Preface and acknowledgements

A history of opera is not lightly undertaken in this Age of Information, particularly when it attempts to survey the entire 400-year period. But while the footsteps of those who have trodden the path before are of course daunting, recent competition is not as intense as it might once have been. Although histories of opera were common a century ago (when Richard Wagner was a convenient and attractively all-embracing endpoint), modern retellings are surprisingly few. This is true of all general histories of music, at least of those emerging from the academy. As information has accumulated, authors used to professing, which means professing authority, have become cautious: their ‘special fields’ have shrunk inexorably. What is more, the subject of opera offers further difficulties, not least that some of its major practitioners still have shaky academic reputations. Puccini is the classic example here: hugely, inescapably popular, for many almost defining what is meant by opera in the early twentieth century; but with a musicological literature that, at least until very recently, looked thin even in comparison with early symphonists or earnest serialists.

There is also the persistent issue, now more than a century old, of ‘opera crisis’: of how to assess the future of an art form that, at best, has had a troubled relationship with modernity. If histories always tell us a good deal about the present, even as they explicitly concern themselves with the past, then this one needs to reflect the fact that one obvious feature of opera today is an obsession – at least among critics – with viability and vitality. In one sense, opera is thriving. The sheer volume of live opera taking place around the world is far greater now than it was fifty years ago, and this expansion shows little sign of abatement. There is also the remarkable way in which modern technology (recordings and broadcasts, both of them now expanding through the internet as well as through more traditional means) has made operatic performances of both the past and present newly available to vast global audiences. Unless one is a diehard elitist, this proliferation would seem an obvious cause for rejoicing. But celebratory hymns are muted by one glaring circumstance: opera’s expansion has overwhelmingly involved performances of works from the past, often works that were blithely cast aside by the people for whom they were produced – by societies who were confident that more operas, and probably better ones, were just around the corner. The present situation is often the subject of elaborate lament: many of those residing otherwise happily in the opera museum are prone to recite mantras about how urgently we need new operas, that modern additions to the repertory are critical to the health or even the survival of the art form.

Our stance in this debate is laid out clearly enough in the last chapter; we need not anticipate it here. But it may be worth stressing that the two elements of operatic change – the establishment of a repertory and its expansion backwards on the one hand, and the gradual dwindling of new works on the other – have been moving in tandem for more than a century now, and are clearly related. To put this another way, it is sentimental, probably downright utopian, to believe that we can lovingly preserve and continue to add to opera’s repertory of historical objects while at the same time providing the best possible environment for the emergence of new work. The key aspect here, one we will mention more than once in what follows, is the cultural pessimism that now fuels the repertory, an attitude which makes the operatic scene so different from that in cognate forms such as the novel, or film, or visual art, where the new is in constant and lively competition with the old. The energies we devote to careful preservation and renewal of opera’s past glories are now enormous, and quite possibly overwhelming. Think of the emulative competitions engaged in by performers and audiences over their favourite roles and operas; the constant rethinking of stage technologies and modes of presentation; the endless historical research and proliferation of new critical editions, either to restore unknown works or to repackage ones we know well, making them more authoritative and imposing. All these endeavours, laudable in themselves, raise the bar ever higher where new work is concerned. How can it hope to compete? If we really wanted a present in which the new was more exciting than the old, in which the world premiere took precedence over the revival, then we would need to learn to discard at least a part of the past, to recapture some of that now-ancient belief in artistic progress. We would also need to forget the nineteenth century’s elevation of music’s importance among the arts, to recover an earlier attitude in which music was almost always new because past efforts were almost always cast aside, being thought of little lasting value. This would be a radical future indeed; but it is one that hardly anyone seems to want.

One further issue needs some discussion, as it has obvious consequences for the content and tone of the book. At a very early stage, and in no sense at the urging of our editors, we decided that this history would contain no musical examples. We did so because, at the same stage, it became obvious to us that – as far as possible – we wanted to write the book without reference to musical scores. This was a more radical gesture than banning musical examples from the printed book, and might seem a wilful renunciation of precisely the expertise that many see as the musicologist’s greatest strength. Why, after all, ignore such rich repositories of musical detail? In part, we did so out of a desire to find a broader audience, one not involved in the disciplinary habits of musicology. But mostly it was because scores encourage elaborate attention to particular aspects of a strictly musical argument, above all those involving harmonic and melodic detail on the small and the large scale, aspects that have tended to figure too prominently in musicological writings about opera. In other words, scores encourage the idea of opera as a text rather than as an event. Memory, on the other hand, goes back to an event – something heard out loud, possibly also seen on stage. Hence the musical descriptions in this book were written almost entirely on the basis of memory, whether in response to a recording, or – far more often – from the repositories of our personal operatic experiences. This in turn engendered a certain style of musical description, one in which various stalwarts of the musicological lexicon are almost entirely absent. Readers will look in vain for abstract structural analyses of music, or extended descriptions of notes interacting with each other: that kind of information, although relatively easy – with training – to extract from a score, is virtually impossible to extract from listening to or attending an opera. On the other hand, room is then available for other details to emerge: sometimes those involving orchestral effects; above all those involving the singing voice, its heft and colour and power. Whether anything has been gained, whether relying on acoustic memory has enabled us to talk more persuasively about opera as presence and material sound, will of course be for the reader to judge. Although it was sometimes frustrating, and although we transgressed occasionally (at a late stage, for example, a triple-metre passage from Tristan Act 2 was aurally present, but its notated time signature remained fugitive to recollection), on the whole we kept to our decision, and found the resulting experiment constantly challenging and liberating.

An important corollary of the renunciation of scores, and the attendant reliance on musical memory, is that this book mostly deals with operas that are firmly in the present-day repertory. Fifty years ago, that restriction would have been much more drastic than it is today, when operas available at least in recordings are more numerous than ever before. However, and despite this new availability, the composers we discuss at greatest length are those most often performed in today’s global repertory: in numerical order of ubiquity, Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, Rossini, Wagner, Donizetti, Strauss, Bizet and Handel. We have not artfully corralled for consideration multiple works outside opera’s central repertories. Rather, we have tried to present ways of hearing and understanding that can, we hope, be extended beyond the usual national traditions, to rich repertories in a host of less likely places. True, we do pay attention to several composers whose historical importance far outweighs their presence in today’s opera houses – the most obvious cases are Monteverdi and, in particular, Meyerbeer, whose most influential works are now very rarely heard, but who figures prominently here. We have also tried hard to consider composers, or even entire genres, that were once famous but now forgotten, and to explain why their fame did not survive. We have, in short, aimed to be responsible in our duty as historians. But it is also true that those nine composers mentioned above had distinctly variable influences on the broad stream of operatic history, from the negligible (Handel, Mozart) to the all-but overwhelming (Rossini, Wagner); concentrating on them is, then, bound to distort the historical narrative. At the least, though, our emphases result in an operatic history that gives due attention to a considerable number of works (the operas of Puccini and those of the later Strauss are the most obvious) which are generally ignored in music histories, even those of recent vintage.

This book, the product of four hands, has had a complicated genesis. We had written articles and edited a book together before, and knew that the collaboration itself would work. What’s more, our particular combination of interests and specialist knowledge probably did no harm, and in some ways mirrored happily the collaborative energies that have forever fuelled our subject. But it soon became clear, somewhat to our surprise in this age of instant digital communication, that we needed to be in the same town and have daily, face-to-face conversations in order to begin the book in earnest, and then – more surprising still – needed to repeat that face-to-face contact in order to contribute anything more than trivial updates to its contents. When homes are separated by thousands of miles, and when writing such a book can never be one’s sole occupation, these requirements presented logistical obstacles. But it also seemed to make sense both of the project and of our collaboration. We have, over the course of almost thirty years of occasional teamwork, often been asked – sometimes incredulously – how we manage to write together. It’s usually assumed that we must agree to divide up the responsibilities by chapter or verse; that one of us does Italy and the other does Germany, with France and the remaining bits parcelled off in smaller assignments. As it happens, though, the modus scribendi is quite different. For better or worse, we end up writing almost everything together, starting with a paragraph tossed across the court, which seems to attract another paragraph or two, and things branch out from there. Because of this odd method, there is hardly a sentence in the book – this one included – without the material traces of both writers. In most instances the original author of this or that paragraph has disappeared entirely, replaced by a composite voice whose personality seems gradually and quite mysteriously to emerge. Such collaboration needs many circumstances to sustain it, not least a willingness to abandon personal control over what writers, even non-fiction writers, often consider paramount: individual prejudices and opinions, firm convictions, habits of punctuation and vocabulary, many other features of style. But that very abandonment can also be liberating and stimulating.

We have, in the time it took us to write this book, frequently had to rely on others, in particular those who were experts in the many unfamiliar fields we occasionally traversed. Many of these are duly mentioned in the bibliography and references. But some did us the good service of reading our work in progress. Thanks, then, to a gentle host of interlocutors. Harriet Boyd, Chris Chowrimootoo, Elaine Combs-Schilling, Lynden Cranham, Martin Deasy, John Deathridge, Marina Frolova-Walker, Katherine Hambridge, Matthew Head, Ellen Lockhart, Marian Read, Susan Rutherford, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, David Trippett, Laura Tunbridge, Ben Walton and Heather Wiebe all read chapters (some of them several chapters) and commented with great generosity. Flora Willson gave us invaluable assistance with picture research, in the process reading and then responding critically to almost the entire book. A special tribute is owed to Gary Tomlinson, who was kind enough to lend us his unparalleled knowledge of opera’s beginnings, and then went on to read large portions of the remainder of the book, in the process leaving welcome traces of his uniquely broad and encompassing purview. We have also been exceptionally lucky in our editors, Stuart Proffitt at Penguin and Maribeth Payne at Norton; their patience and persistence were remarkable, as was their intellectual engagement in the entire enterprise. In Stuart’s case this involvement started at the very beginning, and included enormously detailed editorial comments that were inspiring enough to change our first draft in fundamental ways.

Most of the book was written at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a venue famous for its mathematicians and physicists, but one also proving a congenial and hospitable setting for operatic fantasy. Our particular thanks go to the Institute’s Director, Peter Goddard, for his exceptional generosity in accommodating us both for prolonged periods; and to Walter Lippincott, long-time Institute habitué and long-time friend, whose enthusiasm for opera and conviviality knows no bounds. Lastly, we want to thank our students over the years. Our graduate seminars and their derivatives – those halfway houses between reading and writing, in which people of different ages share and sometimes create ideas, a miniature society with all its complications and joyous communication – have been central to the ideas that emerge in this book.

One moment made doubly complex by a collaborative enterprise might come when choosing the dedication. In some shared ventures the act is strangely revealing. F. R. and Q. D. Leavis proudly dedicated their joint volume on Dickens ‘to each other’; but they also signed chapters individually and so were perhaps justified in this disconcertingly inward turn. For us, though, agreement on the matter was immediate. We have long been aware that our collaborations are facilitated partly by the fact that we grew up as writers under many of the same critical influences. Among these the most significant has always been Joseph Kerman. His monograph Opera as Drama, written in the 1950s, was still the operatic book for our generation, and has – quite remarkably – remained in currency, challenging readers to this day. Joe himself then presided benignantly over both our apprenticeships, as he did over those of so many others. He published each of our earliest scholarly essays on opera in 19th-Century Music; and he then applied his legendary editorial hand to our first collaborative book. His presence is everywhere in the chapters that follow. If even a few of their pages manage distantly to recall the wit and critical edge of his writings on opera, or suggest the generosity of his intellectual spirit, then – for the authors at least – the project will have reached a happy end.

Carolyn Abbate, Princeton, NJ (40° 37′ N, 74° 35′ W)

Roger Parker, Havant, Hants (50° 85′ N, 0° 96′ W)

Distance: 3483 miles