A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

Father M. Owen Lee, renowned opera commentator and professor emeritus of
classics at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, has revised
and updated 23 articles from the past 30 years for this concluding third
volume of his criticism.

The “season” spans the life of the art form itself, beginning with
the musical experiments of the Camerata in late–16th-century Florence
through to such 20th-century masterpieces as R. Strauss’s Ariadne auf
Naxos and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Lee says that Orpheus, the
fabulous musician of Greek myth, is the story of opera, inspiring a host
of works including Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice,
both of which are described in this volume. Lee the classicist is in
evidence throughout, for example, in the essay on Berlioz’s Les
Troyens, the libretto for which is adapted from Virgil. He also shows
how echoes of Shakespeare can be heard in Verdi’s Aпda, the influence
of French symbolist poetry in Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande, the
impact of Donizetti and Italian opera on Walt Whitman, and the mythic
overtones of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Lee writes insightfully about
Georges Bernanos, the French Catholic writer whose play, The Carmelites,
became the basis of Francis Poulenc’s opera Dialogues of the
Carmelites. The cornerstone of the collection is the splendid
disquisition on Tristan und Isolde, which elucidates how Wagner’s
extraordinary voyage into the subconscious became a cultural landmark.
Lovers of Russian opera, however, will be disappointed by the absence of
such composers as Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

Ultimately, it is Lee the religious humanist who makes the most
enduring impression. Time and again, he reminds us of the inner
spirituality of all great music—that art has value and is
life-affirming. Beautifully written and richly illustrated with personal
reminiscence, A Season of Opera is a veritable feast of the operatic
imagination.