Book review: A History Of Opera: The Last 400 Years

A History Of Opera: The Last 400 Years

Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

Allen Lane, 604pp, £30

Even when it caught the wider influence of “realism”, as advanced by Courbet in the visual arts, Zola in the novel and Ibsen in the drama, and told stories about contemporary peasants (Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana) or terrorists and tourists (John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer), rather than Orlandos and Seigfrieds, it could not circumvent the fact that everyone is singing the whole time. Even in Puccini’s La Bohème, Mimi manages to sing her final duet even though her lungs are purportedly wracked with tuberculosis. As Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker succinctly summarise the situation: “In the end, though, verisimilitude gets discarded no matter what. In the end, opera can’t ever be anything other than unreal”.

Wagner claimed that the opera was the Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of all the arts, but it more accurately approaches that claim to totality through its essential unrealism. I would almost be tempted to argue that opera itself is at its greatest when it embraces its unrealism; whether that is in Mozart’s The Magic Flute or Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole. It is also therefore no surprise that opera’s origins are similarly shrouded in unrealism; the first “opera” being Monteverdi’s Orfeo, with a plot about cheating death and the power of music to reverse the inevitable.

Writing such a book as this entails certain compromises and a number of decisions about depth of critical reading versus breadth of coverage, and for the most part I would not quibble with the authors’ choices. There is serious and extended consideration of those twin fulcrums of the 19th century, Wagner and Verdi, and the internal wrangles of opera – the Germanic versus the Italian versus the French, and very occasionally a piping-up from Russia and Britain and America – are dealt with even-handedly and insightfully.

The old story of the Verdi versus Wagner dichotomy is rather cleverly unravelled through Verdi’s fury at being accused of Wagnerism (and his telling letter on Wagner’s death) and Wagner’s more occluded debt to Verdi in terms of the development of a musical theme associated with a character – though Abbate and Parker admit that the leitmotif and the “musical calling-card” are rather different phenomena.

Abbate and Parker give rather more space to Bizet than Beethoven (with their own justifiable reasons), but in terms of the scope I was surprised that Prokofiev gets only a single mention, and even then just for Peter and the Wolf rather than The Gambler, Betrothal in a Monastery or The Love For Three Oranges. That Haydn is left out entirely seems a rather more grievous omission, and I would have liked to have known their reasons; my grumpiness may, I suspect, be because Orlando Paladino was the last opera I saw – and the fact that Sky Arts 2’s regular broadcasts of opera (while BBC4 and even Channel 4 do so very rarely) are one of the few redeeming features of the Murdoch empire.

It is an inherently difficult proposition to write a history of opera, since one is dealing with not just composers but librettists, directors, singers and designers at each turn. The real strength of this book is how much attention it pays to a frequently forgotten part of the multitude that make up an opera: the audience. Although the sections about performance history might be slightly lacking, the sections about performance reception are excellent. If opera has one huge problem at the moment it is veneration: you are supposed to sit, sometimes even with score in hand, but always in silence, and devote yourself utterly to the experience. It is rewarding to do so, but that is not how opera was consumed for most of its history. Having something on in the background (as I do now writing this: Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba, since you ask) is perhaps the best way to begin with opera.

Throughout this history the reader is given ample evidence of the writers of opera being savvy about reception: an aria changed to highlight a leading diva, a particular piece of music held back not for aesthetic reasons, but so that when it was heard, the aristocrats who had missed Act I would be in their seats, even the wholesale recycling of material when circumstances demanded. This very smart awareness that opera is not now what once it was extends to the scores; the ease with which composers, particularly pre-Wagner, would alter orchestration and transplant melodies is one of the book’s most salutary messages.

Any history of opera also has to deal with the future of opera. Abbate and Parker offer grounds for sotto voce optimism – YouTube is full of bits of operas that people evidently want to watch, and their asides on the use of opera in film are judiciously placed – but equally suggest that this most enlightening, uplifting and sublime form is more Cretaceous than Technocene. The canon is diminishing from the days when an opera would be commissioned on a regular basis, and our ransacking of the canon looks increasingly desperate. New operas are less likely to be revived than old operas: I could, had I but wit and time, fly off to catch Fidelio or The Barber Of Seville someplace, but it would be damned unlikely that I could do the same for Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face or Harrison Birtwhistle’s Punch And Judy or Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (none of which are mentioned in this book).

It seems to be without the purview of the authors to discuss musical compositions that include voices, and that was probably a wise decision to make: any history runs the risk of being everystory. But the absence of discussion on how influential some forms were – from Haydn’s Creation to Beethoven’s final symphony to Mahler’s Das Leid von der Erde or his Eighth Symphony to Tippett’s A Child Of Our Time is like closing one eye the whole time. Similarly, the relationship between Schubertian song and operatic aria is touched on only lightly.

I hope that anyone who has googled down a song they heard on an advert and found it was from an opera buys this book, and realises the extent to which the operatic has been a touchstone for our griefs, our needs, our joys and our aspirations. Devotees might want to stroke their beards over how their precious-isation of opera has cut it off from its natural audience: that is, anyone with ears and eyes and a gasping mouth and a soul.