The 2013 Operatic Bicentenary

  

On a Saturday in December of the bicentenary of the births of the two greatest opera composers of their century and—with Mozart, the greatest of them simpliciter—I enjoyed the HD broadcast of the splendid Met production of Falstaff.  The next day I attended a concert called Wagner Gala, offering arias and orchestral preludes from Tannhäuser to Tristan, presented by the Orquestra del Teatro de Bellas Artes and three singers, the tenor Francisco Araiza, a young soprano and a young baritone.  Although everything that was performed on those two occasions was familiar to me, the juxtaposition was nevertheless something of a revelation.

   It explained to me why the two composers had never actually met, even though they lived almost side by side in the world of operatic Europe.  Franz Werfel—known in the US mostly for his best seller, The Song of Bernadette—wrote an early novel, Verdi. Roman der Oper, in which he did have Verdi and Wagner meet in Venice just before Wagner died there.  But while I don’t remember much of the book—I read it in my early teens when I was still more attuned to reading in German than in English—I do recall that Werfel did not have them talk to each other.

   That also makes sense to me; what would they say to each other?  Wagner is said to have looked down on Verdi’s operas and while it is reported that Verdi made enthusiastic statements about Tristan, there are those who think he was being sarcastic.  Leaving aside their personalities, which, to say the least, were sharply different, the music of the one is remarkably different from the other and so are the aesthetic goals they strove to achieve.  It is most likely that Wagner did not learn anything from Verdi and while Verdi probably adopted from his contemporary the mode, if that’s what it is, of through-composing, that is, eliminating breaks between arias and ensembles, that hardly counts as a significant influence.

   But I must now go on to talk about Verdi and Wagner.  An immense amount has been written about them and I am in no position to contribute fruitfully to that vast literature.  Instead, I want to say some things about their relationship to me, since I know a good deal about me, if not by any means everything, if Freud et al. are right about self-knowledge.

   So, back to my high school days at Brooklyn Tech.  Having been hooked on “classical” music via radio stations WQXR and WNYC, I went to see the Ring in 1943, with Melchior, Traubel and Lotte Lehmann’s last Sieglinde.  From next to the last row of the Family Circle at the Old Met, the Rhine Maidens, behind scrims, were barely visible.  But I could see the orchestra; and since I had denuded the library of its volumes of miniature scores, it was clear to my purist indignant self, that the Met was cheating by providing only four of the six harps Rheingold called for.  But adolescent carps notwithstanding, I reveled in the sounds of the four evenings, even if the sets and staging were pretty humdrum.

   Around the same time I managed to get into a dress rehearsal of Tristan und Isolde, sung by the same veteran pair and conducted by a very young Erich Leinsdorf.  The other opera I saw early was Mozart’s Zauberflöte that led me to buy my first records, two volumes (they were 78 rpm then) of Beecham’s unsurpassed account.  I saw some other operas—not many—in those days and a few more at the Civic Opera, when, right after high school, I was briefly stationed on Chicago’s Navy Pier.

   Did these experiences cause me to become what is called an “opera lover”?  A question I must answer with a somewhat ambiguous “not really.”  I have not yet mentioned that besides much listening to New York’s “good music stations,” I went to orchestral and chamber music concerts.  (If your request, that had to be on a postcard and postmarked on Monday, made it to the top of the pile, you were admitted to the Sunday concerts at the Frick Museum.  Success allowed me once to sit close enough to Mischa Schneider of the Budapest Quartet to follow the cello line over his shoulder.)  All these experiences certainly made me a life-long “music lover,” with a taste for the classics, but also for more contemporary music.  I bought the score of Mahler’s Second Symphony after having been bowled over by a 30-year old Bernstein conducting it—years before Mahler became a repertory staple and long before Bernstein’s ascent to the New York Philharmonic.  I was captivated by the Kolisch Quartet’s performance of Schönberg’s Second Quartet, the dramatic soprano, Astrid Varnay, standing, legs slightly apart, behind the two rows of quartet members.  I heard Cantor Richard Tucker in a Town Hall concert of Jewish music and thought he should be at the Met!  And so on.

   What I have in mind with that distinction is that I prize the music of certain operas, but, even though I enjoy outstanding singing, it is not enough to keep my undivided attention.  This was brought home to me the only time I went to a performance of a Donizetti opera and could not stop my mind from endlessly counting phrases of eight bars.

   So back, finally, to Verdi and Wagner.  I have seen and enjoyed a number of Verdi operas, a couple of them more than once.  I see him—or, better, hear him—as coming out of the bel canto tradition and effectively transcending it.  He cares about singers and writes to their strengths, often—but surely not always—reducing the orchestra to the role of accompanist.  Wagner—certainly in the later operas—mostly treats singers the way he treats the french horn or the oboe, as instruments that create a total musical texture, fatigue be damned.  (I heard Jon Vickers twice as Tristan.  The first time he sang heroically in the second act and was audibly fatigued in the third.  The second time he almost crooned in Act Two and sang all out while dying from his wound.  How anybody can get through Siegfried is beyond me, though I have heard it done.

   Many of Verdi’s arias are captivating; not so many of Wagner’s are.  But if Verdi stands on the shoulders of the Italian operatic tradition, Wagner derives from the impetuousness of Beethoven and from the harmony of his late quartets.  For me, Wagner’s greater musical complexity is alluring.

   Much more can and perhaps should be said, such as the relationship of music to libretti, but anything I might say has probably been said many times before—and better.  So I will conclude with a revelation that may perhaps surprise the reader of my remarks about the 2013 bicentenary celebrants.  In my view, the most perfect opera yet written has a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, namely Figaros Hochzeit, The Marriage of Figaro, that is, Le Nozze di Figaro.