A Night at the Opera

The year is 1627. You’re pressed in elbow-to-elbow on the ground-level parterre, jockeying to catch a first glimpse of the performers’ feet below the curtain. The air is full of smoke from the tallow candles lining the base of the stage, and your view is blocked by a sea of decadent wigs. The roar of the crowd lowers to a murmur as the concertmaster beats his staff to begin the overture. Heads crane to track the King’s progress to his prominent box. As the orchestra finishes the overture with a flourish, the curtain rises ...

Opera houses have always been a place to see and be seen. Some of the earliest designs featured box seats for royalty that didn’t even face the stage, displaying the monarchs for audience members rather than letting them see the action. Sometimes, the singers and dancers on stage rivaled the fame of the monarchs perched above them. Stars won legions of fans wherever they performed and composers would tailor arias to specific singers, giving them ample opportunity to display their talents.

While arias give singers a chance to show off vocal pyrotechnics — especially the da capo form, with its built-in repeat leaving ample room for lavish ornamentation — recitative dialogue fills in the blanks and moves the story forward. Meanwhile, the orchestra often holds the most emotional power of all, introducing important melodies and pulling at heartstrings as tensions rise.

What of the stories? Perhaps the most stereotypical opera plot finds both humor and heartbreak in an unlikely love triangle, straining the barriers between classes, or entangling the fates of gods and mortals. The very earliest operas, written at the turn of the 17th century, attempted to revive the sung dramas of Classical antiquity, drawing inspiration from Greek mythology. Throughout the 18th century, adaptations of folklore and literature joined the mix, often with allegorical connections to powerful rulers or current events. As the 19th century progressed and revolutions weakened monarchs across Europe, audiences began to prefer plots that featured everyday people and their lives — a tradition that came to be known as verismo (true to life).

Tonight’s concert borrows common elements of opera — instrumental overtures and interludes, arias, and choruses — to tell a story that transcends time and place, celebrating this treasured art form.

The program opens with the overture from Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, a delightful opera based on the Shakespeare play. With the scene set, the evening’s soloists launch into the final part of Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka. Dvořák resists the usual alternation between aria and recitative, preferring a drama that flows organically as the action unfolds. In this fateful final embrace between a human prince and a water spirit, you can hear how the music changes to match the conversation, rather than following a fixed form.

The Orchestra then whisks us off into the longing world of Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound). In this opera about an opera, a young composer, Fritz, leaves his small-town love behind in search of “the distant sound” that compels him to write music. The Nachtstück (Night Piece) from Act III accompanies his realization that he has squandered his life by abandoning his sweetheart. In the end, the two are reunited, and he frantically revises his great opera before dying in her arms. This popular work catapulted Schreker to the limelight as Austria’s rising star of opera, but his fame was cut short by Nazi bans of Jewish composers and by his untimely death in 1934.

A fellow Austrian Jewish composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold had a much longer career after he emigrated to the United States and became a notable Hollywood composer. While he’s most remembered for his film scores, he had an auspicious start in the opera world. Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) is an adaptation of a novel about a man who struggles to let go of the memory of his dead wife, Marie. He meets a young opera singer, Marietta, who so resembles Marie that he imagines she’s come back to life. In Marietta’s Lied, she sings a tender song for Paul that Marie used to sing. Driven to madness, Paul spends much of the rest of the opera in a twisted fever dream, before emerging to finally find closure.

The final selection of the first half comes from yet another Austrian, Franz Lehar. His opera The Land of Smiles centers on a common opera trope: cultural mismatch. In it, an Austrian noblewoman marries a Chinese prince but ultimately cannot bear his native customs and returns to Europe. “Yours is my heart alone” was a so-called Tauberlied — a virtuosic aria Lehar wrote specifically for his friend, famed tenor Richard Tauber. Of the Tauberlieder Lehar wrote in various operas, this is perhaps the most famous.

From Austria, the Orchestra travels south to Italy for the second half of this program. As in The Land of Smiles, Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) follows doomed lovers from different cultures. South American Don Alvaro and Spaniard Donna Leonora experience disaster after disaster — from the accidental murder of her father, to the lovers’ separation in their haste to flee, to the deaths of both Leonora and her vengeful brother (the ominous triple blows of fate that open the overture presage the loss of life that awaits). “Son giunta!” is Leonora’s song of gratitude in Act II, as she arrives safely to a monastery to live out her days, alone, but protected.

The Blossom Festival Chorus continues the tribute to Verdi with two of his most memorable choruses. Both represent the voices of oppressed peoples — the Roma in Il trovatore (The Troubadour) and the Israelites in Nabucco. In the Anvil Chorus, the Roma mock their station in a rollicking song, singing that a good drink and the love of a maiden will carry them into the hope of a new day. The hope of the Israelites in “Va pensiero” is much more understated yet inspiring, as they sing a lilting waltz about their homeland in the face of certain death at the hands of their Babylonian enslavers.

Giacomo Puccini was Verdi’s successor as the leading composer of Italian opera, and the concert closes with selections from two of his operas, after the pulsing strains of doomed love from Umberto Giordano’s Fedora (based on the 1882 play from which the iconic hat draws its name). The first comes from Tosca, a gripping tale of love, mistrust, and loyalty set during the Napoleonic wars. In “Or lasciami al lavoro,” the painter Cavaradossi and his jealous lover Tosca flirt and bicker.

Puccini’s final, unfinished opera, Turandot tells the story of a Chinese princess who vows to marry only the one who can answer her three riddles. All who fail are executed. But when a mysterious prince succeeds in passing the test, Turandot refuses his hand. He sets her a counteroffer: if she can learn his name by morning, he will accept death. As Turandot frantically demands that no one rest until this name is discovered, Prince Calaf sings “Nessun dorma” (Let no one sleep) confident he will prevail. And with all of these enchanting melodies dancing in our minds, we may all find it difficult to sleep tonight.

— Ellen Sauer Tanyeri

Ellen Sauer Tanyeri is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Archives & Editorial Assistant and is a PhD candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University.