The end of a novel or play or a musical composition is always a challenge. It has to arrive, to conclude a journey, bring together the threads of a theme or a plot, resolve puzzles and contradictions, satisfy the listener or reader. How much more challenging is the end of an opera – a combination of story, acted drama and musical work.
There are lots of sites offering favourite finales from opera, but most are about the story. Here’s tenor Michael Fabiano describing how the music of favourite operas brings them to an end.
Fishing for a finale
Have you noticed, when operas are revised after the premiering, by the composer or by others after their death, it’s almost always the ending that was changed.
Such it was with Pearl Fishers. From its premiere, it had mixed reception and still remains a puzzle, mainly known for that duet (which occurs early in the opera, leaving the rest to follow). The libretto was and still is widely dismissed as weak and the story as implausible (including by the librettists, Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré, who expressed their dissatisfaction with it!) The characters are unconvincing, inconsistent and hard to act, and the moral issues of the drama rely on a supposedly exotic religious context that’s even less convincing. So how to arrive at a satisfactory ending, resolving this complicated combination of fantasy and fantastic plot?
The Pearl Fishers presents a dilemma because there is no extant full score in Bizet’s hand, and some passages were only available in vocal score editions until very recently. The first run of late 19th-century revivals also changed the opera’s ending significantly, scrapping the original ending in which Zurga allows Leïla and Nadir to escape and replacing it with ones in which Zurga meets his end in various ways as punishment for defying the villagers. New music was interpolated into these scenes and later issued in subsequent editions used for performances through the 20th century. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the opera was fully restored following the discovery of a conducting score in which Bizet had made indications for orchestrations. More here.
So while Bizet didn’t rework the opera, later productions almost immediately did. Full detail here.
Tim Ashley in the Guardian reviews a recent UK production that ‘presents what is effectively the British premiere of the score as Bizet left it’:
For all its familiarity, Bizet's The Pearl Fishers is one of the most difficult operas to get right in performance. Set in ancient Ceylon, it is more often than not treated as a piece of orientalist hokum, when in fact its theatrical roots lie in the concentration of French classical drama. Essentially it is a tautly woven study of a masculine friendship, threatened then transfigured by the love the two men feel for the same woman. The work's tone - a combination of emotional turmoil and pervasive sadness - and its sparseness of musical gesture steer it closer to Racine's Bérénice than to comparable operatic experiments of its day.
Not surprisingly, its austerity was deemed perplexing in Bizet's lifetime, and after his death in 1875, the score was hacked about to offset severity with sentiment. The most marked change was the replacement of several sections for the two men, Nadir and Zurga, with soupy repetitions of their famous duet Au Fond du Temple Saint.
Revisit the reviews on our blog post to explore the ways the Met production modernized and interpreted the roles - Zurga is a manager for the pearl industry, for example.
These rethinks help us understand the strengths and potential of the opera – but still leave us with an ending that satisfies none of the requirements for a good finale! It seems a good finale requires a good plot to start with?
Another way of looking is to see the opera as awkwardly bridging traditions. The Washington Post review of the Met production:
“The Pearl Fishers” is… a document of a particular chapter in musical history, reflecting a range of antecedents and tilling the soil that ultimately yielded late Verdi, Wagner, and even Puccini (who had in many ways the last word on this kind of orientalism in “Turandot,” which this opera at moments seems to anticipate). The opera, like its characters, is clinging to old traditions. Woolcock’s production manages at once to show how attractive those traditions are, and the futility of trying to grasp them too tightly.
Carmen’s end
Forward 10 years from Pearl Fishers, and Bizet produces his brilliant success, Carmen. By contrast, this is one of the operas most often cited in discussions of perfect finales. Short notes here. Full details as always on Wiki. And the ending is all in her last declaration: “Carmen will never give up; free she was born and free she will die.” His final words? “My beloved Carmen”, as the bullfight crowd celebrates. The libretto is honed to the drama – note her recurrent call of consistency – “Carmen has never lied…” (Libretto here)
Carmen is the classic example of operatic endings where death of the primary character ends the opera, tying it together - and plot and music meet there. Limelight reviews death endings here,
Bizet’s musical depiction of the end of the line for his feisty heroine is genius in its poignancy: he alternates between the triumphant strains of her beloved toreador’s victory song, heard off-stage, and the ominous “fate” theme heard in Act 3 when Carmen first learns of her impending doom as her fortune is read.
To my knowledge, though the response was mixed (the Paris audience wasn’t ready for so much verismo) no attempt was made to alter the libretto or score of Carmen. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, and significantly, it was very tightly based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée. (If you want a strong plot leading to a strong finale, it probably always helps to start with a novel!)
Bizet died shortly after that first production, never knowing what a triumph he’d produced. And until very recently, the ending remained as it was always, inevitably, to be. Carmen, as she predicts from the brilliant card song of the penultimate act to the finale, is murdered.
And so it was until 2018 when in a production at Florence’s Teatro del Maggio, the libretto and score remain untouched but, in recognition of the statistics of violence against Italian women, Carmen pulls a gun on Jose!
What next, Brünnhilde with a fire extinguisher?
Or Aida jumping out of her tomb saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this!’
Feel free to add your own alternative fem-pos ending to familiar operas.
Death as finale.
Undoubtedly, death is a more common ending to operas than it is to novels, plays or symphonies. Why, I wonder? Here's some food for thought...
The author of this piece on Operatic Death , Kenneth LaFave, offers a detailed summary of the changing ways of using death in opera and portraying it,
Carmen, of course, ends with the death of its heroine, and she even sees it coming. She has rejected her former lover for a new one and the former will stab her to death outside the bullring. She has seen this in the cards— literally. But her death is not a sacrifice, it is an affirmation of the values by which she has chosen to live. Nietzsche at the last saw in this a greater, larger thing than Wagner's "love-death."
I understand that operatic exit arias have been a popular target of ridicule. Scenes in which a character dies, and sings about it at length, are fun to lampoon, and contribute to the sense of artificiality that can alienate a first-time listener. And feminist critics are correct to point out that the profusion of death scenes involving female characters cements patriarchal norms by ritualizing the destruction of exceptional women.
The artifice, far from alienating us, helps draw us in. Opera can both condense life and blow it up. Transformational processes that in nature are drawn out and messy are concentrated into (relatively) compact scenes. But at the same time, the stream of psychological affects and thoughts these experiences spark in us — which in reality are so often ephemeral and unexamined — are slowed down and magnified through music.
Our session
We’re comparing the final act of Pearl Fishers with the final two acts of Carmen. For the production of the former, see our previous post.
For Carmen, we’ll watch the Met Opera production in 2010 by British director Richard Eyre.
CONDUCTOR Yannick Nézet-Séguin
MICAELA Barbara Frittoli
CARMEN Elīna Garanča
DON JOSÉ Roberto Alagna
ESCAMILLO Teddy Tahu Rhodes (by accident! He was called in at a few hours’ notice when Mariusz Kwiecień was ill.)
It ain’t over yet…
All the considerations above rather undermine the cliche that ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings’, a longtime joke usually interpreted as about opera (and Wagnerian sopranos). But it apparently began as a comment about ball games in the US. Read the explanation here.
P.S. Audience intervention? Operagoers, I reckon, divide into those who can always critically improve on an ending and those who despise such irreverence. As a member of the first group, I have to be stopped from yelling "Don't do it!" at the character (e.g. Liu, or Alfredo's dad...) about to doom a good ending. And opera lore is loaded with joke endings, improving the drama greatly - for example the legendary Tosca finale when the diva landed on a trampoline behind the castle wall from which she leapt crying “Scarpia, we meet before God!” She reputedly returned several times. Check out the accounts here.
Lyn, 20/3/23
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