The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas. When performed uncritically, the misogyny, racism, and other ideologies ...present in many of these works clash with modern sensibilities. In Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier argues that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage. Where some directors explicitly respond to contemporary dialogues about sexual violence, others utilize sexual violence as a surefire way to titillate, to shock, and to generate press for a new production. Drawing on archival footage as well as attendance at live events, Cormier analyzes productions of canonic operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, La forza del destino, Un ballo in maschera, Salome, and Turandot. In doing so, Cormier highlights the dynamism of twenty-first-century opera performance practice with regard to sexual violence, establishes methods to evaluate representations of sexual violence on the opera stage, and reframes the primary responsibility of opera critics and creators as being not to opera composers and librettists but to the public.
Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful ...roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.
During a crucial period in opera's development as a genre and as a business, the flamboyantly libertine Spanish aristocrat Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán (1629-87), Marqués de Heliche and del Carpio, ...influenced operatic practices and productions for both Italian and Hispanic operas. A voracious collector of books and antiquities and famed connoisseur of visual art, the marqués financed operas in both Spain and Italy and further shaped them through his ideas, energy, and politics. His legacy also brought forth the first operas of the Americas, as posthumous revivals of the operatic genres he nurtured appeared in the Americas less than fifteen years after his death. In this book, author Louise K. Stein follows the trajectory of this first operatic producer to have shaped opera in two different worlds--Europe and the Americas--and in doing so, advances our musical and historical understanding of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century opera and cultural encounter. Each chapter focuses on different productions spearheaded by the Marqués in Madrid, Rome, and Naples during his lifetime, with the final chapter considering how his influence continued in operatic productions in Lima, Mexico City, and other regions of New Spain after his death. Alongside this portrait of the distinguish patron of the arts, Stein shows how conventions of musical dramaturgy for both private and commercial opera were developed within a consistent politics of production across the far-flung administrative centers of the Spanish empire in the years 1650-1730. She reveals the place of opera within the siglo de oro (Golden Age) of Hispanic theatre and delves deeply into how the Marqués became the principal patron of Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy after his time in Rome, sparking a reliable production system for Italian opera in Naples. Stein also addresses gendered performance--how beliefs about female fertility conditioned listeners and shaped the operatic genre--and advances the concept of the ""womanly voice"" in the first extant Hispanic operas, the Italian operas produced in Naples between 1683 and 1687, and the first operas of the Americas from 1701 to 1730.
Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, ...Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization" was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern" operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time.
The postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk : Disrupting
the Eurocentric perspective on art history and addressing Germany's
colonial history
Opera Village Africa , a participatory art experiment by
the late ...German multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, serves
as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard
Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk . Sarah Hegenbart
traces the path from Wagner's introduction of the
Gesamtkunstwerk in Bayreuth to Schlingensief's attempt to
charge the idea of the total artwork with new meaning by
transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso.
Schlingensief developed O pera Village in collaboration
with the world-renowned architect Francis Kéré. This final project
of Schlingensief is inspired by and illuminates the diverse themes
that informed his artistic practice, including coming to terms with
the German past, anti-Semitism, critical race theory, and questions
of postcolonial (self-)criticism.
From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso introduces the notion of the
postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk to disrupt the Eurocentric
perspective on art history, exploring how the socio-political force
of a postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk could affect processes
of transcultural identity construction. It reveals how
Schlingensief translocated the Wagnerian concept to Burkina Faso to
address German colonial history and engage with it from the
perspective of multidirectional memory cultures.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed
Content).
In his lifetime, the opera composer Fromental Halévy was considered the leader of the French school; his admirers included Wagner, Berlioz, and later Mahler. Today, he is chiefly remembered for his ...grand tragic opera La Juive (1835). Halévy, a native of Paris, was active when the French capital was at the centre of the operatic world. His 30 operas worked within established genres of grand opéra and opéra-comique, and many of them attained considerable popularity across Europe and the wider world (such as La Reine de Chypre 1841, Charles VI 1843, Les Mousquetaires de la reine 1846, and Le Val d'Andorre 1848). Although acclaimed in their day, most have not been staged for decades.This study throws light on this shadowy figure, looking at his life, contemporary opinion about him, and, most importantly, his operas. Each one is examined in terms of its origin, libretto, musical features, and place in the vibrant critical journalism of mid-19th century France. The book provides musical examples and something of the rich iconography that accompanied the creation of his works.
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