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Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers’ revisions, singers’ improvisations, and stage directors’ re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some of our best-loved musical works. It looks at opera's history of multiple visions and revisions and asks a simple question: what exactly is opera? Remaking the Song, rich in imaginative answers, considers works by Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Berio in order to challenge what many regard as sacroscant: the opera’s musical text. Scholarly tradition favors the idea of great operatic texts permanently inscribed in the canon. Roger Parker, considering examples ranging from Cecilia Bartoli's much-criticized insistence on using Mozart's alternative arias in the Marriage of Figaro to Luciano Berio's new ending to Puccini's unfinished Turandot, argues that opera is an inherently mutable form, and that all of us—performers, listeners, scholars—should celebrate operatic revisions as a way of opening works to contemporary needs and new pleasures.

Antonin Dvorák made his famous trip to the United States one hundred years ago, but despite an enormous amount of attention from scholars and critics since that time, he remains an elusive figure. Comprising both interpretive essays and a selection of fascinating documents that bear on Dvorák's career and music, this volume addresses fundamental questions about the composer while presenting an argument for a radical reappraisal. The essays, which make up the first part of the book, begin with Leon Botstein's inquiry into the reception of Dvorák's work in German-speaking Europe, in England, and in America. Commenting on the relationship between Dvorák and Brahms, David Beveridge offers the first detailed portrait of perhaps the most interesting artistic friendship of the era. Joseph Horowitz explores the context in which the \"New World\" Symphony was premiered a century ago, offering an absorbing account of New York musical life at that time. In discussing Dvorák as a composer of operas, Jan Smaczny provides an unexpected slant on the widely held view of him as a \"nationalist\" composer. Michael Beckerman further investigates this view of Dvorák by raising the question of the role nationalism played in music of the nineteenth century. The second part of this volume presents Dvorák's correspondence and reminiscences as well as unpublished reviews and criticism from the Czech press. It includes a series of documents from the composer's American years, a translation of the review ofRusalka's premiere with the photographs that accompanied the article, and Janácek's analyses of the symphonic poems. Many of these documents are published in English for the first time.

Well-known for leading audiences to a new appreciation of Verdi as a subtle and elaborate musical thinker, Pierluigi Petrobelli here turns his attention to the intriguing question of how musical theater works. In this collection of lively, penetrating essays, Petrobelli analyzes specific operas, mainly by Verdi, in terms of historical context, musical organization, and dramaturgical conventions. Originally published in 1995. ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways.Vocal Apparitionstells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film,The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers'A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's playThe Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers'A Nightat the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera,Vocal Apparitionsreveals something original and important about each medium.

In these essays, Roger Parker brings a series of valuable insights to bear on Verdian analysis and criticism, and does so in a way that responds both to an opera-goer's love of musical drama and to a scholar's concern for recent critical trends. As he writes at one point: \"opera challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets.\" Verdi's works, many of which underwent drastic revisions over the years and which sometimes bore marks of an unusual collaboration between composer and librettist, illustrate in particular why it can sometimes be misleading to assign fixed meanings to an opera. Parker instead explores works likeRigoletto, Il trovatore, La forza del destino, andFalstafffrom a variety of angles, and addresses such contentious topics as the composer's involvement with Italian politics, the possibilities of an \"authentic\" staging of his work, and the advantages and pitfalls of analyzing his operas according to terms that his contemporaries might have understood. Parker takes into account many of the interdisciplinary influences currently engaging musicologists, in particular narrative and feminist theory. But he also demonstrates that close attention to the documentary evidence--especially that offered by autograph scores--can stimulate equal interpretive activity. This book serves as a model of research and critical thinking about opera, while nevertheless retaining a deep respect for opera's continuing power to touch generations of listeners.

Summer Opera played to the deeper Verdi: There was hardly a cymbal crash throughout the afternoon that didn't seem part of a long-meditated and carefully shaped totality. H. Teri Murai's conducting was taut and fierce, and his small but well-drilled orchestra responded reflexively to his direction. Soprano Fabiana Bravo, a Catholic University alumna, sang with a healthy, florid lyricism and intensity as Leonora. Baritone Grant Youngblood, a late substitute for Jason Stearns as Count di Luna, grew stronger and stronger as the afternoon wore on; his rendition of \"Il balen\" was brilliantly expressive both musically and dramatically. Benjamin Warschawski, who sang the tenor role of Manrico, has the ringing high notes for \"Di quella pira,\" one of opera's all-time showpieces. But I was even more impressed by the aching tenderness he brought to softer passages such as \"Ah si, ben mio\" and \"Amor, sublime amor,\" which gave the character a human dimension that is too rarely explored. Patrice Houston has an unusually light mezzo- soprano voice; whatever her Azucena may have lacked in the way of plummy tone was mostly made up for by agility of phrasing. Soprano Monica Szabo made a bright, ebullient Ines, while Kwang-Kyu Lee sang the role of Ferrando with dignity and lithe grace.

This austere, almost classical quality is to the fore in Peter Watson's production, first performed by Scottish Opera and now entering Welsh National Opera's repertory. Watson aspires to stasis, even abstraction. Metal walls, the colour of dried blood, imprison the characters. The costumes are neutral, mostly suggesting the 15th century in which the work is set, although Leonora, dreamer that she is, first appears in Jugendstil spangles, and Di Luna, the tortured tyrant, wears a Napoleonic greatcoat.

The Yugoslav bass Ivicsa Tomasev delivered Ferrando's opening narration with plenty of blood and thunder, but also ample elegance. Mezzo Tatiana Sparacino made a vivid Azucena, singing with imagination, dignity, and fire. Some of her low notes had a peculiar nasal resonance, but her voice has presence and shading. When the curtain snagged on the way down at the end of one of her big scenes, she displayed presence of mind and acted her way out of sight. The company's star tenor, Roumen Doikov, was a first-rate Manrico, singing with beauty of tone and finesse of phrase, and lofting a pair of ringing high C's in \"Di quella pira.\" He also made a more consistent effort to act than he sometimes has in the past.

As the villain Count di Luna, baritone Giovanni Meoni doesn't mine his role for telling introspective nuances, preferring instead to pour out a stream of sound. Thankfully, it's a fine sound -- as dark and bracing as good Italian coffee, with virile strength in all registers and the kind of big, expressive delivery that's tailor- made for this opera. Mezzo Marianne Cornetti is even better, as Azucena, allowing the tormented Gypsy's despair to register vividly in her phrasing. Warm yet incisive, mesmerizing in its emotional commitment and solid to the core, Cornetti's is powerhouse mezzo singing in the great Italian tradition.

All that is needed for a good performance of Il Trovatore, the famous tenor Enrico Caruso once said, is \"the four greatest singers in the world\". That observation might not be much encouragement for a company such as English National Opera, which puts its faith in a roster of regular house singers rather than the jet-setting circuit of international stars. Undaunted, though, they have mounted a new production of the most challenging of Verdi's middle-period masterpieces and, musically at least, made a big success of it. Anyone who hankers after hearing this supercharged score live - it contains some spellbinding music wedded to a plot whose blood feuds and sexual rivalries could fuel a dozen episodes of EastEnders - shouldn't hesitate to buy a ticket.