The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (30 page)

The score is rich in wit and ingenuity, with brilliant parodies of the clichés of dance-hall band tunes, honky-tonk, ragtime and operetta, as well as Weill’s unique adaptation of the Bach chorale.
Among the more celebrated numbers are the ‘Alabama Song’, with its amusing pidgin-English lyrics, and Jim’s ‘Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man’ – you made your bed, now lie on it.

In performance

Unlike
Die
Dreigroschenoper,
Mahagonny
is a true ‘through-composed’ opera rather than a superior form of musical comedy, although its rambling yet inert plot and cartoon characters make it difficult to pace and pitch in the opera house.
Weill’s bitter-sweet lyricism sometimes sits uneasily with Brecht’s iconoclastic cynicism and his feeling that music primarily exists as a medium in which to communicate his political message.

Yet too many productions today end up neutering the satire, mistaking
Mahagonny
for the innocent farce of
The
Best
Little
Whorehouse
in
Texas.

Recording

CD: Lotte Lenya (Jenny); Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggerberg (cond.).
CBS 77341

Hans Werner Henze

(1926– )

Elegy for Young Lovers

Five acts. First performed 1961.

Libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman

Over the last half-century, Henze has proved himself the most prolific and versatile of contemporary opera composers.
His major works include the one-act
Boulevard
Solitude
(1952), a modern take on the Manon Lescaut story;
Der Prinz
von
Homburg
(1960), an adaptation of Kleist’s play exploring military values; the black comedy
Der Junge
Lord
(1965); and
The
Bassarids
(1966), a powerful version of Euripides’
The
Bacchae.

Elegy
for
Young
Lovers
has a sophisticated libretto, dealing with the question of how far an artist is morally entitled to exploit real life in order to create a work of art.

Plot

The year is 1910.
Accompanied by his mistress Elisabeth, his patron Carolina and his physician Dr Reischmann, the celebrated poet Mittenhofer visits a hotel in the Alps to seek inspiration from the hallucinations of Hilda Mack, a widow who has lived there since her husband was killed in a climbing accident during their honeymoon forty years previously.
When a guide announces that he has found the frozen corpse of her husband, Frau Mack is distraught – she had always believed that her husband was still alive.
Her hallucinations cease.

Reischmann’s son Toni falls in love with Mittenhofer’s mistress Elisabeth.
When Mittenhofer finds out, he is both mortified and enraged, but he needs a new source of inspiration.
He tells Toni and Elisabeth that he is planning a new poem about young love, and needs an edelweiss collected from the nearby mountain in order to complete it.
Toni and Elisabeth volunteer for the expedition and are killed in a blizzard, as Mittenhofer intended.

The final scene shows a fashionable salon in Vienna where Mittenhofer is reading his new poem, ‘Elegy for Young Lovers’.

What to listen for

A chamber opera, full of what the composer called ‘tender, beautiful noises’ in which the orchestral texture is light and clean, with particular instruments associated with particular characters – brass for Mittenhofer, flute for Frau Mack, violin and viola for Toni and Elisabeth.
Although there are several formal arias, duets and ensembles, the texture is so cunningly interwoven that the opera seems conversational and intimate.
In emulation of Berg’s Lulu, Frau Mack is required to sing some fearsomely high coloratura.

In performance

With three acts divided into thirty-four short scenes, this is an opera which requires a small theatre and understated performance to make its proper mark.
The role of Mittenhofer, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is a
tour
de force
for a baritone who can act as well as he can sing.

Recording

CD: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Mittenhofer); Hans Werner Henze (cond.).
DG 449 874 2

PART THREE

Italian Opera

Gioachino Rossini’s operas swept through the gloom of post-Napoleonic Europe and brightened the spirit of the age.
Rossini ranks among the laziest of great composers, constantly recycling his best tunes and shamelessly resorting to clichés when inspiration failed; he broke the rules of
opera
seria
and
opera
buffa
unsystematically, and an older generation thought his music coarse and needlessly loud.

But the young adored his fantasy, wit and energy, and even his more routine efforts have their passages of breathtaking beauty and originality.
Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini followed in his wake.
Donizetti was an indefatigable worker and a skilled craftsman rather than a genius: his best operas are probably his comedies, but his tragedies, several of them drawn from the historical novels of Walter Scott, are also highly effective and stageworthy.
Vincenzo Bellini died before he had fully matured: his powers of orchestration were minimal and his forms often conventional.
But he had a wonderful gift for intense elegiac melody as well as a fiery patriotic fervour, and his operas can rise to heights of emotional grandeur.

Both composers wrote keenly for the great singers of the day and their work is now often associated with the term
bel
canto
(‘beautiful singing’), used to indicate a vocal technique which emphasizes both smoothness of line and the capacity to execute fast passages with accuracy and precision.
The profession of singing was changing.
Napoleonic law banned the practices which led to the castrati, and by the 1820s they had become virtually extinct in the opera house.
Public adulation now transferred to sopranos like Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran and Giulia Grisi, as celebrated for their acting as for their vocal abilities, and the male leads were increasingly taken by tenors like Gianbattista Rubini and Gilbert Duprez, notable for the ease and power of the top of their voices.

From the 1840s to the end of the century, the dominant figure in Italian opera was Giuseppe Verdi.
He came from a
peasant background and his early operas, like Rossini’s, are more notable for sheer vigour than polish or subtlety.
But he doggedly acquired mastery of his art, and the fifty years which separate
Nabucco
from
Falstaff
constitute one of the great journeys of the history of music.
Verdi was more than a composer: his operas embody a passionate nationalistic idealism, and they played a significant propaganda role in the fight to reunify Italy as a democratic nation.

By the 1870s, however, a new generation of composers sought to move away from the high-minded, self-sacrificing characters and antiquated dramatic subject-matter that shaped Verdi’s work.
Operas of this period, like Amilcare Ponchielli’s
La
Gioconda
and Alfredo Catalani’s
La
Wally,
are devoid of political content, focusing more on the extreme emotional crises of tormented individuals; and at the end of the century, Pietro Mascagni’s
Cavalleria
Rusticana
set a fashion for dealing with sensational low-life crimes of passion, in harsh, febrile and often overheated music.

Of all those composers involved in this ‘Verismo’ (‘realism’) movement (as it was labelled), the most sophisticated, original and successful was Giacomo Puccini.
He drew on French music (in particular, the heart-throb sentimentality of Jules Massenet) and the ‘through-composed’ techniques of Richard Wagner, but he was also innately gifted as a vocal melodist and orchestral colourist.
It is not surprising that his best operas, with their matchless ability to hit an audience’s most tender emotional spots, remain the most popular in the world.