Heinz Politzer’s discussion of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “musical drama,” The Consul, now running on Broadway, raises again, in somewhat original terms, the question of whether an “American opera” is possible. This article was translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.
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Gian-Carlo Menott’s “musical drama” The Consul has been received with great acclaim. The New Yorker’s critic, hardly noted for unrestrained enthusiasm, speaks of a “history-making accomplishment” and hails the work as Broadway’s “first successful all-out opera.” The warmth and enthusiasm of this ovation demonstrate the eagerness of America, the Occident of the 20th century, to catch up with the European continent in every field of culture—even opera.
But opera is a historical form, inseparable from the European social past which molded it. It was nurtured in Baroque, and the European South is its favored scene; it is doubly bound up with Catholicism: with the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, and with the Spanish autos, such as Calderon’s. It is firmly rooted in the feudal order that collapsed in the year 1789, destroyed by that same freedom which still broods over American democracy. The world of opera, with its gods and heroes, with its basic unreality, with the supernatural, time-suspending gesture of the aria—that “lull in the dramatic storm” (Franz Werfel)—all this is a product of feudal arrogance, all this attests feudal disregard of “the lower classes.”
The realistic drama has tried again and again to gain a foothold on the operatic stage: this was part of the bourgeois reaction to the challenge of feudal aristocracy. Gluck in his Alcestis had already attempted to turn the operatic form towards greater realism and to overthrow the supremacy of the aria by emphasizing the dramatically accented recitative. Bizet’s Carmen diverted the romantic passion of “grand” opera style towards an essentially realistic theme. Subsequently the leitmotif—a stylistic device typical of the bourgeois rationalism of the 19th century—came into its own in the work of Richard Wagner, whose ironic, psychologized world of gods and heroes constituted an almost scientific reinterpretation of the German mythos.
But opera continually turned back towards musically determined forms of expression. In Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex or Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, European opera seeks again to return to its sacral ecstasies and to the aria, that illogical and absurd freezing of the climactic moment.
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The chance for an American opera lies undoubtedly in the area of a middle-class realism directly opposed to the rigid feudal forms of “grand” opera, which owes its origin to a social structure basically in conflict with American life. But Americans in general do not accept the idea of “the stage as a moral institution” (Schiller), but have used the theater primarily as a means of escape from reality—and therefore American opera has made almost no attempt to realize itself.
So far, significantly, nearly all attempts at American opera have been set in the South, that section of America which with its backwardness and autocratic ruling class offers the closest approach to European feudalism. Here, in the relations between white and black, a small remnant of serfdom survives, while the contrast between the easy, idle life of the upper classes and the smoldering humility of the people echoes the old conflict of Count Almaviva and the lackey Figaro in the Mozart opera.
That is why Showboat and Oklahoma, not operas to be sure but dramatic operettas with tragic and sentimental emphasis, take place in that American South. And a number of more serious attempts to create a native American opera are bound up with the Negro problem and written for Negro singers: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess; Virgil Thomson’s burlesque oratorio Four Saints in Three Acts to words by Gertrude Stein; and recently Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars, a facile, watered-down version of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, about the suffering and revolt of the South African Negroes.
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In its flight from reality, American operetta, like the American theater generally, does not treat race problems as an area of serious human reality; rather it uses race problems as a reduction of general social problems, which are thus made bearable and even pleasant: “It can’t happen to us.” Or else, as in the work of Tennessee Williams, social problems are reduced to the neurotic fixations of the outsider. Or when they are treated seriously, as by Eugene O’Neill, they remain without significant consequences. Or, as in Thornton Wilder, they are deprived of reality and stylized into legends or fairy tales of “our town” or “our time.”
On the other hand, the average American’s inborn sense of reality, and his inherited puritanical rejection of pleasure, leisure, and display, make him ill disposed to appreciate the sensual abundance of the European theater, let alone the opera: he is a realist who at bottom refuses to take seriously the means by which he seeks for an hour or so to escape from reality—and thus he makes no serious aesthetic demands. And one who serves time, as he does, can find no pleasure in such an operatic element as the aria, which is a deliberate denial of time. Only his bad conscience, his dread of having missed something significantly European (and this, in passing, is one of the most powerful forces at work in the process of American civilization), is responsible for his desire to produce and possess his own, American opera. But bad conscience is not enough.
Actually, in America opera is essentially a prerogative of those foreign minorities in the big cities that have retained some wisp of longing for the old country. American Jews have had a hand in our semi-operas or pseudo-operas: in the music of Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill, or in the words of Gertrude Stein. And this is not only because show business is a field that is open to them (and they have made ample use of the opportunity), but also because for the enlightened, emancipated Jews, especially of Central Europe, opera has always served as a kind of substitute for religious worship. And perhaps their own minority status still finds some echoes in the issues involved in operatic stories: some of the situations dealt with in opera may represent for immigrants at least a remote reality, whereas to native Americans, they are simply dead issues. So it happens that the great Broadway successes up to South Pacific have reflected the pathetic, sentimental display of the European theater (Ezio Pinza along with Mary Martin) much more often than the reformist realism of the American theater-goer.
Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul is a product of the Italian minority, and there is no doubt that this Italian American, who is his own librettist and director, has effectively exploited the halo of martyrdom as well as other feelings surrounding the minority.
Menotti calls his opera a “musical drama”—he, too, no longer believes in the future of the lofty European opera. He has an authentic modern subject, too, worthy of serious treatment, and capable of evoking authentic emotion. For his minority theme, as it happens, involves a situation and an issue that historical events have made so central and so crucial that its protagonist, the alien and outsider as refugee (usually symbolized by the Jew), has become the symbol par excellence of modern alienated, suffering humanity. But, given his subject, Menotti has done little, in his music, to realize the serious potentialities of an independent and original American opera.
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The action is contemporary: we have lived through it; it consists in the struggle for a visa to the land of freedom, good life, redemption. The visa on his passport has become an indispensable prop in the drama of modern man. W. H. Auden wrote more than ten years ago:
The consul banged the table, and said:
“If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially
dead.”
But we are still dive, my dear, but we are
still alive.
Magda Sorel’s husband is a member of the resistance movement in a European police state. The secret police are on his trail. He flees to the mountains and advises his wife to apply to the consulate of an (unnamed) “friendly” state for a visa, and to wait for him in that country. The scene now shifts back and forth between Magda’s working class flat and the consulate. The great adversary, the Consul, remains as invisible as Juarez in Franz Werfel’s Juarez and Maximilian, the last European play in the true operatic style. He is represented by his secretary, a wheel in the state machinery, a small, cold, faceless pane of glass, impervious to humanity and its preoccupations. The subject of Menotti’s opera reveals itself as the destiny of the European Everyman, a worthless bundle of human flesh tossed helplessly about in the backwash of the European crisis.
The drama ends in pity and horror: the wife, put off indefinitely by the secretary, goes home and turns on the gas to prevent her husband from returning to her and thus endangering the fight for freedom. But John, the husband, can bear the separation no longer; he comes home and falls into the hands of the police.
Here we have a banal irony of fate and the wisdom of the sentimental tear-jerker. Menotti avoids any such Kafkaesque denouement to his dramatic involvement as that Magda’s visa should have arrived at the very moment when her death destroyed its value. Instead of this, he builds his last act around the dying woman’s visions of terror, and draws the dramatic action out interminably. In so doing, however, he enters into the tradition of the essentially Baroque dream play, with its spirits and hocus-pocus. (In the very first act Magda sings a duet with the dream figure of her husband.) It is good, reliable, and utterly obsolete theater.
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Musically The Consul partakes of the verismo of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana or L’Amico Fritz; it is a semi-successful programmatic rendition of the dramatic action. Added to this, we have Magda’s long aria against bureaucracy, the modern tyrant, which is exactly patterned on Tosca’s long aria against Police Chief Scarpia—indubitably a late feudal figure. Even the place occupied by this aria is the same as in Puccini—the build-up to the climax of the second act. The logical mechanism of traditional operatic dramaturgy forced Menotti’s adroit hand to this cliché.
Modern effects are artificially superimposed: as the curtain rises, the orchestra is silent and a gramophone is playing a popular hit. As it falls, a telephone is ringing. In between, there is the clatter of a typewriter, the heavy tread of the secret police, the hissing of the gas, and the monotony of fear and expectation, translated into tones that are far too euphonious.
In one scene, indeed, Menotti has captured something of the eery twilight that lies over our time. Among those who have come to the consulate in search of protection and freedom is a magician. Not to obtain his visa but merely to have an audience, he performs his great trick before the spellbound machine, the secretary: he hypnotizes his companions in fate, the insulted and injured, and to the sensuous, unreal strains of a sweet, commonplace waltz, they are lulled into the depths of their suppressed longings. This scene has something of the burlesque irony of Jacques Offenbach, of the surrealistic irony of Jean Cocteau, and of the insane irony of modern existence. In it the theater becomes the mirror of an illusion that reflects another, deeper illusion: here the theater becomes truly magical.
The performance, by young and almost entirely unknown singers, was excellent It achieved a harmony of acting and singing unknown on the European stage and perhaps not even to be desired in a form of dramatic production which to this day retains some memory of the improvised plays of its beginnings. Menotti and his troupe have put an enormous amount of precision work and imagination into this product of wishful thinking—an American opera. The result is a dazzling misfire.
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