Opera 101 Part I

OPERA 101

Part I

By Arthur W. Ritchie

Copyright 2013 Arthur W. Ritchie

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The Instant Opera Expert

George Bizet

Carmen

Gaetano Donizetti

Lucia di Lammermoor

L’elisir d’amore

Ruggero Leoncavallo

Pagliacci

Pietro Mascagni

Cavalleria Rusticana

Gioachino Rossini

The Barber of Saville

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Eugene Onegin

Tired of all the phony sex and violence on television? Why not try some REAL sex and violence? OPERA! Find Scarpia more hateable than Heinrich Himmler with hives! Let Rodolfo rip your heart out with his plaintive, MIMI! Watch as the ultimate Ugly American enters the stage to find his BUTTERFLY dead! But let me warn you, opera is addictive. Like cheap cigars or bar gin, just a little exposure and you’re hooked. Why? Because in blending the human voice with all the other arts, it teases our senses as nothing else can. But that’s not to say it’s perfect.

Suppose the proverbial, ‘theater near you’ was performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Danish. Would you rush out to buy a ticket? Or join the critics in laughing your socks off? Yet Russian operas are routinely sung to these same English-speaking people in French, and all you hear from the critics is praise. Am I missing something?

Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore — [The Elixir of Love] — and the spelling is correct, only proper nouns are capitalized in Italian titles — began its Turin run, as the marquee noted, Translated and edited into the Piedmontese dialect. [tradot e ridot an dialet piemonteis]

Wagner’s grandson, Wieland, thought nothing of updating the great Richard’s 70 odd year old texts that modern Germans might better understand them. And should the Paris Opera even hint that a non-French language production was being considered, lines would form at Les Invalides to await the second coming of Napoleon. The English-speaking world is alone in believing there’s something culturally correct about having native singers trying to communicate with native listeners in a language neither understands. But before we can fix this, we have to understand how it came about.

Why We Sing them in Foreign Languages!

Before motion pictures and all that, hundreds of small opera houses dotted America’s landscape staging productions in the vernacular. Wisconsin alone had 50 in 1889. Then the rich got into the act and many is the great company today whose founding can be traced to nothing more profound than some nouveau riche biddies wanting to show off their nouveau biddiness. Even New York’s prestigious Metropolitan was built for no better reason than that the ‘better’ boxes at the city’s Academy of Music were taken. And the first thing these pseudo-intellectuals did when they set up a new company was? Come up with gimmicks to keep out the hoi polloi — those as rude and crude as their daddies who’d made the family fortunes in the first place. And no way held more promise than that of having their expensive imported stars singing in foreign languages. And it wasn’t too important which language they sang in either.

October 22 1883, found Met ushers tearing tickets for the first time as patrons seated themselves to hear the very new and very French, Gounod’s Faust — sung in Italian. Wagner’s Lohengrin was also translated, for the company’s first season was an Italian Year. It also found the company in hock to the tune of nearly $600,000 so they looked around for ways to raise money — found the city’s Germans were richer than its Italians — so from the fall of 1884 through the spring of 1892, everything the Met did from Verdi’s Italian masterpiece Un ballo en mascara, [A Masked Ball] to Bizet’s French Carmen were sung in German.

While it is possible to think Un ballo’s, Mayor of Boston, umlauting himself to death, Carmen’s singing of love in German noticeably slows her hip movements. By the way, the German Years only ended when the opera house’s interior was gutted by fire and the rebuilding gave them time to rethink.

Yet, the Met has never had an ‘English Year.’ This would be more silly than important if it hadn’t been for a man too deaf to appreciate much music much in any language, Thomas Alva Edison.

Edison invented the motion picture, the first of which were shown in a movie theater in New York City on April 23, 1896. Impresarios found projectors less ulcer inducing than divas, [and dog acts a lot cheaper than sopranos] and in no time the small opera houses were running two reelers with a few acts of vaudeville to flesh out the bill and we were left with the large companies and their silly traditions. And rather than fix the language problem they’ve taken to ameliorating it by packaging their commercial products, such as televised performances and DVD’s, with English subtitles. Even New York’s stodgy Met has gone to using ‘titles.’ [On a light strip on the back of the seat in front of you.] But while making opera more understandable, they also delay implementing the obvious: SINGING THE DAMNED THINGS IN ENGLISH! But this usually leads to the question: Are you sure you want to do that? For much of opera’s mystique is lost when we understand the words. Or as Voltaire so sarcastically commented, That which is too stupid to be spoken, is sung.

Operatic Plots Are …

Well, if some are simplistic it’s because the bulk of today’s repertory dates from a time when opera was becoming a public entertainment for the un-washed masses, and for them only two things mattered: action and melody. If they were humming a tune as the curtain fell on a stage awash in blood, it was a hit. Early plays were much the same. Look at Macbeth, or any of the Shakespearian tragedies for that matter. Verdi’s penultimate opera — or next to last if you prefer — Otello, packs two murders and a suicide into the last 12 minutes alone. Or three murders and a suicide if the stage director decides to knock off Iago too. Forget the story, its action and melody and nothing else counted, but there are other reasons for weak stories.

By its very nature, music moves words along more slowly than speech. If you want the melody hummable that is. [No Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs please.] Words are usually spoken many times faster than sung. But while plays, such as Shakespeare’s, average 3,500 or so lines, all-sung operas running the same time average only 800 lines posing a problem: How does one come up with a reasonably complex plot under such severe word count limitations? You don’t. That’s why many operas have long stretches of spoken dialogue. Nearly two thirds of the words in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are spoken and there are repeats in the sung words that should only be counted once too. Then there’s the set limitations problem.

Myths, books and poems often have stories jumping all over the place forcing those who write opera libretti [Italian for ‘little books’] to strip tales down to a few dramatic scenes requiring that we fill in any missing story-line from our own knowledge. A problem for our generation that isn’t particularly well versed in this old literary material. And, just as in literature, some operas are serious, some silly, and some make no pretense at telling a story at all.

Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, is a spoof pure and simple, and forgetting that, can really bend your credulity out of shape. [Actually, it’s many saints in four acts. He couldn’t count either.] Its premiere was sponsored by the Society of Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. No kidding. One does not joke about things like that. And if the following quotes from it look strange, it’s because its librettist, Gertrude Stein, detested punctuation in any form using only an occasional period; a rare coma or two; never used colons, semicolons or question marks; and found the exclamation point, positively revolting [.]

Four Saints begins:

To know to know to love her so

Four saints prepare for Saints

Four saints make it well fish

Four saints prepare for saints to makes it well fish

it makes it well fish prepare for saints

Question: Was it the Friends, or the Enemies of the Society that put this on? Anyway, this leads to a second act where the cast acquires a telescope to count the windows and doors of heaven. There are lots. The third act’s high moment is the build-up to an off-stage chorus singing: Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy Let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily Let Lily Lily Lucy let Lily Let Lucy Lily … [This goes on for pages and my fingers are getting tired.] leading to the question: Should there be a fourth act? Don’t get your hopes up. They still have to chorus on, Pigeons in the grass alas [.]

While the final curtain cue may be the heavenly-hoteled Compère’s words, Last Act [(?) or (!) Your choice.] to which all reply, Which is a fact [.] The opera really ends with the audience’s very audible, Amen!

How Gerty might have done in medicine is anyone’s guess. She only missed receiving an M.D. from Johns Hopkins by one credit. A frightening thought.

That this has been described as unpretentious unto the opposite of epochal, needs no explanation, but that’s not to say Virgil Thompson was alone in scoring junk librettos. Verdi loved them. He’s guilty of something and I think it’s pandering to public taste for action no matter what. Forget the texts, what are Verdi’s subjects? Love and hate; murder and revenge; lust and fulfillment. Yup, that’s pandering all right. But let me ask: How many think, I’m Goin’a Wash that Man Right out’a my Hair, is great literary material?

Verdi’s Il trovatore [The Troubadour] is among the most popular operas ever written. It also inspired New York Times music critic, Harold C. Schonberg’s comment, Looked at dispassionately, a large number of Verdi librettos are literary trash. It makes no difference. The operas continue to live because they do have drama, no matter how primitive, and most of all because they do have great music.

Now that you know what you’re getting into, let’s see how it came about.

The Baroque Era is considered to have run from the founding of opera in 1600 to the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750. [J.S.B. never wrote an opera.]

Probably a corruption of the Spanish word ‘barueco’ meaning, ‘deformed pearl,’ ‘baroque’ originally described the gilded doodads decorating the interiors of Spanish cathedrals. Others hold that it’s from a similar Portuguese word meaning, ‘new.’

Italy has always been the land of song. I mean, would you even know about Rome’s big fire if Nero hadn’t sung and played his fiddle while his bodyguard tested their latest invention, the marshmallow?

Actually, the fiddle wouldn’t be invented for another 14 centuries and Nero was out of town at the time. His last words, Qualis artifex pereo! [What an artist dies with me!] come to us compliments of the same bodyguard who probably got it right — they killed him. It was his singing. Or, some say he fell on a sword held by a servant as his guards rushed up. Or, as Hillary would say, What difference does it make?

Minstrels, Miracle Plays, Moralities and Mysteries all preceded opera for it wasn’t until the late 1500’s that Count Giovanni Bardi di Vernio formed a group — probably one of several — called the Camerata, [Italian for, ‘salon’] in Florence to restore the ancient Greek Drama. As they had no idea of what the ancient Greek drama was, this took a bit of thought, but they arrived at rules that were basically:

• The text must be understandable. [No arcane words, convoluted stories, no Gertrude Stein.]

• The words must be sung to be understood. [Write the music to fit the words and not the other way around.]

• Let’s see if we can get some good tunes into this strictly contrapuntal stuff.

Or, as Camerata member Vincenzo Galilei — and father of the great physicist Galileo Galilei — wrote in his "Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna," [1581] Why cause words to be sung by four or five voices so that they cannot be distinguished, when the Ancients aroused the strongest passions by means of a single voice supported by a lyre? We must renounce counterpoint and different kinds of instruments and return to primitive simplicity.

Using the rules he had helped create, Jacopo Peri wrote what is generally considered the first opera, Dafne, [1597] and called his prolog with six scenes, a drama with music, [dramma per musica] and this is what such things would be called until the word ‘opera’ made its debut in 1639.