LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Verdi and Puccini decades later. In a short life he managed to produce a body of powerful work (no comedies) that climaxed in Norma, and their truncated potential for development make him one of the great what-ifs of music history. Had he only lived to fifty, Italian opera might have taken a very different direction.

      GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813–1901)

      As it was, the mantle passed to a composer who emerged as the supreme figure in Italian opera of the later 19th century and with no rival of quite such exalted stature anywhere in the world apart from Richard Wagner. He was Giuseppe Verdi. Unlike Wagner, Verdi was not a theorist, a proselytiser or a visionary. During the 1840s his operas were read as a call to battle for the unification of Italy, but beyond that he did not write to advance radical ideas or debate abstract issues. He was a practical, straightforward man of the theatre whose work was direct and assertive, accepting sometimes crudely improbable plots for the sake of the dramatic situations they set up, but otherwise emotionally true and with a predilection for certain themes that related to his own life and about which he spoke from the heart. One of them was father-child relationships, and it’s no coincidence that early in his life he lost two children and a wife in traumatically rapid succession.

      The breadth and compass of Verdi’s work is so great that it resists summary, but in the broadest terms he introduced a new dimension to the catalogue of opera voices. Vivid, strong and sometimes as rough-edged as they are eloquent, his characters fill the ever-larger space that 19th-century opera came to expect as appropriate for its activities, following the irresistible lead of what was happening in Paris.

      FRENCH OPERA

      Nineteenth-century opera may have been dominated by Italian composers, but the Paris Opéra still somehow remained the Gold Standard venue from which universal trends and fashions flowed and to which everyone aspired. Wagner’s early failure to be taken up by Paris was a humiliation he never forgot, generating a lifelong grievance against the man who was the undisputed monarch of the city’s operatic life – Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Meyerbeer was an expatriate German who mastered the art of monumental spectacle beloved by Paris audiences and whose works, with their Cecil B. de Mille expansiveness and crowd-pleasing ballet sequences, defined the term ‘grand opera’. They set the tone, and the scale, of French stage music for decades to come, and they played their part in encouraging the massive enterprise that was Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz (1803–69), although Berlioz raised the artistic stakes of grand opera with elements of idealism and subtlety that were beyond Meyerbeer. Above all, Berlioz was a maverick, always his own man and never in thrall to fashion. When he wrote big, it was to please himself.

      More fashion-conscious figures on the Paris circuit were Charles Gounod (1818–93), whose lighter, easier lyricism won him the fame and fortune that eluded Berlioz, and Jules Massenet (1842–1912), of whom much the same could be said. But the outstanding French opera composer of the later 19th century was Georges Bizet (1838–75) who only managed to produce one work of unarguable greatness during his brief life (another what-if?) but made it count. With a storyline of unadorned low-life realism, Carmen effectively invented verismo a decade-and-a-half before the Italians got there. In that sense it was innovative. But its opéra comique mix of arias and spoken dialogue was actually quite unsophisticated if you compare it with the truly epoch-making work that was emerging at the same time, across the German border.

      RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83)

      Born in the same year as Verdi, Wagner was the other supreme figure of 19th-century opera, and in many ways the magnitude of his achievement could be explained as a reaction against the two-and-a-half bad years he spent failing to establish himself as a young composer in Paris. French opera in general, and Meyerbeer in particular, became targets for attack, examples of the way opera had allowed itself to be debased from high art into entertainment. Wagner was to be a Messianic saviour, restoring the lyric stage to the status he imagined it once enjoyed as a temple of enlightenment – ennobling, spiritual, cleansed of all impurity – and by a stroke of luck it was during those bad years in Paris that he found solace in the German medieval myths that would prove the literary inspiration for his cultural campaign. Almost all the mature Wagner operas are based on these ancient legends, which Wagner advocated as ideal material for operatic treatment on the grounds of their timeless relevance and universality.

      However ridiculous (and dangerous) some of his ideas turned out to be, Wagner was a truly revolutionary artist who changed not only the ideology of opera but its form and content. He once and for all got rid of the enduring operatic convention of ‘number’ opera, with the score broken down into units of aria, recitative, chorus and the like. Instead, his music was ‘through-composed’ in long, unbroken lines, with the vocal parts declaimed in a manner halfway between the decorative enlargement of aria and the direct narration of recitative. He set his own texts in a comparatively straightforward way, one note to a syllable. But his melodies were highly chromatic, weaving through myriad sharps and flats that undermine any clear sense of belonging to a specific key. He also set his singers the challenge of singing for long periods of time against a huge orchestra. And it’s in Wagner that the orchestra really comes into its own as a distinctive force to be reckoned among the diverse elements that feed into opera. In fact, it all but takes over, with the voices sometimes reduced to an accompaniment for what’s happening in the pit, rather than the more conventional reverse arrangement.

      NATIONALISM

      Thanks to Wagner, German was at last established as a major operatic language that could hold its own against Italian, and he spawned several generations of German disciples, starting with Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), who developed and refined the process of writing stage works for their own native tongue.

      But there were sporadic outbreaks of nationalistically-inspired anti-Italianism in other parts of 19th-century Europe. Spain was an example, where a tradition of folksy light opera saturated with local colour called zarzuela was gathering ground and would, at the turn of the century, prove influential on Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). But the most significant nationalist activity was taking place in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904) took the lead in establishing a distinctive, folk-generated style of writing for the stage. What they began found its ultimate expression in the later, 20th-century works of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose skeletal, spikily compressed approach to operatic story-telling has come to be recognised as one of the most significant contributions to the modern history of music.

      The chief centre of 19th-century nationalism, though, was Russia, a land which had only recently begun to develop a distinctive musical culture after years of French and Italian domination. The father of Russian nationalism was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), who set an enduring precedent for a grandly ceremonial kind of opera that mixed history with fairy tales but wasn’t terribly well crafted in terms of its structure. These were very early days for Russian music. Composition was a semi-amateur activity, and it remained so for the generation who came after Glinka, notably a group known as the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group’s leading member, Modest Musorgsky (1839–81), left mighty works of startling but rough-edged originality that his more craftsmanlike compatriot Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) subsequently tied up. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) completed the process through which Russian opera reached mature refinement, with works which tend to be considered more Western European than those of the ‘Mighty Handful’, although it would be more accurate merely to describe them as less inward-looking in their Russian-ness.

      THE 20TH CENTURY

      Summaries of 20th-century music are invariably messier than those of earlier periods, because composers fit less easily into territorial groups or ideological movements. They tend to make their claims as individuals and resist categorisation. But the century was ushered in by one conspicuously flourishing movement in Italy known as verismo, a school of low-life realism whose first champions, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), found instant fame with their respective mini-masterpieces Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, but were soon eclipsed in stature by a fellow Italian.

      Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) emerged as the next great Italian composer after Verdi. In the history of music he doesn’t stand

Скачать книгу