Opera as Politics

Professor Sarah Hibberd explores the history of opera as a vehicle for reflecting, responding to and even effecting political change.

Woman clutches a Bible in front of a man on a gurney Woman clutches a Bible in front of a man on a gurney

Joyce DiDonato in Dead Man Walking © Felix Sanchez

Joyce DiDonato in Dead Man Walking © Felix Sanchez

Ever since its emergence from courtly theatrical entertainments in Renaissance Florence, opera has been inseparable from its political environment. An extravagant art, embracing poetry, music, painting and choreography, it has required wealthy patrons – who quickly recognised its ability to influence audiences through the heightened emotional impact of its storytelling.

Opera’s messages have rarely been straightforwardly communicated and received: music and spectacle have together proved ambiguous, unstable and resistant to control. Nevertheless, opera has frequently been used as a tool of propaganda, or conversely as a rallying cry, and it has offered a barometer of society’s beliefs and anxieties, even acquiring new meanings when performed in new circumstances.

'Opera has frequently been used as a tool of propaganda, or conversely as a rallying cry...'

In short, opera is a powerful emotive tool, reflecting, responding to and even effecting political change. At a time of significant national and global uncertainty, old and new operas continue to demonstrate the genre’s power in the social and political landscapes that form the context for The Art of Change programme at the Barbican throughout 2018.

17th Century Propaganda

Illustration of man with scythe surrounded by cherubs Illustration of man with scythe surrounded by cherubs

Decoration for the prologue of Atys in a 1708 staging © Roger-Viollet / ArenaPAL

Decoration for the prologue of Atys in a 1708 staging © Roger-Viollet / ArenaPAL

When Monteverdi moved from the courts of northern Italy to the Venetian Republic in 1613, opera became a commercial product. The city’s nobility recognised opera’s value as an expression of their splendour and power but could not afford to underwrite the expenses, and so it was created for a paying public. Shaken by military, economic and political crises, Venice had become more self-conscious about its republican status, and historical tales defending the republican ideal and attacking authoritarian rule took on more significance.

L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) was the first known opera to treat a factual historical subject. Instead of honouring the qualities of virtue and honour, rationality and morality, it glorifies human passions through the affair of the depraved Roman emperor Nero and the courtesan Poppea. Though the intentions behind the comparison of ancient Imperial Rome and modern Republican Venice remain unclear, the shocking sensuousness of such duets as ‘Pur ti miro’ – in which the vocal lines of the emperor (a castrato role) and Poppea entwine in the same register – demonstrates how music can persuade an audience to sympathise with its characters, however repellent they may be.

Meanwhile, Lully’s tragédies lyriques for the court of Louis XIV did not need to satisfy the taste of mass audiences, and instead maintained the classical decorum required to glorify a royal dynasty – at a time when the French had crushed the Habsburgs, and emerged as the most powerful state in Europe. Such works would usually begin with a deferential prologue: when Atys premiered in 1676, France was at war with the Netherlands, and a chorus was sung in praise of a ‘hero’ (Louis XIV) and his ‘just laws and great exploits’. Lully’s operas also featured elaborate ballet divertissements on mythological subjects, in which the king would often dance. These sometimes concluded the opera, providing an intensity of spectacle and sound that projected the magnificence of the king and his nation.

19th Century Social Reform

Woman in black dress holds hand of a man sitting on the floor Woman in black dress holds hand of a man sitting on the floor

Susanna has to shake off the unwanted attentions of Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro © Robbie Jack / Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. / ArenaPAL

Susanna has to shake off the unwanted attentions of Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro © Robbie Jack / Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. / ArenaPAL

As well as being a tool for propaganda, opera often offers a window onto society at a particular moment. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786) was a sort of curtain raiser for the French Revolution. The cavatina ‘Se vuol ballare’, sung by Figaro when he learns of his master’s plans to sleep with his wife Susanna, is set as a mocking (aristocratic) minuet: ‘if you want to dance’, sings Figaro, ‘I’ll play for you’, anticipating the challenge to the nobility that was to follow on the streets of Paris.

Susanna in turn manipulates Figaro – to save herself from the unwanted attentions of the Count, but also to repair the Countess’s marriage. Their sisterly collaboration is expressed touchingly in their letter duet, ‘Sull’aria’, and looks ahead to women’s (theoretical) inclusion in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. By the end of the opera, however, although the Count has been humiliated, servants and women resume their inferior social roles and the domestic order is restablished. But the status quo has been challenged.

In most nineteenth-century tragic operas, women have an altogether tougher time than their comic counterparts, either sacrificing themselves for their lovers and families, such as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata (1853), Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème (1896), or punished for daring to resist society’s conventions like Lucia, Carmen, Tosca – the eponymous heroines of operas by Donizetti (1835), Bizet (1875), Puccini (1900). 

Either way, they end up dead.

Such representations underscore on the one hand the limited freedom enjoyed by women at this period, and on the other hand, the anxiety felt by societies as women began to trouble the social order, more visible and active in the public sphere.

Carmen offers a shocking cautionary tale. A gypsy woman enjoys her freedom and sexual power over men, as captured in the sinuous habanera, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’. But when she abandons the upright soldier Don Jose for the glamorous matador Escamillo, she dies at the hands of the former.

Such a brutal end is evermore graphically represented in the next century: the teenage Salome (Strauss, 1905) is battered under the shields of Herod’s soldiers, sonically as well as visually, for daring to express her sexual power and manipulate the king into satisfying her wish for the head of John the Baptist.

19th Century Nationalism

Shirtless man surrounded by men with weapons Shirtless man surrounded by men with weapons

William Tell inspires the men of the three cantons of Switzerland to rise up against their Austrian oppressors © Clive Barda / Royal Opera House / ArenaPAL

William Tell inspires the men of the three cantons of Switzerland to rise up against their Austrian oppressors © Clive Barda / Royal Opera House / ArenaPAL

Across Europe, the nineteenth century was also an era of revolution and emerging nation states. Theatres and opera houses were rare public spaces where crowds could gather in large (and vocal) numbers. Although the potential challenges to authority were recognised with censorship of the dramas on offer, operas nevertheless proved a potent expression of national identity in such circumstances.

At the beginning of the century, Italy was a patchwork of independent states and territories under the control of foreign powers. But during the Risorgimento, which culminated in the united kingdom of Italy, with Rome as its capital in 1871, ideas expressed in operas reflected and stimulated political fervour. Verdi’s early operas featured pervasive march rhythms and choruses of oppressed peoples, most famously Nabucco (1842).

Its incantatory chorus of Hebrew slaves longing for their homeland, ‘Va, pensiero’, is sung initially in unison, and then breaks into four-part harmony at its climax, a metaphor for the democratic ideal.

'If you shouted Viva Verdi! you were showing your support for the new king'

Verdi became a figurehead for Italian independence, and following the first stage of unification in 1861 under the Savoy king, his name provided an acronym to disguise political enthusiasms. If you shouted Viva Verdi! you were showing your support for the new king, Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia. Nevertheless, Verdi’s disillusion with unification, and the growing power of Church and State, is embodied in Don Carlos (1867; revised by Verdi and performed in Italian as Don Carlo, 1884) in the confrontation between the Spanish king Philip and the Grand Inquisitor, in ‘Son io dinanzi al Re?’, a duet for two basses (with accompanying dark instrumental timbres).

Meanwhile, in Paris, French grands opéras about distant historical events provided potent metaphors for the recent – and ongoing – experience of revolution. Their librettos tended to present ‘safe’ stories (unsuccessful revolutions, condemnations of violence), approved by the censor, but their musical and visual realisations enabled audiences to inhabit and work through their emotional experiences, whatever their political opinions. Thus, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829) evoked the dark horrors of war against foreigners and the contrasting sublime moral triumph of freedom. 

Listen to William Tell stirring the cantons of Switzerland to rise against their Austrian oppressors:

And a sixteenth-century massacre on the streets of Paris in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836), in which the people seem to be at the mercy of historical forces beyond their control, seemingly absolved the French of responsibility for the violence of their revolutions.

Most vividly, perhaps, Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828), which featured a rallying duet to launch an uprising in seventeenth-century Italy, both evoked the revolutionary songs of the 1790s and inspired those on the barricades in Paris during the July Revolution of 1830. ‘Amour sacré de la patrie’ (the line was taken from the Marseillaise) also proved a catalyst for the Belgian uprising against the ruling Dutch in the same year: during a performance in Brussels, people took their cue from the duet and streamed into the streets to fight.

Listen to the duet that started a riot from La Muette de Portici:

The erupting Vesuvius at the conclusion of the opera – accompanied by a chorus of thanksgiving when the revolution had been defeated – discharged the overwhelming emotional effect into spectacular mise en scène. 

'During a performance in Brussels, people took their cue from the duet and streamed into the streets to fight...'

Final scene of La Muette de Portici Final scene of La Muette de Portici

Final scene of La Muette de Portici

Final scene of La Muette de Portici

In Germany, Wagner built on Weber’s example to create a distinctively German form of opera.

Weber had borrowed folk tunes and tales for Der Freischütz (1821), and peopled the dark German forest with a complete social community and supernatural forces, capturing the need for escapism for German speakers, when their lands had so recently been overrun by the French. A sinister diminished seventh chord provided a sort of recurring motif for the devil Samiel and a tonal plan for the climactic Wolf’s Glen scene where a fatal bullet is cast.

Wagner appropriated Ancient Greek, Germanic medieval and Norse legends to build a new mythical universe for his Ring cycle (1876), which critiqued the capitalist greed of the nineteenth century. The orchestra similarly provided a crucial element of the narrative: associative keys and instruments and leitmotivs provided a skein through which the characters operated. In his 1976 Bayreuth Centenary staging of the Ring, Patrice Chéreau opened Das Rheingold on a hydroelectric dam with the Rhinemaidens as prostitutes out to deceive Alberich. The production not only brought the opera’s nineteenth-century social and political contexts to the surface, but was also understood as an allegory of man’s exploitation of natural resources.

Wagner has proved a particularly divisive composer, however, in part because we know so much about his political as well as artistic views through his voluminous writings.

Although in his early essays he envisions a universal opera, in which Germans, Italians and Frenchmen join forces, by 1850 he was promulgating a more aggressive German nationalism, entwined with antisemitism (his notorious essay Das Judenthum in der Musik evokes the empty commercialism of Meyerbeer’s spectacular grands opéras).

His opera house at Bayreuth went on to become a centre of Nazi ideology in the twentieth century, and this association has tainted his reception ever since. There are ongoing arguments among commentators as to whether his antisemitism is evident in his operatic works – which have never been staged in Israel.

20th Century Politics

Soldiers marching in uniform Soldiers marching in uniform

Terry Gilliam’s contemporary reimagining of The Damnation of Faust © Robert Piwko / ArenaPAL

Terry Gilliam’s contemporary reimagining of The Damnation of Faust © Robert Piwko / ArenaPAL

It has always been difficult to predict how audiences will react to an opera, and the original intensions of its creators are often adapted, obscured or reinterpreted by later directors. Occasionally, political events will put the plot in a different light.

When Verdi and Boito were working on Otello in the context of Italian colonisation in Africa – a project to which Verdi was unsympathetic – they were careful to preserve Shakespeare’s reversed racial stereotyping. The duplicitous white soldier Iago manipulates the noble black general Otello into murdering Desdemona. A week before the premiere in 1887, however, hundreds of Italian soldiers were killed by Ethiopians. The opera was received in this light as confirming Otello’s reversion to racial type as a violent African – and Iago’s role was sidelined. Zeffirelli’s 1986 production of the opera presents Otello even more explicitly as a savage. It seems to be a response – perhaps unconscious – to the ongoing relationship between Italy and its former colony, and the anxiety induced by the influx of Somali (and other) refugees to Italy in the 1970s and 80s.

Although opera no longer holds the central cultural-political role it once did, a number of composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to engage with political incidents. John Adams has tackled some defining events, including the testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in 1945, and President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) treats the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean by Palestinian terrorists, and the drowning of a Jewish American passenger.

It has been performed regularly in the US and Europe, and continues to elicit strong reactions, becoming ever more relevant as our interests in the Middle East and the threat of terrorism increase. Adams has been accused of giving voice to terrorists (with a beautiful and lengthy solo and choral numbers for the Palestinians, detailing their historical perspective on the modern day conflict in the Middle East), and of antisemitism (including a number that mocked a Jewish American family, and which was swiftly cut after the first performance). An international simulcast to be broadcast from the Met in 2014 was cancelled, so as not to offend the Jewish community in the febrile climate of increasing antisemitism.

Listen to John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer:

'This powerful work demonstrates vividly how opera continues to challenge audiences...'

Woman holds mans shoulder surrounded by police Woman holds mans shoulder surrounded by police

Joyce DiDonato in Dead Man Walking © Felix Sanchez

Joyce DiDonato in Dead Man Walking © Felix Sanchez

Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000) confronts the moral and ethical issues around capital punishment. It dramatizes the experiences of Sister Helen Prejean, spiritual advisor to a death row inmate at the Angola state prison in Louisiana, and its themes remain pertinent to situations around the globe.

Indeed this emotionally powerful work demonstrates vividly how opera continues to challenge audiences and offer new perspectives on our evolving political culture, stimulating and responding to change.

Dead Man Walking
Fri 16 Feb

Joyce DiDonato stars as Sister Helen Prejean in the UK premiere of Jake Heggie’s powerful operatic exploration of the US justice system and capital punishment.

Book tickets

About Professor Sarah Hibberd

Professor Sarah Hibberd is the Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on nineteenth-century opera, and has a particular interest in Revolutionary Paris.

Part of The Art of Change: our 2018 season The Art of Change explores how the arts respond to, reflect and potentially effect change in the social and political landscape.

Learn more about The Art of Changebarbican.org.uk/theartofchange