14 research outputs found
Introduction
A special edition of the Cambridge Opera Journal (Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2017) was produced from papers discussed at the conference Grand Opéra on the Move. This conference was convened at King’s College London, under the auspices of Professor Roger Parker’s European Research Council-funded Music in London, 1800–51 project (Advanced Grant 2012, "Music in London, 1800-1851": ERC-2012-AdG 323404-Muslond).
This chapter was also sponsored by Sarah Hibberd's AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship: French Opera and the Revolutionary Sublime (2014/15)
Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut
Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello
One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman
Unsound Seeds
With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905.
Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there
Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy
For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886
Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton
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Musical Materialities in Milan and Liberal Italy at the fine secolo
This dissertation examines musical culture in Milan from the 1870s to 1890s, with particular attention to the ways the material conditions of musical production and consumption were enmeshed with liberal values. The urban center in these decades was known as the capitale morale--the economic, cultural and moral seat of the new nation--in contrast with Rome, the nominal capital. I show that the development of the urban center and that of Milan's preeminent theater, the Teatro alla Scala, were intimately linked. Milanese liberal imperatives of hard work and innovation in these immediate post-unification decades were played out in and around the theater.Such imperatives implied breaks with tradition, as in the establishment of the baton conductor and the introduction of electric illumination at the Teatro alla Scala. Chapter 1 concentrates on Franco Faccio, La Scala's first baton conductor. Critics loved the sturdiness of a man measured no less in moral than musical terms. Faccio's reliability and exacting standards of instrumental execution resonated with a new Bismarck-inspired pragmatism in Milan, and the sound Faccio brought forth from the orchestra at La Scala adumbrates the much more famous house sound under his successor, Arturo Toscanini.Chapter 2 centers on the Società Edison Italiana's 1882 installation of electric lighting at La Scala, one of the earliest incandescent installations in the world-- and by far the most ambitious. The innovation was made possible by the economic bullishness and inventiveness of these liberal decades. La Scala became a crucial promotional forum for Edison, where unusual measures were taken to ensure the venture's success, including the unprecedented darkening of the auditorium planned in order to focus audience attention on the novel stage illumination.Milanese liberal imperatives also implied continual renewal. Chapter 3 investigates the contemporaneous operatic voice: in response to a perceived decline in vocal production, the Milan Conservatory promoted "bel canto" vocal methods in treatises by Lamperti (1864) and Delle Sedie (1874). In fact, however, the latter method set vocal instruction on a controversial new course, one that, because it was alleged to cause extreme vocal strain, stimulated debate about the limits of human productivity.Finally, Chapter 4 turns to Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, which premiered at La Scala in 1893. It is a commonplace of Verdi criticism that the opera was perplexing in its newness. I show that several critics at the premiere chose to promote the idea of Falstaff as a civic innovation par excellence, thereby downplaying its links with other "less groundbreaking" repertory. The more innovative the opera seemed, after all, the more it had in common with the capitale morale, that center of continual work and progress