SMOOTH OPERATORS WHO KNEW HOW TO TRILL AN AUDIENCE
Rossini, Verdi and Wagner aimed for musical perfection – and found it
Rossini quipped: ‘Wagner has beautiful moments, but bad quarters of an hour’
‘None of Wagner’s idealism stopped him stealing Cosima, his conductor’s wife’
pera lovers have seen the best of Rossini and Verdi in the past two weeks: Rossini’s greatest work William Tell – 145 years after its last performance here – and last week, the great Verdi favourite La Traviata. Rossini was the dominant figure in opera in the early 19th century up to 1830. Verdi and Richard Wagner, both born in 1813, were to develop Rossini’s ideas and dominate the remaining years up to 1901. But apart from being born in the same year and being musically gifted, Verdi and Wagner had almost nothing in common.
Verdi, from a very poor background, was impressed by Rossini’s operatic and financial success, especially by William Tell, a major dramatic advance on Rossini’s earlier work.
Surprisingly, Wagner was also influenced by Rossini. It’s hard to imagine anyone less like the wealthy, prolific, fun-loving, food-guzzling Rossini than Wagner, an introverted character driven by gloomy philosophy and overwhelming self-belief, who spent a lot of his life in debt while trying to totally reconstruct the whole concept of opera and art.
Wagner even wrote an essay about the older composer called A Memory Of Rossini, describing a fascinating conversation between them. I’d love to know how Wagner responded to Rossini’s quip that ‘Mr Wagner has beautiful moments, but bad quarters of an hour’.
Rossini, son of a musician who was also an inspector of slaughter houses, notched up (depending on how they’re counted), a remarkable 39 operas in a mere 23 years: works generally in comic mode, but including melodrama and historic tales. He once remarked,
‘Give me a laundry list and I’ll set it to music’. After William Tell, he stopped writing opera, at the age of
37, to enjoy his remaining 40 years entertaining guests and occasionally writing liturgical pieces. William Tell had developed the nature of opera considerably and had set the stage for the advances made by Verdi and Wagner.
Rossini was a master of melody and the sheer joy of music, using lavish costumes and offering plenty of opportunity for tenors and sopranos to show off their vocal gymnastics.
Verdi, coming from a poor background (his father ran a very humble type of tavern in northern Italy) was more interested in the everyday human emotions of love, hate, greed, and lust.
There was nothing artistic about his childhood: Russian soldiers (them again) raided his Italian village after the overthrow of Napoleon and massacred women and children sheltering in a church. His mother escaped with him by hiding in the campanile.
Verdi had an active role in the politics of Italian unification, and his operas have recognisable flesh and blood characters, often picturing the times he lived in. But he didn’t write his own librettos, which often suffer from flawed stories and clumsy attempts to improve them. And political censors didn’t help.
La Traviata, set in the 19th Century, is about the sad life of
Violetta, essentially an upmarket call girl. The authorities insisted that for propriety, it had to be set in the 17 Century with Louis XIVstyle costumes.
Un Ballo in Maschera, originally about the assassination of a Swedish king, had to be switched to Boston and the assassination of a local governor, making nonsense of the original.
But in his later operas Verdi had a fine librettist and his Shakespearean adaptations are particularly powerful. His last opera, Falstaff, was written when he was 80. Like Rossini, he never lost his gift for melody.
Wagner, like Verdi, was a strong political campaigner, once expelled from German territory for 12 years. When he wasn’t escaping the law he was running from creditors. His eventual saviour was Ludwig II,
King of Bavaria, who bankrolled him for all his unorthodox ideas about opera, art and life, including helping him to build his own theatre in Bayreuth.
His early operas are generally accessible, but when he became obsessed with German legends, everything changed. The format of arias, recitatives, and ordinary people’s loves and emotions were scuppered, especially in his Ring Cycle, and transformed in almost semi-religious symbolic form, into a constant stream of music, drama, myths, gods, philosophy and political ideals aimed at re-imagining the whole world of art and opera. Wagner wrote his own librettos in meticulous detail, with no expense spared on elaborate staging.
However, none of his idealism stopped him stealing Cosima, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow. Artistic idealism has its limits.
■ Bewley’s Cafe Theatre has a strong production starting tomorrow: Brian Friel’s oneact Afterplay, about a woman with a large estate, who meets the brother of three sisters who always wanted to get to Moscow but didn’t succeed. It’s Friel’s epilogue to Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. With Karen Ardiff and Barry Barnes.