The harmony of the spheres

Summary

Whoever takes a serious approach to opera will sooner or later come into conflict with opera the institution. There is a vast discrepancy between the aspirations of the works and the institution tasked with presenting them. In the never-ending battle with these inadequacies, one can at least find a little comfort and take courage in being in the very best of company. Hardly had the art of opera been invented when its first-ever grand master, Claudio Monteverdi, was writing letters in which he complained bitterly about the shoddy, negligent treatment meted out to his works. Handel was driven to sickness and financial ruin by the insatiable lust for money of his castrati and prima donnas – not to mention their impossible whims and rivalries. When his star soprano Francesca Cuzzoni one day refused to sing her aria ‘Falsa immagine’ at a rehearsal of his opera Ottone, Handel could take it no longer. He grasped his fractious singer by the waist, cried: ‘Oh, Madame, I know you're a veritable she-devil, but I hereby inform you that I am Beelzebub, the lord of all devils’, and threatened to drop her out of the window if she made any more objections. The aria was a huge success – and Cuzzoni was still singing it thirty years later when she gave her farewell performance on the London stage.

Gluck's despairing fits of rage during the rehearsals of his works were as talked about and feared in Vienna as they were in Paris. And in his famous letter to court councillor Anton Klein in Mannheim, Mozart despaired of the ‘breakdown of German opera’ in Vienna: ‘It is the greatest misfortune that the directors of both the theatre and the orchestra have been retained, for their ignorance and inactivity have played the greatest part in the failure of their own work. If only a single patriot were on the board – it would all look very different!’ In his disappointment, he ends by saying ‘after such an outpouring of the heart one should be able to drink oneself drunk without danger of ruining one's health’.