Harmony and Content
Or why recent tonal operas fail. Or do they?
Opera is not for the facile anymore. If your harmonic language is based on popular music and your presentation is melody and (ostinoto) accompaniment, your attempts at opera will fail. The work will sound like a musical with an excuse. Dramatic content requires more then a lot of “melody” with a little dissonance to spice up the tense parts. These half baked musicals would never survive a day on Broadway. You say, “What about Richard Strauss?” Though most composers write one work at a time it is a fallacy to say only the last compositions count. Strauss had knowledge of Schoenberg and Berg and he made his own choices. Without Electra there is no Four Last Songs and not without Mahler either). You can argue the importance of Bernstein’s “serious” works but which of his music is most loved? Or performed? The exception to this is George Gershwin. A pop musician who composed “serious” music as well. His opera, Porgy and Bess, had the kind of failure (124 performances) for which every composer I know would die. It was called a failure at the time, by Virgil Thomson and others, but it still gets quite a lot of performances (more then Mr. Thomson). Gershwin was on to something but the work is at its heart a musical as the songs overwhelm everything else. Then again why can’t a musical can be just as important as an opera anyway ? So, if your musical language is based on Rodgers and Hammerstein, musicals are your best bet.
10 rules for being a successful opera composer
1) get the commission
2) get the commission
3) get the commission
4) get the commission
5 )get the commission
6) get the commission
7) get the commission
8) get the commission
9) get the commission
10) get another commission
It seems on the above paragraphs that I’m getting to some point or other. Perhaps it is this. It is very likely that operas judged artistic failures will still be seen as successes. How can this be? Today it is so difficult to get a work produced and presented to the public by a major or minor company that the performance in itself is a success. That is undeniably true. Further, once you are part of the system, your name will come up again, failure or not. So it’s easier to get your second work done then your first even if the first one fails. Of course who judges the work a failure is important too.
Also, something else comes to mind. In many of the operas out today the music comes last. It is the least important part of the show.
The job of the music is not to get in the way of the text, author, or concept. Or to recycle the familiar, the popular, or the trite.