Use Of Opera Research Articles

‘You Want Drama? Go to the Opera!’

This article addresses the role played by opera in fiction film by drawing attention to the action film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015). Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (1926) is treated here in a way that makes it appear as something more than a diegetic background and energy reinforcement for action scenes. By taking into consideration Daniel Yacavone’s (2012; 2014) view of film as a combination of a construction and a known world, I argue that the use of opera displays a stretching of the boundaries between fiction and real life, which in turn has implications for how the film can be regarded as an opera–film encounter. The film makes the opera emerge as significant in its own right through an intricate interaction between fictional denotation and engagement with the lived reality of the film viewer. Ultimately, I suggest that Rogue Nation provides an opportunity not only to reconsider a common way of approaching intersections between opera and fiction film, but also to extend and refine Yacavone’s theory.

Introduction

Introduction Rebecca Fülöp (bio) In desperation we turned to crime. We began to dismember the great masters. We began to murder the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, J. S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Wagner—everything that wasn’t protected by copyright from our pilfering. —Max Winkler on common scoring practices for “silent” films, “The Origin of Film Music”1 It still bothers me when certain deeply cherished pieces of music are merged with visual images in such a way that the sounds take on a film master’s specific meanings, thereby depriving me of my own—or at any rate trying to. In that respect, Ingmar Bergman has a lot to answer for in the next world. I can’t pinpoint which of his films to blame, but whenever I hear a recording of Casals playing a Bach suite I am trapped in a dark room with a morbidly depressed woman. Outside the window, I believe, large black birds flap menacingly. It is hard for me to believe that Casals is somehow not to blame. —Donal Henahan, “Film Music Has Two Masters” 2 The use of preexisting “classical” music in film soundtracks has been part of the aural world of moving pictures ever since their inception. As the above epigraphs indicate, however, it has not always been accepted as best practice. Labeled “murder” by silent film accompaniment compiler Max Winkler and bemoaned by music critic Donal Henahan for ruining his associations with “autonomous” musical works, using recognizable classics for film underscore has long been debated. Composers, scholars, and audiences alike have discussed classical music in film in terms of its aesthetic qualities, suitability for the storytelling needs of narrative film, and even the supposed “mutilation” of autonomous works.3 Nevertheless, the past few decades have produced [End Page 1] a wealth of scholarship concerning the use of classical music in film, with the overall consensus that classical works can be and have been employed to great effect in Hollywood and beyond. Much attention has been paid to the use of opera in film, notably by Marcia J. Citron, Jeongwon Joe, and Jennifer Fleeger, as well as classical music more generally by Dean Duncan and others.4 Less attention has been paid to the use of J. S. Bach’s music in screen media. In part, this omission makes sense—baroque music has long been considered less suitable to film scoring than popular or Romantic-inspired idioms.5 Thus far, few scholars have delved deeply into Bach’s appearances in film, with a few notable exceptions, including Carlo Cenciarelli, Alexis Luko, Per Broman, and William Gibbons.6 The two 2019 volumes of BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute devoted to “Bach on Screen” seek to address this gap in the literature. [End Page 2] Bach on Screen opened with a successful one-day conference in February 2018 at Baldwin Wallace University, at which all of our authors presented earlier versions of the work to be published in this and the next issue of this journal. These articles address the use of Bach in screen media from a number of perspectives, from questions of “appropriateness” to the many meanings and stereotypes Bach’s music has accrued over the course of the twentieth century. They also represent the breadth of media included in what was once simply called the study of “film music,” including not only film but also television, video games, and advertising. By presenting this work in a publication devoted to Bach scholarship, we hope to open conversation between scholars of the seemingly divergent fields of Bach and media studies as well as to demonstrate the connections between our approaches. In grouping these articles together in the two issues, we have chosen to highlight two broad categories into which uses of Bach’s music in audio-visual media fall: the “sacred” and the “profane.” As is discussed by many of our authors, Bach’s music is often called upon to support “profane” narratives either of madness or of horror, as in the frequent use of works such as the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or the Goldberg Variations, or conversely of “sacred” or semi-sacred...

"A combination of the sublime and the ridiculous"

"A combination of the sublime and the ridiculous" Michael Halliwell Andrea Mariani. Italian Music in Dakota: The Function of European Musical Theatre in U. S. Culture. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht UP, 2017. 250 pp. $45.00 (Paperback). The use of opera as part of the narrative in fiction developed markedly during the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century, with several contemporary writers still regarding opera as useful for their particular purposes. In literature, the performative, intellectual, and cultural role of opera is depicted by using a particular aspect of performance: usually part of an operatic scene but also in the way the spaces in which the performances take place are used, most particularly the opera box, an important site of the dominant male gaze. It is important to remember that music making in the nineteenth century was both visual and aural, the last period in which this was the case. Susan McClary notes that opera "was one of the principal media through which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie developed and disseminated its new moral codes, values, and normative behaviors" (xviii). Fiction increasingly used operatic scenes as a form of both visual and acoustic ekphrasis, often to suggest a sense of interiority. As the ambition and complexity of operatic music evolved out of operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, where the orchestra played a subordinate role to the virtuosity of the singers, into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, where much of the drama is embodied in the orchestra, a form of omniscient musical narration was developed. Analogous with fiction, this allowed opera to explore interiority of character, independent of the vocal line, through orchestral means. It is no accident that the greatest evolution of the novel, and opera, occurred almost simultaneously. [End Page E-7] One of the difficulties when surveying a plurimedial field is that allusions, parallels, and comparisons between works from different genres can sometimes seem contrived and unconvincing and often require some neat footwork to make the comparisons "stick." Author Andrea Mariani has set himself an interesting yet challenging task in his book, which engages with the role that opera has played in the works of a wide range of American writers. He notes: The migration of European opera across the Atlantic . . . provided American authors with an extra medium of expression, enhancing the possibility of conveying feelings and emotions that the naked words . . . could not communicate. It promoted the application of more and more sophisticated intersemiotic techniques, making it finally possible to overcome the traditional predominance of Wordsworth's despotic organ of sight—Emerson's imperialistic, totalizing "transparent eyeball." (234) He further describes the importance of the use of opera scenes in fiction: Opera stages the interplay of characters who are at the same time human beings, dramatically suffering, and archetypes of psychological structures, exactly as the traditional figures of the commedia dell'arte. Opera is not based on improvisation but produces in the audience a similar sense of immediacy and almost automatic response to the sudden turns of events (something that regularly happens in Italian opera and, in particular, in Verdi). (230) Mariani starts his survey with Emerson and Poe, moving on to Thoreau and Melville in the second chapter, dealing mainly with poetry rather than opera, but there are interesting discussions of both these authors' interactions with opera. Much of the first section of the book is a not completely convincing attempt to draw out and elaborate on the references and inferences to opera in the writers the author discusses. However, with a central chapter on Whitman, the operatic relevance of his discussion emerges in full voice. Whitman, perhaps more than any other poet writing in English, drew on his extensive knowledge of and love for opera, and particularly Italian opera. Mariani focuses on a handful of poems that reveal Whitman's use of music in innovative ways. Central to Whitman's employment of musical analogies in his verse is the voice, and the discussion of a range of singers and opera performances is illuminating. This chapter ends with a fascinating connection made between Whitman and architecture, particularly the Chicago Opera House designed by Louis H. Sullivan: Both wanted to create an "egalitarian...

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.

Opera as Translation: Ezra Pound's Le Testament

In Ezra Pound's Le Testament, the first of his three operatic compositions, the relentless drive for linguistic precision is undermined by an ironic recourse to the imprecise, even mystical, signifying capacity of music and rhythm. Given Pound's lifelong engagement with translation, it is likely not surprising that his turn to opera was essentially literary in purpose, serving the poet as a means to ‘translate’ the category of poetic language he termed melopoeia (in this case, François Villon's Le Testament). What is surprising, however – particularly given Pound's notorious fascist sympathies and his own esoteric poetic style – is Pound's determination to make this poetry accessible, intellectually and materially. Though Le Testament unapologetically valorizes Villon's poems for their unique difficulty, the use of opera (and later radio opera) as the means of translation reflects Pound's desire to make Villon's poetry ‘sing’ to the masses – calling into question the common conflation of modernist difficulty with modernist elitism.

Opera as Translation: Ezra Pound's <i>Le Testament</i>

Abstract In Ezra Pound's Le Testament, the first of his three operatic compositions, the relentless drive for linguistic precision is undermined by an ironic recourse to the imprecise, even mystical, signifying capacity of music and rhythm. Given Pound's lifelong engagement with translation, it is likely not surprising that his turn to opera was essentially literary in purpose, serving the poet as a means to ‘translate’ the category of poetic language he termed melopoeia (in this case, Francois Villon's Le Testament). What is surprising, however – particularly given Pound's notorious fascist sympathies and his own esoteric poetic style – is Pound's determination to make this poetry accessible, intellectually and materially. Though Le Testament unapologetically valorizes Villon's poems for their unique difficulty, the use of opera (and later radio opera) as the means of translation reflects Pound's desire to make Villon's poetry ‘sing’ to the masses – calling into question the common conflation of modernis...

“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber'sPhantom of the Operaand “High-Pop” Theatre

“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber's<i>Phantom of the Opera</i>and “High-Pop” Theatre

Inventing opera as art in nineteenth-century Manchester

There can be little doubt that in recent times opera has gained an increasing social visibility. This can be illustrated in a number of different ways; for example, by the fairly extensive use of opera in advertising and on film soundtracks. At a more general level, one could point to opera stars performing with pop stars, opera stars hosting variety shows and opera stars performing at major sporting events. Are these (and other) changes something new or are they in fact a return to the cultural relations of opera as they existed before the nineteenth century? This article, based on original empirical research, presents a critical analysis of the invention of opera as art in nineteenth-century Manchester.

Jean Mongrédien. French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830. Translated by Sylvain Frémaux. General Editor, Reinhard G. Pauly. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1996. 394 pp. ISBN 1-57467-011-5 (hardcover)

Jean Mongrédien. French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830. Translated by Sylvain Frémaux. General Editor, Reinhard G. Pauly. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1996. 394 pp. ISBN 1-57467-011-5 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 19, numéro 1, 1998, p. 1-132) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.