An anti-theatrical opera would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Theatricality, after all, suggests an exaggerated perspective on what we take to be reality, a certain inauthenticity that, as Jonas Barish argued in The Antitheatrical Prejudice, has been an issue within Western thought since its beginnings. The term operatic implies the exaggeration of a theatrical stance already assumed to be exaggerated. Thus, an opera that questions the nature and value of theatricality would seem to put enormous constraints on composers and performers, not to speak of audiences eager to experience the enactment of those high emotions that they would not dare to reveal in their everyday lives.

Yet many of the operas that we now see as central to the twentieth-century canon display an anti-theatricality similar to what Barish, in his final chapter, describes in such major dramatists of the century as Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett. Pirandello, as he puts it, poses “a challenge to the theater as an expressive medium, a rebuke to its age-old claim to be able to instruct us about our true natures,” while Beckett initiates “a new radicalism” in which “the tissue of plausible event is stripped away” and “character is scraped down to the bone of consciousness.” For Barish, the revolutionary innovations of twentieth-century theater have worked to “burn down the ornate, overloaded theater of the past in the hope that a purified theater will rise from its ashes.

As the common wisdom goes, novel and opera would seem antithetical to one another. For one thing, they are wholly different media: the one a printed form designed for private reading, the other a dramatic representation meant to be performed. The novel is not only consumed privately, but it supposedly focuses upon the private experience of its characters and in turn encourages its readers to reconsider their individual life experiences. By contrast, opera, located as it is in large sonorous spaces, patronized by the so-called beautiful people (whoever they fashion themselves to be at any particular moment of history), and attended by hordes of avid fans relegated to the cheaper parts of the house, can count as the most public and social of art forms.

This appealing model of two media in powerful confrontation with one another served me well when, years ago, I wrote a chapter on the many opera scenes contained within novels for my first book on opera. The scene at the opera, whether centered in social interactions in the lobby or boxes, or in the action onstage, has been an ongoing topos in the novel as a way, one might say, of distinguishing between the ordinariness of the everyday life that is its essential subject matter and the extravagance, as my book's subtitle suggests, of the world of opera.

Why opera? Why (How, Where) situate?

interlocutor: Still another book on opera?

author: You mean by me or in general?

interlocutor: Both.

author: I still have a thing or two to say about opera.

interlocutor: Does the world need another book on this topic?

author: It's a much bigger topic than it seemed thirty years ago when I first wrote on it. Opera's been exploding all over the place: new audiences, new companies (and in towns where you could never have imagined opera before), new approaches to how one stages the thing, and, to top it off, as I'll show in the epilogue, a whole new area of inquiry that people are calling opera studies.

interlocutor: How can you even speak of an explosion when we know that for most people these days classical music is giving way to popular forms?

author: That may be true of some classical genres, but opera is flourishing more than ever. When I was growing up in Seattle during the 1930s you got only a single week of opera a year – and this from a touring group called the San Carlo Opera, which did only the most tired of warhorses, and with the flimsiest of sets, and singers who could charitably be described as of bush-league quality. Today, though I no longer live there, the city boasts its own company with a respectably sized season plus a summer Ring that draws international audiences.

It is easy enough to imagine doing a history of opera based on a succession of musical texts, or librettos, or, what is much more usual, a combination of these. A history of opera can also, as is frequently the case these days, consist of a history of performers and performing practices. But what about a history of how members of the audience engaged, or may have engaged, with what they heard and saw? As a preliminary sketch toward this sort of history, consider the following significant moments, each roughly a half century apart.

Monteverdi, La favola d'Orfeo, Mantua, Ducal Palace, February 24, 1607

What must they have thought, those noblemen of Mantua, as they witnessed the first performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo? Surely they were not aware that they were observing the birth of a new art form, one that would continue and evolve for at least four more centuries. Strictly speaking, however, this was not exactly the birth of opera, for several works – all of them attempts, in one way or another, to activate the theories about the rebirth of Greek drama enunciated by the Florentine Camerata – had been performed during the preceding decade. But Monteverdi's was something different from these earlier operas, whose continuous recitative strikes us as ultimately boring when we hear it revived today. For Monteverdi not only gave his recitative a dramatic intensity largely lacking in that of Caccini and Peri (who had both set to music this same ancient myth), but he also found a means of varying degrees of intensity with choruses and with lyrical outbursts that looked forward to what would later come to be called operatic arias.

Why (What, How, If) opera studies?

interlocutor: Your title alone portrays you on the defensive. Why all those questions? If it's a new field you're seeking to institute, your hesitancy is not likely to win converts.

author: Don't get me wrong. I don't want to persuade anybody to institute still another field, of which the modern university boasts more than it needs. I just want to deal with the practical institutional problems we face studying a phenomenon such as opera, which, as it happens, straddles a number of distinct fields.

interlocutor: But the moment I hear the term studies attached to an area, I sense a political agenda guiding you: think of those other fields that have imposed themselves on universities in recent years: feminist studies, Afro-American studies, Chicano studies, gay and lesbian studies, disability studies, animality studies and any number of others that, in the future, will be seeking a place in the academic sun.

author: So everything calling itself studies has to be politically motivated? What about film studies? Surely this would be the appropriate analogy to opera studies. Like film studies, opera studies is dedicated to the understanding of a particular genre or, more properly, a medium. Except, of course, that opera encompasses four times as many years of history and impinges on a larger number of other disciplines: musicology, obviously, but also theater history, art history, and every one of the literature fields in those countries where opera has thrived.

Ten recent instances

Two Rodelindas

How do you find an appropriate means for staging an opera set in barbarous Lombardy during the supposedly darkest of ages (c. 700 ad)? Do you research what brutish clothes and crudely fortified buildings would have shaped these operatic characters' lives? But that would be too much the way of the nineteenth century, which wanted its theater and fiction to represent an earlier world “as it really was.” Or do you imitate the way that Rodelinda's parent play, Corneille's Pertharite, Roi des Lombards (1653), was likely staged, that is, in the elegant theatrical dress of the dramatist's own time? Or do you go to the equally elegant operatic dress, often Roman, but never medieval, prevailing at the time – 1725 – that Rodelinda was first performed? To be sure, the title character, sung by the famous Francesca Cuzzoni, wore what Horace Walpole described as a “brown silk gown, trimmed with silver,” that he pronounced “vulgar and indecorous,” though as he admitted, “the young adopted it as a fashion.”

Had there been a continuing performing history of Rodelinda, audiences would likely have settled happily for whatever setting had become customary by the end of the nineteenth century (doubtless a medievalizing one). But Handel's operas were not performed between his own lifetime and the early twentieth century – and, until a decade or so ago, only at the most sporadic intervals.

About

What is Il trovatore “about?”

1. a. the standard dramatis personae of Italian Romantic opera: heroic tenor, yearning soprano, unpleasant and unsuccessful baritone, wronged and vengeful mezzo-soprano, loyal bass, plus these people's various attendants.

2. b. the Romantic Middle Ages.

3. c. the Middle Ages as romanticized in the later novels of Sir Walter Scott.

4. d. the Middle Ages as further romanticized by Scott's followers, above all, in the dramas of Victor Hugo and his followers – most notably for Il trovatore, in the play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez.

5. e. the characteristic structure of arias and duets of its time: recitative leading into the cantabile, then the tempo di mezzo, and, finally, the cabaletta.

6. f. the dangers posed by gypsies (though gypsies did not yet reside in Aragon at the time the play was set).

7. g. the gypsy's revenge, revenge becoming an emotion the audience can identify with since it is mediated by a romantically distant setting and by music that seeks to overwhelm any moral compunctions we may have (see violence).

8. h. very little in the present and a lot in the past (see narrating).

9. […]

The affinities between opera and lyric are longstanding. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, non-comic opera was distinguished from spoken drama by the term tragédie-lyrique. In Italian the word lirico is appended as an adjective to opera to form the generic term opera lirica, for the word opera can refer to a variety of things such as work or action. The term lyric has been preserved in the names of opera houses such as the Théâtre-Lyrique, which functioned in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, and in such present-day institutions as the Boston Lyric Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera.

The word lyric derives from that ancient instrument, the lyre, which accompanied the recitation of poems. During the early modern period the word was revived to define shorter poems accompanied by plucked instruments supposedly descending from the lyre. In its early manifestations, opera demonstrated its affinity to lyric through the dominant role that these instruments – baroque harp, chitarrone, theorbo, and lute – played in the small chamber ensembles accompanying the singers. When we hear a performance of, say, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria or La Calisto, we are constantly aware of how conspicuously the various plucked instruments define the rhythms and the harmonies of the declamations uttered by the characters.

Consider the following statements, written within less than a decade of one another:

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek to establish between other artistic forms and society – between, for instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?

As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase “opera and society” seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for example, one is faced with a multitude of forms, each rooted in a particular social context, from the animals depicted on the caves of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio walls. Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It encompasses an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a discernible institution, the opera house, though also, at least in its earlier years, within aristocratic courts. And despite the substantial differences in national traditions of opera, the particular roles assigned to those who create and sustain it – impresario, singers, librettist, composer – have maintained a degree of constancy over these four centuries rarely to be found in other art forms.

Modernist opera?

The terms we use to periodize opera are not necessarily the terms we use to characterize other forms of music. “Baroque opera,” a label attached to well over a century of works from Monteverdi through the early Gluck, belongs to the same category we apply to all the arts. But although the music of Mozart and Haydn is classified as marking the so-called Classical style, we do not readily speak of Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte as Classical operas. Yet we do speak of Romantic opera, but this, as mentioned earlier, is a relatively narrow term that suggests Weber and his successors up to early Wagner, and it is most often applied to German examples. Yet how do we bring the Germans together with their contemporaries Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti? Better perhaps to keep the Italians by themselves and speak of the Age of Bel Canto, a period concept intrinsic to opera and not transferable to other music, let alone the other arts.

Modernist opera, however, is a concept that seems to have caught on, if only because the operas we see as “modernist” emanate from composers whom we have already classified with this term. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, the modernist composers of opera were not primarily “opera composers.” Very few of the great nineteenth-century opera composers created significant oeuvres outside the opera house – the most notable exceptions being Beethoven, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky.

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek to establish between other artistic forms and society – between, for instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?

As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase “opera and society” seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for example, one is faced with a multitude of forms – each rooted in a particular social context – from the animals depicted on the caves of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio walls.

Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It encompasses an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a discernible institution, the opera house, though also, at least in its earlier years, within aristocratic courts. And despite the substantial differences in national traditions of opera, the particular roles assigned to those who create and sustain it – impresario, singers, librettist, composer – have maintained a degree of constancy over these four centuries rarely to be found in other art forms.

The second noun in the phrase “opera and society” obviously presents a more fluid situation than the first.