History Of Opera Research Articles

The Earl of Manchester and opera in London

Abstract Charles Montagu (c.1662–1722), Earl (later Duke) of Manchester, played an important role in furthering the establishment of Italian-style opera in London. He gained knowledge of opera and continental singers and musicians on his Grand Tour and three diplomatic missions abroad. This article prints relevant portions (some for the first time) from his correspondence and other printed and manuscript sources to expand our knowledge of his involvement with opera in London, Vienna, France and Italy. The correspondence suggests why his advice and assistance were sought by John Vanbrugh and later by the Royal Academy of Music and adds to our knowledge of the history of opera in London in its so-called ‘critical decade’. Most important was his mission to Venice in 1707–8. Although no evidence has emerged that Manchester met Handel in Venice or extended to him an invitation, he was responsible for the recruitment of Nicola Grimaldi (called ‘Nicolini’), painters and other singers to London. Even at this early stage, opera in London was part of an operatic system that extended across Europe, involving not only musicians and impresarios but also ministers of state and foreign diplomats.

That Obscure Object that Sounds. Metamorphoses of the Composer’s Score in the Opera Industry

In the 20th century, the composer’s music score acquired the status of the firmest and almost sacred core of the opera in stage performance. Battles between traditionalists and Regieoper lovers are still ongoing both online and offline. However, oaths of allegiance to it and accusations of wrongdoing against it show that it is almost impossible to maintain the inviolability of the score in theater practice. The history of opera presents various approaches to this problem. From the birth of the art of opera, the composer was an equal contributor to the show, just like the set designer, stage manager, or impresario. However, their position underwent changes until the 19th century when the phenomenon of repertoire theater emerged, and the operatic canon began to establish itself. From then on, music started to be considered a sacred element of every opera evening. Nevertheless, even the most traditionalistic opera houses nowadays modify the original scores by removing especially long passages, changing original arias, and rewriting default music or text.This article o5ers a historical essay on the relationship between composers and the opera industry, and discusses types of modifications to opera scores, such as cuts, inserts, and the pasticcio phenomenon.

No kora Liepājā uz galvenajām lomām Berlīnē: latviešu tenora Artūra Priednieka-Kavaras starptautiskā karjera starpkaru periodā

The article brings to the spotlight Latvian tenor Arthur Cavara (Artūrs Priednieks-Kavara, 1901–1979), one of the most outstanding Latvian operatic tenors of the 20th century in the context of his international career successfully developed in Germany in the 1930s. In both the recently established Latvian Republic and Europe, the interwar period was a very intensive and, at the same time, very contradictory time due to the historical conditions, social processes and political regimes, but it was also the time of opportunities when one of the centres of art life longed for by Baltic musicians was Berlin. Arthur Cavara was one of a few Latvian singers gifted with unique voice qualities, working capacity and a vast repertoire, who managed to develop a successful career on operatic stages in Berlin in a very short time, thus engraving his name in European opera history of the interwar period. In 1927 the young opera choir singer from Liepāja was not hired by Latvian National Opera, and he decided to go to Berlin to study vocal art with Louis Bachner (1882–1945). In a few years, Priednieks-Kavara developed a successful operatic career in Germany, becoming one of the leading tenors of Krolloper un Die Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, participating in guest performances in other countries, including South America, and finally, he was critically acclaimed in Latvia, too. The Second World War and related circumstances stopped the singer’s career at its peak, Cavara, together with his family, emigrated first to Germany, a well-known country to him, and afterwards to the USA, where he worked as a vocal coach and opera director. A great deal of facts regarding the life of Latvian tenors in Berlin was documented in letters published in Latvian press of the interwar period and autobiographical works by another opera singer and writer Mariss Vētra (1901–1965), who often met Cavara both in Germany and Latvia. The article traces the career of Cavara until the emigration in 1944.

«Othello» G. Verdi – A. Boito as a game of chess

«Othello» G. Verdi – A. Boito as a game of chess

Gender aspects of musical performance: conductor, female conductor, woman conductor

The article is devoted to the history of opera and symphonic conducting, considered through the prism of correlation of professionalism and gender. The facts of women’s mastering the conductor's profession in the second half of XIX - the first half of XX centuries (J. Aman-Weinlich, C. Gonzaga, E. Leginska, F. Petrides, A. Brico, F. Belinfante, V. Kapralova) are presented, which are considered as the evidence of gradual sociocultural changes, caused by the feminism processes in USA and Western Europe. The study highlights the activities of the first domestic female conductors (E. Slavinskaya, O. Berg, V. Dudarova, M. Heifetz), possible due to the drastic political, economic and cultural reforms in the USSR. The author identifies the problem of “female conducting” connected with socio-political, psychological, and socio-cultural patriarchal traditions as a manifestation of gender asymmetry in the sphere of academic conducting.

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Poetics of the Opera Genre

The paper considers the poetics of opera as a factor in ensuring genre self-identification during over four centuries of opera history. It focuses on the root sources of opera related to the system of musical and theatrical genres. With the emergence of opera at the turn of the seventeenth century, its poetics was formed simultaneously in two versions: in the verbal texts and explanations and in the system of linguistic and expressive means of the works. The idea of the conditional existence of three different stories of opera is suggested. Each system is built depending on which components are the main focus when considering the historical material. There is opera as a “chanted drama”, opera as a genre of vocal-instrumental music, and finally, opera as one of the independent types of theatrical art. The three main elements of opera poetics and the functions of each of them are revealed on the example of the analysis of the sixth work in the history of the genre and the first truly classical example, the opera L’Orfeo byClaudio Monteverdi. If the opera characteristic vocal language and sung dialogues became a purely operatic innovation, two other elements of opera poetics used in this opera were actively developed throughout history: instrumental music, as well as choral and ensemble scenes. Thus, opera poetics is associated with constant flexible interaction of the laws of dramatic, musical, and theatrical arts.

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

Политические интриги флорентийского двора как предпосылки к появлению оперы «Похищение Кефала» Дж. Каччини

The beginnings of opera history are usually associated with Euridice by Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri as the first staged and preserved example of the genre. Not many people know that Euridice was by no means the main event during the wedding celebrations in honour of Maria de’ Medici and King Henry IV of France in 1600, to which the opera was timed. The audience was much more drawn to the opera Il rapimento di Cefalo (The Abduction of Cephalus) by Giulio Caccini, a direct rival of Peri. As the music has not completely survived, we know about Il rapimento di Cefalo mainly from the reviews of contemporaries. Historical materials allow us to recreate the genesis of the opera, which is inseparable from the history of opera as a genre. The reported study focuses on personal ambitions, court intrigues, and the rivalry between the Florentines and Emilio de Cavalieri. It also explores similar other factors without which the genre of opera would have taken a different historical path. Besides, the article describes the political and cultural landscape at the court of Ferdinando de’ Medici. The history of Caccini’s opera is analyzed against the general backdrop of Florentine musical art of the last quarter of the 16th century.

Early Italian Opera Within the Labyrinths of Postmodernity

The article is focused on certain critical questions of the position of early Italian opera in contemporary culture. For a long time both performers and scholars considered it as an outdated genre meriting only historical interest. This state of affairs began to change in the 1970s, when a series of facsimiles prepared by Garland Publishing revealed a certain number of published opera scores and librettos. Over the past 50 years, three trends have emerged in the scholarly approach to early Italian operas. The first is that of deconstruction of the prevailing and largely erroneous stereotypes. The second is that of reconstruction, filling in the gaps of knowledge (compilation of encyclopedias, catalogues, works on the history of opera, and monographs about composers). The third is that of interpretation of the 17th- and 18th-century European musical and theatrical heritage in the context of culture and style. In this regard, a special position is held by the issue of performance interpretation. The postmodern era has transformed the early opera from an antique rarity into a topical musical and theatrical phenomenon. The dimension has opened up for directorial experiments aimed at projecting this genre onto the topical problems of today, bringing it closer to the perception of the mass of listeners – each and every one. The plotlines based on ancient myths and historical legends, conventional comedic and farcical situations referring to the earliest literary specimens are easily adapted to the realities of the modern theater: one convention becomes replaced by another, the wigs and camisoles of the 18th-century singers are replaced by army camouflage. Most of these productions provide interpretations not so much of the early opera as such, but particularly of us, bringing our own existential fears and ambitions onto the stage, playing on our political sympathies and antipathies. But there also exists an opposite side. It finds expression in the manner of singing and instrumental playing which comes close to the norms of three and four centuries ago, i.e., historical performing practice, which in our conditions is perceived by everyone as exquisite, designed for the refined taste of the elite, and in this sense of the “aristocratic” listener, rather than the general masses. Thus, in many cases there arises a combination, which is paradoxical in its essence – an unreasonable duality. Interpretation of the essence of early Italian opera is becoming acutely relevant as the path for this art to regain its previously lost artistic integrity.

Analysis of the piano accompaniment characteristics of the national opera "Yimeng Mountain" and the synergy with the singers

Yimeng Mountain, a Chinese national opera, is a dazzling star in the history of opera. It is well known by the majority of music teachers and students because of its beautiful melody and exciting plot. The national tenor Aria "aiyongzai", as the aria of one of the excellent hero "Lin Sheng", is difficult to sing, long in length, requires high singing skills and has great artistic value. As a student in the art direction of piano accompaniment, the coordination and tacit understanding between piano accompaniment and vocal singers, It is particularly important to complete a work with high quality. The author will start with the creation of Yimeng Mountain, and then the creation background of Aiyong, to specifically analyze the characteristics and performance analysis of piano accompaniment texture. Finally, combined with the author's own professional direction, the author will explore the ability and quality that should be possessed as a piano accompaniment art guidance direction, and rely on his own personal practice to analyze the cooperation with vocal singers.

A Brief Opera History of France and the Holy Roman Empire in the Late 18th Century

A Brief Opera History of France and the Holy Roman Empire in the Late 18th Century

Opera, Sound Recording, and Critical Race Theory

This review essay considers the relationships among opera, sound recording, and critical race theory, and explores them at a moment when these fields are beginning to converge. One of my concerns will be the recent and ground-breaking studies and collections on opera and race by Naomi Adele André (2017, 2019), Kira Thurman (2012, 2019), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (2011), and Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley (2016). Another will be the neglected history of opera and sound recording; notable scholars here include Karen Henson (2020), Robert Cannon (2014), and Richard Leppert (2015). Finally, I will focus on the thought-provoking analyses of race and sound by Alexander Weheliye (2005), Brian Ward (2003), Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019). There are obvious connections among these three bodies of scholarship, yet these connections have not yet been clearly identified and explored.
 Although many scholars have come to embrace opera as a material and embodied phenomenon, the artform’s dissemination, analysis, and enjoyment through sound recording is still overlooked as a site of enquiry, especially its potential as a fertile site of inquiry about identity. To overlook the issue of identity in relation to recording is to perpetuate the belief that recordings are primarily documents of performance practice. It ignores the army of technicians who invisibly craft the acoustic object, many of whom are historically white and male. This review essay seeks to address this neglect and to suggest some ways in which the processes of making and consuming opera recordings is intimately related to whiteness and anti-Blackness—but also to Black possibility. In what follows, I cast a broad net, ranging widely and at times unexpectedly. I begin with some recent events in American musicology and in the New York operatic scene; then, turn to a consideration of some of the scholarship just mentioned; and finally conclude with a brief discussion of a specific recording, the Metropolitan Opera’s “live” sound recording of the 2019 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Hybrid in Form, Socialist in Content: The Formal Politics of Chŏlga in the North Korean Revolutionary Opera Sea of Blood

AbstractKim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

TÜRK DÜNYASININ İLK OPERASI ‘’LEYLA İLE MECNUN’’

The Turkish world's opera history gave its first example in 1908 with the opera "Leyli and Majnun" by Azerbaijani composer Üzeyir Hacıbeyli. According to many sources, "Leyli and Majnun" is described as the first opera of the Turkish world and the Islamic world, and the east. The most important feature of this opera is the masterful synthesis of classical western music and folk music. The opera, which was composed for the first time in this way, influenced the east with its staging and ensured that the art of opera was adopted by the public. The great composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli was born in the city of Shusha in Azerbaijan, which was developed in the field of literature and music and called the "natural conservatory." He developed his existing talent here and built it on solid foundations. He was interested in music and literature, wrote many books, articles, and was a writer for newspapers. The subject of the opera Leyli and Majnun is taken from Fuzuli's "Leyli and Majnun" poetry of the same name. At the age of 13, the composer decided to write this opera, influenced by the theater show "At the tomb of Majnun Leyli'' which he watched in Shusha, his home city. He started working on opera in 1907 when he was only 22 years old. By bringing a different perspective to opera, he used the tonal structure of western music with 'mugham,' also known as Azerbaijani folk music. This type of opera is also called "Mugam Opera.'' The opera, which was composed and performed despite the conditions of the period, preserved its originality by combining two cultures and was performed many times in other countries. Operas from the Turkish world are rarely staged in our country, and there is a need for such an article because the opera "Leyli and Majnun" has not been staged much in Turkey and there are very few theses, articles, and books about it. In this study; Different titles have been created such as the history of Azerbaijan opera, the life of Uzeyir Hajibeyli, the composer's process of creating the opera, and the content of the opera Leyli and Majnun. Keywords: Leyli and Majnun, Uzeyir Hajibeyli, Turkish World, Opera

The “operatic of opera” in music history pedagogy – exploring the temporal narrativization of opera

This study suggests that the pedagogy of music history for the professional training of musicians –including opera singers and future opera composers – could benefit from applying narratologyto operatic analysis and acknowledging the “operatic of opera” in the organization of the artisticmaterials as one possible pedagogical approach. By breaking with the canonized forms of musichistory pedagogy, the subject content of opera history can be explored for instance through thearchitecture of temporal narrativization, as made possible by the multiple media types incorporatedinto opera. The study demonstrates this temporal narrativization through examples grouped into threemain categories: “temporal sameness”, “temporal incongruence” and “non-linear temporality”. Whilemost of the examples are drawn from the classical-romantic repertoire, the analysis also shows thatnew pluri-medial ways of dealing with temporality and narration have been emerged in contemporaryopera. The study argues that by analyzing and illustrating the architecture of temporal narrativizationas one form of the “operatic of opera” in Western operatic practice, students will gain a betterunderstanding of the special nature of the pluri-medial nature of opera.

1. Abstract Machines

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days.
 About Gary Tomlinson:
 Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Tomlinson has taught and written about the history of opera and early-modern musical thought and practice, but also on the philosophy of history and anthropological theory. In his current research, he combines humanistic theory with evolutionary science and archaeology to search for the role of culture in the evolution of man. Following A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (MIT Press, 2015), his new book Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago, 2018) deepens the theoretical framework on how culture has shaped biology.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt David E. Latané (bio) Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. xviii + 348, $85/£65 cloth. Serial Forms is one in a line of intriguing, wide-ranging, and often enthralling books that cast the widest nets to reel in the material and intellectual phenomena of nineteenth-century British culture. Works such as Richard Stein’s Victoria’s Year: British Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 (1989), James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1999), or the more recent What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole (2019) have ignored disciplinary boundaries to freely roam across media and events. Clare Pettitt’s project to complete a trilogy of books showing the birth of the modern to the end of World War I is self-consciously ambitious, along the lines of Peter Gay’s five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984–98). The book reflects immense study. The bibliography, thirty-five pages of close print, begins with Carolyn Abbate’s A History of Opera (2012) and concludes with Slajov Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Footnotes sometimes creep into the top half of the page, allowing for careful consideration of the evolution of scholarship. Gratifyingly, predecessors such as Richard Altick and Brian Maidment are not only cited in the notes but also discussed. Pettitt expertly weaves together various strands to show how the growing infiltration of seriality into every aspect of culture forms “the dynamic processes involved in calibrating a new form of social time” (292). The page-turning and page-anticipating urgencies of the expanding news media are only one aspect of the case for the modern’s emergence. Serial Forms has chapters exploring the intersections of shows, such as the panorama and diorama; theatrical spectacles; exhibited paintings like Géricault’s “Shipwreck of the Medusa” at the Egyptian Hall (1820); canonical works, such as Childe Harold (1812–18), Don Juan (1819–24), and fictions by Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer; and the play of spatial and temporal scale in works by Thomas Carlyle, Augustus Pugin, and Charles Dickens. Pettitt accurately observes that the period 1820–37 “has long been a neglected and arid field in British literary studies” (8). The same cannot be said for periodical studies, as it was the heyday of Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, and the Keepsake craze, not to mention The Times at its thundery best. Amidst the riches of Serial Forms are two chapters especially relevant to periodical scholars. Chapter 6, “History in Miniature,” makes a strong case for the centrality of a group of popular titles that are too often overlooked: the information-oriented non-news weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–50) and the Penny Magazine [End Page 376] (1832–45). The next chapter, “Biopolitics of Seriality,” uses the short run of the weekly Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) “to consider how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics” (251). “History in Miniature” starts with a remark in David Copperfield (1850) about how the Peggottys take the sort of pleasure they might receive from “a pocket model of the Colosseum” when seeing Little Em’ly and David side-by-side in their boat-house (213). What does a shrunken model of a large Roman ruin mean in this context and to such people? The chapter examines how cheap illustrated periodicals helped cause a seismic shift in attitudes toward the historical past. This shift was abetted, somewhat ironically, by the “taxes on knowledge” that meant a penny paper could not contain news—only knowledge. Pettitt explores how the intersections of “models, panoramas, inexpensive toys, dioramas, stage sets and prints, and engravings and woodcuts in the cheap press” made it possible for society “to consume the past as never before” (216). Perhaps most importantly, “novel time-space frames were beginning to be inserted into the common experience of working class people” (216). The “promiscuous miscellanity” of the cheap papers, she argues, works differently than in...

Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise by Vincent Perez Benitez

Reviewed by: Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise by Vincent Perez Benitez Melissa Cummins Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise. By Vincent Perez Benitez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xxii, 302 p. ISBN 9780253042873 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780253042880 (paperback), $38; ISBN 9780253042903 (e-book), $18.99.] Notes, music examples, dramatic synopsis, glossary, bibliography, index. Speaking about using Oliver Messiaen's own commentary to aid in analyzing the composer's music, Roger Nichols advised the reader to "above all, not [take] all Messiaen's own remarks about his music at face value," because his "apparently compulsive explaining … was designed as a kind of smokescreen. All the things he says about his music are true, as far as they go, but really that's not very far" ("Performance Reviews," Musical Times 135, no. 1812 [February 1994]: 117). Acknowledging this and other limitations, Vincent Perez Benitez crafts a comprehensive tonal and coloristic analysis of Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise out of the composer's many birdsong notebooks, observations on philosophy, notes on the opera, and thoughts on color associations, to name a few sources. Benitez states in the introduction that the two interrelated purposes of the book are to "[examine] Saint François d'Assise from both theological and musical-analytical perspectives in order to interpret how Messiaen achieves his stated goal of expressing the depth of his Catholic theology through a work that contains all his harmonic techniques and sound-color harmonies. … [A]nd more importantly, … to better understand his compositional practice from larger theological and musical perspectives" (p. 2). He sees this analysis as necessary, as the opera "has yet to see such a book-length study in English that offers an extended analytical treatment of both its theological semantics and musical language, along with its contextualization as an opera" (p. 3). Benitez also sees his book as adding to the writings that analyze twentiethcentury opera. The author makes clear that a history of the opera is not included nor is an "accounting of the dramatic, psychological, and structural functions" of the opera's themes (p. 4). Before the introductory chapter, Benitez devotes four pages to general "Notes on the Text," in which he explains capitalizations, recommends having a version of the opera score handy (as he refers to it and includes only greatly reduced versions of musical passages), and explains the various didactic and primary sources referred to, including interviews and lectures by Messiaen. It should be mentioned that Benitez uses extensive endnotes throughout the text not only for citations but more often to provide a further explanation of or expansion on an idea mentioned in the main narrative. Flipping back and forth to these endnotes provides a complete overview of some of the more technical points in the document. Benitez provides an overview of the eight chapters, a very brief background of the opera's history, and an explanation of Messiaen's specific type of synesthesia in the introduction. In chapters 1 and 2, he discusses philosophical and theological connections to the symbolism in the opera and the connection between Saint François and earlier operas and French religious works. He continues in chapters 3 and 4 with an overview of Messiaen's ideas of overall form and the connections he made between chords, chordal structure, and colors. Music analysis dominates the final four chapters. In chapter 5, the longest section at fifty-seven pages, Benitez explains the opera's musical language, using four analytical approaches that he identifies as precompositional, referential, transformational, and additive pitch designs. He states that these terms "encompass aspects of post-tonal theory … and contextualize compositional designs suggested by Messiaen's aesthetics" (p. 135). These varied techniques are needed, Benitez admits, because "the sheer complexity of this music makes [analyzing Messiaen's] work as a harmonist, in particular, a challenging proposition" (p. 135). Birdsongs and their symbolism in the theological message of the opera are discussed in [End Page 256] chapter 6. In chapter 7, Benitez breaks down Saint François scene by scene with a tonal and color-association analysis of the saint's spiritual journey. He also provides links to theology and symbolism...