Opera Staging Research Articles

Some Scenes of Intersection Between Psychoanalysis and Opera

The article theorizes the intellectual intersections of psychoanalysis and opera. First, it analyses Sigmund Freud’s ambivalent relationship to music in general and to opera in particular. The principal reason for Freud’s conscious rejection of music’s influence becomes the impossibility of conceptualizing pleasure. One of the first to bring together musicological and psychoanalytic discourses was Max Graf, who was not only a friend of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg but also a member of the very first psychoanalytic circle of friends that gathered at Freud’s home. Max Graf’s article, in which he offered a detailed analysis of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, was the first psychoanalytic publication devoted to the art of opera. Max Graf’s son Herbert Graf is known in the history of psychoanalysis as Little Hans. Herbert’s Graf dissertation was devoted to the works of Richard Wagner and he subsequently became a prominent opera director. In his dissertation, Herbert Graf used Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas to build his theory of opera staging where the concepts that unite the unconscious and operatic scenes, namely fantasy, desire, and identification, come to the fore. These subjects allow us to contextualize and map the space of the encounter between opera and psychoanalysis, fantasy and its embodiment.

The Evolution of Opera Performance from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the Nineteenth Century

"The presentation of the book The Evolution of Opera Performance, from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the 19th Century, offers a synthesis of our work as a musical theatre director. Our aim is to stimulate the public’s interest in the opera genre and opera staging, by revealing aspects in the history of opera performance(s), as they have been shaped, century after century, by following the gradual effort and the tireless passion of its creators. Our aims are also to illustrate the original charm and the infinite resources of this genre, which continues to delight the public at large and the knowledgeable even today. Keywords: opera performance, opera staging, liturgical drama, vernacular drama, secular drama, dramatic madrigal, intermedi, the Florentine Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi, comédies-ballets, tragédie en musique, semi-opera, opera seria, the comic opera, opera buffa, ópera comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, tonadilla, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "

Ukrainian performances of small form operas in the era of the 2000s

The purpose of the work. The article defines the role of the small form operas in the development of Ukrainian music and drama theatre of the 2000s. The research methodology is based on key provisions, concepts of music directing, developed during the twentieth century and their diversification in today's realities. Such general scientific methods as art history, history, analysis and synthesis, and comparative methods were chosen to compare Ukrainian productions of small form operas of the 2000s. The scientific novelty of the work lies in rethinking functioning of small opera forms according to the realities of modern Ukraine and elucidating the factors influencing their modern development and changes. Conclusions. The role of operas of small forms in the repertoire of Ukrainian musical theatres and artistic-theatrical projects is increasing under various conditions such as: socio-cultural and political conflicts of a new millennium, the role of operas of small forms in the repertoire of Ukrai-nian musical theatres and artistic-theatrical projects is increasing. The modern audience is the part of information society, which exists on its own, often developing at an accelerated pace, and it must be taken into account by the directors of musical theatre when deciding on the repertoire for subsequent staging of an opera. The relevance of the drama of the selected works, ideological and artistic qualities, aesthetic and educational aspects of the opera, as well as the assessment of creative and material possibilities for the realization of the idea of the play are essential, crucial elements that should be taken into consideration in order to ensure effective opera staging and production. In the 2000s, art and theatre projects enriched Ukrainian stage by conducting research and experimenting with the scope and subject of performance as well as with their genre and style, thus confirming and updating small opera forms.

The Danish Première of Alban Berg’s Three-Act Lulu A Contextualized Oral History of a European Capital of Culture Event in 1996

In 1996, Copenhagen was awarded the title European Capital of Culture. Amongst its most publicized events was the Danish and Scandinavian première of the complete version of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. In this study, an oral history methodology is applied to draw conclusions regarding the significance, reception, and legacy of Lulu in Copenhagen from the perspectives of four Danish administrative leaders involved in this production, who, through interviews, reflected on this project within the context of Copenhagen’s cultural landscape. Their testimonies depict a narrative of how this production established a new perspective of opera in Copenhagen, as well as the innovation of performing opera at unique venues not usually associated with this genre. This phenomenon contributed to attracting a wider audience demographic, who would be less receptive to more traditional methods of opera staging. Furthermore, it was established by the Lulu project instigators that the production depicted Danish cultural identity, while simultaneously promoting an international cooperation and an international standard of artistic execution.

現代オペラ演出，あるいはニュー・ミュジコロジーの劇場：ローレンス・クレイマーの音楽解釈学再考

現代オペラ演出，あるいはニュー・ミュジコロジーの劇場：ローレンス・クレイマーの音楽解釈学再考

Faust secondo La Fura dels Baus: teatro, opera, cinema

Summary: The article focuses on the Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus’s works on the myth of Faust. The analysis is based on the drama F@ust versió 3.0 (1998), the free adaptation of Berlioz’s La damnació de Faust (1999), the cyber show Faust Shadow (1999), the movie Fausto 5.0 (2001) and the opera staging of Gounod’s Faust (2014). In its interpretations of the myth, the group recreates it in different artistic dimensions: drama, cyber theatre, lyric opera, cinema. Nevertheless, the study of these productions demonstrates that all of them share some common basic elements: the multifaceted personality of the protagonist, his fragmented perception of himself and reality, a postmodern vision of the Self and life. At the same time, La Fura deepens its investigation on theatre/performance and technology, reaching impressive and groundbreaking results. Keywords: La Fura dels Baus, Catalan contemporary drama, performing arts, cinema, lyric opera, cyber theatre

Wagner’s Visions: Poetry, Politics, and the Psyche in the Operas through Die Walküre by Katherine R. Syer (review)

Wagner's Visions: Poetry, Politics, and the Psyche in the Operas through Die Walkure. By Katherine R. Syer. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 115.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014. [x, 256 p. ISBN 9781580464826. $80.] Music examples, illustrations, figures, bibliography, index. In Wagner's Visions, Katherine R. Syer explores the musical and scenic portrayal of dreams, nightmares, and altered states of consciousness Richard Wagner's characters experience in his operas their potential to embody in art the hopes and anxieties of liberal thinkers during the politically unpromising times of the composer's own lifetime (p. 3). Locating these works within their immediate cultural and historical context, Syer identifies scientific, musical and dramatic models for Wagner's handling of these psychological experiences. She points out connections to a pool of common imagery, and confronts Wagner's operas with related tendencies to incorporate meaning in art, not only in opera, but also in poetry and painting. Starting in 1813, both the year of Wagner's birth and of the fateful Volkerschlacht (battle of the nations), chapter 1 paints a detailed and colorful picture of the historical events in the first half of the nineteenth century surrounding the development of a liberal nationalist movement that continued to cling to the idea of a unified, democratic Germany (p. 1). Focusing particularly on the repercussions these developments had on the local culture and art in Dresden and Leipzig, Syer sets up the frame of reference through which she aims to shed new light on the political undercurrents in Wagner's operas (p. 114). Among the models and contextual phenomena Syer deems significant both for Wagner's treatment of dreams and visions as well as for his engagement with contemporary issues in his works is the poetry of Theodor Korner--and even more, the hero-worship developed around this poet-soldier who died in the Wars of Liberation. Besides Carl Maria von Weber's settings of Korner's poems and Weber's operas Der Freischutz and Euryanthe, further influences stretch from Christoph Willibald Gluck's operas Iphigmie en Aulide and Iphigenie en Tauride across paintings of the Dresden-based artists Georg Friedrich Kersting and Adrian Ludwig Richter to contemporary theories of the psyche and the unconscious. The rich and varied language is one of the book's most outstanding features. Syer's portrayals of the historical and cultural circumstances are vividly descriptive and draw the reader in. Her account shows what historiography can gain by pairing historical evidence with attention to narrative and storytelling and a skillful use of language. The same goes for the descriptions and analyses of musical passages, dramatic scenes, poems, and paintings, which are always supplied with illustrations and extensive music examples so the reader can easily follow. Often, Syer manages to make connections between two scenes or between the atmosphere of a painting and an operatic scene palpable just through the way their descriptions are designed and juxtaposed. This carefully constructed cultural framework sets the stage for the detailed analyses of Die Veen, Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and Die Walkure make up the remaining chapters of the book. Syer's analytic method is thereby entirely based on comparisons and the construction of intertextual references. She discusses Wagner's least-known opera Die Feen, for instance, within a web of related dramas (p. 41). She points out common metaphors, structural patterns, and dramatic constellations with Weber's and Gluck's operas, but especially emphasizes the intimate connection exists between Die Feen and Wagner's later works, arguing for continuity in his artistic development. In line with her self-assessment the book is rooted in her intensive study of opera staging practices (p. …

From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging. By Evan Baker.

<i>From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging</i>. By Evan Baker.

Between an Angel’s Cry and a Murmur: The Invention of the Telephone in Colonial Havana

In 1849 in an electroplating factory on second floor Havana's Teatro Tacon, city's home for Italian opera, theater engineer Antonio Meucci placed a piece copper in a patient's mouth and shocked him. The patient, who was an opera house employee of color, was hoping to be cured what he described as head rheumatism. He cried out in pain as voltage contacted his tongue.1 Meucci thought he heard something and repeated experiment. This time a murmur-an inarticulate sound was carried down wire to adjacent room where Meucci was administering shocks, and Italian inventor grasped basic workings telephony, some thirty years before Alexander Bell.2Meucci is kind character who seems more proper to a novel than to history. A Florentine inventor and engineer for Pergola Opera, he moved to Havana in 1835, where he became machinist for Teatro Principal and then Teatro Tacon, opulent theaters owned by Catalan merchant and infamous slaver Francisco Marty y Torrents. In 1850 a year after discovering principles behind telephone, Meucci and his wife Ester Mochi moved from Havana to a home on Staten Island that they shared for some time with Italian unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi. From sizable wealth in Cuba couple descended into poverty in New York, worsened by Meucci's severe burns from an exploding boiler aboard Staten Island Ferry (the 1871 Westfield Disaster); Meucci's wife sold his plans for telettrofono-named for speaking at a long distance-while he was recuperating.3 Three years later Meucci's plans for his invention, which he had registered with District Telephone Company, were, he was told, but may well have been slipped into a competitor's hands. A month later Bell requested a patent for his telephone, and in 1885 Meucci lost a suit against Bell's American Telephone Company for primacy invention. Meucci died poor in 1889.Many aspects Meucci's life and his inventions have been detailed in an amateur biography by Italian communications engineer Basilio Catania. Catania's biography does not discuss, however, how accidental discovery telephony ought to be situated in relation to both Cuban aesthetics at time-specifically island's flourishing Italian opera scene, which Meucci was an instrumental part-and island's harshest period in its history racialized slavery. One might, for instance, be tempted to read Meucci's shock treatment as part a history ongoing experiments on and torture black bodies in Cuba during a period severe corporal punishment and just five years after Conspiracy la Escalera, or Ladder Conspiracy (1844). The conspiracy was a coordinated antislavery insurrection that yielded revolts on a swath plantations throughout country. Its eventual suppression ended in killing many members island's black bourgeoisie; name owed to manner in which accused were tied to ladders and whipped. Yet freethinker Meucci intended to heal man he shocked and, himself in flight from conservative politicians in Italy opposed to his and Ester's progressive politics, was likely also critical Cuba's colonial slave state.Similarly, one might easily connect Meucci's pioneering work on transmitting human voice to his work on opera house technologies. Besides inventing an acoustic (nonelectronic) to communicate between stage and backstage in Italy, he created a fan system to clear dangerous smoke generated by candles lighting theater.4 Avital Ronell, who does not mention Meucci in her study The Telephone Book, argued that the possibility telephone was always linked to music, noting that Bell's other competitor Elisha Gray had been fiddling with a musical telephone in 1870s.5 But here too a possible association might be too easy. In Meucci's case it may be that and operatic voice share more philosophically than they do technologically: Meucci was experimenting with electricity because he was interested in its use in opera staging and in medicine, but-the fortuitous setting aside-he was not explicidy looking to capture operatic voice. …

Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner (review)

Reviewed by: Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner Joseph M. Ortiz Der Ring des Nibelungen. Music and libretto by Richard Wagner. Directed by Robert Lepage. Metropolitan Opera, New York City. 5-12 May 2012. After the world premiere of his Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) in Bayreuth, Richard Wagner expressed disappointment with the opera's staging. "There is so much that we shall have to put right next year," he wrote in a letter to the soprano Lilli Lehmann. Although his fastidiousness is well-known, his reaction was tepid so far as Ring criticism goes. No other work in the operatic repertoire regularly inspires such high expectations among its audiences or provokes such impassioned diatribes among its critics. Any opera company that decides to mount a new production of the Ring does so with the knowledge that it will inevitably spark controversy in some corner, in addition to shouldering the enormous costs required to stage a cycle of four operas based on Nordic mythology that stretches to nearly seventeen hours of music. The Metropolitan Opera expended much financial and critical capital when it recently staged its new production of Wagner's Ring, designed and directed by Robert Lepage. Lepage, one of Canada's most highly regarded theatre directors, is best known to American audiences for his work with Ex Machina and Cirque du Soleil. The Met rolled out the production in installments, premiering Das Rheingold and Die Walküre during the 2010-11 season, followed by Siegfried and Götterdämmerung during 2011-12. Three complete cycles of the Ring were performed in April and May 2012. By the time the third cycle opened, the critical verdict had already been pronounced: Alex Ross in the New Yorker dubbed it "the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history" (12 March 2012), and reviews in the New York Times, Opera Times, and the New York Observer were about as congenial. Much of the criticism was directed at what has come to be known as "The Machine"—an expensive forty-five-ton contraption of rotating aluminum planks that occupies most of the stage and that is used throughout the cycle as stage architecture and video projection screen. Early performances were marred by technical issues associated with The Machine (such as a loud creaking noise whenever the planks were in motion), although the production resolved most problems by the third cycle. On the face of it, it seems unfair to criticize Lepage's production for its unusual approach to stagecraft, given his well-known penchant for acrobatics and visual pyrotechnics. Such criticism also seems at least premature, given the fact that many Ring productions during the last forty years have been avant-garde in nature—including some that were initially panned but are now considered landmark achievements. The critically acclaimed Seattle Opera Ring that premiered in 1986, directed by François Rochaix and designed by Robert Israel, proudly billed itself as a "postmodern" Ring. In addition to real fire onstage, it featured Rhinemaidens in Victorian-era pantaloons and Valkyries riding carousel horses. Most famously, Patrice Chéreau's Ring, which premiered at Bayreuth in 1976, presented the work as a Marxist critique of political power—in line with George Bernard Shaw's interpretation in The Perfect Wagnerite. Instead of evoking mythological settings or natural landscapes (as Wagner prescribes in the libretto), Chéreau's sets were made to resemble modern hydroelectric plants and dilapidated urban tenements. Although the production provoked near-riots among critics and audiences at its premiere, it is now generally considered by Wagner scholars to be the most important Ring production of the twentieth century. Lepage's production might have elicited a kinder response from its critics, or at least found more champions to balance the attacks, had it extended its revolutionary zeal to other aspects of the drama. His Ring was, in many ways, surprisingly traditional, as was especially evident in the visual presentation of the characters, especially in the first three operas. Wotan enters Rheingold donning a bronze breastplate and long, wavy hair—evocative of Nordic mythological heroes though without self-conscious irony or exaggeration. Likewise, Wotan's wife, Fricka, was clad in regal, matronly gowns...

Borrowings and Original Music: A Dilemma for the Ballet-Pantomime Composer

Parisian audiences of the 1830s and 1840s were well acquainted with the custom of musical borrowing. In vaudevilles, they heard melodies taken from folk-songs along with the original tunes vaudeville conductors composed for such works.' In melodramas, they heard the strains of familiar arias in the overtures and instrumental refrains.2 At the concerts given by virtuosos, they heard, buried under the arpeggios and flourishes, wellknown tunes from both operas and folk-songs.3 At the Opera, in performances of foreign operas, they heard both the music of the opera itself and a pastiche of borrowings from other works: for the Opera's staging Don Giovanni in 1834, for example, Franqois Henri J. Blaze (better known as Castil-Blaze) was charged with the task of providing music for ' . .. the dance airs, marches, final chorus, entr'actes, in short, all of the accessories necessary for producing Don Giovanni at the Paris Opera'4 he did so by borrowing from Mozart's piano sonatas, symphonies, masses, Die Zauberflite, and La Clemenza di Tito. Parisians during this era were also much taken with the opera pastiche, a genre which consisted entirely of borrowed music. Many such works were performed in the Boulevard theatres and at the Opera as well,5 though they did not always meet with the approval of critics (Hector Berlioz even calling Castil-Blaze a 'veterinarian' for his efforts in this regard). Opera audiences also encountered borrowed music in balletpantomime scores.6 Indeed, since the breaking off of ballet from opera with the first appearance of the ballet d'action at the Opera in the 1770s, Parisian ballet composers had made free use of music appropriated from other sources. So slight is the role of original music in some of the early scores, in fact, that in several cases the identity of the composer or arranger is today difficult, or impossible, to discern.7 Though composers began to contribute more original music to ballet scores around the beginning of the 19th century, they continued to make use of borrowed music well into the 1830s and 1840s.