Who's afraid of opera? : a highly opinionated, informative, and entertaining guide to appreciating opera

199 Pages·2004·1.23 MB·English

by  Walsh

Who’s Afraid of Opera?
A Highly Opinionated, Informative, and Entertaining
Guide to Appreciating Opera
Michael Walsh
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1994 by Michael Walsh
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever.
Lyrics to Chess reprinted by permission of Tim Rice.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition August 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-966-5
Also by Michael Walsh
Novels
Exchange Alley
And All the Saints
As Time Goes By
Hostile Intent
Early Warning
Shock Warning
Nonfiction
Carnegie Hall: The First One Hundred Years
Who’s Afraid of Classical Music?
Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works
So When Does the Fat Lady Sing?
Rules for Radical Conservatives (as David Kahane)
The People v. the Democratic Party
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

For Clare Veronica Walsh, a natural performer
Introduction, or Why Opera?
Thanks to you, this book is a sequel. In 1988, in response to an almost weekly
barrage of queries about how to “get into” classical music from friends,
acquaintances, and readers of my musical criticism in Time magazine, I wrote
Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? (I wanted to call it Who’s Afraid of Hugo
Wolf?, but the reference was felt to be too obscure.) At that time, there were a
number of perfectly adequate introductions to concert music on the market, but
each of them seemed to me to be aimed at the reader who was already interested
in, and to a certain extent familiar with, the norms of classical music—the
etiquette, lore, and terminology those of us in the business take for granted, but
which may strike outsiders as mysterious, pretentious, arrogant, and daunting,
not necessarily in that order.
So the thought occurred to me: why not write a book that presupposed
absolutely no knowledge of music on the part of the reader? For the sake of my
sanity, I had to assume that anyone picking up the book would at least be
vaguely curious about classical music, but otherwise I posited zero knowledge of
the field. My hypothetical reader came armed with his or her intellectual
curiosity—call me old-fashioned, but I believe such things still exist in Beavis
and Butt-head America, if only in isolated pockets of resistance—and a
willingness to indulge my frequent nonmusical images and a deliberately breezy
tone that was nearly guaranteed to alienate my fellow professionals.
Write the book I did, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute. I treasure all the
letters from those readers who found it helpful, valuable, and even amusing, and
I am pleased that a number of American orchestras are using it as a painless
introduction to the mysteries of the classical organism for their younger and
newer subscribers. The book even caught the eye of the producers of NBC’s
Today Show, on which I appeared bright and early one morning to sit, somewhat
ridiculously, at a white grand piano and demonstrate to Deborah Norville the
melodic similarities between Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “I Don’t Know How to
Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar and the lyrical second theme from the
Funeral March movement of Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata.
And you bought the book—enough of you, anyway, to have kept it in print
since publication and for it to have gone into second and third editions. Although
that volume treated opera in some detail, there was obviously not enough space
to adequately discuss what is, after all, a way of life in its own right. This book,
therefore, became inevitable at a certain point.
However, it had to wait awhile. In 1989 I left the United States to live in
Europe and write about foreign affairs. With impeccable timing, I got there the
same year the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Eastern Bloc collapsed under
its own dead weight, and, finally, the Soviet Union itself disappeared into the ash
can of history. For most of this period I wrote little about classical music; having
been a professional music critic since 1973, I needed a break from an art I loved
too much to continue to watch slide into artistic irrelevance. It was far more
interesting, rewarding, and considerably less frustrating, to hang out with the
mafiozniki in Moscow, to chat with the leader of the only functioning Jewish
congregation in Warsaw, to tour the fine breweries of Bohemia and to sip the
exquisite nectar of Pilsener Urquell and Czech Budweiser (“the beer of kings”)
straight from the source. In short, to watch a world die, change, and be painfully,
but optimistically, reborn.
About the chances of survival of classical music, I was considerably less
sanguine. Much of the snobbish image of our field we can blame directly on
ourselves, on the cult of personality that has, Stalin-like, afflicted music since
even before the war. In a kind of reverse, perverse Marxism-Leninism, we
embraced the indefensible premise that musical history had ended sometime
around 1935, that all the good music that would ever be written already had been
written, and that the function of performers from here to eternity would
henceforth be to worship at the shrine of the Great Composers, to endlessly
regurgitate the Great Masterworks for the edification of a dwindling corps of
true believers.
This is the not the place to go into the historical reasons for such
developments. Suffice it to say that six years later I am more hopeful about the
state of classical music than I was during the go-go eighties. The defeat of that
most pernicious form of musical Stalinism, the twelve-tone system, by a group
of courageous composers signaled the end of the belief that music history had
ended. Just as in Russia, there would be no paradigmatic New Soviet Man in
music; the Schoenberg revolution fell as hard as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky
when it came crashing down in front of KGB headquarters in Moscow. And if
we no longer have the commandments to guide us, we are better off in our
freedom, however messy and anarchic it may prove to be.
What has all this got to with opera? you ask. Plenty. If music and opera are
dead art forms, then there would be no need for this book. If the repertoire
closed some sixty years ago, then you could just pick up Deems Taylor and be
done with it. But opera has proved itself more resilient than the conformists
imagined; despite their protestations, it has flourished over the past half decade.
A thousand flowers have bloomed: not only Philip Glass’s minimalism but John
Adams’s variety; not only John Corigliano’s flamboyant conservatism but Bill
Bolcom’s. Young composers across the country have turned to opera and musical
theater with a vengeance (in John Moran’s The Manson Family, sometimes
literally), finding in it the most liberating venue for their imaginations and
renewing the form in precisely the way it should and must be invigorated if our
musical culture is to stagger into the twenty-first century.
In the meantime, American opera companies have suddenly shown
themselves to be far more hospitable to new works and new productions of old
works than they were in even the recent past. In Chicago, Lyric Opera director
Ardis Krainik has embarked on an ambitious program of new American operas
—and this in the house that used to be called, not always flatteringly, La Scala
West. Even the staid Metropolitan Opera in New York, the country’s Mother
Church of European operatic culture, surprised everybody during the 1992–93
season with the premieres of Glass’s The Voyage and Corigliano’s The Ghosts of
Versailles. New opera is suddenly hot, big box office, a development that can
only bring joy to those of us who would like to see content-free singing contests
such as Francesco Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur slip from the repertoire in favor
of something with, shall we say, a little more substance.
So let me state my point of view clearly, right up front. If you are a vocal nut,
if you only attend opera to cheer your favorite diva, if you rush down the aisle
and hurl a bouquet of flowers the size of the Manhattan phone book at the object
of your affection, then this book is not for you. Although many contemporary
singers will be mentioned in these pages, this is not a discussion of whether
Pavarotti is better than Domingo, or vice versa; nor will it take a stand on the
burning question of whether Callas was a greater diva than Renata Tebaldi.
Although I will recommend some recordings in the Discography, it is not a guide
to the best performances on disk, for nothing ages faster than a list that is out of
date even before it is published. If you’re looking for this sort of thing, then you
will have to look elsewhere.
What I offer in its stead is a philosophy of listening to and understanding
opera. There is an old saying that if you give a starving man a fish, you have fed
him; if you teach him how to fish, on the other hand, he can feed himself. It
would be easy to give you a series of opera recommendations—repertoire,
performers, venues, recordings—and send you off into the world, waving this
book the way the budget tourists in France used to wave Arthur Frommer’s
Europe on $5 a Day back in the sixties. But, as former president Nixon (whose
destruction of the Bretton Woods agreement did so much to ensure those days of
strong dollars would never come again) might say: it would be wrong.
In the end, the best way for you to come to opera is on your own. Your taste
is your own; and while you and I may share a fondness for certain composers or
works, our tastes will never match exactly. The first opera I ever got to know
was, of all things, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, widely regarded as one of the thorniest
and most difficult scores of the twentieth century (it’s not, but that’s another
story). I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting out with Berg, but because
nobody told me it was supposed to be so tough I got to know it intimately; it
held no terrors for me, and to this day, I regard it as one of the century’s most
beautiful, moving scores. You may want to start out with something “simpler”:
Puccini’s La bohème perhaps, or Verdi’s Il trovatore; that’s up to you.
What I’m trying to do in the pages that follow is to expose you to the
marvelous variety of opera, and guide you to certain works I find especially
rewarding or noteworthy. But even more important, I’m trying to help you to
develop your own philosophy of opera. If you read the first book, you know that
I overwhelmingly favor the music over the performer and if I succeed in one
thing, I hope it is that you should too.
So you’ll learn what opera is, and isn’t, and how to listen to it. You’ll get an
overview of operatic history, how and why the art form developed the way it did.
We’ll discuss that age-old question: which is more important, the words or the
music, and come up with an answer. There is a long central chapter in which a
basic repertoire is proposed; after that, among other things, we’ll examine
nonoperatic operas, the physiology and psychology of singing, and what we’re
going to do once (gulp) we’re actually in the theater.
So curtain up! It’s time to settle into our seats—two on the aisle, if you
please—tuck the programs under our seats, fold our hands on our laps and watch
the house lights go down. And get ready for the musical ride of our lives.
CHAPTER 1
What Opera Is—and What It’s Not, or
How I Got Here
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to
support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social
challenge.
— CLEVELAND AMORY
Opera is like an oyster; it must be swallowed whole, or not at all.
— SPIKE HUGHES AND BARBARA MCFADYEAN, NIGHTS AT THE
OPERA
Acting is very, very important in opera. But, of course, it is just as
well if you also have a voice.
— OPERA SINGER TITO GOBBI
Let’s start with what opera is not. It’s easier that way.
Opera is not, as Dr. Samuel Johnson famously, if perhaps apocryphally,
noted, an “exotic and irrational entertainment.” Nor is it, in the immortal
wisecrack of Mark Twain, “as bad as it sounds.” (He was speaking of Wagner,
but he could have been thinking about anybody.)