[MUSIC] A Guide Through The Jungle of Opera - Part 5 - The 20th Century

For the previous parts, see:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

We have finally reached the tumultuous 20th century in this series where I list my 20 favorite opera pieces of each century. Romanticism had become mystical impressionism, ugly and disturbing expressionism, cold and difficult serialism and finally the minimalism that had its highpoint between 1960 and 1990. But we start off a bit hesitantly...

1. "Un bel di vedremo" from Madama Butterfly (1904) by Giacomo Puccini. This is music that still has one foot in the 19th century, but too essential to leave out. Puccini's tragic opera about Cio-Cio San (aka Butterfly) who forsakes her family, her faith and her culture in order to marry the American Lieutenant Pinkerton, is after all one of the world's most popular and performed operas. Is this tragic opera about unrequited love? Rampant madness? Or a sublime portrayal of an unfair world where the adventures of one can lead to the death of the other? The mere 15 year old Butterfly marries Pinkerton. For her it's dead serious. For him, not so much. She sacrifices everything, abandons her gods and traditions and is ostracized by her family. When Pinkerton returns to his home country, Butterfly refuses to realize the truth. She waits for him for three long years, becoming increasingly poor and isolated. When she finally realizes that he will never come back to her and that she has to give up the child she gave birth to while Pinkerton was away, she decides to take her own life. Here in the second act Cio-Cio San is waiting in the decaying house where Pinkerton left her. Three years have passed since the wedding. His promise to return when the robin makes his nest is still echoing in her head. The mental torture that Puccini and the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa subjects Madama Butterfly to in the two last acts, especially the long third and last act, is almost unbearable, from "Un bel dì vedremo" (One fine day we'll see) as she naively waits for Pinkerton's return, to the very end with the suicide aria and farewell to her child. Truly heartbreaking. No one beats Maria Callas in this aria.

2. "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca (1901) by Giacomo Puccini. We find ourselves on the roof of the Castel Sant'Angelo prison in Rome, where Cavaradossi awaits his execution. The bells are ringing, and a shepherd boy sings a song. The jailer informs him that he has an hour left to live and the artist asks for one last wish: to write a farewell letter to his beloved, which becomes a feverish farewell to life itself. "Tosca" is a red-hot opera filled with love, jealousy, politics, murder, greed, passion and desire for freedom. The power-drunk and sadistic police chief Scarpia violently and by any means tries to prevent the disintegration of the old regime. He's truly one of the worst villains in the history of opera. The young artist Cavaradossi is in love with the famous opera diva Floria Tosca, who is also Scarpia's object of desire. When the revolutionary republican Angelotti flees from Scarpia claws, Cavaradossi gives him temporary shelter. The price he'll pay is high.

3. "S'ils s'embrassent, petit père?" from Pelléas and Mélisande (1902) by Claude Debussy. We finally have both feet in the 20th century! Debussy was truly one of the greatest innovators who was one of those responsible for the dissolution of tonality and form. It probably resulted in immediate expulsion from the Paris Conservatory if anyone were caught with this, at the time, utterly modern opera score. But ahead of his time as Debussy was, "wrong" harmonies have now become completely right. In this scene the father, Golaud, uses his poor son to spy on the mother, Mélisande and her lover Pelléas. One of my five all time favorite operas.

4. "Mamicko, mam tezkou hlavu" from Jenufa (1904) by Leos Janacek. Jenufa has given birth to an illegitimate child. While she sleeps for two days sick with fever, the child has been abducted from her to be drowned under the ice in the pond. She wakes up and misses her child and directs a prayer to the Virgin Mary that she may protect her little one. Janacek is one of those composers that has a clear musical "ID" that is immediately recognizable. When Jenufa was produced in my town's opera house, I was so moved by it that I had to go see it twice the same week.

5. "Ah! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan" from Salome (1905) by Richard Strauss. To sing Salome is extremely demanding. The soprano must have the depth of an alt and the height of a soprano. In addition, she must be able to dance the the infamous "Dance of the Seven Veils" so well that Herod promises to give her the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Truly shattering and upsetting music and story that manages to shock and revolt audiences even in our day. In 1905 it managed to provoke riots. Watch Maria Ewing's stellar and bone-chilling performance below.

6. The final scene of Elektra (1909) by Strauss. Strauss takes romanticism and bends it to the very limits of tonality. This is the end of a dysfunctional family. Orestes has murdered his mother and her husband out of revenge, Elektra and her sister Chrysothemis are dancing feverish and lunatic waltz before Elektra finally falls down dead. Yet another shocking and disturbing Strauss opera and musical expressionism at its very best.

7. "Glück das mir verbleib" from Die tote Stadt (1920) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold wrote and arranged film music to nothing less than 22 Hollywood films and didn't receive much cred from his contemporaries as he continued to write tonal music while the atonal Second Viennese School dominated. Only in the 70s, 30 years after his death, Korngold had a revival, not least through the opera Die tote Stadt. The young dancer Marietta is performing in the city and is visited by Paul, who is obsessed by the memory of his dead wife and filled with self-pity to the sounds of Marietta's sad song. In the opera it's sung as a duet, but I chose a solo recital version sung by the legendary German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

8. The final scene of act 1 of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) by Dmitri Shostakovich. Katerina Lvovna Izmailova isn't only tired of life as a merchant's wife, she is also a prisoner of a brutal environment of physical abuse. She believes that she can find happiness with the new farmhand Sergei. This scene from the final of the first act, is a sex scene that culminates in what one critic called "pornophony". One can literally hear how destructive their relationship is, which leads to the murder her husband. Shostakovich's controversial opera about the darkest sides of humans angered Stalin to the point that he wrote a threatening article in Pravda entitled "Chaos instead of music."

9. "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades" from Peter Grimes (1945) by Benjamin Britten. Peter Grimes isn't just a fisherman who's heavy handed with his young apprentice boys. He's also the misunderstood recluse, a monster to the village mob. The individual stands no chance in the small fishing community on the Suffolk coast, from where also Benjamin Britten came. The exclusion depicted in this opera most likely had a lot to do with Britten's own situation as a pacifist and homosexual.

10. "Salve Regina" from Dialogues des Carmelites (1957) by Francis Poulenc. Dialogues of the Carmelites is a dramatic story set in late 18th century France. The young Blanche can't come to terms with life as a noblewoman. She wants to find a higher purpose in life and her strong faith leads her to the convent in Compiègne. She becomes a novice of the Carmelite order, the strictest of all monastic orders, to live a life of silence and prayer. But fate wants something else. The French Revolution rages and one day the angry mob stands in front of the monastery gates. Many operas end with the heroine dying, but in this opera there's a veritable gluttony in the death of women when the devout Carmelite nuns are sent to the scaffold, one by one. You can clearly hear the metallic blade of the guillotine as it falls. And the voices are becoming fewer and fewer. Worst of all is that it's based on real events, described by the only surviving nun from the monastery.

On this horrible and gory note we end the first half of my list of 20 favorite opera pieces of the 20th century. In the next and concluding article of four centuries of opera, I can promise a guest appearance by none other than Jack the Ripper!

 @SteemSwede