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.