Forbidden Desires - Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.

Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.

- By Alex Ross - Illustration by Katherine Lam

Until the mid-nineteenth century, opera was wedded to rhythm and rhyme. Librettists supplied composers with heaps of verse for arias and other vocal numbers, alongside chunks of prose recitative that allowed for interstitial exposition. The convention began to break down with Wagner, who expanded recitative to epic proportions. In 1867, the Russian composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky took a further step, setting Pushkin’s blank-verse play “The Stone Guest” almost verbatim. Mussorgsky followed with “Boris Godunov,” a Pushkin adaptation on a monumental scale. Thus arose a genre that became known as Literaturoper, because nothing officially exists until it is named in German. Composers did not need librettists at all; they could make direct use of plays and other literary properties. Two formidable prose operas emerged just after 1900: Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a condensation of the play by Maurice Maeterlinck; and Strauss’s “Salome,” after the decadent drama by Oscar Wilde. This summer, Des Moines Metro Opera, one of America’s boldest smaller companies, staged those two works side by side, sending psychic shivers into the hot summer night.

Literaturoper rests on the assumption that opera suffers from excess artifice and that modern theatrical speech supplies a corrective. The justification was also musical: intensifying experiments in harmony and rhythm called for less formbound texts. Debussy’s otherworldly sonorities, drifting away from the tonal system, uncannily matched Maeterlinck’s Symbolist prose. Mélisande’s entrance line—“