Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000014
Jennifer Walker
When Jules Massenet began work on Hérodiade in the late 1870s, he likely expected to see his work premiered at the Paris Opéra. But the coveted Parisian premiere was not to be. Based on a liberal reworking of the infamous tale of Herod, Salome and John the Baptist, Hérodiade undoubtedly challenges traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet Massenet's opera was not as ‘secular’ as it may seem. I argue here that it draws instead on a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lay the reasons why Hérodiade was outlawed. It was not so much the libretto's liberal transformations of biblical characters as what those transformations represented both to the Catholic Church and to the French state: in the end the representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ presented a dangerous analogue to the country's strained political situation.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000038
A. Jones
In this article I explore how public acts of defiant silence can work as forms of historical evidence, and how such refusals constitute a distinct mode of audio-visual attention and political resistance. After the Austrians reconquered Venice in August 1849, multiple observers reported that Venetians protested their renewed subjugation via theatre boycotts (both formal and informal) and a refusal to participate in festive occasions. The ostentatious public silences that met the daily Austrian military band concerts in the city's central piazza became a ritual that encouraged foreign observers to empathise with the Venetians’ plight. Whereas the gondolier's song seemed to travel separate from the gondolier himself, the piazza's design instead encouraged a communal listening coloured by the politics of the local cafes. In the central section of the article, I explore the ramifications of silence, resistance and disconnections between sight and sound as they shape Giuseppe Verdi'sRigoletto, which premiered at Venice's Teatro la Fenice in 1851. The scenes inRigolettomost appreciated by the first Venetian audiences hinge on the power to observe and overhear, suggesting that early spectators experienced the opera through a mode of engagement born of the local material conditions and political circumstances.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586720000087
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586719000119
R. Ebright
Abstract In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, challenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams's obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586719000181
M. Burden
Abstract When London's new Pantheon Opera opened in 1791, the artist Henry Tresham, not long returned from Italy, was paid to paint the ceiling and proscenium of the new auditorium and to provide a drop curtain. The curtain provided a focus for the new institution's aspirations and for the audience's attention on those inspirations when they arrived at the theatre. Its elaborate nature – the zodiac, the music of the spheres, ancient and modern composers, the passions, and with a centrepiece of the apotheosis of Pietro Metastasio – was the subject of a series articles in the press explaining the curtain's allegory. All visual material was thought to be lost, but the recent identification of a preparatory watercolour of the apotheosis has offered an opportunity to re-examine both its place in the context of late eighteenth-century iconography and the place of Metastasio in the late eighteenth-century London opera house.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586719000107
Michael A. Bane
Abstract In the famous monologue from Act II scene 5 of Lully and Quinault's Armide (1686), the title character attempts to slay the sleeping hero Renaud but, overcome by his beauty, falls in love with him instead. As commentators have noted, the monologue departs from the opera's source material, Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (1581). In contrast to the placid scene recounted by Tasso in canto 14 of the original work, the libretto depicts Armide's transformation from enemy to lover as a moment of struggle and psychological doubt. While scholarship has generally credited Quinault with having recognised the dramatic potential of the encounter, this article argues for a broader contextualisation of the scene in seventeenth-century French artistic production. A review of the major translations and adaptations of Tasso's poem published in France before 1686 reveals that Quinault's libretto represents not a decisive break with the past but rather one contribution to a much broader tradition of literary and musical experimentation.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586719000016
J. Pistorius
Abstract Active at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0954586719000211
{"title":"OPR volume 31 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0954586719000211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586719000211","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42672,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Opera Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0954586719000211","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47148327","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 : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0954586719000193
L. Tunbridge
Young Millie Dilmount arrives in New York City during the jazz age, shingles her hair and looks for a job with a rich, handsome boss she can marry. The musical-film Thoroughly Modern Millie (dir. George Roy Hill, Universal, 1967) may have been a spoof of the 1920s but various twists and turns in its plot nonetheless reveal its middlebrow scaffolding. Social aspiration is written into the plot, as is the ambiguity of its signifiers: although Millie (Julie Andrews) falls for the penniless Jimmy Smith (James Fox), she sets her sights on the seemingly more appropriate Trevor Graydon (John Gavin) only to discover that, of course, Jimmy was a millionaire all along. This is a narrative as much about cultural and social as financial capital. Through its ‘second-order parody’ of racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, Angelo Pao argues, Thoroughly Modern Millie – along with other American musicals – ‘has played a significant role in the formation of a national persona’. The middlebrow, though, is not necessarily about identity politics, storylines or style; it is also closely bound with modes of dissemination and their relative costs and, because of that, with questions of class. Indeed, the Broadway musical was (and continues to be) a mainly middle-class affair, from its makers to its consumers, who David Savran points out have long needed ‘a good deal of disposable income’, given that ticket prices have always outstripped cinema, spoken theatre – and, on occasion, opera.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s095458671900020x
{"title":"OPR volume 31 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s095458671900020x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s095458671900020x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42672,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Opera Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s095458671900020x","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41679450","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}
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