Strange thing I just realized.
The Met Opera celebrated New Year’s Eve with a new production of Tosca. Made sense to me when I first heard about it. An opera people love, some grand singing, if it’s cast well. What’s not to like?
And then it dawned on me. This makes no sense at all, Tosca on New Year’s Eve. Not if you take the opera seriously, and remember what it’s about.
Let’s remind ourselves. (Not that I really need to recount the plot to readers who know classical music, but still).
Blood and torment
A brutal man — torturer, killer, sexual predator, police chief of a tyrannical state — sees an opportunity. Lock up an enemy of his regime. Torture him. Make his lover — a smoldering diva — watch the torture. Tell her he’ll free the man, if she’ll submit to him.
Tito Gobbi as Baron Scarpia, the sexual predator
Helpless, she says yes. And true, she kills him. But the sadist has the last laugh. His order to free the man was bogus, and, thinking she’ll see her lover freed, she sees him shot to death instead. And so she kills herself.
And, sure, all of this is dressed up in operatic grandeur, with sweeping melodies, but still! Torture, death, impending rape, and suicide. When Tito Gobbi, the great Italian baritone, famous for his singing of the villain, recorded the opera for the second time with Maria Callas, he said after (listening to the scene where she kills him), “This isn’t opera. This is a real murder!” Or words to that effect.
And all of us, reading that back in the 1960s, said, “Now that’s a great performance!”
So if it sounds real…
…how is Tosca a celebration, fit for New Year’s Eve? It’s as if classical music really didn’t have any content. Oh, we love opera! We love the singing, love the drama, love the high notes. But does it mean anything? Not really.
Like when I realized that we still perform Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri, an opera that makes fun of Muslims.
Well, maybe you could say that at least in Tosca, the woman kills the predator. But he wins in the end.
Or you could say, oh, lighten up, it’s only opera. So then let’s take away the funding it gets for being high art, presumably with deep meaning.
(And, by the way, thanks for making my point for me. Or more than my point! I only said we treat classical music as if it had no meaning. Not that it truly doesn’t have any.)
What makes this even more uneasy, in the time of #metoo, is not simply that Tosca’s sadistic police chief is a sexual predator. But that the conductor originally set to lead the performance, James Levine, had to be replaced because he’s been credibly exposed as a predator himself.
So the real world really does force its way into opera.
I knew someone who once spent Easter Sunday at the State Opera in Prague for “Don Carlo”, that uplifiting ode to the Spanish Inquisition ! I thought that was kind of ironic. Most of Europe gets less religious by the week but really, what were they thinking, on Easter Sunday ??!
Well, I never cared much for Tosca anyway. Badly constructed plot, lots of cheap emotion, a few pretty good arias — basically the opera equivalent of a modern slasher movie, with professionally trained voices and instrumentalists. I never understood why so many people love horror movies, either.
Wasn’t that the general opinion about much opera during its time? Popular low brow entertainment?
Yes! But still the operas had content, meaning. There’s a moment in Madame Bovary where Emma Bovary, in the mists of an adulterous affair, is transported by Lucia di Lammermoor, because it’s about a forbidden love. Operas cod be censored for their content — if, for instance, they were thought to be disrespectful of royalty. Tosca would never have been produced in the mid 19th century in Italy, because it showed a brutal and corrupt monarchy, and sympathize with rebels against it.
And what about the racist and sexist The Magic Flute?
For a long time, productions have cut the language about Monostatos’s dark skin. But the sexism is another story. Women chatter too much, the opera says, to attain high spiritual goals. Yuck. And we can hear, in the same vein, Susanna and the Countess chatter in the way Mozart writes some of their music in the 2d act finale, even though they’re smart women, more than a match for the men in the opera.
The larger — and I’d think obvious — larger problem with the old opera repertoire is that it depicts women in ways we’d now fund unacceptable. Except we somehow don’t. Women are almost entirely defined in relation to men. And have to die at the end of the opera.
There’s a book about this, published in the 80s, written by an opera-loving French feminist, Catherine Clément. Called Opera, or the Suppression of Women. We don’t recognize nearly enough that an immersion in old opera means an immersion in obsolete and now offensive views of women. Not a great experience, to say the least, for female opera singers. Compare the roles a serious actress plays in a theater and film and TV career, with what an operatic soprano plays.
The most offensive opera, to me, is Flying Dutchman. I can’t watch or listen to it. Senta, waiting her whole life for the fulfillment of sacrificing herself for a man. Disgusting. I can’t see how we can produce that today, except as a cautionary tale. An even then, seems like we’re throwing a lot of time and money and work to teach a lesson almost too obvious to bear repeating.
I’ve recently thought what Il Trovatore would be if it were an episode of Game of Thrones. Leonora, in the last act, would forget Manrico and go off with the Count. Then later kill him, and find a way to replace his royal patron on the throne. Plotting her ascent from lady in waiting to queen!
Thanks!
I think we just have to face it: much, if not most, of the content in the librettos of our favorite old chestnut operas is so disgusting that we simply have to ignore it and concentrate on the music. I’m fortunate in that respect with Italian and French operas (not to mention Czech and Hungarian ones) because, not knowing those languages very well, I can just pay no attention to the words. Of course, you still have the action on stage, if you’re watch a live performance or video, which forces you to close your eyes.
Knowing German a lot better, I can’t really ignore Wagner’s words. But Der Fliegende Crazy Ship Captain is not one of his works I have ever liked very much, so I can side-step it. But I don’t want to go into old Richard’s very complex psyche here; that would require a whole book, and several of those have already been written. Let’s just say that it’s best to concentrate more on the music in his case, too.
But aren’t you then saying that the music is meaningless? How can that be true, if it affects us so powerfully, and if, when it was composed, it was created from the crucible of drama? A d depicts that drama. I don’t see how we can appreciate the music and put aside the drama it represents. Could you watch a Shakespeare performance, and just listen to the poetry?
I guess what I’m saying is that the sexist, politically conservative, etc., aspects of the libretti we object to now are parts of the historical epoch in which they were written. In the 18th-19th centuries, they were part of the developing impact of the Enlightenment, with which people were just beginning to come to terms. (Many people still haven’t come to terms with it. Hence Trump’s election.) So they are of course mixtures of “enlightened” (or today we say “woke”) attitudes and the opposite. We just have to deal with that. Even the most “woke” of us today aren’t so elevated, we must admit.
Beethoven was rather advanced for his time on the subject of misogyny and dictatorship in Fidelio, but even it isn’t considered very pure by 21st-century standards by many people. And the 9th Symphony: why not “alle Menschen werden Geschwister” instead of “Brüder”? What was wrong with him and Schiller? Were they male chauvinist pigs, or were they midway on the journey from the Enlightenment to our splendid era? I don’t really think much about such a question when I listen.
The music is of course closely connected with the words, but it is certainly possible to listen to it without paying attention to the words. What about listening to Janacek’s operas with no knowledge of Czech? I don’t know a word of the language, and haven’t even really looked up the synopses of the operas, so I only have a vague idea of what they’re “about.” But I am certainly powerfully affected by the music.
Of course, Janacek wouldn’t have liked the way I approach his work; the meaning of the words was vitally important to him. I admit that ignoring the words is far from the perfect way to relate to the whole work, but it is often good enough for me. As an atheist, I don’t really pay much heed to the words of the Passions of Matthew and John, the B Minor Mass, or the Verdi Requiem, even though I have some knowledge of German and Latin. The words don’t mean anything emotionally to me. But I still think they are fantastic music.
Taking the case of Shakespeare, how do we deal today with The Merchant of Venice? It’s tough; there’s no way around that.
Somehow this is easier in other arts. Or with old songs, movies, TV shows. There we can go film by film, song by song, classic novel by classic novel, and react however we want. Some things being more problematic than others.
I don’t want to to seem like a broken record (obsolete reference alert!!), but classical music messes up our perceptions of the past, by serving up a diet of mostly old works, which taken together and individually we’re supposed to revere as timeless masterworks. Which makes it hard to clearly see anything about them, including their provenance as messages from the past.
Hard but not impossible. Really understanding anything true and accurate about history or about the arts (and the sciences, and what-have-you) is really tough. That’s what education is supposed to help with, or so I always thought. So that brings up the dreaded topic of “music education.”
I think that redressing the balance between old and contemporary musics is very important. But part of that is recognizing that masterworks are masterworks, whenever they were composed and whether or not they are “timeless” (meaning, I guess, “will continue to be considered masterworks for all time”). Of course, that’s a subjective judgment, which gets us into the “subjectivity/objectivity of esthetic statements.” Oy gevalt, as Bach wouldn’t have said.
Almost everything in nonreligious art–literature, music, drama, painting, sculpture–is about a reprehensible act by a man or–yes, a woman–Medea et al. If we are going to deplore the past we will lose it and then we’ll have just the morals of the present moment! God help us.
I’ve always thought that the purpose of art was to show us alternatives to the way we live now. If that’s so, it can certainly show us ways to live that we reject. And we’ll know why.
It seems to me pretty simple-minded to think that any complex human activity can be undiluted good. Until now, it seems many people understood that. Now, though, we reduce people and art to their worst moment and then throw it all away. (“Jefferson owned slaves: that’s all you need to know about him.”)
For years I’ve noted a growing hatred of the past. But a people who have no past have a very bleak future.
This isn’t about rejecting the past. This is about an enterprise — classical music, as presently done — that most of the time is buried in the past. That’s the problem, not the past in itself.
No longer is it sufficient to wonder at the tonal architecture of Mozart’s comic operas as if they were symphonies by Bruckner, or to gush about Verdi’s great-hearted commitment to the cause of Italian nationhood. We have learned to reflect on the social contexts of opera as the preferred art form of the ruling classes; to challenge historiographical narratives constructed around a procession of great composers in this inherently institutional form; to ask questions about representations of gender or race; to ask questions about representation tout court. Unable to cast off my Nietszchean hermeneutics of suspicion, I am always tuned into the ideological subtext to the most apparently innocuous narrative or musical elements. And those appeals that solicit our feelings most pressingly are, perhaps, to be regarded with the greatest wariness. Whenever I’m cajoled by Verdi or Puccini to sob at the pathetic fates of Violetta or Mimi, I recall as you reference the devastating account by the French feminist critic Catherine Clément of “the infinitely repetitive spectacle of a woman who dies” in opera.
Yet despite all of my carefully maintained guards, I can still be bushwhacked. What is it that brings on these powerful responses? It’s not those tubercular death scenes, weepy though they be – Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor put paid to that. And it’s not the Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro bemoaning her lost happiness: when the countess concludes her list of the indignities she has suffered with the revelation that she (a woman of middle-class origin) has been “forced to seek the help of one my servants”, Mozart tells us, through his musical emphasis, that she is spoiled and self-pitying. No, it’s the following scene, in which the countess and the servant she is referring to, the staunch and resourceful Susanna, plot the comeuppance of the philandering count in a duet in which the countess, taking control of her life, dictates the letter that will lure her husband into their trap. The voices spin the seductive melody between them, passing phrases back and forth seamlessly, Susanna repeating and embroidering the phrases, until they finally conjoin. For a moment, sisterly solidarity overcomes class difference, as the pair conjure a nocturnal idyll of the pine-scented glades where the false assignation will take place.
Thanks for all of this. Beautifully thought and written. I like your final point. I think Mozart intuited profundities he count have spoken about consciously. One of the reasons his essence has seemed elusive (cf Kierkegaard).
No longer is it sufficient to wonder at the tonal architecture of Mozart’s comic operas as if they were symphonies by Bruckner, or to gush about Verdi’s great-hearted commitment to the cause of Italian nationhood. We have learned to reflect on the social contexts of opera as the preferred art form of the ruling classes; to challenge historiographical narratives constructed around a procession of great composers in this inherently institutional form; to ask questions about representations of gender or race; to ask questions about representation tout court. Unable to cast off my Nietszchean hermeneutics of suspicion, I am always tuned into the ideological subtext to the most apparently innocuous narrative or musical elements. And those appeals that solicit our feelings most pressingly are, perhaps, to be regarded with the greatest wariness. Whenever I’m cajoled by Verdi or Puccini to sob at the pathetic fates of Violetta or Mimi, I too recall as you reference the devastating account by the French feminist critic Catherine Clément of “the infinitely repetitive spectacle of a woman who dies” in opera.
Yet despite all of my carefully maintained guards, I can still be bushwhacked. What is it that brings on these powerful responses? It’s not those tubercular death scenes, weepy though they be – Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor put paid to that. And it’s not the Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro bemoaning her lost happiness: when the countess concludes her list of the indignities she has suffered with the revelation that she (a woman of middle-class origin) has been “forced to seek the help of one my servants”, Mozart tells us, through his musical emphasis, that she is spoiled and self-pitying. No, it’s the following scene, in which the countess and the servant she is referring to, the staunch and resourceful Susanna, plot the comeuppance of the philandering count in a duet in which the countess, taking control of her life, dictates the letter that will lure her husband into their trap. The voices spin the seductive melody between them, passing phrases back and forth seamlessly, Susanna repeating and embroidering the phrases, until they finally conjoin. For a moment, sisterly solidarity overcomes class difference, as the pair conjure a nocturnal idyll of the pine-scented glades where the false assignation will take place.
In Schiller’s famous analysis of the distinction between the “naive” and the “sentimental” artist, the naive artist is the realist who is at home in the world as he or she finds it, whereas the sentimental artist is always aware of humankind’s fall from Eden and disjunction from the world. The sentimentalist either acknowledges the rift through a critical attitude to the world, laments the loss through elegy or seeks to restore lost harmony with nature through idyllic art. In a bare three minutes, Mozart manages, miraculously, to spin all three positions simultaneously: the music transports us effortlessly to its idyllic moonlit scene; yet the letter’s exaggeratedly romantic literary tropes, upon which Susanna and the countess comment knowingly, are designed explicitly to deceive. In so far as it is framed critically in this way, the idyll that is summoned so matchlessly is inherently elegiac, conveying knowledge that states of grace must always pass. The duet is so affecting because it conveys a dramatic turning point that we have been longing for, but suffuses it with a more fundamental sense of loss, and of our desire and regret for a better and happier world.
Reminds me of the story of people going to Morton’s after seeing and hearing Wozzeck.