Song and Sign

Wagner believed that reducing vocal display and rejecting the convention that the orchestral material remain subordinate to vocal melody would involve listeners more intensively in the drama, and enhance their ability to identify with mythic or “uncanny” dramatic situations. In addition, Wagner’s new ideas about the “symphonic” potential of poetic-musical periods were complemented and challenged by occasional allusions to the simpler designs and textures of the Lied—a polarity that Richard Strauss found no less appealing. After an introductory Wagner/Strauss comparison—the music for night-watchmen in Die Meistersinger and Die Frau ohne Schatten—some relevant episodes in Wagner’s works from Rienzi to Parsifal are discussed, and then set in counterpoint with comparable passages from operas by Strauss. Finally, there is brief consideration of more recent developments in German opera that have sought to retain some aspects of the focus on reflective song that Wagner made his own.

Verdi’s Dramatic Use of Tonality, Topics, and Recurring Themes

This chapter examines recurring musical themes, tonality, and musical topics in Verdi’s La traviata (1853) and Don Carlos (1867). It argues that both operas draw upon cultural codes to establish oppositions that propel their dramatic and musical narratives. In Don Carlos, the dramatic opposition of reality versus ideality unfolds within Elisabeth’s aria at the beginning of the final act. This is supplemented and reinforced with recurring themes that, while work-specific, gain much of their meaning as conventionalized musical topics. In La traviata, the dramatic opposition of love versus death unfolds as a foreground musical opposition contained within a single recurring theme, but also as a larger-scale tonal opposition that arises between the first and last acts of the opera. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the applicability of contextually based analytical models to Verdi’s operas, while also providing further evidence in support of his compositional and dramatic techniques.

Dance Music and Signification in Handel’s Opera Seria

This chapter makes a case for the interpretive significance of Baroque topics by examining historical thought and modern analytical precedent, detailing the types of significations these topics might convey, and presenting case studies that demonstrate the efficacy of musical topics in the analysis of opera seria. These case studies are drawn from the Italian-language operas of G. F. Handel and focus on his uses of the minuet and the gigue. The strategic use of dance topics in the late Baroque was likely meaningful to Handel’s audiences and can still be useful for interpretation today.

Twelve-Tone Serial Techniques in Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero as a Reaction to Fascist Ideology

Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero embodies a connection between political protest and musical technique. The composer’s specific use of dodecaphonic serialism can be interpreted as a reaction to Fascist ideology. Through an analytical narrative from three complementary angles, this chapter highlight how the music carries dramatic and ideological meaning. First, it explores a network of 12-tone rows and combinations projecting specific sounds and gestures acquiring and bestowing meaning through associations, disassociations, and re-associations with text and characters. Second, it investigates the role of “theatrical words,” tracing how word-music dyads develop reciprocal meanings and how individual, detached components lend momentum to the psychological drama. Third, it shows moments of overlapping meanings in which semantically filled musical motifs and/or text phrases combine to create a subplot of motives—an inner action displayed by the music in counterpoint with the drama.

Stormy Weather

Operatic Formenlehre seems to be alive and well—witness the wealth of publications on the solita forma (after Ritorni, Basevi, and Powers) and on concerto-like sonata forms in Mozart arias as early as the 1768 La finta semplice (after Mann and Rosen). But even standard operatic forms have often been thwarted—throughout opera’s long history—by dramatic exigencies. The purpose of this chapter is to explore and define subcategories of deformations in operatic storm scenes by identifying formal types along the continuum between closed operatic numbers and continuous, fragmentary musical flow. Formal (and deformational) categories are examined here in light of the topos of storm scenes from operatic selections of the Baroque, Galant, and Romantic periods, and avoiding the more traditional loci of continuous music, such as act finales.

Unity and Discontinuity in the Act 2 Finale of Le nozze di Figaro

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.

The Romanesca as a Spiritual Sign in the Operas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven

This chapter explores the role of a musical pattern, the Romanesca schema, as a signifier of spiritual meanings in opera. It addresses the relationship between the Romanesca and the hymn topic and argues that the schema, semantically empty in its origins, acquired in the late eighteenth century connotations of ceremony, solemnity, alterity, and even transcendence. Several vignettes from operas by Haydn and Mozart illustrate how composers deployed the pattern in scenes depicting worship, prayers, and ritual actions. Beethoven’s Fidelio occupies the final section, a case study that shows the Romanesca interacting with other elements of the musical structure for expressive purposes. The chapter provides a novel interpretation of certain moments of the opera, suggesting that Beethoven relied on the sacred implications of the Romanesca—arguably available to historical listeners—to intensify the spiritual dimension of the drama.

John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer

The viewing of opera begs the question of how operatic text (music and libretto) becomes constrained and absorbed by the performance medium. Especially in contexts where the filmic projection of images creates additional layers to the actions taking place on stage, the visual field becomes semantically overloaded and requires negotiation on its own terms. This chapter argues that Tom Morris’s production of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer preserves the integrity of the operatic text by interjecting visual images that set the broader allegorical themes into relief. Themes implicit in the operatic text, while being absorbed into the performance text, become integrated into the overall narrative that balances the mythic dimension with realism. More specifically, this chapter examines the intersection between the operatic and performance texts in Morris’s productions in three analytical stages and introduces a theoretical framework for categorizing intermedial relationship based on Nicholas Cook’s models of conformance, contest, and complementation.

Postmodern Opera 101

Reacting against traditional narrative strategies while engaging the dialectics embedded in both irony and nostalgia, postmodern aesthetics transform and subvert conventional models, transgressing the ideology behind musical conventions and appealing to a reconfiguration of normative conceptions. In this chapter, the author’s reading of Dennis Kam’s Opera 101 examines how the bifurcating narrative trajectories of the music and the libretto articulate a postmodern metanarrative that invite ironic and nostalgic interpretations. Within this work, nostalgia is anchored on intertextual references of firmly established operatic gestures, while irony is grounded in the dialectics of bifurcating narratives and supported by localized, surface-level indexical tropes. This chapter thus underscores that the postmodernist impulse in opera may be revealed by deploying analytical frameworks liberated from the traditional understanding of “narrative” and its associated normative aesthetics.

Sowing the Seeds of Loss

The interruption figures prominently in Verdi’s Otello, and, because of the goal-oriented, syntactical structure of tonal music, is thus a singularly dramatic event that is rife with potential musical meaning. When the musical line is cut off or abbreviated (i.e. by pausing at 2̂ over V, without reaching 1̂ over I), three questions immediately come to mind: Why did this happen? Will it be remedied? What implications does it have? With these questions in mind, the author of this chapter investigates Verdi’s masterful opera and demonstrates that the large-scale interruption supports a dramatic plan in which no character is about to achieve his or her objectives.