

Samuel Barber

Vanessa

Béla Bartók

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Ludwig van Beethoven

Fidelio

Vincenzo Bellini

Norma

I Puritani

La Sonnambula

Alban Berg

Lulu

Wozzeck

Hector Berlioz

Béatrice et Bénédict

Les Troyens

Leonard Bernstein

Candide

A Quiet Place

Harrison Birtwistle

Gawain

Punch and Judy

Georges Bizet

Carmen

Les Pêcheurs de Perles

Arrigo Boito

Mefistofele

Alexander Borodin

Prince Igor

Benjamin Britten

Albert Herring

Billy Budd

Death in Venice

Gloriana

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Peter Grimes

The Rape of Lucretia

The Turn of the Screw

Alfredo Catalani

La Wally

Gustave Charpentier

Louise

Luigi Cherubini

Médée

Francesco Cilea

Adriana Lecouvreur

Domenico Cimarosa

Il Matrimonio Segreto

Peter Maxwell Davies

The Lighthouse

Claude Debussy

Pelléas et Mélisande

Léo Delibes

Lakmé

Gaetano Donizetti

Don Pasquale

L’Elisir d’Amore

La Fille du Régiment

Lucia di Lammermoor

Maria Stuarda

Antonin Dvořák

Rusalka

Gottfried von Einem

Dantons Tod

Manuel de Falla

La Vida Breve

John Gay

The Beggar’s Opera

George Gershwin

Porgy and Bess

Umberto Giordano

Andrea Chénier

Fedora

Philip Glass

Akhnaten

Mikhail Glinka

A Life for the Tsar

Ruslan and Lyudmila

Christoph Willibald Gluck

Alceste

Iphigénie en Tauride

Orfeo ed Euridice

Charles Gounod

Faust

Roméo et Juliette

George Frederick Handel

Alcina

Giulio Cesare

Semele

Serse

Tamerlano

Joseph Haydn

La Fedeltà Premiata

Hans Werner Henze

The Bassarids

Elegy for Young Lovers

Paul Hindemith

Mathis der Maler

Engelbert Humperdinck

Hänsel und Gretel

Leoš Janáček

The Cunning Little Vixen

The Excursions of Mr Brouček

From the House of the Dead

Jenůfa

Kátya Kabanová

The Makropulos Case

Oliver Knussen

Where the Wild Things Are

Erich Korngold

Die Tote Stadt

Franz Lehár

Die Lustige Witwe

Ruggero Leoncavallo

I Pagliacci

Heinrich August Marschner

Der Vampyr

Pietro Mascagni

Cavalleria Rusticana

Jules Massenet

Manon

Werther

Gian Carlo Menotti

Amahl and the Night Visitors

The Consul

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Les Huguenots

Claudio Monteverdi

La Favola d’Orfeo

L’lncoronazione di Poppea

Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

La Clemenza di Tito

Cosí fan Tutte

Don Giovanni

Die Entführung aus dem Serail

Idomeneo

Le Nozze di Figaro

Die Zauberflöte

Modest Musorgsky

Boris Godunov

Khovanshchina

Otto Nicolai

Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor

Carl Nielsen

Maskarade

Jacques Offenbach

La Belle Hélène

Les Contes d’Hoffmann

Orphée aux Enfers

La Vie Parisienne

Francis Poulenc

Les Dialogues des Carmélites

La Voix Humaine

Sergei Prokofiev

The Fiery Angel

The Love for Three Oranges

War and Peace

Giacomo Puccini

La Bohème

La Fanciulla del West

Madama Butterfly

Manon Lescaut

Tosca

Il Trittico

Il Tabarro

Suor Angelica

Gianni Schicchi

Turandot

Henry Purcell

Dido and Aeneas

The Fairy Queen

King Arthur

Maurice Ravel

L’Enfant et les Sortilèges

L’Heure Espagnole

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

The Golden Cockerel

The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh

Gioacchino Rossini

Il Barbiere di Siviglia

La Cenerentola

Guillaume Tell

L’ltaliana in Algeri

Camille Saint-Saëns

Samson et Dalila

Aulis Sallinen

The Red Line

Arnold Schoenberg

Moses und Aron

Dmitri Shostakovich

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Bedřich Smetana

The Bartered Bride

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus

Der Zigeunerbaron

Richard Strauss

Arabella

Ariadne auf Naxos

Capriccio

Elektra

Intermezzo

Der Rosenkavalier

Salome

Igor Stravinsky

Oedipus Rex

The Rake’s Progress

Arthur Sullivan

The Gondoliers

HMS Pinafore

Iolanthe

The Mikado

Patience

The Pirates of Penzance

The Yeoman of the Guard

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Eugene Onegin

The Queen of Spades

Michael Tippett

King Priam

The Knot Garden

The Midsummer Marriage

Giuseppe Verdi

Aida

Un Ballo in Maschera

Don Carlos

Falstaff

La Forza del Destino

Macbeth

Nabucco

Otello

Rigoletto

Simon Boccanegra

La Traviata

Il Trovatore

Richard Wagner

Der Fliegende Holländer

Lohengrin

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Parsifal

Der Ring des Nibelungen

Das Rheingold

Die Walküre

Siegfried

Götterdämmerung

Tannhäuser

Tristan und Isolde

William Walton

Troilus and Cressida

Carl Maria von Weber

Der Freischütz

Kurt Weill

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

Die Dreigroschenoper

Street Scene

Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Die Soldaten

Glossary

About the Publisher

How to Use this Ebook

Over 180 operas and operettas, the major works of more than 70 composers, are covered in the Collins Guide to Opera and Operetta, an invaluable guide to this fascinating but sometimes misunderstood artform.

The main body of the book is arranged alphabetically by composer, starting with Adams and continuing through to Zimmermann, taking in the likes of Britten, Mozart, Puccini, Strauss (Johann II and Richard), Sullivan, Verdi and Wagner along the way.

The section for each composer begins with a list of their major operatic works arranged in chronological order by year of composition. Those operas set in bold type are featured in detail on the pages within each composer section. Biographical details and information on other non-operatic works set the operas in context.

The featured operas for each composer are arranged in alphabetical order. Within the entry for each opera the presentation is exactly the same: Form, Composer, Libretto, First Performance, Principal Characters, Synopsis of the Plot, Music and Background, Highlights and Recommended Recording. The vast majority of the operas also feature an entertaining Did You Know? box including anecdotes and diverting background information.

An overview of the history and development of opera and operetta, and a glossary of musical terms round out this indispensable reference source for opera devotees and newcomers alike.

Introduction

FLORENTINE BEGINNINGS

The four-hundred-year history of opera as we know it is based on a mistake. Or at least, a mistaken assumption, made in the late 16th century by a group of Florentine intelligentsia, who were minded to re-create what they believed to be ancient classical drama. Their guide was Aristotle who, in the 4th century BC, had written about theatre and music as though such things were synonymous. Drama, said Aristotle, was the imitation of life made pleasurable by ornament and melody; and armed with this information, the Renaissance Florentines supposed that ancient drama must have been completely sung.

The first composer to put their ideas into practice was Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), whose initial attempt to ‘re-create’ Greek mythic drama, Dafne, has been largely lost – leaving his subsequent Euridice (1600) as the first surviving opera. But in truth it only survives as a matter of academic interest: an undiverting compromise between speech and song, it’s hardly ever staged.

The first opera to survive in regular performance is La Favola d’Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), who wasn’t a Florentine at all but worked for the court at Mantua, where the ruling Gonzaga duke had witnessed the fame of Euridice and wanted something of his own to rival it. In the event, he got a score that outclassed Peri’s capabilities, with rich and complex music partly based on the assertive style of Italian Renaissance madrigals and partly on the tradition of what were called intermedi – musical interludes between the acts of spoken plays which, by the late 16th century, had begun to acquire a life of their own as separate music-theatre pieces.

What Monteverdi chiefly added was a sense of how music can be used to heighten the emotional charge of a moment of theatre; and to that end he led a move away from the mythic allegories that dominated the plots of very early opera, preferring to deal with human characters and situations. ‘I see the characters are winds …’, he wrote scornfully of a libretto somebody had sent him. ‘How can I imitate their speech and stir the passions?’

Stirring passions was increasingly the business of Renaissance opera composers as, with extraordinary speed, opera escaped its origins in private courtly diversion and became a public entertainment. In 1637 the world’s first general-access opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, opened in Venice. By the end of the 17th century the city housed eleven more, and the turnover of work they produced was phenomenal. It was designed to meet an insatiable demand for novelty that seems inconceivable to a time, four hundred years on, when opera has become a largely museological pursuit of the past. The repertoire was always new and ran for no more than short periods before it was taken off and (usually) abandoned. Only the libretti tended to be cherished and preserved, often to be set again. The music disappeared, or was reprocessed into other scores.

WHAT DID 17TH-CENTURY ITALIAN OPERA SOUND LIKE?

Essentially it grew out of long lines of declamatory vocal music that would be embellished as appropriate and intercut with choruses and dances. Over time, and for the sake of variety, the long lines came to be divided into two types of music:

Recitative: a prosaic kind of sung speech, skeletally accompanied by supporting chords on a small group of ‘continuo’ instruments and designed to deliver large quantities of information quickly.

Aria: a more spacious, song-like melody designed for moments when the action stops and the singer has time to reflect on what has happened, how he feels, and what a splendid voice he has.

‘He’ is the appropriate gender here, because women had a very limited role in early opera. The vocal interest of high pitch was more often provided by castrati, who came courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church which had been castrating small boys in the cause of art for several centuries. The practice was officially illegal but an open secret, its results standardly attributed to some natural accident like ‘the bite of a wild swan’.

The orchestral accompaniment to these operas would have been very modest, basically strings and one or two keyboard instruments. Woodwinds only gradually became standard, and brass instruments were reserved for grand effects.

THE ITALIAN DIASPORA

Monteverdi moved to Venice in the middle period of his life, and there he had two followers of distinction: Pier Francesco Cavalli (1602–76), remembered now for one work, La Calisto, and Antonio Cesti (1623–69). Cavalli went to work in Paris, Cesti in Vienna, and between them they exemplified the way Italian opera composers (not to say Italian operatic style) spread abroad.

France proved particularly welcoming, and the court of Louis XIV brokered a productive marriage between the new Italian ways and its own existing tradition of great, dance-based spectacles. Dance was the second language of the French, and, along with a general aggrandisement of scale, it became their chief gift to the operatic genre. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the Italian-born chief composer to Louis, filled his opera scores with ballets that look and sound delightful but do nothing for the sense of drama. So did his successor, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), who worked with Voltaire and specialised in absurdly extravagant sound-and-vision spectacles at Versailles and the Palais-Royale that no doubt played their part in the ultimate downfall of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the cultural reaction to these over-opulent indulgences was the development of opéra comique: lighter, shorter, simpler, with a spoken text to link the arias rather than sung recitative.

England was slower to seize on the Italians, and generally content with its own version of the French dance-spectacle – the courtly masque, whose storyline, usually allegorical, was no more than a vague excuse for ceremonially scenic splendour. But Charles II’s years in exile had exposed him to the magnificence of what was happening at Versailles and he was keen to have something of the sort back home, albeit more modestly funded. John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682) was a development of the masque tradition that came close to opera. But England had nothing that could be called the real thing until Henry Purcell (1659–95) wrote his French-influenced (with lots of dancing) Dido and Aeneas (1689) for a girl’s school in Chelsea. The strange thing is that having established this landmark, he took it no further and reverted to the form of writing known as semi-opera, spoken drama with musical interludes which, however substantial, is still essentially decorative and looks back to the old ways of the masque.

Germany, too, was slow to rise to the Italian bait. It imported Italian musicians who set up opera houses, but the basis of its indigenous music-making throughout the 17th century was religious and instrumental, with a new type of popular, comic speech and song mix known as Singspiel making an appearance around 1700. Thereafter, of course, the lure of Italy proved as strong in German-speaking countries as anywhere else; and it was to Italy that Georg Frideric Händel (1685–1759) travelled as a young man to learn his craft as a composer for the theatre.

The interesting thing is that he didn’t then go back to Germany to practice it (well, not for long). He moved to London where, in 1711, when he took the town by storm with Rinaldo, the otherwise thriving musical life of the capital had witnessed very little Italian opera. Handel effectively created his own market, and within a short space of time it was so buoyant that London could truly be described as one of Europe’s leading opera centres – a magnet for the greatest singers of the Baroque stage who came, conquered and ruled the whole process of opera production from start to finish.

THE STARS OF THE BAROQUE

It was in the 18th century that the phenomenon of star singers travelling throughout Europe in pursuit of massive fees first materialised. They tended to be Italian, ensuring that opera continued to be written and sung in their native language, even when it was being performed in England, Germany or Austria. And by now they included women in prominent roles, although the true superstars continued to be the castrati, whose abnormally high voices in roles that designated them great heroes or great lovers contributed to the pantomime-like gender anarchy of Baroque sung theatre. As men had once played women’s roles, now women frequently played men. And the element of the surreal in all this was heightened by the way that standard-form Baroque opera presented Classical subjects in a bizarre synthesis of ancient and modern dress. Puffed breeches, crinolines and breastplates, plus a lot of ostrich feathers, were the uniform. But although the genre was called opera seria – meaning ‘serious’ – and usually involved stories of chivalric duty and high moral tone, it had no choice but to make allowances for occasional elements of comedy.

THE CONVENTIONS OF OPERA SERIA

As the singers literally called the tune in Baroque opera, its ultimate function was to flatter them with vehicles for vocal display; and the vehicles were solo arias, strung together one after another in a way that turned the whole thing into a costumed concert. Each character (there were usually six) had a specified number of arias according to his status in the piece. Each aria was meant to illustrate a particular temperament – anger, sorrow, jealously, delirium – as a calling card for the singer’s sensitivity to that emotion. An aria came in three sections: part A, part B, and an embellished repeat da capo (‘from the top’) of part A. At the end of the aria the singer left the stage, to signify that his concert-in-miniature was over and to encourage rapturous applause. The tortuous absurdity and length of opera seria plots was largely caused by the requirement to accommodate these endless monologues-with-exit.

Otherwise, the conventions also took in freer arioso singing that was melodic but without the set-piece formal stature of an aria. The linking recitative came in two forms: secco (dry), with minimal accompaniment, and accompagnato, with more instruments and fuller texture. Ensembles and choruses were rarely used. For the most part, opera seria only gives you one voice at a time.

However, back in Italy not everything was seria. The ever-expanding lifelines of opera had spread from Venice to Naples, and in both cities a new kind of comic theatre emerged in the early 1700s in the form of intermezzi, which, like the old Florentine intermedi, were originally filler-pieces that played between the acts of larger works. Over time they had come to acquire an independent existence as artisan comedy (commedia dell’arte), featuring stock, low-life characters and situations. Refined into crafted opera by writers like Goldoni or composers like Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36), they established a looser kind of writing that wasn’t so focused on the virtuosity of individuals and accordingly took more interest in developing ensemble style. Because of its grounding in earthy humour, it became known as opera buffa, and in its genial way it was on the attack.

REFORM

In fact, the excesses of opera seria and the singers who performed it prompted counterattacks in many quarters. In England they came with ridicule, through parody pieces like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In German-speaking countries the response was more earnest: a considered call for reform. The most celebrated reformer was Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) who, with his librettist Calzabigi, published a manifesto for the cleaning up of operatic malpractice and propagandised the ideal of ‘beautiful simplicity’. No more over-decorated da capo arias. No more deadening rules to govern how a score must be constructed. Just a broad intention towards elegance and modesty.

Between them, Gluck and the Italian intermezzi shifted opera’s goalposts at a crucial time, because around the corner, ready to exploit the consequences, was a youthful genius.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–91)

Making an early start in opera, at the age of twelve, Mozart understandably began to write according to the conventions of opera seria, complete with all their formal requirements and high tone. But he soon broke free into a less prescribed world, coloured generally by comedy and infinitely more than an embellished string of arias. The list of everything he brought to opera would be long and headed, no doubt, by his matchless gift for melody. But of hardly less significance was a dramatic energy and intelligence that rarely failed him. He created characters who lived and breathed, whose actions were dictated not by artificial rules but by the natural consequences of their situation. They are truly human (for the most part) and they truly interact, with vocal lines that interweave and build into astonishing ensembles. It’s still ‘number’ opera, capable of analysis in terms of arias, recitatives, choruses and so on, but the numbers often merge, accumulating into long, near-seamless tracts of music like the massive finale to Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro, which begins about a third of the way into the Act and just rolls on – brilliantly – with barely a pause for breath.

The genius of Mozart is essentially comic, indebted to the tradition of Italian opera buffa, and most of his mature stage works explore some aspect of comedy, from the knockabout humour of Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the ideological pantomime of Die Zauberflöte. Even Don Giovanni is a comedy of sorts, described by the author as a ‘dramma giocosa’. But Mozartian high spirits marked an end rather than a beginning in the history of Austro-German opera, not to say the whole history of Europe, because Mozart’s death coincided with the French Revolution.

ROMANTIC IDEALISM

The French Revolution (1789–99) fed a new and very serious Romantic idealism into Western European consciousness. In the new France, opera was uncomfortably associated with the old order and had to reinvent itself in radical, politically high-moral terms to survive. Rescue operas involving the righting of wrongs and epic libertarian themes became the Paris fashion, championed by Cherubini and Spontini, and the fashion spread to Germany, where Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio, adopted a politically-driven rescue plot already set to music by the Frenchman Pierre Gaveau.

But by then, the centre of gravity in the opera world had shifted once again to Italy. The great Austro-German composers of the 19th century looked to the concert hall rather than the opera house, and those that did dream of operatic success, like Schubert, generally failed. The major exception was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), whose fireside horror-story Der Freischütz became the definitive statement of German Romanticism – and, like Fidelio, it was written to be sung in German.

The one supreme reason for Italy’s return to the top of the operatic pile in the early 19th century was Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), whose fame through Europe was so all-embracing that it left little room for any would-be German rivals to raise their heads. Rossini was not untouched by Romanticism, and much of his work sets grand, quasi-historical stories adapted from authors like Sir Walter Scott, whose novels had a fervent international following. But the Rossini operas that survive in repertory and are deemed his best are comedies; and they exemplify a kind of singing loosely called bel canto. What the term means is a matter of debate, but it implies the decorative virtuosity of coloratura singing, highly embellished with (in Rossini’s case) a steely glitter that tends to prize exquisite technique above spontaneous emotion.

Of Rossini’s two heirs and successors, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) is arguably the closest in spirit, with a brilliant light-comedic touch balanced by moments of pathos, most obviously the famous (and fashionable at the time) Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti set derangement so effectively that his own subsequent descent into madness was poetically appropriate.

But the master of bel canto emotion was the other heir, Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), whose truly passionate writing found a middle way between virtuosity and expressivity that would influence Verdi and Puccini decades later. In a short life he managed to produce a body of powerful work (no comedies) that climaxed in Norma, and their truncated potential for development make him one of the great what-ifs of music history. Had he only lived to fifty, Italian opera might have taken a very different direction.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813–1901)

As it was, the mantle passed to a composer who emerged as the supreme figure in Italian opera of the later 19th century and with no rival of quite such exalted stature anywhere in the world apart from Richard Wagner. He was Giuseppe Verdi. Unlike Wagner, Verdi was not a theorist, a proselytiser or a visionary. During the 1840s his operas were read as a call to battle for the unification of Italy, but beyond that he did not write to advance radical ideas or debate abstract issues. He was a practical, straightforward man of the theatre whose work was direct and assertive, accepting sometimes crudely improbable plots for the sake of the dramatic situations they set up, but otherwise emotionally true and with a predilection for certain themes that related to his own life and about which he spoke from the heart. One of them was father-child relationships, and it’s no coincidence that early in his life he lost two children and a wife in traumatically rapid succession.

The breadth and compass of Verdi’s work is so great that it resists summary, but in the broadest terms he introduced a new dimension to the catalogue of opera voices. Vivid, strong and sometimes as rough-edged as they are eloquent, his characters fill the ever-larger space that 19th-century opera came to expect as appropriate for its activities, following the irresistible lead of what was happening in Paris.

FRENCH OPERA

Nineteenth-century opera may have been dominated by Italian composers, but the Paris Opéra still somehow remained the Gold Standard venue from which universal trends and fashions flowed and to which everyone aspired. Wagner’s early failure to be taken up by Paris was a humiliation he never forgot, generating a lifelong grievance against the man who was the undisputed monarch of the city’s operatic life – Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Meyerbeer was an expatriate German who mastered the art of monumental spectacle beloved by Paris audiences and whose works, with their Cecil B. de Mille expansiveness and crowd-pleasing ballet sequences, defined the term ‘grand opera’. They set the tone, and the scale, of French stage music for decades to come, and they played their part in encouraging the massive enterprise that was Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz (1803–69), although Berlioz raised the artistic stakes of grand opera with elements of idealism and subtlety that were beyond Meyerbeer. Above all, Berlioz was a maverick, always his own man and never in thrall to fashion. When he wrote big, it was to please himself.

More fashion-conscious figures on the Paris circuit were Charles Gounod (1818–93), whose lighter, easier lyricism won him the fame and fortune that eluded Berlioz, and Jules Massenet (1842–1912), of whom much the same could be said. But the outstanding French opera composer of the later 19th century was Georges Bizet (1838–75) who only managed to produce one work of unarguable greatness during his brief life (another what-if?) but made it count. With a storyline of unadorned low-life realism, Carmen effectively invented verismo a decade-and-a-half before the Italians got there. In that sense it was innovative. But its opéra comique mix of arias and spoken dialogue was actually quite unsophisticated if you compare it with the truly epoch-making work that was emerging at the same time, across the German border.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83)

Born in the same year as Verdi, Wagner was the other supreme figure of 19th-century opera, and in many ways the magnitude of his achievement could be explained as a reaction against the two-and-a-half bad years he spent failing to establish himself as a young composer in Paris. French opera in general, and Meyerbeer in particular, became targets for attack, examples of the way opera had allowed itself to be debased from high art into entertainment. Wagner was to be a Messianic saviour, restoring the lyric stage to the status he imagined it once enjoyed as a temple of enlightenment – ennobling, spiritual, cleansed of all impurity – and by a stroke of luck it was during those bad years in Paris that he found solace in the German medieval myths that would prove the literary inspiration for his cultural campaign. Almost all the mature Wagner operas are based on these ancient legends, which Wagner advocated as ideal material for operatic treatment on the grounds of their timeless relevance and universality.

However ridiculous (and dangerous) some of his ideas turned out to be, Wagner was a truly revolutionary artist who changed not only the ideology of opera but its form and content. He once and for all got rid of the enduring operatic convention of ‘number’ opera, with the score broken down into units of aria, recitative, chorus and the like. Instead, his music was ‘through-composed’ in long, unbroken lines, with the vocal parts declaimed in a manner halfway between the decorative enlargement of aria and the direct narration of recitative. He set his own texts in a comparatively straightforward way, one note to a syllable. But his melodies were highly chromatic, weaving through myriad sharps and flats that undermine any clear sense of belonging to a specific key. He also set his singers the challenge of singing for long periods of time against a huge orchestra. And it’s in Wagner that the orchestra really comes into its own as a distinctive force to be reckoned among the diverse elements that feed into opera. In fact, it all but takes over, with the voices sometimes reduced to an accompaniment for what’s happening in the pit, rather than the more conventional reverse arrangement.

NATIONALISM

Thanks to Wagner, German was at last established as a major operatic language that could hold its own against Italian, and he spawned several generations of German disciples, starting with Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), who developed and refined the process of writing stage works for their own native tongue.

But there were sporadic outbreaks of nationalistically-inspired anti-Italianism in other parts of 19th-century Europe. Spain was an example, where a tradition of folksy light opera saturated with local colour called zarzuela was gathering ground and would, at the turn of the century, prove influential on Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). But the most significant nationalist activity was taking place in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904) took the lead in establishing a distinctive, folk-generated style of writing for the stage. What they began found its ultimate expression in the later, 20th-century works of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose skeletal, spikily compressed approach to operatic story-telling has come to be recognised as one of the most significant contributions to the modern history of music.

The chief centre of 19th-century nationalism, though, was Russia, a land which had only recently begun to develop a distinctive musical culture after years of French and Italian domination. The father of Russian nationalism was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), who set an enduring precedent for a grandly ceremonial kind of opera that mixed history with fairy tales but wasn’t terribly well crafted in terms of its structure. These were very early days for Russian music. Composition was a semi-amateur activity, and it remained so for the generation who came after Glinka, notably a group known as the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group’s leading member, Modest Musorgsky (1839–81), left mighty works of startling but rough-edged originality that his more craftsmanlike compatriot Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) subsequently tied up. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) completed the process through which Russian opera reached mature refinement, with works which tend to be considered more Western European than those of the ‘Mighty Handful’, although it would be more accurate merely to describe them as less inward-looking in their Russian-ness.

THE 20TH CENTURY

Summaries of 20th-century music are invariably messier than those of earlier periods, because composers fit less easily into territorial groups or ideological movements. They tend to make their claims as individuals and resist categorisation. But the century was ushered in by one conspicuously flourishing movement in Italy known as verismo, a school of low-life realism whose first champions, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), found instant fame with their respective mini-masterpieces Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, but were soon eclipsed in stature by a fellow Italian.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) emerged as the next great Italian composer after Verdi. In the history of music he doesn’t stand as a notable innovator, and his appeal is far from intellectual, but the strength and passion of his melodies, the quality of his orchestral writing, and his sheer theatricality (in both the best and worst senses of the word) have guaranteed his domination of the modern opera repertoire. And if Puccini doesn’t always ‘feel’ like a 20th-century composer, remember that the majority of his mature scores, from Madama Butterfly onwards, came after 1900. However, the other dominant figure of early 20th-century opera was a German.

Not to be confused with the Viennese king of operetta (no relation), Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was the successor to Wagner in much the same way that Puccini was to Verdi, adopting the master’s language, adjusting its parameters and, in the process, lightening its intensity. A young radical who, in archetypal fashion, grew into a middle-aged conservative, Strauss’ early works set out to shock the bourgeoisie, his later ones to charm them. But the Wagnerian inheritance was constant in the prominence and weight he alotted to the orchestra, and in the declamatory, through-flowing style of his writing for the voice, which commonly requires the power and stamina of Wagner’s helden singers. Through Strauss, a style of writing was fixed whose consquences can be heard today in the sometimes tough, politically driven but also sometimes romantic operas of Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) and the massively neo-Wagnerian project of Karlheinz Stockhausen (born 1928) to write an apocalyptic cycle of seven music dramas – one for each day of the week.

The excesses of Wagner and Strauss, though, led to an inevitable reaction away from opulent, well-upholstered writing on a grand scale and towards smaller, leaner alternatives. A changing world made the economics of large-scale opera harder to sustain, and while some German figures like the young Erich Korngold (1897–1957) clung to large forces and traditional trappings, more forward-looking ones like Kurt Weill (1900–50) were scaling down and rethinking the way in which opera addresses its audience. Weill’s collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht pioneered a new kind of music theatre, designed to be popular (with cabaret-style numbers), stripped of the top Cs and tiaras glamour of the opera house. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was also concerned with usefulness and, specifically, the relationship between the artist and society, although he gave operatic expression to it in a decidedly less radical manner than Weill and Brecht.

Meanwhile, the so-called Second Viennese School composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Alban Berg (1885–1935) had taken the Wagnerian message to its logical conclusions and beyond, with music that initially extended Wagner’s exotically free harmonies to a point where key signatures became almost irrelevant, and subsequently did away with any allegiance to a key centre altogether. The resulting serial or twelve-tone music proved more viable for instrumentalists than for singers, and it hasn’t found much of a following on the opera stage, even though Berg left two masterful scores of lasting importance in the modern history of the genre.

Before we leave the post-Wagnerian empire, mention has to be made of Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whose ethereally vague Pelléas et Mélisande is like Wagner in a whisper – perfumed, rich in symbolism, but without the bombast. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the one opera of Béla Bartók (1881–1945), is another heavily symbolic score in serious debt to the master of Bayreuth.

But the Wagnerian ascendency was finally (and ironically) ended by the intervention of one of the master’s most devoted admirers, Adolf Hitler, who single-handedly lost Germany its prime position in the mid-20th-century operatic league. The majority of the significant Austro-German composers went into exile as the Nazis came to power – usually with no choice in the matter – and their general direction was America, where Hindemith, Korngold, Weill and Schoenberg (among others) settled, assimilating with varying degrees of enthusiasm into the culture of their adoptive land and making their own contributions to the American musical melting-pot.

It would be wrong to describe the America of the 1930s as an operatic wasteland. It had been importing European talent (not least, Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte) for more than a century and boasted flourishing lyric companies. But home-grown opera was a novelty, and native composers were struggling to find a native means of self-expression – something that wasn’t merely shipped in from the old world. Marc Blitzstein (1905–64) and Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) were early experimenters, but the breakthrough came with George Gershwin (1898–1937), whose Porgy and Bess realised the hopes and strivings of a whole generation of American composers in the way it so successfully transcended the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art: cultivated and vernacular. Gian Carlo Menotti (born 1911) has never been the showbiz figure that Gershwin was, and his Italian background tells in the Puccini-esque nature of his feel for melody and drama, but he was pushing at those high/low boundaries during the 1940s, with a succession of operas designed to play commercially in non-traditional Broadway-type venues. And with passing input from the racy Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) and the conservative but passionate Samuel Barber (1910–81), American opera has become a brilliantly hybrid industry, overflowing into transcendental events, such as those of Philip Glass (born 1937) and the very serious musicals of Stephen Sondheim (born 1930).

Backtracking slightly, France has had a disappointing 20th century for a country whose national house was once the spotlit focus of the opera world. After Pelléas et Mélisande there hasn’t been much of stature apart from a couple of lightweight charmers by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and a religious drama by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).

Russia has had an altogether more distinguished time with Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), whose combined works add a sharp, abrasive edge to the development of an operatic language that largely derives from Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky. The earliest operas of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) take their tone from the magic fantasies of Rimsky-Korsakov. But as Stravinsky became progressively less Russian and more cosmopolitan, so his music became less ‘enchanted’ and more austerely Neoclassical, reinventing the past and reaching back beyond Wagner to the delicate detachment of Mozartian and Baroque closed forms. Another displaced person in America, it’s significant that Stravinsky wrote his chief opera, The Rake’s Progress, to an English text provided by the poet W.H. Auden and set almost as though it were Latin, with wilful unconcern that the language should sound idiomatic.

And that brings us, finally, to Britain, which, in the second half of the 20th century, became a serious creative centre for opera after two hundred years of producing almost nothing of significance. The English musical renaissance that began with Elgar produced a few attempts at music theatre that attracted passing fame, like Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, Delius’ A Village Romeo and Juliet and Vaughan Williams’ epic Pilgrim’s Progress. But the spark of genius didn’t quite ignite until 1945, when Peter Grimes put Benjamin Britten (1913–76) on the map as a figure of world stature. The thirteen original operas that followed built into a body of work unmatched by anybody of his generation. Their success inspired a torrent of work from other British composers that continues unabated, starting with Michael Tippett (born 1905) and William Walton (1902–83) and progressing down the years through the Mancunian duo of Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) and Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934) to Judith Weir (born 1954) and Mark-Anthony Turnage (born 1960). Turnage’s blistering adaptation of the bitter social satire Greek by Steven Berkoff has proved one of the most powerful and most-performed operas of the last decade or so, and it crowns a period of extraordinary productivity. With the possible exception of Finland – yes, Finland – where Aulis Sallinen (born 1935) has conjured a thriving opera industry out of nothing, it’s probably true to say that no country in the world could currently beat Britain’s ability to generate new opera. For a political culture which does as little as possible to encourage music in general and opera in particular, this is a pleasing but bizarre state of affairs.

A POSTSCRIPT ON OPERETTA

Unlike most aspects of opera proper, operetta was a French invention, derived from the mix of song and speech practiced by composers like André Ernest Grétry (1741–1813) and Pierre Monsigny (1729–1817). ‘Comique’ implied lightness though not necessarily comedy, and the boundary with serious opera was fairly loosely drawn, allowing figures like François Boïeldieu (1775–1834) and Daniel Auber (1782–1871) to cross it freely.

But operetta finally came into its own in the French Second Empire with Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), whose career began on a small scale, writing for tiny Parisian theatres, but gathered international fame – which spread to Vienna in the 1860s and prompted Johann Strauss II (1825–99) to imitative action. Strauss’ waltz-based shows were softer in tone than the sometimes abrasive satire of Offenbach, and they owed almost as much to the native Viennese tradition of Singspiel (another mix of speech and song, often heavily sentimental) as they did to the French import. But the formula was unequivocally successful, and it was soon followed by Franz Lehár (1870–1948) who took the Viennese version of the genre to the point of no return.

Meanwhile, the Offenbach phenomenon visited Britain in the 1870s and left its mark on the librettist/composer team of W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), whose Savoy Operas so insinuated themselves into English cultural life that its language and customs carry their imprint – not least the practice of queueing, which was introduced as a means of coping with the demand for G&S tickets.

Offenbach and G&S between them then spread to America where, reinterpreted via European exiles like the Hungarian Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951), they laid one of the foundations for the American Broadway musical. But that’s another story …

John Adams

(1947–)

Nixon in China (1987)

The Death of Klinghoffer (1990)

I was looking at the Ceiling and then I saw the Sky (1995)

According to official statistics, John Adams is the most frequently performed of living American composers – his fame founded on an accessible style of writing known as Minimalism which involves the repetition of small groups of notes to a point where listeners are either mesmerised or driven crazy. An essentially West Coast American phenomenon, it was adopted by Adams in the early 1970s in reaction against an East Coast academic upbringing and meant that he was automatically associated with older Minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But Adams has developed in a more eclectic way, providing himself with an escape route from what could otherwise be a restrictively dead-end musical language. Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer are striking examples of newsreel opera, their stories taken from real life and presented like televisual current affairs. Nixon deals with high-level politics; Klinghoffer (a treatment of the Achille Lauro hijack) with the personal consequences of political conflict. His most recent stage work, I was looking at the Ceiling and then I saw the Sky, is a dramatised song-sequence in something like the popular manner of the collaborations between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill earlier this century. Looking critically at the lives of young Americans at the time of the last Los Angeles earthquake, it premiered with spray-paint set-designs by radical graffiti artists.

Nixon in China

FORM: Opera in three acts; in English

COMPOSER: John Adams (1947–)

LIBRETTO: Alice Goodman

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Houston, 22 October 1987

Principal Characters

Richard Nixon, American president Baritone

Pat Nixon, his wife Soprano

Mao Tse-tung, Chinese statesman Tenor

Henry Kissinger, American statesman Bass

Chiang Ch’ing, Mao’s wife Soprano

Chou En-lai, Chinese statesman Baritone

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: China; February 1972

ACT I On their arrival in Beijing, Nixon and his wife are greeted by Chou En-lai. Nixon feels that this visit is of great symbolic significance – as much as the first moon landing, in fact, and he also expresses his pleasure that their arrival coincides with peak television viewing time in America, thus ensuring him maximum publicity. Then the President, Henry Kissinger, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai each offer their individual views on world issues, during which the contrasting ideologies and philosophies of East and West become evident, and the first act closes with a banquet.

ACT II Pat Nixon is taken to visit a commune and the Summer Palace and later joins the President, Mao, Chou En-lai and Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, to watch a performance of the contemporary ‘political ballet’, The Red Detachment of Women. This depicts a courageous group of women soldiers successfully battling against an unscrupulous landlord (played by Henry Kissinger). When the ballet ends, Chiang Ch’ing presents her account of the Cultural Revolution and how she sees her own place in history.

ACT III On the last night of the visit Nixon, Pat, Mao, Chiang Ch’ing and Chou En-lai are each seen in separate beds. Nixon and Mao reflect on past events in their lives and on their struggles to succeed. Nixon’s wartime memories centre on the acquisition of his own hamburger stand while Mao’s most vivid memories are the struggles of the Revolution. It is left to Chou En-lai to unite the past with the present by asking the question common to all political ideologies: ‘How much of what we did was good?’, which brings the opera to a close.

Music

Nixon in China is a mixture of exhilarating upbeat rhythms, pounding through the endless repetitions that make up a Minimalist score, and moments of reflective poignancy in which potentially cardboard characters really come to life. It isn’t easy to show recent historical figures with credibility on an opera stage, and the mere idea of Nixon and Mao singing to each other raises an assumption that the tone of the piece will be satirical. But no. Despite forays into the surreal, this is straight-laced all-American drama which if anything veers toward Romanticism – with appropriately luscious music. Even the synthesiser which Adams insinuates into the orchestral textures is given a romantic treatment.

Highlight

A brilliantly energised orchestral sequence called ‘The Chairman Dances’, which has entered the concert repertoire as a stand-alone piece.

Did You Know?

Nixon in China is one of the most commercially successful of all modern operas. The Grammy Award-winning recording was named a ‘recording of the decade’ by Time magazine, and the whole thing broadcast on American TV as though it were a newsflash, introduced by Walter Cronkite – which is probably the only time Richard Nixon ever saw it. He declined an invitation to attend the Houston premiere, and is not known to have been present at any other live performance.

Recommended Recording

Sanford Sylvan, James Maddelena, Chorus and Orchestra of St Luke’s/Edo de Waart. Nonesuch 7559 79177-2. The only recording to date.

Samuel Barber

(1910–81)

A Hand of Bridge (1953)

Vanessa (1957)

Anthony and Cleopatra (1966)

Barber was an American who looked to Europe and the melodic abundance of European late-Romanticism for inspiration. Born into a WASP-ish East Coast family, he was one of the first students at the new Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he studied singing as well as composition. Opera wasn’t a preoccupation, and his few stage works have tended to be overshadowed by concert scores like the Violin Concerto, the lyrically nostalgic scena for voice and orchestra Knoxville, Summer of 1915, and above all by the deathless Adagio, which must have featured on the soundtrack to more feature films and TV documentaries than anything since Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But at Curtis he had met another young composer called Gian Carlo Menotti who was supremely a creature of the theatre. They went on to spend most of their lives together, and the first two of the three Barber operas were collaborations in which Menotti wrote the words. A Hand of Bridge doesn’t actually require many words: it lasts nine minutes and is no more than a brilliant little diversion. Vanessa, with its darkly Ibsenesque plot, is far more substantial, while Antony and Cleopatra is grander still, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Vanessa

FORM: Opera in four acts; in English

COMPOSER: Samuel Barber (1910–81)

LIBRETTO: Gian Carlo Menotti; after Isak Dinesen’s story

FIRST PERFORMANCE: New York, 15 January 1958

Principal Characters

Vanessa, a baroness Soprano

Anatol, a young man Tenor

Erika, Vanessa’s niece Mezzo-soprano

Old Baroness, Vanessa’s mother Contralto

Doctor Bass

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: A country house in an unnamed ‘northern country’ in the early 1900s

ACT I Vanessa waits alone in her sumptuous drawing room for a visitor to arrive. When he does at last come, Vanessa keeps her back turned to him, saying that she has waited twenty years for his return but, if he can no longer love her, then he must go immediately. As the visitor answers her, Vanessa whirls round, realizing that he cannot possibly be her lover, Anatol; he is much too young. Weak with shock she is taken to her room by Erika. Meanwhile, Anatol casts an acquisitive eye over the rich furnishings of the room. When Erika returns he explains that he is the son of Anatol, Vanessa’s lover who went away twenty years ago; his father is now dead. In view of the snowstorm raging outside, he begs Erika to let him stay the night and, carefully scrutinising the girl, calmly sits down to enjoy the meal prepared for his father.

ACT II A month has gone by. Erika confesses to the old Baroness that, although she and Anatol became lovers on that first night, she does not love him and will not marry him. Vanessa, aglow with happiness, returns from skating with Anatol and announces plans for a grand New Year Ball. Later, the old Baroness questions Anatol about his behaviour towards Erika and extracts his promise to marry her. Erika, however, knowing that her aunt, Vanessa, is in love with Anatol, rejects him.

ACT III The ball is under way and Vanessa and Anatol are about to announce their engagement. The pregnant Erika, shocked and disturbed, wanders unnoticed outside into the bitter cold as the music and dancing continue in the background.

ACT IV Erika has been found unconscious and has suffered a miscarriage, kept secret from Vanessa, who is now married to Anatol and preparing to leave for their honeymoon in Paris. After they leave, Erika is alone; she orders the mirrors to be draped and the gate to be shut, just as her aunt had done: ‘Now it is my turn to wait’.

Music and Background

A conservative piece for its time, Vanessa is richly scored in the manner of late Romanticism, owing much to Puccini and Richard Strauss, and with most of the formal ingredients of conventional 19th-century grand opera but translated into American terms. There is a fragment of a ball scene, ravishingly lyrical set-piece arias, and a sort of folk ballet – all of which contributed to the enormous success Vanessa enjoyed in its early years. It was the first opera in English ever to be heard at Salzburg, where it played with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit.

Highlights

Erika’s aria ‘Must the winter come so soon?’ is a winner, as is Vanessa’s ‘Do not utter a word’, and the final quintet is arguably one of the most effective climaxes in modern opera.

Did You Know?

The original production of Vanessa was a grand event with opulent sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton. It was intended that Maria Callas should sing the title role but she declined – allegedly because she thought Erika too much a rival part.

Recommended Recording

Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, Regina Resnik, Nicolai Gedda, Metropolitan Opera/Dmitri Mitropoulos. BMG/RCA GD 87899. The original cast, and the only recording.

Béla Bartók

(1881–1945)

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918)

Born in a part of Hungary which is now Romania, Bartók was one of the pioneer figures of 20th-century music, forging a new musical style from the folk traditions of his native country that owes nothing to the two composer-giants who are generally considered the great originators of modernity, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Most of his work was instrumental and orchestral, with a set of six string quartets that rank as the most significant of their kind since Beethoven, and major concert scores like the Concerto for Orchestra and Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta. His involvement with the stage was limited and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle his only opera, although he did subsequently produce two ballet scores, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin. He left Hungary for America in 1940 and died there in financially straitened circumstances five years later.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

FORM: Opera in one act; in Hungarian

COMPOSER: Béla Bartók (1881–1945)

LIBRETTO: Béla Balázs; after a fairy tale by Charles Perrault

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Budapest, 24 May 1918

Principal Characters

Duke Bluebeard Bass

Judith, his wife Mezzo-soprano

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: Bluebeard’s castle; an unknown time and country

Bluebeard enters, leading his new wife into her home, a strange, dark Gothic castle which has seven doors but no windows. He asks her if she has changed her mind about staying with him and, on her reassurance that she has not, they embrace. The door behind them is shut and bolted. Judith then notices the doors for the first time and, saying she wants to let in light and air, asks the Duke for the keys. A strange, long sighing sound is heard throughout the castle as Bluebeard, on her insistence, gives her the key to the first door. As she opens it a vivid red light streams through; it is the Torture Chamber and the walls are wet with blood. Undeterred, Judith maintains that she is not afraid and proceeds to open the next four doors: the Armoury is characterised by bronze light, the Treasury by golden light, the Garden by bluish light and the vision of Bluebeard’s Kingdom by a brilliant white light. Bluebeard suggests that she has seen enough and takes her in his arms. But Judith is, by now, obsessed with knowing all his secrets and demands the sixth key. The haunting sigh is heard once more as she opens the door to find a Lake of Tears.

The final door, insists Bluebeard, must remain closed. But Judith begins to question him about his love for her. She wants to know about the women he loved before he met her, and asks what happened to them. Bluebeard stays silent and Judith opens the door, convinced that the truth lies behind it. Immediately the fifth and sixth doors swing shut and the stage darkens. Three beautiful women step out: they are his ex-wives, Bluebeard explains, and represent the morning, noon and evening of his love. Judith, he says, is his last love, that of the night, and after her is eternal darkness. Judith disappears through the seventh door and Bluebeard is alone.

Music and Background

As theatre, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is compact, with just one act and a playing time of an hour, but as music it has epic stature, grandly terrifying in its depiction of Duke Bluebeard’s dark domain and heavy with the gloom of Gothic horror. Bartók’s treatment of the story is, of course, symbolic – the opening of the doors is like an exercise in Freudian analysis, exposing the hidden secrets of the subconscious mind – and the counterbalancing of inner and outer worlds is echoed in Bartók’s key structures, which gravitate between F sharp for Bluebeard and C for Judith.

Highlight

This is not an opera with stand-alone arias, and there are, after all, only two singing characters: the dead wives behind the sixth door are mute. But there is a great musical climax at the fifth door when the vision of Bluebeard’s kingdom floods the stage – a heart-stopping moment that never fails in its effect.

Did You Know?

Bartók wrote this grim tale of domestic serial killing shortly after his marriage. He dedicated the score to his wife.

Recommended Recording

Samuel Ramey, Eva Marton, Hungarian State Orchestra/Adam Fischer. Sony MK 44523. Idiomatically conducted, with explosively strong performances from the two singers.

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770–1827)

Fidelio (1805)

Born in Bonn but living and working in Vienna from his early twenties, Beethoven is one of the towering, pivotal figures of music history, with a massive output (nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, seven concertos …). His work carried the Classical forms of Haydn and Mozart into the new territory of Romanticism and confirmed the potential of music to speak in spiritual as well as political terms. A radical humanitarian with revolutionary sympathies, he used his work as a public platform for the expression of personal beliefs about society and the individual, and his only opera Fidelio was exactly that: a statement of the power of the human spirit to triumph over tyranny and oppression which stands beside the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as an anthem to the ideals of universal brotherhood. Other scores express a more autobiographical struggle with human weakness: at the age of thirty he began to realise that he was going deaf, and as his hearing worsened he withdrew into a world of inner turmoil which found a mystical dimension in the late quartets.

Fidelio

FORM: Opera in two acts; in German

COMPOSER: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

LIBRETTO: Joseph Sonnleithner and Georg Friedrich Treitschke; after the play by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Vienna, 20 November 1805

Principal Characters

Florestan, a Spanish nobleman Tenor

Leonore, his wife, disguised as the male Fidelio Soprano

Rocco, chief jailer Bass

Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter Soprano

Jaquino, Rocco’s assistant Tenor

Don Pizarro, governor of the prison Bass-baritone

Don Fernando, the king’s minister Bass

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: A fortress near Seville; 18th century

ACT I Florestan, a political prisoner and freedom fighter, has been flung into a dungeon by Pizarro and is slowly starving to death, while Pizarro spreads rumours that he has already died. Leonore, suspecting the truth, has disguised herself as a man, Fidelio, and has been taken on as an assistant by Rocco, swiftly becoming a trusted aide. Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter, is unaware of the disguise and has taken a considerable fancy to Fidelio, rejecting the overtures of Jaquino, her jealous former suitor. Leonore learns that Don Fernando, the king’s minister, is coming to inspect the prison, having heard that Pizarro is unlawfully locking up his own personal enemies. To Leonore’s horror, Pizarro gives Rocco money and instructs him to kill Florestan. Rocco declines to commit murder, but agrees to dig a grave in the prison dungeon if Pizarro will do the deed himself. Meanwhile Leonore has urged Rocco to allow the prisoners out for some light and air, but she is heartbroken to find Florestan is not among them. Rocco then tells her that she is to help with the gravedigging so at least she will be able to see Florestan and perhaps be able to help him; if nothing else she will die with him.

ACT II Rocco and Leonore enter the dungeon where Leonore is shocked to see her emaciated and chained husband, although she is careful to control her behaviour to avoid rousing Rocco’s suspicions. Leonore persuades Rocco to allow her to offer the condemned prisoner some bread and wine. Suddenly Pizarro bursts in, dagger in hand, and rushes towards Florestan – only to be stopped by Leonore who throws herself between them, declaring that she will shoot Pizarro, with a pistol she has kept hidden, before he kills Florestan. At this moment a fanfare is heard and Jaquino announces the minister’s arrival. Florestan is saved and, in a symbolic gesture, he is released from his chains by Leonore. The minister orders the immediate release of all the prisoners and the arrest of Pizarro. Justice is done.

Music and Background

Fidelio is a mixture of music and speech which can prove upliftingly sublime or stodgily leaden, depending on how it’s done and (critically) how much of the speech is left in. Beethoven had no previous experience of writing opera, and he took enormous trouble over it, passing through three different versions, a different name (Leonore) and four overtures before arriving at a final form. You could argue that the effort shows. There is also an uncomfortable relationship between the domestic and heroic elements in the opera, and a sense in which the great but static chorus of celebration at the end takes the whole thing out of the realms of theatre and into oratorio. But there is no denying the sincere depth of emotion involved, or the fact that Fidelio can be an exhilarating and radiantly affirmative experience – in the right hands.

Highlights

The canonic quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’, Leonore’s aria ‘Komm, Hoffnung’, and the prisoners’ chorus ‘O welche Lust’ in Act I; the Leonore/Florestan duet ‘O namenlose Freude!’ and final chorus ‘Wer ein holdes Weib errungen’ in Act II.

Did You Know?

Fidelio’s subtitle is Die Eheliche Liebe (Married Love), and Leonore is very much the idealised woman Beethoven spent his life searching for but never finding. She also represents a comparatively rare example in opera of the female lead as active heroine rather than passive victim.

Fidelio is said to have been based on a true incident in the French Revolution.

Recommended Recording

Christa Ludwig, Jon Vickers, Philharmonia Orchestra/Otto Klemperer. EMI CMS7 69324-2. A classic 1962 recording with a warmth and dynamism that remain unmatched.

Vincenzo Bellini

(1801–35)

I Capuleti e I Montecchi (1830)

La Sonnambula (1831)

Norma (1831)

Beatrice di Tenda (1833)

I Puritani (1835)

If Rossini was the presiding genius of Italian bel canto opera in the first half of the 19th century, Donizetti and Bellini were his two lieutenants, and like Rossini, they made their mark in Naples before moving on to Paris, which was the centre of the operatic world. Bellini was Sicilian by birth and showed an early gift for melody that got him noticed while he was still a student. His first full-length opera was staged at Naples’ Teatro San Carlo when he was twenty-three and a commission from Milan followed immediately, spreading his fame beyond Italy. From then on came a steady flow of work, totalling ten operas in ten years – frantic productivity by modern standards but fairly modest by the standards of the time. In fact, Bellini took uncommon care over his work, suiting the music to specific voices (from which he nonetheless made great demands) and developing a close association with the poet Felice Romani, which became one of the most effective composer/librettist partnerships in opera history.

Norma

FORM: Opera in two acts; in Italian

COMPOSER: Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35)

LIBRETTO: Felice Romani; after Alexandre Soumet’s verse tragedy

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Milan, 26 December 1831

Principal Characters

Oroveso, chief of the druids and Norma’s father Bass

Pollione, Roman pro-consul in Gaul Tenor

Norma, high priestess of the druid temple Soprano

Adalgisa, young priestess of the temple Soprano

Clotilde, Norma’s confidante Mezzo-soprano

Flavio, Pollione’s friend Tenor

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: Gaul; the Roman occupation

ACT I Oroveso comes to the sacred grove to pray to the gods to help him raise support to fight and defeat the Romans. After he has left, Pollione confides to Flavio that he no longer loves Norma, who has broken her vows of chastity for him and secretly borne his two children; he has transferred his affections to the young priestess, Adalgisa. When Adalgisa joins him, Pollione successfully persuades her to renounce her vows and go back to Rome with him. Adalgisa, in some distress, goes to see Norma to ask to be released from her vows. Norma, sympathising with her predicament, agrees to do so and asks the name of her lover. At that moment Pollione himself enters and Norma, stunned, realises the truth. She furiously denounces Pollione and the shocked Adalgisa declares that her first loyalty is to Norma, rejecting Pollione’s desperate attempts to persuade her to go with him.

ACT II In her hut Norma stands over her sleeping children, dagger in hand, contemplating the shame and humiliation they will suffer in the future because of her disgrace. She cannot bring herself to harm them, however, and suggests to Adalgisa that she should leave with Pollione and take the children with her to safety. Adalgisa’s response is to say that she will indeed go to Pollione – but only to try and convince him to return to Norma. In an atmosphere of gathering violence Norma learns that Pollione plans to abduct Adalgisa from the temple. Enraged, she strikes the great shield three times and declares war against Rome. Pollione is captured within the sacred temple but, to save his life, Norma offers herself, a disgraced and blasphemous priestess, as an alternative sacrifice. Confiding her children to Oroveso’s care, Norma prepares to mount the funeral pyre, as Pollione, overwhelmed by her selfless love and courage, commits himself to her once more and walks beside her to the flames.

Music and Background

Norma is Bellini’s masterpiece, written for what the composer called the ‘encylopaedic’ range of expression of the great bel canto singer Giuditta Pasta and closely responsive to the libretto of Felice Romani, which passed through many changes before the composer was satisfied with it. Norma herself is one of the most formidable roles in all opera, calling for extremes of tenderness and fury. Not for nothing does she get taken into the repertory of Wagner singers, and Wagner admitted a personal debt to Bellini’s combination of powerful passion with spacious melodies.

Highlights

Norma’s Act II ‘Casta diva’ is a benchmark aria for sopranos with the substance and finesse to tackle it (and there aren’t many of them). Also in Act II comes a superb scene for the two sopranos – ‘Mira o Norma’.

Did You Know?

The two great Normas of modern times once appeared in the opera together, in 1952. Maria Callas took the title role, Joan Sutherland the small part of Clotilde.

The 19th-century soprano, Therese Tietjens, playing Norma, swung her arm so wide as she struck the gong that she hit her leading man, who collapsed unconscious at her feet.

Recommended Recording

Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, John Alexander, London Symphony Orchestra/Richard Bonynge. Decca 425 488-2. A classic from the 1960s, magnificently cast in the two soprano roles, with Sutherland in better voice than when she recorded Norma a second time, aged fìfty-eight(!).

I Puritani

(The Puritans)

FORM: Opera in three acts; in Italian

COMPOSER: Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35)

LIBRETTO: Carlo Pepoli; after Ancelot and Saintine’s play, itself based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Paris, 25 January 1835

Principal Characters

The Puritans

Lord Walton Bass

Sir George Walton, his brother Bass

Sir Richard Forth Baritone

Sir Bruno Robertson Tenor

Lord Arthur Talbot, a Cavalier Tenor

Henrietta of France, Charles I’s widow Mezzo-soprano

Elvira, Lord Walton’s daughter Soprano

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: A fortress outside Plymouth during the English Civil War

ACT I Elvira has finally overcome her father’s objection to her marriage to the Cavalier, Arthur Talbot, leaving Richard Forth a disgruntled and rejected suitor. To Elvira’s joy, distant horns announce Arthur’s impending arrival and he sweeps in in great style, bringing gifts that include a superb white bridal veil for his betrothed. Lord Walton gives Arthur and Elvira a safe conduct pass, saying that he cannot attend the wedding because he must escort a female prisoner, a suspected spy, to London. The prisoner is brought in and Arthur recognises her as the widow of the executed Charles I. Arthur knows that, if anyone finds out who she is, she will be murdered, and he resolves to help her escape. Draping Elvira’s veil over Henrietta’s head, he smuggles her out of the fortress, intercepted only by Richard, who, seeing the woman is not Elvira, is glad to see Arthur go and hopes that he may now win Elvira’s love. On discovering her apparent desertion Elvira loses her reason.

ACT II Elvira’s madness is observed at length in the famous Mad Scene, but the act closes on George Walton and Richard Forth as they confirm their readiness to fight to the death for the Puritan cause and, if necessary, to kill Arthur Talbot.

ACT III Arthur has now delivered Henrietta into safe keeping and is a fugitive. Nevertheless he risks his life to return to Elvira who is so shocked that she seems, partially, to regain her senses. But her obviously fragile mental state deeply disturbs Arthur and he refuses to leave her, even when he hears his Puritan enemies approaching, although he knows that capture will mean death. But, just as he is about to be summarily executed, news arrives of Cromwell’s victory and the granting of a general amnesty. Elvira’s joy finally restores her to sanity, Arthur is a free man and the lovers are united.

Music and Background

Written for Paris, I Puritani is generally considered the most sophisticated – though perhaps among the less dramatic – of Bellini’s opera scores, with a finer grasp of orchestration (the composer’s undeniable weak point) than he showed elsewhere. There is a pervasive militarism in the music, with prominent brass and percussion, and marching rhythms that bear out Bellini’s own description of his work here as ‘robust’ and ‘severe’. But there is also brilliance in the vocal writing, which demands a strong quartet of principal singers and, especially, a tenor with good top notes.

Highlights

Elvira’s Act II ‘Qui la voce’ is one of the more affecting mad scenes in Italian opera; and the duet ‘Suoni la tromba’, also in Act II, is a famously stirring example of Bellini’s martial music.

Did You Know?

Bellini wrote no comedies. He always chose to place his characters in what he termed situazioni laceranti – heart-rending predicaments.

George Bernard Shaw disliked the opera intensely, saying that the music ‘has so little variety in its cloying rhythms that it vies for dullness with any Italian opera on the stage’.

Recommended Recording

Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, La Scala Milan/Tullio Serafin. EMI CDS7 47308-8. A 1955 recording in mono, but with Callas in superbly stylish form; not always beautiful but powerfully dramatic.

La Sonnambula

(The Sleepwalker)

FORM: Opera in two acts; in Italian

COMPOSER: Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35)

LIBRETTO: Felice Romani; after Scribe and Aumer’s ballet-pantomime

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Milan, 6 March 1831

Principal Characters

Amina, an orphan Soprano

Teresa, her foster-mother Mezzo-soprano

Lisa, an innkeeper Soprano

Alessio, a villager Bass

Elvino, a wealthy landowner Tenor

Count Rodolfo, the local lord Bass

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: A Swiss village; early 19th century

ACT I The villagers have gathered together to celebrate the forthcoming betrothal of Amina and Elvino. The only one not joining in is Lisa, who loves Elvino herself, and is not mollified by the unwelcome attentions of Alessio. The marriage contract is signed; Elvino pledges Amina everything he owns and gives her a ring and a bunch of wild flowers. In return, Amina promises him her love. At that moment a handsome stranger in a soldier’s uniform arrives on the scene, apparently on his way to the castle. No one recognises Count Rodolfo, who is persuaded by Lisa to stay the night at the inn. As dusk approaches, Teresa warns the villagers to go home, for fear of the white phantom that haunts the area. At the inn Lisa is flirting with Rodolfo in his room; she tells him that his identity has been discovered and the villagers will soon come to offer him their respects. They are interrupted by a noise and Lisa quickly leaves. Amina, sleepwalking, enters the room and Rodolfo realises she must be the ‘phantom’. Unwilling to cause her embarrassment, Rodolfo leaves her alone (he exits through the window), just before the villagers crowd in to discover the sleeping Amina in Rodolfo’s room. Lisa has thoughtfully brought Elvino and Teresa along to witness her rival’s disgrace and the girl is roundly condemned by all before the wedding is cancelled.

ACT II The villagers are on their way to the castle to ask for Rodolfo’s help in restoring Amina’s reputation. Elvino and Amina come face to face, but he cannot believe she is innocent and furiously wrenches his ring from her finger. Back in the village square Elvino is preparing to marry Lisa when Rodolfo arrives to try and convince him of Amina’s innocence. At that moment Amina herself appears, sleepwalking on the roof before crossing a dangerous bridge, and carrying the flowers, now withered, that Elvino had given her. She speaks of her sadness at her lost love. Elvino, finally convinced, kneels before her and begs her forgiveness; Amina wakes and they are joyfully reconciled.

Music and Background

La Sonnambula is generally considered Bellini’s first true masterpiece, and a fine example of the vocal style known as bel canto: a term which literally means ‘beautiful song’ but implies far more, including an extreme refinement of tone and technique, and an ability to deal with decorative embellishment. For a bel canto composer, Bellini’s embellishments are actually rather restrained – he preferred to write in long, elegant phrases – and La Sonnambula is remarkable above all for the lyricism of the music provided for the original incumbent of the title role, Giuditta Pasta, one of the supreme singers of her age and a continuing champion of Bellini’s work.

Highlights

Amina’s opening cavatina ‘Come per me sereno’ has beguiling charm; her sleepwalking ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ in the closing scene is a touching example of Bellini’s extended melody; and her final ‘Ah! non giunge’ is a brilliant showpiece arguably unsurpassed in all bel canto writing.

Did You Know?

Bel canto heroines commonly go mad, a device used to generate a sense of pathos in the character. Amina’s somnambulism is a less extreme equivalent.

The ‘dangerous bridge’ over which Amina sleepwalks was reputedly added for Jenny Lind.

Recommended Recording

Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, National Philharmonic Orchestra/Richard Bonynge. Decca 417 424-2.The second of Sutherland’s two recordings, made in 1980 when her voice was still fresh but more expressive than before. Pavarotti is a hard-to-beat partner.

Alban Berg

(1885–1935)

Wozzeck (1922)

Lulu (1935)

Born in Vienna, Alban Berg was a pupil of Schoenberg who began writing in the opulent post-Mahlerian manner of European composers early in this century and then adopted his teacher’s controversial method of making music out of ‘tone rows’: a technique using sequences of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a way that allows no one note greater prominence than any of the others and denies the possibility of a key-centre to anchor the music ‘in C’, ‘in F sharp’, or whatever. Berg was never as strict an exponent of this ‘serial’ method as his teacher, or as his fellow-pupil Anton Webern, which makes him the most accessible of the so-called Second Viennese School of composers. Wozzeck and Lulu have accordingly acquired the status of modern classics, although they were banned in Berg’s own time (the Nazi Third Reich) as degenerate. Berg’s other work includes a Violin Concerto written in memory of Alma Mahler’s daughter, and the Lyric Suite which contains in cryptic number-code a secret love message to his mistress.

Lulu

FORM: Opera in three acts; in German

COMPOSER: Alban Berg (1885–1935)

LIBRETTO: Alban Berg; from two plays by Frank Wedekind

FIRST PERFORMANCE: (Complete) Paris, 24 February 1979

Principal Characters

Lulu Soprano

Dr Schön, a newspaper editor Baritone

Alwa, his son Tenor

Schigolch, an old man Bass-baritone

Lulu’s admirers and lovers

Countess Geschwitz Mezzo-soprano

The Painter Tenor

The Athlete Bass

The Schoolboy Mezzo-soprano

The Marquis Tenor

The Banker Bass

The Prince Tenor

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: Setting: Germany, Paris and London; late 19th century

ACT I Lulu is having her portrait painted as a present, but is caught in a compromising situation with the Painter by her husband, who drops dead from shock. Lulu marries the Painter and is living in some luxury; she has, as Schigolch points out, ‘come a long way’. Dr Schön, one of Lulu’s lovers, comes to tell her that they must stop seeing each other as he is getting engaged, at which Lulu protests vehemently. After she has gone Schön tells the Painter all about her colourful past and the many names by which she was known to her former lovers. The Painter is so distressed that he kills himself. Free again, Lulu compels Schön to call off his engagement.

ACT II Schön and Lulu are now married, but Schön is consumed with suspicious jealousy over Lulu’s many admirers, including his own son, Alwa. Schön overhears Alwa declaring his love for his stepmother and suggests to Lulu that she should end her own life. Lulu, almost distractedly, takes up the gun and shoots Schön.

In a silent, filmed interlude, we learn that Lulu has been jailed for murder. She has contracted cholera, transmitted to her on purpose by Countess Geschwitz, to enable her to escape from the hospital. Lulu, Schigolch and Alwa leave for Paris.

ACT III Lulu is surrounded by a crowd of disreputable characters in a Parisian casino. The Marquis, having failed to blackmail Lulu into joining a Cairo brothel, informs the police of her whereabouts but she manages to escape just in time. Her final home is a dingy attic in a London slum where she supports herself, Alwa and Schigolch by prostitution. They are joined by the faithful Geschwitz. In this final, dark episode of her life Lulu sees Alwa killed by one of her clients before she herself, together with Geschwitz, is murdered by Jack the Ripper.

Music and Background

Lulu is a difficult, abrasive and altogether demanding piece, written for a large orchestra, with a bizarre assortment of characters who give the otherwise dark plot a surreally comic edge. It is constructed entirely from a single row of twelve notes in the closest Berg came to total Serialism. However anarchic it sounds in performance, the score actually works according to meticulously organised formal principles, and for ears accustomed to its sound-world, it presents a curious kind of beauty. Berg died before finishing the orchestration of the last act, and his widow prevented completion of the score by other hands during her lifetime. As a result, Lulu had no complete staging until 1979.

Highlights

For anyone less than steeped in its idiom, the big moments of Lulu will be dramatic rather than musical, including the pivotal film sequence in Act II (where the second half is supposed to be a palindromic mirror-image of the first), and the horrendous death of Lulu at the end (a gift for directors with a lurid imagination).

Did You Know?

Berg’s widow forbade completion of the score for personal reasons: she believed Lulu – probably correctly – to be an oblique portrait of that same lover who features in the code of the Lyric Suite.

Recommended Recording

Teresa Stratas, Franz Mazura, Kenneth Riegel, Paris Opera/Pierre Boulez. DG 415 489-2. A lucid account of the complete score by the cast and conductor responsible for the 1979 premiere.

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