The Opera Guide: 100 Popular Composers UPDATED 2017

By Acorn Independent Press

THE OPERA GUIDE – 100 POPULAR COMPOSERS surveys the world’s greatest opera composers and their most popular works. Beginning with Monteverdi, who wrote the first important operas, they range through the repertory up to today’s ground-breaking works by Philip Glass, George Benjamin and other living composers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909122864

Book preview

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JOHN ADAMS

John Coolidge Adams; b 15 February 1947, Worcester, Massachusetts, US

Adams is among the leading opera composers who emerged in the late-20th century and, it has been claimed, the most frequently performed living American orchestral composer of our time. Often described as a minimalist, he has moved even further away than have Reich, his erstwhile mentor, and Glass, the other major figure in so-called minimalist opera, from the pared-down rigour characteristic of this approach in the 1960s and 70s. Indeed, Adams’s success as an opera composer lies precisely in the extent to which he has incorporated narrative, characterisation and other aspects commonly thought essential to opera, but antithetical to minimalism, to forge an operatic style on minimalist foundations.

While only ten years younger than Glass, Adams could be said to have become the foremost figure in a second generation of composers inspired by the early explorations of sustained sounds and repetition undertaken by La Monte Young and Terry Riley in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They built their experimental work on a solid conventional training in Western classical music and Adams has allied himself more consistently with this heritage, though he has also been extremely interested in the wide range of other musics – non-Western, jazz, rock – from which the minimalist approach in part derived. Following Adams’s move from the East Coast to the West in 1972, his music first became more experimental – notably during the earlier part of his period as a teacher at the San Francisco Conservatory (1972–82) – and then increasingly related to the styles and techniques of a range of 19th- and early 20th-century Romantic composers. His invention in the mid-1980s of an operatic style owing at least as much to earlier operatic and even oratorio traditions as to avant-garde genres of music theatre and performance art thus appears quite natural. And it is by bringing a new vigour and purpose to composing music for drama that does not avoid a clear narrative basis that Adams has found his full maturity.

Adams’s style from as far back as the late 1970s is, in fact, characterised by its individual development of a repetitive idiom in which direct emotional expression is not avoided and in which allusions to – or even direct quotations from – other musics often play a significant part; Shaker Loops for string septet (1978) represents the emergence of this style. An avoidance of extensive reliance on tuned percussion or keyboard instruments (mainstays of at least the earlier Reich and Glass) is significant. Even more important is an increasing concern with melody, harmonic motion and regular metre, which Adams shares with these composers but takes even further.

The development of this approach has taken him naturally to opera. In both Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams was aided by the American poet Alice Goodman, who provided him with texts closely reflecting the composer’s own musical approach in their deployment of everyday language; the choreographer Mark Morris also proved crucial to the concept and staging of each. But Adams has been most strongly influenced and assisted by the American director Peter Sellars, who has had a considerable impact on both the initial inspiration and the first productions of all seven of Adams’s staged works so far. As their instigator and co-creator, as well as director, Sellars has generally favoured subject-matter based on recent historical events; in several cases their protagonists were still living at the time of the work’s premiere. In seeking to make opera directly relevant to modern audiences, Sellars, Adams and their librettists (the latter role now often also taken by Sellars himself) attempt to root new opera directly in the culture and politics of its own time.

Nixon (1987) their first collaboration, is based on the American President Richard Nixon’s visit to the Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung in February 1972; this has now become Adams’s and Sellars’s most widely successful opera. The more reflective, even oratorio-like Death of Klinghoffer (1991) is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985. Goodman builds references to great literature of the past into her libretto for this. The opera has been the source of much controversy in the last 25 years over its alleged adoption of a pro-Arab and anti-Semitic stance. Public demonstrations, threats of cancellation of some performances, and the publication of diatribes by eminent musicologists such as Richard Taruskin, have been among the consequences of this. The creators of Klinghoffer have consistently denied that their opera promotes any anti-Semiticism or the glorification of terrorist acts.

The third and fourth collaborations of Sellars and Adams, now without Goodman and Morris, move away from the ‘grand opera’ of the first two to explore different ways of combining music and theatre. The ‘Songplay’ I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with libretto by June Jordan, is at root a rock musical, set at the time of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake and bending Adams’s musical style closer to popular forms. For the ‘Nativity Oratorio’ El Niño (2000), Sellars put together a wide variety of texts from English, Spanish and Latin sources; a more reflective work, this moves even further away from more conventional operatic modes to incorporate film as well as dance.

Their more recent music-theatre compositions explore further ways in which drama and music, text and image can be brought together to create musico-theatrical forms of relevance to the 21st century; all are set to texts assembled by Sellars. Doctor Atomic places the figure of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer at the centre of a work set in the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion in 1945. Taking its departure from a South-Indian folktale crossed with references to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, A Flowering Tree has a libretto adapted from Indian sources. The Gospel According to the Other Mary, described as ‘A Passion Oratorio in two acts’, is set to a mixture of Biblical and other texts; originally presented as a concert work, it has also been staged.

Nixon in China

Opera in three acts (2h 30m)

Libretto by Alice Goodman

Composed 1985–7

PREMIERES 22 October 1987, Brown Theater, Wortham Center, Houston; UK: 1 September 1988, Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh

CAST Chou En-lai b, Richard Nixon b, Henry Kissinger (also Lao Szu) b, Nancy T’sang (First Secretary to Mao) ms, Second Secretary to Mao ms, Third Secretary to Mao ms, Mao Tse-tung t, Pat Nixon s, Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao Tse-tung) s, Wu Ching-hua dancer, Hung Chang-ching (Party Representative) silent; satb chorus of Chinese militia, guests at banquet, citizens of Peking, trio of citizens (also singing the roles of participants in The Red Detachment of Women and the voice of Ching-hua); dancers in The Red Detachment of Women

SYNOPSIS

Act I Nixon – with an entourage that includes his wife Pat and Dr Henry Kissinger – arrives at Peking airport for his historic visit to China in February 1972. His first audience with Chairman Mao finds the Chinese leader philosophical and inscrutable, but a banquet the same evening brings the two sides together more successfully.

Act II Pat Nixon goes sightseeing and the Nixons watch a performance of the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, presided over by Madame Mao, in the course of which fact and fiction become hopelessly confused; the singer playing Kissinger is required to take a leading role in the ballet’s action.

Act III consists of one long scene in which the six main protagonists, on the Americans’ last night in Peking, ruminate on the events that have taken place and on their significance for themselves as individuals more than as political figures.

Nixon in China demonstrates, in a more extended form than ever before in Adams’s music, the move from stylistic allusion – to Romantic music in particular – to actual quotation. Musical and dramatic incident are firmly integrated, and music serves a vital role in the characterisation of the protagonists in dramatic situations given additional perspective by their open reference to, and reflection on, the fact that the Americans’ visit to China was carefully constructed and managed as a major media event.

The increasing emphasis on the protagonists as real people, in an opera that could easily have developed purely as a political pageant in poster colours, is most clearly demonstrated in the final act. And it is here that another expansion of Adams’s style is to be found: the virtual abandonment of minimalist repetition and its replacement by a new, highly lyrical manner, predominantly slow but very sensitive to the ebb and flow of action and, especially, text. Emphasis is placed firmly on a natural and free-flowing setting of Goodman’s libretto, under-pinned by a harmonic language of great variety and subtlety.

The Death of Klinghoffer

Opera in a prologue and two acts (2h 15m)

Libretto by Alice Goodman

Composed 1989–91

PREMIERES 19 March 1991, Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels; US: 5 September 1991, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; UK: 18 January 2002, Barbican Hall, London (concert); 23 August 2005, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (stage); 25 May 2003, Channel 4 (TV film)

CAST Captain b, Swiss Grandmother s, First Officer b, Molqi t, Mamoud b, Austrian Woman s, Leon Klinghoffer b, ‘Rambo’ b, British Dancing Girl s, Omar ms, Marilyn Klinghoffer c; dancers (both ensemble and solo, including the doubling of some of the solo singing roles); satb chorus of exiled Palestinians, exiled Jews, passengers etc.

As with the same team’s previous opera, The Death of Klinghoffer is based on a recent world event: in this case the hijacking, in 1985, of the cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their eventual murder of a paralysed American Jewish tourist. Goodman drew for her libretto on the Bible and the Koran, as well as on her own personal transmutations of everyday language. The original production by Sellars was shared between six European and American opera houses, but was not performed, as intended, at Glyndebourne. In the US, much more than at its European premiere, Klinghoffer’s political ramifications stirred up strong feelings, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. The original lengthy prologue portraying a wealthy American family relaxing at home and talking about travel abroad was cut, and the opera now begins with a Chorus of Exiled Palestinians followed by a Chorus of Exiled Jews.

The British film director Penny Woolcock directed a new film production of Klinghoffer for television. For this, the composer made some revisions to the score and conducted the soundtrack (this was in the process of being recorded in London when the 9/11 attacks occurred in America).

SYNOPSIS

Act I The cruise liner Achille Lauro has been hijacked just a few hours out of Alexandria. The purpose of the hijackers is at first unclear. The hostages are rounded up; the ship’s Captain is guarded by Mamoud, and both soon start to reflect on their situation.

Act II The liner awaits permission to enter the Syrian port of Tartus. The passengers have now been moved on deck, but the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer is forced to remain apart. The Palestinians begin to quarrel. Klinghoffer is shot. The Captain and the hijackers come to an arrangement which will allow the ship to return to Alexandria, where the Palestinians will be able to disembark. Klinghoffer’s body is thrown overboard. After their arrival in port, the Captain tells Mrs Klinghoffer of her husband’s death.

As in the final act of Nixon in China, Klinghoffer takes as its main subject matter the private thoughts and emotions of its characters. The two main acts allow the action to unfold via a libretto consisting mainly of individual statements and meditations. The opera thus falls into a sequence of arias and choruses inspired, according to Sellars, by Bach’s Passions. The arias offer reflections of the individual protagonists in the Achille Lauro drama, with the Captain of the ship emerging as the character with whom one might most readily sympathise. In this opera, however, unlike Nixon, Sellars and his associates deliberately eschew attempts at characterisation in order to focus more strongly on the issues and make the audience question their own preconceptions.

Musically, the opera continues for the most part the approach first observed in the final act of Nixon. Occasional use is made of what the composer himself calls his ‘trickster’ style – the other aspect of Adams’s recent development in his non-operatic works – as in the aria for a British Dancing Girl in Act II, which draws on popular styles in a more overtly minimalist way. But, for the most part, the music is more reflective, more melodic, contrapuntal and sometimes more dissonant, marking something of a watershed in Adams’s style, and responding acutely to the nuances of Goodman’s text. Still present, though, is a virtuosic approach to orchestration, aided in the premiere production by a specially devised sound-distribution system. The use of video to provide close-up views added a further dimension. Even more than Nixon, The Death of Klinghoffer distances Adams’s mature style from its minimalist roots.

Doctor Atomic

Opera in two acts (3h)

Libretto by Peter Sellars, based on original source material

Composed 2004-5

PREMIERES 1 October 2005, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco;

UK: 25 February 2009, Coliseum, London

CAST J. Robert Oppenheimer bar, Edward Teller b, Robert Wilson t, Kitty Oppenheimer ms, Pasqualita ms, General Leslie Groves b, Fran Hubbard b, Captain James Nolan t; satb chorus of scientists, technicians, secretaries and military personnel working on the atomic bomb

This opera centres on the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb, usually called the Manhattan Project. Its action takes place in June and July 1945, mainly over the last few hours before the bomb explodes at the test site in New Mexico. Alice Goodman, the librettist of both Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer was at first engaged for this project but, following her withdrawal, Sellars put together a montage of texts drawn from contemporary texts, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, nuclear physics manuals and declassified government documents; poetry by Charles Baudelaire, John Donne and Muriel Rukeyser, and texts taken from the Bhagavad Gita and a traditional Tewa Indian song are also included. A Doctor Atomic Symphony, drawn from orchestral music in the opera but also adding new material, was given its first performance in St Louis on 16 March 2007.

SYNOPSIS

Act I In the Manhattan Project laboratory at Los Alamos, the first atomic bomb is now almost ready for testing. It is June 1945, and since the Germans have already surrendered, many of the scientists involved are already questioning whether the bomb should be used at all. Caught in the midst of these disputes, Oppenheimer ruminates on his predicament. At the ‘Trinity’ test site at Alamogordo, the weather contributes to his problems.

Act II The next month still sees no resolution regarding the destructive threats posed by the atom bomb which has still not been detonated. The mixture of personal, political and scientific dilemmas continues, but the final countdown eventually leads to its inevitable conclusion, and the bomb goes off.

The private thoughts and emotions of all the protagonists in Doctor Atomic are, as usual with Sellars and Adams, the crucial foreground to a narrative based on real events and real people. As a consequence, the music of this opera attempts to balance lyrical reflection and dramatic urgency in scenes of frequently heightened musical and dramatic intensity. The centrifugal force is Oppenheimer himself, whose neuroses lead him to seek refuge, early on in the opera, in the poetry of Baudelaire, and subsequently express the full force of his personal crisis in the aria ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’, drawing on the poem by John Donne, that concludes Act I. Other participants in the action are tortured souls too. Edward Teller is soon excluded from the scientific team as unstable. Another scientist, Robert Wilson, is campaigning against the bomb’s use. Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, supports her husband but has her own concerns as well, which are examined via her relationship with her Indian maid, Pasqualita.

More than once in the opera, the weather becomes a significant part of the action too. In Act I, a freak electrical storm renders the bomb potentially dangerous to its minders, and causes Frank Hubbard, the chief meteorologist, to be blamed for the situation by General Leslie Groves, frustrated by pressure for success from the government in Washington. Captain James Nolan articulates the growing realisation of the problems arising from the toxic properties of plutonium in the bomb. In Act II, Wilson’s and Hubbard’s anxieties are tested to their limits, Pasqualita adds her own, now drunken, visions to the boiling cauldron of personal angst and physical danger. Oppenheimer succumbs to a vision of Vishnu in the night sky, as described in the Bhagavad Gita. As atomic fission is portrayed to be as splendid in its way as it will clearly be destructive, the sky clears and the bomb can finally be exploded.

OTHER OPERATIC WORKS I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, 1995; El Niño, 2000; A Flowering Tree, 2006; The Gospel According to the Other Mary, 2013 (concert), 2014 (stage)

PUBLISHER Boosey & Hawkes

FURTHER READING ed. Thomas May, The John Adams Reader: Essential writings on an American Composer, Amadeus Press, 2006; John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, Faber, 2008

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THOMAS ADÈS

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès; b 1 March 1971, London

Adès emerged in the 1990s as one of the most promising British composers of his generation. He studied at the Guildhall School in London before reading music at Cambridge University, where his composition teachers included Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway, and confirmed his individuality with a Chamber Symphony (1990), composed while he was an undergraduate. The series of vividly imagined works that followed boosted his reputation still further; they included his first opera, Powder Her Face, though at the time of its premiere the sensationalism and sexual explicitness of the subject matter overshadowed the craft and imaginative power of the score. Adès’s development as a composer has progressed in parallel with the increasing success of his career as a pianist and conductor; from 1999 to 2009 he was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. His orchestral work Asyla won the Grawemeyer Prize for Composition in 1999, and the following year he was awarded the Siemens Prize for Music. Since the premiere of The Tempest, Ades' works have included a violin concerto (2005), a single-movement symphony, Tevot (2007), the 'voyage for orchestra' Polaris (2010), and his longest concert work to date, Totentanz for mezzo, baritone and orchestra (2013).

Powder Her Face

Opera in two acts (2h)

Libretto by Philip Hensher

Composed 1994–5

PREMIERES 1 July 1995, Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham; US: 25 April 1997, Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley, California (concert); 25 July 1997, Wheeler Opera House, Aspen, Colorado (stage)

CAST Duchess s, Maid/Confidante/Waitress/Mistress/Journalist/Rubbernecker/Society Journalist s, Electrician/Lounge Lizard/Waiter/Rubbernecker/Delivery Boy t, Hotel Manager/Duke/Laundryman/Guest/ Judge bar

The colourful life of Margaret Sweeny, later Duchess of Argyll, whose eventual divorce from the Duke (in 1963) scandalised Britain, is the framework for a sometimes surreal series of episodes, viewed in flashback from the end of the Duchess’s life.

SYNOPSIS

Act I Mocked by an Electrician and a Maid in a hotel bedroom in 1990, the Duchess takes refuge in memories of her glamorous past. A male figure is seen in the doorway as the action switches back to 1934. The Duchess has divorced her first husband, and is about to marry the Duke; the Lounge Lizard sings her favourite song as the Duke himself enters. A Waitress describes the marriage of the Duke and Duchess in 1936, as the rest of the cast enact a series of tableaux depicting the ceremony and its aftermath. In a London hotel room in 1953, the Duchess fellates a room-service Waiter; a flashbulb goes off as he climaxes. The Duke’s mistress persuades him to ruin his wife, and they find the incriminating photographs.

Act II Rubberneckers eagerly discuss the divorce proceedings in 1955; the Judge delivers his verdict, branding the Duchess as having the ‘morals of a bed post’, and praising the Duke’s tolerance. The Duchess is interviewed by a journalist in the hotel room that by 1977 has become her home; as delivery men come and go, she laments the loss of elegance and style in the modern world. Returning to 1990, the Hotel Manager presents the destitute Duchess with a notice to quit within the hour. She recalls her past happiness but is terrified of the future; a final attempt to seduce the Manager fails. As she leaves, the Electrician and the Chambermaid emerge from beneath the bed and trash the room.

The libretto’s pitiless portrayal of the Duchess has a whiff of misogyny about it; even her pathetic state in the final scene fails to turn the portrait into a sympathetic one. But Adès’s virtuosic score, with a tendency to use instruments at the extremes of their ranges, captures that heartless brittleness exactly. The music, alternating set pieces with instrumental interludes, contains pastiches of 1930s dance tunes, but also shows its debts to Britten and Weill, Richard Strauss, Ligeti and Kurtág; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is quoted directly. The sharply characterised vocal writing includes coloratura for the Maid, and lines of greater suavity and breadth for the Duchess; the Judge’s summing-up is presented as a Bergian passacaglia that reaches a climax of expressionist frenzy.

The Tempest

Opera in three acts (2h 15m)

Libretto by Meredith Oakes after the play by William Shakespeare (1611)

Composed 2002-4

PREMIERE 10 February 2004, Covent Garden, London; US: 29 July 2006, Opera Theatre, Santa Fe, New Mexico

CAST Prospero high bar, Ariel high s, Caliban t, Miranda ms, Ferdinand t, King t, Antonio t, Stefano b-bar, Trinculo ct, Sebastian bar, Gonzalo b-bar; satb chorus Court

In both its musical and dramatic structure and approach to linear narrative, Adès's second opera, commissioned by the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, is much more conventional than Powder Her Face. Oakes’s libretto reserves every aspect of the original play, but offers a demotic paraphrase in rhyming couplets of Shakespeare's high-flown verse.

SYNOPSIS

Act I Prospero, deposed as Duke of Milan by his brother Antonio and exiled to an island that he has transformed into a magical kingdom, conjures up a storm to sink a passing ship carrying the King of Naples and his court, including Antonio. His spirit Ariel reports on the survivors and leads them to Prospero's kingdom. Caliban states his claim to the island, but is banished to his cave by Prospero. Ariel lures Ferdinand, the king's son, away from the other survivors; Miranda, daughter of Prospero, encounters Ferdinand and, to her father's fury, is enchanted by the sight of another human being. Prospero imprisons Ferdinand.

Act II The survivors of the shipwreck come ashore, and are taunted by Ariel. The King laments the loss of his son, but Gonzalo and Antonio's efforts to comfort him are confused by Ariel. Though Caliban is ridiculed by the courtiers, he calms their fear of the island's sounds and voices, but is silenced by Prospero's magic when asked who his master is. Caliban pleads for the help of Stefano and Trinculo in regaining his island. Ferdinand is liberated by Miranda, and Prospero realises that he cannot prevent their love.

Act III Ariel has led the King and his court across the island, still teased and denounced by Ariel. Prospero realises the horror his magical powers have unleashed, but summons Ariel to bless Miranda and Ferdinand's union. Caliban's attempted rebellion is easily quashed, and when Ariel describes how Antonio and the King are suffering, Prospero promises to show mercy. Prospero appears to the court; the king begs his forgiveness, and Ferdinand and Miranda are revealed. A union between Milan and Naples is announced; Prospero offers forgiveness to Antonio but is rebuffed, and breaks his staff so relinquishing his magic powers. Ariel is released, and despite Prospero's pleas, flies off to freedom. Caliban is alone on the island again.

Apart from some vague allusions to renaissance dance music in the third act, Adès's score, transparent and full of glinting instrumental colours, contains no parody or pastiche. Each of the three acts is anchored by a substantial set-piece aria, for Ariel, Caliban and Gonzalo in turn, which provides oases of limpid tonality in a musical world that otherwise shifts and changes very rapidly. The principals are crisply characterised vocally - stratospheric and increasingly wordless coloratura writing for Ariel, lyrical tenor lines for Caliban, smoothly contoured phrases for Miranda and Ferdinand. Only the largely declamatory writing for Prospero lacks real vividness; he has no large-scale vocal number to himself. The resolution of the final act is achieved over a huge, slowly moving chaconne in the orchestra, the culmination of a series of harmonic sleights of hand that underpin the entire drama.

The Exterminating Angel

Opera in three acts (2h)

Libretto by the composer and Tom Cairns based on the screenplay of El angel exterminador by Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza (1962)

PREMIERE 28 July 2016, Haus für Mozart, Salzburg; UK: 24 April 2017, Covent Garden, London

CAST Lucia de Nobile s, Leticia Maynar coloratura s, Leonora Palma ms, Silvia de Ávila s, Blanca Delgado ms, Beatriz s, Edmundo de Nobile t, Raúl t, Colonel high bar, Francisco de Ávila ct, Eduardo lyric t, Russell b-bar, Alberto Roc bar, Doctor, b, Julio bar, Lucas t, Enrique t, Pablo bar, Meni s, Camilla ms, Padre bar, Yoli treble; satb chorus; bear, lambs

Adès first saw Buñuel's enigmatic, surreal film when he was in his early teens, and conceived the idea of an opera based upon it around the turn of the 21st century, before he began work on The Tempest.

SYNOPSIS

Act I After an opera performance, guests are arriving for dinner at the Nobiles’ mansion, but the staff are trying to leave. A bear and some lambs are banished and there is dancing and piano playing but Leticia, the prima donna of the opera, refuses to sing. Though it is getting very late, none of the guests attempts to go home; they prefer to sleep in the dining room.

Act II The following morning the only remaining servant, Julio, announces that no food has been delivered and the guests discover they are trapped in the dining room. As the day goes on, illness and panic begins to spread among them, but Russell says he would rather die than experience the 'extermination'.

Act III Outside, a crowd is trying to reach those trapped within. The guests begin to act irrationally; lambs wander in from the garden, the roaring of the bear terrifies everyone. The army seals off the mansion and the guests butcher and cook the lambs. Leonora attempts a magic ritual, but claims that innocent blood is needed for it to succeed. The bodies of Eduardo and Beatriz are discovered in a cabinet, and the bear reappears. The guests decide that to gain their freedom, Nobile must be a sacrificial victim. As he agrees to be killed, Leticia realises everyone is where they were when their ordeal began, and she encourages them to repeat their movements and dialogues from that moment. This time she is willing to sing, and the guests find that they are now able to leave the room.

Buñuel's film, Adès has said, is 'an operatic story in a very pure form', and he has described The Exterminating Angel as 'a child' of his first two stage works. Without ever suggesting pastiche, the score continues his preoccupation with a whole range of historical models, from the baroque era to the 20th century. While the sound world certainly has its own distinctive colours – the sound of bells frames the opera, while the orchestration includes an ondes Martenot, heard when characters die or attempt to leave the room, and apparently representing the 'exterminating angel' itself. Other aspects of the score hark back to The Tempest in particular: the ultra-high coloratura writing for Leticia recalls that for Ariel and the final act is underpinned by an orchestral chaconne. Unlike the earlier example, though, the chaconne does not to bring closure to the drama, but suggests that the characters are locked into an endless cycle of repetition from which they cannot escape.

PUBLISHER Faber Music

FURTHER READING Thomas Adès, Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service, Faber, 2012

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DOMINICK ARGENTO

b 27 October 1927, York, Pennsylvania, US

One of the most admired and technically well-equipped American composers of his generation, Argento was initially self-taught as a composer. He commenced serious studies after leaving the army in 1947. From the Peabody Institute in Baltimore (where he worked with Nicolas Nabokov), he progressed to lessons with Hugo Weisgall, the locally based, Bohemian-born composer, whose compositional sophistication became a feature of his own works. Further periods of study with Dallapiccola in Florence and with Henry Cowell (again at Peabody) were later followed by a spell at the Eastman School where his teachers included Alan Hovhaness and Howard Hanson. A PhD marked the end of a long apprenticeship.

Meanwhile his first opera, Sicilian Limes, had been performed and withdrawn, and a second, The Boor, more successfully received. Settling in Minneapolis, Argento commenced a teaching career at the University of Minnesota that continued in step with his increasing success as a composer, especially of operas. In 1965 he and his librettist John Olon-Scrymgeour founded the Center Opera Company (subsequently the Minnesota Opera), which staged the premieres of three of his works. The steadily rising interest aroused by them, however, eventually brought forth commissions from other companies in the United States as well as follow-up stagings overseas.

Argento’s development has been marked by a constant ability to extend his range in terms of subject-matter and style; his careful craftsmanship never gets in the way of his fluency, nor has a discrete use of serial techniques (in The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe and The Aspern Papers) ever hampered his lyricism. But his success as an opera composer lies in his consistent understanding of what is effective in music written for the theatre.

Postcard from Morocco

Opera in one act (1h 30m)

Libretto by John Donahue

Composed 1971

PREMIERES 14 October 1971, Cedar Village Theater, Minneapolis; UK: 28 July 1976, King's College, London

Written for seven singers, a group of mimes and an orchestra of eight players, the opera sets a semi-surreal libretto in which only one character is named while almost all the others double parts designated by the possessions they carry with them – A Lady with a Hand Mirror, A Man with a Cornet Case, and so forth. The period implied is 1914 (giving occasion to parodies of popular song, Viennese operetta and a café orchestra playing Wagner). The location is less clearly defined, though the librettist suggests a scene ‘like an old postcard from a foreign land showing the railway station of Morocco’. In this true ensemble piece Argento has considerable fun with a range of styles and textures that mirror the swiftly changing moods of the absurdist plot.

OTHER OPERATIC WORKS Sicilian Limes, 1954 (withdrawn); The Boor, 1957; Colonel Jonathan the Saint, (1960), 1971 (withdrawn); Christopher Sly, 1963; The Masque of Angels, 1964; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 1967; The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, 1976; A Water Bird Talk, 1977; Miss Havisham’s Fire, 1979, rev. version, 2001; Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, 1981; Casanova’s Homecoming, 1985; The Aspern Papers, 1988; The Dream of Valentino, 1994

PUBLISHER Boosey & Hawkes

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SAMUEL BARBER

b 9 March 1910, West Chester, Pennsylvania, US; d 23 January 1981, New York

Barber was one of the most successful American composers of the mid-20th century. Confidently conservative in style, his romantic music has stood its ground through changes of fashion and seems as enduring as that of Copland or Gershwin, although it is less distinctively American in style.

Barber’s family background was conducive to his musical development. His mother was a good pianist and his aunt, the opera singer Louise Homer, was married to a composer. Barber began composing when he was seven and his first attempts at an opera date from three years later. In 1924 Barber became a student of singing, piano and conducting as well as composition at the newly founded Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. There he met Gian Carlo Menotti who became an essential colleague, librettist and near-lifelong companion. After graduating Barber went to study singing in Vienna, gave recitals and radio broadcasts and recorded his own song, Dover Beach (composed 1931), for voice and string quartet.

At Curtis, Barber received a thorough traditional grounding in composition from Rosario Scalero. His student works were polished and well received, enabling him to gain awards for European travel. He soon attracted the attention of major conductors such as Rodzinski and Toscanini. The latter conducted the first performance of the famous Adagio for strings (arranged from the String Quartet, 1936) which has become a classic.

All this augured well for Barber’s progression to opera, as did his early orchestral pieces related to dramatic subjects, such as the School for Scandal overture and the Music for a Scene from Shelley, as well as his ballets, Medea (1946) and Souvenirs (1952). Barber was concerned to communicate directly. In a late interview he said, ‘There’s no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand, is there?’

Vanessa

Opera in four acts (2h)

Libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, inspired by Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (1934)

Composed 1956–7, rev. 1964

PREMIERES 15 January 1958, Metropolitan, New York; rev. version: 3 March 1964, Metropolitan, New York; UK: 8 July 1999, Bloomsbury Theatre, London

CAST Vanessa s, Erika ms, The Old Baroness c, Anatol t, The Old Doctor bar, Nicholas b, Footman b; satb chorus of servants, guests, peasants, children, musicians

Menotti, as a seasoned man of the theatre, contributed significantly as both librettist and director of Vanessa. Elegant sets and costumes were designed by Cecil Beaton and the casting – as can readily be confirmed in the original recording – was superb. Barber had written Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1948) for Eleanor Steber and she was chosen for the title role (Callas had refused it on the grounds that the work had no melody and she could not be expected to fall in love with a man who had slept with the mezzo-soprano). Menotti’s plot has overtones of Ibsen, which suited Barber’s nostalgic tendencies and inspired arias, dances and dramatic moments in his strongest vein.

Remarkably for a first opera, Vanessa was a resounding success. Winthrop Sargeant considered it a ‘near masterpiece in the genre’ and Paul Henry Lang predicted that its impeccable vocal writing and sumptuous orchestration would be an ‘eye-opener for Europeans’. Although there were reservations about its derivative nature when it was performed at the Salzburg Festival later in 1958, Vanessa seems likely to survive.

SYNOPSIS

The action takes place at Vanessa’s country house in an unspecified northern country, c. 1905.

Act I Vanessa, her mother the Baroness and her niece Erika are waiting for the return of Vanessa’s lover, Anatol, who left 20 years ago. When he arrives he turns out to be the son of her lover, and also called Anatol; his father is dead.

Act II Anatol and Vanessa are becoming increasingly attached although Anatol had seduced Erika on the night of his arrival. Erika decides to give him up.

Act III At a splendid ball Anatol and Vanessa pledge their love in public: Erika collapses.

Act IV Erika, pregnant by Anatol, is recovering after attempting suicide. Vanessa and Anatol, married, prepare to leave for Paris. Erika settles down to wait for Anatol indefinitely, as had Vanessa at the start of the opera.

Although Barber sticks to the traditional forms of opera (arias, duets, ensembles, etc.), his musical language is far-ranging, encompassing folklike and parodistic elements within the predominantly lyrical whole. Barber and Menotti revised the opera to a three-act version in 1964, but the original version is more commonly performed.

OTHER OPERAS A Hand of Bridge, 1959; Antony and Cleopatra, 1966, rev. 1975

PUBLISHER G. Schirmer

FURTHER READING Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: the Composer and his Music, OUP, 1992

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GERALD BARRY

b 28 April 1952, Clarecastle, Ireland

With its rhythmic exuberance, persistent capacity for surprise and ability to illuminate familiar musical forms from unfamiliar perspectives, Barry’s music is as distinctive as that of any European composer of his generation. After studying at Cork University, a series of scholarships took him to the Netherlands (to work with Peter Schat), to Cologne (Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel) and finally to Vienna (Friedrich Cerha). Of those contrasting teachers, it was Kagel's influence that persisted longest, especially in the earliest work that Barry now acknowledges, Things That Gain By Being Painted, a music-theatre piece based upon The Pillow Book of the 10th-century Japanese lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon, in which a miming soprano is set against an unseen narrator. But Barry's conceptual instrumental works of the early 1980s, which quarry raw material from sources as diverse as Tchaikovsky symphonies, Irish folk music and BBC shipping forecasts, owed more to painterly ideas than to musical models, and pre-20th-century composers, especially Handel, have proved most significant to Barry’s development in the long run.

In his first opera, The Intelligence Park, baroque and classical forms provide the formal skeleton, while the harmonies are derived from Bach chorales; set in Regency Dublin, it explores the boundaries of the creative impulse through the story of a composer and his love for a castrato. That score’s emphasis on linearity was continued in The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, originally commissioned for television, in which the text for Handel's masque The Triumph of Time and Truth provides the dramatic framework and melody is the dominating element in the high-intensity score.

Both of those works had specially written librettos, but Barry's subsequent operas have all relied on pre-existing sources, from which he has distilled his librettos. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant uses the script of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play and film (1972) about a 30-something fashion designer's disastrous affair with a much younger woman, while the soprano monodrama La Plus Forte is based upon a one-act Strindberg play. In those works and in The Importance of Being Earnest, the text tends to be delivered with machine-gun-like rapidity, with voices pushed to the extremes of their ranges. Conversational exchanges veer between the comic and the tragic, while beneath them the orchestral commentary rampages along with furious brassy marches and manic toccatas that cut across the vocal lines, and often suggests a different emotional scenario altogether.

While continuing the vein of anarchic, surreal humour that had proved so successful in The Important of Being Earnest, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which weaves together episodes from both Lewis Carroll's Alice books, takes the dramatic and textual compression of Barry's theatrical works almost to the point of no return. The opera lasts under an hour, with scenes following each other without breaks or transitions; the vocal and instrumental writing (for a classically proportioned orchestra with added percussion and lower brass) is scrupulously detailed, but it unfurls so quickly that the nuances hardly register. Premiered in concert, with many cast doublings, it was hard to imagine how it could be staged convincingly.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Opera in three acts (1h 30m)

Libretto by the composer after the play by Oscar Wilde (1895)

Composed 2009-10

PREMIERES 7 April 2011, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles (concert); 17 March 2013, Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy (stage); UK: 26 April 2012, Barbican Hall, London (concert); 15 June 2013, Linbury Theatre, London (stage)

CAST Jack Worthing t, Cecily Cardew s, Algernon Moncrieff bar, Gwendolen Fairfax ms, Miss Prism c, Lady Bracknell b, Lane/Merriman b, Dr Chasuble, spoken role

Barry's libretto may jettison two-thirds of the text of Wilde's comedy, but what is omitted often seems like a shadowy presence behind what is actually sung, so that his score sometimes seems to be as much a commentary on the business of creating an opera out of such a well-known play as it is a manically witty stage work in its own right.

SYNOPSIS

Act I Algernon's London flat. Ernest, also known as Jack Worthing, admits to Algernon that he is in love with his friend's cousin Gwendolen. Algernon discovers a cigarette case inscribed with a message from Cecily to her 'uncle Jack' and forbids Ernest to marry Gwendolen until he reveals the true identities of Jack and Cecily. Ernest explains that Jack is the name he uses in the country, and that Cecily is his ward; she thinks that Jack is his feckless younger brother. Lady Bracknell and her daughter Gwendolen arrive for tea; Jack proposes to Gwendolen and is accepted - how can she not love a man called Ernest? - but when Lady Bracknell discovers that he was adopted after being found in a handbag at Victoria Station, she refuses to allow the marriage. Jack gives Gwendolen his country address, and Algernon makes plans to visit him there.

Act II Jack's country house. Cecily is studying German with her governess Miss Prism, until Algernon appears, posing as her guardian's brother Ernest, and so fulfilling Cecily's dream of marrying someone who is wicked, bad and called Ernest. As Algernon makes plan to have himself rechristened, Jack arrives with news of the death of the real Ernest in Paris. Gwendolen arrives and over tea she and Cecily discover that they both engaged to 'Ernest'; they quarrel, but Jack and Algernon's trickery is exposed, and the two women leave the men to argue among themselves.

Act III Cecily and Gwendolen tell Jack and Algernon that they cannot marry men with such Christian names. They agree both men must be rechristened. Lady Bracknell is horrified to discover that her nephew has become engaged to Cecily without her permission, though she is mollified when she discovers that Algernon's fiancée is so wealthy, but as Cecily's guardian, Jack refuses to give his consent to the marriage until Lady Bracknell agrees to his marrying Gwendolen. Miss Prism reveals that 28 years before she was governess in the Bracknell household, looking after the son and heir, but managed to leave her charge in a handbag at Victoria Station. Jack produces the very same bag, proving he is Lady Bracknell's nephew and Algernon's older brother and, it is quickly established, his real name is Ernest. Finally the two couples are able to marry.

As well as the quickfire dialogue and surreal comic additions that are all Barry's own - the role of Lady Bracknell is sung by a bass, Gwendolen and Cecily's quarrel is conducted through megaphones and accompanied by the smashing of dinner plates, and members of the orchestra join the women in condemning Jack and Algernon for their names - the score is crammed with historical references and allusions. There are nods to the forms of opera seria, and passages that recall Stravinsky, Webern and Messiaen, while explicit references to Auld Lang Syne (which Algernon is heard playing on the piano as the opera begins) and to Beethoven's Ode to Joy (quoted by both Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism) permeate the orchestral textures too.

OTHER OPERATIC WORKS Things that Gain by being Painted (music theatre), 1978; The Intelligence Park, 1990; The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, 2002; The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 2005; La Plus Forte, 2007; Alice's Adventures Under Ground, 2016 (concert)

PUBLISHER Schott Music

AC

BELA BARTÓK

Béla Viktor János Bartók; b 25 March 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania); d 26 September 1945, New York

Bartók wrote only one opera, but it is the major work of his early maturity. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle would doubtless have had successors but for the obstacles it encountered; these not only deterred him from writing for the stage but for a time blocked his creative faculty altogether. In 1911, at the time of its composition, Bartók was becoming established as a leading figure in Hungarian music, albeit through performance of early works which were no longer representative of his current style. In 1910 the first performance of his String Quartet No. 1, together with the experimental Bagatelles and the First Romanian Dance, Op. 8a, for piano, had been greeted with incomprehension verging on hostility, and when he entered his new opera for a competition sponsored by the Budapest Lipótvarós Club, it was rejected as unperformable and denied a prize.

The opera is nevertheless the most integrated of all Bartók’s works written before the First World War and the first to show a completely personal synthesis of the various strains in his music up to that time. Seven years earlier he had been writing chamber works in a post-Brahmsian manner. Then, in about 1905, he made his first contact with the ancient peasant music of Hungary, a music remote from the Hungarian style copied by Brahms, Liszt and others; and a year or two later he came across the latest piano music of Debussy (the Estampes and Images). The Bagatelles of 1908 show in rather anecdotal form some of the effects of these encounters; folk tunes with drumming accompaniments alternate with pieces using streams of common chords, or series of irregular scale patterns that seem to mimic the modal scales of peasant music. In the first Bagatelle the left and right hands play in different keys, a semitone apart. But the String Quartet No. 1, written at about the same time, sticks to a lyrical manner not wholly remote from the Expressionism of contemporary Viennese music, though with folksong ingredients too. In the opera, which was Bartók’s first work for voices, these apparently incompatible elements fused to create a unique masterpiece of Hungarian Symbolism.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

A kékszakállú herceg vára

Opera in one act (1h)

Libretto by Béla Balázs, after the story La Barbe bleue by Charles Perrault (1697)

Composed March–September 1911; ending rev. 1912, 1918, 1921

PREMIERES 24 May 1918, Budapest Opera; US: 8 January 1946, Dallas (concert); 2 October 1952, City Center of Music and Drama, New York (stage); UK: 16 January 1957, Sadler’s Wells, London

CAST Prologue (The Bard) speaker, Judith s, Duke Bluebeard bar, Bluebeard’s former wives silent

Balázs’s libretto owes a good deal to Maeterlinck’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, set by Dukas, and was apparently written in the same spirit – that is, without commission but in the conscious hope that it would be set as an opera: ‘I wrote [it] for Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály because I wanted to give them an opportunity to write works for the stage.’ It treats the well-known legend of Bluebeard in Symbolistic fashion as an allegory of the incommunicable privacy of our inmost selves, and hence as a tragedy of Expressionism well adapted to the dying years of Romanticism. It must have had special resonance for Bartók, an intensely withdrawn but passionate man who had, moreover, recently married (the opera is dedicated to his wife, Mártá Ziegler).

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle had to wait until after the success of Bartók’s ballet The Wooden Prince (1917) for its first production, and after 1918 there were no further Hungarian productions for nearly 20 years because the reactionary regime of Admiral Horthy would not allow the socialist Balázs’s name to be credited, and Bartók would not allow performances if it were not. Recent revivals have shown, however, that the work’s supposed untheatricality is a myth; static it may be, but the strong visual imagery more than compensates.

SYNOPSIS

The short spoken Prologue (often omitted in performance) hints that the well-known tale is to be retold as a parable of the inner self; the curtain then rises on a ‘vast, circular Gothic hall’ with seven large doors. When Bluebeard and Judith enter through another door at the top of the stairs, the ‘dazzling white opening’ is the only light in the darkened hall.

A short orchestral introduction sets the gloomy scene. Judith, who is still in her wedding dress, has married Bluebeard against her family’s wishes. She finds his castle cold and dark and the walls ooze moisture. Bluebeard reminds her that she could have married into a ‘brighter castle, girt with roses’, but she insists that she will bring brightness to his castle. An orchestral transition clearly supports Bluebeard’s denial of this possibility.

Judith now notices the seven doors and demands that they be unlocked. She hammers on the first door, and as she does so a deep sigh is heard from behind it ‘like the wind in a long, low corridor’. As the door swings open to reveal Bluebeard’s torture chamber a blood-red light glares on to the stage. Undeterred, Judith insists on opening the second door. This time Bluebeard’s armoury is revealed in ‘a lurid reddish-yellow light’. Once again the ‘blood’ motif intrudes, as Judith sees blood on the weapons. But as she presses Bluebeard for the remaining keys, he senses the joy of release from oppressive secrets. He allows her three more keys. The doors open to display first his treasury and then his garden, bathed in a blue-green light. Yet again, the image of blood returns as Judith sees spots of red on the flowers. Finally the fifth door opens on to Bluebeard’s vast and beautiful domains, portrayed in the grandest and loudest music in the whole work.

This is the architectural centre of the opera, and its visual climax in terms of light. The mood now returns gradually to the gloom and darkness of the start. Bluebeard tries to distract Judith from the remaining two doors, but she persists. She sees blood even on the lands that for him are radiant with light. Reluctantly he yields the sixth key, and as she turns it in the lock another deep sigh warns of sinister revelations, and a shadow passes over the hall. The door conceals a silent lake of tears. Judith now exerts her feminine guile to coax the final key out of Bluebeard. She questions him about his past lovers and suddenly guesses that the blood on his possessions signifies that he has murdered them all. Bluebeard gives her the key. The seventh door opens (at this point doors five and six should swing shut), and his three former wives, richly adorned, process slowly out. The first, he says, he met in the morning, the second at midday, the third in the evening. ‘You’, he tells Judith as the three women vanish back through the door, ‘I met at night.’ He dresses her in the crown, mantle and jewels she herself brought from the treasury (the third door closes as he does so), and she slowly follows the other wives through the seventh door, which closes behind her. ‘The darkness of night creeps back across the stage, and engulfs Bluebeard.’

In musical style, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is still an early work which shows Bartók’s debt to German and Austrian late-Romanticism. But it also reveals influences that were to help turn him into an abrasive modernist. Debussy is an obvious model for passages such as the massive parallel chords at the opening of the fifth door (cf. La cathédrale engloutie in the first book of Préludes, published in 1909), while echoes of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, a work Bartók had once transcribed for piano, are unmistakable in the biting semitone clashes of the ‘blood’ motif. Yet Bluebeard is hardly a derivative score. It has an individuality that comes partly, perhaps, from Bartók’s study of Hungarian folk music, with its strange modal scales, which seem to rub off on the opera’s harmony as well as on its melody. The sharpened fourth note, which produces the interval C–F#, is a common feature of the folk songs Bartók was collecting at this time, as is the descending perfect fourth, and both leave their mark on the very opening of the opera. Also typical of Hungarian peasant music are rhythmic details such as the decorated first beat, which produces the characteristic ‘snap’ or ‘turn’, and the so-called parlando rubato style of word-setting, which ensures that the incessant Hungarian accent on the first syllable rarely becomes monotonous, though it makes translation hard. Balázs himself modelled his regular octosyllabic lines on peasant verse.

Balázs’s imagery, on the other hand, aligns him with modern Expressionism, with its strong colour symbolism; and with the German art nouveau, or Jugendstil, of which images of blood, flowers, castles and crowns were the stock in trade. Bartók adapts the gentle colourings of Debussian Impressionism to provide vivid but not-so-gentle musical equivalents of his imagery. In this respect Bluebeard is a kind of stage tone poem. It also has a strong built-in symbolism of its own, based on the opposition of keys and tonal centres. The score follows the arch form of the libretto. The darkness–light–darkness cycle is exactly matched by the tonal scheme, F#–C–F#, with its centre at the opening of the fifth door, and its ending in the ‘darkness’ music of the start. Bartók’s later instrumental music offers many more instances of this type of plan: the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (A–Eb–A), its third movement, and the larger arch structures of the Third and Fourth String Quartets. The actual key symbolism of Bluebeard, however, is unique in Bartók. F# stands for Bluebeard’s world, while the outside world represented by Judith inhabits the region of F and C. But the symbolism is made ambiguous. For example, the C major of the fifth door is Bluebeard’s pretence at formality, while Judith sees the shadow of blood on it (F#). Bluebeard’s first note is F#; Judith’s is F, but the wives are in C minor, though now belonging exclusively to his world. Bluebeard’s last two notes are F# and C, and the last orchestral note C#. The same ambiguity is constantly present in the harmony, which achieves psychological depth by mixing elements rather than segregating them.

PUBLISHER Universal

FURTHER READING David Cooper, Béla Bartók, Yale University Press, 2015

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

b 16 December 1770, Bonn; d 26 March 1827, Vienna

Amid the abundance and supreme self-confidence of Beethoven’s oeuvre, his solitary opera cuts a strangely isolated and equivocal figure. In large-scale instrumental forms, Beethoven wrote prolifically and with a mastery surpassed by none. Yet he achieved only one opera – and this not from any lack of interest in writing for the theatre. (Music for the stage forms a surprisingly large part of his output – Egmont and the Prometheus ballet music are only the most obvious examples – and at intervals throughout his career we find him searching for a congenial opera libretto.) Moreover, this one opera took more than ten years to reach its final shape and went through three separate versions and no fewer than four overtures. Compared with the speed and assurance with which he wrote the Eroica Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the Razumovsky quartets, this degree of uncertainty suggests a clear distinction between a composer in his element in the symphonic medium and out of it in the operatic form.

So the argument frequently goes. Fidelio has regularly fallen foul of academic commentators. It is as if the work’s detractors needed to free themselves of the burden of Beethoven’s greatness by finding some field of composition in which he was not a master but could, on the contrary, be criticised and even patronised with impunity. Yet looked at without prejudice (including the prejudice against opera with spoken dialogue), Fidelio in its final form is as characteristic and as powerfully wrought as anything Beethoven wrote. It took him longer to perfect, not only because to begin with he lacked experience of the operatic medium but also because the subject – the unjustly imprisoned man, the fearless, dedicated woman – moved him too much and struck such resounding chords in the depth of his being. But he got it right in the end.

Fidelio, oder Die eheliche Liebe

Fidelio, or Married Love

Opera in two acts / 19 scenes (2h 15m)

Libretto by Joseph Sonnleithner and Georg Friedrich Treitschke, after the libretto by Jean Nicolas Bouilly for Léonore ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux (1789)

Composed 1804–5, rev. 1806 and 1814

PREMIERES original three-act version: 20 November 1805, Theater an der Wien, Vienna; first rev. version, in two acts: 29 March 1806, Theater an der Wien; second rev. version: 23 May 1814, Kärntnertortheater, Vienna; UK: 18 May 1832, King’s Theatre, Haymarket, London; US: 9 September 1839, Park Theater, New York

CAST Leonore (Fidelio) s, Florestan t, Rocco b, Marzelline s, Jaquino t, Don Pizarro bar, Don Fernando b-bar, first prisoner t, second prisoner bar; satb chorus of officers, soldiers, state prisoners, people

Vienna first heard the rescue operas of the French Revolution school in the spring of 1802. These opéras comiques – i.e. operas with spoken dialogue, of which Cherubini’s Lodoïska and Les deux journées were the prime examples – startled the Viennese with their dramatic force, realism and topicality and, for the next few years, dominated the Viennese stage. They made a profound impression on Beethoven, whose orchestral style, not only in Fidelio but generally, shows clear signs of the influence of Cherubini’s massive, driving tuttis, insistent rhythms, incisive accents and cross-accents, and strong dynamic contrasts. By early 1803 he had signed a contract with the Theater an der Wien.

For some reason it was for a work not after the current French model but on an ancient Roman subject, entitled Vestas Feuer, the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder (perhaps Beethoven accepted it because of his admiration for The Magic Flute). He composed a couple of scenes – musical material from one of them was later used for the Fidelio duet ‘O namenlose Freude!’ – but by the end of 1803 he had abandoned it and turned to a French libretto by J. N. Bouilly (librettist of Les deux journées), which had been set a few years earlier by the French composer Pierre Gaveaux (and which both Paer and Mayr set at about the same time as Beethoven).

The plot was based on an actual event that had happened not long before in France during the Terror: a woman disguises herself as a man in order to free her husband from a gaol where he is being held as a political prisoner. The poet Joseph Sonnleithner wrote a German version, and Beethoven worked on it during 1804 and the first half of 1805. Composition coincided with his abortive love affair with Josephine von Brunswick, and there is little doubt that his longing for a woman who would commit herself unreservedly to him gave added intensity to his portrait of Leonore, just as his self-identification with the lonely, persecuted Florestan – immured in the darkness of his cell, as Beethoven felt himself imprisoned in his growing deafness – contributed to the extraordinary force and vividness of the dungeon scene.

Despite its many beauties the first version of Fidelio (usually known as Leonore, the title Beethoven wanted to give the work) was not a success when it was performed in November 1805. Vienna was occupied by Napoleon’s army. Most of Beethoven’s supporters were absent, having fled the city, and by the time they came back the opera had been taken off. But it was also felt that the work had failed because it was too long, in particular because the early scenes dragged. For the revival in March– April 1806 Beethoven was persuaded, by Stephan von Breuning and others, to make cuts, some of them quite drastic. In this form (in two acts instead of three) it was more successful, but Beethoven, in dispute with the management, withdrew his score after only two performances.

It was not heard again for eight years. (A Prague production planned for 1807 came to nothing. It was probably for this production that Beethoven wrote the overture known as Leonore No. 1.) In 1814 when his fame (thanks to the enormously popular orchestral extravaganza Wellington’s Victory) was at its height in