Pablo Massa writes in response to me:

>>Yes.  Even Wagner's greatest musical heights, in the main, find him in his
>>least "symphonic" mode (e.g.  Quintet in "Die Meistersinger", Act 2 Final
>>Trio in "Gotterdammerung".)
>
>Sorry, I'll insist: I don't see why a "numbers" opera should be harder
>to write than an opera based on the "endless melody" wagnerian model.

Comparison of the virtues and difficulties wasn't what I trying to ask
about.  I was more interested in why (a) it became fashionable to go down
the 'melos' route; and (b) why all composers, when it comes to the dramatic
crunch, tend to break into 'numbers'.  This is as true of Wagner and
Verdi as anyone else (cf the start of the last scenes of both Otello and
Falstaff, which of course ends with a fugal number).  All of which rather
suggests it's easier to do numbers rather than the reverse.  But ...

>A good faking method for numbers opera could be this: you can collect
>a number of previously written arias and duets (even written by another
>composer), adapt the words and change the keys.  After this, you will have
>only to write the recitative parts.  Isn't that easy?.

Yes.  Except, of course, that it doesn't work.  Examine Handel's
pasticchios that he vampirised from his other operas.  The arias are the
same, the keys and recits work fine.  The characters, on the other hand,
fall apart.  The difference? To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, if we look at
Cleopatra's sequence of arias in "Giulio Cesare" we find seven different
ways of looking at the same blackbird.

>In fact, what sometimes is
>glorious is not a leitmotiv in itself, but some of its transformations.

Indeed, although this shunts my question a little further down the line.
Why do we seem to find the rather simple sequential development of, say,
the 'Fate' motif in Act 1 of "Die Walkure" more 'advanced' than Handel's
use of complementary themes for Cleopatra? Rhythm and timbre can, of
course, equally define form.

>Concerning formal coherence: some entire acts in wagnerian operas are
>globally builded from schemes like AAB, etc.  They are not divided in
>numbers, each of them with a formal unity, but they have indeed a global
>form.

Examples? I have a suspicion that we're not aware of any such symphonic
structures in performance.  If the piece has worked dramatically, the
material will have moved on in a way which cannot be 'symphonic' in this
classical manner.  Ah, but (say the analysts) we're aware of them at a
deeper level.  Again, this sort of argument is interesting not because it's
right or wrong - it's manifestly neither - but because we feel the need to
come up with it at all.

>However, about a century and half ago, many people was of the opposite
>opinon of Christopher.  What some wagnerites felt as an "evasion" was
>precisely the "superficial" intelligibility and "pleasantness" of numbers
>opera model.  One can see this clearly at Nietzsche's "Geburt der
>Tragoedie" (chapter 19, not "11" as I wrote in a former message, sorry).

My opinion, as I thought I'd made clear in the first post, is not so
polarised - it's like comparing apples with oranges.  At some junctures
in time, we might prefer one or the other, that's all.

As far as Nietzsche goes, he's a dangerous authority to quote.  In another
context I've just had cause to employ a precisely contrary point he made
later in life, when he saw Chueca's revista-zarzuela "La Gran Via" in
Vienna (numbers opera, short, super-organised as an urban dance suite but
not thematically) to the effect that Chueca's masterpiece was wonderfully
refreshing after hours of Wagnerian 'melos', and really represented the
"true path forward" ...  so much for Nietzsche (wise man!)

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"