The Future of American Opera

by LINCOLN KIRSTEIN

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I WORK in the lyric theater; my practical experience may have interest since I have had the chance to collaborate with many poets, painters, and musicians in the last twenty years. The dance, particularly the classic academic ballet, is part of lyric theater, but I am n o t going to discuss ballet as this department is healthy; examples can be seen annually in many cities. I am more troubled by music drama or opera, since its present seems so hazardous and its future is so obscure.

What are the works of lyric theater as opera? They are staged presentations of drama, set to music — vocal and instrumental, with the voice dominant. Since the sense and sentiment in the text are projected by singing rather than the spoken voice, degrees of stylization in a wide variety of convention are required. Styles range from the highly artificial to the flatly conversational. Useful examples of successful lyric theater from the past three centuries are Lorenzo da Ponte’s and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Meilhac’s, Hal‘vy’s, and Bizet’s Carmen, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkaavalier. While the part of the composer is primary, the contribution of poets has been indispensable. For the moment, we can forget singers and orchestra, yet we always acknowledge them first whenever these works are revived.

For our purposes, I ask your indulgence as theater-minded amateurs — members of an audience hungry for a new repertory; I shall pose as a producer eager to present new pieces. There are few new pieces to be produced. Most of those produced recently have been, by and large, failures.

We are undergoing la crise de l‘opéra, but the crisis is at least half a century old and exists wherever there are opera houses. While there remain a luxuriant repertory from the nineteenth century and some pieces surviving from the eighteenth or even the seventeenth, there are, comparatively speaking, few from the twentieth.

Many composers in our lifetime have written opera. Both commercial and academic agencies have combined to produce more than two hundred separate first performances since 1900. But how many of these have enjoyed a third or fourth repetition? How many can be said to have entered the international, or even the local, repertory?

A repertory work is one that has, to some extent, conquered public acceptance either in live performance, by broadcasting, or through mechanical recording at home and abroad. Porgy and Bess seems to be a repertory work even abroad, where it has had a recent great success with a native American company. Rut is not its popularity due more to its exotic and special casting than to its relative literary or musical charm? On the other hand, Carmen has been successfully (artistically as well as commercially) produced as Carmen Jones; and while the locale was transposed, few of its literary or musical values were lost. But Carmen is the most indestructible work in opera and has long been the object of envious study by nonrepertory composers.

Porgy and Bess recalls other pieces, primarily composed as speculative musical investments — such as Street Scene, Oklahoma! or South Pacific — which are certainly works in the lyric theater, which have enjoyed great popularity and have been heard and seen all over. Their songs are on everyone’s lips; their stories, ingenious; their characters have charm and personality. Rut it is unlikely that they will ever enter the permanent repertory, even as folk works (like Smetana’s Bartered Bride), because their musical vitality depends on small independent units, an exhaustible formula for a succession of hit songs rarely adding up to a dramatic synthesis. Hit songs tend to be identified with the season of their first singing, like the vogue in dressmaking or popular novels. Perhaps the single modern work in this genre that has survived fifty years is The Merry Widow — chiefly because of the exquisite quality of its vocal music.

There have been, since the triumphant creations of Puccini and Richard Strauss, now almost half a century ago, a few international works in a slightly different category — works which are never exactly successful, which indeed were never intended to be, which nevertheless continue to fascinate and which justify revival — such as Pelléas et Mélisande or Berg’s Wozzeck. And there are a number of works which have enjoyed a local acceptance, such as the repertory of Benjamin Britten in England or of Carl Orff in Germany, but which do not seem to export well. They have a personal, almost geographical charm and were composed consciously or unconsciously for special audiences or particular conditions, so that they rather fade without them.

The criterion of lyric theater is still Italian. Since the last war, there has been an enormous resurgence of coloratura singing, long smothered by the Wagnerian orchestral domination. Unfamiliar works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Von Weber, and the early Verdi have been brilliantly revived, not alone in Naples and Milan, but in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. A whole new generation of virtuoso singers has emerged, and with the help of the recording industry the vast literature of bel canto has become generally available. But our singers are given few contemporary roles which can exploit their full talents.

Singers long for new roles in which they can create wholly new characters. Old roles are challenges but always accompanied by the shadowy competitors of past remembered performances. Every producer is hungry for a new repertory work. Every serious composer wants to write a new opera. Even contemporary audiences will suspend immediate judgment, since they increasingly realize how apathetic or hostile they have been on past historic premieres. Yet there are next to no works worth the hazard of production. What is the matter?

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Is THE fault with the producer? Not really. The list of first performances is long. A large amount of money has been spent from every source, from the Metropolitan Opera to the foundations and university music-faculties, who seem almost eager to provide first hearings. No score with any real quality has to wait long for some sort of hearing, even if only in concert style. Hope springs eternal ... but there are few second performances.

Is the fault with the composer? To a very great degree. There are many composers capable of writing music of ingenuity, even of originality, even with a slight melodic gift, which would be acceptable to a melody-minded public. But few of these composers have enjoyed any connection with theater itself. During the formative period of their youth, when their working methods and their individual styles were being forged, the composers ignored both theater and opera house. Those were seen as homes of corruption for the delinquency of music — meretricious plots, vulgar tunes, cheap theatrics — everything impure in style, insincere in sentiment. These were the sites of preposterous operatic behavior, of plump tenors and large soprani, of repetitious farewells and grotesque duets. The sounds of crazy mice, the movements of awkward lobsters; who could listen seriously to Lucia or Madama Butterfly?

After the official standards of the academies and prize agencies of the late nineteenth century, modern composers tidied up their medium. They were bent on clearing away past formulas; the accretions of formalism and stylization that they had to assume made all music stagnant. But their tidiness resulted in a new formula, a combination of clinic and kindergarten. They found themselves with a purified language, chiefly useful in talking to themselves. At that time, avant-garde composers, whom we now honor as deans of American music, were ambitious for absolute music, by which they meant orchestral music. Their reputations were to be made in concert halls, not in opera houses. They were not theater folk. They were pure musicians.

Naturally they were musicians. They conceived of music as a strict language, which it certainly is; they were forging new frontiers in its proper materials of rhythms and sonorities. But, after many special triumphs, they started to feel lonely. A merely private audience of severe musicians no longer warmed them. They never stopped envying Igor Stravinsky, who always had as his private pilot-project the Ballet Russe of Serge Dlaghilev, where his annual innovations were performed with visual splendor. But Stravinsky, after all, had the luck to be born, at least, symbolically, on stage during an entr’acte of a double bill of opera and ballet. Our composers began to realize that the great simple-minded (or single-minded) audience never stopped going to opera houses, night after night. Hesitantly, shyly even, but with increasing velocity, they turned their attention to opera.

The reason they have, in the main, failed is a complex one. They did not realize, and indeed do not now realize, that operas are performed in theaters with large stages as well as large orchestra pits; that opera houses must maintain the repertory system of alternating programs; that every opera is in continual competition with every other opera, new or old. Most importantly, they did not realize that opera is theater, a dramatic whole, the primary element of which is not instrumental music or poetry, but the projected human singing voice. To this they had rarely the curiosity to listen, except in the fashionable conversational post-Wagnerian style or its domesticated reduction in French or German art songs. The notion that the human voice could be launched into wild flights of released melody still seems definitely in the realm of bad taste.

How does one go about writing a first opera? First, there is the question of libretto. Whom does the composer choose as collaborator? Usually someone he happens to know personally, who has much less experience in writing words than the composer in writing notes, but someone nevertheless who is comfortable to work with, who can never dominate. It seems irrelevant that the librettist may not have had the slightest experience in workaday theater. The modern librettist, unfortunately, very rarely considers the quality of a voice singing his words, or indeed his words as vowels being set to musical phrases. How many vocable syllables are there in love or hate? Amor, amour, Liebe are easier to vocalize than lu-uv. Because librettists give too little consideration to English consonants and diphthongs, we are frequently told that English is the most ungraceful tongue to set to music, which is not true. The Elizabethan and Jacobean songsters, or even a German writing English as did Handel, are models of clear diction and transparent prosody. ‘Think of any of Shakespeare’s lyrics — or on a less familiar plane, those of Thomas Campion, John Dowland, or Robert Jones.

It is certainly more difficult now to rush into the composition of opera than it was in the great epoch of Italian lyric theater. Then there was a fairly simple-sounding formula which provided many successes but which did not save as many failures. It was a reliable formula — very rigid, to be sure. The novelist Stendhal described it in his biographies of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio: “Every story needs six characters, all of them in love, so that the musician can get his contrasts. The primo soprano, the prima donna and the tenor, the three principal characters in an opera, must each sing five arias: one passionate (l‘aere patetica), one brilliant (di bravura), one straight-forward (aria parlante), one ‘demi-character’ (half folksonglike), and one expressing joy (l‘aria brilliante). The drama must be divided into three acts and not exceed a certain number of verses. Each scene has to end with an aria, and no one character can sing more than two consecutive arias. The first and second acts must end with melodies of greater importance than those to be found in the rest of the piece. The poet has to contrive two good niches in the second and third acts and place in one a recitativo obbligato to be followed by a display of virtuosity (di trabusto) and in the other a grand duet (not forgetting this must always be sung by the principal lovers). Neglect these rules and there will be no music. Further, it must be clearly understood that the poet must provide the designer with ample opportunity to display his talents.”

Very few composers who tell you that they want to write an opera (if they can only find a good libretto and a large commission) honestly love the form. To be sure, like everyone else, they admire what they call “good” opera. They have “good taste” and love Figaro and Carmen. But imagine a poet or a lover of poetry telling you he liked only “good poetry”: Shakespeare and Eliot, but neither Rope nor Keats. People who like “good opera” mean that they presuppose a certain preference which to them is “good taste.” It does not mean that they tire familiar with the repertory of its requirements. The test, as Chester Kallmaan said, is not whether they like Figaro or Carmen, but whether they will knowingly listen to Andrea Chenier or La Fanciulla del West. Are they, in fact, in love with the possibilities of the human voice as an agency of intense drama?

It is hard to imagine a contributor to the permanent repertory who has not lived around opera houses, who does not know at first hand what the nature of the vocal apparatus is, what sort of human beings have what sort of superhuman voices — the habits of the tenor, for example. The peculiarities of tenor behavior are complex indeed. The physiological strain of constantly trying to sing very high with easy articulation has serious psychological repercussions. Its tensions exert grave pressure on tenor temperament; and great tenors are rarer than great diamonds and harder to handle.

Few composers have much conviction in their subject, although there are native locales, periods, or fables which seem more sympathetic to some than others. Operas have been based on Melville, Poe, Edward Everett Hale, and Henry James. But it is hard to believe that Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt offers attractive pretexts. The nineteenth-century Italian heroic portrait gallery offers precedents, but when you fasten on Lincoln or Roosevelt —who is the soprano? Billy Budd and the Emperor Jones have no opposite numbers and hence no aural polarity, focus, or relief. Many good ideas never get beyond the crucial problem of the soprano, for she is the basis, the absolute minimal requirement, for a solid repertory work.

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IT HAS been frequently suggested that Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy would make a first-rate American opera. The question immediately presents itself: what are the words? One cannot sing Dreiser’s conversations. As with other subjects which seem to have assumed the prestige of local legend (Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one example), one is forced to conclude that while they are effective in print and possible on stage or screen, they do not evoke song. Yet An American Tragedy has a strong, simple plot, a strong moral, two good characters for women’s voices, a tenor for the hero, a basso for the district attorney; a factory scene, a party scene, a courtroom scene, and a final prison cell. Perhaps what renders it least possible is the irritating passivity of Clyde Griffiths. Shyness, fumbling self-pity, and a sense of ambivalent social position are awkward to define in grand musical terms.

Yet one might imagine An American Tragedy with book by Bert Brecht and songs by Kurt Weill, staged by Piscator in Berlin, not later than 1932. It would have been eked out by savage irony; the social background would have been indicated by documentary commentators, who, while removing or delaying emotional directness to a degree, might have framed the work with unity and tension. But there is a difference between tragedy and irony, a difference in the proper scale, which is why both Don Giovanni and The Rake’s Progress are so much better not produced as grand opera but performed in small opera houses.

There exists one ironic masterpiece of international repertory dimensions—The Threepenny Opera of Brecht and Weill, which, while not exactly an opera, is certainly a minor monument of lyric theater. It is assured its place in the international opéra comique by the beauty of its songs and orchestration, but most of all by the unequaled ferocity of its sentiment. A tone was found for The Threepenny Opera which, while it may have been remote from that of its original eighteenth-century inspiration, certainly fitted the times in which it was produced. The American Tragedy has not yet been fortunate enough to find that perfect consonance of tone and prosody.

So here we are in 1957, our century more than half spent. Let us assume we know an American composer in Berkeley, Princeton, or Cambridge eager for the chance to write an opera. Where does he go from here? What opera house can school him? What opera singers does he know? What opera producers will seriously interest themselves?

First, he should withdraw to the center of his conscience and ask: Am I essentially interested in the human voice as prime mover of my work? Have I the will or talent to treat it as a positive projector of action and emotion? Do I understand what the voice can or cannot do in terms of stage situation on the lyric level? Assuming the voice problem solved, do I have a story, plot, or pretext for action which can propel my voice-laden actors into holding a restive audience? Where is my locale — in the historic or legendary past, or in the indeterminate present? Shall the musical structure be unbroken and continuous, as in the Strauss and Puccini repertories, or shall there be formal set pieces, duets, trios, sextets, as in Mozart or Rossini? Is there to be a chorus; if so, what is its role? Do I have aptitude for the fantastic? (Can I compete with The Magic Flute?) What are my gifts for the comic? (Where am I against The Barber of Seville or Don Pasquale?) What are the chances of the veristic? (Should I attempt A Streetcar Named Desire?)

As for the fantastic, there are musical gifts that can rise above weak libretti. Even The Magic Flute is a much better book than many commentators would have us believe (as the Auden-Kallman version shows). But it does not seem a very happy model. The composer, with his poet, is self-betrayed when he attempts to impose a personal mythology on a puzzled public. Mozart presupposed freemasonry and Austrian politics. Symbols may be at hand and yet not legible. Our critics have made us so conscious of symbolic reference, of meanings on many levels, that simple stories seem almost too innocent to a literate or literary-minded composer. Americans seem luckiest with comic or ironic fables. One might, for example, imagine an opera buffo on The Skin of Our Teeth if the author didn’t mind a relocation or adaptation of his original words. A German has recently set The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

As for the realistic — our version of the Italian verismo of Puccini, Mascagni, or Leoncavallo — it is somewhat surprising that more attention has not been paid to Tennessee Williams’s longer plays. To be sure, a short story of his has been used as a oneact opera, and A Streetcar Named Desire is the subject of a compressed ballet-pantomime. But one might have thought that some composer would have gone obediently to Williams as once they went to Scribe, Sardou, or Belasco. The Rose Tattoo, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, all provide big soprano roles. Streetcar opens with a prelude of New Orleans street cries; there is a poker-party quartet; extended self-apotheosizing arias, violent duets, and a grandiose mad-scene. It is, in its own script, almost an opera without music. In fact, it requires no music, but neither did The Girl of the Golden West! Since we need a large public to support the producer’s risk, it would seem sensible for the composer to consider the comic genre, where irony can hint at an underlying tragedy without pretension, and fantasy seem logical, while avoiding rigidity of tone and atmosphere. That is perhaps why The Skin of Our Teeth might work better than Our Town.

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DESPTE suggestions and speculations, there are few formulas or short cuts; only analysis and diagnosis. Furthermore, in spite of all the mistakes in our musical history, distinguished international repertory works have indeed been written in the United States — works that have enjoyed success in more than one American city and in Europe as well. A brief résumé of the qualities that seem to have assured them durability may be instructive; and three works less alike can scarcely be imagined.

The oldest in order of composition is Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, composed in 1928 but not produced until 1934. The text chosen was written some years before by Gertrude Stein. It had the advantage of being amorphous. Half of its charm, which is enormous, lies in witty engineering, the imposing of a rational musical progression on an anarchic script. The composer simply accepted the insistent rain-patter or sewing-machinegun drill of Miss Stein’s words and Set everything to song; everything, including scenic divisions, stage directions, and punctuation. Thomson had the precedent of Erik Satie and the Six French composers around the Russian ballet for making an intensely personal style out of domestic bits and pieces. Poet, painter, ballet master, stage director, and composer could be fused in a festival combination.

Ostensibly, its absolute elegance framed provincial vignettes from the lives of popular Roman Catholic saints. The characters were Mediterranean fisherfolk or villagers, graciously depicted by North American Negroes. The vocal manner was ecclesiastical, owing more to the Baptist chapels of Kansas and Harlem than to the cathedrals of Avila or Florence. The entire conception was an American, indeed a Protestant American, commentary on Mediterranean material. Vivid glimpses of glory, immortality, the divine love of God, the human love of man, mutual hopes for heaven, were demonstrated through staged hymns, processions, or bright solo arias, of which the best known is, of course, “Pigeons on the grass alas.” Here, again, those who say that one cannot gracefully set awkward modern English to fluent song were proved wrong. Four Saints in Three Acts is a complete, thoroughly conceived art work, almost in the Wagnerian criterion.

The voice has always interested Stravinsky from his early Nightingale and Mavra to Les Noces and Oedipus Rex; his father was a famous basso of the Imperial Theater. And Stravinsky commenced his career fifty years ago to angry screams of thrilling protest. Recently, The Rake’s Progress earned a prejudged, sophistical boredom. Between the early yells and the late yawns lie how many masterpieces of lyric theater, for voice and movement — The Rites of Spring, Petrouchka, Pulcinellɑ, Persephone, Apollo, Orpheus, The Symphony of Psalms, and many others. Contemptuous of criticism which is usually based on the unique criterion of his own next-tolast work, Stravinsky is and always has been certain of his gift and direction. He engineers every new turn with all the vast craft and gifts at his disposal.

For The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky obtained a libretto he desired — a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kaliman which remains one of the best since da Ponte’s for Don Giovanni. It is true that both words and music suffered from their first American presentation, on the huge stage and within the large frame of the Metropolitan Opera House, where the scale swamped the work, which is not grand opera but lyric theater or opéra comique. The production of The Rake’s Progress by Boston University showed far more of its real value. But the opera is in the international repertory; it has received more than two hundred performances, all over the world, since its premiere in 1953.

The music is available in recording. It has a series of beautiful set pieces, arias, duets; a brilliant use of chorus as a dramatic background; and a luxury of melodic invention unequaled by any living composer. A number of familiar forms, from the fairy talc of the Three Wishes to the Catechism and an auction, support the strong skeleton of the morality play. All its action is recognizable human behavior; characters are both people and prototypes. The use of the fantastic and the ordinary, and the edge of acrid sweetness, produce an electrical charge with a low-intensity shock, not strong enough to command show-stopping applause, but insistently surprising and increasingly moving.

The subject of The Rake’s Progress is the responsibility of the individual for his own life, and salvation through love. What makes it truly of the twentieth century, in which it was written, rather than the eighteenth century, in which it is presumably set, is its psychological and philosophical acuteness. The hero does not lose his immortal soul to the Devil in a gamble for all his funless games; he loses his human mind. The soprano does not die of grief when she finds him in the madhouse; she recognizes that since he is no longer able to exercise choice, she is free from all vows. And the epilogue, which has had leveled at it the most critical condemnation, contains the point of the piece. The tragedy is over; house lights are raised to half. All the figures come before the curtain — the men with their wigs off, Baba the Turk without her beard — and the Devil sings: —

Many insist that The Rake’s Progress does not exist; but what they really mean is they wish it didn’t, because it brings up every difficult contemporary problem in the composition of an opera and solves each as if it were not a problem, as if it had all somehow been done before yet never in quite the same way, as if there had been no real change since Mozart except a diabolical transformation of sonority, rhythm, and sensibility.

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JUST as the eighteenth century has been lazily assigned as the guiding model of The Rake’s Prog- ress, so Puccini has been allocated to The Saint of Bleecker Street. Certainly Menotti is the legitimate heir of verismo, of Italianate naturalism. But he has always displayed a great taste for the fantastic and there is a more serious, unnoticed, and revealing debt in Menotti’s latest grand opera — Moussorgsky. The Saint of Bleecker Street is primarily a choral opera. There is only one short scene in its entire two and a half hours where the chorus does not dominate, accompanied or unaccompanied. Solo voices are always heard against a choral mass, in a conflict of doubting individuals against the credulous or accepting society in which they move. The story is more complex than in most successful operas, with meanings on many levels, and one which on first telling hardly seems suitable for operatic treatment. This may indicate how great a range of sentiment exists for operatic use when sentiment is sufficiently invested with passionate vocalism.

Four Saints in Three Acts is a nostalgic hymn to popular Romanist iconography by a cosmopolitan American who received his training as organist in King’s Chapel, Boston, and who never forgot the Kansas hymnals of his boyhood. The Rake’s Progress is an Anglican morality parable set by a Greek Orthodox Christian; it is an historic fact that there is communion between the two protestant congregations.

The Saint of Bleecker Street is an agnostic fable by a born Roman Catholic which has been claimed as heretical by unbelievers and logical by professing Christians. Its subject is the conflict of faith and reason in a deracinated society. The saint, who suffers no temptation, becomes, as she desires, a saint by sheer goodness rather than by demonstrable miracle. The hero-villain remains a freewheeling anarchist, destroying himself in spite of all her love can do. Her triumph is bleak, and his tragedy is dubious.

The ending of The Saint of Bleecker Street is not easy; there have been few who have not been disturbed by it. The power of the unaccompanied choirs, in their ritual concentration and attack, after all the luxury of the orchestra is exhausted, is an example of what lyric theater can do in its manipulation of formal stagecraft. Here it is more intense for the moment, more lasting in memory, than any kind of equivalent filmed naturalism. The lyric theater, by virtue of its song, encompasses the heroic without appearing presumptuous or inadequate. The broadness of its possible effects is its constant attraction.

Is it accidental that these three works, composed over a quarter of our century, which seem to have some claim to durability in the repertory, have all attached themselves to the most durable body of Western myth — that is, to popular theology rather than literary fable? The floor of their structure is as solid as one can get. Terrestrial and celestial love are irreducible minimal subjects; in each of these operas style and tone reflect sentiment almost on folk levels. It is surely not by accident that these three composers have lifelong histories of involvement with voices, from church and court choirs to opera houses; from popular songs in music halls to art songs in concert halls. They have returned to the lively tradition of vocalization; in fact, they were never separated from it. They were never smothered or seduced by the orchestra of Wagner or Strauss, nor did they accept these great artists as anything but hypnotic giants. Yet they were not hypnotized. Each one of their operas is transparently orchestrated to allow the voices to shine through; there is no hedge of instrumental sonority blocking the stage from the audience. Only pantomimes or processions are underscored, their visual effect enhanced by fuller-bodied noises.

Our poets, humbled by studying the libretti of lasting opera, may find their simple if rich rewards in constructing plots; above all in making rhythmic combinations of words which will service the voice. Our composers, emboldened by the few successes we have described, may turn to materials which are close at hand, familiar if not ordinary; even melodic. The audience is always ready: give us action beautiful to look at, singing glorious to listen to.