About opera

The first opera I saw was Verdi’s “la Traviata” at the Fenice (where it was first performed). I was seventeen, in Venice while inter-railing and was standing up in the gods, having foregone a proper dinner for the ticket-price. The audience was clearly having a great time. I remember them singing along to the chorus “Libiamo” when it was encore-d.
It was a long time before I went again; that was in the late eighties in Brussels to see Mozart’s “la Finta giardiniera”. It was at the time of the Théâtre de la Monnaie’s renovation, so it was put on in the much smaller Théâtre Royal du Parc which meant we were sitting close to the stage and could really see the singers’ expressions and acting, which convinced me of the theatrical potential of opera. It was also in one of the Hermanns’ delightful stagings. That was what prompted me to take out a season ticket with the Monnaie, which was easy to do just then as the newly enlarged theatre could accommodate more opera-goers the next season. Since then I have seen eight to ten operas a year, including those caught elsewhere on my travels.
I’ve seen well over a hundred different operas performed live, and heard as many again done in concert version or of course on CD. I find, however, I don’t listen to opera that often on CD, apart perhaps from on long car journeys, as I need to have enough time to get all the way through a work. Most operas, being conceived as an evening’s entertainment, last two to three hours. So I prefer my opera in the opera-house. I’ve seen some bad performances of operas I like on CD and seen some good performances of operas the music of which I don’t particularly care for.

We recently had the perfect operatic experience at the Monnaie at the first night of Verdi’s “la Forza del Destino”. Everything was just right.
The singing was tremendous with big voices from the principal tenor Zoran Todorovich as Don Alvaro and soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, as Leonora, both young and relatively unknown (at least to me) but really giving it some, which is just what is called for - bel canto is not dead. The whole cast was good and it was nice to see José van Dam as the cameo grumpy monk Fra Melitone: his voice in old age is sadly not what it was, but is still suited to this rôle. The huge choir was on top form, especially in “Rataplan”.
The Monnaie orchestra played beautifully conducted by Kazushi Ono, their departing musical director, with whom they have a great rapport.
It was great music.
The staging was simple and sympathetic, concentrating attention on the singers and the action. Against a plain backdrop of varying colour, indicating in a minimalist way the location, they stood out in period costume, lit often like so many scenes from the golden age of Spanish painting. Some terrific effects were achieved just by lighting especially in the battle scene. The acting was convincingly natural and everyone had the “physique du rôle”.
It was great theatre.

This is what opera should be: great music and great theatre at the same time.
If you have read previous postings, you will know I like both classical music and theatre, so when the conditions are right, opera is a wonderful experience.
It’s not always that way of course. Sometimes the singing is not so good, the staging rather ridiculous and the music boring.

A first key to success is to put on a work that is worth performing.
“La Forza” is not put on often, but it is Verdi in his mature period, and undeservedly neglected. The overture is one of his best and well known. It contains three beautiful tunes that return prominently (at the climax of Act I, at the final show-down between Don Alvaro and Don Carlo in Act IV and on Leonora’s arrival at the monastery in Act II) and are quoted at key moments (not quite in the manner of Wagner’s leitmotiv, more as dramatic pointers). For my taste great tunes are called for in an opera and their recognition gives the audience satisfaction. There is a whole lot more good music in la Forza: stirring arias, great duets and big choruses. Although it comes in at nearly three hours, we didn’t notice the time passing.
This opera is often shunned for its length, uneven tone and totally ramshackle plot and is regarded as difficult to stage. It certainly didn’t feel that way in this performance. As the title “the force of destiny” suggests, the whole point is that seemingly random events and improbable coincidences shape our lives. So actually the very far-fetched nature of the story is appropriate. Likewise the fact that the story is not stripped down to its bare essentials but spread over a period of several years and presented in a whole mixed bag of scenes including intimate ensemble, crowd scenes (tavern, monastery, battlefield) genre (grumpy monk, fortune-teller, camp-following pedlar), tragic and comic, sets it in a full range of random circumstances which may or not have an impact on the outcome. So it does actually make dramatic sense.
Some of the text is diificult to take these days: most famously the line “Morte ai tedeschi” (Death to the Germans); but also “Viva la guerra” (long live war); and plenty of heavy-duty Catholicism. But actually if scenes are on the battlefield and in a monastery, it is of a piece with the action (and of course as always in Verdi with the situation of Italy at his time).
In short, “La Forza” is a good Verdi opera and worth staging. I have now seen thirteen of Verdi’s operas performed. My favourite is “la Traviata” with “Rigoletto” a close second.

Mozart is my other favourite composer of opera, I have seen eight of his, and like “Don Giovanni” best followed by “die Zauberflöte” and “le Nozze di Figaro”.
Mozart is quite different to Verdi. For a start Mozart mainly does comedy, while Verdi mainly does tragedy. but they do both go in for great tunes. Mozart’s operas are not through-composed like Verdi’s, rather the numbers are separated by recitative accompanied by harpsichord (or even in the case of the German ones, by spoken text). That makes it easier to follow the text (if you understand the language). and plot, then the arias mark the key dramatic moments giving depth to the characters’ feelings. Mozart’s operas are not conceived on the same grand scale as Verdi’s, the forces are smaller (orchestra, choir) and the instrumentation, of a different period, is quite different, much lighter and airier.
It so happens that I saw “le Nozze di Figaro” in Prague a couple of weeks earlier in the Estates Theatre, a beautiful small 18thC house which is one of the first theatres where it was performed, actually conducted there by Mozart himself in 1787. The vibe of seeing this opera in these ideal historic conditions was wonderful. As it’s on a small scale you’re quite close to the singers and can really see their facial expressions and gesture. The small orchestra (40 players) doesn’t make a sound so big that it drowns out the voices. This is how Mozart should be performed and is best enjoyed. I have to admit that though I know the music well and have seen “le Nozze” a few times, there were some aspects of the plot I got for the first time!
Also like Verdi, Mozart adores ensemble singing but he takes it further with his trick of adding more and more singers as the finales build up. You get the different characters singing their contradicting views at the same time and the music actually makes it all work. Mozart excels in this truly dramatic art of getting his charcters to interact in an intimate setting. He is not interested in painting a huge historic fresco with atmospheric music. I say Mozart, but he obviously owes a lot to Da Ponte the gifted librettist of his three great Italian operas “le Nozze di Figaro”, “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte””. Having said that, the texts without the music would be nothing. Great opera is the succesful combination of good music and a text that works dramatically as theatre.

This brings me to why I dislike Wagner who is the third great composer of operas in the canon alongside Mozart and Verdi, certainly in terms of how often their works are performed. I have seen ten of Wagner’s operas performed (as we have a season ticket at the Monnaie, we see all of their new productions), so mine is an opinion informed by some experience. I have tried hard to keep an open mind about Wagner, given the fact than many opera-goers do enjoy him and that he has an important place in the history of music. He is of course not helped by the fact that he was Hitler’s favourite composer, but I shall ignore that and tell you what I don’t like about his operas.
To start with, Wagner’s orchestration is too thick and opaque. You can’t really hear the singers properly and there is little variety of texture or relief. The music is relentlessly through-composed without there being any distinction between recitative style passages and arias: it’s all the same and never really breaks into song. Oddly enough Wagner’s best tunes are in the instrumental bits (flight of the Walkyries, wedding march, Tristan and Isolde prelude/Liebestod). The singing is not beautiful: most of the time it’s bombastic, heroic, declamatory rather than lyrical. His music after about fifteen minutes begins to pall and bore me big time, and his operas last for three hours and longer. For me it’s just not great music.
At the same time there is no action. There is no ensemble singing, it’s just one interminable monologue after another talking about things that have happened elsewhere: hardly anything happens on stage and the characters don’t really interact. He wrote his own librettos. The text is absolute doggerel, unreadable (I have ploughed through the whole libretto for “Tristan”) and full of dliberately archaic German. The stories are invented mythology: there is nothing that rings falser than fake myths, there’s something not quite right and rather silly about them. So dramatically, Wagner is dead in the water. His operas lend themselves to colossal over the top gloomy sets and no movement. For me, it’s just not great theatre.
Between the boring music and the boring stage business, I always fall asleep at some point during a Wagner opera. I really fail to see the attraction, and I make no apology for that, I’ve seen pretty well all of his operas and they leave me cold.

So whose operas do I like apart from Mozart’s and Verdi’s?

Puccini seems to be spurned by the Monnaie who rarely put on his operas, perhaps finding them too low-brow compared to Wagner. I think Puccini is good. He has a great dramatic sense, is very economical and effective in creating emotions in the audience and can be quite moving. He gets through to me more than many other composers. He has some great tunes (“lucevan le stelle”, “nessun dorma””) and clear and varied instrumentation. “Tosca” is my favourite by him.

Britten too has an unerring sense for what works on stage and a fine and boldly original sense of melody. “Peter Grimes” has some terrific dramatic moments and you feel the tension between this loner and the tight-knit village community (some great passages for the choir), with always the presence of the elemental sea in the orchestral interludes.

Shostakovich was stopped dead in his operatic tracks by severe criticism from the Stalinist régime of his second opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”. To play safe, and probably to save his skin, he then avoided the genre - a great loss for us. “Lady Macbeth” is really very good with moments of high comedy and deep tragedy: it is a very powerful piece with some fantastic orchestration, as one would expect from Shostakovich. I saw a great production in Riga set in the last days of crumbling Soviet Latvia with lots ol allusions to daily life not lost on the audience. His earlier comic “the Nose”, based on Gogol, is terrific fun as a cheeky youthful piece.

You certainly need the surtitles for Janacek, sung in Czech, but I enjoy his highly original instrumentation, his slightly folk-music like tune and rhythms and his theatrical sense. “Jenufa” is best. Surtitles by the way are an essential requirement for enjoying opera as theatre and have fortunately become the norm in most opera-houses.

Rossini and Donizetti were very prolific in both comedy and tragedy. I can’t help liking the tuneful singing and sometimes over the top virtuosity they never fail to provide. I’ve seen many good productions of their operas over the years. They’re rarely opera at its most profound, but are reliable for a good evening out.

However, my enjoyment of a good opera can be marred if it is staged unsympathetically. On some rare occasions I have felt like closing my eyes just to listen to the music. My main wish is for the director to treat the opera as theatre rather than as conceptual art, that is taking the form of a series of static tableaux with special effects which are meant to symbolize some particular bee in his bonnet. It really annoys me when the director seems not to have bothered reading the text so that the stage business doesn’t match the words that are being sung. He misses the point and substitutes one of his own not actually in the work. I remember a particularly dreadful staging of “la Traviata” in Nuremberg, where for example in their final love duet “Parigi, cara” Adolfo and Violetta were apart at opposite extremes of the stage. Many German directors seem to go in for this sort of thing.
Having said that, I hasten to add that I do like the highly inventive Hermann couple’s work, their marvellous series of Mozart operas for the Monnaie, also Rossini’s “il Turco in Italia” and more recently Handel’s “Giulio Cesare”. They do pay close attention to the text but bring their idiosyncratic playfulness to bear in a way that illustrates it amusingly and can often help maintain interest in otherwise over-long passages. Theirs are certainly some of the productions that have stuck in my memory for their aesthetic appearance.
As for dramatic impact I would single out this season’s “Wozzeck” which I mentioned in “About theatre” -
“In “Wozzeck” the opera, you basically get the text in a sing-song way with atmospheric musical backing. With the action played here realistically in period costume in a dark minimalist setting, the overall effect was devastating. The drowning of Wozzeck at the climax was actually staged - he was seen to disappear into a pond of water leaving his cap floating on the surface. Great stuff!”

One of my worst operatic experiences also occured during this season. It was “Phaedra” a new work by Henze (which has nothing to do with the tragedy by Racine). The production designer admitted he had never even staged a play before. He took the orchestra out of the pit and placed it at the back of the stalls. He covered the entire back of the stage with a giant mirror in which the audience could see itself and the orchestra reflected. For the first scene, which contained a lot of important background information for the plot, he had the surtitles switched off so no one knew what was going on, the singers unidentifiable and a slowly revolving gold ring in the dark caught in a spotlight above the auditorium casting reflections - for ten minutes. All very gimmicky but it had nothing to do with the story. The music was unspeakable: the worst excesses of tuneless disjointed percussive modernism that soon became boring in its very predictable inanity. The text was like bad sixth-form poetry. Proceedings reached an embarrassing all-time low when the main character simulated a rape on top of a grand piano crying out “Freiheit” (freedom). The evening was toe-curlingly bad from all points of view. It was bad music and bad theatre by a self-indulgent composer and a self-indulgent director.

This brings me back to my starting point: good opera is great music and great theatre at the same time. When it fails to deliver, bad opera can get very boring and rather silly, but when good opera works it can be a captivating and deeply satisfyng artistic experience.