OPERA: FERGUS JOHNSTONreviews Verdi and/or WagnerBy Peter Conrad Thames & Hudson 384pp, £24.95
ONE of the great generalisations often made about European music history is that German music is heady, while Italian music wears its heart on its sleeve. Combine that with the fact that opera in the second half of the 19th century was dominated by two composers, an Italian and a German, and you have the premise for this book by Peter Conrad, which compares and/or contrasts the personalities of the two men in question, and their historical status, in great depth.
Coincidentally, they were both born in the same year, 1813, and both were composers of opera to the virtual exclusion of other musical genres – but everything else about them was different.
The book opens engagingly, with a description of the two statues of Verdi and Wagner in the public gardens on the eastern end of the Venetian Castello district, and how it appears that the two are trying to ignore one another. This opening is something of a survey, and the rest of the book moves through a number of sections that cover aspects of both men and the worlds they inhabited, ending with a discussion of their treatment during the 20th century, including their treatment at the hands of another dualist pair, Hitler and Mussolini.
The conceptual section titles themselves are organised into chapters under such headings as “Ups and downs”, “After the war, before the revolution”, “Lovers and heroes”, making the comparative structure apparent here also. This non-narrative approach makes it a valuable reference item, and students will probably mine it for material for that essay which they have to get in on 19th-century opera.
There is a danger with the approach of continually comparing and contrasting the two men, however (although that’s what the book is about), and that is that the dualism inherent in the method becomes overworked. This becomes most evident on the few occasions when the subject matter relates to musical ideas as opposed to literary, dramatic and/or historical ones. (In fact one of the problems with the book is the lack of discussion of and/or engagement with the music of the two men, with the focus of the argument being placed, although supremely well so, on literary, dramatic and historically documented ideas and the events that took place in their orbit.)
As an example of this weakness, early in the book references are made to Italian melody and German harmony, exemplified by Verdi the tunesmith and Wagner the harmonist. This is terribly simplistic, and the inverse could also be argued – equally simplistically – that Wagner operas are constructed from endless melodies and harmonic movement is frequently static, while Verdi’s operas are replete with relatively simple melodies but rapid and complex harmonic movement. Missing in the former argument is any effort to establish in musical terms a supporting basis for stating the dichotomy.
To those who know the two composers and their operas, and who are acquainted with the plots and subterfuges within them, and with characters and their tragic or comic flaws or traits that create the drama on the stage, this book is a mine of information. It repeatedly delves into an aspect of one of the two composers, finds a point worthy of comment, then finds in the other composer a point worthy of contrast with the former.
It could even be dipped into by opera-goers for easily memorised opinions and vignettes of post-performance dinner conversation, and your friends will be very impressed with your knowledge when you come out with: "Well, now, darling, I don't know, but to me 'the feud between the Christians and the Muslims in ( I Lombardi) is less a theological combat than an exercise in name-calling', wouldn't you agree?"
Or even “I love the way Verdi shows Griselda ‘expressing her mental intrepidity in violently flamboyant harangues, with slashing rhythms and wildly elated coloratura’, don’t you?” Note: if you do use that last one, don’t make the mistake of gesturing with your fork.
The author is not content to confine himself solely to the two composers, and large sections of the book step outside of the pair and their works, and into the world, and works, of their artistic contemporaries, throwing light on to the men and on to the characters in their works as seen by others. Here, Conrad’s vast knowledge of letters (he taught literature at Oxford for years) enables a deep exploration of his theme of the moment.
There are many illustrations, but a serious flaw is that footnotes and/or sources for the ubiquitous phrases in quotation marks are totally missing, which gives the impression that the author doesn’t really care about anyone else’s opinions except his own.
When he writes, for example: “Verdi called Shakespeare ‘the great searcher of the human heart’, a secular priest who listens to our collective confessions but provides no penance (p212),” I want to know where and when did Verdi so describe Shakespeare? Conrad has written a wonderful line which someone else is sure to quote; but the quote within the quote remains unsourced, and the book abounds with similar instances.
Fergus Johnston is a composer based in Ireland and Bulgaria. He has recently completed a piano trio for the London-based Fidelio Trio
