Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera

Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera HERBERT LINDENBERGE R An anti-theatrical opera would seem to be a contradiction in lenns. Theatricality , aner all, suggests an exaggerated perspective on what we take to be reality , a certain inauthenticity that, as Jonas Barish demonstrated in his magisterial book The Anlilhealrical 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 theatricallty 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 mediwn. a rebuke to its age-old claim to be able to instruct us about our true natures" (453), 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" (457). For Barish, the revolutionary innovations of twentieth-century theatre have worked to "bum down the ornate, overloaded theater of the past in the hope that a purified theater will . rise from its ashes" (464). The task of the present essay is to demonstrate the differing ways that four operas cutting across the twentieth century - Debussy's Pel/eas el Melisallde (1902), Schoenberg's Moses ulld Aroll (1932), Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), and Messiaen's Saint Fran,ois d'Assise (1983) - express an anti-theatricality analogous to what Barish explores in the drama of the same period. But unlike Barish, who considers modem drama in the light of a 2,50o-year debate about the theatre, I am principally concerned with the ways Modern Drama, 44:3 (2001) 300 Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera 301 in which modernist works, whether spoken or musical, respond to what their creators and audiences would have viewed as peculiarly theatrical in the writing of the past. Thus, Brecht's use of a multitude of devices to break the theatrical illusion, or Beckett's insistent repetitions and his refusal to work toward what once counted as a dramatic resolution, play upon their audiences' knowledge and often too-willing acceptance of the conventions governing the socalled well-made play. In this form, whether the "serious" drama of an Ibsen or the boulevard plays of a Scribe, the need for a constantly forward-moving plot and for characters who could pass for real-life persons provided a model that twentieth-century drama worked fervently to undo. Similarly with opera. Just as the model for what counts as theatrical was rooted in the writing of the preceding century, so the model for what is peculiarly operatic derived from the works with which audiences have been most familiar, namely the canonical operas of the mid- and late nineteenth century. What we see as "operatic" has, of course. changed in the course of history: what would have seemed operatic in the Venetian public theatres of the midseventeenth century is something quite different from what wasdeemed operatic in the heyday of opera seria during the eighteenth century.' For twentieth-century audiences, who until recent years rarely heard operas earlier than those of Mozart, the operatic canon occupied a relatively small segment of musical history. Despite differences in national styles, some key operas of the I850S display an extreme of what subsequent opera-goers could perceive as operatic - in Italy, 1/ trovatore (1853); in Germany, Tristan u"d Isolde (1859); in France, Faust (1859). In 1/ trovatore, for example, we experience a melodramatic plot in which crises follow one another at a dizzying pace until the final catastrophe; an unrelenting extravagance of gesture, as in Leonora's putting a stop to the duel fought by her two would-be suitors, or the gypsy's flamboyant narrative...