At first glance, modernism and opera may seem like strange
bedfellows-the former hostile to sentiment, the latter wearing its
heart on its sleeve. And yet these apparent opposites attract: many
operas are aesthetically avant-garde, politically subversive, and
socially transgressive. From the proto-modernist strains of Richard
Wagner's Parsifal through the twenty-first-century modernism of
Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, the duet between modernism and
opera, at turns harmonious and dissonant, has been one of the
central artistic events of modernity. Despite this centrality,
scholars of modernist literature only rarely venture into opera,
and music scholars generally return the favor by leaving literature
to one side. But opera, that grand cauldron of the arts, demands
that scholars, too, share the stage with one another. In Modernism
and Opera, Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith bring together
musicologists, literary critics, and theater scholars for the first
time in a mutual endeavor to trace certain key moments in the
history of modernism and opera. This innovative volume includes
essays from some of the most notable scholars in their fields and
covers works as diverse as Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, Bartok's
Bluebeard's Castle, Berg's Wozzeck, Janacek's Makropulos Case,
Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, Strauss's Arabella,
Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress,
Britten's Gloriana, and Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise. A
collaborative study of the ultimate collaborative art form,
Modernism and Opera reveals how modernism and opera illuminate each
other and, more generally, the culture of the twentieth century. It
also addresses a number of issues crucial for understanding the
relation between modernism and opera, focusing in particular on
intermediality (how modernism integrates music, literature, and
drama into opera) and anti-theatricality (how opera responds to
modernism's apparent antipathy to theatricality). This captivating
book-the first of its kind-will appeal to scholars of literature,
music, theater, and modernity as well as to sophisticated opera
lovers everywhere.
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