Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.
Author(s): Herbert Lindenberger
Series: Cambridge Studies in Opera
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 325
Half-title......Page 3
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents
......Page 9
Acknowledgements
......Page 10
Why opera? Why (How, Where) situate?......Page 13
About......Page 20
Brainworm......Page 21
c"......Page 22
Dream......Page 23
Endings......Page 26
Gesamtkunstwerk......Page 27
Heroics......Page 29
Intertextual......Page 30
Judgments......Page 32
Kultur......Page 33
Movies......Page 35
Narrating......Page 38
Ornamenting......Page 40
Parody......Page 41
Quoting......Page 43
Realistic......Page 46
Thrust......Page 47
Violence......Page 49
X-rated......Page 51
Yawn......Page 53
Zingara......Page 54
2
On opera and society (assuming a relationship)......Page 56
3
Opera and the novel antithetical or complementary?......Page 74
Two Rodelindas......Page 96
Kentridge/Monteverdi, Il ritorno dUlisse in patria......Page 98
Kentridge/Mozart, Die Zauberflöte in the museum......Page 100
Wilson/Waits, The Black Rider The Casting of the Magic Bullets......Page 104
Cocteau/Glass, La Belle et le bête......Page 106
Mayer/Armstrong/Green Day, American Idiot......Page 108
Korot/Reich, Three Tales Hindenburg, Bikini, Dolly......Page 112
Fausts in the museum......Page 114
John Cage, Europeras 1 and 2......Page 116
Opera in the head......Page 117
The Upshot......Page 118
5
Opera and/as lyric......Page 127
6
From separatism to union aesthetic theorizing from Reynolds to Wagner......Page 151
Disparities among the arts......Page 154
The arts as system treatises of aesthetics......Page 158
Interchanges and encroachments......Page 172
Music-drama, or the myth of union......Page 181
Modernist opera?......Page 186
Not-quite opera......Page 187
Modernism, hard and soft......Page 191
Modernist opera in historical perspective......Page 197
Postmodernist opera, perhaps?......Page 202
Operatic modernism in retrospect......Page 204
8
Anti-theatricality in twentieth-century opera......Page 208
Monteverdi, La favola dOrfeo, Mantua, Ducal Palace, February 24, 1607......Page 231
Cavalli, La Calisto, Venice, Teatro S. Aponal, November 28, 1651......Page 235
Handel, Rinaldo, London, Queens Theater, February 24, 1711......Page 240
Rousseau, Le devin du village, Fontainebleau, October 18, 1752......Page 245
Rossini, Tancredi, Venice, Teatro La Fenice, February 6, 1813......Page 249
Wagner, Tannhäuser, Paris, Opéra, March 13, 1861......Page 254
Strauss, Salome, Graz, Stadt-Theater, May 16, 1906......Page 260
Berg, Wozzeck, Vienna, Theater an der Wien, June 16, 1953......Page 265
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, New York, Metropolitan Opera, March 28, 2008......Page 269
Why (What, How, If) opera studies?......Page 275
Works cited
......Page 292
Index......Page 310
