What Makes Opera Run

EVER since I moved to Boston to conduct symphony concerts exclusively, one of the principal questions put to me in interviews is “How much do you miss opera?” Mind you, not “Do you miss opera?”, because the questioner takes it for granted that it is impossible for one who has conducted so much opera to live without it, but “How much?” Half-seriously and half-facetiously I reply that my nostalgia at this stage, less than four years after my last Metropolitan performance, is still controlled.

A European may gradually become saturated with the operatic repertory, but this rarely happens in the English-speaking world, which is ever more fascinated by this hybrid theatrical form. The reasons for the belated popularity of opera in the United States lie outside the realm of musical or theatrical aesthetics; for many years, financial support here was channeled mainly toward the symphony orchestra, which to the austere philosophy of Anglo-Protestantism appears worthy and uplifting while much of opera is tinsel and circus.

Since 1937, when I first looked at the American scene, the picture has changed radically. The Metropolitan then played a sixteen-week season, and that was all the operatic fare available to New York in a year. Now there are twenty-seven to twenty-nine weeks of the Met, twelve of the City Opera, two of the National Company, and performances by special organizations of a list of rare works. In Chicago and New Orleans, opera has been revived, and the West Coast boasts a major artistic enterprise in the San Francisco Opera Company, whose ascendancy is being challenged by the development of Los Angeles as an opera-producing city.

To analyze the reason for opera’s hold upon the affection of the public, we must distinguish at the outset between those operas which are truly loved and those which are tolerated, appreciated by small specialized audiences, or totally ignored. Annals of Opera, compiled by Alfred Loewenberg, lists about 3800 titles of operas performed from 1597 to 1940.

I have picked at random the year 1865. What do we find? C. E. diBarbieri’s Perdita, or A Winter’s Tale, Lassen’s Le Captif, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, Cornelius’ Der Cid, Faccio’s Amleto, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, von Suppé’s Beautiful Galatea, Moniuszko’s The Haunted Castle, Sebor’s The Templars in Moravia, Marchetti’s Romeo e Giulietta, Serov’s Rognyeda, Basin’s Le Voyage en Chine, von Flotow’s Naida, and that is it.

Of the thirteen works premiered during that year, current repertory retains only one of them, Tristan. We know the names of Meyerbeer, Cornelius, and von Suppé. Maybe some people recall the names of Moniuszko and von Flotow, but neither of these composers figures on opera or concert programs, notwithstanding a recent revival of Martha by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I did record the comic opera The Barber of Baghdad by Cornelius in 1956, and while the music is charming, I realized then that a stage performance, particularly outside the German provinces, is no longer likely to happen, for the story is a silly yarn about a love-sick young man who is helped in the oddest way by a quasi-philosophical barber, and the Wagnerian-style music is somewhat ill suited to the text.

Most operas see the light of day for a very short time, then are relegated to library shelves and to secondhand music stores. Therefore our musical snobs should stop looking down on such perennials as The Barber of Seville or La Bohème. La Bohème will be seventy years old this year. It had its premiere in Turin on February 1, 1896; within three years it was given in twenty-eight different cities including Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Tunis, Smyrna, and in all the better known musical capitals of Europe.

The enormous effort it takes to conceive, compose, and fully orchestrate an operatic score does not necessarily ensure a lasting success. The surviving and successful operas — and by successful I mean broadly popular in a variety of countries — number only from forty to sixty works. Eight by Wagner, an equal number by Verdi, four to six Puccinis, three to five Mozarts, a number of single works from the French repertory, a few of the older Italians — Rossini, Donizetti — a small number by Richard Strauss make up the staples without which repertory cannot exist. Whether you count eight or sixteen Verdi operas in this group depends on the localities you are canvassing. In Glyndebourne, for example, Macbeth has been produced repeatedly but never Aida; in Tokyo, Rome, or London, Aïda is rated as one of the most popular works, but not Macbeth. With every one of the prolific operatic composers — Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss — this relative rating is necessary, and accordingly, the popular repertory varies from three dozen to five dozen works.

From the category of works played only for a specialized audience, I recall a beautiful and typical example. The German composer Hans Pfitzner wrote a long and difficult opera in three acts called Palestrina. It is an attempt to dramatize the pain of the creative process by showing the melancholy Palestrina torn between a cardinal’s peremptory order to write a model Mass and his own doubts of his creative powers. The composition takes place on stage with nine dead composers appearing to Palestrina as symbols of the immortality of great music. By contrast, the second act shows the Council of Trent during a tumultuous session; and what had seemed the central theme in Act One — a composer in his quest for inspiration — becomes the world of church politics in Act Two.

When I was a student, my colleagues and I never missed a performance of this work. It was given regularly, once in the fall and once in the spring, in a rather small auditorium. It never drew more than half a house, and that half was made up of music students and priests. Perhaps the priests went to bone up on the Council of Trent, and perhaps they went because there was no wild lovemaking and love music to corrupt them. In any case, the opera never had a genuine following among the general public. It never made the international circuit. Performances in five German cities, plus Vienna, Switzerland, and Antwerp, constitute the geographical range of Palestrina. The length of the work cannot be the reason for its failure since equally long works by Wagner are high on the list of favorites. The heavy German texture cannot be responsible, as once again Wagner, and Strauss, have made the popularity charts. Thus I suspect that the subject matter, in its eminent suitability for priests, was the cause of its limited appeal.

In that long work no woman plays a role. The composer’s dead wife is part of a dream sequence; the other female voices, a soprano and a mezzo, belong to two boys, son and disciple of Palestrina. The opera is entirely devoid of any love interest, and I suggest that the loyalty of the public has always been weakest when a love story was missing and strongest when love inspired the composer to write music of great fervor and sensual effect. The love stories of the most popular, successful, and enduring operas are so full of passion that their impact from the stage, as expressed through beautifully timbered human voices, preferably at extreme ranges, has no equal in music or theater.

ANY analysis will show how prominent are the elements of passion and love among successful operas. We generally consider five works of Mozart to be part of the standard repertory: Seraglio, Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutte, and The Magic Flute. Of these five the second and third hold a special position of affection, while the other three, musically just as great, are less successful because their libretti are less capable of arousing true compassion on the part of the audience.

The Magic Flute suffers from the worst fate of all. While the text was being written by Emanuel Schikaneder, a bankrupt theater manager who was determined to seek his fortunes anew with the help of the great Mozart, a rival impresario premiered a show called Kasperl, or The Merry Bassoon Player, taken from the same source as The Magic Flute. Schikaneder quickly changed all the principal characters from good person to bad person and vice versa. But in his haste he did not bother to make these changes on what he had already written, the shift taking place in the middle of the first act. Any kind of audience participation in the suffering of the principal characters therefore becomes impossible. When a great score — and all of these three works, Seraglio, Così, and Magic Flute, are among the most sublime ever written — is provided with an inferior libretto, many listeners simply sit back and enjoy the incomparable music, but they do not get much out of the work as a whole.

It is maddening to musicians that Falstaff, the greatest score by Verdi, has not attained the popular acclaim accorded Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, and Aïda. Falstaff, with a wonderful comedy text taken by Boito from Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, is one of the few truly miraculous scores, not only in terms of Verdi’s own development but by any and all standards. It is an exuberant, exhilarating piece of music; but the fact that a love story (and it is only puppy love between young Miss Ford and young Mr. Fenton) has been relegated to the background has impeded the popular success of the work.

Rheingold and Siegfried are far less popular with even the Wagner enthusiasts than are Walküre and Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal has not attracted as large an audience as Tristan. Among Puccini’s works, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi (another chef d’oeuvre) cannot hold a candle to Bohème, Tosca, and Butterfly for audience popularity. Puccini proves most eloquently that when story and score drip with passion, the public goes wild. People are also completely enchanted when they are witnessing in an exotic setting problems of love which never occur in a lifetime on the block where they live or in the offices where they work.

Fatal ending of tragic love, passions fighting taboos, and the scorn of the establishment are themes with the strongest appeal because audiences feel and identify with these situations. Look at the three masterpieces of Puccini: hero and heroine live together without the benefit of clergy. What greater thrill than to witness the glorious exchange of arias between Mimi and Rodolfo, the duets of Tosca and Cavaradossi, and the long preparation for the “wedding night” by Butterfly and Pinkerton.

Verdi too gives us in his most successful works either love that cannot but lead to disaster — Aïda and Radames — or love that is illicit, as in Rigoletto and Traviata. In Walküre we see the tragedy of incestuous love, and in Carmen we find a weak man with a beautiful tenor voice fatally attracted by a gypsy, when all forces of decency have him marked as the future husband of a blonde childhood sweetheart who sings the prettiest tunes.

RARELY in the history of opera have there been successful comic works. Mozart’s Figaro, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Wagner’s Meistersinger, and Strauss’s Rosenkavalier are the only ones which have remained in standard repertory without interruption.

These four comedies have one significant motif in common: the assumption of a false identity by one of the principals — Cherubino, Count Almaviva, Magdalena, and Octavian. Their disguises serve in each case to frustrate the ridiculous lover, who in a comedy is the indispensable third party. The ridiculous thirds are Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Figaro, Doctor Bartolo in Rossini’s work, Beckmesser in Meister singer, and Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier. In the first and last of this distinguished quartet, the piquancy of the disguise is heightened by having the boy’s role acted by a female. It speaks ill for the understanding of certain film and opera producers that at times Octavian has been assigned to a man. What was intended as delightful and amusing masquerade in the original thus becomes slightly questionable, semiperverted buffoonery.

Opera, unlike the spoken dramatic comedy, is not the proper medium for social satire. And whatever sociological overtones we might find in Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier are more in the eyes of the beholders than in the minds of librettist and composer. The social significance in The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchais has been eliminated almost entirely by da Ponte, notwithstanding the fact that many contemporary stage directors bend over backward to instill rebellion into the love comedy. The jus primae noctis, which in Beaumarchais has all the earmarks of an intolerable social evil contributing to revolt of the peasantry and the servants, is in The Marriage of Figaro only part of a very attractive love chase. To make the seigneur’s “right of the first night” appear as an intolerable hardship to the servant, the lord should be an evil, revolting man on whom the public can lavish its hate. But Count Almaviva in Figaro is no worse than a very active woman chaser. Indeed, there is very little in him of a grand seigneur oppressing his servants to the point where revolt becomes justified. Social satire is an intellectual exercise admirably suited to spoken dialogue but out of place with music.

But why is it that no matter how carefully the great comedy score Falstaff is produced, or how well it is performed, it retains only a limited attractiveness which puts it in group two of our repertory?

One of the reasons is that although it contains all the elements of a successful comedy, they are not effectively related to one another. The protagonist, Falstaff, has no connection with the lovers, Nanetta and Fenton, and their ultimate good fortune in marrying despite the earlier objections by the girl’s father is really in no way linked with the central comedy.

Compare the second act finale, when the two lovers stand kissing behind a screen and are discovered during the chase after Falstaff, with a similar scene in the second act of Meistersinger, when Walther and Eva are hidden behind some bushes beside Pogner’s house while Beckmesser, the man who is being fooled, sings to a girl in the window, supposing her to be Eva. All this is known to Hans Sachs, who not only disturbs the serenade of the ridiculous lover but in his song contrives to insert many allusions to the girl sitting with her lover in the shadow of her father’s house.

In Falstaff there are two unrelated actions: Ford and his companions chasing after the old rogue, and the love affair of the young couple, who need not even be there to alter the situation; while in Meistersinger all five principals are inextricably bound together.

Disguise, which in the four greatest comic operas plays such a large part, is used in Falstaff, too, when Ford visits Falstaff’s residence as Mr. Fontana. Logically speaking, Ford need not disguise himself since Falstaff has never met him before; therefore he merely assumes a different name. Again the device is there, but not as an essential, dramatically cogent motif.

Dr. Caius, representing in Falstaff what Beckmesser is in Meistersinger, never develops into a real character and is made so ridiculous that it is hard to conceive why he would ever have been promised the hand of Ford’s daughter. Beckmesser, however, has never been chosen by Pogner. He may qualify through artistry, since Pogner has promised Eva’s hand to “him who will win the crown of the Meistersinger,” but this is quite different from having been chosen. Beckmesser is not an established suitor to either the audience or the girl, while Dr. Caius has been officially chosen by Ford; being of a ridiculous deportment and revolting appearance, the Doctor adds nothing but incongruity to the play.

The comedy ends with the marriage of the lovers, which, strange to say, has rarely inspired the finest musical inventions. The great death scene has produced much finer music than the happy ending. Think of Gilda, Violetta, Otello, Tristan, Siegfried, and many more. Stronger still is the combination of love and death. Wagner makes it into a whole philosophy in Tristan und Isolde, but it has been a basic motif in many tragic operas, be it in Ballo in Maschera, La Bohème, or Wozzeck.

Much has been made recently of the popularity and revival of the bel canto operas which have lain dormant for the better part of a hundred and fifty years, allegedly for want of singers. I do not believe that lack of singers was the reason. There were plenty of singers to perform the roles in Meyerbeer, which are just as difficult to negotiate as anything written by the earlier Italian bel canto composers. Bel canto was dependent on the availability of castrati. The disappearance of castrati as distinguished singers — or the reluctance to make an able choirboy into a mastersinger by castration — was a progressive development in European civilization. But I don’t think that the reasons were humanitarian, since humanitarianism was not conspicuous in Western civilization. I think that with the transition from a small, mostly aristocratic audience to a large, middle-class subscription public and with the establishment of permanent theaters to replace touring troupes, a new focus of interest began to determine style, content, and purpose of opera. The desire was no longer for virtuoso singing by desexed master vocalists, but for an artful expression of the passionate urge between the sexes.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that with Idomeneo, an opera seria with a castrato in one of the leads, Mozart bade farewell to that form and ventured next into the German Singspiel, Abduction From the Seraglio. That the libretto did not quite come up to the great fire and passion of Mozart’s all-understanding heart is a small calamity. But here we have a forerunner of nineteenth-century operetta, based on the formula of a serious couple, a gay couple, a comedian, a certain amount of trouble between the couples, and an inevitable reconciliation at the finale.

The proliferation of operettas during the nineteenth century, particularly in Vienna and Budapest, undoubtedly deprived opera of many comic works and drove composers to tragic subjects as sophisticated people demanded more than the facile conflicts and easy solutions offered in operetta. Thus tragedy, passion, and death became the landmarks of triumphant operas traveling over the world stages and still in public favor.

IT WOULD be worthy of an extensive literary critique and analysis to show how a few operatic archetypes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century influenced the dramatis personae in later works. I think particularly of three operas which served as models: Mozart’s Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787), and Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805). The latter is a unique case among the great repertory pieces. With part of our audiences it is a favorite for its wondrously beautiful score, high standard of morality, and more recently, its political timeliness. Since the end of World War II, revivals of Fidelio have been many and frequent. Political prisoners and a tyrannical, corrupt governor naturally recall to mind the Third Reich. If not all the public has taken Fidelio to heart as much as its grandeur and emotional sublimity warrant, it is again for reasons of a nonoperatic book. The story is indeed a paean to a most devoted wife, but opera lovers are out for less elevating thrills.

In Rocco, the jailer, there was created a prototype who had several variations in later works. The money-minded father of the marriageable girl becomes Daland in The Flying Dutchman (1843), Pogner in Meistersinger (1868), and Faninal in Rosenkavalier (1911). Just as the Byronic hero eventually becomes Rhett Butler, each of these characters gets more strongly and simply drawn with time, and it may well be that the development of a dramatic prototype over several decades reveals the public’s increasingly jaded taste, which must be stimulated to laughter or compassion by ever sharper dramatic devices.

Rocco manifests his philosophy about money in an aria telling the young lovers that without money it is difficult to be happy in marriage. (Gustav Mahler felt that this greedy sentiment was below the general high moral tone of Fidelia and omitted the “gold" aria altogether.) Daland, the Norwegian sea captain, seeing cases of treasures carried ashore by the crew of the unknown skipper, whom he has just met, is ready on that evidence alone to take him home and introduce him to his daughter. It is quite clear that the stranger’s wealth is for Daland a sufficient passport to accept him as his future son-in-law.

In Pogner, cultural snobbery has been added to wealth, and while he wonders in the second act if he hasn’t been a bit vain in putting his daughter up as a prize for the best Meistersinger, he is a sympathetic and yet accurate image, not of the medieval, but of the nineteenth-century rich German bourgeois who had to manifest his concern for culture if he desired to be a fully respected member of society. Finally, in Faninal we see the caricature of the moneyed man. A war profiteer, he will marry off his daughter to a man of the wrong age, boorish, unfit for his child, but with a genuine title to bestow. Our Herr von Faninal, willing to pay the debts of the impoverished, squandering, whoring baron, is a true portrait of many twentieth-century fathers who sell their daughters for titles, real or spurious, at great expense to themselves, and remain as oblivious to the human characteristics of the intended as Faninal.

Other characters in Rosenkavalier are drawn more radically than their prototypes in Mozart-da Ponte’s Marriage of Figaro. Octavian derives in a direct line from Cherubino. But whereas Cherubino chases around the estate to steal a quick kiss from a maid or country girl, Octavian spends night after night in bed with an older woman. The Marschallin herself is an extreme Countess Almaviva. Both ladies have been disappointed by negligent husbands; but while the Count comes back to his wife from his flirtations for what we assume will be a spotty but still well-matched conjugal existence, the Marschal was never loved, and we do not expect him back in his wife’s arms. It was a marriage ordered by convention, and the girl who came from a convent was abandoned or neglected by her husband very soon. The Marschal spends most of his time hunting big game in the southern provinces of the Austrian empire.

Without detracting from Hofmannsthal’s achievement in writing the charming libretto for Rosenkavalier, it is clear from these examples that what is hinted at in classic opera is here put very realistically before us; where one’s imagination is free to fill in the details of Cherubino’s chases and the Countess’s dreams and yearnings, little is left to guesswork when one sees Octavian and the Marschallin in bed, and hears the details of her forced marriage, her early biography, and her later life.

This comment does not lessen the literary and theatrical value of the book; it should serve only as a reflection on the culture in our theater, patronized as it is by people who demand more and more explicit acting out of the problems presented by the dramatist.

In Octavian, the Marschallin, and Faninal, the classical prototypes of Cherubino, the Countess, and Rocco are easily recognizable. Ochs, seemingly an original creation, shows how dramatic motifs and situations tend to appear over and over again because their appeal to the public is timetested.

In the first scene of Don Giovanni, Leporello sings his famous aria “Madamina.” It is a showpiece during which he exhibits to a startled Elvira, abandoned by the Don, a list of all the girls who over the years have been lovers of his master. It is in modern lingo a “little black book,” where conquests are noted. It is gaudy and bawdy, a piece such as only Mozart in music and Shakespeare in words could conceive.

This aria has its counterpart in Act One of Rosenkavalier; the Baron regales the Marschallin with his own amorous routines chez Lerchenau, tells how he judges the four seasons of the year by their suitability to lovemaking, and gives detailed descriptions of the various types of females whom he finds more or less to his liking. He has an entire rule book of the mechanics of seduction at the tip of his tongue, and delivers it in very spirited, highspeed, six-eight time to the alternately amused and slightly miffed Marschallin.

There is a difference between the two pieces; Leporello’s aria is not only one of the highlights in Don Giovanni, it has become a showpiece on the recital platform for bassos who normally do not sing Leporello on stage. The role is performed by the buffo, while the principal basso cantante is cast as Don Giovanni, yet principal bassos are happy to sing “Madamina” in concert. Most of our famous Dons have sung this great aria; its latter-day successor, the narrative of Ochs, not only never made the recital platform, it is even shortened in most performances of Rosenkavalier. The piece, brilliant though it is, presents difficulties of delivery which make it an unlikely candidate for the top ten basso arias.

IT SEEMS to me that each composer is inspired by some different variety of the love theme and conflict. Whether constant return to a basic motif is a psychological clue to the composer’s own personality, I leave to the amateur analysts to determine. Verdi found his best libretti in novels or dramas where a love affair between the soprano and the tenor conflicts with a third party (the baritone or mezzo). These love affairs, some platonic, some less so, are “challenged” by fathers in Rigolelto and Traviata; by a betrayed husband in Ballo in Maschera; by a rival mezzo in Aida; and in Don Carlo by the basso, who happens to be not only the husband of the soprano but also the father of the te nor.

The lower voices usually represent violated social custom. Rigoletto — baritone — knows that the Duke is married and has taken but a very temporary fancy to his daughter; father Germont — baritone — knows that his son’s liaison jeopardizes the chances of a proper marriage for his daughter; Renato — a baritone — the betrayed husband in Ballo in Maschera, needs no explanation; in Don Carlo the betrayed father and husband is the King, who cannot live in his exalted realm with suspected betrayal behind his back; and Amneris — a mezzo — speaks not only as an enraged, jealous woman, she personifies a social order which frowns upon a victorious general who prefers the slave daughter of the vanquished enemy to the royal offspring of his own country.

Just as Verdi showed great preference for the couple that rebels against society and is punished, so did Wagner have a predilection for the hero who violates every ground rule of society, yet in the end is redeemed, mostly by self-sacrificing, loving women. And since Wagner saw himself in most of his hero-figures, it is perfectly conceivable that Verdi, too, portrayed his own life upon the stage. Verdi’s young wife died in 1840. In 1847 he met in Paris the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, who lived with him for twelve years before they were married.

In 1852 the father of Verdi’s first wife seems to have complained of Miss Strepponi to Verdi. Verdi replied:

In my house there lives a lady, free, independent, a lover like myself of solitude, possessing a fortune that shelters her from all need. Neither I nor site owes to anyone at all an account of our actions. On the other hand, who knows what relationship exists between us? What affairs? What ties? What claims I have on her and she on me? Who knows whether she is or is not my wife? And if she is, who knows what the reasons are for not making the fact public? Who knows whether that is a good thing or a bad one? And even if it is a bad thing, who has the right to ostracize us? I will say this, however: in my house she is entitled to as much respect as myself — more, even; and no-one is allowed to forget that on any account. And finally, she has every right, both on account of her conduct and her character, to the consideration she never fails to show to others.

The situation must at times have been difficult for such a public figure as Verdi, and may account for the compassionate understanding of irregular relationships which he brought to his operas.

Mozart is more complex. It seems to me that the developed in his four late works (Seraglio excepted) the strange and fascinating concept of dividing woman into three different parts. In Figaro, Countess, Cherubino, and Susanna; in Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina; in Così, Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Despina; and in Magic Flute, the Queen, Pamina, and Papagena. In all four works the first-named expresses the more austere woman, the second sings the most passionate music, and the third is the cuddly, kittenish, warm, and primitive girl.

Mozart, the unique dramatic genius who understood every facet of life, knew that it was impossible to create one role representing woman as he saw and dreamt of her. He chose libretti where he found woman divided into her components; this adds to the fascination of casting and singing Mozart roles. Like Shakespeare, Mozart was a performer himself and knew that a company of singers would show up best if all its virtues and talents were exhibited. By writing three good roles, he enabled three gifted women to shine.

Strauss followed Mozart, perhaps consciously, in favoring the female voice. He excelled in writing for sopranos and mezzo-sopranos but, unlike Mozart, was not equally at home with male voices. Three women sing in Rosenkavalier — the Marschallin, Octavian, and Sophie; in Elektra it is the protagonist, her mother, Klytemnestra, and her sister, Chrysothemis, who carry most of the score; in Ariadne the Composer, Ariadne, and Zerbinetta; in Frau ohne Schatten, the Empress, the dyer’s wife, and the nurse.

This is no coincidence. Composers pick their librettists and then influence them to a degree, because a composer must do so if he is to be inspired lay the text delivered to him.