Preface
Opera is impossible and always has been. Impossibility is baked into the art form’s foundations. The operatic ideal, an imagined union of all the human senses and all art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, painting—is itself an impossibility. But this impossibility is productive and even liberating: all of opera’s bizarre and beautiful fruits, its cathartic embodiments of the extremes of human psychology, its carnivalesque excesses, its improbable moments of intimate revelation, stem from artists’ ongoing search for this permanently elusive alchemy. The art form’s first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Italy, strove to re-create the effect of ancient Greek drama, which of course they had never heard, and which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Nearly four centuries later, Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote a twenty-nine-hour operatic cycle titled Licht (Light), which he called an “eternal spiral” with “neither a beginning nor an end.”
These are not merely ambitious endeavors. They are impossible ones. And this impossibility, this perpetual sense that the real thing is just out of reach, is opera’s lifeblood. If its essence weren’t unrealizable, the art form wouldn’t exist at all.
But never in living memory has opera felt impossible in the way it does now.
I’m writing this from the farmhouse where I live with my husband, Clay, in southern Vermont. We are deep into the barren doldrums of the winter of 2020–21. A foot of snow fell here the other night, heightening the sense that the world is stuck in an eerie, enforced hibernation. The composer in me feels lucky to live in a place where such stillness is possible: on the country roads where I go for my daily run, I’m as likely to encounter a herd of deer as another human being. But I have also never felt so distant from live music, from the nourishing symbiosis of performing and appreciating the performances of others. Around here, I couldn’t tell you where the nearest—no doubt shuttered—music venue is, even a coffee shop with an open-mic night, never mind a concert hall or an opera house.
A year ago, I was relishing the sublime desert clarity of winter in Southern California as I conducted the world premiere of my opera Eurydice at the Los Angeles Opera. I wrote Eurydice in collaboration with the playwright Sarah Ruhl between 2016 and 2019, and the LA production was the long-awaited first chance to bring our efforts to life; as of this writing, the opera is also slated for production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2021. I was proud of every note of Eurydice—I wouldn’t have said that of my previous operas—and throughout the two months I spent in LA, I woke up every day eager to share it with as many people as possible.
Eurydice’s first production was not entirely free of behind-the-scenes drama: practically every member of our stellar cast fell mysteriously ill at some point during the process, and as a result, nearly every performance was preceded by hours of nail-biting about whether this or that principal singer would feel well enough to take the stage. Danielle de Niese, our star soprano, suffered from a persistent cough; Barry Banks, our stratospherically agile principal tenor, had a bad bout of laryngitis; and Rod Gilfry, a veteran baritone who’s usually sturdy and imperturbable as a redwood, was plagued by a cold that lingered for weeks. Nobody thought much of it at the time. Opera singers are notoriously prone to colds and the flu, and since their careers depend on the faultless functioning of two temperamental bands of muscle tissue within the larynx, they can be forgiven for their hypersensitivity (even if it does, at times, verge on hypochondria). Though this barrage of inexplicable maladies was stressful, it didn’t feel so far outside the norm for a midwinter production of a grand opera. And hey, we made it through every performance, even if it was by the skin of our teeth.
But from my current vantage point—the snowbound, black-and-white hush of the Green Mountains—the whole experience of Eurydice’s first production seems like a dream that I keep mixing up with reality, a memory from a past life or parallel universe. It doesn’t quite compute that throughout February 2020, even as news of a newly discovered, rapidly spreading coronavirus grew bleaker by the day, audiences of nearly three thousand people continued to gather night after night in the auditorium of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the singular communion that is live opera. In the pit, the orchestra and I crammed together to form one sweaty, subliminal sound machine. Onstage, the soloists sang in each other’s faces with spittle-spraying vehemence. The audience coughed cheerfully and continuously, as opera audiences do. The cast and I hugged at our curtain calls, and celebrated afterward at crowded bars. Now, after eleven months in a sepia-tone quarantine, every aspect of the Eurydice experience seems as fantastical, in its Technicolor vividness, as a memory of Oz.
After our last performance, I flew home to New York, where Clay and I shared an apartment with our friend, the director Zack Winokur. The virus was on everyone’s mind, but in Trump’s America, it was hardly the only potential source of anxiety in our polluted informational ether, and the threat still felt pretty remote.
A couple of weeks later, however, the distant alarm bells got louder, and the halfhearted precautions we’d all been following—the elbow bumps, “don’t touch your face,” and so on—suddenly seemed hilariously ineffective. Abstract unease curdled overnight into panic, and the world creaked to an unpracticed halt. In such a moment, performing artists were anything but “essential,” as nurses and grocery store workers were; we were, instead, suddenly a public health liability. I’m sure I was far from the only musician who detected the metallic whiff of some unknown anesthetic being released into the air. Our whole field was being lowered into a medically induced coma.
* * *
Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to write a book celebrating opera’s generative impossibilities. But I wasn’t sure when, if ever, I’d manage to step off the merry-go-round of musical work—composing, performing, traveling—long enough to gather my thoughts. When the pandemic took hold, eighteen months’ worth of performances evaporated from my calendar, and in-progress commissions were pushed back a year or more.
Though this exile from my usual practice was (and remains) intensely dispiriting, I realized it also afforded me a window like none other in my lifetime to write down why I love this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form, and what I think it’s capable of at its best. To borrow the title of a great opera by Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf, this book is full of l’amour de loin—love from afar.
There’s something to be said for distance, for loving from afar: there’s a reason that Jaufré, Saariaho’s troubadour protagonist, perfects the art of longing only when he’s worlds away from his imagined beloved, Clémence. (When Jaufré makes the mistake of trying to visit Clémence, he dies. Some love affairs, like some art forms, are meant to remain impossible.) In the same vein, if I may channel Jaufré’s idealism, I think there’s a strong argument to be made for getting to know opera “from afar,” in a setting other than the opera house.
When I was growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I hardly ever attended live operatic performances. I got to know the art form mainly through scores and recordings, thanks in large part to a nearby public library that had an extensive collection. Throughout elementary and middle school, whenever my mom was willing to drive me, I’d ransack the library’s shelves and stock up on as many scores and CDs as I could carry.
I immersed myself in opera the same way I immersed myself in books: operas, like the young-adult fiction I was reading at the time, felt to me like interior adventures rather than extravagant public spectacles. I didn’t associate opera with overpriced tickets or ladies in fur coats or venomously picky aficionados. Opera was pure sound, wild and lush and improbably beautiful sound. And opera taught me that music, a medium that already obsessed me, could be channeled as a vivid means of storytelling.
We performing artists tend to insist on the primacy of the live experience. This is partly because live performances do, of course, have many unique properties, but it’s also—let’s face it—in part because our livelihoods depend on them. Putting aside the latter consideration for a moment, I’d argue that the in-person experience of opera is not always the ideal gateway drug to an appreciation of the art form. The atmosphere of the opera house, and its many rituals, can have a double-edged effect. If you’re not already an opera fan, the opera-house experience might seem impressive, but being impressed is not the same thing as falling in love, and the theater’s many trappings might also obscure the opera at hand. (Think of the thick frame of gilt that surrounds the Metropolitan Opera’s stage. It seems almost engineered to swallow any opera that dares to wander into its gaping gullet.)
From outside, many opera houses look forbidding and ornate, part Masonic temple and part courthouse. Once you make it into the lobby, you might find the audience’s more seasoned operagoers to be an intimidating bunch: at intermission, they’re likely to hiss their devastating assessment of the performance by that evening’s leading lady, who, if she keeps singing the way she’s singing now, will have ruined herself within a few years, just you wait. If you’re sitting in a cheap seat, the orchestra might sound distant and muted. How could such an experience possibly compare to hearing Frank Ocean croon in your ears on your headphones back home?
I sympathize with people who feel this way. It makes perfect sense to me that the social experience of live opera might seem fun only the way an overpriced multicourse dinner or an elaborate themed dress-up party is fun. It’s worth the expense and the effort maybe once a year, tops.
But if you’re someone who savors the experience of reading books, or watching movies, or listening to music of whatever genre from the comfort of home, I want to invite you to think of opera as another art form that can be experienced this way. (And then, once you’ve established a basic familiarity with it, you’re likely to develop a taste for hearing it live.) Think of this book as a portal into your own inner opera house.
* * *
Over the past year, distanced for the first time in a decade from the daily grind of rehearsing, performing, coaching, and casting, I’ve felt closer than ever to my original, innocent experience of opera, that early love from afar. I’ve been reminded that operas can be approached from many angles. They can be treated as musical texts, works of theater, works of literature, immersive at-home audio experiences, historical documents, drag pageants, horror movies, Freudian psychodramas, even as a complexly vicarious form of primal scream therapy.
In this book, I want to invite you inside a wide array of operas written across more than four centuries. My aim is to close-read these operas, to take a deep dive into what makes them tick and what they have to tell us. This book is, in a way, a musical autobiography: from Verdi to Monteverdi, Adès to Birtwistle to Czernowin, every composer considered here has nourished my own work in some way. (It’s hardly comprehensive, though: Wagner’s operas, for example, are close to my heart, but Wagner barely features here. That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere.)
I also want to offer a practitioner’s view of the art form: these essays draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach. My hope is that you might gain a sense of how an opera’s creators experience a piece as it comes to life, both as it’s being written and as it’s brought to the stage. To that end, I’ll touch on the creative process for my operas Crossing and Eurydice, not because I want to make grand claims on behalf of either piece, but rather to offer a window into the many challenges of opera-making.
This isn’t a book that needs to be read strictly from beginning to end. If you’re interested in the nature of the working relationship between composer and librettist, you might jump to the chapter on Igor Stravinsky and W. H. Auden’s collaboration on The Rake’s Progress. If you’re a Shakespeare buff, you might want to dive into the chapter on Giuseppe Verdi’s fruitful lifelong Shakespeare fixation. If you’re drawn to mythology and magic, you might check out the chapter on the long history of Orpheus and Eurydice operas.
The notion of a productive impossibility—a goal that is both foundational and unreachable—recurs throughout the book. In a moment when so much in our world feels impossible in the bad sense, it has been liberating for me to look again at an art form that will always be impossible, and whose intrinsic impossibility is somehow also an inextinguishable life force.
Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Aucoin
