17

Turning point

In 1893, a French composer decides to write an opera. He is classically trained, a product of the Paris Conservatoire and winner of the prestigious ‘prix de Rome’ composition prize. He has already finished one opera in draft form, a three-act giant in a historical-Spanish-chivalric setting. This fulfils any lingering grand opéra responsibilities that inhabit his nationalist conscience, and he becomes unhappy with it. One night he attends a spoken play by the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) and daringly decides to use this play as the text of an opera – without turning it into poetry, without even restructuring the sections he takes from it in any significant way, aside from some cutting and line editing. The play has only one brief passage that in any way lends itself to becoming an operatic set piece, a song for the heroine. Everything else is freeform conversation and random musing.

This new opera takes two years to write, orchestration not included, and is then extensively revised before finally being performed in 1902. The venue is Paris’s Opéra-Comique. For much of the earlier nineteenth century, anything performed at the Opéra-Comique would – by law – have had passages of spoken dialogue interspersed among the numbers; but by now this rule had evaporated and the theatre was happy to stage operas containing no speech. With this new Maeterlinck opera, the Opéra-Comique had a succès de scandale that became a flashpoint for debates about the past and future of French music. It premiered a piece that for some opera-goers to this day remains an inexplicable bore, hardly an opera at all, with no great melodies and only a few instances where the orchestra plays at anything approaching full volume.

In brief, this is the story of Pelléas et Mélisande, a drame lyrique in five acts by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) and the single most innovative opera to emerge at the fin de siècle. Despite the indecisive princes and other sensitive flowers that populate its dramatis personae, and despite its generally languorous pace and extreme musical informality, it excited great passions. Maeterlinck and Debussy fought bitterly over the casting of the heroine Mélisande. At one point the playwright – although a wilting aesthete on the page, he was evidently a decent swordsman in real life – roared into the composer’s flat and challenged him to a duel. The opera’s reception was mixed. The young Maurice Ravel went to every single performance in the initial run. In 1908, Henry Adams was looking forward to seeing a revival but arrived at the theatre to find that Massenet’s Manon was on instead. A letter he wrote after the fact says merely ‘My wrath was deep.’¹ At the other end of the spectrum, critics wrote dismissively of ‘rhythm, song, and tonality [being] three things unknown to M. Debussy’.² For some, rhythm and tonality were the least of its problems. Camille Bellaigue saw civilization itself under threat:

after listening [to Pelléas] one feels sick … one is dissolved by this music because it is in itself a form of dissolution. Existing as it does with a minimum of vitality, it tends to impair and destroy our existence. The germs it contains are not those of life and progress, but of decadence and death.³

The director of the Paris Conservatoire issued an edict prohibiting his students from attending performances. Decades later, Pierre Boulez railed against conductors who tried to make Pelléas boring with ‘discretion worthy of a footman’, interpretations in which ‘the many contrasts in the work were reduced to a minute scale and … robbed … of their potency and violence’.⁴ In short, Pelléas is for some unbearable in its tedium while for others it is the most beautiful edifice in sound ever to involve characters, libretto and costumes.

It’s important to start with this account of Pelléas because so much about the opera is strange, new or unusual. For one thing, opera libretti adapted from spoken dramas had before this point almost invariably undergone restructuring by professional librettists: men of letters who slashed and burned, and who then put what remained into verse, neatly packaged to suit the conventional musical forms of opera’s past. For a composer himself to turn a pre-existing play into an opera, and to do little more than cut here and there for the sake of brevity, was almost unheard of. Parts of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov were done this way, and it is a famous earlier example. Debussy knew the piece. He had spent apprentice years in Russia, as a musician in the personal entourage of Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Nadejda von Meck. An opera with a text like Boris or Pelléas – in German they would be called Literaturoper, works whose words are taken directly from a spoken drama – is a frighteningly blank slate. Where does one start, musically? How to fashion regular melodies from unmetred prose? What can mark the musical points of articulation when there is so little in the words to say where such points might reasonably lie?

This is not the only conundrum raised by Pelléas. For much of the nineteenth century, composing opera in the central Western European traditions was a particular kind of job. If you were good at it, you rarely ventured into other genres; and if you were a fine instrumental composer, perhaps even outstanding in solo song, you dabbled in opera at your peril. Examples abound: curiosities such as the largely unperformed operatic œuvre of Franz Schubert, or Robert Schumann’s Genoveva (1850) or Hugo Wolf’s Der Corregidor (1896). Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, three of the greatest German instrumental composers, hardly even tried. Of course, there were a few Western European exceptions, Saint-Saëns being perhaps the most obvious. And several who hailed from outside Italy, Germany and France – composers such as Dvorˇák or Tchaikovsky – were polymaths, writing orchestral works, operas and chamber music with equal fluency. But the extent to which operas in the nineteenth century were the products of specialists is still remarkable. The giants, Verdi and Wagner, are the paradigmatic cases.

By 1900 this was changing. In the twentieth century it becomes difficult to think of anyone aside from Puccini who fits the old, specialist pattern and made a success of it. This is important for several reasons. On a practical level it underlines that new operas were declining in number and importance. It proved ever more difficult, even with much-improved copyright protection, to make a decent living by composing exclusively for the stage. But the rise of the twentieth-century operatic dabbler also had consequences for the kinds of opera composed. When composers brought up as specialists in instrumental genres chose to write opera, their efforts were often suffused with an alternative musical universe, one with its own habits and sounds, its own methods of acoustic theatricality. When he started Pelléas, Debussy was already an orchestral radical whose sonic imagination resembled little else in music of the time, and whose harmonic vocabulary was recognized as avant-garde. He was also an attentive and often caustic observer of the French operatic milieu, and harboured a particular critical distaste for imitation. ‘There is nothing more deplorable’, he wrote a little later, in 1906, ‘than that neo-Wagnerian school in which French genius is obscured by a lot of imitation Wotans in long boots and Tristans in velvet jerkins’.⁵

In this neo-Wagnerian department, there were a great many to deplore. Ernest Reyer produced a Sigurd in 1884 featuring Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Gunther and Gutrune, all spelled differently; his music, though, is more grand opéra than grand Bayreuth. An increasing number of libretti in French began to involve tragic medieval love affairs (Emmanuel Chabrier’s Gwendoline, 1886, or Ernest Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus – King Arthur, 1903) or misty legends (Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal, 1897). Nor were the long boots and velvet jerkins confined to France. To the south, Ruggiero Leoncavallo planned a massive trilogy (to his own libretto, of course, and entitled – with embarrassingly deliberate Wagnerian overtones – Crepusculum, ‘twilight’ in English, ‘Dämmerung’ in German). It was to be set in the Italian Renaissance – Italy’s answer to Nordic myth. I Medici, the first instalment, was premiered in 1893 but was received so coolly that its composer wisely shelved the two sequels, instead trying vainly to beat Puccini at the box office with an alternative version of La bohème. To the east, Peter Cornelius unsuccessfully tried his hand at Gunlöd (1869–74), which features Odin (aka Wotan, tenor) and a triangle resembling Hunding, Siegmund and Sieglinde. Richard Strauss’s first two operas, Guntram (1894) and Feuersnot (1901), struggle through multiple Wagnerian attractions and anxieties, being respectively a medieval-religious tragedy about renunciation and a folk-Bavarian comedy. The Russians, too, were vulnerable. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (1907) mates Slavic and Teutonic mythology, featuring all-knowing forest birds (à la Siegfried) and a half-mystical, half-ecclesiastical redemptive transfiguration at the end (à la Parsifal). Before that he had dabbled in an Odyssey opera, and even a trilogy of works based on Russian epic poems;⁶ both ideas petered out at the sketching stage.

While it would be wrong to assume that every late-nineteenth-century opera with medieval knights was aping Lohengrin (there had been many such knights before Wagner), Nordic gods are harder to explain away. But libretto trends are only a minor symptom. Wagner’s fundamental innovations in operatic music, especially the sheer attraction of his sound, proved extraordinarily hard to ignore. His operas resonated around Europe and beyond whether you shunned them or stared them boldly in the face. They resonated even if you lampooned them – many a French operetta composer would try this route, and Emmanuel Chabrier’s wry piano-duet quadrilles on themes from Tristan, called Souvenirs de Munich, are not to be missed. Debussy’s ironic reference to fin-de-siècle operas swarming with Wagnerian revenants, characters mired in the Middle Ages or the fjords, only begins to illustrate the dilemma: what style to adopt in the wake of Bayreuth?

For some, a way out was to renounce words altogether. There are a whole series of French post-Wagnerian operas in which soprano or mezzo-soprano siren calls represent danger in direct proportion to the absence or meaninglessness of their words. In the previous chapter, we touched on Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Delila and Massenet’s Esclarmonde, both of whose heroines exercise this charm. More famous still, at least in concert renderings, is an aria from the second act of Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883). An upstanding British officer is betrayed when he responds to the eponymous heroine’s singing voice, which is for him an object of fascination. The fatal lure is Lakmé’s ‘Bell Song’, a locus classicus of hyper-ornamentation functioning as hyper-seduction. At such moments, the singer, vocal part and character combine to overcome all resistance. Here, for instance, is a suitably hyperbolic and erotically charged account of Lily Pons as Lakmé, from a review of 1929:

But whatever may be the amazing power of her high soprano, the caress of the middle register, there is her ideal incarnation of these heroines, the artistic intoxication of youth that bursts forth from her heart like a blaze of love, now in accents of terror, like an Aeolian harp, like the light and burning perfume of the great mimosas in the forest consecrated to Brahma. I have no memory of greater enchantment than her Bell Song heavy with an indefinable exotic seduction.⁷

Such extreme coloratura is textless almost by definition, but the same effects can occur when the words are present but are of little consequence. In a strange, typically refracted way, a shard of this singing style reached Pelléas, part of whose radicalism is its unusually slavish, meticulous musical attention to the rhythms of words. A strange, elliptical exchange between Pelléas and Mélisande summarizes the degree to which the female voice, even with words, can still be taken as birdsong or siren bells. Mélisande sings to her lover, Pelléas, ‘Je ne mens jamais, je ne mens qu’à ton frère’ (I never lie, I only lie to your brother), a statement that is, like so much in Maeterlinck, simultaneously disturbing and mystifying. But Pelléas does not react to this uncertainty of meaning, instead going into ecstasies over her vocal timbre: ‘Oh! comme tu dis cela! Ta voix, ta voix! Elle est plus fraîche et plus franche que l’eau’ (Ah, how you say that! Your voice, your voice! It is cooler and clearer than water). Throughout the opera, the hero rhapsodizes in similar terms over the heroine’s voice, which rivals her long hair as his chief erotic fixation: just as, not coincidentally, Carmen’s voice was for Don José, or Dalila’s for Samson.

In this particular sense, elements of Pelléas are directly in line with far more conventional French operas of the later nineteenth century. Debussy dealt with the problem not by indulging it to excess – with too much coloratura and open vowel sounds – but by enquiring into it philosophically. Mélisande certainly fascinates her lover, but never for a moment does she sing without words, and never does she sing with any particular virtuosity. Nonetheless, accounts of the singers who performed Mélisande can become as rapturous as those concerning Lakmé, suggesting that the seductive effect could be analogous. Mary Garden, the first Mélisande and a famous operatic interpreter, could be called ‘a condor, an eagle, a peacock, a nightingale, a panther’;⁸ another excited commentator said that her voice as Mélisande had the ability to:

shape and colour the significant and haunting phrase, to thread her way through an iridescent web of them … at moments her singing is like a new and strange speech – as new and strange as Debussy’s music. The listener feels the captivating fascination and the penetrating suggestion, and leaves the tests of cold technical blood until after the spell has passed.⁹

THEATRE OF THE ALMOST-ABSURD

Maeterlinck specialized in a style of theatre called ‘symbolist’, which was related to an anti-realist movement in art and poetry (Mallarmé and Verlaine were standard-bearers) that favoured addressing the largest human issues by indirect means, often through fantasy and dreams. True to its label, Pelléas is characterized by an overriding sense that human beings will always, ultimately, be submerged by those giant, impersonal forces of fate constantly bearing down on them. It is a drama of halftones and mystifying epigrams, peopled by actors who efface their individual personalities the better to reflect the symbols they represent. The setting is a fictional long ago, a castle in the kingdom of Allemonde – alle is German for ‘entire’ and monde is French for ‘world’. While out hunting in a forest, Prince Golaud (baritone), a widower and the heir of his grandfather, King Arkel (bass), stumbles on a girl (soprano) weeping by a well. She refers enigmatically to her past but mostly refuses to answer his questions, revealing only that her name is Mélisande. All subsequent scenes take place in or around Arkel’s castle, where Golaud brings Mélisande after marrying her. There she meets Golaud’s younger half-brother, Pelléas (high baritone or low tenor), and the remainder of the opera involves a string of vignettes, mostly between Pelléas and Mélisande, who are thrown together with what proves to be tragic frequency. Arkel drifts in and out representing noble antiquity; Pelléas and Mélisande play emotional games and fall in love; Golaud’s young son, Yniold (boy soprano), has a solo scene in which one of his toys, a golden ball, becomes trapped and in which a flock of weeping sheep pass by; Golaud kills Pelléas when he discovers the couple in a lovers’ tryst. In the final act, Mélisande dies, fading away inexplicably after a minor injury, having (we are told) given birth to a daughter. Riddles concerning minor events in the plot abound. Does Mélisande deliberately lose her wedding ring when she drops it into a fountain? Why is Golaud thrown from his horse at exactly that moment? Why does Golaud take Pelléas to visit an underground cave? Who is the mysterious shepherd (not to mention his weeping sheep) whom Yniold encounters while trying to dislodge his golden ball?

Such indeterminacy is typical of symbolist literature, in which the signs and secrets of fate remain self-consciously impossible to decode. The point is to create, in the reader or spectator, a feeling that meanings are all-powerful but elusive, that behind each object or phrase lie infinite possibilities that cannot be pinned down. In this respect, Wagner was often an explicit hero and model of symbolist poets and dramatists. But what they adored in Wagner – and what they tried to capture in words – was a quality they found not in his libretti but in his music. It was music that seemed to well up from an unseen, transcendent realm, representing neither pure, abstract form nor self-evident emotional expression. This in turn accounts for much of the strangeness of symbolist texts. If words rather than music were to articulate their artistic projects, the words had to evoke an equivalent mystery, as half-references or dissolved meaning; they became like music by retreating from sense and approaching pure sound.

On the surface, this aesthetic gave rise to an art of suggestion rather than statement. In Maeterlinck’s play, events can often seem detached from one another, as if we are witnessing causes without effects or consequences without origins. And it was just these features that became Debussy’s inspiration for the radical operatic music he conceived in Pelléas. Often the characters barely intone their lines, with music so austere as to be next door to silence. Phrases often funnel down into pure orchestral resonance, with the harp or another deep instrument playing a single note that decays into echoes in an empty space. The drowned causality in Maeterlinck’s play becomes Debussy’s model for a musical equivalent. Scenes are assembled out of individual musical sections which are unique and very beautiful, but which are largely separate from each other – as unrelated as the enigmatic events that occur without motivation in the play. These are also the idiosyncrasies that make Pelléas fundamentally a musician’s opera, and a fastidious musician at that. The piece has little to say to people who like narrative thrust, self-contained arias and the satisfying bray of cadential closure with trumpet and drum. In 1910, Thomas Beecham revived Pelléas at Covent Garden, and it was greeted with great pleasure after a season of Richard Strauss:

It came along at the right moment: blood and thunder had exhausted [Strauss’s] appeal; there was something akin to an unspoken demand for a work of pure beauty. London responded immediately; a large gathering assembled to hear Debussy’s masterpiece. The antagonism between the early Victorians, who regard La traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor as works of art, and their grandchildren, who know better, seemed to have faded before the season of Peace on Earth … if Mr. Beecham has reconciled London to Pelléas and Mélisande by his production of operas like Tiefland and Salome, he will not have laboured in vain.¹⁰

And note that by 1910, eight years after its premiere, Pelléas is a masterpiece. Its divided reception lasts to this day; but it was, like most great operas, hardly an unrecognized wallflower in its debutante period.

OLD KLINGSOR

Wagner was never far from Debussy’s mind when he composed Pelléas. He went to Bayreuth in the summers of 1888 and 1889, and heard Parsifal, Meistersinger and Tristan. He heard Lohengrin in Paris in 1887 and again in 1893, and was at the first Paris performance of Die Walküre, also in 1893. In the spring of that last year he had assisted at a strange lecture-performance, held on the stage of the Opéra, with Catulle Mendès discoursing on the Ring while Debussy, a second pianist and six soloists did their best to serve up excerpts from Das Rheingold. One tries in vain to imagine Rheingold’s sustained opening Ea as executed by two pianos, four hands. Did they open the lids and pluck the string? Afterwards Debussy said: ‘It is good to have done with the Rhine. The performance was a terrible bore.’¹¹ But much that Debussy wrote about Wagner took a scornful tone that may well indicate an emotion too deep, or a debt too heavy for comfort. As he put it in 1903:

It is not my concern to discuss Wagner’s genius here. His force was undeniably dynamic. But its effect was all the greater because the way had been prepared by cunning magicians whose guile knew no bounds. … Perhaps it is the extraordinarily anguished groaning in his music that is responsible for the deep impression made by Wagner on the contemporary spirit: he has awakened the secret thirst for the criminal in some of the most famous minds of our age [Debussy added a wry footnote here about Richard Strauss]. To conclude, Wagner’s works suggest a most striking image: Bach is the Holy Grail, Wagner is Klingsor, who wants to destroy the Grail and take its place. Bach reigns … Wagner vanishes. A fearsome darkness, black as soot.¹²

The drift of the metaphors is striking. German composers are magicians – the predecessors include Bach. Wagner is a magician too, but a different kind. He is a criminal sorcerer like Klingsor, the infertile nihilist from Wagner’s Parsifal. Indeed, almost every polemical statement Debussy made about opera took aim at Wagner: ‘I shall not imitate the follies of the lyric theatre where music insolently predominates and where poetry is relegated to second place. In the opera house they sing too much.’¹³ But the rejection was much easier to announce polemically than it was to translate into musical practice. At one early point in its genesis, Debussy made elaborate sketches for a scene in Pelléas but then realized that ‘the ghost of Klingsor, alias R. Wagner’, had appeared; he felt obliged to rip out the offending pages.¹⁴ Perhaps to inoculate himself and his opera from further unwelcome visits, he scattered through the score little clues relating to his obsession. At one point Mélisande, with a characteristic show of enigma, says, ‘je suis heureuse, mais je suis triste’ (I am happy, but I am sad), and on that word ‘triste’ the Tristan chord punningly appears, a ghost whose presence could be tolerated only (one assumes) because swathed in irony.

Such caution towards Wagnerian enthusiasms might at first seem compromised by Pelléas’s opening, which introduces a sequence of contrasting musical ideas that will all return later as leitmotifs. First come four bars of low, modal music, almost like plainchant, which will be attached to the antique ambience of Allemonde and perhaps also to the dense forest in which the action begins. This gives way to, and then alternates with, a restless idea later associated with Golaud, in the middle register and based on the whole-tone scale. And then, high up, doux et expressif, comes a lyrical idea that will later belong to Mélisande, based on the more densely chromatic octatonic scale. The message would seem clear. Three musical ‘calling cards’ are here propped up on the Pelléas mantelpiece in the first minute of the opera, as if in homage to Wagnerian practice. But there are crucial differences. For one thing, although these three ideas are strongly differentiated in register, harmony, rhythm and texture, they appear in sharp juxtaposition, with hardly any attempt at transition from one to another. In that sense, they represent an antithesis to the Wagnerian praxis, in which leitmotifs succeed each other and even transform into one another without seams. Debussy’s leitmotifs, self-sufficient and isolated, foreshadow in microcosm his opera’s overarching aesthetic, the unmediated shifts from one musical atmosphere to another. Equally important, though, the three initial ideas in Pelléas constitute virtually its entire leitmotivic substance, and none of them recurs with any regularity. A symphonic web of recurring ideas? Hardly.

The score is also un-Wagnerian in more noticeable ways. There is little loud noise, since the orchestra is unusually deployed in groups and at modest dynamic levels. Although the sound-world Debussy creates – the orchestral web is a continuous presence behind the singers, with its own musical matters to pursue – channels the spirit of Wagner, the musical surface rarely sounds anything like him. ‘Old Klingsor’ is kept firmly at bay. Consider Act 2, scene 3. Pelléas and Mélisande make a night-time visit to a vaulted grotto by the edge of the sea. Mélisande has lied to Golaud about her wedding ring, saying that she lost it there and will return to search for it. Before any singing, we are treated to the vaulted grotto in orchestral form. Over a pianissimo rumble in the lowest registers, the woodwind play a quiet, phantasmal fanfare, and then they repeat it to show where we are – in a place where sound bounces and echoes. A cymbal is brushed by a feather, tremolo strings hover in the heights. A strange combination of brass instruments plays a single chord, then an odder mix – muted instruments – plays it again, showing the same view from a different angle, or the same object in a different light. When the lovers appear, they hesitate outside; but once they pass over the threshold, the music accompanying their initial appearance is repeated with its acoustic wrapper entirely different, because when you walk into a cave the ambient sound changes.

The scene is a monologue for Pelléas, who describes in detail the dark grotto they walk through, his vocal line shaped to the music of the orchestra. There is a spectacular coup de théâtre. The moon suddenly floods the cave with its radiance. Pelléas cries in ecstasy, ‘Oh! voici la clarté!’ (Oh! here is the light!); the orchestra instantly stops what it is doing in order to create musical light, harp glissandos up and down, the woodwinds in a circular, melancholy motif heard earlier. But this only lasts a moment, because the pair catch sight of three starving, white-haired paupers who have crept into the cave for shelter. The gorgeous moon-sounds disappear, to be replaced by a single oscillating figure, two notes repeated over and over again, with a bleak melodic fragment above. ‘There is a famine’, sings Pelléas, ‘they are asleep.’ Mélisande wants to flee but refuses Pelléas’s arm to help her climb. Everything audible begins to wind down. Motifs heard earlier in the scene pass like shades, and last of all comes the woodwind echo-fanfare from the start, now voiced very low in the cellos and basses. The music doesn’t end so much as pass beyond the threshold of hearing, as if we ourselves are getting further from the grotto’s sound-shifting ambience.

Debussy’s genius for the music of ambient sounds predated his opera, and was not limited to it. He would write brilliant orchestral tone poems like the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and La Mer (1905). More important in terms of operatic tradition is the scene’s assembly. The musical sections succeed one another without transition; something different always comes along, and the mystery that results is to be savoured. This novel structure was in many way inspired by the words. Maeterlinck’s idiosyncratic libretto helped spring Debussy from the fin-de-siècle French opera trap. His earlier, abandoned grand opéra – Rodrigue et Chimène – resembles Massenet. Pelléas et Mélisande is, and has remained, unclassifiable.

SALOME, TOWARDS THE EXTREME

The parallels between the early operatic careers of Debussy and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) are immediately arresting. Strauss also first came to prominence as a specialist in orchestral tone poems, and also wrote journeyman operas that suffer from derivative libretti and the operatic models they suggest. What the examples of both Debussy and Strauss indicate is that freeing one’s voice as an opera composer around 1900, at least in France and Germany, often involved finding a different kind of libretto. The various cast-offs from and rehashes of nineteenth-century operatic manners, especially when obviously cloned from Wagner, were of little help, since they led, inexorably, along old musical roads. A solitary exception was the unexpected success of Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera Hänsel und Gretel (whose premiere in 1893 was conducted by Strauss). Unashamedly Wagnerian in orchestral and harmonic language, it managed to harness these unwieldy musical attributes to a fast-moving plot, also incorporating some of the realistic touches that were, to the dismay of nationalists and others, making Leoncavallo and Puccini so successful in Wagner-saturated Germany at that time. Strauss praised the score, declaring it ‘original, new and so authentically German!’ and also saying (with a disparaging reference to the new Italian craze) that it had ‘given the Germans a work they hardly deserve’.¹⁵

No one felt the operatic problems more keenly than Strauss. Of all the opera composers who came of age around 1900, he was closest to Wagner and seemed most fated to continue in the Master’s footsteps. Nearly an adult when Wagner died, he got to know the operas intimately through an early apprenticeship to Hans von Bülow in Meiningen (von Bülow called him ‘Richard the Third’ – after Wagner there could of course never be a worthy ‘Richard the Second’). Strauss became a virtuoso conductor, hired by Wagner’s widow Cosima to direct Tannhäuser at Bayreuth in 1894 and going on to conduct almost all Wagner’s mature operas during his long career. He also became a friend of the Bayreuth clan, with all the obeisance and indoctrination that could entail. Small wonder that he steered away from operatic composition. His initial creative persona was established by the 1890s as a master of the Germanic symphonic poem, a genre he injected with wholly new energy and orchestral brilliance. By contrast, and as we have already said, his first operas, Guntram and Feuersnot, were haunted.

Strauss waited patiently, and was already forty when early in 1903 he attended a performance in Berlin of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé (1891), translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann from the original French and staged by the young Max Reinhardt. Strauss had read the play a little earlier, and may have been sketching themes already, but it was the staging that fired his imagination. He decided to use Lachmann’s translation as the text for his opera, like Debussy fashioning his own libretto simply by means of cuts and line editing. Wilde may himself have owed a tiny debt to grand opéra, since his biblical setting and Oriental exoticism, complete with Judean femme fatale, is reminiscent of Samson et Dalila and other Gallic epics. However – the similarity with Pelléas is significant – the play’s language was nothing like old-style libretto-speak. Nor would its frankness about sexual obsession, necrophilia and the nude female form have possibly passed the censors of an earlier era.

In England, which admittedly had special problems with Wilde, the Lord Chamberlain banned the Salomé play altogether, and it was not allowed to cross the Channel until 1931. The opera, though, was staged in London as early as 1910 – we have already cited one reviewer’s note about how Thomas Beecham followed Salome with a course of Pelléas for the Christmas season that year. Public sensibilities were admittedly somewhat protected in the 1910 London staging: the decapitated head of John the Baptist, brought to Salome on a silver tray near the end of the drama, was replaced by a (relatively innocuous) bloody sword. But the fact that the opera was palatable long before the play underlines music’s tendency to defuse words and images which otherwise might be thought to go too far. A protective umbrella spreads out over all operas by virtue of their music, and in acknowledgment of the labour that goes into their production. Back in the Victorian era, Alexandre Dumas’s play La Dame aux camélias (1852) was subjected to censure and censorship in England, but the opera based on it, La traviata (1853), was praised for its artful delicacy. Sober, highly accomplished people are responsible for performing opera, typically at great expense. Scandal is always prone to be smothered by gravitas, even when the composer was, like Strauss, being as outrageous as possible.

Salome the opera is relatively short. A single act depicts the court of King Herod on Lake Galilee at the time of Jesus and his disciples. Herod (tenor) has imprisoned John the Baptist (called Jokanaan, baritone) in a cistern below the terrace of his palace. His stepdaughter, the princess Salome (soprano), daughter of Herodias (mezzo-soprano), is sixteen years old, bored, beautiful and innocent – Strauss insisted on this last quality. Herod lusts after her with quivering intensity, as do, we are led to believe, numerous others in his court. But she disdains them all. After an opening scene involving one such lovelorn soul (Narraboth, Captain of the Guard, tenor), Salome hears Jokanaan’s voice emanating from the cistern and is bewitched by it. She persuades Narraboth to bring the prophet up from his cell. As soon as Jokanaan appears it becomes clear that Salome has developed an erotic fixation; she praises in turn his ivory body, his mane of black hair and, finally, his red mouth. When Jokanaan recoils and curses her for her evil thoughts, she turns angry and sullen. He retreats to the sanctity of his cistern. Herod and Herodias appear, and Herod begins wheedling, trying to persuade Salome to dance. Fired up by her refusals, he offers her whatever she desires, if only she will dance. Salome agrees to the bargain and performs the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils, all seven falling as contracted to the floor. She then claims as her reward, with due innocence of tone, the severed head of Jokanaan, to be brought to her on a silver tray. An executioner is sent down, does the deed, appears with the head. Salome seizes it, addresses it tenderly, reproaches it, kisses it on the mouth and discovers a bitter taste on its lips. By this stage Herod, although himself no stranger to decadence, has had enough. He orders his soldiers to kill Salome; they crush her beneath their shields as the curtain falls.

One of the shock elements in Salome is not so much that insanity and perversion are presented for viewing pleasure, but that these states are couched in flowery phrases full of highly perfumed poetic metaphor and imagery. Another is that a female protagonist treats her male antagonist as an object, waxing hideously lyrical about his body, his hair, his mouth. Up to now in operatic history, such lyricism had been heard often enough, but the prerogative of dominance had been confined to men, and the object-status confined to women. One could argue that Wilde’s play was merely homoerotic in its rhapsodies over a male form, and that the admiring words are put by a male author into the mouth of a girl for the sake of misdirection. But this biographical nuance is far removed from the opera, in which the rhapsodizing soprano is easily the most powerful vocal presence on stage. Her voice fills the theatre, particularly when she addresses for the last time her male antagonist, now no more than a bloody fetish served up on silver.

Fundamentally, the libretto released Strauss’s operatic fantasy not because it was daring per se, but because Salome, as a soul in torment overmastered by passion, suggested an extreme role for music in opera. Such music would be neither commentary nor scene painting. It would not pretend to be objective. It would instead trace in intimate detail Salome’s and the other characters’ morbid thoughts, the multiple and violent disturbances of their disordered minds. So Strauss, who had the experience of several raucous tone poems behind him, let things rip. The levels of dissonance, of orchestral volume, of sheer, cacophonous musical noise in Salome are unprecedented. Unsavoury characters such as Herod quaver and pipe, shriek and snarl; his nagging wife Herodias is if anything even less given to lyricism. And although Salome is supposed to be sixteen, her singing impersonator must, in Strauss’s words, have the voice of an Isolde. It speaks volumes that the most controlled, even ironic, music in the entire opera is the orchestral episode that accompanies Salome’s dance. Although this interlude cites some earlier leitmotifs associated with the heroine, it mostly seems to deal in routine exoticism, of a type explored in abundance by earlier French and Russian opera composers.¹⁶ This might seem strange as an accompaniment to the erotic climax of the opera, but is less so when we recall that the dance functions as stage music. It exists within the fiction and for this reason doesn’t bear the weight of expressing any of the characters’ interior states of mind – states that range in a narrow band from the obsessive to the fanatical to the delusional to the frankly insane.

Strauss used many devices he learned from Wagner, most obviously some complicated games with leitmotifs. When Jokanaan takes leave of Salome, he cries out to her, ‘Du bist verflucht, du bist verflucht’ (You are cursed, you are cursed). He sings this to a four-note motif, with the first three notes on the same pitch and the last a minor third higher. In the long instrumental transition between his departure and Herod’s arrival, the orchestra repeats this motif, but turns it into something else. The original four notes are followed by a sequence of five new ones that send the motif (now played by a horn) upward to end in disquieting harmony. The orchestra is clearly saying something here: as it turns out, something that is surfacing in Salome’s mind. When much later, with her seventh veil shed, she makes her demand to Herod ‘Ich will den Kopf des Jochanaan’ (I want the head of Jokanaan), the nine notes that articulate her statement are the very same. The earlier orchestral transition is, in other words, the trail of Salome’s inner evolution, as Jokanaan’s curse rings in her head, and the ringing generates a resolve that causes the opera’s bloody denouement.

Jokanaan is the only major character unburdened by sin, and what he sings from the cistern – mostly prophecies of redemption – is stable and harmonious, with distinct, Lutheran-leaning chorale undertones, all boomed out in a warm, strong baritone. This sonorous hum is of course what we hear in the theatre; but it also conveys Salome’s experience of his vocal presence. She apostrophizes his voice after he is dead, telling the decapitated head, ‘Deine Stimme war ein Weihrauchgefäss, und wenn ich dich ansah, hörte ich geheimnisvolle Musik’ (Your voice was an incense vessel, and when I looked at you, I heard mysterious music). As she sings this phrase a ghostly echo comes from the orchestra, a motif that Jokanaan had indeed sung earlier during his conversation with her. This close alliance – between the orchestral music and Salome’s perceptions of it – is made clearest in the interlude during which the executioner goes down into the cistern. Salome tries to hear what is happening, and as it turns out she misreads the sounds. Strauss uses orchestral tricks in order to suggest these multiple acoustic delusions. A solo double-bass plays a very high note, misleading us into thinking that it’s a violin; instrumental cracks and whispers obviously imitate noise, but they avoid giving us any sense of what that noise could be.

ELEKTRA, ERWARTUNG, BLUEBEARD: THREE ROUTES TO MODERNITY

Strauss’s Salome is often called ‘expressionist’, a term primarily associated with the visual arts in Germany around this period (Schiele, Kokoschka and Kandinsky are prime suspects here) but also found in literature (Trakl, Kafka), film (Fritz Lang) and other arts. It was a movement in which phenomena, both human and non-human, are characteristically distorted in order to increase the emotional temperature of their representation, tracing an intense subjectivity that typically favours negative emotions. One of the reasons Strauss’s music is labelled expressionist is that its frequent lingering on extreme perceptions and mental states has a shattering effect on audiences. In the early days, such effects were often negative, even among those who in general respected Strauss’s undoubted musical skills. The French dramatist Romain Rolland, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of Pelléas, wrote a letter to Strauss in which he put the blame firmly on Oscar Wilde:

Wilde’s poem … has a nauseous and sickly atmosphere about it: it exudes vice and literature. This isn’t a question of middle-class morality, it’s a question of health … Wilde’s Salomé, and all those who surround her, except the poor creature Jokanaan, are unwholesome, unclean, hysterical or alcoholic beings, stinking of sophisticated and perfumed corruption. In vain do you transfigure your subject, increase its vigour a hundredfold and envelop it in a Shakespearean atmosphere … you transcend your subject, but you can’t make one forget it.¹⁷

Even today, good performances of Salome tend to be received with moments of stunned silence. There is a sense that, having been dragged into these demented inner worlds by musical means, we need a pause before returning to the outside, the places we usually inhabit.

Operatic expressionism is indeed a devastating riposte to operatic realism, a riposte in which female characters seem especially prone to mental disorder. The sufferings of nineteenth-century Italian opera heroines, for all their glorious emoting, offer greeting-card sentiments by comparison. To put this another way, Italian and French opera’s increasingly fragile fantasy was to imagine that madness could be an aesthetic state represented by volleys of perfect coloratura and lyric control; that overwhelming emotion was properly represented by beautiful, warmly expressive music. The late nineteenth century was a time when the pathology of mental suffering was being researched and codified. Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris from 1862 to 1893, staged clinical demonstrations with hysterical patients, ones that Sigmund Freud attended in 1885–6. Freud and Josef Breuer published their Studies on Hysteria in 1895. According to these fin-de-siècle theories, hysteria did not express itself in well-modulated song, but in defects of language, bizarre paralyses and physical ills. The public and scientific explorations of psychosis made conventional theatrical suffering, such as that of Donizetti’s Lucia or even Verdi’s Violetta, appear quaint; the cultural aftershocks in all the arts were obvious.

While Strauss was working on Salome, he visited Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin again, this time for a new play, Elektra, freely adapted from the Greek by the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929). While writing the play, Hofmannsthal had read and absorbed the lessons of Freud and Breuer’s hysteria book, particularly the claim that hysterics repeated certain verbal formulae as protective talismans. Gertrud Eysoldt, who had played Reinhardt’s Salome, now starred as his Elektra. Reinhardt thus played a critical supporting role in Strauss’s operatic evolution. He was the most important theatre director in Germany for the first three decades of the twentieth century, and his innovations included rhythmic choreographing, so that crowds seemed to flow like insect swarms over the stage sets, and re-imagining the body language of actors, asking for long frozen moments and sudden kinetic explosions. This was all very far from the ambulate-and-gesture traditions of conventional acting at the time, and was an obvious sign that nineteenth-century habits were waning. It is in this sense significant that Strauss did not fully grasp the potential of Wilde’s Salomé until he saw Reinhardt’s staging; and he was so struck by Elektra that the idea of using it persisted throughout his work on Salome – he wrote to Hofmannsthal in 1906 for permission to proceed, thus beginning a collaboration that extended to five further operas and ended only with Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929.

Elektra (1909) continued the Salome aesthetic. Based on Sophocles’ play of the same name, it puts a mad, ragged, dirty, cunning, tragic heroine at centre stage for ninety uninterrupted minutes. Elektra (soprano) broods obsessively over the murder of her father, Agamemnon. Other characters appear, including her sister, Chrysothemis (soprano); her stepfather, Aegisthus (tenor), who makes a brief but memorable transit to his doom; her mother, Clytemnestra (mezzo-soprano), who provides the occasion for opera’s most awful mother–daughter chat; and her beloved brother, Orestes (baritone), believed dead, who arrives out of exile to avenge Agamemnon’s long-ago death and brutally murders Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. A buried axe once used to cleave open Agamemnon’s skull figures as the most important prop. The opera ends with Elektra executing a wild dance of triumph and then falling lifeless to the ground.

Given this plot, it comes as no surprise that Elektra is often raucously dissonant; as with Salome, it embraces this style primarily because its music seems to issue directly from the consciousness of the shrieking, groaning, tortured characters, above all from the protagonist, who never leaves the stage. As Elektra puts it, ‘Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir’ (How could I not hear the music? The music comes from me). The aphorism could stand for operatic Expressionism tout court. But Strauss also worried about the potential similarity between the two one-act operas. He wanted to do something new and, typically for the times, ‘new’ meant more advanced in harmonic language and sheer orchestral din. This experimentation comes to a cacophonous climax in the heroine’s final, fatal dance, in which a triumphant major (C major, no less) is constantly interrupted by a mysterious, distantly related minor triad – a fracture maintained even in the final, brutal, fortissimo cadence.

By the time of Salome and Elektra, Strauss was thought by many to be at the apex of operatic modernism. However, the year of the latter, 1909, saw the composition of a thirty-minute ‘monodrama’ called Erwartung (Expectation), whose concentration on the extremes of human emotion were clearly related to those of Strauss, but which made his efforts look conservative by comparison. Its composer was Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), unlike Strauss a minor and occasional opera composer. But Schoenberg resembled Strauss in being someone who in other genres had already made a reputation for the uncompromising embrace of musical extremes. Indeed, it is certain that Strauss was for some time one of Schoenberg’s models. Gustav Mahler gave Schoenberg a score of Salome soon after its premiere, and one of Schoenberg’s pupils recalled him saying that ‘Perhaps in twenty years’ time someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions theoretically’,¹⁸ a statement of non-comprehension that could count, in the atmosphere of the time, as a powerful endorsement. Erwartung’s libretto is a strange, fragmentary stream-of-consciousness, patching together impressions emanating from an unnamed woman (soprano), who is (possibly, it may all be an elaborate nightmare) on the edge of a dark wood, searching for her lover, whose mutilated body she eventually stumbles over. It was written by a young doctor called Marie Pappenheim, and had been influenced by contemporary developments in psychiatry even more obviously than had Hofmannsthal and Strauss. Pappenheim had, though, never before written for the stage, and probably for this reason opted for a kind of interior monologue rather than anything more conventional. Whatever the case, her drama did not, like Strauss’s, dress up the expressionist extremes in exotic or classical subjects. The mise-en-scène of Erwartung was to be nothing more nor less than the human psyche, bereft of time and place – Central Europe before the Great War – whose downward arc was evident.

Let us pause to sample the invective that has greeted Schoenberg’s ‘sound’ almost from the moment he put pen to paper. Here is a representative screed:

The leader of cacophonists is Arnold Schoenberg. He learned a lesson from militant suffragettes. He was ignored until he began to smash the parlor furniture, throw bombs, and hitch together ten pianolas, all playing different tunes, whereupon everybody began to talk about him. In Schoenberg’s later works, all the laws of construction, observed by the masters from Bach to Wagner, are ignored, insulted, trampled upon. The statue of Venus, the Goddess of Beauty, is knocked from its pedestal and replaced by the stone image of the Goddess of Ugliness.¹⁹

Or, if not a suffragette, perhaps he is a naval munitions expert, ‘Arnold Schoenberg is the musical Von Tirpitz of Germany. Having failed to capture a hostile world by his early campaign … he began to torpedo the eardrums of his enemies, as well as neutrals, with deadly dissonances.’²⁰ Fighting words: Schoenberg’s music is anhedonistic, allowing for no pleasure or aesthetic warmth, and is understood as an act of aggression against the audience. But such ugliness is no more than proper to Erwartung’s spare devastations. An ancient operatic credo – that the music be expressive in just measure to the drama – has been affirmed.

Even for Schoenberg, Erwartung was an acoustic extreme. Had his contemporary critics known of atomic bombs, they would doubtless have rushed to embrace the metaphor. Strauss’s use of dissonance was always intended to express peculiar states, and could comfortably reside next to passages of relatively stable tonality (such as Jokanaan’s music in Salome). Schoenberg, though, had precisely in these years (1908–11) decided to abandon tonality as an organizing force within his musical language, and had done so under the influence of an overtly expressionist credo. As he wrote in a famous letter to his friend Kandinsky, ‘art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly!’²¹ In his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, 1911), he questioned the antithesis between ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, suggesting that musical evolution would soon make them irrelevant; elsewhere in the book he heralded the appearance of ‘tone-colour melodies’, in which variations of pitch would be less important than those of tone colour, a mode that would heighten ‘in an unprecedented manner the sensory, intellectual and spiritual pleasures offered by art’.²² Erwartung is in many ways an illustration of these emerging principles. Although there are fleeting moments of tonal reminiscence, most of the score is written in the rapidly codifying lingua franca of free atonality. In arguments certainly influenced by Schoenberg’s own theorizing, critics used to claim that Erwartung’s harmonic language was, like its literary text, an unfettered stream-of-consciousness, with no connecting threads or discernible system. But the determined avoidance of anything that might smack of tonal direction or even tonal anchor produced in its turn a pronounced gravitation towards alternative chordal anchors. Erwartung favours the perfect fourth plus the augmented fourth, a sonority that became for atonality something close to a cliché – a trusted and reliable standby when invention flagged.

In its angular extremes, the vocal part in Schoenberg’s opera might be described as Kundry plus Salome in excelsis, and he makes that ancestry explicit by sketching in fleeting but quite recognizable quotations from both formidable predecessors. Their tendencies to scream and whisper are explored to the full, within an anti-melodic vocality unimaginable in the models. In this context it is something of a surprise (particularly in the light of his own, barely representational sketches for the setting) to learn that Schoenberg tried to insist on staged productions with a degree of naturalism, in particular with a nice, recognizable forest. Such naturalism would today be disjunctive in the extreme, particularly as – to most listeners, at least – Schoenberg’s music sounds no less alien and ungraspable now than it did a century ago. But it may also remind us that, in dramatic terms, his heroine had obvious links to the immediate past.

To read comparisons between Strauss and Schoenberg – sometimes even in histories of opera, within which Strauss might seem self-evidently of enormously greater significance – can emphasize how far the story of twentieth-century music still tends to rely on narratives of progress. Schoenberg, we are often told, ‘went further’ than Strauss in harmonic terms and thus deserves pride of historical place. Salome and Elektra may get the performances, but Erwartung should nevertheless take the musicological medals. This argument was brewing even at the time. Not long after Erwartung, Strauss wrote a letter of recommendation for Schoenberg (it was addressed to Gustav Mahler’s widow). In it, he showed himself to be part of the uncertain times in his care not to dismiss out-of-hand the atonal revolution, ‘since one never knows what posterity will think about it’. He nevertheless voiced strong personal opinions, suggesting that Schoenberg would ‘do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music paper’.²³ Schoenberg, who got to know about the letter, was quick to respond in kind, saying that Strauss ‘is no longer of the slightest artistic interest to me, and whatever I may once have learnt from him, I am thankful to say I misunderstood’.²⁴ Of course, by that time Strauss had turned away from his Salome and Elektra manner, and – as we shall see in the next chapter – had embarked on a route that made the antagonism between the two even more pronounced. A mutual lack of sympathy would set in. But the passing of time usually encourages historians to enfold such squabbles into a larger picture. In this case, with hindsight, the querelle between the two composers might be thought a good illustration of the creative turmoil of the time. However, this historical readjustment hasn’t taken place. The investment of music history in a particular, forward-looking strand of its modernist past has, until very recently, proven too intense.

Historians of modernism thus struggle with Béla Bartók (1881–1945), whose one-act opera A kékszakállú herceg vára (Bluebeard’s Castle), written in 1911, was first performed in Budapest in 1918. The text, originally a play but with an operatic setting already in mind, was by fellow Hungarian Béla Balázs. He took the plot from Perrault’s fairy tales, but added various national elements, in particular the insistent rhythms of Hungarian folk ballads – what he called ‘dark, weighty, uncarved blocks of words’.²⁵ But Balázs had also imbibed from Maeterlinck and the symbolist movement generally. As he later stressed, ‘My ballad is the “ballad of inner life”. Bluebeard’s castle is not a real castle of stone. The castle is his soul. It is lonely, dark and secretive: the castle of closed doors.’²⁶ He might have been describing Maeterlinck and Debussy’s Allemonde – or, although he could not have known it, Pappenheim and Schoenberg’s dark wood. The plot has a further resemblance to Pelléas in its strange, ritualistic, mostly unmotivated action. Bluebeard (baritone) brings his new wife, Judith (soprano), back to his castle. They stand in a Gothic hall that has seven large doors. Judith asks for them to be unlocked; Bluebeard is reluctant; she insists. The first two doors reveal a torture-chamber and an armoury, both stained with blood; the next three, with gathering light, show Bluebeard’s treasury, his garden and, to an enormous orchestral climax, his vast lands. But each scene again becomes blood-soaked. Gloom descends as the last two doors are opened: the sixth is a lake of tears and the seventh a procession of Bluebeard’s three past wives. Judith is constrained to accompany the wives back through the seventh door. Bluebeard is left alone.

Bluebeard, one of the great early twentieth-century operas, seems in many ways to mediate between Debussy and Strauss. Bartók, too, came to opera with successes as an instrumental composer, and this circumstance again becomes embedded in the fabric of the opera. For example, a rigid tonal scheme (which one might expect in a purely instrumental piece, but has always been rare in opera) accompanies the ‘arch’ structure of the tale. The journey from darkness to light to darkness is mirrored by a tonal movement from F♯ to C major (the fifth door) and then back to F♯. The opera’s inheritance from Bartók’s instrumental imagination is evident above all in the music for the seven doors. The sonic world behind every new door is fashioned as a miniature orchestral tone poem, as if in each case a special chamber orchestra were lurking in there alongside the horrors. There are muted brass fanfares for the armoury; a solo violin rhapsodizing at the riches of the treasury; harp arpeggios, horn calls and flute trills for the gardens; and an Also sprach Zarathustra-like C-major tutti (organ and all) for the fifth door and its domains. The elephantine chords of door five may be orchestrally Straussian, but harmonically they move through a sequence of parallel triads, thus rehearsing a Debussy signature heard most famously in piano pieces such as ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ (The Submerged Cathedral) from the first book of Préludes (1910).

Few composers at this time ignored leitmotif, and Bluebeard includes one at its core. Each time the stain of blood invades the stage picture, the orchestral ensemble is coloured by a ‘blood’ motif, a grating minor second, shrill and strident in the woodwind. 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. Only towards the end, in one of the bleakest finales in all opera, does a more connected vocal idiom emerge. As Bluebeard grasps the inevitability of each door giving up its secrets, his resignation and awareness of loss bring forth the lyricism that had before been impossible. Eventually, even he becomes mute. The orchestra makes the ending, returning us to instrumental austerity, where we had begun.

OUTSIDE THE RADIOACTIVE ZONE

What does opera history make of outsiders, composers and works that have no apparent genetic ties or compositional debts to the central tradition? Perhaps a better question would be: given that opera outside the German, Italian or French traditions, circa 1900, quickly found idiosyncratic ways to evade the Wagnerian curse, is that because any such curse can extend only so far geographically? Consider the opera known in the West as Jenůfa, written between 1894 and 1904 by Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), a Czech (or, more properly, a Moravian) who spent most of his life as no more than a local celebrity in Brno, and whose remarkable late flowering as an international opera composer will be considered in Chapter 19. Janáček’s first operas are conventional enough in their mixture of Romantic and nationalist elements, but in the early 1890s he came across a play by Gabriela Preissová called Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter). Just like Debussy before him and Strauss a few years later, the experience of this spoken drama was inspirational enough to generate experiments with a new kind of opera – one that set the text directly to music. What captured Janáček’s imagination is clear, because although Preissová’s play has a folk-like setting its action is anything but traditional. Act 1 opens with Jenůfa (soprano) in love with and secretly pregnant by Števa (tenor), who owns the local mill. But she is loved by Števa’s half-brother, Laca (tenor), who in a fit of jealous rage slashes her cheek with a knife. In the second act, half a year later, Jenůfa has been hidden away by her stepmother, the Kostelnička (soprano), and has just given birth to a son; Števa has deserted her. When Laca arrives to enquire about her, the Kostelnička admits that she has had a baby, but tries to reassure him by saying that it has died. Laca leaves, and the Kostelnička takes the baby out into the winter night and drowns it in the millstream. In Act 3, two months later, Jenůfa has agreed to marry Laca, but as the stream thaws the villagers discover the dead child. Jenůfa fears it is her son, and the crowd close on her threateningly, believing she is the murderer. But the Kostelnička confesses and is led off. Jenůfa, after great struggles, forgives her, and in a finale of gathering musical intensity accepts Laca’s love.

Part of the reason the opera took so long to write is that Janáček changed his objectives over time. While attracted to the violent, verismo elements of the plot, he rightly felt he needed a new musical language to make the opera work dramatically. Parts of Act 1, the first to be written, still bear traces of his older, nationalist vein, with lively, modal folk choruses in syncopated rhythm and even some recognizable arias and ensembles. But during that same period Janáček, previously a dedicated collector of folk music, began to collect what he called ‘speech-melodies’, fragments of Czech spoken discourse that he would notate rhythmically and melodically, in the process finding the musical building blocks from which he would construct a new operatic style. The extreme realization of this technique would occur in his later operas; in Jenůfa the effect is more sporadic, and interacts with an older, more familiar language (which is probably why it has remained his most popular work).

The drama thus grows out of an accretion of musical miniatures – often based on speech-melody fragments or small, mimetically inspired melodic gestures. This gift for assembling a mountain from pebbles is evident right from the start of the opera, and makes Janáček’s idiom unmistakable. In the brief orchestral prelude to Act 1, an obsessively repeated rhythmic idea, clearly meant to mimic the turning of the mill that looms continuously over the action, is not so much developed as explored in multiple sonorities: first restrained and rather gentle, then in full orchestral flood, then with a solo violin. We are, in other words, presented with an orchestral tour through the emotions that will soon crowd on to the stage. As the characters are introduced and the action develops, more and more of these miniatures are established and then explored. It is as if the orchestra savours the words or brief phrases a character has just declaimed, turning them over without altering them, just repeating them again and again. Such assemblages, so very different from the gradual musical transformations of Wagner and his followers, mystified many when the opera was first performed. It was not until 1916, with Janáček sixty-one years old, that Jenůfa had a major revival in Prague, and not until the 1920s and 1930s that it became an accepted – if eccentric – work, and even then it was mostly performed in German translation.

Only with time has Jenůfa become a staple of the repertoire. By the mid twentieth century, operatic developments elsewhere made its innovations less perplexing, allowing audiences to understand what a tremendous vehicle for musical drama Janáček’s special idiom could be. The end of the opera is justly famous. After the melodrama of the Kostelnička’s confession, poor, disfigured, bereft Jenůfa and patient, violent Laca are left alone onstage. As the heroine finds a route to forgiveness, a last musical idea emerges in the orchestra – a magnificent, pulsing, full-orchestral chord, with trumpet arpeggios sounding forth. It is as if the obsessive repetitions on which the opera has been built have at last found a goal, a wall of sheer musical sound that moves nowhere and, like the characters onstage, celebrates sheer survival.

LATE VERISMO

A vital aspect of Bartók’s and Janáček’s operas is that they show how the works of Debussy and the early, expressionist Strauss – both in their different ways seeming like end-points, unrepeatable extremes – might be points of departure. However, an even earlier sign that Wagnerism might not be an everlasting obsession came to Germany quite soon after Wagner’s death, and was also felt in France and elsewhere. The source of this awakening was all the more threatening because of its unexpected origin. Wagnerian complexity and profundity had been thought by many to have conquered once and for all the Italian tradition represented by Verdi. Many German intellectuals thought Verdi’s masterpieces from the early 1850s ridiculously old-fashioned (albeit still disturbingly popular), while the more sophisticated fruits of his old age, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), were judged modern and improved, the result of salutary Wagnerian influences. But then, in the early 1890s, operatic Europe found itself in the grip of an entirely new kind of Italian opera, one in which up-to-date harmonies and orchestration were grafted on to realistic plots oozing with steamy passion, enlivened by brief but show-stopping, singer-grateful arias. Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry, 1890), Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (Clowns, 1892) and, most dangerous of all because most obviously sophisticated, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) became international successes. Anxious Teutonic glances were once again cast southwards across the Alps.

The glances were in fact being cast both ways. Even though Puccini enjoyed unprecedented fame in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was constantly aware that more advanced music from France and Germany carried greater intellectual prestige; he paid close attention to musical innovation there – searching as always for new dramatic means. Debussy was more to his taste than Strauss. He praised the orchestration and ‘extraordinary harmonic qualities’ of Pelléas, even though ‘it never carries you away, lifts you; it is always sombre in colour, as uniform as a Franciscan’s habit’.²⁷ About Strauss he was more circumspect. He attended a famous revival of Salome in Graz in 1906, putting him in the company of a host of other celebrities of the present and future, including Mahler, Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg, and – if his later recollections were correct – a struggling, music-obsessed young Austrian called Adolf Hitler.²⁸ Puccini confided to a friend, ‘Salome is the most extraordinary, terribly cacophonous thing. There were some brilliant musical effects, but in the end it’s very tiring. Extremely interesting spectacle, though.’²⁹ Puccini and Strauss were, however, linked in another important way. Much more so than today, when original-language performances are the norm and singers tend to specialize in either the German or the Italian repertory, they wrote for the same female stars – Maria Jeritza, Emmy Destinn, Selma Kurz and Lotte Lehmann were all famous for both their Strauss and Puccini roles.

Did this Puccinian sampling of the ultra-modern have any effect on his later operas? As his remarks suggest, both Debussy and Strauss, in their very different ways, were too extreme and monochromatic for a composer who prized variety above all. He never attempted a prose libretto, despite their vogue in his later years; to do so would have been to renounce the vocal lyricism that was so critical a side of his musical personality. But his later libretti did become increasingly prose-like, while space for arias or grand, singing-together ensembles become rarer. La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West, 1909) is a case in point. It is set in the Californian gold rush of 1849 and features a fiercely independent, gun-toting heroine, a handsome, tough-but-sensitive hero, and a cruel antagonist (lo scheriffo, the sheriff, no less). Given such extroverted dramatis personae, it’s surprising that there is virtually no trace of exportable, concert-style arias, even though the hero’s role was created especially for Enrico Caruso. What’s more, the second act ends in something close to spoken drama, a tense poker-game played out between the heroine and the antagonist (the prize will be, in antique Italian-opera mode, the heroine’s honour), with cards violently slapping the table as the dominant sound effect.

Not everyone was happy about it. In 1924, the year of Puccini’s death, one irritated Englishman summarized the composer’s creative arc as follows:

No living composer is more despised and execrated by the leaders of musical opinion today in every country. … What we really resent, if we take the trouble to analyse our feelings, is that, however detestable his music may be, particularly on paper, it is impossible to deny that it generally ‘comes off’ exasperatingly well in performance, where other and better music fails disastrously. … Some of his later work is by no means as contemptible as many suppose. For although his operas from Manon Lescaut onward reveal a constantly growing preoccupation with theatrical effect and a correspondingly marked decline in musicianship – a melancholy progression in which La fanciulla del West represents the culminating point or rather the nadir – his recent partial recovery, as exemplified in the so-called Trittico, is all the more welcome because it was so wholly unexpected.³⁰

What is more, this ‘decline’ – which begins from day one with Manon Lescaut – is laid at an interesting door:

Puccini’s artistic development suggests an analogy with Verdi. He seems to have set himself to Italianize modern composers in precisely the same way Verdi. … Italianized Wagner. But while the latter’s attempt to prolong the existence of the old Italian tradition which was lying gasping and emaciated upon its death-bed, by means of a kind of artificial rejuvenation or transfusion of blood from a younger and more vital organism, resulted in the production of two supreme masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff … the former’s operation, performed by a less skilful and steady hand, has hardly tuned out so successfully.³¹

This ‘young and vital organism’ that saved Italian opera circa 1890 is once more none other than R. Wagner (dead at the time). The unnamed ‘modernist composers’ Puccini turned to a generation later are deemed incapable of working the same trick. La fanciulla does indeed have its fair share of advanced harmonic and orchestral effects, ‘transfusions’ from the moderns. But what is it about Il trittico (The Triptych, 1918), a sequence of three one-act operas, that signals Puccini’s ascent out of perdition? To choose one-act operas suggests the model of Salome and all those other, self-consciously modern works. The first opera of the three, Il tabarro (The Cloak), is a grim melodrama about adultery set on a barge on the Seine, with an atmospheric introduction cast as an advanced orchestral tone poem. The opening chords, depicting the relentless swell of the river, are built on fourths and with their delicate orchestration sound almost in homage to Debussy; a distant car motor horn and tugboat siren add to the realistic effect. A little later, there are allusions to Stravinsky (both in orchestration and harmony) in a strangely dissonant imitation of an old, out-of tune organ.

In some ways, though, the last panel of Il trittico, the comic piece Gianni Schicchi, is the most radical. Written during the dark days of the First World War, its story is derived from Dante, the literary icon of the Italian past, and noisily celebrates the cultural and economic energies of the Renaissance, a period when Italians led the world. The plot concerns a venal family group who gather at the deathbed of a relative to discover that he has left a will not at all in their favour. They engage a wily merchant, Gianni Schicchi (baritone), to help them; he impersonates the deceased relative, successfully alters the will, but in the process awards the choicest items to himself. The love interest is supplied by Schicchi’s daughter, Lauretta (soprano), and Rinuccio (tenor), both of whom have well-defined arias. Rinuccio’s famous ‘Firenze è come un albero fiorito’ (Florence is like a tree in flower) is delicately poised between irony and sincerity, part nostalgic travelogue, part bombastic celebration of local pride. Puccini’s setting, with its march-like theme and uncomplicated harmonies, is very different from his usual, lachrymose tragic solos. The macho optimism is put into cultural perspective, and its musical mood matched, by his embarrassing ‘Inno a Roma’ (Hymn to Rome), which he wrote soon after the premiere of Il trittico, and which was premiered during a gymnastics competition in Rome (training ‘the soldiers of tomorrow’), pealed forth by a chorus of 5000, accompanied by the massed brass bands of the carabinieri. (The ‘Inno’ was a great hit in the decades to come, particularly when recast as the ‘Inno al Duce’.)

Moments such as this highlight the fact that nationalistic sentiments became more strident over much of Europe after the First World War. But other passages in Schicchi are within hail of atonality, with curious disjunctions in the musical argument. Even openly parodic sections cast a shadow, particularly the sinister foxtrot, ‘In testa la cappellina!’ (On his head the little cap), a marche funèbre for modern times that would not be out of place in a Brecht–Weill collaboration. Critics seem for the most part to have passed over these passages without comment, perhaps thinking them merely innocent fun. Nor was any sinister resonance felt in Schicchi’s warning to the relatives that their stratagem risks a grisly punishment, amputation of the hand and exile. He underlines the point by singing a little ditty (‘Addio, Firenze, addio cielo divino’ – Farewell, Florence, farewell, divine skies), its flowery ornamentation in imitation of Renaissance vocal style as he raises a handless sleeve in mock farewell. The relatives repeat the tune, and its threat prevents them from exposing Schicchi when he takes for himself the most enticing parts of their inheritance. Again: all innocent fun? In 1918 in Italy, after years of brutal conflict, with wounded, limbless soldiers returning to every town? Perhaps the echoes were just too close to contemplate.

Just as did Verdi’s Falstaff, Puccini’s comic masterpiece ends with an address to the audience that carries with it a clear nationalist message. In Verdi’s case there is an energetic fugue in celebration of the world’s folly, perhaps not least the folly that had led young Italians to neglect such learned musical forms and to rush in search of dangerous, foreign idioms. In Gianni Schicchi, Puccini (once a prime example of those Italian upstarts) plays another card: with a last, fleeting reference to Rinuccio’s bombastic celebration of Florence, the protagonist conjures up ‘il gran padre Dante’. As one early, fervently nationalist critic put it, this ending was meant to release the ‘purest word of the race’. The tone of such praise is now jarring, even alienating, but it can also be instructive. In Gianni Schicchi we can if we so choose merely enjoy the blue sky and the Renaissance sunshine; but not far beneath this surface we may also find other, darker colours, not least a remembrance of times past in Italian history and, perhaps still more disturbing, an anticipation of times soon to come.