Four Famous First Nights

This book tells the story of five operatic premieres: four world premieres – Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” in London in 1724, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in Prague in 1787, Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots” in Paris in 1836, and Verdi’s “Otello” in Milan in 1887 – and one premiere of an opera house, when Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” in 1876 opened Bayreuth.The operas chosen have been arrived at from several points of view: historic occurrences, as with “the greatest opera ever written,” “Don Giovanni,” or the return of the aged and wildly popular Verdi to one of the greatest opera houses in the world, La Scala, with his new opera. The Handel portion spotlights the genre of opera seria, now once again a feature of opera seasons worldwide, while the Meyerbeer treats the genre of grand opera.That event was one of the most anticipated premieres in the 19th century, though the work itself has been overshadowed by such later examples as Verdi’s “Don Carlos.” But the Bayreuth opening, of the first opera of the Ring Cycle, is in some ways a greater event than any of the foregoing. For it was intended as an artistic justification as well as a music-dramatic statement, and as such a revolutionary approach to the art form itself.Out of these five works Thomas Forrest Kelly has woven a splendid tale (Yale University Press, 441 pages, $35), and one that, although it is packed with detail, remains highly readable and consistently informative. Mr. Kelly, a Harvard music professor, has accomplished this by doing what Walter Cronkite once did with history: By taking you back to the event itself, and putting you in the audience on that date, so that “you are there.”Mr. Kelly surrounds each event itself with contemporary eyewitness writing about it, including reviews of the performance; with the specifics of the theater, its size, configurations, stage possibilities; and with the singers of the evening, their backgrounds, their abilities, their limitations. We also hear from the impresarios and the people in the audience, and Mr. Kelly fills us in on the way opera was performed at that time. The text is broken up with pictures, inserts, stage plans, and set designs, so that the reader is given the most complete possible idea of what it was like to be there.What Mr. Kelly has created is a miniaturized history of the opera form itself and of its most important moments. Though all of us in the field have read many of the writers he excerpts (especially about the opening of Bayreuth), rarely have these writings been excerpted so tellingly and informatively. The event that was the premiere of “Giulio Cesare” is quite different from that of “Otello,” and it is to Mr. Kelly’s credit that he makes us realize the differences, not only in the music, the style of singing, and the staging, but in the acting and in the differing levels of importance to the outside world of each event.Mr. Kelly knows that he is writing for a public that is not thoroughly familiar with opera history. His explanations of, say, the “exit aria” formalism of the opera seria, or the leitmotif of Wagnerian opera, are simple, straightforward, and deft in that they do not write down to the connoisseur. And the plethora of detail that he gives – such as of the focal Parisian opera house on the Rue Lepelletier (not today’s Garnier, finished after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870), which was the site of all-important grand operas – only enlivens the discussion. After the discussion of each opera, he collects a series of documents for a fuller picture, and an afterward lists recordings.It is exactly this attention to detail that brings out many things we have never known about, and which place the operas firmly within their historical contexts – a context, by the way, which is being systematically undermined by current a historical stagings. Did you know that, even at the world premiere of one of the finest through composed works ever written (“Otello”), certain passages were repeated, and the great opera itself was followed by two acts of a ballet? Who stayed? What is more, that tough stickler Verdi, whose contract with La Scala allowed him to cancel the venture – even after the dress rehearsal – should he be displeased, made no objections. A ballet was merely the habit of the time.The first sentence of the book is inaccurate – “High-Baroque serious opera … is not much in vogue nowadays” – we exist in a flood of such works, mostly, it must be admitted, by the master Handel. And Mr. Kelly tries to make a case for “Les Huguenots” as a great opera, rather than as a greatly important 19th-century opera. (Its neglect today is partly owing to its vocal demands, but these are hitched directly to the lower quality of its music, made even more obvious by its inordinate length.) Nonetheless, he was correct in selecting it to represent the form.There are many books on opera, but even though this one only chooses five works from the vast number in the form, it gives a strong image of the history and diverse enjoyments of this great art form. Within its pages, you will be there.Mr. Smith last wrote for these pages on sopranos.

Four Famous First Nights

Four Famous First Nights

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