Abstract
In Opera: The Autobiography of the Western World, Simon Banks takes a bird's-eye view of the development of modern liberal democracies through the themes represented in the four-hundred-year history of opera. The modern interpretation of women's rights is such a topic. As an example of revolt against patriarchal sexism, he cites the case of Francesca da Rimini, as narrated in Dante's Divine Comedy and treated in four operas, dating between 1829 and 1914. He reproaches Dante for sending the adulteress Francesca to hell without recourse, while he does not even feel the need to relate what happened to the duke of Rimini, guilty of double murder, in the afterlife. To do justice to Dante, he did. In the same fifth canto of his Inferno, Dante sends the murderer unequivocally to Cain's circle, which is that part of the Cocytus, the lowest part of hell, that is intended for traitors who had killed relatives. Is it hair-splitting to take issue with such a slight error? Banks treats it as a big deal. Such mistakes are bound to happen when an author endeavours to fit historical facts into a pre-established framework.
The straitjacket into which Banks squeezes four hundred years of operatic history is his thesis that the history of the Western world can be summarized as a development from theocratic absolutism to liberal democracy. To demonstrate this development, he employs two time scales. On the one hand, there is history writ large, dating from the very beginning to today. On the other, there is the four-hundred-year history of opera. His thesis holds that the second reflects the first. This reflection influenced decision makers. The historical audiences that attended opera are defined as the wealthy and powerful, as people in charge of society.
Any art form could be pressed into the service of Banks' thesis. Painting, literature and spoken theatre reflect the same cultural preoccupations. Nevertheless, Banks argues, opera was vital because of its emotional appeal. He suggests that Beethoven's Fidelio may have incited the Vienna Congress delegates to abolish slavery.
To reconcile the two timescales is no straightforward matter. Opera treats history in a mythologized version. For this reason, Banks does not start from its mythologized representation. In the beginning was Creation, artistically represented in Haydn's Creation and Wagner's prelude to Das Rheingold.
Banks distinguishes 36 topics, which he organizes into three parts: (1) new answers to timeless questions: the basics, such as humanity's relation to God, to history, to the individual, or to a sense of home; (2) the modern West liberates itself from the Middle Ages – not a narration of the passing of the Middle Ages into Modern Times, but of the treatment of the Middle Ages in opera; and (3) from despotism to pluralism – covering everything from a critique of absolute rulership to the rise of the creative artist and the emancipation of ordinary people.
In the way Banks develops his thesis, his great familiarity with the repertoire is well demonstrated. Operas are creatively selected and juxtaposed to illustrate a theme. The disadvantage, however, is the treatment of opera as an art form of cultural signals rather than of content. Opera still comes across as an emotionally exalted art form, rather than a medium for profound and nuanced thinking. Precisely those operas that acquired fame for their philosophical nuance are conspicuously absent. There is no trace of Don Giovanni, nor of The Magic Flute, no Rusalka, not even Pelléas et Mélisande. Messiaen's Saint-François d’Assise could have offered the necessary balance in a rather one-sided reading of religion as an oppressive force.
The fallacy of treating complex art works as mere symptoms runs throughout the book as a whole. Reducing Faust, for instance, to a moralizing story about a sexual liaison in a small bourgeois town amounts to an extreme reduction of one of the most complex philosophical undertakings of western culture.
For which readership can this book be intended? Historians may find it of little use. Opera lovers may be a likely audience. The best place for this book is in education. It is widely documented, beautifully illustrated, and above all written with verve. In a single volume, it offers much material that may be of use in an educational setting, especially if treated as a starting point for discussion.