A musical challenge to our view of the past
In Musical Exoticism (Cambridge 2011) Ralph P. Locke undertook an extensive appraisal of the portrayal of the ‘Other’ in works dating from 1700 to the present day, an enquiry that embraced a wide range of genres from Baroque opera to Algerian rap, and which was at once musical, cultural, historical, political and ethical.
Is it okay to tweet during a concert, if it allows those who couldn’t attend to engage with the performance and the music? Or is it really just distracting, on top of all the coughing?
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera.
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’.
Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
An important new book on Italo Montemezzi sheds light on his opera Nave. The author/editor is David Chandler whose books on Alfredo Catalani have done so much to restore interest in the genre.
Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions.
I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now difficult to locate.
Vincent Giroud’s valuable new French Opera, a Short History, is in hand and very welcome it is.
The noted operatic impresario and stage director, Lotfi Mansouri, with the professional help of writer Donald Arthur, has issued his memoirs under the title Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey.
Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors.
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding.
Readers may recognize the author of this book, David J. Buch, a specialist on the origins of the libretto to Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good.
According to the book jacket, this is the first major scholarly study of Così fan tutte, considered to be one of Mozart's least-understood operas and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte's most interesting text.
Così fan tutte has been studied extensively, despite the broad assertion stated in the book. What the author of this study brings to the reader, which others have not, is a detailed examination of the philosophical, pastoral, and comic background of the libretto, characters, and music of the opera. New perspectives on text and tone in the opera, the subtle use of the pastoral mode, and the tension and balance between philosophy and comedy are what the author brings to the study of this work. In addition, the author does an intensely close reading of the primary sources of the opera, in order to support his theories and statements.
The book is divided into four major sections. Chapter 1 looks at the poetics of Così fan tutte, examining the history of the word/music relations in the opera, then in relation to postmodern poetics, and the reception of the opera itself in the eighteenth century. The author then puts forward his hypothesis that, rather than continue the long-standing tradition of the musical and textual incompatibility of the opera, he will prove that this rift between text and music is a distinctive and indeed important union that is unparalleled in any other Mozart opera. To illustrate this, some portions of recitative contained in the opera, as well as the overture and the song "Tutti accusan le donne," are provided with explanation and as musical examples.
Chapter 2 examines the philosophical mode of Così fan tutte. The author specifically focuses on the character of Don Alfonso, discussing his various aspects and attributes that appear throughout the opera, including the old man, poet, cynic, and comic philosopher. The author relates these archetypes to various eighteenth-century readings, concepts, and popular understandings at the time of the opera. Other philosopher-type characters in eighteenth-century operas are mentioned, Paisiello's Il Socrate immaginario in particular.
The pastoral mode of the opera, along with the character of Despina, comprises the content of Chapter 3. Here, the author examines Despina's musical and textual authority, discusses the theory and practice of the pastoral mode, how the pastoral setting was sentimentalized in the eighteenth century, and links to Epicureanism. Specific Despina musical numbers, such as "In uomini, in soldati" and "Una donna a quindici anni," are provided with in-depth analysis and commentary.
The comic mode in Così fan tutte is the topic of Chapter 4. Various characters in the opera fit into the sentimental comedian role, such as Don Alfonso, Fiordiligi, and Ferrando. The origins of sentimental comedy are discussed, and this opera as anti-sentimental opera is presented. Some interesting research on heroic and martial images of love in the soldiers, and the seduction duets, is provided.
Finally, in the epilogue, the author points out that Così fan tutte, as an artificial comedy, enjoyed a brief period of popularity before it lost favor with the opera-going public, especially in the nineteenth century. It is an opera that looked back to older theatrical and operatic traditions for inspiration, and therefore never really found a place in the oeuvre, nor in the favor of the opera-going public. Overall, this is a well-documented and researched scholarly study of Mozart's least-understood opera.
Dr. Brad Eden
University of Nevada, Las Vegas