What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s fashion. The most read novel of 2012 is Fifty Shades of Grey. But nobody would regard that as an exemplar of the novelist’s art, or think of it as trendy in any way. The link between popularity — or ubiquity — and importance is a complicated one. Here, in an ingenuous way, is an object for a case study.
Opera is not ‘popular’ in any sense at all. Almost nobody is interested in it, apart from you and me. If it’s next to impossible to get tickets for any performance of significance, and if in recent years the broadcasting of live performances to cinemas worldwide has increased the audience exponentially, those audiences are still minuscule in number compared to other art forms.
Nevertheless, opera has shifts in taste like anything else. The best-known hits of 100 years ago may have disappeared (Rutland Boughton, anyone?). Other operas, and other composers, have risen to prominence. It is surely the task of a guide to the 25 greatest operas to register those changes, and talk about what really commands the operatic stage nowadays.
Here’s a curiosity, I thought, on reading Michael Steen’s volume: a book about the most popular and interesting operas which doesn’t seem to recognise any differences in taste at all in the last 60 years or so. In other fields you would have been bound to question a decades-old repertory. Janácek, Berg’s Lulu and John Adam’s Nixon in China have all now entered the operatic canon, and emphasis within a composer’s own works has changed. The key Verdi operas are Un Ballo in Maschera, the last two Boito collaborations and, especially, Don Carlos; while Berlioz’s Les Troyens has authoritatively moved to the centre.
But this book is still stuck with Gounod’s awful Faust, Johan Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, and considers the greatest Verdi opera to be Il Trovatore. How out of touch, you might think. But when I looked at the statistics gathered on that remarkable website, operabase.com, it turns out that Steen’s choice aligns solidly with the operas that still get the most performances worldwide.
You thought that Verdi’s Don Carlos was his most admired opera these days? You metropolitan sophisticate! The most performed are, in order, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Aida, Nabucco and Il Trovatore, which echoes more or less exactly Steen’s choice (he leaves out Nabucco). You thought that Gounod’s unlovely Faust was dead and gone? In 2010-11 the wretched thing was performed 153 times somewhere or other.
Steen does get a few things wrong when it comes to performance statistics. Most startlingly, he omits Richard Strauss, though the latter is now the seventh most performed operatic composer (in order, Salome, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Elektra). The Flying Dutchman is much more regularly staged now than Steen’s choice of an early Wagner, Tannhäuser. And he omits the Ring altogether, although Die Walküre also got over 150 performances this season. Peter Grimes, Steen’s choice of Britten, was done less often than The Turn of the Screw. Janacek, not included, is on a rough par with Leoncavallo and Mascagni, the mysteriously enduring composers of Cav and Pag, who make it in.
In my opinion a list of great operas compiled by most metropolitan critics would now have to include The Rake’s Progress, Nixon in China, Lulu, Les Troyens, Pelléas, and L’Enfant et les Sortilèges; Russian opera would be represented not by Eugene Onegin but by Boris Godunov and the divine Prince Igor.
Does this book, with its fairly unerring grip on genuinely popular operas, provide what the opera-goer wants and needs? I would find that a depressing thought. Steen’s method is to give two separate plot summaries for each opera, one short, one long. Both are guilty of the gibberish characteristic of such things, the following being an example for Il Trovatore:
Ruiz arrives with two pieces of news: Manrico has been ordered to take charge of Castellor, a castle which has fallen to the rebels, and Leonora, thinking Manrico is dead, is about to enter a convent.
Personally, I don’t find this gripping. But then I’m someone who enjoys a lot of opera without having the faintest idea what’s happening; in fact Steen’s plot-summary of Tristan came as quite a pleasant surprise to me, since I’ve always wondered who Morold was.
There are the usual titbits of information about composers’ lives, comic anecdotes about disastrous performances (the trampoline introduced by disgruntled stagehands at the end of Tosca) and other fragments, collected under the heart-sinking category ‘The Interval: Talking Points’.
The music, on the other hand, is not gone into in much detail. Steen’s main musical interest, it seems, is in particular high notes. The Queen of the Night ‘should reach top F’. Lucia’s mad scene ‘ends on high E flat’. Gilda ‘will make this clear on top F’. Madame Butterfly ‘soars over the bridesmaids, to D flat, if she can get there’. I don’t know how interesting this is to opera-goers with a limited grasp of musical detail. ‘Belting squawk’ is probably the reaction, whether it’s a top C in The Rake’s Progress or still higher notes for Zerbinetta or the Queen of the Night. Who cares, really, apart from the soprano herself who knows what she can and can’t reach?
This curiously old-fashioned book doesn’t answer the big question — which is who, these days, wants to be introduced to opera at all? Its survival is a miracle. It hasn’t done so on ticket sales alone, and never could. Most people enjoy a few arias, but would find a whole opera too demanding. New works are constantly commissioned and performed, but very few survive to a second run, and hardly any make it into the repertory.
And yet opera goes on. Some of my most intense aesthetic experiences have been in the opera house — and some of the most agonisingly awful too. The power of great opera may be a mystery, but it continues unabated.
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