Opera

Article Outline

Introduction; The Form of Opera; Opera as Drama; The Opera Repertory; The Singers; Opera Houses; Opera Festivals; History

Romantic Opera in France

France’s appetite for heroic and spectacular operatic entertainment, which had characterized French opera since the time of Lully, was sated in the 19th century by opéra grande (grand opera) with its sweeping historical epics, lavish sets and costumes, and enormous choruses. This genre was largely the creation of Eugène Scribe, a playwright, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German émigré who would have Europe at his feet for three decades. The prolific Scribe turned out librettos at a fast pace. He was not above taking a previously set libretto, making a few cosmetic changes, and fobbing it off on another composer, as when he gave the text of Donizetti’s Il Duca d’Alba to Verdi for Les Vêpres Siciliennes (The Sicilian Vespers, 1855).

Scribe and Meyerbeer collaborated on a series of grandiose works for the Paris Opéra—Robert le Diable (1831), Les Huguenots (1836), Le Prophète (1849), and L’Africaine (1865)—that treated historical fact and mass bloodshed with equal unconcern. Meyerbeer devoted most of his energy to exploiting novel orchestral effects, bravura singing roles, and theatrical spectacle, including the obligatory ballet. Le Prophète devotes half an hour to an ice-skating ballet. The persecution of minorities, a recurring theme in these operas, also dominates Jacques Halévy’s La Juive (The Jewess, 1835), a more rigorous and musically defined example of the Meyerbeer-Scribe model.

The outstanding and transcendent example of opéra grande is Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz, an epic, two-part dramatization of Virgil’s Aeneid composed between 1856 and 1858. While its length is not considerably greater than that of Meyerbeer’s biggest operas, its vocal and scenic demands are enormous, and Berlioz never lived to see a complete performance of it. A string of revivals beginning in the 1950s proved the musical and dramatic worth of Les Troyens, and contemporary audiences have shown a greater tolerance for the work’s vastness than did their Parisian forebears.

Georges Bizet achieved success in the very different style of opéra comique. At the time Bizet came upon the scene, opéra comique had mingled with the conventions of romanticism to produce such graceful operas as Faust (1859) by Charles Gounod and Mignon (1866) by Ambroise Thomas. In Carmen (1875) Bizet supplied the incisive musical characterization missing from the French operatic stage since Rameau. His librettists preserved as much of the stark realism of the original novella (by Prosper Mérimée) as was compatible with the opéra comique form. A violent tale set amid assorted lowlifes, Carmen initially shocked audiences, yet it enjoyed about 50 performances before Bizet’s untimely death in mid-1875. Continually reexamined and readapted, the story and music have retained their fascination into our own time.

Other Romantic Operas

In Russia and central Europe prominent composers both influenced and were influenced by Italian, French, and German romantic opera. No style had a greater influence on Debussy, or on any other composer struggling with the influence of Wagner, than that of Modest Mussorgsky of Russia. Determined to create a characteristically Russian opera, he turned his back on the colorful, episodic folklore that had earlier served his compatriot Mikhail Glinka in A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Russlan and Ludmilla (1842). Instead, Mussorgsky adapted a grim drama of psychological realism, Aleksandr Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov in 1874. At the time of his death, Mussorgsky was struggling with an even more epic canvas: Khovanshchina (1886), a depiction of the conflict between the indigenous ways of Russia and the incursion of Western influences, embodied by Tsar Peter the Great.

Mussorgsky modeled his vocal writing on the inflections of Russian speech, and in both his operas made the chorus—which represented the Russian people—the protagonist. His musical textures swung between bold chromaticism (use of tones not part of the prevailing musical scale) and the austere modes of Russian liturgical chant—whichever worked best for the subject at hand. Mussorgsky’s score for Boris Godunov, now perceived as powerful and original, was considered by his contemporaries to be crude and naive. After his death, Mussorgsky’s friend Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov revised both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, 'correcting' much of Mussorgsky’s characteristically unorthodox and craggy style. Despite prevailing for most of the 20th century, Rimsky-Korsakov’s splashier version was discredited and Mussorgsky’s original text has become the one most often heard by operagoers.

More lyrical, but no less national, was Prince Igor (1889) by Aleksandr Borodin, an episodic military drama completed by Aleksandr Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov after Borodin’s death. Rimsky-Korsakov’s brilliant writing rules the realm of the Russian fairy tale, with such pieces as The Snow Maiden (1882), Sadko (1898), The Invisible City of Kitezh (1907), and The Golden Cockerel (1909). Political satire permeates the last of these, and Rimsky-Korsakov was also capable of tragic utterance, as in The Tsar’s Bride (1899). More cosmopolitan in style are the operas of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose lyrical and romantic Eugene Onegin (1879) and darker, more unified The Queen of Spades (1890) both draw their texts from Pushkin.

Two different movements have been grouped under the label Czech opera: one of pro-Russian Slovaks and the other of German-influenced Bohemians. The most recognizable figure among the Bohemians was Antonín Dvořák, although only Rusalka (1901) with its deep pathos has taken a firm hold in the repertory. Prague was the capitol of Bohemian culture, and its dominant operatic figure was Bedřich Smetana, whose The Bartered Bride (1866) was quickly assimilated into the repertory, usually in German. Its comic subject matter has made it the most accessible of Smetana’s operas. Other operas by Smetana include two stirring patriotic works: the fast-moving rescue opera Dalibor (1868), and the epic tableaux of Libuše (1881), portraying the unification of the Czech people under a wise female leader.

Representing the Slovak school, unofficially headquartered in Brno, was Leoš Janáček, who like Mussorgsky and Debussy favored the use of natural speech rhythms. After some early, uninspired attempts at opera, Janáček flowered creatively at age 50, starting with an electrifying tragedy of Moravian life, Jenufa (1904), which is probably his most popular work. In subsequent operas, Janáček turned for subject matter to adultery born of stifling repression (Kát’a Kabanová, 1921), the order of the natural world (The Cunning Little Vixen, 1924), the supernatural (The Makropulos Case, 1926), and the prison-camp experiences of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (From the House of the Dead, 1930). Success in Prague both obsessed and eluded Janáček. International interest in his operas came only after diligent restoration in the late 20th century.

20th-Century Opera

The romantic era ended with World War I (1914-1918); the era’s ideal of heightened emotion, already showing signs of decay, could not survive such a shock. The patterns of operatic composition began to break down, giving way to a period of uncertainty and experimentation.

European Trends

The fascination with medieval themes evident in Wagner’s Parsifal and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande wound down with such Italian works as L’amore dei tre re (1913) by Italo Montemezzi, I Cavalieri di Ekebu (1925) by Riccardo Zandonai, and Semirama (1910) and La fiamma (1934) by Ottorino Respighi. Austrian post-romanticists such as Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Alexander von Zemlinsky used medievalism as a springboard into explorations of spiritualism, abnormal psychology, and other popular movements of the time.

Early in the century, Richard Strauss appeared as the true (and self-proclaimed) successor to Wagner. Strauss first achieved renown with a pair of sensationalistic one-act operas: Salome (1905), based on the play by Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde, and the more harmonically advanced Elektra (1909). In these works, harmonic dissonance and heavily textured instrumentation uncannily mirror the abnormal psychology of the characters. Having gone to the brink of atonality (music without a central key), Strauss drew back with the elegant, expressive comedy Der Rosenkavalier (1911). Commedia dell’arte and opera seria collide to humorous effect in Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; revised 1916). Strauss’s grandiose so-called magic opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow, 1919) celebrates sacrificial love. Intermezzo (1924) presents a vignette of Strauss’s own turbulent domestic life; Arabella (1933) is a charming romance; Daphne (1938) evokes the healing powers of nature; and Friedenstag (Day of Peace, 1938) decries the dehumanizing effects of war. Capriccio (1942) is a lengthy inquiry into the primacy of words versus music in opera. But Die Liebe der Danae (1944), in which love prevails over poverty and hardship, finds Strauss (self-portrayed in the character of Jupiter) going out in a blaze of tonal glory.

Wagner’s legacy then passed to Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, members of what became known as the second Viennese school (the first consisting of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven). The operas of Schoenberg and Berg express disillusionment through their deliberate abandonment of conventional harmony as well as through their grim subject matter. Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), about a soldier driven mad through regimental sadism, medical experimentation, and his mistress’s infidelity, is a powerful emotional drama in spite of its intricate and highly formalized musical framework. Berg’s second opera, Lulu (1937), relates the life of an amoral street child. Schoenberg struggled for many years with Moses und Aron (unfinished; premiered posthumously in 1957) after he had completed a series of short operas, of which Expectation (1909) is the most successful. Moses und Aron, based on biblical stories, deals with crises as diverse as Moses’s inarticulateness and Aaron’s seduction of the Israelites into worship of the golden calf. With its scenes of orgy, destruction, and human sacrifice, the prohibitive complexity of Schoenberg’s opera has discouraged frequent performance.

Elsewhere, composers turned away from Wagner, substituting a discrete or single melodic part in place of the continuous, organic structure of Wagner and his disciples. In Budapest, Hungary, Béla Bartók composed the psychological parable Bluebeard’s Castle (completed 1911, first performed 1918), while Zoltán Kodály turned to Hungarian folk humor for Háry János (1926), the story of a mythic, Paul Bunyan-like figure. In Berlin, Italian-born composer Ferruccio Busoni infused new life into the well-known stories of Arlecchino (Harlequin, 1917), which freely mixes speech and song, and Doktor Faust (1925).

In England, a full-scale flowering of indigenous opera took place for the first time in some 200 years. The earliest works included The Immortal Hour (1914) by Rutland Boughton and The Wreckers (1906) and The Boatswain’s Mate (1916) by Ethyl Smyth, the former a rustic romance, the latter depicting the activities of pirates in an impoverished English coastal village. Smyth’s works enjoyed great popularity in continental Europe, as did some works of Frederick Delius, whose most famous opera was the German-derived A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907). Delius, however, was constitutionally unable to depict conflict, either in text or music, so his fairly inert music-dramas have never enjoyed more than occasional revival. Indeed, finding compelling subject matter proved an ongoing problem for English opera composers. Sāvitri (1916) by Gustav Holst looked to the Mahabharata, an epic poem from India. Hugh the Drover (1924) by Ralph Vaughan Williams is a low-key pastoral drama infused with folk songs, as is Sir John in Love (1929), an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599?) by English dramatist William Shakespeare.

It fell to Benjamin Britten to give English opera definition and force, beginning with Peter Grimes (1945), a sea drama about a persecuted, visionary fisherman. A work by French writer Guy de Maupassant inspired Britten’s Albert Herring (1947), a satire of country manners, while Billy Budd (1951), increasingly acknowledged as Britten’s masterpiece, adapts an allegory of good and evil in the fiery tumult of the Napoleonic wars by American novelist Herman Melville. Britten tried his hand at grand opera with Gloriana (1953), portraying England’s Queen Elizabeth I during a time of crisis, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), whose Shakespearean text was adapted by English tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s longtime companion and preferred interpreter. Britten also composed an opera for television, Owen Wingrave (1971). His Turn of the Screw (1954), adapted from a story by American writer Henry James, captures in its music the psychological tension of the original tale. Britten’s final masterpiece was Death in Venice (1973), one of his most harmonically inventive and self-revealing works.

Such has been Britten’s stature that few subsequent British composers have emerged from his shadow, although Peter Maxwell Davies enjoyed some success with Taverner (1972) and Harrison Birtwistle with Gawain (1991). Michael Tippett turned to opera with the philosophical The Midsummer Marriage (1955), for which he wrote his own libretto. He also wrote his own librettos for The Knot Garden (1970), The Ice Break (1977), and New Year (1989), with its science-fiction orientation.

Meanwhile, novelties from elsewhere in Europe were considered passing fancies. These included Aniara (1959) by Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl, which is set aboard a spaceship and features electronic sound, and Licht (Light, 1980-2003), a cycle of operas for every day of the week by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. More enduring works included Antigone (1949) by German composer Carl Orff, which harks back to ancient Greek theater with its rhythmic declamation over an austere, percussive accompaniment. The first opera of French composer Francis Poulenc was the earthy Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1947). He then took up the aesthetic that emphasized the rhythms of natural speech, an aesthetic advanced by Janaček, Mussorgsky, and Debussy. Poulenc’s two most notable operatic works are Les Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), based on a true story from the French Revolution, and the telephone monologue La Voix humaine (The Human Voice, 1959). In dramatizing the martyrdom of an order of Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution, Poulenc employs deceptively simple harmonic structures to potent emotional effect. His direction that the opera be performed, whenever possible, in the language of the audience gave it enormous international currency.

The opening of Russia to the West immeasurably enhanced the viability and currency of all schools of Russian opera. Sergey Prokofiev turned his hand to a text by Italian author Carlo Gozzi for the satirical The Love for Three Oranges (1921), one of his most enduring and popular works. Prokofiev also crafted the sinister—and somewhat incoherent—The Fiery Angel (1919-1927; produced 1954), before being beaten down into writing the formulaic, patriotic opera demanded by the Communist government that ruled the Soviet Union at that time. Even his often-beautiful setting of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1946) seems to be filled with homage to the Communist regime. Prokofiev’s colleague, Dmitry Shostakovich, fought a hit-and-run campaign with the government. After a brilliant and scathing adaptation of Nikolay Gogol’s satirical story The Nose (1930), wherein a bureaucrat’s nose takes on a life of its own, Shostakovich slammed the corrupt officialdom of Communist Russia in the overtly sensual Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934). The latter work is now regarded as one of the greatest of all 20th-century operas.

Working in an assortment of styles, Igor Stravinsky, who was born in Russia but eventually settled in the United States, built up an impressive catalogue of operas. These range from the romanticism of The Nightingale (1914) to the Mozartean The Rake’s Progress (1951), inspired by the engravings of English artist William Hogarth. Stravinsky also tried his hand at Greek drama in Oedipus Rex (1927), a work that is performed unstaged as often as staged. Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht, both from Germany, reworked John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera into the even more popular Threepenny Opera (1928). The two then collaborated on the cuttingly satiric Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). Nazi persecution and changes of philosophy soon ended this potent collaboration, and Weill turned to American musical comedy.

Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, who settled in Europe in the 1970s, enjoyed a tremendous vogue during the 1960s and 1970s with his expressionistic and overtly sexual operas Don Rodrigo (1964), Bomarzo (1967), and Beatrix Cenci (1971). German-born composer Hans Werner Henze came to prominence in 1952 with Boulevard Solitude, which incorporates jazz, blues, and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system of composition. Henze’s subsequent operas include Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), set in the snowbound Alps and dominated by the music of the xylophone, vibraphone, harp, and glockenspiel; the darkly comic Der Junge Lord (The Young Lord, 1965); The Bassarids (1966), a version of The Bacchae, an ancient Greek play by Euripides; the multilayered We Come to the River (1976); the fairy-tale opera Pollicino (1980); and Das verratene Meer (1990).

American Trends

Perhaps because it is not an art form indigenous to the United States, opera has had difficulty finding an American voice. There have been attempts at mining Native American lore, as in The Pipe of Desire (1910) by Frederick Converse, which was the first American opera to be produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company. Deems Taylor turned to English subject matter for The King’s Henchman (1927) and Peter Ibbetson (1931). The fashion for setting operas in the past was continued by the harmonically and melodically rich Merry Mount (1933) by Howard Hanson and The Man Without a Country (1937) by Walter Damrosch. Douglas Moore found rich sources of inspiration in American literature (The Wings of the Dove, 1961, based on a story by American expatriate author Henry James) and in legend (The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1939). He scored a lasting triumph with a true-life gold-rush story, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956).

The distinguished American composer Aaron Copland produced but one opera, The Tender Land (1954). Samuel Barber wrote two works for the Metropolitan Opera: Vanessa (1958), with a libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti won a Pulitzer Prize, and Antony and Cleopatra (1966). Menotti himself, born in Italy but a resident in the United States for most of his life, wrote operas for radio (The Old Maid and the Thief, 1939) and television (Amahl and the Night Visitors, 1951) as well as for the opera house. Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), set in New York’s Greenwich Village, won a Pulitzer Prize. His La Loca (1979) was written for American soprano Beverly Sills and his Goya (1986) for Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo.

Harmonic writing, drama, and other hallmarks of Italian opera characterize the works of Thomas Pasatieri, who made his mark with the television opera The Trial of Mary Lincoln (1972) and subsequently wrought an elegantly melancholic setting of Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1974). Likewise, the Italianate style of Dominick Argento evolved over more than a dozen operas, from mawkishness (The Masque of Angels, 1964) to the spare but gorgeously tonal weave of The Aspern Papers (1988), an adaptation from a story by Henry James. Leonard Bernstein struggled fitfully with opera throughout his compositional career, achieving his true voice in large-scale musicals such as Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957).

In the 1980s minimalism became a defining characteristic of American opera. Minimalism stressed repetition and subtle shifts in rhythm within stable melodic patterns. It is exemplified in the works of Philip Glass, whose first opera, Einstein on the Beach (1976), avoids solo singing altogether. Glass later worked in various genres, including science fiction (The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1988), but he enjoyed greater success in such historical portraits as Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984). Satyagraha depicts the early struggles of Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi and incorporates passages from the Baghavad-Gita sung in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. Akhnaten (1984) is a portrait of the Egyptian pharaoh who established monotheism in Egypt. Other Glass operas include CIVil WarS (1983), an allegory of conflict across the ages; and The Voyage (1992), which draws parallels between Christopher Columbus’s exploration of the Americas and futuristic space flight. John Adams scored an enormous success with Nixon in China (1987), a work that combines minimalist techniques with forms that audiences at the Paris Opéra would recognize, including a formal ballet and coloratura display aria. His subsequent, and less successful, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) dealt with terrorism in the Middle East.

In the 1990s American composers tried a variety of styles. The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) by John Corigliano exploded the last of the Figaro trilogy by French dramatist Pierre Beaumarchais into a “grand opera buffa.” It incorporates the ghosts of Beaumarchais and Marie-Antoinette along with Figaro and the Almaviva family (from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro), who narrowly escape the guillotine. Numerous musical styles, from microtonality (the use of more than 12 tones in an octave) to Mozartean simplicity, are melded along the way, with time out for a Rossinian number (in his Turkish manner) performed by an Egyptian belly dancer. Other major American operas of the 1990s fared less well, including William Bolcom’s McTeague (1992) and Conrad Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons (1994). But Bolcom scored a hit in 2004 with The Wedding, a witty opera based on the 1977 Robert Altman film comedy and directed by Altman at Chicago’s Lyric Opera.

Windows Live® Search Results

Romantic Opera in France

Other Romantic Operas

20th-Century Opera

European Trends

American Trends