Listening to Everyone at Once

On a rather tiresome and slow Tuesday afternoon a few weeks ago that filled with work that dragged, I put a recording of Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville on the stereo. After the breathless overture the drama started off simply enough and it faded into the background as I continued to tap away on my computer.

But slowly and inexorably the music drew me in, until I couldn’t work anymore and I was standing up, being dragged along by the irresistible momentum and force of the Act I finale. I nearly applauded in my empty flat when it drew to a close, and then wondered where exactly I had heard that kind of writing before. Oh yes, of course: Mozart. What was it? Cosi fan Tutte? Don Giovanni? No, it was Figaro where it all started.

Mozart seems to have been the first composer fully to realise what could be done with this kind of writing. Earlier operas certainly contained duets and larger ensembles, but they were generally moments in which characters sing together rather than express themselves individually. In The Marriage of Figaro, however, the music did something that spoken theatre cannot. It ceased simply to accompany the drama and started representing several independent states of mind at the same moment.

The great Act II finale starts with something almost absurdly domestic: the Count demanding that the Countess unlock the door to her dressing room. Cherubino is hidden inside. Susanna is elsewhere. Figaro knows only part of what has happened. The Count knows less, but suspects more. The audience knows almost everything.

At first the drama advances in recognisable stages. The Count insists on opening the room himself. The Countess reluctantly agrees. They leave together to fetch tools. During their absence Susanna releases Cherubino, who escapes through the window, and takes his place inside the room. When the door is finally opened, the Count discovers not his wife's page but her maid. His certainty evaporates.

One might imagine that the misunderstanding has now been resolved. Instead, Mozart and Da Ponte allow it to proliferate. Figaro arrives, unaware of the latest developments. Antonio, the gardener, enters complaining that someone has leapt from the window into his flower beds. A dropped piece of paper threatens to identify the fugitive. Figaro calmly claims that he himself made the jump. Before that explanation can properly settle, Marcellina, Bartolo and Basilio appear on stage to press Figaro's obligation to marry Marcellina.

What is remarkable is not simply the ingenuity of Beaumarchais's plotting, although that is considerable. It is the way Mozart transforms it into comprehensible music. As each new character enters, he does not stop the dramatic flow to give them an aria explaining their feelings. Instead, they bring those feelings directly into the musical fabric. The Count becomes increasingly convinced that he has uncovered deception. Figaro improvises explanation after explanation. The Countess and Susanna attempt to keep pace with events. Antonio stubbornly refuses to abandon his evidence. Marcellina is concerned only with enforcing her legal claim. They are not taking turns to speak. They are thinking simultaneously.

Nor are they all singing in the same way. Mozart gives each character music appropriate to their temperament and immediate purpose. The Count's lines are firm, often rhythmically decisive, reflecting his confidence that reason and authority remain on his side. Figaro's phrases are quicker, more agile, constantly adapting to each new complication. The Countess's music repeatedly seeks moments of poise, only to be interrupted by fresh developments, while Susanna slips easily between the characters, her vocal line often acting almost as a thread binding the ensemble together. Underneath, the orchestra does far more than accompany. Strings maintain a nervous pulse, woodwind comment with extraordinary subtlety on shifts of mood, and the harmonic direction quietly tells us when confidence is becoming uncertainty or suspicion is beginning to harden into conviction.

What makes the scene almost miraculous is that none of these musical identities disappears into the crowd. Even when six or seven people are singing together, each retains an individual musical personality. We hear not simply a collection of voices but a collection of minds. It is difficult to think of another artistic medium capable of doing quite the same thing. A novelist can move from one consciousness to another, but only sequentially. A playwright can allow interruptions, but not genuine simultaneity. Cinema can cut rapidly between faces, but it still asks us to observe one emotional reality after another. Music alone allows several interior worlds to occupy the same instant.

For nearly twenty minutes the finale expands in this way. New voices enter; earlier ones return; alliances shift; accusations dissolve into fresh misunderstandings. Yet the music remains perfectly lucid throughout. It is rather like watching a conversation in which everyone interrupts everyone else, yet somehow every word remains audible. More remarkably still, every emotional truth remains intelligible.

Rossini inherited that dramatic possibility and recognised that it could be driven still further. Where Mozart allows the tension to grow almost imperceptibly, Rossini delights in exposing the mechanism itself. His finales often seem to gather momentum by the simple expedient of refusing to let anyone leave the stage.

The first act of The Barber of Seville provides perhaps the clearest example. Almaviva, disguised as a drunken soldier, has gained entry to Bartolo's house. Bartolo protests that he is exempt from providing military lodging. Rosina attempts to conceal her own excitement. Figaro tries to keep Almaviva's increasingly implausible scheme alive. Berta watches the proceedings with weary disbelief. Basilio arrives at precisely the wrong moment. Eventually the noise attracts the town guard.

By now almost everyone is singing at once, but not in agreement. Bartolo demands justice. Almaviva continues his masquerade. Figaro invents explanations as quickly as the others destroy them. Rosina fears the entire enterprise is collapsing. The soldiers are simply trying to establish what has happened. Rossini's celebrated crescendos do not merely make the music louder. They create the impression of a situation that has become impossible to arrest, each repetition adding another layer of confusion until the whole scene seems to tip over under its own accumulated weight.

Where Mozart differentiated characters largely through the individuality of their melodic lines, Rossini set them apart through rhythm and momentum. His melodies are often shorter, more conversational, allowing the words to tumble over one another. The orchestra lays down an almost mechanical pulse beneath them, and against that pulse each character struggles to impose their own version of events. The strings drive relentlessly forwards with repeated figures, the winds punctuate the action with flashes of wit, while sudden orchestral silences become almost as important as the music itself, freezing the confusion for a split second before releasing it again. His famous crescendos are therefore dramatic devices as much as musical ones. They suggest that events have slipped beyond anyone's control. The characters continue to believe they are driving the scene, while the audience increasingly realises that the scene itself has taken over.

Rossini himself perhaps explained his connection with Mozart better than anyone. Speaking of Beethoven in later life, he observed: "I take him twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day. You will tell me that Beethoven is a Colossus who often gives you a dig in the ribs, whilst Mozart is always adorable; it is that the latter had the chance of going very young to Italy, at a time when they still sang well."

There is affection in the remark, but also recognition. Rossini knew perfectly well what Mozart had achieved. He did not imitate him. He took one of Mozart's great dramatic discoveries and asked what would happen if the whole apparatus were wound tighter. Mozart had shown that music could represent simultaneous consciousness. Rossini discovered that it could also represent the exhilarating loss of control that accompanies it.

Donizetti inherited Rossini's fluency but relaxed its precision slightly. In L'elisir d'amore and Don Pasquale, the ensemble becomes less a machine than a conversation, allowing vanity, embarrassment and self-deception to circulate freely through the cast. Characters misunderstand one another not because the plot demands it but because, as in ordinary life, each is preoccupied with their own concerns. One begins to feel that the music is mapping not simply events but the shifting social relationships between people.

Verdi, by contrast, found that the same technique could sustain tragedy. The quartet Bella figlia dell'amore from Rigoletto remains an extraordinary masterpiece because each of its four participants inhabits an entirely different emotional world. The Duke seduces in long, graceful phrases that scarcely acknowledge anyone else. Maddalena answers with playful scepticism. Hidden outside, Gilda's melodic line is wounded and inward, while Rigoletto's darker, more declamatory phrases point relentlessly towards revenge. Verdi scarcely asks the characters to listen to one another. Instead, he invites us to listen to all four of them at once. It is not conversation. It is four consciousnesses laid bare.

From there the idea became almost part of the grammar of musical theatre. Offenbach filled his operettas with ensembles in which Parisian society seems unable to stop talking over itself. Johann Strauss II did much the same in Die Fledermaus, where disguises, flirtation and intoxication produce an almost continuous state of elegant confusion. Gilbert and Sullivan inherited the tradition, replacing Italian bel canto with rapid-fire verbal dexterity in English, yet preserving the same underlying principle: that music can accommodate several independent viewpoints at once without reducing any of them.

By the time of Bernstein's West Side Story, more than a century after The Barber of Seville, the language has changed almost beyond recognition. Yet in the "Tonight" quintet the underlying dramatic idea is immediately familiar. The orchestra no longer sounds like Mozart or Rossini: jazz harmonies and Latin rhythms have entered the musical vocabulary. Nevertheless, the dramatic achievement is essentially the same. The Jets anticipate violence. The Sharks prepare for confrontation. Tony and Maria imagine reconciliation. Anita senses danger. Each group inhabits its own emotional future, and Bernstein allows us to experience all of those futures simultaneously.

Once again, music proves capable of something that neither dialogue nor film editing can quite equal: allowing several human consciousnesses to coexist, complete and distinct, within a single dramatic moment. And it was the experience of hearing an entire world of minds contained within a single operatic scene that had me out of my chair and swept away by the genius of Rossini.