Writing

Leoš Janáček — THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN

It is startling to realize that Leoš Janáček’s enchanting yet profound opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, had its origin in what was close to being a newspaper cartoon strip.

From April through June, 1920, Brno’s popular liberal daily, Lidové noviny, published the illustrated story of a clever vixen constantly outwitting a forester. The 200 or so sketches had been drawn by the painter Stanislav Lolek (1873 – 1936) who had been apprenticed as a forester before turning to art. One of the paper’s editors saw the sketches and assigned Rudolf Těsnohlídek (1882 – 1928), the Lidové noviny’s law reporter, to come up with some text to accompany the illustrations.

The printer mistook Těsnohlídek’s original title, “Liška Bystronožka” (Vixen Fleetfoot) for “Liška Bystroužka” (Vixen Sharp-Ears”) — and so she has been ever since. Janáček’s title for his opera is Adventures of the Vixen Bystroušky (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky). When Max Brod translated the opera into German, the title became Das schlaue Füchslein or The Cunning Little Vixen—the title by which the opera is known almost everywhere outside of Janáček’s homeland.

The difference in the wording of the title is not mere pedantry. As Michael Ewans has pointed out in Janáček’s Tragic Operas, the German and English translated titles “are sadly symptomatic: the West has shown too little ability to interpret an opera whose vision is as far from Disney as it is from the clumsy symbolism of Max Brod’s ‘arrangement for the German stage.’ Janáček’s animals are not patronized or sentimentalized by the attribution of human features: human singers and dancers, taking on the masks and skins of insect, bird or animal, find themselves for the duration of this opera members of an order nobler, by its deep humor and its simple, amoral enjoyment of life, than that of humanity. The particular moments where animals assume the manners of men satirize human rather than animal behavior; no animal is portrayed ironically, except the dog and hens who have succumbed self-righteously to exploitation by mankind.”

This unsentimental view of the opera is shared by Edward Berkeley, director of Aspen Opera Theater Center. “In our production, the sense of character, in terms of animals, is going to be strong, but it definitely is going to go away from ‘cute.’ The period will be the 1920’s or ’30s with a European flavor. It will be calling back to a time of awareness of the earth and the values of the earth, a kind of re-finding oneself in nature.”

Throughout all the adventures the Vixen has during the course of the opera, there is a strong underlying theme of the relationship between humans and the world of nature. Janáček emphasized this part of the work — as well as the cyclical nature of renewal found in life itself — by the changes he made in Těsnohlídek’s original version.

Těsnohlídek’s story was largely devoted to the numerous adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears, culminating in her marriage to the Fox. Janáček, however, used this ending to the original story as the finale to Act Two of his opera. For Act Three, the composer used a few incidents from earlier in Těsnohlídek’s story, primarily the incident with Harašta the poacher — but with a major difference. In Janáček’s version, the poacher kills the Vixen, which completely changes the nature of the work. However, the profundity of Janáček’s version is sealed by not ending the opera with Sharp-Ear’s death (which would be merely sentimental), but by the last two scenes of the opera which are Janáček’s invention.

The almost painful nostalgia of the scene at the Inn where the Schoolmaster realizes his beloved Theresa has married another man, and the Forester announces the Vixen has left her burrow and disappeared, gives way to the astonishing transformation scene with which the opera ends. The Forester enters the forest with his gun, as he did at the beginning of the opera. But this time — because of his relationship with the Vixen, and because he has been open to learn from her — he sees Nature in all its beauty, and it renews him. He values not only the mushroom he picks, but everything he sees. Unlike the memories he has of his wedding day in the opening scene (“I feel as tired as I did on my wedding night. The next day I was dead to the world” — an obvious metaphor to his being dead to the world of nature in which he found himself) this time — as he revels in the splendor of nature all around him — he remembers the passion of the love they had felt and the all consuming kisses they had shared. As in the opening scene, the Forester falls asleep, and this time meets the descendants of the Vixen and the Frog from Act One.

In an marvelous touch, the huge dramatic arch the Forester has traveled since we first met him is deftly conveyed by Janáček’s last stage direction in the piece, the last words in the score: “Absentmindedly, the Forester lets his gun slip to the ground.” He no longer needs it. He is at peace with Nature.

When Max Brod wanted Janáček to write some final words for the Forester “in which he could sink into rumination,” the composer adamantly refused. “In the final scene the Forester’s gun simply slips from his hand,” he insisted. “Nothing more; let everyone work out for himself what he will.”

“Vixen is a life-giving piece,” Berkeley explains. “That sense of renewal — that we don’t loose the past, but we grow by accepting it. By accepting the Vixen’s death, and then looking into the future, the shape of the opera says that death is a natural part of things, and from that sense of renewal we can learn and grow.

“The work is a parable about what we should appreciate and learn from nature and the natural cycle — and about male/female relationship in general.” Berkeley agrees with the critic who said the Vixen is the embodiment of unrestrained femininity. “The growth of the piece is toward her own discovery of that — and the Forester discovering that. The scene with the Fox, at the end of Act Two, is where it all comes out. That’s a glorious moment!”

Aside from a few moments, such as the humorous political harangue the Vixen gives the Hens in Act One, there are comparatively few words in the opera’s libretto. It is the music, by far, through which Janáček subtly conveys the shifting relationships. “The musical insight lavished on the depiction of each successive stage of [the Vixen’s] life is intended to have deep meaning for us,” writes Ewans. “Human beings, like vixens, are born, grow, marry and die; those seen in the opera live lives poor in comparison with Bystrouška’s — except for the Forester, whose road to wisdom is carefully charted, and on whose closing vision Janáček lavished some of his most inspired music.… Janáček illuminates for us the cycles of life and nature; and at the same time he shows us archetypes of the morality of the humans who cannot accept those cycles — and the road by which one human eventually can.”

The orchestral interludes and mimes/dances were integral parts of Janáček’s vision of the story from the very beginning, and he resisted all well-meaning suggestions to add conventional arias so the animals could “explain” things.

“The Vixen is a forest idyll; only a hint should surface of our cycle and that of animal life,” he wrote to his publisher. “That is enough — it is true that for most this symbolism is too little. The Vixen can only eat rabbits, not romances and arias.”

“I’m hoping the audience will come away from the performances really loving the music,” says Berkeley. “That sounds like such a cliché, but for me the piece is such a revelation of Janáček’s incredible musical style that is really a unique voice. It’s an important voice. It’s romantic, it’s very beautiful, and here it’s conveying a quite serious vision of nature, and the importance of nature in our lives. As we destroy the environment, we should be learning how to restore ourselves the way nature does, and renew ourselves, rather than destroying each other and destroying nature.”

Janáček and Animals

Janáček loved animals and the family always had numerous pets: dogs, pigeons, a gold finch — and three hens. Marie Stejskalová, the Janáček’s servant for over 40 years, remembered, “Janáček talked to the hens as to children, they looked at him, answered something and he understood. In the evening, when he sat down in the garden in his armchair to read the paper, he rapped on the table, like a schoolmaster at school. The hens came running at once, jumped up [onto the table] and kept him company.”

During the summer of 1922, while he was working on The Cunning Little Vixen, Janáček and some friends went into the forest near Hukvaldy to observe a family of foxes. The gamekeeper, J. D. Sládek, later wrote, “We reached Babí hora [Old Woman Mountain], and indeed, as if to order, the vixen’s family emerged from the den and began to show off and frisk about. Janáček started twitching with excitement until in the end he frightened the foxes away.

“ ‘Why couldn’t you keep still, Dr. Janáček? You could have gone on looking?’

“Janáček, completely exhilarated and happy, just brushed this aside. ‘I saw her! I saw her!’

This article originally appeared in the Aspen Opera Theater program, 2005.

The photo at the top of the article is by Jonn Leffmann.

The drawings in the article are Stanislav Lolek’s of “Vixen Fleetfoot.”

Poulenc — Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (1899 – 1963) had an upbringing that could hardly have been more fortunate, given his eventual career. He was born in Paris to a wealthy family of pharmaceutical manufacturers. The arts were an important part of the Poulenc household, and the young boy’s interest in them was encouraged, especially by his mother, herself a pianist of some talent. At the age of five, Poulenc began piano lessons with her. She steered him to the music of Mozart, Chopin, Scarlatti, and Couperin and later fostered his explorations of composers such a Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. She also firmly resisted all attempts to force her son into the rigid, scholastic education of the day. From her brother, Poulenc’s Uncle Papoum, young Francis developed a lifelong delight in Parisian theater and café life in all its forms.

At sixteen, Poulenc began studying with Ricardo Viñes, a pianist who often performed the works of his friends Ravel and Debussy and who was a staunch supporter of avant-garde music. It was through Viñes that Poulenc met Erik Satie, who would be a great influence on him. While still a teenager, Poulenc met Auric, Honegger, and Milhaud, and to them he dedicated his first published composition, Rapsodie négre. Written in 1917 and revised in 1933 Rapsodie négre made it clear, once and for all, that Poulenc and the French musical establishment of the time were unsuited to each other. The director of the Paris Conservatory told the eighteen-year-old composer, “Your music stinks, it is nothing but a load of balls. Are you trying to make a fool of me? Ah, I see you have joined the gang of Stravinsky, Satie and company. Well then, I’ll say goodbye.”

Though Poulenc briefly studied with Ravel, Charles Koechlin was the one who gave the young man the grounding he needed in order for his profound musical individuality to blossom confidently. Today, the individuality of his music has made Poulenc the dominant member of Les Six, a composer whose stature seems to grow with time. While he was alive, however, Poulenc’s works were often treated dismissively, leading the composer to remark to a friend that though he was “not intoxicated with the idea of being a Grand Musician, it nonetheless exasperates me to be thought of by so many people as nothing more than a ‘petit maître érotique’.” His colleague Igor Stravinsky thought otherwise: “You are truly good, and that is what I find again and again and again in your music.”

The wit, ebullience, and Gallic charm that mistakenly led people to undervalue Poulenc’s music — as well as the superb craftsmanship which Stravinsky and other composers so admired — are fully present in Poulenc’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano. Written in Cannes in 1926 and dedicated to Manuel de Falla, the Trio reflects the composer’s own considerable abilities as a pianist (he often performed in concert and toured several times with the baritone Pierre Bernac and later with soprano Denise Duval) and his love of wind instruments.

The Trio is in three movements. The first (marked Presto) begins with a sixteen-measure introduction, slow — one might almost say portentous — and completely opposite to the playful quality of the rest of this movement, which one writer has called “rococo crossed with Offenbachian opéra bouffe.” The more lyric second movement (Andante) demonstrates fully the composer’s astonishing melodic gifts, coupled with his ability to use subtle harmonic shifts to alter the emotional color of the music. The last movement (Rondo) is a rollicking modern version of the baroque French gigue, modified by Poulenc’s own sensibilities. The entire work is delightful, potent, and sec.

This article appeared originally in the program book of the San Francisco Symphony and is used here with permission.

WAGNER’S LOHENGRIN — A BEL CANTO WORK IN DISGUISE?

“[Adelina] Patti continued her new departure into Wagnerland by singing Elisabeth’s prayer from Tannhäuser,” wrote George Bernard Shaw on July 18, 1894. “Now, if I express some skepticism as to whether Patti cares a snap of her fingers for Elisabeth or Wagner, I may, after all these years of ‘Una voce’ and ‘Bel raggio,’ very well be pardoned. But it is beyond all doubt that Patti cares most intensely for the beauty of her own voice and the perfection of her singing. What is the result? She attacks the prayer with the single aim of making it sound as beautiful as possible; and this being precisely what Wagner’s own musical aim was, she goes straight to the right phrasing, the right vocal touch, and the right turn of every musical figure, thus making her German rivals not only appear in comparison clumsy as singers, but actually obtuse to Wagner’s meaning.

“If Patti were to return to the stage and play Isolde, though she might very possibly stop the drama half a dozen times in each act to acknowledge applause and work in an encore…the public might learn a good deal about Isolde from her which they will never learn from any of the illustrious band of German Wagner heroines who are queens at Bayreuth, but who cannot sing a gruppetto for all that.”

George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, who knew a great deal about the art of singing and spent much of his tenure as music critic bullying the best singers of his day into adding Wagner to their repertory, ends with a couple of sentences that should be posted above the desk of everyone responsible for casting opera today: “Wagner means his music to be sung with the most exquisite sensitiveness in point of quality of tone and precision of pitch, exactly as Mozart did…I am really tired of going to the theater to hear the best music associated with the worst singing, and the best singing in the worst music.”

Unfortunately for most opera singers — to say nothing of audiences — Wagner himself often sabotaged the performance of his works with “exquisite quality of tone” by making sheer survival a preeminent consideration in some of his best-known roles. If a singer is worried primarily about just getting out the notes, being heard above a roaring orchestra, and making it to the end of the evening, vocal nuance and quality of tone are likely to be jettisoned early on, in the interest of staying afloat through a performance of Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Isolde, or Tristan. It is possible to sing Wagner’s heaviest roles beautifully and still be heard, but how often does God send along a Kirsten Flagstad?

In Lohengrin, Wagner wrote an entire opera for human-size singers. To borrow an analogy from the world of sports: if Amina in La Sonnambula and many of her bel canto cousins can be compared to a hundred-yard sprinter, and Siegfried or Tristan to an Olympic weight lifter, then Lohengrin might be an ice skater, who needs stamina and physical strength, but also grace and poise, as well as the ability to maintain a fluid, long line. In Lohengrin, Wagner wrote roles that make their greatest effect, not through sheer lung power but with the ability to infuse a beautiful vocal line with all the nuances and yes, charm, a singer would use to bring to life an opera by Bellini or Donizetti. This in the process of constructing an opera made up of arias, ensembles, choruses and finales, which — when properly performed — send shivers of delight down the spines of bel canto fans.

Wagner himself was thoroughly familiar with bel canto opera. As a young conductor he had prepared and led countless performances of the repertory. While conducting in Riga, he even went so far as to doctor up a performance of Bellini’s Norma by writing an additional aria for bass and male chorus, “Norma, il predesse.” (During his early years in Paris, Wagner tried to talk the great bass Luigi Lablache into adding the aria to his portrayal of Oroveso, but this idea was turned down on the grounds that Norma was too well known by the public to insert extra music.) In Paris, Wagner often heard the great singers of his time, such as the tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, and the performances left an indelible impression on the young composer.

“R[ichard] sings a cantilena from I Puritani and remarks that Bellini wrote melodies lovelier than one’s dreams,” Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary on August 3, 1872. “The melody recalls Rubini to him, how wonderfully he sang it, and he observes: ‘Our German singers have to go about it in an entirely different way, because they have not got this gift.’ ” In March 1878, Wagner entertained guests by playing parts of Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, La Straniera, and Norma. “There is real passion and feeling here, and the right singer has only to get up and sing it for it to win all hearts,” Cosima quotes her husband as saying, “I have learned things from them which Messrs. Brahms & Co. have never learned, and they can be seen in my melodies.”

Indeed they can. Take Elsa’s entrance aria, “Einsam in trüben Tagen.” Like many bel canto entrance arias (Lucrezia Borgia’s “Com’è bello,” for instance), on paper it looks simple, but to make its effect, it must be not only beautifully sung but mined for every emotional and musical nuance, a difficult feat. Otherwise the aria falls flat.

In the best bel canto tradition, Wagner uses the vocal line itself to describe Elsa’s character. Her pure, trusting nature and lack of worldly experience is reflected in her rather narrow vocal range: only from E‑flat above middle C to A‑flat at the top of the staff, a note she sings only twice during the entire aria. Yet her simple vocal line is studded with grace notes — beginning in the very first measure — and Wagner constructed the aria to provide numerous opportunities for portamento, and for a soprano to color phrases by using crescendo and diminuendo, as well as by taking subtle liberties with the rhythm, to vary their shape.

Rosa Ponselle

A prime example of a singer doing exactly what needs to be done to bring the aria to life is to be found at the end of Rosa Ponselle’s 1923 recording. Though Ponselle never sang the role onstage, she recorded the aria in German and, on the basis of this excerpt, could have been a superb Elsa. In the last phrase, “was ich bin!,” Ponselle lingers on the E‑flat at the top of the staff (“was”), then slowly reduces its volume, before using a portamento down to the G (“ich”) and gently leaning into and caressing the last note (“bin”). With just these three notes, there can be no doubt that Elsa is already in love with her champion, even though he has not yet appeared. It is superb drama, conveyed solely through the voice.

Ortrud too gains considerable power when she approaches her phrasing from a bel canto standpoint, rather than being content merely to be a vocal blowtorch. Listening to Lohengrin excerpts performed by the Vienna State Opera during a visit to Paris in 1933 (Volume 16 of the Vienna State Opera Live series from Koch/Schwann), I was stunned by Gertrude Rünger’s great Act II outburst, “Entweite Götter!” Where many Ortruds simply bellow the F‑sharps at “Wodan!” and “Freia!” in monochromatic fashion, leaving the depiction of the drama to the orchestra, Rünger hits the climactic notes cleanly, exactly on pitch, elegantly. (Remember, Ortrud is a noblewoman, and her family ruled the country for generations before the upstart Christians took over.) Rünger then borrows from Wagner’s dynamic marking for the timpani, making gradual crescendos on both of the F‑sharps. This gives her performance an astounding sense of power in reserve. Just by her vocal inflection on those two notes, Rünger lets us know her Ortrud still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

In the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, the singer’s voice was supreme. The orchestra was used to support and frame the voice, never to compete with it, a method Wagner incorporated in Lohengrin to a surprising degree. Of course, it is Wagner, so the Lohengrin orchestra is an important part of the drama. But even a cursory glance at the score shows a considerable amount of a cappella singing, which Wagner uses to great dramatic purpose.

Take Lohengrin’s entrance. After being heralded by a rousing eight-part chorus and fortissimo orchestra, Lohengrin’s first phrase is sung — a cappella. In fact, most of his farewell to the swan is unaccompanied; what discreet orchestral color Wagner uses is marked pianissimo and is supposed to diminuendo further from that pianissimo. Clearly Wagner meant to use Lohengrin’s first thirteen measures to seduce the audience by purely vocal means, by the way the tenor shapes his phrases, by the elegance and grace with which he sings Wagner’s embellishments.

Another example of Wagner’s use of a cappella singing appears at the beginning of the Act I finale, shortly before Lohengrin and Telramund fight their duel. Here, Wagner had the audacity to write an a cappella quintet! As if it were not tough enough for the singers to stay squarely on pitch, Wagner makes it even tougher: Ortrud, who has been standing around ever since the curtain went up (about fifty minutes before), finally sings for the first time all evening — a cappella. When Wagner brings in the first male chorus, then the orchestra, the effect is nothing short of hair-raising.

But then, Wagner also clearly understood the wonderful bel canto tradition of the two-part operatic finale, that massing onstage of chorus and principals, all of whom give voice to their (separate) feelings at that moment, first in slow tempo, then much more quickly. One of the tricks bel canto composers used to build excitement during the finale was to give one or two of the principal singers a long, flowing melody that would float ecstatically above the pulsating rhythm of the chorus, orchestra, and choppier vocal lines of the other soloists. Donizetti used the device to great effect time after time — at the end of Act II of Lucia di Lammermoor, for instance.

Wagner follows this example at the end of Act I, during the general rejoicing that follows Lohengrin’s defeat of Telramund. He gives Elsa a broad vocal line (even embellishing her music at one point with a turn) that effectively dominates the otherwise intensely rhythmic finale. In perfect Bellini or Donizetti fashion, Wagner keeps stretching the length of Elsa’s phrases, finally asking her to stretch one word, “Alles,” for seven and a half measures as she holds a high B‑flat for four of the measures, then moves stepwise (still singing the first syllable of “Alles”) down to C. It’s all about beautiful singing, and an Elsa in radiant voice, coupled with the right conductor, can bring down the house every time.

Perhaps it is in the bridal-chamber scene of Act III that Wagner wrote Lohengrin’s most heartfelt music. The intimacy he wrote of the duet for Elsa and Lohengrin, “Das süsse Lied verhallt,” calls for the purest bel canto singing from the tenor and soprano. For the duet to make its maximum effect, both singers must use the same sense of rubato that Maria Callas did in her 1949 recording of “Qui la voce.” It is the subtle speeding up or the slight hesitation a master singer uses that truly brings the melody to life.

Franz Völker as Lohengrin

There are two recordings of “Das süsse Lied verhallt” that illustrate this vividly, both based on the deservedly legendary 1936 Bayreuth performances of Lohengrin with Franz Völker and Maria Müller. The commercial recording (on Teldec CD) is conducted by Heinz Tietjen, and the sound is more than good, But to be really swept away by the power of Wagner at his bel canto best, listen to the thirty minutes worth of excerpts from the live July 19, 1936 Bayreuth performance (available on various labels). Under the magical baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Völker and Müller simply are Lohengrin and Elsa, overwhelmingly in love. Their music pulsates with emotion: the vocal lines have a truth and life that are almost unthinkable today. The carefully controlled, dreamy quality of the performance reminds us powerfully that once upon a time the Germans were viewed as a romantic people, not a brutal, militaristic society. Listening to Völker and Müller sing “Das süsse Lied verhallt,” one can easily understand why tenors like Enrico Caruso, even Fernando De Lucia, would chose to sing the part of Lohengrin — in Italian, of course. (Though Caruso never recorded any of the arias, De Lucia recorded an Italian version of “Mein lieber Schwan.”) One can also understand how Jean de Reszke could, and did, successfully alternate performances of Lohengrin and Faust, or Lohengrin and Roméo et Juliette, at the old Metropolitan Opera House.

And listening to the ebb and flow of the melodic line as gloriously spun out by Furtwängler, Völker, and Müller, one is also reminded of the sheer power a melody can have — and how often in Lohengrin Wagner made his dramatic and emotional points by composing some of the most beautiful bel canto music ever written.

This article originally appeared in the March 14, 1998 issue of Opera News magazine.

The art at the top is The Arrival of Lohengrin in Antwerp, a mural by August von Heckel (1882 – 83).

W. A. Mozart — Quintet in D Major for Strings, K. 593

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756 – 91) was an inveterate player of chamber music. Today, with 20/20 hindsight, we might assume that such an august musical genius would gravitate to the first violin parts when he played string quartets with his friends. But in fact Mozart much preferred to play the viola on such occasions. He loved the instrument, with its warm, mellow timbre, and he seems thoroughly to have enjoyed being at the center of the music, rather than playing one of the more immediately noticeable outer voices.

By the time Mozart finished writing his first string quintet, in December 1773, the seventeen-year-old had already composed fifteen string quartets. It is possible that Mozart decided to try his hand at the more unusual five-instrument form because Michael Haydn, younger brother of the composer Franz Joseph Haydn and a good friend of the Mozart family, had written what he called a “Notturno” for two violins, two violas, and cello in February 1773. This must have been successful, because the younger Haydn soon followed it up with a second quintet, and in Mozart’s letters from that year he speaks of playing both works.

Oddly, Franz Joseph Haydn, who wrote so much chamber music and whom Mozart revered, never wrote a string quintet. When asked why, he is said to have replied that no one ever commissioned one from him. A great exception to the usual quintet instrumentation of two violins, two violas, and one cello is Schubert’s single string quintet, D.956 in C major, where the cello is doubled rather than the viola.

Though Mozart wrote far more string quartets (twenty-three) than quintets (six), he obviously had a great personal affection for the five-voice form. Two string quintets comprise the last chamber works he wrote: K. 593 in D major, completed in December 1790, and K. 641 in E‑flat major, which he finished on April 12, 1791. Both works were written on commission, though exactly who commissioned them remains a mystery.

A couple of years after Mozart’s death the quintets were published with the note: “Composed for a Hungarian Amateur.” Since Mozart’s wife, long after the fact, said her husband had written some music for Johann Trost (a violinist from Eszterháza and a musician to whom Haydn had dedicated some of his quartets), some writers have speculated that Trost was the “Hungarian Amateur” in question. We know that, before Haydn left Vienna on December 15, 1790 for the first of his two visits to London, he joined Mozart in playing the younger man’s quintets, especially (according to Maximilian Stadler, a friend of Mozart’s and one of the other string players) the new Quintet in D major. Stadler added that, during these chamber music sessions, Haydn and Mozart took turns playing first viola.

Mozart’s D major String Quintet is in four movements. The first, one of the most unusual first movements in all of Mozart, begins with a twenty-one-measure Larghetto introduction in ¾ time. This is — surprisingly — brought back in a slightly modified form at the end of the movement’s main, duple-meter Allegro section. The first movement is then finished off, rather abruptly, by an eight-measure restatement of the movement’s principal theme.

The Adagio is one of Mozart’s most beautiful lyric creations, with the individual instruments juxtaposed with enormous skill. In the Menuetto, the composer makes dramatic use of sudden shifts in the dynamics, asking the players to go from forte to piano within one or two beats. The Allegro finale is in 6/8 time. The delightful, bouncing opening theme gives no hint of the astonishing polyphony that Mozart will employ before finishing the Quintet.

This article appeared originally in the program book of the San Francisco Symphony and is used here with permission.

The Devil Gets His Due

The world of opera is generously populated by an assortment of unsavory, even nasty and sometimes downright evil characters, some of whom employ magic and the supernatural in their quest of wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting. But even though opera as a genre does not flinch from exploring The Dark Side of life, there are remarkably few operas in which the Devil himself actually appears onstage. Two of them — Gounod’s Faust and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress—enter the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire this spring, offering audiences the opportunity to ponder what would seem to be a conundrum, Why is it that the attainment of our heart’s deepest desire is only possible by entering a pact with the Devil which, inevitably, leads to our eternal damnation? Why does it seem that behind every delight and pleasure, retribution lurks in one form or another?

Faust premiered in 1859 and quickly became so extraordinarily popular as to almost be ubiquitous, even inaugurating the old Metropolitan Opera House on October 22. 1883. For several decades audiences could not get enough of watching the aged philosopher Faust sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for a second chance at youth and the opportunity to experience the bliss of desire. (In Goethe’s original, more profound telling of the story, Faust bargains not specifically for youth and young love but says, “If to the moment I should say:/Abide, you are so fair – /Put me in fetters on that day,/I wish to perish then, I swear.” Perhaps Gounod’s librettists felt their audience could more easily relate to the desire for a second chance of youth and romance than to the more amorphous quest for the single perfect moment.)

A devilish Marcel Journet

The opera might be called Faust but the juiciest role is Méphistophélès who, summoned by Faust, makes his appearance to five fortissimo chords played by the entire orchestra. “I am here. Is that so surprising?” Méphistophélès asks the astonished Faust. “Does my appearance displease you?” And immediately the orchestra begins giving us clues about what kind of guy this particular Devil is. His first questions are all followed by four soft, quick notes from the flutes, bassoons and fourth horn, accompanied by two eighth notes by the strings. The music is playful, elegant, slightly mocking, the essence of a man very much in control of the situation and thoroughly enjoying it.

It is true that Faust takes the initiative by summoning Méphistophélès, and it is Faust who asks what the price will be for the Devil working his supernatural powers on the philosopher’s behalf. He does not go blindly into the deal with Satan, he knows exactly what the price will be before he signs away his soul. He is fully aware of the consequences and even hesitates at the crucial moment — Méphistophélès has to summon a vision of Marguerite to nudge, or entice, Faust into the final step. But once Méphistophélès steps on stage, he dominates the action and delights in it, while seducing us into enjoying his delight.

Pol Plançon

There are basses who have tried to make Gounod’s Méphistophélès a caricature of loathsome evil, the vocal equivalent of the Bible’s description of the Devil in I Peter 5:8 as being “like a roaring lion, [who] walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” But how many people would willingly hang around a roaring lion set on devouring them? Far more enticing is the Apostle Paul’s version in II Corinthians: “Satan himself is transformed into an angle of light,” which is much closer to Gounod’s Devil. An “amalgam of debonair grace and cynical menace,” is the way critic Paul Jackson summed up the role, and listening to recordings of great Méphistophélès like bass Pol Plançon (who sang the role 85 times at the Metropolitan between 1893 and 1908) one can understand why everyone is so taken in by the guy. A critic for The New York Times describes Plançon’s Méphistophélès as “a boulevardier,” a man about town, the kind of guy Faust, actually, would like to be in his second youth, which is why he leans on the Devil for help, advice and instructions when it comes to wooing Marguerite.

This identification between the Devil and his victim is even more closely drawn in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which premiered in 1951, almost a century after Gounod’s Faust. In the Twentieth Century opera there is no magic potion, no overt summoning of the Devil. Tom Rakewell merely says, “I wish I had money,” and instantly a stranger appears and informs the young man he has been left a fortune by an uncle Rakewell never knew. Perhaps it is Rakewell’s unthinking youth which blinds him to the true identity this messenger, but Stravinsky’s librettists W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman give man the name “Nick Shadow,” which leaves no doubt in the minds of the audience as to the man’s identity: “Old Nick” being one of the Devil’s many names, and “Shadow” being the dark side of every human being.

“Those unpleasant and immoral aspects of our selves which we would like to pretend do not exist or have no effect on our lives — our inferiorities, our unacceptable impulses, our shameful actions and wishes — this shadowy side of our personality is difficult and painful to admit,” writes Rob Hopcke in A Guided Tour of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

“The shadow is, in truth, a devilish form,” observes June Singer in Boundaries of the Soul, “and just when you think you know who he is, he changes his disguise and appears from another direction.”

Igor Stravinsky

Tom Rakewell, who has no desire to work for a living and plans to rely on the favor of Fortune, only has to express as wish and his shadow, Nick Shadow, grants it. Every wish appears, as if by magic, just by the wishing itself. But none of the wishes last, and Tom ends up dying insane in Bedlam.

Perhaps one of the reasons our delights fade, and sometimes have unpleasant consequences, is to be found in the root of the word itself. “Delight” comes from the same root as “to snare” or “to bind,” and is closely related to “a noose.” Our delights can hang us, and we do it to ourselves by remaining unconscious of the roots of our desires, even if we blame it all on the Devil.

In the first scene of The Rake’s Progress, Nick Shadow thanks Rakewell for taking him on as guide and says, “for masterless should I abide/Too long, I soon would die.” What a concept, that the Devil needs us or he dies? In the Epilogue, Shadow explains, “Day in, day out, poor Shadow/Must do as he is bidden.”

Nick Shadow needs Tom Rakewell as much as Rakewell needs Shadow for the fulfillment of his wishes. Méphistophélès needs Faust as much as Faust needs him. What a paradox. Or is it?

“If I can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both,” notes Robert A. Johnson in Owning Your Own Shadow. “This is not compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to humankind.”

This article appeared in the Metropolitan Opera Playbill, March 2003.

The painting at the top of the article is Eugene Delacroix’s “Faust and Mephistopheles,” 1826 – 27.

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