I caught the V & A’s exhibition Opera: Power, Passion and Politics 10 days or so before it closed (which it has done now – sorry), and found it thought-provoking though not in the ‘unmissable’ category.
The exhibitions centres on seven ‘first nights’ of operas in seven different cities. As it turns out, I’ve only seen one of these works – Le Nozze di Figaro – on stage. They were cleverly chosen to illustrate major developments in the history of opera; for example, the Paris premiè of Tannhäuser did duty both for Wagner and for French grand opera. Inevitably this resulted in quite a bit of compression and the exhibition didn’t pretend to cover the entire history of this art form. This was brought up to date with clips of 20th and 21st-century operas shown at the end.
The focus was very much on social context rather than musical technicalities, although there were a lot of instruments and scores on view. Many items had been loaned, including 18th-century costumes from a former private theatre in Italy and a lot of material from Russia relating to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
A potential problem was the varying amount of documentation for each opera and its contemporary reception. There’s really not much relating to Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, certainly not from Monteverdi himself, or even reactions from his contemporaries, and for different reasons we don’t get much insight into Shostakovich’s own observations on his opera, while Nabucco and Salome are much better documented.
What intrigued me the most were the items which related to the practicalities of staging opera. There was a reconstruction of a Handelian stage set with billowing waves, a moving ship and a mermaid which bobbed up and down. A later visual extract from the Met’s L’Amour de loin showed that nothing much has changed when it comes to wowing people with staging. There was a very detailed diagram showing the blocking for the final scene of an early production of Lady Macbeth.
Probably I wasn’t the intended audience for this exhibition because I was familiar with a lot of the background to these operas, but I found myself spending a generous amount of time in the exhibition which is always a good sign.