Opera As Drama

We came to appreciate opera relatively late in life — in our early 30's, to be more precise — our musical preoccupation prior to that time being concerned mostly with so-called "absolute music" (i.e., instrumental music) in all its forms the only exceptions being the Bach cantatas, the oratorios of Handel, and the Elijah of Mendelssohn. Even the mature operas of our beloved Mozart were not objects of our interest given their mostly Italian-form structures, much less the extravagant and Germanic operas and music-dramas of Richard Wagner whom we thought a vulgarian of the first water.

How time and experience doth change one's perceptions, even radically so!

Once we became hooked on dramma per musica as an artform (our damascene conversion chronicled here), we knew we had lots of catching up to do, and so devoted the next ten years or so to reading about and listening to opera of all sorts, especially opera of the Italian persuasion simply because it was clearly the most popular sort among devoted operagoers of longstanding, and also because it was the sort of opera we were least in sympathy with; viz., grossly melodramatic and sentimental, both dramatically and musically.

As we became more familiar with the artform generally, we quite naturally began forming certain ideas and theories about it of our own. Most of these were arrived at unsystematically and therefore were somewhat fuzzy and mildly inchoate until we happened upon an extraordinary book that, in substance, articulated authoritatively much of our self-arrived-at thinking concerning opera as an artform (which is not to say we agreed with all the book had to say; we didn't and don't): Joseph Kerman's seminal work, Opera as Drama; a slender volume (some 225 pages or so depending on the edition) that today remains for us the most valuable single volume on opera as an artform extant.

An excerpt (from the chapter entitled, "Drama and the Alternative"):

Drama requires not only the presentation of action, but an insight into its quality by means of response to action. Only the presentation of such quality justifies the dramatic endeavor; and in the best dramas, the response seems imaginative, true, illuminating, and fully attached to the action. Monteverdi's Orfeo centers on a vision which is projected powerfully for four acts; then no element of the action suggested itself — or, let us say, no element that was possible under the theatrical conventions of the day — to consummate and complete the drama. The same is true of Gluck's Orfeo. These are not perfect works, but for all their imperfections they are more meaningful than the technical successes of others.

Another, subtler kind of dramatic failure results when the guiding idea proves intractable to the necessities of dramatic form.... [N]evertheless, a few extraordinary dramas have overcome limitations of this sort. Tristan und Isolde, I have suggested, is such a one. [Debussy's] Pelléas et Mélisande and [Berg's] Wozzeck, on the other hand, seem to me pieces which struggle on the whole unsuccessfully with essentially undramatic material — though the struggle creates a strong semblance of drama, and the genuineness of the composer's response is never in doubt. They are works of power and sensitivity, works of genius, even if we are bound to mind the misemployment of the dramatic form.

Quite different is a piece in which the response, the quality of the action, is insensitive or simply sham all the way. The more shrewdly consistent the action and the style, the more exasperating such a piece becomes. In the deepest sense, the operas of [Richard] Strauss and Puccini are undramatic, for their imaginative realm is a realm of emotional cant. They are unable to match any action, however promising, with anything but the empty form of drama. And the form is always there. Alarmingly precise, alarmingly false.

Kerman's Opera as Drama is a book that should be required reading for all who've more than a passing interest in opera as an artform. It will repay hundreds of times over one's time spent reading it closely.