The complete idiot's guide to classical music (59 page)

When
Tosca
opened in 1887, it was as a play by Victorien Sardou (actually titled
La Tosca
), and the title role of the tempestuous diva was undertaken by no less a theatrical legend than Sarah Bernhardt. Puccini retained the high-tension melodrama in his operatic translation, and the soprano who portrays Floria Tosca must be able to deal with outbursts of piousness and passion and convey furious jealousy one moment, selfless love the next.

The story opens in Rome at the turn of the 19th century, when Napoleon had kings quavering in their royal boots and anyone suspected of Republican tendencies was subject to immediate arrest. A political prisoner has escaped and hides in a chapel of the Church of Sant’Andrea. He is Cesare Angelotti, a consul of the former Roman republic, and a friend of the painter Mario Cavaradossi, who is working on a portrait of the Blessed Virgin at the same church. Hot on the fugitive’s trail comes Baron Scarpia, the dreaded chief of police, who is convinced that Cavaradossi has had a hand in the escape; in his spare time, the chief lusts after Tosca, who is the painter’s mistress. Plotting to advance his political fortunes, get rid of his rival, and enjoy Tosca’s favors with one evil deed, he arrests Cavaradossi. Even under torture, Cavaradossi will not reveal Angelotti’s hiding place, but unable to bear her lover’s cries of agony, Tosca finally blurts out the secret. Scarpia sends his men to arrest Angelotti, and pronounces a sentence of death for Cavaradossi.

Scarpia now moves on to the rest of his dastardly plan: He offers to spare her lover’s life if Tosca will spend the night with him. She refuses him angrily, then begs for mercy, all to no avail. In despair, she finally agrees to Scarpia’s bargain. The Baron orders his henchman to stage a mock execution, then turns to claim his prize. Is he ever in for a shock. “Here is Tosca’s kiss,” she cries, stabbing Scarpia with a knife from his own table, cursing him as he dies, then in a moment of remorseful reverence, placing prayer candles around his lifeless body.

At the prison, Tosca tells Cavaradossi of the impending fake execution, warning him to fall when the blank bullets are fired. They sing a final duet, full of love and hope for the future. The soldiers arrive, they fire, Cavaradossi crumples to the ground. Waiting until everyone else has left, Tosca rushes to her lover, only to find that the execution had been all too genuine. She has no time to mourn: The guards burst in to arrest her for Scarpia’s murder, but tearing herself away from Cavaradossi’s body, Tosca joins her lover in death by hurling herself from the castle ramparts.

Yes, opera has all the passionate throbbing of a romance novel, the tingling suspense of a murder mystery, the intriguing twists and turns of a spy movie, and the assorted other examples of blood and gore that fill the evening news on TV. You even get some pretty terrific music into the bargain.

For a fascinating glimpse into the way fact and fiction come together on the operatic stage, read George Jellinek’s
History Through the Opera Glass
; for plot synopses, there are two excellent paperback collections by Paul England,
Favorite Operas by Italian and French Composers
and
Favorite Opers by German and Russian Composers
; and for a top-notch one-volume paperback survey of opera, including the stories of nearly 90 important stageworks, you won’t do better than to latch onto
The Limelight Book of Opera
by Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie.

 

• Many times plots and characters in operas are reworked, retold, and rewritten.
  
 

• Sometimes historical people make the best opera characters because the audience can easily relate to them.
  
 

• Death plays a large role in dramatic opera.
  
 

• Dramatic opera plots are replete with tragedy, death, and sorrow.
  

Chapter 22
 
Comedy in the Buff-a

 

• Opera buffa
  
 

• Most popular comedic opera composers
  
 

• No murders tonight
  
 

• Most popular comic operas
  

It’s called “opera buffa” in Italian, meaning it’s comedy tonight, as opposed to the gloom and doom situations so beloved of “serious” opera composers. (Victor Borge says that it’s also called “light opera” because the prima donnas weigh less). Comic operas are not about heroines who murder their brothers while descending into coloratura madness, or heroes who foil dastardly plots and expire in a flurry of high Cs. Rather, they’re about everyday people facing the everyday eventualities of life, like heroines dressing up as their brothers while rising to heights of coloratura, or heros foiling other dastardly plots while trumpeting their high Cs. Hmm, maybe there’s not as much difference as we thought.

The way you can tell it’s a comedy is that the main characters are still alive when the curtain falls. No matter how many mistaken identities there were, how many schemes-within-schemes go awry, how often misunderstandings cause boy to lose girl (or vice versa), in the end everything works out for the best. The lovers are reunited, the duped villains slink off to lick their bruised egos, virtue is triumphant, and everybody (including the audience) can go home happy.

 
Music Word
A
singspiel
indicates a musical drama, usually lighter in tone and spirit than a full-fledged opera, with spoken dialogue interpolated between the musical numbers. Sometimes, as in Mozart’s “The Impressario,” there’s actually more dialogue than music, but “spielsing” doesn’t sound nearly so attractive.

When the biggies (Mozart, Rossini, et.al.) wrote comic operas, the musical values were equal to those found in more weighty productions. It’s the plot and some of the slapstick antics on stage that produce the laughter. Some of Mozart’s music in
The Marriage of Figaro
is as ravishing as any you’ll find in serious opera, and Wagner didn’t lose his unique dramatic touch simply because
Die Meistersinger
(The Master Singer) is listed officially as a comic opera.

When the music is lighter in idiom, when the arias are interlaced with fairly extended dialogue, when the comic intent is more clearly delineated, we have operetta, which is the Italian diminutive of opera. In Germany, such pieces are called Singspiels because the performers spiel when they aren’t singing. Operettas are usually shorter and more good-natured than their operatic relatives, and often use satire to make their witty points.

When gods and goddesses are evoked, it is not to have them carry on in Valhallan excess, but rather to have them experience the same fussings, foibles, and follies that beset us regular mortals. Orpheus played his lute in Greek mythology, but when Offenbach gets through with him, he’s dancing the cancan. Gilbert and Sullivan aimed their barbs at more local targets—models of current major generals, rulers of the Queen’s Navee, and peers of parliament—while Johann Strauss, with gentler satire, twitted Viennese high society.

Jacob Eberst never amounted to much, but when he moved to France and changed his name to Jacques Offenbach, things started looking up. Yes, Offenbach, the typical Parisian boulevardier, the composer whom Rossini dubbed “the Mozart of the Champs Elysees,” and the man whose melodies were the very pulse and beat of France during the Second Empire, was born in Germany (1819–1880).

His French career started when he got a job playing cello in the Opera Orchestra, but his penchant for musical pranks (when he got bored, he’d play only every other note in the score) got him in trouble, and he became a conductor instead. Eventually, he decided to try composing a few pieces himself, and when he sold a couple of waltzes, his future path was set. He wrote his first operetta at the age of 20, but the big push came in 1855 when he bought a broken-down old theatre on the Champs Elysees, completely renovated it, and started producing his own stageworks there.

Critics flapped but audiences flipped, and Offenbach really hit his stride, turning out no less than eight operettas that year alone, seven more in each of the next two years, and thereafter keeping up an only slightly slower pace of three or four new productions annually, eventually racking up a total of nearly 100. Occasionally, the censors gave him a hard time when some of the spoofs hit too close to home, but Offenbach generally managed to throw them off the track. One of his favorite dodges was setting his operettas in faraway times or climes, thus seeming to avoid any topical references. The ruse was transparent, much to the added merriment of audiences, but censors weren’t a terribly bright lot, and Offenbach rarely got himself into serious difficulties.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Offenbach’s fame and popularity eventually reached across the Atlantic, so he was invited to the U.S. to participate in the nation’s centennial celebrations in 1876. Ten thousand listeners attended his first concert, and he gave several more to even larger crowds. Normally he conducted his own music exclusively, but one night he also introduced a new piece by the 22-year-old concertmaster of the orchestra. “The march was very good,” he told the budding composer; “you ought to write an operetta.” “I’ll remember that,” said the grateful John Philip Sousa.

Like the comedian who wants to play Hamlet, Offenbach was obsessed with the idea of writing a “grand” opera, feeling somehow that he had wasted his life on all those frivolous operettas. The result was
Tales of Hoffmann,
based on the fantastic stories of E. T.A. Hoffmann, but left unfinished at Offenbach’s death. Various completions of the work and reorderings of its story sequences have vied for the public favor, but in whatever form it is presented,
Tales
has had precisely the grand success Offenbach envisioned. Nonetheless, his fame rests firmly upon the rollicking tunes and witty lampoonery of his brilliant operettas.

Tales of Hoffmann
is a favorite with opera fans (it includes the ever-popular “Barcarolle”), but for operetta delights,
Orpheus in the Underworld,
with its rowdy cancan, is probably the best place to start.
The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein
has the tune that the U.S. military would later swipe for the Marine Corps Song (“From the Halls of Montezuma . . .”), and there are vocal gems galore in
La Belle Helene
(Beautiful Helen) and
La Vie Parisienne
(Parisian Life).

If you’d rather go rollicking without words, sample one of the many CDs of Offenbach overtures on the market, or better still, enjoy “Gaite Parisienne,” Manuel Rosenthal’s zesty orchestral wingding that incorporates many of Offenbach’s best tunes.

Officially, it’s Johann Strauss, Jr., since Papa also was an enormously popular composer of waltzes. In fact, for a while, folks weren’t sure which Strauss wore the crown, but if you call Johann Sr. the Father of the Waltz, and Jr. the King, you’ll be pretty much on target.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When the Nazis realized that the Strauss family was of Jewish origin, there was panic in the propaganda office until somebody came up with the bright idea of forging the parish birth documents. With this definitive, albeit falsified, proof of racial purity in hand, the waltzes were returned to official party favor.

Papa Strauss, meanwhile, wasn’t too thrilled about the musical competition. First he tried to stop Johann Jr. from composing at all, and when that didn’t work, he tried to sabotage the 19-year-old boy’s debut concert in Vienna by sending over a bunch of friends to hiss and boo the performances. That didn’t work either. The young Strauss played with such elegance, and his waltzes were so entrancing, that the audience went wild, cheering, shouting bravos, and demanding repeats of almost every piece. At the end of the concert, Johann Jr. signalled for silence, then offered his final encore: His father’s most famous waltz, “Lorelei Rhine Echoes.” That did it, the crowd tore up the place, carried Strauss out into the streets on their shoulders, and from that moment on, there was definitely a new Waltz King in town. As one Viennese reporter put it, “Good evening, Father Strauss. Good morning Son Strauss.”

We were, though, talking about operettas, and Strauss was too busy churning out hundreds of waltzes to worry about them until his wife got into the first act. She convinced Johann that longer works could be fun too, and that nobody would mind if he stuffed them full of waltzes. His first operetta was produced in 1871, with 14 more to follow over the next quarter of a century.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Strauss never wrote a grand opera, but he conducted the first Vienna performance of the Prelude to Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
. Later, Wagner said thank you by conducting Strauss’ Waltz “Wine, Women and Song” at Bayreuth.