Review: Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love

In the age of the coronavirus, planet earth’s arts sector is fighting for its economic life. Politicians and their commensals gather among the tele-corridors of power, quarreling over what dollar’s-worth of human creativity the future will administer. Venues shutter, leaving a fortunate few to accept pay cuts while millions of workers, most of them “casuals”—the epithet seems more insidious than ever these days—fall headlong through fissures in government stimulus. And yet, at the same time that the institutions of imagination are enduring an epochal existential threat, expression’s fundamental importance for human sanity and sociability is clearer than ever. Turned out of its houses, performance has come home to streets ringing to the sounds of makeshift musical instruments, rooftop discos, and literal balcony scenes.

It’s a happy irony that opera, which some take pleasure in deriding as “lavish entertainment for nobs,” has been contributing so lavishly to upwellings of public feeling. Vivien Schweitzer’s new field guide to the genre can help us understand why. A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera leads its reader jauntily through more than four hundred years of sung drama, pausing at regular intervals to elucidate exemplary composers, works, singing actors, and stagings. It is replete with, though not overburdened by, specialized terms, characters, and contexts, and operatic novices may at times experience the disorientation—and the frisson—of the foreign. But in its essence, Schweitzer’s book is an ode to the basic and transcendent power of the “unamplified human voice,” and to the realms of truth and feeling that only it can conjure. 

A Mad Love charts a trail along significant waypoints in Western opera’s developmental history. Schweitzer is a nimble guide, and she is an expert one, too: she covered opera and classical music for The New York Times for ten years, and happens also to be an accomplished pianist. Her book’s itinerary consists of considered, accessible accounts of noteworthy advances in aesthetic sensibility, compositional accomplishment, and performance. It is made intelligible by a course in the basics of opera’s technical vocabulary, elegantly and appealingly supplied. While by no means negligent of the finer details of biography, cultural context, or critical debate, these are not Schweitzer’s primary concerns. We are here to learn, briskly, how to orient ourselves toward an art form rendered at panoramic, not miniature, scale.

Schweitzer’s scene opens among the courts of northern Italy in the late sixteenth century, where opera emerged as a new genre of essentially aristocratic entertainment. It bore the marks of a variegated musical inheritance, from the chivalric lyrics of medieval troubadours to liturgical song, and it aspired to replicate the cathartic force of classical Greek drama. With the opening of public venues, like Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano in 1637, opera’s audience grew far beyond the nobility. Still, on account of its extraordinary expense, it has never stopped relying on patronage, first from royals, then from rising merchant and industrial classes, and later still from public governmental subsidy and corporate philanthropy. An operatic canon did not really establish itself until the nineteenth century, but when it did, it proved phenomenally resilient—and the dominance of the standard repertory, in conjunction with the art’s longstanding associations with wealth, have given it a reputation for thoroughgoing conservatism. 

But of course opera is more than its stately pedigree. It is a phenomenally and persistently popular mode, and has long been reaching beyond the walls of its grand houses. The first record ever to sell a million copies is the tenor Enrico Caruso’s 1902 rendition of the aria ‘Vesti la Giubba,’ from Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Caruso would sing the same aria at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910 as part of earth’s inaugural public radio broadcast. From the introduction of surtitles, in 1983, to the Met’s revolutionary Live in HD series, opera has with time become relatively accessibleThis is true, in a particularly poignant sense, of life under coronavirus: as Anthony Tommasini writes, the professional art’s streaming audience has abruptly become the only one it has.  

A Mad Love’s first extended stopover is Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, first performed in 1607 at the Ducal Palace of Mantua. An interpolation of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, L’Orfeo is, as far as Schweitzer is concerned, the first opera worthy of the name. The nature of this distinction reflects A Mad Love’s governing principles. For Schweitzer, an opera merits attention when it achieves two things simultaneously: when its music represents an historical innovation in feeling and form, and when its drama expresses a high degree of emotional realism. There is an Enlightenment spirit operating here, one that privileges those works which recompense the penetrative workings of mind and morality and which contribute to the progressive march of aesthetic improvement. Art that appears to exist for its own sake—that offers only a baroque collection of pleasurable surfaces, for example—is the sort of stuff that this tour leaves mostly off-piste.

Onward from L’Orfeo, Schweitzer traces a path among a who’s-who of operatic ‘pioneers.’ Most often, a composer distinguishes themselves by testing the tastes of their audiences. Monteverdi’s oeuvre delivered dissonant harmonies that rankled a fair few of his contemporaries. The first chord of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, performed originally in Munich in 1865, set a legendarily ambiguous tone that discomfited many of its listeners for seeming to refuse resolution. In the early twentieth century, the atonal experiments of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg radically decentered the historical relationship among musical notes, earning themselves a heady mixture, in their own time, of repudiation and enthusiasm. Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, which appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, weaves a story of medieval love and loss through a mélange of acoustic and electronic sound. And so on: A Mad Love arranges case studies in the operatic avant-garde, so many manifestations of its guiding dictum that the art form is no inert affair.

Voltaire, who wrote librettos for Jean-Philippe Rameau, famously likened opera-going to traveling to ‘the land of the fairies.’ It’s because of notions like this that some will find Schweitzer’s other key claim pleasantly counterintuitive. Readers accustomed to thinking of opera as the domain, before all else, of fantastic spectacle may be surprised to learn that the best works achieve a high degree of emotional, and even psychological, authenticity. On these terms, Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie is recalled for inspiring deep sympathy for its characters, notwithstanding those characters’ being mythological. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his frequent collaborator, the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, are credited with moving, via their comic masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutti, away from the universalisms of allegory and toward ‘complex characters’ and ‘relatable scenarios.’ And exemplary singing actors, such as the soprano Maria Callas, are lauded for mastering the use of technique to reveal a character’s ‘mental state.’ Of course, this is not quite the same thing as saying that good opera is verisimilar in the same way as film or theater. Operatic realism has more to do with the irresistible truth of sung feeling, or what W. H. Auden, who wrote libretti for Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Hans Werner Henze, called music’s peerless ‘emotional persuasiveness.’

A Mad Love’s central doctrines intersect with several of the more tenacious problems in the history of Western aesthetics. Toward ‘authenticity,’ are we to prefer George Frederick Handel’s baroque coloratura or Christoph Willibald Gluck’s elemental simplicity? The floridness of a bel canto aria or something more manifestly weighty? Schweitzer forgoes any reductive or programmatic stance, but she prefers works that coordinate their bits and pieces into coherent narrative wholes. ‘More relevant than a composer’s particular aesthetic,’ she writes, ‘is how effectively the musical language can tell a story.’ Does a work’s compositional structure elucidate or distract from its audience’s understanding of the tale it tells? Does a singing actor perform character in a way that enables recognition, or confuses it? Helpfully, these lines of inquiry give readers a fairly clear set of critical standards with which to start watching opera. At times, however, they hazard tipping over into something like dogmatism; when it comes to the relationship among a production’s constituent parts, Schweitzer has little patience for incongruity or the ‘odd.’

Schweitzer’s sense of opera’s importance hinges on her conviction that its music, feelings, and stories transcend space and time. When her particular expertise, and the genre’s particular attributes, are made vivid, her reader is drawn into a realm of human expression that may feel radically unfamiliar, but also feels compelling and consequential. Ironically, Schweitzer undermines herself when she reaches for well-meaning but jarring contemporary analogues. Castrati, we’re told, are like ‘the rock stars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’ Encountering Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is akin to ‘binge-watching a Netflix series.’ If these comparisons are awkward, they are worse for disrupting A Mad Love’s essential project, which is to acquaint its reader with artists and artworks that are worth caring about precisely because they aren’t Radiohead or Mad Men. They are something different—not necessarily better, and not necessarily worse—and it is the value of encountering such difference that is Schweitzer’s book’s most important claim to attention.

Readers will find that attention tantalized by A Mad Love’s many fascinating—and sometimes shocking—forays into social, cultural, and political history. Schweitzer alludes, for instance, to the pivotal class aspects of the aforementioned castrato system, which regularly exploited impoverished Italian families in search of an economic lifeline. Elsewhere, she highlights opera’s distinguished tradition of offending the censors, from the Nazis’ prohibitions on Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu to the Soviet Union’s banning of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District and The Nose. And by touching on debates regarding ‘color-blind casting,’ and on the discrimination faced by nonwhite performers—and triumphed over by singing actors like the contralto Marian Anderson—A Mad Love raises intriguing and vexing questions concerning racism and the ethics of representation. On several occasions, this reviewer winced at the speed with which matters like these were raised and moved past—but to critique the book on these grounds would be to misrepresent its aims. The cultural sleuth in search of a research lead will find a great, great deal to entice them here.  

Opera, Schweitzer tells us, is artificiality’s antidote. Song, which Auden memorably called ‘a form of public outcry,’ mobilizes feeling in a manner that precludes dissimulation, and such honesty has never been needed more than it is now. These are bold, inspiriting claims, and we’ve heard something like their empirical proof, these past weeks, issuing from showers, bedrooms, balconies, and rooftops. The poet Dan Chiasson suggested recently that what we are witnessing, as social isolation turns to song, may be nothing less than the rebirth of the public square. Listening to and attending opera will mean something different—already does mean something different—in and after a pandemic-stricken world, and it’s right that it should. A Mad Love can make us better listeners, if not necessarily better singers.