Search Results

This introductory chapter presents the scope and value of recognition as an approach to Mozart's operas. The terms recognition and reversal (Aristotle's anagnôrisis and peripeteia) are defined, and the larger implications of recognition as a function of both plot and theme are explored. A section devoted to the opera-as-drama problem suggests that recognition offers a new perspective on some of the particular difficulties inherent in the study of opera. To illustrate the special status of recognition scenes as problem moments, a final section is devoted to the scene in Le nozze di Figaro in which Figaro is discovered to be the long-lost son of Bartolo and Marcellina, a moment that rather obviously combines Aristotle's paradigmatic examples of strong and weak recognitions into one highly implausible scenario.

This chapter takes up the question of how an individual event, such as a recognition scene, functions with respect to the operatic plot as a whole. It explores the notion of plot in critical works ranging from Aristotle's Poetics to Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, and differentiates plot from plotting. Plot in Aristotle's definition is static, “the structure of the events”, while plotting, according to Brooks, is active — the dynamic process that propels the work forward. The chapter illustrates the interaction of recognition and “operatic plotting” with a detailed consideration of the multiple plot of Le nozze di Figaro. Attention is given to prominent moments of recognition, including the dénouement in the Act IV finale. The last section of this chapter is devoted to comments about plot dramaturgy in Mozart's letters.

This chapter considers the narrator's own acts of reading in the novel, tracing the development of his understanding of the phenomenology of the act. After the Primal Scenes, reading Bergotte further aids the narrator's self-discovery and increases his awareness of the potentialities of literature. His reading of Albertine's note and Mme de Cambremer's invitation to dinner show his growing understanding of relationships, style, and social conventions; his involuntary reading of a newspaper illuminates reading's unpredictable revelatory potential; reading his own work in the Figaro and attempting to read at once as self, other, and author brings to light the inescapable subjectivity of the act of reading. Whilst we cannot control the reading of others, one's own reading, like involuntary memory, is shown to be capable of permitting uninterrupted access to the deeper reaches of the self.

Sigmund Freud, in the second of his Introductory Lectures, catalogues some common forms of erroneous performance, such as misspeaking, misreading, mishearing, and mislaying. This chapter continues those lines of thought, analyzing the opening duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. There, the musical aspect of the theater work lends special interest to Figaro's miscounting and mis-singing. Figaro and Susanna, about to marry, are servants in the employ of Count Almaviva, who has been making harassing advances toward Susanna. Figaro does not yet know of these advances, and the bedroom that the Count is providing for the couple lies close to his own quarters. One immediately notices tension and conflict in the opening of the scene. G as tonic key and harmony represents the proper state of affairs. The metaphorical interplay of music and drama is evident here. Figaro's mistakes eventually lead him to reaffirm his commitment to Susanna, thanks to her insightful management of the situation.

This chapter presents detailed readings of several celebrated ensembles—specifically the Figaro Sextet, the Idomeneo Quartet, the Don Giovanni Quartet, the first-act Figaro Trio, and the Don Giovanni Sextet. It aims to show the distance Mozart could put between himself and traditional formal patterns when the dramatic occasion required to show that linear, future-oriented time can acquire a variety of highly individual shapes.

This chapter considers the character Cherubino from Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro. A participant in what might be called a contrapuntal subplot, at once extraneous and yet essential to the ligaments of the drama, the ubiquitous Cherubino implicates himself in the action at every turn. There is something elusive, if not inscrutable, about this Cherubino. His sexuality, which seems the essence of his character, is veiled in ambivalence. An unwitting catalyst in his social interactions, there is also in Cherubino a touch of the divine, suggesting rather a timeless, mythic Eros, a Cupid (even a Peter Pan), than a partner in some reasoned conversation.

This chapter proposes two linked ideas about classical music theater. First, it suggests that each analytical observation about the music-cum-text intends (inter alia) a point of dramatic direction. Second, and conversely, it argues that each intuition we have about the behavior of characters on stage naturally seeks its validation (inter alia) through musical-textual analysis. To oversimplify the matter in a brief maxim: no analysis without direction; no directing without analysis. To demonstrate the relation between musical analysis and stage direction, the chapter examines a short passage from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. The passage, comprising a solo by Count Almaviva, and a subsequent solo by Basilio, opens the first act trio “Cosa sento!” Most people will observe that the Count has trouble making a firm cadence on the tonic, that the cadence on “sento” is somehow unconvincing, and that the Count must work hard—too hard—to achieve the eventual cadence at the end of his solo.

Il barbiere di Siviglia was not, in its earliest years, Gioachino Rossini’s best-liked opera. Its arrival at classic status came rather later, at a time, ironically, when Rossini’s general stock was beginning to fall. Today one accepts its status but tends to overlook the radical impact it had at that time. In 1816 Rossini’s Figaro shocked and stirred a largely unsuspecting public. Here, in its newest manifestation in Figaro’s “Largo al factotum,” was the embodiment of the old driving force itself, the libidinous élan vital which underpins much that is innovative and youthful in human affairs. In his book on Rossini, Lord George Harcourt Johnstone Derwent spent no more than a couple of pages on Il barbiere di Siviglia. The forms Rossini had evolved for deployment in opera buffa and in opera seria are used in Il barbiere di Siviglia both to contain the comedy and to furnish the characters.

Mozart's central place in the operatic canon rests mainly on three works with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, thanks to which the privileged position of Viennese opera buffa among late 18th-century repertories remains unchallenged. When he began Figaro, Mozart had not finished an opera buffa for over ten years; his Viennese works belong to a different species. Given their sheer musical and dramatic fascination, their originality is hardly important; such as it is, it lies mainly in the ensembles for which even the quartets in Zaide and Die Entführung provide only a modest precedent. The multimovement finales, among the glory of these operas, use a form older than Mozart himself. Mozart's originality lies more in method than in form, especially in his synchronisation of musical design and action; and his achievement proved surprisingly difficult for later composers to exploit.

Harvard’s graduate and professional schools were where the tension between social responsibility and teaching the technical skills demanded by a complex society most fully emerged. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the traditional Big Three of Law, Business, and Medicine continued to dominate the Harvard professional school scene (though the Kennedy School of Government was coming up fast). From 1940 to 1970, they and the smaller schools took on their modern configuration: meritocratic, intensely professional, intellectually ambitious. From 1970 to 2000 they faced a variety of internal challenges to that academic culture, as well as constant competition from their counterparts in other universities. After he became president in 1971, Derek Bok devoted his first annual report to Harvard College, his second to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This was not surprising: the closely linked College and Graduate School were Harvard’s traditional academic core. What, he asked, was GSAS’s essential mission? Now as before, it was to train scholars and add to basic knowledge. But the Graduate School was in trouble. One problem was student attrition. Up to half of those who entered failed to get their Ph.D.s, compared to a drop-out rate of less than 5 percent in Law and Medicine. The fault, Bok thought, lay in the lack of structure in many doctoral programs, and he prodded the faculty to do something about that. Another concern was the Ph.D. job shortage. Nonscientists had to be ready to have careers in colleges, not just in research universities. That meant that the Graduate School would have to teach its students how to teach. At his urging in 1976 the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning (renamed the Bok Center in 1991) was set up to tend to the pedagogical instruction of graduate students.1 Declining academic job prospects cast the longest shadow over GSAS in the 1970s. More than 1,000 students entered in the peak year of 1966–67; by 1971–72 the number was down to 560. The humanities were particularly hard hit: the 1975–76 entering class in English Literature was 16, compared to 70 a decade before.

This chapter discusses the entire opera Don Giovanni, which explores the liberal, individualist component of the modern outlook. Don Giovanni, the embodiment of limitless desire, is one of perhaps only two mythical figures born of the modern age (the other being Faust), a figure of the liberal Lockean strand within modernity that accepts and celebrates our endlessly acquisitive stance. Absolute, unlimited freedom, however, defeats any attempt to create a coherent self or a community. Don Giovanni's is a story of how the foundations of human individual and collective autonomy were laid, one which bears comparison with The Marriage of Figaro on the one hand, and of the Passion, on the other. It also bears comparison with the story of Goethe's Faust, a figure driven by will to power rather than merely erotic desire.

The question of being a real prima donna seems to be a starting point for much of the critical discussion regarding the Countess Almaviva and her maid, Susanna. The heroines of Le nozze di Figaro pose a special case. In a genre that thrives on catfights and romantic rivalries between women, the Countess and Susanna display a remarkable solidarity, more so than any other two female characters in Mozart's operas. In a sense, the Countess had borrowed her maid's “wardrobe” long before she became the Countess, and the potential for their friendship was established even before they met. This chapter looks back to the origins of the Countess's story, namely Beaumarchais's play Le barbier de Séville (1775) and, subsequently, Giovanni Paisiello's celebrated operatic version, Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782).

The premieres of Le barbier de Seville (1775) and Le mariage de Figaro (1784) were separated by nine years of royalty disputes, censorship, and imperial prohibition. Le marriage was an amazing success, but Beaumarchais indicated in the preface of its first edition that he regretted having cut one particular passage: Marceline's imposing speech on the injustices and abuses which men inflict on women of every rank. In the original play, her wild scheme to force Figaro's hand in marriage as payment of a debt he owes her seems like a desperate grab at the happiness she was denied long ago.

The act 2 finale of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro has been the subject of intense categorization and analysis for over a century. Often, these analyses attempt to explain this portion of the opera such that coherent musical structure and drama spring forth from an organic unity. But these analyses overlook the inherent discontinuities in the finale that drive the plot forward and necessitate the following two acts. This chapter explores the analytical history of the finale and offers an alternative view to its structure that prioritizes semiotic relationships among musical structure, topic, character, and plot. The questions raised here have implications for the goals of opera analysis more broadly.

This chapter presents a case study in the volatility of aesthetic value in early twentieth-century France. It investigates Proust’s involvement in the “Lemoine Affair,” a diamond-fabrication scandal that captured the French popular imagination in 1908. When the scam was made public, it inspired Proust to publish a series of pastiches in Le Figaro. Inspired by Lemoine’s carefully choreographed trick, Proust undertook his own virtuosic exercise in fraud, writing fictional accounts of the affair in the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve, and Edmond de Goncourt, among others. The chapter argues that these experimental pieces highlight modernism’s fascination with inestimable worth. Organized around the specter of the mass-produced diamond—the ultimate luxury product suddenly transformed into a commodity like any other—the pastiches expose the thin margin that divides signs of preciosity from signs of ordinariness in modernity. They also help us to recognize the central part that the newspaper played in the genesis and development of Proust’s novel.

Joseph II’s failed scheme to swap the Austrian Low Countries for Bavaria provoked the formation of a league of states opposed to this reconfiguration of Europe. In order to repair the damage done to his reputation in the German-speaking world, he reinstated the recently disbanded Singspiel, so that it could compete with the Italian troupe. A lighthearted contest in the Orangerie at Schönbrunn inaugurated two years of intense operatic rivalry. Thanks to Dittersdorf’s hit success Der Apotheker, which overshadowed the impact of Figaro, the German party established an early ascendancy, but the Italians struck back with an opera featuring Spanish fashion. Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara was greeted with storms of applause at its premiere on the name day of the fiancée of Archduke Franz, second in line to the Habsburg Monarchy.

The onset of the Austro-Turkish War had a major impact on opera in Vienna, as Joseph II decided on economic grounds to close one of his two companies, bringing to an end two years of intertroupe rivalry. His choice fell on the Singspiel ensemble which was instructed to disband. On the political front, two dynastic Habsburg marriages had to be scheduled in haste: between Archduke Franz, nephew of Joseph II, and Elisabeth von Württemberg, who was sponsored by Catherine the Great of Russia, and between Maria Theresia, the emperor’s niece, and Prince Anton of Saxony. Three festive operas were commissioned: Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana, Salieri’s Axur, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In the growing political turmoil, Mozart’s commission was not ready in time, and Joseph II ordered that Figaro be given instead.