It is only by attending to what is unique to opera that we can get at the source of its power, and it is here, in the appeal to the physical, the expression of emotion as a bodily experience, of spirit in a bodily experience that takes us back, beyond speech, to some earlier and more direct form of communication, that we come to it. It is, for all its artificiality, in its capacity to bypass language and deal directly from body to body, that opera, at its moments of greatest intensity, touches, and in an immediate way, on what is deepest in us, releasing older and darker apprehensions and forces than belong to our social life, or to education or culture; and we need such experiences, as we need dreams, precisely because they give us access to other states than consciousness knows, and bring so instantly and energetically alive in us deeper and more unknowable selves.
Here then, to begin with, a series of paradoxes: that this most artificial of all dramatic forms speaks for what is most natural in us; that this latest, and arguably most over-civilised of forms, puts us in touch with the primitive; that an art that is often thought of as being intended only for socialites in evening dress, for snobs and stuffed shirts, releases in us the most naked emotions. We see this clearest in those characteristic instances of the operatic, the love duet, the death-bed aria, the ensemble.
In the love duet we have a unique meeting and mingling of spirits in which all the personal power of the body is present in that most intimate agency of life, the breath.
Other arts, poetry for example, can express love, either erotic or spiritual, in one voice and from one side. The love duet gives us both that and, at the same time, what the poem has only in prospect, the actual physical union in all its individuality and reciprocity; a union which is both supremely physical and at the same time bodiless, erotic and at the same time transcendent. This reaches its highest form in the love duets in Wagner, but exists as well in many earlier and later instances, from the final aria of L’Incoronazione di Poppea to the love duet in Butterfly. What is essential to it is the freedom of the two voices to express separate but reciprocal emotion in the same instant, interweaving, supporting each other, soaring in unison. The simultaneity is unique to the form and comes from our capacity – the fact is almost too obvious to bear stating – to hold more than one voice in our head at the same time, to follow both voices horizontally but at the same time experience the harmony in which they are vertically combined.
It is the fact of what breathing is, of how we know it in ourselves as the driving force of what is vital in us, that makes such moments supremely exciting and precarious, and explains why we are moved in a similar way by that other occasion for passionate duet, the swearing of loyalty between two male figures. Here too we experience a heightened sense of life at a point where two spirits are united in the most idealistic terms, but this time under the male sign, and in a union that takes them outward rather than inward, into action in the world.
What increases our sense of the physical in this latter case is the risk that action involves, the possibility of death, since we are never so aware of the poignancy of so much life and power as when it comes up hard against its own extinction; and it is here that our first operatic instance offers a hint of what we might have to say of the second.
It is one of the grand privileges of opera (or, if you wish, one of its crowning absurdities) that sopranos at the last gasp of TB, tenors who have just received their death wound, find breath to sing, and not just feebly either but in the fullest expression of an abounding healthfulness. This is the very crux of the matter, presented here at its extreme: breath expressing most powerfully what it means to be alive and in the body at the very instant of its imminent extinction, and with no diminishment of its power. Our apprehension of physical presence on the one hand and its annihilation on the other are brought into violent conjunction, and the pathos of it can be felt even when death is present only in prospect, or when the audience is aware of it and the singer as yet is not; as when Butterfly, in ‘Un bel dì vedremo’, looking forward to the intense joy she will experience at Pinkerton’s return, has to restrain herself not to die of it, soaring to the climax of her aria, the point where we feel most poignantly the doomed life in her, on ‘per non morir’; or where Cavaradossi, expecting to be saved from execution in the last act of Tosca, ends ‘E lucevan le stelle’ on a note of passionate physical assertion with ‘la vita’. Joseph Kerman’s famous jibe, ‘Tosca leaps [off the battlements] and the orchestra screams the first thing that comes into its head,’ misses the point. Puccini is not simply cashing in on the repetition of a good tune. He is setting against the deaths we have just witnessed Cavaradossi’s blazing affirmation of bodily presence and being.
Love and death. These highest expressions of the individual, the personal, the physical, achieve such powerful embodiment here because what is at stake in them is the very thing that stands before us, in all its power and vulnerability, to give them resonance, and because we are so poignantly aware of breath, the essence of life itself, as being what gives them breath.
But the capacity to take in more than one line of melody offers a further possibility, the very complex one, unique to opera, of allowing several voices, all speaking out of their own inner worlds and giving expression to their own most intimate being, to be apprehended at the same instant, in a conflict that we hear, miraculously, as from some point of reconciliation that lies outside all this, as harmony.
The auto-da-fé in Act III of Don Carlos is perhaps the classic example of such an effect.
Here, to the complex interaction of the leading characters, Phillip II, Carlos, Posa and the Queen, all torn between love of one sort or another and duty, Verdi adds the voices of the Flemish rebels who are about to be executed, the fanatical monks, the Grand Inquisitor, the page Thibault, a crowd divided many ways, and, soaring above all, the Angel who speaks from a point beyond all this of a higher and future judgement.
The musical texture, as it gathers all these voices in, dramatises a complex situation in which individual emotions are expressed at the same time as the public issues with which they are in conflict (that larger, social world to which the personal may have, at times, to submit) but from the purely musical point of view; that is, with no subjection of one to the other and in the fullest expression of both. Conflict that remains alive and active on the horizontal level is, in the unfolding scene, resolved on the harmonic level, vertically. The nineteenth-century novel aims for something like the same polyphonic richness, but in extended time and within the linear restriction of narrative. Here, in the multi-voiced world of music, the effect is immediate.
But the word ‘unfolding’, as I used it there, is misleading if what it suggests is an unfolding in real time. Time in the world of opera has a quite different consistency from real time, or even dramatic time as we experience it in a play. The music flows and is continuous (even when it is broken up into set pieces) but every aria, or duet or trio or ensemble, from the dramatic point of view, is quite literally a show-stopper. It interrupts dramatic time while musical time, taking advantage of its elasticity, expands to whatever length it pleases. Drama in opera exists in these ‘free’ moments, when real and dramatic time come to a halt. And here we have another paradox: opera is at its most intense dramatically when, from the point of view of the ‘action’, it is static.
It is this stopping and extending of time that accounts for the sense we get of distance as well as immediacy, of elevation above the particular while we are being drawn into it in a quite wholehearted and bodily way, and to a peculiar depth. By stepping free of real time into a musical time with its own pulse and duration we can be both inside the action, at the centre of the separate voices, and gathered at the same moment into a harmony that abstracts and reconciles.
This is what happens in those great moments of pause, of reflection, that are in many ways the most impressive occasions of all in opera: the ensemble in Act III of Onegin, the trio in the last act of Der Rosenkavalier, the quintet in Die Meist
ersinger, all wonderfully reposeful moments of summing up; most of all, that marvellous interweaving of voices, the resolution of all conflict on a higher level, that precedes the final triumphant scramble in Le Nozze di Figaro, but also – and the point is worth emphasising – of those extraordinary finales that Rossini so delights in, where freedom from real time allows a further freedom from every sort of logic but the purely musical one, and the characters, in a spirit of pure nonsense, abandon recognisable speech for the din din, cra cra, bam bù of pure sound.
In their irrepressible energy and joy in mere breath and being, these too speak up for the spirit, in an exercise of freedom that is supremely moving, and lifts our spirits to such a sense of bodily lightness, such exuberant pleasure in Being itself, that the effect is a profound one, though the thing itself is to all appearances superficial.
A last paradox then: that opera may move us profoundly even when it is feather-light and has nothing to say.
But what of that side of opera that I spoke of earlier as belonging to the dark?
Music has always been the realm of the sacred. The odd thing is that in Western music after the Baroque we come closest to the sacred, to moments that put us in touch with something mysteriously beyond mere statement of faith, in secular music, and most of all in music for the theatre.
In the moment in Act I of Don Giovanni when the three masked figures, Donna Elvira, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, come uninvited to the wedding, we are dealing on one level with figures who, in the ordered social world of this opera, are representatives of all that is conventional and stands on the other side from the Don’s disruptive libertinism. They enter to the strains of a minuet, that most polite of eighteenth-century dance forms, and what they sing is contained within the rhythms of it. But behind their masks these uninvited ‘galanti’, as Leporello calls them, become something altogether darker and more disturbing than the voice of eighteenth-century platitude. They are transformed by the music into representatives of an older and more primitive morality, as if dark gods had stepped in and were expressing through them values that go deeper than the conventionally social ones.
We are in touch here with the numinous, as we are not, or not quite, when Gluck evokes the numi directly in Alceste. The whole world of the opera bursts open, and the effect is all the greater – as it is again later when that other unexpected guest, the Commendatore, appears – because social conformity is so strong in the work and had appeared to be challenged from a quite different side.
Something equally mysterious happens in those melodramas such as Rigoletto or Il Trovatore or La Forza del Destino that share, with popular novelists like Dickens, and street ballads and folk stories, a fondness for the sort of improbable coincidences and shocking peripeteia that survive, these days, only in the most naïve places, in television romances, say, from Mexico or Brazil. Lost and substituted children, fateful prophecies, family feuds; deadly rivals who turn out to be brothers; sworn friends who turn out to be blood foes; the fatal obsession of brothers with their sisters’ honour or fathers with their daughters’ virginity – all these go back to some darker and more primitive condition of human existence where happenings of the kind must have represented real possibilities, or at least real fears, and which, under certain circumstances, we still respond to. Under the circumstances, I mean, where we let go of our modern self-consciousness and open ourselves to Dickens’ spellbinding power of narration or to the primitive passions released by the music of Il Trovatore.
The characters in these nineteenth-century dramas belong to a darker crueller world than the one we move in, a world we know quite well in fact from dreams, and they act there on darker principles than we care to recognise in the broad light of day, though we are familiar enough with them too, and from the same source. It is something in music itself, some power it has to subvert the ‘intelligence’ and speak directly to the passions, its having its roots perhaps in the ‘primitive’, that makes it possible for us to move back into these dark places in ourselves, as we could not if such absurdities were played or spoken; and we find in moving back, in the release into a more primitive area of ourselves, something energising, uplifting, healing.
It is this regressive quality in the phenomenon, this letting go of the social and critical part of our consciousness, that so scandalised Brecht and made opera, for him, the very antithesis of all he wanted for the modern theatre. He was right. Opera is all he said it was. Which is why it has survived. It is the last place in modern theatre where we can experience the dark thrill that Greek drama offered, and Shakespeare too before the Brechtians got hold of him; of being in touch with deeper forces in ourselves, and in the world, than our clever modern selves can deal with. Brecht seems these days like part of that sour, critical side of the twentieth century that we have begun to lose patience with. Verdi, on the other hand, is more than ever one of the giants – not of the nineteenth century but of our own. Speaking directly to the heart of a modern audience, he is (however such a conjunction may disturb some of our most cherished cultural theories) both profound and popular. For opera is, as it has always been, a popular art. This makes it a stumbling block to those who believe that an art whose appeal is both widespread and immediate can only be trivial; but the rest of us, who do not mind sharing with the hoi polloi an experience that so hugely moves and transforms us, will rejoice in one of the few places in the high arts where such a sharing is still possible.
All this will go some way, one hopes, towards answering those who ask how these dusty melodramas can be relevant to a modern audience, and whether the experience they offer is in any sense a modern one at all. It is not. It wasn’t modern in the nineteenth century, either. Its whole point is to free the audience of real time and awake in them a consciousness which, like the one we step back to in dreams, is free of the forms of behaviour, and the moralities too, that belong to social conditioning. It is in this sense neither modern nor anti-modern; they are terms that have no meaning for it. Our response to Jenufa or Wozzeck or The Turn of the Screw is not essentially different from our response to Rigoletto, though the musical language may have to be learned, like all musical languages including that of Rigoletto, before it comes fully alive for us. Nor does it matter that the repertory is, for the most part, Italian, German, French, with a few Eastern European additions. Onegin is perfectly accessible to an Italian audience, as it is to a Dutch or Spanish or Australian one. Something in music itself dissolves the boundaries of place and language as it does the boundaries of time.
Is opera still a living art? That is, apart from its vitality in performance, is it a form that is still capable of being added to, or are its great occasions inevitably behind us? Can composers, looking at opera today, see an opportunity to shake the repertory by setting beside the great works of the past, Figaro, Don Giovanni, Tristan, Carmen, Falstaff, Wozzeck, Peter Grimes, an equivalent work of their own? Why not?
What we mean by greatness in any artist, it seems to me, is that he finds the conditions he is born into precisely the ones that suit him, the ones he needs. Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Janacek, Berg, Britten – each of these composers, in his different way, found the state of opera in his time exactly suited to the fullest expression of his gift. This is always the case. It is one of the conditions of genius that the world he is born into has already prepared a place for him; the time and the place are always right. The only condition on a great creative spirit, in any art and at any time, is that he should be creative.
As for the life of opera itself – one reason for playing new works along with the old is that the old works need a living context if they too are to be fully alive; they are changed and revivified by the new, as the new draws a large part of its power from them. Audiences learn to hear old works in a new way by having their ears kept alert by the demands of the new. How can we respond to the new if our listening experience is not a continuous one, if what comes new to the repertory has not been prepared for so that we recognise it
as both new and continuous? The popularity of opera in this century, which is quite undiminished, speaks for the liveliness of one side of the art. The list of twentieth-century masterpieces, from Pelléas to Billy Budd and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, speaks for the other, though it has to be said that, since Britten, opera is still waiting, with a place prepared, for its newest spirit to appear.
First delivered as the Kathleen Robinson Lecture on Drama and the Theatre, Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney, October 1988
SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I spent a night at the opera with two overseas visitors: my German translator, who was here to see in the original what she had so far experienced only on the page, and her husband, who also works in publishing. They were, like many Germans, well informed about Australia: the landscape, the animals, the Aborigines. They had chosen Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea because it was such a rarity. How unlikely, how unexpected. To come all the way to Australia and find a 300-year-old baroque opera they had never had the chance to see at home.
Even more unexpected was what the evening actually provided. Not just the excellence of the singing and the cheekiness of the production, with its punk prepubescent Cupid in Doc Martens and its outrageous play with gender, but the buzz the audience itself brought to the occasion, the interaction between Monteverdi’s unpredictably ‘modern’ opera and, for my Germans, these unpredictable Sydneysiders, who clearly found something of themselves in it. This night at the opera turned out to be the strongest of all their impressions of Australia; the one, they felt, where they came closest to an Australia they could never have guessed at and which put them immediately in touch, or so they felt, with the energy, but also the originality of the place.