Misanthropic Nostalgia
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Misanthropic Nostalgia A Rage for Opera: Its Anatomy as Drawn from Life By Robert Lawrence Dodd, Mead. 176 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell GRAND OPERA, like the novel, has fallen on...
...the Met was founded by nouveau-riche socialites as a display case for themselves...
...Seasonal subscriptions will run dry unless the renewal comes, fresh composers are found, new trends explored...
...it began near the end of the 16th century with Jacapo Peri's Dajne (circa 1597) and reached its zenith in the 19th...
...More experimental, Luigi Nono's L'lntoleranza was castigated for being ugly and gimmicky...
...There is still a tendency to use the historically oriented, melodramatic librettos popular in the last century or, worse, overloaded allegory a la Magic Flute...
...But without state subsidies, cheap tickets for workers and students, low-budget performances, or any of the other European innovations, it is hard to see how opera in the United States can survive, let alone attract new composers...
...As E. M. Forster pointed out in one of his novels, opera in Italy "aims not at illusion but at entertainment," and while one may not hear the music free of interruptions, it is at least theater, not the hush of religious awe inaugurated by the Wagnerites...
...His greatest wrath is reserved for the demonstrative audience that disrupts the performance, especially one that screams its lungs out for a star "as if at a sporting event...
...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell GRAND OPERA, like the novel, has fallen on hard times, and we cannot be certain whether its malaise is temporary or terminal...
...The young Hector Berlioz shocked and amused Parisian audiences by castigating bad musicians during the performance, and by weeping at sublime passages...
...Throughout the history of opera, and more so in its flowering than today, people have come to it for non- or extra-musical reasons: L'Opera at one time served as a display case for demimondaine prima donnas and ballerinas...
...Even the most musically appreciative have not always been restrained...
...Yes, even the pliant congregation will at last sink exhausted beside the long cocktail bar, champagne trickling unchecked along their trouser legs...
...it is one man's opinions on his favorite subject...
...about preserving the costly star system, he is more adamant...
...This state of affairs is the primary motivation for Robert Lawrence's A Rage for Opera, an emotional complaint against present decay in the light of past glories: "It is opera that I love, with the rage of vanished youth...
...Again like the novel, opera is not an ancient form...
...Until these problems—both musical and theatrical—are resolved, it is unlikely that much new opera will be forthcoming...
...Attend performances at such well-behaved locales as the Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires and the Edinburgh festival, or: "Attend Wagner and Straus 'live' (they leave no chance for audience uproar during the musical flow...
...No one would deny the necessity of singers adequate to the musical demands of the score, yet this is hardly a justification for the personality cults promoted by the star system, to say nothing of its demoralizing effects on others in the production...
...to some extent it is the crisis of modern music looking for new turnings...
...That indeed is today's problem...
...The passion of 19th-century society for spectacle (with no mass media to satiate it) embraced this most eclectic of the arts, and made conditions favorable for the best composers of the day to write operas...
...Lawrence brings his passion to almost every aspect of opera, devoting a section each to audiences, repertoire, singers, conductors, producers and designers, the massed forces of orchestra-chorus-ballet, and the impresarios...
...The two most successful modern operas, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes and Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, have been criticized for not being modern enough...
...A Rage for Opera is not a primer for fledgling enthusiasts...
...The crisis in opera is not merely economic...
...But his concern is genuine, and as a conductor and operatic authority (he is currently director of the opera department at Baltimore's Peabody Institute) he knows how desperate the situation really is...
...In the meantime, it would be well for critics and writers like Lawrence to let go of the past and start pointing the way to a living future...
...The problem here is that Lawrence is asking for an even more elite audience than the present one...
...Cheering, it courts the vocal home-run...
...The great difficulty with A Rage for Opera is that Lawrence seems less interested in revitalizing opera than in restoring his youthful passion...
...How to keep her vibrant, ever in the vein...
...Performances in which the cast functions strictly as a unit have small value if the singers are not first-class...
...His solution...
...Regrettably, he has a touch of that snobbism which revels in the obscure...
...Enjoy everything else on records or tapes in the quiet of one's rooms...
...And one suspects that the cult surrounding Maria Callas stemmed in part from stories of her temperamental outbursts (reminiscent of past divas who behaved like goddesses and were treated as such...
...his pantheon of forgotten operas and performers will send even the moderately informed opera buff leafing through reference books...
...Lawrence slights student and semiprofessional opera troupes...
...With the decline of that society, the increasing expenses of production and the formation of unions to protect exploited orchestras, singers and stagehands, new operas have not only become few and far between but the old repertoire has shrunk dismally...
...Lawrence is reluctant to forego the elegant trappings of the old opera houses...
...This quotation gives a general idea of Lawrence's overripe style, as florid as the worst libretto...
...the burden of opera's decline is laid on the general managers who pander to their subscribers' limited taste...
...In tackling the question of new operas, he also shows his era by hailing such musicals as Porgy and Bess and West Side Story as the potential beginning of a fresh form of music drama...
...The result is a combination of nostalgia and misanthropy...
...He never mentions "rock operas" like Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar, popular forms that seem more vital than those moribund musicals...
...Indeed one's last thought, unless he were a martinet stage director, would be the abolition of stars...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
