Opera
Alive and Kicking
By DAVID CAIRNS MusicoLoGisis, one sometimes , feels, combine the functions of archaeologist and undertaker, unearthing forgotten mediocrity ''N110.4 only to bury it again beneath a load of learned irrelevance.
At their worst, they suggest a jo dying sect of secret initiates for whom necrophily has long ceased to yield any pleasure. Their creed proclaims that the only good music is dead music, their gods are Ditters- dorf, Teleniann and the duller sons of Bach. They recall Bertie Wooster's remark about the dog which continually lays dead rats on the drawing- room carpet, 'though persistently apprised by word and gesture that market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.' But in Haydn's comic opera 11 Mondo della Luna they have come 1113 with something that is still alive and that deserves to go on living. The revival at the Hol- land and Aix festivals this summer, in a new edition by Professor Robbins Landon, is a rare and triumphant example of musicology in action. 1 confess I went to Aix prepared to endure and write abOut a distinguished bore, a poor ha'p'orth of art for such an intolerable deal of historical significance. That is what is so excellent and salutary about the revival : it has not only brought forward a virtually unknown work by a great master which is a pleasure to see and hear, but in doing so it has .upset certain ancient and cherished critical standbys. Whether, given other circumstances Haydn might have become an outstanding operatic composer must now be con- sidered an open speculation. We can no longer trot out the weary paradox that Haydn's operas were not dramatic precisely because his sym- phonies were Had he been free as a young man to travel to Italy and learn from its example, had he found a da Ponte and worked with him at first hand on new texts instead of always having to make do with old ones, had he developed under pressure from the stimulating society of a great musical centre and not in secluded, orderly Esterhazy, where for most of the time the only operas from which he need fear com- parison were his own, the emphasis of his career might have been very different.
The textbooks, in fact, must be revised. In making instrumental music respectable and un- precedentedly popular, in raising the symphony to a position where it could look opera in the face, in persuading polyphony to return to the world from its banishment to the dusty formalities of baroque church music, and in discovering and exploiting the immense dramatic possibilities of sonata form, Haydn was after all not necessarily disqualifying himself from writing good operas. He could never have become a Mozart, perhaps. He did not command the extraordinary under- standing and penetrating observation of human nature to make him an equal dramatist. His characterisation would never have explored the subtleties and ambiguities, the wit and pathos and sublimity that Mozart's did, just as his symphonic modulations, though superbly bold and original, were mostly far simpler and less complex. Haydn himself said the last word on the subject when he turned down the idea of composing an opera for Prague two months after the premiere of Don Giovanni: '1 should be taking a big risk, since it is scarcely possible to stand beside the great Mozart. If I could impress Mozart's incomparable works as deeply, and with the musical understanding and feeling with which I myself grasp and feel them, on the soul of every music-lover, especially those in high places, the nations of the world would compete to hold such a jewel within their borders.' It is symbolic that even when his patron's death left him free to move, he refused the offer of a post in Naples, though he had wanted to go to Italy all his life and believed to the end that Italy would have been the making of him as an operatic composer. But II Mondo della Luna explains and justifies the long hours and years and the love and pains which Haydn lavished on opera. It leaves no doubt that he was right : he had it in him.
The libretto, by Goldoni, had been set before by other composers, but it might have been a lot worse. The situation, in which a simple- minded amateur astronomer is persuaded by an adventurer that he has made a journey to the moon and is there obliged to agree against his will to his daughters' marrying the adventurer and his friend (as the programme note admirably put it, consent a marier ses deux files . . .
de hams dignitaires lunaires qui ressemblent etrangement a des soupirants qu'il avait econduits sur terre'), is not unpromising and, except for a mechanically obvious denouement, it is worked out with skill and freshness. Clearly it pleased Haydn; the melodies are racy and individual, the rhythmic interest nicely varied and the scoring, in beauty, aptness and invention, far above the level of what was required at the time : the music which depicts the transition to the `moon' as Buonafede, the astronomer, sits drugged and bound in his chair, is magically effective in its use of violin harmonics. When Buonafede gets to the moon (the adventurer's garden) his aria in praise of its beauties is fully worthy of the composer of 'With verdure clad' and 'On mighty pens,' but it is also in keeping with the naïve and impressionable character of Buonafede. Here, too, Haydn, in 1777. has already surpassed the best that the chittering Cimarosa and the Italian school could do. The two daughters. for example, are simply but clearly characterised; we do not know them as people in the round, but their music is identi- fiably different. In the invention of musical phrases which define the psychological action, and in the all-important matter of musico- dramatic continuity, Haydn may still be far from the point that Mozart reached five years later in The Seraglio, but he is recognisably on the road to it.
Paradoxically it is the finest number in the score that makes the distance between them most obvious. Near the end of the opera, when the marriages have been assured, one of the daugh- ters, Clarice, sings a beautiful love duet with Ecclitico, the adventurer. It is a long duet, but it is superbly wrought and, for itself, one would not shorten it by a note. But its very length and fineness, in the context of the opera, are against it; they assume much more about the characters than we have been told, and more than we are ready so late in the day to grant on trust. The duet, in fact, shows up the comparatively primi- tive quality of the preceding characterisation. Beautiful though it is, it is not organic to the opera. It reminds one of the much shorter duet in the epilogue of Don Giovanni, but the com- parison, dramatically and operatically, is damag- ing; Haydn was right to fear it. It is a hard comparison, and by such standards II Mondo della Luna is not a first-rate work. But both as evidence of what Haydn was capable of in opera long before the full maturing of his powers and for the sake of its genuine freshness, elegance and humour, its disinterment has been a service to art. If there is any justice in the world, we will hear more of it, and less, much less, of The Secret Marriage.
The Aix performance was set with luminous charm and just the right amount of fantasy by Jean-Denis Malcles, competently sung and acted with vivacity by a cast headed by the endearingly bemused and irascible Buonafede of Marcello Cortis, and superbly conducted by Giulia
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