Life in tune

Bernard Williams
ON OPERA
224pp. Yale. £19.99.
0 300 08976 7

There are, in principle, two quite different kinds of opera books: the ones that are about opera and the ones that are about operas. There aren’t (to my knowledge) many of the second kind that are very good; and there are practically none of the first kind. It would be lovely if someone were to write a good book about opera, since the medium is a conundrum both for its devotees and for aestheticians. The litany of complaints is familiar: most libretti cannot be taken seriously; but for the music, they couldn’t hope to hold the stage. The performers often don’t look right for the parts they sing and generally can’t act. Even if you understand the language that they sing in, what they sing is likely not to be intelligible (operas in English are routinely performed with surtitles for anglophone audiences). And so on. How, then, can anything that is in so many ways preposterous be, when it works, so enormously moving? Granted that one might like some of the tunes; but how could anybody like opera? Bernard Williams doesn’t say and he doesn’t try to. His book is mostly a collection of (previously published) papers that discuss one or other of the major works in the operatic canon. (There is also a very sympathetic introduction by Michael Tanner.) If you are prepared to settle for critical responses to operas in the standard repertory, responses that are informed, insightful, literate and civilized, you will have to look both far and wide for anything better than this.

Williams does offer the occasional aperçu about opera as such; sometimes he’s convincing, sometimes he’s not. For example: “A concrete feeling of performance and of the performer’s artistry is nearer the front of the [spectator’s] mind than in other dramatic arts”, especially in Italian opera. “It is because of this that outbreaks of applause . . . can be appropriate.” I think there must be something wrong with that. Movies have made a living out of star appeal for decades. It is hard to imagine a more concrete sense of the performer than, say, a Bogart film provides. Or consider ballet: bravura displays of virtuosity are at least as likely to be important to the success of a dance performance as they are in opera; and they are at least as likely to evoke applause that interrupts the action. But the relation between what the performers do and the development of the story-line is not at all alike in opera and ballet. This shows up strikingly in the quite different things that “reform” has meant in their histories.

For Gluck (and, in a way, for Wagner) to reform opera was to tame the singers to the texts; at a minimum, to reduce the number of notes they sang per syllable. (In Handel’s operas, on the other hand, the ratio sometimes gets shamelessly out of hand.) Reforming opera meant making it more closely approximate sung drama: more like a play, less like a recital. By contrast, the reform of classical ballet (as practised above all by George Balanchine and the choreographers he influenced) meant getting rid of the storyline entirely, reducing scenery to a signature monochrome blue backdrop, and “letting the dancers dance”. Ballet is mostly about dancers (female dancers in particular, according to Balanchine). Arguably, opera is mostly about singing. But I wouldn’t have thought that it’s mostly about singers. That is why companies that can’t afford to present casts of international stars (English National Opera in London, or the City Opera in New York, for example) frequently achieve deeply successful results all the same. And it’s why even Pavarotti in his prime often couldn’t salvage the bloated productions that are cash cows at the Met. So why is the performer’s relation to the performance so different in opera and ballet? I don’t know; I wish someone would write a book that explains it.

Most of the essays in On Opera are about particular works that Williams likes very much; these include, especially, the Mozart–Da Ponte operas and Wagner from the Ring to Parsifal inclusive. The critical sensibility at work is invariably subtle and sophisticated and, often enough, the things Williams says seem to me exactly right: “In Don Giovanni it is important that, while other characters sing about themselves, Giovanni never does. He is all action and the lack of any piece that reveals anything more about him leaves a very appropriate sense that there is nothing to be revealed”. Nothing, anyhow, except the sorts of virtues that pertain to agents of actions as such; ones that show from the outside, like resourcefulness, courage, ingenuity and pride. Kierkegaard says that the outer is not the inner; but in Giovanni’s case, it is.

Williams doesn’t get it right every time. On the contrary, this is the kind of book you’d like to argue with; preferably over wine and cheese after a good performance. Sometimes Williams’s tastes seem to me excessively refined. He has, for example, a sort of horror of kitsch, which makes him very severe indeed about Der Rosenkavalier in particular and, in general, about Strauss after Electra. It is fashionable at the moment not to like Strauss, but these things come and go. There is, it seems to me, very little in opera that is as charming as the first act of Ariadne auf Naxos; but charm is a virtue to which Williams seems not very responsive. (Parsifal, by the way, retains Williams’s affection despite a display of kitsch in the second act that is perhaps without rival. Likewise passages in the second act of Siegfried, where the hero goes on at length about how much he misses his mother. Wagner’s operas evoke mixed reactions in Williams, as they do in most other Wagner fans.)

Williams says of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande that it is a “representation of its characters’ inner life which is uniquely subtle in opera”. In fact, I think, Pelléas is the reverse of a psychological drama: it’s an opera in which everything is mysterious because nothing is hidden. The central characters are Golaud, who is patently mad with jealousy; Pelléas, who, like a child, is without premeditation; and Mélisande, who is an enigma to Golaud because she is entirely transparent. He can’t believe that she is just as she seems to be; that is the irony that drives the action. In Pelléas, as in Impressionism, it’s not the depths but the surfaces that seem to be beyond grasping.
There are two kinds of problem that anyone who makes an opera has to face. One of these is common to all the dramatic arts, namely to achieve the right distance between the audience and the performance. The other is characteristic of opera as such: namely to achieve the right relation between the singers and the orchestra. (In both cases “right” means, of course, right for the work in hand.) Distance and balance are among the parameters at the composer’s disposal in constructing a work, and differences in their handling are fundamental to distinguishing between operatic styles. One of the things that makes it right to describe Italian opera as a “popular” genre is that it invites (or almost invites) the audience to sing along. Notoriously, one can’t get the tunes out of one’s head. Wagner is not like that.

The interaction between distance and balance in Pelléas makes it unlike anything else in the canon. Pelléas is an opera about what can’t be mended; the fate of the characters is fixed and the opera consists merely of its unfolding. Pace some of what Williams says, Pelléas isn’t about what can’t be known; it’s about what can’t be done; above all it is about spaces between people that can’t be bridged. (“Don’t touch me” is Mélisande’s first line.) The action seems very far away and very long ago. The key line (which Williams, in a most uncharacteristic lapse, dismisses as “idiotic”) is Arkel’s: “If I were God, I should have pity on the hearts of men”. That is, if I were God “I would pity the hearts of men”, not “if I were God I would make things better”. Action doesn’t happen at a distance, but pity can.

The action in Pelléas seems much further from the audience than does anything in Verdi or Wagner (or, certainly, in Puccini). One feels pity, but there is no Aristotelian terror, and one doesn’t feel empathy. (What would it feel like to feel like Mélisande?) What seems to me miraculous is how the opera effects this sense of apartness – by rethinking the relation between the music and the drama. Usually, the one supports the other (not least by helping the singer to stay on pitch); or the music comments on the action in ways that are familiar from Wagner. In Pelléas, remarkably, the drama seems to be suspended in the music, rather in the way that something might be fixed in amber. The music itself seems to contain the action and thereby maintains the distance between the action and the audience. I know of nothing comparable except, perhaps, in old Chinese poetry, where the verse seems less to express emotion than to be the medium in which it transpires.

I would also like to have had a chat with Williams about Peter Sellars, whose direction of Handel’s Theodora (at Glyndebourne, in 1996) Williams takes to be a paradigm of authenticity, but which seemed to me to be heavy-handed and intolerably intrusive. The performance Williams discusses (now available on DVD) is indeed a marvel, in part because it recruited some of the very best singer-actors in the business; including, especially, the wonderful Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, whose recent death opera-lovers feel as a personal loss. But I thought that Sellars’s direction of the performance, though it achieved occasional moments of beauty, was a cautionary example of how embarrassing things can get when a director undertakes to, as one says, make a statement.

Theodora is the story of the love between two Christians in ancient Rome. Theodora refuses to worship Rome’s pagan gods and is therefore martyred, together with her lover. Sellars updates the action to contemporary America. There are soldiers in US battle dress; politicians who give speeches on television. The martyrs are executed by lethal injection.

Why? Does Sellars suppose that the audience needs to be prompted to see dire parallels between the Roman and the American empires? That there are many is, after all, a journalistic cliché. And what, precisely, is the parallel that Sellars has it in mind to stress? That soldiers in both Rome and America wore uniforms? Come to think of it, why America? It is very possible, perhaps it is mandatory, to believe that the present American government is either dangerously mad or dangerously stupid (or, heaven help us, both). But it certainly does not show any penchant for state-sponsored religious persecution. There are, to put it mildly, a lot of places where you are more likely to get killed for your faith than you are in America. It is hard not to believe that Sellars was bending his bow at a venture; it is in both senses a cheap way to show who is the villain: dress someone up as an American. (Alternatively, you might just have him carry a sign saying “villain”.) It apparently has never occurred to Sellars that the ideal director is transparent; you see through him to the performance. The art of the director is to disappear.

It would have been fun to argue opera with Williams; he knew a great deal about it and he loved it. One feels both in reading these essays. Those of us who philosophize for a living saw in him a reminder of days when philosophers cared for more than technique and knew about more than they found in the journals. There are many such philosophers still around, of course; but Bernard Williams was among the best of them.

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Jerry Fodor is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers
University. His books include The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The scope and limits of computational psychology, 2000, In Critical Condition, 1998, The Elm and the Expert, 1994.