Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586720000099
Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit
Abstract This article looks at representations of masculinity in Italian operatic performance in the 1820s and 1830s, with a particular focus on the ways in which male characters were transformed through the practice of aria and scene substitutions. Upon his retirement in 1833, the tenor Nicola Tacchinardi chastised musico performers – women who sang male roles – for their unconvincing portrayal of operatic heroes. Rather than complain about their high-lying voices, he chose to criticise these women's feminine appearance and idiosyncratic stage behaviours as unmasculine. Tacchinardi's criteria for gender performance, then, sidestepped embodied vocality and centred on performer appearance and behaviour in specific narrative situations. My study explores how Tacchinardi and his contemporaries employed aria substitution in heroic roles as a means for plot substitution, forgoing arias of dramatic stasis for dynamic scenes that showcase decisive action and augmented narrative significance. In this pre-Duprez milieu, before the onset of predetermined physiology in operatic discourse, male singers across the 1820s achieved an explicitly masculine self-definition not through voice, but as masters of textual control. Aria substitutions in the operas La Sacerdotessa d'Irminsul, La donna del lago and Norma demonstrate how singers established the components of masculine-heroic conventions through sensitive consideration of dramaturgy. I stress that the singing voice before 1830 was under-assimilated as an index of gender, and that rethinking the history of the ‘rise of the tenor’ may be crucial to understanding the history of the vocalic body.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586720000117
Marc Brooks
Abstract Musicologists have tended to assume that Berg's ‘translation’ of Büchner's play was an unproblematic affair and have felt free to set about uncovering how the music articulates the drama and the themes as if the meanings of play and opera were identical. In this article I listen to Wozzeck as a dialogue between Büchner's original fragment and Berg's operatic translation in a manner that acknowledges the differences between them. In particular I propose an alternative way of hearing nature in the opera that accords with Büchner's and Berg's own valorisation of the creative power of Life, rather than focusing on the political power of the idealist subject like many earlier appraisals of the opera. I first argue that, with Woyzeck, Büchner was opening up an exploratory space in which he asked his audience: ‘If the autonomous self-identical subject is indeed illusory, what is the mechanism through which social progress can take place?’ Second, I challenge the assumption that Berg managed to set the text in a neutral way, arguing that he imposed upon the fragments an alien set of aesthetic values and inadvertently dismantled the mechanism Büchner had designed to provoke audiences into thinking about volition and creativity. In the final two sections of the article, I argue that, despite the violence Berg did to Büchner's plan, the music in the opera's nature scenes can be heard to generate the philosophy of potential that Büchner was searching for in the original fragments.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586720000130
Nicole Vilkner
Abstract In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.
1828年夏天，布兰奇夫人的企业集团(enterprise gsamsamrale des Dames Blanches)在巴黎街头推出了一支白色公共汽车车队。这些公共交通工具以博伊尔迪厄(Boieldieu)的作品《白色夫人》(1825)命名和设计:它们的后门装饰着苏格兰的景色，侧翼画着手势的歌剧人物，机械喇叭在街道上吹奏着号角。公共汽车是世界上最早的公共交通系统之一，是改变城市交通的一项创新。在其三十年的流通中，公共汽车也对博伊尔迪厄歌剧的接受史产生了深远的影响。当公共汽车提高了工薪阶层和中产阶级的生活质量时，资产阶级的巴黎人为这种汽车的平等主义商业模式鼓掌，而博伊尔迪厄的歌剧出人意料地与围绕公共汽车的民粹主义言论纠缠在一起。通过布兰奇夫人的镜头观看歌剧，巴黎人将歌剧和街头的声音结合在一起，正如查尔斯·瓦伦丁·阿尔坎(Charles Valentin Alkan)的钢琴曲《Les omnibus》(作品2)(1829年)所展示的那样，它结合了歌剧的习惯用语和号角。通过这些例子和其他例子，本研究考察了物质文化影响音乐作品传播和接受的复杂方式。
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Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000154
{"title":"OPR volume 32 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0954586720000154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586720000154","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42672,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Opera Journal","volume":" ","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0954586720000154","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49588420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000142
{"title":"OPR volume 32 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0954586720000142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586720000142","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42672,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Opera Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0954586720000142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46955759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000026
Ditlev Rindom
This article examines the relationship between Milan's 1906 Exposition and a celebrated revival of Verdi'sLa traviata(1853). An event of national and international importance, the Exposition was notable for its focus on Italy's global presence, and in particular Italy's relationship with Latin America. TheTraviataproduction, meanwhile, comprised the first Italian staging of Verdi's opera in period costume, performed at La Scala by a quintessentially modern, celebrity ensemble to mark the Exposition's opening. This article explores the parallels between the Exposition and the production, to investigate the complex, shifting position of Milan (and Italy) within the transatlantic cultural and operatic networks of the time; and more broadly, to examine the role of operatic staging in shaping understandings of global space within the mobile operatic canon of the early twentieth century.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000051
J. Allison
Long before opera was first heard in South Africa, and even longer before it took root there, the country had its own operatic figure. But Adamastor was not introduced to the rest of the operatic world until 1865 and the premiere of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, where in Nélusko's Act III ballade the terrifying story is told of the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocky spine of the Cape Peninsula and barred sailors from rounding the ‘Cape of Storms’ and opening up the sea route to the East. The literary invention – perhaps via Rabelais – of Luís Vaz de Camões, the great Portuguese Renaissance poet who himself was the first European artist to round the Cape, Adamastor appears in Canto V of Os Lusíadas (1572) and has exercised a considerable fascination over South African artists and writers. But to whom does Adamastor belong? This is a question that some, increasingly, have sought to answer, re-examining Camões's myth from an indigenous perspective – for example, André Brink in his postmodernist novella The First Life of Adamastor, imagining how that meeting with the Portuguese fleet would have looked from the landward side, and the artist Cyril Coetzee in his huge T'kama-Adamastor painting commissioned for the University of the Witwatersrand.
早在歌剧在南非首次被听到之前，甚至在它在南非扎根之前，这个国家就有了自己的歌剧人物。但阿达马斯托直到1865年才被介绍给歌剧界的其他地方，直到梅耶尔比尔的《非洲》首演，在奈鲁斯科的第三幕民谣中，形成了开普半岛的岩石脊，并阻止水手绕过“风暴角”，开辟通往东部的海路。伟大的葡萄牙文艺复兴诗人路易斯·瓦兹·德·卡梅斯（Luís Vaz de Camões）的文学发明——也许是通过拉贝莱（Rabelais）——阿达马斯托出现在奥斯·卢西亚达斯（Os Lusíadas）的第五章（1572年）中，并对南非艺术家和作家产生了相当大的兴趣。但是阿达马斯托属于谁？这是一个越来越多的人试图回答的问题，他们从本土的角度重新审视Camões的神话——例如，AndréBrink在他的后现代主义中篇小说《阿达马斯托的第一次生命》中，想象着从陆地的角度来看，与葡萄牙舰队的会面会是什么样子，艺术家西里尔·库切（Cyril Coetzee）为威特沃特斯兰德大学（University of the Witwatersrand）委托创作了一幅巨大的T’kama-Adamastor画作。
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000063
Yvonne Liao
In recent years opera studies have taken a distinctly global and migratory turn: Nancy Rao'sChinatown Opera Theateris a notable example. Rao's book sheds new light on the art form's transpacific networks, Cantonese immigrant communities and their highly racialised experience of everyday entertainment in early twentieth-century America, thereby ‘strip[ping] the veneer of exoticism from [southern] Chinese [i.e., Cantonese] opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience’. Still more illuminating is Rao's focus on the Chinatown theatre companies, their contracting of touring performers and their role in transoceanic commerce. Woven into the book is an intimately connected narrative of Cantonese opera in the 1920s, encompassing San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Honolulu and (to a lesser extent) Havana. The selection of these locations is no coincidence, given their significance in the interwar years as port cities linked within imperial steamship networks, amidst the part-conflicting, part-intersecting agenda of dominant and emergent empires (for instance, Japan and the United States, in the case of the latter).
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000075
{"title":"OPR volume 31 issue 2-3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0954586720000075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586720000075","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42672,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Opera Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0954586720000075","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45091691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s095458672000004x
A. Andries
This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of operatic aesthetics in France: fuelled by post-Revolutionary notions about theatre's importance in processes of nation-building, the Opéra sought to strengthen its reputation as the ‘Académie that unites all the arts’. The intertwinement of this aesthetic and political aim is conspicuous in the production of Jean-François Le Sueur's Ossian ou les bardes (1804), loosely based on James Macpherson's Ossianic ‘translations’. The work's meticulous coordination of the arts sought to bring third-century bardic society back to life and make audiences feel part of this long-forgotten, supposedly ‘historical’ and French, past. Thus, this article points to the Opéra's intensifying interaction with nationalism and genealogical historiography around 1800 as it sought to define its role as a national theatre. It also challenges the common scholarly notion that the Opéra's productions served primarily to aggrandise Napoleon.
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