In the preface to this book, Michael Rose quickly lays out how his is different from piles of other books about opera – not a history, not a musical analysis, but instead descriptions of the conception and creation of individual operas from primary source accounts. For the most part, he succeeds quite nicely, fleshing out familiar stories (the celebrated da Ponte-Mozart partnership, the initial anger over Rossini’s Barbiere which dared to come after the popular Paisiello adaptation, Wagner’s adulterous love driving his Tristan und Isolde) as well as some lesser known ones. As would be expected, some sections are better than others and Rose does make his opinions known in subtle and obvious ways. Overall though it is a very interesting read. However, the selections hew very closely to the standard repertoire. Rose has some explanations – claiming that the period from post-Monteverdi to Gluck had plenty of operas but not much written material and that 20th century operas were hampered by translation issues and copyright problems. I can buy that it would have been difficult to do later operas but the piece on Monteverdi’s Poppea didn’t have a lot of direct material and Rose did a nice job on that one so I wondered if it might be timidity or disinterest in the older period instead.

All the sections are interesting and they all have a different tone – though Beethoven’s gloomy obsessing over Fidelio, his only opera, did make that one a bit of a dull read. The first person POVs also get across the personalities of the composers and librettists – Gluck comes off as passionate but a little crazy, Verdi is a very grumpy and touchy old man who eventually gets into Otello, and the section on Ariadne auf Naxos is pretty much an involving dialogue between the erudite, high-intentioned Hugo von Hofmannthal and the more laissez-faire Richard Strauss. It’s fun to read all the composer’s reactions to each others’ works – in the latter half of the 19th c., everyone has an opinion of Wagner (Tchaikovsky on Wagner: {Wagner} is gifted with genius, but it has wrecked itself upon its own tendencies…For I cannot call that music which consists of kaleidoscopic, shifting musical phrases which follow one another without a break and never come to a close, never give you the least chance to grasp a musical form”).

The documents and the close progression of a single opera also bring to life some well-known stories. Debussy and Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote the Symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande that Debussy set to music pretty much straight, had a famous falling-out when Debussy refused to cast Maeterlinck’s mistress Georgette Leblanc as Melisande and opted for Mary Garden instead. Rose has various accounts of the almost literal blows and the long bitter feud, as Maeterlinck publicly repudiated Debussy’s version and refused to see it (later he would admit when he heard Garden that no one could have done it as well as she did). I knew that there was a large time gap between the early masterpiece (L’Orfeo) of Monteverdi, the first operatic genius, and his later works but Rose really emphasized the change in fashion, history and Monteverdi’s status when he composed L’incoronazione di Poppea. Puccini was rather notorious for being hard to please with a subject and libretto; Rose includes all the frustration of his librettists and his many aborted starts and delays on a variety of projects before he settled on his last opera Turandot.

Taken together, the sections also emphasize how messy the business of operamaking was - Gluck’s Alceste had two versions – the French and Italian; Beethoven worked and reworked Fidelio over the years (resulting in multiple overtures and the tonally incongruent first act); Berlioz’s Les Troyens had a tortured performance history before sinking forgotten for years; Ariadne started out with a completely different conception in mind; Turandot was unfinished at the time of Puccini’s death. A very involving book and a departure from the usual operatic histories. There are summaries of the operas at the back of the book for readers unfamiliar with the stories but it would probably help to be interested in the subject – for illumination on well-known stories, as mentioned above, and also so that when the author makes an aside such as one about how Zerbinetta’s aria in Ariadne was actually cut and simplified from the original version, the reader lets out the appropriate WTF??

Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea; Gluck, Alceste; Mozart, Idomeneo; Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro; Beethoven, Fidelio; Rossini, Il Barbiere di Siviglia; Berlioz, Les Troyens; Wagner, Tristan und Isolde; Bizet, Carmen; Tchiakovsky, Eugene Onegin; Verdi, Otello; Debussy, Pelleas et Melisande; Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos; Puccini, Turandot; Berg, Wozzeck ( )