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Could it be magic?

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Jonathan Dove is a new opera in a long, magical tradition. JULIAN GRANT conjures up its family tree

With his new opera The Adventures of Pinocchio (the subject of the current OperaLovers podcast), Jonathan Dove has pulled off the trick of winning over audiences – not least children – and also music critics, a notoriously sceptical faction. It is very early days yet in the life of Pinocchio, but perhaps it will join the select band of operas that are deemed safe for pre-teens. Beyond Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, there are surprisingly few. Perhaps that is because magic in the opera house is generally far from childsplay.

Source for the Mother Goose

The idea that so-called fairy tales are for children only dates back to the 19th century, when adaptations of folk tales were anthologised. In their original forms, some of these stories merit a ‘parental guidance’ rating: an early Sleeping Beauty sees the prince impregnating the slumbering princess, while a seminal Chinese version of Cinderella brings ugly sisters who are sentenced to dance to their deaths in red-hot iron shoes.

Opera tends to favour themes taken from literary fairy tales, a genre which originated in France around the turn of the eighteenth century with the gossipy and racy works of Madame d’Aulnoy and the better-known narratives of Charles Perrault. His Les contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Stories) first published in 1697, features characters such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Hop o’ My Thumb, Puss in Boots and Red Riding Hood. The literary fairy tale reaches its popular peak in the work of Hans Christian Andersen, yet there are countless other examples, from writers as prominent as Goethe, Pushkin and Calvino. When Carlo Collodi, a respected social and political commentator, first conceived the picaresque and allegorical adventures of Pinocchio in the 1880s, he did not guarantee a happy end for the puppet; it was later supplied, ensuring the book’s place as a children’s classic.

Giant steps

In opera, the ‘fairy tale’ genre can encompass works of vastly differing scale and seriousness. Wagner’s colossal Ring of the Nibelungs teems with dragons, giants and dwarves, yet its emotions, time-scale and cultural references are far from juvenile. In the Ring, Wagner transformed legend and folk-tale into an all-consuming Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’), yet even his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), written in 1835, draws on a hodge-podge of sources: it’s a chivalric romance with questing lovers and hypnotic instruments, magic shields and curses. This cocktail of fairy tale, myth and history has sources in medieval crusading epics, 18th century 'magic operas' (by Handel, Gluck and Mozart with Die Zauberflöte) and prefigures Richard Strauss's epic Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) of 1919. Die Frau’s hybrid mythology is so obscure that the librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, published a separate book to clarify the story and its symbolism. This extravagant opera is widely performed today, relished as a virtuoso…