Top 10 Composers: Hailing Opera’s Shakespeare, and Its Proust By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 17, 2011, 7:00 am

Top 10 Composers: Hailing Opera’s Shakespeare, and Its Proust By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

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Anthony Tommasini has been exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

Having skipped ahead to the 20th century in our ambitious quest to identify the top 10 classical composers of all time, let’s shift back to the crowded and complex 19th century. And let’s start with the dynamic duo of 19th-century opera, Verdi and Wagner.

Opera, you could argue (and many readers have), is a different animal. But Verdi and Wagner were great students of Beethoven, and their operas have symphonic sweep, architectonic integrity and orchestral richness galore. In addition, you cannot discount their enduring popularity.

Verdi is an ideal case of a composer who came from a definite tradition that laid out the protocols and practices of how to write an opera. All his life he balanced honoring tradition with striking out on new paths. Each opera, almost without exception, was better, bolder, more masterly and more personal than the one before, right until the end, when, in his 70s, he wrote his final masterpieces, “Otello” and “Falstaff.”

“Don Carlo” is the “Hamlet” of Italian opera. If the plots of some works are nonsensical, Verdi embraced musical drama not as a way to present neat little narratives but as a chance to bring to life flawed and lost characters caught up in complex relationships, especially those between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. Sorting out the political factions and power plays of “Simon Boccanegra” may be impossible. But the opera is like a bleak morality tale that shows how rash actions taken in your youth can fatalistically set the course of your life. The tenor Plácido Domingo had an improbable triumph last season at the Metropolitan Opera singing Simon, a touchstone Verdi baritone role. The opera returns to the Met this week with a compelling baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, in the lead.

Verdi should not be blamed for his own popularity nor tainted by the excessive devotion of the most fanatical opera buffs. Those who dispute the sophistication of his craft don’t know what they’re talking about.

Let me defer to a rather authoritative voice, that of Stravinsky. In his book “Poetics of Music,” Stravinsky challenges the assertion that the early Verdi works, steeped in the traditions of Italian opera and thick with oom-pah-pah arias, are somehow negligible, and that only with the more experimental operas of his later years did Verdi reach his potential.

“I know that I am going counter to the general opinion that sees Verdi’s best work in the deterioration of the genius that gave us ‘Rigoletto,’ ‘Il Trovatore,’ ‘Aida’ and ‘La Traviata,’ ” Stravinsky wrote. But, he added, “I maintain that there is more substance and true invention in the aria ‘La donna è mobile,’ for example, in which this elite saw nothing but deplorable facility, than in the rhetoric and vociferations of the ‘Ring.’ ”

I disagree with Stravinsky about Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But the elite he was referring to were his fellow composers, and Stravinsky’s astute defense of Verdi shook up contemporary music circles.

Consider Verdi’s specific skills as a composer. Orchestration? Listen to the diaphanous opening of the Nile scene in “Aida.” Counterpoint? The greatest fugue in opera is the joyous concluding ensemble scored for soloists, chorus and orchestra at the end of “Falstaff.” And speaking of “Falstaff,” there is an episode in Act III that might seem like a throwaway moment, when Falstaff, as he has been instructed, arrives in Windsor Forest at night for what he thinks will be a romantic assignation. As distant chimes strike midnight, he counts off the hours (“Una, due, tre, …”). Each is accompanied with a different chord in the orchestra, an ingenious and haunting harmonic progression.

For Stravinsky, there was just too much bombast in Wagner. I certainly understand what he meant. Still, the more I immerse myself in the Wagner operas, the more staggering they seem.

Wagner was a nasty guy who transcended himself in his works. He and his followers produced a lot of hype about the Gesamtkunstwerk concept: opera as an ideal amalgam of all the arts. Yet cut through the aesthetic verbiage, and Wagner pulls it off. A great performance of “Tristan und Isolde” in a compelling production offers an artistic immersion like no other.

Musically, Wagner was a pioneering figure without whom Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and even Debussy (though he hated to admit it) would have been impossible. You have to look at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel murals or Proust’s seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time” to find a work in any field as ambitious and arresting as Wagner’s “Ring.” Yet for all the work’s mystical trappings and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, it is a humane, wise and moving story of the imperious god Wotan and his dysfunctional family, who bring about their own destruction.

Perhaps too much is made of Wagner’s leitmotifs: the technique of fashioning brief musical motifs for crucial characters, objects, places and philosophical themes (fate, death, renunciation) in his operas. Yet the masterly way he manipulates, develops and transforms these motifs has never been equaled in opera. His model here, I think, was Beethoven, the ultimate master of motivic development. Wagner honored Beethoven, one of his heroes, by adapting the technique to opera.

This much I’m giving away now: Verdi and Wagner make my list. Both of them.