scholarly journals Celluloid Diva: Staging Leoncavallo's Zazà in the Cinematic Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 144 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-321
Author(s):  
Ditlev Rindom
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Post War

AbstractGeraldine Farrar's performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Zazà (1900) at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar's Zazà in the context of New York's post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar's own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Opera Houses

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

scholarly journals American Christians for and against Parsifal: Debating the Holy Grail Opera in New York

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Hale
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House

The appropriateness of Christian themes in the performing arts has often been debated. Defenders have argued that various media, including drama, can serve as instruments of spiritual edification, while critics have contended that such efforts often eventuate in sacrilege and a vulgarising exploitation of the sacred for commercial and entertainment purposes. A heated debate took place in 1903 when Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, which since its première at Bayreuth in 1882 had been hailed as a magnificent representation of redemption and other themes central to Christianity, was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York – its first performance as an opera outside its original venue. Numerous clergymen and lay people in several denominations sought to have the production banned and cautioned fellow Christians against seeing it. Others, generally of a theologically more liberal bent, defended the work. The heated public controversy is placed into historical context and compared with the history of Parsifal in the United Kingdom, where it was widely appreciated without noteworthy opposition.

Ballet Theatre after Fifteen Years

Tempo ◽  
1955 ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
R. J. Austin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The World ◽  
Opera House

This year Ballet Theatre celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with a three-weeks' season in April at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. After fifteen years it still remains one of the greatest companies in the world, and if the New York City Ballet has become more widely accepted as America's leading company, there can be no doubt that the influence of Ballet Theatre has been decisive in establishing the popularity of ballet throughout the United States.

Photo-Opera:La fanciulla del Westand the staging souvenir

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN LOCKHART
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
New Instrument ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Opera House ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Third Dimension

AbstractGiacomo Puccini'sLa fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, itsmise-en-scènewas given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play,The Girl of the Golden Westby David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staginglivretensured thatLa fanciullalooked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. BothThe GirlandLa fanciullabear the marks of their mediated nature:The Girlsuggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunsetLa fanciullamoves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, thefonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.

A New Opera House

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 470-503
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Franco Zeffirelli ◽  
Technical Failures ◽  
Critical Reviews

The commission that was one of the greatest tributes to Barber’s career turned out to be his nemesis. Antony and Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York, was handicapped by the inflated Franco Zeffirelli production, with its problematic paraphernalia, including camels and goats and a malfunctioning pyramid, which eclipsed serious evaluation of the music. This chapter narrates how the opera based on Barber’s favorite Shakespeare play came to life, how he handpicked the major characters ̶—Leontyne Price for Cleopatra and Justino Díaz for Antony ̶—and how these artists devoted themselves to the literature and history of their roles. Although Barber’s work here was no less brilliant, the critics felt that the failure of the opera was due to overproduction, with an infusion of mechanical and technical failures. After the premiere, Barber boarded the SS Constitution for Europe. Over the next decade, he devoted his energies intermittently toward a revision of the opera in collaboration with Menotti. In 1975, four performances of the more intimate version with increased lyric meditation were presented at the Juilliard School. Critical reviews of a production at the Spoleto Festival in Italy after Barber died gave much attention to the musical strengths of the opera, with uniform appreciation of Barber as a master of orchestra and choral writing. Performances followed in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

Opera in America

Tempo ◽  
1945 ◽  
Vol -3 (11) ◽  
pp. 208-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. W. Heinsheimer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Social Event ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Opera House

For all practical purposes opera in America was, for a long period, a mere luxury product for the few, a social event much more than an artistic undertaking. It had not played any significant part in the spiritual and cultural development of the nation. To Europeans, opera in America meant only the making of as much money as possible in the shortest possible time. To Americans it meant the display of the most precious jewels and the most expensive gowns of a few hundred privileged families at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. And for the rest of the population it meant practically nothing.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

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