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Euryanthe's Silence
Weber's opera Euryanthe is traditionally criticised
as a masterpiece with blemishes that make it unstageable. The main
problems allegedly stem from an over-complicated libretto with an
inconsistent and unintelligible plot, set to music with such meticulous
attention to every textual detail that the result is musically
incoherent. [1] To say there is a close connection between
this view and the rarity of performances, even mutilated ones,
sounds at first like an obvious statement of cause and
effect. But it could equally be argued that the rarity of
performances itself serves to perpepuate the critical emphasis on
musical-textual misalliance. For on the one hand
it is understandable that a work largely studied, rather than heard and
seen in the theatre, should be judged in terms that exclude any visual
considerations. It is commonly regarded as outside the business of
music criticism to speculate creatively on a mainly loose dimension of
opera and relate it plausibly to the fixtures [2] : especially - and
now we enter a vicious circle - when the effort is about to be wasted
on something held to be basically deficient, rather than to crown what
is already good. On the other hand no director or team with
sufficient overall talent to project some exceptional and
coherent musical insight through images and movement has so far
emerged to change accepted opinion through performance.
The converse of the Euryanthe phenomenon is that commercially
successful operas with laughable plots or libretti never lose
their popularity as a result of the almost exclusive critical
emphasis on music and text. Apart from the fact that success attracts
canonisation, this may simply be because regularly staged works offer
some ready-made images or other to the writer who may not state or be
conscious of how far these influence - usually to advantage - an
understanding of libretto and/or music even when those alone are
ostensibly being discussed. So
a major question here is whether we can construct an inclusively heard
and seen idea of Euryanthe that will work, instead of getting stuck
with the idea of irredeemable failure somewhere along the
libretto/music axis.
The emphasis away from textual fuss toward gestural clarity invites a
classical approach to Euryanthe - in the sense of regarding it as
basically a number opera [3] , and rejecting the more influential view
that it is some kind of unsuccessful premonition of Wagner's
music-drama. [4] For if the set-pieces can be perceived as
centres of gravity, then the transitions - those mixtures of
accompanied recitative and arioso which take up significant timespans
and constitute an important part of the opera's claims to innovation
[5] - can drop most of their heavy responsibility for
conveying details of verbal meaning to the audience and concentrate
instead on supporting explanatory gesture, mime and movement, leaving
the more, or less, obscure textual flow to satisfy
naturalistic opera convention that those creatures on stage are human,
and therefore talk words. The shift in perception of aria
versus recitative would then be, broadly speaking, away from
"meditation versus explanation "to "crisis versus consequent behaviour
". This should make clearer why the aria is central - it
generates the behaviour in the recitatives; furthermore, behaviour is
understandable in terms of actions (visual and musical) without
requiring a complicated verbal gloss.
In the generations before Weber, the speech-like delivery of secco
recitative was an acoustically possible way of conveying information in
the smaller theatres for which it was originally intended.
By contrast, the words of accompanied recitative
are less intelligible, the more elaborate the music, and the larger the
theatre. So from a practical standpoint as well,
it is better in these transitions to let gesture and staging extract
the essentials from the plot/text surface at a comprehensible pace,
particularly since accompanied recitative introduces a definite metre
and so invites choreography.
A significant role for movement and gesture in post-classical opera
should also seem less extravagant when it is remembered how the
classical style itself partly owes its multi-topicality and the kind of
driven elaboration typified by the symphony to an early association
with pantomimic ballet pioneered in mid-eighteenth century
Vienna by Hilverding and Starzer, then developed by Angiolini and
Gluck, particularly in Don Juan and Sémiramis .[6]
Weber himself was evidently as much occupied with the visual aspects of
opera as with music or text [7] and the then less well-defined role of
the régisseur meant that an ambitious musical director could
exercise much more influence on staging, lighting, costumes, etc. than
would be thinkable today. [8] Also during the years leading
up to Euryanthe a new style of acting emerged in which an earlier taste
for the picturesque - literally, the conception of staging as a series
of tableaux modelled on paintings - gave way to a more fluid, gestural
and "natural" style. [9] An early exponent was W.
Schröder-Devrient who sang Euryanthe in the 1824 Dresden
performances. [10] Euryanthe therefore appears at
a transitional historical moment where picturesque staging, though not
prettiness for its own sake, was still held to be desirable; at the
same time a new form of expressive gesture was theoretically advocated,
but could only be realised by someone with exceptional acting and
singing talents like Schröder-Devrient. This
conflict of approach closely parallels the formal musical tension
between the traditional enclosed opera number and the new free-ranging
extended accompanied recitative.
The following discussion first questions some common general criticisms
of the music and libretto, leading to an investigation of
controversial scenes in the opera. A more prominent role for
gesture is proposed in two areas. One is the classical
perspective outlined above, where the set number is central and
so invites an interpretation of recitatives as behaviour
rather than explanation. This will involve analysing some examples of
set-pieces to show in what sense they can be seen as dramatically
crucial, rather than decorative or even misplaced.
Equally important, if more obvious, is the visual dimension
generally, and its potential to clarify, compensate or act as
substitute for obscurities in the libretto or plot, particularly in
those fluid recitatives. Comments on stage direction are to
be understood on a fairly abstract and simplified plane.
Abstract, because my experience of staging is limited to
collaborative and advisory involvement as a composer of multi-media
works, including opera, so that at times I might turn out to be
providing directorial fantasies rather than practical suggestions.
Simplified, in the following sense. Visual and
textual elements supposedly interact with music rather as rhythm
interacts with metre. Disregarding its own internal rhythm, music in an
opera represents a hyper-meter for these other elements. Rhythm is not
just asserting metre but playing with it. Analogously,
non-musical elements play with the music, but I will only be
sketching these out as though they were asserting a metre, and not
proposing the actual rhythm. The project seems
worthwhile, if modest, since its present purpose is to help elucidate
that far from self-evident "hyper-metre", the music,
rather than supply a clever production as such.
The occasional revivals of Euryanthe nearly all treat its alleged
faults as a licence to cut, insert, replace or rearrange music, text or
plot. [11] Since none of these versions has
brought the work any closer to public success the attitude of
René Leibowitz that the music stands or falls as
Weber wrote it [12] is adopted here. It also avoids
unnecessary complications and is a view with which Weber would
apparently concur. [13]
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