Opera

The female singers who graced the nineteenth-century operatic stage were among the most celebrated women of their era, but they were also among the most transgressive. This book explores the means by which this preeminence was negotiated, traversing the musical, the dramatic, and the visual, while addressing more recognizably modern concerns, such as career management, literary representation, and image manipulation. A key theme is the emergence of the diva archetype over the course of the century—a new ideological discourse through which the extremes of operatic female vocality were reinterpreted. Chapters approach the prima donna from the perspectives of cultural history, musicology, gender/sexuality studies, theater and literature studies, and critical theory.

This study seeks to explore the role and significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian operas. Each chapter investigates the art of aria insertion during the nineteenth century from varying perspectives, beginning with an overview of the changing fortunes of the practice, followed by explorations of individual prima donnas and their relationship with particular insertion arias: Carolina Ungher’s difficulties in finding a “perfect” aria to introduce into Donizetti’s Marino Faliero; Guiditta Pasta’s performance of an aria from Pacini’s Niobe in a variety of operas, and the subsequent fortunes of that particular aria; Maria Malibran’s interpolation of Vaccai’s final scene from Giulietta e Romeo in place of Bellini’s original setting in his I Capuleti e i Montecchi; and Adelina Patti’s “mini-concerts” in the lesson scene of Il barbiere di Siviglia. The final chapter provides a treatment of a short story, “Memoir of a Song,” narrated by none other than an insertion aria itself, and the volume concludes with an appendix containing the first modern edition of this short story, a narrative that has lain utterly forgotten since its publication in 1849.

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan und Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a “mere trifle”—a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. The book explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. It attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries, offering also a keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. It is an argument which touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. This account of Wagner's music drama blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the 21st century.

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelung. This book offers an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner’s achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. The book draws out the philosophical and human significance of the text and the music. It shows how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As it journeys across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, the book leads us to the central concern of the Ring—the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan’s quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The book traces the evolution of Wotan’s efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, it suggests that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible—to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brünnhilde who shows the way. The Ring’s ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but this book sees a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative.

This book explores the idea of expression and meaning in Mahler's music by examining its plural voices—their tone, manner, and historical resonance. Ranging across all the symphonies and songs, it considers how these works foreground the idea of artifice and irony while at the same time presenting themselves as acts of authentic expression and disclosure. While this music is shaped by strategies of calling forth its own mysterious voice—as if from nature or the Unconscious—at other times it reveals itself as something constructed, often self‐consciously assembled from familiar and well‐worn materials. It plays constantly with different musical genres and styles, moving between them in a way that often bewildered audiences. The result is that Mahler's symphonies exacerbate to breaking point their own inherited ideals of symphonic unity, narrative struggle, and transcendent affirmation. Their quality of radical self‐critique creates a link between the late‐18th‐century idea of romantic irony and the late‐20th‐century idea of deconstruction. But Mahler's music is not easily subsumed by either idea. While it acknowledges the conventionality of all its voices, at the same time, through the intensity of its tone, it speaks “as if” what it said were true. The urgency of this act, bound up with the Viennese modernism that Mahler prefigured, remains powerfully resonant for our own age.

This book explores the means by which two early 20th-century operas — Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) — transform the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language, and how this language reflects the psycho-dramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Balázs. In reaction to the realism of 19th-century theater, many authors began to develop a new interest in psychological motivation and a level of consciousness manifested in metaphor, ambiguity, and symbol. In his plays, Maeterlinck was to transform the internal concept of subconscious motivation into an external one, in which human emotions and actions are entirely controlled by fate. The two operas of this study represent the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. The new musical language is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic-diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations (dominant ninth, whole-tone, octatonic). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serving as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as symbols of fate. This book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social, and aesthetic contexts.

Alternatives to grand opera and popular musical go back at least as far as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, early Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill as well as the Broadway and off-Broadway theater operas of the '30s and '40s, and the modernist experiments of the '60s. Yet this long and continuing history, with its complex ideas and philosophy as well as musical and theatrical achievements, has never been properly sorted out. This book is the first comprehensive attempt in English to cover a still-emerging art form in its widest range. It provides a wealth of examples and descriptions, not only of the works themselves, but of the concepts, ideas, and trends that have gone into the evolution of what may be the most central performance art form of the post-modern world. The first two sections of the book deal with Music in Music Theater (including the many new and various uses of the human voice) and Theater in Music Theater (including culture, text, visual strategies, and the multiple new concepts of space). The third section covers European and American music theaters in their various histories and manifestations, with chapters on the more innovative wing of popular music theater, extended voice, and the influence of new media. The fourth part of the book discusses criticism and analysis, improvisation, the issues surrounding pop and high art, and the crucial questions about the audience for music theater. An appendix includes a music-theater bibliography and information about some of the principal venues for the art form.

Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Recognition — or anagnôrisis, Aristotle's term in the Poetics — is a moment of new awareness that brings about a crucial reversal in the action. Employing both literary and musical analysis, and drawing on critical thought from Aristotle to Terence Cave, this book explores the ways in which the themes of Mozart's operas — clemency, constancy, forgiveness, and other ideals cherished by late 18th-century culture — depend for their dramatization on recognition. Several of the operas culminate in a moment of climactic recognition, many involve the use of disguise, and all include scenes in which characters make significant realizations of identity, feeling, or purpose. Many turn explicitly on themes of knowledge, themes that possess a special resonance in an age that named itself the Enlightenment. A critical understanding of recognition in Mozart's operas reveals the late 18th-century culture of sensibility as an influential but uneasy presence in the age of enlightenment. At the same time, it opens up new ways of thinking about questions of cultural identity, conventions of ending, and the representation of cultural values in these works. Theoretical chapters are devoted to the concepts of recognition and plot; analytical chapters are devoted to Die Zauberflöte, La finta giardiniera, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and La clemenza di Tito. Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, and other works of Mozart and his contemporaries are also considered.

The years between 1900 and 1920 mark a moment of change in the relations between opera and popular music in the United States, a midpoint between the intimate connection of the nineteenth century and the widening gulf of the later twentieth century. This book describes Tin Pan Alley songs that quote operatic melodies, describe opera singers or operatic characters, or in other ways allude to operatic culture. These verbal and musical allusions illuminate social issues that the songs address either indirectly or directly in a comical way, as novelties. Part 1 considers songs that use Italian opera, and especially singers such as Enrico Caruso, to comment on the period's massive wave of immigration from southern Italy. Part 2 treats songs that respond to first-wave feminism either by satirizing female opera singers or appropriating the heroines of two operas that premiered in the first decade of the century, Strauss's Salome and Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The songs in part 3 use opera and its lowbrow opposite, ragtime, to debate the cultural aspirations of African Americans, expressing the era's growing awareness that America's most valuable musical contribution might be not its symphonies and operas but its vernacular music, rooted in black ethnicity but emblematic of the nation as a whole. Tin Pan Opera demonstrates how opera's role in the popular culture of the early twentieth century was only scarcely less extensive than in the nineteenth.