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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.

Berlioz the composer was also a writer and critic. His Memoirs and Evenings with the Orchestra are well-known and well-loved. This book offers a selection of his day-to-day criticism in English, taking him from his student days as a participant in musical polemics over Rossini to his first years of mature success: in 1834 he began writing for the newly founded Revue et gazette musicale, the French counterpart to Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; in 1835 he became music critic at the Journal des débats, the most influential such post of the day. Through Berlioz’s eyes we follow musical events during one of the richest periods in French cultural history—the decade surrounding the Revolution of 1830, a year that also saw Victor Hugo’s victory for the Romantics in the Classical bastion of the Théâtre-Français, of and the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. A substantial introduction situates Berlioz’s criticism in these watershed years that bring the advent of the as yet unknown Beethoven in France along with the first modern symphony orchestra, a recognized musical canon, the first successful French music journals, and music criticism designed to guide and instruct rather than to judge. Each selection is accompanied by an introductory paragraph and explanatory notes. The most entertaining of critics, Berlioz has found here the “good English-language anthology” of his criticism that Jacques Barzun, founder of modern Berlioz studies, called for in 1950.

This is a study of the political context in which Mozart wrote his three Italian comedies, Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. Joseph II’s decision to place his opera buffa troupe in competition with the re-formed Singspiel provoked a struggle between supporters of the rival national genres. Cabals soon became active, organizing claques to cheer or hiss as required, and encouraging press correspondents to circulate slanted notices. In the spring of 1786, Mozart was caught up in the infighting. Figaro, the flagship work for the Italian troupe, received a mixed reception, whereas Dittersdorf’s Der Apotheker for the German party scored a triumph. In this fraught atmosphere, satire flourished. A rival setting of Die Hochzeit des Figaro by Dittersdorf, the music for which is lost, lampooned Mozart in the guise of Cherubino, focusing on his obsession with dancing. The intertroupe contest came to an abrupt end at the start of 1788, when the deteriorating international situation for the Austrian Monarchy necessitated cutbacks in expenditure, including the closure of the Singspiel. During the ensuing years of the Austro-Turkish War, Mozart successfully negotiated the unpredictable twists and turns of theater politics. The revival of Figaro in 1789, now as a Habsburg festive work following its gala performance in Prague, sealed his reputation. He was ideally placed to accept a commission from the commercial stage, the revitalization of which was the most lasting musical consequence of the war years.

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915. Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes. The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.

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.

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet the work remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the accuracy of the surviving scores cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris provides a detailed consideration of the many theories that have been proposed for the opera’s origin and chronology. She re-evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer and examines the work’s historical position in Restoration theater. She also offers a detailed discussion of Purcell’s musical declamation and use of ground bass. The final section of the book is devoted to the performance history of Dido and Aeneas from the eighteenth century to the present.

Scott Joplin (ca. 1867–1917) was one of the most prominent and admired ragtime composers of the period (ca. 1893–ca. 1920). Starting his music career as a stage minstrel and quartet singer, he took from this experience elements that enabled him to write rags of uncommon sophistication. His Maple Leaf Rag (1899) was the period’s most famous and imitated instrumental rag and changed the direction of the genre. Although about a dozen compositions were lost (including an opera), his extant works number about forty rags, almost twenty other piano pieces and songs, an instructional manual, and an opera (the second he had composed). He was described in interviews and by those who knew him as intelligent, well spoken, dignified, and exceedingly modest. Despite his subdued manner, most of his music is spirited and lively. He died in a mental institution due to complications of syphilis. Most ragtime compositions faded quickly into obscurity in the 1920s and 1930s as other styles came to prominence, but his Maple Leaf Rag remained in the repertory. The 1940s saw a revived interest in his music and his life, the interest growing slowly through the 1960s. A spectacular, unprecedented revival of Scott Joplin's music emerged in the early 1970s. His opera Treemonisha received its first full performance, his piano rags were performed and recorded by both popular and classical artists, and he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to American music. Earnings from his music also brought nasty litigations in the 1970s–80s.

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 is the first full-length biography of one of the most outstanding singers of the eighteenth century. Gaetano Guadagni is widely known for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice; he was also a leading singer in Handel’s oratorios, and worked with other progressive composers such as Traetta, Jommelli and Bertoni. His career coincided with a movement to reform heroic opera, with the intention of freeing dramatic music from restrictive conventions, and bringing it into harmony with the more expressive aims of the age of sensibility. A cultured and literate singer, Guadagni was in sympathy with the reform, and understood how its aims gave full scope to both his strengths and limitations as a singer. He worked alongside other innovative artists, transferring the dramatic skills of ground-breaking actors such as Pertici and Garrick to the operatic stage. From the reformer Gluck he caught the notion of the integrity of the complete work, and led reluctant audiences to give their undivided attention to dramatic continuity by refusing to acknowledge their applause or to grant them encores. Sometimes judged touchy or arrogant, he made friends and enemies in equal measure: a unique and fascinating character in the history of eighteenth-century opera.

Mozart’s Ghosts is a monograph in which Mark Everist examines the developing reputation of the composer from his death in 1791 to the present.It takes reception to mean the multiplicity of sites of impact (Wirkung) of the composer’s work in the period between the work’s composition and now, and considers them the principal environment for the development of meaning. Organized around an introduction and nine chapters, the book presents a number of sites of Mozart reception, and seeks to read them against the musical worlds that created them. So Mozart’s reception, for example, in Berlin in the 1840s is contrasted with the way in which the composer’s works were received in Paris in 1880, or in London in 1920. The book treats opera, sacred music and instrumental music as evenhandedly as the history which supports it. The overarching aim of Mozart’s Ghosts is to suggest that modern reverence for the composer is conditioned by earlier responses to his music, and that such earlier responses are more complex than a simple model of production and reception (the composer composes; the audience or critic “receives”) allows. It does this by stressing the problematic and indirect nature of much Mozart reception and contrasts this with the more antiquarian, perhaps static, gathering of information about sites of reception: performances, reviews, literary texts and material culture.

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.

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a completely forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This work challenges a common stereotype that opera in nineteenth-century America was as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest to a niche market. It also demonstrates conclusively that the historiography of nineteenth-century American music (which utterly ignores English-language opera performance and reception history) is completely wrong. Based on information from music and theatre periodicals published in the United States between 1860 and 1900; letters, diaries, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and other performance materials; and reviews, commentary, and other evidence of performance history in digitized newspapers, this work shows that more than one hundred different companies toured all over America, performing opera in English for heterogeneous audiences during this period, and that many of the most successful troupes were led or supported by women—prima donna/impresarios, women managers, or philanthropists who lent financial support. The book conclusively demonstrates the continued wide popularity of opera among middle-class Americans during the last three decades of the century and furthermore illustrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which eventually led to the emergence of American musical comedy.

Opera in the Jazz Age examines the place of opera in the contemporary ‘battle of the brows’: a debate, prompted by the growth of the mass entertainment industry, about the extent to which art forms ought to be labelled ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, or ‘lowbrow’. The book considers this question from a number of viewpoints, examining topics including: the audience for opera during the period; opera’s interactions with forms of popular culture including jazz, film, and middlebrow novels; and the ways in which different types and nationalities of opera were categorised differently. A number of significant figures in the highbrow–lowbrow debate are scrutinised, among them highbrow and middlebrow critics, the mythical figure of the ‘man in the street’, and the much reviled celebrity singer. The book explains how modern technological dissemination methods such as gramophone recordings and broadcasting came to bear upon questions of cultural categorisation, as did contemporary anxieties about national identity. The book concludes that opera was very difficult to categorise according to the new terms: for some commentators it was too highbrow; for others not highbrow enough. Examining the battle of the brows through an operatic lens challenges received wisdom by revealing the fault lines in this supposedly definitive system of cultural categorisation, undermining any simplistic binary between the high and the low. More broadly, the book also gives a detailed account of British operatic culture of the 1920s from the perspectives of performance, staging, opera-going, and criticism.

This book uncovers a largely forgotten chapter in music history by considering the intersection of music and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Germany. Drawing on research from the fields of musicology, history, classical studies, and theater studies, it explores the trend of combining music and Greek tragedy that began in 1841 with Felix Mendelssohn’s wildly popular score for the groundbreaking Prussian court production of Sophocles’ Antigone and that later included productions of Euripides’ Medea, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King with music by Wilhelm Taubert, Mendelssohn, and Franz Lachner, respectively. Staged at royal courts in Berlin and Munich, these productions reflect an effort by the rulers who commissioned them to appropriate the legacy of Greece for the creation of a German cultural and national identity, while the music involved seemed at the time to mark the advent of an entirely new Romantic genre. This study also reassesses Wagner’s reception of the Greeks, highlighting the degree to which he was reacting against works such as Mendelssohn’s Antigone when he called for the creation of a music drama rooted in the spirit of Attic tragedy and arguing that the Ring cycle can be understood as the composer’s attempt to reclaim the mythic significance of the Oedipus myth in the service of his own aesthetic aims. Viewed within a framework of Germany’s longstanding obsession with Greece, these developments attest to the enduring significance of antiquity as a powerful trope that helped to shape the European cultural and artistic landscape of the nineteenth century.

The Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’), once a key concept in Wagner studies, has become problematic. This book sheds light on this conundrum by first tracing the development of the concept in the nineteenth century through selected examples, some of which include combinations of different art forms. It then focuses on the culmination of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Wagner’s theories and in the practice of his late music dramas, of which Der Ring des Nibelungen is the most complete representation. Finally, the book contrasts the view of the Ring as a fusion of dramatic text and music with the 20th-century trend towards deconstruction in Wagnerian productions and the importance of Regie. Against this trend a case is made here for a fresh critical approach and a reconsideration of the nature and basis for the fundamental unity which has hitherto been widely perceived in Wagner’s Ring. Approaches through Leitmotiv alone are no longer acceptable. However, in conjunction with another principle, Moment, which Wagner insisted on combining with Motive, these can be ingeniously ‘staged’ and steered to dramatic ends by means of musical dynamics and expressive devices such as accumulation. Analysis of the two Erda scenes demonstrates how this complex combination of resources acts as a powerful means of fusion of the musical and dramatic elements in the Ring and confirms its status as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

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.

In light of the recent historiography of Vichy, which stresses its initial political concession, competing factions, and then escalating collaboration with the occupant, this book proposes new questions concerning the shifting nature of French cultural as well as political identity. As the occupation advanced, how did those responsible for cultural policies attempt to adapt their conceptions of French values to accord with the agenda of collaboration in all professional fields? How was French cultural identity and its relation to German culture gradually reconceived by both the occupant and by Vichy as the former played an increasingly interventionist role in music, a symbolic stake in the national self-image of both regimes? Employing the theoretical insights of Gramsci and Bourdieu into hegemony and how it is achieved and combated, this book examines the ways in which musical works were fostered or appropriated and transmitted—physically inscribed, framed, and presented during different phases of the regime as specific groups assumed power. As this study concomitantly demonstrates, we find not only accommodation but also resistance among those artists involved with Vichy’s institutions, and especially in music, where new cultural practices, strategies, and modes of communication emerged as musicians confronted the increasing loss of autonomy in their field. They were forced to assume a position along the spectrum from compliance to resistance on the basis of their perceptions, experience, and subjectivity. Some sought to maintain integrity and avoid appropriation while remaining visible, continuing subtly to innovate and incorporate alternative cultural representations proposed by the Resistance.