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This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from Louise Glück's oeuvre. The differences between Ashbery and Glück are meant to stress the pervasiveness of the fascination with the vocational trajectory that they share: the same conflicted embrace of career is as legible in the serene disorders of Some Trees as it is in the fierce analyses of Firstborn and throughout the seven collections Glück published leading up to Vita Nova. The logic of Glück's career, the chapter argues, illustrates the double bind of literary professionalism with radical severity.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of many composers who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thought more and more about a German-language opera. The idea of a German national opera was intensively discussed in Mannheim, and also put into practice with Ignaz Holzbauer's setting of Anton Klein's libretto Günther von Schwarzburg (1777). The idea of the national opera took hold in Europe during the nineteenth century. Is the German national opera, which composers and writers on music from Richard Wagner to Hans Pfitzner see as starting with Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz, a historical reality or a historiographical construct? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes a brief look at the situation of opera around 1800, for only in Germany, and not in the other two leading opera nations, Italy and France, can a development at this time be observed in which the idea of a national opera takes shape.

This chapter examines how Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's opera reforms responded to Victorian culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. Gluck was music tutor to Marie Antoinette in Vienna and, after her marriage to Louis XVI, followed her to Paris, where he was a regular at Versailles. He died two years before the Revolution broke out. His music, according to Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, led to the shattering of the throne of France. The chapter considers formal elements of composition as well as frames of comprehension: the role of classicism in the critical understanding of theater; the role of dance in opera; the role of the chorus as a specifically classical element in modern opera. It also analyzes the differences between Vienna and Paris and London as sites for Gluck's operatic success and failure—within the incipient but self-conscious nationalism of the era.

This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and this double goal affects her subjects and the size of her poems. Graham has always been inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics and in her new volume she revisits Wordsworthian scenes of childhood to develop her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what the Romantics called spots of time.

This chapter looks at the dialogics between opera, art song and parlor ballads, blackface minstrelsy, spirituals, and crooning in the art and identity of the early twentieth-century prima donna. Singing mammy songs enabled Alma Gluck to comply with a pervasive American Africanism in the United States, while mitigating her alterity both as a woman of Romanian Jewish ancestry and as a professional opera singer. But it also acknowledged the intimate, symbiotic relationship between the mammy and the high-born Southern lady, which shaped ideas of female vocality, domesticity, and maternalism profoundly in the American imagination. In addition, this chapter’s discussion highlights how radically the development of commercial recording unsettled the categories of “high art” and “popular art,” and exposed perceptions of “color” and “class” in vocal performance to manipulation and renegotiation.

This selection contains the introductory part of a four-part essay devoted to the opera that Berlioz considered Gluck’s masterpiece (for the remainder, see the Companion Website). That he should choose to devote two long essays to Gluck for the Gazette musicale, a progressive new journal, in its inaugural year, shows just how important Gluck remained in Berlioz’s inner pantheon, despite his disappearance from the active operatic repertoire. As related in this section, indeed, part of which will ultimately figure in the fifth chapter of his Memoirs, it was Gluck who most powerfully inspired Berlioz’s vocation as composer. Berlioz recalls here the extremes of his anti-Rossinian fanaticism during the Gluck-Rossini controvery of the 1820s. At both ends of the excerpt, he expresses some reservations about his enthusiasm, sensing that its youthful beginnings render it suspect. In later years, he will lose all compunctions about praising Gluck.

Gluck's French-language opera Iphigénie en Tauride, which premiered in Paris in 1783, has remained alive in the repertoire having been choreographed in the 20^th century by both Isadora Duncan and Pina Bausch. Gluck and his librettist Nicolas-François Guillard, who made use of an excellent stage play by Claude Guymond de la Touche (1757), effected the last stage in Gluck's transformation of opera into a medium—‘Reform Opera—in which continuous vocal and instrumental writing is synthesised with psychological register. Euripides' IT enabled Gluck to create an opera which expressed emotion continuously in music, since much of it consists of psychic exploration of subjective consciousness—nightmares, thoughts and memories—rather than action. The opera also reflects the constitutional crisis and ideological conflict of its era. Its condemnation of cruelty and tyranny is connected with the emergent sensibility of the French revolutionary movement as well as with the Enlightenment distrust of religion.

This biography, one of Berlioz’s first major contributions to the newly founded Gazette musicale, serves to signal his unswerving fidelity to Gluck, a lifelong spiritual father, his worship of Beethoven, the main god of the new journal, notwithstanding. This first segment of the piece (it concludes in the Companion Website) features, notably, the lyrical description of an aria from one of Gluck’s early Italian-language operas and the admiring mention, despite his anti-Italian bias, of the Italian diva Mme. Pasta. Based on faulty sources, the piece bears reading not for historical specifics but for Berlioz’s image of Gluck as a man of immense talent and strong character, the latter illustrated by an incident during a performance before the Viennese court, when Gluck defied protocol to insist on repeating a ballet.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Robert Lowell's public and aesthetic vision as it relates to the use of the forms of biography in poetry. This is followed by sections that discuss four poets from the following generations (David Antin, John Koethe, James McMichael, and Louise Glück), under the aegis of the same concept of "biographical form."

Although both Wagner and Gluck are two prominent operatic reformers who contributed between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, Franz Brendel and probably a number of other observers perceived how the first encounter of these two was not without certain conflicts. Wagner, although he was well-aware of how Gluck was a significant figure in the music scene and how his contributions cannot be undermined, was able to make relatively harsh comments because of his disappointment in Gluck’s works. Wagner, however, felt the need to appreciate Gluck’s works although he could not reconcile the progressive spirit of the works. This chapter shows how Wagner could not accept how Gluck was considered a “classic,” and that he had to deal with this situation by modifying the link between music history and tradition in performances.

This chapter includes three dialogues mainly on music and fascism between Tagore and Rolland on 24 and 25 June 1926 in Villeneuve, Switzerland and on 28 August 1930 in Geneva. These spontaneous dialogues, noted down by witnesses, add a special dimension to this correspondence.

In this early letter to the editor, Berlioz pretends ignorance about “dilettantes,” and simulates a conversation with an expert who fills him in. Dilettantes, we learn, patronize the Théâtre-Italien and admire its singing style to the exclusion of any other. They swoon over vocal embellishments, while disdaining the more austere style prevalent at the Opéra and volubly criticizing its singers. In their view, Mme. Branchu, the greatest singer of Berlioz’s pantheon, “screams” as Hypermnestre (in Salieri’s Les Danaïdes), and the tenor Dérivis “thrashes about” as Orestes (in Gluck’s Iphigénie)—they lack decorum, and neglect to ornament their parts. With one such criticism, Berlioz does not disagree: the Opéra orchestra sometimes does drown out the singers, he admits, but the fault often lies with the composer, not the orchestra. By implication, he applauds Opéra singers for identifying with their parts and adapting themselves to different characters, rather than maintaining the same style for all.

In an apt preface to his critical career, Berlioz offers here a brief description of the music critic’s task. Equipped with literary talent and musical expertise, he declares, the critic should analyze works in light of their guiding principles—rather than carp about minor matters in dilettante fashion, as in a recent journalistic skirmish apropos of engravers’ errors and echoes of popular tunes in Gluck’s Armide. Young though he is, Berlioz already exhibits the requisite skills, and with remarkable assurance for one so young, he turns them brazenly against the Parisian critical establishment, in particular the eminent Castil-Blaze, who signed as “XXX,” and whose post at the Journal des débats Berlioz would inherit ten years later.

Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its status as a literary space in the context of postmodernism’s critiques of the canon. Underworld mythology lends itself to postmodern interrogations of authenticity, history, and authorial proprietorship. Further uses of the underworld tradition include artist Anish Kapoor’s “Descent into Limbo,” Oliver Sacks’ memoir Awakenings, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Louise Glück’s Averno. The Other Worlds imagined in catabatic fiction contribute to these themes with implied correspondences between dreams and ghosts.

Jerome Robbins’ surpassing of de Mille as the primary and most influential choreographer of his period is acknowledged. His training with Gluck Sandor and actors from the Group Theatre exposed him to Constantin Stanislavski’s early acting methods and his creative years at Camp Tamiment honed a brand of humor that he would use throughout his Broadway career. I consider Robbins first musical, On the Town (1944), developed from his ballet Fancy Free (1944), in the context of de Mille’s Broadway success and argue that he was at first imitative of her but ultimately found his voice and surpassed her in terms of success and output. The chapter includes analysis of selected Robbins’ choreography in what I consider the first phase of his Broadway career: On the Town (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945), High Button Shoes (1947), Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! (1948), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), and The King and I (1951). I explore how Robbins developed a system for creating dance in musicals that employed the early acting techniques of Constantin Stanislavski as well as Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting. Both techniques embraced theatrical realism and informed Robbins’ creation of dances that were seamlessly embedded into musical theater librettos. His meticulous attention to the where, when, and why of his dance creations and his comic sensibility established a model for the generations of choreographers that followed him.

Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.

This chapter discusses scenes of supernatural punishment that foreground the dramatic power of the eighteenth-century opera orchestra. It argues that instrumental music increasingly represented the powers of condemnation and punishment in the theater, thanks to the expansion of the orchestra's theatrical role. It demonstrates how composers' use of the terrifying topic (sometimes called the "Sturm und Drang") allowed them to communicate judicial authority and violence in new ways, overshadowing the earlier practice of personifying these forces in judicial figures. The author finds that the "tormenting orchestra" depersonalized penal authority at the same time as operas placed greater emphasis on criminal subjectivity and interiority. The chapter discusses penal scenes in operas by Campra (Idomenée), Rameau (Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Boréades), Gluck (Iphigénie en Tauride), and Sacchini (Oedipe à Colonne), as well as their contemporaries. Examining changes in the orchestra's dramatic function, the chapter concludes that in later operas the orchestra came to be a key element in scenes exploring a recognizably modern tragic-heroic model of bad conscience.

This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, commodity culture, and “Lebensphilosophie” or vitalism. It explores his writings on fate, graphology, gambling, childhood, language theory, his doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty, foregrounding his Neoplatonist investments, interests in magic, and take on the nineteenth century. Overall, the chapter considers the relations between Benjamin’s model of reading, especially magic reading, and the idea of happiness or “Glück.”