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It is fitting that what is likely to be my last article appear in a journal founded by Wolfgang Leiner. He was the first dix-septiémiste I met, other than my professors, and his dedication, his erudition, and his generosity have been a model for me \"pendant un demi-siècle\".

This article discusses the use of pseudonyms by artistic creators. It explores the life of the writer Fred de Gresac [Frédérique Rosine de Grésac], who contributed libretti to Western classical opéra comique in addition to being a prolific playwright and screenwriter. It then examines pseudonym use in several contexts, and controversies surrounding the “Reclaim Her Name” campaign in literature to provide additional insights addressing the complexities inherent in pen names and identity. The article concludes with thoughts about how singers might balance the benefits of diverse representation while acknowledging historical context.

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; xii + 276 pp. Since the advent of musical theatres so-called Golden Age in the 1940s, the forms prevailing conceit has identified song and dance as the means by which characters communicate emotions that exceed conventional speech. [...]musical theatre invites spectators not only to take erotic pleasure in the singing and dancing body, but also \"to undertake an increasingly vertiginous set of identifications and misidentifications that reach across different gendered, raced, and sexualized bodies\" (8). The books focus shifts to race in Chapter 4 when Rogers assesses Rouben Mamoulians use of rhythmic integration in Show Boat (1927), a theory which aimed to stoke spectators' fascination with and fear of Black subjects.

In tempi relativamente recenti, a partire dagli anni Ottanta circa del Novecento, una certa attenzione alla produzione librettistica russa è stata rivolta da parte di filologi russi e, in àmbito italiano, dagli slavisti (Stefano Garzonio, per citarne uno), che però, non avendo interessi scientifici in àmbito musicale, si sono interessati quasi esclusivamente all'influsso della metrica italiana su generi poetici russi di diversa destinazione. Scomparso poco prima dell'uscita del volume, Jurij Georgievič Dimitrin (1934- 2020) è stato uno scrittore, drammaturgo e librettista russo, avvicinatosi alle Lettere dopo una formazione di tipo tecnico ottenuta all'Istituto chimico-tecnologico di Leningrado. Oltre a maturare un'ottima competenza pratica proveniente da questa attività, Dimitrin seppe individuare la necessità di convogliare le proprie (e non solo) conoscenze in quest'àmbito in modo sistematico, pubblicando una serie di articoli e il manuale di teoria e pratica Libretto: istorija, tvorčestvo, technologija (Učebnoe posobie v žanre ėsse) (Il libretto: storia, arte, tecnologia - Manuale in forma di saggio), Sankt-Peterburg, Kompozitor, 2011, tradotto in inglese per Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), insegnando presso il corso di \"Dramaturgija opernogo libretto\" (\"Drammaturgia del libretto operistico\") dell'Istituto statale russo di arti sceniche (Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj institut sceničeskich iskusstv), e fondando nel 2000 il sito \"Libretto vo sne i najavu\" (Il libretto nei sogni e nella realtà, http://www.ceo. spb.ru/libretto/) dedicato a questo specifico genere letterario e alla professione del librettista. Questa ragionevole aspirazione alla sistematizzazione di un dato reale amplissimo e variegato, di cui ancora oggi non riusciamo a percepire nettamente i confini, è stata condivisa e raccolta dalla co-curatrice del volume, una ricercatrice in slavistica che da qualche anno ha intrapreso un percorso di censimento e catalogazione dei libretti editi in lingua russa a partire dal primo, pionieristico e fatidico Cefal i Prokris (Cefalo e Procri, 1755) di Aleksandr Petrovič Sumarokov, titolo che figura tra i candidati al ruolo di \"prima opera russa\" nella storiografia tradizionale. Di questo dà conto la brevissima nota introduttiva \"Da parte dei curatori\" (\"Ot sostavitelej\", p. 5) che apre il volume presentandone l'obiettivo: ... (rafforzare il posizionamento della disciplina nella ricerca russa sulle arti). Coerentemente con le premesse sopra esposte, i curatori lasciano la parola a quello che può forse dirsi l'unico studioso ad essersi pronunciato, in tempi non sospetti, su una disciplina rimasta in ombra: nella sua \"Introduzione\" (\"Predislovie\", pp. 6-9) Grigorij Ganzburg accredita questo volume come ... (prima raccolta pubblicata in Russia sulla librettologia). Da ciò si origina quello che Ganzburg definisce metaforicamente un «effetto ottico» («optičeskij ėffekt»), dovuto allo sguardo \"diagonale\" rivolto da ciascuna di queste due figure a quell'aspetto del nostro testo ibrido che non la riguardava direttamente. Il che è di per sé uno dei meriti di questo volume, che di qui in avanti presenta una serie di saggi, per la maggior parte già apparsi in lingue occidentali e qui proposti per la prima volta in traduzione russa, accostati a originali russi, in alcuni casi inediti. Un elenco potrà forse rendere trasparenti non tanto i contenuti quanto gli argomenti e la logica della loro selezione e disposizione, laddove non sarà invece possibile esaminare in dettaglio ogni singolo contributo: - 'Nekotorye razmyšlenija ob opere kak o žanre' (pp. 10-16) è la traduzione, a cura di Anna Stetsenko, del saggio di Wystan Hugh Auden, Some Reflections on Opera as a Medium («Tempo», n.s., XX, 1951, pp. 6-10); - in 'Libretto kak literatura' (pp. 17-26) la curatrice riproduce The Libretto as Literature del comparatista Ulrich Weisstein («Books Abroad», XXXV/1, 1961, pp. 16-22); - 'Gofmanstal\" (pp. 27-45) è invece la parziale riproduzione (nella traduzione di I. Patruchina) del capitolo n. 22 ('Hofmannsthal') del libro di Patrick John Smith The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); - in 'Legitimost' librettologii' (pp. 46-72) Ju. Montėl' ripropone il manifesto Légitimité de la librettologie della filologa romanza Maryse Jeuland-Meynaud («Revue des Études italiennes», n. s., XXI, 1976, pp. 60-101); - 'Modus - Tip - Žanr, O meste libretto (i opery) v sisteme žanrov' (pp. 73-88) è la traduzione di A. Spiridonova del saggio Schreibweise - Typus - Gattung: zum gattungssystematischen Ort des Librettos (und der Oper) di Albert Gier (in Musiktheater

In Freer's home of Chicago the history of opera in the city is well-documented, making it an excellent case study for the needs of this article. [...]when it comes to the matter of paying out money for tickets to support the native article, there is a sudden shiftof activity.6 Other writers were more critical of the new art of American opera composition. Some, like respected New York music critic and opera advocate Lawrence Gilman stated in 1911 that \"either by reason of weak or amateurish librettos or dull, derivative, mediocre music, they have fallen short of the standard which must be maintained if our native operatic art is to have anything more than a parochial interest and importance. In a 1925 article dripping with sarcasm, New York City writer and high school principal Benjamin M. Steigman rails against the efforts of many organizations trying to support young native composers, specifically mentioning the Opera in Our Language Foundation and the American Opera Society of Chicago (both of which Eleanor Everest Freer founded).8 He complains that after \"more than a decade\" of experimentation, the works offered by the American Opera Society of Chicago and others exhibit \"sheer incompetence\" of technique and absurdity of libretti.9 It is curious that Dr. Steigman, himself an educator, did not seem to have the patience for the development of this craftin the United States.10 Instead, he patronizingly declares, \"we cannot as yet compete with the foreign musical markets, in spite of the widespread activities of the associated women's music clubs of America, the dauntless accoucheuses [midwives] of our as yet puny infant industry.

Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with \"the exotic\"—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from \"us\" Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and \"Gypsies\" in Bizet's Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, e.g., the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach's Bouffes-Parisiens. The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various \"different\" (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented (as a community—through chorus and authority figures—and through the feelings and actions of individual characters). These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either allpurpose style markers of the exotic generally (oddities, one might say) or more specific style markers associated with an identifiable people or region (e.g., tunes, rhythms, and other devices understood as signaling one particular region). But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of \"the exotic in music,\" which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably \"point to\" (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent. In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: e.g., five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. Composers whose works are mentioned, or discussed in some detail, include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos). Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.

Pietro Metastasio’s opera Catone in Utica (Rome, 1727) represents ancient Roman imperial politics through the recurring trope of ‘enslavement’. Reading Catone alongside Metastasio’s sources, from Lucan to Addison, reveals how the poet’s de-particularizing representational code converted historical modes of racialization into a generalizing Cartesian moral framework, and thereby demonstrates how the continuing influence of post-Enlightenment constructs of biological race has obscured the multiplicity of racialisms in earlier contexts. Turning from a physiological episteme to an earlier, ‘unassimilated space’ limned by poetics, sentimentality, and song, this article takes Metastasian opera seria as a window onto historically contingent conceptions of racialized difference.

This article focuses on three of Beat Furrer's works described as opera or music theatre: Begehren (2001), FAMA (2005) and Wüstenbuch (2010). Each of these pieces sets texts from Roman, contemporary and historical authors in exploration of the liminal spaces between life and death, and the possible transitions between them. In Wüstenbuch one such text is included from the Papyrus Berlin 3024, known as the source of the Ancient Egyptian philosophical text ‘The Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, a reflection on the meaning and value of life and the transition between life and death. Furrer's compositional style does not offer a linear narrative on such questions but rather multiple perspectives and tableaux, each of which calls the others and itself into question. In order to explore this and understand what the meeting and interchange of the different texts and authors offers within the context of Furrer's music, I outline a method of ‘listening intertextually’ in order to hear the liminal spaces not only within but between these compositions. I consider the hybrid and hypertexts that arise within the music, and the ways that they can be therefore considered – as in the subtitle often given to FAMA – a ‘drama of listening’.