The libretto of life, frame by frame

Between the ages of 7 and 35 (childhood and adolescence), I spent a lot of time in picture palaces and opera houses. Broken dreams were my racket, love trouble my on-site forensic lab, and the ruling passions of my life opera and motion pictures, twin hierogamous monarchs of the coinciding arts scrutinized in “Cinema’s Illusion, Opera’s Allure.” The two seemed entwined indeed, and I came to believe myself not merely the viewer-listener but truly one of their marked offspring; I yearned (transgressively) to be with them in bed, working all day-for-night like Marcel Proust (see Lauren Bacall baiting Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep”). Precocious, I understood early that life was a question of strong music making a weak libretto into a high melodrama of awe-filled recognition.

Then I became metaphysical about both, to preserve them, for to my dismay, they had begun the long irreversible slide into, respectively, televised entertainment and architectonic spectacle by which the really massive mass audiences engendered by the population explosion and easy money were able to capture each. They traded in the experience of being overwhelmed for the infinitely less enervating one of working a little emotional and aesthetic karaoke.

The essential value of metaphysics is consolation. Those decades of great opera and great motion pictures, gone in real time, are all still there in stolen moments, in film cans, on records, even in lobby cards, and “Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure” is an enormously engaging dialogue with that same long-gone still-here time. Were there world enough and space enough, I would enter into a long and spirited discussion with it and its author until the sun came up over Mt. Helicon. It is that kind of book, and good for it and David Schroeder both.

It is only that the premise it argues, with so much exhaustively researched detail and in such an exuberantly engaging riff-style, has always struck me as a vivid notion trying without real success to stretch itself into a big idea. That said, vivid notions can and often do nourish the mind on its way to big ideas, not to mention the fact that big ideas are sometimes carded as being categorically insane. Consider the ruckus over Catherine Clement’s “Opera: The Undoing of Women,” whose author has bounded into the realm of critic-as-diva, or anti-diva, depending on one’s aesthetic politics, whereas vivid notions, even when underwhelming, do indeed pitch a protective sanity the zealot too often abandons with dire results. (All the same, what a world, what a world, where vivid notions dissolve metaphysical ideas with the negligee aplomb of good little girls from Kansas destroying beautiful wickedness.) In any case we may all be barking up two curved sides of the same wrong tree, for are we not being told with some finality that all lexical, aural, imagistic, sung, spoken, danced and otherwise felt experience is to be subsumed any minute now into hypertext?

In the heightened reality of gesture that is cinema, gesture is parceled into segments and reassembled. The master shot, the long and medium shots, the two-shot, the close-up, diopter lenses, back projections and matte work, the dialectical montage cut, the mise-en-scene tracking shot, the invisible cut, all are pure cinema, derived from silent mimesis, the architectonics of trompe l’oeil and what we have come to call the dance. They bear no essential relation to the heightened reality of speech (either soliloquial, rhetorical or choral) in song that was Greek tragedy and became opera in the last years of the Florentine Renaissance.

Opera proceeds according to the rubric “prima la musica, dopo le parole,” first the music, then the words. The musica of film is not the music enhancing the film but the regulated pulse of an equation derived from either the mise-en-scene over the montage or vice versa, and it is the product (and not the ratio) of the music and the script that makes the talking picture.

A complete operatic experience -- orchestra and singers going at it in full throttle -- can be had absent any spectacle, while on the obverse, a complete cinematic experience (of, say, D.W. Griffith’s staggering “Intolerance”) can be had in a dead silent auditorium, with no aural complement but the subway rumbling underneath.

Concerning the application of actual operatic motifs to cinema itself, together with the practice of tagging characters and situations with signature tunes, are these really structural essentials or rather erotic enhancements, the effect of which will depend very much upon one’s musical preferences rather than on one’s sympathetic eye? (I’m thinking of two particular high-concept uses of the Wagnerian imprint in significant pictures: Jean Negulesco’s “Humoresque” in which Joan Crawford walks from her sumptuous Long Island beach house into the Atlantic Ocean while on the radio John Garfield renders the aforementioned “Liebestod” on the violin, relayed from Carnegie Hall; and Samuel Fuller’s counterpointing in “Verboten” of the seven-note motif from Siegfried’s Funeral March with the opening four-note so-called “fate” motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.)

And Fritz Lang’s “Die Nibelungen” saga really has nothing at all to do with Wagner or his ethos; it is a quite faithful translation to the screen of the great medieval German epic, one source among many Wagner appropriated. Nor do the Nibelungen represent mieskeit Jews; they are clearly avatars of the medieval German grotesque in which “lesser” human beings seem (like Rumpelstiltskin) to resemble pictures seen in old gnarled trees, or lumps of earth half-fashioned into men.

And, as it were, on the rim of the coin, the dizziest appropriation in all kitsch cinema, the transformation of motifs from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony into the love duet from the fake opera “Tzaritza” in the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy melodrama “Maytime” (1937) is certainly the epitome of ... something else.

Of film directors whose work in film and in opera has cross-fertilized to produce masterful effects in each medium, Luchino Visconti’s “Traviata” for Maria Callas at La Scala comes readily to mind, as do two of his screen masterpieces, “Senso” and “Ludwig,” and ought we not consider two European post-Visconti, post-Max Ophuls mise-en-scene operatic-cinematic extravaganzas of the recent past: Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s “My Hitler” and “Parsifal”?

As for opera itself realized as cinema, for me the masterpiece is not Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful “Magic Flute” starring the Royal Theatre at Drottningholm, nor Joseph Losey’s stately “Don Giovanni” starring the Villa Rotunda, but Abel Gance’s absolute-cinema translation of Gustave Charpentier’s “Louise,” starring Georges Thill and Grace Moore.

Which calls to mind the fact that in reality the opera diva, as it has for more than two centuries ahead of the movie star, can show her cadet sister both how to act up (Grace Moore once threw Greta Garbo out of her Connecticut weekend house party for obdurately refusing to sign the guest book) and class up (Rosa Ponselle once gave serious singing lessons to, yes, Joan Crawford).

And if Mae West’s parlor production of Camille Saint-Saens’ “Samson et Dalilah” in “Goin’ to Town” is the most moving example of the seraphic inane in all of cinemoperatics, then Dorothy Comingore’s appearance (faithfully chronicled here) singing Bernard Herrmann’s pastiche “Salammbo” in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” is surely the most terrifying. It is, in fact, in this immortal sequence that the transgressive hierogamy the adolescent aesthete so feverishly imagined was shown him in ... reality?

It is the chapter on “Vertigo” (in which Clement’s book is pointedly invoked) that readers will find the most persuasive correlations between the two art forms. Schroeder is at his keenest here, not least in pointing out Herrmann’s debt to “Tristan und Isolde” (although it should be noted that this great score is at least as redolent of Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht”). The chapter is reason enough for the book.