One Hundred Nights at the Opera

 

The Operagoer's Guide - One Hundred Stories and Commentaries, by M. Owen Lee

 

 

A review by Michael Richter
 
This review must begin with disclosure of a conflict of interest. I have been an unabashed admirer of Father Lee's thoughtful and thought-provoking insights into the world of opera since I first heard him on a Met intermission. My respect has grown through his talks and his quiz appearances and has blossomed with each of his books. We have corresponded and the copy of his forthcoming book reviewed here was a gift from him, not a plea from his publisher.
 
The Operagoer's Guide is a compact, modern handbook to prepare the reader for an opera experience. As the preface makes clear, it was prompted by the changing fashion in opera performance. A Guide to the Opera, published in 1899, covers just twenty-nine titles. Necessarily, it omits 20th-century works, but the change of fashion means that it offers three operas of Meyerbeer and none of Handel; three of Weber and none from Russia. Thus, modern selection of titles might alone explain the value of this volume. There is no evidence that Father Lee's choices were based on analysis of contemporary performance or sales of recordings. They do show excellent judgement. Of course, each of us would insist on a different list, but none of the inclusions is without great merit and none of the omissions is fatal to the purpose.
 
A second contribution - again probably without statistical support - is the performance practice documented for each work. Don Carlo is treated as a three-act Italian opera in the synopsis; the commentary briefly and effectively supports that choice. Indeed, the commentaries are in many ways the most valuable contribution to the volume. On average, an opera's synopsis is given a page and a half; the commentary takes half a page. In that small space, essentials of performance practice and key elements of the work's significance are documented simply and effectively. Each commentary is a gem of concision and clarity.
 
Completing the guidance are recommendations for recordings (one only for each work); a brief, clear glossary of the terms used in the book; a reference from the English to the listed language of some titles; and an index by composer of the titles included - with dates for all. It is difficult to find a way to improve on this effort within its confines, and yet those limits seem artificial and counterproductive. I miss a cast listing and an index into the characters named in the synopses. I long for a bibliography or at least one reference per opera, even one per composer, to a source for additional information. Without being certain of the intended readership, I still want Father Lee's guidance on supplemental volumes - Grove Dictionary of Opera, Viking Opera Guide, St. James Encyclopedia, Kobbe, and on. There are minor errors, none more humorous than failing to translate 'Freud' (in '. . . welche Nacht voll Freud!') and having Fledermaus end on a night full of the psychoanalyst! More to the point, there is an uncertainty of focus, sometimes assuming a more knowledgeable reader, often presuming that the reader is a novice. ('Dialogues of the Carmelites' refers to 'another increasingly popular twentieth-century opera', presumably based on the French Revolution. The reader who needs a synopsis of Aida will not immediately infer 'Andrea Chenier' from that description.)
 
Of course, I treasure the Guide and most operagoers will as well. There is a parenthetical remark in the synopsis of Don Giovanni Act I finale which triggers thoughts worth the price of the book:
 
'Admitted to the castle, they join in the praises of liberty. (The word, very much in the air in Mozart's day, means something different to each of the seven characters.)'
 
Father Lee, you have just driven me back to the recordings and the score and the history books!
 
Thank you for that and for far more.
 
 
© Michael Richter, 20 August 2001
mrichter@cpl.net
 
M. Owen Lee, The Operagoer's Guide - One Hundred Stories and Commentaries is published by Amadeus Press, 2001, paperback 233 pages, 1 illustration, ISBN 1-57467-065-4. The price is US$ 12.95
 
 
Michael Richter was born in Philadelphia in 1939. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1960, he worked in various technology fields, largely aerospace systems engineering, until being disabled by heart disease in 1989. His love of music emerged early, attending symphony concerts in Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. An obsession with music for the voice began with the discovery of Mozart's operas in the early 1960s and has never abated. For the past decade, he has combined professional and musical interests in efforts to preserve our common musical heritage, transferring recordings and publishing volumes of an Audio Encyclopedia, as described at his WWW site www.mrichter.com . He has published numerous articles in engineering journals together with a book on computer programming, but his writings, in both the Opera Quarterly and The Classical Singer, now focus on music and recording technology.