The complete idiot's guide to classical music (57 page)

Chapter 21
 
Those Dirty Plots and Plans: Dramatic Opera

 

• Borrowing from the Bard
  
 

• Who’s in opera?
  
 

• Opera plots
  
 

• The most popular dramatic operas
  

When most of us hear the word opera, we think first of great singing, then of the overall theatrical experience: The sets, the costumes, the lighting effects, and the numerous other ways in which opera makes a spectacle of itself. Behind every production, though, lies a story: A plot that theoretically engenders the arias and ensemble numbers, which gives the soprano a reasonable excuse for going mad and makes it seem vaguely logical for the tenor to unleash a barrage of high Cs.

These stories can be realistic or romantic; they can be set in a smuggler’s den or atop Mount Olympus; they can deal with historic or purely fictional characters; but they give the composer a framework upon which to hang his memorable musical moments.

Shakespeare, they say, didn’t bother coming up with original plots—he just swiped, reworked, and embellished older tales of love, jealousy, and greed from any source that had the potential for good theater. In his own words (from
Julius Caesar
), he was “a surgeon to old shoes.”

Turnabout is fair play, of course, so succeeding generations of composers and their librettists had no qualms about borrowing from the Bard:

 

• Gounod had Romeo and Juliet singing in French.
  
 

• Bellini’s balcony scene unfolded in Italian (in “I Capuleti ed I Montecchi”).
  
 

• Bernstein’s
  West Side Story
  had the lovers graduated to the streets of New York.
  
 

• Handel had a go at Julius Caesar.
  
 

• Benjamin Britten dreamed up
  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
  
 

• Verdi had Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff raise their operatic voices.
  
 

• Berlioz brought “Beatrice and Benedict” to operatic life.
  
 

• Samuel Barber’s
  Antony and Cleopatra
  opened at the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966.
  

A good story is a good story, in other words, and the very fact that the Bard made a narrative effective in theatrical presentation gave composers and librettists a certain confidence that it would work equally well on the operatic stage.

 
Important Things to Know
Handel’s
Julius Caesar
, all but forgotten for a couple of hundred years, not only came roaring back to life in the mid-1960s, but served to catapult Beverly Sills (the Cleopatra of the New York City Opera cast) into the international spotlight. “She trilled the birds off the trees” said the conductor of the evening, Julius Rudel, and in short order, she became one of the most popular, in-demand, and famous singers of our time. “I got more than I bargained for,” the soprano told a
Newsweek
interviewer, with her typical sparkly humor. “I expected to be carried out feet first from the City Opera, and that people would think Beverly Sills was a place in California.”

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction, and when the most far-fetched coincidences can be justified by pulling out the encyclopedia and showing that they actually happened that way, the concoctors of opera knew that they had latched on to a good thing. And if they had to stretch the truth a bit to make the plot work out right, well, you can just put it down to poetic license.

Since fact-based plots have a special appeal, the stage has welcomed everybody from Attila the Hun to Joan of Arc, and from Nero to Bluebeard.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Yes, Bluebeard was indeed based on real life. The legend grew up around the horrible deeds of an actual villain, one Gilles de Rais, who in his younger, saner days, was an officer in Joan of Arc’s army. Convicted of murder, sodomy, and witchcraft, he was hanged (and burned, just to make sure) in 1440.

Political figures are always good for plots dealing with intrigue, corruption, and assassination, wherefore we have such epic dramas as Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar
and Mussorgsky’s towering portrait of the tragic Tsar,
Boris Godounov
. In Giordano’s
Andrea Chenier,
we meet a poet-victim of the French Revolution, and in Donizetti’s
Anna Bolena
(Anne Boleyn), one of the wifely victims of Henry VIII. This fascination with history and actual news events has continued to our own day, as witness John Adams’
Nixon in China
and
The Death of Klinghoffer,
Ezra Laderman’s
Marilyn
(Monroe), and quite a few other contemporary operas.

This phrase (the title of a famous tone poem by Richard Strauss) pinpoints one of the elements that can turn pure tragedy into inspiring drama. If the hero’s death leads to martyrdom, if the heroine dies knowing that she and her lover will be reunited in heaven, we ourselves feel some sense of relief and uplift. Their suffering has somehow been exalted, their nobility of character has surmounted the afflictions of earthly existence.

When we think of Lincoln or, closer to our own day, Martin Luther King Jr., and John and Robert Kennedy, it is with sadness that their work remained unfinished, but exhilaration that their passionate lives touched us so deeply. Their brutal deaths put their selfless achievements into even sharper relief, and enhanced their status as American heroes. So it is in opera, where our empathy with the characters on stage brings us a kind of emotional release; their sufferings and moral triumphs deputize our own struggles to be better human beings.

 
Important Things to Know
Just as Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to be more popular than the comedies, the most popular operas—
Aida, Carmen, Madame Butterfly,
etc.—are the heartbreakers, the ones where half the audience is sobbing as the final curtain falls. At heart, we’re just gluttons for punishment.

Opera thrives on such transfigurations, and one fairly sure way to tell that you’ve been to a serious (rather than comic) opera is that by the time you’re ready to go home, most of the main characters will no longer be amongst the living. They may have suffocated in a pyramid, killed each other in a sword fight, expired from tuberculosis, been shot, stabbed, poisoned, or just committed suicide, but they will most assuredly have given up the ghost. Equally certain, though, they will rise from the grave in time for their final curtain calls.

So, you’ve decided to go to the opera. Great. Be sure to get there early enough to read the synopsis in the printed program. You probably still won’t be able to figure out exactly who’s doing what to whom at any given point, but you’ll at least have a general idea. It also helps that supertitles are now customary in most American opera houses, meaning that translations of the libretto are available in sync with the unfolding of the arias. Anyway, to give you a bit of a head start, here are a few of the stories behind some of the more popular operas.

We go far back in time to a highly exotic location in
Aida
: Memphis and Thebes in the era of the pharaohs. Radames, the captain of the Egyptian guards, is loved by Amneris, the current Pharoah’s daughter, but wouldn’t you know it, he loves Aida, one of Amneris’ slaves, who was captured during a battle with the Ethopians. Don’t tell anybody, since nobody on stage knows it yet, but Aida is actually of royal blood too, the daughter of Amonasro, the King of Ethiopia. As Act I ends, Radames once again goes forth to face the Ethiopian army, emboldened by a sacred sword that will ensure his victory.

The big deal of Act II is the Triumphal Scene, with hordes of trumpeters, warriors, slave girls, and usually a few horses, all greeting Radames, who returns in glorious victory with a new crop of prisoners, among them Aida’s father. Finding out about his daughter’s infatuation with Radames, Amonasro urges her to persuade Radames to reveal the route of the next Egyptian attack; this she does, and Radames, unable to resist her importunings, gives her the details, only to have his words overheard by the jealous Amneris. The Princess decides that if she can’t have Radames, nobody else will either. She calls in the guards, and as Aida flees, Radames is captured and charged with high treason. His sentence: To be buried alive. Instead of making good her escape, however, Aida has secreted herself in the tomb, and after the most touching love duet ever to be sung in the absence of oxygen, Aida and Radames die in each other’s arms. Their abiding love, foiled by fate and destroyed by jealousy, will at last have passed through death to life eternal.

In Puccini’s day, poets, painters, and musicians seeking self-expression were called Bohemians and considered themselves figurative descendants of an earlier generation of Italians known as Scapigliatura (the disheveled). As a young man, Puccini belonged to a group of four composers who called themselves Giovane Scuola (new school), the others being Pietro Mascagni (later to write
Cavalleria Rusticana
), Ruggero Leoncavallo (
Pagliacci
) and Alberto Franchetti, who wrote an opera about Christopher Columbus, but whose fame, such as it was, has pretty well evaporated (Franchetti’s, that is). They too didn’t like rules and conventions, and at this early stage in their careers, they paid for their independence with poverty. For Puccini, writing
La Boheme
was almost like leafing through his diary. In fact, he even went back to the Conservatory, looked up his graduation piece, and plucked from it what would become the famous opening bars of his opera,
La Boheme.