“Through singing, opera must make you weep, shudder, die.”
Vincenzo Bellini
Brussels sprouts and beets were the last vegetables I learned to like. Opera had a similar position in my list of arts. Not that I was able to see or hear much opera while growing up. The Met came to St. Louis on tour. My father said he would get tickets for the family if my sister and I read the libretto. Leontyne Price was Aida. She knocked me out. It was a grand production, but it is Miss Price I remember. She was gorgeous; her voice was something totally different than any other sound I had heard.
Dana Gioia’s book is entertaining; that is a toxic word for operas but not for the stories he tells. I learned a lot from reading his 25 essays about the essential role of librettists, how they worked with composers, how the words of an opera can make the music more musical, and how the partnerships of composers and librettists sometimes call for divorce.
Many great composers never got themselves into opera. Beethoven suffered ten years working through Fidelio. Were there musical problems he could not fix? No, it was the words that got him down. Gioia gives the reader the reason. “’I assure you,’ Beethoven wrote to his third librettist, ‘that this opera will win me a martyr’s crown.’” p 9
The world of opera has a narrow repertory. Gioia researched opera numbers. In any year of the “standard repertory,” 50% of the top 100 operas are by seven composers: Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Wagner, Donizetti, R. Strauss, and Rossini. The list of successful librettists is even shorter. Gioia notes that in the 110 years from Rossini’s Barber of Seville (1816) to Puccini’s posthumous Turandot (1926), the majority of operas seen around the world involved five poet/librettists: Romani, Piave, Boito, Illica, Cammarano. They wrote for Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini, Puccini. Luigi Illica wrote for Puccini: Tosca, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly. Arrigo Boito wrote for his own opera, Mefistofele, and for Verdi: Otello, Flastaff and Simon Boccanegra. He also wrote La Giocanda for Ponchielli.
Don Giovanni, Le Nozze de Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutti are still Mozart’s most popular operas. He wrote nine others. Lorenzo Da Ponte was the librettist of those three. The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) librettist was Emanuel Schikaneder. His poetry had broad humor, slap stick, silliness. Without his theatrical instincts and sense of timing, the characters of The Magic Flute would lack magic. The opera has dignified, formal Masonic scenes as well as the comic ones. Schikaneder made the balance work knowing the audience would be happy and understand Mozart’s moral themes.
As Gioia writes, “Poetic drama – comic or tragic — is not primarily poetic; it is theater that uses poetry to intensify the language that the drama requires.” p 57
The libretto is not only for reading. It has to move the action, story, characters and fulfill the music’s destiny.
Dana Gioia is the author of six books of poetry, librettist of six operas, and, counting this book, seven books of prose. He studied in Vienna, received his undergraduate degree and MBA at Stanford, became a corporate executive, until he left to write full time. He served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. For nine years he was USC’s visiting Professor of Poetry & Public Culture. He has lived in more than one world. His experiences give his critiques of operas and writers reality. They give the reader a deeper understanding of how art rolls out from the artist and what the art, or other artists, do to the librettist.
Lorenzo Da Ponte’s collaboration with Mozart had a powerful impact on Mozart’s operas. Gioia points out with Da Ponte Mozart transformed his work from Abduction from the Seraglio to Don Giovanni. Da Ponte’s life was full of changes. He was a Catholic priest who had been born to a Jewish family which converted to be able to work. A literary professor, he was Giacomo Casanova’s pal. He lived in a brothel, and that got him thrown out of Venice.
Antonio Salieri found Da Ponte work in Vienna as the Latin secretary and theatrical poet of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II. That is how he met Mozart. They created his top three, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) Cosi Fan Tutti (1790). The Emperor died; Da Ponte was out of a job. He traveled Europe looking for a position. The French Revolution had taken over Paris; he moved to London and wrote twenty-eight more libretti. Debts piled up. In 1805, he took his mistress and children to the US and sold vegetables in Pennsylvania. He moved to New York, opened a book store, and became the first professor of Italian at Columbia College. He did not get a salary, but worked as a tutor.
In 1825, he produced the first American performance of Don Giovanni. He became an American citizen at seventy-nine. In 1833, he started an opera company and built the first opera house in the US. It was the source of bankruptcy and debts. He passed away in 1838, age 89, and was given a glorious funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Da Ponte’s experiences got him banished from Venice but gave him his understanding of Don Giovanni. Mozart wrote to his father that he wanted to “secure” Da Ponte. The great composer was concerned that the Italian composers, especially Salieri, wanted to keep Da Ponte for themselves.
Although Da Ponte was the first great librettist in America, an opera tradition did not take off. Gioia describes the one step forward and two steps back tradition. There were homegrown composer/librettists who started with success and then fizzled out. In 1951, five million viewers watched Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors on TV. It was the biggest opera audience ever. He continued writing operas which attracted audiences in the US and Europe. Gioia writes that, “His best operas were excellent but never masterpieces.” Quoting composer Ned Rorem, “Menotti single-handedly revitalized the concept of living opera in the United States.” Gioia again on Menotti: “He instinctively understood something his Modernist contemporaries had forgotten: opera is a celebration of the human voice.” p 82.
Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd wrote Susannah in 1955. He set the Biblical story in Tennessee. It premiered at Florida State Univ. In 1957, the New York City Opera staged it, and it was presented at the Brussels World Fair. He wrote ten more operas and became a composer-in-residence at Houston Grand Opera. His operas did not last.
It seems that devoted opera-goers and critics were looking for something to go Bang! It would need to be so loud that they could not blink. I like Aaron Copland’s observation, “’The composer who is frightened of losing his audience through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of art.’” p 101
George Gershwin “created the sound that American opera had been waiting to sing.” p 126 The music and inclusion of African American casts made the Bang! The greatest and most produced American opera is still Porgy and Bess. Its music and story can touch everyone. The songs grab the listeners’ hearts and then break them. Gershwin’s music had mixed ancestry: Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, popular song, African American music styles. Gioia says it is not perfect, “but in its best moments – in “Summertime,” for example, or “Bess, You is My Woman Now” – the music is sublime.” p 126 The sound poured through American voices into the American mix. The librettists, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, hit the bull’s eye.
The definition of “opera” says that music and lyrics must go on without any spoken dialogue, but great operas pay little attention when beauty goes past the rules. Porgy and Bess’s spoken dialogue is in good company. Here are a few: Beethoven, Fidelio; Donizetti, La Fille du Regiment; and Carmen. Bizet died three months after the premiere, in 1875. Bizet’s Carmen had spoken dialogue. His friend, Ernest Guiraud, replaced dialogue with recitatives for Vienna where the rule was no spoken dialogue. Recent productions have returned to what one hopes follows Bizet’s design.
Gioia gives a long look at Stephan Sondheim as the possible source of new opera. Was he or wasn’t he writing operas? As composer/librettist he wrote complex music and poetically “dazzling, conceptually bold, and emotionally cool” libretti. p 171 The cool evolved into anxiety and distance from others’ lives. The audience is smart to be “bitter.”
Sweeney Todd, according to Sondheim, is definitely an opera if it is performed in an opera house, but it is a musical in a theater. p 180 His songs are performed as lieder; Sweeney Todd has been a huge success. I imagine Sondheim fans do not want to quarrel about a definition.
Gioia writes that Sondheim’s audience is “polarized” by his emotional distance. p 172 I do not love the songs though I recognize his brilliance. Maybe it is a regional issue. Sondheim is very New York-y for a California girl.
My favorite aspects of Weep, Shudder, Die are Gioia’s stories about himself. Teenagers, he and a friend went to free performances and concerts around Los Angeles. Gioia: “What I loved no one else cared for – classical music. I heard it first only in snatches in movies and cartoons. It had such a strong effect on me that I searched out more.... I took odd jobs and purchased albums from a tiny record shop a few blocks away.” p 39
When you buy this book, start with “Lost and Found in Vienna,” Chapter XIX. Gioia writes, “When I was nineteen, I left Stanford after my freshman year to study in Vienna.” p 141 The story’s motto: Cherchez la femme. He went to Vienna because a female, Stanford student was going there. Uncomfortable at Stanford, in Vienna he read poetry, saw operas, heard concerts. At Stanford, his music professors thought Puccini was worthless, better to spend time with Stockhausen. An American female exchange student accompanied him to La Bohème. Surprise! Puccini’s orchestration was outstanding. He heard Rodolfo introduce himself to Mimi. That was it. He was caught in the net. Living in Germany, he heard English differently. He began to read and write poetry. He had come to Stanford to be a composer. Now poetry came to him.