Vaguely related.
But is it any good? | The Spectator
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Writing to his friend and fellow-author William Dean Howells in 1907 about the Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, Henry James said, ‘They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines — as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart.’
Happily for him, he wasn’t at all interested in music, or specifically in opera, otherwise his heart might have broken a long time before it did. For there isn’t much writing about opera which even pretends to be criticism, if that means a disciplined account of the nature and achievement of individual operas, in the light of a first-hand response to them, and of a general view of what opera, as opposed to other art-forms, is capable of achieving, and what are its limitations. Criticism of any of the arts is a demanding affair, and in the case of opera there are so many ways of avoiding it for something easier.
Obviously the simplest way out is to live from performance to performance, merely comparing one with another. In the old days, it would be a matter of comparing singers and conductors, and leaving it at that; now it is the much more luxuriant matter of what the ‘Concept’ of the production was like, so that any actual criticism is not of the opera concerned, but of the way it is presented. Of course you might say that it isn’t possible to make adverse remarks about a director’s view of a work unless you have an alternative view of what the work is about, but that would be too simple. You don’t need to have a worked-out view of Wagner’s Ring cycle to object to a production which presents it as a study of the mafia, and ignores the aspirations to sublimity of the Ring itself and some of its chief characters.
At present, however, there is a more intimidating way of pretending to practise operatic criticism while actually producing a body of pretentious irrelevance, and it is known as ‘contextualisation’. People who use such words should never be trusted. As against old-fashioned criticism, in so far as it existed, which claimed to concentrate on ‘the works themselves’, this newer kind brings to bear on opera — it is practised widely in literary criticism, too — the conditions, cultural, social, political and personal, in which it was produced. What were the composer’s and librettist’s views on women, on class, on race, etc.? What was the work taken to be concerned with by its original audience? How was it financed? And so on. Not difficult to see that such questions give those who address them a more or less indefinite scope for research and the production of tenure-securing articles or books.
Take a look online at the contents of a typical number of the Cambridge Opera Journal, for instance, and, supposing you can understand any of the titles, you’ll notice that they are about, e.g., the representation of Jews in Haydn’s operas, a subject that is unlikely to yield many insights into why Haydn was so unsuccessful as an opera composer. Read any such articles and see whether you can tell whether the writer thinks the opera is any good or not, and why. For in the end the only thing that matters, in our relationship to any of the arts, is what they do to us, what state they put us in and maybe leave us in, and what consequences that might have for other parts of our lives.
Opera is not a subject for study, in the first place, but a matter of experience. If it were true that Puccini’s operas were sentimental, for instance, then that would be a good reason for objecting to them, since sentimentality is an insidious and corrosive condition, a ‘corruption of consciousness’ as R.G. Collingwood called it, and therefore works that skilfully invite you to indulge in it are to be avoided. It used to be a standard issue about Puccini, but it’s a long time since I have seen anyone even raise the question. My own feeling is that, mainly, Puccini is free of sentimentality, though he does a good job of pretending he is not. That seems to me worth discussing, as opposed to his attitude to colonialism, his extra-marital affairs, and his rivalry with his Italian contemporaries.
It’s not as if there were a critical consensus on the matter, which we might either join or question. I don’t think there is a critical consensus on almost any matter, and that for the obvious reason that opera-goers would have to do some serious criticising first.
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No one really objects to Wagner on principle any more, though I dare say that if he were around today and hanging out with members of UKIP people would object and avoid his shows and things like that. I'm not sure why 70 years difference should make things alright, but apparently it does.
I don't really think that I agree with his point about sentimentalism either - not about whether Puccini's guilty of it (personally I could go either way), but whether it's an acceptable criticism to level at any work of art. He seems to object to it on the grounds of the moral effect it'll have on audiences, which is surely just more contextualising, isn't it? If he was using that as a reason to object to it in every day life it'd be fine, but the only reason to object to sentimentalism in art is if it produces bad art (which it usually does).
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