Is Opera Music?

For two reasons, I wasn’t going to write about either Monodramas or Séance on a Wet Afternoon (pictured.) First, I accepted New York City Opera’s invitation to their Artists Council last fall, so interests conflict.  Second, I don’t review living writers any more, accepting Sondheim’s solution (see penultimate ‘graph) to these qualms: and Stephen’s a friend.  (I give a lecture to the opening-night audience of Séance on a Wet Afternoon in a few hours.)  But, last Wednesday, the question of Monodramas, which I had seen at its final dress, bubbled up before my ALT class: one of the composers I work with had posited that the sheer musical richness of that evening should and did trump all other concerns, and it occurred to me that NYCO’s spring season had—perhaps accidentally—posed a crucial question:

Is opera music?

Or—less gnomically, more specifically:

When we talk about theatrical music, how are defining theatricality; by the standards of the theatre, or by those of the concert hall?

Theatricality in the concert hall, I suggest, can consist of no more than an orchestra projecting images of the Great Gate at Kiev during their performance of Pictures at an Exhibition; Charles Ives, for mood and persona, placing a trumpet far offstage in his The Unanswered Question; even a mezzo-soprano choosing wafting sleeves for her performance as the Angel in The Dream of Gerontius.  Theatricality in the concert hall means importing a whiff of the visual, the psychological, the emotionally suggestive, into what remains, in 2011, largely an abstract medium.  Those black suits of Philharmonic musicians (however “fashionably” tieless during a lunchtime engagement) give you tone, consistency, protocol: but they’re not chosen to give you character.

So, by orchestral standards, Monodramas was shinily theatrical.  Before she sang, a boy and a girl in tight black suits revealed Zorn’s soprano (Anu Komsi) from beneath a burka: as she sang a rangy and vehement vocalise, a thought bubble overhead broadcast Artaud-inspired drawings before itself bursting into flames.  In Morton Feldman’s Neither, a fantasia on a brief Beckett text that comprised the second half of Monodramas (more on Erwartung anon,) soprano Cynthia Sieden vocalized in her own sleek black dress while, behind her, mirrored cubes shimmered and flashed: occasionally, casually, a man on wires rose into the upstage air.  Had Monodramas been programmed by the New York Philharmonic (who made a similar gesture with Ligeti’s Le grand Macabre last year,) you’d have to judge it a programming masterstroke.  Here was a chance to hear, at full orchestral strength, two American composers (tastily juxtaposed with Schoenberg) rarely heard in the concert hall.  If opinions differed about whether the pieces held their length, there were at least beautiful images to savor along the way, and—ideally for an orchestral organization—the composers’ idioms and the players’ performances owned the evening.  George Manahan and the NYCO Orchestra may have earned the best reviews of their careers for Monodramas, and justly so.

But there are those who expect theatricality in the opera house to have something to do with drama: not the “drama” of a red suit rising from a crowd of gray veils (which is not drama at all, merely spectacle;) but the art form—as old as music, if not older—in which actors in character speak a play to an audience so as to embody something about the way we live now.  This is, after all, how the form was forged: by a group of Florentine nobles trying to reimagine drama at its Athenian peak.  By this standard, the only monodrama on the NYCO program was Erwartung: a piece clearly composed as a journey on which a singer could portray a character, in a narrative—however intriguingly fractured—which leaves her a changed person.

The Zorn and the Feldman scores didn’t so much refute these expectations of drama as shrug them off.  I say this without heat.  Zorn set no text in La Machine de l’être, and wrote very clearly in his program note that the singer and production team were free to do whatever they liked.  Feldman, too, wrote that every line of Neither is really “the same thought said another way.”  But—also without heat—I do suggest that simply omitting the dramatic impulse (and technique) that makes opera opera does not remake the form. You do not refresh an art by ignoring it.  Hearing it in an opera house didn’t make Neither anything but what it was: a soprano concerto in a dark mood.

But opera is music, right?  Enter Wagner: he who expanded the orchestra to Olympian dimensions, who “raised,” some would say, sung drama to symphonic “heights.”  This is the point on which the voice queen in the Family Circle setting his watch for the will-she-or-won’t-she? E-flat in “Sempre libera” agrees with the fresh-from-Juilliard composer with her eyes on the prize: sound trumps all, and doesn’t Wagner back us up?  I suggest (and, today, Alex Ross points out) that Wagner is all about story, character, specific emotional process. However modern Wagner’s music seemed at the time, there was nothing exclusively music-driven about his dramatic thinking: his six harps serve—not comprise—his point.  It’s ironic that Wagner, the most drama-driven of our operatic composers—and the only one who wrote his own libretti— is so often remembered today as the apostle of orchestral gigantism, when he had no sooner raised his titanic orchestra than he built a theatre to bury it.

All of which places the prima of Séance on a Wet Afternoon in a fascinating context. Monodramas offered the work of concert composers writing in, if not necessarily for, the theatre: Séance offers a theatre composer-lyricist (and now librettist) stretching his skills and sensibilities toward acoustic opera.  Both involve unexpected artists engaging new resources and audiences: but Stephen’s project has attracted more of the language of “crossing over.”  I wonder, though, after Monodramas and Séance have been heard in the opera house, which composer will seem most at home in it.