The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas.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.
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.
Drama kings Goldstein, Joshua
2007., 20070114, 2007, 2007-02-13
eBook
In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture ...in Republican era China. Providing a fascinating look into the lives of some of the opera’s key actors, he explores their methods for earning a living; their status in an ever-changing society; the methods by which theaters functioned; the nature and content of performances; audience make-up; and the larger relationship between Peking opera and Chinese nationalism.
Richard Strauss' fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941, make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on ...texts by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss's compositions.
In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples ...from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.
The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to ...power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.