The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera

by Matthew Aucoin

Overview

A user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera

From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera’s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms—music, drama, poetry, dance—into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music—opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals.

The Impossible Art is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. Aucoin writes of the rare works—ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin—that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera’s greatest figures and those of literature. Aucoin also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera’s iconic stage. The Impossible Art opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374175382
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/07/2021
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, and writer. His operas have been commissioned and presented by the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and many other companies, and his instrumental music has been performed by Yo-Yo Ma, the Brentano Quartet, and other artists. He is a cofounder of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) and was the Los Angeles Opera’s artist in residence from 2016 to 2020. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 A Field Guide to the Impossible 3

2 Primal Loss: Orpheus and Eurydice in Opera 23

A Guide to Four Hundred Years of Orphic Operas 27

The Impossible Moment: Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo 37

Music as Consolation: Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfers 49

Supersaturation: Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus 56

3 The Firewood and the Fire: Words, Music, and Stravinsky's the Rake's Progress 73

4 Verdi's Shakespeare Operas: Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff 111

Verdi's Warmth 117

Raw Material: Macbeth 121

The Overreacher: The Singular Career of Arrigo Boito 133

Expansion and Contraction: Otello 142

A Last Step, A First Step: Falstaff 157

5 Walt Whitman's Impossible Optimism 165

6 Inner Rooms: Two Recent Impossibilities 201

Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel 205

Chaya Czernowin's Heart Chamber 224

7 Finding Eurydice 241

A Conversation with Sarah Ruhl 265

8 Music as Forgiveness: Mozart's le Nozze di Figaro 277

Works Referenced 287

Recommended Recordings 293

Acknowledgments 297

Editorial Reviews

12/01/2021

Composer Aucoin's personal reflection on and guide to opera has the perfect title; in the book's preface, he writes that opera's (arguably) impossible feat is capturing human ideas and emotions. The book's chapters can be read out of order, but each has a distinct relationship to the penultimate chapter, which explores Aucoin's key operatic work, Eurydice (commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 2020). In an earlier chapter, Aucoin analyzes other works inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; he also examines the Verdi operas that were based on plays by Shakespeare (Otello; Falstaff). Aucoin's expressive language conveys his passion for opera and its influence on his life. For each composer, librettist, or composition the book discusses, he explains what made them groundbreaking and new and what made them similar to their operatic predecessors. VERDICT Opera lovers will be delighted by this conversational, memoir-style book from an author who has spent years studying and writing in the art form.—Elizabeth Berndt-Morris, Loeb Music Lib., Harvard Univ., Cambridge

Library Journal

★ 2021-10-02
An opera composer shares his love for “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form.”

Aucoin, a MacArthur fellow and the composer of operas about Walt Whitman and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, fell in love with the art form while growing up in suburban Boston during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this exceptional book, he describes what he calls opera’s impossibility, “the unattainability of its attempt to gather every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience.” He offers “a practitioner’s view” of opera in essays that “draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach.” His passion is evident in every chapter, starting with an introduction on opera’s basic ingredients, including “the most primal human needs: song and narrative.” From there, he offers learned readings of earlier works about the Orpheus myth; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas; and two contemporary operas that give him hope for the genre’s future: Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angeland Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber. Also included are chapters on the inspirations for his own operas, including Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries and the Eurydice play by Sarah Ruhl that “retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through the eyes of its heroine.” Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating, as when he approvingly notes W.H. Auden’s “ready-for-RuPaul’s-Drag-Race affronts to good taste” in his libretto for The Rake’s Progressor when he writes that Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfershas harmonies that “might have struck a seventeenth-century audience as twangingly dissonant, but to modern ears the whole thing sounds positively groovy…the Beach Boys on the shores of Hell.” The author is often clever, as when he justifies barely mentioning Wagner in this book: “That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere.”

An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.

Kirkus Reviews

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal

"Exceptional . . . [Aucoin's] passion is evident in every chapter . . . An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera." —Kirkus Reviews

"[The Impossible Art's] investigations of musical themes and personal obsessions constitute a scholar’s analysis and a practitioner’s diary as well as a lover’s rhapsody . . . [Aucoin's] intellect is sharp and varied, his tastes catholic." —Willard Spiegelman, The Wall Street Journal

"[The Impossible Art is] a magnificent blend of criticism and rapture." —John Domini, The Boston Globe

"Like Stravinsky and Rosen before him, Aucoin displays a prose style, a thoughtfulness, a brazenness of opinion arising from expertise, that put him in a league with those predecessors . . . Aucoin can really write. It is a pleasure to read his prose, and the moments when he makes me want to stop right now and go hear the music he describes so vividly are what makes the experience so pleasurable." —Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard Magazine

"Aucoin writes with a precise awareness of what has gone before in [opera's] domain." —Geoffrey O'Brien, The New York Review of Books

"Meaty, absorbing, fretting, and ultimately mind-blowing . . . The Impossible Art will last me the rest of my life." —Timothy Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter

"Many composers have written about music—think of Wagner’s eight volumes of prose—but the phenomenon of a young composer setting forth his thoughts succinctly, persuasively and readably about the nature of opera and selected individual works, as Aucoin does here, is something special." —George Loomis, The New Criterion

"Vivid . . . Aucoin has the impulses of a master auto mechanic, relishing the act of getting under the hood and pulling the engine apart. Best of all, he wants to pass that knowledge on to us. Eschewing musicological jargon, he conveys his enthusiasm and wonder as he spells out, bar by musical bar, how Monteverdi creates a mood or Mozart manages to touch our hearts in the final scene of The Marriage of Figaro." —Wynne Delacoma, The American Scholar

"Triple threat Matthew Aucoin: conductor, librettist, and composer, and now writer and thought leader. The Impossible Art sheds new light on the musicology, history, and personalities that bring opera to life, with a poet’s appreciation of the importance of the libretto, often overlooked. Personal, witty, and well-researched, it will have you rushing to recordings of works you know well, and ones you have never heard, to listen with Aucoin’s provocative insights in mind." —Renée Fleming

"Matthew Aucoin's The Impossible Art shines with unforced generosity; his generation’s perceptiveness, honesty, and frank address; and the personally felt urgency of moving history forward. Writing with uncanny wisdom and a modesty that is equal parts nerdy and heroic, here is a musician who is as insightful about Auden as about Stravinsky and who blows your mind with psychedelic and synesthetic descriptions of Birtwistle. This is a book infused with first love, and first vows of clear-eyed, lifelong devotion." —Peter Sellars

"Deeply insightful and delightfully entertaining . . . The Impossible Art serves as a valuable guide to those who seek a more intimate relationship with art, with opera and with the mysteries of the human soul that reside within the realm of artistic creation—no matter how impossible that realm may be to approach." —Eamon Stein, Shelf Awareness

"I could not put this book down. To read such cogent insights from such an important composer is pure joy from beginning to end. I thought I knew a fair amount about opera, but I learned a lot. If you are new to opera, this book will draw you in—if you are already among the converted, this book will open your eyes to new vistas about this greatest of arts." —Patrick Summers, Artistic & Music Director of the Houston Grand Opera

"Opera lovers will be delighted by this conversational, memoir-style book from an author who has spent years studying and writing in the art form." —Elizabeth Berndt-Morris, Library Journal

"Aucoin speaks eloquently from his own experience as composer, conductor, writer, and pianist . . . With substantial lists of works cited and recommended recordings, Aucoin's insightful and informative opera history will engage everyone interested in music, including students and opera fans." —Booklist

"[Aucoin gives readers] a rare behind-the-scenes look at an art form with a reputation of being particularly impenetrable to outsiders." —Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

From the Publisher