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The female singers who graced the nineteenth-century operatic stage were among the most celebrated women of their era, but they were also among the most transgressive. This book explores the means by which this preeminence was negotiated, traversing the musical, the dramatic, and the visual, while addressing more recognizably modern concerns, such as career management, literary representation, and image manipulation. A key theme is the emergence of the diva archetype over the course of the century—a new ideological discourse through which the extremes of operatic female vocality were reinterpreted. Chapters approach the prima donna from the perspectives of cultural history, musicology, gender/sexuality studies, theater and literature studies, and critical theory.

Berlioz the composer was also a writer and critic. His Memoirs and Evenings with the Orchestra are well-known and well-loved. This book offers a selection of his day-to-day criticism in English, taking him from his student days as a participant in musical polemics over Rossini to his first years of mature success: in 1834 he began writing for the newly founded Revue et gazette musicale, the French counterpart to Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; in 1835 he became music critic at the Journal des débats, the most influential such post of the day. Through Berlioz’s eyes we follow musical events during one of the richest periods in French cultural history—the decade surrounding the Revolution of 1830, a year that also saw Victor Hugo’s victory for the Romantics in the Classical bastion of the Théâtre-Français, of and the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. A substantial introduction situates Berlioz’s criticism in these watershed years that bring the advent of the as yet unknown Beethoven in France along with the first modern symphony orchestra, a recognized musical canon, the first successful French music journals, and music criticism designed to guide and instruct rather than to judge. Each selection is accompanied by an introductory paragraph and explanatory notes. The most entertaining of critics, Berlioz has found here the “good English-language anthology” of his criticism that Jacques Barzun, founder of modern Berlioz studies, called for in 1950.

The book centers on the four music dramas (Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal) Wagner created in the second half of his career. Two aims are pursued here: first, to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas, the secret the very existence of which was called into question by the composer’s critics, including the most perceptive of those, Nietzsche; second, to see the ideological import of Wagner’s dramas against the background of the worldviews that were current in his lifetime and, in particular, to confront his works with Nietzsche’s critique. What connects the two aims is my conviction that a grasp of Wagner’s large forms affords insights into the dramatic and philosophical implications of his works. The music dramas of Wagner’s later years registered and reacted to every major component in the complex ideological landscape that emerged during his century. Like a number of artists of his time, in his later years Wagner understood himself to be something more than just an artist; rather, he saw himself as a cultural prophet announcing and preparing better, more desirable forms of life for humanity. The specific content of his message never ceased to evolve, but his self-understanding as someone with a message to deliver remained constant. The confrontation with Nietzsche, a rival cultural prophet, takes a particular urgency in this context, since what was at stake in the philosopher’s objections to the artist was precisely the ideological import of Wagner’s works.

This is a book about thinking, interpreting, and writing about music in performance that incorporates how race, gender, sexuality, and nation help shape the analysis of opera today. Case-study operas are chosen within the diaspora of the United States and South Africa. Both countries had segregation policies that kept black performers and musicians out of opera. During the civil rights movement and after apartheid, black performers in both countries not only excelled in opera, they also began writing their own stories into the genre. Featured operas in this study span the Atlantic and bring together works performed in the West (the United States and Europe) and South Africa. Focal works are: From the Diary of Sally Hemings (William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton), Porgy and Bess, and Winnie: The Opera (Bongani Ndodana-Breen). A chapter is devoted to the nineteenth-century Carmens (novella by Mérimée and opera by Bizet) and black settings in the United States (Carmen Jones, Carmen: A Hip Hopera) and South Africa (U-Carmen eKhayelitsha). Woven within the discussions of specific works are three rubrics for how the text and music create the drama: Who is in the story? Who speaks? and Who is in the audience doing the interpreting? These questions, combined with a historical context that includes how a work also resonates in the present day, form the basis for an engaged musicological practice.

This book critically examines the intersections of race and music in the multifaceted genre of opera. A diverse cross-section of scholars places well-known operas (Porgy and Bess, Aida, Treemonisha) alongside lesser-known works such as Frederick Delius's Koanga, William Grant Still's Blue Steel, and Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! to reveal a new historical context for re-imagining race and blackness in opera. The volume brings a wide-ranging, theoretically informed, interdisciplinary approach to questions about how blackness has been represented in these operas, issues surrounding characterization of blacks, interpretation of racialized roles by blacks and whites, controversies over race in the theater and the use of blackface, and extensions of blackness along the spectrum from grand opera to musical theatre and film.

This is a study of the political context in which Mozart wrote his three Italian comedies, Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. Joseph II’s decision to place his opera buffa troupe in competition with the re-formed Singspiel provoked a struggle between supporters of the rival national genres. Cabals soon became active, organizing claques to cheer or hiss as required, and encouraging press correspondents to circulate slanted notices. In the spring of 1786, Mozart was caught up in the infighting. Figaro, the flagship work for the Italian troupe, received a mixed reception, whereas Dittersdorf’s Der Apotheker for the German party scored a triumph. In this fraught atmosphere, satire flourished. A rival setting of Die Hochzeit des Figaro by Dittersdorf, the music for which is lost, lampooned Mozart in the guise of Cherubino, focusing on his obsession with dancing. The intertroupe contest came to an abrupt end at the start of 1788, when the deteriorating international situation for the Austrian Monarchy necessitated cutbacks in expenditure, including the closure of the Singspiel. During the ensuing years of the Austro-Turkish War, Mozart successfully negotiated the unpredictable twists and turns of theater politics. The revival of Figaro in 1789, now as a Habsburg festive work following its gala performance in Prague, sealed his reputation. He was ideally placed to accept a commission from the commercial stage, the revitalization of which was the most lasting musical consequence of the war years.

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915. Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes. The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.

This study seeks to explore the role and significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian operas. Each chapter investigates the art of aria insertion during the nineteenth century from varying perspectives, beginning with an overview of the changing fortunes of the practice, followed by explorations of individual prima donnas and their relationship with particular insertion arias: Carolina Ungher’s difficulties in finding a “perfect” aria to introduce into Donizetti’s Marino Faliero; Guiditta Pasta’s performance of an aria from Pacini’s Niobe in a variety of operas, and the subsequent fortunes of that particular aria; Maria Malibran’s interpolation of Vaccai’s final scene from Giulietta e Romeo in place of Bellini’s original setting in his I Capuleti e i Montecchi; and Adelina Patti’s “mini-concerts” in the lesson scene of Il barbiere di Siviglia. The final chapter provides a treatment of a short story, “Memoir of a Song,” narrated by none other than an insertion aria itself, and the volume concludes with an appendix containing the first modern edition of this short story, a narrative that has lain utterly forgotten since its publication in 1849.

In this expansive project, Nancy Yunhwa Rao examines the world of Chinatown theaters, focusing on iconic theaters in San Francisco and New York but also tracing the transnational networks and migration routes connecting theaters and performers in China, Canada, and even Cuba. Drawing on a wealth of physical, documentary, and anecdotal evidence, Rao brings together the threads of an enormously complex story: on one hand, the elements outside the theaters, including U.S. government policies regulating Chinese immigration, dissemination through recordings and print materials of the music performed in the theaters, impresarios competing with each other for performers and audiences, and the role of Chinese American business organizations in facilitating the functioning of the theaters; and on the other hand, the world inside the theaters, encompassing the personalities and careers of individual performers, audiences, repertoire, and the adaptation of Chinese performance practices to the American immigrant context. The study also documents the important influence of the theaters on the Chinatown community's sense of its cultural self. Presenting Chinese American music as American music, Rao's work significantly revises understandings of American music by placing the musical activities of an important immigrant group firmly within the bounds of music identified as "American," liberating it from the ghetto of exoticism. Firmly grounded in both Chinese and English language sources, this study offers critical insight into both historical and contemporary questions of cultural identity in the American context.

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and functioned from its start as an embodiment of Bourbon prestige. While historians have long privileged the popular origins of French dialogue opera (opéra comique), this genre, too, had close links to the Crown. In 1762 government authorities incorporated the fairground players that invented the form into a struggling royal troupe, the Comédie-Italienne, thereby consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent pre-revolutionary years. Drawing on extensive new musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied lyric genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the Comédie-Italienne. This project also, critically, interrogates the political implications of such organizational and stylistic shifts. The comic theater alternately reinforced and undercut the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a collection of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.

Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific audiovisual details into their creative visions, thereby furthering the development of stage machineries as well as the means of their codification. In particular, composers fostered what the author calls “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensory devices intended to veil both the artificiality of illusionist stage representation and their own mechanicity. Building on Richard Wagner’s theories of the total work of art and exposing its reliance on technology, the book looks in detail at the uses and effects of curtains, the gong (or tam-tam), and steam. Designed to appeal directly to the audience’s sensorium like media interfaces, these technologies not only mediated between the sound and sight of a production but also smoothed over its heterogeneous materialities. Drawing on scores, performance documents, treatises, reviews, and cultural discourses, the book traces the practical, hermeneutic, and artistic implications of each titular technology in a wealth of European operatic works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him. Each technology was temporarily absorbed into common notions of the relevant operas but gradually transformed in later productions, in its own mechanical evolution, and its resurgence across performance genres of the last half century. With its interdisciplinary angle on the history and materiality of staging, Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work.

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan und Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a “mere trifle”—a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. The book explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. It attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries, offering also a keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. It is an argument which touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. This account of Wagner's music drama blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the 21st century.

This book is an account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with the author's personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances, and suffused with his passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, the author brings to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favorite operas. The book begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. It then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between opera scholars, opera conductors, and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, the author also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this work, the text enlivens a personal history with reports personal own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro.

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelung. This book offers an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner’s achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. The book draws out the philosophical and human significance of the text and the music. It shows how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As it journeys across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, the book leads us to the central concern of the Ring—the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan’s quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The book traces the evolution of Wotan’s efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, it suggests that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible—to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brünnhilde who shows the way. The Ring’s ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but this book sees a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative.

This study of some sixty-odd Italian-language music-theater pieces for Holy Week in seventeenth-century Vienna addresses the issues of Habsburg dynastic piety, memory and commemoration, Passion devotion, and political meaning in the works. It further considers some surprising conjunctions of poetic conceptualism in connection with surprising—and theatrical—musical techniques. The pieces were meant to be performed in front of a constructed replica of Christ’s tomb—hence their Italian sobriquet, sepolcri—and often with an additional stage-set. Flourishing during the reign of Emperor Leopold I (1657–1705), the genre was also indebted to the patronage and piety of the women around him, including his stepmother, the Dowager Empress Eleonora, his three wives, and several of his daughters. The libretti, many by the famed Nicolo Minato, show unusual textual strategies in the recollection of Christ’s Passion, as they are imagined to take place after his burial. But they also involve wider realms of the dynastic’s self-image, material possessions, and political ideology. Although both the texts and the music—the latter by a variety of composers, most notably Giovanni Felice Sances and Antonio Draghi, along with Leopold himself—are little studied today, they also combined in performance to provide a sonic enactment of mourning according to the most recent norms of Italian musical dramaturgy.

Since 1875 the heroine of the most performed opera in the world, Carmen has become a universal cultural icon. She has appeared in a multitude of ballets, on stage as well as ice rinks, and in some eighty international films. The success of Bizet’s opera owns a lot to the libretto’s singular accounting of the 1845 short story on which it is based. In her close textual analyses of Ludovic Halévy’s and Henri Meilhac’s libretto and Prosper Mérimée’s novella, the author strives to account for the multiple aspects of Carmen’s attraction that support Georges Bizet’s acclaimed musical score.

Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville surveys the opera’s fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted in spectators and critics from the nineteenth century to the present. Opening with a wide-ranging overview of the types of alterations that have been imposed on Rossini’s score for the past two centuries, the first chapter addresses the mechanics behind these changes as well as the cultural forces that both fostered and encouraged them. The book next looks at some of the earliest revivals, drawing attention to alterations that were made to the score and to individual singers who were responsible for the changes, especially those who appeared in the roles of Almaviva and Bartolo. An entire chapter is devoted to Rosina, examining the wide array of creative liberties that prima donnas have unremittingly and unrepentantly taken with their interpretations of this character. The final sections turn to the opera’s recent history, observing how the Rossini Renaissance brought with it a new dedication to the “work concept” and to shedding the types of alterations that had long characterized performances of this work. The book closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the myriad ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded, digitized, and commodified glory.

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet the work remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the accuracy of the surviving scores cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris provides a detailed consideration of the many theories that have been proposed for the opera’s origin and chronology. She re-evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer and examines the work’s historical position in Restoration theater. She also offers a detailed discussion of Purcell’s musical declamation and use of ground bass. The final section of the book is devoted to the performance history of Dido and Aeneas from the eighteenth century to the present.

Scott Joplin (ca. 1867–1917) was one of the most prominent and admired ragtime composers of the period (ca. 1893–ca. 1920). Starting his music career as a stage minstrel and quartet singer, he took from this experience elements that enabled him to write rags of uncommon sophistication. His Maple Leaf Rag (1899) was the period’s most famous and imitated instrumental rag and changed the direction of the genre. Although about a dozen compositions were lost (including an opera), his extant works number about forty rags, almost twenty other piano pieces and songs, an instructional manual, and an opera (the second he had composed). He was described in interviews and by those who knew him as intelligent, well spoken, dignified, and exceedingly modest. Despite his subdued manner, most of his music is spirited and lively. He died in a mental institution due to complications of syphilis. Most ragtime compositions faded quickly into obscurity in the 1920s and 1930s as other styles came to prominence, but his Maple Leaf Rag remained in the repertory. The 1940s saw a revived interest in his music and his life, the interest growing slowly through the 1960s. A spectacular, unprecedented revival of Scott Joplin's music emerged in the early 1970s. His opera Treemonisha received its first full performance, his piano rags were performed and recorded by both popular and classical artists, and he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to American music. Earnings from his music also brought nasty litigations in the 1970s–80s.