A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate, Roger Parker (review)

Opera is strange. As an art form that requires the actors to sing all or most of their dialogue, opera’s impact (and strangeness) is due, in part, to music. With a cautionary nod to opera’s strange nature, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker begin their synthesis of the four-hundred-year history of opera. This is a gargantuan task, one that Abbate and Parker tackle despite opera’s “troubled relationship with modernity” (p. xiii). What results is an impressive and accessible opera history that interweaves composers, works, and performers with their cultural contexts.

Abbate and Parker’s performance-based approach to opera is inclusive, refreshing, and enlightening. The book primarily covers composers most often performed today: Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, Puccini, and Strauss. On occasion they give an overview of composers based on their historical significance rather than their prominence in the opera house, such as seventeenth-century father-of-opera Monteverdi, and nineteenth-century sprechstimme innovator Meyerbeer. In addition, Abbate and Parker provide a brief overview of twentieth-century opera that glosses Adams, Britten, and Adès. Though they organize this history by composer, Abbate and Parker also focus on the place of performers in shaping and indeed, creating, operatic masterworks. The authors cover big-name operas (Le nozze di Figaro, Turandot, Nixon in China) as well as slightly less popular works (Iphigénie en Tauride, Der fliegende Holländer, Jenůfa). They expertly intersperse historical writings with operatic film scenes and dense descriptions of their listening experiences via recordings and live performances. What permeates this opera history is a profound consideration for a musical ear that cannot readily name meaningful harmonic progressions and for whom intricate structural analyses would mean little. Performance prevails as the primary method and inspiration for documenting the long and august history of one of Europe’s most privileged art forms.

Abbate and Parker do not use any notated music examples in their analyses; rather, they describe their memories of operas as live performances or audio recordings. To the musicologist, such an approach is obviously problematic. What is a history of a musical art form without traditional music analyses? Abbate and Parker defend their methodological choice in the preface (pp. xv–xvi); they want this history to be more accessible to the musically illiterate (i.e., people who have not formally studied music). In addition to these readability concerns, Abbate and Parker seek to give an opera history that maintains the spirit of the art form, one that respects its place as a theatrical event rather than a written text. Strictly music analyses in such a volume would be misplaced, they argue; but Abbate and Parker are careful not to completely abandon their musicological roots. They employ chordal and structural analysis when it can more accurately describe an opera’s sonic presence. Such moments occur, for instance, in their discussion of meter in Tristan und Isolde (p. 346–47) and of modes in Der Freischütz (p. 185). With this in mind, readers may want to be near a piano when reading if they wish to hear the infamous “Tristan chord” in Tristan’s Prelude, or at least near a computer (Abbate and Parker are not above encouraging YouTube searches).

Above all, Abbate and Parker capture opera’s musical presence in vivid descriptions that intertwine with each opera’s narrative. For example, in describing Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, after a rough tonal analysis of each of the seven doors’ openings, they end by situating the music in its narrative. “Each time the stain of blood invades the stage picture, the orchestral ensemble is coloured by a ‘blood’ motif, a grating minor second. . . . But this is a surface gesture. The opera is Pelléas-like in being formed from a series of vignettes, just as its vocal manner is for the most part determinedly syllabic and faithful to spoken rhythms” (p. 448). This example also...