Five Excerpts from Operratics

Eternal Decline

One day, as I deplored the declining state of bullfighting, Picasso mocked me, saying that people have always complained that the corrida was in decline, that the bulls of the past had been bigger, more powerful, etc. While bullfighting has admittedly evolved, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is in decline (or only in the sense that an art can be termed “in decline” when the incidental supplants the essential: in this case, the increasingly brillant play of the cape and muleta, the deathblow no longer being the climax, but merely the conclusion).

People frequently talk about the decline of opera. But, taking a good look at it, where is this so called decline? As far as the interpreters are concerned, if they don’t sing as well as in the past (which has yet to be proven, of course), they act better and generally have a more acceptable physique. As far as the works are concerned, a great number of more than notable operas has been composed in the first half of the twentieth century: Puccini, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Falla, Alban Berg, Kurt Weill, Charpentier, Stravinsky, these names alone bear witness to that fact. There is no doubt that in today’s opera the libretto is more important than before; but does that mean the music is any less important? And even if it were, we could see this as an evolution, a displacement of the center of interest, and not a state of decline.

In a letter dating (I believe) from 1867, Verdi already describes a number of problems with the Paris Opera that are still true today.

What Is an Opera?

By “opera” I mean any theatrical work whose basic medium is song. A wide variety of genres fall under this definition: opera strictly speaking, comic opera, light opera, operetta, musicals, lyric drama, etc.

An opera might very well have but a single character (cf. Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung), but the character must sing from within the context of a dramatic action. Theoretically, it is difficult to distinguish the single-character opera from the dramatic song (frequently performed in recitals); likewise, there is no solution of continuity between the single-character play and the monologue (Chekhov’s The Ravages of Tobacco can easily be seen as one or the other). Nevertheless, we clearly leave the monologue — or the dramatic song — for the theatrical work as soon as we have a decor or, at the very least, when the protagonist embodies his character in a more than allusive way and that by his physical appearance (costume included) he appears to have become that character. The action must also be present and not merely reduced to its narration (in this sense The Ravages of Tobacco is no monologue but indeed theater since the character does not relate something that has happened to him but is caught in the present of the speech that he is to deliver to the public). If we stick to this criteria, it remains that certain dramatic songs constitute mini operas; for example, the song The Shadow that, as a child, I heard sung in the Alhambra by the declamator Georgei: the singer walks on stage dressed as a ruined gambler (black suit, cape, top hat) and, having described how he lost everything but his “shadow” (projected by a spotlight onto the background), decides to drown himself and his faithful companion and rushes off to throw himself in the Seine. But it’s obvious that a such a song could not reasonably be considered an “opera.” So what’s the difference, if not the musical style? Simplistic in the song (with couplets and repeated refrains), the composition of an opera — were it a “minute-opera” — is much more complex. The definition of opera as theater sung is thus insufficient: theater sung, surely, but not sung in any old way; sung, on the contrary, according to a score that has been “composed” rather than being reduced to segments that could be indefinitely repeated.

Certain great ritual events — with protagonists in costume, mimed actions, music and choruses — are nearly operas; but they will only...