Interludes in opera articulate moments when the lush voices of singers and vivid spectacle of scenery and action are removed and often the curtain is drawn, and thus they span a functional gap between textless instrumental music and explicit theatrical vehicle. Although composers and analysts suggest rich and multivalent meanings for the music, those implications often escape decoding by audiences. Even the interlude titles — Zwischenspiel, entr'acte, intermezzo — suggest their intermission-like nature. As functional placeholders for scene changes and the like, the interludes are for many a cue to relax attentive listening, read synopses, and whisper with companions. Undaunted by such complexities, Morris takes up the problematic nature of operatic interludes, engaging their ambiguities with eyes wide open in an effort to enrich our understanding of these challenging bits of music.
According to the book jacket, this is the first major scholarly study of Così fan tutte, considered to be one of Mozart's least-understood operas and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte's most interesting text. Così fan tutte has been studied extensively, despite the broad assertion stated in the book. What the author of this study brings to the reader, which others have not, is a detailed examination of the philosophical, pastoral, and comic background of the libretto, characters, and music of the opera. New perspectives on text and tone in the opera, the subtle use of the pastoral mode, and the tension and balance between philosophy and comedy are what the author brings to the study of this work. In addition, the author does an intensely close reading of the primary sources of the opera, in order to support his theories and statements.
The importance of the Teatre del Liceu, can not be overstated. The house ranks with all the leading theatres of the world, being right up there with Paris, London, New York, Vienna, Madrid, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Turin, Naples, Buenos Aires, and other cities of comparable importance. During its long history (158 years at the time of writing) it featured many of the great singers. These include Caruso, Battistini, Tamagno, Ruffo, Caballe, Tebaldi, Mario, Pavarotti, Vignas, Lazaro, O'Sullivan, Stracciari, Pagliughi, Gayarre, Masini, Stagno, Lauri-Volpi, Bellincioni, and countless others. Quite a few of these who sang there before 1897 are represented on the accompanying disc.
Thomas May's stated goal in Decoding Wagner is indeed summarized in his subtitle, An Invitation to His Music Dramas. Mr. May offers an introduction to those who may seek a reliable yet succinct guide in their first Wagnerian experience; a further potential readership is seen among those who have attended performances of Wagner but who wish to expand their appreciation of the music dramas. In his chronological overview of Wagner's oeuvre from the mid-1830s until the close of his career May presents an approachable guide to appreciating the composer's operatic genius. As an illustration of May's commentary on the works, a generous selection of Wagner's music is included on two Discs that accompany the volume in a protective sleeve.
Books described as a "Companion" to this or that and published by university presses should be required to come with a Reader Beware label. As is the case with many books put out by university and many for-profit publishers, the main reason for publishing these is to advance the tenure and promotion prospects of the authors. This is not a bad thing, except that all too often the books aren't very good.
In Making Words Sing, Jonathan Dunsby investigates what he calls the "vocality" of song, that is, the "quality of having voice," as the author states in the introduction to his study. By using this perspective, Dunsby focuses on the intensification of the text that occurs when words are set to music, which stands in opposition to the kind of "songfulness" that Lawrence Kramer discussed in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
"Puccini & the Girl" is a rare and engrossing work of scholarship that can be enjoyed on several levels. For the Puccini-lover, to say nothing of one who has a special interest in La Fanciulla del West, it will provide a wealth of information not previously available, particularly all in one place. Any one interested in the creative process will find it exposed and examined clearly. The scholar will recognize the fascinating chance discovery, the thrill of the chase and the deep rewards of work undertaken lovingly and with rigorous care by the dedicated and passionate co-authors.
Jack Winsor Hansen's 520-page biography of Sibyl Sanderson (1865 - 1903) is packed with romanticism and gossip that will delight and titillate true worshipers of operatic divas and inquisitive opera fans. It also fills a gap in the music-historical writings about opera at the end of the 19th century.
Cage's music is like Einstein's theorem: most people know it exists, know it's important, but beyond these facts know nothing about it (count me in this category when it comes to Einstein).
If any opera lover feels daunted by the many biographies and analytical tomes dedicated to the life and art of Giacomo Puccini, Norton has done that reader a tremendous favor with the publication of The Puccini Companion. Tightly organized, this series of essays details the life, discusses the operas, and provides a wealth of supplementary information about the composer.
Much current popular culture assumes that its audience is knowledgeable of the American musical. References to, and parodies of, specific musicals are frequently a part of episodes of The Simpsons and South Park, and ads for companies as diverse as The Gap and the World Wrestling Entertainment promotion recently have restaged numbers from West Side Story to plug their products or events. Rarely, if ever, are the sources acknowledged; it is simply taken for granted that a general audience will understand the quotations and parodies.
"I particularly want to reach newcomers" writes Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music critic, in his preface. I do not think they will be helped very much by this book. A rookie who picks it up and reads the subtitle may expect something more than two operas by Bellini, two by Donizetti, one Gounod (not Faust), one Massenet (not Manon) and no Lohengrin.
"New musicology" is the cultural study, analysis and criticism of music, which proffers the belief that music has societal, religious, political, personal, and sexual agendas. Consequently, new musicology, much like the discussion of such topics at social gatherings, can be polarizing.
Among the recent publications on opera, The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David Charlton, breaks new ground with its systematic and thorough exploration of grand opera, a specific part of the genre which played an important role in the musical culture of the nineteenth century.
This volume has long been regarded as the definitive work on the subject, and has been quoted in countless later works whenever a reference was required to the performance histories of individual operas. Taken as a whole, especially when one considers the state of library science when the book was first written, it is a magnificent piece of work, and belongs on the bookshelf of every researcher in the operatic field.
Roger Scruton’s new book is an engrossing attempt, intensely argued throughout, to persuade the reader that Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is a religious work, not only in the vague sense that it elevates our feelings into an exalted condition that strikes the non-religious as “religious”, but in the precise sense that it incarnates, as the Eucharist incarnates the doctrine of Christianity, a doctrine that would give our meaningless lives a sufficient meaning if we were to believe and follow it. Nearly half a century ago, Joseph Kerman, in Opera as Drama, called Tristan “a religious drama” and suggested an analogy between it and Bach cantatas dealing with religious conversion and conveying religious experience. Twenty years later, Michael Tanner, a resolutely acute writer on Wagner, described Tristan and Bach’s St Matthew Passion as the two supreme examples of works “of which it is a prerequisite that one suspends disbelief . . . in the ethos which the work embodies and promulgates”. At the same time he admitted that the love unto death of Tristan and Isolde is not “a kind of living that can be rationally valued”. More recently and less cautiously, in his Wagner, he calls Tristan “the one work of Wagner’s which seems to be making an unconditional demand on our capacity to embrace a new, redeeming doctrine”.
Wagner, bloody Wagner; will we ever have done with the man? I don’t suppose that we’ll ever have done with his operas. For many of us, they are indispensable art; among the defining achievements of the Western tradition. “There is no music deeper . . . and no drama deeper either. (The Ring) is enough in itself to place Wagner alongside Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Mozart.” If you don’t think Wagner is that good, you won’t like Wagner and Philosophy, Bryan Magee’s new book about him. Whether or not he is that good, there is surely a problem that arises insistently about Wagner but not Michelangelo or Mozart or, least of all, about Shakespeare: that of getting the art clear of the artist. Shakespeare is notorious for disappearing from his plays, but Wagner is everywhere in his operas. You just can’t think about them and not think about him; nor would he conceivably have wished you to.
The title of this book, "The Cambridge Companion to Rossini" probably means different things to different people.
Every CD collector faces the day (or days, in the case of the truly dedicated collector) when denial no longer suffices — the shelves are sagging and overflowing, and the time has come to purchase yet another storage unit. Perhaps others have done what I did once to forestall that day — I removed all the booklets from my opera sets (and cover boxes as well, of course) and stored them on that increasingly archaic furniture item, a bookshelf.
Writing a history of an important and complex operatic repertory spanning three dynamic centuries is a daunting task, one that is perhaps better suited to several specialists than a single author. While an individual rarely possesses the scholarly breadth to write with expertise and authority on so much music, he or she can impart a unifying perspective and a consistent set of goals. But this advantage can also prove to be a limitation.
Here's a serious niche book, a relatively slender volume dealing with a topic at once both arcane and surprisingly central to some of the major controversies in opera production today. I think it has major problems but it has become for me the pebble dropped into the pond that sends ripples to unexpected places, raising interesting questions in the process.
Mary Ann Smart is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a scholar investigating her topics through the lens of feminist gender study. There is no indication in the book that she is or has ever been a performing artist or director, a situation I will return to later. The time line she lays out as her area of interest stretches from the development of Auber and Scribe's La Muette de Portici, commonly held to be the very first French Grand Opera, to the later works of Wagner and Verdi — several of which, not so coincidentally perhaps, were influenced by the concerns of Grand Opera — in other words, the bulk of the nineteenth century. Although Smart does not articulate this in so many words, this century saw the union in stage performance of the gesture- and pose-based system of acting in general use since at least the eighteenth century (if not several centuries earlier when indoor theater developed in Europe) with the Romantic compositional style wherein music described in detail the emotions of the character and suggested the gait, posture, gesture and physical relationship of the character to other characters on stage. By the end of Verdi and Wagner's careers (and largely because of Wagner), she sees music as having abandoned mimetic description in favor of psychological character exploration, although I think a good case can be made for Strauss's "big three," Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), and Rosenkavalier (1911) as being filled with quite specific musical depiction of movement and gesture.
Smart begins with Auber's Muette for two happily coincidental reasons: that it is the first Grand Opera and therefore not involved with stylized mythological or heroic characters, and that its voiceless heroine Fenella has no means of expression other than mime to musical accompaniment. Her description of the creative process, and particularly of the drastic cuts taken in Fenella's lengthy mime sequences before the premiere (when the language of mime as it existed in 1828 proved inadequate to express abstract concepts) is fascinating. But it is here that the first red flag goes up concerning Ms Smart's scholarship: in two separate places she states definitively that Fenella is the ONLY such character in opera, having obviously never heard of the title character in Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada (a spectral mute portrayed by a dancer); of Toby in Menotti's The Medium, the mute assistant to Mme Flora whose entire role is mimed; or of the many, many mute characters in the one act Intermezzi of the 18th century like Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, where the convention was to have one male singer, one female singer and one mime as the entire cast; or of the magnificent episode in Les Troyens when the widowed Andromache and her young son come before the Trojan populace in a wholly mimed scene whose music clearly describes their demeanor and movement.
One problem seems to me that Smart isn't an experienced theatrical practitioner. In her chapter on Bellini,, et al., she backs off the topic of expression by physical gesture to a discussion of expression through non-verbal but still vocal means: sighs, moans, groans and sobs as supported by onomatopoeic orchestral writing. Such blatant imitation was disparaged as simplistic and inartistic by contemporary commentators and Smart the theorist has difficulty acknowledging that the overwhelmingly effective nature of Bellini's or Verdi's sighs and tears is precisely because of the orchestra's faithful imitation of non-verbal human emotional utterance. No experienced singer, conductor or director would have any problem here and one begins to question the value of Smart's interlude in the orchestra pit and away from the stage.
Smart gets back on track when discussing the fully mature Verdi's use of musical/gestural climaxes for closed numbers so as to end them in a definitive way that precludes the formulaic cabalettas he had come to dread. She is most involved with Violetta (a woman of ambiguous social status fighting a body failing due to disease), Amelia (Ballo in Maschera, a woman fighting to control her body's adulterous erotic urges), Elizabeth and Carlos (Don Carlos, same situation as Amelia complicated by Carlos's neurotic physicality), and Aida (a woman of high rank captive in an alien world and forced into the pose of a slave).
It is in the climactic chapter on Wagner that Ms Smart scores most effectively, linking the composer's turn from "outer drama" to "inner drama" with the transformation of operatic music from describing action and movement, to a rhapsodic evocation of mood and erotic longing. Yet even here, she neglects the one great mimed episode in Tannhauser that that would not only nail her thesis conclusively but would also involve her gender study in perfect combination. It occurs just after Elisabeth has finished her prayer by the roadside shrine in act 3:
bq. She remains for some time in devout rapture. As she slowly rises, she sees Wolfram who approaches to speak to her. She entreats him by a gesture not to do so. [Wolfram: "Elizabeth, may I not walk beside you?"] Elizabeth again expresses to him by gesture that she thanks him for his faithful love, but that her way leads to heaven where she has a high purpose to fulfill; he must therefore let her depart alone and not follow her. She ascends halfway up the height and disappears gradually on the footpath toward the Wartburg.
[translation by Rodney Bloomer, copyright 1988 for the English National Opera]
It is one of the most demanding moments for an actress in Wagner, the music expressing the "rapture" of the moment while the soprano has exactly the kind of abstract concepts to convey that were the cause of such difficulty to Auber and Scribe. And as she is on her way, in effect, to give her life in exchange for the salvation of Tannhauser's soul, the purpose of Woman in Romantic opera, a major issue in gender study in opera, was there just waiting for Smart to dig in.
The book is well illustrated with musical examples integrated into the text rather than relegated to an appendix (and the notes, stretching to almost fifty pages, are both interesting and well composed), but is surprisingly short on visual examples of the very poses and gestures that are supposed to be the heart of the study. In particular, Smart has never heard of — or has chosen to ignore — Francois Delsarte (1811-1871), whose acting system dominated the stage in the nineteenth century. An externally applied repertory of what we would now consider melodramatic claptrap, the Delsarte System generated charts of hand movements and gestures, as well as sets of photographs employing contemporary actors demonstrating each pose that could have been a valuable resource here. When I mentioned this omission to a director and acting teacher whose career spans the U.S. and The Royal; Shakespeare Company (where they know a thing or three about externally applied acting technique) she was amazed that anyone writing on the subject would not include Delsarte.
"Mimomania" (a term used by Nietzsche in connection with Wagner) is an interesting but flawed, occasionally unfocused look at the emotional power of Romantic music in conjunction with a vanished acting style that worked with it hand in glove. It is a fascinating topic if only because Romantic opera remains the core repertory of most opera houses. This subject still awaits a satisfying major study.
William Fregosi
Technical Coordinator for Theater Arts
Massachusetts Institute of Technology