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The Comedians of the King: "Opéra Comique" and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution

Julia Doe

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and ... More

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and functioned from its start as an embodiment of Bourbon prestige. While historians have long privileged the popular origins of French dialogue opera (opéra comique), this genre, too, had close links to the Crown. In 1762 government authorities incorporated the fairground players that invented the form into a struggling royal troupe, the Comédie-Italienne, thereby consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent pre-revolutionary years. Drawing on extensive new musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied lyric genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the Comédie-Italienne. This project also, critically, interrogates the political implications of such organizational and stylistic shifts. The comic theater alternately reinforced and undercut the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a collection of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.Less

Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

Philip Gossett

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 ... More

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

Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet

Pierpaolo Polzonetti

This book explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through ... More

This book explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, sharing, or the refusal to share have defined characters’ identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century when Wagner’s operatic reforms put a stop to conviviality at the opera house by banishing refreshments during the performance and mandating a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book addresses questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and the meaning of food in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. The book ends with a discussion of the diet the legendary singer Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta in Verdi's la traviata, shedding light on an epoch-changing shift in body types in the star system and the impact of modern cinematic and fashion industry on opera production.Less

Music in the Present Tense: Rossini's Italian Operas in Their Time

Emanuele Senici

In the early 1800s, the operas composed by Gioachino Rossini permeated Italian culture, from theaters to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But around 1830, not long after Rossini ... More

In the early 1800s, the operas composed by Gioachino Rossini permeated Italian culture, from theaters to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But around 1830, not long after Rossini stopped composing new works, there was a sharp decline in popularity that drove most of these operas out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to stages worldwide, but this newly found fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Music in the Present Tense provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by placing these works in the culture and society in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. The book is in two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1-7) focuses on a set of related themes characteristic of the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-century Italy, which are put into dialogue with recent interpretations of Rossini’s Italian operas. Discussions of such different issues as imitation, repetition, self-borrowing, style, and genre pivot around the relationship between representation and reality posited in Rossini’s dramaturgy. In part 2 (chapters 8-15) attention shifts to the ideology behind this dramaturgy, situating the operas firmly in the context of the social practices, cultural formations, and political events of nineteenth-century Italy, and focusing on such broad themes as trauma, theatricality, modernity, memory, and pleasure. Rossini’s dramaturgy emerges from this investigation as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time.Less

Networking Operatic Italy

Francesca Vella

Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of ... More

Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently music and cultural historians have turned their attention to how opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. Networking Operatic Italy examines how opera (was) networked across and beyond the Italian peninsula during the years immediately preceding and following the country’s unification in 1861. The book explores the trajectories opened up for the artform by new technologies of transportation and communication, such as the railway and the telegraph, as well as opera’s continuing dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and moving human bodies. By attending to the operatic interplays that both old and new media encouraged on a transnational as well as national level, we may lay to rest (or substantially dismantle) hidebound notions of nineteenth-century Italian cultural life as parochial, aesthetically conservative, and balkanized into many isolated pockets of local dialect, aesthetic taste, and culture. On the contrary, this book argues that opera at midcentury articulated a “connective” sense of Italian experience, taking impetus from and reorienting the burgeoning global and technological consciousness of the period.Less

Not without Madness: Perspectives on Opera

Fabrizio Della Seta

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 ... More

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

The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession

Claudio E. Benzecry

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 ... More

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

The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi

Abramo Basevi

Stefano Castelvecchi (ed.)

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 ... More

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

Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House

Suzanne Aspden (ed.)

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 ... More

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

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia Dell'Arte

Emily Wilbourne

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 ... More

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

Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Melina Esse

From the theatrical stage to the literary salon, the figure of Sappho—the ancient poet and inspiring icon of feminine creativity—played a major role in the intertwining histories of improvisation, ... More

From the theatrical stage to the literary salon, the figure of Sappho—the ancient poet and inspiring icon of feminine creativity—played a major role in the intertwining histories of improvisation, text, and performance throughout the nineteenth century. Exploring the connections between operatic and poetic improvisation in Italy and beyond, Singing Sappho combines earwitness accounts of famous female improviser-virtuosi with erudite analysis of musical and literary practices. Melina Esse demonstrates that performance played a much larger role in conceptions of musical authorship than previously recognized, arguing that discourses of spontaneity—specifically those surrounding the improvvisatrice, or female poetic improviser—were paradoxically used to carve out a new authority for opera composers just as improvisation itself was falling into decline. With this novel and nuanced book, Esse persuasively reclaims the agency of performers and their crucial role in constituting Italian opera as a genre in the nineteenth century.Less

Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner

Adrian Daub

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 ... More

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

The Trouble with Wagner

Michael P. Steinberg

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 ... More

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