A History of Opera

For the young, summer is the season of Speedos, tan lines, and White Parties. By the Curmudgeon’s age, it’s all about a nice cabana set and a light read.

Sigh.

The light read this time around is A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. (Forget the cabana set, the Curmudgeon does not do Insta.) The book is a joy and a delight if for no other reason than it is a serious history of a musical form, but a history that does not require the reader know anything about musical notation. “Priceless,” as they say in the ads. On the downside for the reviewer, writing about opera for this crowd is a bit like singing it for you: half the audience already knows the material intimately and is waiting for the performer to make a mistake. If you are one of those who can recite all the plots and subplots in The Ring from memory (really?) you’ll enjoy the book but are excused from the review.

The topic of gay men and our attraction to opera has been written to death, and since it is a topic that our authors do not address directly, let me put it to bed in one sentence: The critiques you first level at opera are that it is elitist, the plots are ridiculous, and the prices exorbitant; if you call gay men snobs, artificial, and expensive, we respond by blushing and murmuring, “Why thank you Darling, I wasn’t sure you’d noticed.”

The form was meant for us.

Opera started around A.D. 1600, but it has its roots a century and a half earlier with the fall of Constantinople, and in a sense a millennium before that with the fall of Rome in the West. (I can feel you relaxing already, we’re back on familiar ground.) Because the Greeks and Romans wrote staged drama, most of us assume the idea of people standing up on stage and pretending to be somebody they’re not – whether speaking or singing – has always been around. Not so: after the fall of Rome at the end of the fourth century A.D., staged drama (spoken or sung) as an art form disappeared for a thousand years. Constantinople fell in A.D. 1453 and in the decades leading up to its final capture much intellectual property of the ancient world – specifically including manuscripts of literature and drama – was consciously exported to the emerging capitals of Western Europe for safekeeping, a process we have considered elsewhere on this site.

Florence was the depository of much of the talent that was fleeing crumbling Constantinople, and wealthy men there hosted scholars and other intellects who were trying to reconstruct the ancient world based on newly-rediscovered works…study groups of a sort. (For the record, that work itself was the Renaissance, the intellectual legwork of “re-naissance,” the re-birthing of Greek and Latin culture.) Drama was one of the forms they stumbled across. It was by then totally alien after a thousand-year hiatus, so scholars approached drama through a type of intellectual archaeology, trying to reconstruct performance tradition. Significant to opera, much debate ensued as to whether lines were spoken or sung. In the homes of the wealthy, Florentine scholars staged and acted ancient texts, with various combinations of sung and spoken lines.

It is that background that sets the stage for our authors, Rheingold to their Ring proper, if you’re an old opera hand…and don’t worry if you’re not, you will be by the end of the book.

Despite its academic origins, opera caught on as public entertainment. Carnival (the period leading up to Lent) in Venice was in the seventeenth century much as it is today: crowded, noisy, costumed, and characterized by misrule. The perfect breeding ground for opera…its artificiality matched the passing scene in a way, and it was in Venice that opera made the hop from academic recreation to money-making paid entertainment. In the mid-1600s somebody got the bright idea to stage opera at Carnival with paid admission, and people showed up in force for what was once thought a dry and academic topic. Opera also spread to other world capitals (in fairness, Renaissance scholarship was happening throughout Europe, not just in Florence) including Rome and Paris.

Rome was significant because the Church had become interested in opera early on, mainly interested in its depravity. As befits an art form resurrected from the Greeks and Romans, topics for early opera tended toward gods and goddesses, and it didn’t take long for savvy opera producers to realize the bad-boy gods like Bacchus presented a dandy opportunity to populate the stage with scantily-clad young people behaving scandalously. A formula that still works on reality TV, but one on which the Church was predictably dour. Less expected is to find a future pope among the “kids” putting on the show: Sant’ Alessio (“Saint Alexis” from 1632, as our authors tell us) boasted a libretto written by Giulio Rospigliosi, later Clement IX. And in true show-biz tradition, apparently the libretto was written as a straight (in all senses) saint’s life, but with an eye to ticket sales the producer tarted it up with lavish costumes and lascivious stage “business,” all the more interesting for us since the female roles were staged by boys and the romances took on a decidedly homoerotic flair.

Nobody claims Pope Clement disliked the production.

And over in Paris, one Cardinal Mazarin took the production mantle and ran with it, staging six Italian operas for the court of Louis XIV. Mazarin’s contribution was to modify Italian opera to fit French tastes, notably by adding ballet to the mix. (Recall that Louis XIV danced ballet, also that Louis while straight was the son of a gay dad. He inherited his seats at the opera.) Our authors make no speculation as to Mazarin’s sexual proclivities, but (a) he was a Catholic priest, and (b) it is a matter of historical record that his parties were world-class fabulous…you connect the dots.

With all that scholarship and high-brow theology, do we really have to talk about the castrati?

Yes, dear, of course we do: it’s opera. In the unlikely event you missed the memo, the castrati were young boys who were selected for the beauty of their voices and then castrated before puberty to ensure adolescence wouldn’t degrade the beautiful voice. (If you’re male, you just crossed your legs.) Castration was accomplished either by surgical removal of the testicles or by banding the testes, in which they were tied off so tightly the blood flow stopped and they dropped away as so much dead skin. (You’re now squirming.) The primary market for castrati was the Church itself, since choirs were all-male yet needed high voices. That fact actually makes the practice a little more comprehensible, at least seen through the lens of Renaissance Catholicism: some of the boys were destined to become monks anyway, monks take a vow of chastity, and so those were unneeded parts whose removal alleviated a source of moral temptation while preserving the beauty of the voice. So at least the argument would go.

Over on the secular side, it was nothing but pure voyeurism. Your average working castrato had time for more than Church gigs on his calendar, and early on castrati became enormously popular (and highly paid) as performers and character types in secular opera. The pairing makes a certain sense given that opera is itself a highly artificial form and the castrato voice is a highly artificial sound, tonally as high as a soprano but acoustically strongest in its low registers whereas a soprano is strongest in her highest. One set of audio recordings exists, of a nineteenth-century Church castrato who cut a few discs in the very early days of the twentieth century. You can sample it here…a truly unworldly sound, nothing like contemporary performances.

Unexpectedly, the castrati developed a reputation as exotic and voracious heterosexual lovers. Given their absence of relevant plumbing and hormones that seems an unlikely role. Our authors elaborate the point but do not look for root causes: the castrati were often cast as the romantic leads on stage, fashionable ladies took them as their lovers and swore by the results. How much of that was self-delusion on an M. Butterfly scale, how much was women enjoying both an undemanding escort and a slightly scandalous reputation (“She once took a castrato as her lover!”), and how much was fact, we’ll never know.

Safe sex proves anything is possible, by comparison Hannibal was a man lacking vision.

As to what happened to the castrati, you’ll have to read the book…both wild boar and George Frederick Handel have blood on their hands. More than usual, this review does a disservice to the excellent underlying work. Abbate and Parker manage to compress some 400 years of opera history into a single, compact, evenhanded volume. It deserves a read if you’re interested in opera even slightly or if you have an interest in classical music generally.

One theme of the work is the extent to which opera is subversive, with outsiders like servants and women controlling events, and where all sorts of sexually prohibited behaviors are not only flirted with, they’re sung about, often at great length. (Predictably The Ring tops the list, for both length and sexual weirdness: it runs 16 hours over four days, incorporates all manner of cross-species sex, and makes an entire four-hour opera out of a guy born from brother/sister incest. And Wagner wasn’t even French.) At the end of the day, it’s that outlaw spirit as much as the outrageous costumes and vocal athletics that draws a gay crowd, a spirit that has been sapped lately by Political Correctness and Historically Informed Performance, along with their handmaiden, Cheap Productions with Lots of Things Projected. Very un-opera.

To quote the esteemed La Cieca ci Guarda over at parterre box, “Let’s make opera queer and dangerous again!”