Just over 14 years went by between the end of the First World War and the Nazis' seizure of power, a short span for the high cultural repute Weimar culture has been accorded in twentieth-century popular and academic imagination – a repute particularly relevant to Berlin, which is still deriving much of its fragile self-confidence from that mythical decade. Opera is part and parcel of these images, but in a limited sense: we think of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the Golden Boys of the Golden Twenties, of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) or Paul Hindemith's Neues vom Tage (1929); we think of the Kroll Opera and its controversial productions under the musical direction of Otto Klemperer; we think of a pointedly urban, sassy modernity. But it may be the range of personalities and events rather than any couleur locale that made Berlin such a musical hotbed at the time. There was the premiere of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in 1925; there were the antagonistic figures of Ferruccio Busoni and Hans Pfitzner, both teaching masterclasses at the Academy of Music since 1920; there was their superior, Academy director Franz Schreker, who had come from Vienna in the same year; there was Hindemith, who joined the Academy as a professor in 1927; there was Alexander Zemlinsky, who came from Prague in the same year to conduct at the Kroll Opera and taught from 1931 to 1933 at the Academy of Arts – composers with wildly different approaches to opera, embodying a disintegration of stylistic common ground that is the main characteristic of twentieth-century music.

‘Back to Bach’ ‘a call to order’ given the nature of the neo-classicists' own slogans, one can perhaps forgive their critics for portraying them as proponents of aesthetic regression. ‘Stravinsky and Reaction’ is in fact the very heading of the second half of Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of the New Music, written in the mid-1940s, in which the author uses all his formidable linguistic and philosophical powers to hold up Schoenberg as a paragon by at the same time stripping Stravinsky's works, in particular those of his neo-classical oeuvre, of any aesthetic justification: ‘the Soldier's Tale turns psychotic behavioural patterns into musical configurations without any hesitation’ ‘in purely musical terms, no difference can be perceived between his infantile and his neo-classical works’ (Adorno 1978a, 160, 187). Pierre Boulez has been more succinct in his judgement of Stravinsky's neo-classicism: ‘I really hate these works, I cannot stand them’ (in Danuser 1997, 330).

The term ‘neo-classicism’ has been used both to castigate and to praise. It has generally been applied solely to that music written between c. 1920 and 1950 which – as in the case of Stravinsky – is essentially tonal and employs formal, harmonic or melodic elements (or any combination thereof) taken from the music of the eighteenth century, often to ironic effect – though the term ‘neo-classicism’ is somewhat misleading, in that the source of those forms and gestures was primarily the music of the baroque rather than of Viennese classicism.

In the course of the twentieth century, various technological advances had as radical an effect on the art of opera as the changes associated with ‘modernism’ had on the character of musical composition. Opera at the start of the twenty-first century has become at the same time both more popular and, in a particular but important sense, less popular. The music of the operas of the past is more familiar to the public than ever before – thanks to the invention and refinement of broadcasting and mechanical recording, both aural and visual. The words of operas are better understood by opera-goers than they have ever been, thanks to the introduction during the 1990s of surtitles or supertitles providing simultaneous versions of the text in opera-house auditoria.

Meanwhile, the taste of the public for classical music seems to have been growing ever more retrogressive. In an era when so-called ‘serious’ music broke away from the familiarly melodious and became far more theoretical and experimental, the popularity of new music steadily reduced and music lovers grew less and less amenable to genuine innovation, though new forms of lyrical expression in jazz and rock singing may offer qualification for this verdict. In colour, rhythm and harmony, modern orchestral music has tended to be far more adventurous, and the vocal lines of opera far more unpredictable, than ever before.

Spaces and genres

From Buxton to Ballarat, Manchester to Manaus, the London Coliseum to Central City, Colorado, the world is full of imposing opera houses built one hundred or more years ago that cause one to wonder just how much opera has gone on inside them. As architectural spaces, they have one and all catered for a mass public's aspirations towards plush velvet seating, regal insignia, the boudoir gilt, livery and privileged partial view (both in and out) found alike in private box and private coach, and the magical illusion of the proscenium stage. Theatrical magic is essentially that of a show, of the dazzle of a star, the virtuosity of a spectacle or the tension of a tragic or comic surprise; music adds magic of its own with the wondrous sounds proceeding from the star's mouth and, unseen or at least unobserved, from the orchestra pit. Some of the musical sounds and shows inhabiting such theatres have constituted opera proper; many of them have not. The dressing rooms, stages and musical cues have been prepared similarly for performing dogs and divas; from the tired businessman in the stalls to the gold prospector or Japanese tourist in the gallery, the men in the audience have ogled Melba, Mary Martin or a potential mistress, the women their men, their matinée idol or their neighbour's jewellery.

Wagner was not the only one to change the course of opera's history in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. And indeed only his most fanatic admirers have ever thought otherwise. It is hard nonetheless not to think of him as someone who left an indelible stamp on twentieth-century opera. Every figure of importance is said to have reacted to him positively or negatively, and rarely indifferently. The possibility exists that this is just another part of the Wagnerian myth that has spread itself like a vulture over Western music since the end of high romanticism, in spite of formidable opposition. The great conductor Hans von Bülow insisted with his usual caustic wit that Richard Strauss should be called Richard III in the dynasty of German music as a Richard II after Wagner was inconceivable (Kennedy 1995, 9). W. H. Auden ventured to suggest that Wagner had no real successors at all, calling him ‘a giant without issue’ (cited in V. Stravinsky and Craft 1978, 400). Not everyone needed to take an interest in him after all, while some of those who did paid him the briefest of respects and quickly went their own way. Igor Stravinsky tells a nice story of how he was persuaded by Diaghilev to go with him at short notice to Bayreuth in 1912 to see Parsifal, even though it meant interrupting work on Le Sacre du printemps (Stravinsky 1936, 67–8). With dismay he noted the mausoleum-like interior of the festival theatre, deplored the cult-like performance, lambasted the Wagner faithful for putting up with it – and simply fled. He did admire ‘the web-like blending of the orchestra from under the stage’, which meant that Parsifal might have been a headache, but at least ‘a headache with aspirin’ (Stravinsky and Craft 1966, 189).

American opera of the twentieth century encompasses a great diversity of styles that vividly reflect the wide landscape of America's social and cultural life. In an opera world dominated by European tastes and traditions, American composers have reached out for their own individual voices. Some have turned to indigenous sources – Native American motifs, black culture, jazz forms, American literature or Hollywood cinematic effects. Others have found a voice in non-narrative ideology, preferring ritual to description, and symbol to an unfolding storyline. But whether in mellifluous melody, romantic-hued harmony or acerbic atonality, American composers melded music and drama within the vital framework of life around them. They saw their art as individual and American, but they also understood music's powerful role in defining character and propelling the drama forwards.

Belonging to a nation of explorers and rugged individualists of many ethnic origins and modes of thought, Americans wrote opera as they travelled along a historic road of many twists and turns. The eclecticism of this opera – its panorama of styles, subjects and moods that seem to know no boundaries – both reflects and defines its people. With the possible exception of Gian Carlo Menotti, who was especially influential in the 1940s and 1950s, there is essentially no enduring ‘school’ of American opera. Whether William Henry Fry or Walter Damrosch in the nineteenth century, or Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, Philip Glass or Carlisle Floyd in the twentieth, each composer – each opera – is distinctive. And each offers an element of surprise along the path to discovery that lies at the heart of American opera.

Culture and Society

In 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, the music publishers Boosey and Hawkes, who had acquired the lease of the Royal Opera House the previous year, issued a manifesto which would have a profound effect on cultural life in Britain:

Avant-garde music and theatre

Of all the performing arts, none has been more circumspect about its theatrical nature than classical concert music. A romantic ideology that located musical content in sounds rather than actions or locations, and that accordingly identified composer rather than performer as the primary origin of that content, came to ensure that the act of performance was, as far as possible, rendered invisible. The theatre of musical performance was largely limited to a carefully circumscribed ritual of dress and behaviour; the performer who sought to assert his or her individuality over and above this ritual risked accusations of charlatanism.

On the face of it, the postwar avant-garde in Europe and America, while enthusiastically dispensing with other aspects of musical tradition, represented the apotheosis of this downplaying of the business of performance. Here was a music that elevated the abstract sonic configuration to the status of a fetish, that finally eradicated the pleasure of the performer as a compositional consideration, and that seemed more at home in the lecture room or the computer lab than the concert hall. As Paul Griffiths has noted, ‘in the 1950s … few young composers wanted to work in the theatre. Indeed, to express that want was almost enough … to separate oneself from the avant-garde' (1995, 171). And yet this apparently arid terrain for theatrical endeavour was soon touched by developments that, conversely, prepared the ground for quite new sorts of musical theatre. During the second half of the 1950s, the music of the avant-garde became, albeit frequently unwittingly, suffused with the spirit of theatre.

With Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, French opera moved decisively beyond broadly imitative ‘wagnérisme’ to a more individual expressive language, and a far stronger sense of synthesizing Wagner's achievements rather than producing rather pale copies. But despite the innovations of Debussy and Dukas, the shadow of Wagner was to hang over a good deal of French opera for the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Gabriel Fauré– like Dukas – was among the many French pilgrims to Bayreuth in his youth, but his only completed opera came towards the end of his career. Already a successful composer of incidental music for plays – notably for Edmond Haraucourt's Shakespeare adaptation Shylock (1889) and Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (1898) – Faurébegan work in about 1907 on Pénélope, a ‘drame lyrique’ in three acts to a libretto by RenéFauchois. The opera was complete in piano-vocal score by 1912 (when it was published by Heugel; a revised edition appeared in 1913). The orchestration, mostly by Faurébut partly by Fernand Pécoud, was completed early the next year in time for the premieres at Monte Carlo on 4 March 1913 and at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 10 May 1913. Pénélope was a work which took Fauréconsiderably longer than any other and its attraction for him seems to have been as an affirmation of conjugal love (something Fauréhimself only experienced intermittently); his son Philippe Fauré-Fremiet described it as ‘a new Bonne Chanson on a mythic scale, sung by characters who are larger than life’ (Fauré-Fremiet 1945, 17).

Emerging from and ultimately belonging to the stage, minimalist music is an offshoot of avant-garde New York theatre. The style has been traditionally associated with American pop culture and African and south Asian music, but just as important are the early minimalist composers' connections with the innovative theatrical figures of downtown Manhattan in the 1960s. Indeed, musical minimalism and American theatre served to define each other at critical points in both their histories.

Before the 1970s, the signal innovations in American music and theatre certainly did not take place in the opera houses. But the minimalists have shown an extraordinary creative interest in music drama and other large-scale theatrical endeavours. The story of this operatic renovation really begins in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Philip Glass and fellow opera composer Meredith Monk were students in New York. The theatres of lower Manhattan were seething with revolutionary change at that time. Pioneering among non-narrative collaboratives in the city was the Living Theatre, founded in 1947 by anarchist free spirits Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

The first stirrings of modernism

The twentieth century began with Rimsky-Korsakov firmly established as the grand old man of Russian opera, with a catalogue of 11 operas to his credit, many of them regularly performed in St Petersburg and Moscow and throughout the provinces as well. His Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (completed in 1904 and premiered in 1907) acts as a summation of the nationalist operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five; aside from the characteristically Russian mixture of history and legend, realism and the supernatural, Russian and Oriental, Rimsky-Korsakov alo introduced Wagnerian elements – to the extent that the opera became known as ‘the Russian Parsifal». But in two other operas from these last years of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov was laying the foundation for modernist opera in Russia and beyond. In Kashchei the Immortal (completed and premiered in 1902) and especially The Golden Cockerel (completed in 1907 and premiered in 1909 – after Rimsky-Korsakov's death) the fairy-tale characters are presented as dehumanized, puppet-like figures, while the elements of The Five's nationalist idiom are presented in an exaggerated, parodic manner. Chromatic harmony is pervasive, but this is used by Rimsky-Korsakov in a most un-Wagnerian way, since the music is designed to leave the audience's emotions unengaged.

The prologue to Duke Bluebeard's Castle (John 1991, 46) invites the audience to use the opera as a mirror for itself, to observe connections between spectator and spectated and also to look beyond the surface of the bloodied castle for its meanings. We do well to think similarly when considering ‘Eastern Europe’, which unlike other ‘Topographies’ in this volume, was not a politically unified entity before the Soviet Union occupied it in 1949. The region' s agglomeration of nations has nonetheless been characterized as a whole in various ways, regarded frequently as an aspiration, but equally often as a problem(see, for example, the editors' preface to Central Europe, 1/1 (May 2003), 3). It has been viewed as a ‘Kingdom of the Spirit’ (Garton Ash 1989, 161–91), a region of people sharing ‘thought-styles and thoughtworlds’ (Schöpflin 2004) or just a myth constructed by Western Europe (Wolff 1994). Eastern Europe's citizens themselves have had far from straightforward relations with their so-called homeland – many emigrated beyond its apparent provinciality or lived in deeply nostalgic, enforced exile. And at times, people have been placed there by sheer brute force.

‘More books on Wagner! Yes, the cry is still they come.’ Since the first two sentences of a review article in the Musical Times for November 1899 (volume 40, 744) would not seem out of place in a similar context more than a century later, the reader of this introductory chapter might anticipate a sermon on the text ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. Even allowing for the fact that opera-goers in 1899 were not able to bolster their ‘live’ listening with a wide choice of performances on CD and DVD, and were not yet travelling to opera houses by private car in casual clothes, still less jetting off to Adelaide or Santa Fe to catch a rarity or a special, star-studded production of a classic, it might still be reassuring to emphasize elements of cultural common ground between then and now: and a description of the world of opera at the end of the nineteenth century which underlines its tradition-establishing role for the new century becomes even more plausible when the topic of repertory is considered.

During the 1899 Covent Garden season, which ran from early April to late July, there were 69 performances, all of operas which were composed during the nineteenth century, with the sole exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, heard three times. The programme extended from Beethoven’s Fidelio (performed only once) through Bellini’s Norma, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Aida, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Wagner’s Die Walküre, Tristan and Die Meistersinger, as well as Gounod’s Faust, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen – with, as novelties, Mancinelli’s Ero e Leandro, de Lara’s Messaline, Adam’s Le Chalet and Puccini’s La Bohe`me (Musical Times, 1899, 536).

Britten's comments about the wider significance of his first successful opera in this letter to Imogen Holst written nineteen days after its premiere (Mitchell and Reed 1991, 1268) were indeed prescient. Opera had in fact figured strongly in the worklists of British composers in the first half of the twentieth century: the genre was central to the work of Charles Stanford, Ethyl Smyth, Gustav Holst and Rutland Boughton, while Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Ralph Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea contain some of their composers' best music. But Britten's Peter Grimes excited an unprecedented degree of faith in opera's possibilities, sustained to this day. Since the Second World War, few British composers of any substance have been able to resist the siren call of what is still probably the most risky of all compositional undertakings, beset as it is by the dangers of multiple collaboration and the strong possibility that, because of the scarcity of funds, the fruits of many months' (if not years') labour will fall silent after the first production. For some composers (Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir are a few examples, along with Britten and Michael Tippett) opera has been crucial in forging or honing a distinctive style; sometimes (as in the case of Tippett's King Priam) it has been the catalyst for momentous stylistic shifts.

Although this book is primarily concerned with operas composed in the twentieth century, space precluding a detailed consideration of how earlier repertoire has been reassessed in modern times, the present chapter will be concerned with filmed interpretations of operas written in various epochs. The relationship between opera and that quintessentially twentieth-century art-form, cinema, has been complex and potentially fruitful – but often fraught with difficulties, both real and imagined. Traditional repertoire has been reassessed from the cinematographer's perspective, the experience having been fed back into modern stage productions; film music was from the outset profoundly influenced by operatic techniques, before it in turn came to influence operatic music; and several operas were specially composed for the screen. This chapter looks briefly at those three topics, examining filmed treatments of existing operas, the relationship between opera and film music, and the select corpus of twentieth-century operas written specifically for film or television.