Philip Gossett
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226304823
- eISBN:
- 9780226304885
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226304885.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
This book is an account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with the author's personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances, and suffused with his passion for music. Writing as ...
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This book is an account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with the author's personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances, and suffused with his passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, the author brings to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favorite operas. The book begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. It then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between opera scholars, opera conductors, and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, the author also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this work, the text enlivens a personal history with reports personal own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro.Less
This book is an account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with the author's personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances, and suffused with his passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, the author brings to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favorite operas. The book begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. It then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between opera scholars, opera conductors, and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, the author also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this work, the text enlivens a personal history with reports personal own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro.
Fabrizio Della Seta
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226749143
- eISBN:
- 9780226749167
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226749167.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be ...
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Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be balanced by sense and reason. Exploring this tension between madness and reason, this book presents new analytical approaches to thinking about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera through the lenses of its historical and cultural contexts. In its twelve chapters, the author explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theater. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical, and scenic mechanisms in parts of La sonnambula, Ernani, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro, Macbeth, and Il trovatore. The author argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications. Purely musical analysis does not make sense unless we take into account music's dramatic function.Less
Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be balanced by sense and reason. Exploring this tension between madness and reason, this book presents new analytical approaches to thinking about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera through the lenses of its historical and cultural contexts. In its twelve chapters, the author explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theater. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical, and scenic mechanisms in parts of La sonnambula, Ernani, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro, Macbeth, and Il trovatore. The author argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications. Purely musical analysis does not make sense unless we take into account music's dramatic function.
Claudio E. Benzecry
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226043401
- eISBN:
- 9780226043432
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226043432.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine ...
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Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust might motivate the occasional operagoer, for hardcore fans the real answer, according to this book, is passion—they do it for love. The book looks at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, a key site for opera's globalization. Looking at the stories of the fans, the book tells of two-hundred-mile trips for performances and nightlong camp-outs for tickets, while others testify to a particular opera's power to move them—whether to song or to tears—no matter how many times they have seen it before. Drawing on an analysis of these acts of love, the book proposes new ways of thinking about people's relationship to art and shows how, far from merely enhancing aspects of everyday life, art allows us to transcend it.Less
Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust might motivate the occasional operagoer, for hardcore fans the real answer, according to this book, is passion—they do it for love. The book looks at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, a key site for opera's globalization. Looking at the stories of the fans, the book tells of two-hundred-mile trips for performances and nightlong camp-outs for tickets, while others testify to a particular opera's power to move them—whether to song or to tears—no matter how many times they have seen it before. Drawing on an analysis of these acts of love, the book proposes new ways of thinking about people's relationship to art and shows how, far from merely enhancing aspects of everyday life, art allows us to transcend it.
Abramo Basevi
Stefano Castelvecchi (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226094915
- eISBN:
- 9780226095073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226095073.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty ...
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Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857—from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while the Basevi's work is still widely cited and discussed—and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world—no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. This book aims to provide a critical apparatus and commentary on Basevi's work. As a contemporary of Verdi and a trained musician, erudite scholar, and critic conversant with current and past operatic repertories, Basevi presented pointed discussion of the operas and their historical context, offering today's readers a unique window into many aspects of operatic culture, and culture in general, in Verdi's Italy. He wrote with precision on formal aspects, use of melody and orchestration, and other compositional features, which made his study an acknowledged model for the growing field of music criticism.Less
Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857—from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while the Basevi's work is still widely cited and discussed—and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world—no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. This book aims to provide a critical apparatus and commentary on Basevi's work. As a contemporary of Verdi and a trained musician, erudite scholar, and critic conversant with current and past operatic repertories, Basevi presented pointed discussion of the operas and their historical context, offering today's readers a unique window into many aspects of operatic culture, and culture in general, in Verdi's Italy. He wrote with precision on formal aspects, use of melody and orchestration, and other compositional features, which made his study an acknowledged model for the growing field of music criticism.
Suzanne Aspden (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226595962
- eISBN:
- 9780226596150
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226596150.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Opera and its urban environment have developed side-by-side throughout the genre’s 400-year history. This volume of essays applies the lens of cultural geography to contend that the notion and ...
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Opera and its urban environment have developed side-by-side throughout the genre’s 400-year history. This volume of essays applies the lens of cultural geography to contend that the notion and performance of place are as important to opera's instantiations and developmental history as this most prestigious of art forms has been to the development of civic and national identity wherever opera is established. In its sixteen chapters, the volume sets about exploring that evolving relationship throughout opera's history as a genre, from the peripatetic and contingent nature of late seventeenth-century opera and its venues, to the establishment of opera houses as defining civic spaces in their own right in the eighteenth century, to the opera house (and opera-going) as cultural commodity and source of regional, national and international territorial definition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the challenges and disillusionments attending on that success and diffusion of the operatic (and opera-house) ideal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In charting opera's developing relationship with its environment in chronological terms, the volume also bears witness to the genre's geographical spread: while the first half of the book focuses on opera in European cities and towns (The Hague, London, Turin, Venice), opera's global dissemination is attested by chapters considering the dynamics of touring or colonialist opera in New Orleans, Calcutta, Melbourne, Sydney, and Shanghai. Later chapters show that opera's negotiation becomes increasingly self-conscious, whether in urban Vienna, the French or English countryside, urban Paris, New York, Texas, or Buenos Aires.Less
Opera and its urban environment have developed side-by-side throughout the genre’s 400-year history. This volume of essays applies the lens of cultural geography to contend that the notion and performance of place are as important to opera's instantiations and developmental history as this most prestigious of art forms has been to the development of civic and national identity wherever opera is established. In its sixteen chapters, the volume sets about exploring that evolving relationship throughout opera's history as a genre, from the peripatetic and contingent nature of late seventeenth-century opera and its venues, to the establishment of opera houses as defining civic spaces in their own right in the eighteenth century, to the opera house (and opera-going) as cultural commodity and source of regional, national and international territorial definition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the challenges and disillusionments attending on that success and diffusion of the operatic (and opera-house) ideal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In charting opera's developing relationship with its environment in chronological terms, the volume also bears witness to the genre's geographical spread: while the first half of the book focuses on opera in European cities and towns (The Hague, London, Turin, Venice), opera's global dissemination is attested by chapters considering the dynamics of touring or colonialist opera in New Orleans, Calcutta, Melbourne, Sydney, and Shanghai. Later chapters show that opera's negotiation becomes increasingly self-conscious, whether in urban Vienna, the French or English countryside, urban Paris, New York, Texas, or Buenos Aires.
Emily Wilbourne
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226401577
- eISBN:
- 9780226401607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226401607.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
This book considers the relationship between commedia dell’arte and early operatic forms, from the court operas of the first years of the seventeenth century, through semi-private productions in ...
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This book considers the relationship between commedia dell’arte and early operatic forms, from the court operas of the first years of the seventeenth century, through semi-private productions in Rome, to the public stages of Venice over fifty years later. While musicology has largely ignored the commedia dell’arte, except in cases of specifically comic opera characters, this book offers a corrective. A substantial re-contextualisation of the term “commedia dell’arte,” in line with recent scholarly developments in Italian-language theatre studies, emphasizes the partial nature of standard musicological treatments of the genre. The importance of serious commedia dell’arte characters is articulated, with particular attention given to the prime donne innamorate and the use of lament. Through a series of case studies based on commedia dell’arte plays, musical performances, pedagogical texts on acting, and several of the century’s best-known operatic works, the book argues that sound itself functioned as a crucial and influential component of commedia dell’arte dramaturgy. Furthermore, the author argues that the aural epistemology of the commedia dell’arte theatre—in which the gender, class, geographic origins, motivations and predilections of each character were audible in their voice—trained Italian audiences in habits of listening that rendered the musical drama of opera verisimilar according to existing dramatic norms, thus underwriting the success of the genre.Less
This book considers the relationship between commedia dell’arte and early operatic forms, from the court operas of the first years of the seventeenth century, through semi-private productions in Rome, to the public stages of Venice over fifty years later. While musicology has largely ignored the commedia dell’arte, except in cases of specifically comic opera characters, this book offers a corrective. A substantial re-contextualisation of the term “commedia dell’arte,” in line with recent scholarly developments in Italian-language theatre studies, emphasizes the partial nature of standard musicological treatments of the genre. The importance of serious commedia dell’arte characters is articulated, with particular attention given to the prime donne innamorate and the use of lament. Through a series of case studies based on commedia dell’arte plays, musical performances, pedagogical texts on acting, and several of the century’s best-known operatic works, the book argues that sound itself functioned as a crucial and influential component of commedia dell’arte dramaturgy. Furthermore, the author argues that the aural epistemology of the commedia dell’arte theatre—in which the gender, class, geographic origins, motivations and predilections of each character were audible in their voice—trained Italian audiences in habits of listening that rendered the musical drama of opera verisimilar according to existing dramatic norms, thus underwriting the success of the genre.
Adrian Daub
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226082134
- eISBN:
- 9780226082271
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226082271.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
In the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner dominated the German opera stage not just aesthetically, in terms of the way opera was written and performed, but also philosophically, providing the ...
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In the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner dominated the German opera stage not just aesthetically, in terms of the way opera was written and performed, but also philosophically, providing the historical, political and metaphysical framework by which to judge what opera could accomplish and needed to accomplish. Tristan’s Shadow provides a history of German opera written in the fifty years after Wagner’s death, with a view not just to Wagner’s legacy as a composer, but his legacy as a theoretician. Specifically, Tristan’s Shadow investigates the way in which the Wagnerian philosophy of sex (judged by Wagner himself to be his most innovative set of ideas) provided a way for his heirs to articulate responses and critiques of Wagner’s broader aesthetic, philosophical and political project. In different ways, these composers interrogated the way Wagner brought sexuality onto the opera stage as a means of interrogating a far broader range of aesthetic issues in Wagner’s oeuvre.Less
In the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner dominated the German opera stage not just aesthetically, in terms of the way opera was written and performed, but also philosophically, providing the historical, political and metaphysical framework by which to judge what opera could accomplish and needed to accomplish. Tristan’s Shadow provides a history of German opera written in the fifty years after Wagner’s death, with a view not just to Wagner’s legacy as a composer, but his legacy as a theoretician. Specifically, Tristan’s Shadow investigates the way in which the Wagnerian philosophy of sex (judged by Wagner himself to be his most innovative set of ideas) provided a way for his heirs to articulate responses and critiques of Wagner’s broader aesthetic, philosophical and political project. In different ways, these composers interrogated the way Wagner brought sexuality onto the opera stage as a means of interrogating a far broader range of aesthetic issues in Wagner’s oeuvre.
Michael P. Steinberg
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226594194
- eISBN:
- 9780226594224
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226594224.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Written from the dual perspective of a cultural/music historian and a dramaturg who worked on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung at La Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera, The ...
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Written from the dual perspective of a cultural/music historian and a dramaturg who worked on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung at La Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera, The Trouble with Wagner engages the deep politics and aesthetics of Wagner's music dramas as well as the responsibility of the stage to bring them both to the visible surface. An introductory chapter seeks an original understanding of the historical, philosophical, ideological, and formal foundations of Wagner's works. The four central chapters focus on the four works of the Ring cycle. An afterword places Wagner at the start of what has become known as the post-secular, with a concluding discussion of post-secular claims as they inform the debate about the Wagner taboo in Israel.Less
Written from the dual perspective of a cultural/music historian and a dramaturg who worked on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung at La Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera, The Trouble with Wagner engages the deep politics and aesthetics of Wagner's music dramas as well as the responsibility of the stage to bring them both to the visible surface. An introductory chapter seeks an original understanding of the historical, philosophical, ideological, and formal foundations of Wagner's works. The four central chapters focus on the four works of the Ring cycle. An afterword places Wagner at the start of what has become known as the post-secular, with a concluding discussion of post-secular claims as they inform the debate about the Wagner taboo in Israel.
