How to Enjoy Opera

John Snelson

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783197163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

From Glyndebourne to the King's Head, in the flesh and streamed online: opera is reaching a broader audience than ever before. With over 400 years of history, and a beguiling mix of musical motifs, costumes, storytelling and song, opera has fascinated and enthralled audiences for centuries. However it can also cast the impression of an intimidating high-art form, inaccessible to the uninitiated. How to Enjoy Opera is an engaging, illuminating primer which will demystify the world of opera. John Snelson, who has worked at London's world-famous Royal Opera House in Covent Garden for over 15 years, gives his expert insight into how to absorb an opera and understand its inner workings. Aimed at newcomers to the art form as well as long-time fans, this book will help the reader to absorb and understand any opera: with examples drawn from more than 45 composers and just over 100 operas included. There are references to some of the most famous of all opera moments, sometimes from less familiar perspectives, but also to lesser-known works. This book decodes many of the elements that opera composers and librettists put into their operas that give enjoyment to audiences, in the hope that readers can gain greater enjoyment from their future viewing and listening too.

CHAPTER ONE

Love, Death and Opera: Tosca

Great operas need great stories. This is one of them.

A painter and a singer are in love. But the singer is famous and glamorous, and she attracts the attentions of a powerful, malevolent Chief of the State Police. He is determined to get what he wants: her. The painter has helped a political prisoner to escape, and when he has to cover this up his secrecy makes his singer-lover suspicious. She accidentally gives this away to the Police Chief, who arrests the painter, then tortures him in earshot of the singer to make her agree to whatever he wants. And we know what that is.

This would make for a dramatic ending to a drama: thwarted true love, evil triumphant, and the tragedy of a woman not so much fallen as sadistically pushed. But it is just the first act. There’s more. She can’t give in to the Chief of State Police’s sex-by-blackmail. In self-protection stabs him to death. Curtain… but only on the second act. It’s still not the end of the story.

The Police Chief has signed a warrant which allows the painter and singer free passage out of the city – in exchange for the singer yielding to his sexual demands. After she has the warrant, the singer stabs him to death. The painter is to be shot by a firing squad on the top of a castle, but the Police Chief promised the guns will fire blanks. After the charade, the painter and singer can escape. But the Police Chief lied; the bullets are real; the painter is shot dead. The singer realizes she’s been tricked. She is about to be arrested – the Police Chief’s men have now found his murdered body. She cries out to the dead Police Chief ‘See you before God’ – in today’s Hollywood it would be ‘See you in Hell’ – and hurls herself off the castle battlements to her death. Curtains in turn for the Police Chief, the painter and the singer. And a final curtain for the audience, too.

This is the story of Tosca. It is one of the most famous and most performed of all operas, composed by Giacomo Puccini, one of the most famous of all opera composers. Puccini and his librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica adapted a play by the Frenchman Victorien Sardou, whose title role had proved ideal for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was Bernhardt that Puccini saw in the play, twice.

But there have to be changes made to turn a play into an opera. As the music in an opera needs space of its own, you don’t need as many lines as in a play, and once you start removing lines you also have to simplify some points to keep the clarity of the action – long explanations are ineffective when sung. And reinterpretation is inevitable, just as when adapting a novel to a film, or a film to a stage play. The new medium may make it better to bring out or suppress particular qualities: just think of the various adaptations for TV and film of Charles Dickens’s novels, and you’ll appreciate that the same book can be acted out in different ways and with different emphases to the story.

For opera, the fundamental question is not about what you do, but why you do it. If a story is already effective as a novel or a play, then what can music add? Music is the ingredient that fundamentally turns that story into an opera. The answer goes to the core of what opera is about. Any story, whether as novel or play, is full of emotional undercurrents and relationships. If you add music to the script, you have a complementary running commentary from a composer that enriches the emotions and fills out the sense of place and the passage of time. If you use singing voices rather than speaking ones, there is a different expressive potential through pitch and tone, the possibilities of melody and the interplay with other voices and instruments. Music adds whole new dimensions to create a world with expanded boundaries.

In Tosca, the music helps describe where the story takes place. The setting is Rome in 1800, and the plot and the characters and the historical detail were researched by the writers and by the composer. The music is essentially of its own day – the first performance was on 14 January 1900 – but Puccini sought out some authentic effects to help create the right setting. For example, in Act I, which takes place in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, there is the large assembly for a church service, a celebratory Te Deum. We have bells, the choirboys and the chanting of the priests. In Act II, we hear a concert in which Tosca is singing, the sound of her voice drifting in through the window of the study of Scarpia, the Police Chief, in the Palazzo Farnese. The cantata has just enough musical characteristics that are appropriate to 1800 rather than 1900 to suggest to Puccini’s first audiences that there was something genuinely historical in the sound, but not so much as to be an archaic pastiche that didn’t fit in with the other music around it. Act III, on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome just before sunrise, begins with the sounds of distant church bells tolling and the song of a young shepherd leading his flock. All this contributes to building the atmosphere and detail of a ‘real’ environment, in a theatrical sense of course. The sounds help fill out for the ears what the stage set and costumes do for the eyes. We honour the theatrical conventions, suspend our disbelief and imagine we are there, in Rome, in 1800. You may have noticed that the locations of the story are all places still on the city’s map today, and many operas take inspiration and even factual detail from history such that you can visit them and think yourself into the drama where it is supposed to have happened.

Music also fills out the character. Floria Tosca, the beautiful singer, makes her first entrance in Act I to the orchestra, playing a beguiling tune we will later hear her sing, and it is orchestrated to sound warm and rich and utterly charming. When she does sing, the impression her voice and melody create confirm that she is a lovely lady. The painter, Mario Cavaradossi, is also introduced to us with wonderful, melodic warm music, and when he sings it is also smooth and memorable. The notes in his melodies have a tendency often to leap up towards the higher notes – he’s aspirational, reaching for higher things (something of the idealism that made him help the political prisoner). Put them together and you have the typical romantic soprano-tenor pairing so familiar in opera.

Baron Scarpia, however, is evil. His music is threatening, with relentless rhythms that suggest the unstoppable force of fate, such as with the tolling bells we hear occasionally in association with his presence. He doesn’t fit musically with Tosca and Cavaradossi. The mismatch is not just with his steady repetitive rhythms – which suggest the sort of person who tramples methodically over everyone and everything in his way – it is also his melody and harmony. Tosca and Cavaradossi sound harmonious, in tune – just as lovers should be. But Scarpia has notes that seem to be slightly wrong, chromatic ones that twist the harmonies. The first three chords of the whole opera are famous and instantly identifiable: two big loud chords in the lower brass resembling some huge musical pronouncement, then interrupted by a third set much higher and which doesn’t fit. The world goes out of tune in the first bars of Tosca. We haven’t come across Scarpia at that point, so we don’t know yet that this strident theme will become associated with him through being played in some form every time he appears. But from the outset, from the orchestral sound alone, we do know that the sound is disturbing and threatening: there is something bad on the horizon.

All the way through the opera, the two lovers tend towards the beautiful and melodic for Tosca, the lyrical and rousingly heroic for Cavaradossi. Scarpia’s music is low and menacing. The music amplifies their characters and their feelings as the drama progresses in all sorts of subtle ways even though we may consciously be focussing on another aspect of the opera performance, such as the words (sung or in surtitles), the faces of the performers, the gestures they make, the stage set through which they are visually thrown into relief. As with good film music, you may not notice the detail of the music at the time, but it nonetheless strengthens the atmosphere of the image and the dialogue and the undercurrents of continuously flowing emotion.

The music is there not only to support the voices. It creates and continues the dramatic atmosphere between the lines of the singers. In Tosca, Act III has a gripping build-up of tension as we wait for Cavaradossi’s mock execution. An orchestral section evokes the cold pre-dawn feeling, and Cavaradossi thinks about his love for Tosca, for as far as he knows at that point the firing squad is real and death is imminent. Tosca arrives and there is the triumphant sound of them reunited – joyful, exuberant and hopeful.

Then we hear very quietly the beginnings of a steady march, the announcement of the military firing squad on their way to this place of execution. Tosca has warned Cavaradossi that the execution is all for show, so after the shots he must pretend to fall and just lie there until she’s gives the all-clear. That little march gradually becomes big; the low flutes are replaced by the brass, the tread gets heavier, the firing squad gets nearer, onto the top of the castle, into position. Cavaradossi is tied to a post and blindfolded. The music gets louder and louder, the trumpets blaring out a twisting, descending melody. Tosca is waiting anxiously, Cavaradossi is bracing himself for the shots. It’s like a horror film – the audience know just what is to happen, but the suspense is gripping. Then the music seems to judder with an over-insistence on some chords, the guns fire, the shots ring out, and Cavaradossi drops down dead. The music subsides as the soldiers leave the scene, the instruments gradually dropping out of the orchestration too. It is a superbly timed dramatic episode in which the sound amplifies perfectly the building tension of the drama to the violent high point of the gunfire and then to the tense quiet as Tosca waits in vain for Cavaradossi to get up.

The significance of the music, however, goes further than just dramatizing in sound the action of the story. Those characteristics of a steady march, rising tension, chromatic turning of the musical screw – all of them are musical markers for Scarpia. He may have been stabbed to death at the end of Act II, but his duplicitous actions live on into Act III. The real firing squad is his last laugh, so naturally it is played out to his music: the evil piper still calls the tragic tune. Music can remind you of a character’s actions and motivations even when they aren’t on stage.

Operatic highlights can create something of their intended effects even when taken out of their original contexts. Tosca’s Act II aria ‘Vissi d’arte’ has become especially popular, promoted to the status of opera hit in particular through a recording by Maria Callas, for whom Tosca was a defining role. Even when not in its place in Act II, without the establishing of the characters and the build-up of the story, it still communicates as an impassioned and hypnotic aria – a real ‘star’ moment of intense emotion through its long melody from the quiet and poised opening phrases through to the big climax for both voice and orchestra. The emotional communication remains even when the exact dramatic situation is absent.

This visceral element of opera has been co-opted in some places that may at first seem unlikely. There is a terrific scene in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace which takes place during an opera performance at the internationally known Bregenz Festival, famous for its lakeside location and its gigantic operatic sets on and around the floating stage. Bond is chasing the elusive underworld group who are meeting there during a performance of Tosca. We see the audience arriving, with various members of the group taking their seats. We follow Bond climbing up into the scaffolding behind the stage set and looking out into the audience. As Bond gets the attention of the underworld leaders, on stage we have the concluding Te Deum of Act I of the opera. The evil Scarpia is singing of his diabolic intent towards Tosca as the priests, the choir and the congregation give thanks to God – against a scene of prisoners being lined up for execution. The mounting tension of the opera provides the perfect score for the tension in Bond’s tracking down of his villains. The conclusion of the music of Act I is the moment Bond catches up with his prey. The slow motion gun fight that follows uses as its soundtrack the agonizing and sorrowful music of the end of Act II – when Tosca, a God-fearing and devout Catholic, has to face up to the dead body of Scarpia, who she murdered – interspersed with images of the deaths in Acts II and III in the production happening on the floating stage for the festival audience at the same time. The opera’s commentary on the sadistic abuse of power by malevolently controlling powers shadows themes in the film, while the underlying emotions of Puccini’s music fit the film’s scenario perfectly.

Tosca is in the top ten of operas today. I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it in the theatre, and I’ve listened to it on CD and watched it on DVD many more times still. And at each encounter, it can still excite and thrill. It is probably one of the most approachable of operas, too. The acts are compact, the action consistently adds to the tension, and the style of the music is one with which we have a lot of familiarity. The sounds of late Romanticism – the end of the 1800s going into the 1900s – were a huge influence on Hollywood film scores. It is this musical language with which so many of the key composers for film in the 1930s and 40s were comfortable, and the film-score conventions of themes to identify characters, soaring main melodies, rich orchestral scoring and even richer harmonic accompaniments are all now the stock-in-trade of a style that we have absorbed without even realizing it through cinema and television dramas.

As Tosca has shown to so many audiences for more than a century, opera brings together many elements in a performance to stir us through ears, eyes, minds and emotions while giving us a glimpse into other people’s lives and feelings, other ages and other places. Music dominates – voices alone and together, the sound of the orchestra – but the use of movement, historical settings and distinctive location, and even the idea of performance itself are also part of this extraordinary mixture. The following chapters look at these complementary elements and the ways they are used to tell stories and heighten the drama – in other words, how they put the enjoyment into opera.

CHAPTER TWO

A Certain Tone: Voice Types

The stage is empty. The orchestra leaps into a forcefully assertive, minor-key introduction, and into the space sweeps a woman to take centre stage. When she starts to sing, it is very clear indeed that she is as angry as the orchestra’s lead-in has suggested. Each short phrase seems to build on the previous one, taking the top note slightly higher each time. In fury, and with absolute certainty, she confronts the audience with a series of high repeated notes, then again a little lower. And finally a phrase that goes up…. And up. This is the Queen of Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), her anger at her arch-rival Sarastro reaching boiling point, and exploding in the coloratura of high Fs in her aria ‘Die hölle Rache’ (‘Hell’s vengeance’). Which is really high. The effect of the pitch and the repetitions leading into the arpeggio that takes the coloratura soprano voice (Italian term for an agile voice that can sing high scales, leaps and trills) right to the top of its range is of arrow-like points of sharp brilliance hurled out into the auditorium. And any singer performing the role of the Queen of Night knows that, from the moment she signs the contract, a large number of the audience will be sitting there from curtain-up just waiting for those stunning notes to ring out.

What an expectation to fulfil! Of course, the coloratura soprano is a special type of voice that is set so that such high notes are part of the territory. It shows that there is more to voices than just a simple division of soprano, alto, tenor and bass that underpins so much choral music. Opera is a world of variations that demonstrate the huge variety of pitch ranges and tones that the human voice can occupy.

Such variation can’t be summarized just by the notes a singer can reach, from their lowest note to their highest. Rather, the voice is linked to the character of the singer in much more extensive ways. Singers need to work out how their voices move through the pitches, what is the most comfortable tone and its range, whether the voice sits naturally higher in the full range or lower. Add to this the character types a singer can most easily project on stage – the tragic and dying lover or the virile, conquering hero, the flirtatious seductress or the brooding baddie – and the whole scheme becomes complex. When all these elements of the performer and their voice come together in one role, then we get those outstanding performances that are musically glorious and dramatically engrossing.

MORE THAN PITCH

This more subtle way of thinking about voice types alongside the repertory, bringing character and range together, is called a Fach, a German term for a systematic categorization of voices. Such formal classification gives one way of listening to voices with more in mind than just the notes the voice can hit. If you are a singer, discovering your Fach, which is the sort of role you suit best, is part of the business. Mezzo-sopranos (Italian name for a pitch range set slightly lower than that of a soprano) can start training only to discover they are really more comfortable as coloratura sopranos (Joan Sutherland, most famously), and baritones can go down to be either bass-baritone and on to bass, or sometimes push up to become full-voiced tenors for those big Wagner roles. Just like actors, too, a singer may be better in supporting roles, or comic ones, or heavily characterized ones, and so on.

As singers progress through their careers, the pitch range may change, usually dropping, and the tone may become darker (older characters on stage may have music written to suit the matured qualities of older singers): it’s part of what a singer has to deal with, constantly keeping a sense of what is comfortable for the voice, and thus what will sound natural and appropriate for the audience. The great Austrian singer Leonie Rysanek made her name especially in roles in Strauss operas, and in Elektra she performed both soprano roles of Elektra and her sister Chrysothemis, but by her final opera performance (at the Salzburg Festival in 1996) was taking the older, lower-pitched mezzo-soprano role of their mother, Klytaemnestra.

Operatic plots create not only character names, but expectations too of what those characters will sound like as well as how they will behave. The choice of voice range and tone is crucial to creating this impression for the audience. Mozart wrote the music for the Queen of Night for a very particular singer, his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer. The individual qualities of her voice – range and agility in particular – were built into the music. But of course, the character had to need that sort of sound, too.

This is not an unusual scenario. It is more common than not for the big roles in opera to have been conceived with specific singers in mind. Often such composer...