Bastille Day! Thurs, July 14
My summer music marathon began very appropriately with a second performance of Les Miserables. I was reasonably certain that I would enjoy the performance as much as I did a couple of weeks ago, and I was right. I loved it! Perhaps because it was on Bastille Day, the audience seemed even more excited and enthusiastic.
As with any great work of music, the more I listen the more I hear. I was again swept along by the emotional and historical waves in this opera, but I also noticed more about how musical themes recurred in different forms at different points in the story. This serves to connect the sprawling narrative into a focused story and also amplifies the emotional echoes among the many characters and events.
(By the way, I think Les Miserables is an opera. It is sung through with no spoken dialogue, and it requires operatic type voices. If Nixon in China, Dead Man Walking, and other modern works are operas, why not Les Miserables?)
I was again struck by the Verdian aspects in this opera. Verdi often addressed the issues that arise when individuals try to reconcile their personal life situations with their roles in history, and this is a major theme in Les Mis. Javert's ultimate self-destruction is rooted in his inability to reconcile his personal feelings with the social order. Marius and his fellow student revolutionaries sacrifice their personal lives for a social movement, while Valjean intervenes to rescue Cosette's personal happiness from the defeat of the revolution.
Verdi also often wrote about parent-child, and especially father-daughter relations (Nabucco, Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore, Boccanegra, Aida, etc.), and they are often more important than the romantic relationships in the story. This is also the case in Les Mis where the relation between Valjean and Cosette is central to the whole story and links Valjean’s past and Fantine with Marius and Eponine and the student uprising they are part of. (Note how the degraded father-daughter relationship between Thenardier and Eponine parallels the Valjean-Cosette relationship.)
It’s clear to me that Boublil and Schonberg were Verdi lovers, but their primary inspiration is obviously the French Romantic writer Victor Hugo. This provides another link with Verdi who used dramas by Hugo for two of his most popular operas (Ernani and Rigoletto). Both Verdi and Hugo were Romantics and tried to reflect in their art the vast panorama of individual and collective human life. Much of popular culture today, Les Mis included, continues the traditions of the Romantic Era.
As for the abundant tunefulness and mass popularity of Les Mis, Verdi’s middle operas especially were endless founts of tunefulness and massively popular in their day. After all, everybody was humming La Donna E Mobile after Rigoletto burst on the scene.
Now Les Miserables might not be the equal of Rigoletto or Traviata, but it is part of a long tradition of music dramas in European culture. It is neither better nor worse for being so popular. The ultimate value of Les Miserables lies in the ability of the music and the drama to move audiences to a deeper understanding of their own lives and of the world around them. That would be my thumbnail description of what art is about, and Les Miserables is a brilliant work of dramatic and musical art.
Tomorrow--off to the Orange County Fair and Bob Dylan!
No comments:
Post a Comment