Words and language in opera

11/11/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My first Summer School at Oxford was on Verdi and Shakespeare. Verdi had written operas for Macbeth Othello. His last opera was Falstaff. The tutor, who was excellent, explained why in his view Italian was the best language for opera – which is theatre set to music. It all sounded very logical, and we discussed the differences with English and French – and giggled when we spoke of German – just a little bit of Jingoism at Oxford.

But I recalled a previous visit to England when I saw a great performance of Billy Budd at Covent Garden. This was in the 90’s when the AO was blazing. I had asked Moffat Oxenbould, the Artistic Director of the AO, whether I should see Billy Budd or La Bohème. One reason he gave in favour of the former is that it would be good for me to hear an opera in my own language. This was very good advice, because at that time I found the music of Britten to be challenging. Billy Budd is now my favourite opera – beside Falstaff. (I would add Die Walküre, with the proviso that I must skip the second act – and watch the closing duet at the bar.)

Simone Young will conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala. (She was the first female conductor of it at Bayreuth, just as she had been the first female conductor with the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.)

She will share the function with a younger conductor who has learned under her. (The person first appointed pulled out at short notice.)

Simone had come to Wagner via Barenboim, who in turn came to Wagner via Furtwangler. She and Barenboim had started their roles in Wagner on the piano. Since Furtwangler is my favourite conductor, this is some pedigree.

You can get an idea of what is involved by watching a video of Young talking in fluent Italian about preparing for Das Rheingold. (She had previously held a long appointment at Hamburg.) It is a great comfort to see learning being passed down from one generation to another in this high art form.

Young told The New York Times that it was essential for the conductor to concentrate on the words in the libretto, as well as the music – then she knew how to place the accents of the orchestra – if I may be permitted the phrase.

That makes sense. The composer of the music wrote it to be played with the libretto written for just that purpose. And it was written to be played with the score in the language in which the libretto was written. Nessun dorma can’t come out like ‘None shall sleep.’

Now, when we who speak English see Shakespeare, we follow it in our own tongue – and miss some of the archaisms of plays written more than four hundred years ago. We get the meaning and the poetry at the same time. And while we may cut the text, and take other liberties, no one has suggested that we may in some way flirt with the text itself. That would be the civil equivalent of blasphemy. Like fiddling with the text Dante or Goethe. Or the opening chords of Don Giovanni. Or the background to the Mona Lisa.

Poetry, like music, is a mix of imagination, form, and rhythm – and, for the want of a better word, alchemy. (When Wordsworth referred to a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ he was expressing a view good for Keats, but not so good for Wordsworth.) And if you fiddle with either the music or the poetry, you might just wreck it. Hamlet in French is a very different beast compared to Hamlet as it was written.

But most Australians who go to see the big operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner or Puccini do not speak the language in which the opera was written. And with the possible exception of late Puccini, they are not the same as the audiences for which the operas were originally created. Recording only started in the twentieth century.

This will not trouble those who go along to hear the big numbers and just bide their time otherwise. (The Italians were notorious for gossiping until a set piece came on – when they exploded with applause – or derision. Rather like a soccer match – or a bull fight. Simone Young said that some thought that you had flopped in Germany with Wagner unless you got both raspberries and applause. On the other hand, on one of my visits to Glyndebourne, the loudest applause came from the toff behind me who snored the loudest.)

But for the rest of us, at least two issues arise. We are not getting the opera in the manner that its creators intended, and we cannot match the music to the language of the script. We therefore have to put our trust in the translator, and in those directing the opera.

These misgivings – and that is what they are – show the wisdom of the advice I got from Moffat Oxenbould about listening to operas written in English. This has led me to something like an addiction to Britten.

Curiously, I have also become attached to Janacek, who was a fanatic about linking the music exactly to the text. He used to patrol the streets listening to people and watching them speak, so that he could mould his compositions accordingly.

My absorption with Janacek and Britten came at a time of extended leave from the great Italian composers. I got to the stage that I had got to with Swan Lake and Giselle many years ago – if I heard La Bohème or La Traviata yet again, I might just give it all away.

I doubt whether this gap for most of us between the text and the music in opera is grasped by many in the audience at the opera house or at home.

We are familiar with the problem with, say, French poetry. On a good day, I can stagger through Verlaine and some of Victor Hugo. (I subscribe to Paris Match, but I may say that is mostly for the photos – which is the precise opposite of what we schoolboys said when we smuggled in a Playboy.) With Latin, I am on much firmer ground, and I have the luxury of not being called on to speak it.

But take a well-known part of the Aeneid by Vergil.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We can have a sporting chance of translating that. ‘Even things have tears, and our mortality touches our minds’. That may get the meaning of the words, but it sounds ugly, and however we translate it, we know it does and cannot have the poetic effect of the original text. Latin has a very different structure and ring to it compared to English.

Or take an example plucked from Gutenberg:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

That is among other things ugly and apparently wrought. This is how Dante began the Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben chi vi trovai,

dirò de laltre cose chi vho scorte.

You do not have to speak a word of Italian to know that the translation into English now sounds like an act of strangulated butchery.

In course of the opera named after him, the third in the Ring Cycle, Siegfried kills his foster father before the latter kills him; he slays the dragon; he talks to the birds; he walks through a fire to free Brunnhilde from the spell put on her by her father; and then he takes off with her to the tune of what Simone Young says is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. The final two lines of the text are:

Leuchtender Liebe,

Lachender Tod!

Even allowing that Siegfried is the dull child who refuses to grow up, those lines could surely not be as banal as their translation:

Radiant love,

Laughing death!

(And there is certainly nothing to laugh about in the death of either in Götterdämmerung.)

The splendid Penguin version of the text and translation gives this comment of Nietzsche, who knew something about this.

Wagner’s poetry is all about revelling in the German language, the warmth and candour in his communion with it, something that as such cannot be felt in any other German writer except Goethe.

That is close to saying the text in this context is barely translatable.

The score of the Ring was formally dedicated ‘with faith in the German spirit’. You would not want it get into the wrong hands, especially one who like Wagner wanted to plant frenzy in the German audiences; a leader who, like the master, could wield magnetic power over the German psyche; a German whose favourite opera was Götterdämmerung, but who failed to see that it prophesied the fall of his regime, and of the whole German volk.

There is another way of looking at what happens when the demands of the audience or reader require tampering with the work of a genius. Goethe and Pushkin are celebrated in their own country to about the same extent as Shakespeare is in England, but neither travels well. (Ibsen and Chekhov do not have the same problems. Homer is seen as untouchable, in part because of intellectual snobbery, and the myth of Oxbridge that ancient Greece was civilized.)

It is hardly surprising that mutilation carries huge risks. Rare people of nerve and imagination and the soul of a director can occasionally succeed. Nearly forty years ago, I took my young daughters to see Goethe’s Faust put on at the little Russel Street theatre, blessed of memory. I warned them that it might be long and tedious. I think a young Barrie Kosky directed it. At the start, the lights went right out. Gorillas were just seen running up and down each side aisle. Then, two spotlights shone down the middle aisle. A gorilla emerged at the front of center stage. From out of it emerged the smiling face of Barry Otto. There may have been the sound of machine-gun fire. And our close attention was held for the duration. I still recall it.

Which brings me back to the suggestion that Italian is the ‘best’ language for opera. Well, opera was born in Italy, and a majority of its superstar composers were also born there, but, putting to one side what experts in linguistics and phonetics might say, you may want to be careful in expressing that view in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Salzburg, Stockholm, Vienna and other cities that know something of music and theatre. Or Commedia dell’ Arte.

And the discovery of the meaning of what you have heard so often may have its own entertainment value. Nessun dorma is the best-known aria. Who knows the real circumstances of ‘None shall sleep’? Who knows just how plain silly Siegfried, the great hero of the Ring, is? (Even the Master thought he was stupid. The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad. And by the time he finally gets to depart, we do not go into mourning.) Heaven knows how many times I had heard Jussi Bjoerling sing Mama chel vino es generoso, before I saw Cavalleria Rusticana, and I started to giggle. ‘Well might you need a stiff drink from your Mum, Comrade, because you are about to greet the guy with whose wife you have been playing tootsies, and in your part of the world, there can only be one result.’

We should be careful about talking about meaning in this context. We have trouble with the meaning of some passages in Hamlet because our language has changed – it is always evolving. We have even more trouble with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with some tuition and encouragement – like I got at another Oxford Summer School – you can get by. Then Beowulf is beyond all but those taught at tertiary level.

It is obviously silly to ask the meaning of the Pietà or the Moonlight Sonata – or Rigoletto or Don Giovanni. Or Ode to a Nightingale.

Macaulay said that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet without a certain unsoundness of mind…. Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.’ That may sound over the top, but Ibsen admired Michelangelo because he had ‘the courage to commit a madness now and then.’ A psychiatrist asked – ‘Why cannot more light enter a mind that is cracked than one that is whole?’ Einstein and Keynes would have had a view on that (as would Barrie Kosky). Keynes said that Newton was ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…. the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’ And, of course, Newton was up to his neck in alchemy.

When we speak of a libretto in a foreign tongue, we are in some kind of hinterland when it comes to meaning. Logical analysis is on very shaky ground. We face three filters. First, we depend on the conductor and director to present their version of this musical drama called opera. Secondly, we depend on the translators to tell us their view of the meaning of the script in English. And, finally, we get a very different account of the carefully managed marriage between the music and the text.

You would not want to be on an ascent of Everest or undergoing heart surgery on such a wobbly footing.

Opera translated into English does not have a good name – for good reason. (One exception is the Mackerass Makropoulos Case.) There is therefore a lot in favour of operas created in our own language. We could never have survived Faust in German with voice over or subtitles. Like the time some well intentioned internationalist got us at a Melbourne festival to see a Romanian theatre group do Titus Andronicus – in Romanian! And our Romanian friends just hung their heads in horror.

This was I think the ultimate risk in fiddling with the work of a giant, but at least to some extent, we take on some of that risk whenever we go to see most of the operas that are put on, especially in the straitened times since Covid.

And the great success of Simone Young in Bayreuth, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna is a sad reflection of the decline of the AO since its glory days of the nineties.

I had been to a talk given by Simone on Tristan, which she opened with a thundering chord on the piano, and I saw her conduct that opera and a Wagner gala. On each occasion, I was transfixed. A chairman of the AO told me that Simone had allowed him to stand at the back of the pit during a performance. He said his hair stood on end as she entered the pit, and she stayed back later to talk to the orchestra. She may be our best export since Melba or Sutherland – but she is just not seen by those up the back as having that éclat.

Well, at least my girls got to see our team at its best. But it is sobering for an eighty-year-old lawyer who has been listening to or going to the opera for more than sixty years to reflect that not only can he not read the score – he cannot even read the script.

That is just one of the reasons why I wonder if I am not much better off watching the live theatre of a test match – cricket or rugby – or a Grand Prix or Grand Final. Or the Melbourne Cup. Then I know just what is going on, but I have no idea how it all may end. There is a lot to be said for that – it is called drama.

Then there is the shortest poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe. ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’

The Passion

02/04/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

We know next to nothing of Jesus until he began his public ministry when he was about thirty. He then came down from Galilee and Capernaum (under the Golan Heights). This rich country then produced fishermen and activists – and religious leaders, holy men (hasidim), healers, wonderworkers, miracle-workers – what would now be called shamans. The politically inclined of these young tearaways might have been freedom fighters or liberators – the Romans would have seen them just as terrorists to be killed as quickly as possible. Galilee may have been a place for the Romans to visit, but hardly a good place to live in.

Jesus began by identifying with another ragged preacher called John the Baptist (later beheaded by an inbred Quisling dictator called Herod). Jesus collected twelve disciples to represent the twelve patriarchs of the twelve tribes for the new Israel. He said that he kept the law, but that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. For Jesus, being true to God meant loving God and loving your neighbour. He preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand and he told his listeners that they should repent. He preached by parables and sermons and sayings. He healed the sick and followers said that he performed miracles. He had what we call charisma and he was getting a following. The problem with the miracles – and it is a problem with all miracles – is that there are never enough witnesses for their reports of the miracles to carry conviction to the world at large.

Jesus was bound therefore to make enemies with either the religious establishment or the secular establishment (the Romans). He was new. He was different. He was a change. He was popular. He was therefore a threat. But above all, he was good. Many people have trouble adjusting to real goodness. It makes the rest of us look terrible, and it can make most of us feel awful. There will always be some who felt like Satan in Paradise Lost when he ‘felt how awful goodness is’. When Milton wrote that Satan ‘thought himself impaired,’ he may have had in mind that chilling remark about Cassio made by Iago, that most evil predator on another’s honour:

He has a kind of beauty in his life

That makes me ugly.

It was inevitable that the religious status quo had to see Jesus as a threat. He was not sent to give them comfort. His mission was to institute a change of management. And if he came to the notice of the Romans, they too might take an adverse interest. You only have to look at the threat to world peace, not just regional stability, from the religious feuds in the Middle East today, not to mention the scary attraction that serial murderers hold for disaffected people of faith in what they see as occupied territories.

That is how things stood when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. He was to tell his disciples that he foresaw that he would die in the way he did and at a supper he in substance took his leave from them. He did so with words that have led to the deaths of so many people. He took to the money changers in the temple amid suggestions that he had talked of the destruction of the temple. It would be difficult to imagine a greater assault on the Jewish religion than talking of the destruction of its temple, and his action in clearing it would very likely have got him a conviction for sacrilege and a death sentence if he had done it to a Roman temple. He had in truth signed his own death warrant.

Spinoza described the impact of Jesus in a way that shows that he – Spinoza – would have been too hot to handle in some quarters.

His sole care was to teach moral doctrines and distinguish them from the laws of the state; for the Pharisees, in their ignorance, thought that the observance of the state law and the Mosaic law was the sum total of morality; whereas such laws merely had reference to the public welfare, and aimed not so much at instructing the Jews as keeping them under constraint.

Spinoza too was cast out. He was excommunicated from the Jewish community. Kant had an almost conscientious objection to ritual in any form – he always had something else to do when his university required him to attend at some religious function on an official basis. But Kant never lost faith in the man he referred to as ‘the Teacher’. Kant described Jesus as ‘the ideal of humanity well pleasing to God’. Einstein said that it was impossible not to be moved by ‘the luminous Nazarene.’ The young tearaway Hasid executed as a common criminal has never lacked followers of genius.

The ‘passion’ is the phrase for the suffering of Jesus from his last meal to his death on the cross. This is the sacred heart of the religion founded on his life and teaching. It has been celebrated in words and music. The most notable is Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion. Put religion to one side, and this work is one of those Himalayan peaks of Western civilization, like El Greco’s paintings of the Cleansing of the Temple, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Michelangelo’s Pieta, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Mozart’s Requiem.

The painting of El Greco at the National Gallery is amazing. (The Frick has a version, too.) Almost all the figures are distorted in the way that became the trade mark of this great artist. The Christ figure is a man on a mission and flowing with energy to that end. The whole thing has the movement of Mozart, but it is movement charged with colour, and behind the head of Christ is an Italian Renaissance background. This is what one scholar says. ‘The money-changers, panic-stricken more by the sudden revelation of power in the suave Christ than by the punishment itself, try to escape, but they cannot. Brilliant is the planned confusion of the detail. The upward-catapulted figures…make a frantic explosive series, away from the Christ and diagonally back into the picture space.’ It is very rare for a picture to be charged with so much energy and movement and rhythm.

Bach, ‘the supreme musical genius of the late Baroque period’, some say of all time, came ‘from the most gifted family in musical history.’ He was born in Saxony. He lost both his parents at the age of nine. He was twice married, and he had twenty children. He moved from town to town in Saxony and spent a large part of his time at Leipzig. He held court or church appointed posts. He was often wrangling with government or his employer. Most work was generated for his employer, and most of it was religious.

He was most famous during his life for his Cantatas (‘something to be sung’) which were sung during the service in church in the ordinary course of that service. He is best known now for the two passions – of Saint Matthew and Saint John – the drama of the passion of Christ according to either gospel and performed with a baroque orchestra and choir and soloists, and the music for piano called The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, and much other incidental baroque music. People of sense are not deflected from enjoying some of the most beautiful music ever written by the fact that they do not share Bach’s faith, or any other faith. It is the same with the other great artists I have mentioned.

At that time you could see artists trying to break clear of a monopoly by the church on commissions for new art. With Bach, it is very necessary to bear in mind that music then was supposed to serve a purpose. As John Eliot Gardiner says in his recent and marvellous biography of Bach:

In Bach’s day the arts were still expected to impart some explicit moral, religious or rational meaning. It was not until the second half of the century that aesthetic concepts such as ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’ began to uncouple the artistic from the scientific and the moral.

Then we have to see that Bach was not just the product of a musical family, but a religious family, and one that followed Luther at that. Luther had not just wanted to bring the bible to people in their language – he wanted to bring them their religion in words and music that were at once of the people and lyrical. One of his best known hymns – Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (‘A Mighty Fortress is our God’) – has both music and words by Luther, and expresses his sense of swelling security within God’s many mansions. This is one of the themes of the St Matthew’s Passion. The Bach family sang at meals – as did Gardiner’s – and this vocal participation was easily carried over into the congregation and communion within the church.

Gardiner himself witnessed the survival of old traditions in the region of Thuringia – in the middle of the service, he and his choir were suddenly joined in the organ gallery by a group of local farmers who sang a short litany in Thuringian dialect and departed. That must have been quite a show. The German philosopher Herder said that the chorales sung in church retained the moral effectiveness (‘the treasury of life’) that German folk-poetry and folksong had once had. Herder also said that the moment the poet writes slowly in order to be read, art may be the winner, but there is a loss of magic, of ‘miraculous power.’ Isaiah Berlin had said that ‘Language alone makes experience possible, but it also freezes it.’

Luther held that ‘the notes make the words live’ and that without music, man is little more than a stone. He also wanted to know why the Devil should have all of the good tunes.

Yet, notwithstanding this close tie for Bach between God and his music, all of that music, including the two great Passions – especially the two great Passions – is open to all of us. Gardiner quotes William James as saying that ‘religion like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse…adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.’ Gardiner then goes on to refer to some observations of a contemporary European composer, Gyorgy Kurtag, that are at once both sane and mystical.

Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it – as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails… That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.

I first heard the St Matthew’s Passion of Bach about ten years ago at the church opposite the Astor which I gather is famous for its acoustics and choral work. The drama alone overwhelmed me – it is the drama and the music and a sense of ritual that is still overwhelming as I listen to any of the three recordings that I have of it. The first time you hear it, or, better, see it, you think at times that you might be listening to Negro spirituals with commentary from Joel Grey as the M C from Cabaret. The ending is signalled by a colloquy within the choir one part of which is Mein Jesu gutte nacht (Good night, my Jesus). Life cannot offer much else that is so fine.

My first recording was by Gardiner with his Monteverdi ensemble. The second is a large boxed set by the Collegium Vocale Gent that features Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist. The third, which I have listened to over the last two nights, is a recording with Karajan and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra made not long after the war in Vienna. That morally stained city was a husk and Karajan had joined the party – twice. Yet the sound of this choir is almost unbearably ethereal. So are the tempi of the choruses and the recording techniques then serve to put distance into the choirs. The effect is remarkable.

John Eliot Gardiner concludes what is in truth a frank and dry-eyed biography with these words.

Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human passions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows us the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God – in human form. He is the one who blazes a trail, showing us how to overcome our imperfections through the perfections of his music: to make divine things human, and human things divine.

People who shuffle off this mortal coil without getting up very close to Bach’s St Matthew Passion are short changing themselves very badly. This is not a spiritual or Godly age; we have lost our taste for ritual and communion; and those who suffer under the emptiness and vulgarity of what passes for sport in Australia should not pass up a chance as good as this to at least glimpse the mystical.

(This piece draws heavily on two books that are available on Amazon and Apple, Parallel Trials (Socrates and Jesus) and The West Awakes, the third volume of a history of the West.)

Mr Turner

22/01/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Once I knew a very refined elderly man in Toorak who refused to go to see the film Amadeus. He worshipped Mozart and he did not want to see that lavatory humour splashed across the screen. For the first hour of Mr Turner, I was wondering if I should have followed this example, but the movie came to life, and started to carry the audience with its hero, thanks to two women, his maid and his later common law wife. Both of these parts looked straight out of Dickens – the sets and costumes are uniformly excellent – and each was played inch perfect. The Poms are so good at this on stage and screen – they bat right down the order.

Turner comes to life with his new love. For some reason the director wanted to drive us to distraction in a very long movie with two of the most irritating whingers ever born, the ex-wife and a failed painter. Foreplay may not be the hero’s strong suit, but the courtship scene is affecting and involving. We knew that he cared for his father, but we wondered otherwise if his only outlet was with the paint brush. Although Turner snorts a lot, and can be abrupt, he gets on with the Academy like one of the boys in the locker room at the golf club. I was surprised at his easy acceptance – the son of a barber with a gruff South London accent. We get a glimpse at some of the great paintings – there is a real frissson when a few of them in a boat see the fighting Temeraire being towed toward them by that black steam boat. Ruskin gets a family backhander, which is not unjust for the most over-rated commentator since Cicero.

For me, Turner is right up there with El Greco as a mould-breaker in painting. I doubt whether the film will convey this wonderment to all, but in one of two beautiful scenes involving a daguerreotype, Turner asks why the camera cannot show colour. When he is told that this is a mystery, he replies, softly, long may it remain so. We have seen an experiment on colour with a prism, but the mystery of art is inviolable. The film is gorgeously apparelled on the screen. I did not like the music, but others, I gather, do. At least it is not that Muzak we normally get. This is a film of substance about a genius.