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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the
important influence of opera on Brecht's writings. Brecht at the
Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent
engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht
later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern
society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout
his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more
with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler,
and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous
work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the new concept
of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and
that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are
reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of
mimesis.
Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered one of
the most typically French as well as one of the most successful of
the opera composers of the 19th century. Although musically gifted,
he initially chose commerce as a career, but soon realized that his
future lay in music. He studied under Cherubini, and it was not
long before his opera-comique La Bergere Chateleine (1820), written
at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. Perhaps
the greatest turning point in Auber's life was his meeting with the
librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), with whom he developed a long
and illustrious working partnership that only ended with Scribe's
death. Success followed success; works such as Le Macon (1825) and
La Muette de Portici (1828) brought Auber public fame and official
recognition. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in
1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the
Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and
in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur.Auber seems to have
been fated to live in revolutionary times; during his long life no
less than four revolutions took place in France (1789, 1830, 1848,
1870). Auber's famous historical grand opera La Muette de Portici
(also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) is perhaps
unsurprisingly based on revolution, depicting the 1647 Neapolitan
uprising against Spanish rule. It is a key work in operatic
history, and has a revolutionary history itself: it was a
performance of this work in Brussels in 1830 that helped spark the
revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. It
was a revolution that hastened Auber's death at the old age of 89.
He died on 12 May 1871 as a result of a long illness aggravated by
the privations and dangers of the Siege of Paris. He had refused to
leave the city he had always loved, even after his house had been
set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. In a twist of fate, a
mark had been placed on the house of the composer of Masaniello,
the very voice of Romantic liberty!Auber's overtures were once
instantly recognizable, favourites of the light Classical
repertoire. His gracious melodies and dance rhythms had a huge
influence, both on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre
of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany. Musical tastes and
fashions have changed, and contemporary audiences are more
accustomed to the heavier fare of verismo, Wagnerian
transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism. The
operas themselves, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), are seldom
performed, yet Auber's elegant, delicate and restrained art remains
as appealing to the discerning listener as ever it was.Zerline, an
opera in three acts with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first
performed at the Academie nationale de musique (Salle de la rue Le
Peletier) on 16 May 1851. The scene is set in Palermo, during the
Restoration. The Prince of Roccanera, married to the sister of the
King, has a supposed niece, Gemma. She is really his daughter by
Zerline, an orange-seller. The latter was abducted by pirates, and
having returned to Palermo after many trials, now meets her
daughter, assuming the role of her aunt. She learns that Gemma
loves a young naval officer, Rodolphe, but that the Prince's wife
wishes Gemma to marry the King's cousin, much against the girl's
wishes. In the third act, Zerline, already alerted to an intrigue
compromising to the two young lovers, is able to safeguard their
integrity and bring about their union.The action is better suited
to a vaudeville than an opera, and the scenario has little innate
interest. The role of Zerline was devised especially for the great
contralto Marietta Alboni (1823-94), the first role she created.
The B-flat major overture immediately establishes the family nature
of the drama, with its parable of past sins, social disparity and
all-conquering maternal love.There is allusion to the Sicilian
setting in the two opening choruses of act 1 which are dominated by
barcarolle rhythms in establishing the couleur locale. Alboni's
magnificent talent added great value to the light music written by
Auber for this slight canvas. The work consequently contains many
pieces of a purely virtuoso nature. Among them are the grand air
d'entree "O Palerme! o Sicile!", the thematically central
canzonetta "Achetez mes belles oranges", and the duet for soprano
and contralto "Quel trouble en mon ame" in act 1. It is as though
the Italian setting of the story and the Italian origins of the
prima donna caused Auber to look to his early love for Rossini, and
his enduring attachment to Italian musical forms and local colour
(as in Fiorella, La Muette de Portici, Fra Diavolo, Acteon, La
Sirene, Zanetta and Haydee).The vocal part of Zerline is a
conscious re-creation of the old Rossini mode, and her various
solos are written in the style of the virtuoso contralto of the
opera seria, obviously with a contemporary Gallic fleetness all
Auber's own. The Grand Air demonstrates all the features.The
original cast was: Merly (Roccanera); Mlle Marietta Alboni
(Zerline); Mlle Maria-Dolores-Benedicta-Josephine Nau (Gemma);
Aimes (Rodolphe); Mlle Dameron (the Princess of Roccanera); and
Lyons (the Marquis of Bettura). The work was only performed 14
times in Paris, with no reprise. It was translated into Italian,
and produced in Brussels (in French) and London (in Italian).
Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a 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. Author Katherine
Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the
American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not
only flourished in the United States during this time, but found
its success significantly bolstered by the support of women
impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who
provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and
compelling study details the lives and professional activities of
several important players in American postbellum opera, including
manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and
performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne
Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna"
Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources,
including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills,
memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the
performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of
how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the
more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States
during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in
English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive
and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the
United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre
as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche
market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and
hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of
late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead
to the emergence of American musical comedy.
Children of many generations have been greatly impressed by the
story of Yona in the belly of the whale and imagined the deep
darkness of the "big fish" and the miraculous landing on safe
shore. But the Book of Yona also contains a different story. The
Christian, the Judaic and the Islamic narrative all show: this
prophet must have been a rather stubborn man: He knew how to tell
right from wrong and he was ready to bet not only his own life but
the life and welfare of others on this truth. This chamber opera
explores what such a strong sense of justice could have meant to
his own family and the neighbors in his village. How did it affect
his traveling companions on the boat when he run away from God's
command and headed for Tarshish, the farthest place he could
imagine? What did the people of Jerusalem, whom he warned first as
a messenger of God, make of Yona? How did the people of Nineveh,
who were rescued from destruction by his prophesies, see this man?
While all the above people are mentioned in the traditional
legends, they appear in Yona as individual characters. The story is
narrated from the perspective of Yona's fictitious daughter Shachar
(morning, dawn). The scenes of the opera are all set in Yona's
house. The time is right after the funeral of the prophet, while
his daughter is sitting the seven days of Shiva for her father.
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