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An exploration of four operatic masterpieces
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Huw Edwards examines four of the greatest operatic masterpieces and finds the reflections of political and social circumstances of the day which lie alongside the fanciful plots and beautiful music.
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1. Don Giovanni 6 July
When Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781, he was hugely excited by what he found. The Emperor, Joseph II, was vigorously pursuing his dream of an Enlightened society; he'd set about reforming Austria, determined to liberate his people from the all-encompassing power of the aristocracy and the Church. Vienna had become the most liberal city in Europe and Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro reflected the new free-thinking society.
But by the middle of the 1780s, the Enlightenment project had hit a snag. The Austrian people, far from finding in themselves a natural, secular morality, were rejoicing rather too much in their new-found freedom and libertinism flourished. While Joseph II's response was to reintroduce censorship and a secret police, Mozart's Don Giovanni reflects the anxiety in Viennese society with its simple message - there is an ultimate sanction, the evil-doer will be punished.
Contributors:
Nicholas Till (author, Mozart and the Enlightenment)
Jonathan Rée (philosopher and writer)
Tim Carter (Professor of Music, University of North Carolina)
2. Eugene Onegin 13 July
Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin belongs to Russians like no work of English literature belongs to us. Ordinary people in the street could and still can quote it at length. Tchaikovsky's setting is quintessentially Russian - according to Stravinsky, the most Russian opera of all. It's full of characters which crop up again and again in Russian art - Onegin himself: the superfluous man, Tatyana: the sensitive, intelligent and naïve heroine.
But more than that, it's a reflection of the deep anxiety of a society in decline - within a few years, the revolution would come and the landed gentry would be gone for ever. And even more than that, this opera hides strange imitations of art in life. One of the characters, Lensky, is a poet who challenges Onegin to a duel, having watched him flirting with his fiancée. Pushkin himself died in a duel, defending his own wife's honour. And Tchaikovsky, whilst composing the scene where Tatyana writes a rather inappropriate letter declaring her love for Onegin, received such a letter himself from one of his former pupils. Even though he wasn't at all interested in women, he couldn't bring himself to behave like Onegin and reject his admirer and they married. It was immediately a disaster; within days Tchaikovsky was trying to kill himself, and it was up to his friends to rescue him from his own impossibly romantic fantasy of a 'normal' domestic life.
Contributors:
John Warrack (biographer of Tchaikovsky)
Elaine Feinstein (poet and biographer of Pushkin)
Gerard McBurney (composer and broadcaster)
3. Salome 20 July
Richard Strauss's operatic version of the famous story contains just about everything which might have shocked turn-of-the-century bourgeois European society. Striptease, homosexuality, incest and necrophilia, murder, decadence, wild exoticism, even, in some opinions, anti-semitism. It's all the more disturbing for being wrapped up in music of stark beauty and expressiveness - a strange snapshot of turn-of-the-century artistic values and a reflection of the anxiety which accompanied the beginnings of liberation for women.
Contributors:
John Deathridge (Professor of Music, King's College London)
Peggy Reynolds (Reader in English and Contemporary Studies, Queen Mary College London)
Russell Jackson (Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Birmingham)
4. Otello 27 July
After Aida, Verdi suddenly found his world under threat. He was the greatest operatic composer ever, enormously wealthy, adored by his public, the self-styled cultural leader of the Risorgimento and the musical father of a nation. But Wagner was beginning to take over the operatic world. The Italian tradition of lyrical vocal writing was fast going out of fashion and when Verdi was accused by some of copying Wagner's new ideas and by others of being hopelessly out of touch, he retired, full of bitterness. Fifteen years later, after much persuasion, he was tempted back to write Otello, and his music for the great Shakespearean tragedy is a curious reflection of Verdi's reaction to the new direction music was taking. The story of the decline of lyricism, the birth of a new operatic world order and its importance to a recently formed nation is told through the musical characterisations of Desdemona, Iago and Othello himself.
Contributors:
Karen Henson (Lecturer in Music, Cambridge University)
Gerard McBurney (composer and broadcaster)
Peter Holland (Professor of English, University of Notre Dame Indiana)
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