The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (52 page)

Calaf is in comparison a relatively easy role – Puccini is kinder to tenors than he is to sopranos, and it seems unfair that ‘Nessun dorma’ (made even more famous by Luciano Pavarotti when it was adopted as the official theme-tune for the 1990 World Cup) should earn the singer so much applause for so little effort.
It is Liù (lyric soprano), however, who has the most beautiful solo music in the opera: ‘Signore, ascolta’, the first of her two arias is very exposed, ending with the ascent to a high floated pianissimo B flat which sounds magical if – and it is a big if – it is executed correctly.
The trio of Ping (baritone), Pang and Pong (tenors) can have great fun with the witty and elegant interlude that Puccini wrote for them at the beginning of Act II: Ping in particular has some fine lyric phrases.

The orchestration of the opera is dazzling in its exoticism and shimmer.
The falling-off in quality when Alfano takes over is palpable – the completion is four-square, if not clumsy, mechanically recycling melodic material from earlier in the opera without imagination or sensitivity.
How one regrets the loss of the crowning glory which Puccini would surely have provided for the final love duet!
Now copyright has expired, Luciano Berio has prepared a more subtle new ending for the opera, performed in 2002 at Salzburg and elsewhere.
Other composers are also set to tackle the problem.
Another quandry – the final ‘t’ in
Turandot.
Should it be
Turandoe
or
Turandot
? Nobody seems to know.

In performance

An opera which can be used as an excuse for pantomime spectacle – as in the hideously overblown oriental kitsch produced by Franco Zeffirelli at the Met, or the much more subtle and elegant staging by Andrei Serban for Covent Garden – or as a piece in which the terror and repression of Turandot’s Peking foreshadows the Fascistic authoritarianism which was to overwhelm Italy shortly after Puccini’s death.

Recording

CD: Joan Sutherland (Turandot); Luciano Pavarotti (Calaf); Zubin Mehta (cond.).
Decca 414 274 2

PART FOUR

French Opera

Until this century, Paris was the undisputed operatic capital of the world, though its glamour and excitement have emanated as much from foreign influences as from native traditions. As early as 1752, the visit to Paris of an Italian
opera-buffa
troupe caused a great stir – its pace, fun and naturalness made the courtly baroque opera-ballets of Lully and Rameau seem slow and cumbersome.
Some twenty years later, the operas of a German, Gluck, also caused heated controversy.

The Revolution of 1789 inevitably brought great changes to public taste, opening opera up to a wider audience and the principles of
Liberté,
Egalité,
Fraternité.
Composers like André Grétry and Etienne Méhul wrote in the style known as
opéra-comique,
in which the static aria gave way to more dynamic musical interchanges.
Spoken dialogue was used between numbers, and plots were no longer confined to the dilemmas of aristocratic or mythological personages.
Instead, partly inspired by the philosophy of Rousseau, the action embraced exotic settings and supernatural effects, focusing on adventurous deeds of ordinary folk (heroic rescues were particularly popular – a concept borrowed by Beethoven for
Fidelio
).

Thus began the development of nineteenth-century ‘Grand Opera’.
Heavily subsidized by the state and almost invariably performed at the Paris Opéra (an institution first housed in the rue Le Pelletier and, since 1875, in the Palais Gamier, where it still functions today), this was a form which gradually lost its revolutionary edge to become a mere formula, top-heavy with empty spectacle and stage effects, cynically calculated to appeal to audiences more interested in show than in music.
Using some episode in European history, usually connected to the fight against religious or political tyranny, a Parisian ‘grand opera’ proceeded through the fixed points of a long ballet interlude (often entirely unrelated to the drama); a procession; a duel or battle; a flood, fire or
similar cataclysm; a big love duet and a long, loud ensemble for as many people as could be fitted on to the stage – all crammed into the central three of its five acts, so that the fashionable crowd who came late or left early wouldn’t miss the highlights.

Although French composers like Daniel Auber made their contributions, many of Paris’s grand operas were written by Italian composers: in the early years of the century, Luigi Cherubini and Gasparo Spontini; then Rossini and Donizetti and, finally, Verdi, whose
Don
Carlos,
first performed in 1867, is one of the last – and perhaps the greatest – examples of the genre.

But undoubtedly the most successful of grand-opera composers was a German Jew, Giacomo Meyerbeer, who collaborated with the prolific French librettist Eugène Scribe on pieces such as
Les
Huguenots
and
Le
Prophète
– the mid-nineteenth century’s nearest equivalent to the Hollywood epic.
Meyerbeer’s fame and fortune was bitterly resented by the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, whose half-hearted attempt to modify his opera
Tannhäuser
for the Paris audience in 1861 was virtually booed off the stage because the ballet occurred too early in the evening.

At a distance from the grand-opera tradition stood one of the great non-conformists of musical history, Hector Berlioz.
Like Wagner, he scorned the bombast and parade of Meyerbeer, and proposed a return to the dignity and purity of Gluck.
But he was also a romantic dreamer with a lively sense of humour – and too much of an original to have been a success in his own day.

Grand opera primarily appealed to the wealthy and socially pretentious.
Middle-class audiences generally preferred Paris’s smaller, less daunting and expensive opera houses like the Théâtre-Lyrique and the Opéra-Comique (or Salle Favart), where they enjoyed the easy, tuneful sentimentality of Charles Gounod and the sparkling talent of Georges Bizet, who died young, unaware that in
Carmen
he had written what probably ranks as the world’s most popular opera.

The allure of grand opera had declined by the 1870s, and in the final decades of the century, Wagner became the major influence on younger composers.
His example was adapted in various ways, all of them related to his idea of continuous music drama, free of barriers between recitative and aria, or song and speech.
Jules Massenet (nicknamed ‘Mademoiselle Wagner’) produced a long series of lushly coloured, erotically explicit melodramas.
Gustave Charpentier presented a slice of real contemporary Parisian life in
Louise.
Inspired by the sonorities of
Parsifal,
Claude Debussy created a true masterpiece with
Pelléas
et
Mélisande.

Twentieth-century opera in France has not been so lively.
Maurice Ravel’s short operas have charm and Francis Poulenc’s
Dialogues
des
Carmélites
has a grim power and intensity. But the major composers of the last fifty years seem to have lost confidence in the form: Olivier Messiaen’s massive
Saint
François
d’Assise
is more oratorio than opera, and Pierre Boulez has as yet failed to find a text which he considers theatrically viable.

Nor has modern France managed to produce many first-class singers, despite a high level of public spending on classical music and superbly equipped new buildings such as the Opéra Bastille.

Hector Berlioz

(1803–69)

La Damnation de Faust

Four parts. First performed Paris, 1846.

Libretto by Almire Gandonnière and the composer

Berlioz never intended his adaptation of episodes and themes from Goethe’s
Faust
to be staged as an opera, and for all its obvious theatrical and pictorial elements, this
‘légende
dramatique’
(as the composer labelled it) continues to work best in the concert hall.

The text is based on Gérard de Nerval’s translation of Goethe’s epic poetic drama.

Plot

In his study, the scholar Faust sings of his joyless isolation.
He decides to kill himself, but as he reaches for the poison, the walls of his study part to reveal a church congregation celebrating the resurrection.
Faust is heartened to live, but then the devil Mephistopheles appears and offers to fulfil all his earthly desires.
After carousing in Auerbach’s beer cellar, Faust is enraptured by a vision of the beautiful village girl Marguerite.
Through his magic, Mephistopheles arranges for the two of them to meet and fall in love.

Marguerite despairs when she is abandoned by Faust.
In a mountain gorge, Faust addresses the majesty of Nature and is then carried off by demons to his damnation.
Marguerite, on the other hand, is redeemed as angels usher her into heaven.

What to listen for

An orchestral rather than vocal showpiece, whether in the swagger of the Hungarian March, the crash and bash of the Ride to the Abyss, or the beautiful accompaniments to the arias (for example: the desolate horn of Marguerite’s ‘D’amour l’ardente flamme’ or the pizzicato guitar effect that underpins Mephistopheles’s serenade).

The role of Faust lies high for modern tenors, but the chance to sing the rapturous invocation to Nature attracts them anyway; Marguerite can be sung by either mezzo-soprano or soprano, as long as the colour suggests girlish openness and vulnerability; likewise, Mephistopheles cannot be taken by a booming bass, since his arias demand a singer who can move fleetly in an almost baritonal register.

In performance