Why Art Forms Rise and Fall
An art form can outlive the age that made it necessary. Its masterpieces may remain indispensable long after the production of comparable new works has become exceptional. This appears to be the condition of the symphony and opera, which are the two art forms on which I will focus this essay. Italian opera from Rossini to Puccini, German opera from Mozart to Richard Strauss, and the symphony from Haydn to Shostakovich represent sustained periods of creative fecundity for which the present offers nothing remotely comparable.
The existence of a successful contemporary opera does little to answer this argument. The question concerns the abundance, stature, and succession of new works across generations. To say that opera has largely run its course is not to say that Otello has lost its power. To question the creative future of the symphony is not to suggest that Beethoven’s Seventh has become obsolete. A great work can remain alive when the tradition that produced it no longer renews itself. The performance of an old masterpiece is a present event; the creation of a new masterpiece is a different achievement.
Art forms do not obey a biological timetable. They have no predetermined adolescence, maturity, and senescence. Nevertheless, their histories often resemble such a progression because they depend on circumstances that do change. An artistic language develops, institutions give it support, and an audience learns how to respond. For a time, these conditions reinforce one another. Eventually, the relationship weakens. The conventions become familiar, the institutions cautious, and the audience’s attention less concentrated. What once seemed the natural medium for an ambitious artist becomes one choice among many.
The symphony offers an unusually clear example. In Haydn’s hands, it became a marvelously flexible means of organizing contrast, surprise, wit, and feeling. Mozart deepened its expressive range. Beethoven made it capable of sustaining a drama without characters or words. A musical idea could encounter resistance, undergo transformation, and return with a significance it had not possessed at the beginning. An orchestra could make an argument that could not be paraphrased.
The nineteenth century supplied both the audience and the institutions for this expansion. Public concerts, professional orchestras, publishers, and a musically educated public gave the symphony a place of unusual prestige. It became a medium in which a composer might attempt his largest statement. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler produced radically different answers to the possibilities Beethoven had revealed. Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich carried the tradition into the twentieth century. Across this long span, the achievement was cumulative: one powerful musical personality followed another, repeatedly renewing the form.
Success, however, creates its own difficulties. Once a form has supported so many commanding personalities, a later composer inherits expectations as well as opportunities. A new symphony must justify itself in the presence of works that already seem to encompass an extraordinary range of human experience. Mere competence is insufficient. Resemblance invites the charge of imitation; departure may make the relationship to the tradition difficult to hear.
This does not mean that combinations of notes have been exhausted. There is no mathematical shortage of music. The difficulty is finding fresh and compelling uses for conventions whose most obvious possibilities have already received magnificent expression. Mahler expanded the symphony toward an all-embracing world. Sibelius, in his Seventh, compressed its processes into a single continuous movement. These were different solutions to the problem of making an inherited form newly necessary.
Shostakovich belongs within this great period of fertility. His fifteen symphonies demonstrated that the form could absorb the terrors, ironies, and ambiguities of a different historical experience. Orchestral composition continues, but the symphony no longer produces a comparable succession of works that command a lasting place in musical life.
Opera’s history involves the additional complications of theater. At its height, it united several powerful attractions: the human voice, dramatic conflict, orchestral color, spectacle, and the excitement of performers taking formidable risks in public. Its conventions were artificial, but its emotional effects could be overwhelming. An audience willing to accept that people sing at moments of mortal crisis gained access to experiences that spoken drama could not supply.
Consider the Italian succession from Rossini through Bellini and Donizetti to Verdi and Puccini. These composers differed enormously, yet each produced multiple works that became permanent possessions of the musical world. Around them stood other composers whose best operas also endured. The period gave us the comic vitality of The Barber of Seville, the sustained lyricism of Norma, the dramatic concentration of Rigoletto, the vast human and political world of Don Carlos, and the intimate tragedies of La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. Its fecundity consisted both in the number of enduring works and in the variety of experience they encompassed.
Verdi’s achievement within this succession illustrates how completely a great artist can inhabit a form without being confined by it. From his early operas to Otello and Falstaff, he repeatedly discovered more exact relationships between musical structure and human behavior. His development also warns against identifying artistic maturity with mere size or complexity. Falstaff is the work of an old man whose musical imagination had become astonishingly quick, economical, and free.
The German tradition presents the same phenomenon on an equally imposing scale. From Mozart through Beethoven, Weber, and Wagner to Richard Strauss, it produced a succession of works that transformed the possibilities of opera. Mozart belongs to this German cultural and musical world even when writing in Italian: the language of The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte does not make their composer Italian. His achievement also includes the German-language The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Magic Flute. These traditions were never sealed national compartments; their interaction was one source of their vitality.
Consider the distance traveled from Mozart’s ensembles, in which several characters reveal themselves simultaneously, through the moral drama of Fidelio and the supernatural world of Der Freischütz, to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and the Ring. Strauss then supplied the violent intensity of Salome and Elektra and the comedy, tenderness, and awareness of passing time in Der Rosenkavalier. Here again was an extended period of creative abundance, embracing strikingly different musical personalities and conceptions of theater. Contemporary German opera offers nothing comparable to that succession in either the concentration of enduring masterpieces or their place in musical life.
Janáček, Berg, and Britten are indispensable to the broader account. Wozzeck and Peter Grimes possess an enduring dramatic force. But these achievements do not erase the historical change. Nor should Strauss be treated as an isolated exception to decline: he belongs within the great German flowering, just as Puccini belongs within the Italian one and Shostakovich within the symphonic tradition. The question is what has followed these extraordinary periods. Pointing to an individual later success leaves the scale of the contrast untouched.
There is an obvious qualification to this comparison. We judge the present’s unfiltered output against the past’s survivors. The ordinary operas of Verdi’s time have mostly disappeared, leaving the impression of an age populated almost entirely by geniuses. Yet selection alone does not explain the change. A century has now passed since Puccini’s death, and subsequent generations of composers have had decades in which to establish their works. The contrast cannot indefinitely be dismissed as a failure to give the new enough time. A flourishing tradition regularly adds works that audiences insist on hearing again. A premiere, an enthusiastic review, and an institutional commitment to novelty do not establish that kind of life. The decisive event is the return.
Changes in musical language contributed to the difficulty. Tonality gave composers and listeners a shared sense of departure, tension, expectation, and arrival. Listeners did not need to know harmony to feel its operation. Composers could surprise them because they possessed expectations worth upsetting.
Some twentieth-century composers deliberately weakened or abandoned this common ground. The resulting music could possess great expressive power, but the listener often had to acquire the language of an individual work before understanding its argument. That is a substantial demand, especially when an unfamiliar opera is expensive to mount and unlikely to receive repeated hearings. Novelty could command professional attention without creating an equivalent public appetite.
It would be too easy, however, to blame the decline on dissonance or on composers’ supposed contempt for their audiences. Familiarity can make difficult music intelligible, and accessibility does not guarantee distinction. An agreeable derivative opera is no more likely to displace Mozart than a forbidding original one. The real problem is achieving individuality and communicative force together. No compositional method can guarantee either.
The audience’s circumstances also changed. Cinema acquired much of opera’s former territory as a large-scale public entertainment combining drama, spectacle, celebrity, and music. Recordings made musical experience available without attendance at a performance. Later technologies multiplied the competition for attention. Musical talent had more places to go, and listeners had more ways to satisfy their appetites. A medium can lose its central position even while excellent work continues within it.
Meanwhile, the economics of live performance favor caution. An orchestra cannot perform a forty-minute symphony in twenty minutes without destroying the work. An opera cannot dispense with most of its singers and instrumentalists because another industry has become more productive. New productions require substantial expenditure before anyone knows whether audiences will want them. Established masterpieces offer imperfect but understandable protection against that uncertainty.
The resulting circle is difficult to break. Familiar works attract audiences; institutions repeat them; listeners become still more familiar with them. New works receive fewer opportunities to acquire the familiarity on which affection often depends. Some deserve more hearings than they get. Others disappear for the same reason most works have always disappeared: they are not sufficiently good. The difficulty is distinguishing neglect from an accurate verdict before the opportunities run out.
Perhaps the most sobering possibility is that great artistic flowering cannot be made permanent. Talent is necessary, but talent alone does not create the combination of language, institutions, opportunity, and public expectation that allows a form to flourish. We can teach composition, support orchestras, commission operas, and cultivate audiences. None of these activities comes with a promise of another Mozart or Verdi. Their appearance was never an administrative achievement.
The symphony and opera appear to have largely completed their periods of greatest creative fertility without having exhausted their value. A new masterpiece would be cause for celebration. Reversing the historical judgment would require something more: a sustained succession of major works demonstrating that either form had entered another fertile age. Until that happens, the occasional contemporary success cannot bear the weight of an argument for continuing vitality on the old scale.
The periodic flourishing of other art forms is just as pronounced as that of opera and the symphony. Art forms can seem to have life spans, as men do, even though their course is not biologically predetermined. The reasons they grow and then wither are as complex as those that govern living things. We can only hope that new forms take root as older ones decline.
There is a loss when a culture’s musical institutions look backward more eagerly than forward. But the inheritance is no small consolation. Don Carlos does not become less profound because we cannot name a recent opera of equal stature. Beethoven’s Ninth does not need a successor to justify another performance. Art is under no obligation to improve with the calendar. We may regret that these traditions no longer produce masterpieces with their former abundance while remaining grateful that the masterpieces themselves have not finished with us.
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