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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 7, 2017 ISSUE
All the World’s a Stage
by Larry Wolff
The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart
by Mitchell Cohen
Princeton University Press, 477 pp., $39.95
Machiavelli’s The Prince was presented to the Medici family in 1513 with
a dedication that turned out to be much more than a flattering formality
since, for the next five centuries, it remained attached to the most
influential treatise of modern political theory. Machiavelli began by
observing that “those who strive to obtain the good graces of a prince
are accustomed to come before him with such things as they hold most
precious”—horses, arms, jewels—but he offered instead his thoughts on
the conduct of princes. By the end of the sixteenth century poets and
musicians would be offering the Medici something new, unprecedented, and
precious: opera. Machiavelli, in dedicating The Prince, affected
modesty: “I have not embellished with swelling or magnificent words, nor
stuffed with rounded periods, nor with any extrinsic allurements or
adornments.” He claimed to value truth over ornament—but opera would
become the most magnificently embellished of cultural products, lavishly
expensive to produce and sensually dazzling to the eye and ear, as it
remains to this day.
Mitchell Cohen’s The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to
Mozart has boldly placed Machiavelli and early modern political theory
at the center of the early history of opera, reflecting creatively on
the ways in which the reverberations of the great Florentine realist
reached even into the musical realm. For just as The Prince was
presented as a precious gift precisely because it described and
prescribed the conduct of princes, so the operas of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries placed princes on the stage and let them sing their
political circumstances.
Cohen focuses on Monteverdi’s Orfeo, one of the founding figures of the
operatic form in 1607, singing his plea for Eurydice in the underworld
kingdom of Pluto, and also on Monteverdi’s Nero, an emperor of extreme
notoriety, working together with his scheming soulmate and eventual
empress in The Coronation of Poppea (1642–1643). Monteverdi achieved an
almost perfectly Machiavellian opera with The Coronation of Poppea,
inasmuch as the two villains, Nero and Poppea, triumph without a moment
of self-doubt and, after eliminating dissidents and rivals—including the
philosopher Seneca—sing a rapturously beautiful love duet as they gaze
upon one another in consummate mutual infatuation. Interestingly, the
most important part of princely character, which Machiavelli called
virtù—meaning not moral virtue but something closer to virile prowess
(colloquially, perhaps, “balls”)—belongs not to the masculine basso
register of Seneca but rather to the soprano register of a castrato, who
sings the unscrupulous Nero.
Anyone familiar with the works of Verdi—which lie outside the scope of
Cohen’s book—would immediately be able to point to his musical gallery
of Machiavellian princes who use, abuse, and consolidate power, like the
Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto (set in the century of Machiavelli and the
city of Orfeo’s premiere) or Philip II, the autocratic sovereign of
Spain, in Verdi’s Don Carlo. There is perhaps nothing as chilling in
opera as the scene that Verdi created for two basses, King Philip and
the Grand Inquisitor, as they trade lines at the bottom of the bass
clef: the king asks whether it would be acceptable for him to put his
own son to death for reasons of state, and the inquisitor lowers the
tessitura but raises the Machiavellian ante by demanding further that
the king sacrifice Rodrigo, his closest confidant. The heartlessness of
the sixteenth-century Habsburg king was a theme that was close to
Verdi’s nationalist heart, since the nineteenth-century Habsburg emperor
Franz Joseph I was an enemy of Italian unification.
Cohen proposes an immensely valuable extension to opera of the Cambridge
School of political thought (associated with Quentin Skinner since the
1970s), by treating operatic compositions partly as political texts that
are produced by and participate in contemporary political debates. The
discussion of Machiavelli in relation to Monteverdi is particularly
successful, though it could be further extended with reference to one of
the most celebrated works of the Cambridge School, J.G.A. Pocock’s The
Machiavellian Moment (1975), which explores the broad European
circulation of Machiavellian ideas, even as far as England.
Pocock did not consider the relevance of Handel to the Machiavellian
moment, and neither does Cohen, but the great German composer, who
relocated from Italy to England in 1712, intensely pursued Machiavellian
political themes over the course of decades in both operas and oratorios
that feature spectacular arias of unscrupulous conquest, brutality, and
duplicity as well as virtuous political dedication, honor, and glory. If
ever there was a Machiavellian operatic moment, it was in Handel’s
London in the 1720s, with Caesar’s conquest of Egypt in Giulio Cesare,
the usurpation of Bertarido’s Lombard throne by Grimoaldo in Rodelinda,
and Tamerlane’s triumph over the Ottoman Sultan Bayezet in Tamerlano.
Handel would later, in the oratorios, go on to dissect the virtues and
vices of Old Testament leaders and kings such as Jephthah, who is
supposed to sacrifice his daughter; Saul, who schemes to murder David;
and Solomon, the model of princely wisdom. Saul orders Jonathan to
destroy David in basso recitative, and Saul’s daughter Merab then
evaluates the conduct of the prince in a brilliant soprano aria:
Capricious man, in humour lost,
By ev’ry wind of passion toss’d!
Now sets his vassal on the throne,
Then low as earth he casts him down!
In Solomon it is Zadok the priest, a tenor, who points the political
moral: Solomon the king of peace can build the temple in Jerusalem that
David the warrior could not achieve:
Our pious David wish’d in vain,
By this great act to bless his reign;
But Heav’n the monarch’s hopes withstood,
For ah! his hands were stain’d with blood.
Cohen’s Politics of Opera follows a selective path through the early
modern history of opera, jumping from the Italian Renaissance of
Monteverdi to the French tradition of Lully and Rameau, analyzed in
relation to the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and the emerging
political criticism of the Enlightenment. The concluding section of the
book considers Mozart and Habsburg political ideology in
eighteenth-century Vienna.
Cohen’s approach to baroque opera will seem blunt to some: he interprets
the emergence of musical monody—the dominance of a solo voice and single
melody that displaced the multiple voices of Renaissance polyphony—as
parallel to the development of the centralized princely state:
Consider this irony. The assertion of monody, that crucial ingredient in
the first operatic experiments, paralleled, as we have seen, the
development of centralizing authority in an age of rising or
consolidating princedoms. Politics and music asserted a single rule
(respectively).
Historians have often found it more fruitful to think of the politics of
art and entertainment in relation to the rituals of the court rather
than the mechanics of the state. Peter Burke’s classic study The
Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992) was fundamental for thinking about the
politics of the arts; while Georgia Cowart’s Triumph of Pleasure: Louis
XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (2008) explored both opera and ballet;
and Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels (2010) laid out the political
dimensions of dance at the court of the Sun King. Cohen traces the
politics of opera from Lully in the age of Louis XIV to Rameau in the
age of Louis XV, and is particularly interested in the writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, probably the most important political theorist of
the Enlightenment and, at the same time, a passionate music critic and a
moderately talented composer with one successful short opera to his
name, Le devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer).
First performed for the French court in 1752, Rousseau’s opera was a
celebration of peasant life and love, and two years later the uncourtly
Rousseau would inaugurate a new philosophical age with his stunningly
influential Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The essay is an
anthropological thought experiment in which Rousseau imagines his way
back into the “state of nature”—an earlier stage of human existence when
men (not women, to be sure) were naturally equal and then, fatefully,
succumbed to inequality. Cohen makes the connection to the
anthropological tour of the “Indies” in Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, his
opera-ballet about love in Turkey, Persia, and Peru, and offers an odd
flow chart to diagram the parts of the opera.
Les Indes galantes was composed in 1735, but was such a success that it
was still being staged when Rousseau wrote his essay on inequality in
1754, and both may be seen as belonging to the same anthropological
impulse at the heart of the Enlightenment. Opera was capable of
deploying remote cultures in order to pose questions of broad social and
political significance, even when the circumstances of elite
entertainment added an ironic accent to the presentation. For instance,
in the Persian scenario of Les Indes galantes, two Persian men fall in
love with two female slaves (the complication is that each falls in love
with the other’s slave), and one couple ends up pursuing the romance in
a disarmingly charming rococo duet on the circumstances of slavery. The
soprano slave sings lightheartedly, almost flirtatiously:
Peut-on aimer dans l’esclavage?
C’est en augmenter la rigueur.
[Can one love in slavery?
It increases the harshness.]
And the tenor master replies with ingratiating reassurance:
On doit aimer dans l’esclavage,
C’est en adoucir la rigueur.
[One must love in slavery,
It softens the harshness.]
Then they harmonize their parts, reconciling musically these
irreconcilable points of view. Serious political opposition to slavery
would not emerge until later in the eighteenth century, but already in
the 1730s opera, in the guise of romantic interplay and under the
influence of the early Enlightenment, could pose questions about the
deformation of the human sentiments under brutal social conditions.
Rousseau, avid music lover that he was, would certainly have been
familiar with this duet, which in all its loveliness echoes so
disturbingly for us across the centuries.
We do not definitively know whether Mozart read Rousseau, but it is hard
not to feel that, given Mozart’s all-consuming intellectual curiosity
and Rousseau’s pervasive presence in eighteenth-century culture, the
composer must have known the philosopher’s ideas, even if only by
intellectual osmosis. Of course, Pierre Beaumarchais read Rousseau, and
Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro was the inspiration for Mozart’s
opera. Cohen notes the presence of François Fénelon’s The Adventures of
Telemachus in Mozart’s life and library: Mozart at the age of fourteen
recorded in a letter to his sister, “I am just now reading Telemachus.”
The novel was already old by that time: first published in 1699 as an
anonymous assault on the absolute government of Louis XIV, it gives an
imaginary account of the education of the son of Ulysses. Fénelon,
archbishop of Cambrai, offered instruction on politics, including the
recommendation of a limited monarchy tempered by patrician republicanism
and respect for some individual rights. Cohen is thus able to use
Fénelon to pivot from the culture of royal absolutism at Versailles in
the late seventeenth century to the Viennese culture of enlightened
absolutism in the age of Mozart in the late eighteenth century.
Discussing the political implications of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro,
Cohen emphasizes the theme of servants “calling the tune,” as in
Figaro’s aria of defiance:
Se vuol ballare, signor contino,
Il chitarrino le suonerò.
[If you want to dance, little count,
I’ll play my little guitar.]
While for Beaumarchais, Figaro’s insubordination would have resonated
with the writings of Rousseau on inequality, the background for Mozart’s
opera was subtly different: the enlightened absolutism of Emperor Joseph
II, who struck down the privileges of the nobles in order to affirm the
absolute authority of the sovereign. Joseph’s revolutionary program of
enlightenment, as enacted from above, included not only the partial
emancipation of serfs but also religious toleration, state control of
the church, the abolition of censorship, and even micromanaged burial
reform—cloth sacks instead of wooden coffins, deposited outside the city
center in collective graves. This was not only hugely controversial in
its own time but leaves us today without a specific gravesite for
revering Mozart.
While it is clear that Mozart relished Figaro’s taunting of Count
Almaviva, and liked the idea of humbling the privileged nobility in
Josephine Vienna—which he would have surely associated with his own
struggle for independence from the patronage of the archbishop of
Salzburg—any attempt to find a strong political point of view in
Mozart’s operas is inevitably complicated by his marvelous affinity for
multiple perspectives. Don Giovanni, for instance—a nobleman who
recognizes no limitations on his doings and desires, and must be finally
punished with fire and brimstone at the end of the opera, dragged down
to hell by the statue of the man he has murdered—would seem to
illustrate perfectly the perspective of Emperor Joseph on nobles who
thought themselves above the law. According to Cohen, “Don Giovanni is
the aristocracy’s unrepressed id siphoned through egotism.” Yet even as
the opera seems to be clear on this political point about the
aristocracy, Mozart’s music makes Don Giovanni so irresistibly
attractive that we come back to it over and over again with
life-affirming relish at his resistance to laws and limits—a spiritual
response that runs entirely counter to the apparent political message.
In The Marriage of Figaro, though Count Almaviva appears as an
oppressive figure, engaged in the bullying and sexual harassment of his
servants—a Josephine examplar of bad aristocracy—the noble class itself
is endowed with the most moving musical sympathy in the figure of
Countess Almaviva, the count’s distressed and neglected wife. For Mozart
she represents the aristocracy with a musical glamour that engaged his
genius in its fullest glory.
Mozart, who sought to earn his living independently by using his own
talent, surely resented the aristocratic privilege of birth, and tried
to evade the sort of patronage position held by Joseph Haydn, who put on
a uniform in the morning to receive his musical orders for the day from
his master, the Esterházy prince. Yet Mozart’s life was full of
appreciative aristocrats, and while he did not want to wear livery like
Haydn, he wrote almost flirtatiously to the Baroness von Waldstätten in
Vienna in 1782 about “the beautiful jacket that is tickling my heart so
mercilessly, please let me know where it can be bought…. I simply must
have such a jacket.” One week later he was writing to thank her for the
jacket. Countesses and baronesses all played their part in Mozart’s
life, and it would be false to represent him as an enemy of the ancien
régime in which he himself was so thoroughly embedded.
Cohen insightfully introduces the philosophy of Edmund Burke into his
discussion of opera and political theory, and when thinking about
Mozart’s countess, I have sometimes found myself rereading the passage
in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he
remembered his visit to Versailles in the 1770s and his glimpse of the
young Marie Antoinette:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France,
then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this
orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw
her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere
she just began to move in—glittering like the morning-star, full of life
and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I
have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!
The passage builds to the famous lament of chivalry desecrated: “I
thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to
avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.” Burke was a
generation older than Mozart and much more deeply embedded in the ancien
régime that he evoked with such nostalgia. Yet Mozart, creating The
Marriage of Figaro in 1786 in Josephine Vienna, three years before the
fall of the Bastille and four years before Burke’s Reflections, already
understood that his world was precarious, riven with tensions that he
could barely resolve musically at the end of the opera as the characters
step forward to sing together: “Ah, tutti contenti saremo così” (“We
will all be content like this”).
Did Mozart really believe it? His musical attentions to Countess
Almaviva suggest that he was already nostalgic for the world that she
would soon lose, as Burke would be for the lost world of the young Marie
Antoinette (who was almost exactly Mozart’s age). In one of Mozart’s
longest and most stunning melodic lines, echoed by a plaintive oboe, the
countess sings: “Dove sono i bei momenti di dolcezza e di piacer?”
(“Where have they gone, the beautiful moments of sweetness and
pleasure?”). She is remembering her once-happy marriage, but the lyric
equally suggests a broader nostalgia for the ancien régime that was
already passing in Josephine Vienna and Mozartean Europe, a nostalgia so
exquisite that it gives the lie to any simple association between Mozart
and revolutionary class politics. After losing her vocal thread in her
emotional turmoil, the countess, without help from the orchestra, must
pick out of the air the single note, a C-natural, that will allow her to
rediscover her melody and regain her equilibrium—the righting of a
disordered world that could be achieved only in the musical dimension.
Operas change their political meaning as they are performed in different
political settings. In 1776, when Christoph Willibald Gluck revised his
Italian opera Alceste with a French libretto for presentation in Paris,
the virtuous Queen Alceste, who offers to sacrifice her own life to save
her husband, would have been seen as a countermodel to Marie Antoinette,
who was already being caricatured in public for her frivolousness and
supposed depravity. In 1952, when the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten
Flagstad sang her farewell Metropolitan Opera performance as Alceste,
the public would have remembered that she had sacrificed her
international career to return to Nazi-occupied Norway in 1941 and join
her husband, who was collaborating with the occupation. The very
different circumstances of 1776 in Paris and 1952 in New York would have
offered completely different political associations for Gluck’s
virtuously noble opera.
When Alban Berg’s masterpiece Wozzeck was first performed in Berlin in
1925 it caused a sensation with its uncompromising modernism—the atonal
musical setting of its fiercely alienating assault on provincial German
military life. When Wozzeck was presented in September 2001 during the
opening week of the Metropolitan Opera season, two weeks after the
September 11 attacks, James Levine conducted the work with such stunning
intensity that the audience could participate in Wozzeck’s psychic agony
in a way that was entirely conditioned by the traumatic moment in New
York City. And when the Metropolitan Opera performed Rossini’s Guillaume
Tell on November 9, 2016, the evening after the American presidential
election, the harmonies of Swiss republican fervor sounded unexpectedly
relevant to our own sense of the fragility of democratic institutions in
the face of tyrannical temperaments. Cohen has demonstrated that the
history of opera is connected to the history of political theory, but
operatic masterpieces also acquire new layers of political meaning as
they encounter new generations and newly fraught political circumstances.
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