In addition, to his popular score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream Felix Mendelssohn wrote incidental music to several other plays. Commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the incidental music to Athalia was intended for a private performance of the play by Jean Racine. While the story is a complicated Old Testament plot, Mendelssohn’s music captures the tone of the tragedy with delight, whimsy, and severity.
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.
When Rudolf Bing came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1950, he scored a tremendous hit with a new staging of the perennial operetta favorite Die Fledermaus. Both at the opera house on 39th Street and on national tour, the slickly Broadwayized Fledermaus packed in big audiences season after season. A decade later, Bing assembled a fine cast and proven production team for the company's first performances of Strauss's Der Zigeunerbaron in fifty years. 18 performances were scheduled. It sank like a stone and has never appeared at the MET again.
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.
The box-sets contaning the complete recordings of the music of J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart occupy substantial shelf space in the collections of those fortunate enough to possess them.
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.
During his heyday, Alain Vanzo did not get quite the recognition he deserved. Though the voice was sweeter and more beautiful than the somewhat white sound of Nicolai Gedda, it was the latter who got all the plums; primo because he was a discovery of Legge and a few years earlier on the scene and secundo while opera managers could cast him in other languages than French and Italian.
The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky joins more than a dozen similar volumes published by the Cambridge University Press over the years and devoted to the life and works of a single composer. Each one traditionally is a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, organized into three main sections — biography; works (mostly by genre); reception and posthumous legacy.
Predictably, however, just like the composer in question, this Companion is much too complex to fit comfortably into the mold. The reader will immediately note the seemingly disproportionate amount of space dedicated to the issue of reception: six of fourteen articles are placed in that section of the volume, with many essays from the other two sections veering frequently in the same direction. Indeed, as Christopher Butler's and Arnold Whittall's essays in the opening section illustrate, contributions to this collection inevitably represent conflicting trends in Stravinsky criticism. In "Stravinsky as Modernist," Butler casts the composer in his traditional role as a "conservative modernist" as opposed to Arnold Schoenberg's "progressive avant-garde." Meanwhile, Whittall, in a rather unfortunately titled "Stravinsky in Context" (now there's a title that means everything and nothing!), often contradicts his colleague while discussing many stylistic and compositional parallels between Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Commissioned separately, the essays do not engage each other's arguments. Instead, the authors polemicize — vehemently at times — with Richard Taruskin, whose distinct, distinguished shadow has loomed large over the Stravinsky discourse ever since the 1996 publication of his comprehensive two-volume Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Indeed, several essays in this Companion are heavily indebted to Taruskin's work. This includes Rosamund Bartlett's opening article "Stravinsky's Russian Origins," the only truly biographical essay in the volume. But while Bartlett's fascinating account of the artistic life in early 20th-century Russia is well worth the reader's attention, I hesitate to make the same claim for the two "Russian" essays in Part 2 of the collection, Anthony Pople's "Early Stravinsky" and Kenneth Gloag's "Russian Rites: Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces." While both authors make a point of summarizing the views of other scholars, such as Pieter van den Toorn and Stephen Walsh, as well as bringing their own perspectives to the table, the number of Taruskin references in Pople's account in particular is at times so overwhelming that one feels a strong desire to abandon the Companion altogether and run back to the original.
Thankfully, that feeling disappears as the reader progresses through the volume and away from the "origins." Martha M. Hyde's insightful essay "Stravinsky's Neoclassicism" explores the complex notions of engagement with time, past and present, imitation, anachronism, and the relationship between neoclassicism and post-modern pastiche. Opera lovers will be delighted to see a significant portion of the article devoted to the analysis of The Rake's Progress, in its textual and musical dialogue with Goethe's Faust. Music for — broadly defined — theater is also the subject of the editor, Jonathan Cross's contribution to the volume, "Stravinsky's Theaters," in which he discusses the aspects of "high" and "low" in the composer's various staged projects. One of the most valuable contributions to the volume, in my opinion, is Joseph Straus's wonderful overview "Stravinsky the Serialist"; but a word of caution — the author's detailed analysis of specific passages may prove prohibitive for the uninitiated.
Two of six "reception" essays in the Companion also include analysis of excerpts from Stravinsky's serial compositions. In a part of his "Stravinsky and Us" (to be discussed below), Richard Taruskin offers an alternative (or perhaps a complementary) view of Stravinsky's journey into serialism to the one outlined in Straus's article through the textual analysis of the Cantata. Meanwhile, Craig Ayrey, in "Stravinsky in Analysis: The Anglophone Traditions," traces and critiques the analytical approaches to Stravinsky's music used in the English-speaking world by applying them to the Lacrimosa section of the Requiem Canticles. Unlike Taruskin's, and even more so than Straus's essay, Ayrey's contribution is dense with formulas, and thus not recommended for amateurs or the faint of heart.
To the contrary, Nicholas Cook's delightful essay titled "Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky" is a must equally for a scholar, performer, and intelligent listener. Cook examines the composer's attitude toward the value of interpretation in performance, and poses questions on the relative significance of the composer's own conducting for discerning his intentions by pointing out important interpretive deviations in his successive recordings of the Rite of Spring. The essay also includes astute observations about the connections between Stravinsky's "new objectivity" and the issues of "authenticity" in contemporary performance practice. For a different kind of contemporary practice, Jonathan Cross's interview with Louis Andriessen titled "Composing with Stravinsky" addresses Stravinsky's influence on this Dutch composer, as well as on other composers today, an influence — it is asserted — that is still in its early stages. The interview is a worthy read; the only drawback perhaps is that the discourse all too frequently abandons its supposed subject matter and focuses on Adriessen's career instead.
Two articles in the Companion address the most classic issue in Stravinsky reception — criticism. Stuart Campbell's essay "Stravinsky and the Critics" provides an overview of the composer's relationship with his critics throughout his long career, and elucidates the role played by these critics (including the fellow expatriates and composer colleagues) in disseminating his works and ideas. Max Paddison's "Stravinsky as Devil: Adorno's Three Critiques" discusses the complexities, contradictions, internal motivations, and a gradual evolution of Theodore Adorno's Stravinsky critiques, from the late 1920s through the early 1960s.
Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky should wear the label "use with caution." While a specialist student of Stravinsky would find in it much fascinating and useful material, the collection would not serve as a good general introduction to the composer's life and works. The reason for this, primarily, is the absence of a continuous narrative or even a coherent argument — in a word, a single point of view. It is a pity that the format of a Cambridge Companion does not provide for an in-depth editorial introduction — beyond, that is, the four sentences available on the opening page. Without it, the diversity of angles and the sharpness of arguments may distract and confuse a reader not easily familiar with the daily fads of Stravinskian discourse. In a stroke of editorial ingenuity, Taruskin's "Stravinsky and Us" serves as a conclusion to the volume. This essay's main focus is unraveling a variety of self-constructed and posthumously imposed "Stravinsky" mythologies that engender our daily engagement with the phenomenon of this composer and his music. To an extent, the controversies and contradictions that fill the current Companion themselves provide a telling illustration of the enduring power of the myths, and the eternal pleasure we musicologists derive from endlessly perpetuating them.
Olga Haldey
University of Missouri-Columbia