Tomás Marco is a national celebrity, one of the most restless and interesting personalities in the cultural field of our country. A composer of international prestige with a solid catalog covering the most diverse genres, an accomplished essayist, as well as a veteran of a thousand and one battles. Music has been and continues to be an important presence in our lives.
Marco returns to the work of dissemination, and he does so with an extraordinary work: the history of opera throughout the 20th century, from tradition to beyond postmodernity, as well as what we carry from the 21st century.
Marco’s survey of schools, countries and composers is comprehensive, providing the reader with surprising discoveries and, above all, encouraging the exploration of dozens of works that fall outside the traditional repertoire. Marco passionately tells us about this last century of a fascinating genre, and he does so with his knowledge and wisdom, as well as an extraordinary capacity for narrative.
The starting point is the dissolution of opera in the 19th century. There, he describes all the models that laid the foundations for an increasing evolution in the second half of the century in areas such as Italian, German and French. Writers such as Wagner or Verdi were essential in advancing the genre and introducing innovations that would extend to all the plots that make up opera as a spectacle; this includes the libretto, which gradually gains weight and allows for a different and diverse interpretation. complex structure. . In addition, the orchestral aspects or stage direction – Wagner will be important here – will undergo profound transformations, which will be an irreversibly important turning point in the change between the 19th and 20th centuries.
One of the achievements of Tomás Marco’s proposal is that it does not limit itself to carrying out a linear sequence of operatic evolution, but is able to explain its enormous richness by explaining the simultaneous coexistence of various tendencies; Thus, we see how advances did not prevent some authors from continuing to publish with great success from traditional parameters, and also how some risks fizzled in their presentation and later gained a strong foothold in the circuits. Of course, there are changes that cause rejection in the first place, but it is still a specific and almost anecdotal thing when the quality of the author prevails over prejudice.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a real revolution began to deepen, the starting point for many of which was the premiere of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902; but, as the author explains, the changes were much more complex. and the effects pass through different countries. In Italy, the predominance of Giacomo Puccini would be decisive in these years, as well as the Verista movement as a whole, while in the Germanic region, Richard Strauss would be equal in terms of influence to decisive premieres such as Salomé. Wilde, Oscar’s work of the same name. Writers from other countries, such as Leos Janacek, will also be decisive. Similarly, the case of Ethel Smyth, a militant composer of the suffrage movement and author of six works, stands out and traces many opera writers hitherto absent from such works. It also explains the decisive weight that a city like Paris has in everything we understand as modernity; for what succeeded in the French capital also prevailed in the circles, although it was to pass the baton to New York after the Second War. World.
Important composers who introduced the genre in the early 20th century are Paul Dukas or Maurice Ravel in France – the Group of Six was very important and the patron spirit of Jean Cocteau – and in other countries Karol Szymanowski, Béla Bartók or Enrique Granados or Manuel in Spain de Falla et al. The avant-garde line, or at least one of the most influential avant-garde lines, would come from the hands of Arnold Schönberg, through titles such as Erwartung or the unfinished Moses and Aron. After that, Alban Berg would come up with a work that, like Wozzeck, would become “the archetype of the new opera” and, according to the author, has an influence that extends into the 21st century. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger (these last three are also members of the Group of Six) and Sergei Prokofiev are some of the dozens of important names whose careers are discussed.
Like other art forms, sociopolitical influence is decisive, and Marco analyzes Nazism or Stalinism and their toxic relationship with opera; Think of Dmitri Shostakovich and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The progressive lyrical explosion that has occurred in the United States since the late 19th century is analyzed with composer Amy Beach bringing jazz to opera or George Gershwin; and Brazil and other countries such as Carlos Gomes, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina.
Throughout the 20th century, writers influenced by the serial avant-garde around Giancarlo Menotti, the great Benjamin Britten, the Darmstadt group, Hans Werner Henze, Aribert Reimann, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Nino Rota. They set a wide variety of trends, just like Marco himself, Cristóbal Halffter, Luis de Pablo or Carles Santos in Spain. The Darmstadt Circle had a defining symbol precisely in Bernd Alois Zimmerman and his play Die Soldate; This play was now widely staged in major theatres. Names like Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Oliver Messiaen, György Ligeti or György Kurtág would follow. Movements such as minimalism or spectralism through Michael Nyman or Philip Glass, among others, are not left aside. In a planned manner, writers born in the eighties of the last century were reached, with the claim that “writing and performing opera is not a remnant of the past, but an art that has a future and is still current.”