Operating on the Opera

...This means that except in the cheap seats, which in American mammoth opera houses tend to be beyond the reach of human senses (maybe a dog could hear, an eagle see from that far), the audience has to be affluent...

...Yet if culture is to survive at all, it has to be supported without regard for financial returns...

...even a much easier modern jewel, Britten's Peter Grimes, cannot begin to compete at the Metropolitan Opera with such dreary old war horses as La Gioconda, Samson and Delila, or Andrea Chenier...

...Opera can survive on an appreciable scale only when original works are written and produced...

...but mounting new productions of old operas is a lot more expensive than simply dusting off a set of ancient bones...

...But inasmuch as I am not a professional music critic, let me return to the question of operatic texts...

...This is, of course, only a random sampling, a mere fraction of the available choices...

...First, there is the objet trouve or ready-made libretto: a play which, usually effective as drama, is equally or more so as opera, and can be set virtually verbatim to music...

...it is dependent by definition on the theatrical dialect of music...

...Whether the possibilities of singable melody have been exhausted through centuries of song composition (folk and art song, opera, operetta, cantata, oratorio, etc...

...Even as arid a score as Schonberg's Moses und Aron might fare better if one could empathize with its story...

...Strauss' opera Ca-priccio deals precisely with the problem of what is first in importance, the music or the words...

...To let in the daylight, she coaxes from him the keys to seven great locked doors and begins to find such things as a torture chamber, an armory, a treasury...

...at the Met??where, to begin with, it was conducted, played and sung worse-its English words communicated less, even to an English-speaking audience, than the Hungarian ones in Solti's rendering...

...or whether our composers are so spiritually jaded and intellectually over-ambitious that they can no longer handle or be content with "mere" tunefulness, is a moot point...

...Then, there is the question of taste: The City Opera's Julius Rudel has a fanatical devotion to inferior composers like Gi-nastera and pretentiously inept stage directors like Frank Corsaro, and disasters ensue...

...If Henze's The Young Lord didn't work out so well, why not try some of his others, notably Elegy for Young Lovers, with a libretto by Auden and Kallman...

...But a supreme example of the meeting of a fine librettist with a great composer is the collaboration of Bela Bartok and Bela Balazs on that 1911 masterpiece, Bluebeard's Castle...

...Hence it is hard to find a decent, working libretto...

...opera houses do not...

...beyond the oft-performed operas of Puccini, Strauss and, latterly, Britten, there are good and even great works that could form the year-round sustenance of a house of modern opera that ought to exist alongside of every traditional opera house...

...But in English, "Tears, Judith, tears, tears" will not scan...

...Where are such profound or delightful works as, for instance, Fal-la's two operas, or some of Syzma-nowski's and Vaughan Williams', Villa-Lobos' and Dallapiccola's...

...Not that there isn't a solid 20th-century repertoire...

...Our government and foundations believe in the "going concern": What is not potentially self-supporting is not worth subsidizing...

...But woman's curiosity will not be gainsaid, and she uncovers his previous wives, reputedly murdered but alive in a mute, ghostly fashion, and all seemingly lovelier than she is...

...that is what Janacek did for Czech, Britten for British, and Bartok for Hungarian speech...

...or you must melismatically stretch the word into a disyllable-tea-ears??an unidiomatic mess...

...Bluebeard tries hard to keep her from the sixth door, opening on a lake of tears-his guilt feelings and the sorrows of his conscience- and desperately hard to keep her from the seventh and last door...

...unfortunately, except for a few passages, neither the words nor the music of Capriccio is very successful, and, as subject for an opera, the whole debate is probably much too academic, anyway...

...If Prokofiev is not in, who is...

...The entire production was pretentious, irrelevant, and totally sabotaged the true meaning and progression of the opera: inward, toward ever greater and more terrible intimacy...

...If our leading opera house will so stupidly, wrong-headedly abuse a rare masterwork, what hope is there for the survival of opera...

...If costs go up, unions prove intractable, and the public ear becomes a recessive organ, opera may die...

...Money is tight, making patronage hard to come by, and opera is less popular and more expensive than many genres...

...Dance theaters and concert halls, however, continue to be solvent...

...just as you can find Cezanne and Vuillard in both museums, you would find Strauss and Britten in both houses...

...where is Prokofiev's The Flaming Angel (neatly butchered by Corsaro for the City Opera) and War and Peace (so expensive that the Met would have to do it, but why not...

...Britten is on safer ground with Melville (Billy Budd) than with Mann (Death in Venice), even though the latter is still at some distance from us...

...The work was performed, moreover, in an English translation that could not begin to cope with the apt harmony between the Hungarian words and the music...

...Another barrier is the stolidity of audiences...

...For most people, opera must be as commonplace and anodyne as a breakfast food...

...Where is Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmelites (done briefly and inadequately at the City Opera), and his potentially sellout double bill of Les Mamelles de Tiresias and La Voix humaine...

...This dual quality is captured by Prokofiev's opera, in which the orchestra has the most timelessly melodious passages, while the characters tend to lapse into a nervous, contemporary quasi-parlando, possessing its own speechlike melodies...

...Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream does not come off, partly because the verbal and musical idioms are too far apart...

...But contemporary music has de-emphasized melodiousness...

...She must now join them behind a locked door, as darkness repossesses the castle...

...Opera, after all, is based on song, on actual human singing and the cantabile aspect of instrumental writing...

...Some examples here are the Janacek-Dostoevsky From the House of the Dead, the Karl Amadeus Hartmann-Grimmelshau-sen Simplicius Simplicissimus, the Dallapiccola-Saint-Exupery Night Flight, the Honegger-Louys King Pausole, the Falla-Cervantes Master Peter's Puppet Show, and the Delius-Keller A Village Romeo and Juliet...

...Into this class fall the Strauss-Wilde Salome, the Berg-Buchner Wozzeck and Berg-Wedekind Lulu, the Janacek-Ostrovsky Katya Kabanova, the Debussy-Maeterlinck Pelleas et Me-lisande (even though the play has rather dated), the Poulenc operas mentioned above, and the Henze-Kleist Prince of Homburg, among others...

...Bryusov, a distinguished poet-novelist, couched his sordid real-life love affair with a neurotic woman whom he kept losing to another important poet-novelist, Andrey Bely, in the form of a medieval tale of witchcraft, necromancy and demonic possession, achieving simultaneously a distant, exotic quality and a harrowing emotional immediacy...

...At the Met, this profound psychological parable was distorted into a catchpenny political allegory, with slide projections of atom bomb explosions, concentration camps, and slums being converted into hideous housing developments...

...The two need not have rigorous boundaries...

...This barrier extends to librettos: Literature, too, has moved away from strong feelings- possibly for no other reason than the genuine need to avoid deriva-tiveness and repetition-and the contemporary modes, full of indirection, ambiguity, allusiveness, and irony, do not readily lend themselves to sustained musical setting...

...But never mind Berg...

...In theory, that is what it has been doing, yet, partly because its audiences also tend to be overconservative, and partly because it happens to have Beverly Sills as its trump card, and her forte is bel canto, the City Opera competes with the Met in areas where its smaller orchestra, lesser singers, and more modest budget are asking to be bested...

...Similarly, Prokofiev comes off better with the fairytale world of Carlo Gozzi (Love for the Three Oranges) than with the much more modern one of Semyon Kotko, all propaganda elements in Kotko aside...

...Programing looms as a very serious matter...

...Translation does not always help...

...And what of that most interesting of electronic operas, Karl Birger Blomdahl's Ani-ara, based on a poem by the Nobel Prize winner, Harry Martinsson...

...The first barrier is the direction contemporary music has taken...

...There are cases where the play was too static, like Hofmanns-thal's Elektra, possibly one reason the Strauss opera seems less than great...

...The splendid Balazs libretto concerns the romantic-erotic tragedy of modern man and woman, told ostensibly in terms of Perrault's fairy tale...

...The disyllabic Hungarian word and the trochaic meter of the language are perfectly espoused by the music...

...Say what you will about great old operas with lousy texts-e.g., The Magic Flute, Il Trovatore, etc.- almost all the finest newer works have distinguished librettos, suggesting that today's audiences demand such niceties...

...True, dinosaur skeletons can thrive in museums even without new dinosaurs being born...

...Otello and Falstaff work, because the first has been simplified, and because both plays have been translated into the Italian of Verdi's time and thus, in effect, updated...

...In this two-character, one-act opera, Duke Bluebeard has abducted the lovely Judith, who loves him, from her fiance and family, and brought her to his dark, dank, win-dowless castle...

...The gifted Swiss composer, Frank Martin, came to grief with The Tempest (Der Sturm...

...another may be the music itself...

...The problem, though, is more complex than that...

...Corsaro was able, almost unaided, to scuttle a work as noble and important as Janacek's The Makropulos Case, with the irrelevant clutter of slide and film projections and actually tampering with the libretto...

...When Judith asks what that white, still lake is made of, Bluebeard answers: "Kon-nyek, Judit, konnyek, konnyek...

...Or Werner Egk's The Magic Fiddle...

...A great deal depends here on the play's having a modern flavor...

...while the concert hall will house mostly the more contemplative expressions of pure sound...

...Yet modern fiction can work, especially when its modernity is veiled in ostensible antiquity, as in the same composer's masterly The Flaming Angel, based on a remarkable novel by Valery Bryusov...

...Judith unlocks further doors, revealing large domains and beautiful flower gardens that are tainted with blood (the symbolism is self-explanatory...

...The third possibility is to find a writer of talent who will produce a superbly suitable text for you, as, for instance, Hofmannsthal did- often, but not always-for Strauss, or Ingeborg Bachmann for Henze...

...Auden and Kallman almost pulled it off for Stravinsky in The Rake's Progress, and Dylan Thomas might very well have done it for him but for the cruel intervention of death...

...The great librettos of recent times have been of three kinds...

...Since it costs much more to produce an opera than any other theatrical spectacle as things now stand, ticket prices are higher...

...The trick is to find a fiction that is contemporary in spirit yet somewhat removed in its trappings, for the stylization of opera cannot easily be reconciled with our own everyday world...

...Most great modern musical settings depend on recreating in musical terms the natural rhythms and melodies of a given language...

...Some of the greatest contemporary operas remain unpro-duced or totally misproduced by our major opera houses...

...I do not know exactly how much the libretto matters to the public, yet I am convinced that it matters to some extent, and that operas whose librettos mean something to a modern audience might have an easier time of it...

...Could any audience resist Honeg-ger's The Adventures of King Pau-sole...

...So you must either add the deadwood of extra verbiage and destroy the stark plainness of the line with its four trochees, its sadness increased by the fact that after the girl's name the tears reappear doubly, as if sharing them with her made them flow with redoubled intensity...

...These represent the sins of his psychic castle-his cruelty, bellicosity, rapacity-all palliated by being brought into the open...

...Surely, Ko-daly's Hary Janos, whose orchestral arrangement is so popular on the radio (and frequently announced there as the "Hairy Anus Suite"), could go over big with its delectably folksy fairy-tale quality...

...But the City Opera, or its equivalent, should concentrate on the newer works...

...If our education- including musical education-gets steadily worse, audiences for the relatively demanding art form of opera will inevitably decrease...

...Just as there is in New York (and, mutatis mutandis, elsewhere) the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, there could be the Metropolitan Opera doing the classics and those moderns on their way to being recognized as classics, and the New York City Opera specializing in less well known works...

...Solti had the opera sung in Hungarian...

...No living woman can compete with the beauty of memories, and some things the lover must keep private even from his beloved...

...New operas, which ought to provide the necessary thrill and revenue, fail to materialize, or fail upon materializing...

...Also, the play, even if modern, has to be well chosen: Had the unhappy Marvin David Levy been possessed of some talent, Mourning Becomes Electro, one of O'Neill's unwieldiest plays, would most likely still have resulted in a fiasco...

...This was enormously moving even in concert form, as performed recently with much brilliance by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony...

...On the other hand, plays like Summer and Smoke and Wede-kind's The Tenor (Der Kammer-sanger) might have yielded better operatic results in abler hands than Lee Hoiby's and Hugo Weisgal's...

...So when the Met finally mounted the work last season, it should have proved a shot in its ailing arm instead of a catastrophe...

...and, the affluent hereabouts tend to be uncultivated, their wealth the reward of cultivating their greed instead of their minds...

...just as in Stravinsky-Ramuz's The Soldier's Tale, whoever wants everything, loses all...

...Where is what would be an irresistible double bill by Ravel, L'Heure Espagnole and L'Enfant et les Sortileges...

...Take a very simple example...

...Thus, whereas you can sell out the house for a Tosca or Rigoletto, today part of a universal Muzak, a palpable 20th-century masterpiece like Wozzeck, though its musical idiom is no longer forbiddingly unfamiliar, never fills the auditorium...

...Like other forms of expression, music can be emotional, muscular, or cerebral-or, to put it more technically, can emphasize melody, rhythm, or sonorous texture-and, clearly, the operatic or theatrical branch must be primarily emotional, feelingful, i.e., mleodious: the dance division, mainly kinetic, rhythmical...

...The second kind of libretto is an intelligent adaptation of some non-dramatic text...

...For an art form to stay alive, it must produce new shoots...

...Where is Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen...