OPERA AS DRAMA
A HISTORY OF THE LYRIC STAGE 1590 - 2000
Opera is perhaps the most diverse and complex of art forms. Contrary to the stereotypical view based on a narrow range of works such as Traviata or Boheme (both masterpieces), opera has continually grown and changed. Its radical shifts have reflected and challenged all the major historical and cultural movements from its beginnings in the 1590s to our day.
This course is about opera - its history, aesthetics and styles - as drama. Music plays a key role, as do the arts of the singer and librettist; but it is with the theatrical impact and meaning of the opera that we are concerned. We take this for granted with Racine, Chekhov and Brecht - we look at them as dramatists not literary writers. The same should be true of Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Britten.
By following the core thread of the dramatic, the course shows how the component parts of opera - words and music, singing and acting, design and staging - interacted in different ways at different times. The result
was a series of radically different kinds of work, each with its own
artistic framework, pleasure, intention and meaning.
The history of opera is the history of the shifting priorities of those who created it - composers, writers, often singers and scenographers, and those who called it into being - princes and impresarios, nationalists and revolutionaries, courts and popular audiences. As each element became important or desirable so the relationship, above all between music and words, changed. In some works, music and the art of the singer were all, as in Handel or Rossini. For many, like Gluck or Wagner, the drama was the overriding concern. In some, for example Offenbach, Sullivan or Lehar, the objective was sheer pleasure and laughter. Others, such as Mussorgsky, Janacek or Tippett were deeply committed politically and socially.
Within this study of the overall history of the form itself, all the major composers - those who most affected it - are fully represented.
With such a variety, the course is designed to appeal both to those
who are familiar with opera and want to understand it in greater depth,
and those who may regard it with some nervousness - but suspect that it would engage them if only they could find a way into this most alluring and fascinating of art forms.
THE CLASSICAL TRADITION -
DARK AGES TO POST-MODERNISM
Many ideas and themes run through the history of European art - but none is more consistent than the use and interpretation of the Classical. There is hardly a major artist, poet, sculptor, dramatist or philosopher whose work has not taken account of one of the great classical models. To follow the debates and interpretations, imitation and rejection of the images and ideas, architecture and poetry, drama and philosophy of Greece and Rome is to follow an extraordinarily exciting and rich thread through the culture of the modern world.
The story of how Classical writing, art and architecture survived the so-called Dark Ages is itself a fascinating story. The Mediaeval world used the classics as one of the foundations of its intellectual thought and analysis. Ironically this led to the gradual opposition of human reason to the divinely revealed ‘truths’ - and power - of the Church. This formed the basis of the new Humanism and its art of the purely material world: landscape, the portrait and genre painting.
The great classical moments are the Renaissance and 18th century Neo-Classicism. But between them the Classical reasserted itself in Mannerism and the Baroque. And after them the 19th Century - Romantics and all - made its own special use of Classical images and ideas. The modern age, born of the cataclysm of two World Wars, is the first in which the arts - and the rest of our culture - have not been defined in this way. And yet just as we will find figures as diverse as Louis XIV, Charles II and Napoleon using the classics to legitimise their states, so in our own time have the Fascisms of Italy and Germany. Finally, as Modernism threatened to fragment European culture, so Yeats and Pound, Picasso and Beckmann, Britten and Tippett, tried desperately to hold on to it through Ulysses and Leda, centaurs and the Argonauts, Lucretia and the Trojan War. Even our own Post-Modernist age has scavenged the Classical to find fragments with which to bolster its architecture, music and art.
So profound is the impact of the Classical, that it is impossible to fully appreciate the works of the great painters and sculptors, composers poets and architects without understanding classicism and how they used it. To pursue the Classical Tradition is to reach deep into the core of all European art.
MYTHS, MONSTER AND THE MEDICI
(1999-2001)
In the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a fresco of 1635 by the painter/decoratorVannini showing Lorenzo the Magnificent surrounded by a group of painters. They are more or less
concentrating on the object to which Lorenzo is pointing it is the head of a satyr. Why, out of all the wonderful sculptures and paintings that came before him, should Lorenzo be depicted admiring this piece of grotesque whimsy?
There are so many aspects of the Renaissance, so many ways of approaching it no one of which can possibly tell the whole story. But one theme that runs through almost everything is the use playful, profound, moral or egotistical of myth. In this course we shall be studying a wide range of aspects of this intriguing and always delightful process. It will involve some of the major painters Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian music, in particular the birth of opera itself, poets, Renaissance garden designers and town planners, bankers try'ng to save their souls and architects, with more than a glance at the myths of Greece and Rome, Christian legends and North European fantasy.
A rich mix that will give you a rather different way of exploring this celebrated period.
ROMANCE AND REVOLUTION
(1999-2001)
Underlying the whole nature of Romanticism are three major enterprises. First is the abandonment of Reason as the guiding principle of our existence: as the I 8th century took stock of its failure to control war, poverty, disease and injustice its dream of a rationally controllable world finally exploded. The second is the rediscovery of nature both inside us and in the outer world: he impulse to replace failed reason with the violence of emotion and feeling.,Finally artists turned to the old myths of Greece and
Rome and discovered those of their own Northern world, reinventing them as a way of exploring the frightening and thrilling powers that were released into this new world.
Following these ideas we will explore a wide range of artists painters, composers, poets and musicians political and social events, philosophies and key historical moments. We will be listening to music and opera as well as poetry, and looking at paintings and theatre designs and sets to establish as full a picture as possible of this extraordinary period that still continues to fire our imagination.
GIUSEPPE VERDI - TRADITION,
REFORM AND INNOVATION
(1999-2000)
2001 saw the centenary of Verdi's death and the fulfilment of Covent Garden's cycle of his complete works. Despite being labelled "HurdyVerdi" for much of this century by the musical establishment he is now recognised as one of the masters of the operatic form and a cornerstone of the serious repertoire. This series of five lectures is designed to let us look behind the operas, to see how the political and artistic world of 19th century Italy helped shape them and their composer's development. What emerges is a highly sophisticated process but one that always confirms and supports the broad popular nature of Verdi's art.
To study his work in this way is to enhance our admiration for the man and to enrich our enjoyment of the operas as music, drama and life.
Verdi's development is, in many ways, a mirror of the century inwhich he lived and which his own life span virtually covered. Over the course of his large output, he moved from the naive but vigorous Romanticism of Nabucco and Ernani to the musical and dramatic sophistication of Don Carl6s, Otello and Falstaff. Significantly in these late works he meets the great European dramatists, Schiller and Shakespeare on their own terms and forges new, individual works of the greatest artistic significance. In the process he far outstripped his early rivals Bellini and Donizetti creating a musicodramatic world that placed his newly established homeland, Italy, back at the forefront of European culture. That political achievement, in which he played his own part, was both the background and, in many ways, spur that enabled this extraordinary achievement. To understand what Verdi accomplished in music, drama, staging and performance requires a knowledge of the fascinating world of European, and in particular Italian opera as a theatrical form. We too easily think of Wigner as the great innovator and reformer of opera in the 19th century. His own position and achievement is not to be questioned. But Verdi's is all too often overlooked in favour of his German counterpart largely because where Wagner enshrined his ideas in theoretical writings and hugely visible accomplishments such as Bayreuth, Verdi's work was done more quietly, perhaps in a
more professional, more businesslike way.
GREECE AND ROME
THE ROOTS OF OUR WORLD
(2002-2004)
We are in so many ways the sons and daughters of antiquity. Our cities are filled with buildings that copy or echo those of Athens and Rome. Our galleries celebrate the myths, themes and history of the Greek and Roman worlds. Our debates in Parliament, the law court and the papers use the logic of Aristotle and the language of Plato to address issues that were first formulated in the agora and stoa of the Athenian state. The theatre drama, opera and, ballet the literary traditions of pastoral, lyric, satire and epic are the inventions of antiquity. Our very sense of the citizen and the state Senate, Tyrant, Republic and orator the very words come directly to us from the classical world.
To understand the vibrant, fascinating worlds of Greece and Rome is not only to discover their inherent artistic beauty and intellectual illumination but also to enrich almost every aspect of our own world that we value and take seriously. And when we say "our world" we mean both the present, where postmodemism quotes the antique in its pediments and cornices in our streets and on our stages, and our more immediate past. What is the Renaissance without antiquity? or Georgian London? or Paris with its own Pantheon and (even) Birmingham with its Parthenon for a town hall?
In this course we will study the development of the arts from the very beginning of Greece to the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century A.D, the point at which the Christian influence radically alters the basis of the culture and its development. The only one of the arts that remains unrepresented is music although even here the descriptions of classical practice had a profound effect on the music of Europe.
Why Greece and Rome apart from their being the two classical civilizations? What, in reality, do they have in common? The answer lies in the famous observation that although Rome conquered Greece the result was that the culture, arts and even language of Greece then overtook those of Rome itself. And just as Rome strove to educateand refine itself on the model of Greece, so too the Europe of the Renaissance saw and modelled itself by the light of the newly appreciated antiquity of Greece and Rome. In fact, as we shall find, the distinction was hardly made or known until relatively late in the 18th century when archaeology and the chance find of Pompeii enabled Europe to see what differences, continuities and adaptations between the two cultures there had been.
We shall see the development of every aspect of the arts architecture, painting including depiction in mosaics and on ceramics, sculpture, drama, literature and the applied arts of pottery, jewellery and costume. With these we shall look at the groundbreaking work in philosophy, the invention and practice of history, mathematics and engineering. All of this will be set against the turbulent and engrossing story of political and social history filled with the statesmen, soldiers, tyrants, martyrs and idealists who remain our own standards of heroism and achievement.
THEATRE - MIRROR OF THE WORLD
(2003-2005)
A history of European theatre -
Plays and Playwrights, Actors
and Directors, Theatres and Design
Theatre is the most public of all the arts. In a space, artists and audience come together and between them the world is opened up and remade. No wonder theatre has always been censored - and banned. Theatre is, by definition, a living, real, experience. Each performance is different, if only because the audience changes and brings with them their personal experience and the “news of the day”. To see Macbeth in London is not the same as seeing it in Tokyo - or Baghdad.. Every shift in our world, means that the actor is saying something slightly different even if the actual words remain the same.
And theatre is far more than just words. A character’s turn of the head, smile or grimace can change the meaning of a line completely; another’s silence can be as potent as anything actually said. And when said is it to be loudly, softly, aside? Who decides such things? Is it the playwright, or the actor - or the director? The “play” we are watching starts to detach itself from any simple sense of belonging to the writer alone, and becomes the product of a network of people, including ourselves, reacting, interacting around an original text.
Then all the other elements. First, scenery: Hamlet set against Elsinore Castle, or perhaps in a 1920s drawing room, or just on a blank stage. Lighting, manipulating our mood as the scene changes from bright to dark, glowing sunset to the silver of the moon. Costume not only affects our perception of the character, but how the he or she moves and reacts. Music will always make a radical difference - sad, violent, threatening, amorous. The theatre building plays a major part - a fashionable event in the Haymarket, a more popular one at Drury Lane, something more serious at the Hampstead Theatre Club.
As if this weren’t enough, much of the repertoire carries with it specific historical and cultural meanings and traditions. If we are not aware of these, we will misunderstand often crucial words and actions; we will also be unaware of what decisions and choices have been made in our modern production. This in turn means that we will judge and react to it in a vacuum - just as we do with a painting if we fail to know about Mondrian’s
theosophy or Botticelli’s neo-platonism. To rely on our immediate reaction can be terribly limited. If we take art seriously, then we need to prepare ourselves for it thoroughly.
The course is designed to open up the history, traditions and practices of European theatre so that we can engage with it in the fullest possible way - both aesthetically and intellectually. It is designed to enable us to derive not only the greatest pleasure from it, but to be able to understand and discriminate within it as part of a living, real experience.
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