A very good post with personal experience. Looking forward to your next on art and political impact.
Henry
Louis Proyect wrote:
> I have become a big opera fan. My tastes had become jaded over the years
> and I was searching for something new. I had reached the point where the
> strains of a Brahms symphony or Vivaldi concerto would set my teeth on edge
> like the voice of Whitney Houston or Billy Joel.
>
> I had the usual prejudices against opera, but they were slowly broken down
> by the inimitable Stefan Zucker, who used to host a show called "The Opera
> Fanatic" on the Columbia FM station on Saturday nights. He was expelled
> from WKCR because of his outspoken support for the mayoral candidacy of
> Rudolph Giuliani, another opera buff, who had been a frequent guest on
> Zucker's show.
>
> Zucker is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as "the world's highest
> tenor." He is a specialist in the bel canto style, which includes Rossini,
> Bellini and Donizetti as the most notable examples. It is form that
> stresses vocal flourish at the expense of character and plot development,
> and is made to order for superstars like the late Maria Callas. Zucker
> represents himself as the only living practitioner of a tenor style that
> was heard in the bel canto era that is pitched much higher than the modern
> tenor style. It is supposed to have the effect of castrato singing but
> nobody's testicles get sacrificed. The joke with Zucker is that he can't
> sing to save his life. I went to one of his bel canto recitals a couple of
> years ago, which included a number of wonderful second-tier singers. When
> Zucker came out to sing, I went into shock. He sounded like Alfalfa on the
> Our Gang comedies.
>
> What Zucker is good at, however, is interviewing retired singers, who had
> illustrious careers. He is especially close to Franco Corelli, who starred
> at the Met in the 1950s, and they would play his old recordings and chat.
> It was just terrific. He would also play ancient 78s and explain the
> difference between singing styles of the early 1900s and today. It is just
> amazing how the same Verdi aria can be expressed in such radically
> different ways.
>
> While Zucker had opened my ears to Italian opera, I had become a Wagner fan
> through exposure to the Patrice Chereau Ring cycle that was broadcast on
> PBS about a decade ago. Conducted by Pierre Boulez, the opera was presented
> in fairly straightforward Marxist terms. The first part of the Ring, Das
> Rheingold, includes a famous scene in a foundry run by the gods, that
> Chereau depicts as a 19th century factory straight out of Engels'
> "Conditions of the Working Class in England."
>
> Now that I have had the opportunity over the past five years or so to
> familiarize myself with the entire opera tradition from Monterverdi to
> Philip Glass, I would strongly urge others to give it a chance. The rewards
> are enormous, both musically and as a sourcebook for understanding the
> class struggle. There is no question that a radical thread runs through
> opera over the centuries. This profoundly democratic and anti-authoritarian
> streak is no accident, since opera composers were subject to the whims and
> cruelty of people who ruled society and who paid their wage.
>
> The earliest example are Mozart's Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
> Mozart was a Freemason, an important semi-clandestine group that promoted
> visions of justice and equality. Freemasonry got the most open endorsement
> in the Magic Flute, but it is Don Giovanni and the Marriage of Figaro which
> are the most consciously anti-aristocratic works. Even though Don
> Giovanni--i.e., Don Juan--is hunted down by other aristocrats for seducing
> and abandoning their women, the point of view is of the outsider in court
> society who would look at all their escapades as having a decadent
> character. The wisest, most down-to-earth and likable character in Don
> Giovanni is his servant Leporello, who I would argue is a stand-in for
> Mozart himself. Mozart allows Leporello to confront the aristocrat in a way
> that most court servants would not be allowed to: "My dear Lord and Master,
> the life you that you lead is that of a scoundrel."
>
> In The Marriage of Figaro, the plot revolves around the efforts of another
> servant to prevent his master from enjoying the feudal right to have sex
> with his wife-to-be, another servant. Declaring his intention to frustrate
> the Count's ambitions, Figaro sings one of the opera's best-known arias,
> "Se vuol ballare" or "If you would dance":
>
> If, my Dear Count,
> You feel like Dancing,
> It's I
> Who'd call the tune.
> If you'll come to my school,
> I'll teach you
> How to caper.
> I'll know how ... but wait,
> I can uncover
> His secret design
> More easily by dissembling.
> Acting stealthily,
> Acting openly,
> Here stinging,
> There mocking,
> All your plots
> I'll overthrow.
>
> Since the opera was first performed in 1786, 3 years before the French
> Revolution, I'd like to think this aria is better titled as "Rovescierò",
> or "I'll overthrow."
>
> The anti-aristocratic tradition was kept alive in the operas of Giuseppi
> Verdi, whose "Don Carlos" is probably the most perfect expression of his
> love of individual and national liberty and his hatred of aristocratic and
> clerical tyranny. The libretto is based on Schiller's "Don Carlos," who is
> also the author of the "Ode to Joy" that climaxes Beethoven's Ninth
> Symphony. It should be noted, by the way, that Verdi, whose democratic
> credentials are impeccable, openly admitted that Wagner's aesthetics had
> influenced this late opera. He told people that he hoped that his own
> Neopolitan Opera House might become another Bayreuth.
>
> Don Carlos is the Spanish monarch who is set to wed Elisabeth, a French
> member of royalty, in order to help bring about peace between the two
> countries. While he is of the nobility, Don Carlos harbors democratic
> aspirations. The main conflict in the opera is between Don Carlos and the
> more benighted elements of the court and the clergy. One of the
> archvillains of the opera is a Grand Inquisitor who urges the monarch
> Philip, Don Carlos's rival, to bloc with the church against all its enemies:
>
> The ideas of the innovation
> have tainted your mind!
> You wish to break with your feeble hand
> the sacred yoke extending over the Roman Catholic globe!
> Return to your duty:
> the Church can offer to the man who has hope,
> who repents, complete forgiveness...
>
> Since Italy had struggled against reactionary clericalism and the landed
> gentry for most of the 1800s, it is understandable why this would have
> influenced both Verdi and Puccini as well. Puccini is much more of a
> "popular" composer, whose emotional excesses were embraced wholeheartedly
> by Italy's working and peasant masses. The opera which best expresses his
> progressive politics is "Tosca," the story of a woman who would sleep with
> a right-wing torturer named Scarpia in exchange for his release of her
> lover Cavaradossi, a left-wing political prisoner. If you would purchase a
> recording of this opera, I would strongly urge the Callas/Di Stefano
> recording. Callas was identified with this role more than any other in her
> career.
>
> Caravadossi has been arrested after intervening to save a woman from
> Scarpia's clutches. The theme of sexual predatory behavior is a constant
> one in Italian opera. Caravadossi sings:
>
> Scarpia? That licentious bigot who exploits
> The uses of religion as refinements
> For his libertine lust, and makes
> Both the confessor and the hangman
> The servant of his wantonness!
> I'll save you should it cost my life!
>
> There has been a strong affinity between Marxism and opera over the years.
> The Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw was an opera critic as well as a
> playwright who saw Wagner as a kindred thinker. In more recent years,
> Maynard Solomon has written books on Beethoven and Mozart that emphasize
> the social and political dimensions of their works, including their operas.
> Solomon is also the author of "Marxism and Art" and founder of Vanguard
> Records, a great label that recorded Beethoven piano sonatas and Pete
> Seeger alike. Mozart, Solomon says, was particularly sensitive to issues of
> economic exploitation and cites his comment that "No man ought to be mean,
> but neither ought he to be such a simpleton as to let other people take the
> profits from his work, which has cost him so much study and labor, by
> renouncing all further claims upon it."
>
> I have my own interpretation about what fuelled the democratic sympathies
> of all these great composers, which I can only sketch out at this point. If
> I ever find the time for it, it will be a chapter in a book that I intend
> to call "The Plebian Democratic Revolution." As I have stated repeatedly on
> various mailing-lists, I reject the notion of a bourgeois-democratic
> revolution. This is a myth that was propagated by the liberal historians of
> the French Revolution and which Marx accepted uncritically. Later in life
> in moved away from this interpretation when confronted by the open
> treachery of the bourgeoisie in Germany and in the French revolution of 1848.
>
> The problem for Marxists is that they can not conceive of revolutions in
> this pre-Communist Manifesto period as having anything but a bourgeois
> character. I would argue that there were anti-aristocratic and
> anti-clerical revolutions but that they were led by the plebian masses of
> the city and the countryside, the so-called "sans culotte". The reason that
> they were not successful, and could not be successful, is that the
> insurgent masses lacked the social weight and political cohesion to form an
> alternative ruling class.
>
> These revolutions were embryonic forms of the socialist revolution.
>
> The importance of the opera composers is that they were some of the most
> conscious advocates of revolution *within* the pre-Revolutionary social
> structures. They had feet in both worlds. Accepted by the aristocracy for
> their musical gifts, they were treated like lap dogs. But they were human
> beings, not lap dogs. Mozart's contempt for the aristocracy leaps from the
> scenes of nearly all his greatest opera.
>
> It would take most of the 19th century for the socialist movement to emerge
> out of the working-class culture of the great European cities. As this
> movement develops, it has tended to have an ambivalent relationship to the
> artists, who are never sure whether to make art or propaganda. This tension
> will exist as long as there is class society. The proper way to make art
> that has political impact is a topic best left to another post, which I
> will turn to when time permits.
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)