ARTS

Not before 1830

John Simon likes only the music of the last 196 years People, told that I don't care for operas written before 1830, ask me condescend- ingly whether I like music. I do. But, to my ears and mind, a watershed occurred round about that time with the coming of the Romantic composers. It was a difference as marked as the abandonment of the hoop skirt. Or, better yet, the uncorseting of the female body.

For me, it is only with the arrival of Weber, Bellini and Berlioz that opera began to encompass the full range of human emo- tions, from the most elusively ethereal to the most intoxicatingly impassioned. I find Mozart far too glockenspielish, and Fidelio too cold to go more than wading in. What follows is, I realise, idiosyncratic, iconoclastic and abhorrent to musicologists. But it comes from someone whose free time — and even working time, as for example right now — is spent most happily listening to the classical music of the last century and a half, a lot of it operatic.

The next question I am tartly asked is, `Do you then also reject literature before 1830?' I don't. There is a more or less unbroken tradition from Greco-Roman lit- erature to that of our time, and especially so in drama, which is, after all, opera with- out music. Neither Pope nor Lord Protec- tor could long stifle an established art form. But one as new as opera, which begins with Peri's Dafne (1598), had to con- fine itself to the parochial demands of an initially very limited audience. This power- ful parish — the Court — wanted opera as a genteel divertissement, subject to an aris- tocratic code of manners.

Opera then, was to be well-behaved, even as it broached the tragic subjects it preferred. The librettos were taken from mythology and ancient history, which pro- vided protective remoteness. What, to the audience, was Poppea, or it to her? Was one likely to go to hell to retrieve a dead spouse? Could Jupiter impregnate one's daughter against one's wishes — or in any other way? Could anyone but Lord Byron — and he probably only in fantasy — make off with a beauty from the seraglio? The false Martin Guerre may have enjoyed Mme Guerre with her collusion; but would the affianced sisters in Cosi fan tutte be that deluded — or that diabolically clever — to fall for their fiances disguises?

To be sure, probability is hardly opera's mainstay, but few if any modern librettos embrace improbability to this degree, unless they flaunt their mythic, fairy-tale, or legendary provenance. But how, in Cosi's age-of-reason setting, accept such an absurd libretto? There is, after all, a differ- ence between the far-fetched and the pre- posterous that a text should not overstep. The musicologist puts me smartly in my place: 'Forget the libretto, and relish what Mozart did with it.' Yet how could music as rational, geometrical and predictable as the century prescribed liberate or humanise its clumsy texts? It tamed the over-fanciful, but in that very tameness lay its undoing. Until the coming of the Romantics — and then, again, with the onslaught of the Mini- malists — music is ruled by the stencil. The temple of the arts is governed by the drafts- man's template. And so opera becomes square: from one side or bar of it you can postulate the other three sides, the next three bars. Differently put, this is music that never thought of burning its brassiere.

The literature of the Baroque and Classi- cal periods was not quite so regimented. The novel could be as picaresque, saucy, even bawdy as you please; plays and poetry still more so. Yet when you look more closely, the difference is not so great as you might think. The erotic poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries and the libertinism of Restoration drama, however risque, lead you down a garden path with carefully laid out grassy borders. Similarly, the music to which Don Giovanni goes to hell is perfect- ly safe for listening to on your car radio: when required, you can switch if off. Unlike Stravinsky or Szymanowski, Hin- Bad news ... I'm B.S.E. positive.' demith or Henze, it will not land you in a ditch.

No music, granted, can do without some regimentation, just as none can do without some surprise. But the proportions can vary enormously. Romantic, Impressionist and Expressionist music has learned from the variety and complexity of human expe- rience. It has mastered such troubling or transcendent phenomena as neurosis, ambivalence and orgasm. It knows how to deliquesce into moral uncertainty or gather itself into transports of unrepeatable ecsta- sy. Above all, it refuses to be bound by decorum or good taste, by orderly sequences of notes that would not rock a paper boat on a park pond. It repudiates predictability, the kind of music that will no more astonish you than your wallpaper pat- tern will sprout a Modigliani nude. It does not care if it makes some backward-looking heads waggle laterally.

However subliminally, beauty hurts. It has a strange taste, like caviar or endives or oysters; it doesn't just warm the heart, it also tears at it. The great nocturnal love scene by the Fountain of the Blind in Pel- leas et Melisande is achingly beautiful, not just because we know that Golaud's sword will cut it short, although that might help; it hurts because of the notes sung and played. Because it musically carries with it a sense of the unfamiliar, no matter how often we have heard it before; because it takes us to a height on which it and we cannot long maintain ourselves; and because if we return to it, it will always reveal something additional, something new. A Handel or a Haydn aria will be there, comfortingly unchanged.

It is not a matter of tragedy versus come- dy. The closing duet in Jenufa, between the heroine and Laca, starts out as if it might lead to a sorrowful parting, but ends with a promise of true marital happiness. It is a free-floating melody set to simple, touching words, and lasts a mere three and a half minutes. Yet it is a complete traversal from abdication to fulfilment. It works in part through its very concision; how long would such a reversal, were it within their means, last in Purcell or Monteverdi? But it also works because of its proximity to idiomatic human speech (in its melody as well as in its words), its rejection of old formulas, its willingness to grab us by the throat.

Nor again is it as if a comic aria could not be as compelling as a dramatic one. Thus Zerbinetta's display piece in Ariadne auf Naxos is every bit as riveting as the frustrated composer's outcry earlier on, or Ariadne's outpourings of grief. For it allows its music to explore new emotional territory: its coloratura expresses the feel- ings of a free spirit, even as the carefree recital of the young woman's countless con- quests manages to hint at some deeper, inner cost of such outward insouciance.

Leanness is of the essence. But that does not mean that repetition cannot be put to good use, provided it functions psychologi- cally rather than as mere embellishment or the milking of a good tune. Take the Wag- nerian leitmotif, whose insistent recur- rences have solid narrative or psychological foundations, or take the recollections of past happiness in Manon or Otello, where repetition, under drastically changed cir- cumstances, makes the same music wrench- ingly not the same.

Still, melody and development, with cer- tain honourable exceptions, profit from conciseness, which is the `modern' trait par excellence. The love music of Nanetta and Fenton in Falstaff is as beautiful as any written, but its two occurrences, early and late, are, even taken together, shorter than any love duet Verdi's predecessors would have drummed up in their place.

Think how Francis Poulenc made an opera of Guillaume Apollinaire's 1917 verse play Les Mamelles de Tirdsias, a famous work in whose subtitle the term `surrealist' made its first appearance. Poulenc took this respected text and made some irreverent cuts in it. Thus the opening monologue of the stage director was reduced by about two thirds; other pas- sages, too, notably the ending, were consid- erably tightened. The result is a much stronger one-act opera, 50 minutes of heady Gallic tunefulness. Particularly ear- caressing is the final, greatly compressed chorus, in which a few cajoling waltz mea- sures say, or recapitulate it all.

Britten, with Peter Pears, is similarly unafraid of taking scissors to Shakespeare's hallowed A Midsummer Night's Dream, and giving us, in Philip Brett's words, a 'drasti- cally truncated version', although a less severely cut Dream would still not have put the audience to sleep. Or advert to Katya Kabanova, the opera based on Ostrovsky's play The Storm. The heroine's soliloquy before suicide takes up about 25 lines of print in the play; in Janacek's version, it is boiled down to six lines, and is, discounting the magisterial music, even verbally more moving.

So, too, in Puccini's La Boheme, Mimi dies suddenly and stunningly as it were off- camera. The hero of Aulis Sallinen's mas- terly The Red Line, with the composer's own libretto from a famous Finnish novel, goes off to fight a predatory bear, and per- ishes off-stage. A poor, exploited peasant whose 'children have died like puppies', Topi rushes out to protect his only, pre- cious cow. As a wordless, unseen chorus laments, his wife, left on stage alone, anguishes: `Topi, are you still alive? Answer me! ... Topi!' This last 'Top? is delivered pianissimo. Then a subdued drum roll, reminding us of the political symbol- ism of that Russian bear; finally, one sub- dued, dying chord. Curtain.

Of course, for versatility in the music, librettos too had to make advances. What Lorenzo Da Ponte saw fit to repeat three or four times for Mozart to tintinnabulate to, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for Strauss, said once, and better. Renata's expository aria near the start of The Fiery Angel may be long, but Prokofiev, as his own librettist, prefaces and interrupts it with such bizarre and vehement goings-on as to make it rush past us breathlessly. Conversely, the entire previous life of Judith, the heroine of Bar- tok's Bluebeard's Castle, is summed up by the librettist Bela Balazs in seven short but poignant lines, and the sovereign, but equally spare, music does the rest.

Or consider the magisterial opening of Wozzeck, where, thanks to the genius of young Georg Biiclmer, whose text Berg faithfully follows, poetic imagery and extreme brevity combine with dramatic force. The hapless soldier hero is shaving his foolish commanding officer and tries to explain poverty to him: 'The likes of us are stuck with misery in this world and the next. I think that if we made it to Heaven, we'd have to help work the thunder.' The music, with corresponding succinctness, rises to the occasion. Again, what a turmoil of contrasting emotions Boito, (with a little help from Shakespeare) bestows on Otel- lo's last aria. And how tersely and seeringly Verdi translates this into music!

Leaving the listener hungry for elabora- tion, but letting him realise that less is more, is the mighty and moving discovery of modern opera. Why, for instance, put up with pages of Baroque recitative, regardless of whether it is secco or strommentato, unaccompanied or droningly seconded by a harpsichord? The renewed craze for Baroque opera is not unlike that other recent mania for period instruments.

There once circulated a joke about old operas: their Baroque is worse than their bite. Not so: their bite is much worse than their Baroque — so bad that, like a tooth- less old dog's, it hardly grips at all. But since, roughly, Bellini's Norma (1831), opera has become something for all peo- ple, whether in the utterly accessible lan- guage of a Mascagni or Ravel, or in the only slightly more demanding one of a Delius or Shostakovich. So it is not opera's fault if the very people it is meant for pre- fer pop and rock. In his General History of Music (1789), Charles Burney wrote of the audience's ability 'to remain tranquil dur- ing the most perilous situations' of the old, aristocratic operas. In the new, democratic ones, the audience is supposed to lose and then find itself, but not for any length of time remain idly tranquil. Modern opera is more than entertainment. It is an experi- ence.

John Simon is theatre critic of New York magazine, film critic of the American National Review, and a contributor to the American Opera News.