Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (review)

Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage. By Herbert Lindenberger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xi + 364 pp. $49.50 hardcover, $18.95 paperback.

After Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984), this is Herbert Lindenberger's second major volume on the subject of opera. Like the earlier book, Opera in History proposes to offer a general yet serious study on opera: not as specialized as a musicological analysis of individual operas, but much deeper and theoretically probing than the average opera guide. In structuring the book, Lindenberger plays with musical and operatic conventions: A "prelude" on opera books introduces the volume, a "finale" on opera audiences concludes it, and the eight chapters in between are loosely organized like pieces in a "number-opera" rather than "full-fledged music-drama" (8). A further playfulness is apparent in the unconventional use of prepositions and word combinations in the book's title: Lindenberger deliberately did not write a history "of" opera, with its presumption of evolution and a certain completeness, nor did he write a book on "the opera of history"--i.e. on operas with historical themes--but rather a study on "opera in history" (4-5). This focus allows the author to unveil narrative and historicizing strategies within an operatic work, to question the relationship between an art work and its presumed historical context, and to draw new connections between operatic aesthetics and history, finding occasionally surprising correspondences to the present.

Despite his skepticism towards conventional approaches to operatic history, Lindenberger does not abandon a loosely chronological approach. Thus the first chapter concentrates on "Monteverdi, Caravaggio, Donne: Modernity and Early Baroque." Reflecting on the operatic canon, Lindenberger notes that the old Metropolitan Opera in New York--a building closed and destroyed in 1966 when the Met moved to Lincoln Center--had the names of six composers inscribed on the proscenium: Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, and Gounod. As much as Gluck, Lindenberger argues, Monteverdi may be regarded as a founding father of opera, in particular of the tradition of opera-as-drama or music-drama. He compares Monteverdi to the painter Caravaggio and the poet John Donne. Lindenberger views all three seventeenth-century artists as possible creators, even classics of twentieth-century "modernism." Monteverdi, Caravaggio, and Donne all reacted against preceding more elegant styles: Monteverdi against contrapuntalists like Zarlino, Caravaggio against decorative mannerism, and Donne against the constraints of Petrarchan love poetry. In these rebellions, all three discovered styles with which modern artists could identify: Monteverdi now belongs to the repertoire of the early music movement that some musicologists consider an integral part of musical modernism. Caravaggio's chiaroscuro technique and his occasionally shrill naturalism have appealed to modern sensibilities. Likewise, the prose-like roughness in Donne's poetic style may have anticipated the irregular verses of modern poetry.

Chapter two turns to "Handel and the Poetics of Opera Seria." While Monteverdi may be regarded as the founder of the movement of music-drama that culminated in the nineteenth century in Wagner and has dominated the discourse on opera, Handel's works represent the tradition of opera seria. This tradition experienced its heyday in the eighteenth century and a revival in the early twentieth century, but is often neglected today. Opera seria, with its alterations of arias and recitatives, foregrounds music over drama. It undermines the union of word and music that music-drama strives for. The castrati who were frequently cast as heroic figures and male lovers, added to the impression of artifice. Yet, while music-drama may predominate today, Oskar Hagen's Handel revival in Göttingen, as well as new works by Busoni, Stravinsky, and Weill that sought to revitalize the number-opera (and also created a famous parody of it with The Threepenny Opera!) have once again raised the popularity of this genre. Lindenberger also wonders whether the high degree of artifice, the absence of attempted verisimilitude, and the occcasional "pasticcio" in an opera seria may have appealed...