2023-12-15 06:25:11
Thomas Marco He is a national glory, one of the most restless and interesting personalities of our country in the field of culture. Composer of international prestige, with a solid catalog that covers the most diverse genres, accomplished essayist and also manager seasoned in a thousand and one battles. He has been and is an essential presence in our musical life.
Marco returns to his work of dissemination and does so with an extraordinary work, “From tradition to beyond postmodernity”, the history of opera throughout the 20th century and also what we have carried forward from the 21st century.
Marco’s review of schools, countries and composers is exhaustive, allows the reader surprising discoveries and, above all, is a stimulus to discover dozens and dozens of titles that are outside the traditional repertoire. Marco tells us with passion this last long century of a fascinating genre and he does so from knowledge and erudition, but also from an extraordinary narrative capacity.
The starting point is the dissolution of opera in the 19th century. There he explains all the models that lay the foundations for an evolution that increases in the second half of the century in areas such as Italian, German and French. Authors like Wagner o Verdi They are essential in the advancement of the genre and in the introduction of novelties that will extend to all the plots that make up the opera as a spectacle, including the libretto, which is increasingly gaining more weight and allowing for a different and complex structure. Also the orchestral aspects or those of stage direction – Wagner will be essential here – will undergo profound transformations that will have an essential milestone of no return in the change between the 19th and 20th centuries.
One of the successes of Tomás Marco’s proposal is that it does not limit itself to carrying out a linear succession of operatic evolution, but is capable of explaining its tremendous richness by explaining the coexistence of various trends simultaneously; We thus see how advances do not prevent some authors from continuing to release with great success from traditional parameters and how, also, certain risks end in fiasco in their presentation, and then establish themselves strongly in the circuits. There are undoubtedly changes that, in the first instance, cause rejection, but this is still something specific and almost anecdotal when the quality of an author ends up prevailing against prejudices.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a true revolution began to deepen that would have, for many, its starting point in the premiere of “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Claude Debussy in 1902, although, as the author explains, the changes are much more complex and the influences travel through different countries. In Italy the weight of Giacomo Puccini would be decisive in these years and also the verista movement as a whole, while in the Germanic area Richard Strauss would be the equivalent in terms of its influence with decisive premieres such as “Salomé” which is based on the work of the same name by Oscar Wilde. Authors from other countries such as Leos Janacek, would also be decisive. Likewise, the case of Ethel Smyth, a militant composer of the suffrage movement, and author of six titles, tracing several female authors of operas hitherto absent in this type of studies. It also explains the decisive weight that a city like Paris had in everything we understand as modernity, since what was successful in the French capital ended up prevailing on the circuits, although it would end up passing the baton to New York after the Second War. World.
Important composers who were promoting the genre at the dawn of the 20th century are Paul Dukas o Maurice Ravelin France – the Group of Six is very significant, with Jean Cocteau as a guardian soul – and in other countries Karol Szymanowski, Bela Bartok or, in Spain, Enrique Granados o Manuel de Falla, among many others. The avant-garde line, or at least one of the most influential avant-garde lines, would come from the hand of Arnold Schoenberg through titles like “Erwartung” or the unfinished “Moses und Aron”. After him would come Alban Berg with a work like “Wozzeck” that would end up becoming “the archetype of the new opera” and that had an influence that, according to the author, reaches into the 21st century. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud o Arthur Honegger –these last three also members of the Group of Six– and Sergei Prokofiev These are some of the dozens of significant names whose careers are discussed.
Like the rest of the artistic genres, the sociopolitical influence is determining and Marco analyzes Nazism or Stalinism and their poisoned relationship with opera; just think about Dmitri Shostakóvich and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” The progressive lyrical boom that has occurred in the United States since the end of the 19th century is analyzed, with the composer Amy Beachbringing jazz to opera, or with George Gershwin; and from other countries such as Brazil and Carlos GomesMexico, Cuba, Argentina.
Throughout the 20th Giancarlo Menottithe great Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze –one of the authors influenced by the serial avant-garde around the Darmstadt group–, Aribert Reimann, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, Karlheinz Stockhausen o Nino Rota They set very diverse trends, just as Marco himself did in Spain, Christopher Halffter, Luis de Pablo o Carlos Santos. The Darmstadt Circle had, precisely, a decisive icon in Bernd Alois Zimmerman and “Die Soldaten”, a play now widely performed in large theaters. And then names like Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Oliver Messiaen, György Ligeti o György Kurtág. Currents such as minimalism are not left aside through Michael Nyman o Philip Glass, or spectralism, among other movements. In a planned manner, authors born in the eighties of the last century are reached with the aim of claiming that “writing and performing operas is not a relic of the past: it is an art that is still current with a future.”
culture
From tradition to beyond postmodernity
Thomas Marco
Galaxia Gutenberg, 592 pages, 27.50 euros
#Opera #genre #full #future