Roger and Opera

My nearest and dearest friend is Roger, known to his many fans as the author Dorien Grey (www.doriengrey.com).  Roger may be the smartest man I know, a man of superior intelligence, wit, and charm.  And he is a man of impeccable taste in all manner of things.  But like all of us, Roger has a glaring flaw: his is that he doesn’t like opera (actually, he has two flaws: he doesn’t like Sondheim either).  He simply can’t abide opera.  He won’t listen to even a single aria of opera music.  I, on the other hand, am devoted to opera.  One of the main reasons I moved to Chicago was opera; I have season tickets to two of our opera companies, so at a minimum I see eleven operas a year.  Add the occasional performance by DePaul University Opera and our newest opera company, the Haymarket Opera, and I see a fair amount of opera productions.  But no amount of persuasion will get Roger to accompany me.

But take heart, my friend!  You are not alone.  Well, that’s hardly an issue, is it.  Of all my friends and acquaintances I can think of only three who have season tickets, and one of those is a half season.  There are one or two other people I know who go occasionally to the opera.  But the vast majority don’t.  Not to worry: opera, at least in Chicago, is doing quite well, thank you.  But, Roger, you needn’t feel that you’re the odd duck out—which I know you don’t.  Some experts have also made major misjudgments of opera.  Here are some comments by reviewers of now famous operas, comments that, I’m quite sure, Roger will agree with:

—Wagner is a good place to start.  Most operas by Wagner come in at around four hours, depending on the length of intermissions.  Here’s what a London reviewer said about Lohengrin in 1855:  “Lohengrin is poison—rank poison.  All we can make out is an incoherent mass of rubbish, with no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments . . .”*  Roger loves the overtures to Wagner operas, but not the operas themselves: you know, the parts that have all the singing.  But even the overtures haven’t always been popular.  A French critic writing in 1860 described the overture to The Flying Dutchman as “a chaos depicting chaos, from which nothing emerges but a few puffs of chords emitted by the trumpets greatly abused by the composer.”

—Verdi is one of the “war horses” of the opera house, composer of such classic works as Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata.  But a writer in 1850 described his music as “screaming unisons everywhere, and all the melodies of that peculiar style the parallel whereof is rope-dancing; first a swing and flourish, hanging on by the hands, then somerset, and then another swing to an erect position of the rope . . .  The unfortunate man is incapable of real melody—his airs are such as a man born deaf would compose by calculation of the distances of musical notes and the intervals between them.”

—La Bohème is one of the most popular operas of modern times.  But in 1900 a New York critic said that “silly and inconsequential incidents and dialogues . . . are daubed over with splotches of instrumental color without reason and without effect, except the creation of a sense of boisterous excitement and confusion.”  Strident phrases are “pounded out by hitting each note a blow on the head as it escapes from the mouths of singers or the accompanying instruments.”

—Surely no one had any complains about Carmen?  Au contraire, mon amie.  A London reviewer in 1878 wrote that if  “it were possible to imagine His Satanic Majesty writing an opera, Carmen would be the sort of work he might be expected to turn out.”  Or from a French critic in 1875: “One cannot express musically the savagery and the caprices of Mlle. Carmen with orchestral details.  Nourished by the succulent harmonies of the experimenters of the music of the future, Bizet opened his soul to this doctrine that kills the heart.”

—I’ll end with the ultimate war horse of operas:  Madama Butterfly.  An Italian critic, writing near the beginning of the 20th century, said, “Butterfly is a replica of La Bohème, but with less freshness.  Instead, there is exaggerated emphasis and musical fragmentation, without precise character which would express sentiment, and identify types.”

I have often teased the ever-patient Roger that his musical lexicon ended with the death of Tchaikovsky.  All these musical experts I’ve quoted come, more or less, from the same period.  At least, my friend, you’re keeping good company!  Outmoded, but good.

*Lexicon of Music Invective: Critical Assaults on Composer Since Beethoven’s Time, Nicolas Stonimsky, 1953.