Nights at the Opera

On June 1, 1800, an 18-year-old Henri Beyle stole off to a concert. His army unit, bringing up the rear of Napoleon Bonaparte’s main force, had just arrived in Novara, a Lombard town about 20 miles to the west of Milan. Although the soldiers were mostly buoyant, the locals, suddenly hosting the French troops, were apprehensive. Beyle’s commanding officer, worried there might be violence, warned his men not to wander the streets at night. Armed with a sword he had never used, Beyle ignored the warning and set off for the town’s modest opera house.

That evening’s production of Domenico Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio segreto, or The Secret Marriage, was as opulent as the setting. The soprano, it seems, was not bothered by a missing front tooth. Neither was Beyle. The performance, he later recalled, was a “sensation I will never forget.” Having encountered “the divine Cimarosa,” everything the teenage Frenchman had until then done and known—even risking his life in crossing the Alps and encountering cannon fire—was now “coarse and base.” Suddenly, he was filled with a “sublime happiness”—so sublime, in fact, that for the time being, he foreswore describing it for fear of committing exaggerations or falsehoods.

Beyle’s life would now veer in a direction from which he would sometimes stray, but always return: “I had just glimpsed where happiness lay.” Back in his army camp that night, Beyle took a vow: “I must first live, see the world, and become a worthy soldier. After a year or two, I will return to music, my only love.” That promise made him feel “renewed,” perhaps even reborn. From this point on, both the vow and music itself became “the basis of all [his] thoughts.”

And so would music remain for Stendhal, the most lasting of the hundreds of pseudonyms Beyle would adopt and discard during his life. Of course, Stendhal’s international renown today rests on his two greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, but during his lifetime his fame and, at times, his infamy issued from his nonfictional work: biographical and musical writings. In fact, this year marks the 200th anniversary of his book that fused both genres: La Vie de Rossini. This quirky life of the Italian operatic composer Gioachino Rossini offers precious insights not only into the life of its author but also into why so many of us feel like the Stendhal who confessed, “Without music I could not live.”

In La Vie de Rossini, Beyle declared that music was still waiting for the arrival of its Lavoisier—the brilliant 18th-century French chemist and biologist—“the genius who will eventually submit the whole system of the aural nerves, and indeed the human heart itself, to a series of accurate scientific tests and experiments.” Legions of Lavoisiers have since arrived, busy mapping the place where music reigns.

The striking thing about musical activity is that it lights up every region of the brain and every neural subsystem known to scientists. (Since a typical brain contains 100 million neurons, it seems likely that one or two subsystems are yet to be discovered.) Most important, connections between the frontal lobe and the cerebellum are in constant communication. The latter harbors the emotions ignited by music, while the former scrambles to process and structure the sounds. These connections, observes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “run in both directions, with each structure influencing the other.”

Yet more intriguingly, Levitin cites recent research showing that intense musical emotions are tied to regions like the amygdala and frontal cortex, which form “the brain’s award system”—namely, the unleashing of dopamine. In his own studies, Levitin found that listening to music—just about any kind of music—sparks rewarding and reinforcing functions in our brains by both increasing dopamine levels and regulating emotions. What occurs, he writes, is a precise “choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.” If you’ve got rhythm and if you’ve got music, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve also got your girl or guy: you already have the makings of an intense emotional experience.

Beyle was a miserable musician—the fault, he claimed, of his father, who “had all the prejudices of religion and aristocracy,” and who vehemently prevented him from studying music when he was 10 years old. “At sixteen,” Beyle recalled, “I learned successively to play the violin, to sing, and to play the clarinet. Only in the last way did I manage to produce sounds which gave me pleasure.”

Yet his passion for music was boundless. As he blurts in his Memoirs of an Egotist, the “only things I have loved passionately in life are Cimarosa, Mozart, Shakespeare.”  The first two great loves were contemporaries. But this is where things turn curious. You know the name Mozart, but most likely not Cimarosa. Don’t worry: few people today know the name Domenico Cimarosa, fewer have heard his music, and those few, thanks to the lilting sigh of its opening movement, probably know only his Oboe Concerto in C major.

As for Cimarosa’s many operas—he composed more than 80—they are rarely revived, apart from Il Matrimonio segreto, or The Secret Marriage. First performed in Vienna in 1792, the sprightly two-act comedy soon became a staple across Europe, including at the Théâtre Italien, created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801. The opera drew larger audiences in Paris than Mozart’s efforts. Later, no less a figure than Giuseppe Verdi believed that the opera had “everything a comic opera should have.”

Today, Il Matrimonio segreto is, at best, a historical curiosity that opera companies, if only to vary their repertoire, periodically dust off and perform. As the opera critic Joseph Kerman pronounced, a few composers “rose above the banalities of their condition—after years in the galley”—namely, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Mozart, and Verdi—with dozens instead going down with the galley. For Kerman, Cimarosa is among the drowned.

And yet, Beyle heard something in Cimarosa’s music, something true and compelling. If we take him at his word, he attended more than 100 performances of Il Matrimonio segreto in Paris. Beyle and his contemporaries emphasized Cimarosa’s light touch and antic spirit—traits that seemed so true to the Italian character. If only we could hear a Cimarosa aria the way Cimarosa’s contemporaries did. After all, social and aesthetic conventions change over the years, and composers thought to be as inspired as Mozart are judged by later generations to be as insipid as Salieri.

Il matrimonio segreto was the first piece of music Beyle heard after crossing into Italy. Later in life, when he recollected that moment of supreme happiness, one that bordered on an epiphany, he had a soundtrack to accompany the images and emotions. Even if the soprano was missing not one but two front teeth, the music would still fit the singular moment of happiness that Beyle experienced and never stopped recalling. Music—and its meaning—happens when sound meets the mind. The mind, in turn, is shaped by countless social, cultural, and material factors. Our temporal lobes, moreover, work only with what they are given, but what they are given must fall within the horizon or gently nudge against it. If the sounds are too unfamiliar, they will strike us as mere noise.

But there is also a more complicated fact, one that brings us closer to why music was so important to Beyle. The older he got, the shallower Cimarosa seemed to him. If you heard one of his melodies, Beyle came to believe, you heard them all. Beyle even expressed astonishment that delirious audiences demanded not one or two, but five encores of the same aria from a Cimarosa opera: “It’s a terrible flaw: once we know several of his songs, we can predict how those we’ve yet to hear will develop.” The time had come for someone new to push the horizon and point toward the future. Beyle did not have to wait long.

“Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna. From Paris to Calcutta, his name is on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save those of civilization itself.” Rossini was only 32 when Beyle penned these opening lines to his life of the composer. Though he would live another 44 years, this world-historical figure had already tossed off nearly all his enduring works. (And though Beyle was already 41, he had yet to write the books for which he is remembered.)

The musicologist Herbert Weinstock dismissed Beyle’s book as little more than a “psychological self-portrait of its author, a parade of enthusiasms and detestations.” But this is the very reason why Beyle’s book fascinates: it is less about the Italian composer than the French writer. By the time of the book’s publication, Beyle was associated with the dilettanti, a group that, depending on one’s perspective, was either respected or ridiculed for its behavior at musical performances. As Beyle makes clear in the book, a member of the dilettanti was immediately recognizable: “Lost in his private and ecstatic universe of contemplation, anger and impatience are the only reactions that he is likely to manifest towards the importunate intrusions of other people—towards anyone who is rash enough to come between him and the rapture of his soul.”

This state of rapture was a thing to behold. “His mouth,” Beyle writes, “will gape half-open, and every feature will bear traces of intolerable enthusiasm—or, rather, will seem utterly drained of the last thin drop of vitality; his eyes alone may give some insight into the fiery recesses of his soul, and even then, should anybody chance to advise him of the fact, he will bury his head in his hands, so desperate is his contempt for other people.”

It is easy to smile at this portrait of such odd and outlandish behavior—I suspect Beyle was smiling as he wrote it—but he knew that it also represented something important about how listeners were responding to the new kind of music they beheld. Rossini’s music, with its technical brilliance, with its sheer power and range of sonorities, overwhelmed Beyle. He praised Rossini as a composer of genius, one who “flings down whole handfuls of new ideas with careless condescension, sometimes hitting his mark, sometimes missing altogether; his music is a jumble, a conglomeration, an indescribable profusion of negligent luxury, all thrown together pell-mell with the incautious profligacy of inexhaustible wealth.” It fired the imagination of the listener, who was free to conjure up images in the mind that may not necessarily have been intended by the composer.

Curiously, Beyle was far more attracted to operatic than instrumental performances. In fact, he positively disliked the latter, complaining that “difficult and boring concertos are everywhere.” Music had a deeper and more enduring effect on the listener, he argued, when conveyed by words, with instruments serving only as accompaniment. The one advantage to instruments, he scoffed, is that they can produce greater volumes of sound than the human voice. Otherwise, “the human voice still maintains its superiority over any instrument yet invented.” For Beyle, the value of any instrument was directly proportionate to its voice-like qualities.

The Frenchman carried this logic to its end by concluding that the words in an opera’s libretto themselves hardly matter; instead, “the inflexion of the words is of far greater importance.” And, as far as he was concerned, no one did inflexion like the Italians. Here was a language that hewed to human feeling closer than other language. Take a young Italian—indeed any young Italian, so long as his “whole being is preoccupied with some imperious passion,” and he will invariably burst into song, choosing “among all the tunes he knows, the one which seems most aptly to echo his own mood.”

Thus Beyle’s claim, while describing Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri, that words do not suffice to do it justice. “But how on earth,” he sighs, “are you to start explaining this to fools who understand nothing but the libretto?” Though I qualify as one of those fools—my nights at the opera are spent with my eyes bolted on the surtitles—I think I understand Beyle’s claim. When I listen to, say, Angelika Kirschlager’s rendition of Bach’s “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” from the St. Matthew Passion or Lucia Popp’s account of Strauss’s “Beim Schlafengehen” from the Vier Letzte Lieder, I confess that, though I have read the texts in translation, I still do not know the meaning of the individual words. And yet, I also know that I am deeply moved by the music. So much so that, like Stendhal, “I dare not say what I feel because I’ll pass for a madman.” The vocal music of Bach, Strauss, and Brahms—whose choral work Nänie, based on a poem I don’t know by Schiller, always brings me to a stop—always conjures moments in my life that made or remade me.

Of course, high Baroque or late Romantic vocal music does not have a monopoly on this effect. I know that my youngest child Basil’s emotions are galvanized by The Deftones’ “Be Quiet and Drive”—not by the words themselves, nearly incomprehensible when sung, but by how those words are sung by the group’s vocalist, Chino Moreno. I was stunned by the song when I first heard it, hammered by the clatter of guitars and wails of Moreno. When we are driving somewhere together and the song is playing, and I spy Basil gazing out the window, clearly moved, neurons and images connecting, I see what Beyle meant by the promise of happiness.