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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und
Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of
the nineteenth century's most important operatic productions - and
created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the
stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also
composed nearly twenty volumes of writing on opera. His influential
concept of Gesamtkunstwerk - the "total work of art" - famously and
controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an
opera into a coherent whole. Less well-known, however, are Wagner's
strange theories on sexuality - like his ideas about erotic
acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the
discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other
developing fields of study that informed Wagner's world, Adrian
Daub traces the influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from
their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of
the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky,
d'Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner's death,
Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas
and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way
out from Tristan's shadow.
In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign
composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were
adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically
altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'.
The operas were translated into English, fitted with spoken
dialogue, divested of much of their music, augmented with
interpolations and frequently set to altered libretti. By the end
of the period, the radical changes of earlier adaptations gave way
to more faithful versions. In the first comprehensive study of
these adaptations, Christina Fuhrmann shows how integral they are
to our understanding of early nineteenth-century opera and the
transformation of London's theatrical and musical life. This book
reveals how these operas accelerated repertoire shifts in the
London theatrical world, fostered significant changes in musical
taste, revealed the ambiguities and inadequacies of copyright law
and sparked intense debate about fidelity to the original work.
Richard Strauss' fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941,
make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of
the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on texts
by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and
Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most
important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the
founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the
Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war
years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book
to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in
its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to
reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's
cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new
insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in
Strauss's compositions.
Opera, for its inherent multimedia nature (text, music,
scenography, ballet, representation), lends itself to
interdisciplinary, including those that touch upon legal topics.
The stories told in the great masterpieces of European opera are,
frequently, based on facts relevant for criminal law. Murders,
abductions, extortions, kidnappings, massacres, and other types of
crimes have filled the stories of opera since its origin. In much
of musical theatre, including the masterpieces by Verdi, Donizetti,
Bellini, Wagner, and many others,there are, also issues addressed
that touch upon the less obvious areas of private law: librettos
often talk about contracts, donations, wills, weddings, family
relationships, debts and money issues in general. In Gaetano
Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Nemorino - in love with the beautiful
but indifferent Adina - is the victim of a real contract scam
perpetrated by Dulcamara. In La sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini,
Elvino snatches the engagement ring given to Amina thinking she was
unfaithful: he revokes a donation made in view of marriage, and
maybe breaks a rule of law. In Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, one
witnesses a sensational case of breach of contract, to be read in
the light of the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a new
sensibility for market economy and the increasingly central value
of contracts in social relations. In Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart,
there is a strange marriage vow, executed in order to guarantee the
repayment of a debt.
From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The
Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South
African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black
people's place in history. Naomi Andre draws on the experiences of
performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with
today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as
well as with the works themselves, Andre reveals how black opera
unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if
uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other
oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and
political force that employs an immense, transformative power to
represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for
critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black
Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied
scholarship.
William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the
composer as his "last card," explores the evolution of the text and
music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama
across Wagner's entire career. This book offers a reassessment of
the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new
light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National
Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through
many unfamiliar manuscript sources, revealing unsuspected models
and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works. Fresh analytic
perspectives are revealed, casting the dramatic meaning of Parsifal
in a new light. Much debated aspects of the work, such as Kundry's
death at the conclusion, are discussed in the context of its stage
history. Path-breaking as well is Kinderman's analysis of the
religious and ideological context of Parsifal. During the
half-century after the composer's death, the Wagner family and the
so-called Bayreuth circle sought to exploit Wagner's work for
political purposes, thereby promoting racial nationalism and
anti-Semitism. Hitherto unnoticed connections between Hitler and
Wagner's legacy at Bayreuth are explored here, while differences
between the composer's politics as an 1849 revolutionary and the
later response of his family to National Socialism are weighed in a
nuanced account. Kinderman combines new historical research,
sensitive aesthetic criticism, and probing philosophical reflection
in this most intensive examination of Wagner's culminating music
drama.
Sentimental Opera is a study of the relationship between opera and
two major phenomena of eighteenth-century European culture - the
cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama. A
thorough examination of social and cultural contexts helps to
explain the success of operas such as Paisiello's Nina as well as
the extreme emotional reactions of their audiences. Like their
counterparts in drama, literature and painting, these works brought
to the fore serious contemporary problems including the widespread
execution of deserters, the treatment of the insane, and anxieties
relative to social and familial roles. They also developed a
specifically operatic version of the dominant language of
sensibility. This wide-ranging study involves such major cultural
figures as Goldoni, Diderot and Mozart, while refining our
understanding of the theatrical genre system of their time.
Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant
et les sortileges (1919-25) are pivotal works in the composer's
relatively small oeuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very
distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two
vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the
heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive
study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and
cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In
documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural
canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical
and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the
composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration,
his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and
the centrality of language and literature in his compositional
practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable
resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of
French music.
At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to
the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify
to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance,
activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book
considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one
that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or
that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body
to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's
Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or
one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the
mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia
satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's
score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art,
addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European
cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War.
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic
achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its
global renown, it remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of
its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the
absolute accuracy of the surviving scores, which date from almost
100 years after the work was written, cannot be assumed. In this
thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris closely
examines the many theories that have been proposed for the opera's
origin and chronology, considering the opera both as political
allegory and as a positive exemplar for young women. Her study
explores the work's historical position in the Restoration theater,
revealing its roots in seventeenth-century English theatrical and
musical traditions, and carefully evaluates the surviving sources
for the various readings they offer-of line designations in the
text (who sings what), the vocal ranges of the soloists, the use of
dance and chorus, and overall layout. It goes on to provide
substantive analysis of Purcell's musical declamation and use of
ground bass. In tracing the performance history of Dido and Aeneas,
Harris presents an in-depth examination of the adaptations made by
the Academy of Ancient Music at the end of the eighteenth century
based on the surviving manuscripts. She then follows the growing
interest in the creation of an "authentic" version in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through published editions
and performance reviews, and considers the opera as an important
factor in the so-called English Musical Renaissance. To a
significant degree, the continuing fascination with Purcell's Dido
and Aeneas rests on its apparent mutability, and Harris shows this
has been inherent in the opera effectively from its origin.
Offenbach's operas were a significant force for cultural change,
both in his own time and in the decades to follow. In this book,
Laurence Senelick demonstrates the ways in which this musical
phenomenon took hold globally, with Offenbach's work offering an
alternative, irreverent, sexualized view of life which audiences
found liberating, both personally and socially. In the theatre, the
composer also inspired cutting-edge innovations in stagecraft and
design, and in this book, he is recognized as a major cultural
influence, with an extensive impact on the spheres of literature,
art, film, and even politics. Senelick argues that Offenbach's
importance spread far beyond France, and that his provocative and
entertaining works, often seen as being more style than substance,
influenced numerous key artists, writers, and thinkers, and made a
major contribution to the development of modern society.
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