“The opera is an impossible work of art.” With this sentence, Oscar Bie opened his famous story in 1913: “The Opera” – a pledge of loyalty in the form of a critical polemic. At the center of the opera is a mythical figure removed from reality: Orpheus. Opera emerges in orphic song. Still?
George Bernard Shaw described the “narrative model” of opera in a pointedly ironic way. “Opera – that’s when a tenor and a soprano want to make love, but a baritone prevents them from doing so.” This concerns opera as Shaw knew it: from Mozart to Verdi and Wagner to Puccini, but without Monteverdi or Handel. The quip has become a prejudice.
A guideline, by no means a limit
According to the old model, the tenor embodies virile masculinity, the soprano the divine or ideal femininity, and the baritone the disruptive third. The characters are assigned to idealized voice types: the lyric-dramatic soprano, the heroic tenor or spinto, the character or heroic baritone. Through their voice characters, they are all representatives of a heterosexual society: as “natural” voices.
The opera had become the most beautiful of all feudal and then bourgeois art entertainments when Wagner gave himself up to the idea of burning down all the opera houses and building an art temple for his “work of art of the future”. In the years following the opening of the Bayreuth Festival (1876), numerous new opera houses were built around the world. New state theaters and city theaters were built after the wars.
In 1967, Pierre Boulez made a joke in a conversation with the Hamburg director Rolf Liebermann that was greeted with delight: “Blown up the opera houses.” His reasoning: Since Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu,” “no debatable opera” has been composed. Of the 21 operas that premiered in Hamburg under Liebermann’s aegis, only two or three are still performed. The genre has survived and is still an ongoing topic today.
None of the eighty German opera houses were blown up. Some need to be renovated, others need to be rebuilt. There is still the old cultural self-image of theater as the heart, even the identity of a city: “The True – Beautiful – Good”, which can be read on the frontispiece of the theater temples in Duisburg, Frankfurt and Lübeck.
The justification for subsidized theater, unique in the world, has long been controversial: on the one hand, because theaters and concert halls are enjoyed by only ten percent of the population and are viewed as “elitist” by some others; on the other hand because of the costs. Ten years ago, 220 million euros were estimated for the renovation of the Cologne Opera. This has become 1.2 billion. Here, as everywhere else, it is “unforeseeable difficulties” that lead to two, three, fourfold increases. One billion euros has become the guideline value – in the renovation in Stuttgart and the new building under consideration in Frankfurt – and by no means the limit.
Many visitors are event visitors
Elitist? A word from the evil spirit of egalitarianism. Opera and theater and concerts are elitist, but not the 10,000 euro car paint or the Hermès handbag. They are exquisite or exclusive. Strange that there is little talk about operating costs, and not about the fact that orchestra musicians, choristers or stage workers are employed under collective agreements. Every tariff increase creates gaps in the immediate artistic budgets. The latest coup: There will be rest days for the choirs in the future, 16 times a year on Saturday and Sunday or on Sunday and Monday. On the best days for visitors, the offers must be limited.
When Boulez caused amusement with his evil joke, the Hamburg State Opera still had 400,000 visitors a year. Recently there were only 200,000. Large houses often play to half-empty rows. It was widely seen as a signal when Peter Gelb, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera, warned of the danger to everyday opera life. The opera company “failed to serve the present day with new works in addition to the museum.” The crisis will also come to Germany.
A return as the most important innovation
Frankfurt’s artistic director Bernd Loebe, whose theater has often been voted “opera house of the year”, has noticed the significant decline in subscriptions, which were previously part of the obligation of the educated middle class: “This makes it more difficult to plan the budget and the schedule. Many of today’s visitors are event visitors.” The fight for them has become a fight in a world of experiences whose standards are set by clicks, likes and ratings.
To date, the twenty most frequently performed operas date from the period between Mozart and Puccini. Shaw’s model is an outdated model. The expansion into an international opera industry – also through the record – has led to the expansion of the repertoire since the 1970s: initially to include major works from the first decades of the 20th century, such as the operas by Leoš Janáček, then by Benjamin Britten, and later by the “outlawed composers”.
No matter how great the efforts were and are to update the program with major works from the 20th century, the most important innovation was a return to baroque opera. It was the consequence of historical performance practice that led to the rediscovery and the founding of smaller, specialized orchestras. First, the operas by Monteverdi and George Frideric Handel returned to the stage. After his death in 1759, Handel remained unplayed for 160 years; since 1920 he had been modernized (distorted?) in a contemporary manner. After the anniversary year of 1985, he returned as the grand master of “unjustly forgotten masterpieces”. In his performance directory, Karsten Steiger lists over 90 recordings and recordings for the period between 1980 and 2000.
Far-reaching changes in singing
The British artistic director Peter Jonas succeeded in establishing Handel in Munich alongside the household gods Wagner and Strauss: musically by resorting to historical performance practice, and scenically by adapting to the artificiality of pop culture. It was not uncommon for the operas to be staged as parodic baroque musicals. Handel was soon followed by Pier Francesco Cavalli, Johann Adolf Hasse, Nicola Porpora, Antonio Vivaldi, Rameau, Stefano Landi, Leonard Vinci, Jean Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Agostino Steffani. It was also a cultural industrial rediscovery of the record.
The prerequisite for this paradigm shift were far-reaching changes in singing, which had repercussions on the traditional core repertoire. The best experts – such as the American critic Conrad L. Osborne (“Opera as Opera”) and the conductor Will Crutchfield – agree that the voices of the diva for divine femininity and the divo for virile masculinity have become rare. The voices of almost all Aida or Tosca sopranos of the last four decades no longer have the caliber of the soprano of Renata Tebaldi, for example. Even Domingo is, according to Conrad L. Osborne, “only two-thirds of Franco Corelli.” After discussions with over a hundred experts – conductors and agents, singing teachers and critics – about the question “where have the great big voices gone”, historian Andrew Moravcsik expressed the fear that the musical dramas of Verdi and Wagner will soon no longer be able to be performed due to the lack of suitable singers.
An often provocative artificiality
Does it need to be mentioned that there are “voices of quantity and voices of quality” (Cecilia Bartoli)? There are many singers who perform brilliantly in the new repertoire, i.e. the old one from the century before Rossini. To put it simply, singing has become quieter or gentler or more delicate, and also more virtuosic and artistic. Mozart and his baroque predecessors are often sung wonderfully today, especially in smaller theaters, at festivals in Innsbruck or Wildbad or in Bayreuth. But in front of 4,000 listeners in the Met and even 2,000 in Salzburg, only a few can penetrate the sound barrier.
It is the zeitgeist that has taken a liking to an often provocative artificiality, often under the influence of pop music. An exponent of the new artificiality is the singer of a “third gender”: the countertenor. A look at the CD shelf: two or three tenor recitals, but thirty by countertenors – many with the addition: Farinelli or Senesino or Carestini or Caffarelli.
Completely tailored to the singer
The fact that countertenors sing castrati music is an emergency solution, which is, however, readily accepted. This acceptance of voices that were still frowned upon six decades ago because they were “feminine” testifies to a change in the history of mentalities, moral feelings and a taste that has adapted to pop culture. Klaus Nomi became an underground sensation in pop music around 1980. It is one of the big gender issues.
The opera of the 18th and 19th centuries was tailored entirely to the singer. Mahler and Toscanini gave priority to the conductor. The primacy of directors has existed since 1950. There is the Wieland and Chéreau “Ring” or the Felsenstein “Hoffmann”. Later came the “new readings” or the “bold concepts”: the Castellucci “Giovanni” and the Warlikowski “Macbeth”, the Kosky “Meistersinger” and the scratch “Tannhäuser”. They are sometimes documented on CD, but always scenically: on DVD. In reviews, the conductor and singer are given 20 lines, the direction gets 140.
Directing as a savior of the repertoire? The schedules, especially of festivals, have become richer: with works by the late Richard Strauss, Ottorino Respighi, Alexander von Zemlinski, Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, as well as by Bohuslav Martinů, George Enescu, Albéric Magnard, Charles Tournemire, Philip Glass, György Kurtág and Kaija Saariaho. The effect is no longer based on the primacy of the melody and vocalità, but rather on their topicality, the skills of the actor, and the direction’s conception.
What absurdity!
A bitterly debated problem: that directors arbitrarily overwrite plays and thereby usurp author’s rights – with the promise of a “bold concept”, a “new reading” or “social relevance”. Key word and stimulus: director’s theater. A tautological term because there can be no play on stage without coordination. The term became en vogue in the 1970s because the publicity economy of some directors relied on shock or scandal in order to be, as they always say, “hip.”
What an absurdity when a historical performance practice or musical fidelity is claimed, but the scene is reinterpreted, changed or distorted. If Violetta survives in “La Traviata” or Carmen. Marrying the spirit of the times. There are many widowers.
These are just some of the questions and problems that the opera of the future will have to deal with. The statement that it provides emotional nourishment and strengthens “social resilience” in times of crises and wars comes from times when wishing still helped.
