Memorable Nights at the Operetta

Although our date books forecast the impending conclusion of the so-called modern century, we still puzzle over its beginning. When and how did we first become modern? Art critic Clement Greenberg pointed to Paris in the middle of the 19th century, claiming that Manet, Flaubert and Baudelaire started it all by boldly breaking the mold of Romanticism. Others, drawn to Vienna at the turn of the century, are happy with the calendar. There, a critical mass of artists and scientists was pursuing a new vision of the world, and Freud, with excellent timing, published “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1899. Some historians hold out until the First World War, which finally extinguished the old monarchies like that of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The latter opinion feels about right when it comes to music. Vienna, the empire’s capital, held sway over classical music in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the city’s musical establishment desperately clung to tradition as the new century dawned. But shortly before the war, both Vienna and Paris felt the unstoppable momentum of modern music; in 1912 Schoenberg’s surreal atonal masterpiece “Pierrot Lunaire” and, in 1913, Stravinsky’s primitivist “The Rite of Spring” had their startling premieres. Then, after the cataclysm rid Europe of its previous society, there was a huge feeling of release.

That is not to say there was no looking back.

Operetta is a very wild card in the Modernist equation. Its heyday falls in precisely the interval--from the 1850s to 1914--historians argue over in debating Modernism’s period of conception. Operetta flourished principally in the capitals, Vienna and Paris, where Modernism originated. And as an affectionate satirizing of those cities’ high society for its high society, operetta might be seen as exactly the kind of thing against which progressive elements would revolt.

But progressive musicians happened to love the great operetta of Johann Strauss and Jacques Offenbach as much as everyone else, and maybe even more. Wagner, the composer who most advanced harmony in the 19th century, allowed no other composer’s music to be performed at Bayreuth, with one exception--that of Strauss. Mahler adored Strauss and Offenbach, and was inspired by them to incorporate popular music into serious symphonies for the first time. Schoenberg and his pupils, Berg and Webern, made their own striking chamber music arrangements of Strauss waltzes.

And even if World War I did, in fact, turn operetta into an anachronism, it stubbornly refused to die. Although most operetta was frivolous, forgettable fashion, the famous works never lost their popularity, respect or, remarkably, their relevance. Even now, fresh new productions of Strauss and Offenbach turn up at the most innovative and prestigious music festivals, in Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, Vienna, Berlin and Edinburgh.

And these lighthearted farces with their conventions from a time long past currently attract the interest of two of the most vital and unconventional forces in music today, forces that you would think most antithetical to the whole notion of operetta (and to each other)--early music and new music.

Take, for instance, two new recordings of Offenbach operettas: the EMI set “Orphee aux Enfers” (Orpheus in the Underworld), with stellar period-practice advocates from the early music crowd; and an avant-garde version of “La Vie Parisienne” (Parisian Life), on a set from the Austrian new music specialty label Col Legno. Suddenly, music history no longer seems quite so linear.

The attractions of operetta for early musickers and modernists may well be the same. The early music movement has gained considerable experience in finding novel approaches to re-creating history; the avant-garde relishes making anything seem novel. And by its very nature, operetta requires some mucking about with theatrically, lest it feel hopelessly dated. But, I suspect, there is a deeper reason for both these movements’ attraction to operetta. Early music and new music, however much they have been appropriated by classical music big business, are essentially anti-establishment. And the sheer outrageousness of both these wonderful works is clearly a draw.

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The conductor of “Orphee” is Marc Minkowski, best known as a specialist of French Baroque opera. True to his early music credentials, he has done his historical homework. He prefers the undomesticated 1854 version of this hilarious parody of the bickering Orpheus and Eurydice (she can’t stand his boring hexameters and finds his violin playing irritating; he brings her back from the dead only for the sake of the personification Public Opinion), rather than what he calls the more wholesome and sugary, better-known later version (although Minkowski feels free to pick and choose among editions for the best music).

The singers are varied. Eurydice is sung by one of the newer stars of French opera, Natalie Dessay, but many in the cast are plucked from the early music pool, including extraordinarily versatile and funny baritone Jean-Paul Fouchecourt (who was Platee in the Mark Morris production of Rameau’s opera of the same name) and striking soprano Veronique Gens.

The CD sizzles. The early music crew has undoubtedly had its fill of humorless Baroque versions of Greek myths, and you can hear what fun it is for them to get silly. But they are also performers whose expertise in early music gives them special flexibility to bring out the sly wit and dazzling colors of Offenbach’s score. The duet in which Jupiter, disguised as a fly, seduces Eurydice contains what must be the merriest buzzing to be heard on CD.

“La Vie Parisienne,” which is a live recording of a production given at the Vienna Festival last year, is radically different. This is a version of Offenbach’s operetta created by resourceful conductor Sylvain Cambreling for Klangforum Wien, Vienna’s leading new music ensemble. (Venturesome Angelenos may recall the group’s appearance here a year ago performing the most challenging new Austrian music in the Resistance/Fluctuations festival at local art galleries and museums.) The production, by droll Swiss director and video artist (and also former early musicker) Christoph Marthaler, looks, from the photos in the CD booklet, properly provocative--one shot is a forest of bare legs. The notes quote fashionable Modernist cultural critic Walter Benjamin (his description of the “phantasmagoria of capitalist culture”).

The cast is made up of mostly actors and dancers, not opera singers. And it often sounds quite crazy: Monty Python meets Kurt Weill meets a histrionic avant-gardist like Mauricio Kagel. The performance goes back and forth between German and French (there are no English translations included), and is unfortunately merely an aural document of what is surely a waggish live production. Still, there is no doubt that this is vital contemporary theater made from Offenbach stock.

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Operetta, especially the Viennese variety, can of course seem hopelessly corny. This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Strauss, and it doesn’t help that we have to contend with dutiful recordings of waltz after waltz after waltz (the Hong Kong-based Marco Polo label is particularly active, literally recording them by the hundreds). But peeking through the Strauss glut are two remarkable new releases.

One is a radio broadcast of “Die Fledermaus,” from Berlin in 1936 (the Nazis loved Strauss, too). For those interested in the history of operetta, this set (on the KOCH Schwann label) is an invaluable historical document, since it features many singers who grew up in the 19th century and had direct lineage to the earliest operetta performance practice. The conductor, however, is Hans Rosbaud, one of the century’s great proponents of modern music (he conducted the first performance of Schoenberg’s opera “Moses und Aron”).

The other release is a recording of Strauss waltzes (on Teldec) by one the leaders of the early music movement, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Harnoncourt is Viennese, and no amount of immersion in Monteverdi, Handel or anyone else has diminished his childhood love for Strauss (he learned the music from his father, who heard the operettas as a young man before World War I). A dozen years ago, Harnoncourt shocked the early music world by performing Strauss with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the new disc is of that vintage.

To compare the two conductors in the “Fledermaus” Overture reveals an intense love for the music from different points of view. Rosbaud is lighter, faster, more buoyant. Harnoncourt can occasionally become entwined in detail, but he has a sure sense of what makes a dance dance. There is an unquestionable ardency in both approaches, a sense from these two idiosyncratic conductors that this is music of enduring fascination.

Rosbaud and Harnoncourt are both ultimately Modernists (the early music movement is a by-product of the modern discipline of musicology), and they remind us why Stanley Kubrick felt “The Blue Danube Waltz” was fine space-station floating music in “2001.” But these new recordings, and especially the Offenbach ones, do something else as well. With their fluid approach to history, their convenient application of archaic and contemporary musical and theatrical practices, they demonstrate how easily operetta has progressed from Modernism to Postmodernism.

Who knows what the next century will bring? But given such resiliency, this popular art is well ready for it. *