Later opera in Germany and Austria

Richard Strauss was greeted as the obvious heir to Wagner (and Liszt). His worldwide reputation was already established by his orchestral music and lieder (German art songs) when he turned to opera for the first time. But his preeminence among non-Italian composers of opera was established by two one-act operas, both shocking in their time: Salome (1905; libretto taken from Oscar Wilde’s drama, translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann) and Elektra (1909). With the latter work Strauss began a long and fruitful association with the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his librettist. Couched in a powerful harmonic idiom, requiring huge orchestral forces and singers of great vocal power and stamina, Salome and Elektra seemed to many early critics to be like his orchestral tone poems with voices added, but they soon became part of the standard repertoire. They were followed by an altogether different sort of opera, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), again with a libretto by Hofmannsthal, a bittersweet comedy notable for the superb musical depiction of the central character (the Marschallin). It marks Strauss’s invention of a subtle parlando (conversational) style all his own, which he also used to great effect in his later opera.

Strauss composed 10 operas after Der Rosenkavalier. All but one or two of them won wide popularity; the most successful have been the chamber (small-scale) opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; revised 1916, “Ariadne on Naxos”); the giant allegory Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; “The Woman Without a Shadow”), which some writers have called Strauss’s masterpiece; and Arabella (1933), which closely resembles Der Rosenkavalier in many details. Capriccio (1942), his last opera, is an absorbing work that reanimates the old argument of whether words or music should take precedence in opera.

Modernism sprang fully formed from the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his student Alban Berg. Both were Viennese practitioners of what came to be called atonality (whereby harmony serves no structural function) and serialism (whereby a strictly repeating arrangement—or “row”—of 12 pitches in the octave forms the structural foundation of the music). Schoenberg’s first theatrical works—the one-act Erwartung (1909, first performed 1924; Expectation, single-character libretto by Marie Pappenheim) and the one-act “drama with music” Die glückliche Hand (1924; “The Hand of Fate,” his own libretto)—are atonal, thickly Romantic, even Expressionistic (intentionally distorted, so as to express intense and often exaggerated or disquieting emotions). These early works occasionally use Sprechstimme, a variety of vocalization between speech and song that uses approximate pitches along a continuum notated by the composer. Schoenberg’s only comedy, the one-act Von Heute auf Morgen (1930; “From Today to Tomorrow”), is according to his 12-tone method, or the serialist technique of composition; as a result, the music is in separate numbers—each built on its own row—rather than continuous. Schoenberg’s largest opera—with monumental choral and orchestral passages—was the powerful oratorio-like Moses und Aron (1957; his own libretto), left incomplete at his death.

The two operas of Alban Berg—Wozzeck (1925; libretto by the composer, after Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck) and Lulu (1937; libretto by the composer, after Frank Wedekind’s plays Erdgeist [1895; “Earth Spirit”] and Die Büchse der Pandora [1904; “Pandora’s Box”])—are among the most powerful, effective music dramas of the 20th century. An outstanding example of Expressionist opera, Wozzeck elaborates the melodrama of a victimized soldier through continuous music and exaggerated gestures, angular melodies, and extreme dissonance. Lulu, unfinished at the time of Berg’s death and later completed by others, is a part-tragic, part-comic drama that employs film clips and spoken dialogue.

Hans Werner Henze and Karlheinz Stockhausen were German opera composers of note in the second half of the 20th century. Henze’s best-known operas are Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), his first collaboration with the poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and Der junge Lord (1965; “The Young Lord”), which satirizes German provincial life. He also experimented with other forms of music and drama in combination. Stockhausen embarked in 1977 on an epic cycle, Licht (“Light”), which consists of seven operas, one for each day of the week. Using his own librettos and specifying every detail of the massive and elaborate productions, the composer worked on the cycle until finishing in 2004.

Czechoslovakia and other eastern European countries

Glinka, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and the other composers of specifically Russian opera have parallels in other countries. In what is now the Czech Republic, the national school effectively began with Bedřich Smetana, best known outside his homeland for the vigorous, colourful folk comedy Prodaná nevěsta (1866; The Bartered Bride, libretto by Karel Sabina), which determined many aspects of future Czech musical usage. The other leading Czech composer of Smetana’s period, Antonín Dvořák, wrote nine operas but remained preponderantly an instrumental composer. Of Dvořák’s mature operas, the one best known outside the Czech Republic is the melancholy fairy tale Rusalka (1901), made attractive by his considerable melodic and harmonic sensibility.

Although Leoš Janáček was more modernist than his Czech predecessors, he also cultivated a specifically nationalist style. Having collected and studied folk music from his native region, he forged a highly personal melodic idiom based on rhythms and inflections of rural speech and song, which was rediscovered after World War II. Janáček became known outside his homeland for the operas Její pastorkyňa (1904; “Her Foster Daughter,” changed to Jenufa for Janáček’s 1916 revision), Kát’a Kabanová (1921), Příhody lišky bystroušky (1924; The Cunning Little Vixen, libretto by the composer), and Věc Makropulos (1926; “The Makropoulos Affair,” libretto by the composer), each of which has a character and milieu of its own while preserving Janáček’s distinctive way of setting the Czech language.

The most noteworthy Hungarian operas of the early 20th century are the one-act Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), by Béla Bartók, and the ballad opera (opera that includes popular tunes and some spoken passages) Háry János, by Zoltán Kodály (1926), both of which have become more familiar in concert performance or excerpts than in staged productions.

The most influential and popular of Polish nationalist operas, Halka (1854), was composed by Stanisław Moniuszko; he also wrote an admirable comedy, The Haunted Manor (1865). Of early 20th-century Polish operas, one of the most substantial is Król Roger (1926; King Roger), by Karol Szymanowski. The notable Krzysztof Penderecki, active in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, composed several operas that were performed in Europe and the United States, including The Devils of Loudun (1969; his own libretto, based on John Robert Whiting’s dramatization of Aldous Huxley’s novel) and Die schwarze Maske (1986; “The Black Mask,” libretto by Harry Kupfer and himself, after Gerhart Hauptmann’s play).

Spain

For several centuries Spain had its own type of musical theatre, akin to opéra comique. This was the zarzuela, devised by the 17th-century dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the composer Juan Hidalgo and imported to Spanish colonies. Spain also introduced the first completely sung opera to the New World stage, namely La púrpura de la rosa (Lima, 1701; “The Blood of the Rose”), by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, commissioned by the viceroy of Peru.

In Spain operatic nationalism began in the second half of the 19th century with Felipe Pedrell, most influential as a teacher. Of the more familiar Spanish composers, both Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados composed operas of strongly Spanish colour that have lapsed from the repertoire—Albéniz particularly in the comic one-act Pepita Jiménez (1896) and Granados in the semiveristic Goyescas (1916). Spanish operatic nationalism at its peak can be seen in two very different operas by Manuel de Falla: the specifically Andalusian La vida breve (first staged in French translation, 1913; Brief Life, libretto by Carlos Fernández Shaw) and the one-act El retablo de Maese Pedro (1923; “Master Peter’s Puppet Show,” text by the composer, after a scene in Don Quixote), which is in effect a chamber opera for marionettes.

United Kingdom

British opera, which had languished for centuries, was revitalized by the theatrical talent of the eclectic English composer Benjamin Britten, whose stage works show a remarkable sympathy for the human predicament, expressed in readily accessible and deeply felt music. His most highly respected work is the forceful Peter Grimes (1945; libretto by Montague Slater). Among Britten’s other operas to win widespread stagings are the chamber operas The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947), the all-male Billy Budd (1951; libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, based upon Herman Melville’s story), and the eerily effective Turn of the Screw (1954; libretto by Myfanwy Piper, after the Henry James story). Less well known outside England are the idiosyncratic operas, to his own complex librettos, of Sir Michael Tippett: The Midsummer Marriage (1955), King Priam (1962), and The Knot Garden (1970).

In the later 20th century the extraordinarily successful Andrew Lloyd Webber, also English, composed more than a dozen musical theatre pieces, some of which had extremely long runs in London’s West End and on Broadway. Each of his “shows” was unique and took advantage of familiar styles, ranging from episodic music in a hard-driving rock style (Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita from the 1970s) to completely sung, Puccini-like opera (Phantom of the Opera, 1986). Meanwhile, English composer Harrison Birtwistle created The Mask of Orpheus (first performed 1986; libretto by Peter Zinovieff), a massive, intricate work with masked characters played by multiple singers and mimes. Two prolific women composers of opera, both Scottish, are Thea Musgrave and Judith Weir. Both wrote several notable semioperatic works as well as full-length operas. The latter include, by Musgrave, Mary, Queen of Scots (1977; libretto by herself, after a play by Amalia Elguera) and A Christmas Carol (1979; libretto by herself, after the book by Charles Dickens); and, by Weir, A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987) and Blond Eckbert (1993), both to her own librettos. By the turn of the 21st century, new operas were being commissioned and performed regularly across the United Kingdom.

United States

Perhaps the most important American work that has consistently had a place in the repertoire is George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935; libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin), a singular blending of folk opera and American musical comedy. A unique niche is occupied by the two operas that Virgil Thomson composed to texts by Gertrude Stein: the Spanish-tinted Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), an appealing flow of invention around the figure of Susan B. Anthony. Their durability has resulted from Thomson’s folk-based setting of texts that alternate between the apparently nonsensical, the satiric, and the emotionally moving.

After World War II, operas by American composers became much more numerous. Two of the most frequently performed mid-20th-century American operas were the folklike “Western” Ballad of Baby Doe (1956; libretto by John Latouche), by Douglas Moore, and the melodramatic “Southern” Susannah (1955; libretto by the composer), by Carlisle Floyd. Jack Beeson achieved moderate success with his operas on American themes, including The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956) and Lizzie Borden (1965)—both with librettos by Kenward Elmslie—in a style that sometimes incorporated such musical “Americana” as marching songs and hymns.

Most successful in reaching a popular audience in the mid-20th century, however, was the Italian Gian Carlo Menotti, who spent more than 30 years composing in the United States. To his own librettos he produced, in a variety of styles, a series of melodramas and tragedies of considerable popular appeal, among them The Medium (1946), The Consul (1950), Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951; composed for television performance), and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), two of which won Pulitzer Prizes. He also wrote the libretto for the first, and best-known, opera of Samuel Barber, Vanessa (1958; also awarded a Pulitzer). Menotti founded the Festival of Two Worlds—first in Spoleto, Italy, and then in Charleston, S.C. (as the Spoleto Festival USA)—a manifestation of the growing interest in making opera a universal rather than a national pastime.

Leonard Bernstein was one of the most internationally acclaimed American composers of the second half of the 20th century. Influenced by the politically potent works of Marc Blitzstein (The Cradle Will Rock, 1937; Regina, 1946–49), Bernstein’s stage works blur the boundaries between opera and that peculiarly American genre, the Broadway musical. Candide (1956; libretto by Lillian Hellman) and West Side Story (1957; story by Arthur Laurents after Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) are at the same time both unconventional and enormously rich syntheses of many musical styles and conventions. Although technically not operas, several of Sondheim’s musicals (Anyone Can Whistle, 1964; A Little Night Music, 1973; Sunday in the Park with George, 1984) contain large sections of continuous music and have been performed in opera houses around the world. His most operatic score is Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979; story by Hugh Wheeler based on the stage version by Christopher Bond).

As the number of new operas by American composers increased, audiences too grew in size and sophistication to the point where they accepted novelty, both in revivals of lesser-known works by older composers and in new works by living composers. Philip Glass wrote many unconventional stage works, including his self-described “portrait trilogy”: his collaboration with playwright Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (1975–76); the Sanskrit Satyagraha (1979; based on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s philosophical guidebook); and Akhnaten (first performed 1984; libretto by Glass and others), sung in several ancient languages. Glass’s The Voyage, commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s journey to America, was performed there in 1992. Another commission by that organization, to celebrate its 100th year of existence in 1980, was bestowed on the contemporary American composer John Corigliano. The resulting opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, in a style that combines French grand opera with opera buffa, was not completed and staged until 1991.

Around the turn of the 21st century, William Bolcom composed three major operas—McTeague (1992), A View From the Bridge (1999), and A Wedding (2004)—all commissioned and premiered by the Lyric Opera of Chicago and all composed with librettist Arnold Weinstein in collaboration with others. Although Bolcolm’s style is eclectic, it fully exploits the emotional impact of the human voice. Meanwhile, John Adams, who had made a breakthrough with Nixon in China (1985–87; libretto by Alice Goodman), wrote a number of other operas that were performed by major opera companies both in the United States and in Europe. Among these were Doctor Atomic (2004–05; libretto by Peter Sellars, centring on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in the creation of the atomic bomb) and A Flowering Tree (2006; libretto by Adams and Sellars).