The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (71 page)

Once described as a ‘sonic battering ram’,
Gawain
contains several recurrent short refrains and blocks of musical material repeated with variations – in parallel with the plot’s emphasis on the passage of time and the seasons.
It also uses complex parodies of medieval musical forms, such as the Marian choral motet, and some obvious onomatopoeia (for example, the ‘clip-clop’ representation of horses’ hooves).
The role of Gawain is for baritone, that of the Green Knight for bass.

Birtwistle’s music deliberately favours orchestra over voice, and is therefore extraordinarily hard for humans to sing and to articulate verbally (especially for the soprano who sings Morgan Le Fay).
The composer has therefore sanctioned the use of surtitles.

Gawain
may lack the delicacy, wit and grace for which the original medieval poem is notable, but the sheer physical power of the music is undeniably impressive.

In performance

Gawain
has to date received only one staged production, directed by Di Trevis at Covent Garden.
It used a circular stage, reflecting the circular nature of the music and the action, and cleverly managed the illusion of the speaking severed head.

Recording

CD: François Le Roux (Gawain); Elgar Howarth (cond.).
Collins 70412

PART SEVEN

Slavic Opera

Imported Italian opera dominated in Russia until 1836, when Mikhail Glinka paved the way for a native school with
A
Life
for
the
Tsar
– a piece rooted in Russian history and folk music, with a peasant as its hero and the chorus, representing the Russian people, playing a major role.
Glinka’s second opera
Ruslan
and
Ludmila,
a fantastic if rambling fairy-tale, drawn from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, contains dazzling orchestration and exotic oriental inflections.
These two operas served as inspiration to a younger breed of patriotic composers determined to forget the Italians and cultivate a distinctively Russian style.
Thus Alexander Borodin’s
Prince
Igor
and Modest Mussorgsky’s
Boris
Godunov
and
Khovanshchina
have grand historical and social sweep, while operas like
The
Snow
Maiden
and
The
Golden
Cockerel
show their composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov saturated in the bright colours of Russian myth and legend.
Igor Stravinsky was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov: his early one-act operas such as
The
Nightingale
and
Renard
follow his master’s example in several respects, but are also notable for using dancers as well as singers to tell the story on stage.
After Stravinsky left Russia, he deserted the music of his country too:
Oedipus
Rex,
with its Latin text, reinterprets the Handelian opera-oratorio, while
The
Rake’s
Progress
contains artful parody of western European opera of the eighteenth century, from Gay’s
The
Beggar’s
Opera
to Mozart’s
Così
fan
tutte.

Under the Stalinist regime, opera was obliged to conform to socialist ideology: Shostakovich’s
Lady
Macbeth
of Mtsensk
had an electrifying impact when first performed in 1934, but its tone was much too dangerous, cynical and subversive to survive a repressive censorship.
A more superficial and versatile composer, Sergei Prokofiev, survived with more aplomb, producing less ambitious operas in a variety of genres before devoting his final years to
War
and
Peace,
a patriotic epic
which looks back to Glinka and Mussorgsky.
Prokofiev also inherited the exuberantly lyrical gifts of another great master of Russian opera, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Although belonging to the same generation as Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky stands apart from them, and his attempts at public drama like
Mazeppa
and
The
Maid
of
Orleans
are not as convincing as
Eugene
Onegin
and
The
Queen
of
Spades,
operas which focus on intimate and even neurotic emotions of the individual psyche.

The great majority of Russian operas created in the Soviet era amount to crude and simplistic efforts to play by the rules and are of no lasting value.
Since
glasnost,
however, Alfred Schnittke’s
Life
with
an
Idiot
has made some international impact – its bitter absurdism recalls the spirit of Shostakovich, as well as the more nightmarish fictions of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

The Russian opera scene is currently suffering devastating impoverishment caused by the abrupt withdrawal of the massive subsidies allocated by the culture-respecting Communists.
But Russia continues to produce magnificent voices of a matchless power and amplitude, and the foreign travels of Moscow’s Bolshoi and St Petersburg’s Maryinsky (or Kirov) Operas prove that the great nineteenth-century traditions survive and even flourish.

In Eastern Europe, national schools of opera have fought to establish their own space between the culturally invasive might of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires which dominate their political history.

Poland boasts Stanislaw Moniuszko’s
The
Haunted
Manor
(1865), with its richly amusing plot and lively score, as well as Karol Szymanowski’s
King
Roger
(1926), an austere but impressive exploration of a medieval Christian drawn back to the pagan cult of Dionysus.
From Hungary comes the sombre, gripping allegory of Béla Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s
Castle
(1918) and György Ligeti’s scabrous
Le
grand
Macabre,
first performed in Stockholm in 1978 and one of the few successful comic operas of the century.

Perhaps the most fertile operatic grounds in this region have been the Czech, Slovak and Moravian lands.
Prague hosted the first performance of
Don
Giovanni,
as well as those of familiar masterpieces of Bedřich Smetana and Antonin Dvořák.
Brno has the honour of being home to Leoš Janáček, a genius whose reputation has grown over the last fifty years to the point at which he ranks among the very greatest of twentieth-century operatic composers.

On a more northerly Russian border, one should also note the importance of opera in Finland, a young country with a small population in which music has been an important factor in the consolidation of national identity.
Aulis Sallinen’s
The
Horseman
(1974) and
The
Red
Line
(1979) are essays in direct and involving music drama of a sort that Glinka and Mussorgsky would have appreciated.

Modest Mussorgsky

(1839–81)

Boris
Godunov

Prologue and four acts, or seven scenes.

First performed St Petersburg, 1874.

Libretto by the composer

Based on Pushkin’s five-act drama, much influenced by Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
and imaginatively drawing on actual historical events which took place between 1598 and 1605, the opera has a complex genesis.
An original version in seven scenes was rejected unheard by the management in St Petersburg.
Mussorgsky subsequently revised and expanded the score into nine scenes, adding the episode in Poland.

After Mussorgsky’s death, Rimsky-Korsakov produced two editions, which softened some of Mussorgsky’s rough edges and enriched the orchestration: it was Rimsky’s second version, with the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, which made the opera popular in the west, but it is now only favoured in Russia.
In 1939–40, Shostakovich made another version, restoring some of Mussorgsky’s intentions – a process continued in the scholarly edition prepared by David Lloyd-Jones in 1975.
The original 1869 version has been revived several times in recent years; partly because it is shorter (and therefore cheaper to mount), it has gained some ground, but despite some problems with the ordering of the scenes, the merits of the 1874 version, in whatever edition, are undoubtedly superior.

Plot

The authorities threaten the people of Moscow, urging them to save Russia from anarchy by electing the boyar Boris Godunov as tsar.
Boris is duly crowned, appearing before the people and humbly dedicating himself to his responsibility.
But Boris fails to bring peace or prosperity to Russia, and in his cell the scholarly old monk Pimen, formerly a soldier at
the tsar’s court, tells the young novice Grigory how years earlier Boris had secretly ordered the murder of the young tsarevitch Dmitri in order to open his path to the throne.
Grigory is the same age as the tsarevitch, and decides to impersonate him and claim the throne for himself.
He sets out to Poland with two drunken monks Varlaam and Missail, hoping to gain support for his claim.
In an inn on the border, he narrowly escapes arrest.

Boris has never been convinced that the tsarevitch actually died, and is racked by guilt and hallucinations.
In Poland, Grigory–Dmitri falls in love with the noble Marina, who is persuaded by the wily Jesuit Rangoni to use his infatuation to win him to the cause of spreading the Catholic faith into Russia.
The treacherous Shuisky brings Boris news of Grigory–Dmitri’s campaign in Poland.
In the street, Boris is accosted by a truth-telling Holy Fool who unnerves him further.
Shuisky conspires with the monk Pimen, and when Boris hears his false tale of the tsarevitch’s miracles, he collapses with horror and dies.
Grigory–Dmitri, accompanied by Varlaam, Missail and a crowd of peasants from the Kromy forest, advances on Moscow.
The Holy Fool laments Russia’s misery.

What to listen for