Damn!, She's Good

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep. See below.]

We're not at all familiar with any of the operas cited in this first-rate piece by Washington Post chief classical music critic Anne Midgette, so have no idea how to assess her expressed opinions concerning each. But whether those opinions are spot-on or off-target vis-à-vis those particular operas, her analysis of opera and what's required to make it work or is for it the kiss of death as an artform is very much spot-on. To wit:

The problem — for many if not most composers [today] — is that dramatic expression is scary, and not at all hip.

"One of things that's been forgotten in music for a long time is the ability to be nakedly emotional," the composer David Lang said to me after he won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for The Little Match Girl Passion, an oratorio that was so nakedly emotional I mistook it for deliberate kitsch when I first heard it. Opera takes the emotional exposure one step further, saying serious things on a very big scale that positively invites parody (which is why everyone makes fun of opera singers). As a composer, you have to know what you're doing onstage, in theatrical terms, if you're going to make it work.

[...]

Stylistic melange alone is now taken as investing some measure of contemporaneity. What a few decades ago was slammed as lowbrow pastiche is today heralded as a visionary merging of disparate traditions (think Osvaldo Golijov). This kind of polyglot approach is certainly cited as a reason for praise by the many adherents of Douglas J. Cuomo's Arjuna's Dilemma....

[...]

It's easy on the ear, and very beguiling. I'm just not sure it's opera. Based on the Bhagavad-Gita, the piece depicts the hero Arjuna about to join battle against an army that includes family and friends; he turns to Krishna for guidance, and learns the secrets of the universe. This is thought-provoking, but not necessarily the stuff of theatrical drama; and while I enjoyed listening to it, particularly as the voices and styles wove together in the work's culmination, I wanted more emotional depth beyond the prettiness.

RTWT here.

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Update (1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep): The above brought a curious response from a member of the Opera-L eMail list which response we reprint below as it's a neat example of selective misreading:

Anne Midgette is a knowledgeable critic in that her writing displays a strong background in literature, theatre and music. But she often lets her understanding of these raw materials of opera suffice to inform her opinions of opera performances and their value without becoming involved with the synthesis of these basic qualities of opera.

[...]

For example, she states that a composer whom she is reviewing has involved himself on a "formless wallow of feelings (and) is trying to shape (opera) through musical means alone". She then states that "you need more". Of course, at the outset, this statement is obviously true and needs not be restated, but the fact is that, regardless of the importance of the text and the story line, the music is the primary dramatic element in opera and all else falls into a less than important consideration. In short, it is the composer's music that 'carries the day' and that requires that the music is an organic outgrowth of the story and, consequently, the text of the opera. Any critical analysis of the opera must begin from the musical presentation and how it relates to the rest of the performance.

To which misreading we responded:

You've not quoted Ms. Midgette correctly. What she actually wrote was,

"I don't like everything [director Peter] Sellars has done myself, but I think his expertise has helped [composer John] Adams take his work a step beyond the formless wallow of feelings that [composer Michael] Nyman, in [his opera] 'Love Counts', is trying to shape through musical means alone. You need more."

Clearly, Ms. Midgette did NOT write what you paraphrased her as writing; viz., that Nyman was trying to "shape (opera) through musical means alone." What she wrote was that Nyman was "trying to shape through musical means alone" the "formless wallow of feelings" in his opera, "Love Counts".

That's not at all the same thing, is it. And if in fact Nyman was attempting to do just that, Ms. Midgette is correct. His attempt was exactly the wrong way to go about it.

To use the metaphor I've often used to describe the overall structure of opera as genuine _dramma per musica_, the core and substance of the drama resides within the music, the libretto and actions of the actors being the armature about which the drama is ordered. What Ms. Midgette is saying in her above is that the armature of Nyman's opera is faulty, and he's attempting to correct it by musical means alone, which is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and doomed to failure. To switch metaphors, that's like a physician attempting to fix broken bones in his patient's skeleton via the agency of the patient's vital organs. In taking that approach, what the physician will end up with is either a dead or permanently crippled patient.