Comic Opera Research Articles

Catherine the Great’s Pastoral Comic Opera “Fedul and His Children” as a Cultural Pattern

Despite her status, Catherine II was a typical writer of the Enlightenment. She wrote her plays in order to “govern morals”, and her goal was to create a new cultural pattern for the nobility. The difference between her and ordinary writers was not the quality of her plays, but the power she possessed to reaffirm her classicist ideals using off-stage effects. Her opera Fedul and his Children, for example, was written to address the pressing contemporary problems arising from unequal relationships between noblemen and non-noble women. The other characters were also based on real people, drawn from the Imperial court and from the theatrical world. Fedul and his Children is a typical comic opera in which Catherine uses the rules of the genre to persuade the audience of the correctness of her views. The moral victory of the third estate is confirmed in the play by the fact that, according to the text, precisely its members are the carriers of primordial natural values, which is why interactions with the corrupt world of the nobility pose such a danger to them. Her ability to make use of the specificities of the genre sheds light on Catherine as someone who was familiar with and sensitive to the style of the period. Fedul and his Children has all the characteristic features of a comic opera, including allusive character names, peasant songs, the use of proverbs and the fear inspired by the hostile city in peasants fresh from their pastoral idyll.

Opera and Land: Settler Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

AbstractThis article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal off-reservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of “civilization” and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Surgical Outcome Reporting. Moving From a Comic to a Tragic Opera?

To assess the current quality of surgical outcome reporting in the medical literature and to provide recommendations for improvement. In 1996, The Lancet labeled surgery as a "comic opera" mostly referring to the poor quality of outcome reporting in the literature impeding improvement in surgical quality and patient care. We screened 3 first-tier and 2 second-tier surgical journals, as well as 3 leading medical journals for original articles reporting on results of surgical procedures published over a recent 18-month period. The quality of outcome reporting was assessed using a prespecified 12-item checklist. Six hundred twenty-seven articles reporting surgical outcomes were analyzed, including 125 randomized controlled trials. Only 1 (0.2%) article met all 12 criteria of the checklist, whereas 356 articles (57%) fulfilled less than half of the criteria. The poorest reporting was on cumulative morbidity burden, which was missing in 94% of articles (n=591) as well as patient-reported outcomes missing in 83% of publications (n=518). Comparing journal groups for the individual criterion, we found moderate to very strong statistical evidence for better quality of reporting in high versus lower impact journals for 7 of 12 criteria and strong statistical evidence for better reporting of patient-reported outcomes in medical versus surgical journals ( P <0·001). The quality of outcomes reporting in the medical literature remains poor, lacking improvement over the past 20 years on most key end points. The implementation of standardized outcome reporting is urgently needed to minimize biased interpretation of data thereby enabling improved patient care and the elaboration of meaningful guidelines.

Not just a Fairy Tale: Parody, Late Fascism, and Ghedini’s ‘La pulce d’oro’ (1940)

ABSTRACT At first glance, La pulce d’oro (1940), a one-act comic opera by Giorgio Federico Ghedini, might seem at odds with the turmoil of late-fascist Italy on the brink of war. A new opera in 1940 was itself anachronistic: a genre mired in unending crisis, resurfacing now at one of the darkest moments in the nation’s history. However, on closer inspection, La pulce d’oro demonstrates a peculiar timeliness and—in the tradition of Verdi’s Falstaff—offers pertinent insight into its contemporary and much overlooked moment. This article proposes a reading of the relevance of Ghedini’s opera through its twofold use of parody: as a musical technique and as an allegorical means, connecting past and present, fiction and reality, fairy tale and history. Encompassing some of the key cultural currents of the time—neoclassicism, magic realism, and social satire—La pulce d’oro’s parody unexpectedly brings together comic opera and fascism at a moment of cultural and political apotheosis.

Henri Kowalski (1841–1916) in the Antipodes and His Comic Opera Queen Venus

French virtuoso pianist and composer Henri Kowalski visited Australia in 1880 and then returned in 1885 when he settled in Sydney for twelve years. In 1881 he wrote a comic opera, Queen Venus. with a libretto by Marcus Clarke. This paper traces the transformation of Queen Venus into a French fantaisie-bouffe called La Guerre aux hommes, ten years later. It reveals a story of unusual cultural entanglement across two countries.

Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England

ABSTRACT This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the “elite” became exclusive of the “popular,” when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.

FUNCTIONS OF PROPER NAMES AND THEIR PARTICULAR FEATURES: A STUDY OF “THE SORCERER” BY WILLIAM GILBERT AND ARTHUR SULLIVAN

The present article aims to reveal the particular features of the way proper names function in an operatic text, in particular in the libretto of the British comic opera “The Sorcerer” created by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. This study is based on the following hypothesis: within the framework of theatrical discourse, one of the main functions of a proper name is an information-accumulative, or cumulative, function. As an integral part of culture, an onym has the ability to store culturally significant information. “Decoding” such onyms in a literary or an operatic text provides the reader or viewer with all the context necessary for an understanding of what is happening according to the plot. For example, in “The Sorcerer” there are anthroponyms that indicate the status that the main characters have in the Anglo-Saxon society. Apart from anthroponyms there are also culturally significant toponyms, which have to be understood in order to grasp the comic effect created by William Gilbert, the author of the libretto. The analysis of the few chosen onyms made it possible to prove that a proper name may play an important role in the construction of the plot and in the creation of characters’ images within the framework of a musical theatre piece.

PUTTING EGO ASIDE IN NEW OPERA: ON THE CO-CREATIVE DYNAMICS AROUND JE SUIS NARCISSISTE

AbstractThe world of opera is well known as a professional community in which egos often clash, yet the complexity of the operatic artwork is often heavily dependent on collaborative practice. This article discusses the co-creative dynamics that gave rise to the premiere production of the comic opera Je suis narcissiste, by composer Raquel García-Tomás, librettist Helena Tornero and stage director Marta Pazos. Through a series of interviews with this artistic team, and a scrutiny of the libretto, score and documentary video recording of its premiere, three significant features of this collaboration are flagged, particularly in Act VIII. These are: a quest for balance in the convergence of the disciplines involved; a mitigation of undesired redundancies in the representation of some elements in the action of the opera; a consideration of the capacity of the human and material resources available for the premiere. The article will also discuss how these anticipatory strategies helped to optimise time during rehearsals.

‘Generational Drag’: All-Child Performances in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Britain

Separated by almost three hundred years and by significant developments in the construction of childhood as an identity distinct from adulthood, the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries stand out as periods of intense and popular activity by child actors, and specifically by companies of child actors who played adult roles and deliberately juxtaposed the age categories of performer and character. While much excellent period-specific work has been accomplished during the last twenty years on early modern boy actors and on the ‘infant phenomena’ of the Victorian stage, there has as yet been no attempt to compare children’s professional performance during these two periods. This article contrasts the repertoire of the boy companies of Jacobean London with that of the children’s opera companies who toured the UK and Ireland throughout the 1880s performing comic operas such as H.M.S. Pinafore and Les Cloches de Corneville. It also explores what it meant for children to perform as adults during these two periods, and what the latter reveals about the historical construction and policing of age categories.

Modern Ukrainian Opera: Varieties of Genres

"The article examines the state of modern Ukrainian opera of the 21st century, which reflects European and global trends aimed at updating the genre and searching for new genre models. The authors of the article purposefully chose works by composers of almost all age categories, which are quite different in terms of genre content – interpretation of traditions and innovation – from creative youth to the most famous artists in the whole world (E. Stankovich), and consciously focused attention on examples of modern opera from several regions of Ukraine: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv, Dnipro. This work, dedicated to modern Ukrainian opera, combined the efforts of a practicing composer and a musicologist-scientist. After all, the material of research in one of the sections of the article was the parody comic opera by Valentina Martynyuk (Brondzia), as an example of the only opera performance in the Dnieper region. The research methodology is based on historical-typological, genre-stylistic, comparative, and analytical methods. The historical -typological method is related to the problems of the opera genre at the modern stage, which needs updating and radical changes; genre-stylistic, comparative, and analytical methods allow us to draw conclusions about the peculiarities of genre models of modern Ukrainian operas. They reflect Ukrainian national traditions, including authentic music and modern compositional techniques. It is noted that the level of the ratio of traditional and innovative appeal to the opera genre is determined by the individual creative approach of a certain composer and director. Keywords: director, double world, genre, comic, modern opera, project, simultaneous, synthesis."

Choosing the Best Design in Surgical Research.

Choosing the Best Design in Surgical Research.

Reappraising Prokofiev's Operas

Sergei Prokofiev's operatic career exhibits a multitude of exceptional successes and failures, political and cultural idiosyncrasies and compromises, and bold convictions and uncertainties. Prokofiev considered himself an opera composer and showed his affinity for it from an early age, completing his first opera by age nine and continuing his work in the art form for the remainder of his life and career. Each opera takes on vastly different subjects, topics and time periods, evidence of his diverse selection of libretto sources. For his mature works, Prokofiev adapted literary works from Russia's nineteenth-century greats (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy), a Russian twentieth-century symbolist author (Bryusov) and two socialist-realist authors (Katayev and Polevoy). He adapted two other operas from the eighteenth century with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comic opera libretto for The Duenna and Carlo Gozzi's fiaba L'amore delle tre melarance.

Surgical research—comic opera no more

Surgical research—comic opera no more

Dikran Tchouhadjian’s Opera Arif՚s Ruse (dedicated to the 150th anniversary of creating the first Armenian comic opera)

On December 9, 1872, Dikran Tchouhadjian’s Arif’s Ruse, the first Armenian comic opera, was staged at the Getik Pasha Theatre in Constantinople, simultaneously marking the beginning of the Turkish musical theatre. The author of the opera libretto was an Armenian opera singer, the first Western Armenian singer who received his professional education in Europe, tenor Hovhannes Achemian (1838-1905), who performed the title role of Arif. The Ottoman stage primadonna Shazik Keuyluyian (born Sevadjian, Lusnak Sargsi Keuyluyian, 1854- 1905) played the main character, Meriem. The performance of Arif was the first occasion in the Armenian musical reality when an Armenian composer’s opera was on stage, performed by Armenian artists. This was not only the birthday of the Armenian comic opera, but also it marked the beginning of the Armenian musical theatre. In the present study on Tchouhadjian’s music, presented to the English-speaking readers for the first time, the results of the opera’s comprehensive research are substantiated, defining the genre of Arif as a comic opera, revealing its musical language and dramaturgical features, and putting forward the necessity of staging it in Armenia, as well as publishing an academic edition of the opera score and claviers. The clavier of the opera prelude has been introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the computer composition of which was carried out by assistant professor Anna Tamiroghlyan, Doctor of Arts.

ИСТОРИЯ СОЗДАНИЯ ОПЕРЫ ДЖ. ВЕРДИ «ФАЛЬСТАФ» СКВОЗЬ ПРИЗМУ ЭПИСТОЛЯРИЯ (к 210-летию со дня рождения композитора)

The year 2023 marks the 210th anniversary of the birth of the opera reformer, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Through the prism of the composer's correspondence and the memoirs of his contemporaries, the article traces his work on the last opus, the opera “Falstaff ”. In this work, Verdi turns to the comic genre for the second time — his first comic opera “The King for a Day”, created during the most tragic period of the composer's life, was not a success. The libretto of “Falstaff ” was based on Shakespeare's comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and fragments from his chronicle “Henry IV”. The composer and librettist A. Boito did not intend to create a purely comic opera similar to opera buffa. Boito wrote for Verdi a lyrical comedy, unlike any other, where the protagonist was a Shakespearean character — a fat, good-natured and cowardly drunkard. Verdi did not seek to resurrect in “Falstaff ” the naive gaiety of the old comic opera. He went his own way, without rejecting the traditions laid down by his predecessors (especially Rossini), but also without imitating them, achieving greater psychological intensity. The composer's letters reveal his amazing character — his modesty and selfdoubt, his mercy and optimism, his thorough approach to all the details of the production and his incredible capacity for work.

Музыкальное искусство России начала ХХ века: жанризм

Editor-in-Chief’s Column has accomplished publication of a large series of artistic-historical essays ‘Artwork Directions’ which consecutively considered the major epochs. Now we’d like to present one more cycle of essays ‘The Russian Musical Art of the Early XX Century’ covering native musical art of the turn and beginning of the XX century as an attempt to comprehend what was happening with the world and the man at the historic turning point from the era of the New to the Newest Time. The previous essays about the Russian musical art of the early XX century described its poles (2021. Vol. 14. Iss. 10), folk genre (2021. Vol. 14. Iss. 11) and “pagan” style in music (2022. Vol. 15. Iss. 2). The essay is devoted to providing insight into the peculiarities of formation and existence of the phenomenon of genrism in the Russian musical art of the early XX century. The paper examines both the most notable musical genre works (I. Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrushka” (1911), S. Prokofiev’s ballet “Chout” (1915)) and lesser-known examples belonging to the national musical comedy genre, written in the forms of a domestic comedy of manners and characters (U. Hajibeyov’s operetta “Arshin Mal Alan” (1911-1913), V. Dolidze’s comic opera “Keto and Kote” (1918)). Special attention is paid to determining the significance of the festive-hedonistic worldview for the figurative sphere under consideration. As a result, the author comes to the following conclusion: the active development of musical genre art, which covered the entire transition period from classic to modernity, became an indisputable and incredible phenomenon of the early XX century, reflecting the people’s ineradicable will to live, manifested in spite of all kinds of negative and frightening processes of the national history during that time.

Опера Ц. А. Кюи «Сын мандарина»: между востоком и западом

The article considers the transformation of the Western European, Russian and Chinese culture influences in the one-act opera «The Mandarin's Son» by César Cui on the libretto by V. A. Krylov (1859). The author relies on an integrated approach and uses cultural-historical, comparative-analytical and musical-analytical methods. The scientific novelty of the study is connected with the appeal to the practically unexplored opera by Cui. As the author proves, «The Mandarin's Son» is firmly based on European and Russian artistic traditions (genre models of commedia dell'arte, Italian and French comic opera, the intonation dictionary of Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, the culture of home music). At the same time, the opera stands at the origins of the Russian opera East, which is modeled in the music of Cui using the techniques of the «Janissary style». The uniqueness of the «The Mandarin's Son» is connected with the fact that the opera becomes a «starting point» in the development of Russian musical chinoiserie. Comparing the text of the libretto with fragments of articles by orientalists and publicists of the mid-19th century, the author demonstrates the embodiment of the ideas about China characteristic of that time. The intonation-thematic analysis of the «The Mandarin's Son» also suggests that Cui had at least a general idea of the music of the Far East and made an attempt to stylize it.

Composição e análise de uma ópera cômica: investigando a construção do sentido musical

I intend to demonstrate the contribution of specific cognitive devices in regulating processes that determine the perceptive choices and the ways of constructing musical meaning in the compositional process of a comic opera. To this end, from the libretto A Sonâmbula, by Machado de Assis, I develop the composition and a reflective analysis of the composition of an opera in two cycles: (i) In the first, according to the principles of formalist semantics, I generate the first version of opera; and (ii) in the second, from the application of devices of an incorporated semantics, I produce the final version of the opera. Comparing the artistic re-sults of the two cycles, I discuss the process of producing the musical meaning that regulates compositional acts, highlighting the role of cognitive devices described by enacting theories of contemporary cognitive sciences, still little addressed by the literature on musical compo-sition, particularly in the operatic genre.

Gioacchino Rossini's Opera "Silk Ladder": from the Author to the Director

Art is considered as one of the forms of social thinking, which depends on social, political and cultural processes of human existence. The author analyzed the dialogue of modern artistic traditions of the world, to which the Ukrainian theatrical space was also invited. It has been proven that at the turn of the 21st century, such a dialogue turns into a "polylogue". The "polylogue" is characterized from the standpoint of the "immersion" of art in general and music, in particular, into the global digitalization of the world with an increase in information flows and the emergence of "clip thinking" in the modern viewer. The following criteria for evaluating the results of artistic creativity are proposed, such as: advertising and performance component; space-time component; material component in the equivalent of decoration, art technologies, the price of a seat — content for viewing. It was determined by the search for the work for its own directorial embodiment, which became decisive in the appeal to the musical work of Gioacchino Rossini. His one-act farce "Silken Ladder" was selected. The work of the composer is studied. The prerequisites for the creation of the opera, some features of the author's style of the artist during the period of its writing are revealed, which determined the universality of this example for interpretations in today's conditions. The kinship of the figurative sphere of the one-act comic opera with the main characters of the Italian street comedy dell'arte has been rethought. The integrity of the ideological and artistic content of the opera is highlighted and its musical and structural component, which corresponds to the features of Rossini's comedy-opera genre, is emphasized. An analysis of the most interesting directorial incarnations of Gioacchino Rossini's opera "Silkin Ladder" was carried out. Typologies of her directorial interpretations are classified. The original concept of staging Gioacchino Rossini's opera "The Silkin Ladder" is proposed, which is reflected in the synthesis of updated scenography principles and the figurative component of commedia dell'arte.

British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference

British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference