Neo-Symbolism and renewal

Poetic modernity may be traced back to and even beyond Charles Baudelaire's searing paradoxes or Gustave Flaubert's clinical ironies, Stéphane Mallarmé's retreat into textual interiorities or Arthur Rimbaud's abandonment of self-illumination, via his flight to Abyssinia and the recognition of the failure of his poetic enterprise. Twentieth-century poetic modernity ushers itself in with a mixture of relatively silken-smooth post-Symbolist manners and rather more jarring or vigorously rethought modes that prefigure both Cubist and Surrealist preoccupations. The principal figures on this early stage are nine in number: Valéry, Claudel, Segalen, Péguy and Perse, Apollinaire, Cendrars and Reverdy, and one often misunderstood woman, admired by Apollinaire and Cocteau and the friend of Colette and Proust: Anna de Noailles.

Paul Claudel's work as a whole is marked by a spiritual questing that conveys itself sometimes in surging lyrical, hymnal modes, sometimes in rather more emotionally taut tonalities to which the elastic and free-flowing verset claudélien (Claudelian verset) or a poetically dramatised prose form bring suppleness and renewed rhythm. Connaissance de l'Est (Knowledge of the East, 1900) offers a set of discreetly narrative/ descriptive and contemplative and emotionally charged prose poems that caress the natural and human phenomena of a distant world, that of the Far East.

INTRODUCTION: FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PHYSICS

The fourteenth century saw the emergence of a new trend in medieval philosophy and science. While continuing to adhere generally to an Aristotelian understanding of nature, Christian scholars began to question and modify certain premises of Aristotelian physics and to suggest non-Aristotelian alternatives, reviving pre-Socratic or Hellenistic views and developing original ideas based on observation and experience. Such remarkable figures as Thomas Bradwardine and his successors in Oxford, and Jean Buridan and his students in Paris challenged basic Aristotelian tenets about infinity, place, vacuum, motion, and material substance, suggesting the possibility of an infinite cosmos filled by multiple worlds. Although motivated largely by Christian doctrine and the condemnations of Aristotle, this move towards critical inquiry led to a new conception of the universe, which anticipated and contributed to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The outstanding Jewish representative of this critical trend in European philosophy was Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410/11), legal scholar, communal leader, and courtier in Barcelona and Saragossa. Perhaps influenced by the Paris physicists, and motivated by similar theological interests, Crescas in his Light of the Lord subjected Maimonides’ summary of Aristotelian physics to a searching attack. Unlike his Christian counterparts, however, Crescas was not content merely to speculate about problem areas within a generally coherent natural science.

When we think of realism in fiction, we think first of mimesis – the imitation of life – a concept that at once implies the existence of something outside the writer's own mind which he or she is trying to imitate. The imitation of this supposedly external “thing” undergirds the term “realism,” whether applied to painting, philosophy, literature, or film. As Harry Levin reminds us, “Etymologically, realism is thing-ism. The adjective 'real' derives from the Latin res [meaning 'thing'] and finds an appropriate context in 'real estate'” – land, property, things. The realist novel in Spain places a special emphasis on this primary engagement with the things of this world. In this emphasis, nineteenth-century Spanish realism harks back even to the epic Poema de Mío Cid (1140), in which a close-up focus on things – cages laid bare, emptied of hunting falcons, weeds growing on the threshold of an abandoned castle – participates vividly in telling the story of exile.

Writing in this realist tradition, Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), in his1870 essay on the art of the novel, first evokes the principle of mimesis. Hisstated aim is to reproduce life as objectively as possible, depicting things asthey “really” are – houses, dress, furniture, gestures, and habits of speech. Ina later essay (1897) he affirms that language itself constitutes the most tellingsign of personal and national identity.

Directing grand opera in the early twenty-first century is somewhat like being required to remake Ben Hur for an art-house budget. The essence of the aesthetic of grand opera was rooted in the fact that it was a commercial enterprise, designed with a lavish sense of the spectacular to flatter the newly rich bourgeoisie, for whom the pompous splendours of theatres like the Palais Garnier were created. It took the aristocratic art form par excellence, transformed it into a celebration of conspicuous consumption, and trumpeted the dominance of new money in its natural home at the heart of the newly industrialised city. Garnier's fantastic building, and the construction of the Avenue de l'Opéra, remind us today of the luxury that clothed grand opera during and after the Second Empire, though it is revealing that the home of opera, once an adjunct of the Court, has now become a traffic island.

The parallels with Hollywood are apt, and especially the Hollywood of escapist fantasy and spectacle of the 1930s and 1940s. It is significant for instance that the main achievements of grand opera are scenic and structural as much as musical. There are probably only two true musical masterpieces which can be correctly attributed to the genre – Guillaume Tell and Don Carlos – although it is clear that neither Les Troyens nor even the libretto of Götterdämmerung is free of its influence.

Introduction

Britain and the Americas, lacking any significant and continuous native operatic traditions, depended upon foreign opera for much of the nineteenth century. Although Italian opera (and to a certain extent French opéra comique) often formed the basis of the repertory, German and serious French opera became increasingly popular in certain areas of Britain and the Americas in response to local circumstances: the nationality of immigrant populations, the tastes of a ruling élite, the experiences of local impresarios and the impact of political events.

In the 1830s the phenomenal popularity of grand opera – works such as Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828) and Gustave III (1833), Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Halévy's La Juive (1835) – spread quickly throughout Europe and across the Channel. In London such works were translated into Italian or English and performed in a variety of faithful productions and pirate adaptations. From Europe they were exported to the East coast of America, often by English impresarios. Travelling troupes in America incorporated occasional grand operas into their still largely Italian repertories, and took them across the continent from where they entered Central and South America and were absorbed – to a lesser extent – into the repertories of local companies. Celebrated singers who had performed these operas in Paris brought to new audiences the roles for which they had become known.

‘A machine so complicated as the [Paris] Opéra is like a maze: only people with long and profound acquaintance with the house can find their way through it.’ So wrote J.-T. Merle in De l'Opera in 1827. The truth is that no artistic enterprise before the creation of cinema could match grand opera in complexity; no mode of artistic production was comparable with what this theatre offered in uniting all the material and human factors that make up an operatic production, and to create the conditions necessary for its performance. It is no denial of the importance of creativity to assert that grand opera was the product of technology, albeit in a very wide sense of the term.

Grand opera developed and became a significant factor in European culture thanks to the power of this technology. For a more comprehensive understanding of this particular variety of opera, it is therefore necessary to describe the ‘machine’ in all its economic and political ramifications (that is to say, its ramifications in Parisian life and its relations with the French state) and also its cultural and moral ramifications (especially with censorship). In the nineteenth century, opera became the vehicle for both aesthetic and moral values indissolubly linked with the environment from which they sprang. Grand opera was born and grew up within a particular historical, institutional and legislative situation.

Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) established a strong but embattled reputation as a composer of grand opera, particularly through his first and most enduring work in the genre, La Juive. Although he wrote popular opéras comiques, two- and three-act operas, choral works, and the occasional ballet, Halévy's six five-act grand operas engendered the most prestige in his day, and played a substantial role in solidifying the genre. After the overwhelming success of La luive in 1835, Halévy composed, with various collaborators, Guido et Ginevra, ou la Peste de Florence (1838), La Reine de Chypre (1841), Charles VI (1843), Le Juif errant (1852) and La Magicienne (1858). In the judgement of Richard Wagner, who was among the composer's partisans, the essence of Halévy's inspiration lay not in comic opera but in the ‘pathos of high tragédie lyrique’. Another writer, although disparaging of both composer and genre, viewed Halevy an ideal creator of grand opera, who ‘gave himself body and soul to the mise-en-scène, the dramatic magnificence and the pomp, which he understands … better than anyone in the world'.

Before La Juive propelled the thirty-five-year-old Halévy to critical acclaim and membership of the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Légion d'honneur, his skills had been well nurtured and honoured at the Paris Conservatoire as both student and teacher, and as professional musician of the theatre. As accompanist at the Théâtre Italien from 1826, then assistant chef de chant at the Opéra from 1829 to 1833 and, at the death of Hérold, main chef de chant from 1833 to 1840, the composer learned invaluable lessons about vocal sonorities and capacities, operatic conventions and effective collaboration with singers.

On 28 March 1884 Fibich's The Bride of Messina (Nevěsta Messinská – designated a ‘tragic opera’, but a music drama in all but name) was premièred in the nearly new Czech National Theatre, recently risen phoenix-like from the devastating fire of 1881 that had closed it only days after its long-awaited opening (see Fig. 28 opposite). Two days later there was a performance of Dvořák's four-act, grand opera Dimitrij, which had been premièred two years before in the latter days of the old Provisional Theatre. The Bride of Messina limped on for five performances in 1884 and a further two in 1885 to dwindling houses; by contrast, Dvořák's Dimitrij, which had run for fifteen performances in 1882 and 1883, was given twenty times in its revised version over a two-year period and by the end of the century was one of the most frequently performed of all non-comic Czech operas. The fact that Dimitrij filled the theatre while The Bride of Messina gradually emptied it tells us much about contemporary taste. Few if any Czech operas from the national revival (dating, loosely speaking, from the opening of the Prague Provisional Theatre on 18 November 1862) were more ideologically conceived than Fibich's Bride. The libretto was by Otakar Hostinský, one of Prague's foremost musical theoreticians and academics, a fine amateur artist, a man of letters and a well-known writer on aesthetics; the music was by the most evidently intellectual Czech composer of the day, the husband of one of the National Theatre company's most respected singers, Betty Fibichová, and the darling of Prague's Czech-speaking chattering classes.

Shifting perspectives

Among the most long-lasting cultural effects of the French Revolution was a sense among the population of Europe of separation from its past. By and large, the eighteenth century experienced continuity with the past, in particular an affinity with the values of classical civilisation, but after the depredations of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, ‘all that had gone before seemed to belong to a world forever lost’. The consequence of this alienation from the past was not, however, the embracing of an exclusively modernist culture. On the contrary, at no time in European history have the forms, styles, and modes of the past been so assiduously cultivated as they were in the hundred years following the Revolution. In all phases of artistic activity, the past was recaptured and preserved, partly to deny its loss, partly to escape from the realities of contemporary life. The nineteenth century also identified with history periods that either offered parallels to unstable aspects of its own social and political life or reflected values important to contemporary society.

The historicist tendency that so characterises post-revolutionary culture had already begun to reveal itself in eighteenth-century Europe in, for example, the pre-Romantic movements of Gothicism in England and Sturm und Drang in Germany. In Paris too there were signs in the latter half of the eighteenth century that theatres were beginning to break away from the conventions of classical scenography in the cause of greater realism.

The familiar story of Russian opera in the nineteenth century begins in 1836, when the first performance of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar inaugurated Russian nationalism in music, and at the same time gave Russia its first all-sung opera. After this brief flash, two dark decades followed, when Russian audiences were distracted by the superficial brilliance of Italian opera, until a succession of powerful operas by Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky established Russia as a nation with a great operatic culture of its own. Such was the account provided by Soviet writers, and such is the account that has largely been accepted in the West. But this conflicts violently with events on the Russian stage during the nineteenth century, when many operas left out of the account enjoyed commercial success and critical prestige and, conversely, the operas figuring in the account were often failures in their earlier productions. The present canon of nineteenth-century Russian opera certainly owes little to the perceptions of nineteenth-century Russian audiences, critics and musicians.

Le Prophète

As he put the finishing touches on the vocal score of Les Huguenots in May 1836 Meyerbeer was already anxious, as he told his wife, to begin work as soon as possible on a third grand opera ‘in order to plant my dramatic system … on indestructible pillars’. Initially Scribe proposed an opera dealing with the career of John of Leyden, the infamous Anabaptist leader of Münster, but eventually this idea was rejected, probably because of the unsuitability of the principal roles to the current company at the Opéra. Instead, in May 1837, Meyerbeer commissioned Scribe to write the libretto of an opera called L'Africaine, a sprawling romantic tale set in Spain and darkest Africa with an intervening act on the high seas. Meyerbeer may have started composing the music, but if so he came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1838 after his friend Germain Delavigne warned him that the libretto was fatally flawed. His confidence badly shaken, the composer laid L'Africaine aside and in August signed a contract with Scribe for Le Prophète. Scribe's principal source was a passage in Voltaire's Essai sur les mæurs, recounting how in 1534 John (Jean) of Leyden (1509–36) established himself in grand style as prophet-king of Münster, espoused communism and polygamy, and withstood the attacks of his enemies until finally betrayed by his confederates. Around these bare facts the librettist wove an imaginary intrigue involving Jean's fiancée (Berthe), his mother (Fidès), three Anabaptist leaders who lead him astray (Zacharie, Jonas and Mathisen), and a lecherous nobleman who abducts Berthe (Oberthal). Laid out in four acts in deference to a short-lived fear that the Parisian public had tired of five-act operas, the libretto was soon rearranged in five acts, following the original plan of 1836.