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| Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci at the Met | COMPOSERS BOOKS SYLLABUS FOLDABLE |
LINKS: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Opera has a reputation as an elitist, extravagant, or escapist form, with little connection to real life. But not even the most extravagantly imagined operas were created or performed in a vacuum. They were sponsored by a prince for his own glory, or written for profit in a commercial market. Even when representing events from mythology or the distant past, they also reflected the social and political conditions of their own time.
Audiences have changed also over the span of opera's history, four centuries and counting. Courtiers have given way to private citizens. Opera houses founded as jewels of the gilded age now struggle to attract a more diverse public. To do so, they have had to present works from earlier eras in ways that reflect the experience of our own. They have faced an even greater challenge in launching new works by contemporary composers born out of present-day conditions and concerns—but these are essential if the art form is to continue to flourish.
The twelve classes below are listed in chronological order of the earliest opera to be presented in them. But most include reference to later operas as well, including many written in our own lifetime that approach similar themes from radically different directions. There will be some familiar operas here, such as The Marriage of Figaro, Fidelio, and Cavalleria Rusticana. But there are many that you may encounter for the first time, such as La Juive (Halévy, 1835), The Battle of Legnano (Verdi, 1849), The Invisible City of Kitezh (Rimsky-Korsakov, 1907), and The Passenger (Weinberg, 1968). By design, the first class will include some videos that I have played before in other contexts, but I intend to offer new material as much as possible from then on, choosing different scenes or productions even when the operas are well-known. There may be some additions or subtractions as I fill out the brief outline below.
The course will be delivered on Zoom. As each class is developed, one or more of the links below each picture will turn to GOLD. You are encouraged to read the HANDOUTS in advance; on a double-sided printer, the FOLDED versions can be printed as booklets. Scripts, YouTube links, and other RESOURCES will be posted immediately after each class. rb.
| February 22 | |
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| Monteverdi's Orfeo in Munich | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
This first class will offer a rapid overview of some of the topics to be considered in the rest of the course. The very different conditions surrounding the funding and performance of Monteverdi's first and last operas, for example. Handel's work to sustain the appetite for opera in London against the encroachment of more popular fare. Verdi expressing his fervor for a united Italy in cautiously coded terms that would evade the Austrian censors. And more briefly, political satire of Brecht and Weill in The Threepenny Opera and John Adams' bold decision in Nixon in China to write an historical opera about still-living people.
| March 8 | |
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| Lully's Atys in Paris | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Opera composers from Monteverdi onwards who wrote for noble patrons had to dress their works with appropriate deference. Lully's operas such as Atys (1675) often began with an allegorical prologue in praise of Louis XIV. Mozart was less explicit in his Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and La Clemenza di Tito (1791) written for Joseph II and Leopold II respectively, but both operas model the ideal clemency of an Enlightement ruler. But Benjamin Britten, writing Gloriana for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, fell short of the mark, by ending with a portrait of the first Elizabeth old, bald, and burdened with regret. It has taken much ingenuity for later directors to salvage Britten's undoubted musical brilliance in the work.
| March 15 | |
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| Rameau's Les Indes galantes in Paris | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Much baroque opera was based on myth and fantasy. Although Rameau's Les Indes galantes (The Gallant Indes, 1735) was written to celebrate the glories of France as a colonial power, most of its depiction of other countries is entirely fanciful. We shall look at Clément Cogitore's recent production of the opera in Paris, in a multi-racial society where "colonial" is a toxic term. Then, for a complete change of pace, we look at Dvorak's fairy-tale opera Rusalka (1901) in a striking production by Martin Kusej inspired by an horrific story that had hit the European headlines a few years perviously.
| April 12 March 22 | |
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| Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in Parma | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
This class has been moved up by three weeks to serve as an introduction to the Metropolitan Opera's screening of Don Carlos in cinemas on Saturday, March 26.
In first half of his career, Verdi was forced to alter the settings of politically sensitive subjects to get them past the censors. The womanizing tenor in Rigoletto (1851) that we now know as the Duke of Mantua was originally François I of France. King Gustavus of Sweden, whose assassination is the subject of Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball, 1859), became Riccardo, the Governor of colonial Boston. And the contemporary action of La traviata (1853) had to be pushed back two centuries to make it palatable. But when setting a French adaptation of Schiller's play Don Carlos in 1867, he was able to remain relatively true both to the original and to history. The action is set against the background of the quest for independence in the Spanish Netherlands; an auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition forms the Act III finale; and King Philip II is shown in private anguish, musing on kingship and mortality.
| March 22 March 29 | |
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| Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in London | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
The Storming of the Bastille took place three years after Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (1786) and eleven years after the Beaumarchais play on which it was based. Yet the sun was already setting on the ancien régime. Beaumarchais' Figaro, which features the comeuppance of a lascivious aristocrat, is inevitably a political play; yet Mozart's genius makes it a personal drama played out in terms of universal human emotions. We shall also look at how Mozart addressed both the personal and political themes in Don Giovanni (1787) and The Magic Flute (1791).
| March 29 April 5 | |
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| Beethoven's Fidelio in London | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Beethoven's Fidelio (first version 1805) is nominally set in Spain and features an aristocrat, imprisoned by another aristocrat, rescued by the heroism of his wife, and finally freed by a minister of the King—yet it pulses with the spirit of revolution, and echoes to the cry of Liberty. After exploring the paradox of Beethoven's only opera, we will glance at one or more later operas that use the prison setting to plead passionate humanitarian points: Janacek's From the House of the Dead (1930), Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (2000), and/or Thierry Escaich's Claude (2013).
| April 5 April 12 | |
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| Halévy's La Juive in Gothenborg | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Two of the composers who created the genre of grand opéra in Paris in the 1830s were Jewish: Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromenthal Halévy, whose opera La Juive (The Jewess, 1835) was to remain a cornerstone of the repertory for many decades. Though set in a real period of persecution in 15th-century Constance, it is highly romanticized, written for its spectacle and passion. We shall contrast this with clips from two post-Holocaust operas. The Passenger by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, composed in 1968 but not produced until 2010, is about a German woman traveling on a passenger liner whose accidental sight of a former camp inmate on a lower deck makes her relive her former life as a camp guard, which she has tried to hide even from her diplomat spouse. And The Promise by Mats Larsson Gothe, which premiered only this year, is a dreamlike (but real) account of a survivor's postwar journey to be reunited with her lost husband.
| April 19 | |
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| Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1882), has been seen as a retreat from real-world concerns into a vaguely-Christian mysticism. Yet a number of recent productions have been dedicated to the premise that Wagner remained what he always was—a social revolutionary—and that Parsifal, like the other operas, is a political document with vital things to say about human, moral, and geopolitical concerns.
| April 26 | |
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| Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in Dallas | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, the culture of the Russian court was dominated by French influence. Following the example set in literature by Pushkin in the first quarter of the century, a group of composers known as "The Five" or "The Mighty Handful" got together in the late 1850s to forge a distinctively Russian style. We shall look at operas by two of them. Modest Mussorgsky based his Boris Godunov (1874) on a Pushkin play about a Tsar thought to have murdered the heir apparent in order to gain the throne; it is simultaneously a portrait of the Russian people, a study in Realpolitik, and a window into the mind of a tormented ruler. By contrast, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's Invisible City of Kitezh (1904) is based on folk legend, but a recent production by Dmitri Tcherniakov at the Netherlands Opera manages to make it brutally relevant to modern life while maintaining the visionary Utopianism that frames it.
| May 3 | |
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| Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana in London | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Verismo (realism), was an Italian movement that began around 1875 in literature and painting, depicting the lives of common people rather than the heroes of myth, history, and romance. Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry, 1890) is generally cited as the first true example in opera. Yet when a director like Franco Zeffirelli puts virtually the entire population of a Sicilian town on the stage in his production, is this truly realism or mere another kind of theatrical artifact? We shall look at different treatments of this opera (and possibly others), including a new one by Robert Carsen who, by fully embracing the theatricality, makes one question the whole idea of reality on the stage.
| May 10 | |
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| Philip Glass' Satyagraha in London | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Opera, which began as court entertainment in the seventeenth century, has attracted a large number of leftward-leaning librettists and composers in the twentieth, even if their audiences still do not match the profile of the people they depict. So we have The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, a much more sophisticated work than their earlier Threepenny Opera (1928), though equally forceful as political and social satire. We will look briefly at The Cradle Will Rock (1937) by Marc Blitzstein, commissioned by the WPA but shut down before its first performance. And we end with Satyagraha (1980), Philip Glass' opera about the early activism of Mahatma Gandhi, sung entirely in Sanskrit but nonetheless making a powerful impact by musical and visual means.
| May 17 | |
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| Turnage's Anna Nicole in London | |
Finally, a group of operas about real people whose lives, whether through media manipulation or their own or both, had in effect become operas long before any music was written: Jackie O by Michael Daugherty (1997), Anna Nicole [Smith] by Mark-Anthony Turnage (2011), and the controversial musical Jerry Springer: the Opera by Richard Thomas (2001). Could real life penetrate opera any farther… or is any of it real?
I regret to say that I have had to cancel this last class, as I have been sick and unable to pull it together to the standard we have all come to expect—especially given the potential of much of this material to seem trivial or cause offence if not carefully handled. I hope you understand. rb.
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