Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven

Martin Nedbal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317094081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about German national theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics, state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and national identity in theater further transformed in response to the crisis of Emperor Joseph II's reform movement, the revolutionary ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals in theatrical performances through the institution of theater censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic works (such as Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio ) that eventually became the cornerstones for later developments of German culture.

1 Cultivating the court and the nation in Gluck’s La Rencontre imprévue

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (“The Unexpected Encounter, or The Pilgrims to Mecca”) was not only one of the most popular works in the repertoire of the National Singspiel troupe, which operated in the Vienna Burgtheater between 1778 and 1783, it was also one of the most emphatically didactic ones.¹ The plot of Gluck’s opera revolves around the ideas of absolute fidelity and clemency: Prince Ali is in search of his beloved Princess Rezia, who was captured by pirates and sold into the harem of the sultan of Cairo. At the beginning of the opera, Rezia finds out that Ali has arrived in Cairo and tests his fidelity by sending three different female slaves (Dardane, Amine, and Balkis) to tempt him. When Ali withstands the seduction attempts, Rezia decides to flee with Ali. The lovers’ plans are betrayed by a mendicant dervish (called Calender), and the furious sultan wants to torture and execute them. Moved by the lovers’ devotion to one another, the sultan eventually changes his mind, grants mercy to them, and decides to punish the dervish for his treachery. The lovers then plead for the dervish, and the sultan grants clemency to him as well amidst general rejoicing.

Gluck’s opera was originally produced in the Burgtheater in 1764 as an opéra-comique, titled La Rencontre imprévue (“The Unexpected Encounter”), but the text of the 1780 German version was in fact taken from Johann Heinrich Faber’s German translation of the 1764 libretto.² Faber’s translation was used during the first German production of Gluck’s opera in Frankfurt in 1771, and its text remained close to the French original (a chronological overview of the different version of the opera discussed in this chapter can be found in Table 1.1).³ The 1780 Vienna libretto, by contrast, brought a few significant changes to the 1771 text (and therefore also to Gluck’s original libretto). Most importantly, the 1780 Vienna adapter revised several suggestive passages in Faber’s text in an attempt to improve the opera’s overall standard of decorum.⁴ One of the revisions occurred in Act I, scene 5, where Osmin describes how a group of pirates abducted Rezia and sold her to slavery. In both the 1764 and 1771 librettos, Osmin mentions that after the abduction Rezia had to “defend herself” against the pirates (“die Prinzessin …, welche sich auf dem hinteren Theile des Schiffe s wehrete”).⁵ The 1780 libretto, by contrast, states that Rezia merely “stood” at the back of the ship (“die Prinzessin …, welche sich auf dem hinteten Theile des Shiffes befand”).⁶ It is likely that the 1780 Viennese editors wanted to avoid the earlier translation’s hint that Rezia was sexually attacked on the pirate ship.

Table 1.1 Four versions of Les Pèlerins de la Mecque

Year and place of premiere performance	Librettist/adapter Composer	First published libretto associated with that performance
1726, Paris	Alain-René Lesage and D’Orneval	Les Pèlerins de la Mecque, in Le Théâtre de la foire, ou L’opéra comique, vol. 7 (Amsterdam and Paris, 1731)
1764, Vienna	Louis Hurtaut Dancourt Christoph Willibald Gluck	La Rencontre imprévue (Vienna: Ghelen, 1763)
1771, Frankfurt	Johann Heinrich Faber Gluck	Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Frankfurt: Andreäische Schriften, 1772)
1780, Vienna	Based on Faber Gluck	Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Vienna: Logenmeister, 1780)

Similar to the 1780 version of Gluck’s work, most operas presented at the National Singspiel in the late 1770s and early 1780s could be performed only after a strict scrutiny for potential breaches of decorum that often resulted in revisions of even slightly suggestive remarks. This chapter traces the roots of this preoccupation with good morals at the National Singspiel. An examination of the 1764 version of Gluck’s exotic opera shows that the concern with the suppression of morally suspect content and the strengthening of educational elements was an important aspect of Viennese court theater from at least the mid-eighteenth century onward. At the same time, the interest of Viennese authors and state officials in didactic opera grew particularly strong during the National Theater era and reflected aesthetic and political debates about the function of German musical theater as a means of courtly and national representation.

Introducing Viennese morals into Les Pèlerins de la Mecque

The 1780 moralistic revision of the text for Gluck’s opera was in fact not as extensive as the revision involved in preparing the libretto for the 1764 production. The 1764 opera was based on an earlier work by Alain-René Lesage and Jacques-Philippe D’Orneval first performed in 1726 at the Parisian fair of St. Laurent under the title Les Pèlerins de la Mecque (“The Pilgrims to Mecca”) and published in 1731 in volume 6 of the collection Théâtre de la foire. In 1763, Count Giacomo Durazzo, the director of the Vienna court theater between 1754 and 1764, commissioned the actor Louis Hurtaut Dancourt to adapt the 1726 text for Gluck. The 1726 work therefore originated in the traditions of Parisian fairground popular culture, but in 1763 Dancourt needed to make it presentable at a prestigious court institution frequented and supported by the royal family. As part of his revision, Dancourt both intensified the didactic message of the opera and greatly reduced suggestive elements of the original libretto.⁷

The sharpened didacticism becomes especially apparent at the end of the 1764 opera, where the Sultan grants mercy to the lovers and the treacherous dervish. The 1726 Paris Sultan says that it was Rezia and Ali’s love for one another and their noble birth that calmed his anger (“Votre amour et votre naissance, / viennent de calmer mon courroux”).⁸ The 1764 Vienna Sultan claims, by contrast, that he was swayed towards mercy not by the tender feelings of Rezia and Ali but by their readiness to remain faithful even when faced with torture and separation: “Love can have no influence over my heart at the expense of justice. Your constancy and the heroism of your feelings have disarmed my anger.”⁹ Whereas the Paris Sultan responds to the lovers’ sentiments and their social status, the Viennese adaptation presents him as more concerned with good behavior and high moral values, especially constancy. The 1764 work also subdues elements of political satire in the Parisian opera’s conclusion. In 1726, the Sultan reflects on his merciful decision in a maxim drawn from the tragedy Pyrrhus by Prosper Jolyot Crébillon (premiered in the same year as Les Pèlerins) and adapted for the circumstances of the opera’s plot:¹⁰

Puisqu’un remords suffit pour appaisser les Dieux,	Since remorse is sufficient to appease the gods,
Un Sultan auroit tort d’en exiger plus qu’eux.	A sultan would be wrong to require more than them.

This potentially didactic moment is subverted when Ali’s servant Arlequin “looks at the Sultan with insolence and puts his hand on the Sultan’s forehead” (“Arlequin … s’approche du Sultan, le regarde sous le nez, et lui met la main sur le front”) – Arlequin is checking whether the Sultan is delirious. Although he is dragged away by the guards, Arlequin here clearly ridicules the Sultan’s maxim, and perhaps also the whole genre of serious tragedy from which the maxim is drawn. The Viennese adaptation replaces Arlequin’s irreverent lazzo with a moralistic observation by Ali: “Wherever a just and generous sovereign reigns, there, too, happiness can be found” (“Partout où règne un souverain généreux et équitable, on trouve la félicité”).¹¹ Also reduced in the 1764 opera were Arlequin’s and Amine’s protests against the pardoning of the Calender.¹² The Viennese version imbues the moment of clemency with seriousness and universality, strengthens the prominence and validity of the Sultan’s decisions, and thus transforms a satirical plot of fairground entertainment into a celebration of absolutism and morality typical for courtly spectacles of ancien régime, such as Metastasian opera seria.¹³

Throughout his revision, Dancourt also diluted sexually suggestive content and strengthened the theme of Ali’s faithfulness to Rezia. Most prominently, the libretto published for the 1764 production suppressed several scenes in the third act (scenes 2, 3, and 7) where Arlequin dresses as a female pilgrim and flirts both with Amine and the Calender. Also cut was a scene in which the Calender flirts with Amine. The 1726 Arlequin, moreover, is more openly appreciative about the physical charms of the three women who try to seduce Ali. Similarly, the 1726 Ali shows interest in one of the female slaves sent by Rezia to test his fidelity. When Rezia’s confidante Amine sings a seductive aria in Act 2, scene 3 of the 1726 opera (no. 13, “Je cherche à vous faire”), Ali is described as watching her tenderly and sighing, which prompts Arlequin to encourage Amine to continue her song: “He sighs! Courage, Madame, he softens.”¹⁴ In the 1764 Vienna version, Ali squarely rejects all love propositions from Rezia’s female companions and does not show any sign of giving in to the seduction, although he does not know whether he will ever be reunited with Rezia again.¹⁵

Rezia’s story, too, was transformed in Vienna to avoid explicit references to the Sultan’s sexual interest in her. The 1764 Rezia simply states the following about her encounters with the Sultan:

Rassurez vous, Ali; l’amour qu’il a pour moi, l’a si fort subjugué qu’il est plûtôt mon Esclave que mon Maître: il ne refuse rien à mes caprices, & j’espère trouver l’instant de profiter de sa complaisance, pour me soustraitre à sa pursuitte. N’en parlons plus: mon coeur ne veut s’occuper maintenant que du plaisir de vous avoir retrouvé toujour fidèle.

Be assured Ali; the feelings that [the sultan] has for me have subjugated him so strongly that he is more a slave than a master to me: he can refuse nothing to my whims, & I hope to find the right moment to take advantage of his compliance so that he does not follow me. Let’s not speak of it: all my heart wishes now is to indulge in the pleasure of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Introduction: Opera and didacticism in early-modern German culture
• 1 Cultivating the court and the nation in Gluck’s La Rencontre imprévue
• 2 Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the didactic aesthetics of the National Singspiel
• 3 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte
• 4 Die Zauberflöte and subversive morality in suburban operas
• 5 The politics of morality at the court theater in the 1790s
• 6 How German is Fidelio? Didacticism in Beethovenian operas
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index