Opera as opera
Rodney Milnes
In Defence of Opera Hamish Swanston (Allen Lane E6.50; Penguin £1.25) Literature as Opera Gary Schmidgall (OUP £6.95) Romantic Opera and Literary Form Peter Conrad (University of California Press E5.5O published 23 February) The very flood of books on opera, of which these represent but a trickle, suggests that it ls no longer in need of defence. It can, I fear, do without Professor (he professes in theology) Swanston's well-meaning but !Mhelpful effusion. As the blurb puts it, he has not attempted anything so comprehensive as Dent's famous account'. Unfortunately he has taken almost twice as many words not to attempt it, which tells its OW n story: the book is disfigured by repetition, received opinion, turgid writing, lengthy statements of the obvious, the .avoidance of any conclusions, and sheer Waffle He admits that he is writing about What he has heard and liked, which is not Cluite enough. He likes operas that have a Mythic' quality — Mozart, Verdi and Wagner — and dismisses those that in his °Pinion have not, such as Puccini and all Prench opera save Pelleas.lcan think of few More 'mythic' operas than Turandot, which Is written off as mere verismo. Puccini is just a sadist, and that's that. Like Puccini or not, a book about opera has got to examine and !hen perhaps condemn his sinister manIPulation of mass audiences.
Opera from Eastern Europe is largely ignored; it seems perverse to discuss rYAlbert's Tie/land and mention Janacek Only once in passing, and though both editions of the book have a nice picture of Christoff as Boris Godunov on the jacket, the opera is not mentioned. Professor n .Nvanston's scope is thus dangerously limited. What he does cover ranges from the sensible to the absurd. On such practical Matters as producers, conductors, gramophone records, and finance he is sound. He is fair on historical development, save for an unclear distinction between reminiscence motive and leitmotiv, and his pnalysis of Monteverdi's Orfeo is the most, if not the only, valuable thing in the book.
I know opinions are opinions. I personally would not agree that Beaumarchais' Figaro is just a pleasant little play, that `Se vuol ballare' makes Figaro look foolish, that Verdi was not interested in the fate of the Queen in Don Carlos, or that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is irrelevant to Eugene Onegin, especially when the ensuing commentary proves quite the opposite. And while on that unfortunate subject, it is hardly true to say that 1phigenie en Tauride is 'one of the few operas to have no love interest at all'. But such differences of opinion are put into perspective when, however carefully you read the sentence in the hope of isolating the sort of clumsy writing that elsewhere implies that Voltaire knew Mozart's Tito, the professor gets the situation of the quartet in Rigoletto utterly, diametrically wrong. If he gets that wrong, he can get anything wrong, and he does — the order of the scenes in Zattherfleite, the motivation of Figaro, and so on.
Most serious, the author never gets around amidst all the waffle to telling us what the function of music is in opera (Schopenhauer gets a mention only in the last ten pages of this curiously back-to-front book), which leads him into dangerous waters when dealing with Cosi fan tutte and Zauberfltite, and he overestimates the importance of narrative values, which in, turn leads him into some absurd judgements on Don Giovanni. But absurdity, as he remarks elsewhere, is not so damaging as the charge of boredom, and .that is a fit epitaph for this amiable but seriously 'misguided book. At least the boredom is enlivened by perfectly wretched editing (countless errors of fact) and proof-reading: such delights as Die drei Pintas and 11 ritorno d'Ulisse in Patna are as oases to the thirsty traveller. Perhaps opera needs defending after all: Penguin could make a start (and amends) with a properly annotated new edition of Dent.
Mr Schmidgall attempts less and achieves far more. He examines the way dramatic or literary works are turned into operas, what is lost, what is gained and, in the process, how opera works. He is infectiously enthusiastic (and right) about Handel's three Ariosto operas even though he hasn't seen them — quite a feat. He is sound on Mozart and Beaumarchais, on Verdi's and Shakespeare's Marbeths, and on the two utterly different works going under the title of Eugene Onegin, and that without disparaging Tchaikovsky. He writes more sensibly on Salome than anyone I know, pinpointing exactly what it was that Strauss. added to, or rather brought out of, Wilde. Here was a play screaming for music, but music that was not content merely to illustrate. He is good on why Woyzeck had to wait eighty-eight years for Wozzeck, and how Berg brought unobtrusive form to the purposefully formless fragments without betraying Bfichner. He is exhaustive on Death in Venice's antecedents in Mann's writing, recognises the opera's faults, admires its virtues and its courage, and illustrates the essay with some unsettling photographs that might come under the heading of curiosa.
Perhaps there is too little about form in the Ben venuto Cellini chapter — the unresolved tension between opera-comique and grand-opera still contributes to its failure — but the strong personal identification Berlioz felt with Cellini is nicely put across. The only section less than convincing is that on Scott, Schiller and Donizetti. Although I like Schmidgall's talk of orgasms and skylarks in connection with coloratura, he is less than precise in his ideas of what bel canto actually is (I think it stopped with Norma) as opposed tomelodramma, and he cites Lucia di Lammermoor as traditionally sung rather than as written. He is thus tempted to undervalue Donizetti as formal innovator — for instance, Maria Stuarda is some way ahead of even middle-period Verdi. Nevertheless, there are very -few good books on opera, and those there are — like Kerman's Opera as Drama — are often infuriatingly wrong-headed; Schmidgall's is one of the few and his head is as level as a mill pond.
From his enviable and clearly communicated knowledge of the sources, I would guess that Schmidgall tills in the fields of Lit. Crit. but he never loses sight of opera as something performed in public and to an audience. Peter Conrad's long essay is about opera wholly in the abstract. It is also infuriating (I nearly threw it away after two pages, but was glad I didn't) and whether or not it is wrong-headed I will only venture to judge when I have read it again, but slowly. His thesis is that drama is a meaningless term, and that far from being music-drama, opera is in fact music-novel. 'Drama is limited to the exterior life of action ... The novel, in contrast, can explore the interior life of motive and desire and is naturally musical because mental.' Er, yes. Once you have made your own definitions you can prove anything. Wagner, Les Troyens, Zauberflote (Goethe's and Auden's as well as Mozart's) are the texts discussed, and at least Conrad takes Strauss seriously before throwing him on the junk heap (a step 'forward). He takes Hofmannsthal very seriously indeed with a helpful examination of the Frau ohne Schatten novel, the springboard of his essay. He too grapples with Salome, but reaches a less positive conclusion that Schmidgall: Salome leaves opera and novel and takes off into dance and painting. But opera is opera. Why does it have to be something else, literature, drama, novel? I think I will have to add my drop to the flood.
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