Operatic Conventions Research Articles

Sophocles’ Antigone and Chinese Opera (xiqu): a discussion of hybridized and indigenized adaptations

Abstract Sophocles’ Antigone has been the subject of numerous adaptations. Among these are two xiqu (Chinese opera) adaptations of Antigone, Hebei bangzi (Hebei clapper opera) Thebes City (2002) and jingju (Peking opera) Mingyue and Zihan (2015). This article compares these two works and the different ways that they adapt the text. The first strategy for adaptation is ‘hybridization’ in which the work is adapted and transformed according to local generic conventions and expectations, but a number of foreign elements remain. A second strategy is ‘indigenization’ in which the work is thoroughly assimilated into the local cultural form, and there are effectively no foreign elements. Both these strategies can be observed in looking at these Chinese adaptations of Antigone. After comparative discussion of the two xiqus, the article focuses on Thebes City, looking at the way that it combines the history and culture of ancient China with ancient Greece as well as the way in which it engages with Chinese culture through its depiction of ghosts. This element is singled out because it provides a mature example of hybridization at work. From discussions of these productions of Antigone, three key points emerge. The first is that adaptions of Greek drama in xiqu privilege creativity and performability over fidelity to an original text. The second is that when operatic conventions of xiqu are observed, the work is more likely to succeed. This seems to be the case with the tremendous local success of Thebes City. Thirdly, it is worth observing that the hybridized mode which is adopted in Thebes City is the most difficult to succeed with as it requires balancing diverse elements. Thebes City’s admirable success lies in its ability to achieve ‘harmony in diversity’.

An Introduction to the Use of Chinese Opera Expressions in Experimental Drama

The paper’s focus is on the operatic elements’ use in experimental theater, and it begins with an analysis of how opera expression means have been used in this context before moving on to investigate the operatic elements’ crucial role in this type of performance. The author investigates pieces like The Wound Disappeared in the Boundless Night and The Green Snake for references to and applications of experimental drama in opera performances, thereby revealing the inextricable bond between opera and experimental drama. While exploring the legacy of operatic conventions in experimental drama, this paper argues that the field would benefit from taking inspiration from even more classical sources if it were to advance at a steady clip.

"Va, pensiero…" – opera w filmie Federica Felliniego "E la nave va" ("A statek płynie")

he aim of the article is to present the ways in which opera exists in 1983 Federico Fellini’s film E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On). The research is aimed at proving the thesis that Fellini’s film is a film about opera – opera as a medium, as an institution and as a social custom. It is the film that follows operatic conventions and is made with the help of operatic means. The film in which opera becomes the structure of the film narrative.

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of <i>Le Coq d'Or</i>

A Tale of Three Rusalkas: Krasnopol’sky, Pushkin, and Dargomyzhsky

Conventional histories of Russian opera mark Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera Zhizn’ za tsarya (A Life for the Tsar) as the point of origin for Russian nationalist opera that quickly burst into full bloom, yet by the middle of the century homegrown opera had fallen out of performance repertory in favor of Western European and particularly Italian imports. It was around this time that a group of amateur composers later known as the kuchka (the “Mighty Handful” or “Mighty Five”) re-ignited the debate around creating a uniquely Russian genre of opera; however, their efforts only obscured Russian opera’s European roots rather than establish a completely separate genre. Yet their critical campaign proved successful, and the idea of Russian opera as a uniquely nationalist genre remains especially prevalent. This article examines Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka (1856), one of the earliest examples of this new type of Russian nationalist opera, and how it responds to the dominance of Italian opera in Russia during the mid-century by embedding Italian operatic conventions into the score itself. Rusalka also inaugurated the operatic trend of adapting literary works by Aleksandr Pushkin, the writer often cited as the father of Russian literature. This article illustrates how both Pushkin’s dramatic Rusalka and Dargomyzhsky’s operatic adaptation of it a generation later imitated Western European literary and theatrical conventions. Paradoxically, the ways in which Pushkin and Dargomyzhsky would conceal these Western parallelisms would later be hailed as markers of a uniquely “Russian” literary and operatic style in a critical campaign designed to erase Russia’s long history of artistic dialogue with the wider Continent.

THE OPERATICS OF DEATH: GENDER, THE MARKET, AND THE REFORM-ERA PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE DEATH OF ANGIOLINA BOSIO

This article analyzes the development of a gendered culture of celebrity in nineteenth century Russia using the death of the opera singer Angiolina Bosio in 1859. Bosio was one of the leading celebrities of her era, and her death became a major social phenomenon. The article examines reactions to the singer’s death in the capital press to demonstrate that the figure of the celebrity female performer reflected major changes in the public sphere during the era of the Great Reforms. Reactions to Bosio show that female opera stars reflected the growing role of commercial forces in the public sphere and the anxiety about them from the point of view of many commentators. This article demonstrates that female celebrities reveal the dynamics of an expanding public sphere in Russia that was visible in the pages of the press. Bosio embodied both the ambiguous status of opera as both a popular and elite artistic genre, and a distinct emotional culture associated with opera. Her death shows the role of gender in the creation and dynamics of the role of celebrity in the textual public sphere. Analyzing reactions to Bosio’s death clearly demonstrates that gendered tropes and conventions from opera spread widely beyond the theater and influenced public life. Through the prism of her death, we can see the development of a public sphere in the which cultural boundaries blurred and European-wide operatic conventions became a model for public behavior.

Practical Significance of the Opera’s Verbal Component in the Context Regarding the Development of Director’s Theatre in the 20–21st Centuries

The question of the expediency of using the original language in opera as the only correct version of performance is debatable and has now acquired the character of an intersectoral and creative debate. The question becomes relevant when the opera is staged in a country where the language of the original libretto is incomprehensible to the vast majority of listeners, and there is a problem of conveying the idea laid down by the author to a wide range of listeners.There are different approaches to this issue – in terms of the convenience of the vocalist, in terms of public inquiries, in terms of the intentions of the composer and, finally, in terms of tasks and goals of the director. If the first three aspects have previously been covered in separate scientific and popular science publications, the director’s approach requires detailed research to substantiate.The purpose of the research is to identify and substantiate the main directorial approaches to the word as a means of conveying the idea and the necessary psycho-physical tools of the actor in opera, as a syncretic genre.The scientific novelty of the research is the first study of the practical aspects of such a phenomenon as a dialogue between the author and the audience from the standpoint of the director’s embodiment of drama.Research Methodology. Methods of theoretical generalization and analogy are used. The object of research is the issue of textual accessibility of foreign opera classics for the director’s dialogue with the public. The subject of the research is the stage solution of the opera text from the position of the co-author of cultural creativity – the director.Conclusions. In the “director’s theatre” in the twentieth century, the interpretation and choice of the opera language fall on the latter. Since the actor’s expressiveness, from the director’s point of view, is impossible without an instant understanding of the opera’s drama, the integrity of the hero’s image is achieved only by a close connection between the art of the body and the stage word, which is difficult if performing an opera in a foreign language.Thus, the language available to the spectator is the only way to overcome operatic conventions and a means for the director to achieve a hypertextual dimension of drama. It is in this expression that the phenomenon of “eternal dialogue” arises.

Negotiating Convention: Pop-Ups and Populism at the San Francisco Opera

AbstractTwenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.

From Hérodias to Hérodiade: Massenet’s Idiosyncratic Take on the Salomé Myth

AbstractMassenet’s Hérodiade (1881) is today one of the lesser-known variations of the Salomé myth. Although based on Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877) and written and premiered at the height of the narrative’s popularity, the opera displays some peculiar deviations from both Flaubert’s tale and other, especially fin-de-siècle, renderings of the myth. By situating Hérodiade’s departures from Flaubert’s short story within both the framework of operatic conventions and the broader context of the opera’s genesis, this article highlights Hérodiade’s status as a self-contained rendering, rather than a mere dramatic rewriting of the story—let alone an unfaithful adaptation. In doing so, three main elements that played an essential role in the process of (re)creation are brought to attention: the conventions of grand opera, Massenet’s own aesthetics and interpretation of the tale, and the impact of the socio-political context of France’s Third Republic on the opera’s development.

Inhabiting Whiteness: The Eoan Group La traviata, 1956

AbstractActive at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

The musical power of Salome: Strauss translates Wilde

When Richard Strauss saw Oscar Wilde’s play Salome in Max Reinhardt’s 1901 production, he felt that it “cried out for music”. Indeed, the insistent repetition of dramatic phrases, incantatory dialogue, fashionable orientalism and stark emotional contrasts all lent themselves very well to iconic representation through music, as became abundantly clear in Strauss’ famous opera, first performed in 1905. This paper examines the various semiotic resources that Strauss used to effectively “translate” Wilde’s play into music. They include an exploitation of the possibilities for signification inherent in musical genre, traditional tonality and operatic convention, as well as the use of Wagnerian leitmotif and musical quotation. The result is a musical portrait of world teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy – an effective rendering of Wilde’s fin-de-siecle spirit, which also offers a subtle comment upon Strauss’ own times.

Czech Music around 1900 by Křupková, Jiří Kopecký et al.

Reviewed by: Czech Music around 1900by Křupková, Jiří Kopecký et al. Albrecht Gaub Czech Music around 1900. By Lenka Křupková, Jiří Kopecký, et al.. (Studies in Czech Music, no. 6.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2017. [vi, 324 p. ISBN 9781576473023 (hardcover), $75.] Illustrations (including facsimile plates), music examples, charts, index, authors' biographies, bibliography. "We get a fascinating kaleidoscope … around the question of Czech music by some of the leading scholars in the field, much of which has never before been available in English" (p. 13). These words from Michael Beckerman's article "Flowers in the Graveyard, Tombstones in the Garden" aptly sum up the achievement of this generously illustrated book. Its main beneficiaries are four Czech composers born after Leoš Janček, who so far have received comparatively little attention by Western musicologists: Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859–1951), Víteˇzslav Novák (1870–1949), Josef Suk (1874–1935), and Otakar Ostrčil (1879–1935). This publication, made possible by a grant from the Czech government, unites nineteen essays by nine authors. No editor is identified, but two people named on its title page—both professors at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic—are the de facto editors, as they sign the "Introductory Remarks on the Conception of this Book." Two more generalizing articles follow: Beckerman's highly personal commentary, with musings on Czechness and the devastating impact its implementation had on the ethnic minorities of the country, and Marta Ottlová's "The 'Other World' of Music at the Turn of the Century," which, written for an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1999, surveys the Czech music scene around 1900 and places it in the context of the philosophical and ideological debates of the time. The remaining articles are grouped under three headings—"In the Footsteps of Tradition: The Spirit of Romanticism," "Czech Music at the Heart of European Music round [ sic] 1900," and "The Clash with Compositional Issues in European Music"—but this categorization seems rather arbitrary. The following description ignores it. Bedrˇich Smetana was long dead by 1900, but his music was very much alive. Kopecký's "1892: The International Success of Smetana's The Bartered Bride" traces the history of this opera's reception and how it defined notions about Czech opera in general. David R. Beveridge's "A Rare Meeting of Minds in Kvapil's and Dvorˇák's Rusalka" (Jaroslav Kvapil was the librettist) is a highly elucidating case study originally written in 2009 for a program booklet of the National Theater in Prague. I was particularly impressed with the discussion of the quotation in Rusalka, hitherto unnoticed, from Antonín Dvořák's [End Page 274](p. 67). "Tchaikovsky, Charpentier and the Formation of Janáčěk's Mature Operatic Style" by the late John Tyrrell, based on his Janáčěk: Years of a Life(vol. 1, The Lonely Blackbird[London: Faber and Faber, 2006]), draws fascinating parallels between Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's Pikovaıa dama[The Queen of Spades], Gustave Charpentier's Louise, and Janáčěk's operas. In "čapek's Feminism and Janáčěk's Femme fatale: Notes on Traditional Opera Aesthetics in Janáčěk's Opera The Makropulos Case," Křupková convincingly argues how Janáčěk turned the work's protagonist into a larger-than-life operatic heroine by downsizing the male characters from Karel Čapek's play and following operatic convention in the musical setting. But is it really true that Literaturoper(literary opera) gravitates towards the lieto fine(happy ending; p. 96)? "Josef Bohuslav Foerster's Lyrical Opera Evaand the Tradition of the French Drama[ sic] lyrique" by Kopecký, the only article in the collection dedicated to this composer, explores French influences. Zdeněk Nouza (who died before publication) contributed "Josef Suk, Dvořák's Favorite Pupil," which constitutes a comprehensive survey of the composer and his music. "Josef Suk's Ripeningand the Birth of the Czechoslovak Republic" by Judith Fiehler provides a wealth of information on this work, arguably Suk's masterpiece, alongside Asrael, and includes facsimile pages from the score. Both Suk articles come with extensive quotations from source texts, especially from correspondence. Two of Křupková's seven (!) articles on Novák...

‘Reappropriating’ Romeo and Juliet: the Play Restored to Italy

The story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy ‘reappropriates'’ its own story.

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

Gluck the modernist: Pierre Audi’s production of the Iphigénie operas

Abstract This article examines the productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), which Pierre Audi staged in Amsterdam in 2011; they were released as a set of two DVDs in 2013. These productions present a radical new vision of Gluck’s last Greek-based operas; far from their being works of neo-classical serenity, Audi encourages us to read them as startlingly modernist psychological dramas of an intensity which is far ahead of its time, and suggests that they are true precursors of Strauss’ Elektra (1909) and Henze’s The Bassarids (1966). The argument is grounded in detailed analysis of Audi’s staging of several crucial scenes in each opera, with particular attention to the two Finales, in which Audi opposes the lieto fine that French operatic convention forced Gluck to adopt.

Dance in Handel’s London Operas by Sarah McCleave (review)

Dance in Handel's OperasEMBODIMENT: DANCE, AND OPERA Dance in Handel's Operas. By Sarah McCleave. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 96.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013. [xiii, 266 p. ISBN 9781580464208. $80.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index.In her impeccably researched book, Dance in Handel's Operas, Sarah McCleave introduces her readers to a historical world where theatrical dance was as dramatically useful as the da capo aria. Focusing on London's most prominent eighteenth-century composer, McCleave shows how and why Handel integrated different styles and genres of dances into his operas for the stage. Yet her title masks the true scope of her book: she does not limit herself to Handel, or even to opera seria. On a broader scale, her project revises the history of theatrical music in using a new, illuminating argument: that dance had a varied range of affective, dramatic, and stylistic uses and meanings, rather than simply providing decorative spectacle. In order to accomplish her ambitious project, McCleave unites musical and dramatic analysis with documentary evidence from texts, libretti, and published dance manuals. Her book is an exemplary model of how to breathe new life into operas that have been studied as a vocal repertory.McCleave's project is also a necessary step in reevaluating England as a center of cultural, national, and musical diversity in the eighteenth century. Her book's argumentative thread claims that Handel embraced different styles of dance (French, Italian, and homegrown English influences) for the purposes of connecting to and manipulating his audience's understanding of the affective and dramatic meanings behind these styles and corresponding genres. She identifies eight major influences on the different ways in which Handel incorporated and integrated dance into his operas, and she treats all of these in her book's chapters: (1) seventeenthcentury Italian libretti, (2) French tragedies en musique (Jean-Baptist Lully/Philippe Quinault), (3) English theatrical dance, (4) his training in Hamburg, (5) contemporary Italian practices, (6) the tastes of his audiences, (7) pantomimes, and (8) contemporary social dance (pp. 182- 88). Such a multitude of influences demonstrate that understanding the dramatic meaning behind Handel's dances is a complex enterprise, not only for us as modern readers, but for eighteenth-century audiences as well.Significantly, Handel was not the first, nor the last, to approach the integration of dance styles into opera in this way. Throughout the book, which is organized chronologically, McCleave makes a considerable effort to connect Handel's innovations with both his English predecessors as well as those who worked in during the first and second Royal Academies: London provides early examples of operas in which creative artists blended French and Italian operatic conventions, with a tradition leading from [Peter Anthony] Motteux through to Handel and [Marie] Salle, and from them to [Francesco] Vanneschi (p. 167). This is a great strength of her book, and especially of chapter 4. While focusing on opera seria, McCleave gives other theatrical genres similar weight, providing a thorough picture of how dance shaped the dramatic profiles of many different kinds of productions. Moreover, such an inclusive focus abolishes the age-old impression of Handel as a musical genius; instead, McCleave illustrates quite convincingly that Handel's integrative approach was as much influenced by his English surroundings and opportunities to work with certain dancers as by his prior training in Hamburg.While McCleave's general argument is one of multinational diversity of style and genre, her chapters analyzing Handel's use of dance in his operas (chapters 1 through 3) focus on how the composer used dance in order to create or dissipate dramatic tension. Handel's ability to shape exquisite dramatic depth in his vocal music has been of keen interest to many scholars, but McCleave shows how he accomplished similar feats in his dance music. …

Competing Visions of Love and Brotherhood: RewritingWar and Peacefor the Soviet Opera Stage

AbstractWhen Sergei Prokofiev chose to adaptWar and Peacefor the Soviet opera stage in the 1940s, he faced both operatic conventions and Soviet ideological demands that ran counter to the philosophy and structure of Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece. Prokofiev’s early decision to split his opera intoPeaceandWar, making the first a romantic love story of individuals and the second a collective story of the people’s love for Mother Russia, marked a major divergence from Tolstoy. This article explores how Prokofiev reworked Tolstoy’s philosophy of love and human connection to make his opera acceptable for the Soviet stage. Moving away from Tolstoy’s family ideal inPeace, with its basis on intimate sibling bonds, Prokofiev shifted the family toWar, turning it into a national Russian family of Father Kutuzov, Mother Russia and their children – the Russian people. The opera uses choral glorification of these heroic parents to foster on a national scale the type of intimacy Tolstoy had advocated in the home.

Verdi at 200: Recent Scholarship on the Composer and His Works

The 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death, observed in 2001, inspired nearly a dozen academic conferences. At the dawn of his 2013 bicentennial, a celebratory year shared with Richard Wagner, hundreds of recent studies assess Verdi’s life, his works, and his impact. The present article surveys a selection of books and articles published between these two commemorations. A popular topic is Verdi’s role as a national icon, the calculated product of Italy’s search for a postunification identity. His engagement with foreign cultures has also received attention, for his German literary sources, his forays into French grand opera, and his use of exotic settings. Recent studies of Verdi’s operas often focus on the testing of boundaries, whether between genres, genders, or psychological states. While musical analyses still engage with operatic convention, they also examine other features, such as melody, meter, and tempo. Visual aspects of performance (set design, lighting, staging), considered separately in some studies and as a unified concept in others, constitute a newer area of scholarly interest.

Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (review)

Reviewed by: Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Richard LeSueur Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera. Edited by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xv, 282 p. ISBN 9780521889988. $90.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, index. The collection of essays found in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera offers a look at not only the music and librettos, but also the performing conventions of the nineteenth century and their continued influence on operatic performance today. All of the contributors look to the score (both manuscript and printed), libretto, or disposizioni sceniche. Disposizioni sceniche were staging manuals published by Ricordi to try to control stage directors and scenic designers by preserving the staging as conceived for premiere performances. It is interesting that these directions, which Ricordi tried to impose on all theaters, did not take into account the real-world difficulties caused by the physical limitations of each particular theater. However, they do convey a sense of the effects, both musical and visual, that the composer had in mind. One wonders what Ricordi would have thought of the concept productions found at opera houses around [End Page 577] the world today. At the same time Ricordi was trying to stem the tide of performances of existing works fitted with new librettos or music borrowed from other works. Our concept of copyright did not exist to protect the composer and the publisher, and so Ricordi tried to control the entire production. Each of the essays is a gem, full of useful information on a topic which has not been explored in depth to this writer's knowledge. All of the essays are well documented with copious footnotes. It is interesting that many of the authors cite Philip Gossett's Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), a particularly fine source for information about performance practice and score notation in nineteenth-century Italian opera. Certainly this new volume should be required reading not only for musicologists and performers but also for the management of opera companies. As with all books that deal with music, the reader's knowledge of the composer and the particular works being discussed plays into the understanding of the author's main points. Having printed music examples is helpful, but only true familiarity with the score allows readers to recreate in their own minds the ideas the author is proposing. The essays discussing various aspects of Aida, Otello, and even I Puritani were, for this reviewer, more readily assessable than the fascinating essay by Francesco Izzo, "Comic Sights: Stage Directions in Luigi Ricci's Autograph Scores," as the works were not in my mind's ear as I was reading. This is, of course, not the author's fault. Looking into the past, Ellen T. Harris's "Viardot Sings Handel (with Thanks to George Sand, Chopin, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Julius Rietz)" looks at the contemporary writings concerning Pauline Viardot's performances of not only Handel but also of Gluck. The discussion includes references to Viardot's source scores and to the reviews of her performances, which give insights into her own performance practices. The thought of applauding during the performance of a Gluck aria due to being overcome with emotion would be anathema today, but audiences still do so regularly after an unwritten high note toward the end of an aria, so perhaps times have not changed that much. The lack of proper copyright protection and its consequences is tackled by Fabrizio Della Seta in "I falsi Puritani: A Case of Espionage." Della Seta compares unauthorized vocal scores of I Puritani from several publishers; these are typically based on excerpts published by Ricordi, with the rest filled in by anonymous hands relying more on operatic conventions than a musical inventiveness of Bellini's caliber. This demonstrates not only the difficulty that publishers had in earning their fair profit, but also the forward-looking nature of Bellini's final opera, as exemplified by passages that do not follow the conventions of the time. In the same vein, Roberta Montemorra Marvin discusses the issue of popular realizations of Verdi arias for home use in England in...

The Expansion of Symphonic Space in Mahler's First Symphony

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.