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.
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.
As far back as the Middle Ages, students (often only identified as Anonymous) have recorded the methods of performance imparted by their masters. In later centuries, such illustrious teachers wrote and published their own methods.
This practice became particularly popular during the Age of Enlightenment when treatises were produced for a growing market of dilettantes who wished to learn the rudiments of singing and playing instruments. Famous examples include Leopold Mozart Violinschule (1756) and J.S. Bach’s son Carl Philip Emanuel’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753 and 1762). Musical treatises took on new significance in the nineteenth century; with the rise of the rise of the conservatory and the increasing emphasis on musical performance in the middle-class home, famous performers who became noted teachers put pen to paper to share their techniques with an ever-increasing market of literate amateurs. Hence, it was possible to partake of a conservatory experience without ever leaving the comfort of one’s own parlor or salon.
Fuzeau Editions has published several series of these treatises in facsimile, gathering volumes of various categories so that they can be consulted together. One such series is a compilation of voice treatises and methods written by important virtuosi and pedagogues of the Romantic Age (although the title suggests a timeline from 1800-1860, the earliest volume dates from 1804 and the latest, 1870); among the authors included are Girolamo Crescentini, both Manual Garcias (father and son), Gioachino Rossini, Gilbert Louis Duprez, Luigi Lablache, and François-Joseph Fétis. Each of the seven volumes contains two or three methods at, as Fuzeau proclaims, reasonable costs. If purchased in toto, the series can be had for 424,000 euros, a savings of 116 euros were each book bought separately. The individual volumes range from 44 to 84 euros (roughly 50 to $100). Purchasers initially might think the publications costly, but compared to the price of a trip to a major research institution to consult the originals, it seems more palatable.
Volume IV of the series includes three important mid-century works, listed here as they appear: Manual Garcia, fils’ Traité complet de l’art du chant (1847), Laure Cinti-Damoreau’s Méthode de chant (1849), and Joseph (Giuseppe) Concone’s Introduction à l’art de bien chanter (c. 1845). Garcia, son of the singer who premiered the role of the Count in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, abandoned his own career as a baritone when he exhibited vocal woes while performing in New York. Far more important was his work as a teacher; among his students were his own sisters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, and Jenny Lind, Erminia Frezzolini, Mathilde Marchesi, and Julius Stockhausen. His main significance, however, comes from his scientific study of the construction of the vocal apparatus; his experiments with the laryngoscope, a small mirror with which the vocal mechanism could be viewed, brought the art of singing into the world of science. Cinti-Damoreau had a highly successful career as a soprano at both the Opéra and the Thêátre-italien. Imitating the techniques she heard from her Italian colleagues, she is remembered as a Rossinian soprano, having premiered roles in his Le Siège de Corinthe, Moïse, Le comte Ory, and Guillaume Tell. She taught at the Paris Conservatoire for 23 years; the lessons and exercises that comprise her Méthode were approved as a text for that institution’s vocal curriculum. After a brief career as a singer, Concone taught in Paris, overlapping Cinti-Damoreau’s teaching career by one year; holding her art in high esteem, he dedicated his own book to her as an “expression of recognition and admiration.” Indeed, the network of influence among all the authors in this series is noteworthy. Concone notes as well that he drew his exercises from Rossini’s Gogheggi e solfeggi (1827; see Volume III of this series; Cinti-Damoreau shares cadenzas she performed in roles in Cenerentola, Il barbiere, and Le comte Ory, among others. Garcia’s method, save for his own pioneering work in the study of the human voice, derives from his father’s Exercices pour la voix (c. 1835; also in Volume III).
Of course, facsimiles have their pros and cons. In their favor, such publications exactly replicate the content and appearance of works as they were published initially. Hence, there is no chance that textual passages or accompanying musical examples would be accidentally eliminated. The job of the series editor is to locate the sources to be included; the Chant series editor, Jeanne Roudet, notes that the provenance of the originals came from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the British Library. Thus, readers and researchers can consult a duplication of the original work rather than an actual edited text. One obvious problem, though, is language; a reader must be fluent in the writer’s tongue to understand the work (of the seventeen methods in the series, fifteen are in French and two in Italian). Although some of these works are available in translation, one is then always at the mercy of someone else’s interpretation. Since a fair portion of these methods includes musical examples and exercises, however, it is almost worth investing in a good language dictionary and having a go at the original text. In truth, one could study the various techniques simply by performing the exercises in ornamentation, vocalization, and etudes that drew on the vocal music of the day. Fortunately, the language of music is universally understood.
One slight drawback of this series is the physical size of the volumes. Printed on fine but heavy stock, the large volumes (9¼ by 13 inches) have a soft cover, making them awkward to use. The size, of course, approximates that of the originals; printed separately, they were manageable books with hard covers. Two or three bound together makes for an unwieldy volume. Anyone considering one or more of the series with the intention of serious usage would do well to invest in making them hardbound. A quick note on page numbers: each facsimile bears continuous pagination at the bottom center of each page while the original page numbers appear at the top verso and recto.
Singers (both students and pedagogues) who aim for an informed performance of the French and Italian repertories from this time period will want to consult (or even own) these facsimiles. If music libraries do not automatically subscribe to the Fuzeau Fac-similes, they would be wise to purchase the entire series because the cost of originals, if they even can be located on the rare book market, is decidedly more. Opera lovers who read music will enjoy glancing through method books like those of Garcia, Cinti-Damoreau and Concone, for they explain from the inside out how singers once learned their craft.
Denise Gallo