Operatic Culture Research Articles

Verdi's Emperor Charles V: Risorgimento Politics, Habsburg History, and Austrian-Italian Operatic Culture

AbstractThis article considers the figure of Habsburg Emperor Charles V in relation to Italy, first as perceived by Italians in his own time, the sixteenth century, but then especially as evaluated by Italians of the Risorgimento—and notably by Verdi in his operatic work. The article emphasizes opera as a crucial cultural medium of Habsburg engagement with the Italian peninsula and of Italian culture within the Habsburg monarchy. Contemporary Italian evaluations of Charles's role in the domination of Italy were both regretful of his military interventions (including the sack of Rome in 1527) and respectful of his political skills. During the Risorgimento, the conventional Mazzinian perspective was deeply hostile to the Habsburgs and conditioned the wars of Italian unification against the Habsburg monarchy. Italian opera, however, especially Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi's Ernani (1844), and Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) indicate a complex operatic perspective on the Habsburgs in Risorgimento culture. While the Austrian Habsburg representative Gessler is the villain in Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Verdi's Ernani actually places Charles V on stage in a major baritone role with beautiful music and an ambivalent presence. In Don Carlos, the ghost of Charles V hovers over and haunts the whole opera.

Cula Mzansi: Towards Strategic Transformation of Operatic Culture in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article outlines a critical analysis of two of a series of three operas that were produced by Gauteng Opera, South Africa, and presented at the Soweto Theatre in 2016 under the generic title of Cula Mzansi (which means “Sing South Africa”). The three operas were Bongani Ndodana-Breen's Hani, Peter Klatzow's Words from a Broken String, and Martin Watt's Tronkvoël, with the first two being the subject of the current analysis. The authors argue that the inclusion of indigenous themes and elements in these operas may be read as a strategic ploy that was meant to transform the operatic form and give it local cultural relevance and appeal. The purpose of the analysis was to assist current and future generations of South African theatregoers to experience some of the possible ways in which the operatic form can be transformed. This transformation is deemed necessary in order to make opera more appealing to the majority of previously disadvantaged black South Africans, notwithstanding the genre's negative historical baggage in many parts of the world where it is largely viewed as an elite form. The authors argue that the inclusion of decidedly indigenous South African cultural elements in these operas in terms of music, costume and setting allowed for the depiction of stories that could more easily relate to the majority of previously marginalised South African communities. They further argue that this strategy had the potential to localise and decolonise this cultural art form in ways deliberately meant to reach a much wider appeal in post- apartheid South Africa.

Constructing an English identity in London: Albert Visetti and Anglo-Italian musical exchanges at the end of the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT This article explores the little-known, yet significant figure of the composer and Professor of Singing, Alberto Antonio Visetti (1844–1928). While his biography is still obscure and contested, his commitment to develop Anglo-Italian cultural relations was certainly pioneering. One of Visetti’s most remarkable achievements was to create a cultural exchange between the Royal College of Music and the Bologna Conservatoire by successfully bringing together the heads of the two institutions, Sir Hubert Parry (1848–1918) and Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909). This connection led to the performance of British music in Italy and to the introduction of the Italian symphonic repertoire in England, which was then dominated by Italian operatic culture. My research further allows us to observe a specific case of the social integration of Italian musicians into London society and its effect on local policies and institutions.

The Performance of Tristan und Isolde in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

In Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), ch. 5, Jacob Flanders is a guest in one of the boxes at Covent Garden for a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde towards the end of October 1909.1 [The date is determined by Jacob’s reflection in that chapter, ‘I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October’ (Jacob’s Room, 96), made by someone who had entered Cambridge in 1906, when he was nineteen (Jacob’s Room, 35 and 37)]. This episode invites, and has received, interpretation in light of the contemporary cult of Wagner, the relation of this opera’s themes to the content of the novel, and its social scene.2 But the performance needs to be situated more specifically in the context of London’s operatic culture in the years before the First World War and in particular, the annual spring/summer season of international opera, during which Woolf’s opera-going primarily occurred.3 Such a context bears directly on the significance of the performance described in Jacob’s Room.

The Changing Aesthetics of Vocal Registration in the Age of ‘Verismo’

Abstract The idea that classical singers should join the notes of the vocal line by maintaining a consistent vocal colour is a relatively recent historical construct. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, singers in the Italian tradition were loyal to a very different vocal aesthetic, which valued the distinct differences in timbre between different vocal registers, as this article shows through a comparative analysis of pedagogical writing and pre-1925 recordings. The latter reveal that, in the early twentieth century, old and new techniques for uniting the vocal registers coexisted, and reflected an aesthetic transition towards a more gendered quality of the operatic voice. This process was intertwined with profound transformations in Italian operatic culture. The demands of a new realistic idiom known as verismo required a new type of vocalism, which prompted singers to re-conceive the ‘art of vocal registration’.

Review: Historic American Sheet Music

Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Historic American Sheet Music Historic American Sheet Music. Molly Bragg, Digital Collections Program Manager, Duke University Libraries. URL: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/ Kristen M. Turner Kristen M. Turner KRISTEN M. TURNER teaches at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on American operatic culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Journal of Musicological Research. Her current project is a monograph on the use of opera in vaudeville and pre–World War I American musical comedies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (2): 565–575. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.2.565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kristen M. Turner; Review: Historic American Sheet Music. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2017; 70 (2): 565–575. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.2.565 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search From medieval manuscripts to parlor songs, musical scores are a popular item for digitization in the United States and Europe. In the United States even libraries with relatively small special collections often hold sheet music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many institutions have invested in digitizing this music and posting it online, as few of these documents are under copyright. The larger digital repositories for sheet music include African American Sheet Music hosted by Brown University and the Historic Sheet Music Collection on the Library of Congress's website, as well as the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection at Johns Hopkins/ Peabody and the Digital Collections Archive of Popular American Music at the University of California, Los Angeles.1 Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Digital Collection (hereafter HASM) is an archive of 3,042 digitized pieces of sheet music (both popular and classical genres) published in the... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Opera as a Fragment in the Literary Reception of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Adam Mickiewicz, Heinrich Heine, Théophile Gautier)

Summary This article examines the influence of early 19th-century operatic culture on Romantic literature by focusing on the cultural, literary and transmedial (cross-genre) reception of one of the most popular works of the early Romantic opera, Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber. More specifically, the analysis deals with that aspect of its influence which can be described as fragmentary reception. The article argues that examples of such fragmentary reception can be found in the works of Adam Mickiewicz, Heinrich Heine and Théophile Gautier. However, the central argument of this study is that the emergence of this type of trans-media links was, in a large measure, determined by a peculiar, fragmentary reception of operas. That model of reception had been popularized by a variety of trend-setting, opinion-making agents and institutions (the critics, the press), and enforced by mechanisms of socio-cultural and technological change (resulting in the broadening of the media landscape and the aesthetic sensibility of the general public). The article also claims that this reception model of the opera not only reinforced some structural elements of the operatic work itself but also prompted the writers to explore new ways of structuring their texts (a development encouraged by the upgrade of the fragment by the Romantic aesthetics). Thus early 19th-century socio-cultural and transmedial reception patterns of the opera can be seen as a spur to creativity and literary experimentation – a conclusion which casts doubt on the traditional view that it was a period when aesthetic idealism ruled supreme.

Opera in the British Isles, 1875-1918. By Paul Rodmell

Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918 is part of Ashgate’s series on nineteenth-century music, which aims to challenge the notion that Britain during this period was ‘das Land ohne Musik’ (p. xv). Paul Rodmell sets out to show how Britain was far from ‘das Land ohne Oper’ (p. 337) in this, the first major contribution to focus on the history of operatic culture in the British Isles during the period commonly referred to as the English Musical Renaissance. This book explains how opera was produced and received in the British Isles from 1875 to 1918. The first chapter serves as a prologue, presenting a snapshot of operatic life in Britain leading up to 1875. The author begins by presenting a survey of operatic activity in London (especially at Covent Garden and Drury Lane), before introducing the idea of opera outside London’s West End. He has chosen 1875 as a starting point for this study because in that year three significant events occurred: Henry Mapleson attempted to establish his ill-fated Grand National Opera House on the Thames Embankment; Wagner’s operas were beginning to catch on after the first British stage production of Lohengrin, and the founder of one of the longest-running and most successful touring opera companies in the world, Carl Rosa, brought his Company to London for the first time.

Of Time and the City

When Don Carlos premiered at the Paris Opéra in March 1867, there was considerable excitement among critics about the prospect of a new work from one of Europe's most famous and popular living composers. In the event, the opera's reception was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. The fundamental problem was the work's ambiguous position: as a new grand opera appearing at a time when Parisian operatic culture was centered ever more on old masterpieces. Moreover, the new work's length (although characteristic of its genre) seemed ill suited to performance in Second Empire Paris, where the pace of life was felt to be constantly accelerating. In this article I ask how and why Don Carlos—a work judged by many critics to be the epitome of “modern” Verdi—was so at odds with broader conceptions of Parisian modernity. Focusing particularly on the Act IV Duo between Philip II and the Grand Inquisitor, I explore how aspects of the scene's musical unfolding foreground tensions between an increasingly prominent operatic past and an imagined operatic future. Ultimately, I argue that the opera's reception was saturated with concerns about an emerging phenomenon of “canonic listening”: an ideal encounter with music extending over countless repeated hearings and predicated on the value of sustained, concentrated engagement with a complex musical surface.

Nietzsche, Tristan und Isolde, and the Analysis of Wagnerian Rhythm

In his first publication, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872), Friedrich Nietzsche famously interprets Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as an ideal union of “Dionysiac” music and “Apolline” myth—a union that revives the spirit of Greek musical tragedy.1 According to the Romantic ideology of early Nietzsche, Wagner's music stands at the culmination of a gradual reawakening in modern German culture of an authentic Dionysiac artistic drive. Nietzsche argues that the music of Tristan—when reconciled with the Apolline element of words and action—represents an antithesis to the modern rationalism and decadence exemplified above all in the conventions of Italian opera. Of course, Nietzsche's early critique of the decadence of modern operatic culture—together with his utopian conviction in the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal as a force for cultural renewal—derived from Wagner's theoretical writings, especially Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, 1851) and “Beethoven” (1870).2 As is well known, however, Nietzsche's attitude toward Wagner and his operas would become increasingly critical over the course of his subsequent writings, culminating in the anti-Wagnerian polemics published at the very end of his career. In one of his last publications, Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888), Nietzsche presented a starkly contrasting view to the one articulated in his first book: a portrait of Wagner and his music as the embodiment of modern decadence.3

Franz Schubert: Ein Opernkomponist? Am Beispiel des Fierrabras by Liane Speidel (review)

Franz Schubert: Fin Opernkomponist? Am Beispiel des Fierrabras. By Liane Speidel. (Wiener Schriften zur Stilkunde und Auffuhrungspraxis, vol. 6.) Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 2012. [371 p. ISBN 9783205786962. [euro]39.] Bibliography, discography, index. Aside from three theatrical works, Franz Schubert never witnessed a full production of his dramatic music. Occasionally, modern opera companies revive one of operas in hopes that it will assert itself into the repertoire. This is the case with Fierrabras: completed in 1823, Fierrabras never made it to the operatic stage during the composer's lifetime. In 1897, as a part of the Schubert centennial celebrations, a performance of the work took place under Felix Mottl's direction. The second full staging of the opera occurred in 1988 under Claudio Abbado's direction at the Theater an der Wien and then in 1990 at the Staatsoper. In Franz Schubert: Ein Opernkomponist? Am Beispiel des Liane Speidel directs her inquiry into operas through an examination of their reception history in scholarly publications and concert reviews. In doing so, her approach differs from recent writings by such authors as Thomas Denny (in Schubert's Operas: 'The judgment of History', in The Cambridge Companion. to Schubert, ed. Christopher Gibbs [Cambridge University Press, 19971,224-38) and Brian Locke (in 'Ever More Fearful Grows the Confusion': Genre and the Problem of Musical Narrative in Fierrabras, in The Unknown Schubert, ed. Barbara Reul and Lorraine Byrne Bodley [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008], 99-117), who have analyzed the dramaturgical and compositional aspects of fierrabras in order to demonstrate growing mastery of the operatic form. In her monograph, Speidel attempts to move the discussion away from a musical analysis of Fierrabras toward an examination of the musicological discourse surrounding this opera in which scholars and performers try to resuscitate one of dramatic works for the operatic canon. White her approach toward operas is nuanced, the structure of the argument and presentation of her ideas hinder the reader from grasping some of the author's unique observations about his dramatic music. In general, the book reads as a string of small, disparate sections, some of which can be independently interesting, but they never coalesce into a grand narrative that helps the reader understand the evolving reception history of theatrical works. The first seven chapters appear to be a literature review of past research into operas in which the author offers few unique observations or new materials. Sections of chapter 4 (Opernstromungen zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts) offer interesting examinations of the patriotic and nationalistic movements that occurred in earl). nineteenth-century Austria and which had an effect on theatrical works. Often within these opening chapters, however, die reader must wade through pages of expositional material before arriving at the author's main points about Fierrabras. At the end of chapter 5 (Das Libretto), for example, Speidel reviews the importance of Fidelio, Der Freischutz, and Euryanthe in the history of German opera but reveals very little as to how these operas affected operatic output, or how they were related to the reception history of Foerrabras. Interspersed throughout other chapters, she points out that Schubert experienced Fidelio and Der Freischutz in performance, and that he likely knew of Euryanthe, which Weber composed for Vienna's Karntnertortheater around the same time that Schubert was working on Fierrabras. (Euryanthe's failure prevented the performance of Fierrabras.) Yet it is not until chapter 7 (Kompositorische Aspekte) that she makes it clear how these works relate to her main thesis about the modern reception of operatic music. That is, modern scholars have drawn parallels between Fierrabras and these three operas in order to contextualize Fierrabras within a historical framework of early nineteenth-century Viennese operatic culture. …

Time management at Turin's Teatro Regio: Galuppi's La clemenza di Tito and its alterations, 1759

Margaret R.Butler Time management at Turin’s Teatro Regio: Galuppi’s La clemenza di Tito and its alterations, 1759Hitherto unexplored materials surrounding Baldassare Galuppi’s 1759 setting of Pietro Metastasio’s La clemenza diTito for Turin’s Teatro Regio shed new light on the work and how the theatrical administration’s priorities influenced its performance. Three manuscript tables tipped into the back of a copy of the printed libretto contain precise durations of every portion of the opera as well as the performance’s total running time. Markings in the tables and the libretto indicate cuts in many of the arias. This study considers the evidence in the tables together with that of other sources including the libretto text, manuscript scores, administrative documents and contemporary reports. It contextualizes the sources within Turin’s operatic culture, yielding a clearer picture of the opera as it was likely performed and considering the implications of this view for 18th-century operatic production and performance practices more broadly. It demonstrates the decisive role a theatre’s administration and production staff could play in shaping an 18th-century opera’s form, character and performance.

Jin Jiang . Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth‐Century Shanghai . Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2009. Pp. xix, 340. Cloth $70.00, paper $30.00.

This book tells the fascinating story of how a fairly obscure subgenre of southern Chinese opera known as Yue became a vital platform for the expression of feminine sentiments in the country's most modern metropolis during a “masculine” age obsessed with themes of war, revolution, and nation-building. Originating in Zhejiang province, Yue was one of many operatic genres that was deeply localized and whose plays focused on the mundane and often tawdry activities of small-town and domestic life rather than the grand stage of national affairs. This style of local opera was bawdy and tended to emphasize sexual encounters and relations in a frank and unadulterated manner. Like other operas of the Qing period, men originally played all roles. Yet by the 1930s, Yue opera had moved to Shanghai, transforming itself from a rural to an urban form of entertainment. Key to this transformation was that Yue opera became a form of operatic culture entirely performed by women.

Classic staging: Pauline Viardot and the 1859Orphéerevival

AbstractThe 1859 revival of Gluck'sOrphée, reworked for the occasion by Berlioz, was one of a series of operaticrésurrectionsstaged at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris during the Second Empire. Starring Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) in the title role, it was the first major revival of Gluck's opera since the 1820s and attracted considerable attention in the press and elsewhere. Critics and others were fascinated by Viardot's dramatic presence on stage, producing images (both in pictures and words) of her Orpheus that are often striking in their awareness of time past. Indeed, ambivalence about the past and its artefacts might be said to haunt the reception of a work – and performer – many designated as the epitome of theclassique. Contextualising thisOrphéewithin the changing meanings of the termclassiquein the mid-nineteenth century, the article focuses on a particularly revealing moment in the transition between an operatic culture based on new works and one ever more reliant on revivals of acknowledged masterpieces.

Sideways looks at Mozart's operas

‘Composers on the stage’ is a new series from Cambridge University Press intended to ‘introduce readers to the operatic works of major composers … and investigate the worlds in which the operas were created and received’. John A. Rice begins with the customary apology for yet another book on Mozart operas, but the apology is superfluous, for no predecessor is structured like this. Responding to his publisher's statement of intent, Rice jettisons the usual chronological approach, with plot summaries and a smattering of music analysis. This does not mean that plots, music and historical elements are lacking; far from it. But they are rearranged in a way that is novel and refreshing. The book is divided into topics such as the genres of Mozart's day; financing and commissioning operas; Mozart and librettists; Mozart and singers; and a thorough look at the theatres where his operas were mounted. Thus the operas are viewed from a series of different angles within the society and operatic culture of his day. Rice carefully explains his approach in the Preface, marking politely but firmly certain points of difference between his and earlier approaches: for instance, the early operas and their context, so often perfunctorily treated, are no less ‘interesting and revealing’ than works of Mozart's maturity (p.xii); and that we should not exaggerate the division between serious and comic operas in Mozart's time (p.xiii). This last point is supported by a sarcastic demolition of Metastasio's Semiramide libretto, ingeniously compared to La finta giardiniera; it is not clear, however, that the admittedly outré plot of Semiramide was considered funny in the 18th century, or that settings of it would have been attended to in such a way as to relish its absurdities.

Staging Stalinism: The search for Soviet opera in the 1930s

With the exception of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Soviet opera in the 1930s has been relatively little studied. Yet this was an era in which opera was vigorously promoted as an ideal Soviet form after more than a decade of criticism from radical proletarian groups. This article considers three main aspects of Soviet operatic culture in the 1930s. First, opera's emotional power was valued as a way to mobilise mass opinion and the opera house was increasingly seen as a highly ideological site. Second, whilst most of the work in founding a Soviet repertory was carried out at Leningrad's Malyi Opera Theatre, Moscow became increasingly involved as the decade continued. Third, Soviet opera was highly dependent on adaptations of socialist realist novels. This phenomenon of ‘transposition’ is seen here as an attempt to invest scores with an unimpeachable political message. Moreover, transposition was an ideal method of regulating ambiguous literary texts by condensing their cardinal features in dramatic form. Although the story of Soviet opera was largely one of failure, its study sheds important light not only on the development of the Russian operatic tradition, but also on the dynamics of Stalinist culture.