Pablo Massa writes:

>According to your standards "Dido and Aeneas" and "Tosca" would be works
>with "sad- not tragic- ends".  Isn't the fact that the heroine ritually
>cuts herself her throat with a dagger enough to declare a work as
>"tragic"?.

No.  Not every suicide is tragic (c.f.  Chekhov, or Schnitzler).  We're
too apt to bandy words and hype every sad event as tragic, which lends
reflected dignity to sudden death but debases the coin of the truly tragic.

"Tosca" most certainly is not tragic, merely a melodramatic series of
unlucky accidents and temporary derangements.  "Dido and Aeneas" ...
well yes, we might allow the Carthagian Queen, albeit mainly for the sake
of Aeneas's dilemma, not Dido's.  However, Purcell's music is ennobling,
sad, a lament for the human condition, bereft of self-pity; all of which
I suppose does indeed give his heroine ultimately a tragic stature.

>but I hardly can conceive a more cruel and tragic ("heavy", if you want)
>libretto than "Madame Butterfly".

Cruel indeed.  Personally, I'd call it an extended exercise in exquisitely
refined sado-masochism rather than a tragedy.  It starts with a comic
fugue ripped off from "The Bartered Bride" for goodness sake!  Where is
Butterfly's tragic flaw or dilemma? She's prettily deluded, that's all.
Everybody tells her the Pinkerton marriage is a temporary nonsense, and her
Uncle the Bonze gives her a good telling off for being so stupid as to
believe in it for one second.

Please, I'm not saying it's a less than great work, musically.  I believe
"Butterfly" is as good as anything Puccini wrote after "La Boheme", though
it's not as consistent as that masterpiece.  However, it is no more a true
tragedy than Berg's "Lulu" or Lehar's "Giuditta".

If it ended with Butterfly falling into Pinkerton's arms, it would be pure
through-written operetta (Just as Shakespeare's "Othello" would be a comedy
if somebody - anybody - had said something -anything - a scene or two
earlier!)

>Operetta is never (or almost never) related to tragedy.  I don't know
>if this argument works in order to trace a line between both, but can
>you imagine Franz Lehar writing a vaudeville about Medea or Oedipus?.

No, he had no sense of humour (a necessity for any tragedian).  But
Offenbach did something horribly similar in both "Orpheus" and "Belle
Helene", which does after all have The Trojan War as an implied sequel!
That's what makes it so potent - farce is very close to tragedy, much
closer than Puccinian melodrama.

>But please, let's say at least that both works are "serious"!!!

Absolutely agreed ... as opposed to solemn, or truly "tragic".

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