Abstract: Abstract Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a many-sided genius: musician, painter, writer, man of law. His influence on the romantic movement was immense. His works of fiction inspired operas and ballets (Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker are examples) as well as instrumental music (Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” etc.). He was a pioneering music critic as welI, and in the following selection, first pubIished separately in 1 814, later incorporated in Kreisleriana, Part II (1815), he addressed himself to a subject close to his heart, opera. Himself an opera composer (he was composing his most successful one, Undine, at the time this essay was written), Hoffmann here expounds some of his basic beliefs, taking his cue from a remark attributed to the Italian composer Antonio Sacchini (1730-86). The remark obviously referred to the older style of opera seria, and Hoffmann is well aware of this; he does not dispute the older aesthetic but rather deplores the confused state of opera in his own time and what he views as a widespread tendency to seek easy “effects.” His own idols are Cluck and Mozart (in whose honor he changed his third name, Wilhelm, to Amadeus), and they figure prominently in this essay.

Abstract: Abstract La Dafne, a “fable” by Ottavio Rinuccini set to music by Jacopo Peri and Jacopo Corsi, was the first opera. “It was performed in a small room and sung privately,” according to Pietro Bardi, who was there (seep. 8 above). It is quite possible that Peri was first apprised of Corsi’s and Rinuccini’s project “as early as 1594,” as he himself states (p. 15 below); but the most informed guess as to its first performance would place it in the carnival season of 1597-98. There are no questions, on the other hand, about the date of the very pub!ic premiere of the second opera, L’Euridice. That took place at the Pitti Palace, Florence, on 6 October 1600 in the presence of Maria de’ Medici, whose marriage to King Henry IV of France was being celebrated throughout the city in the grandest Medici style. A description of the event appeared in a printed account of the festivities by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (grandnephew of the great artist). Only two stage settings were needed for the short work, but it is evident from the description below that no expense was spared to make them impressive. Elaborate stage effects were nothing new (see pp. 2-7 above), and it is worth noting therefore that, while the sung dialogue of early opera was innovative and experimental, the scenic component had by then reached a high degree of sophistication.

Abstract: Subject Opera Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Abstract: Abstract Although Leos Janacek’s sixth opera, Kat’a Kabanova (Brno, 1921), had some success in Czechoslovakia during the ‘20s and ‘30s, and three German productions in the pre-Nazi era, it had to wait until after World War II before it began to be heard in the West. After Munich and Zurich, London heard it for the first time in April 1951. It had for the most part an unfavorable reception, both public and critical. The spirited defense of the opera given below appeared that autumn in The Music Review. In the course of rebutting some of the critics’ objections, its author, Charles Stuart, succeeds in providing an excellent analytical introduction to what many consider one of the operatic masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Abstract: Abstract Der Freischiitz had its first performance on 18 June 1821 at the newly erected Royal Playhouse in Berlin. Musical politics attended the birth of Weber’s most famous opera. Spontini’s Olympia, reworked specifically for Berlin and translated into German by E. T. A. Hoffmann, had had its premiere at the Berlin Opera shortly before, on 14 May, with much scenic splendor. Spontini was the favorite composer of King Frederick William Ill and had just been appointed General musikdirektor over the opposition of much of the German public; indeed the Court Theater Intendant, Count Bruhl, had hoped to install Weber in that position. Weber’s triumph obliterated Olympia, and in the end both composers were the losers: Berlin remained closed to Weber for the rest of his short life, and Spontini, though he remained there until 1842, never won over the public. Heine, a witness to both operatic premieres, reported gleefully on the party politics surrounding them; and Weber’s son, born the following year, pictured the political situation vividly in the extract given below, from the biography of his father (published in 1864).

Abstract: Abstract Just as there are four principals-Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard, Colline-in Puccini’s La boheme, so there were four principals in its creation: the professional librettist Luigi illica (1857-1919), the playwright and man of letters Giuseppe Giacosa (1847-1906), the publisher Giulio Ricardi (1840-1912), so prominent in the genesis of Verdi’s Ote//o (see p. 230f above), and of course the composer himself, Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924). Ricardi served as a sort of court of appeals during the sometimes heated squabbles concerning the ultimate shape this opera, based on Henry Murger’s Scenes de la vie de boheme (1851), was to assume. lllica undertook the drafting of the scenario, with important interventions by Puccini. Giacosa took care of the versification and the smaller details, putting on the final touches, though in one of the letters below he is heard complaining that none of his touches ever seemed to be final. Between the first mention of the opera in 1893 (in connection with a dispute that arose between Puccini and Leoncavallo, who was also at work on the same subject) and its first performance under Toscanini in Turin on 1 February 1896, the correspondence between the two librettists, the publisher, and the composer flowed thick and fast.

Abstract: Abstract Charles de Brosses (1709-77) was not yet President, that is, chief magistrate of Burgundy’s supreme court, when at the age of thirty he undertook the Grand Voyage to Italy in the company of five equally cultivated friends. The journey lasted from May 1739 to April 1740 and took the friends from Dijon to the south of France, across northern Italy, down through Tuscany to Rome and Naples, then back north by a different route. Brosses wrote letters home describing everything he saw-and heard; for he was exceptionally well prepared to describe not only the artistic and architectural wonders of Italy but its music too. These letters, fifty-eight in all, were read avidly in France, where they circulated in manuscript form. In later years Brosses revised them, adding further memories; but they were not published until long after his death, in 1799. A more complete edition appeared in 1836, winning the enthusiastic approval of Stendhal, who promptly placed Brosses at the top of his list of favorites, “after Mozart and Cimarosa.” The lengthy letter on Italian opera (no. 51) from which the following extracts are taken was originally dated from Rome, 2 December 1739, but was doubtless revised and enlarged a few years later. complete, they are so true to life that I must make an effort to detect where the pieces I have seen brought on are joined together.

Abstract: Abstract Verismo was the Italian version of realism, the literary movement espoused by such novelists as the brothers Goncourt and Emile Zola in France. 1870 had marked the end of an era for both countries: the Italians, having gained Rome as their capital, were now faced with the prosaic task of running a new nation beset with internal problems; and the French were painfully engaged in a similar endeavor after their disastrous defeat by the Prussians. In Italy as in France, the age of romantic dreaming and heroics was over.

Abstract: Abstract After the triumph of Aida (1871 ), Verdi seemed to have retired from the operatic stage. The story of how he was gradually lured back by his publisher Giulio Ricordi (1840-1912) has often been told. The earliest attempts to get him interested in a new project date from June 1879, when Ricordi paid him a visit with Boito, who showed him the outline of a libretto he had derived from Shakespeare’s Othello. And although the composer and poet were soon exchanging ideas regarding details of the versification, Verdi did not finally commit himself to writing the opera until 1884, by which time he had probably composed most of Act I and in any case hammered out with Boito much of the shape of the libretto as a whole. The following excerpts from their correspondence show them at work on the words for the Act Ill finale. Otello, overcome by jealousy as a result of Iago’s poisonous insinuations and by now helplessly out of control, insults Desdemona and violently throws her to the ground during a solemn state reception.

Abstract: Abstract Reform was very much in the air during the eighteenth century: the spirit of the Enlightenment sought to correct abuses in all the institutions of society, including the arts. Opera came in for its share of the reforming spirit. Contemporary chroniclers declared that the abuses of seventeenth-century Italian opera had been corrected by two reformers, first by the Imperial court poet Apostolo Zeno, then by his successor Pietro Metastasio: they had purged the operatic libretto of its trivialities and made it “regular,” worthy even of comparison with the masterpieces of French tragedy. Modern historians take a more nuanced view of this development, being less inclined to credit the creation of opera seria to any one or two persons, however eminent. But there is no doubt that Metastasio’s dramas, especially, were universally admired not only as librettos but as literature. It was not long, however, before critical voices were raised again, clamoring for reform: they complained of the rigidity of the new operatic conventions, which, among other things, tended to indulge a new breed of superstar singers by focusing all the musical expression in da capo arias. Italian critics like Francesco Algarotti (Saggio sopra /’opera in musica, 1755) turned to French opera, as others had done before: with its ballets, choruses, mythological plots, expressive recitatives, and relatively modest arias, it presented a living contrast to opera seria that could well serve as a model for its reform. In Vienna, where Metastasio still officiated as court poet though virtually retired from the operatic stage, there arose in the 1760s what was destined to become the best-known attempt at operatic reform. French influence was very strong there at the time, and the court theater had for some years been presenting French operas comiques and ballets under the supervision of its Francophile directeur des spectacles, Count Giacomo Durazzo (1717-94).

Abstract: Abstract In May 1781 Mozart broke with his employer, Count Hieronymus Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and took up residence in Vienna as a free lance. His first major commission there was the Singspiel Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), on which he worked that year and the next. The libretto was adapted by Gottlieb Stephanie “the Younger” from an existing libretto by C. F. Bretzner, set to music earlier that year by Johann Andre. Mozart kept his father in Salzburg informed of his progress; and the letters he wrote to him on this occasion are among the most exhaustive and revealing documents we have of his creativity as an opera composer. The first mention of the new opera occurs in a letter of 1 August 1781: The day before yesterday Stephanie the Younger gave me a libretto to compose. I must confess that, bad as he may be towards other people, of which I know nothing, he is an excellent friend to me.-The libretto is quite good. The subject is Turkish and is called: Belmonte und Konstanze, or Die Verfuhrung aus dem Serail.-The overture, the chorus in the first act, and the final chorus I will write with Turkish music. Mad:selle Cavalieri, Mad:selle Teyber, M:r Fischer, M:r Adamberger, M:r Dauer, and M:r Walter are to sing in it.-1 am so happy to be setting the libretto, that Cavalieri’s first aria, and Adamberger’s, and the trio that concludes the first act are already finished. Time is short, that is true; for it is to be produced in mid-September-however-the conditions under which it is to be performed, and generally-all the other plans-cheer my spirits so, that I hasten to my writing table with the greatest anticipation, and remain sitting there with the greatest joy.

Abstract: Abstract The seventeenth century is known in France as the Great Century, le Grand Siecle, not only because of the splendor brought to it by the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose absolutist rule and dazzling court became a model for all the rest of Europe, but also and especially because of the great poets who thrived under his patronage. Moliere (with whom Lully, before he turned to opera, collaborated on several comedies-ballets), Corneille, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine scheme of his opera, for which I was unstinting with my advice. We were busy with this miserable task, whose outcome was by no means certain, when all of a sudden a happy incident relieved us of our quandary. The incident was this: M. Quinault having come in tears before the King and having pointed out to him what a humiliation he would suffer if he were no longer to work for His Majesty’s entertainment, the King, touched with compassion, declared frankly to the ladies I mentioned earlier that he could not make up his mind to let him suffer. Sic nos servavit Apollo [thus did Apollo save us]. And so we, Racine and I, returned to our former occupation, and no further mention was made of our opera, whose only remains were a few verses of M. Racine, which were not found among his papers after his death, and which he most likely suppressed from nicety of conscience, since they dealt with love. As for me, since there was not a trace of flirtatiousness in the scene I had composed, not only did I think it improper to suppress it, but I herewith present it to the public, persuaded it will please the readers, who perhaps will not regret seeing how I went about sweetening the gall and vehemence of my satirical poetry in order to take a plunge into the saccharine style. This they will be able to judge from the fragment I present to them here, and I present it to them the more confidently in that, since it is very short, should it not amuse them, it will not allow them enough time to get bored.

Abstract: Abstract To appreciate the full import of the following selections from the correspondence of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) with the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), one ought to be familiar with Der Rosenkavalier, more specifically with Act II, which is here seen in the making. While space does not permit a detailed synopsis of the opera, the following may do for an understanding of these letters. The comedy is set in mid-eighteenth-century Vienna. Sophie, the young daughter of the newly rich Faninal, has been promised in marriage to Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, an older nobleman whom she has never seen. The official marriage proposal is conveyed to her by the young Count Octavian Rofrano (nicknamed Quinquin) in a glittering ceremony in which he presents her with a silver rose. Ochs arrives soon afterwards and shows himself to be a vulgar brute. Sophie is horrified. She and Octavian fall in love. Octavian fights a duel with the Baron, wounding him slightly in the arm. The Baron makes a scene, but his cheerfulness is restored by a note inviting him to an amorous rendezvous with a chambermaid (actually Octavian in disguise); the note is brought by Valzacchi and Annina, two Italians who live by their wits.

Abstract: Abstract Opera was born in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. It derived almost seamlessly from its immediate precursor, the intermedio, or lavish between-the-acts spectacle presented in conjunction with a play on festive occasions. Plays were spoken, and their stage settings were simple: a street backed by palace façades for tragedies, by lower-class houses for comedies; for satyr plays or pastorals, the setting was a woodland or country scene. Meanwhile the ever-growing magnificence of state celebrations in Medici Florence on occasions such as dynastic weddings gave rise to a variety of spectacles involving exuberant scenic displays: naval battles in the flooded courtyard of the Pitti Palace, tournaments in the squares, triumphal entries into the city. These all called upon the services of architects, machinists, costume designers, instrumental and vocal artists. Such visual and aural delights also found their way into the theater-not in plays, with their traditional, sober settings, but between the acts of plays. lntermedi had everything the plays had not: miraculous transformations of scenery, flying creatures (both natural and supernatural), dancing, singing.

Abstract: Subject Opera Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Abstract: Abstract Opera did not spring from the brains of a few “inventors,” though that may be the impression one gathers from documents of its early history. Rather, it emerged from the rich matrix of theatrical practices at Italian courts of the late Renaissance, with an added component. The Florentine intermedi show that almost everything was already in place: a penchant for classical mythological subjects with their abundance of marvelous happenings; elaborate scenery and scenic effects involving “machines” for the realization of those happenings onstage; plenty of music, both vocal and instrumental, to accompany ballets and pantomimes, and to fill empty intervals in the action. To all of this, the “inventors” of opera added the one ingredient that would define the new genre throughout its later history, long after the Greek and Roman deities of early opera and their attendant machines were discarded and forgotten: solo singing of the actors’ lines. Yet the revival of classical antiquity had everything to do with the birth of opera. The group of poets, singer-composers, and theorists that gathered at the palace of Giovanni Sardi, Count of Vernio in Florence in the l 570s and l 580s, and who sometimes referred to themselves as a “camerata” (loosely, a club or gathering), were fascinated by the miraculous effects of Greek music as told by the authors of antiquity.

Abstract: Abstract Literary criticism in Italy around 1700 was very much preoccupied with the dominance of French culture in Europe and the consequent waning of Italian prestige. Gone were the days when Italian literature was held up everywhere as a model to be imitated. Instead, Italy for a century had been in the grips of a literary decadence that soon would acquire the derogatory name of secentismo, “seventeenth-century-ism.” Its poetry, ornate and mannered, was hardly exportable anymore. Instead, the main export item now was opera, and this, if anything, only held Italy up to further ridicule (see Saint-Evremond, p. 51 ff above). It was in this atmosphere that the Arcadian Academy was founded in Rome in 1690. An institution whose goal was the purification of Italian literature in all its forms, including, very importantly, tragedy (a genre in which France had recently offered the world supreme examples), the Academy soon turned its attention to opera. The Arcadians felt (quite rightly too) that opera had usurped the Italian stage, bringing about the decline of “legitimate” theater in Italy. Some writers wished to abolish opera altogether, as a degrading, “venal” spectacle. Pier Jacopo Martello (1665-1727), who helped found an Arcadian “colony” in his native Bologna, was more reasonable: he belonged to those who merely sought to reform opera. He had in fact written several librettos himself, as well as “legitimate” tragedies; and when he came to formulate his thoughts on tragedy in a treatise entitled Della tragedia antica e moderna (On Ancient and Modern Tragedy), he included in its second edition (1715) an entire section on opera. The premise of the treatise is this: on his way to France, Martello has met a stranger who, upon further acquaintance, turns out to be none other than Aristotle himself, the founder of tragic theory, miraculously come back to life. What follows, then, is a series of dialogues, carried on mostly in Paris and environs, between Martello and this latter-day philosopher, who reinterprets the classical “rules” of tragedy, adapting them quite sensibly to eighteenth-century conditions. With a light touch, pseudo-Aristotle teaches his disciple how to write a libretto. He dismisses the notion that such a work might be considered poetry in any serious way and instead gives him a down-to-earth, mildly satirical account of all the components of Italian opera that need to be taken into consideration by the would-be librettist.

Abstract: Abstract The Second World War had ended in Europe just a few weeks before Benjamin Britten’s first full-length opera, Peter Grimes, had its premiere, on 7 June 1945, at Sadler’s Wells in London. Its success was instantaneous and lasting. The distinguished American literary critic Edmund Wilson was on assignment from The New Yorker at the time, visiting some of the war zones in newly-liberated Europe. In London, the devastation from the bombing was to be seen everywhere, as was the psychological aftermath of the war effort. It was therefore a not wholly unrelated experience that awaited him when, in July, a girl he knew (“G.”) took him to see Peter Grimes, that summer’s theatrical sensation. I was a little taken aback one evening for which I had had vague other plans to find out that I was going with G. to a new opera by Benjamin Britten which was being done at Sadler’s Wells. She had bought the tickets herself and said nothing about it in advance. The only thing I had heard by Britten had been a Requiem that had not much impressed me, and I did not feel particularly eager to sit through an English opera called Peter Grimes, based on an episode from Crabbe. G. did try, with her usual lack of emphasis, to get me to read the libretto, of which she had procured a copy, but she did not explain that this work had been something of a sensation in London, where the critics, who, like me, had not at first expected anything extraordinary, had been roused from their neat routine to the point of hearing it several times and writing two or three articles about it.

Abstract: Abstract The literature on Wagner that appeared during the composer’s life and for some time afterwards is for the most part passionately for or against him, and it rarely sticks to opera: after all, Wagner didn’t. And so he was championed or condemned not only as a composer but also as an essayist and, later, as the highly visible promoter of the Bayreuth Festival. His new theater was inaugurated in 1876 with the first performance of the complete Ring of the Nibelung, an event that attracted world-wide attention and brought, in addition EPILOGUE .. Modern man represents biologically a contradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yes and no in the same breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh, became even genius! That Wagner “dwelt among us”! Not without reason did I call Wagner the Cagliostro [i.e., the impostor] of modernism... But all of us, whether we know it, will it, or not, have within our bodies values, words, formulas, morals that are antagonistic in their origin-physiologically we are false... A diagnosis of the modern soul-where to begin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection of its most instructive case.-To the philosopher the case of Wagner is a stroke of luck. This essay, as anyone may see, was inspired by gratitude.

Abstract: Abstract Nixon in China by John Adams and the poet Alice Goodman was given its premiere by the Houston Grand Opera on 22 October 1987 and was later seen in its original staging in New York, Washington, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Paris, Adelaide, and Frankfurt. A televised version was shown over the PBS network in 1988. The original productions were directed by Peter Sellars, who worked closely with Adams and Goodman on the concept and many details of the work. The opera has been revived several times in the United States and in Europe. Dubbed “headline opera” by the critics, Nixon in China is based on a historical event still fresh in the memory of its audience: President Nixon’s official visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972, which established diplomatic relations between the two countries, nonexistent since the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949. The opera depicts episodes from the eight-day visit as reported in the press and seen on television: Nixon’s plane landing in Beijing, Nixon’s “historic handshake” on the airport runway with Chinese premier Chou En-lai, the meeting between Nixon and Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party, the banquet at the Great Hall of the People, a visit by Pat Nixon, the First Lady, to a model pig farm, the Evergreen People’s Commune. In the original production the principal characters Nixon (baritone), his wife, Pat (soprano), Henry Kissinger (bass), Chairman Mao (tenor), Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing (soprano), and Premier Chou (baritone) were made up to look as much as possible like the historical figures they portrayed, several of whom were still alive at the time of the premiere. In the opera, plot is at a minimum: the characters interact in stylized exchanges and reminisce singly or in pairs about their personal histories and history in general.

Abstract: Abstract Musorgsky’s masterpiece received its first performance on 27 January/8 February 1874 in St. Petersburg. It was a great popular success and was repeated four times that season before sold-out houses. The critics were another story. After all, Musorgsky had been one of the kuchka, the St. Petersburg “Five,” whose aggressive theories regarding the future of Russian music had raised the hackles of conservatives. In the eyes of these critics Musorgsky stood condemned a priori: Boris could only be the product of repugnant aesthetic doctrines, realism chief among them. And yet Cesar Cui, a fellow member of the “Five,” found fault with the opera precisely for its failures to adhere to kuchkist doctrine. From the very first, then, Boris met with conflicting reactions, and that was only the beginning of its tortuous reception history. Hermann Laroche, professor of music history at the Moscow Conservatory and friend of Tchaikovsky, shared with Eduard Hanslick, the Viennese critic whose writings he translated, the latter’s elegant self-assurance in the face of music he could not understand. Though he had regarded with benevolence three scenes from Boris performed the year before, he found much to disapprove of when he reviewed the opera as a whole at its premiere.

Abstract: Abstract The buffo style in opera was first heard outside Italy in the intermezzos brought to various European cities in the 1720s and ‘30s by the two or three singers required for their performance. When full-length opere buffe began to be exported in the late 1740s, they traveled by much the same routes with some-what bigger companies; still, following the tried and true pasticcio practice, many were cut down to the size of intermezzos and patched together with music from other operas. It was just such a repertory of miscellaneous intermezzos that Parisians heard when the impresario Eustachio Bambini, on tour in northern France with his tiny, undistinguished company, was summoned to Paris by the directors of the Opera. The Italians opened on 1 August 1752 with Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, sharing the bill with Lully’s Acis et Ga/atee performed by the regular company; the Opera orchestra accompanied both. Not immediately successful, the Buffoons (as they were soon called) adjusted to the relative vastness of the Palais Royal and, as they added other works to their repertory, began winning enthusiastic support from a part of the public.

Abstract: Abstract Opera thrived in Rome in the days when the Barberini family were in power, with one member, Urban VIII, on the papal throne (1623-44) and two nephews prominent cardinals. Cardinal Francesco built the monumental Barberini Palace in the via Quattro Fontane and there presented operas for his invited guests. By 1639, with the palace completed, the space devoted to operatic productions was said to accommodate three thousand or more spectators. The most famous of the Barberini operas was Sant’Alessio, with music by Stefano Landi and libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX), first performed on 18 February 1632 and several times later that season. It was revived in 1634 in a revised and enlarged version to honor the visiting Prince Alexander Charles of Poland, for whom a full score was printed, decorated with plates illustrating the various stage settings.

Abstract: Abstract The letters of Mozart and his family, such a rich source of information about earlier operas like Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (see pp. 130-36 above), tell us very little, unfortunately, about Le nozze di Figaro. The correspondence between the father in Salzburg and the son, now permanently settled in Vienna, had become less frequent. A first hint of the opera to come is contained in a letter written by Mozart to his father on 7 May 1783, less than a year after the premiere of Entfuhrung: Now the Italian comic operas have begun here again and are a big success.... I have looked through easily 100 librettos, in fact many more-however-I have hardly found a single one with which I am satisfied; at least there would have to be many changes made here and there. And if a poet were to busy himself with that, perhaps he would find it easier to write an altogether new one. And anyway, something new is always better.-We have here a certain abate da Ponte as poet.-At the moment he is frightfully busy with revisions at the theater-and he is under obligation to furnish Salieri with an entirely new libretto. That will take him at least 2 months. After that he has promised to write a new one for me; who knows whether he will be able to keep his word when the time comes--or whether he will want to! You know very well that these Italian gentlemen have very polite faces!-enough, we know them!-and if he is in league with Salieri, I shan’t get anything as long as I live-and yet I should very much like to show what I can do in the Italian opera as well.

Abstract: Abstract The following appreciation by Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize winning culture writer for The Washington Post, accompanied the 1993 CD recording of Glass’s most famous opera. Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a pivotal work in the oeuvre of Philip Glass. It is the first, longest, and most famous of the composer’s operas, yet it is in almost every way unrepresentative of them. Einstein was, by design, a glorious “one-shot”-a work that invented its context, form and language, and then explored them so exhaustively that further development would have been redundant. But, by its own radical example, Einstein prepared the way-it gave permission-for much of what has happened in music theater since its premiere. Einstein broke all the rules of opera. It was in four interconnected acts and five hours long, with no intermissions (the audience was invited to wander in and out at liberty during performances). The acts were intersticed by what Glass and Wilson called “knee plays”-brief interludes that also provided time for scenery changes. The text consisted of numbers, solfege syllables and some cryptic poems by Christopher Knowles, a young, neurologically-impaired man with whom Wilson had worked as an instructor of disturbed children for the New York public schools. To this were added short texts by choreographer Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson, an actor who played the Judge in the “Trial” scenes and the bus driver in the finale. There were references to the trial of Patricia Hearst (which was underway during the creation of the opera); to the mid-‘70s radio lineup on New York’s WABC; to the popular song “Mr. Bojangles”; to the Beatles and to teen idol David Cassidy. Einstein sometimes seemed a study in sensory overload, meaning everything and nothing.

Abstract: Abstract Bart6k wrote his only opera in 1911. It is a setting of a previously written play, and as such illustrates an early twentieth-century penchant for what the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has called “literature opera”: Pe/leas et Melisande, Salome, Wozzeck are other notable examples. The poet in the present instance was Bela Balasz. Three years younger than Bart6k, Balasz belonged to the same coterie of young intellectuals and artists then rising to prominence in Budapest, all keenly aware of contemporary artistic developments in western Europe, yet all seeking to attain a higher level of artistic expression through a fusion of modernism with quintessential elements of their man-rise to their feet, dreamlike, from the deep recesses of slumbering memory. And wreathed with diadems and halos, they are more beautiful than all women presently living. Oh, how plain, how miserable Judith feels when Blue-beard sings in dreaming ecstasy of his past loves. But she doesn’t shudder in horror until he begins to beautify her, to adorn her with jewels. “Ah, Bluebeard, you are not dreaming, I am your poor, living wife.” But the man covers her with glittering ornaments, and Judith gradually grows numb with death. The man’s dream kills her, the very dream she herself has conjured up in him. And the dreaming man remains alone once more, his castle again locked and dark.

Abstract: Abstract Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pe/leas et Melisande was first performed on 17 May 1893 by a recently formed company called La Maison de l’Guvre, which set itself the task of presenting avant-garde drama to the Parisian public. The company’s stage manager was Camille Mauclair, a young critic and poet who took an active part in promoting the play in the weeks before its premiere. In the following letter to a theater critic for the paper Gil Blas, Mauclair described the visual characteristics of this first production. They must have impressed Debussy, who had read Pe/leas (it had been published a year earlier) and can hardly have failed to appreciate its vaporous realization onstage when he attended the first performance. It was Mauclair, later that year, who obtained Maeterlinck’s permission for Debussy to set the play to music.

Abstract: Abstract Among Wagner’s writings in mid-career (see p. 201 below), A Communication to My Friends (1851) stands out as retrospective, a summing up, more than a program for the future. It served in fact as a preface to the publication in book form of the texts of the last of his early operas, Der f/iegende Hollander (1843), Tannhauser (1845), and Lohengrin (1848). Wagner himself furnished the reason for this Communication: he wished to explain the apparent contradiction between the style of his early works and the dramatic theories he had been propounding lately. In the following excerpt he looks back at his very first operas, Die Feen (1834, after a fable by Carlo Gozzi), Das Liebesverbot (1836, after Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), and at Rienzi (1840, after the novel by Bulwer-Lytton), the work that actually launched his career. He was from the first his own librettist, and in discussing the operas that followed (the three whose text he was now publishing in book form), he goes into some depth as he analyzes his dual role as both poet and composer of his operas. It is in the reciprocal influence of those two functions that he finds the driving force behind his unique stylistic development, one that took him from his frankly imitative youthful operas to the increasingly unconventional works of the 1840s, culminating in Lohengrin.

Abstract: Abstract The subject for Poulenc’s only full-length opera was suggested to him in 1953 by the director of the Ricordi publishing house, while the composer was in Milan on a tour of Italy; it was Georges Bernanos’s posthumously published scenario for a film, itself based on prior literary treatments of a true episode of the French Revolution: the martyrdom of sixteen Carmelite nuns who were guillotined on 17 July 1794, going to their death while singing the Veni Creator. Poulenc, who had been searching for a libretto, took to the suggestion eagerly and set Bernanos’s words directly to music, after shaping them to his purpose. He worked with great enthusiasm, though not without interruptions due to personal as well as legal, copyright problems. The premiere, in Italian, took place at La Scala on 26 January 1957 and was hailed by Le Monde in Paris as “A great international event. A great French victory.” The first performance in French took place on 21 June, after which Poulenc’s Carmelites was on its way to a notable international career. Massimo Mila (1910-88), Italy’s most distinguished music critic at the time, covered the Scala premiere for the weekly L’Espresso. His is by no means a rave review, but it helps to recreate for us admirably the effect Poulenc’s opera had on sophisticated European ears, inured to the problematic musical scene of the late 1950s. The Darmstadt avant-garde was in full cry. How to account for a major work by a retrospective composer like Poulenc?