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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sanderson was an immensely popular late nineteenth-century opera singer in Paris, where she made her debut at the Opéra-Comique in 1886. Sanderson and her family hailed from California where her father was a wealthy and influential politician and lawyer until his death in 1886, at which point Sanderson moved permanently to Paris with her mother and sisters, and Sanderson began her operatic career in earnest. That her studies began rather late resulted mainly from her father's opposition to her having a career on the stage, a circumstance that also resulted in a lack of proper vocal training until she was older than usual for opera divas to start studying. Yet despite her inauspicious beginnings, Sanderson became known for her three-octave range and excellent acting skills, as well as her apparently irresistible beauty. In particular, she was associated with the French composer Massenet, for whom she created roles such as Manon, Thaïaut;s, and Esclarmonde; and she also worked closely with Saint-Saens, who wrote Phryné for her.
There was, however a dark side of her life, as she developed an addiction to alcohol and morphine, which resulted in advanced liver disease at an early age. Hansen captures all of this, from the time that Sanderson's parents married through her tragic death at the age of thirty-eight. Moreover, he broadens the picture with information about the many composers, conductors, and singers with whom she worked.
Throughout, the attention to detail and thorough review of the numerous documents surrounding Sanderson's life and career attest both to Hansen's integrity as a biographer and to his obsession with the divine Mlle. Sanderson herself. Clearly, he has left no stone unturned, and he has thought long and hard about the reasons for her tragic illness, and subsequent poverty and early demise. Hansen supports his claims about Sanderson's life with a wide variety of documentary evidence including letters, telegrams, diary entries, receipts, hotel registers, newspaper articles, and extensive personal interviews with Sanderson's relatives and acquaintances and their progeny.
Unfortunately, in his zeal to present Sanderson's life in the fullest, Hansen often includes documents that are less than fascinating and occasionally banal. If the overall result is a scintillating story, it is occasionally a slow read. Hansen's prose is repetitive and too often spiced with dramatic insinuations and heavy-handed foreshadowing. And though the text is rarely interrupted either by musical examples (there are only four), or by copious endnotes, sometimes the lack of specific documentation sometimes gives the impression that Hansen is carefully controlling the reader's access to documents in order to support his own romantic versions of events. It is unfortunate that more documents are not made available in their entirety in an appendix or in the endnotes, since these would allow the reader to draw her own conclusions.
The reader might also find frustrating the lack of contextual information about French opera at the time of Sanderson's career. Although The Sibyl Sanderson Story includes captivating, if tangential, anecdotes and biographical tidbits about many of the major figures in French opera at the end of the 19th century, it fails to account for the overarching politics and nationalism then rampant in the opera business. While Hansen portrays Sanderson's career as turning on the machinations of such powerful personalities as Massenet and Svengali, he only occasionally alludes to the contemporary debates that raged over the direction of French opera in the face of the rising tide of Wagnerian music drama.
That Hansen is enamored with Sanderson is apparent in his portrayal of her as a larger-than-life talent moving in the highest echelons of musical society. He never acknowledges that Massenet may have been a "second-rate composer" (as Elliot Forbes describes him in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) who needed a gimmick--such as a beautiful, unknown, American singer with extraordinary sex appeal--to help his operas fill the house. Moreover, though the reasons Hansen gives for Sanderson's alcoholism and forced early retirement, such as early overuse of her untrained voice and a predilection for socializing, may indeed be a part of her story, it is also true that the genre to which Sanderson dedicated her career--French grand opera--was not championed in her day (nor is it today). She dedicated herself completely to a small number of French lyric-soprano roles written by Massenet, Saint-Saens, and Gounod, to the exclusion of repertoire by Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. Thus, her choice of roles limited her potential for popularity and fame outside the Opéra-Comique or the Opéra, just as much as mismanagement and greed destroyed her voice.
In short, The Sibyl Sanderson Story is an entertaining biography of an unusual operatic personality, though it occasionally lacks focus. Hansen speculates a great deal about the particulars of some events in Sanderson's life--including the possibilities of her lesbianism and of having been the victim of euthanasia--but having done exhaustive research on Sanderson, he is surely qualified to do so.
Megan B. Jenkins
CUNY — The Graduate Center