Opera Since World War II

[James]

After World War II a new generation of composers emerged who experiences of the war would have a direct bearing on the kind of operas they would write. The nightmare of totalitarian oppression haunted many composers, and is perhaps most nakedly expressed in Il prigioniero (1948) by Luigi Dallapiccola, an Italian who combined the serialism of Schoenberg with his own lyrical intensity. At exactly the same time - in the immediate postwar years - the Austrian Gottfried von Einem was writing Dantons Tod (1946), a more epic treatment of political tyranny in which the volatility of popular feeling is conveyed by brilliant writing for chorus. Similarly dynamic choral writing is used in the contemporary Peter Grimes (1945) of Benjamin Britten to express the claustrophobia of group conformity, which in this case is pitted against a troubled and troubling outsider. One of the major figures of postwar opera, and the first British opera composer to establish an international reputation. Britten returned repeatedly to the themes of the abuse of power and the corruption of innocence in works such as Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw, achieving a degree of success that was to act as a catalyst for several British composers. The most prominent of these was Michael Tippett, whose The Midsummer Marriage (1952) is almost unique among operas written in the aftermath of the war for the way it presents a life-affirming vision of rebirth and renewal. His next opera, however, was markedly less optimistic: King Priam is a powerful indictment of war, but one in which the contradictions of human behaviour are never simplified.

All of the above composers were born in the first two decades of the century and, though their styles are diverse, they are similar in that each of them pursued a largely undoctrinaire and individualistic approach to composition. The next generation to make significant impact on opera were committed to a profoundly radical reappraisal of the whole genre, when they were interested in it at all. From the early 1950s the European avant-garde were primarily concerned with the structure and organization of pure sounds - a project antithetical to the traditionally expressive of opera. Pierre Boulez - the most rigorous and dogmatic of the postwar modernists - has never written an opera at all and once facetiously suggested that all opera house should be blown up. The first truly experimental composer to tackle the theatre was Luigi Nono, whose Interolleranza 1960 (1961) uses a whole range of sounds and devices, including taped electronic music, to tell the story of a immigrant worker and the hostility he faces. Although Nono does not completely reject narrative, much of his material is presented as a montage of fragmentary images and ideas, using a variety of different texts. This approach can also be found in Die Soldaten (1964) by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, an anti-military satire in which the music quotes from different historical styles while several layers of action occur simultaneously.

The music-theatre of Luciano Berio is less overtly political than that of Nono or Zimmermann and is, above all, preoccupied with the versatility of the human voice and with the symbiotic relationship between performer and audience - concerns encapsulated in his opera Un re in ascolto (A King Listens, 1984). The other seminal figure of the post war avant-garde, Karlheinz Stockhausen, did not commit himself to theatre work until the late 1970s, when he embarked on Licht, a projected series of seven operas designed to be performed on each evening of a week. Epic in scale, each episode is a mystical and didactic spectacular, with a strong ritual aspect replacing a clearly coherent narrative. Stockhausen's one-time pupil, Wolfgang Rihm, has married his teacher's epic vision to a more lyrical style, and a sense of theatre influenced by anti-naturalist aesthetic of Antonin Artaud. But his most successful opera to date, Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico, 1991), has yet to make an impact outside of his native Germany. Rihm's Italian contemporary, Salvatore Sciarrino is another recent composer with a highly developed sense of theatre. His finest work, Luci mie traditrici (My Treacherous Sight, 1998), combines a richly poetic text with an extremely idiosyncratic musical language.

In Eastern Europe under communism, those composers who were not merely time-servers had few opportunities for writing opera. Since the early 1960s, however, the Polish Krzysztof Penderecki has forged an international career as an opera composer by combining an expressive and highly wrought musical language with dramatically extreme subject matter - as in his first opera, Die Teufel von Loudun (The Devils of Loudun, 1969). A more exploratory and inventive approach can be found in the work of the Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti, who emigrated to the West in 1956. His only opera, Le grand macabre (1977), combines a helter-skelter of stylistic references within an anarchically satirical vision - as, indeed, does Life with an Idiot, a scabrous satire on the decline of the Soviet Union written in exile by Russia's major composer of the period, Alfred Schnittke.

Despite its small population, Finland has proved an astonishingly fertile spawning ground for operative activity in the postwar period. The brand-new opera house at Helsinki and the magical lakeside summer festival at Savonlinna have commissioned some outstanding work by several native composers, of whom Aulis Sallinen and Einojuhani Rautavaara are the two most celebrated and successful. Denmark's Poul Ruders is best known for his dramatic and monolithic orchestral works, but his musically diverse setting of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale (1998) has proved to be one of the most successful operas of recent years.

Of all the composers of the Stockhausen/Boulez generation, Hans Werner Henze has maintained the greatest enthusiasm for opera, having written over fifteen of them. Musically he is receptive to a huge diversity of musical idioms, from jazz to Donizetti, but he has tended to assimilate these into his own style rather than present them as self-conscious quotation or pastiche in the way that Schnittke does. From the late 1960s Henze adopted a militantly leftist political stance, but all of his operas contain rich, sensuous music sustaining an incisive theatricality. In Britian, a similarly eclectic approach has been evident in the work of Peter Maxwell Davies. Mixing a vocal style derivied essentially from Schoenberg's  with an array of aggressive parody, Davies fashioned a raw and confrontational music-theatre in which social and political evils are generally the focus of attention. His friend and contemporary Harrison Birtwistle developed a similar sound-world  with his violent and strident Punch and Judy, before developing a more ritualistic, formal and richly orchestrated kind of theatre with rugged works like The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain.

In the USA, a lusher and traditional tonal approach has been the norm, due largely to the paucity of state subsidies and competition from the Broadway musical. The operas of Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and John Corigliano have earned enthusiastic receptions on their home soil, but though Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) has become a Christmas favourite in many countries, their style hasn't really travelled well. This is far from the case with those American composers bracketed together as "Minimalists", whose music is accesibly tonal but has a drive and often hypnotic quality that allies it more with progressive popular music than with the classical tradition. The most successful of these, Philip Glass, made his theatre debut with Einstein on the Beach (1976), a bizarre and patience-testing collaboration with Robert Wilson, a guru figure on the US progressive drama scene; later works have been less offbeat, and Akhnaten has established itself on the repertoire of more enterprising opera houses. Glass's compatriot John Adams has a more wide-ranging and "American" style (you can hear traces of Copland and Thompson in his work), and is virtually alone in turning to contemporary history for his subject matter, in opera such as Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer. Where composers like Britten and Philip Glass recharged their musical imaginations by exploring Far Eastern music, the Chinese composer, Tan Dun has reversed the process. Born in China but resident in New York since 1986, his music combines East and West and places a strong emphasis on the importance of ritual. Like Rihm, Tan Dun is an opera composer who sees no contradiction in combing the experminetal with the highly lyrical.

In Europe, the most radical response to Minimalism has come from the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen whose work, as exemplified by the music-theatre work De Materie, is aggressively dynamic and highly political. In Britian, Minimalism has been an influence on the bright, funky textures of Michael Nyman (it was Nyman who coined the term), while being put to rather different use by John Tavener, whose Mary of Egypt (1991) is less a music-drama than a staged exercise in spiritual contemplation. In its uncompromising purity of expression and devout spirituality Tavener's work might be compared to Olivier Messiaen's colossal opera Saint Francis of Assisi (1983) - apart from the works of Francis Poulenc, the only postwar French opera to have attained any sort of reputation outside France.

The sheer diversity of modern opera is exemplified by the contrast between the work of Judith Weir, who studied with Tavener, and her contemporary Mark-Anthony Turnage. Whereas Weir has fashioned a sequence of witty and ironic parable such as A Night at the Chinese Opera and Blond Eckbert (1994), Turnage's Greek (1988) - a transposition of the Oedipus story to London's East End - is as savage and visceral an opera as you're ever likely to hear. What Turnage and Weir have in common is a refusal to be doctrinaire, and a receptivity to a wide range of musical influences - from folk music in Weir to Miles Davis in Turnage. This creative eclecticism is also evident in the work of the latest British wunderkind, Thomas Ades, whose satirical first opera Powder her Face (1995) reveals a fertile imagination emerging from a kaleidoscopic range of influences.

-Matthew Boyden

[zamyrabyrd]

Thanks, very informative.  I was just wondering about Russian opera in the last half of the 20th century. Maybe someone else can chime in who knows more about the subject. Stravinsky and the Rake's Progress come to mind as well as War and Peace by Prokofiev - just a start.

ZB

[zamyrabyrd]

Again thanks for the description of Saint Francois d'Assise. Dawn Upshaw should make a wonderful angel.  I was reminded of another religious opera (on Mezzo TV several months ago) Les Dialogues des Carmélites (1953) by Francis Poulenc, very beautiful and convincingly done. The other two operas by him are Les mamelles de Tirésias and La voix humaine.

ZB

[MDL]

James, any comments forthcoming on Aribert Reimann? I love his Lear and have both recordings of it, but have heard none of his other operas.

[MDL]

Oh, and I really, really have to get my ears wrapped around Dienstag.

[mjwal]

A few desultory comments:
The first post-WW2 opera I saw (in Southampton, a guest production) was The Turn of the Screw in 1965. It blew me away of course. At a pinch, I would still choose it as my favourite. In my Hamburg period I only saw one fitting this category, Boris Blacher's Zwischenfälle bei einer Notlandung (1966), which was the first what I would call post-modernist opera I had seen; it still resonates in my mind as a remarkable production, though I cannot "hear" the music in my head any longer. Later, in my Frankfurt period, there were a number of productions that fit the bill. The first I remember was Henze's Die Bassariden under Dohnányi, perhaps the most sheerly sensuous operatic music since Lulu. I would single out Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, the first production since the premiere and also conducted by Michael Gielen. This has perhaps the most violently overwhelming ending of any opera I have ever experienced, and I must say that no recording of the work, on CD or DVD, comes anywhere close to conveying that. To call this work a satire, though, is grossly to mistake its radical nature: it is a tragically conceived denunciation of human self-destructiveness. Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore I found difficult to follow owing to its non-linear structure, though some passages of the music were radiant, something I realised more intensely because less confusedly at a later concert in which Gielen conducted orchestral fragments from the work. Some years later in the same opera house Rihm's Die Eroberung von Mexico was the occasion of great excitement for me, since i had already "learned" the work from a CD recording of the original production in Hamburg. In this case, though, the stage production was not significantly revelatory of anything I had not imagined from hearing the music and studying the libretto and related materials. That work remains for me Rihm's most striking achievement. Finally, I would like to draw attention to two very different recent operas that have engaged my imagination: Henze's Phaedra, a deeply disturbing "late" work by this puzzlingly protean composer, and Sciarrino's Macbeth, a haunting, even ghostly work that takes a radical new approach to the presentation of human behaviour in musical terms, stripping both action and affect of their conventionally associated rhetorics. I have no particular plans to go to the opera in the near future, but I am looking forward to watching the DVD of The Minotaur!
P.S. There are a couple of extracts from the Blacher opera on the RCA Musik in Deutschland series Oper 1966-73. I've ordered this. It was the first opera I saw with electronic sounds - it's beginning to come back to me...

[MDL]

Never heard of him .. but feel free to post info on it in this thread if you think it's worthwhile.

I'm quite surprised by that. For a modern opera, Lear is reasonably famous. It's certainly one of the most bruising pieces I've ever heard. Here's the devastating last scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5srOEgJFQ

[MDL]

I was in a rush earlier and didn't have time to say more about Reimann's Lear.

I first heard Lear in the very early '80s when I borrowed the LPs from a library in Manchester. At the time, I had mixed feelings about it. I was going through one of those teenage phases, listening to nothing but post-1945 avant-garde music. Reimann's musical materials were right up my street; dense orchestral clusters, clattering volleys of dissonant brass and percussion... proper cat-strangling, piano-down-a-lift-shaft modern music. Magic! But I had a problem with Reimann's treatment of the material. It seemed rigid and repetitive, like some form of minimalism. Tempos would remain static for ages; each line would be declaimed in a similar way and was punctuated with a similar explosive clatter from the orchestra. Compared to the fluid, ever-changing tone painting in the operas of Schoenberg, Berg and Penderecki, it seemed that the drama had been sacrificed to the rigid logic of shifting musical patterns. Imagine Penderecki chopped up and arranged by Orff and Glass. I liked it, but not enough to record it on cassette, so for many years, it was off my radar.

Two decades later, when I was in my 30s, DG released Lear on CD. I realised that despite my ambivalent reaction to it in my youth, many passages had stayed with me, crystal clear in my memory, so I decided to reacquaint myself with this awkward, troubling work. And suddenly, it all made sense. What had seemed rigid and repetitive now revealed itself as monumental and ritualistic. Reimann's sense of the big picture, the arc that the drama will work its way through, is compulsive. It's a deeply harrowing opera and the final scene never fails to, well, depress the hell out of me, frankly! But if you're up for a gut-wrenching experience, I'd recommend it highly.

[Mandryka]

Very interesting thread.

Some operas I've enjoyed. I think they are all wonderful except one:

-- The OP mentions Adams's  Klinghoffer and Nixon. I liked El Nino too -- but maybe that's not an opera.
-- Ligeti's Grand Macabre. I saw that semi staged and it worked really well as a piece of theatre. The only problem was I was hoping for more porn.
-- All the Britten operas are post war except Albert Herring, and they are the summit (I am British, you know!)  -- Grimes and The Screw of course. But also Billy Budd, Albert Herring, Midsummer Night's Dream and (outstanding) Curlew River. I never enjoyed the one about Elizabeth I at all. And I enjoyed parts of Death in Venice. There are some I haven't seen yet -- one day. The short chamber operas and children's operas he wrote towards the end of his life are a fun area for exploration. I'm very enthusiastic about Curlew River.
-- Reich's The Cave. Also Three Tales, which he describes as an opera(he may be stretching things). I saw Three Tales in London a few years ago. There's an underlying religiousness which may be a problem.
-- Glass's Galileo Galilei. I saw this in London at about the same time as Reich's Three Tales and I thought it was slick and a complete waste of time. Some of the dance things in it were OK.

[mjwal]

-- All the Britten operas are post war except Albert Herring, and they are the summit (I am British, you know!)  -- Grimes and The Screw of course. But also Billy Budd, Albert Herring, Midsummer Night's Dream and (outstanding) Curlew River. I never enjoyed the one about Elizabeth I at all. And I enjoyed parts of Death in Venice.

Albert Herring was 1947 - perhaps you mean Paul Bunyan?
Curlew River is great. Because of its simplicity it is one opera it would be hard to ruin by an over-ambitious production - both I've seen were very involving. I've seen The Burning Fiery Furnace too and enjoyed it, but it did not leave an indelible imprint on heart and mind.
I notice nobody here is saying anything about Tippett's operas. I've never seen one. I would quite like to see The Knot Garden.

[mjwal]

He's mentioned in the opening post of the thread!
I'll eventually dig up and post more on his work later.

Oh, sure - but I thought that was an imported text by a musicological somebody, not someone on this thread. I meant "a personal comment by somebody who has seen/listened to the music" (I am not implying that you haven't). I have some difficulty making sense of the Tippett operas I have heard - I think they need to be seen & heard, at least by me, not just listened to on record.

[UB]

http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/cat/Theatre___Danse

Go here and watch Aperghis' new theatre work 'Luna Park' - Reminds me very much of an updated Beckett play with video and music. Very strange but also for me quite powerful. Not sure this qualifies for this thread but it is the closest I could find and I did not want to start a new thread.  Enjoy or hate...my guess it will be one or the other.