ALT 6: Last night we talked through chorus: that element of opera arguably easiest to write, hardest to make feel necessary. Professionally, AGMA’s contract tells you that chorus means 8 on a part: if a soprano sings solo, she’s paid as a principal, and acting, dancing, &c—all that will cost you extra, darling. Useful, if dispiriting, for a composer to know: but what is a chorus artistically? Is it an orchestration or an attitude? The Florentine Camerata, remembering and misremembering Greek drama in unequal measure, took from that great public literature the twin principles of massed voices and dramatic remove: the chorus, like us, can delight in, or recoil from, but never, ever affect the actions performed by the principals onstage. But twentieth-century writers tossed those two—and other—balls in the air, and we’re still dazzled by the juggling. The Male Chorus, in Britten/Duncan’s The Rape of Lucretia, is a tenor soloist. But doesn’t his dramatic stance—removed from the action, yet still harrowed by it—make him as choral as Verdi/Solera’s imprisoned Hebrews in “Va, pensiero”? Yes, Puccini/Illica/Giacosa’s “Humming Chorus” in Madama Butterfly was, in fact, built to show off the operatic stage’s first functioning rheostat: but does that make that magical minute any less convincing a demonstration of how the chorus can be at once in the orchestra and not of it? In Sondheim/Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, why is “Perpetual Anticipation,” with its sparse three singers, a chorus, whereas “A Weekend in the Country,” sung by twice that many voices, an ensemble? (Here, does dramatic stance trump vocal mass?) Adams/Goodman’s “The people are the heroes now,” which opens Nixon in China, refreshes with ‘80s minimalism a form of dramatic exposition familiar to Aeschylus: I offered, in my own Little Women, uses of the chorus both as döppelgangers of the principals and timbral memories of a perfect and irretrievable moment in their lives. Are those four singers a very small chorus, or an unstaged quartet of shadow principals?
Happy Thanksgiving, all. We’ll connect again re Ainadamar, if not before.