Operatic Stage Research Articles

Il mondo della luna (review)

Reviewed by: Il mondo della luna Alexander Carpenter Joseph Haydn . Il mondo della luna. DVD. Concentus Musicus Wien/ Nikolaus Harnoncourt. With Dietrich Henschel, Bernard Richter, Vivica Genaux, Christina Landshamer, Anja Nina Bahrmann. [Germany]: Unitel Classica, 2010. 703508. $39.99. Despite having composed many of his own operas, and having directed over 1000 opera performances during his long career as Kapellmeister at Esterháza, Franz Joseph Haydn is not chiefly remembered as an opera composer, or even particularly well-regarded in the history of dramatic music. The critical reception of his operas—only rediscovered and revived in the latter half of the 20th century—has been decidedly mixed, due to the often poor quality of the libretti and to the fact that Haydn's dramatic gifts did not readily or consistently translate to the operatic stage. However, Haydn's 1777 Il mondo della luna[The World of the Moon], with a libretto by Carlo Goldoni, has proven to be something of a standout in the composer's otherwise under-appreciated operatic oeuvre: with its absurdly funny, sci-fi themed libretto, and Haydn's elegant, energetic music, this work has earned itself a small niche in the repertory in recent years. Il mondo della lunacomprises a buffafarce in which the old fool and amateur astronomer Buonafede, who opposes the marriages of his daughters and his maid to their respective boyfriends, is tricked by one of the boyfriends, Ecclitico, into thinking that there is life on the moon. After drinking a "magic" potion, Buonafede passes out, and then wakes up believing he has been transported to the moon (in reality, Ecclitico's garden). Buonafede is welcomed by the moon emperor and his retinue (the boyfriends). His daughters and his maid are subsequently "transported" to the moon, where they contrive to marry the disguised boyfriends in a lunar ceremony. Buonafede finally uncovers the hoax, but it is too late. He resigns himself to the outcome, pays the dowries and forgives everyone. Though in some ways an unremarkable dramma giocoso, with its stock characters, cross-dressing, predictable lieto fineand blending of the comedic and the serious, Il mondo della lunais ultimately redeemed by its original and imaginative fantasy, and by Haydn's vivacious score. This DVD features Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting Concentus Musicus Wien in a performance filmed at the Theater an der Wien in 2009, the Haydn bicentennial year. At 167 minutes spread over two discs, presumably nothing has been left out of the original opera (some modern performances have employed substantial cuts, to clean up and streamline the drama). In terms of the performance's rudimentary elements, the orchestral sound is good, with clean, crisp highs and warm, resonant lows; the vocal sound is likewise clear and well-balanced, though some numbers—the opening chorus, for example—and some pianissimopassages are simply too quiet, the voices a little too far back in the mix. In terms of lighting and general watchability, it is somewhat dark, but the dynamic, cinematic filming more than makes up for this: the camera is seldom static, but rather provides a wide range of angles and depths, enlivening the performance. Tobias Moretti's staging is staunchly modern: it is, for instance, computer technology—including web cameras and virtual reality, with more than a few suggestive nods to the world of Internet porn—that is used to initially deceive Buonafede and lure him to the moon. The opera is visually rich in general, but is worth watching for the spectacle of the second and third acts alone, set on the "moon" and beginning with Buonafede awakening, disoriented, and finding himself in a gilded hot tub. Hilarity ensues as Buonafede is promptly dressed in a ridiculous moon costume (comprising a [End Page 140]halter top and pink harem pants), with the other cast members playing moon dwellers in a delightfully manic buffastyle. The main roles are all well managed, and the singing is solid throughout. The role of Ecclitico is particularly well played by Bernard Richter, who displays considerable range as both singer and actor here, providing some of the opera's funniest physical comedy while carrying the bulk of narrative. Buonafede, played by Dietrich Henschel...

Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage – By Caryl Clark

Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage – By Caryl Clark

‘That invisible dance’. Reflections on the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in Richard Strauss's Salome

The Dance of the Seven Veils is one of the main reasons for the scandalous success of Richard Strauss's Salome, whose premiere in Dresden on 9 December 1905 shook the musical world and brought extraordinary fame to its author. Just as Oscar Wilde, in the play on which Strauss based his libretto, had written no instructions as to how the dance should be performed, the composer left this section of the opera to the imagination. The quotation in the title of this article is taken from Wilde's inscription to Aubrey Beardsley in his copy of ‘Salomé’ and aims to draw attention to the ambiguous nature of the dance in Strauss's opera. The source of endless fascination and moral disapproval, his Dance of the Seven Veils is characterized by contradictions: it marks a stasis as well as a frenzied advancement of the plot; it is performed to pleasure the king and yet it is also Salome's supreme moment of self-expression; it is a separate entity from the opera and yet it is at the heart of the story. In my article, I will examine the role of this pivotal episode within the opera and highlight its uniqueness as an early example of modern expressive dance on the operatic stage. I will also mention other examples of the use of dance in literature and music, with a particular focus on the works of Heinrich Heine. Finally, I will analyze Strauss's own scenario for the piece, which he wrote many years after the opera was first performed. This is a text of important documentary value despite the fact that, ironically, the composer's choreographic suggestions amplify the sense of the elusive quality of the piece.

Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in the Russian Theater (review)

Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in the Russian Theater. By Olga Haldey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. [xiv, 354 p. ISBN 9780253354686. $44.95.] Plates, figures, chronology, list of premieres, bibliography, index. After the revocation of the crown's monopoly on theatrical enterprises, in Tsarist Russia in 1882, private opera companies mushroomed. Only one could actually compete with the crown (court) operas: the enterprise founded and owned by Savva Mamontov (1841-1918), a Muscovite merchant and heir to a large railway company. It existed from 1885 to 1888 and from 1894 to 1904; Mamontov dropped out after bankruptcy in 1900. Olga Haldey's book is the published version of her doctoral dissertation, (Savva Mamontov and the Moscow Private Opera: From Realism to Modernism on the Russian Operatic Stage [Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2003]). Her revisionist portrayal of Mamontov and his company aims at debunking myths, following the lines of Richard Taruskin and Marina Frolova-Walker. Haldey emigrated from Russia at an earlier stage of her life than Frolova-Walker, whose writings reflect a continual and conscious struggle with her own Soviet education. Haldey takes a more relaxed, outside stance. Surveying the considerable body of existing literature on her subject (pp. 6-14), she concludes that even the best latter-day Soviet scholars, such as Abram Gozenpud, were too severely constrained by ideological demands to produce a valid assessment of Mamontov's achievement. The standard study of his opera company, Vera Rossikhina's Opernyi teatr S. I. Mamontova (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985) is actually an abridged, posthumously edited version of a dissertation from 1954. Soviet historiography could not deny that Mamontov was the quintessential capitalist, but it was common to stress the national component in his outlook and to praise his attempts to make high art accessible to the masses. On the other hand, his formative years in Rome (p. 37) received little attention, and the consequences of his sojourn--his passion for the art of ancient Greece and Rome, his penchant for Italian opera, and his belief in l'art pour l'art--were routinely denied or played down (as was done in the case of Tchaikovsky). Haldey offers detailed insight into Mamontov's complicated, sometimes contradictory aesthetics and sets the record straight. If his opera emerged as a nationalist hotbed--acclaimed as such by writers in the tradition of Vladimir Stasov, both in the Soviet Union and in the English-speaking world--this was, according to Haldey, mostly the doing of the Muscovite critics and audience. In some (unholy?) alliance they ranted against the foreign dominance at the Bolshoi and demanded a sanctuary for Russian opera, which Mamontov granted them (chap. 7, Politics, Repertory, and the Market). Haldey's subtitle underscores her view of Mamontov as a harbinger of artistic progress. Dismissing the equation of modernism and avant garde (Mamontov despised the latter), she declares him and his opera the immediate forerunner to Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets russes--both with respect to aesthetics and to the formation of a creative collective, an ensemble (the term used in Mamontov's circle, p. 104) from which the productions--veritable Gesamtkunstwerke, but hardly indebted to Wagner--emerged. It is well publicized that Mamontov backed Diaghilev's journal Mir iskusstva, yet Diaghilev also took a lively interest in his productions. Mamontov's staging of Gluck's Orfeo (1897), a Moscow premiere, probably made a deep impression on Diaghilev (pp. 127-29): standing up against all trends then current in Russian art (nationalism, realism, modernism), it was a manifesto of art for art's sake and an endorsement of ideal beauty (pp. 49-53). Haldey comes up with an interesting discussion of two Russian caricatures of Diaghilev in which a mammoth--in Russian, mamont--figures prominently (p. …

Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic StageClarkCaryl Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage Cambridge University PressCambridge, 2009, xviii, 244, £55.00ISBN 978-0-521-45547-3

Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic StageClarkCaryl <i>Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage</i> Cambridge University PressCambridge, 2009, xviii, 244, £55.00ISBN 978-0-521-45547-3

Deutsche Nationalidole in der italienischen Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts

Freedom fighters and national heroes frequently appeared on the operatic stage of the 19th century. Rossini used the story of Wilhem Tell, Verdi composed an opera about Jeanne D’Arc, the national heroine of France, and in La battaglia di Legnano Emperor Barbarossa figures as the incarnation of the menace for the Italians’ longing for freedom, exerted through centuries by the sovereigns of German-speaking countries. The article deals with Italian operas about personalities of German history who had special importance in the national discourse of their own country. In particular it focuses on the historical characters of Arminius and Charlemagne, already present on the operatic stage in the 17th century. Their representation underwent essential modifications in the age of the Risorgimento.

Haydn's Jews (review)

Reviewed by: Haydn's Jews Jonathan Sturm Haydn's Jews, by Caryl Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 244 pp. $99.00. Prior to the twentieth century, the intersection of Jews and classical music brings to mind Wagner (for his antisemitism), the Mendelssohn family, Mahler, and perhaps Halevy's early Grand Opera La Juive. Dr. Caryl Clarke (whose prior publication has established her a place in Haydn studies) has recently published a new book that takes this intersection back a century, maintaining there was a persistent perception in Haydn's day that Jewishness was a designation of "Otherness." Cultural exoticism—think alla Turca—in [End Page 166] Haydn's time included the resident Other (the Jew) as well as the non-resident Other (peoples from Turkey and farther East). While her book's title suggests a focused topic relating the resident Other's stage portrayal and reception, she weaves a multitude of tangents into her research and writing. At times these are intriguing; at times they seem self-indulgent, straining the reader's stamina to remember her main topic. The Introduction, an important component of this book, sets the stage and provides a relevant overview. This said, I recommend reading the Introduction and concluding Apologia as a unit. The reader who embarks upon the central chapters having read her opening questions and her conclusions together will likely fare better in the detail of her supporting arguments. In the Introduction, Dr. Clark raises some intriguing questions and contends that Haydn was most likely familiar "with the lexicon of Jewish theatrical representation and that he exploited the comic potential of this well-known stage stereotype in two works dating from the 1750s and 1760s," referring to his (now lost) apprentice-era opera Der krumme Teufel, and his early Esterháza opera Lo speziale. Her desire "to uncover possible dialogues and interconnectivities within and between Gentile and Jewish communities," while acknowledging that many of her arguments "rest primarily on circumstantial evidence," leaves us excited to discover that ethnic conflict and stereotype—now accepted as integral to certain music in the nineteenth century—may be proven or disproven to have been an issue a century earlier. Clark builds her case for the intersection of Jew and (Catholic) Austrian at multiple levels, beginning in Chapter One with cultural context, or the ways Jews were represented on stage prior to and during Haydn's early life. What eventually comes to light is that music most likely made the stage stereotype of the Jew—represented sometimes as Fool (Bernardon), sometimes as syphilitic, limping devil—more intense by accentuating the visual and vocal codes already present in the plays of the day. Chapter Two initiates a detailed discussion of the Jewish ghetto in Eisenstadt, postulating that Haydn may well have acquired considerable familiarity with its space and population as he walked to work and to the apothecary for medicines to treat his chronic gastritis. Clark then discusses his Missa brevis St. Joannis de Deo, composed particularly for the Barmherzige Brüder, who ran a hospital and almshouse on the periphery of Eisenstadt. Catholic church history intersects Jewish locale, and Clark postulates that, in a Missa brevis, the telescoping of text (singing multiple lines of the Creed polyphonically at once) and omission of certain liturgical lines of the full Mass (most notably the lines stating Jesus is the Son of God) may point to these Masses being used as "conversion Masses" for Jews [End Page 167] in attendance who were not quite "ready" for the full Christian doctrine. Issues of speculation arise here, all of which may be moot, however, since the Mass is not an operatic stage work, and thus is really not on point. A discussion of early operas at the newly built Esterháza in the 1760s sets the context for a discussion of Haydn's opera Lo Speziale (The Apothecary) in Chapter Three, in which the main focus is upon the elements of ethnic coding found in both libretto and score that make a case for the lead character, Sempronio, being a pejorative caricature of the local Jewish pharmacist. This is the crux of her book, and she marshals a variety of points to support...

Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage (review)

Reviewed by: Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage Paul Christiansen Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage. By Caryl Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. [xviii, 244 p. ISBN 9780521455473. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. So much has been written about Haydn, yet significant lacunae remain. Because much of what was written prior to the late [End Page 114] twentieth century was grounded in a formalism that divorced German and Austrian composers from their origins and presented them instead as somehow "universal" artists who transcend geographical and historical situation, we have an incomplete and distorted picture of the true significance of the work and lives of composers from Haydn to Brahms. Discussing the social, political, and historical imperatives that obtained while these works were composed and performed is crucial to approaching a truly nuanced and rich understanding. And because this type of research has been avoided for so long, much remains to be done. With her book Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage, Caryl Clark offers a well-written and carefully researched account of Haydn's relationship to Jews in his everyday life, his representation of them on stage, and how such characterizations squared with prevailing public sentiment about the "inside Other." Out fitted with maps, copious figures, and music examples, and comprising an introduction, four chapters, an epilogue, and an appendix, Clark's book attempts to act as a corrective to conventional wisdom about Haydn. Chapter 1 situates the Jew in theatrical productions of the eighteenth century and takes as a point of departure Der krumme Teufel (The Limping Devil), Haydn's first stage work. Pre-Enlightenment portrayals of Jews as physically defective as well as morally bankrupt have their origins partly in associations with the devil in the form of Asmodeus, the prince of demons, who figures in Jewish legends. Clark explains how Haydn's early acquaintance with comic actor Joseph Felix von Kurz, made famous for his characterizations of the fool Bernardon, heavily influenced his characterization of the apothecary as a stereotypical Jew, worthy of contempt and derision. The social position of Jews in Haydn's time and his contact with them is the subject of chapter 2. Here Clark shows how Haydn's proximity to Jews living in ghettos around Vienna, Eisenstadt, and Eszterháza—his most consistent orbital path during his years working for Eszterházy—gave him ample opportunity to observe Jewish people on a near daily basis. Further, this chapter explores the relationship of the composer to the Barmherzige Brüder. During his youth in Vienna, Haydn worked for this order of Brothers, and Clark suggests ways in which the composer's association with the Brotherhood might have influenced his compositions. Chapter 3 is a tour de force. Drawing on conclusions from chapter 2, Clark guides us through Haydn's characterization of Sempronio, the apothecary in the 1768 opera Lo speziale as a stereotypical Jew with exaggerated gestures and an unnaturally high tessitura, and she juxtaposes this depiction against the representation of Turkish difference, also present in the story. (The Turk ends up with the more even-handed portrayal.) Clark situates the opera in the complicated and fraught ethnic and racial circumstances of eighteenth-century Vienna and Eszterháza and their environs. To conclude the narrative, in chapter 4 Clark treats the fin-de-siècle revival of the opera with a new German translation under the name Der Apotheker. Significantly rewritten by Jewish critic Robert Hirschfeld, the new version was denuded of the most offensive aspects of Sempronio's character from the original version and given to Gustav Mahler to conduct at the Vienna Hofoper in 1899. By resurrecting one of Haydn's long-forgotten operas, Hirschfeld hoped to present the composer as the quintessence of German classicism, in opposition to Wagnerism. How Hirschfeld failed in his attempt is explained at the end of this chapter. An epilogue considers the significance of Der Apotheker in the twentieth century. Here Clark finds resonances for the opera that extend into World War II and beyond. She points out the irony that many of the actors who played in the 1930...

Formenlehre goes to the opera: Examples from Armida and elsewhere

One of the more surprising developments in recent American music theory has been the revival of interest in traditional, as opposed to Schenkerian, approaches to musical form. Spearheading this renewal are William Caplin’s 1998 treatise Classical Form , and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s more recent Elements of Sonata Theory (2006). Both treatises, however, ignore the eighteenth-century operatic repertory entirely. And while valuable studies of eighteenth-century aria-forms exist (notably by James Webster and Mary Hunter), such studies generally predate the advent of the new American Formenlehre . There is, as a result, a gap between the most recent developments in the theory of Classical form and our current understanding of formal processes in late-eighteenth-century opera.This paper sketches one possible way across that gap. Even a casual survey of Haydn’s Eszterháza operas suggests that formal processes play out in ways related to, but nonetheless distinct from, their articulation in Haydn’s instrumental music (in response, no doubt, to the particular exigencies of writing texted music for the operatic stage). Thanks to its characteristic attention to the smallest possible form-functional units — the presentational, continuational and cadential phrases that subsist at the intra-thematic level — Caplin’s approach to Classical form proves particularly adaptable to this new context. The paper illustrates the analytic usefulness of Caplin’s approach for analyzing vocal music through a consideration of representative examples from Armida and Il mondo della luna .

Composing in words

The English composer William Alwyn was not only one of the most versatile creative figures of his age, writing music for the concert hall, recital room, operatic stage and film screen; he was also a virtuoso instrumentalist and conductor, the teacher of some of the most important composers of the succeeding generation, and the founder of a number of influential music committees such as the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. Alwyn was a gifted writer, too, alive to literature and art - especially pre-Raphaelite painting, on which he was an authority - as well as to music, and Composing in Words presents his most important writings: the autobiographical essay Winged Chariot; the diary, Ariel to Miranda, in which he chronicled the composition of his Third Symphony; an extract from Early Closing, Alwyn's reminiscences of his Northampton childhood; and essays on film music, and on other composers, among them Elgar, Bax and Puccini.

Makbet Giuseppe Verdiego wobec romantycznej recepcji

Romantic approach to William Shakespeare’s dramatic works, as well as the notions and questions so vital for the consciousness of the epoch concerning the capacity and function of destiny, unrecognizability of existence, interference of supernatural powers in the world that can be grasped with human mind and common sense, are all intriguingly transparent in Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth . The Italian composer, who knew the Romantic reception of Shakespeare’s dramatic plays well (e.g. the Italian translations of the lectures given by August W. Schlegel), embarked upon the issue of the ambiguity of the scene with the witches that appear to Macbeth, posed a question on the cognitive value in the dreamy apparition (in the brilliantly constructed Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene), and, finally, emphasized the aspect of hybridity of the world that inseparably combines the grandeur and the grotesque (the point highlighted in Victor Hugo’s considerations on Shakespeare). The two versions of the operatic Macbeth — the one produced in Florence in 1847, the other, 1865 revised version produced for Paris — relate well with the long sequence of changeable conventions in the nineteenth century theatre, taking into consideration its requirements (the need for a spectacular character of staging, the introduction of multiple A ke a Romantic implant in the operetta world of farcical braggadocio dominant on the Parisian stage at the time of the Second Empire, testifies to the enormous influence of the Romantic reception of Shakespeare exerted at the time and defining for a considerable period of time the concept of adaptation of the works of the Stradford master to meet the needs of the operatic stage.

A Note from the Guest Editor

In a revealing paragraph of Bourgeois Opera, Theodor W. Adorno asserts that Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is the first “authentic” opera and “that it is hardly too much to claim that all opera is Orpheus.”1 Earlier in his essay Adorno adopts the same qualifier “authentic” for operas such as Der Freischütz, Die Zauberflöte, and Il trovatore (thereby intentionally excluding Wagner's works), which he characterizes as “prototypes of the theatrical.” The theatrical element of authentic operas consists of “that aura of disguise, of miming, which attracts children to theater,” and manifests itself in cloak-and-dagger scenes. The indispensable presence of costumes in any operatic staging, writes Adorno, reflects the audience's basic, childlike delight in dissimulation—gestures and voices working, in this respect, like costumes. Opera, however, does not merely display mimetic components but also preserves magical elements, even in the midst of a disenchanted world. The meaning of opera as a product intended for a judging audience of bourgeois consumers—a function that the genre shares with cinema—is inextricably tied to myth, as the earliest operas show. This link with myth, however, is characterized not so much by sheer imitation of the plots but by music's intervention and transformation of “fate's … ties to nature.” In the attempted rescue of Eurydice through music, the myth of Orpheus becomes, in Adorno's view, the “archetype of opera,” and the correction of mythological plots that often characterizes the genre reveals the Enlightenment's aspiration to subjective freedom. Despite their courtly contexts of production, the first Florentine and Mantuan operas already display this bourgeois and rationalistic element.2 Opera, in fact, Adorno observes, first truly flourishes in Venice under the “social conditions of an evolved bourgeoisie,” in an environment in which Monteverdi figures among “the great opera composers.”3

Voss, du roman de Patrick White au livret de David Malouf : simple adaptation ou transformation de l’imaginaire national ?

When a couple of years before Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations, David Malouf accepted the commission from Opera Australia, the Sydney Opera company, to adapt Patrick White’s novel Voss for the operatic stage, he was certainly aware that this meant participating in the Establishment’s efforts to promote a culturally exalted Australian identity on the European model. When the opera was premiered in 1986, the libretto was praised both by the critics and the public for its success in making use of the dramatic potential of the novel and, beyond that, in bringing out the musical possibilities of a style which had often been described as difficult and obscure. This article first undertakes to analyse a few aspects of Malouf’s generic rewriting of the source text, which suggest that insofar as the opera was designed as a monumental celebration to Australian achievement, the libretto does seem to betray, to a certain extent, the novel’s criticism of heroic posturing and complacent patriotism, and to collaborate in the institutional recuperation of what remains a controversial work. However, a closer study of the way in which Malouf writes his own homoerotic poetry into White’s narrative reveals that it subtly contributes to maintaining a truly “post-colonial” ambivalence within the apparent conventionality of the national celebration.

Six Short Talks: Reading in, around, &amp; on (&amp; on) Anne Carson’s “Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of fifteen minutes”

SHORT TALK on Drinking Since May 2009, six excerpts (Recipe, of Addressing Oscar Wilder' Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Pt 3, Reticent Sonnet; Isolate, and Drop't Sonnet) from Anne Carson's Possessive Used As (Me) have been installed as a curated series on the University of Michigan's Play Gallery website. According to Carson, when she was commissioned by Harvard University to write a lecture on pronouns, she penned the sequence that serves as the backbone of this performance event. Although Carson's use of the term sonnet privileges the literary, the event that unfurls in the virtual gallery space celebrates the operatic potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. The process of creative interventions involved in the creation of Possessive Used As (Me) certainly embodies the kind of interdisciplinarity Linda Hutcheon has identified as inherently operatic: the performance is the product of the collaborative work of a librettist [Carson], who writes the dramatic or poetic text, and a composer [Stephanie Rowden], who sets that text to music, and a host of other artists [three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company], whose task is to bring the dramatic texts (the libretto and the score) to life on the (1366). As embodied, time-based events in word, sound, and movement, Carson's sonnets, moreover, represent opera as a performative text through which writing and reading, listening and looking, doing and un-doing, meaning and mis-understanding decline to the same verb: drink. To drink is a particularly apt metaphor for the operatic event: as a verb, it privileges both the eye and the ear and thus can be used to illustrate a syncretic experience of visual spectacle and spoken word. To drink is the physical act of swallowing a liquid. To drink is a physical sensation, an immediate experience, the act that occurs before digestion, before the liquid is processed into smaller components the body can use To drink is also, in the Shakespearean sense, a mental act of listening, gazing upon, or contemplating with rapture or eager delight: My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words of thy tongue's uttering (II.ii.58). To then, is also a romantic act, an intoxicating experience involving the ears, the eyes, and the nose, as well as the mouth, in the transformation of physical sensations into emotional responses. To drink is operatic in its potential for melodrama: the risk of being overwhelmed, of sucking in the landscape in its entirety and drowning. As a way of experiencing language, moreover, to drink represents an ecstatic recuperation of the relationship between reader and text. As the thing that is drunk (in the double sense), the text becomes--rather than a solid, enduring artifact--a substance that can't keep its own shape, that adapts to fit its container, that flows through holes and is subject to water-slide ... plummet sheer descent amnesia vertical dive this fast drainpipe ... this streaming downspout (Carson Drop't Sonnet). The reader, as the one who drinks, is changed by the act and thus is, in turn, drunk. The performance, in other words, drinks its reader. As subject and object of performance's transformative potential, both text and reader belong, as Carson recognizes, in parenthesis: Drink (Me). Short Talk on Operas and Outlaws In contrast to the melodramatic potential of drink, life on Carson's operatic stage is minimalist and markedly un-spectacular. Three dancers (two women and a man) in non-descript, androgynous, identical costumes move methodically across a cool, ultra-clean, ultra-modern, Beckett-esque stage while, somewhere offstage and beyond the camera's gaze, the poet reads her sonnets in a sonic landscape that is stark and suburban: elevator bells, a sporadic typewriter, creaking door hinges, and chairs scraping the floor. Neither stage nor dancers nor speaking voice are dressed up: their performances, though polished, have a quality of the everyday--that un composed, anonymous, un-fixable performance we re-iterate unwittingly, in accordance with the assumed social norms. …

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS AND PATRONAGE: MUSIC AND THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION OF NAPLES

ABSTRACTIn December 1798 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with Naples as its capital, capitulated to the Republican armed forces of France under the direction of General Championnet. The establishment of the First Republic of Naples, the so-called Parthenopean Republic, was brief, lasting only until June 1799. Although fleeting, the Republic nevertheless exercised a profound effect on virtually every facet of contemporaneous society, especially music and theatre. In this essay I examine musical life during the first Republic of Naples (1798–1799), based upon surviving primary sources.These sources include legal and civic documents, personal diaries and correspondence, employment rosters, newspapers (giornali), opera librettos and musical compositions. They illustrate the effects of the revolution on contemporary artistic practices, specifically with regard to those political and social uses of the operatic stage by the new regime that had consequences for repertory choice, production practices, theatrical management and the artists themselves. The bringing-together of these sources provides not only a detailed chronicle of contemporaneous events, but also significantly furthers present-day understanding of artistic practices during the Republic as well as providing a context for the policies enacted with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (review)

Reviewed by: Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy Thomasin LaMay (bio) Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy. By Bonnie Gordon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 244 pp. Bonnie Gordon's book intrigued me at first glance because the title brought together Monteverdi and unruly women, both subjects dear to my heart. Monteverdi's music has always generated rigorous scholarship, particularly because his output stands at that watershed in early modern history where "change" happened, where, put simply, an old aesthetic was challenged by a newer, modern music and scholars even of the time debated transgressive musical behaviors. Monteverdi's work has been epicentral to that early/modern discussion; concurrently, Monteverdi has always been part of our acceptable musicological canon. By virtue of that academic nod, he has not historically been associated with any flagrant or even gentle championing of feminine unruliness. Suzanne Cusick and Susan McClary, who have read sections of Monteverdi's music from their feminist perspectives, have actually suggested ways whereby Monteverdi's music served further to inscribe the assumed patriarchal silencing of women who temporarily found voice. A book that might locate moments of women's deliberate unruliness in a composer's music that I have always loved but have not especially heard as an advocate for women's culturally uplifted voices was most appealing. So I must say up front that this was not the book I found, even if Gordon does offer some tantalizing nuggets about women's embodied voices, contextualized in commonly held beliefs about those bodies and how they functioned. Her references to women's leaky vessels and Galenic theories about humoral heat are not new, even to musical scholarship. However, her most valuable contribution is her nuanced reading of how cultural perceptions of bodily change instigated crucial musical shifts and how the embodied voice necessarily reinvented itself to accommodate a new worldview. This does not, for me, reflect a singularly "feminine" phenomenon but one that might also accommodate the burgeoning of instrumental versus vocal music, a fascination with the castrato, and the myriad of cross-dressed, ambiguous, and complicated gender roles that erupted on the youthful operatic stage. The shifting soundscape that Gordon identifies is original and thought-provoking, and perhaps a different title would have better reflected the merits of her book, for when I encountered these thoughts, most clearly articulated at the end of the book, I was better able to look back into the volume with different eyes. Given the book's title, I felt compelled to reach first for that content in ways that I could. Gordon's work reads sometimes as a dissertation (from whence it came), though the writing is fluid and compelling to read. There are times, too, when I am intrigued by a thought I wish she had developed; instead, summaries of others occasionally stand in for her own ideas. My reading is selective and threads its way through two particular pathways that Gordon identifies in her introductory materials. The first is the potential of the embodied female voice. For Gordon, the very act of a woman's mouth moving in song is her unruliness. It allows her to occupy a "space between the lines" in a culture that did not aspire to see her with her mouth opened (1). So I look to see where Gordon identifies these spaces, what constitutes the "in between" in kinesthetic ways for women in the music she describes. Second, Gordon asks us to follow certain of Monteverdi's female voices through the real and imagined women's (and, sometimes, men's) bodies through which his music circulated. I turn to the notion of fantasy that those performances inspired. Every culture projects fantasies onto its performers. Those fantasies are not singular but reflect the diverse anxieties of the gendered, socioeconomic, racial otherness of the audience. Depending on who is looking, Monteverdi's women could have inspired multiple [End Page 101] fantasies (though I read Gordon's work to suggest that the patriarchal fantasy was the dominant one). So as I travel through Gordon's discussion I imagine myself as a viewer of the performance as Gordon...

Voices from beyond: Verdi's Don Carlos and the modern stage

It has often been suggested that a renewed fascination with Verdi’s Don Carlos coincided with the advent of Regieoper (or radically revisionist staging) in Germany over the past few decades. However, Don Carlos already counted among the most frequently revived operas in German-language theatres during the first half of the twentieth century. This article argues that neglect of this rich performance tradition is linked both to a German-centred narrative of the history of operatic production, which constructs the 1930s and 1940s as a gap in the development of ‘avant-garde’ direction, and to an over-emphasis on the visual side in recent academic discourse on operatic staging. These attitudes are challenged by a close look at selected German productions of Don Carlos from the 1920s to 1940s. Treatment of the opera's most difficult scenes – the mystical elements of the auto-da-fé finale and the dénouement – reveals striking continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras, as well as conceptual affinities to some of the most acclaimed recent stagings. These findings call for a more historically grounded approach to operatic production.

Adapting a Canonical Canadian Novel for the Operatic Stage: A Dystopia for Our Times

Adapting a Canonical Canadian Novel for the Operatic Stage: A Dystopia for Our Times

Adapting a Canonical Canadian Novel for the Operatic Stage: A Dystopia for Our Times

A plain, cream-coloured leaflet listed the program for the day-long Opera Exchange symposium at the University of Toronto – ‘The Handmaid’s Tale: No Balm for this Gilead.’ From 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday 2 October 2004, a mixed audience of academics, students, and members of the general public assembled to hear a series of lectures and presentations on Margaret’s Atwood’s chilling futuristic novel turned opera. While the house lights are up and people are taking their seats and reading their programmes a proscenium-arch-filling Video Conference screen displays ... four moving ‘screen-savers’ [the first of which reads] ‘International Historical Association Convention, 20–25 June, 2195, Twelfth Symposium on the Republic of Gilead (Formerly the United States of America).’ (Ruders, xiv)

‘Veluti in speculum’: The twilight of the castrato

The final performances of castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti in London in the late 1820s constitute a particularly rich vantage point from which to explore why the castrato was eventually forced from the operatic stage. What does this historical moment have to say about shifts in vocal style and audience expectations? Why did the question of castration become so loaded under ‘Romantic’ conditions? This article constructs a speculative theoretical framework by bringing together recent insights in the history of vocal science, histories of gender and subjectivity, the history of listening and opera studies. Velluti's hostile reception in the London press is surveyed in detail, alongside a historically informed examination of his vocal manner. Evidence suggests that the castrato quickly became an unthinkable figure, falling from grace in the wake of embodied conceptions of vocality and ‘natural’ expression, newly dominant ideas that projected him beyond prevailing notions of human nature.