Newspaper Article

Review: BOOK OF THE WEEK: 'It makes me want to scream': Philip Hensher on emotion in opera and why it isn't a dead art form - yet: A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker 624pp, Allen Lane, pounds 30

Hensher, Philip

2012

Overview

Probably to the vast mass of English people, \"opera\" means something ridiculous, or a singer who has never sung on the operatic stage, appearing on a talent show with a microphone. [Carolyn Abbate] and [Roger Parker] have fun with Jackie Evancho, who, aged 12, swept a TV talent show with an \"eerie\" version of \"Nessun Dorma\". As you and I know, but Jackie apparently didn't, this is the big G major tenor aria from the third act of Turandot, in which the singer promises to take the princess in bed at dawn - quite in accord with operatic manners, but not suitable for a 12-year-old girl. Nobody cared, though similar expressions about sexual congress in the rapper Azaelia Banks's \"212\" get a Parental Guidance sticker. The fact is that opera has removed itself from the meanings of its fervent expressions, and now that these are safely in museums, they can be brought out randomly without anyone wondering what they were about. This is an art form that changes only slowly. Operabase.com, which keeps records of performances worldwide, shows that tastes in opera haven't developed much in the past 50 years. The most popular operas remain La Boheme and La Traviata. Dreadful old warhorses such as Gounod's Faust are still hanging on - imagine a spoken theatre in which The Second Mrs Tanqueray was the most familiar play in performance. If you thought that the shifts in intellectual fashion that brought late Verdi such as [Don Carlos] and modern classics such as Berg's Lulu and [John Adams]'s Nixon in China to the forefront were reflected in performance, think again: Aida, with its elephants, is still the most popular. The only real shift in taste in recent decades, as performance evidence makes clear, is the rise of Richard Strauss's operas to the centre of the repertory. \"That now so ascendant Ariadne? \" Stravinsky remarked. \"I hate Ariadne. It makes me want to scream.\" Abbate and Parker have written an interesting and alert history of the art form, which follows the unusual path of paying little attention to the industry around it. There is little about the opera houses, the financial structure of patronage that has always been necessary to support this expensive art form, and very little about individual singers. We do sometimes hear about the behaviour of audiences when - as in the case of French grand opera - it explains curiosities of the form, such as the requirement for a ballet in the second act. But pleasingly what we read about most are the operas themselves, in great schools - opera seria, French light opera (given a thorough and welcome reappraisal), Meyerbeerian spectacle, verismo and so on. It's welcome, too, to place composers in proper intellectual company, and try to see exactly where Richard Strauss lies in his age - that opera to the greatest of librettos, Rosenkavalier, seems evasive, but still as crucial as his Salome's pre-war declaration that \"There haven't been enough dead yet.\"

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Abbate, Carolyn / Parker, Roger