What Opera Can Do for You

...The numinous-in-passing Scarpia turns into an "ambivalent father-figure...

...Starting from a worthy proposition and landing in an improbable conclusion is a frequent phenomenon in the book...

...or he comes up with something devious such as "even in verismo opera there are hidden layers, where archetypes may be working assiduously enough beneath the surface in their usual way...

...though "collective unconscious" does not appear as such, it is repeatedly paraphrased or subsumed...

...Anything can be made numinous...

...and the localizing component, staging...

...To be sure, it had been there all along in the form of recitative, which itself came in two forms: accompanied by full orchestra (stromentato) or merely punctuated by the harpsichord (secco...

...Whether we like it or not, arioso has become the stuff of modern opera— perhaps because it is more like the workings of the mind than aria is, or because it is more neurotic and thus more contemporary...

...some desperate librettos have been turned into pretty decent operas, not least // trovatore and, yes, The Magic Flute...

...The rest is Donington projecting the collective unconscious or anima mundi promiscuously and procrusteanly...

...This reaches its apogee in his statement that "The gap, if it is a gap, between body and soul is most agreeably bridged...

...This self-contradiction is somewhat softened by an earlier assertion: "I think there has to be something reasonably good about any words which can be composed in good music on the scale of opera...

...confirm it to our feelings and our intuitions, if not to our thoughts...

...As Donington writes, "For me, opera has to move on...

...Though the number of possible combinations of musical sounds may be infinite, the number of pleasurable combinations is far more limited...

...What of it...

...These and related questions occupy the late Robert Donington in Opera and Its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music, and Staging, a long title, but one that as nearly as any says it all...

...All the same, G m happy to read what he has to say about megalomaniacal directors and certain modernist composers, whether, like Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and Hans Werner Henze, they call their quasi-operas by some other name, or whether, like Philip Glass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Harrison Birtwhistle, they don't...

...I cannot, for instance, think of a ballet score I would rather keep rehearing than Henri Dutilleux's Le Loup (The Wolf) of 1953, or of an opera less likely to pall on me than Aulis Sallinen's The Red Line (1973...

...white, white—or, at the utmost, slightly off-white, e.g...

...When the director, even if for very different reasons of his own, plays into Donington's hands, apparently it is all right to interpret the symbols...

...To sleep with him is the last thing she wants...

...in that magical coloratura...

...That may well be true, despite its scant relevance to Capriccio, but Donington continues, "and nowhere more so than in opera...

...In his case the Jungian footwork gets very fancy...

...The book is a statement of beliefs and, further, a short history of opera with brief musical analyses...

...Arioso, of course, like most things, comes in various qualities...

...Words function as conscious or unconscious symbols (archetypes), but music has its symbols, too...

...The only directorial perspective that can be right is the perspective of the work itself...

...The book is full of references to archetypes, animusand anima, thenuminous, feminine and masculine components, and the rest of the Jungian paraphernalia...

...Or perhaps melody, as it was practiced from, say, Monteverdi to Verdi and Strauss, has been used up, and what is left is mostly arioso...

...But when I say a third source of music—speech—entered modern opera, I mean something else: strong suggestions of talk in the main vocal and orchestral passages...

...Isn't that, again, staging the meaning of the symbols...

...yet more archetypal...

...And especially in this one...

...Like all doctrinarians—including benignly Jungian ones— Donington constructs a seemingly impregnable system...

...Tosca is not attracted to him, she abhors him...

...but that is only...

...I hope this isn't just snobbery: "Melody...

...it makes a big difference whether Leos Janâcek is doing it or Michael Tippett...

...But it is selling well: I saw a goodly supply in a bookstore where hardcovers of this sort from Yale seldom showup...

...It seems much more plausible that Wagner was being, as usual, grandiosely autobiographical—that the Dutchman is Wagner himself, the supreme artist, looking for the perfect loving woman who will sacrifice everything for him...

...Madame Sans-Gêne or Tosca...

...bel can ?? opera was singer's opera, to which, as time went by, more and more spectacle was added, and spectacle had to be dance or, at the very least, its cousin, pantomime...

...or he gives them rather short shrift by twisting one or two aspects of the story to suit his needs before quickly moving on to the next opera...

...Apropos Strauss' Capriccio, he says "the artist above all is the man who knows more than he knows that he knows...

...And the villain Scarpia, in Tosca, "as he soars into his wonderful cantilena in Act II...

...It seems to me that, like all music, opera comes from two sources, the movement of the vocal cords and the movement of the body, i.e., song and dance...

...Donington's intention is to maximize Wagner's profundity, yet he actually trivializes a dragon that stands for the trials the hero (or we) must overcome in the quest for self-fulfillment...

...The images resulting may not look supernatural, but they are certainly numinous...

...He wrote a number of books, mostly about opera and baroque music...

...But now we read: "No one would be bothering much with Schikaneder [the librettist of The Magic Flute] if it were not for Mozart...

...Franco Zeffirelli, in his magnificent stage production, certainly took this view of Tosca, insisting that Tosca desires Scarpia as much as she detests him...

...we don't stoop to that...

...That is where speech, or musically verbalized thought, comes in...

...This is straightforward and compelling...

...It is, for example, more than plausible that Alban Berg's formal rigor, especially in Lulu, had to do with fear of losing control...

...Mathematics may have something to do with it...

...comes very near to taking over the hero's role"—in other words, becomes transiently numinous...

...doubly disturbing to Tosca on that account...

...His Scarpia was a dyed-in-the-wool villain, and remains so in the opera, albeit worldly and debonair...

...We leave that to operetta or musical theater...

...How, let me ask, do you respond to the following: "She is an essence of that Great Mother of a thousand names...

...Later on, her sign will be negative...

...and for me, I am bound to admit, minimalism resembles nothing so much as one of those nightmares in which you most wish but are least able to move your own legs and get away...

...Or to this: "Maybe Elsa [in Lohengrin] in her dreamy way really had repressed something of her own masculine component...

...Notwithstanding such nuggets, and there are quite a few, Opera and Its Symbols strikes me as a questionable book...

...that's what her turmoil is about...

...He may himself stand for the ability which the human unconscious has for growth...

...Why, despite its artificiality, the lasting fascination...

...Whereupon there follows an extensive Jungian analysis of the libretto...

...In that incomparable 'Vissi d'arte...

...and the beauty and the poignancy of the music...

...If it starts more people thinking about opera, that at any rate is a good thing...

...It is, I fancy, just a little sick...

...Tosca sounds more like a woman in turmoil than the kindly young innocent she seems to be trying to make herself out to be...

...The proportions have varied...

...The characters in opera, human beings or gods that are even more quintessentially human, act out those aspects of our personalities that we are least able or willing to acknowledge within ourselves...

...Long live the otherness," Donington exclaims charmingly...

...Donington, a conscientious objector during World War II, served as an assistant to the Jungian psychiatrist D.W...

...There are throughout Opera and Its Symbols musical examples that, to my inexpert judgment, appear valuable to readers who can also read music...

...It is, in the creation as well as in the hearing, a confrontation with archetypes that has a cathartic effect...

...Her sign is positive in this portion of the opera...

...My concern, however, is not with musical analyses...

...But it gets worse...

...Sardou, who wrote the play the opera is based on, was an out-and-out melodramatist...

...To be sure, there are some librettos that resist Jungian interpretation...

...That Don Giovanni has an element of the archetypal may be his ultimate recommendation...

...Whatever the exact reason, arioso is in...

...Those Donington deals with in one of three ways: He ignores them altogether...

...Winnicott, and got hooked on Jungianism...

...From the House of the Dead is sublimely an opera...

...Thus "even if the director has not the insight to bring out this crucial ambiguity, we shall in all probability pick it up that way, because this is the scenario beneath the scenario...

...But Zeffirelli's camp sensibility prefers naughty titillation, and Donington's Jungianism falls into the trap...

...or perhaps it would be better to say that music is not so much of the body or the soul as of the psyche-soma, that ultimate uniting within duality where all our human experiences are mysteriously melded...

...Nor do I think anything is gained by saying of the Flying Dutchman that "the sea from which he comes is a traditional image for the deep and deeply ambivalent unconscious...

...The Queen of Night is an archetypal image, and all archetypes are ambivalent, showing now a creative and now a destructive aspect of the same mythologem...

...For example, when Benjamin Britten made an opera of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, there clearly was no place in it for dancing...

...This, clearly, is what our author wished to prove all along, and failed to do...

...Eventually, a third element entered opera: speech...

...King Priam is a crashing bore...

...Genius may always turn up new ones—that may be the definition of genius—but how many geniuses are around in any given age...

...But how does it follow that the opera should be made to look "terrible rather as the Guernica pictures of Picasso are terrible...

...Unfortunately, as Leinsdorf pointed out in his review, the book has quite a few misprints in both the musical examples and in the various foreign-language libretto excerpts—shame on the Yale University Press...

...Where now is that sage advice about the director staging only the symbols themselves, not the meaning of the symbols...

...Let me begin by laying my own views about opera on the table...

...any slant imposed is mistaken and harmful...

...And how should it be produced properly...

...Or, as Donington aptly remarks, the director should stage the symbols, not the meaning of the symbols as he perceives it...

...it is with the main thrust of a work that could use more such felicities as, "I'm all in favor of a lunatic fringe, but not a lunatic core...

...Yet it was no longer possible to go from song to song, i.e., aria to aria: There was too much shadowy psychological terrain to be investigated, where, in the half-light, music has to be more tentative, exploratory, inchoate...

...Erich Leinsdorf, the noted conductor who reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review, gave it an unqualified rave that greatly aroused my curiosity...

...Black was black to him...

...The argument of the book is that opera works as a collaboration of the articulate component, words...

...But Sallinen's operas do not figure in Donington's book, which is very selective and concentrates on operas that lend themselves to Jungian analysis...

...Here, in any event, is the summation: "I mean by opera a drama with essentially human (or godly...

...I don't think it really helps to equate Wagner's dragon—a close relative, it appears, to all other operatic monsters —with "some sort of inner parental opposition to growing up...

...Donington was an Englishman who taught and produced operas in several American universities, and played the viola da gamba in various consorts, including one he founded...

...This recitative led into an aria, conveyed the preliminary information, laid the groundwork from which fullbodied song and orchestral accompaniment could take off...

...A questionable defense...

...but then read Donington's lengthy discussion of Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (a Jungian and supra-Jungian morass—both the opera and its interpretation), and see whether you can still trust Donington with particulars...

...This is arrant nonsense...

...The Queen of Night achieves the state by "soaring to high F...

...characters and situations unfolding through words, music and staging to a resolution which will be the more convincing the more inevitably it grows out of those characters and situations...

...Fortunately, there is not a little else in the book that strikes me as sensible, well expressed and necessary...

...in this his posthumous tome he revises and consolidates a lifetime's thinking on operatic matters...

...In technical terms, the arioso, music that is only aria-like, took over from the aria...

...Or this, about Siegfried: "In his dragon form, [Fafner] is a close relative to others we have met, and perhaps represents massively the same sort of inner parental opposition to growing up which nostalgia for the mother-image may represent seductively...

...It will be at a very great peril that a director will monkey around with the period and style of awork...

...Try arguing with that...

...So those archetypes are toiling away like the Nibelheim dwarfs in their underground workshop, while above ground the dazzling concept of the numinous throws Stardust in our eyes...

...Still, there are even in the drier second half of our musically rather arid, cerebral century pieces of gloriously tuneful music...

...What conclusion does Donington lead up to...

...It is also, significantly, something else...

...This does not disqualify Opera and Its Symbols, but it does make it reductive, repetitious, and stylistically uneven...

...From that review, alas, it was not clear to what extent this is a Jungian reading of opera, an approach I consider as misguided as it is reductive...

...the expressive component, music...

...No opera is without its quotient of at least spontaneous symbols, and probably a blend of spontaneous and deliberate is best...