Opera League Seminar: Carmen and The Magic Flute

This morning I paid my dues to opera geekdom by going down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the L.A. Opera venue) for a seminar on their next two operas. It's a Saturday, mind you, but these are two of my faves. When I read in their last newsletter about the chance to attend lectures about them, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. What would possess me to get up at dawn on a Saturday to hear scholars blow hot air about operas? The Magic Flute and Carmen, that's what.

Let's start with Carmen, shall we? It was the second lecture, but it's the next one they're putting on. Performances start two weeks from today and continue into the middle of December. Indeed, I've just bought my ticket for the first Saturday in December. And then in January they'll be doing The Magic Flute. I'm not sure why they talked about The Magic Flute first. Now that I think about it, maybe it's because that opera was written first. It came out in September 1791 whereas Carmen debuted almost a hundred years later, in March 1875. Whatever. They're staging Carmen first. So I'll talk about that first.

If you only see one opera before you die, Carmen is a sure bet. No, I'm not just saying that. I wouldn't say the same thing about The Magic Flute. Or any Mozart opera for that matter. Don't get me wrong, Mozart knew opera. His are among the best. You've got The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and, one of my faves, The Marriage of Figaro. But I'm talking one opera here. If you've never seen an opera before, and you could only pick one, Carmen's a definite winner. I'm sorely tempted to recommend The Marriage of Figaro, but since that sucker's four hours, I'd have a hard time recommending it to someone who's never seen an opera and who only has the chance to see one. Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute aren't exactly short stories either. Carmen, however, clocks in under three hours and has what just about every classical music buff and their cousin considers some of the most beautiful music the world's ever heard. I don't care how alien opera is to you, I guarantee you that you'd recognize at least two of the numbers in this piece. You've got that one scene early on when Carmen herself is singing in the street with all those people standing around. And then you've got that one instrumental ditty toward the end, right outside the bullfight arena. The undisputed best opera that's ever come out of France, Carmen is the C in the ABC operas, the three operas widely considered to be the most popular in the repertoire. The A stands for Aida, and the B is La Boheme. In other words, if you can only see one opera in your life, and Carmen isn't it, either of the other two would be just as surefire a bet.

Speaking about Carmen this morning was a chap called Williams, Simon Williams. He's an English chap who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. Specifically, he is both a professor and the chair of the Department of Dramatic Art. The theme of his lecture was why Carmen was such a dismal failure. Premiering in Paris on March 3, 1875, Carmen was composed by thirty-six-year-old Georges Bizet. According to Simon, the vitriolic reviews affected poor Georges to such an extent that part of the reason why he died of a heart attack exactly three months to the day after the premier was because he took the reviews so personally. They precipitated a depression, which in turn affected his health. The date of his death was not only the three-month anniversary of his opera's debut, it was his sixth wedding anniversary.

Like movies today, operas were oftentimes adapted from another work. Quite a few of Mozart's operas were adapted from plays, for example. Carmen was adapted from a novella published about thirty years earlier by a Frenchman named Prosper Mérimée. Set in Seville, Spain circa 1830, it's a pretty simple story. You've got this hot factory girl named Carmen, right? And then you've got this army guy named Don Jose. Dude falls head over heels for our gal and flips his life upside down to get her. He's got this other hot gal who wants to marry him, and who keeps him informed about his ailing mother. Well, so much for that. At first Jose says he'll go back to Mom, but once he's under Carmen's spell, forget it. Forget Mom. Forget this hottie who wants to have his kids. He also blows off his superior. And to make his unhinging complete, he goes and joins a group of bandits or something. By the end of the opera, in other words, Jose's pretty much gone a full one-eighty from the prim and proper military man and momma's boy we meet in act one. And I'm not just referring to a total change in his outward comportment, but in his emotional psyche as well. Again, at the start of the piece, Jose's all composed and professional seeming. But by the climax, his very being is riven into pieces by a fiery jealousy and insecurity. It's only then that we realize the Don Jose at the start of the opera was just a flimsy facade. The Don Jose at the end is the real Don Jose, and good for Carmen for getting him in touch with himself, with the base elements of his being which he'd been trying in vain to control.

So why was Carmen such a friggin' flop? Well, pretty much for the reasons intimated above. Remember, it was 1875. Things like women's lib and feminism weren't even a seed in anyone's noodle. This opera was just too racy for the times, and specifically for its venue, the Opera Comique. No, Opera Comique doesn't mean funny operas. It was a brand of operas founded in the early eighteenth century as a French alternative to Italian operas. You have to understand that Italians invented opera. There was a time when the word "Italian" in "Italian opera" was redundant. There was no other kind. But soon enough the rest of Europe started contributing to the art form. Opera Comique is an example of the French contribution. Simon summed up Opera Comique as essentially being opera that included speaking parts instead of just pure singing. Much more than that, before Georges showed up with Carmen, Opera Comique had a tradition of being very chaste. Characters never died. The endings were always happy. Without spoiling anything for you, let's just say that Carmen has things which don't exactly jive with that tradition. I agree with Simon that it's kind of weird that Georges would be so taken aback by the adverse reaction. He knew Opera Comique better than most. How could he think a storyline as racy as Carmen's would go off without a hitch?

Simon said the problem was even more fundamental than that. In his words, Georges was a square peg trying to fit into the round hole of the Paris theater scene. Georges wanted sex in his work. He wanted hips, sensuality, all that sweaty stuff that was antithetical to the audience's sensibilities at the time. Playwright Henrik Ibsen was doing something similar at the same time with his plays. Like Georges, he was writing about sex and other topics that people in polite society didn't want to talk about.

Rehearsals for the premiere of Carmen were accordingly pretty tense. The cast members had no illusions about how their new opera was going to be perceived. Infighting became the norm. The two glaring exceptions were the two leads: Marie Galli-Marié (Carmen) and Paul Lhérie (Don Jose). Simon said they stood by their man Georges Bizet to the very end. When any doubters let their doubts be known, these two wouldn't hear it.

The opera didn't flop right out of the gates, just exactly. On the night of the premiere, act one was a rousing success. Georges was backstage feeling good. But as the second, third, and fourth acts progressed, people steadily walked out. Again, Opera Comique was the Disney of its day. Parents brought their kids to it. Young couples came to celebrate their engagements. An opera like Carmen was the worst kind of opera for this venue. In fact, now that I know what I know about Comique, I'm amazed Georges would allow his piece to be played there. Didn't he have any other choices? Seriously, even if it meant an opera house in another country? At any rate, those who were still in their seats by the time the last curtain fell were dazed and confused.

Poor Georges. The theater tradition of his hometown was antithetical to everything he stood for culturally and socially. He was a positivist. He went for realism at a time when Romanticism was in theatrical vogue. One of the things that rubbed his cast the wrong way was how he made his choristers individuals. He didn't use his chorus in the traditional wedge format whereby the entire body of choristers move around the stage en masse. Georges was the verite storyteller of his day. He did dabble in other kinds of operas, though, such as grand opera. Ivan IV is perhaps the most popular example of that. And he did opera buffa (light or comic opera), such as Don Procopio.

And he sure had his fans. Some Russian composer named Tchaikovsky came to Paris to see Carmen. At first, he remained mum on his opinion, maybe because he figured he'd be drowned out by the critics going to town on it. Many years later, though, he wrote a review that was very positive. Nietzsche was a fan too. It is kind of difficult to imagine this opera getting even mixed reviews, let alone negative ones. To this day Carmen is hands-down the most widely performed French opera on Earth. It's one of the five most popular operas in any language.

Amazing, really. Here people were. It's almost 1900 already. By our standards, people were still relatively prudish. And in France of all places, a country that views us Yanks as being too loyal to our Puritan heritage.

Simon concluded by saying flat out that Georges Bizet's death is the greatest tragedy opera has ever suffered. Mozart was also in his mid thirties when he died, but he'd already churned out a lifetime's worth of stuff. Not so Georges. While it's hard to see what more Mozart could have possibly done, it's not hard at all to imagine what Georges could have accomplished had he lived to brush off Carmen's bad reviews. It boggles the mind, really. Simon's right. What a tragedy.

Like I said, Simon was the second of two speakers, so his remark about Georges's death being the opera world's greatest tragedy was how this morning ended, and what an exclamation point that was. Now let's back up to the first lecture, on Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Delivering this lecture was an American named Mitchell Morris. Mitchell is a musicology professor at UCLA. What stands him apart is that he doesn't just study human singing. Dude does whale songs too. There was some interest in that amongst the crowd this morning. I mean really, how often do you get to hear someone talk about the art of whale singing? Alas, he had to defer that bit of esoterica to another time.

It's just as well. Like any Mozart opera, The Magic Flute provides plenty of fodder to fill up a lecture. Or a whole book. Remember how I said above that if you see only one opera in your life, Carmen, Aida, or La Boheme are a safe bet? Well, if you've got time to squeeze in a second one, The Magic Flute's a sure thing. Premiering in a suburban Vienna theater on September 30, 1791, this was Mozart's final opera. Strangely enough, he died about three months later, just as Georges did three months after Carmen. Actually not even three months. He died December 5. Unlike Georges, though, Mozart's ill health wasn't precipitated by negative reviews. In fact, then as now, Mozart was pretty much critic proof. Nah, Mozart's health was bad already. No one really knows how he died. He did have poor living and working habits, which obviously had to contribute somewhat. But a person dying at thirty-five in the pre-antibiotics age wasn't all that unheard of, sad to say.

Mitchell admitted to having mixed feelings about The Magic Flute, and mainly that's because of its narrative incoherence. Like me, Mitchell doesn't attend opera exclusively for the music, as some people do, not looking at the supertitles and just basking in the sound. That's fine and all, but I want to know what's happening on stage. So does Mitchell, and what's happening on stage with this opera is all over the place.

First of all, you've got a main character who's a prince from Java. Tamino's his name. But when it starts, he's in Egypt. Some of the characters he interacts with are Egyptian priests and so on. And the villain is a woman known only as the Queen of the Night. Well, what's her deal? Where's she from? And how in tarnation did Tamino get "lost" in Egypt? Why did he leave Java in the first place, and what was his intended destination? See what I mean? When it starts, Tamino, a Javanese prince, is lost in Egypt. Ooooooookayyyyyyyy. 'Course, what you need to know going in is that Mozart had always intended it to be a fantasy. The libretto for the opera (a libretto is to an opera what a screenplay is to a movie) was written by his good friend Emanuel Schikaneder, a writer, singer, and actor who played the bird man Papageno in the premiere. So Mozart knew from the get-go that his new opera would start out with a giant snake in scene one, that one of the characters was a man-bird hybrid, and so on. When you've established it's a fantasy, man, all bets are off.

Mitchell went even further with why he wasn't comfortable with The Magic Flute as an opera. It's a more fundamental issue: Technically speaking, The Magic Flute isn't an opera. It's a Singspiel, the German equivalent of a musical at that time. While already hot in Europe in the 18th century, musicals didn't really take off in the U.S. of A. until Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in the spring of '43.

To help put Mozart's time in context, Mitchell pointed out that the way we experience an opera today is vastly different from how people experienced Singspiels. Today when we see an opera, or a play or musical, we sit silently in a darkened auditorium with our attention one hundred percent on the performance. That's a good one-eighty from how Germans and Austrians took in Singspiels in the beforetimes. Going to a Singspiel wasn't just about the performance, it was a social event where the performance was just one of many things going on. The lights didn't go down, for one. People in the so-called audience would sit around and chat, gossip, have dinner, play cards, throw down some beers. Seriously. No dimmed lights. No reverent hush. Quite the contrary. Mitchell said the closest we come to that today are rock concerts. It wasn't like that everywhere, though. You'd have recent college graduates from Great Britain going on their Grand Tour. The itinerary would invariably include one or more of the German-speaking states and, while there, they'd take in a Singspiel. Not knowing what to expect, they'd be just as dumbfounded by the experience as any of us today would probably be.

So I guess Mitchell's point in going into all that detail is that, at that time, plot wasn't the point. People weren't there to analyze the friggin' thing. They were there to eat, drink, and be merry. So what if the protagonist was a Javanese prince who gets lost in Egypt? Now that I think about it, that's a pretty cool setup. Nah, the point of the Singspiel was simply to put on a good show with good music and lots of spectacle.

Speaking of music, Mitchell pointed out that it's not only the plot that's incoherent. So's the music. The Magic Flute represents the meshing together of myriad musical styles. First off, you've got the strophic music. Yeah, I didn't know what strophic meant either. According to Dictionary.com, a strophic song is a song that has the exact same music in each successive stanza. In other words, it's very simple. Strophic songs are those songs anyone could sing. Funny how they'd pick such a fancy-sounding label for such a simple musical style. Anyway, in The Magic Flute the strophic stuff represents the lowest class of people, epitomized by that bird guy I was talking about, Papageno.

The second style of music you've got here is the sentimental stuff, corresponding with the bourgeoisie. It's our main character, Prince Tamino, who represents the middle class. We're talking achingly slow and gorgeous melodies and arching notes that are chockfull of emotion. To cite an example, Mitchell played us an excerpt of the first song Prince Tamino sings in the opera. Let me set up the scene for you. When the curtain comes up, the lost Prince Tamino is being attacked by this giant twelve-foot snake that flies through the air. It's not quite big enough to be a dragon, but Tamino isn't really worrying about that detail. He conks out from utter dread. Just as the snake's about to gobble him up, these three hotties working for the Queen of the Night show up and kill the snake. After they go away, Papageno shows up and tells the just wakened Tamino that he killed the snake. Yeah, right. Anyone can see that Papageno's a little scardy cat. The three hotties come back and put a padlock on dude's mouth as punishment for lying. Then they turn their batting eyelashes on Tamino and show him a picture of the Queen of the Night's daughter, Pamina. They need him to go rescue her from the evil Egyptian priests. So anyway, it's at that moment when he looks at Pamina's pic that Tamino falls in love with her. He sings a song called "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön" (This image is enchantingly beautiful).

That's what Mitchell played an excerpt of to give an example of the middle class music. He pointed out--and I'm glad he did or I wouldn't've thought of it--that people at that time, for the most part, didn't get married strictly for love. Oftentimes love had nothing to do with it. It was usually a property arrangement. Read anything by Jane Austen and you'll know exactly what he means. It was only forty years before The Magic Flute, circa 1750, that the Romantic era kicked into high gear in Europe (it didn't really catch on in the States until the early 1800s). This is when you started having poems and plays that were gushing and overflowing with emotions.

It's important to know this when listening to Tamino's song. Looking at Pamina's picture, he's experiencing an emotion he's never felt before: Love. By the time The Magic Flute came out, the idea of love having anything to do with relationships had become a very bourgeois thing. And Mitchell wanted us to know he meant bourgeois in a good way, not in the pejorative sense with which it's often used nowadays. At any rate, marrying for love hadn't quite taken over by 1790. Mozart's a good example of that. The "only" reason he wanted to marry Constanza was because he loved her. His dad Leopold was accordingly furious. Marrying Stanzie would affect no financial gain at all, so why bother? Apparently Leopold begrudged Stanzie this fact. They never got along.

The third type of music Mitchell discussed was the stuff representing the upper class, personified by the Queen of the Night. This style, in itself, is a hybrid of various styles. When we first see her, in the very beginning of the piece, she seems like a sympathetic character. We're supposed to believe she's on Tamino's side. She sings a beautiful aria called "O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn" (Oh, tremble not, my beloved son). This song spans the style spectrum, from baroque to opera seria to sentimental, back to seria, and ending on sentimental. Opera seria, by the way, means "serious" music. It's the opposite of opera buffa, which I mentioned above when talking about Georges Bizet. Mitchell played an excerpt of this song to represent the upper class music. In the premiere, by the way, the Queen was played by Mozart's sister-in-law.

The fourth and final musical style came from Mozart's Masonic background. This is the stuff sung by the head priest Sarastro, and the other priests. We're talking a lot of deep-chested stuff, basses and tenors. These songs represent brotherhood. As an example you've got "In diesen heil'gen Hallen" (Within these sacred halls), which Sarastro sings in the third scene of the second act.

After playing four songs to represent the four styles, Mitchell decided to play one more excerpt just for good measure. And his choice, which made me smile, was the second--and only other--aria sung by the Queen of the Night. As with the Sarastro piece I mentioned above, it comes in the third scene of the second act. By the time we get to the second act, we know that it's the Queen, and not Sarastro, who's the villain. This aria may be my most favorite in any opera. It is also, by the way, perhaps the most challenging piece in the operatic repertoire for sopranos. It's called "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" (Hell's vengeance boileth in mine heart). Seriously, one of the best songs ever in any opera. And one of the hardest. If you see a performance, and the soprano pulls it off without a hitch, then you know you're watching a singer at the pinnacle of her game. Mitchell said this song's a great example of why Mozart could be called a Romantic composer, and that the term "classical" would apply more to Beethoven. At any rate, do yourself a favor and find this piece online somewhere. You'll be glad you did.