Christiansen - The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera: New Edition

Whether you are a first-timer at La Bohme or a seasoned Wagnerian, every opera-goer can benefit from a little background information. This book aims to provide just that, setting out concise, friendly and accessible introductions to the most frequently performed works in the repertory, discussed without confusing detail or abstruse technical terms.

Now that translated text titles, projected on to either a screen or the backs of seats, are so widely in use, only a minimal synopsis seems necessary. In any case, it is my firm belief that the human brain finds the intricacies and absurdities of opera plots impossible to grasp for more than the nanosecond they take to enter one ear and exit the other. I have preferred instead to sketch in a few points of musical interest and some reference to outstanding productions and lines of dramatic interpretation, as well as recommending a widely available recording, and identifying one or two of its outstanding performers and the conductor.

I hope that the result is easily digestible and immediately useful, and if what I have written stimulates some conversation in the interval or at dinner afterwards, I shall have done the job I set out to do. Those who want to take their study a stage further can be encouraged to consult either Kobbs Complete Opera Book (edited by Lord Harewood) or The New Penguin Opera Guide (edited by Amanda Holden), both of them more scholarly and comprehensive than I can hope to be.

Within the dimensions of a pocket guide, it is impossible to do justice to the entire operatic corpus. Among a senior generation, I particularly regret that more room could not be found for dealing with operas by Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Ruders and Messiaen. Nor do Rameau, Massenet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev or Henze receive their due my apologies to their shades, but I can only blame the size of the average pocket.

I owe debts to a range of sources, among them ENOs excellent series of Opera Guides, edited by the late Nicholas John, the epic and authoritative Grove Dictionary of Opera, Tom Sutcliffes survey of operatic production Believing in Opera, back numbers of the unbeatable Opera magazine, and most of all, my vast and mercifully well-catalogued collection of programmes, chronicles of over forty years of opera-going and evocative documents of some of the most wonderful experiences of my life.

My thanks to Sam Matthews for her expert copy-editing, to Belinda Matthews, a most sympathetic and supportive commissioning editor, and to Gerald Martin Moore, who has contributed vital expertise in matters relating to the human voice.

Rupert Christiansen, 2013

Music has always formed an integral part of drama the purely spoken play is a nineteenth-century aberration and even infants seem to understand instinctively the idea that a song can tell a story or express an emotion. So why has opera developed a reputation as a difficult and exclusive art-form?

Perhaps because it grew from roots that were both aristocratic and academic. Surviving evidence suggests that throughout the Middle Ages music was used in various ways for plays both religious and secular, but these had no direct influence on the development of opera, and it was only in the High Renaissance period that the seeds found the cultural conditions in which to flourish. During the sixteenth century, the French and Italian royal and ducal courts lavished expense and ingenuity on mounting splendid entertainments as part of the celebrations surrounding weddings, christenings, birthdays and political treaties. These often focused on a play or masque, in which the spoken episodes would be broken up by musical interludes, also known as intermedii. In each intermedio, a madrigal choir would recite a little myth ical story comic, pastoral or romantically poignant which costumed dancers simultaneously acted out in mime.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, two groups of scholars and composers, known as the camerata, met in Florence to discuss their research into classical drama. Fascinated by the idea that the Ancient Greeks had sung their plays throughout, they developed a theory of what they called stile rappresentativo, representative style, in which solo (as opposed to choral) voices sang a form of musical speech, now known as recitative or arioso, accompanied by a small band of instruments.

Modern scholars still dispute what should rank as the very first opera, and in fact the term opera (a Latin word, meaning literally works) did not come into general use until the end of the seventeenth century. Before then, the sung plays which evolved out of the intermedii and the writings of the camerata were generally called dramma per musica, drama through music.

The first great composer to exploit the possibilities of sung drama was Claudio Monteverdi. His Orfeo, the earliest opera to maintain a regular place in the modern repertory, was written in 1607 for a private court performance in Mantua; later in his career, he moved to Venice, where he produced several works for the first opera houses, built to admit a paying public.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, opera became more elaborate, both vocally and scenically audiences demanded spectacle, excitement and novelty, as well as comic relief from the high-flown emotions of mythological heroes and heroines. An important development was the idea of pausing the narrative for an aria, a song which allowed the singer to show off his or her prowess, and which stood out from the recitative or arioso passages which carried the story forward: one pioneer here was another Venetian composer, Francesco Cavalli. Opera also spread to France, where the tragdies en musique (tragedies in music) of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau emphasized the role of the chorus and introduced elaborate ballet sequences. In England, John Blow and Henry Purcell wrote both musical interludes for plays and short operas drawing on the French model.