French Opera Research Articles

STAGING AND ITS DRAMATIC EFFECT IN FRENCH BAROQUE OPERA: EVIDENCE FROM PROMPT NOTES

The staging of tragédies en musique and related genres remains an elusive aspect of French baroque opera. Although scores and librettos supply some information (through scene rubrics and the sung text), several rare sets of prompt notes provide us with many more specific details. The prompt notes fall into two categories: those that illustrate a dramatic convention and those that illustrate individual artistic choices. Both make notable differences in dramatic effect. Choristers and dancers are almost exclusively blocked as a single, collective body while the entrance of soloists to instrumental music often determines the dramatic function of préludes and ritournelles, sometimes accompanying mute acting or conveying meaning when the stage is empty. The prompt notes show that the genre, generally thought of as tradition-bound, also elicited dramatic interpretations from those responsible for staging. An appendix provides a glossed list of the more than fifty prompt notes for a 1778 proposed production of Lully’s Armide.

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Harry T. Burleigh, "One of Erie's Most Popular Church Singers"

Harry T. Burleigh has been recognized primarily as singer who introduced Antonin Dvorak to plantation songs and spirituals and as a pioneer arranger of African-American spirituals. In past several decades, more and more singers have discovered art songs that in quarter of twentieth century earned Burleigh distinction as one of most respected composers of American art songs. But other important aspects of his career are less well known, such as his more than thirty years as an editor at New York office of Ricordi Music Publishing Company, headquartered in Milan, Italy. His role as vocal coach and mentor to a number of singers--including Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Carol Brice, Abbey Mitchell, Revella Hughes, and Ella Belle Davis--has been overshadowed by greater fame of those he assisted. Even less understood is Burleigh's success as a recital performer, which drew these younger singers to seek his help in developing their own singing careers. His fifty-two-year tenure as baritone soloist at wealthy St. George's Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square in New York City merely hints at importance of Burleigh's role as a link between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American concert singers such as sopranos Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Madame Marie Selika, and Madame Sissieretta Jones; tenors Wallace King, Harry A. Williams, and Sydney Woodward; and baritones John Luca and Theodore Drury and younger singers who followed him and have become established in our collective memory as the first generation of African-American concert singers: Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson. Burleigh family papers hold programs and clippings of reviews of Burleigh performances that document a significant recital career along eastern seaboard, particularly through New England, with a few appearances as far west as Minneapolis and Chicago and as far south as Nashville and Atlanta. In fact, Burleigh saw himself primarily as a singer, particularly in twenty years of his career in New York City. It was to become a serious classical singer that he left Erie, Pennsylvania, in January 1892 to audition at National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where Antonin Dvorak would be director following September. In an interview with A. Walter Kramer (1916) at height of his fame as an art song composer, Burleigh declared, never even dreamed of being a composer--at least not out loud. I was going to be a singer and I am. As Kramer's article emphasized, despite Burleigh's modest protests, he was indeed a genuine composer as well as a singer. Burleigh's skill as a song composer was rooted in his thorough knowledge of German lieder and American song repertoire, along with Italian and French opera arias, and vocal facility of his songwriting grew from a public singing career that began in his teenage years in Erie. Burleigh described his January 1892 audition at National Conservatory of Music in a 1924 interview with Lester A. Walton (1974, 83): The late [Rafael] Joseffy, Romualso Sapio and Adele Margulies were among artists of renown on jury. I think I was given an ABA for reading and B for voice. I was told that AA was required mark, below which I had fallen a little. When conservatory registrar, Frances MacDowell (mother of composer Edward MacDowell), informed Burleigh that he had failed audition, he told her of his ambition to be a professional singer and showed her a letter of recommendation from Mrs. Elizabeth Russell. told her my cherished longings, and she sympathized with me (Walton 1974, 83). Burleigh had seen Frances MacDowell in Erie at a musicale played by Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreno at Robert W. Russell home, at which Burleigh's mother had assisted as a maid and Burleigh as doorman. Carreno had been Edward MacDowell's teacher, and she introduced MacDowell's piano compositions to audiences in United States and Europe. …

Staging Venice

Starting in 1697 a series of operatic works set in Venice during Carnival season appeared on the stage of the Paris Opéra, a phenomenon that marked a major shift in repertoire from a period that had been dominated by the Lullian tragédie en musique. This article investigates the implications of the sudden French fascination with things Venetian and explores the multiple agendas Venice served within the world of French opera.

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century

Review of Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century and Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style.

Review of Lacombe, <i>The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century</i> and Huebner, <i>French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style.</i>

The Triumph of Diversity: Theories of French Accentuation and Their Influence on Verdi's French Operas

This study investigates a variety of primary sources dealing with French poetic rhythm and concludes that the variety of approaches discussed in these sources must be kept in mind when evaluating a composer's setting of French verse. French poetic theory discusses practices such as scanning verse in iambs and trochees regardless of interior accents; determining the number of accents based on the metre of the verse; and observing only the most essential accents based on syntactic considerations. Focusing on Verdi's French operas, this study examines the relationship between these possibilities and the melodic style. 42 For evidence regarding Les Vipres siciliennes, see Giger, 'The Role of Verdi's French Operas', ch. 4; evidence regarding Don Carlos will be provided in a study that is currently in progress.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Bibliographie des (Euvres de Denis Diderot 1739–1900. By David Adams. Réflexion utopique et pratique romanesque au siècle des lumières: Prévost, Rousseau, Sade. By Guillaume Ansart. Situation 53. Memory and Desire: Rétif de la Bretonne, Autobiography and Utopia. By Peter Wagstaff. Faux titre 115. Le Chevalier Bayard. By Jacques Autreau. Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts 3. Edited by Richard Waller. Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth‐Century England. By Richard A. Barney. Hogarth: Representing Nature's Machines. Edited by David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner. The Prime Minister of Taste: a Portrait of Horace Walpole. By Morris Brownell. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800. By Philip Carter. French Opera 1730–1830: Meaning and Media. By David Charlton. Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS634. Michel‐Jean Sedaine (1719–1797): Theatre, Opera and Art. Edited by David Charlton and Mark Ledbury. Religions en transition dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Edited by Louis Châtellier. SVEC 2000:02. Samuel Johnson in Historical Context. Edited by Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine‐Hill. Jane Austen: The Parson's Daughter. By Irene Collins. Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees. Edited by Deidre Lynch. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 4. Edited by Kevin L. Cope. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 5. Edited by Kevin L. Cope. Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe. By Andrew Curran. SVEC 2001:01. John Soane: An Accidental Romantic. By Gillian Darley. Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungs‐roman, 1750–1850. By Lorna Ellis. L'Annonce et la nouvelle. La presse d'information en France sous I'Ancien Régime (1630–1789), By Gilles Feyel. The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society 1660–1720. By Perry Gauci. Des beautés plus hardies… Le théâtre dans la France de I'Ancien Régime (1750–1789), By François Genton. The Nation, The Law and the King, Reform Politics in England, 1789–1799. By Jenny Graham. Lanham. Hogarth. By Mark Hallett. Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid‐Eighteenth Century. By Bob Harris. Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy. By Jonathan M. Hess. The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond. Edited by Clare Hornsby. Those Delightful Regions of the Imagination: Essays on George Romney. Edited by Alex Kidson. Saint‐Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with the collaboration of Franqois Fitou. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.Leonhard Horowsku Institute fur Geschichtswissenschaft, Technische Universities Berlin Boswell un libertine mdancolique. Sa vie, ses voyages, ses amours et ses opinions. By Maurice Levy. Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context. By Jeff Loveland. SVEC 2001:03. Public Architecture in Ireland 1680–1760. By Edward McParland. The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England 1760–1800. By J. C. S. Mason. Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850. By Robert Mayhew. Studies in Modern History.The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth‐Century Culture. Edited by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714. By Bridget Orr. Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry from Burns to Haney. By Fiona Stafford. John Berwick, Engraver on Wood, 1760–1795; an appreciation of his life together with an annotated catalogue of his illustrations and designs. By Nigel Tatters field. Painting the Cannon's Roar: Music, the Visual Arts, and the Rise of an Attentive Public in the Age of Haydn, c.1750 to c.1810. By Thomas Tolley. Universal Right. By Giambattista Vico. Trans. and ed. by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. By Elizabeth Susan Wahl.

Grabu's Albion and Albanius and the opera's of Lully: '...acquainted with all the performances of the French Operas'

Grabu's Albion and Albanius and the opera's of Lully: '...acquainted with all the performances of the French Operas'

Grabu's Albion and Albanius and the operas of Lully: '... acquainted with all the performances of the French Opera's'

Journal Article Grabu's Albion and Albanius and the operas of Lully: ‘… acquainted with all the performances of the French Opera's’ Get access Bryan White Bryan White Bryan White is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds. His primary research interests are in English music of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is currently preparing an edition of Albion and Albanius for the Purcell Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXX, Issue 3, August 2002, Pages 411–428, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/XXX.3.411 Published: 01 August 2002

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Source Readings in French Opera: Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque opera: a reader

Source Readings in French Opera: Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque opera: a reader Get access Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque opera: a reader (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), £39.95 Lois Rosow Lois Rosow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXX, Issue 2, May 2002, Pages 273–275, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/XXX.2.273 Published: 01 May 2002

French Opera at the Fin de Siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style

French Opera at the Fin de Siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style

German opera: from the beginnings to Wagner

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Map: centres of German opera 1. Sixteenth-century beginnings 2. The Thirty Years War and its aftermath 3. The Hamburg enterprise 4. Travelling troupes and changing attitudes 5. From the Seven Years War to the French Revolution 6. The Viennese Singspiel 7. Mozart's German operas 8. From the French Revolution to the turn of the century 9. French opera in Germany after the Revolution 10. New critics and singers 11. Opera in a new century: the first decade (I) 12. Opera in a new century: the first decade (II) 13. The growth of Romantic and grand opera 14. Romantic opera and grand opera in the 1820s (I) 15. Romantic opera and grand opera in the 1820s (II) 16. Opera in the mid-nineteenth century (I) Opera in the mid-nineteenth century (II) 18. Wagner Appendix: list of operas Bibliography Index.

Professionalism: What Graduate Students Need

Professionalism: What graduate Students Need Andrew Hoberek (bio) In what follows, I argue that we need to think more seriously about graduate education as professional training: that is, as training geared towards preparing students to perform the work of professional academics. 1 Implicit in my argument is, of course, the idea that we don’t do this now. The closest we now come is when we think about preparing our students “for the market.” The sadly appropriate resonances of cattle ranching in this phrase aside, such preparation assumes that our students disappear once they get that magical call from the chair of another department. In this way training solely for the market is complicit with the fact, as John Guillory notes, that getting an academic job has become itself “the culmination of a successful career” (92). More practically, it leaves graduate students largely unprepared for the actual work they’ll do once they land a job. Of course, there are certain things that one can learn only on the ground, but right now we carry this situation to an extreme: the resulting game of catch-up is one of the main reasons why (as everybody knows) “you can’t get any writing done your first year.” This is a big problem, for which there is no simple fix. In what follows I’ll discuss graduate training in my own field of English, both because its theory and practice are what I know best, and because English exemplifies an academic mindset that sees graduate training as fundamentally different from professional training, rather than a version of such training. My proposal for one course of action is as follows: I [End Page 52] think that every PhD student should receive at some point on the way to their degree a one-course teaching release and instead be paid for a semester’s worth of administrative activity in their department. This could take the form of working on a journal, serving on a labor-intensive committee, mentoring other graduate students, or other activities depending on the particular department. If this seems like a foolish (or possibly irrelevant; what does administrative work have to do with professional training?) plan of action, this is because—as I will discuss below—the profession operates under a falsely constrained notion of what constitutes its work. Thus, my suggestion is not aimed at maintaining the status quo; on the contrary, it’s meant to serve the long-term goal of effecting institutional and cultural change within our departments. Anti-pedagogy No one can teach you anything, not at the core, at the source of it. —Henry Cameron Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead tells the story of architect Howard Roark’s heroic and ultimately triumphant struggle against the forces of professional and social conformity. Near the book’s beginning Roark, who has been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology, is called into the Dean’s office and given a final chance to redeem himself. During this scene we learn that although Roark has excelled in his math and engineering courses, he has repeatedly refused to complete the historical exercises required by his professor of design. “When you were given projects that left the choice of style up to you and you turned in one of your wild stunts,” the Dean tells him, —well, frankly, your teachers passed you because they did not know what to make of it. But, when you were given an exercise in the historical styles, a Tudor chapel or a French opera house to design—and you turned in something that looked like a lot of boxes piled together without rhyme or reason—would you say it was an answer to an assignment or plain insubordination? (21) Roark replies simply, “It was insubordination” (21). Turning down an offer to return to the institution after he has taken a year off “to grow up” (22), he informs his befuddled former dean, “I see no purpose in doing Renaissance villas. Why learn to design them when I’ll never build them?” (22). [End Page 53] As anyone familiar with Rand’s novel (or the 1949 film adaptation starring Gary Cooper...

Review of Hervé Lacombe. The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Edward Schneider. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xv, 415 pp.

Review of Hervé Lacombe. The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Edward Schneider. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xv, 415 pp.

French Baroque Opera: A Reader (review)

"Every sea monster, for example, should be at least 18 feet long by 6 feet wide with an aperture in its head that could gobble up a twenty-year-old; how ridiculous a monster seems if it is reduced to snapping like a common guard dog. That is truly ignoble" (p. 125). So opined a Burgundian noblewoman in response to a court performance of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera Persée in 1747. This delightfully evocative and historically telling statement joins a remarkably varied and revealing collection of source readings now easily accessible in English, thanks to Carolyn Wood and Graham Sadler's French Baroque Opera: A Reader. Because interest in this repertory is burgeoning and little of the diverse literature generated by French opera is readily available in English, the book's aim is "to present a coherent sequence of translations which, between them, provide a wide-ranging and informative survey of the organization and evolution of French baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses" (p. viii). One can happily add "and its reception" to this list.

Staging at the Opéra-Comique in nineteenth-century Paris: Auber's Fra Diavolo and the livrets de mise-en-scène

Printed stage-direction books, so-called livrets de mise-en-scène, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an ‘‘objective” reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.

Maeterlinck: Pelleas et Melisande -- Les Aveugles -- L'Intruse -- Interieur. Edited with an introduction by Leighton Hodson. (French Texts Series). London, Bristol Classical Press, 1999. xxxii+109 pp.

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access French Opera at the Fin de siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style. By STEVEN HUEBNER. Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 526 pp, 22 ills., 88 musical examples. EDWARD FORMAN EDWARD FORMAN UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LV, Issue 4, October 2001, Pages 561-a–561, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LV.4.561-a Published: 01 October 2001

Book review. French Opera 1730-1830: Meaning and Media. D Charlton

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access French Opera 1730-1830: Meaning and Media. By David Charlton. pp. 390. ‘Variorum Collected Studies Series’. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000, £55. ISBN 0-86078-782-6.) MICHAEL McCLELLAN MICHAEL McCLELLAN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 82, Issue 2, May 2001, Pages 307–309, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/82.2.307 Published: 01 May 2001