The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (15 page)

German Opera

German opera in the early nineteenth century struggled to liberate itself from the domination of sternly regulated royal or ducal theatres and a preference for the proprieties of Italian
opera
seria.
As part of the revolution in the arts known as Romanticism, composers reached for a freer, more demotic range of subject-matter, drawn from the history and legends of the German peoples rather than regal personages and classical mythology.
The crucial work of this period was Carl Maria von Weber’s
Der
Freischütz
(1821), an opera embodying the fascination with sinister aspects of the natural world and the mists of the medieval past which also colours contemporary cultural phenomena such as Schubert’s
Lieder,
Grimm’s fairy-tales and Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings.
The use of spoken dialogue, customary in the genre of eighteenth-century German comic opera known as
Singspiel,
is another remarkable feature of
Freischütz,
as are its episodes of light relief.

Robert Schumann, Heinrich Marschner, Albert Lortzing and Otto von Nicolai were among the many composers who fell under Weber’s influence, but it was Richard Wagner who decisively broke through the folkloric parameters to themes of broader significance.
In early operas like
Das
Liebesverbot
(
The
Ban
on
Love,
based on
Measure
for
Measure
) and
Rienzi
(about a revolutionary uprising in fourteenth-century Rome), he drew on elements of Italian and French fashion.
Gradually, however, his own voice grew in power and confidence.
Essays written in 1849–51 outline his rejection of the trivialities and excesses of operas written only for profit or effect and point the way forward to the
Gesamtkunstwerk,
‘the complete work of art’.

What this implied was a return to the ideals of Greek drama: opera, Wagner believed, presented an opportunity to combine all the arts into a uniquely powerful unity.
It should
deal with themes of fundamental importance and embrace all members of society rather than just a wealthy bourgeoisie.
Shakespeare, Beethoven, and a variety of religious philosophies are invoked, and although Wagner’s thinking was increasingly twisted by violently irrational racial hatreds, there can be no question of his high intellect and erudition.

Wagner went on to realize his ideas in the great operas of his maturity,
Lohengrin
to
Parsifal,
as well as building at Bayreuth an opera house which replaced the conventional horseshoe arrangement, and its tiers of boxes and galleries, with a more egalitarian amphitheatre layout, masking the orchestra beneath a hood.
Here, the lights were extinguished during a performance and the usual hum of chatter and casual coming-and-going silenced.
Wagner’s critics may have deplored his pretensions and branded Bayreuth as more a temple than a place of entertainment, but his impact was soon to prove revolutionary, not least in his eschewal of spoken dialogue or recitative and his weaving of a continuous
durchkomponiert
(‘through-composed’) musical fabric, coloured by the practice of attaching a melodic theme (or leitmotiv) to a particular character or dramatic emotion.

Among Wagner’s immediate disciples were Engelbert Humperdinck and Richard Strauss.
The latter composed operas between 1894 and 1942, and during that half-century his technically brilliant essays in Wagnerian grandiosity were later balanced by excursions back to the more gentle and intimate musical worlds of Mozart and operetta.
Throughout, Strauss remained fundamentally backward-looking, a romantic conservative, and it was left to Alban Berg to incorporate the more radical changes in musical language proposed in Vienna by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, whose own mightily impressive but dauntingly austere biblical opera
Moses
und
Aron
was left unfinished at his death in 1951.

Other composers who produced significant work through the terrible upheavals of the First World War, the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power include Erich Korngold, whose Straussian expressionist fantasy,
Die
Tote
Stadt
(
The
Dead
City
), was enormously successful in the 1920s, and Paul Hindemith, who backed away from the extremes of romanticism and modernism in
Cardillac
and
Mathis
der
Maler
(
Matthias
the
Painter
).
More lastingly popular has been Kurt Weill, a composer with a great sense of theatre, as well as a punchy energy and simplicity of means which owes much to J.
S.
Bach.
Following his collaboration with Brecht in Berlin on operas with a socialist bent, Weill emigrated to America and became a prolific composer of Broadway musicals.

Of post-war German composers, only the traditionally crafted neo-romantic operas of Hans Werner Henze have penetrated internationally, though Gottfried von Einem and Aribert Reimann have made their mark between Berlin and Vienna.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s
Die
Soldaten
was a sensation of the 1960s.
Exploring the horrors which fall out from war, it uses a collage of eighteenth-and twentieth-century narratives, incorporating film, jazz and electronic elements.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s even more daring experiments along these lines, manifested in a cycle of seven long operas (one for each day of the week) called
Licht,
make Wagner’s pretensions look modest.
But neither composer has to date found favour with a wide public.

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770–1827)

Fidelio

Two acts. First performed Vienna, 1814.

Libretto by Joseph von Sonnleithner and Georg von

Treitschke

Beethoven’s only opera has a complicated history.
Drawing on a libretto by Jean-Christophe Bouilly which had already served for three composers, he began work on a three-act version in 1804.
After problems with the censors (Vienna had just fallen under Napoleonic occupation), this was given a handful of unsuccessful performances in 1805.
To avoid confusion with its predecessors, it was entitled
Fidelio
– Beethoven would have preferred
Leonore.
In 1806, the score was revised and reduced to two acts for a further Viennese production.

In 1814, Beethoven returned to the opera again, making even more extensive revisions to the score, providing new finales to both acts and substantially altering Leonore’s and Florestan’s arias.
With the help of Georg von Treitschke, the libretto was drastically rewritten too.
It is this version which has been performed ever since, though the earlier versions have occasionally been revived and even recorded.
The protracted and hopelessly stilted passages of spoken dialogue are now almost invariably abbreviated.

Further confusion is caused by the existence of four overtures relating to the opera.
Leonore
No.
2
was written for the 1805 production,
Leonore
No. 3
for 1806,
Leonore
No.
1
for an 1807 production in Prague which never materialized.
The overture known as
‘Fidelio
’
w
as composed for the 1814 version.
Until quite recently, it was the practice to play the
Fidelio
overture at the beginning of the opera, with
Leonore
No.
3
as an entr’acte after the dungeon scene.
But the latter is now considered to be dramatically inappropriate, and it has become a show-piece for the concert hall rather than the opera house.

The story is supposedly based on an actual incident during the French Revolution.

Plot

Near Seville, sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, Leonore has disguised herself as a boy named Fidelio, with the aim of rescuing her husband Florestan from unjust imprisonment, ordered by the tyrannical Don Pizarro.
She has taken a job with the jailer Rocco, whose daughter Marzelline has lost interest in her humble suitor Jacquino and fallen in love with ‘Fidelio’ instead.
The materialistic, opportunistic Rocco admires the hard-working ‘Fidelio’, but insists that marriage has to be based on a sound financial footing.

‘Fidelio’ begs to be allowed to accompany Rocco on his visit to a cell in which a secret prisoner is kept – she suspects, rightly, that he must be Florestan.
Keen for some help, Rocco agrees, even though it contravenes Pizarro’s orders.
Overheard by Leonore, Pizarro instructs Rocco to kill Florestan and bury him in his cell before the Minister Don Fernando comes to inspect the prison.
Realizing that the testing moment has come, Leonore steels her courage.
Rocco allows some prisoners to be briefly let out into the courtyard – much to Pizarro’s fury.

Locked and chained in a dark subterranean cell, Florestan struggles to keep hope alive.
Rocco and ‘Fidelio’ enter, and dig Florestan’s grave.
As Pizarro is about to stab Florestan, ‘Fidelio’ brandishes a pistol and reveals her true identity.
As the three men stand frozen in amazement, a distant trumpet call is heard, signalling the arrival of the minister Don Fernando.
Pizarro is arrested.
The other prisoners are released and reunited with their families.
Florestan is publicly reunited with Leonore, and all join to praise her wifely courage and constancy.

What to listen for

Despite its awkward, melodramatic plot, two-dimensional characterization and the uneven inspiration of the long first act, Beethoven’s music can make
Fidelio
an overwhelming experience.

The early domestic scenes have a certain charm, even if Beethoven lacks the Mozartian lightness of touch.
Another composer might have made more of Rocco’s aria preaching the virtues of a positive bank balance – it’s as dull as befits its subject.
But the canonic quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’ for Leonore, Marzelline, Jacquino and Fidelio and the chorus for the prisoners as they are led from their cells into the sunlight both show Beethoven’s genius at its most sublime and intense.

There’s a whiff of cloak-and-dagger ham to Pizarro’s aria ‘Ha!
welch’ ein Augenblick’, but it can be very exciting if the bass-baritone doesn’t rush over the top and simply shout it.
Leonore’s ‘Abscheulicher!’ is much more than an aria – within its outwardly conventional three-part structure, it charts the character’s spiritual journey, from fear and revulsion to hope to defiant resolution.
Beethoven did not write with realistic ideas of human vocal capacity – tenors suffer from more than their chains as Florestan and even the most powerful of dramatic sopranos find the climax of this aria, with its prolonged ascent to a top B, almost unsingable.
Because Leonore has to soar over a couple of loud ensembles, hefty Wagnerians are often cast in the role – but it is the smaller-voiced, more flexible lyric sopranos who find this aria, and much else in the score, easier to negotiate.

It is in Act II that Beethoven’s imagination seems to become fully engaged.
Here the drama proceeds in one great arc, from the tenor Florestan’s anguished cry of ‘Gott!
welch Dunkel hier’, followed by an aria which echoes Leonore’s ‘Abscheulicher!’; a tense trio as the grave is being dug; the thrilling climactic quartet ‘Er sterbe’, broken by the distant trumpet call (evoking the Last Judgement); and the culminating release of the ecstatic duet between the reunited Florestan and Leonore.
The final scene constitutes one of Beethoven’s great essays in epic choral writing, alongside the last movement of the Ninth Symphony and the
Missa
Solemnis.

In performance