The New Music

By Gerald Clarke

THE SPLENDID ART OF OPERA by Ethan Mordden; Methuen; 413 pages; $19.95

THE GOLDEN CENTURY OF ITALIAN OPERA by William Weaver Thames & Hudson; 256 pages; $27.50

The rich Florentines who crowded into the house of Jacopo Corsi in 1597 were unaware that they were about to witness a miracle. Dafne, the work they were to applaud, was an unprecedented marriage of music and drama: the world's first opera. Jacopo Peri's score is lost, but it must have been a success, because soon nearly every composer in Italy was trying le nuove musiche.

In the mid-1600s, Venice became the home of the new art form. The locale was appropriate: opera was more comfortable in that city of intrigue and sensuousness, and Titian red was better suited to its grand theatricality than the umber of Tuscany. Monteverdi settled there and wrote at least six operas; by 1700 there were 16 opera theaters among the canals. In the mid-19th century, the new music had progressed so far from its simple start that Hector Berlioz recalled: "... horses, cardinals under a canopy . . . orgies of priests and naked women . . . the rocking of the heavens and the end of the world, interspersed with a few dull cavatinas here and there and a large claque thrown in."

An old story perhaps -- yet there al ways seems room for a new history of opera. Composers are constantly being rediscovered or reinterpreted, and, unlike plays, many of which are forgotten after their first production, operas have the gift of eternal life. Within the past 20 years, for example, there has been something of a revival of the works of Monteverdi's little-known successor, Francesco Cavalli.

The Glyndebourne Festival staged Calisto (1651) twice in the early '70s, and the Santa Fe Opera put on Egisto (1646) in 1974.

The chief value of Ethan Mordden's The Splendid Art of Opera is in just such updatings, which are the results of exhaustive research. Unfortunately, Mordden, a former editor of Opera News, has a brass ear for language: one composer, he writes, "will have to wow 'em pronto." His book is less pleasurable than utilitarian, something to thumb through for answers rather than for diversion.

That is provided by William Weaver's The Golden Century of Italian Opera, a lavishly illustrated account of the glorious years from 1815 to the mid-1920s, from The Barber of Seville to Turandot. "All we contemporary composers, without exception, are so many pygmies beside this great master," Bellini said of Rossini. But he was wrong. Geniuses followed each other like monarchs in a royal procession: Bellini himself, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini. Opera lovers became so accustomed to dazzling new works that they thought the parade would never end, that the extraordinary had become the usual.

The great composers were not exactly marble statues, and Weaver's book is full of anecdotes and gossipy snippets.

One example: Leoncavallo, the composer of Pagliacci, was furious when Puccini told him that he was working on a story about bohemians. The next day Leoncavallo rushed to announce that his next opera would be called La Boheme. So what? said Puccini. We will each write our La Boheme, and the public will decide between them--and that is precisely what happened. Puccini was justifiably confident of his gifts, and Weaver includes an eloquent picture of him sitting in his garden: dressed all in white, the maestro stares at the camera, his heavy-lidded eyes conveying a kind of genial arrogance.

When he died in 1924, records The Golden Century, the world waited for the next in opera's regal line. But like so many other royal families, it ended as abruptly as it began, and no one yet has been able to pick up the crown. --By Gerald Clarke

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