Books, Arts & Manners: Opera Reconsidered & Mass Appeal

H. L. MENCKEN argued that “opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral”— as usual overstating his point. Debussy wryly summed up what he saw as a deficiency of the form when he found in it “too much singing.” Yet Mozart could say fervently, “To me opera comes before everything else”— perhaps because he had been listening to his own. Of course he felt as he did, since in almost everything he wrote there is an operatic quality. How often, in listening to a Mozart symphony, have we expected the orchestra to pause for the entrance of tenor or soprano!

Nevertheless, it should not be a hanging offense to suggest that at least once the operatic Mozart may have nodded, perhaps because he was bowing more to his career than to that musical instinct which so felicitously dominated him. When he wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entfürung aus dem Serail), non-musical factors guided him. The Emperor Joseph II was pushing to make Vienna a musical capital by promoting the Singspiel, which he saw as the Germanic answer to Italian opera. As Mozart’s letters to his father show, the young composer saw himself ensconced as Kapellmeister of the Germanic musical scene—and a court favorite should he turn out a sing-andtalk that pleased the Emperor. But The Abduction, though tremendously popular, did not win over Emperor Joseph. It was not Germanic enough for him, and the spoken passages replacing the recitative remind us that German is not a language for speaking. The Abduction’s libretto offers little as entertainment or drama—the opposite of his Don Giovanni, which cuts deep as music, and as drama is both psychologically and ontologically insightful. But if we must have The Abduction, then we might as well rejoice in the advantage of the excellent performances by the Konzertvereinigung Staats Opernchor and the Vienna Symphony, conducted by Bruno Weil, and voices that are matched and balanced in a way not always found at the Met or La Scala these days (Sony S2K 48O3).

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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H. L. MENCKEN argued that “opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral”— as usual overstating his point. Debussy wryly summed up what he saw as a deficiency of the form when he found in it “too much singing.” Yet Mozart could say fervently, “To me opera comes before everything else”— perhaps because he had been listening to his own. Of course he felt as he did, since in almost everything he wrote there is an operatic quality. How often, in listening to a Mozart symphony, have we expected the orchestra to pause for the entrance of tenor or soprano!

Nevertheless, it should not be a hanging offense to suggest that at least once the operatic Mozart may have nodded, perhaps because he was bowing more to his career than to that musical instinct which so felicitously dominated him. When he wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entfürung aus dem Serail), non-musical factors guided him. The Emperor Joseph II was pushing to make Vienna a musical capital by promoting the Singspiel, which he saw as the Germanic answer to Italian opera. As Mozart’s letters to his father show, the young composer saw himself ensconced as Kapellmeister of the Germanic musical scene—and a court favorite should he turn out a sing-andtalk that pleased the Emperor. But The Abduction, though tremendously popular, did not win over Emperor Joseph. It was not Germanic enough for him, and the spoken passages replacing the recitative remind us that German is not a language for speaking. The Abduction’s libretto offers little as entertainment or drama—the opposite of his Don Giovanni, which cuts deep as music, and as drama is both psychologically and ontologically insightful. But if we must have The Abduction, then we might as well rejoice in the advantage of the excellent performances by the Konzertvereinigung Staats Opernchor and the Vienna Symphony, conducted by Bruno Weil, and voices that are matched and balanced in a way not always found at the Met or La Scala these days (Sony S2K 48O3).