The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (80 page)

In performance

Stravinsky was accused of writing ‘a waxworks opera’, and he certainly specified that the soloist should be masked and that there should be no acting in the normal sense – ‘the people in the (opera) relate to each other not by gestures, but by words,’ he said.
‘They do not turn to listen to each other’s speeches but address themselves rigidly to the audience.’ But this does not mean that the opera has no emotional impact.
Recent productions, however, have often ignored the composer’s instructions and ‘re-dramatized’ the opera, taking the characters out of masks and suggesting the imagery of totalitarian oppression, terror and social crisis.

Stravinsky came to detest the device of the narrator and his supercilious tone, but felt that the pace of the whole work was too closely constructed around the hiatuses of his speeches to eliminate him.

Recording

CD: Peter Schreier (Oedipus); Seiji Ozawa (cond.).
Philips 438 865 2

The
Rake’s
Progress

Three acts. First performed Venice, 1951.

Libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman

An opera inspired by Hogarth’s series of eight engravings which the composer saw in Chicago in 1947.
The English libretto incorporates references to other Hogarth engravings as well as neo-classical poets such as Pope and Dryden, and the score is rich in allusions to Mozart operas and English music (the ditties of
The
Beggar’s
Opera,
for example, and the brilliance of Gilbert and Sullivan).
Miraculously, from such a self-consciously assembled patchwork, there emerges a beautifully coherent and deeply touching work of art.

Plot

England, in the eighteenth century.
Trulove worries that his angelic daughter Anne is in love with a man, Tom Rakewell, who does not wish to work for his living.
His suspicions are confirmed when the mysterious Nick Shadow appears with news that Tom has unexpectedly inherited a fortune from a long-lost uncle.
Tom leaves for London at once, engaging Shadow as his valet with an agreement that wages will be paid after a year and a day of service.

Tom soon forgets Anne and loses all constraint: he visits Mother Goose’s brothel and takes to a life of vice.
When he confesses himself tired of all available amusements, Shadow suggests that he marry Baba the Turk, a fairground bearded lady.
Tom agrees delightedly and brushes aside Anne, who has followed him to London.
After their wedding, Baba proves an infuriatingly ceaseless chatterer until Tom forcibly silences her.
Shadow shows Tom a magical machine which turns stones to bread and Tom briefly interests himself in the amelioration of mankind’s lot.

But Tom soon loses all his money, and his possessions are put up for auction.
After a year and a day, Tom visits a graveyard with Shadow, who reveals that he is the devil incarnate
and demands his wages – Tom’s soul.
He tells Tom that he must now kill himself, but Tom challenges him to a last-minute game of cards, which Tom wins.
Shadow is vanquished, but as he descends to hell, he drives Tom into insanity. Anne lovingly visits him in Bedlam and gently lulls him asleep.
When he awakes to find himself alone, he dies from grief.
The cast assembles to point the moral – ‘For idle hands and hearts and minds, the Devil finds a work to do.’

What to listen for

Self-consciously modelled on eighteenth-century operatic style, in which the drama develops through a succession of solo arias, duets, trios and choruses, separated by harpsichord-accompanied recitative and scored for a small orchestra.
A Mozartian spirit hovers benignly over the score:
Così
fan
tutte
is quoted at several points, and the graveyard scene and the audience-addressing epilogue have obvious parallels in
Don
Giovanni,
but the influence goes deeper than mere allusion.

Among the many delights of the score are Tom’s elegant ‘Love, too frequently betrayed’, with clarinet obbligato; Anne’s coloratura aria ‘I go to him’, crowned with a difficult, out-of-the-blue ten-beat top C originally interpolated by the first Anne, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; the exquisitely melancholy Miles Davis trumpet riff which accompanies Anne’s arrival in London; the high camp and nonsense patter of Baba the Turk; the comic auction scene; and the wonderful final scene in Bedlam, with its succession of short airs and choruses of which the most beautiful is Anne’s lullaby, ‘Gently, little boat’.

Stravinsky’s setting of Auden’s libretto – by turns graceful, quirky and irritatingly mannered – contains several oddly un-English emphases (notably in Baba the Turk’s patter).
Whether these are indicative of the slightly off-centre, skew-whiff asymmetry of modern neo-classicism or simply an indication that the composer was not a native speaker is debatable.

Tom is a role for lyric tenor, Anne for lyric soprano, Baba for mezzo-soprano, Nick Shadow for bass-baritone; all four are considered a pleasure to sing, and have many distinguished
interpreters.
However, young, sweet, light, high-lying tenors and sopranos should not be deceived: the music for Tom and Anne requires red-blooded voices which can sing broad phrases over a full orchestra.

Is the opera fifteen minutes too long for its own good?
Could both the opening scene and the graveyard scene do with a trim?

In performance

Without doubt, the classic production is the one which originated at Glyndebourne in 1975 (and which subsequently travelled to opera houses all over Europe and the USA), brilliantly designed in cross-hatched black and white by David Hockney.
No other design for this opera has ever managed to find such an apt visual match for the neo-classicism of Stravinsky’s music.
Several productions, such as Peter Mussbach’s for Salzburg, have opted to put the opera into modern dress, but the attendant disco-dancing and coke-snorting has become rather predictable.
More interesting was the concept of Matthew Warchus for WNO, in which the setting moved forward in historical period from scene to scene; more bizarre was Peter Sellars’s idea (for the Châtelet) of locating the opera inside a high-security American prison.

Recordings

CD: Ian Bostridge (Tom); John Eliot Gardiner (cond.).
DG 459 648 2

Video: Felicity Lott (Anne); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Carlton SL 2008

PART EIGHT

American Opera

The history of American opera is essentially a twentieth-century one.
The nation has no grand-opera tradition of its own, although the huge opera houses of New York, Chicago and San Francisco became splendid showcases for great imported singers as well as magnets for those with ambitions to shine in high society.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, a modest form of native ‘folk opera’ developed.
It took as its subject-matter slices of American life, using an unpretentious lyrical idiom that wasn’t far from musical comedy and avoiding opera houses for the friendlier, more intimate atmosphere of ordinary theatres.
Gershwin’s
Porgy
and
Bess
is the most celebrated example of this school, which also includes Aaron Copland’s gentle pastoral
The
Tender
Land
and Carlisle Floyd’s
Susannah
and
Of
Mice
and
Men,
as well as Britten’s operetta
Paul
Bunyan,
written during his sojourn in the USA, 1939–42.

After the Second World War, American composers became more confident and diverse in their operatic ambitions.
Gian Carlo Menotti wrote a hugely successful children’s opera for television,
Amahl
and
the
Night
Visitors,
and two melodramas which owe much to the verismo school,
The
Consul
and
The
Medium.
Marc Blitzstein’s
Regina
and Samuel Barber’s
Vanessa
and
Antony
and
Cleopatra
are rather grander exercises in a more dignified and conventional style.
Leonard Bernstein’s one attempt at a full-scale, full-dress opera,
A
Quiet
Place
(incorporating an earlier one-act comedy,
Trouble
in
Tahiti
) was not successful.
More recent American operas have tended to adapt existing books, plays or films as their subjects – André Previn’s
A
Streetcar
Named
Desire
and John Harbison’s
The
Great
Gatsby
among them – but slickly enjoyable and effective as such pieces often are in performance, none of them seems to have established a firm foothold in the repertory.