As a rule, I favor a strict separation between music and politics. Politics need not worm its way into every nook and cranny. Of course, sometimes composers like to impose politics on their music. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies declared that a string quartet of his was about the Iraq war: a depiction of it and a condemnation of it. What it was, was a string quartet.
Once, Toscanini was asked about the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. What does it mean? He said, “It means allegro con brio in E flat.” That’s the spirit.
When you put words with music, however, all bets are off. Then you can invest music with political or other meanings. And this is doubly true—triply true—in opera, with its stories and messages.
Now comes Mitchell Cohen, with The Politics of Opera. Cohen is a professor of political science at Baruch College, a branch of the City University of New York. For almost 20 years, he coedited Dissent magazine and is now one of its editors emeriti. One of his previous books is about Lucien Goldmann, a French Marxist philosopher, born in Romania, who lived from 1913 to 1970.
“Early operas began usually with prologues,” Cohen writes. Following suit, he begins his book with a prologue. In it, he says that the book will be about “ ‘political operas’ in a broad sense: operas that address politics and political ideas directly or indirectly; or that harbor important political implications.”
Operagoers, especially in Europe, will know that any opera can be rendered political by a determined director. Some years ago in Salzburg, I reviewed a production of Der Freischütz, Weber’s Christian tale of 1821. Rather ingeniously, the director turned it into an anti-American polemic. His townsfolk were fat American tourists, wearing sports jerseys and munching chips. He had a villain of the piece say, “Destruction, death, corruption, rape, war, invasion, burned children, low taxes, and religion—that is what we would kill for; that is what our hearts yearn for.” The inclusion of “low taxes” was a nice touch.
In his book, Cohen does some stretching, I think, meaning that he sees politics where politics may be absent. One problem is that he simply knows so damn much, about politics and everything else. Yet he is aware of the problem of overinterpreting—of stretching—and he is measured in his judgments. You can see this in the following passage:
An excellent passage, with a particularly good final sentence. (Cohen writes well, though I have a complaint: He is one of those who say “reason why”—as in “One reason why Ovid’s retelling of Greek myths spoke to his own Roman times . . .” I go for “that.” But mine is not to reason why.)
* *
The book’s title, The Politics of Opera, suggests perhaps a bigger book, a wider survey, than Cohen has written. The subtitle narrows you down: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart. Monteverdi was born in 1567; Mozart died in 1791. Also, Cohen writes that “for the sake of manageability, I limited the geography of this book to Italy, France, and the Habsburg Empire.” That is a mighty swath.
Cohen begins before Monteverdi, actually—with those pioneering opera composers Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. (Caccini is the composer of “Amarilli, mia bella,” one of the most beautiful and haunting songs ever written.) They lived and worked in Renaissance Florence, and who can resist that place, in that time? When Monteverdi got down to writing operas, says Cohen, he was “a true reformer of his art.” That phrase made me smile, because we’re used to thinking of Monteverdi as the Origin.
I was interested in what Cohen had to say about Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, or The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, Monteverdi’s masterpiece of 1640. I had just reviewed a performance of it, as there is a good amount of Monteverdi about now: This is an “anniversary year” for him, the 450th anniversary of his birth.
Suffice it to say, when Mitchell Cohen sees and hears an opera, he sees and hears a lot. To you, it may seem primarily a piece of music or a piece of lyric theater. For him, it reveals layer upon layer, politically, socially, and historically.
Of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Cohen writes, “The story is about gods, royals, aristocrats, and men of ‘lower’ strata. It is sung through them, and political and social implications are suggested significantly by whose voices do and do not join.” That would never have occurred to me. Did it occur to Monteverdi? Cohen also says that this opera, at the time of its premiere, “presented a persistently unflattering mirror to aristocrats in an aristocratic republic” (Venice).
Cohen is very good at getting under the skin of a piece and gauging the environment in which it was created. At the same time, he realizes that a really good work of art transcends time and space.
In the course of his book, Cohen tells us about Galileo’s father, a musician who, in the early 1580s, wrote a treatise called Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music. He also tells us about two illustrious French Rs—Rameau and Rousseau—and their contentious relationship.
I had a special interest in Cohen’s treatment of The Magic Flute, too, because I had just reviewed a performance of that Mozart masterpiece (as one does: Mozart does not need an “anniversary year”). The Magic Flute provides a field day to someone like Cohen: Masons, Illuminati, priests, child-spirits! And Cohen indeed goes to town, for some 50 pages. A modern journalistic term applies: “deep dive.”
“The overlap among Viennese Enlighteners and Masons is an essential backdrop to The Magic Flute,” Cohen writes. Who knew? Cohen, certainly. He also speaks of the “middle and capitalist classes.” I’m not sure what he means by “capitalist,” but those who use it usually mean nothing good.
True to his subtitle, Cohen ends with Mozart—but he dips a toe into Beethoven, in the form of Fidelio, the composer’s sole opera. It is a masterpiece, of course. It is also one of the great paeans to political freedom, and to marital love, in all of art.
I wonder whether Professor Cohen would consider a sequel to his book. You could do a volume on Verdi alone, when it comes to the politics of opera. People have also written volume after volume about Wagner’s Ring, and probably always will, quite aside from the rest of that composer’s oeuvre.
* *
Cohen dedicates his book to the memory of Irving Howe, with whom he worked over the years. An “exemplary intellectual,” he calls him. Cohen cites Howe’s book Politics and the Novel and says, “I learned a great deal about smart writing and thinking well from him.” You can learn a great deal from Cohen, too: He is astoundingly, dizzyingly learned—although an intellectual writing on music is not for everybody.
For years, I would run into Martin Bernheimer in the opera house. (The great critic has retired this season.) We had a regular, joking routine. Say we were about to see a performance of Der Rosenkavalier. One of us would say, “This is the one about the cigarette girl in Seville, right?” (That would be Carmen.) The other might say, “Actually, it’s the one about how the Ethiopian princess runs off with the bullfighter.” (That would be a mixture of Carmen and Aida.)
Stories abound in opera—and they can run together in one’s mind—but the music stands above them, somehow. The Marriage of Figaro gives you a thousand layers, politically, socially, and historically. It is also a Mozart piece in D major (a long one).
A book such as Cohen’s may not be for everyone—whose is?—but it is certainly for some. I was thinking of the ideal reader of this book. He ought to be a political scientist, an opera maven, a man alive to the myriad machinations of the world.
The answer came to me as I was reading passages on Machiavelli, that (literal) Renaissance man. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Kristol.
Jay Nordlinger is a senior editor of National Review and the music critic of the New Criterion.
