5/5/2023 0 Comments Artful rebel jeans![]() There is no way I can "demonstrate" any cause-and-effect relationship between a particular musical form, and a particular feeling-in-me let alone demonstrate that the feeling I claim to have experienced is (or ought to be) shared by anyone else. In the process, I have reduced complex verbal and musical effects to a series of adjectives and metaphors which I only hope will suggest to others both the music I heard and the feelings it aroused.īut the feelings are (or were) only in me. In the essays that follow, I have turned to the scores in an attempt to explain my emotional reactions to certain moments in certain operas: Alceste, Don Giovanni, Norma, Die Meistersinger, Otello, Oedipus Rex. Since most of these people cannot readily read musical scores, or understand the specialized language (what Shaw called the "Mesopotamian words") of musical analysis, I have tried, like most music critics who address themselves to general audiences, to keep such things out of my writing. It is intended for men and women who enjoy opera (I have no dream of converting the unconverted) who attend performances when they can who listen to broadcasts and recordings and who are curious to know more about the works they are seeing and hearing. This collection is intended for people interested in opera who are neither professional musicians nor "opera fanatics"-i.e., obsessional voice-connoisseurs who dote on particular singers or particular styles of singing. I make frequent use of the work of musicologists, but I don't pretend to compete. As a musical amateur, in both senses of the word, I have no desire to betray any more of my inexpertness than I absolutely must. There is relatively little here of what is usually called "musical analysis." The more of it I read, the less faith I have in its cogency or effectiveness: very few people perform it persuasively or well, and I am not likely to be one of them. To know what led to the conventions of opera seria, why the Paris Opera demanded ballets, or how a librettist may have hobbled a composer (or challenged him to new inspiration) enlarges the nature of the operas we see. Different pressures, different impulses throughout cultural and musical history have led to many different sorts of opera, all jumbled together today in a repertory that spins us from Vivaldi to Offenbach by way of Wagner. Our experience of opera is enhanced, I believe, by knowing something more about the different worlds from which it sprang. ![]() The standard opera repertory is madly heterogeneous, drawn from a broad array of historical and cultural sources. Considerations of the history of culture, of literary, historical, and topographical sources, of librettos in their own right, of the lives of artists, of theatre history, of set design, of great singers, and of changing public taste-all of which I write about here-are as pertinent to the understanding and the enjoyment of opera as are music history, analysis, and criticism. Partly because of their original occasion-as background essays intended for people who had already made the decision to attend a particular opera-and partly because of my own interest in opera as a cultural phenomenon, a product and inhabitant of other-than-musical worlds, many of these essays deal with things other than music.īut then so does opera. It is only the very exceptional critic who can turn rapidly written reviews of the passing scene into literature worth reading long after the event. Although I have written critical reviews of many individual opera productions, none of the others seemed to me sufficiently reflective or substantial to warrant collecting and preserving. The one exception is a piece written after, rather than before, a particular event-my description of and response to Peter Sellars's productions of Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni at Purchase, New York, in the summer of 1989, originally written for The Opera Quarterly. ![]() They are frequently longer, in any event. I like to think (but am not convinced) that the more recent pieces are better. I have added a couple of updating footnotes or postscripts, and have tried to correct a few earlier errors I'm sure others remain. ![]() They add up to no statement about or position on the phenomenon we call "opera," except insofar as the fact that one person wrote them may lead you to detect some sort of "unified sensibility" behind them. All but one of the essays that follow the Introduction were written for the San Francisco Opera Magazine, the program book of the San Francisco Opera, during the last sixteen years. ![]()
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