Retro Book Review: Kerman on Opera

I rarely do reviews of current CD releases, or books for that matter. It's just too common! I do the occasional "retro" review, meaning a review of something that came out a long time ago and is still important so we know it's good. Case in point, a book published in 1956 by Joseph Kerman, one of the great musicologists of our time. He published an excellent book on the Beethoven quartets that I have spent a lot of time with and one of the last books he wrote before passing away was a brilliant book on Bach keyboard fugues published in 2005. Opera as Drama, the 1956 book, was actually his first book, but it remains significant today.

I think I have had two epiphanies in my life: one was the discovery of classical music, and Bach in particular. The other I only realized recently as it was a very slow epiphany in contrast to the musical one. I think I would call it a "scholarship" epiphany as, over a number of years, I slowly came to a sense of the vast well of the history of civilization and of the scholars who not only chronicled it, but made sense of it and essentially uncovered what was happening. Perhaps the first foreshadowing of this was when, in my late teens, I started reading books on classical music from the local library. But it really only took hold when I attended university at age twenty. I discovered the great threads of the tapestry in philosophy, history and so on. I began to realize that there were certain scholars that actually had a commanding knowledge and understanding of these things. Perhaps the first was Frederick Copleston whose multi-volume history of philosophy I started to read in my first year at university. Actually, I think I am still reading it! I just re-read the first couple of volumes a year or so ago. Later on I discovered the work of historians Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee and still later I became familiar with Joseph Kerman on Beethoven and Richard Taruskin on all manner of musicological topics. Other giant figures in musicology were Charles Rosen on Classical style and Willi Apel on ancient music. I have a somewhat battered copy of his indispensable The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600 on my shelf. What do all these disparate figures have in common? They really know their field.

Reading Kerman's book on opera I realize what an utter neophyte I am in this area, despite having played in the pit in three or four opera productions. I know almost nothing! Kerman notices that much of the commentary on the relatively recent musical genre of opera--only 400 years old!--talks largely about the musical techniques and does not delve into the dramaturgy of the form. This is what he tries to rectify.

The book ends with a critical evaluation of two 20th century operas: Wozzeck by Alban Berg and The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky. Regarding the contrasting schools of compositional thought, serialism in the former and neo-classicisism in the latter he says:

Both stylistic principles have been miserably abused, and both schools protect their fair share of the talentless. The great trouble with conventional discussions of contemporary music is that they center too much on style, and not enough on meaning. Style for what? The critical disparity is natural enough; meanings are hard to estimate while artists are in the process of formulating them, and hard to express under any circumstances. In the field of opera, perhaps, these difficulties are a little less intense than with purely instrumental music. We can see and say what an opera is trying to project. These masterpieces of Berg and Stravinsky are bigger than their schools, and it is parochial to regard them simply either-or as signposts to “the music of the Future.”

Kerman, Joseph. Opera As Drama . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 This is the kind of intensely learnéd and critically aware scholarship that is so rare these days.

This is the Vienna Opera production of Wozzeck, released in 1988. This is just Act I, but you can find the rest on YouTube. I first heard this opera forty years ago, but I only now realize how little I understood it!