An Earnest Meyerbeer: Le prophète at London's Royal Italian Opera, 1849 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety. This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here. In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Angelica Catalani was the most celebrated opera singer of the first decades of the 19th century. Her performances in London served as a focal point for an audience wishing to participate as cultivated connoisseurs in a cosmopolitan community of taste. However, her performances in London also attracted an exceptionally wide range of attacks and critiques which pointed towards the various measures the opera singer is employing within the symbolic logic of the medium (such as an abnormal physicality or the manipulation of language) and the social corruptions they supposedly entail. In my paper I will focus on one image that was repeatedly invoked as part of the anti-Catalani discourse, that of a singing cat, and the ways it was used to alert the public to the dangers of opera on the background of the political turmoil and cultural anxiety of those years.
Sullivan, Scott, and Ivanhoe: Constructing Historical Time and National Identity in Victorian Opera
Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 9/2 (December 2012), 295-321
based opera Ivanhoe, despite attaining great success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. Taking its bearings from such criticisms this paper explores Sullivan's problematic magnum opus from the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels -his opera's musicaldramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the 'iconic mode' in Sullivan's music, Ivanhoe can be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stasis and stability located in the past -highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and to found a new tradition for future English opera. Moreover, investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity. These features are teased out in the context of Scott's impact on the Victorian mind and their affinities with other historicist tendencies in the arts such as the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
We wish to propose a study of the relationship between Meyerbeer and the French grand opéra through the personal and aesthetic links Meyerbeer and Berlioz shared. We will present a comprehensive analysis of the texts these two composers wrote to each other and one about another. Studying the interactions between Meyerbeer and Berlioz, we will try to bring forward a clearer vision of the French grand opéra, which encapsulates the strong links and interactions those two composers had together, as well as musical, cultural and political contexts of their time. Indeed, the grand opéra has the particularity to provide material subsistence to a composer (and even encourage patronage and alliances, as did Meyerbeer towards Berlioz). The grand opéra grants a composer a certain prestige, a prominent place as a cultural player in a splendid and eternal cultural place. Grand opéra provides a material and spiritual support for the new French policy-makers: the bourgeoisie, politicians, and other major institutional figures. Artistic careers of Berlioz and Meyerbeer were clearly marked by the periods of monarchical and imperial restoration they went through, and we see the model of the grand opéra act as a powerful tool for cultural domination of elites in France and Europe. Grand opéra will appear as a splendid tool for social and political recognition, above all for its composer. Namely, the relationship between Meyerbeer and Berlioz revolve around such mutual and global recognition, Berlioz acknowledging the genius and power of Meyerbeer, trying to gain fame through Meyerbeer's personal influence and operatic form. We will study the work of Meyerbeer, showing that it contributes significantly to define the characteristics of the grand opéra and how the composer proclaims its aesthetics in the musical world, including towards Berlioz whom he supports. More generally and also going in the details of music, we will present the aesthetic of the grand opéra and its influence on the art of its time, notably on Berlioz whose compositions all take a kind of Meyerbeerian Grandeur: with fantastic symphonies, funeral and triumphant masses, virgilian operas, etc.
Opera and Music Drama (1850-1900)
Survey of repertoire, critical issues, and cultural themes in European opera of the later nineteenth century. Chapter 14 of _The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music_ (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 371-423.
Staging at the Opéra-Comique in nineteenth-century Paris. Auber’s Fra Diavolo and the livrets de mise en scène, in: Cambridge Opera Journal, 13/3 (2001), S. 239–260. - Printed stage-direction books, so-called livretsd e mise-en-scene, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an "objective" reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.
Music & Letters, 2018
Due to the grand scale of the productions, the unmatched musical forces, the virtuosic vocal display and the complicated literary narratives of personal triumph drawn from chronicles of history, French grand opera was perceived by many throughout the nineteenth century as an aspirational art form that redefined what was possible on the dramatic stage. Wherever French grand opera was presented, be it in Switzerland, Russia or Spain, in translation or severely reduced due to local censorship, the works exported a world-view that highlighted the liberal forces of a bourgeois city centre founded upon revolution.
Few other cultural forms possess the flexibility that opera has to integrate music, literature, theater, and painting and to stimulate discourse about the effectiveness of their performativity as aesthetic practices. Unlike other art forms that proudly claimed ancient origins, opera originated around 1600 in Italy in combinations of poetry, dance, and music staged in lavish productions to celebrate weddings, to enliven civic celebrations, and to provide courtly entertainment. Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus and Hermione of 1673 launched opera in France at the court of Louis XIV. The clarity of five-act structures replaced the congested Baroque plots of Italian opera, and French opera evolved into a form of theater that incorporated the musical, dramatic, and visual arts in a lasting but often contentious partnership. Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley's Art, Theatre, and Opera in Paris, 1750-1850. Exchanges and Tensions focuses on a crucial period in political and social life where the arts sought not only to support but often to rival one another as they mirrored the territoriality of the French governments and their political regimes. The mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century in Paris bracketed by the editors of this book experienced tumultuous revolutions in governments and subsequent changes in the arts that defined French culture and nationhood. The thrust of post-Revolutionary individualism and the prioritizing of originality led to competition for critical authority among the arts. Hibberd and Wrigley's eloquent " Introduction " highlights the growing instability in genre boundaries that in previous eras codified aesthetic and political intentions. If the Opera and the Salon sought to maintain their sovereign images by controlling subject matter and the hierarchy of the arts, the satellite theaters that operated as entertainment venues offered different artistic viewpoints that found a comparison in changing exhibition policies by which artists brought their works to the attention of the public outside of the official walls of the Salon. The essays in this collection seek to highlight key concepts most often by making particular cases visually and thematically emblematic of larger issues. David Charlton launches the intermedia investigations with " Hearing through the eye in eighteenth-century French opera, " in which he tracks the impact that the Paris Opéra designer Jean-Nicolas Servandroni (1695-1766) had on opera scenery. Servandroni decided that stage scenery should no longer serve merely as a backdrop to the actor. He invented the genre of spectacle d'optique; instead of a solo organist performing alone multiple instrumentalists played music, composers' names were announced, and illusionistic staging magnified the dramatic effect rather than serving as a static prop behind the actors. Opera's merging of the arts produced a level of aesthetic intensity that surpassed the display of any one of these arts by themselves in their traditional venues. Librettists were cautioned to remain aware of the composer's use of nuanced expressions so that the two arts complemented rather than competed with one another. The dominance of landscape scenery at the Opéra-Comique at the end of the eighteenth century foreshadowed the establishment of the Prix de Rome for landscape in 1816 by the Académie. The