Opera Unlimited

I have been on an opera frenzy lately. In four days I've watched four operas: Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses, Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Richard Strauss's Salomé. As I watched the four operas, I was tremendously moved by the power of music to assist the drawback of our spoken language. The spoken language, in short, is two-dimensional; it has rhythm and meaning, but it also has the physical limitation of needing to be spoken quickly; it is also not made for repetition. Words or phrases repetited can become tedious. Music, on the other hand, covers this third temporal dimension. A musical phrase can be compressed or lengthened (and is usually done so); it can also be repeated and often is repeated. The art form of opera is thus the happy marriage that gives the human intellect the most powerful way of expressing itself.

The spoken language is not made for the most powerful and sublime human expressions - love and despair. Phrases like "I love you" are too trite; they have seem to lost their meaning and seem to become mere words. With music (composed by the best composers, of course), however, these phrases revive and are born again. Let me give some examples.

In Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the prelude establishes a "Tristan" motif that lends itself to continous variations and transformations throughout the opera, both musically and verbally. One of the most powerful transformations of the motif occurs in Act II: musically, the motif doesn't change at all; but Wagner has written a vocab melody that sings first "Isolde", then "Tristan". This simple move changes the entire nature of the motif: the music phrase is no longer just a beautiful melody; everytime the motif sounds the names Isolde and Tristan are attached to it together. This is Wagner's way of musically illustrating the powerful love between the lovers.

In Strauss's Salomé, again there is an undevelopped musical motif, introduced at the beginning, that gets its full development at the climax of the opera. This point is significant because the fully developped motif becomes an illustration of Salomé's love for John. Her love is very difficult to perceive if we only take Wilde's words:
"There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth."
These words, in fact, are trivial taken out of context, strange within the story. But with Strauss's music they become central to the story; from his music the words grow a new set of meaning.

In Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, the music, while it does not play as much of an important role as in Wagner and Strauss' music dramas, still serves a significant role in propelling the story along and illustrating the psychological landscape of the characters. The climax of the story is when Pelléas tells Melisande that he loves her. At that moment it was complete silence. That is much more powerful than the full bloom Wagnerian orchestra (especially when Tristan is dead in Isolde's arms, the orchestra basically takes over the music and one can hardly hear what Isolde is singing). The mere phrase "I love you" is augmented to power beyond the stretch of the (musical) imagination.

I'm not quite sure why until now did I become interested in opera. For the longest time I've neglected vocal music in general. My main musical reportoire consists of sonatas, concertos, string quartets and symphonies. But now I have realized the power of syntheized Art.

PS: A couple of things: 1.) I'm very sadden to realize that my instrumental heros are not exactly opera composers: Beethoven wrote one opera, Schubert wrote 17 neglected ones (in fact I didn't even know that he had written operas until recently), Brahms wrote none, Mahler wrote none, and I'm not entirely sure if Elgar had written any. 2.) I was surprised after I had read Wilde's French version of Salomé that a highly philosophical and academic composer like Strauss can set this rather lighthearted, absurd drama in music. The liberetto from Strauss' opera is almost exactly the same as Wilde's words, which makes Strauss's task even more amazing. I would think a composer like Ravel would set Wilde's play in music; instead, Ravel prefered Mother Goose.