Operatic Works Research Articles

Gilbert-Louis Duprez and Gustave Roger in the composition of Meyerbeer's Le Prophète

It is well known that mounting large-scale productions at the Paris Opéra during the 1830s and 1840s was a highly collaborative effort. The nature of so-called ‘grand opera’ demanded that composer, librettist and stage designer work closely together for the sake of a creation larger than the sum of its parts. Above them loomed the directeur, who laboured to ensure that his creative team had the means to produce their æuvres both in materials and human resources, and to guarantee that the Opéra made a profit from the finished products. A fifth collaborator, the singer, is not often cited as such in the literature, but in many ways wielded the greatest power in the creation of Parisian operatic works. By the 1830s, European singers had achieved professional status, and a singing artist of high calibre could find the Opéra a perfect venue in which to flex muscle. During the Opera's ‘golden age’, a bourgeois public, tired of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, found escape in the new ‘romanticè fare of the Opéra, and elevated the singers who strode its boards to what today is called ‘star status’. The Opéra became a temple and its singers, adored gods and goddesses. A beloved singer could – and did – ensure an opera's success simply by appearing in it, or doom it to failure by refusing to appear. With such power a singer could easily hold a new opera for ransom, forcing the composer and librettist to revise, excise or otherwise alter the work to some self-serving end. To secure a place for their stage works at the Opéra and to guarantee a public triumph, therefore, it is not surprising that composers such as Donizetti, and especially Meyerbeer, the leading composer of French grand opera, composed or revised their operas for particular singers.

Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave and the politics of the closet; or, ‘He Shall Be Straightened Out at Paramore’

Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave, first broadcast on the BBC on 16 May 1971, is probably the least known of his sixteen operatic works. Based on an equally obscure tale of the same name by Henry James, it concerns the last scion of a military family who decides to abandon his calling and embrace pacifism. After fierce family opposition and disinheritance, Owen agrees to spend the night in a haunted room in the family mansion of Paramore – a room in which an ancestor was found dead ‘without a wound’ after accidentally killing his son while disciplining him. Several hours later, his body is discovered – dead, without a wound, like that of his forbear. Despite the compeffing nature of the story, Owen Wingrave has never found a secure place in the Britten canon, largely owing to a lingering dissatisfaction aroused by the ending. In what follows, I should like to explore this dissatisfaction and propose a context within which to approach the opera.

Heitor Villa-Lobos. The Life and Works, 1887-1959

Heitor Villa-Lobos was perhaps the greatest of Brazilian composers. He wrote music for voice, guitar and piano, as well as chamber pieces, concertos, and orchestral and operatic works. This book, a revision of a work first published in Finland, concentrates on his compositions, with many analyzed in depth.

The Preparation for Vichy: Anti-Semitism in French Musical Culture Between the Two World Wars

In January 1923 the important journal Courrier musical published an article by Louis Vuillemin entitled provocatively, Concerts mteques: m~~tque, a term widely propagated at the time by the nationalist Ligue de l'Action Frangaise, denoted, technically, a halfbreed, but specifically, in the usage of the league, a Jew. This nuance is unmistakable, for the article relentlessly excoriates the concerts organized by Jean Wiener, a Jewish composer, pianist, and entrepreneur. Vuillemin indicts these concerts, which presented the works of the Second Viennese School, of Les Six and Stravinsky, in addition to jazz, employing the code popularized by the league: he impugns such repertoire as appealing primarily to suckers (implying Wiener), whom he describes as physically seedy and apt to wear lunettes L la boche (German glasses). Finally, insinuating treachery, the critic poses the invidious question of who or what machiavellian and poisoned propaganda really lies behind the venture. For he asseverates that such figures are seeking to gangrener the national organism and to demonstrate the decline of French taste to the many curious foreigners attending the concerts. Vuillemin concludes, however, by reassuring his readers that the public has uncovered the plot and exposed the despoiled and impotent exoticism that this repertoire so odiously incarnates.1 The rhetoric and racist circumlocutions the article so dexterously interweaves were by no means exceptional in postwar French writings on music or indeed in operatic works. The image of the insidious, avaricious outsider, or the exotic and rootless Jew, who is not truly French but bound to international or Germanic conspiracies against the nation, is common. This discourse, moreover, links such an image to the assault on French tradition or to the modernist and cosmopolitan danger now posed to indigenous French cultural values. We may

Spirituality in Post‐War British Opera

Opera is currently enjoying a great deal of public interest. In its popular understanding, as the most lavish, the most spectacular, the most luxuriant of art forms, it might not seem an obvious form for religious exploration, or the working out of spiritual problems. That, one might think, is rather the preserve of more private and introspective art forms: to be left to writers, poets, and workers in the plastic arts. Yet, in the operatic works produced by British composers in the last fifty or so years, many do take this apparently private subject-matter into this most public of artistic domains. This article is an attempt to draw together some of the more notable examples of this tendency, to compare them in their diversity, and to draw attention to this phenomenon among the non-opera-going public. (In all that follows, dates after opera titles refer to the year of their first production.)Bishop Richard Harries has recently remarked, ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension’, in that they can be a source of comfort and solace. He goes on to distinguish ‘a distinctive tradition of ostensibly spiritual art’, which ‘seeks to indicate through symbols the eternal reality behind, beyond and within this world’. In this article, the term ‘spirituality’ is used quite loosely, usually to refer to the use by composers and their librettists of material from sources acknowledged to be of spiritual significance. I have also drawn attention to composers’ uses of myths and legends, since these may be said to have a spiritual content in Harries’ sense, insofar as they consciously direct their hearers to levels of understanding beyond the simple level of the story being told.

Viva la liberta!: politics in opera

In this book, Anthony Arblaster sets out to uncover the political dimension of a vast range of operatic works, from Marriage of Figaro to Nixon in China, including many of the most popular in the repertory, revealing the ideals of freedom and justice so often present, but invariably ignored or suppressed by critics. Beginning with an investigation of opera in revolutionary France, Arblaster goes on to analyze Mozart's enigmatic politics, and to explore the work of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and above all, Verdi, in the context of the Risorgimento. Further chapters examine Wagner's early radicalism and notorious anti-semitism, nationalism in Russian. Czech and English opera, and the weaknesses of Puccini and Strauss. Arblaster discusses women in opera, taking issue with Catherine Clement's influential Opera, or the Undoing of Women, and concludes with a survey of the treatment of everyday life in opera and musicals from Dallapiccola to Sondheim. The book is aimed at general readers interested in opera and music and should also be a useful text for students of music and cultural studies.

Editor's Note to Philip Glass's Akhnaten

The study of Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten by Paul John Frandsen comes from an unusual source for publication in an American journal of music, especially in that it concerns American opera. Mr. Frandsen is neither American nor a musical scholar, but he has singular qualifications. He is a Danish Egyptologist whose background in music comes through his father, who is a former general music director of The Royal Opera of Copenhagen. And Mr. Frandsen's musical literacy is such that, not having a score available from which to work, he took the musical examples down by dictation from the CBS Masterworks (now transferred to Sony) recording of the opera. The paper, first presented as a public lecture, was originally written in Danish for publication in Papyrus, a journal of the Danish Egyptological Society. It is, to say the least, a quirky study. Mr. Frandsen's musical analytical methods are not particularly sophisticated. Nor, before examining Akhnaten, Mr. Frandsen admits, did he have much exposure to Minimalism. But finding such a nondoctrinaire approach toward what is surely the most controversial musical style of the past quarter century is precisely the attraction of this study for an American readership. Whatever its limitations, it brings a completely fresh perspective to an area of music so hotly debated that there seems little middle ground, a perspective that can not only shed light on the musical structure of the work, but also offer a unique inquiry into its historicity. Mr. Frandsen's study comes at a propitious time. Akhnaten, Mr. Glass's third opera, is not a new opera, but there have been few serious investigations into Mr. Glass's operatic works, even though Mr. Glass is, by far, the most prominent American opera composer of our time. He has written some seven or eight more operas since Akhnaten. (It is not easy to count them; the composer is so prolific some have not yet been performed, and there is the further difficulty in distinguishing between the more general theater works [such as 1000

"Don Giovanni" and Other New Electronic Operatic Works

This article serves as a comprehensive introduction to the composer’s operatic compositions and features an in-depth discussion of his opera Don Giovanni . Atchley composes short (20–30 min) operas that feature sung and/or spoken libretti; titles, characters, musical and textual fragments from works by other composers; electronic and acoustic or synthesized instrumental accompaniment. The author discusses his relationship with his uncle, who introduced him to opera, painting and a philosophy of art; the uses of electronics both specifically in Don Giovanni and generally in his compositional technique; the structure of his work and its relationship to Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera; and performance elements of the work.

Musical and Dramatic Structure in the Opera Buffa Finale

he study of the opera buffa of the late eighteenth century has for many years been virtually synonymous with the study of Mozart's mature operas. Scholars have recently shown an increased interest in the operas of Haydn, but operatic works by the leading contemporaries of these two great figures remain almost completely unknown.l It is thus not surprising that what is believed to 191 be true about the finale in opera buffa applies quite well to Mozart's finales, but far less well to those of Paisiello, Salieri, Martin y Soler, and

Neuprizorjena Gerbičeva opera »Kres«

Neuprizorjena Gerbičeva opera »Kres«

Two opera composers

There is no strong opera tradition in Hungary. The founder of our national opera literature, Liszt's contemporary Ferenc Erkel, clung chiefly to the ‘verbunkos’ style as a characteristic Hungarian element in his attempts to form a national operatic style. He succeeded in fusing this with the style of his Italian models, and this was his great merit as a composer. But he left unsolved the crucial problem: the creation of a melodic style arising out of the characteristic accentuation of Hungarian speech, out of the spirit of the language. From this point of view Bartók was the epoch-making master. Bluebeard's Castle was the historic event in the rise of new Hungarian opera. As Kodály wrote after the première: “Bartók has taken the road to liberating the language, transforming its natural inflexions into music, thereby greatly furthering the emergence of a Hungarian recitative style. This is the first Hungarian operatic work in which the singing is consistent from first to last, free from all jarring prosody”. But Bartók's opera had no successors. The two stage works of Kodály, whose feeling for drama and theatre was not strong, were more in the nature of experiments, and were so intended by their composer. The following generation could hardly have made any progress in the direction indicated by them—though there was much that later opera composers could learn from his other vocal music, the songs and the choral works.

Sezona 1826/27 v Stanovskem gledališču v Ljubljani

Sezona 1826/27 v Stanovskem gledališču v Ljubljani

K vprašanju o kompozicijskih nazorih Slavka Osterca

K vprašanju o kompozicijskih nazorih Slavka Osterca

Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

Although Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera which most people remember today, it is wrong to think that it was the first operatic work to be seen in London. That honour belongs to a through-composed French work, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus. This opera was performed only once, and that was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 30 March 1674. The music was the work of the French composer, Louis Grabu, who at that time was attached to the English court as Composer of the King's Musick. Then, about the same period, two English operas were seen at The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden. One was a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the other was Psyche by Thomas Shadwell, but both of these pieces included spoken dialogue and do not concern us here. But a decade later, in 1685, the through-composed opera by Dryden and Grabu, Albion and Albanius, was given six performances at The Duke's Theatre. So it was Ariane and this work that were the predecessors of Purcell's opera.

Operatic Fantasias and Late Piano Works

Operatic Fantasias and Late Piano Works

Tradition in Perspective

THE CONCEPT of is dialectical and ambivalent as any concept that demands, and allows of, interpretation, for such interpretation may start at different and possibly opposite points of departure. These in turn depend on the system of values chosen by the respective observers so that the term tradition will take on positive or negative shadings, as the case may be. Consider, for instance, Gustav Mahler's sneering pronouncement Tradition ist Schlamperei (tradition is slovenliness). By this he meant to castigate the laziness of those of his subordinates at the Vienna Opera House who would resist his perfectionist drive, claiming that things had been done in a certain way as long as anyone could remember and a had been established. To change it would amount to sacrilege. Now what Mahler wanted, as we are told, was to make the rendition of the operatic works that came under his direction as closely correspond as he could to what he understood to be the intentions of their creators, given the resources of his institute. If means faithfulness to values established in the past and recognized as being still vital, Mahler was certainly not against it. What he fought were habits that had superimposed themselves like barnacles upon those values under the name of tradition through generations of thoughtless and selfish performers. Tradition, then, is the continuity of ideas expressed through the repetition of procedures. If we apply the term to the creative aspect of music, it designates adherence to compositional procedures of the past, especially of the immediate past. It is the continuation of things created in the past, but still alive in the present. If stylistic elements of a farther distant past are taken up, as for instance in some phases of neoclassicism, an antitraditional attitude is frequently the motivating factor, and a rupture of traditional continuity is usually the result.

The Later Operatic Works of Richard Strauss

Almost exactly 350 years have passed since the invention of that marriage-of-the-arts which we call Opera. How frequently during this time has its impending collapse been prophesied; how often has it been pronounced dead! Yet again and again, like a woman who never ages, it has rejuvenated itself, kept alive, assumed a different shape, changed, its face and appeared in some new guise. And today once more, after a long period of stagnation, we find ourselves in the presence of a regeneration of the musical theatre with new goals and new tendencies both as regards creation and presentation.

Experimental Pianofortes and the Music Written for Them

During the earlier years of the nineteenth century a pianoforte recital without an orchestral accompaniment to at least one of the works, was a rarity and the concerto form was almost always used in all the greater performances. It was not, in fact, until 1837 that Moscheles ventured to introduce pianoforte-evenings without this addition. The great pianists wrote concertos or divertissements for their instrument and in order that these works could be performed by the amateur in his home, where there could be no orchestra, all the tuttis were printed in short score and with the appropriate dynamic marks. Thus a pianist often found himself playing music originally designed for strings, brass or wood wind. In consequence of the desire on the part of these amateurs for two and four hand reduction of operatic and symphonic works, numerous devices were added to the pianoforte for the purpose of giving the illusion of an orchestra. These may be grouped under the following headings:— (1)Devices for sustaining the sounds after the note had been struck.(2)Octave couplers.(3)Characteristic stops such as (a) echo pedal, (b) bassoon stop, (c) Janissary music.(4)“Repetition” actions to make it possible to imitate quickly repeated notes of the violins in trills and cadences.

Hsin Ch'iao (The New Tide): New Trends in the Traditional Chinese Drama

Here in ever changing China, one is impressed with the truthfulness of the statement: old order changeth, giving place to the new. About two centuries ago what is now variously designated as Peking drama, Chinese opera, the p'i-huang drama, and so on, gained a firm place with the people. The Peking drama, then itself a novelty, is now in turn experiencing new trends, which, it is hoped, will lead through the present period of crude experimentation to a higher art. Generally speaking, the conventional Chinese drama differs as much from the realistic school of the Occident as the manner in which one waves to a friend: that is, while the foreigner moves his hand towards himself, the Chinese waves his outward in order to signal a person to come to him. Be that as it may, the purpose of the drama in the Middle Kingdom, like that of the rest of the world, is to divert, edify, and occasionally to instruct. In order to comprehend fully the significance of new trends in traditional drama, it is necessary to describe briefly the Peking, or p'i-huang, school, which is so well established throughout most parts of the Republic that it is now said we live in a p'i-huang world. This musical style of drama, a combination of various types of music set to acting, may be said to have had its successful beginning about 1760 when the Four Great Anhwei Training Schools in Peking taught actors to perpetuate northern traditions. Everything: acting, declamation, singing, and so on, is done according to strict convention. The late Empress Dowager, who herself is said to have taken great pride in writing plays and who, it is rumored, donned the actor's robe along with her courtiers, encouraged the p'i-huang school, which at once enjoyed even greater popularity. The Peking drama, which is not devoid of spoken dialogue, is filled with songs that usually form for the audience the piece de resistance of the evening. Plays fall into two general divisions: the wen-hsi, or more quiet and operatic works, and the wu-hsi, or noisy and military works. Treatment, even of -tense and realistic situations is invariably light and conventional. Except for rare moments and except for the gags of comedians and the r6les of the lao-tan, or old women, there is no stark realism. Sometimes, through the tangle of artificial convention a great actor, by sheer force of personality, puts over the footlights to the audience a semblance of realism denuded of the commonplace. An outstanding fact is that men still portray the heroines and have developed a peculiar style of singing and acting which generally is preferred to the natural interpretation of the same r6le by women. Actresses, who are said to have been in vogue as early as the Yuan Dynasty (1280-1368),

Russian-English Transliteration: A List of Operatic and Other Works, with Names of Dramatic Characters

Russian-English Transliteration: A List of Operatic and Other Works, with Names of Dramatic Characters