Below is an exclusive excerpt from Dana Gioia’s forthcoming new book, Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry
Gesand ist Dasein.
(Singing is being.)
—Rainer Maria Rilke
It is not coincidental that George Gershwin's Porgy, the most popular American opera, emerged from commercial theater. Broadway has a different way of developing musical theater. It puts greater emphasis on the lyrics than opera companies do. It is worth noting that five of the ten most widely performed American operas, including Leonard Bernstein's Candide and Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul, premiered not in an opera house but in commercial theater or on television. That is an astonishing and significant fact for an art form that exists entirely in the non-profit sector, supported more by private and public donations than box office receipts.
Commercial theater understands something that opera companies do not—the expressive power of strong and memorable lyrics. The talent needed to compose a song is self-evident, but writing lyrics demands great skill, too—a quirky genius that even poets rarely possess. It is not a talent most playwrights have, which is why Broadway usually selects different authors for the book and lyrics. When a lyricist perfectly matches words to a melody, people feel it.
Anyone who hears Porgy and Bess or Candide in an opera house notices how the audience’s engagement to the text changes. It isn’t merely a matter of hearing the words in English. Audiences don’t listen to the text of Britten’s Turn of the Screw with the same sort of attention, even though it has a fine libretto. Music alone doesn’t deliver the same theatrical effect. Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land has a beautiful score, characteristic of the composer at his best, but Erik Johns’s book and lyrics are so corny they make the crowd flinch. (When The Tender Land premiered in 1954, the New York City Opera pulled it after three performances.) With Porgy and Candide operagoers respond to the poetic power of lyrics meant to be heard line by line. They are enchanted by the power of song.
Song has an existential status that classical musicians sometimes forget. It no longer seems to have much connection to what serious composers do. To classically trained contemporary composers, song is an inferior or negligible category, amateur music that lacks sophistication and complexity. How can anyone compare modern opera to teenagers in a garage band? This professional bias isn’t arbitrary. It is a reasonable response to the gross commercialization of song in a media-saturated culture. That is a world which classical artists now define themselves against. Nonetheless it is important to see song from a broader perspective—not as a commercial category but as an essential human behavior. Song isn’t a thirty-two-bar musical form. It is a primal mode of human communication and communality.
Song is a universal human art. No one has found a culture which does not have song. It is also a ubiquitous art—used for every human activity from worship to warfare. Armies once sang as they marched off to battle. Sailors chanted as they put out to sea. Shepherds sang to their flocks. Mothers still sing to their sleepy children. Whether solo or choral, song is communal. It links the singer to the listener. Song can be stylized and developed in countless ways from bel canto to Kabuki, but the underlying common impulse remains. Song is magical. The Latin word for song is carmen, a word that also means a poem, magical spell, or prophecy. All poetry was originally sung. Its purpose was to enchant, seduce, comfort, and include. Songs are spells to awaken and enlarge emotions—listeners weep or smile, they feel affinity or loss. Songs communicate across languages. People feel meaning in songs whose words they don’t understand.
Song isn’t intellectual. It communicates physically and holistically. But song is most powerful when the listener understands and feels each word memorably reinforced by both the music and the human voice that performs it. There is a reason that Orpheus has appeared in opera since its origins. The first poet, he created songs that transformed nature and moved the gods of death to compassion. What better hero to restore the lost form of Greek drama in the new art of opera? As Ezra Pound declared, “Music rots when it gets too far from dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” Opera was created to reunite song and poetry to recapture that primal magic. Opera abandons song at great risk.
Orchestral opera has one sort of special power. Works such as Wagner’s Parsifal or Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande immerse the audience in the mood and emotions of the drama. The continuous flow of music carries the listener forward according to the composer’s design. Philip Glass channels this power in his epic operas. In Akhnaten, the words matter less than the shimmering sound of the orchestra and chorus. (The music pulses with dance-rhythms, slow and fast, that Pound would have admired.) Overwhelmed by son et lumière, the audience hardly cares that the libretto is in ancient Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Akkadian. Glass has the old-fashioned theatrical instinct, however, to end the middle act with “Hymn to the Sun,” a rhapsodic aria sung in English (or the language of the audience). The self-contained musical number creates a human connection between the title character and the listener. The aria is the most popular moment in the three-hour work. Although Akhnaten has spoken narration, no critic has dared to call it an operetta. Like The Magic Flute, whose Masonic episodes it resembles, the work is too serious to demote.
Number operas achieve their enchantment in a different way—not as a continuous line of sound but a series of rising and falling motions. Each musical number creates a self-contained moment of expressive power. Different numbers seek different effects. Together they build an overall dramatic plan. Lyrics play a crucial role in establishing the nature of each new number.
No Italian baritone singing “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s Barber of Seville will slur the words; they are clever and amusing, even to foreigners. Singers revel in their power to enthrall a crowd. Figaro’s monologue is witty, rhythmic, and well rhymed. In Rossini’s frenetic setting, it becomes unforgettable. Even Bugs Bunny can bring it off. The aria’s climax, when the barber’s many clients simultaneously call for his services, requires no translation to make itself felt:
Figaro qua, Figaro la,
Figaro su, Figaro giu.
Pronto prontissimo son come il fulmine,
Sono il factotum della città.
Librettist Cesare Sterbini is not remembered as one of opera’s great laureates, but it would be a mistake to underestimate his talent. Figaro’s exuberant entrance aria has no parallel or precedent in either of Sterbini’s sources, Pierre Beaumarchais’s play, Le barbier de Séville (1775) or Giovanni Paisiello’s opera, Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1782). The show-stopping number was Sterbini’s invention. His rapid-fire lyrics not only inspired Rossini’s most famous aria; they trigger the scene’s madcap comedy. Farce requires immense sophistication. “Largo al factotum” is an explosion of lyrical self-assertion that joyfully interrupts the drama—an effect a through-composed score cannot easily duplicate. Opera is richer for having both styles.
Read Weep, Shudder, Die
Dana Gioia was born in Hawthorne, California, on December 24, 1950. He received a BA from Stanford University. Before returning to Stanford to earn an MBA, he completed an MA in comparative literature at Harvard University, where he studied with the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. In 1977, Gioia moved to New York to begin a career in business. For fifteen years Gioia worked as a businessman, eventually becoming a vice president of General Foods. In 1992, after publishing his first book of poetry, Daily Horoscope (Graywolf Press), in 1986, he left business to become a full-time writer.
Mr. Gioia's article transported me back to my early opera going days and the standing room line at the Old Met. The last Menotti opera I saw was The Last Savage. At the end it has a very lovely septet.
I fell in love with lieder and Italian art songs. I have been a staunch admirer of Ivor Gurney's poetry. But I have never been able to warm up to his songs. These days I feel at home with Appalachian songs and traditional folk.
We live in Santa Fe, but haven't been to the opera in awhile. Our first local opera production was Le Nozze di Figaro. I have never forgotten the bats rising from the Orchestra during the overture.
Do I sense a nostalgia
for the days of the troubadours
when musical muses went begging
with tunes of romance?
Did they throw them quarters then
and dollars too?
Would rap centuries back have been
as welcome as voodoo?
Pavarotti was best at Christmas songs.
None has sung them better,
whether in old or new Latin.
Sound alone is the emotion begetter.