Illustrations
LISTENING TO OPERA
1. A scene from Frank Darabont’s 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. Prisoners in a brutal US prison fall silent and listen when one of their number commandeers the public address system and plays them ‘Sull’aria’, the two-soprano duet from Act 3 of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.
2. Tristan at the Paris Opéra, according to Billy Wilder’s 1957 film Love in the Afternoon. Distractions abound: Audrey Hepburn has caught sight of Gary Cooper down in the expensive seats, while her colleague at the Conservatoire fussily examines the conductor and consults the score. Behind them, ordinary opera-goers are watching the actual performance.
COURTLY OPERA
3. A reconstruction, seen from the performer’s viewpoint, of the room in the Duke of Mantua’s palace where Monteverdi’s Orfeo was first performed in 1607. Some of the seats for audience members are throne-like, but the space is comparatively intimate.
4. Le nozze degli dei (The Marriage of the Gods), a favola by Giovanni Carlo Coppola, performed in Florence on the occasion of a royal marriage in 1637, and giving an indication of the scenic marvels that could be produced in such mythological court entertainments.
5. After two centuries of almost complete neglect, the extraordinary revival of Handel opera performances over the last thirty years has often gone hand in hand with startling postmodern productions. This scene is from Graham Vick’s 2010 Royal Opera House production of Tamerlano.
6. Many eighteenth-century Londoners felt resistance to the operatic invasion of British culture. William Hogarth’s engraving Masquerades and Operas (or the Bad Taste of the Town) of 1724 shows the crowd flocking to entertainments featuring extravagantly paid castrati; a woman in the foreground wheels away the now discarded treasures of British literature.
7. Two famous castrati, Senesino and Gaetano Berenstadt, appear on either side of the equally famous soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, possibly in a performance of Handel’s Flavio (1723). The tendency of castrati to be oversized and misshapen is cruelly exaggerated.
8. Rosalie Levasseur (1749–1826), one of Gluck’s favourite singers, created Eurydice in the French premiere of Orphée (1774) and the title role in Alceste (1776), as well as starring in several of his other French operas.
9. Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), as Orphée in an 1859 Paris revival of Gluck’s opera. Her austere costume and restrained pose suggest that the classic severity of Gluck’s operatic reform had attractions even a century later.
MOZART
10. The public figure. Mozart as a stiff and bewigged court functionary. This portrait by Barbara Krafft dates from 1819, nearly twenty years after the composer’s death, but is based on contemporary sources.
11. The private man. Much more modern-looking than Krafft, this silverpoint drawing by Doris Stock dates from 1789. It was considered by those who knew him well to be one of the best likenesses of the composer.
12 and 13. Near-contemporary images of Papageno and Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte. These coloured engravings from 1793 come from a set of twelve illustrations by Johann Salomon Richter (1761–1802). Papageno appears far more human than bird-like, and carries an extremely large birdcage on his back. Sarastro, with white beard, sandals, robe and solar ornaments, is a Masonic-Egyptian priest-as-wizard, reflecting the many historical sources of the Zauberflöte libretto.
14. Charles Edward Horn (1786–1849) as Caspar in an English-language performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz (London, 1824), bearing a rifle, hunting horn and (somewhat superfluously) a sword. The Musical World (23 March 1850), recalling the event many years later, said that Horn ‘had no voice, but made amends for the deficiency by gesture and attitudes’.
15. Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient (1804–60) as Fidelio in the second act of Beethoven’s opera. Cross-dressed, tensed and ready to combat tyranny, she is one of many female symbols of early nineteenth-century ‘liberty at the barricades’.
16. Caroline Ungher (1803–77), in a much more conventional engraved portrait. Born in Vienna, Ungher sang in the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony but made her greatest reputation in Italy, as one of a new, forceful, not-entirely-bel-canto breed of operatic sopranos.
ROSSINI
17. Rossini as merchandise. The apple-shooting scene from Guillaume Tell (1829), the opera’s most striking tableau, is captured in Sèvres porcelain.
18. Rossini as popular culture. Mickey Mouse conducts the Guillaume Tell overture, from The Band Concert (1935). The overture is continually interrupted by the popular tune ‘Turkey in the Straw’, just as ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ interrupts Il trovatore in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (also 1935).
19. Operatic spectators on and off the stage. Natalie Dessay as Donizetti’s Lucia at the Metropolitan Opera in 2007, directed by Mary Zimmerman. In her famous mad scene, Lucia appears before the assembled company having stabbed her husband Arturo on their wedding night. The stark contrast of white gown and bloody hands retains its power to shock.
20. A caricature by Gustave Doré from the 1860s in which the grotesque facial and physical contortions of the singers emphasize the strain and exertion that had become typical in operatic performance where vocal heroics trump finesse.
21. Un bal de l’Opéra (A Ball at the Opéra), coloured lithograph from the middle of the nineteenth century by Eugène Charles François Guérard (1821–66). From 1821 to 1873 the Paris Opéra ball was held at the Salle Le Peletier, where masked participants were more than happy to shed their inhibitions.
VERDI
22. The famous divided-stage scene from Act 3 of Rigoletto (1851), as illustrated in a card advertising Liebig meat bouillon. Liebig opera cards were issued in German, French and several other languages from 1872 until well into the twentieth century. The bouillon company has taken liberties with the plot, since Rigoletto is shown with the assassin Sparafucile rather than his beloved daughter Gilda.
23. Verdi’s funeral procession in Milan, 1901; 300,000 people reportedly attended, more than half the total population of the city. Although his early operas of the 1840s were, at best, only sporadically regarded as political, their composer became a potent symbol of Italian nationhood in the later nineteenth century.
GRAND OPERA
24. Act 3 of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865) at the Paris Opéra. The scenic splendour demanded at this theatre is obvious, as is the prevailing taste for operatic sets that seem precariously balanced and far from the juste milieu with which the Parisian mid-century is often associated.
25. Tannhäuser’s Song Contest in the Wartburg, as staged by the Metropolitan Opera in 2004. This lavish production, designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, quotes and re-creates the luminous richness of nineteenth-century German Romantic paintings, conjuring up an idealized and long-lost Middle Ages.
OPERA OUTSIDE THE OPERA HOUSE
26. The cover of A Treasury of Grand Opera (1946), with a montage of scenes from famous works which are featured inside in easy piano arrangements, transposed for amateur voices. Note the central position of opera’s most famous gypsy.
27. Gounod’s Faust (1859) was one of the most popular operas of the early twentieth century. Here, in 1931, it is arranged and much condensed for solo piano, with libretto text in English helpfully written above the musical staff.
28. Risë Stevens, a famous Carmen, in an advertisement from the 1950s. The endorsement – Stevens prefers Chesterfields because she is ‘careful’ about her voice – is yet further testament to a bygone age.
29. Sophia Loren as the heroine in Clemente Fracassi’s 1953 film spectacular of Verdi’s Aida. Loren lip-synched and mimed the lead role, which was sung by Renata Tebaldi.
OPÉRA COMIQUE
30. Emma Calvé (1858–1942) as Carmen, one of her most famous roles. Calvé was reported to have researched the deep background of the part, touring Spain and even its gypsy camps. George Bernard Shaw said she had ‘divested Carmen of the last rag of romance and respectability’.
31. Two robber accomplices in an 1857 London revival of Auber’s Fra Diavolo (1830). One critic remarked that they were ‘the very incarnations of that mixture of the terrible and the ludicrous which go to make perfect specimens of the grotesque’. Another felt that ‘their make-up was irresistible’.
32. Jacques Offenbach in a caricature by André Gill, garlanded, astride his cello with baton in hand and surrounded by images of his famous works. In the sketch of La Belle Hélène (upper right), Offenbach’s head is grafted on to Hélène’s body.
33. The Wagnerian anti-hero: the American bass Carl Cochems (1877–1954) as Hagen in Götterdämmerung, c. 1910. This atmospheric photograph is in striking contrast to the bluff, heroic portraits of contemporary Wagner singers in roles such as Siegfried, Brünnhilde or Wotan.
34. ‘Verdi, the Latin Wagner’, a caricature by Carl von Stur published in 1887. This was a familiar view of the ageing Verdi. He still has his big drum and barrel organ, and screaming Aida is in the background; but the beret and angry-looking swan (presumably let loose from Lohengrin) mark Wagner’s inescapable influence.
35. The travails of modern opera. Janáček’s Jenůfa was written between 1894 and 1902 and first performed in Brno in 1904. The sheer difficulty of his task, and his multiple changes of mind, are graphically illustrated on this page of his sketches for the opera.
OPERA ON RECORD
36. Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) as Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca (1900). For many at the time Caruso defined the idea of the heroic tenor. He was one of the first and most astute of a generation of singers who exploited new gramophone technology to enhance their fame.
37. Geraldine Farrar (1882–1967) as Suor Angelica, a role she created in Puccini’s 1918 opera. Farrar, one of the most popular sopranos of her day (her followers in New York were called ‘Gerry-flappers’), recorded widely and even starred in a 1915 silent film of Carmen, directed by Cecil B. De Mille.
38. Lauritz Melchior (1890–1973) as ‘world famous Danish tenor Olstrom’ in the movie Two Sisters from Boston (1946), recording the Prize Song from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. The film is set in the early 1900s, this scene re-creating the recording processes of the time.
39. Costume for Mélisande by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff, 1892–1990), the Russianborn French artist and designer. This art deco design for the Metropolitan Opera in 1927 captures the darker undertones of Debussy’s opera: light beams as icicles threaten impalement, and the heroine’s rope-like hair is as much a noose as an adornment.
RICHARD STRAUSS
40. Hugo von Hofmannstahl with Strauss in a 1914 silhouette by Willi Bithorn. By this time, the two had collaborated on Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and the first version of Ariadne auf Naxos (1912).
41. Nadja Michael as Salome and Duncan Meadows as the Executioner in David McVicar’s 2007/8 production of Strauss’s opera at London’s Royal Opera House, by which time the opera had been giving trouble in London for nearly a century. When Thomas Beecham attempted to get it staged in 1910, Jokanaan’s severed head had to be replaced by a bloody sword. When that proved too messy, a tray (sans head) was substituted.
OPERA IN THE 1920S
42. The vocal score of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927). Unsurprisingly, given its jazz-influenced subject, the opera was banned in Germany six years later.
43 and 44. Costume designs by Eduard Milén for the first production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen (Brno, 1924).
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, FANTASY AND REALITY
45. In René Clair’s musical comedy, Le Million (1931), an opera called Les Bohémiens is staged. The tenor’s opening vocal salvo, ‘We are alone, O angel mine!’, is received with bewilderment by the nearby brigands. Le Million pays tribute to opera’s enchanting absurdity as well as its transformative force.
46. One of the Hamburg opera houses in 1945, lying in ruins after an Allied bombing raid. It was not rebuilt until 1955.
POST-WAR UNCERTAINTIES
47. John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987), at its Metropolitan Opera premiere (2011), directed by Peter Sellars. This scene illustrates the opera’s epic treatment of an episode (and a notably vilified protagonist) from recent history.
48. The tenor Neil Shicoff as Peter Grimes in Willy Decker’s production of Britten’s opera at Turin’s Teatro Regio (2009/10). One of the last operas to become a firm part of the operatic repertory, Grimes has proved itself readily adaptable to a variety of staging fashions.
FUTURES AND FAREWELLS
49. Leaving the opera. In this lithograph from the early 1880s, the audience (and possibly some costumed characters) depart after an evening at the Paris Opéra ‘in the year 2000’. Open-top aerial transport (goggles optional) was the order of the imagined future.
50. A final glance. The Gods walk vertically up the rainbow bridge in Robert Lepage’s 2010 staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Froh looks back. Whether this is in allusion to Orpheus, or a gesture of nostalgia and loss, or merely to check the position of the other body doubles, is poignantly uncertain.