Weep, Shudder, Die: Can Opera Talk?
I write musical theater. The trouble with saying Broadway is that it has a pejorative context.
—Stephen Sondheim
There is a basic question about Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that has haunted American musical theater. What is Porgy? Is it an opera, operetta, or musical? Most productions and editions of the work avoid an answer. They simply state, “Music by George Gershwin, Libretto by DuBose Heyward, Lyrics by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.” There is an obvious reluctance to place the work in a specific category. (The publisher knows that musicals make more money than operas.) In a few instances, however, the work is called “a folk opera,” which was Gershwin’s own description.
The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.
The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.
The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?
Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.
No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.
There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung. It keeps things simple: opera is sung, theater is spoken, popular musical theater mixes the two modes. The problem is that the history of the standard repertory does not reflect this neat division. The problem is not just with Mozart. Many famous operas have dialogue; many more once had spoken elements that were removed or altered by producers, often without the composer’s consent. Beethoven’s Fidelio, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, Léo Delibes’s Lakmé, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, and Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve all have dialogue. So, too, does Georges Bizet’s Carmen, some of the time.
Carmen is always listed as an opera, and it is mostly performed with sung recitatives, but Bizet did not write it that way. When Carmen was first produced in 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, the work had spoken dialogue. Three months later the composer died at thirty-seven from heart failure. That same year his friend Ernest Guiraud replaced the dialogue with his own recitatives for production in Vienna. That revision became the standard international version. Meanwhile the original version continued to be performed in France at the Opéra-Comique and in the provinces. Carmen’s lurid plot and tragic ending set it apart from standard operettas, but Guiraud’s posthumous additions certified its status as a real opera. The new score did not reflect Bizet’s creative vision, only the house style in Vienna. In recent years, the original version of Carmen has often been revived. It delivers a different effect—tougher and more urgent than the Guiraud edition.
Few operas are performed exactly as the composer intended. They are cut for length, transposed for individual singers, reorchestrated by conductors, and censored by governments. (Then the directors get to work with their unpredictable improvements.) When the Paris Opera produced a work, the composer was obliged to set all dialogue to music and provide a ballet after the intermission. The changes rarely improved the original. Gounod’s Faust (1859) was composed with dialogue between the musical numbers. A year later Gounod composed recitatives for German productions. The work was also retitled Margarethe or Gretchen, to avoid confusion with Ludwig Spohr’s German-language version. Then in 1869, the Paris Opera produced it with recitatives and a ballet. In this version, Faust became the most popular opera of the century. The ballet, expensive to produce and distracting to the dramatic structure, was gradually dropped in most productions. Consequently, a third version, never approved by the composer, is the standard score.
Modern critics have long been suspicious of the so-called “number opera,” which unfolds as a series of individual songs and ensembles—the standard form of popular musical theater from Broadway to the Danube. This aversion will puzzle the average operagoer. Handel, Mozart, Rossini, and other classic composers all wrote operas with distinct arias, duets, and ensembles. Indeed, arias constitute the most popular parts of opera. Many people listen to them who never enter an opera house. Most of opera’s cultural presence comes from these excerpts. Like poetry, the opera is mysteriously quotable. The high points of both arts can often survive removal from their original context. A few lines from a great poem evoke the power of the whole, an aria conveys much of the opera’s lyric magic. Millions of people listen to the radiant high points of operas they will never see in performance. Are they missing something? Yes, but one should not underestimate the joy they receive. The human purposes of opera are not restricted to watching complete performances in a theater. The enchantments of song are so transportable that one wonders how the number opera fell into such ill repute.
The notion that serious opera required continuous music began in the late Romantic period with Richard Wagner. He developed a new style of opera to realize his vision of completely unified musical drama. Wagnerian opera never lets the audience go. The orchestra leads it forward, without interruption, through shifting, chromatic harmonies and endlessly unfolding melodic lines, all further unified by recurring thematic motifs. The effect is powerful, almost hypnotic. For many of the earliest listeners, the impact was Dionysian.
Wagner’s compositional innovations were only part of his revisionist view of opera. He designed his own theater at Bayreuth. He eliminated the boxes, which had traditionally characterized the interior architecture of opera houses. Bayreuth had only one box—for King Ludwig who had financed the construction. Instead, there were two thousand hard seats without armrests, all set in straight lines of sight to the stage. The huge orchestra was hidden. The lights were turned out just before the piece started. Until then, opera had been performed in lighted theaters where the audience members could observe each other. At Bayreuth, all attention focused on the stage. It was not an opera house; it was a temple of art. Like Yahweh, Wagner was a jealous god who allowed no strange gods before him. Only his operas were performed in his austere Festival Theatre. The opening of Bayreuth marked a historic shift in European drama. Opera was no longer entertainment. It was a sacred art.
The new Germanic style met initial resistance in Italy, still the epicenter of opera. Wagner’s innovations intensified the historic debate between German fascination with symphonic elements and Italian emphasis on the human voice. His theatrical reforms also violated the social nature of Italian opera houses where opera was a communal as well as artistic occasion. Box owners often attended every performance in the season; their enjoyment of the music was inextricably mixed with seeing their friends and neighbors. Ultimately, Wagner’s elevation of the composer and the art proved too seductive for late Romantics to resist. Opera had evolved into the most glamorous and extravagant art form in Europe. Composers had long felt trapped in the conventions imposed by impresarios, official censors, and audiences. When Italy’s national composer, Giuseppe Verdi, adopted many of Wagner’s techniques in his late operas, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), Europe surrendered to the Old Sorcerer of Bayreuth. It had taken three centuries, but Germany had finally conquered Italy on the battlefield of opera.
Once the world’s two operatic titans agreed on the procedure, the durchkomponiert or “through-composed” score became codified as the mandatory design for serious opera. The orchestra was expected to provide an ongoing foundation for the drama, unbroken by dialogue or separate vocal numbers. There was a critical and creative consensus that continuous scores were modern and progressive—the logical development of German musical genius. By contrast, the traditional Italian structure with arias and ensembles was retrograde and patronizing. The new consensus survived the transition from Romanticism into Modernism. It provided the structure for influential key works such as Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande (1902), Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). Indeed, the style still exercises a near monopoly on new opera in the twenty-first century.
When a modern opera contains a definable aria, such as “Ch’ella mi creda” in Puccini’s masterfully through-composed La Fanciulla del West (1910) or “Es gibt ein Reich” in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), it emerges from and then returns to the underlying orchestra-driven design, interrupted only by applause. This was the method of the early twentieth-century composers such as Puccini, Strauss, and Janáček. Strauss spoke for most of his contemporaries when he asserted that the aria was still “the soul of opera,” but now it needed to be part of a seamless musical structure.
There were still a few significant modern works that presented self-contained songs, introduced by spoken dialogue, such as Porgy and Bess, The Threepenny Opera, The Moon, and Street Scene. Their style makes musicologists nervous; it recalls Broadway or even Viennese operetta, the favorite genres of the supposedly philistine middle classes. To what category does one assign such works? Each of these operas had to develop a strategy to avoid being demoted to mere entertainment. It was often a literary strategy that used plot, characterization, and verse style as much as musical innovation.
In The Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Weill escape the charge of commercial pandering by presenting criminals, prostitutes, and other deplorables who mocked middle-class values and pieties. Brecht’s mordant lyrics were shocking, aggressive, and brilliant. Weill’s music delighted—not always ironically—in the malevolence of the characters. Take, for example, the famous “Pirate Jenny” song, in which a maid at a filthy harbor hotel imagines herself a pirate queen. Jenny savors the murderous vengeance she will exact when her pirate crew levels the town and decapitates every in habitant. Porgy demonstrated its artistic integrity by bringing the African American voice and experience into the segregated operatic stage. Orff’s The Moon was a dark and macabre parable about death. Weill’s Street Scene declared its serious identity by presenting the lives of poor and immigrant families given voice by Langston Hughes’s lyrics. None of these strategies would have worked, of course, had not each opera had a strong and distinctive score.
The questions about spoken dialogue and self-contained songs are not academic. They influence artistic decisions. The through-composed opera and the number opera draw from different traditions—not just musically but also in literary terms. Each aesthetic is so different that the peak lyric moments in one style hardly resemble the other. In the symphonic tradition, the orchestra and voices rise in passionate climax, but the words, less important than the physical sound of the combined musical forces, are often lost. There is a joke about Strauss’s Elektra that exists in several versions, each purporting to quote a different conductor or the composer himself: at the end of the performance, the maestro exclaims with satisfaction, “The orchestra played well tonight—you couldn’t hear the singers.” Elektra can probably survive such a performance, though few would consider it ideal. The orchestra and vocal lines convey the peak moments of anger and suffering, even if the words are muffled. (Strauss’s use of operatic pantomime and image suffices to convey the dramatic situation.) No one conducting The Threepenny Opera would make the Strauss joke. Brecht’s lyrics need to land for the audience to experience the work. In the number opera, the poetic impact of the lyrics matters.
Neither operatic style is inherently better than the other. Both are legitimate aesthetics with long legacies of masterpieces. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the through-composed technique has been considered superior. It is assumed to embody a more modern approach—the pure and bold aspirations of high art. By contrast, the number opera has been regarded as a backward form trapped in the mercenary instincts of popular entertainment. Does this once useful dichotomy still seem valid? Does the Wagnerian tradition still feel modern or progressive? Hasn’t it become just another period style? Does contemporary opera need a full symphony playing continuously from start to finish?
The requirements of nineteenth-century grand opera are still reflected in the institutions that sustain opera. They employ huge orchestras and choirs, bigger than anything Mozart or Donizetti would have known. Opera houses have also grown bigger over time. The Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center, which was opened in 1966, has 3800 seats. San Francisco, which opened in 1932, has 3149. The Vienna Staatsoper, which was built in 1869, has 1709 (with 567 places for standing room). Venice’s La Fenice, which was originally built in 1792, has 1126 seats. Not only do large theaters favor large orchestras; their size makes it harder to hear the words. In big houses, diction is less important than steady vocal production. It takes most of a singer’s energy to fill the space. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton premiered in the Richard Rodgers Theater, which has 1400 seats. The audience heard every word. Not only was the theater small; the singers used amplification. Miranda knew the impact of Hamilton depended on the words as well as the music.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry (Paul Dry Books, 2024). All rights reserved by publisher.
