Opera: Battleground of the Arts

You In the year 1678, St. Evrimon said, opera is a bizarre affair of poetry and music, in which the poets and the musician each equally obstructed by the other, give themselves no end of trouble to produce a wretched result. On the other hand, a hundred years later, Mozart said, the best thing of all is when a good composer who understands the stage meets an able poet. In that case, no fears need be entertained as to the applause even of the ignorant.

Riverside Radio, WRVR in New York City, presents opera, the battleground of the arts. In this series of half-hour programs, Bory Skoldowski discusses some of the problems that beset operas and those who create and produce them. The programs are produced in association with the Goldowski Opera Institute for National Educational Radio, under a grant from the National Home Library Foundation. Bory Skoldowski is nationally known as an intermission commentator for broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, and as an opera producer, principally through the productions of the Goldowski Opera Theatre, which have been presented in about 400 communities from coast to coast. And now, here is Mr. Goldowski. Operatic life in the United States presents a confusing picture. Some of it looks very bright, but there are features which are intensely discouraging. What puzzles most observers is why, with our abundance, in fact our overabundance of vocal and instrumental talent,

we do not have, in this wealthiest of nations, a more widely distributed and active operatic life. Why is it many people ask that large cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Boston, and Los Angeles can witness operatic productions only sporadically, and why we cannot have a resident opera companies in our smaller cities, companies of the type that exist in such astonishing numbers in central Europe, in Italy, and in the Soviet Union? The basic reasons for this are fairly obvious. To be blunt about it, opera simply is not sufficiently popular with Americans, and in its European format, at least, is much too expensive for general distribution. The remedy would therefore seem to be equally obvious, let us increase the popularity of opera and decrease its cost. In order to accomplish this, however, we must stop thinking of opera exclusively in terms of its European traditions. Our cultural inheritance is so different from that of the Europeans, that we should not expect to follow their traditions and habits.

To begin with, we have not inherited the way the Europeans have the facilities for producing opera, and it is extremely doubtful, in spite of all the talk of building fine art centers, if we will ever have more than two or three theaters built especially for operatic presentations. The ideal seating capacity in an operatic auditorium is about 2500 people, and this is the maximum really. Many fine European opera houses accommodate only 1500 spectators, and some even fewer than that. In a theater seating, many more than 2500, certain operatic effects simply cease to function. It is not surprising, therefore, that so many Americans who have seen opera only in auditorium seating between 5 and 9000 spectators fail to see the dramatic or musical purpose of many operatic endeavors. Even the grandest of operas has many intimate scenes, the impact of which depends entirely on discrete musical nuances, on minute facial expressions, and on subtleties of vocal inflections.

Nothing of this sort can be enjoyed in an auditorium where four fifths of all listeners and spectators sit at a distance of half a city block from the stage. Verdes Aida is generally considered to be one of the most spectacular of grand operas, but surprisingly many of its most important dramatic scenes consist of episode of chamber music like intimacy. Listen, for instance, to this passage where Princess Amneris pretends to be tenderly insinuating an even playful while trying to discover the secret of Aida's amorous involvement. And when my daughter is in love with Aida, and you are free to see me, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. This type of operatic music and drama produces its full effect only in relatively small theaters,

but the trouble is that in terms of its European development, a theater to be suitable for giving Verdes Aida must have an orchestra pit large enough to accommodate no less than 60 players. Now then theaters that have a capacity of 2500 or less and yet have large enough orchestra pits exist in our country, only in about a dozen university centers where these theaters are used almost exclusively for student performances. This more or less permanent lack of suitable facilities for an European style development of operatic life is a basic fact of our cultural environment and a fact that cannot be overlooked or underestimated when we plan for a richer and wider employment and deployment of our human resources. We must adjust our thinking to conditions as they exist here

and not keep insisting on methods and procedures that have been developed for the very different European environment. To make opera more popular and less expensive, we must find ways to present it within the framework of existing facilities. But wait a moment you will say, have we do not seem to be able to pay for opera even by selling 5000 tickets? How do you expect us to make ends meet in theaters that have only half that many sees or even fewer than that? Very well, let us for a moment evaluate our operatic strengths and weaknesses. Our main strength lies in the high quality of our instrumentalists and in the vocal excellence, musicianship, mental alertness, acting ability and physical attractiveness of our singers. Our weaknesses, besides the shortage of suitable theaters, lie in the fact that our people are used to higher standard of living and expect to be paid better than the Europeans. And even greater obstacle to less expensive opera comes from the high cost of labor, construction and transportation. Putting all these elements together, what seems to suggest itself is the use of smaller halls, but also fewer instrumentalists and smaller courses.

Our alliance on artistic nuances rather than on spectacular scenic effects and on masses of people. It is surprising how many famous operas, not Aida perhaps, can be presented in smaller halls perfectly adequately, with orchestras numbering no more than 30 of our high quality instrumentalists. Modern opera composers have shown us what can be accomplished with even much smaller instrumental ensembles. Listen for instance to this excerpt from Britain's Albert Herring, which is performed by no more than 12 instrumentalists. It is designed and now is really one of the greatest PLAYINGES and music You may remember that on the tenth program of this series, I mentioned several ways in

which modern technology can help improve the acoustics of our stages. Well then, by combining the technological genius of our engineers with the technical skill of our composers and performers, we should be able to find ways of converting our high school stages in our basketball courts into adequate little theatres, where relatively small groups of highly efficient vocalists and orchestra players would present opera of a musical and dramatic quality that will not only make it more popular, but also save it from bankruptcy. Another very serious defect of our cultural inheritance, which must be overcome before we can hope for a healthier operatic life, is the habit, so many music-loving Americans have of thinking of opera productions, as of occasional exotic banquets, which depend on the presence in the singing company of one or more international stars.

For his daily operatic bread, our opera lover turns to recordings, which excellent though they may be, do not build a taste for the interplay of visual and musical drama, which is the essence of this form of art. In the good old days, that means until the late 1920s, opera in our country was based in the presence of two or three dozen sufficiently famous European singers, and it was supported by an equal number of sufficiently wealthy American opera lovers. There was no need for more than just a very few companies of this type, and therefore the supply and demand, as well as the cost and financial support, were so to speak in balance. In the course of the last 40 years, however, the situation has changed radically. Now we have many hundreds of excellent native singers and dozens of gifted conductors, stage directors, and scenic and costume designers who clamor for the opportunity to express themselves in the field of opera.

The number of potential supporters has also grown spectacularly, but thanks to the inexorable facts of taxation, the size of the individual contribution has dwindled to a fraction of what would be needed for a healthy national operatic life. If it hadn't been for the sudden awakening of interest in the humanities and the arts, on the part of our larger foundations, and more recently, on the part of our federal and state legislators, professional opera would long ago have been on its last legs. It is undeniable that grants by charitable foundations, as well as by arts councils and other government agencies, are helping to keep alive many of our operatic organizations. It is unfortunate, however, that in so many instances, the assistance is hedged in by special rules of the game, rules which reflect a completely unrealistic attitude to the problem. Much of the money is available only for so-called creative or innovational purposes. The term creative has become a regular shibboleth among those who pass on requests for financial

support. Thus, the designing of scenery and costumes is considered creative, while the much more expensive construction of these items does not qualify under the usual interpretation of this term. Salary spade to musicians or singers are singularly uncreative expenditures, and administrative overhead is by definition the item least worthy of support. This distaste of the foundations for anything as prosaic and unimaginative as support for day-to-day operations and overhead expenses has been noticed also in organizations having nothing to do with operatic arts. In March of 1967, the president of the Afro-American Institute, Mr. Waldemar Nielsen, wrote as follows in the pages of the New York Times. There is a highly developed distaste for giving to overhead costs. The result is that the nonprofit organizations are forced to play the shuttlecock in a particularly brutal form of badminton.

Those responsible for the management and development of nonprofit agencies are driven to a more and more frantic search for the funds with which to pay the dismal but inescapable basic costs of any institution. The rent, the light, the equipment, and the central staff on which the unending tasks of planning, administration, evaluation, and development fall. Private foundations, individual donors and government agencies might recall that overhead, though most commonly used as an epithet, also signifies the vital management core of an institution without which neither its ongoing programs nor its new experiments can maintain their quality, much less achieve excellence. Innovating, on the other hand, means doing something that you have never done before and chief among these all-important innovations, is an expansion into new and untried fields and the performance of new and untried works.

Thus, upper companies that clamor for help in the form of daily bread are more or less forced to eat cake, which gives most of them nothing but the bad case of indigestion. Instead of insisting on expansion and creativity, foundations and government agencies would do well to look into some of the contributing causes of upper financial plight. Besides its inescapable built-in costliness, upper in this country is plagued by two additional economic ills. One is the inefficiency and wastefulness of so many operatic producers, and the other is the short-sighted attitude on the part of many unions that refuse to discriminate between profit-oriented commercial ventures and deficit-ridden cultural endeavors. The same identical hourly wage scale is applied to speculative ventures that can, if successful produce fat profits, as to serious artistic endeavors that by their very nature can never hope to avoid back-breaking deficits.

No amount of foundation and government support will suffice if it encourages the producers to be more spectacularly wasteful, and if it leads to ever greater demands on the part of organized labor. The effect of these grants on unsubsidized operatic groups is even more disastrous. Companies that have to depend for their existence solely on the nations by individuals cannot possibly keep up with the general escalation in costs, which is bound to result from large grants to few companies. Since the government and the foundations can support only a very small number of organizations, a rapid demise of the others is a mathematical certainty, and will reduce further the opportunities available to American artists. From my own dealings with State Chains and other theatrical unions, it has become apparent to me that only the government or the larger foundations, and preferably both, acting in concert, could command enough economic leverage to persuade the leadership of the unions that the change in their attitude to high deficit cultural enterprises would be in their

own interest. Even then, and quite rightly, the unions will expect to be given credible assurances, that the subsidies granted to the opera groups would not be reckless, disc-wondered in poor planning and in a variety of expensive gimmicks. Similarly, members of the orchestra in the course are not likely to feel in a cooperative mood if they have reason to believe that they are the only ones who are asked to make sacrifices in the name of culture. One way or another, however, the astronomical costs of live opera must be brought under control. If some steps in that direction are not taken soon, all except two or three companies will soon go out of existence, and eventually most gifted conductors, stage directors, and senior designers of opera will seek refuge in the music departments of our universities and colleges, where they are able to function in decently equipped theaters and without having to worry about meeting a payroll. The proliferation of large-scale operatic events in our more ambitious music departments

is not an unmixed blessing, however. Many thoughtful educators doubt whether continuous involvement in public performances of difficult operatic works is compatible with the educational needs of the music students. It is also rather frightening to contemplate the future where large numbers of exceptionally gifted instrumentalists and vocalists are trained to excel in an art form for which there is no existing public outlet. Perhaps we are facing a time when opera will be performed only by students, for other students, and where the only professional outlet for opera graduates will lie in the teaching of the coming generation of undergraduates, who will again perform only for other students and hope only for a career of teaching and so at infinite. In this survey of our present-day operatic condition, we cannot overlook what too many opera lovers seem to constitute the alienation of many a serious modern composer from his

audience. In our free and open society, no one would dream of setting up rigid artistic rules or suggesting to composers in which style they should clothe their creative thoughts. Since, however, opera cannot survive without the support of very large numbers of music lovers. It would seem logical to presuppose that opera composers would make an effort to please more than a handful of listeners. This does not seem to be the case. Many composers seem to delight in antagonizing their audience. And they do it, frankly, not so much by writing dissonant or complicated scores as by restricting their musical style to a very narrow range of expressiveness. In this age of anguish and travail, it used to be expected that artists would want to deal predominantly with the ugliness, corruption, and absurdity of contemporary life.

The successful opera composers of the past, however, were always able to furnish also some strongly contrasting elements. Anguish appeared side by side with ecstasy. Horrible events were relieved by happy ones or at least by some glimpses of happier ones. In Strauss' Electra, we hear many ear-splitting sounds, such as… But in the same Electra, we are also regaled with contrasting sections of great lyrical tenderness, such as… In this age of anguish and travail, we hear many ear-splitting sounds, such as… In this age of anguish and travail, we hear many ear-splitting sounds, such as…

In this age of anguish and travail, we hear many ear-splitting sounds, such as… The depiction of human degradation in Albanberg's Wotzek is conducted generally speaking in a sternly atonal musical language. But this depressing atmosphere is relieved by many passages couched in a warm and appealing idiom, such as this episode dealing with Marie's religious devotion. The dreadful fate of Wotzek, who is relentlessly driven to despair, murder and self-destruction,

evokes near the end of the opera an orchestral response wherein the composer and the listeners comming all their feelings of human compassion in this grandiose orchestral peroration. As we come to the close of the series of programs and as we get ready to say farewell to that battleground of the arts that is known as opera, we have time for one final observation.

The purpose of all art is to unfold before us a new and unexpected vision of human truth in a different aspect of eternal beauty. In the immensely complicated organism that we call opera, the composer is the deciding element, the ultimate catalyst. It is the composer who wields the mysterious power of taking us out of our narrow selves of extending our knowledge of the world and of life. Some people say that music has reached an impasse, that everything we're saying has been uttered long ago. I do not believe that this is true or that it will ever be true. The inspired composer will always find ways of creating novel musical ideas, even out of the oldest and seemingly most outworn materials. Listen to and true love's area in the Reich's progress. By mixing in an unusual and very individual manner,

the most common chords of the C Major tonality Stravinsky has created a highly personalized and expressive idiom. Is it old-fashioned? Is it modern? Who cares? It is convincing and it shows us a new way of understanding love and life. It doesn't really matter whether music be atonal or tonal. What matters is that it be personal and convincing. Tonality is capable of adjusting itself to new ideas and absorbing

the most advanced musical developments. Here is a baseline of an Aryan Jan Mirovitz's opera ester. It consists of a series of non-repetitive tones, a series which is akin to the so-called role used by the adherence of the 12 tone system of composition. And yet it is adapted here to a perfectly normal feeling of tonality. This Arya also demonstrates that in the middle of the 20th century it is still possible to invent unforgettable operatic melodies, melodies that express eternal longing for a better world, for the ever old and ever new homeland of life and art. There, I dream of David's up on a little tree. I know John and Land is the home for me.

Oh John, by the hands of Zion, I see a place where he comes to do with his shining face. Sweet sail in the hundred years in John and Land where there are no fears. Oh the land sweet sail in the hundred years in John and Land where there are no fears. Oh the land sweet sail in the hundred years in John and Land where there are no fears.

Oh John, by the hands of Zion and Land where there are no fears. You've been listening to the final broadcast of Opera, the Battleground of the Arts. With Boris Goldowski, nationally known operatic commentator, producer and scholar.

Opera, the Battleground of the Arts, was produced in association with the Goldowski Opera Institute by WRVR, the non-commercial, cultural and information station of the Riverside Church in New York City. Producer Walter Shepard, production assistants and technical operations, Matthew Bieberfeld and Peter Feldman. The Aria, I dream sometimes of a land so fair from Esther, by John Mayerwitz, was recorded especially for this program by soprano Marybeth Peele. A member of the Metropolitan Opera National Company, the Goldowski Opera Theatre and other leading opera companies. Members of the trio singing with her were Judith Allen, Elizabeth Farmer and Karen Roeweid, all from the Goldowski Opera Theatre. A grant from the National Home Library Foundation has made possible the production of this program series for National Educational Radio. This is the National Educational Radio Network.

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