Voice and the Sleepwalking Body

This article explores the relation between body and voice in the performance of a contemporary opera, Ficarra and Whittington's The Empress's Feet, based on a Chinese tale relating the origin of the practice of foot binding. The tale relates the ancient practice to cure a queen from bouts of sleepwalking that afflicted her. I initially explore the opera's complex formal structure, its central themes and the way it transforms the original tale. I will then develop some of the significant aspects, imaginary as well as factual, of both the practice of foot binding and the phenomenon of sleepwalking. I suggest that the opera not only relates itself thematically to the tale and through it to the practice of foot binding, but also suggests a further parallel between foot binding and a form of bodily mutilation that is associated with the development of the medium of opera in the West, namely the phenomenon of the castrato. The threefold consideration of foot binding, sleepwalking and the voice of the castrato will serve to reveal a moment of liberation, at the heart of the opera – call it the agency or voice given to the feet ‘unbound’. I will conclude with an account of a production of The Empress's Feet which I directed in 2014, based on the interpretation suggested in this article.

The “operatic of opera” in music history pedagogy – exploring the temporal narrativization of opera1

This study suggests that the pedagogy of music history for the professional training of musicians – including opera singers and future opera composers – could benefit from applying narratology to operatic analysis and acknowledging the “operatic of opera” in the organization of the artistic materials as one possible pedagogical approach. By breaking with the canonized forms of music history pedagogy, the subject content of opera history can be explored for instance through the architecture of temporal narrativization, as made possible by the multiple media types incorporated into opera. The study demonstrates this temporal narrativization through examples grouped into three main categories: “temporal sameness”, “temporal incongruence” and “non-linear temporality”. While most of the examples are drawn from the classical-romantic repertoire, the analysis also shows that new pluri-medial ways of dealing with temporality and narration have been emerged in contemporary opera. The study argues that by analyzing and illustrating the architecture of temporal narrativization as one form of the “operatic of opera” in Western operatic practice, students will gain a better understanding of the special nature of the pluri-medial nature of opera.

Drama-Music Communication in Opera Performance

The study “Drama-Music Communication in Opera Performance” builds on my 35-year experience of lyric drama in opera production. In my career as a director, which spanned from Baroque opera to contemporary opera, I was intrigued by the multiple connections between the musical dramaturgy, vocal expressiveness, stage image and impact on the audience. Consequently, I realised that all these elements which rely on musical scores are connected by something similar to the principle of communicating vessels: with genuine and intense musical-dramatic communication, the artistic emotion may reach the same level in all the components of the connections mentioned above.

The Song Inside Your Mind

Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2003), has been celebrated for many reasons. In the public imagination it has solidified comparisons between Adès and Benjamin Britten (the composer of one of the other most well-known Shakespeare operas of the last hundred years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960). The Tempest also established Adès as a leading presence in contemporary opera. My goal in this essay is to explore how two interrelated concerns—the expressive possibilities of moving from one medium to another and the interpenetration of different subjectivities with one another—show one way of thinking about The Tempest which is emblematic of several recurrent aspects Adès’s sensibility. The Tempest, as the largest work he completed in the decade after his initial flush of success in the 1990s, demonstrates the longevity of his quest for what he calls “new objects” which transcend their medium and engender singular subjective experiences.

Opera and Beauty

Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris after the 1820s. Parisian mélomanes wrote imaginatively and at length about opera, leaving for posterity a treasure trove of “souvenirs.” When contemplating the idea of beauty in the contemporary opera stage, these recollections often revisited a single musical event led by Henriette Sontag and Maria Malibran in 1829, which, they claimed, bequeathed to them something extraordinary: a new lyrical mood, at once blissful and discontented, which ushered into opera the divided affect of modernity. Théophile Gautier elaborated on this divided affect a few times in his poetry and in the process, he invented the figure of the diva, the allegory of beauty.

Ein(Stein) on the Beach (in Egypt): ‘Syncopated Time’ and the Formation of a ‘Continuous Present’ in Philip Glass’ Akhnaten

In her 1935 lecture Plays, Gertrude Stein identifies a problem at the heart of the theatrical experience, that “your emotion concerning [the] play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening” (Stein 58), creating an emotive and cognitive asynchronicity between the audience and the work, which she terms “syncopated time” (Stein 58). At the heart of this disconnect is her observation that “plays are either read or heard or seen” (Stein 59); the audience’s difficulty navigating this trialectic relationship is largely responsible for their desyncing from the emotional time-sense of the work. As the theatrical medium involving perhaps the most complex interplay of reading, hearing, and seeing, opera is an excellent subject for the application of Stein’s theories. This paper applies Stein’s questions of cognitive perception and emotional time to Akhnaten, Philip Glass’ third opera (which recently received its Metropolitan Opera premiere), in order to explore how the work navigates the problems which Stein identifies. This paper will argue that Glass’ iterative and ‘minimalist’ compositional style creates a synthesis of reading, hearing, and seeing to create a ‘continuous present,’ allowing the audience to remain in emotive and cognitive synchronicity with the work, and thus preventing them from falling into ‘syncopated time.’ In this way, contemporary opera offers novel approaches to the performative relationship between a work and its audience. Works Cited Stein, Gertrude. “Plays.” Writings and Lectures 1911-1945, edited by Patricia Meyerowitz, Peter Owen, 1967, pp. 58-81.