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Monday, November 4, 2024 |
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Two centuries later, a composer gets a second look |
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Italian pictural school (17th century ), Portrait of Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851). Oil on canvas. Naples, Museo di Strumenti del Conservatorio. Item Number: XIR224998
by George Loomis
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NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Composer Gaspare Spontini wasnt known for his modesty.
In 1844, at 70, he traveled to Dresden, Germany, to conduct his opera La Vestale at the invitation of the young Richard Wagner. The older composer discouraged Wagner from a career as a dramatic artist, saying that he, Spontini, had brought the art of opera to such heights that any attempt to follow him could only have ruinous consequences.
But Wagner later wrote that, despite Spontinis vanity, the meeting only raised his high esteem for the master. Berlioz, too, was a passionate admirer who devoted two chapters to Spontini in Evenings with the Orchestra.
In those days, Spontini was at the apogee of the opera world. Yet his reputation faded, along with those of other grand-opera stars.
La Vestale, a spectacular success at its 1807 premiere in Paris, has kept Spontinis name alive, if barely. Maria Callas had a triumph in the title role at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in the 1950s, and Riccardo Muti chose the opera to open that theaters 1993-94 season.
Spontini is one of my two gods, together with Cherubini, Muti said in a telephone interview.
His admiration may be spreading. Last year, Agnes von Hohenstaufen was presented in Erfurt, Germany. In October, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence offered a rare staging of Fernand Cortez, and a new production of La Vestale just closed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Olimpie has recently been excellently recorded, with Jérémie Rhorer conducting.
Spontini attended conservatory in Naples but, according to Berlioz, taught himself by studying Glucks scores. Unlike other Italian opera composers who came to Paris, he was little known on his arrival, in 1803, but soon he acquired the backing of Empress Josephine, who was instrumental in bringing La Vestale to the stage.
We have an excellent idea of who Napoleon was from an artistic perspective because of painters such as David, said Jean-Luc Tingaud, who conducted Fernand Cortez. Spontini offers an opportunity for a similar understanding of Napoleon through music.
When the victorious Roman general Licinius, in La Vestale, returns home to popular acclaim, a stirring chorus honors him while simultaneously reminding audiences of Napoleons military triumphs. With Spontini, the chorus is no longer decorative or secondary, said Patrick Barbier, a scholar of the composer, but an essential protagonist.
La Vestale has an aura of Gluckian Neo-Classicism, but, Muti said, is also charged by flashes of Romanticism. While the recitatives look back to the 18th century, other passages anticipate Berlioz and the grand opera of Meyerbeer. And Muti believes that Spontinis mastery of large musical structures directly influenced Wagner.
Berlioz documented Spontinis skills as an orchestrator. His writing for winds and percussion is especially striking, said Tingaud. Muti mentioned a celebrated passage from Agnes in which Spontini evokes the sound of an organ by cleverly scoring music for stage band.
Napoleon dictated the subject of Spontinis next opera after La Vestale. Thinking that a music drama could bolster support for his Iberian campaign, he directed that a libretto about Hernán Cortéss Mexican conquest be prepared and that Spontini write the music. The idea was that audiences would recognize in Cortés a liberator in the Napoleonic mold.
But the propagandistic content of Fernand Cortez seriously misfired. The Iberian campaign bogged down, and audiences identified Cortés with the courage of Napoleons opponents. The opera was ordered withdrawn, although it triumphed in a revised form in 1817, after Napoleon was sent into exile.
The Florence production revealed Fernand Cortez to be uneven Act I is overweighted with ballet but possessed of enough strong scenes to more than justify its revival. A heroic aura is never far away, but Italianate lyricism enriches the personal drama of Cortés and his Mexican lover, Amazily, while choral writing colorfully differentiates Spaniards and Mexicans. More than once, I was reminded of Berliozs Les Troyens.
The straightforward production, by Cecilia Ligorio, dealt astutely with the question of how to characterize Cortés, a figure now deplored as a brutal colonialist but revered as a hero when the opera was written. Ligorio essentially preserved the operas favorable portrayal of Cortés, but enlisted Cortés confidant, Moralez, as a silent conduit for dissent. At the beginning of acts and during the final ballet, texts drawn from or inspired by contemporaneous writers attacking Cortés fanaticism were projected as if they were Moralezs thoughts, offsetting the laudatory libretto.
Spontini wrote one more grand opera for Paris, Olimpie, but a year after its unsuccessful 1819 premiere, he became general music director in Berlin. There, German Romantic opera was taking root, especially in works by Weber. After producing two operas on lighter subjects, Spontini made his mark in 1829 with Agnes von Hohenstaufen, a grosse historische-romantische Oper set in the Middle Ages. The hostilities he faced in Paris, however, persisted in Berlin and impeded the success of what Spontini considered his masterpiece. He eventually returned, disappointed, to Italy, where he died in 1851.
Muti pointed out that Spontinis nationality counted against him. The Germans wanted one of their own as their leading opera composer, he said, not an Italian who made his reputation in France.
But Muti offered a tantalizing morsel. It is possible, he said, that before I disappear from this planet, I will conduct Agnes von Hohenstaufen with the original German text.
© 2019 The New York Times Company
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