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A Project of Her Own: Emma Carelli's Enactment of Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century Italy Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Barbara Gentili
The story of soprano and opera impresaria Emma Carelli (1877–1928) has often been recounted as the tale of a successful prima donna who rather abruptly turned to opera management in order to assist her husband, Walter Mocchi, in his entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished primary sources – including Carelli's scrapbooks, critics’ reviews and a set of letters she wrote to the impresario
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Playing Hopscotch on Dangerous Ground: Site-Based, Transit-Oriented Opera in Los Angeles Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance that sought to bring opera into various communities in Los Angeles, many of which were economically disadvantaged. In the process, this opera set off a firestorm of protests that ultimately resulted in confrontations with community members, protests that would test the very premise of the dissemination
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Per Nørgård's Tragic Vision: A Comparison of Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Barry Wiener
The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and
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The Tourist Gaze and Rossini's Operas about Others Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Stephen Armstrong
This article reconsiders two of Rossini's exoticist farces, L'italiana in Algeri (1813) and Il turco in Italia (1814), in the light of recent theoretical studies in tourism. These operas appeared at the juncture between the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and nineteenth-century mass tourism, and they became implicated in multiple layers of tourist experience. Travellers from faraway countries went to
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‘The Saga of Lenny’: Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and Weill's Lady in the Dark Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Rebecca Schmid
Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti created a stepping stone towards his own brand of serious but accessible music theater. While he dedicated the opera in seven scenes to Marc Blitzstein, that path was paved by the formal innovations of Kurt Weill. A comparative analysis of Trouble in Tahiti with Lady in the Dark reveals that Bernstein derived essential impulses from Weill's musical play, although
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Production as Criticism: Staging Wartime Rape in the Opera Canon Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Margaret Cormier
This article explores contemporary representations of wartime sexual violence on the operatic stage. Rape and the threat of rape loom over many operas in the canon, but even those operas that do not thematise rape may have sexual violence introduced to them in performance. Through analysis of four twenty-first century productions, I consider how the idea of sexual violence works in these wartime stories
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From Grinder to Nipper: Opera, Music Technology and Italian American (Self-)Representation Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Siel Agugliaro
In this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream
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Genre, Class and Gender in a Suffragist Operetta: Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) at the Waldorf-Astoria Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Kendall Hatch Winter
Alva Belmont and Elsa Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) is a little-known work promoting women's suffrage, which was publicly performed only once in New York City. It was advertised as an operetta, a decision which minimised its overt stylistic and functional similarities to other genres of popular musical theatre from the period, namely, musical comedy and pageantry. Framed through Jeffrey
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Franz Lehár's Friederike as Weimar Middlebrow Culture Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Micaela Baranello
Franz Lehár's 1928 Berlin operetta Friederike boasts an unusual subject: a romantic incident in the early life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weimar Berlin is usually considered as a haven for experimentation between high and low culture, a bifurcated view which has dominated German studies, but in this article I argue that Friederike is best considered as an example of the middlebrow. I examine the
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The Body Behind the Curtain: Performing Disability in Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Charlotte Armstrong
Like many modernist engagements with the theme of outsider identity, Alexander Zemlinsky's 1921 opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) finds its dramatic nexus in the disabled body. In opera, such bodies are not only (historically) texted but also (presently) performed, with modern stagings offering a form of mediation between the historical and contemporary. With reference to two productions of Der Zwerg, this
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‘The rain soaked sky is leaden’: Welsh Identity and Dystopian Impulses in The Doctor of Myddfai Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Nicholas Jones
The Doctor of Myddfai (1995), Peter Maxwell Davies's third full-scale opera and his first collaboration with David Pountney, is a work that occupies an important position within the composer's output for the opera house and theatre. However, whereas a significant amount of scholarly attention has been afforded to Davies's music-theatre works of the 1960s and the operas Taverner (1962–8) and Resurrection
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The Dialectics of Nationalism: Jaromír Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper and Anti-Semitism in Interwar Europe Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Tina Frühauf
This article examines the conception and subsequent reception of Jaromír Weinberger's 1927 opera Schwanda the Bagpiper in the context of various expressions of nationalism, anti-Semitism and Jewish identity politics throughout the interwar period. It takes into consideration the many historical, political and musical junctures before and during the opera's trajectory. While remaining rooted in nineteenth-century
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Grechaninov's Sister Beatrice and the Consecration of the Stage in Orthodox Russia Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-02-16 David Salkowski
When Alexander Grechaninov's opera Sister Beatrice on a text by Maurice Maeterlinck premiered in Moscow in 1912, it promised to bring together two conceptual worlds, those of symbolist aesthetics and the Russian Orthodox liturgy. Critics who hoped that Grechaninov's experience as a composer of sacred music would help bring alive the ‘unheard music’ of Maeterlinck's symbolist ‘Miracle Play’, however
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Quel Plaisir! Quel Plaisir? – On Bodies in Performance Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Elisabeth van Treeck
Let's start with where opera happens: the opera house. For the 2022/23 season, Opernhaus Dortmund, known for its fine instinct for rare gems on the operatic stage, decided to mount Jacques François Fromental Halévy's La Juive. Having been introduced to this grand opéra as a first-year musicology student, I was excited to see the premiere of Sybrand van der Werf's production on a Sunday night in November
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The Mask of Bourgeois Masculinity and Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Amanda Hsieh
This article interrogates how Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten and its early reception reflected an uneasiness about the confines of manhood. As an opera with a complex genesis and a difficult reception history, Die Gezeichneten's allure comes from its resistance to being reduced to only one thing. I nevertheless seek to locate this opera around the time of its premiere towards the end of the First
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A Mexican Semiramide: García and Rossini in Postcolonial Latin America Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Francesco Milella
In 1828, five years after the premiere in Venice of Rossini's final Italian opera, Semiramide, Gaetano Rossi's libretto was again set to music, this time by the famed bel canto tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City. The opera, one of the first to be composed in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish empire, was intended to demonstrate independent Mexico's ability not just to import
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Performing Ot(h)ello: Verdi, Salvini and the Stage Manual Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Enza De Francisci
This article retraces Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) to the great Italian mattatori (star actors), particularly Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), whose ground-breaking performances of the Moor of Venice, in a translation by Giulio Carcano, coincided with the time when Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, were collaborating on their Otello. The grandi attori enjoyed a reputation for realistic immediacy
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Reconfiguring Voice in The End: Virtuosity, Technological Affordance and the Reversibility of Hatsune Miku in the Intermundane Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Jessica Tsun Lem Hui
This article explores the technological affordances of vocal production software in performance through a case study of Shibuya Keīchirō's The End (2012). In the performance of this ‘humanless opera’, desires for pliability and fantasies of control are realised through the affordances of a singing voice synthesis software known as Vocaloid. By reflecting on The End's thematic focus on death and existentialism
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The Operatic Roots of Performativity: Bodies Decontextualised in Butler, Brecht and Busoni Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Sarah Collins
It has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with
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Verismo's Dramatised Deviants: Lombroso's Criminal Anthropology in Tosca Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Jane Sylvester
Following the premiere of Tosca in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini's progressive critics generally took issue with two main aspects of the opera: the first was the composer's supposedly unoriginal modes of expression, and the second was the work's scandalous plot. While many attributed the dark tone of Tosca to its French source, Sardou's melodrama La Tosca, I contend that there is an underlying context
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The Politics of the Bagatelle: Opera and Smallpox Inoculation in Enlightenment France Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Julia Doe
This article examines the production and reception history of C. S. Favart'sLa fête du château, commissioned by a French noblewoman, the Marquise of Monconseil, to mark her granddaughter's inoculation against smallpox in 1766. The first half of the article situates thevaudevillecomedy at the Bagatelle (Monconseil's private theatre), underscoring the gendered tropes that had accrued to the disease in
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Spectral Mechanics and the Technical Failures of the Monograph Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Pallas Catenella
In 2018, Maria Callas rose from the dead. During a series of tours dubbed Callas in Concert, local orchestras performed with a three-dimensional hologram of the departed diva as she re-sounded arias of her past. This virtual manifestation of Callas put on a convincing show. Listeners were struck by the quality of the diva's voice – ‘from heart-breaking vulnerability to imposing strength’ – and marvelled
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Ideologies of Voice Type and Ravel's L'heure espagnole Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-09-20 John Kapusta
Despite the advent of voice studies, opera scholars have yet to develop a thoroughgoing conversation about one of the most familiar elements of operatic vocal culture: voice type (categories such as soprano, tenor and the like). To address this, I suggest opera scholars analyse ideologies of voice type: the complex of ideas and practices that guide how individuals understand voice types and their relevance
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‘In my end is my beginning’: Peter Grimes and Death in Venice Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Sterling Lambert
Benjamin Britten, gravely ill at the time of its composition, was surely aware that Death in Venice would be his last opera, and it is not surprising that the work should make reference to his first opera, Peter Grimes, as if to bookend his entire operatic career, and survey the enormous distance he had travelled, as a hallmark of what might be considered the composer's late style. Even so, the dramatic
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The Importance of Being Serious Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Marco Ladd
What exactly is operetta? As a genre it seems defined by its lack of definition, by its inherent in-betweenness. On an aesthetic scale defined by opera at one end and music hall, revue and burlesque at the other, it lies somewhere in the middle. But where? True, it is difficult to disentangle operetta from the various kinds of variety theatre; it shares their fondness for a chorus line and a catchy
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Verdi, Auber and the Aida-type Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Jacek Blaszkiewicz
This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While scholars have explored the opera's resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined ‘East’, Aida's etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 premiere. Her name is not Egyptian or Ethiopian but Greek,
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Gina Oselio and Opera in Fin-de-Siècle Norway Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Patricia Puckett Sasser
In 1888, Norwegian newspapers eagerly announced the arrival of ‘Miss Gina Oselio’, who was returning to Norway ‘after seven years of staying abroad’. Oselio (Ingeborg Aas (1858–1937)) had achieved tremendous success as an opera singer in Europe and her performance on the Norwegian concert stage did not disappoint. Her new popularity positioned the singer as a member of the country's cultural elite
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An ‘Execution’ at the Hofoper: Czech Perspectives on the Viennese Premiere of Dvořák's The Cunning Peasant Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-07-21 Eva Branda
On the score of his St Ludmila oratorio, Dvořák scribbled: ‘completed in the days when The Cunning Peasant was executed in Vienna’. Indeed, Dvořák's comic opera sparked a riot at its Hofoper premiere in 1885 and was met with harsh criticism in the Viennese press. David Brodbeck argues that the rioters were motivated to action not by The Cunning Peasant itself, but by the composer's nationality. Likewise
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Mozart's Operatic Embellishments Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-06-13 Dorian Bandy
Alongside the model embellishments Mozart composed for various keyboard works, he also wrote embellishments for contemporary arias including ‘Ah, se a morir mi chiama’ from Lucio Silla, the concert aria ‘Non sò d'onde viene’ K.294 and ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ from J.C. Bach's Adriano in Siria. Although these have been overlooked in the critical literature, they shed light on many aspects of Mozart's
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Displaying the Magician's Art: Theatrical Illusion in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975) Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Estela Ibáñez-García
Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart's opera but also reflects on the experience it generates in the theatrical audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of theatrical illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. I examine the film's take on the representation of theatrical illusion from two perspectives.
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The Takarazuka Opera Company? On the Persistent Ties between the Takarazuka Revue and Opera Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-05-02 Tove Solander
Although the Takarazuka Revue is technically a musical company, its founder's ambition was to create a uniquely Japanese form of opera or operetta, merging elements from Western and Japanese forms. Like opera, and unlike musicals in general, trouser roles play a central part in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, and are typically cited as its main appeal. Research from a Japanese-studies perspective
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(Trans)National Fairy Tale and Romantic Childhood: Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel through its Parisian Reception Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-04-19 T. F. Coombes
Around 1900, Engelbert Humperdinck and Adelheid Wette's Hänsel und Gretel was one of the most widely performed operas in Europe. The critical discourse prompted by its Paris premiere provides an opportunity for exploring the political dynamics of nineteenth-century fairy tales and for elucidating the piece's considerable historical significance. Although Humperdinck's opera was a prime vehicle for
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A Tale of Two Houses: Opera Houses in Cairo and Cape Town Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Donato Somma
This article considers the parallel histories of the opera houses in Cairo, Egypt and Cape Town, South Africa. Their respective stories reflect common and divergent experiences of the colonial and postcolonial and the emergent national and nationalist identities at the terminal cities of Africa. Considered separately from the content performed on their stages, the article traces the significance of
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The Reproduction of Caruso Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Gavin Williams
Few figures loom larger in the early history of recorded sound than Enrico Caruso. Man and voice are ubiquitous in the making of gramophone markets, and conspicuous, too, as means of scholarly explanation by which a sound medium was born. In sound studies, Caruso has become a cipher for ‘audile technique’ (Jonathan Sterne's coinage), the bodily practices by which listeners came to engage musical media
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Bellini's Idyllic Endings Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Edward Jacobson
This article takes its cue from the claim, made both in 1831 and in our own time, that Bellini's La sonnambula is a pastoral opera. Frustratingly difficult to define, the term ‘pastoral’ is at once both musical and literary, able to attach itself to everything from madrigal to oratorio to symphony across four hundred years. This article explores the various meanings of pastoral specific to the early
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Opera and the Politics of Postdramatic Theatre: Frank Castorf's Bayreuth Ring Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Mark Berry
This article considers Frank Castorf's Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner's Ring (2013–17) and its relationship to postdramatic theatre, including the latter's fraught relationship to conceptions of the political. Framework and context are provided by Castorf's theatrical practice, both prior to and following German reunification; by Wagner's nineteenth-century revolutionary and post-revolutionary
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Censoring the Muses: Opera and Creative Control in Nicholas's Russia (1825–1855) Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2022-02-23 Daniil Zavlunov
This article offers the first systematic investigation of the institution of opera censorship in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. Drawing on new archival sources, it examines censorship legislation, the organisation of dramatic (i.e., theatre) censorship, the workings of its bureaucracy, censors’ reports and protocols and Nicholas's personal decrees on productions of specific operas, and printed
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Opera History, the Travel Edition Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-11-02 Jonathan Hicks
This book has been in my bag for a long time and, on reflection, I am glad that I have read it gradually. When the central premise is so simple – Grand Opera Outside Paris is, indeed, about Grand Opera outside Paris – the payback comes in the detail of individual chapters and the slow emergence of a Europe-wide survey of encounter and exchange. The volume's editor, Jens Hesselager, provides an erudite
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Opera and the Built Environment Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Laura Vasilyeva
In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's ‘Crisantemi’ string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the
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Heaven, Hell or Somewhere in Between: Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel and the Search for Spiritual Truth Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-08-25 Margaret Frainier
Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (Ognennyi angel) has remained comparatively little studied among his operatic works, interpreted primarily as a parody of Russian symbolist beliefs and practice. In the last few years, however, new biographical information has emerged about the period during which Prokofiev wrote The Fiery Angel that points to ways of reconsidering the opera's compositional history
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‘Ein sonderbar’ Ding’: Music, the Historical and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-06-25 Benedict Taylor
Der Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's
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Offenbach, Pépito and the Théâtre des Variétés: Politics and Genre in the First Year of the Second Empire Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Richard Sherr
Offenbach's first commercially performed dramatic work, the opéra comique Pépito, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 October 1853. This article examines it from historical and musical perspectives. First, I argue that its production at the Théâtre des Variétés is an example of what Mark Everist has called ‘the politics of genre’, in this case the attempts by managers of Parisian boulevard
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The Invention of an Opera House: The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-05-20 José Manuel Izquierdo König
The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile, can be considered the first purpose-built opera house in the Andean region of the Americas. Managed by impresario Pietro Alessandri, it became the centre of an early operatic scene in the South Pacific and a model for theatres built during the following decades. In this article, I discuss the Teatro Victoria as an opera house and the way in which it functioned
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‘Opera and …’: The Pleasures and Perils of Amalgamation Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2021-05-17 Roger Parker
We might start with the Index, often a good indicator of a book's flavour, its local habitation. First up is ‘Abbate, acoustics, acting, Adler, Adorno’, a reassuring miscellany; later on, the German-speaking collective of ‘Schopenhauer, Schreker, Schubart, Schumann-Heink’ awakens memories of time past. ‘Ventilation systems, Verdi, vitalism’, however, turns on the landing lights for a distinctly new
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Competing Ways of Hearing Nature in Berg's Wozzeck Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-12-10 Marc Brooks
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
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The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu's La dame blanche Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Nicole Vilkner
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
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Dreams of Iberia Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-11-25 Ditlev Rindom
‘Spain is different’, the Spanish tourist board famously declared in the 1960s as part of its strategy to attract mass tourism to the country. The campaign played a key role in opening up Spain's economy during the later years of Franco's regime – the so-called apertura – following two decades of autarchic rule that had left the country geopolitically isolated. As the slogan suggested, however, exoticism
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Costumes and Cosmopolitanism: Italian Opera in the North Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-11-24 Christine Jeanneret
This article explores operatic costumes from a perspective of cultural exchange, with a focus on Giuseppe Sarti, first director of the permanent opera theatre in Copenhagen. Sarti's Danish audience had almost no prior exposure to opera and little understanding of Italian. After a disastrous first season, he took measures to realise more successful productions of Italian opera in a context of migration
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Rethinking Operatic Masculinity: Nicola Tacchinardi's Aria Substitutions and the Heroic Archetype in Early Nineteenth-Century Italy Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit
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
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Uniting the Arts to Stage the Nation: Le Sueur's Ossian (1804) in Napoleonic Paris Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-07-01 Annelies 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
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Violetta's Further Predicament: La traviata under Apartheid Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-06-11 John 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
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Italians Abroad: Verdi'sLa traviataand the 1906 Milan Exposition Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-06-02 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
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Noise and Silence inRigoletto's Venice Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-06-02 Alessandra 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
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Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet's Hérodiade Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-05-06 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
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Orpheus's Civilising Song, or, the Politics of Voice in Late Enlightenment Italy Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2020-04-30 Jessica Gabriel Peritz
This article explores new conceptions of voice in late eighteenth-century Italy as expressed in discourses connected with opera reform. Inspired by the convergence of Enlightenment epistemologies of feeling and neoclassical aesthetics, certain progressive singers and literati sought to rebrand the singing voice as an agent of moral and political edification. Here, this ideology-laden project is traced
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‘O Strange Transformation!’ The Monologue from Act II Scene 5 of Lully and Quinault'sArmide(1686) and the Retelling of Tasso in France Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2019-11-25 Michael A. Bane
In the famous monologue from Act II scene 5 of Lully and Quinault'sArmide(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 poemLa Gerusalemme liberata(1581). In contrast to the placid scene recounted by Tasso in canto 14 of
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Reading Henry Tresham's Theatre Curtain: Metastasio's Apotheosis and the Idea of Opera at London's Pantheon Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2019-11-14 Michael Burden
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
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Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2019-11-14 Ryan Ebright
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
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Thoroughly Modern Middles Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2019-11-11 Laura 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
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Inhabiting Whiteness: The Eoan Group La traviata, 1956 Cambridge Opera Journal Pub Date : 2019-10-31 Juliana M. Pistorius
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.