Operatic Conventions Research Articles

Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the operatic phenomenon known as verismo, and of the relationship of Puccini's Tosca with that movement. In contrast to previous scholarship on verismo, which often treats the relationship between literature and music as transparent, I stress that marrying empiricist aesthetics to traditional operatic values was a highly unnatural process. I suggest that Italian opera in the 1890s was pushed to a sort of crisis point, and that the very act of singing could no longer be taken as self-evident. Composers developed a set of new techniques—offstage song, performer-characters, an extreme reliance on bells—to deal with this sudden untenability of operatic convention. All of these techniques were elaborated most fully in Tosca, and the opera might be read as an allegory of the verismo moment, embodying the conflict between hard-nosed realism and unapologetic singing in its two antagonists: Baron Scarpia and Floria Tosca. The plot clearly endorses Tosca's position, but a close reading of the opera's music suggests a rather different interpretation. By focusing on the role of bells in the opera, I argue that realistic sound often overwhelms the autonomy of the characters, at times seeming to collapse them into the scenery itself. Early critics were disturbed by this aspect of the music. Listening to the opera with their ears may help us realize that—despite its overt celebration of individual freedom, and its much-lauded critique of state-sanctioned violence—Tosca exhibits an antisubjective impulse that has much in common with other “Fascist” and “proto-Fascist” texts.

Opera and comedy: Jacopo Melani, Il potesta di Colognole, ed. James Leve, Yale University Collegium Musicum, Second Series, xiv (Middleton WI: A-R Editions, 2005), $152

From its beginnings opera has always been a mixed genre. Elements of tragedy, comedy and the pastoral exist in varying proportions in any sample of early opera. But theorists (including a sizeable contingent of librettists) seem to have emphasized the tragic side of the genre, stating, for instance, that the comic was indecorous and thus unfit for the general public. By the 1640s the idea of opera as a mixed genre finally seems to have gained general acceptance, coinciding perhaps with the establishment of the term dramma per musica. As a result of this and the development of a full set of operatic conventions, questions of genre were less frequently discussed. It is all the more surprising that in Florence, a place where the audience would perhaps contain a higher proportion of nobility than in Venice, a tradition of strictly comic opera was established during the following decade. The opera that founded this tradition is Il potestà di Colognole (1657), libretto by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia and music by Jacopo Melani. James Leve, editor of the publication reviewed here, notes that no other 17th-century opera tradition can claim to be as close to the classical definitions of comedy as the Florentine one. The librettist, Moniglia, took his inspiration from the Roman comedies of Terence, as well as from the 16th-century Italian tradition of comic theatre. However, it is hard to see how Il potestà di Colognole is significantly different from the usual dramma per musica of the time.

Bare interiors

Opera is a genre that prizes interior expression. How then does it cope with characters who are defined by reticence and inscrutability? Donizetti's 1837 opera Roberto Devereux thematises these issues – a reflection, in part, of the nineteenth century's growing anxieties over public self-expression. Engaging with contemporary 1830s criticism, this article focuses on two numbers in the work that were identified as problematic by early audiences, arguing that their perceived failure is a consequence of the work's inventive depiction of its characters' vacant subjectivities. Donizetti's opera can be seen to stretch primo Ottocento operatic conventions to their limits, in the process undoing the traditional correspondence between interior expression and self-definition.

Les implications du travestissement dans I Capuleti e i Montecchi de Vincenzo Bellini

My concern for transvestite parts stems from the Shakespearean drama conventions in which all female roles were performed by young men and apprentice boys for decency’s sake. Bellini and Felice Romani, his librettist, were certainly not influenced by the English bard, but by a common source, book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when they composed the score and lyrics of their opera in the 1820s. According to baroque Italian operatic conventions, the part of the lover should have been performed by a castrato so that his voice could merge perfectly with that of the soprano heroine. However Bellini preferred a female singer, Giuditta Grisi, who specialised in a repertoire of young male lovers called musico, to play against her own sister, Giulia, as Julietta. Both women met with great success as appears from contemporary reviews, which praise their vocal performances but ignore the change from the tradition of the castrato, as well as the physicality of the show. An analysis of some photographs from a series of recent productions of the opera sheds some light on this visual dimension and on the choices made by several stage directors in their own approach to the opera.

Aci, Galatea e Polifemo: Serenata a tre, HWV 72 (review)

Georg Friedrich Handel. Aci, Galatea e Polifemo: Serenata a tre, HWV 72. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Windszus unter Mitarbeit von Annerose Koch und Annette Landgraf. (Hallische Handel-Ausgabe, Ser. 1: Oratorien und gro[beta]e Kantaten, Bd. 5.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 2000. [Editorial policy, pref., in Ger., Eng., p. vii-xvi; facsims., p. xvii-xx; texts and trans., p. xxi.-xxx; score, 105 p.; Krit. Bericht, p. 107-24. Cloth. ISMN M00649585-6; BA 4068. DM 225.] George Frideric Handel's Ad, Galatea e Polifemo, composed in Naples, 1708, tells basically same story as his musically unrelated Acis and Galatea, composed ten years later in England. The English work has eclipsed Italian one in popularity for numerous reasons. Acis and Galatea opens with a depiction of a pastoral idyll punctuated by longing, desire, and exuberantjoy of soprano-tenor couple, and combining humorous parody with ominous foreboding, continues with this reverie's violent interruption by lovesick bass giant. Following Acis's death, Cantata concludes with a wrenching portrayal of Galatea's grief and her transformation of Acis into a (or, metaphorically, a living memory). The Neapolitan cantata (or serenata a tre) lacks all of these elements. Adhering to Italian operatic convention, young lovers in Ad, Galatea e Polifemo are both treble voices, with Aci's soprano role lying higher than Galatea's mezzo-soprano. The lovers are never shown in a happy state b ut are from beginning oppressed by pursuit of giant, who is more conventionally villainous. After Aci's death, Polifemo presses on with his suit of Galatea, who calls on her father, a water god, to transform Aci into a stream as she plunges into ocean to greet his arrival. Left alone, Polifemo hears Aci's voice in flowing stream expressing his eternal love and finally realizes that the constancy of those who once have known true love cannot, nor ever could, change. The three singers then slip out of character and move figuratively (or literally) to footlights to deliver moral that those who love well and are constant are never without hope. The striking contrasts between Italian and English renditions of this story are based on different artistic traditions, and, in particular, divergent choices in terms of vocal range and musical depiction may explain some of relative obscurity of Aci, Galatea Polifemo. Nevertheless, these distinctions, especially given expanding Interest in baroque opera and its conventions, as well as musical riches of score of Aci, Oalatea e Polifemo, do not in themselves explain different receptions of two works. Part of problem has also been that until now there was no complete edition commercially available, for when Friedrich Chrysander prepared this work for publication in Handel-Gesellschaft edition (Geog Friedrich Handels Werke, 53 [Leipzig: Ausgabe der Deutschen Handelgesellschaft, 1892?; reprint, Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1965, etc.]), autograph's final signature of four leaves containing end of Polifemo's aria Del mar fra l'onde (no. 18), his accompanied recitative relating Aci's declaration of eternal love (no. 19), and concluding trio Chi ben ama ha per oggetti (no. 20) had been separated from main manuscript (and was then in private hands). Some of this material was supplied from later sources, but no copy of Polifemo's recitative seemed extant. The missing pages were later discovered bo und into a manuscript copy of Acis and Galatea in Egerton Collection (MS 2953) now housed at British Library. In preparing new edition of Ad, Galatea e Polifemo for Hallische Handel-Ausgabe (HHA), editor Wolfram Windszus, in collaboration with Annerose Koch and Annette Landgraf, used divided, but complete, autograph as primary source, while also consulting an eighteenth-century copy containing no recitatives, from which two nineteenth-century copies were made (one serving Chrysander as a supplement to incomplete autograph; no libretto or any early prints are extant). …

Bohemian rhapsodies: operatic influences on rock music

Opera and operatic images have invaded nearly all aspects of popular culture. Films (even silent films), radio, television, literature and numerous other media have all, to one degree or another, appropriated either actual opera or operatic devices and conventions. One important realm of popular culture that has appeared relatively immune to operatic influence, however, is rock music. Though several studies have illustrated the impact of ‘classical’ instrumental music on heavy metal and pop music, no serious scholarship has as yet explored the considerable influence exerted by opera, and its conventions, on various forms of rock music (Aledort 1985; McClary and Walser 1990; Walser 1992; Covach 1997). This essay examines the various manifestations of opera in rock music with particular concentration on works by Queen, Nina Hagen, Klaus Nomi and Malcolm McLaren that employ specific instances of operatic vocality or borrowing. Such opera–rock fusions are often predicated upon the transgression of conventional musical boundaries and often reflect an analogous rejection of traditional cultural boundaries surrounding sexual orientation, gender and class. Long overlooked, recognising opera's cross-relations with rock offers new insights into the postmodern blurring of traditional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and broadens our understanding of both genres.

Phantoms at the opera: The Ghosts of Versailles by John Corigliano and William Hoffman

John Corigliano and William Hoffman's The Ghosts of Versailles is a prime example of a work that explores that region where operatic convention overrides traditional strategies of narrative to create fluid connections between history and fiction. The opera is an example of the “simulacrum,” a perfect reproduction of a work that does not in fact exist. This article explores the ways in which Corigliano and Hoffman mine the givens of operatic practice to create a work that references previous music in a particularly sly, unpredictable, and yet “accessible” way for audiences familiar with those norms. A concluding discussion also considers how the work fits into the aesthetic tradition of camp.

Some difficulties in the historiography of Italian opera

The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrate some problems in the general field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs to the canon, not to say the museum, of learned western music; indeed, today's opera houses surpass concert halls in projecting the ‘museum character’ in which musical tradition seems ‘frozen’. On the other hand, it is also true that only in recent years has international musicology accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. The reasons for this delay are clear enough. Some were easily overcome, connected to the very history of our discipline: since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the musical language of Italian operatic composers diverged from the mainstream Austro-German tradition; the dramaturgy of Italian opera was difficult to understand in a cultural context moulded by Wagnerian theory and practice (in part also by Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.). Other factors, however, are more deeply embedded, and continue to have an effect even in intellectual conditions very different from those of traditional musicology. These include: the manner in which extra-artistic factors determine the operatic work; the various creative competencies that take part in operatic production; the considerable importance accorded to performers, particularly singers; the possibility that parts of an opera may be moved from one work to another, or from one author to another; the fact that in die history of Italian operatic conventions, shared codes and repetition of formulas often prevailed over the search for novelty.

The aging psyche and the question of artistic change: An examination of one career

A long-time lover of music, I confess to having a bizarre penchant for trying to test my informally trained musical intelligence in situations which require quick recognition, be it a piece, a composer, a performer, or some such feature. In fact, this article originated with my failure to recognize a theretofore unfamiliar work and with the surprise I experienced upon learning it was Verdi's last opera,Falstaff, composed when he was nearly 80. For a listener familiar withLa Traviata orAida, it appeared quite strange and surprising. Moreover, as I found out later, the sense of puzzlement was not merely a matter of subjective impression but rather exemplified an overall stylistic departure in Verdi's late life work, its salient features being compression and urgency rather than spaciousness, flowing line, a pervasive use of biting irony compared to the straightforward lyricism of the earlier work, a retreat from psychological realism in favour of sketchy, abstract portrayals, an overall impatience with established operatic convention, and a symphonic rather than linear or melodic conception. Some of these characteristics have also been found in the late works of painters and sculptors (e.g., Arnheim, 1986; Clark, 1972; Munsterberg, 1983). Taken together these observations raised for me the issue of artistic change, an issue of considerable significance to the understanding of creative endeavour in general.