Opera News Review
Vivien Schweitzer’s new volume, A Mad Love, provides such a breezy yet thorough introduction to opera that die-hard fans may want to read it first before gifting it to nieces or nephews. An experienced critic, Schweitzer has a knack for concision, and she covers plenty of ground here, hitting major points about repertoire while tucking in musical terminology, historical developments, cultural movements and the social aspects of operagoing.
Every story or joke you ever heard about opera is here, including Lully stabbing himself in the foot, opera singers shattering glass and the cat who wandered onstage during the premiere of Barber of Seville. But Schweitzer is great at relaying plot and analyzing characters in a few deft phrases, and she has made excellent choices both in repertoire covered (there are very good sections on Slavic opera and twentieth-century works) and in the accompanying Spotify and YouTube playlists of examples. Another strength is her way of singling out and describing musical techniques, such as those used in Puccini’s snowfall motifs in Act III of La Bohème or Britten’s depiction of the sea in Peter Grimes.
Opera before Mozart gets its due, but there’s a needless romp through the history of music. Why give a gratuitous nod to Hildegard of Bingen but ignore the chance to mention her Ordo Virtutum as a proto-opera? Why ramble on about women finally being allowed to play Shakespeare’s heroines during the Restoration without connecting this to the simultaneous rise of the operatic diva.
Opera before Mozart gets its due, but there’s a needless romp through the history of music. Why give a gratuitous nod to Hildegard of Bingen but ignore the chance to mention her Ordo Virtutum as a proto-opera? Why ramble on about women finally being allowed to play Shakespeare’s heroines during the Restoration without connecting this to the simultaneous rise of the operatic diva.
Other detours seem pointless, including a recap of Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s 2015 New York Times op-ed piece about men interrupting women in meetings, in contrast to an operatic heroine’s ability to “hold the floor on the opera stage.” Yet Schweitzer jokes about these characters’ “predictable fate: they kill themselves after being driven to despair by a man, they are murdered by a jealous lover, or they die of consumption. In the best-case scenario, they end up in a convent.”
Discussion of librettos is limited (why not omit the analysis of a Mozart violin sonata?), and the would-be hip language can get tiresome: “In verismo, feelings are on steroids,” while Alcina is compared to “an online dater whose fake profile led to [her] rejection.” I also quibble with footnotes that credit secondary sources (Harvard professor Thomas Kelly was not actually present at the 1607 premiere of Orfeo, and Samuel Johnson’s well-worn joke about opera as “an exotic and irrational entertainment” didn’t originate in the 2006 Yale Book of Quotations).
Even if Schweitzer’s freewheeling riffs make her sound like a chatty dinner guest, the reader will appreciate the way her critical eye and ear play into the presentation, particularly in a final chapter on staging opera in the twenty-first century. In describing Peter Sellars’s Don Giovanni staging, as well as a more recent German production, she gives the reader helpful ground rules for successful updating: “At no point is the story or the music compromised, and viewers are not distracted from the music by trying to figure out […] why someone is dressed like Jesus, or wearing an ape costume, or hanging upside down from the ceiling.” — Judith Malafronte