Читать книгу: «The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta»
Published by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1997
Copyright © 1997 Michael White and Elaine Henderson All rights reserved.
Michael White and Elaine Henderson assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780004720616
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2018 ISBN: 9780008299538
Version: 2018-05-16
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
How to Use this Ebook
Introduction
John Adams
Nixon in China
Samuel Barber
Vanessa
Béla Bartók
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Ludwig van Beethoven
Fidelio
Vincenzo Bellini
Norma
I Puritani
La Sonnambula
Alban Berg
Lulu
Wozzeck
Hector Berlioz
Béatrice et Bénédict
Les Troyens
Leonard Bernstein
Candide
A Quiet Place
Harrison Birtwistle
Gawain
Punch and Judy
Georges Bizet
Carmen
Les Pêcheurs de Perles
Arrigo Boito
Mefistofele
Alexander Borodin
Prince Igor
Benjamin Britten
Albert Herring
Billy Budd
Death in Venice
Gloriana
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Peter Grimes
The Rape of Lucretia
The Turn of the Screw
Alfredo Catalani
La Wally
Gustave Charpentier
Louise
Luigi Cherubini
Médée
Francesco Cilea
Adriana Lecouvreur
Domenico Cimarosa
Il Matrimonio Segreto
Peter Maxwell Davies
The Lighthouse
Claude Debussy
Pelléas et Mélisande
Léo Delibes
Lakmé
Gaetano Donizetti
Don Pasquale
L’Elisir d’Amore
La Fille du Régiment
Lucia di Lammermoor
Maria Stuarda
Antonin Dvořák
Rusalka
Gottfried von Einem
Dantons Tod
Manuel de Falla
La Vida Breve
John Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
George Gershwin
Porgy and Bess
Umberto Giordano
Andrea Chénier
Fedora
Philip Glass
Akhnaten
Mikhail Glinka
A Life for the Tsar
Ruslan and Lyudmila
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Alceste
Iphigénie en Tauride
Orfeo ed Euridice
Charles Gounod
Faust
Roméo et Juliette
George Frederick Handel
Alcina
Giulio Cesare
Semele
Serse
Tamerlano
Joseph Haydn
La Fedeltà Premiata
Hans Werner Henze
The Bassarids
Elegy for Young Lovers
Paul Hindemith
Mathis der Maler
Engelbert Humperdinck
Hänsel und Gretel
Leoš Janáček
The Cunning Little Vixen
The Excursions of Mr Brouček
From the House of the Dead
Jenůfa
Kátya Kabanová
The Makropulos Case
Oliver Knussen
Where the Wild Things Are
Erich Korngold
Die Tote Stadt
Franz Lehár
Die Lustige Witwe
Ruggero Leoncavallo
I Pagliacci
Heinrich August Marschner
Der Vampyr
Pietro Mascagni
Cavalleria Rusticana
Jules Massenet
Manon
Werther
Gian Carlo Menotti
Amahl and the Night Visitors
The Consul
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Les Huguenots
Claudio Monteverdi
La Favola d’Orfeo
L’lncoronazione di Poppea
Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
La Clemenza di Tito
Cosí fan Tutte
Don Giovanni
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Idomeneo
Le Nozze di Figaro
Die Zauberflöte
Modest Musorgsky
Boris Godunov
Khovanshchina
Otto Nicolai
Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor
Carl Nielsen
Maskarade
Jacques Offenbach
La Belle Hélène
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Orphée aux Enfers
La Vie Parisienne
Francis Poulenc
Les Dialogues des Carmélites
La Voix Humaine
Sergei Prokofiev
The Fiery Angel
The Love for Three Oranges
War and Peace
Giacomo Puccini
La Bohème
La Fanciulla del West
Madama Butterfly
Manon Lescaut
Tosca
Il Trittico
Il Tabarro
Suor Angelica
Gianni Schicchi
Turandot
Henry Purcell
Dido and Aeneas
The Fairy Queen
King Arthur
Maurice Ravel
L’Enfant et les Sortilèges
L’Heure Espagnole
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
The Golden Cockerel
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh
Gioacchino Rossini
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
La Cenerentola
Guillaume Tell
L’ltaliana in Algeri
Camille Saint-Saëns
Samson et Dalila
Aulis Sallinen
The Red Line
Arnold Schoenberg
Moses und Aron
Dmitri Shostakovich
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
Bedřich Smetana
The Bartered Bride
Johann Strauss II
Die Fledermaus
Der Zigeunerbaron
Richard Strauss
Arabella
Ariadne auf Naxos
Capriccio
Elektra
Intermezzo
Der Rosenkavalier
Salome
Igor Stravinsky
Oedipus Rex
The Rake’s Progress
Arthur Sullivan
The Gondoliers
HMS Pinafore
Iolanthe
The Mikado
Patience
The Pirates of Penzance
The Yeoman of the Guard
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Eugene Onegin
The Queen of Spades
Michael Tippett
King Priam
The Knot Garden
The Midsummer Marriage
Giuseppe Verdi
Aida
Un Ballo in Maschera
Don Carlos
Falstaff
La Forza del Destino
Macbeth
Nabucco
Otello
Rigoletto
Simon Boccanegra
La Traviata
Il Trovatore
Richard Wagner
Der Fliegende Holländer
Lohengrin
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Parsifal
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
Götterdämmerung
Tannhäuser
Tristan und Isolde
William Walton
Troilus and Cressida
Carl Maria von Weber
Der Freischütz
Kurt Weill
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
Die Dreigroschenoper
Street Scene
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Die Soldaten
Glossary
About the Publisher
How to Use this Ebook
Over 180 operas and operettas, the major works of more than 70 composers, are covered in the Collins Guide to Opera and Operetta, an invaluable guide to this fascinating but sometimes misunderstood artform.
The main body of the book is arranged alphabetically by composer, starting with Adams and continuing through to Zimmermann, taking in the likes of Britten, Mozart, Puccini, Strauss (Johann II and Richard), Sullivan, Verdi and Wagner along the way.
The section for each composer begins with a list of their major operatic works arranged in chronological order by year of composition. Those operas set in bold type are featured in detail on the pages within each composer section. Biographical details and information on other non-operatic works set the operas in context.
The featured operas for each composer are arranged in alphabetical order. Within the entry for each opera the presentation is exactly the same: Form, Composer, Libretto, First Performance, Principal Characters, Synopsis of the Plot, Music and Background, Highlights and Recommended Recording. The vast majority of the operas also feature an entertaining Did You Know? box including anecdotes and diverting background information.
An overview of the history and development of opera and operetta, and a glossary of musical terms round out this indispensable reference source for opera devotees and newcomers alike.
Introduction
FLORENTINE BEGINNINGS
The four-hundred-year history of opera as we know it is based on a mistake. Or at least, a mistaken assumption, made in the late 16th century by a group of Florentine intelligentsia, who were minded to re-create what they believed to be ancient classical drama. Their guide was Aristotle who, in the 4th century BC, had written about theatre and music as though such things were synonymous. Drama, said Aristotle, was the imitation of life made pleasurable by ornament and melody; and armed with this information, the Renaissance Florentines supposed that ancient drama must have been completely sung.
The first composer to put their ideas into practice was Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), whose initial attempt to ‘re-create’ Greek mythic drama, Dafne, has been largely lost – leaving his subsequent Euridice (1600) as the first surviving opera. But in truth it only survives as a matter of academic interest: an undiverting compromise between speech and song, it’s hardly ever staged.
The first opera to survive in regular performance is La Favola d’Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), who wasn’t a Florentine at all but worked for the court at Mantua, where the ruling Gonzaga duke had witnessed the fame of Euridice and wanted something of his own to rival it. In the event, he got a score that outclassed Peri’s capabilities, with rich and complex music partly based on the assertive style of Italian Renaissance madrigals and partly on the tradition of what were called intermedi – musical interludes between the acts of spoken plays which, by the late 16th century, had begun to acquire a life of their own as separate music-theatre pieces.
What Monteverdi chiefly added was a sense of how music can be used to heighten the emotional charge of a moment of theatre; and to that end he led a move away from the mythic allegories that dominated the plots of very early opera, preferring to deal with human characters and situations. ‘I see the characters are winds …’, he wrote scornfully of a libretto somebody had sent him. ‘How can I imitate their speech and stir the passions?’
Stirring passions was increasingly the business of Renaissance opera composers as, with extraordinary speed, opera escaped its origins in private courtly diversion and became a public entertainment. In 1637 the world’s first general-access opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, opened in Venice. By the end of the 17th century the city housed eleven more, and the turnover of work they produced was phenomenal. It was designed to meet an insatiable demand for novelty that seems inconceivable to a time, four hundred years on, when opera has become a largely museological pursuit of the past. The repertoire was always new and ran for no more than short periods before it was taken off and (usually) abandoned. Only the libretti tended to be cherished and preserved, often to be set again. The music disappeared, or was reprocessed into other scores.
WHAT DID 17TH-CENTURY ITALIAN OPERA SOUND LIKE?
Essentially it grew out of long lines of declamatory vocal music that would be embellished as appropriate and intercut with choruses and dances. Over time, and for the sake of variety, the long lines came to be divided into two types of music:
Recitative: a prosaic kind of sung speech, skeletally accompanied by supporting chords on a small group of ‘continuo’ instruments and designed to deliver large quantities of information quickly.
Aria: a more spacious, song-like melody designed for moments when the action stops and the singer has time to reflect on what has happened, how he feels, and what a splendid voice he has.
‘He’ is the appropriate gender here, because women had a very limited role in early opera. The vocal interest of high pitch was more often provided by castrati, who came courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church which had been castrating small boys in the cause of art for several centuries. The practice was officially illegal but an open secret, its results standardly attributed to some natural accident like ‘the bite of a wild swan’.
The orchestral accompaniment to these operas would have been very modest, basically strings and one or two keyboard instruments. Woodwinds only gradually became standard, and brass instruments were reserved for grand effects.
THE ITALIAN DIASPORA
Monteverdi moved to Venice in the middle period of his life, and there he had two followers of distinction: Pier Francesco Cavalli (1602–76), remembered now for one work, La Calisto, and Antonio Cesti (1623–69). Cavalli went to work in Paris, Cesti in Vienna, and between them they exemplified the way Italian opera composers (not to say Italian operatic style) spread abroad.
France proved particularly welcoming, and the court of Louis XIV brokered a productive marriage between the new Italian ways and its own existing tradition of great, dance-based spectacles. Dance was the second language of the French, and, along with a general aggrandisement of scale, it became their chief gift to the operatic genre. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the Italian-born chief composer to Louis, filled his opera scores with ballets that look and sound delightful but do nothing for the sense of drama. So did his successor, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), who worked with Voltaire and specialised in absurdly extravagant sound-and-vision spectacles at Versailles and the Palais-Royale that no doubt played their part in the ultimate downfall of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the cultural reaction to these over-opulent indulgences was the development of opéra comique: lighter, shorter, simpler, with a spoken text to link the arias rather than sung recitative.
England was slower to seize on the Italians, and generally content with its own version of the French dance-spectacle – the courtly masque, whose storyline, usually allegorical, was no more than a vague excuse for ceremonially scenic splendour. But Charles II’s years in exile had exposed him to the magnificence of what was happening at Versailles and he was keen to have something of the sort back home, albeit more modestly funded. John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682) was a development of the masque tradition that came close to opera. But England had nothing that could be called the real thing until Henry Purcell (1659–95) wrote his French-influenced (with lots of dancing) Dido and Aeneas (1689) for a girl’s school in Chelsea. The strange thing is that having established this landmark, he took it no further and reverted to the form of writing known as semi-opera, spoken drama with musical interludes which, however substantial, is still essentially decorative and looks back to the old ways of the masque.
Germany, too, was slow to rise to the Italian bait. It imported Italian musicians who set up opera houses, but the basis of its indigenous music-making throughout the 17th century was religious and instrumental, with a new type of popular, comic speech and song mix known as Singspiel making an appearance around 1700. Thereafter, of course, the lure of Italy proved as strong in German-speaking countries as anywhere else; and it was to Italy that Georg Frideric Händel (1685–1759) travelled as a young man to learn his craft as a composer for the theatre.
The interesting thing is that he didn’t then go back to Germany to practice it (well, not for long). He moved to London where, in 1711, when he took the town by storm with Rinaldo, the otherwise thriving musical life of the capital had witnessed very little Italian opera. Handel effectively created his own market, and within a short space of time it was so buoyant that London could truly be described as one of Europe’s leading opera centres – a magnet for the greatest singers of the Baroque stage who came, conquered and ruled the whole process of opera production from start to finish.
THE STARS OF THE BAROQUE
It was in the 18th century that the phenomenon of star singers travelling throughout Europe in pursuit of massive fees first materialised. They tended to be Italian, ensuring that opera continued to be written and sung in their native language, even when it was being performed in England, Germany or Austria. And by now they included women in prominent roles, although the true superstars continued to be the castrati, whose abnormally high voices in roles that designated them great heroes or great lovers contributed to the pantomime-like gender anarchy of Baroque sung theatre. As men had once played women’s roles, now women frequently played men. And the element of the surreal in all this was heightened by the way that standard-form Baroque opera presented Classical subjects in a bizarre synthesis of ancient and modern dress. Puffed breeches, crinolines and breastplates, plus a lot of ostrich feathers, were the uniform. But although the genre was called opera seria – meaning ‘serious’ – and usually involved stories of chivalric duty and high moral tone, it had no choice but to make allowances for occasional elements of comedy.
THE CONVENTIONS OF OPERA SERIA
As the singers literally called the tune in Baroque opera, its ultimate function was to flatter them with vehicles for vocal display; and the vehicles were solo arias, strung together one after another in a way that turned the whole thing into a costumed concert. Each character (there were usually six) had a specified number of arias according to his status in the piece. Each aria was meant to illustrate a particular temperament – anger, sorrow, jealously, delirium – as a calling card for the singer’s sensitivity to that emotion. An aria came in three sections: part A, part B, and an embellished repeat da capo (‘from the top’) of part A. At the end of the aria the singer left the stage, to signify that his concert-in-miniature was over and to encourage rapturous applause. The tortuous absurdity and length of opera seria plots was largely caused by the requirement to accommodate these endless monologues-with-exit.
Otherwise, the conventions also took in freer arioso singing that was melodic but without the set-piece formal stature of an aria. The linking recitative came in two forms: secco (dry), with minimal accompaniment, and accompagnato, with more instruments and fuller texture. Ensembles and choruses were rarely used. For the most part, opera seria only gives you one voice at a time.
However, back in Italy not everything was seria. The ever-expanding lifelines of opera had spread from Venice to Naples, and in both cities a new kind of comic theatre emerged in the early 1700s in the form of intermezzi, which, like the old Florentine intermedi, were originally filler-pieces that played between the acts of larger works. Over time they had come to acquire an independent existence as artisan comedy (commedia dell’arte), featuring stock, low-life characters and situations. Refined into crafted opera by writers like Goldoni or composers like Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36), they established a looser kind of writing that wasn’t so focused on the virtuosity of individuals and accordingly took more interest in developing ensemble style. Because of its grounding in earthy humour, it became known as opera buffa, and in its genial way it was on the attack.
REFORM
In fact, the excesses of opera seria and the singers who performed it prompted counterattacks in many quarters. In England they came with ridicule, through parody pieces like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In German-speaking countries the response was more earnest: a considered call for reform. The most celebrated reformer was Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) who, with his librettist Calzabigi, published a manifesto for the cleaning up of operatic malpractice and propagandised the ideal of ‘beautiful simplicity’. No more over-decorated da capo arias. No more deadening rules to govern how a score must be constructed. Just a broad intention towards elegance and modesty.
Between them, Gluck and the Italian intermezzi shifted opera’s goalposts at a crucial time, because around the corner, ready to exploit the consequences, was a youthful genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–91)
Making an early start in opera, at the age of twelve, Mozart understandably began to write according to the conventions of opera seria, complete with all their formal requirements and high tone. But he soon broke free into a less prescribed world, coloured generally by comedy and infinitely more than an embellished string of arias. The list of everything he brought to opera would be long and headed, no doubt, by his matchless gift for melody. But of hardly less significance was a dramatic energy and intelligence that rarely failed him. He created characters who lived and breathed, whose actions were dictated not by artificial rules but by the natural consequences of their situation. They are truly human (for the most part) and they truly interact, with vocal lines that interweave and build into astonishing ensembles. It’s still ‘number’ opera, capable of analysis in terms of arias, recitatives, choruses and so on, but the numbers often merge, accumulating into long, near-seamless tracts of music like the massive finale to Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro, which begins about a third of the way into the Act and just rolls on – brilliantly – with barely a pause for breath.
The genius of Mozart is essentially comic, indebted to the tradition of Italian opera buffa, and most of his mature stage works explore some aspect of comedy, from the knockabout humour of Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the ideological pantomime of Die Zauberflöte. Even Don Giovanni is a comedy of sorts, described by the author as a ‘dramma giocosa’. But Mozartian high spirits marked an end rather than a beginning in the history of Austro-German opera, not to say the whole history of Europe, because Mozart’s death coincided with the French Revolution.
ROMANTIC IDEALISM
The French Revolution (1789–99) fed a new and very serious Romantic idealism into Western European consciousness. In the new France, opera was uncomfortably associated with the old order and had to reinvent itself in radical, politically high-moral terms to survive. Rescue operas involving the righting of wrongs and epic libertarian themes became the Paris fashion, championed by Cherubini and Spontini, and the fashion spread to Germany, where Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio, adopted a politically-driven rescue plot already set to music by the Frenchman Pierre Gaveau.
