Opera History, the Travel Edition

This book has been in my bag for a long time and, on reflection, I am glad that I have read it gradually. When the central premise is so simple – Grand Opera Outside Paris is, indeed, about Grand Opera outside Paris – the payback comes in the detail of individual chapters and the slow emergence of a Europe-wide survey of encounter and exchange. The volume's editor, Jens Hesselager, provides an erudite and generous introduction, beginning with the familiar difficulty of defining grand opera and the importance of attending to specific performance contexts. In the first instances, of course, this meant the Paris Opéra, and Hesselager draws our attention to Sarah Hibberd's observation that the coherence of the genre was initially established ‘more through the licensing requirements of [this] institution than by [any] specific dramatic content’ (1). From here, the introduction gently encourages us to look outward.

Opera and the Built Environment

In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's ‘Crisantemi’ string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific – Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world.

‘Ein sonderbar’ Ding’: Music, the Historical and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier

Der Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Offenbach, Pépito and the Théâtre des Variétés: Politics and Genre in the First Year of the Second Empire

Offenbach's first commercially performed dramatic work, the opéra comique Pépito, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 October 1853. This article examines it from historical and musical perspectives. First, I argue that its production at the Théâtre des Variétés is an example of what Mark Everist has called ‘the politics of genre’, in this case the attempts by managers of Parisian boulevard theatres to circumvent the hierarchical system of genre imposed on them by the government. Offenbach may have been directly complicit by offering an opéra comique to a theatre that was legally not allowed to perform the genre and by supplying a musical element – ‘local colour’ – as part of the political strategy by which the manager of the Variétés sneaked the opéra comique past the authorities. The subterfuge did not work, however: I argue that Pépito was recognised by audiences as an opéra comique primarily through the character of its music. A discussion of the score, and the musical competence of the original cast and orchestra of the Variétés, allows a partial reconstruction of the actual sound of the first performance of Pépito. Finally, I consider the later history of Pépito, and in a postscript suggest that a faint memory of Offenbach's Spanish opéra comique may have resurfaced twenty-two years later when Georges Bizet, who became part of Offenbach's circle in the late 1850s, was composing his own Spanish opéra comique, Carmen.

The Invention of an Opera House: The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile

The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile, can be considered the first purpose-built opera house in the Andean region of the Americas. Managed by impresario Pietro Alessandri, it became the centre of an early operatic scene in the South Pacific and a model for theatres built during the following decades. In this article, I discuss the Teatro Victoria as an opera house and the way in which it functioned on the borders of what was then a new global operatic scene. Latin American research on opera has focused mostly on singers and performances, rather than on the workings of the opera houses and the operatic scene. This article discusses the rationale behind the development of the Teatro Victoria project, some of the strategies underpinning its success and the notion of this particular opera house as a projection of certain ideas of ‘Italian culture’ and networks. The article shows, first, that the successful reception and appropriation of Italian opera in this period was not necessarily guaranteed, and it differed across the Americas. Second, that local brokers and host communities had key roles in shaping that reception, which can easily be perceived as a passive one when looked at only from the perspective of the singers or the music itself.

‘Opera and …’: The Pleasures and Perils of Amalgamation

We might start with the Index, often a good indicator of a book's flavour, its local habitation. First up is ‘Abbate, acoustics, acting, Adler, Adorno’, a reassuring miscellany; later on, the German-speaking collective of ‘Schopenhauer, Schreker, Schubart, Schumann-Heink’ awakens memories of time past. ‘Ventilation systems, Verdi, vitalism’, however, turns on the landing lights for a distinctly new approach, while ‘hygiene [both mental and moral], hyperacusis, hyperaesthesia acoustica, hypnosis, hysteria’ ushers in another region entirely: medicine, pathologies. Starting at the end, we are thus prepared: a sense of anticipation is allied to hopes of intriguing surprises in the offing. And such expectations are on the whole justified. In spite of its title – that fence-sitting conjunction – this collection is a worthy and serious attempt to write new chapters in musicology's revolving challenge to the internalist preoccupations of its past.

Heaven, Hell or Somewhere in Between: Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel and the Search for Spiritual Truth

Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (Ognennyi angel) has remained comparatively little studied among his operatic works, interpreted primarily as a parody of Russian symbolist beliefs and practice. In the last few years, however, new biographical information has emerged about the period during which Prokofiev wrote The Fiery Angel that points to ways of reconsidering the opera's compositional history and legacy. Furthermore, recent scholarship on the application of narrative theory to opera studies presents new methods for examining how opera might incorporate a narrative point of view. Combining these lines of inquiry, this article scrutinises Prokofiev's two complete versions of Angel (1923 and 1927) in the context of the composer's conversion to Christian Science during the intervening period. It argues that the 1927 version privileges its central character's point of view, as he experiences a process of spiritual awakening similar to the composer's own.

The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu's La dame blanche

In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.