[ANPPOM-Lista] ‘A History of Opera,’ by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, NYT

[Carlos Palombini]

Books of The Times Has the Fat Lady Finally Sung?‘A History of Opera,’ by
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/books/a-history-of-opera-by-carolyn-abbate-and-roger-parker.html


 Luca Bruno/Associated Press

Teatro alla Scala in Milan, which has been a showcase for opera for more
than two centuries.
 By ZACHARY WOOLFE Published: December 27, 2012 With Richard Wagner turning
200 on May 22, what better way for the venerable Teatro alla Scala in Milan
to celebrate than to open its season this month with his “Lohengrin”? That
seemingly innocuous decision caused an unlikely firestorm. Calling it “a
humiliation for Italian art, a blow to national pride in a moment of severe
crisis,” the Corriere della Sera newspaper attacked the
company<http://www.corriere.it/opinioni/12_novembre_12/torno-milano-maledizione-lohengrin_02b05440-2ca3-11e2-ac32-eb50b1e8a70b.shtml>for
not featuring Italy’s own Giuseppe Verdi, whose 200th birthday arrives
in October.

“Would the Germans,” the column sneered, “have opened the Wagner year with
a Verdi opera<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/opera/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>?”
The Italian president had to deny another publication’s allegation that he
missed the performance to protest the choice.

All this because of opera. After four centuries this weird, wonderful art
form — which we are told time and time again, decade after decade, is dying
— still gets people riled, still has some pep in its step. The numbers, at
least, are on its side. As Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker write in “A
History of Opera,” their insightful, smoothly written, ultimately
unpersuasive new book, “The sheer volume of live opera taking place around
the world is far greater now than it was 50 years ago, and this expansion
shows little sign of abatement.”

The news is not all good. As the authors point out, the operatic repertory
has stagnated since the middle of the 19th century, when revivals of older
works began to overtake the popularity of new ones, calcifying into what
Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker call “a wonderful mortuary.” In search of the
new, companies now modernize productions of the classics or excavate
forgotten operas rather than present much that’s actually contemporary.

So is opera as vibrant as ever, or is it hanging on by a thread? How to
write the history of an art form that hovers, Schrödinger’s catlike,
simultaneously alive and dead?

For Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker (she teaches music at Harvard, he at King’s
College London), the answer is to pay as much attention as possible to the
living side. Older histories tended to view opera as a written text: a
score and a libretto. This book, which wisely forgoes the long-standard
snippets of musical notation, strives to present the art form as a
fundamentally live experience.

The excellent early chapters set up a distinction between the way a
character is perceived in the libretto and the way he or she comes across
in a performance. The authors explain, for example, how the straight-arrow
Wolfram in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” takes on a surprisingly sensual authority
when he sings. A traditional synopsis would give only a part — a less
interesting part — of the story.

Starting with a refreshingly widened account of opera’s origins, Ms. Abbate
and Mr. Parker highlight key works that are not always the expected ones.
Along with the usual suspects, the authors pay rewardingly close attention
to operas like Donizetti’s “Parisina,” Ambroise Thomas’s “Mignon” and Ernst
Krenek’s “Jonny Spielt Auf,” all largely ignored today but once popular and
influential. This is, in the best sense, history not as it ended up but as
it happened.

Their descriptions of music are evocative. (The first two chords of
Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” sound “as if a question has been answered by
another question.”) Their trenchant analysis of the quartet near the end of
Verdi’s “Rigoletto” swiftly and precisely captures that composer’s gifts
for definition and juxtaposition of character.

Yet any book about a Schrödinger’s cat has finally to take a position on
whether its subject is breathing. The opera industry’s party line is that
while the repertory may be woefully static, it could and should be
refreshed with an influx of new works. Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker are not so
sure. It is telling that their book’s British edition carries the subtitle
“The Last 400 Years,” where “last” could mean both “previous” and,
ominously, “final.”

While at one point the authors ask what an alternative would be “to this
preservationist tendency, to the beginnings of the operatic museum,” it
turns out that the question is wholly rhetorical. The problem, they
suggest, is not that worthy new operas are being overlooked. Rather, the
operas themselves are unworthy: pale, derivative attempts to recapture a
vanished past. The art form — which has had, they observe, “unusual
longevity for a musical genre” — will linger but is effectively dead,
despite the zombielike proliferation of opera houses and performances.

It is not an indefensible position, yet Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker deliver
it in the smug tone of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They leave out nearly
all of postwar opera, then bemoan its paucity. Besides Britten, their
discussion focuses on Henze, Tippett, Berio, Messiaen, Ligeti and Adès, who
are collectively described and dismissed in a long paragraph. John Adams
gets a little more space for “Nixon in China” and “The Death of
Klinghoffer,” but his rejection is no less cutting. No examples are given
of the agile, chamber-scale works — Mr. Adès’s “Powder Her Face,” for one —
that Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker imply would be preferable to rehashes of the
old war horses.

Certain omissions are particularly puzzling, because the book seems to
anticipate them. “A History of Opera” occupies itself for many pages with
questions of genre and convention, of the ambiguous division between
singing and speaking. Yet Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” at the center of
these concerns, comes up just once, in passing. The authors virtually
ignore Philip Glass’s vast “Einstein on the Beach,” dismaying in a book
that so sensitively deals with the significance of sheer duration in
19th-century grand opera and Wagner.

The culprit may be the limitations of musicology, a stubbornly conservative
discipline that tends, like this book, to admit only grudgingly that operas
continued to be made after Britten. While Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker have
written a general-interest study, it is one that reflects an academy still
antipathetic to popular composers like Gershwin and Mr. Glass. But it is
hard to take seriously the completeness of an opera history that neglects
“Porgy,” or the pessimism about contemporary opera in a book that makes no
mention of Mr. Glass’s powerful, innovative “Satyagraha.”

If Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker had given a richer discussion of the recent
and current state of opera and come to the same gloomy, wanly elegiac
conclusion, you could agree or disagree with them. But they have stacked
the deck so unfairly that after many entertaining and learned chapters,
their polemic ends up as something you can safely ignore, less provocative
than merely querulous. The status of the cat remains tantalizingly
uncertain.

Certain omissions are particularly puzzling, because the book seems to
anticipate them. “A History of Opera” occupies itself for many pages with
questions of genre and convention, of the ambiguous division between
singing and speaking. Yet Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” at the center of
these concerns, comes up just once, in passing. The authors virtually
ignore Philip Glass’s vast “Einstein on the Beach,” dismaying in a book
that so sensitively deals with the significance of sheer duration in
19th-century grand opera and Wagner.

The culprit may be the limitations of musicology, a stubbornly conservative
discipline that tends, like this book, to admit only grudgingly that operas
continued to be made after Britten. While Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker have
written a general-interest study, it is one that reflects an academy still
antipathetic to popular composers like Gershwin and Mr. Glass. But it is
hard to take seriously the completeness of an opera history that neglects
“Porgy,” or the pessimism about contemporary opera in a book that makes no
mention of Mr. Glass’s powerful, innovative “Satyagraha.”

If Ms. Abbate and Mr. Parker had given a richer discussion of the recent
and current state of opera and come to the same gloomy, wanly elegiac
conclusion, you could agree or disagree with them. But they have stacked
the deck so unfairly that after many entertaining and learned chapters,
their polemic ends up as something you can safely ignore, less provocative
than merely querulous. The status of the cat remains tantalizingly
uncertain.
-- 
carlos palombini
www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011
-------------- Próxima Parte ----------
Um anexo em HTML foi limpo...
URL: <http://www.listas.unicamp.br/pipermail/anppom-l/attachments/20121228/0363a2a6/attachment.html>