Our genial Moderator invites us to write on subjects, art and opera, about which he modestly disclaims having, himself, anything worthwhile to say; and, even though I am certain that I have nothing to say about opera that anybody who was musical would think worth hearing, I am going to risk taking up his invitation. (After all, it may be that he speaks for more than himself and that, through my one, astigmatical and myopic eye, I can see what—as my mother used to say—a blind man would be glad to be shown.)
I cannot claim to be musical. I never got much beyond being able to play (I think it was) ‘middle C’ on the recorder and my voice can’t carry a tune. As a young man, when drunk enough at parties, I would challenge all-comers to sing worse than I while doing their best to sing well. And, although I would always let my opponent judge the contest, I never came across anyone who thought he sang worse than I did. (Trying to sing well, for someone who can’t sing, guarantees singing badly.) My party piece was Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime? but, if the audience wanted more (if it were late enough, surprisingly, it quite often did), I would give it Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons as an encore. That was my repertoire.
Nevertheless, I do like listening to music and know (I think) what I like. One of the things I like tremendously is Mozart opera, especially, The Marriage of Figaro. And recently, having noticed online that 16 Royal Opera House operas on Blu-ray may be bought for hardly more than £100 (delivered!), I bought them and a Blu-ray player to play them on.
Well (just fancy!) ROH performances of Le nozzi di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte (with subtitles) for £6.50 each! (Do you have any idea what it costs togo to the ROH nowadays?) I thought it a pity that, in order to get these, I had to buy another dozen or so operas, which weren’t by Mozart, also for £6.50 each, but, still, it did give me an opportunity to listen to things I wouldn’t dream of going to, even at prices much less than the ROH charges: Szymanowski (whose name I can more or less pronounce but otherwise am ignorant of), for instance, and Verdi and Puccini, both of whom I was brought up to be rather sniffy about.
I am leaving Szymanowski and George Benjamin (whom I had never heard of) and even Britten for later (perhaps much later) but last night I did watch Verdi’s La traviata; and have two observations to make, which others might confirm (or deny) for themselves. One is that I hadn’t realised quite how seductively beautiful the music is for the whole of the first act. I found it irresistible, impossible not to lose oneself in (would drown be sniffy?). But the second act revived and confirmed the prejudice of my upbringing that however tuneful he is, Verdi is not just an over-emotional Latin but an over-emotional Latin whose emotions are fraudulent. The trouble with him is that he lacks any Germanic judgement of emotion. His music asks us to take seriously emotions that are simply preposterous.
Take the second act of La traviata: Violetta is a fallen woman, dying from tuberculosis, now living with—loving and loved by—an entirely respectable, rich young man, Alfredo. The love between them that the music celebrates I have no difficulty taking seriously. I don’t even mind being asked to feel sad about Violetta’s dying from TB. It is a dashed sad thing that a girl as beautiful as the actress who plays Violetta, sings as beautifully and has a dress as low-cut, should be dying at all, let alone of TB. It’s when and where Alfredo’s even richer and more respectable father comes in that all sense flies out of the opera and one finds oneself wanting to give Verdi, his characters and his admirers a good (Germanic) kick up the bum.
Alfredo has a sister you see, and the sister is a good and virtuous young woman engaged to a good and virtuous young man. Being good and virtuous, the young man naturally objects to allying himself to a young woman who, however good and virtuous in herself, has a brother living in sin with a fallen woman. In fact, he doesn’t just object to it, he will not have it. Either the brother and the fallen woman part or he and the good and virtuous sister must.
What is a rich and respectable father to do? Naturally, what God inspires him to, which is that he go in search of his son and the fallen woman and part them. God so directs him that he finds Violetta on her own and is able, without any interference from his son, to ask her to sacrifice herself (and his son) for the sake of the good and virtuous sister and her good and virtuous fiancé.
What is a fallen woman to do? The only sensible and right and proper thing, the only natural and morally correct thing, for her to do is to laugh and tell the foolish and selfish old man to bugger off; to tell him it is not God he is inspired by but family self-interest; to demand to know why, if there’s any self-sacrificing to be done, it should be done by his son and her rather rather than his daughter and her fiancé; and to ask what, anyway, is so good and virtuous—and so desirable in a husband and son-in-law—about a young man who blackmails the family he wants to marry into in this way?
What the music ought to celebrate is Violetta’s scorn and laughter at the preposterousness of the self-interested demand Alfredo’s father makes of her. Verdi ought to have treated him rather as Mozart and Da Ponte treat the Count in The Marriage of Figaro, as a self-righteous old hypocrite, good only to be made a butt of. Instead, his music asks us to take Alfredo’s father at his own valuation, to feel that he has been inspired by God, that the sister and her (rotten) fiancé do matter more than Violetta and Alfredo and that it is unquestionably noble of Violetta to sacrifice herself for the sister’s sake. Pfui! A musical fraud.
Mozart si. Verdi non. (But well worth £13 to know it.)
If you prefer another classical composer, tell us which one in the comments