operatic boondoggle?

[calimac]

I wonder if any of the opera-oriented classical bloggers will take up a reply to this. It sounds very much like nonsense to me, but I lack the expertise in opera to make a serious rebuttal.

Basically, the argument is that contemporary opera has failed because it dramatizes reasonably contemporary true-to-life stories. Opera works when the settings and stories are mythic, but the slow pacing of characters standing there while others sing long arias doesn't work when the story is supposed to be realistic. Evidently that applies even if the story is also an out-of-the-everday lurid thriller, as in his example to hand, Picker's new Dolores Claiborne, based on the Stephen King novel.

If Fogelsong invited comments, which quite clearly he does not, I would ask him:
1) How far back are you claiming modern opera had this flaw? Do you consider Menotti's quite plainly quotidian operas of the 1940s and 50s to be failures on this account, for instance?
2) What about verismo? While often lurid and improbable, its plots are no more unrealistic, in the sense you're using the term, than Dolores Claiborne. That's why it's called "verismo." Yet these are some of the most popular operas of all time.
3) Is Die Walküre really mythic? Cannot it equally be seen as a long conversation over an adulterous love triangle?
4) Aren't there ways around this problem? A composer could write an opera in which the interactive conversations are quick exchanges - opera dialogue can move pretty fast when it needs to - or, at last resort, spoken dialogue, which is not forbidden in the opera form (see, e.g., Carmen), and have the characters express their feelings in soliloquies, rather than in long addresses to each other.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

It's intermission at SFS, so for now I am not reading Fogelsong, but based on what you say 1. Sounds Iike bullshit to me 2. Fogelsong is still fighting the Style Wars even though serialism lost long ago

More later.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Fogelsong is still fighting the Style Wars

Well, that's certainly true.

even though serialism lost long ago.

Alas, it's not over. Serialism still thinks it won.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Really? I was under the impression that there are hardly any serialist composers under the age of 70, meaning the style is rapidly heading toward a time when it won't be a living style.

In any event, Fogelsong is full of it. As you note, it's a little tough to tell what he means by "contemporary," since he talks about Dolores Claiborne, Britten's operas (written between 1945 and 1974), and hardly anything else. He mentions headlines, so maybe he means Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic. Nixon is a great, great piece, with fantastic music and a really terrific, if eccentric, libretto - I haven't seen Klinghoffer and can't really comment on it; Doctor Atomic does, indeed, have libretto problems, for which I blame bad decisions by Adams and Sellars (long story). Possibly the most successful American opera of the last 20 years is Mark Adamo's Little Women, which is not exactly on mythic subjects. It is a good piece and gets performed a lot.

I have no problem with his disliking Dolores Claiborne and stating what didn't work for him; however, there are reviewers, including me, who thought the libretto extremely strong and the music effective and successful. The idea that opera has to be mythic to succeed is crap and so is his claim that contemporary music doesn't write about mythic subjects.

Regarding myth - okay, he loves Wagner, fine. So do I. That Wagner succeeded wildly in the realm of myth in some of his operas doesn't mean it's the only potential source. Historically, composers have based operas on classical era literature (Homer, Virgil, etc.); Shakespeare; the Bible; great authors; contemporary works.

To read him, you might think there would be absolutely no chance of writing a good opera about a poet, a painter, and their more or less prostitute girlfriends; good thing someone forgot to tell Puccini about that. Or about romantic rivalries within a traveling troupe of actors or in an Italian village. Or about a philandering nobleman, his long-suffering wife, and their servants. Good thing no one told Mozart about that, and of course Nozze is based on what was a then-contemporary play. I'll also stretch "contemporary" back into the 1930s and mention Lulu and, of course, Porgy & Bess, which is about ordinary, everyday people.

Verdi based his librettos on a range of sources: the Bible (Nabucco), plays by the likes of Schiller (Luisa Miller, Don Carlo, I Masnadieri) and Hugo (Rigoletto, Ernani) contemporary novels (La Traviata), Shakespeare, older plays, etc.

As far as mythic subjects go, oddly, contemporary composers write about mythic subjects. Does Reiman's "Lear" count? How about Birtwistle's "Gawain" and "The Minotour"? Sariaho's "L'Amour de Loin"? Adamo's "Mary Magdalene"? (which is terrible, but it's because of a ghastly libretto and music that just doesn't work very well).

He's flailing around a lot. He needs to be a lot more specific and needs to name names, and I don't think he'll get very far in making his case.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I expect, from the tenor (sorry) of his arguments, that Fogelsong would reply to your points something like this:

First, that he's allowing mythic treatments of quotidian material - see his comments on Britten. I expect he would let in Adams under that allowance. Exploring the mythic in the material is the pure essence of the libretti of Adams' operas, and to my mind separates them distinctly from those of Berg and Gershwin, or the Menotti works I was referring to.

Second, that by success he means the kind of commercial and popular success that came to earlier operas, not critical esteem. Birtwistle's operas may be mythic, but the general opera-going public has never taken to them, so they're not a counter-example.

Returning to my own account, I'm going to have to wait till the next time I come across non-superannuated musicians talking about serialism as if it's still the only way to fly, to cite it for you. I have before, but I can't recall the instances.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Re popular success, though, thanks for bringing up Porgy and Bess, which totally shoots down F's entire argument. I expect the only things he could say to get out of that one are: 1) it's not an opera (an argument I've seen made before, but questionable); 2) it's not new enough to be contemporary.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I immediately said, "Menotti," as I was reading the first part of this.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Oh, about your questions: Boheme and Falstaff are the classic examples of quick-exchange operas. Boheme has arias, Falstaff does not.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Huh. Never thought much about the plots. I've never seen an opera, though I listen to some with pleasure. It's all about the music for me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if by "all about the music" you mean what I'd mean by that phrase, which is the kind of pleasure I get from abstract concert music. I can't listen to opera that way: if I have no idea what's happening dramatically, it sounds wayward and meandering, because its flow is determined by dramatic needs, not purely by structural ones.

Consequently I view opera as a species of stage drama, rather than a species of concert music. The problem is that, while the drama restricts the music, the music also restricts the drama, and it usually doesn't succeed in either form. This is why I don't much care for opera. The impression I get is that what excites real opera-lovers is the combination. That doesn't work for me. I like musical theatre (Broadway-type shows) better than opera because they're not aiming at as much complexity in musical sophistication, and consequently are setting at a musical mark they can hit.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I get that--it probably explains why I am not a total opera fan. The stories, almost without exception, are so stupid that I never look at libretti, and am relieved I can't understand the words (with a few exceptions). I know every note of Madama Butterfly, for example, and love it for the music alone. Invisible City of Kitezh as well, Boris Gudonov, and while I do know the story of the Magic Flute, I love that one, too. Portions of others, purely for the music.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, and it's not true that I've never seen an opera, I have: Magic Flute, in sixth grade. The teacher carefully prepped us for it, which I have appreciated all my life, even if, when she played the themes for us, I thought they "said" completely different things.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Mary Anthony Turnage's 'The Silver Tassie' certainly doesn't fail.

I left my first experience of it very thoughtful indeed and we booked to see it again immediately.

The character of 'the Creeper' sat alone on a damn great heavy artillery piece on a darkened stage in act two and singing lines based on the book of revelation is utterly mythic, but it's also incredibly real and spine chilling.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I immediately thought of Jake Hegge's "Dead Man Walking." I was so moved by the ensemble piece of the parents pouring out their grief to Sr. Helen as they remembered their last words to their murdered children were things like "comb your hair," "don't be late," and mundane matters such as that. Good opera can move you like that, be its story realistic or mythical.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

I'll suggest that the problem with contemporary opera is a Sturgeon's Law problem. The opera canon (depending on where one draws the line) is somewhere between 100 and 400 works -- really only that top 100 are presented with any frequency. Those 100 were drawn from probably a few thousand operas created in the years when opera was a popular entertainment for the prosperous.

There just aren't that many contemporary operas being composed and staged -- more than there were twenty years ago, but even including University productions I'd guess there are at most a dozen new operas being created each year in the Anglophone world.