This is a series of studies of individual operas, written for the serious opera-goer or record-collector as well as the student or scholar. Each volume has three main concerns. The first is historical: to describe the genesis of the work, its sources or its relation to literary prototypes, the collaboration between librettist and composer, and the first performance and subsequent stage history. The history is itself a record of changing attitudes towards the work, and an index of general changes of taste. The second is analytical and it is grounded in a very full synopsis which considers the opera as a structure of musical and dramatic effects. In most volumes there is also a musical analysis of a section of the score, showing how the music serves or makes the drama. The analysis, like the history, naturally raises questions of interpretation, and the third concern of each volume is to show how critical writing about an opera, like production and performance, can direct or distort appreciation of its structural elements. Some conflict or interpretation is an inevitable part of this account; editors of the handbooks reflect this - by citing classic statements, by commissioning new essays, by taking up their own critical position. A final section gives a select bibliography and guides to other sources.

When Mozart received the commission for Idomeneo and began work on the opera, he knew that he would be writing for some of the best singers in Europe and for one of its finest orchestras. The principal tenor was to be Anton Raaff (Idomeneo), then aged sixty-six and at the end of a career that had started with study under Bernacchi in the late 1730s. He had worked with Jommelli in Vienna, dominated tenor roles in Italy in the 1760s, and concluded his career in the service of Karl Theodor in Mannheim and Munich. While he was at Mannheim in the 1770s, Raaff shared the stage with Dorothea Wendling (Ilia), who was considered by the aesthetician Christian Schubart and Wilhelm Heinse, the novelist, to be one of Europe's finest sopranos. Christoph Wieland thought her superior even to the famous Gertrud Elisabeth Mara. The wife of Dorothea Wendling's brother-in-law, Elisabeth Wendling (Elettra), had been praised by Leopold Mozart in 1763. Since four participants in the premiere of Idomeneo were named Wendling, a fragment of their family tree is given as Figure 3.1.

The orchestra was effectively the same that had so impressed Charles Burney among others. In August 1772 he described it in words that have since become famous: ‘There are more solo orchestra in Europe; it is an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it.’

When he composed Idomeneo Mozart was not quite twenty-five, yet it is his tenth completed opera. It followed two serious operas, Mitridate, re di Ponto and Lucio Silla, written for Milan; the courtly allegories Ascanio in Alba and Il sogno di Scipione, for Milan and Salzburg; and Il rè pastore, for Salzburg in 1775. In these works there is scarcely a moment of levity: they deal in heroism, love, loyalty, magnanimity, and affairs of state. Despite two comedies written when he was twelve, and the Munich opera buffa La finta giardiniera, comedy played a comparatively small role in Mozart's early operatic output.

Idomeneo stands at a watershed in Mozart's career, but it also stands alone. It is the first of his mature operas rather than the last of his youth: thereafter he wrote only one opera seria, La clemenza di Tito. Idomeneo falls between two oriental adventure operas in German, the grave and unfinished Zaide (c. 1779) and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, performed in Vienna in 1782. It bears surprisingly little relationship in technique to the earlier Italian operas. Mitridate, Lucio Silla, and Il re pastore conform to the traditional type of opera seria in which there is no supernatural intervention; the plots are fiction, the characters historical, and the score consists almost entirely of recitative and arias. Idomeneo is based on classical mythology, and the drama depends on the intervention of a ‘real’ deity, the sea god Poseidon (Neptune); yet it is a richly human drama, not an allegory, and it makes abundant use of ballet, chorus, and scenic effects.

The ‘argument’

The argomento in the printed libretto conveys Varesco's idea of the essential content of the drama. The following translation is nearly literal, but breaks up Varesco's interminable sentences.

A serious opera composer, even one as fluent as Mozart, is absorbed in this work over a relatively extended period. It is natural, therefore, that singularities of style should contribute to its particular character, what in the nineteenth century would have been called its ‘colorito’ or ‘tinta’. Musical ideas are prone to recur in an intriguing fashion, although not necessarily in circumstances which impel one to search for what Dent called a ‘ridiculous’ or ‘Wagnerian’ name. This chapter seeks to describe aspects of the musical language which have struck responsive chords in one listener's extended exposure to Idomeneo.

It is no part of my intention to demonstrate that the opera is musically an ‘organic whole’. It may be that, of course, but only if conceived as an inextricable combination of a dramatic idea, words, scenery, and music. The music is undoubtedly the most important single element, but it is never independent of the others. Mozart himself, in excising so much as the performances approached, made it clear that musical integrity was not the principal criterion in shaping his work.

In practice external factors, apparently restraints upon the Composer's fantasy, may contribute positively to the unique colour of an opera. In Idomeneo one such factor was the personnel of Munich (see chapter 3, above), because of whom the orchestration is of unparalleled richness; Mozart had to order trumpet mutes from Salzburg, but Munich provided the four horns, the excellent strings, and wind players clearly equal to the Viennese for whom he composed later. But orchestral players do not impose a style to the extent that singers may.

The story of Idomeneus is scantily represented in mythology and literature. Its comparative popularity in the eighteenth century may have something to do with a desire vicariously to stage the story of Jephtha, at a time when biblical subjects were generally banned from the theatre. Jephtha's daughter, like Idamante (and, in a far more widely known Greek tale, Iphigenia), is willing to die at her father's hand:

In the earliest versions of the Jephtha, Idomeneus, and Agamemnon stories the sacrifice is consummated.

This is a series of studies of individual operas, written for the serious opera-goer or record-collector as well as the student or scholar. Each volume has three main concerns. The first is historical: to describe the genesis of the work, its sources or its relation to literary prototypes, the collaboration between librettist and composer, and the first performance and subsequent stage history. This history is itself a record of changing attitudes towards the work, and an index of general changes of taste. The second is analytical and it is grounded in a very full synopsis which considers the opera as a structure of musical and dramatic effects. In most volumes there is also a musical analysis of a section of the score, showing how the music serves or makes the drama. The analysis, like the history, naturally raises questions of interpretation, and the third concern of each volume is to show how critical writing about an opera, like production and performance, can direct or distort appreciation of its structural elements. Some conflict of interpretation is an inevitable part of this account; editors of the handbooks reflect this – by citing classic statements, by commissioning new essays, by taking up their own critical position. A final section gives a select bibliography, a discography and guides to other sources.

Prelude (A major)

The prelude has three principal thematic sections, each of which reappears later in the opera in conjunction with specific characters or situations. It thus introduces highlights and also the affective tensions that compel the opera. By the time it returns in the final act, the prelude's various sections will have become so heavily thematized that it may be heard in retrospect as having contained the opera's central dramatic dilemmas. But when we first hear it, it serves a more immediate function: it establishes the opera's exotic; deceptively festive atmosphere.

The first section introduces the flashy, pseudo-Spanish music that returns in the Bullfight Scene of Act IV (Ex. 1). Two features of this segment seem noteworthy. First, it is composed of the four-bar phrases typical of opéra-comique. This regularity is violated only four times in the entire prelude. Yet the expectation of four-bar phrases becomes so ingrained that even a slight alteration constitutes a dramatic event. An extraordinary degree of order is set up by this phrasing – an order that is extremely resistant to change or difference.

Second, while each four-bar strain is static within itself, each pivots harmonically in its last measure – under a flamboyant trill - to the next segment, which sets out a contrasting key (A major, D major, A major, C major, A major). Here too we have a high degree of certainty, with the constant, reassuring returns to tonic.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Carmen on popular culture. The pseudo-Spanish costumes typical of Carmen productions regularly influence fashion design. Several contestants in the ice-skating competitions of the 1988 Olympics presented routines based on Carmen, and this inspired a full-length television production in 1990 called Carmen on Ice, featuring three Olympic champions in the leading roles. Cartoon versions of the opera indicate that Carmen is a standard touchstone of general culture, even for children. In an episode of The Simpsons, the family goes to the opera, where – what else? – Carmen is playing. Bart and Homer join in singing the contrafactum lyrics to the “Toreador Song” that must be nearly as old as the original: “Toreador / Don't spit on the floor / Use the cuspidor / That's what it's for.”

But the principal site of Carmen's entry into popular culture is film. Films of Carmen began to appear in 1910, with versions produced by both Pathé and Edison. In 1915 Cecil B. De Mille released a Carmen starring the opera-singer Geraldine Ferrar, a casting decision that enhanced the film with Ferrar's prestige alone, since the film was silent; and Fox responded with a version starring Theda Bara, the quintessential “vamp.” Some of the more illustrious Carmen movies that followed include ones featuring Charlie Chaplin and Pola Negri (Lubitsch's Gypsy Blood) and Dolores del Rio (The Loves of Carmen).

Reactions to the premiere

Ludovic Halévy realized on opening night that Carmen had failed (see his account in Chapter 2). A few days later, he assigned the blame to unfamiliarity: “It took a little time for [staff and performers] to get to like and admire this score. At the outset we were more astonished than enchanted by it. Such was the evident impression on the audience the first evening. The effect of the performance was uncertain, indecisive. Not bad, but not good either.”

If Halévy found it difficult to read the audience's cool response during the performance itself, he did not have to wait long to learn the grounds for its displeasure. While unfamiliarity no doubt played a role, it was by no means the principal problem cited by the reviews that began appearing immediately. Bizet's opera sparked antagonisms along two fronts: moral propriety and musical style. Given his boasts that he intended to “change the genre of opéra-comique” and the protests of the Opéra-Comique management over the project, the hostility with which Carmen was greeted in the press ought not to have been a surprise. Yet the response devastated Bizet, who is reported to have exclaimed during opening night: “Don't you see that all these bourgeois have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them?”

The most ferocious of the attacks objected to the explicit portrayal of female sexuality in the opera, and the most abusive of these came from Jean-Pierre-Oscar Comettant and Achille de Lauzières, Marquis de Thémines.

To the average reader of 1845, there was nothing particularly original or surprising about Prosper Mérimée's Carmen when it first appeared on October 1 in La Revue des deux mondes. It is, indeed, entirely possible that few recognized the story as fiction. La Revue des deux mondes (Review of the Two Worlds) had originally been founded as a bi-weekly travel journal depicting, for the civilized “world” of France, exotic landscapes and adventures in what today we call the Third World. The volume of October 1 contains Mérimée's contribution as lead with no indication of its nature, together with an article on Belgium and the Catholic Party since 1830, a literary/historical article on the satires of Lucilius, an article on the political situation in Germany in 1845, a synopsis of the political events of the previous fifteen days and a review of the historical plays of G. Revere. In this context, Carmen takes on all the trappings of a “Letter from Abroad.” Not even professional critics appeared to notice the story.

For several decades, French culture had manifested a fascination with history: the desire to rediscover the truths of the past, to place France at the head of a continuum of scientific progress, to assert its supremacy over lesser cultures. As we shall see in Chapter 3, this agenda was coupled with a fascination with the exotic, the bizarre and the supernatural, often resulting in stories very much like Carmen: stories in which a sober, high-minded French narrator, representative of French superiority and civilization, visits an area alien to him and reports upon what he finds.

All pieces of music develop in dialogue with many others. Far from being self-contained, a composition produces meaning through its use of codes transmitted and reproduced within a variety of repertories, its generic affiliations, the social contexts in which it is written and received, as well as through the strategic arrangement of its particular parts. This is true even of the most apparently autonomous of instrumental movements: its medium, formal procedures and aesthetic premises all have social histories, engaging associations that can neither be predicted in advance nor – even with the best of formalist intentions – kept altogether silent. But it is more obviously true of a work such as Carmen, which operates in large part on the basis of its transgressive mixture of codes, genres and styles.

Bizet's first audiences recognized this transgressive mixture and responded accordingly (see Chapter 6). But because we no longer possess their expectations with respect to genre, we now tend to hear the opera as an unruptured entity: whether listening to the placid lyricism of Micaëla or the third-hand Cuban strains of the “Habañera,” we hear only … Carmen. Thus, before embarking on a reading of the opera itself, I want to sketch out some of the principal musical discourses it engages and juxtaposes.

Opéra-Comique

Carmen belongs to the genre of opéra-comique, and it must be read in part in terms of the conventions of that genre, even though Bizet virtually imploded the opéra-comique with this work.

In 1872 the co-directors of the Opéra-Comique, Camille Du Locle and Adolphe de Leuven, approached Georges Bizet and proposed that he write an opera in collaboration with the librettists Ludovic Halevy and Henri Meilhac. De Leuven offered Bizet three scenarios as suggestions, but Bizet rejected them in favor of an idea to which he held tenaciously, even in the face of what became the severe opposition of his collaborators: he insisted that the new work be based on Mérimée's Carmen. From our vantage point, over a century after Bizet's Carmen triumphed as a masterpiece, we may have difficulty seeing his choice as problematic. But this choice contributed to de Leuven's decision to resign, provoked rebellions among the performers and incited the wrath of music critics before the public finally embraced Bizet's vision – unfortunately, only after his death.

During this period, France had two subsidized opera houses: the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, which differed with respect to both target audience and musical genre. The Opéra commissioned and presented French Grand Opera to an upper-class clientele, while the Opéra-Comique specialized in the production of opérascomiques, largely geared for a family-oriented bourgeoisie. A century earlier the genre of opéra-comique had been a vehicle for social satire, aimed in part at puncturing the stuffy conventions of elite operatic procedures. In place of lavish spectacle and uninterrupted singing, opéras-comiques featured a style that alternated lyrical expression with spoken dialogue, and they focused on more topical subject matter.