A term often used to characterize a kind of opera and opera production in which spectacle and dramatic impact are emphasized over purely musical factors. It was first used specifically in the 1960s to describe the small-scale musico-dramatic works by composers of the postwar generations that proliferated in western Europe and North America during that decade.
During the early 1960s, the elaborate trappings of the opera house and of ‘grand opera’ in particular were selfconsciously discarded by a number of progressive composers in favour of more modest dramatic and musical means, often combining elements of song, dance and mime, which could be tailored to a wide range of performing spaces. The genre came to prominence during the 1960s and early 70s for aesthetic, economic and political reasons, and though it almost as quickly became unfashionable again the most effective works of the period – especially those by Ligeti, Berio, Henze, Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies – remain in the repertory and to a large extent continue to define its parameters.
The advocates of music theatre cited more remote historical precedents such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Renard, Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel and even Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. In the postwar period, however, it appears to have arisen as a loosely connected tendency, partly dictated by the attempts of a number of composers to come to terms with the prescriptions and proscriptions of total serialism and to reconcile that rigour with their interest in exploring renewed combinations of music and gesture, partly as a political reaction against the conservative musical establishment which traditional opera was perceived as representing, and partly (and perhaps most significantly) as a pragmatic response to the increasing problem of mounting new operas in a period of rapidly increasing production costs.
Even in 1968, when leaders of the postwar avant garde such as Nono and Berio had begun to work within the framework of the operatic establishment, and the première of Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten in 1965 had been hailed as the remaking of an operatic tradition thought broken after Berg’s Lulu, Boulez was calling for opera houses to be blown up because they were representative of a ‘museum culture’ antipathetic to the radicalism that composers of his and subsequent generations had espoused (indeed, in 1992 he described music theatre as ‘opera of the poor’). Most of his contemporaries went on to explore opera in some form and often used music theatre as the means of first approaching the genre.
‘Music theatre’ became an umbrella term covering works ranging from those that were in effect chamber operas, demanding traditional vocal techniques and a high degree of virtuosity in performance, to pieces such as Stockhausen’s Herbstmusik (1974) and Musik im Bauch (1975) and many works by Schnebel and Kagel in which the overt musical content was at best minimal. Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles aventures (1962 and 1962–5) existed as concert works, albeit ones of a highly individual character, before their theatrical implications occurred to the composer and he concocted (in 1966) a suggested scenario. Kagel’s compositions, such as Match (1964), often demand the description ‘music theatre’ even when apparently they were written for conventional genres. His Staatstheater (1967–70), commissioned by the Hamburg Staatsoper, uses all the apparatus of the opera house to question cherished assumptions about the traditions of operatic performance rather than to extend the range of means by which music and gesture might be combined.
Henze used music theatre as a means of focussing an overt political message, notably in El Cimarrón (1969–70). He began to explore music theatre only in the late 1960s, when his disaffection with the social trappings of traditional opera had reached a climax, and he sensed that in The Bassarids (1964–5) his own operatic style had reached a stylistic end-point. His Second Violin Concerto (1971) also contains a strong element of music theatre.
Nono and Berio were both influenced by the experimental theatre groups that flourished during the 1960s and incorporated elements from such productions into their music-theatre compositions (e.g. Nono’s A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida, 1966). Nono’s large-scale dramatic works, Al gran sole carico d’amore (1972–4) and Prometeo (1984), forsook the trappings of the opera house altogether. Berio’s Opera (1969–70, revised 1977) used material from the Open Theatre’s production Terminal as one element in a highly allusive meditation on the nature of opera and the interdependence of music and gesture. But his exploration of music theatre and its possibilities for concert works was already well advanced before Opera: there is a clear line of development from Circles (1960) through Laborintus II (1965) to the fully-fledged music theatre of Recital I (For Cathy) (1972). And in his series of solo instrumental Sequenze (1958 onwards) there was a gradual drift away from the abstract musical designs of the early pieces towards much more comprehensive studies of performance. In the instrumental works of Heinz Holliger and Vinko Globokar the dramatic potential of virtuoso performance was used to define a distinct genre for which ‘music theatre’ seems the most appropriate description.
In Britain, where in the period after 1945 conditions for the encouragement of new opera were arguably more unfavourable than anywhere in western Europe, Goehr, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle were prominent in efforts to establish a music-theatre repertory in the 1960s and early 70s. Their music-theatre pieces represented a much more direct and concentrated fusion of music and gesture than the equivalent works of their continental European contemporaries, perhaps because their aims were concerned less with ideology than with producing a more potent dramatic fusion than traditional opera appeared to offer.
Goehr’s Triptych (Naboth’s Vineyard, Shadowplay and Sonata about Jerusalem, 1968–70) was composed immediately after the completion of his first opera. Davies and Birtwistle jointly formed the Pierrot Players (later called The Fires of London) in 1967 with the specific purpose of creating and presenting a repertory of music theatre. For their concerts Davies composed Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) and Vesalii icones (1969), in which it was the borderline between concert and theatre piece, rather than that between theatre piece and opera, that was blurred. These works were consciously designed to be performed in a concert hall. The theatre pieces Birtwistle wrote for the Pierrot Players (including Monodrama, 1967) have been withdrawn, but in such works as the ‘dramatic pastoral’ Down by the Greenwood Side (1969) the pared-down instrumentation and skeletal gestures reveal the experience of those explorations. In his Bow Down (1977), composed when the music-theatre movement was on the wane across Europe, Birtwistle achieved an unclassifiable fusion of music, text and gesture that was perhaps closer to the music-theatre ideal than anything produced during the movement’s heyday ten years earlier.
The influence of John Cage’s work and an increasing awareness of Kagel’s significance fostered a new phase in British music theatre in the 1970s and 80s, typified by the creations of Trevor Wishart and Michael Nyman.
In the USA and Canada music theatre acquired an entirely distinct and independent pedigree. Its most striking manifestations had their origins in the experimental tradition of the inter-war years, in the multimedia projects of Harry Partch and in Cage’s demonstrations from the 1950s onwards of the open-ended and all-embracing possibilities of any work of art. From his ‘happenings’ of the 1960s, HPSCHD (1967–9, in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller) and Musicircus (1967), to Apartment House 1776 (1976) and the purely electronic Roaratorio (1979), Cage gave demonstrations of the spectacular possibilities of such catholic musical collage, while in Europeras 1 & 2 (1987) he offered a commentary on the European operatic tradition.
In other respects North American music theatre struck out in several directions, often straining the limits of the definition of the term. The works of R. Murray Schafer may be related to developments in the European avant garde of the 1960s, though his theatre pieces show a far wider range of reference and gesture, while Robert Ashley’s explorations of the possibilities of television opera and use of multi-layered technology introduced another ingredient into the experimental mix. And within the broadest sweep of the term, Alvin Lucier’s installations and ‘sonic environments’ offer experiences in which the visual component is certainly intended for consideration alongside the acoustic phenomena, but which take music theatre a very long way from both its origins and its conventional parameters.
See also Opera, §VI, 7.
W. Felsenstein and S. Melchinger: Musiktheater (Bremen, 1961)
W. Felsenstein, G. Friedrich and J. Herz: Musiktheater: Beiträge zur Methodik und zu Inszenierungs-Konzeptionen (Leipzig, 1970, 2/1976)
‘Music and Theatre’, Yale/Theatre, iv/3 (1973)
P.P. Fuchs, ed. and trans.: The Music Theater of Walter Felsenstein: Collected Articles, Speeches, and Interviews (New York, 1975)
ANDREW CLEMENTS