Opera in the twentieth century – Part One – 1901 - 1939

 

Any overview of twentieth century opera will have to mention those composers whose musical style is more influenced by the 19th century traditions than those of the twentieth.  Their music is as important as those with whom we credit with changing the role, characteristics and developments of opera today.  No doubt those in our past still linger around, notably Wagner, whose anti-semitic sentiments still has him banned in Israel till this day.   On Where’s the Beat? we are going to examine the development of opera from 1901 until 1939.  This is going to be a bit of a sidestep for this show as we generally play particularly contemporary stuff, and some of this stuff is going to be pretty darn tonal.  We’re going to do this all in loose chronological order.  Perhaps the first operatic masterpiece of the twentieth century is Strauss’ Salome.

 

Richard Strauss: Salome – (1905)  EMI CLASSICS  5 67159 2 9 – Karajan, Wiener Philharmonker, Behrens, van Dam, Baltsa, Böhm, Ochman, 

Track 8 – 9 (to 3:03), “Jochanaan! Ich bin verliebt in deinen Lieb”

 

How appropriate that the opera I have chosen to begin with doesn’t have an overture!  Already, things are beginning to change.  The libretto is based on the story of Salome from the Book of St. Matthew and was written by Oscar Wilde.   It would take forever if I was to overview the entire plot of each opera so for reasons of brevity I won’t.  Nevertheless, the original Wilde work was banned in London as was Strauss’ opera for the authorities believed it was offensive.   In this passage, Salome has ordered the prisoner Jochanaan be brought to her.  Here, she tells of her lustful feelings for him, despite his protests and his outrage.  Here Narraboth, Captain of the Guard, kills himself during her passionate pleas to Jochanaan, but she is not stopped.   There is already a sense of orchestral overplay in this music, tonal centers are skewed.  It is difficult at times to make out the pitches of the singers.  This recording is a classic EMI release of 1978 re-released in 1998.  Karajan gave the first performance in Salzburg in the 1920’s.

 

Giacomo Puccini – Madama Butterfly  (1904)   EMI CLASSICS 5 655820 2 – Sir John Barbirolli, Coro e Orchestra del teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Renata Scotto, Carlo Bergonzi   Track 3, “Un vel dì vedremo”

 

               Puccini’s classic needs little introduction.  Puccini may very well be the most successful operatic composer ever!  One thing this guy knew how to do was write a really good tune!   Nevertheless, Madama Butterfly addressed interesting political questions that may very well be asked today.  The story revolves around Madama Butterfly, a Japanese woman who is wedded to an American lieutenant near Nagasaki.  Given the horrible things that would befall that city at the hands of the American military in 1945 one can certainly see a startling closeness.  As well, Puccini also brings into the twentieth century arts fascination with orientalism.  Here, Puccini’s musical language remains disturbingly western, but the concept of injustice at the hands of western society is interesting.  I’m not going to play much of Puccini’s work, as it certainly will be familiar to almost everyone.

 

Arnold Schoenberg – Erwartung Op. 17 (1909)  SONY CLASSICAL SMK 48 466 – Pierre Boulez, BBC SO, Janis Martin

Track 1, Scene 1 “Hier hinein?… Man sieht den Weg nicht…”

 

               In terms of opera, Schoenberg is best known for his musical drama Pierrot lunaire from 1912.  His earlier work Erwartung has escaped notice, but it is also tremendously interesting.  The year is 1909 and only five short years after Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Schoenberg has created a work of such strange harmonies and complex vocal lines that opera (or the term he uses monodrama) will be forever changed.  It is indeed this change in titling that also provides some of the basis for this change.  Erwartung is written before Schoenberg solidifies his twelve-tone system.  So in this atonal work, written while on holiday in 1909, Schoenberg pushes the boundary of the listening public.  The libretto tells of a woman trying to find her lover, whom she finds murdered, still blood-covered.  The violent nature of the work is disturbing in its foreshadowing of the horrors of World War One.  A much darker and younger cousin to the smaller and more performable Pierrot lunaire.

 

Bela Bartok – Le Château de Barbe-Bleue  Op. 11 (1918)  DEUTSCHE GRAMOPHON  445 445-2, Ferenc Fricsay, Berlin Radio SO, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hertha Töpper

Track 2, “Dies ist also Blaubarts Feste”

 

               An opera for two characters, Bartok’s only operatic composition is an early work but also fascinating in its treatment of character.  It is quite tonal, but where Bartok take an interesting step forward is in his treatment of his subjects.  The story, based on a famous fairy tale of Perrault, is centred on two characters Bluebeard and Judith, his seventh wife.  Judith, curious about his past asks him to open one by one the seven doors which conceal the terrible secrets of his past.  Of course, without a doubt the seventh door is for her as she joins the miserable fate of his previous wives.  It is Judith’s fascination with his terrible past that is so alluring here.   There is such an intense feeling of drama in the work that it succeeds where the lack of action and the small number of characters can be seen as a problem.  The one act opera was premiered in Budapest in 1918.   This is a classic mono recording from 1961 which won the Prix du Disque.  Fischer-Dieskau plays Bluebeard while Hertha Töpper plays Judith.

 

Alban Berg – Wozzeck  Op. 7 (1925)  DEUTSCHE GRAMOPHON 435 705-2,  Karl Böhm, Orchester der Deautschen Oper Berlin, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau as Wozzeck, Evelyn Lear as Marie

Track 5, “Tschin Bum…! Hörst Bub? Da kommen sie!”

 

               Without a doubt, probably the opera that changed everything.  While Schoenberg set the wheels in motion it was Berg who put the pieces together.  Wozzeck is a bleak portrayal of a man destroyed by his circumstance and those around him who take advantage of his disadvantages.  It gives a brutally powerful message.   Moreover it is Berg’s structural references to past musical styles and forms that provide interesting analogies to power and hierarchy.  Berg’s opera was the first using a twelve-tone system.  In Scene 3, Marie, a prostitute who has fathered Wozzeck’s son hears the arrival of a marching band.  This wonderful mix of tonality and atonality is almost shocking.  This clash between two systems highlights the conflicts to come.  Wozzeck enters but he is upset, mentally anguished.   Marie sings a lullaby trying to appease him, but it fails and he leaves.  Like Bluebeard’s Castle Fischer-Dieskau plays the lead in this classic recording from 1965.

 

Maurice Ravel – L’Enfant et les Sortileges (1925)  LONDON  440 333-2  Dutoit, L’OSM, many artists

Track 8, “Ah, C’est l’Enfant au couteau”

 

               Ravel first began work on L’Enfant et les Sortileges with the intention of writing a fantasy-ballet.  This as abandoned when the commissioner wanted the work to be titled Divertissements pour ma fille to which Ravel responded in with no irony “But I do not have a daughter”.  So renamed the work and also changed the conceptual nature of the opera from a light opera to a more surreal nature.  The libretto was written by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who was better known as just Colette in Paris at the time.   There is a Disney-like feel to this opera, and I mean that in the best sense.  Amongst the many characters are a bat, an owl, a squirrel, a Chinese cup and an English character, The Teapot.   L’Enfant is refreshingly different from the other opera’s featured so far in its less serious subject matter and its reference to fantastic elements.  But there is also a sense of union between many musical styles here.  From jazz to music-hall to neo-classicism all within Ravel’s brilliant orchestral colours.  I have chosen the last movement “Ah, C’est l’Enfant au couteau” as the example.   The story revolves around a child who has lashed out at the things around him, the animals in the garden.  Then he discovers the joy around him and falls in love with his environment but he is rebuked by a squirrel and told of the suffering he has caused.   The animals attack him and in the midst of their fighting harm the squirrel.  The boy binds the wounds of the squirrel and then collapses, the animals then release that he has changed.  In Ravel’s magnificent orchestration, they gather around him and comfort him, forgiving him.  It is as magnificent as Ravel’s conclusion to La Mere L’Oye. 

 

Igor Stravinsky – Oedipus Rex (1928)  DEUTSCH GRAMOPHON 445 445-2  Fricsay, Berlin Radio SO, many artists

Track 15 0 “Oportebat tacere”

 

               Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a riot in Paris and Oedipus Rex caused similar outrage when in premiered in 1928.  The work is not an opera in the traditional sense but more of an oratorio.   The libretto was written by Jean Cocteau and is based on Sophocles original tragedy.  Oedipus, having become king of Thebes by murdering his father marries Jacosta without knowing that she is in fact his mother.  When the truth comes out as a result of a curse that has befallen the city, Jacosta kills herself and Oedipus takes out his eyes to wander the land.  Here we listen to Oedipus impose self-exile on himself until the conclusion of the work.  The entire opera (or oratorio, however you look at it) is sung with the singer’s faces covered with masks.  The singers were not to sing to one another but to direct their voices at the audience.  This would cut away the individual tragedy and focus more on the fatal elements of the story.   This is almost like Petrushka, the same puppet-like fatalistic qualities.   In terms of music, Stravinsky is showing quite a bit of his neo-classicist bend here. 

 

Kurt Weill – Aufstieg und fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930)  COLUMBIA K3L 243 (LP), Max Thurn, North German Radio Chorus, Lotte Lenya

Jenny Song from Act One  (Side 1, Band 2)

 

Lotte Lenya:

 

All of us were of course fascinated by America, as we knew it from books, movies, popular songs, headlines – this was the America of the garish Twetnies, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis – the Florida boom and crash, also a disastrous Florida hurricane – a ghastly photograph reproduced in every German newspaper, of the murderess Ruth Snyder in the electric chair – Hollywood films about the Wild West and the Yukon – Jack London’s adventure novels – Tin Pan Alley songs – I think it is not difficult to trace some of this in the make-believe America of Mahagonny.   Another friend reminded me recently that Brecht had a theory that he often expounded at this time, that a kind of pidgin English would become the first world language; perhaps the reason Alabama-Song and the Benares-Song are written in pidgin English?

 

The Opera Mahagonny had its first performance in Leipzig in March, 1930, and set off what has been called the worst theatre riot in history.  It was the same houst that had seen the wildly successful premiere of Krenek’s Jonny Spielf Auf a few years earlier, but the political climate of Germany had been steadily darkening.  I have been told that the square around the opera house was filled with Nazi Brown Shirts, carrying placards protesting the Mahagonny performance.  But I had come to Leipzig the day of the performance, and I could see, hear, think nothing but Mahagonny; Kurt’s parents and I were in our seats, and the performance well under way, before I was startled out of my absorption by the electric tension around us, something strange and ugly.  As the opera swept toward its close, the demonstrations started, whistles and boos; by the time the last scene was reaced, fist fights had broken out in the aisles, the theatre was a screaming mass of people; soon the riot had spread to the stage, panicky spectators were trying to claw their way out, and only the arrival of a large police force, finally, cleared the theatre.  The next day, the city council of Leipzig held a special meeting, to consider cancelling all further performances of Mahagonny.  It was finally decided not to impose hasty censorship measures, but the second performance was played with the house lights on and police lining the walls of the theatre.

 

               Lotte Lenya, from the liner notes of the Columbia Mahagonny LP. 

 

There is a Canadian connection here as well.  Mahagonny is a fictional town in the Yukon, inspired by the writings of Robert Frost who the German scholars call an “obscure” author.  Weill’s German writing far outdoes anything he did in Germany.  The idea of Epic Opera was also important as was his collaboration with Brecht.  I encourage you to find out more as time won’t allow us to get into it.  But this idea is:

 

DRAMTIC OPERA                                                                 EPIC OPERA

Music serves                                                                              music acts as intermediary

Music heightens the text                                                      music interprets the text         

Music reasserts the text                                                         music takes the text for granted

Music illustrates the text                                                       music takes issue with the text

Music draws the psychological situation                      music shows behaviour

(from the liner notes of Mahagonny)

              

 

Dmitri Shostakovich – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) DEUTSCH GRAMOPHON  437 511-2, Myun-Whun Chung, Orchestre et Choeurs de l’Opéra Bastille + Maria Ewing as Katerina

Track 1 – 3, CD 2

 

               Shostakovich’s second go at operatic composition and his last is probably the most tragic story of his artistic career.  Shostakovich started with The Nose, composed in 1928 and was subsequently pulled because the authorities didn’t like it.  Shostakovich began Lady Macbeth in 1930 and it was completed by 1932.  Shostakovich was inspired by Berg’s opera Wozzeck but he didn’t follow his atonal path.  Many critics argue this is because he couldn’t, but I would argue that at the time, he probably didn’t want to.  For me, it’s a case of whatever.  Lady Macbeth is a superb work, composed by a master orchestrater.   The libretto is inspired by a story by Nikolai Leskov that appeared in Dostoevsky’s journal Ephoka in 1865.  It is a tragic, Medea-like story where a woman is driven crazy by the circumstance around her and the injustices to her.  Katerina has married a beast of man who is rarely home and she has sunk into depression.  Tormented by her lustful father in law she is seduced by one of the workers, Sergei.  To cover her tracks she murders first her father-in-law and then her husband inheriting the business.  She decides to wed Sergei but in the preparation for the wedding the staff discover the body of her husband.  Arrested and sent away to Siberia Sergei pursues a younger inmate and as an example of his love gives her socks that he has taken from Katerina while on a boat crossing a river.  Katerina, furious jumps the inmate and pushes her into the water where she falls herself, they both drown.   Scene five provides a brilliant contrast in composition style and colour.  From the lyrical cello solo and tonal passages of Katerina and Sergei’s love making to the murder of Katerina’s father in law it is quite a haunting passage.

 

George Gershwin – Porgy and Bess (1935) VERVE  827 475-2  Russel Garcia (cond), Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

Track 7 – Bess, You Is My Women Now

 

               George Gershwin is often forgotten when we discuss the development of contemporary music, but I think it’s a mistake.  Gershwin first thought of writing an opera in the 1920’s but wasn’t sure how to go about it.  Soon after he decided to work on a script by Du Bose Heyward, a relatively unknown American author.  In complete form, the opera runs for almost three hours and first started off on broadway.  While it has never been produced at the Met in New York, it has been staged at La Scala!  Gershwin, right near the end shied away from labelling it an opera by declaring it a folk-opera.  While calling it a “folk” opera may have spared him some criticism as to the seriousness of the writing it was in no sense based on folk melodies.  In fact, Gershwin composed all of his own material for the work.  Like Dvorak before him, who was inspired by African-American melodies in his 9th Symphony Gershwin travelled to the south, visiting churches and listening to the songs of the community.  It would return to broadway again with limited success but finally in the mid-1940’s the work toured the world establishing the work as one of the true classics of the first-half of the twentieth century.   While I could have chosen an operatic recording, I’ve chosen to take out the classic (almost an understatement there) recording of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald from 1958.   Released on Verve, the record also shows how crossover began long before Helmut Lotti and Boccelli and seems to have been done pretty well as well!

 

Alban Berg – Lulu (1937)  DEUTSCH GRAMOPHON 435 705-2  Karl Böhm, Orchestra and Chorus of the German Opera in Berlin, Evelyn Lear as Lulu

Track

 

A Montreal connection her, however loose and perhaps shaded in doubt.  Lulu is a somewhat tragic and almost absurdly complex character.  There is a rise and fall of the character’s in the story.  Everyone who encounters her seems to fall in love with her.  She shoots her husband only to seduce his son who becomes entirely devoted to her.  Near the end, having lost all of her money she lives in London and becomes a prostitute where she lives with Alwa and her friend Gräfin Geschwitz, a lesbian who is also in love with Lulu.  Here, she is murdered by Jack the Ripper (a character who in real-life supposedly was educated right here at McGill).   The story is impossible to detail in a short few minutes and the complex psychological and sociological implications of the work are vast.  From feminist theory to Marxist rhetoric, all have tackled Lulu.   Those curious about the opera should also check out Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box a startling film from 1929.  The lesbian scene was actually cut out from the British release and in the French release she was not murdered but rather saved by a member of the Salvation Army.  If you can get your hands on the original it is an excellent film. 

               Here we’ll listen to part of the Second Act, Scene One where Dr. Schön commands Lulu to kill herself but when he turns is back is shot by her instead.  This is followed by the music for a silent film that sums up the happenings of one year after Lulu has killed her husband.