There’s a simple, rough-and-ready litmus test for distinguishing between good and bad opera composers. The good ones, after considering the possibility of adapting Shakespeare into operatic form, either reject the idea as overambitious folly or are named Verdi.
Charles Gounod, whose“Romeo and Juliet”draws to a close on Tuesday, Oct. 1, at the San Francisco Opera, was not, in the scheme of things, a good composer.
There’s other evidence for that proposition as well, most notably his lamentable and ever-popular opera “Faust.” But “Romeo,” which before this season had not been performed at the War Memorial Opera House in more than 30 years, offers a telling case study in why Shakespeare is — or should be — such a dangerous third rail for composers.
At a superficial glance, Gounod’s “Romeo” seems to be nothing more nor less than the familiar tale of star-crossed lovers in Verona, told in the lush and somewhat faceless musical strains of 19th century France. The two principals fall in love, marry in secret and pursue one another to an early death.
Yet if that were all there was to Shakespeare’s play, it would hardly have held the stage so tenaciously all these centuries. Actors, directors and audiences keep going back to the source for everything that Gounod and his librettists left out.
Chief among these, of course, is the luxuriant richness of Shakespeare’s language, but that is an inevitable sacrifice in any kind of adaptation. More important is the intricate moral and psychological infrastructure within which the tragedy of the lovers plays out — the dynastic rivalry of the two families, with its numbing and seemingly endless cycle of crime and reprisal, or the robust inventive presence of such characters as Mercutio and Tybalt.
Little of that texture informs Gounod’s score. His lovers might as well be named Susie and Bob for all the psychological specificity he gives them.
And “Romeo” is by no means the only work in the repertoire to have its weaknesses exposed by the contrast with its Shakespearean source. On the contrary, those shortcomings are more the rule than the exception.
一次又一次,作曲家在年12月ided that the famous stories and overarching themes of the Bard — the creeping ambition of Macbeth and Richard III, the shortsightedness of Lear, Othello’s tragic susceptibility, even the historic pageantry of Antony and Cleopatra — would make suitable fodder for their compositional gifts. And nearly all of them have come to grief.
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera lists page upon page of Shakespeare operas, almost none of which have found success. There are countless “Twelfth Nights” and “Hamlets,” “Tempests” and even the occasional “Pericles” or “Henry V.” As a very young and very green opera composer, Wagner turned to “Measure for Measure” for a rollicking stage comedy called “Das Liebesverbot,” or “The Ban on Love.”
There are just two ways to make such a project work. One is to do what Shakespeare himself did in dealing with his sources, which is to scavenge and steal only as much of the plot as you need and then fill out the rest from yourimagination.
In 1868, for example, just a year after “Romeo” premiered, the Paris Opera unveiled Ambroise Thomas’ opera “Hamlet,” adapted by the same pair of librettists who had served Gounod so poorly. This piece has its share of flaws as well (the setting of Hamlet’s soliloquy is embarrassingly thin) but as a 2017production at West Edge Operamade clear, it doesn’t so much adapt “Hamlet” as use it as an excuse to create a new work, which really should be called “Ophelia.”
Rossini’s “Otello” (not to be confused with Verdi’s) and Bellini’s “Romeo”-ish opera“The Montagues and the Capulets”both undertake something similar. In each of those cases, the creators used Shakespeare as a more or less transparent excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.
The alternative is to be a composer of such electrifying talent that you can create a musical analog for Shakespeare’s verbal sorcery, fleshing out the old plots with new textures. The obvious examples of this are Verdi’s two great final operas, “Otello” and “Falstaff,” as well as Britten’s“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”and, in the current century, Thomas Adès’“The Tempest.”
But one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare operas is one that never got written. That would be Verdi’s opera of “King Lear,” a project he kept coming back to over many years, only to shy away from it at every turn. Toward the end of his life, he counted that as one of the great regrets, admitting that the idea of setting Lear’s scene on the heath had “terrified” him.
It’s a salutary thing, that kind of fear. It keeps a composer from writing something as flimsy as Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
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