Music books
First the drama
Denis Arnold
Caw:till Jane Glover (Batsford E8.50)
The vast graveyard of opera tempts exhumation; and where better to start digging than in that area known nowadays as 'the baroque'? Monteverdi's stage works on one side, Handel's operas on the other, have proved astonishingly alive. Cavalli is the obvious candidate for applying the kiss of life. Jane Glover's book, the first study of any size in English — and the first in any language to combine biography and critical analysis for half a century — includes a list of the productions of his more than thirty operas given in his lifetime which, allowing for the difference in diffusion, proves him to have been as popular a figure in his day as was Puccini two hundred and fifty years later. The analogy iS, of course, unfair. Cavalli was, by all accounts, a much nicer man than Puccini and certainly a more honourable composer. Although he took trouble to please, he didn't pander to his public, and Dr Glover suggests that in his old age he found himself out of touch largely because he had been brought up in the old serious ways which didn't allow the popular aria to dominate the drama. But just as the shade of Verdi was embarrassingly near to Puccini. so does Monteverdi's hover around Cavalli. And the analogy rests on the fact that the older man in each case was the stronger, the more heroic. Their disciples were more sensuous and though more skilful men of the theatre, less characterful.
The new information which the author, amongst others, has unearthed, tells us quite a lot about Cavalli's life. It was for the most part a success story. Son of a small town cathedral organist, early training and a good voice found him a powerful patron, whose name he took and who saw to it that he went to Venice, then a great centre of music, to sing in the choir of St Mark's. Study with Monteverdi, the greatest composer of the time, jobs as organist at the civic church of SS Giovanni e Paolo and then at St Mark's itself, and then, at a moment when he seems to have been taking to gambling, a steadying marriage to a wealthy widow all add up to a pretty smoothly running career. Though his wife died when Cavalli was about fifty, he was left comfortably off.
But by that time he had, in any case, made a considerable success as a composer of opera. Little here, also, of the experimental nature of Monteverdi's first stage works in which differing styles and philosophies had to be welded together. Instead, Cavalli arrived on the scene when the concept of the aria, the memorable tune to relieve the 'tedium of the recitative' (to use a fellow
composer's admission), was very much in being. True, Monteverdi was very much in evidence during the early years of the theatres opened specially to cash in on the vogue for opera among the Venetian public. And Monteverdi never gave way to public demand: he was still a High Renaissance composer, determined to 'move the whole man' — which meant for him, not so much prima le parole, poi la musica (though he would not have dissented from the concept) so much as 'first the drama, then the musical pleasure'. He was a formidable figure to have as one's master, and one can sense that his ideals of an expressive recitative music was one which Cavalli couldn't entirely reject. But looking at the passages of recitative quoted by Dr Glover, it is their arioso, smooth progressive quality which stands out — and significantly, she makes her discussion of recitative follow a more ample section of the aria: prima la musica, poi le parole. This is not quite just; Cavalli makes the words work for him even in the arias. It is the rhythms of the verse which govern his phrase patterns, and the mood of the libretto is the basis of the grand set-piece laments which are his finest moments. He has a flair for expressive melody, and the arias given complete in the book whet the appetite for more. One can understand how his operas can be revived (albeit butchered) at Glyndebourne for an audience untutored in seventeenth-century music.
One can also understand why at the end of a pleasant evening, little lingers in the memory. There is too little character in the music — and far too few real characters on the stage. Dr Glover has just four pages on characterisation, one taken up almost completely with a list of stock figures, nurses, confidantes, servants and so on. These comedy roles are, according to her, stronger than the serious characters, the heroes being 'remarkably inactive', the women somewhat more forceful. She remarks that 'it is extremely rare for a serious character not to achieve his or her desire'. No doubt it was comforting for the Venetian patricians, and not a bad reflection of Cavalli's own circumstances, but it is not a basis for larger-than-life operatic heroes and heroines. Monteverdi's great operas admit
tedly adhere to the lieto fine, the inevitable
happy ending, but for Orpheus it is a second best to be taken up to heaven rather than be united with Eurydice, while such have been the vicissitudes of the plot that the marriage of Nero and Poppea hardly seems likely to end their neurotic desires. By the side of these, Cavalli's are much weaker creations.
Dr Glover does not claim too much for her subject, and though she clearly enjoys
his qualities, she sees his limitations. Her method of going through each particular of technique — recitative, aria, orchestration -has the disadvantage of making it difficult either to experience the totality of the operas or to feel a sense of development within the composer. She also tends to throw away the latter part of his life, when back from Paris after his one worldly failure, the ceremonial opera for the marriage of Louis XIV with the Spanish Infanta, he swore to give up writing operas, but then submitted to the temptations of the Veil' etian theatres again. Nevertheless, this is highly useful book, packed full of inform at ion . (editors about to tart uP seventeenth-century scores should read the section on performance practice) and attractively written. It may not spark off a great Cavalli revival, but should encourage conductors and producers to look at his scores to provide some pleasant evenings.
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