The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (81 page)

Younger audiences have been attracted to the more imaginatively daring subjects favoured by the ‘minimalist’ school.
Philip Glass’s
Akhnaten
and
Einstein
on
the
Beach
were sensationally successful in the 1970s and 1980s, though their dazzling initial impact seems to have faded fast.
More substantial and complex in style is John Adams, whose
Nixon
in
China
and
The
Death
of Klinghoffer
rank internationally as two of the most admired operatic scores of recent years.

The American opera scene is enviably rich and active, but generally conservative in tone, with programming dictated by wealthy individual donors.
American singers initially found it hard to establish themselves in Europe, but now, helped by the presence of so many great teachers who emigrated from war-related deprivation or persecution to well-paid posts in American conservatoires, they dominate the casts of all the major opera houses.

George Gershwin

(1898–1937)

Porgy
and
Bess

Three acts. First performed 1935.

Libretto by Du Bose Heyward and Ira Gershwin

Initially presented (without much success) as a Broadway musical, but now rightly accepted as a full-blown operatic masterpiece,
Porgy
and
Bess
combines elements of jazz, blues, and gospel with the classical apparatus of arias, recitatives, leitmotivs and ensembles – Gershwin hoped that it would ‘resemble a combination of the drama and romance of
Carmen
and the beauty of
Meistersinger’.

Plot

A black tenement, Catfish Row, in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1920s.
The stevedore Crown flees after killing a man in a fight over a crap game.
He leaves behind his wayward girl friend Bess, who moves in with the crippled Porgy and finds some happiness.

Crown emerges from hiding to claim Bess back, but Porgy kills him in fury and is arrested by the police.
Bess is tricked by the dope-dealer Sportin’ Life into thinking Porgy will never return and leaves with him for New York.
When Porgy is released from custody uncharged, he sets off on his cart to find Bess.

What to listen for

One of the great tunesmiths of popular song in the inter-war period, Gershwin surpassed himself in
Porgy
and
Bess
with numbers like ‘Summertime’, ‘I got plenty o’nuttin’, ‘Bess, you is my woman now’, ‘I loves you, Porgy’, ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ and ‘There’s a boat dat’s leaving soon for New York’ which have passed beyond the opera house and entered the common musical currency.
But these are more than just isolated good tunes – every number grows out of its dramatic
moment, framed by declamatory recitative and integrated with a sequence of motifs linked to individual characters.
Although Gershwin spent time in South Carolina soaking up authentic atmosphere and researching indigenous music, jazz fans tend to be sniffy about the results, finding the use of Afro-American elements (such as the liberal use of ‘blue’ notes and syncopation) ersatz and superficial – Duke Ellington once notoriously excoriated what he called ‘Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms’ and black activists have taken offence where surely none was intended.

In performance

Although
Porgy
and
Bess
was steadily popular from the early 1940s, it was for many years staged in heavily cut and simplified versions suitable for theatrical runs of eight performances a week.
Only in 1976, when Houston Grand Opera gave the first-ever performance of Gershwin’s original score did its true operatic stature emerge.
It was followed by similarly complete productions in several other major opera houses, notably at Glyndebourne in 1986, where Trevor Nunn was responsible for a colourful yet emotionally hard-hitting staging, also seen at Covent Garden and the Met.
The terms of Gershwin’s will dictate that
Porgy
and
Bess
should only be performed by an all-black cast.

Recording

CD: Willard White (Porgy); Simon Rattle (cond.).
EMI 49568 2

Gian Carlo Menotti

(1911– )

The
Medium

Two acts. First performed New York, 1946.

Libretto by the composer

Inspired by the young composer’s own visit to a seance, and often performed in a double bill with a brief comic curtain-raiser,
The
Telephone.
Menotti described it ‘as the tragedy of a woman caught between … a world of reality she cannot wholly comprehend and a supernatural world in which she cannot believe’.

Plot

The fraudulent Madame Flora prepares her theatrical tricks for a seance with the help of her daughter Monica and mute servant-boy, Toby.
A new client, Mrs Nolan wants to be put in touch with her dead daughter.
During the seance, Monica duly impersonates the girl, but Madame Flora feels a hand touch her throat and is terrified.
She blames the mute Toby, who cannot defend himself from the accusation.
Later, Mrs Nolan returns and Madame Flora, now very drunk, confesses she is a fraud.
She falls asleep and is awoken by Toby, accidentally making a noise behind a curtain.
Madame Flora seizes a revolver and shoots the boy, whom she believes to be a ghost.

What to listen far

Menotti was heavily influenced by Puccini, and the score is couched in an extravagantly dramatic style, interrupted only by Monica’s aria, ‘Monica, Monica, dance the waltz’, and the simple song ‘Black Swan’, with which Monica soothes her mother’s jangled nerves.
The music becomes increasingly dissonant as the drama progresses.
The opera is orchestrated for fourteen players, including a piano duet.

In performance

One of the most popular post-war operas, once described as an ‘operatic film noir’,
The
Medium
ran for six months on Broadway and was later filmed.
Although it has now gone out of fashion, it remains an effective piece of melodrama, with a strong role for the contralto who plays Madame Flora.

Recording