Mozart's Operas
A Companion
by Mary Hunter
Yale, 280 pp., $35
So, what is a "companion," anyway? Less than a friend, more than a sidekick, something of a teacher, but good company through thick and thin, Mary Hunter's companion book to Mozart's operas makes good on its subtitle, especially for many of us who love the famous operas but don't know the early ones, or the opera seria, or much about the historical background or musical vocabulary from which they arose.
Hunter starts by showing us something of how things work, like a "da capo" aria, which displays two parts of varying sentiments that allow a more intense rendering in the repetition of the first. Similarly, when we know that the cantabile, or singing, style conveys sincerity and tenderness, we can deduce that, when Susanna deceives Figaro with a cantabile aria, she really still, sincerely, loves Figaro.
Perhaps her most useful chapter is on opera seria, an art form that is strong on pyrotechnical singing but seems stiff and undramatic. It helps to understand the convention (already fading in Mozart's day) of the castrato voice as heroic. More fundamentally we learn that the emotional power of opera seria isn't found in seeing action on stage but hearing its effects reflected in the feelings of the character.
Then there are the complex origins of the history of Singspiel, the German comic opera with both Viennese and North German roots, and its share in the 18th-century culture wars of emancipation of German literature and theater from French models. Her treatment of The Magic Flute, with its much-decried, interpreted, and over-interpreted libretto, is appropriately sensible. And when it comes to the great opera buffas like Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte, we get what we need, from the relation of Mozart's rather more anodyne but still somewhat risky opera to Beaumarchais's revolutionary play to the 19th century's unhappiness with the return of Cosi's lovers to their original mates. (For every opera Hunter provides a plot summary and a commentary, which includes a history of its composition and first performance.)
I did miss, though, any reflection on the oddity of the enlightened Mozart taking on an old Jesuit tale of divine punishment in Don Giovanni. It matters that each of the late Mozart operas is about revenge, and only in one of them, Don Giovanni, does it seem, at least on the surface, to be approved.
If Hunter does have a tendency in interpretation, it is found in her chapter on "Mozart's Social World." This mostly concerns the comic operas, where you find lower-class characters and something like social commentary. She claims that "the social stratification in Mozart's comic operas is represented as mostly clear, absolutely immutable, and generally desirable."
While nobles don't always behave nobly, the lower-class characters, even the heroes and heroines like Figaro and Susanna, are, if female, clever and sexy and, if male, dopey and clumsy. Both "are largely absolved of moral responsibility." Other than Figaro and Susanna they don't even get to have "particularly deep feeling." Hunter emphasizes that this stratification didn't reflect the realities of a time in which what "we today would call the middle classes" were increasingly in evidence. This omission, in turn, she attributes to the desire to keep the upper-class audience assured that, in the composer's view, "the system was not fundamentally unjust."
This leads Hunter to the occasional forced judgment about particular musical moments, and to a general obscuring of what may be going on in Mozart's treatment of society and politics. Thus Hunter repeatedly cites Figaro's aria "Aprite po' quegli occhi" as a classic piece of buffoonery. Such arias "almost always end with the character seeming to lose control . . . in a case study of incoherence." For her, the aria descends into confusion and spluttering; Figaro "aspires to the character of nobility but fails to achieve it." She finds a typical deflection of the audience's sympathies away from the lower-class characters, who are "making accusations rather than describing the character's own situation or feelings." Figaro comes off badly against Susanna, as "relatively ineffective within the plot." Again, despite being "the cleverest of the lot," he remains typical of the bumbling male servant because he "is not the one who comes up with the successful plot to thwart the Count, and he is in the end duped by his own betrothed."
