Opera Quarterly 30, 2014

The Fade Out: Metaphysics and Dialectics in Wagner, 2020

This article is a critique of the failure of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It considers this as a metaphysical problem rather than an aesthetic or formal one. The article, considering Wagner's inheritance from Haydn, claims him as the first composer of the culture industry. This will lead the author to conclusions regarding a gendered Das Unheimlich, the distinction between technology and technique, and the philosophy of aesthetics.

Brecht Yearbook, 2004

Oh show us.... ": Opera and/as Spectatorship in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny 1 When we contemplate the Mahagonny-project and its some 80 years of development and controversy, we survey not only a work, not only a reception history, not only the substrate of numerous fascinating interpretive and critical ideas, and not only a unique document of a troubled and exciting time. 2 We do much more. We survey, and we therefore participate in, the reiteration of the possibility of opera. Opera, of course, always retains what the word 'opera' itself embeds: the idea of the often-collaborative musical and dramatic work that stands as the trace of the effort of its authors and composers. Opera however, must be more than just that sort of trace. Opera is work that recognizes, stages, and occasionally resists its embeddedness in a network of institutions, discourses, and spectatorial behaviors. Wagnerian operatic ideology essentializes author-authority, and therefore demands that the terms 'opera' and 'work' become synonymous. 3 Brecht and Weill, along with many of their colleagues of the 1920s, insisted that such an essentialized approach to opera as pure work does violence to the nature of opera as opera, because opera is work that must be realized through its many networks of performance and spectatorship. The atmosphere of 'crisis' in the German opera world of the 1920s owed much to a renewed focus by Brecht, Weill, and their contemporaries on the contentious network of relationships between operatic works, their institutions, and their audiences. Ernst Krenek may have most succinctly expressed their exploratory 1 The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Prof. Daniel H. Magilow, University of North Texas, in the preparation of this article. 2 By "Mahagonny-project" I refer here to the Mahagonny-Songspiel, the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, and to the literary and critical work done by Brecht and Weill both before and after the two larger works. 3 Wagner's understanding of his double authority as both composer and conductor, as well as the ways in which this double authority leads to an elision of work and performance, are richly explored in Adorno's comments on Wagner's essay "Über das

Cambridge Opera Journal, 1992

Operatic ambiguities and the power of music ELLEN ROSAND 'Pur sempre su le nozze canzoneggiando vai.' Arnalta's remark to Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Act II scene 10), occasioned by Poppea's lyrical exultation over the death of Seneca, provokes the closing sententia of Edward T. Cone's recent exploration of the ambiguous world of opera and its inhabitants. 1 Translating the nurse's comment as 'You're forever going around singing songs about your wedding', Cone concludes that 'this is just what characters in opera do: they go around singing songs all the time'. But that is not what Arnalta says. Nor, more importantly, is that what characters in opera do all the time-not Poppea, not Cherubino, not even Orpheus. As Cone himself acknowledges at the beginning of his essay, sometimes operatic characters, like any others, sing real songs-what Cone calls 'realistic song'; other times, although they may in fact be singing, they are intended to be understood, by the audience and by one another, as speaking-Cone calls this 'operatic' or 'expressive song'. This mode of expression distinguishes them from characters in other dramatic worlds and, to be sure, from the inhabitants of our own world. There is yet a third category of expression in opera, of course, that of literal speech, or recitative, which, had he considered it at all, Cone might have called 'realistic speech'. Having ostensibly undertaken to investigate whether the distinction between 'realistic' and 'operatic' song actually holds up (p. 126), Cone chooses examples that allow him to conclude in the negative and to affirm the importance of the overlap between the two kinds of song. I think he abandoned his quest too easily. Peter Kivy's attempt to help him out 2-by showing, on the one hand, that the distinction may be cleaner in some operas than in others and, on the other, by trying to bridge the gap that such an overlap would seem to create between the world of opera and our world-has encouraged my own. Although my method and motivation are very different, my comments, like Kivy's, should be taken as sympathetic musings on some of the issues raised by Cone, rather than as dissent. Kivy's approach is based on a reductive view of Cone's purpose, which he construes as the desire to demonstrate that all operatic characters are composers

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. An introduction traces the historical development of opera interludes from seventeenth-century sinfonie, which commanded only minimal audience attention, to the nineteenth-century Wagnerian preludes and interludes, which coerced captive audiences, isolated in a darkened theater, into experiencing them fully. Along with this history Morris traces the increased dramatic focus on the orchestra, which becomes the agent of notions of interiority and the unconscious via the use of reminiscence motifs, the lessening of caesurae found in the numbers format, and idealistic unification of music with drama. Even so, he still acknowledges the tension between music "that represents a stopgap measure (literally and figuratively) and the prominent position to which it is assigned." (8) Having provided a background for his study, he focuses in earnest on Wagner and further considers works of seven other composers (for whom Wagner's influence was impossible to ignore) ranging from the late nineteenth century (Massenet's Esclarmonde, 1889) through the first quarter of the twentieth (Berg's Wozzeck, 1925). Carefully researched biographies and commentaries from the reception literature on each of the operas ground the critiques in the cultural milieu through which Morris filters his readings. In addition to the writings of contemporary critics and performers, Morris cycles through the important psychoanalytic and aesthetic discourses of the day, citing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wagner, as well as more recent writings by Lacan, Kristeva, Youens, Adorno, and Abbate among others; all while maintaining a critical ear to those arguments. By returning in each chapter to these important writers, Morris aids the reader not only in grasping details of the arguments at hand but also in teasing out more transcendent themes. Helpful as this strategy is, and cushioned as it is in Morris's elegant and clear prose, this book is no casual read. That is not to say that it is anything less than enjoyable, however, for its reasoned arguments are well worth the reader's attention. Artfully performing his analysis, Morris sets the stage by summarizing each dramatic plot, cleverly weaving surrounding music and narrative details into his larger dramatic discussion. In portraying the music of the interludes, Morris paints an impressionistic picture. "It is as if ..." begins an abundance of sentences that draw the reader into the imaginative and speculative world of his reading. Although his concerns are largely historical and cultural, Morris conscientiously grounds his "as if" propositions in analysis of musical detail supported by clear examples in the text. In the main, these analyses are thorough and well thought out. At times, though, they leave us wanting to know more about how the music does what he claims it does, even when we may completely agree with his impression of the music.

It is perfectly obvious that opera is a particular form of theater: a particular form, that is, of stage action. Not so obvious is how to identify the elements that generate drama in an opera: to precisely describe operatic dramaturgy. This is evidenced by the inconclusive debate that has recurred throughout the history of music (Di Benedetto 1988). This chapter relates to an epistemological study of the ways in which operatic dramaturgy has been analyzed; more specifically, to a comparison of two schools of thought. According to one of these, the drama stems from the verbal text; according to the other, it originates in the musical elements. To avoid any ambiguity, the phrase " musical dramaturgy " will be understood here in its etymological sense of the " production (ἔργον) of theatrical action (δρᾶμα) through music. " In that sense, musical dramaturgy is a sub-category of poetics. This definition is narrower than the generic " study of opera " seen in many university courses, but it covers more ground than theories of musical dramaturgy such as the one that Carl Dahlhaus strove to forge in the 1980s.

The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations , 2016

Journal of Music Research , 2023

The historiography of the German Romantic opera is a largely ignored topic today. However, its elucidation of the multifold intellectual debates on the relationships between German music and German national identity among international academicians makes it worthy of investigation. The discourse of German Romantic opera within the German-speaking community reveals how those debates are shaped and addressed. In this essay, the author analyzes the writings of pre-and post-World War II works by Siegfried Goslich (1937, 1975), Carl Dahlhaus (1983, 1984), Sabine Henze-Döhring and Sieghart Döhring (1997), which are representative not only of their individual narrative methods but also of their sequential "problem-solution" exposition. Through the lens of these German-speaking musicologists, this paper explicates how the conceptions of German Romantic opera narratives break through a nationalistic framework by veering toward the "history of ideas" in composition technique, and then achieve a historiography of transnational fluidity and connectivity over the course of the twentieth century.

2011

Arch. europ. sociol., LII, 3 (2011), pp. 573–576—0003-9756/11/0000-900 $07.50 per art+ $0.10 per page© AES, 2011 collective standards against which individual responses to live performances are judged. Bitter conflicts over taste arise among fanatics, yet such disputes turn out not to be efforts to maintain relative status (as Bourdieu might predict) as much as defenses against the distortion of individual ideals.