Tag Archives: Opera

by | March 12, 2025 · 6:00 am

Electroacoustic sound, multimedia, and digital opera

Digital opera has roots in electroacoustic works that integrate spatial soundscapes into performance, such as Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000, pictured above). Musicologist Anna Schürmer offers a broader view, tracing its history even further, suggesting its origins may precede electroacoustic sound. Schürmer links the evolution of digitally mediated works to the construction of larger 18th century theaters, where sound connected audiences across physical divides. Earlier multimedia-infused productions, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die soldaten (1965), Harrison Birtwistle’s The mask of Orpheus (1986), Libby Larsen’s Frankenstein (1990), and Bill Viola’s The Tristan project (2004, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), are significant for their use of electronics. However, they fall short of utilizing digital sound sample processing. Additional antecedents include mid-20th century radio plays and performances where multimedia significantly shaped the auditory experience.

A production of Viola’s The Tristan project.

From Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine.

The most prominent use of contemporary digital technology in opera lies in sound design, where digital processing techniques shape how audiences perceive sound within the performance space. This innovation builds on earlier milestones, including IRCAM (the French institute of research on music and sound) performances employing electronic or MIDI keyboards and voice, such as Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine (1987) and various works by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 21st century, the digital manipulation of sound samples has become a staple–though often overlooked–in both contemporary and traditional operatic productions, with subtle amplification techniques further extending its reach.

This according to the new entry on digital opera by Megan Steigerwald Ille, in DEUMM Online.

Below is a performance of Die soldaten with music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, along with an excerpt from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin sung by the soprano, Susanna Phillips.

Read related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2024/03/19/kaija-saariahos-avant-garde-sound-worlds/

https://bibliolore.org/2014/04/05/spohr-and-german-opera/

https://bibliolore.org/2011/07/10/italian-opera-manuals/

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by | December 30, 2024 · 6:00 am

Anna Moffo, the versatile soprano

Born in Wayne, Pennsylvania to an Italian American couple in 1932, the opera singer Anna Moffo began her formal music studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 1951. Initially intending to pursue a piano course, she found that the available spots were filled, so she auditioned for the vocal program and was accepted. At the Curtis Institute, Moffo also studied piano, viola, and composition, under the guidance of soprano Euphemia Giannini Gregory and pianist Martha Halbwachs Massena. In 1953, Moffo made her debut with a solo recital at the Tri-County Concerts Association. During her time at Curtis, under Gregory’s dynamic teaching, she quickly engaged with the core works of the classical repertoire.

In 1954, she won the Philadelphia Orchestra Young Artists Auditions and moved to Rome to train as a singer as a Fulbright fellow. Moffo made her debut at the Teatro Lirico in Spoleto a year later. After an audition, she won the role of Cio-Cio San in a television production of Madama Butterfly (1956), directed by Mario Lanfranchi. The broadcast, which aired on Italian national television in January 1956, marked her breakthrough in Italy and began her long career as a television opera star during the black-and-white era. Although Moffo primarily accepted lyric soprano roles early in her career, she also developed a vocal technique that enabled her to take on the more agile lyric soprano repertoire.

Moffo in La traviata.

She made her debut at the old Metropolitan Opera in New York on 14 November 1959, performing the role that would become her signature, Violetta in La traviata. Between 1955 and 1975, Moffo’s career took her to the world’s most prestigious theaters, including the inaugural series of performances at the new Metropolitan Opera in New York. During this period, she consistently demonstrated remarkable vocal stamina, appearing in over 200 performances at the Metropolitan Opera alone.

Moffo’s physical beauty, captivating presence, and exceptional stage and acting skills not only secured her continuous engagements in prestigious theaters but also led to successful ventures in film, where she performed admirably. Her participation in various productions showcased her innate acting talent. Moffo’s artistic versatility is evident in her diverse roles as a soprano, solo pianist, musicologist, presenter, narrator, composer, and even as a pop music singer. This breadth of talent was documented in various Italian television variety shows.

This according to the entry on Anna Moffo by Mario Giuseppe Genesi in DEUMM Online.

Below is a performance by Anna Moffo on Italian television.

Read a related post in Bibliolore:

https://bibliolore.org/2013/06/28/mise-en-scene/

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by | November 14, 2024 · 6:00 am

Zitkala Ša, Dakota composer and activist

At the end of the 19th century, a series of narrative essays published in The Atlantic Monthly by Dakota composer and activist Gertrude Bonnin, better known by her self-chosen name Zitkala Ša, focused on the violence of compulsory U.S. boarding schools. Existing research on her activism, however, has overlooked the subversive role of music, dance, and sound in her literary and musical projects, which reveal Zitkala Ša’s sophisticated sonic politics.

The historical tension between the prohibition and appropriation of Indigenous sounds highlights how the boarding school press functioned as a powerful engine for assimilation projects. A close reading of Zitkala Ša’s essay, The Indian dance: A protest against its abolition, along with an examination of its reception, reveals her reverse-gaze strategy and demonstrates her effectiveness in challenging aggressive assimilationists. Similarly, her collaboration on The sun dance opera resulted in a project that defied neat categorization and withheld complete disclosure of the ceremony, establishing its own sonic politics of self-determination. Zitkala Ša wrote the libretto and the songs for the opera, while William F. Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University, composed the score. The songs were inspired by a sacred ritual that was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978. The opera was groundbreaking, allowing Zitkala Ša to bridge her worlds through music. It premiered in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah, featuring performances by members of the Ute Nation residing on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation.

Zitkala Ša’s years on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, often mischaracterized as a period of domesticity in her literary career, were marked by significant creative sonic productivity, representing an important phase in her evolving activism that bridged her earlier years of serial publication with the sophisticated vocal activism of her later work.

This according to “Tiny taps and noisy hacks: Listening to Zitkala Ša’s sonic politics” by Kristen Brown (Resonance: The journal of sound and culture 2/1 [spring 2021] 348–362; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-7615).

Watch a short documentary on Zitkala Ša’s life in music and activism below.

https://www.pbs.org/video/zitkala-sa-american-indian-composer-author-activist-qqjsyq/

Related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2022/11/03/national-native-american-heritage-month-an-annotated-bibliography/

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by | January 9, 2024 · 6:00 am

The opera house as architectural space

While the term “opera house”, as a designation of a specific architecturally and institutionally consolidated venue for musical theater works, differs in content rather strictly from the genre-oriented term “opera”–both terms, at least in the European and American language areas, have been closely linked. Part of this is due to an overlap in everyday language and administrative terms where the word “opera” has been used in the official naming of musical theater institutions since the 19th century. Even today, terms such as “state opera”, “state theater”, “music theater”, and “opera” indicate the complex history of the opera house and its relationship to theater construction, urban planning, the opera genre, music theater composition, and the direction of state and city institutions.

Conversely, a convergence of the two terms can also be seen in the social and cultural science-oriented historiography of musical theater, which subsumes under opera not only aspects of composition history but also the institutional and architectural developments of opera houses. This is first and foremost due to the epoch-changing and distinctive social contours of the opera as a courtly or bourgeois institution, whose practical norms and aesthetic innovations can be linked to the architecturally fixed spatial layout of opera houses.

Additionally, comprehensive aesthetic reconceptions of musical theater such as Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk also represent important impulses for greater consideration of the opera house as an architectural space. While more recent scientific emphasis on the symbolism and practical theatrical relevance of opera house architecture can be explained via the turn to cultural studies and praxeology, the reorientation of popular opera, evident since the post-war period, was based on individual venues or with a strong concentration on opera as a spatially bound artistic practice due to the reconstruction of opera houses after World War II.

Read the entire article on the opera house as part of the brand new Free Article feature on MGG Online. New free articles will be updated regularly.

Below is a video on the architectural and cultural history of the Teatro alla Scala (pictured above), a well-known opera house in Milan, Italy. If you don’t speak Italian, turn on the captions function for an English translation.

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by | November 17, 2023 · 6:00 am

Comic farce and the operatic satire of Borodin

Italian opera has played an important role in Russian musical life since the early 17th century, but by the 19th century it was being promoted there more than Russian opera. In retaliation, Russian composers used their operas to make fun of Italian opera’s stock situations and styles, and brought Russian opera back into prominence.

For example, in his early comic farce Богатыри (Bogatyri, Heroic warriors), Alexander Borodin used familiar music and arias from Italian and French operas (by Rossini, Verdi, Offenbach, Meyerbeer, and others) to set up situations where the original intention of the music and its new setting were at humorous extremes.

Read more in “Italians in a Russian manner: One step from serious to funny” by Svetlana Sergeevna Martynova (Fontes artis musicae LVI/1 [January–March 2009] pp. 1–6). This post originally appeared in Bibliolore 10 years ago this week.

Below is the opening of his B-minor symphony, which Massine used for his ballet Bogatyri, illustrated with images of the heroic warriors of Russian folklore.

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by | August 15, 2023 · 6:00 am

Grace Bumbry at Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Grace Bumbry’s appearance as the first African American singer in the role of Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser from 1961 through 1963 sparked fierce reactions. By the age of 23, Bumbry had created such a stir in the opera world that she was invited to audition in Bayreuth for Wieland Wagner, the grandson of the composer Richard Wagner, where he would be producing a new production of Tannhaeuser. When the press discovered that the new Venus was a Black singer, protests began to appear publicly in various publications. Wieland Wagner stated that his grandfather would want the best voice for the part and remained steadfast in his decision to cast Bumbry. Her racial background did not dissuade him, and neither did the negative press. Bumbry courageously performed the role and changed the history of opera by becoming the first person of color ever to be cast in a major role at the prestigious Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The next day, the critics called her “Die Schwarze Venus” (The Black Venus), and a new star was propelled into international stardom.

In those performances, Bumbry paved the way for opera singers of color. She grew up in modest surroundings in St. Louis, Missouri and as a young girl became interested in music after attending concerts given by Marian Anderson. Bumbry’s life was forever altered by the concerts, and she soon absorbed every recording of classical music she could find. At age 16, she won first prize in a local radio contest which provided her the opportunity to appear on The Arthur Godfrey Talent Scout Show, a popular U.S. radio and television variety show, where she sang “O Don Fatale” from Verdi’s Don Carlo.

Bumbry later studied at Boston University after encountering racist policies at the St. Louis Conservatory. She continued her studies with Lotte Lehmann in Santa Barbara, California in 1955 and finally with Pierre Bernac in Paris, where she made her debut at the age of 23 as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida at the Théâtre National in 1960. She made her debuts at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden London, as Princess Eboli in Don Carlos in 1963, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1965, and at La Scala in Milan in 1966. Around 1970 she shifted her full, energetic mezzo-soprano voice to soprano and went on to sing Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Salome in Richard Strauss’s eponymous opera. From the late 1980s onward, she returned to her lower voice and took on character roles such as Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the Salzburg Festival in 1994.

Bumbry passed away on 7 May 2023 at the age of 86 in Vienna.

Read the full obituary on Grace Bumbry in MGG Online. A previous posting on Bumbry in Bibliolore can be found here: https://bibliolore.org/2017/01/04/grace-bumbry-black-venus/

Below is a video of her performing Vissi d’arte, a soprano aria from the opera Tosca by Giacomo Puccini.

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by | July 18, 2023 · 6:00 am

Discovery of eight new arias by Gluck

A new discovery is on its way to boost the Gluck Complete Edition, headed by the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, as the editing project nears its completion. Project manager Tanja Gölz authenticated eleven vocal pieces from Gluck’s opera Poro found in a Berlin antiquarian bookshop and originating from an anonymous private collection. These include eight arias that had previously been considered lost and were therefore completely unknown to Gluck researchers. Composed in 1744 for the Teatro Regio in Turin, Poro is one of Gluck’s early opere serie, of which only individual numbers have survived in the form of copies, subsequently created parts, or isolated selections.

On this basis, the historical-critical edition of the fragmentary opere serie is presented in two parts of the Gluck Complete Edition published by Bärenreiter, thus making another facet of the hitherto almost unknown early work of the opera reformer available to scholars and performers. As a result of the newly found short score and canto e basso copies, which were likely made for rehearsals and thus within the immediate context of the world premiere, the proportion of Poro’s musical text has increased to a total of 14 complete numbers (including the sinfonia), which is almost 50 percent of the original, full-length work.

Learn more in the news section of MGG Online.

The image above features È prezzo leggiero, Gandarte’s entrance aria from Gluck’s opera Poro (Turin 1744). Listen below to pieces from Gluck’s Alceste, including the work of U.S. soprano Jessye Norman.

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by | May 22, 2023 · 6:00 am

Wagner and Buddhism

Scholars have long known that Wagner had a deep and lasting interest in Buddhism; less known are the specific insights garnered from Buddhism that are manifested in Parsifal. The key to understanding this connection is the enigmatic figure of Kundry.

Contrary to the common interpretation of Kundry as the incarnation of the will, and in light of Wagner’s admiration for Schopenhauer, she may be seen as the personification of desire. Desiring, which is different from wanting, is a fundamental aspect of Buddhism. As Buddha explained in his very first sermon, desire is the cause of suffering (dukkha). Buddhist teaching holds that suffering can only be overcome when desire is vanquished.

Kundry appears in three forms in Parsifal; these correspond to the three forms of desire in Buddhism. This interpretation aligns the work’s Christian, pagan, and Buddhist symbolism as an expression of the inner way that is shared by all who tread the path of religious mysticism. Through extensive study of Buddhism, Wagner came to understand the deeper side of all religions, a universal truth that all mediators of religious traditions come to understand.

This according to “Kundry: The personification of the role of desire in the holy life” by Pandit Bhikkhu (Cittasamvaro) (Wagnerspectrum III/2 [2007] pp. 97–114; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2007-20593).

Today is Wagner’s 210th birthday! Above, Christa Ludwig as Kundry; below, Waltraud Meier in the role.

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by | May 17, 2023 · 6:00 am

Women in early modern Florence

Aristocratic women exerted unprecedented political and social influence in Florence throughout the late 16th and early 17th century; during this period convents flourished and female members of the powerful Medici family governed the city for the only time in its history.

These women also helped to shape the city’s aristocratic life, commissioning works of music, art, and theater that were inscribed with their own concerns and aspirations, promoting a vision of their world and their place in it—a worldview that differed significantly from that of their male counterparts.

The musical construction of female characters in the developing operatic realm became especially important and increasingly politicized. Court sponsorship of the arts began underwriting a new image of legitimate authority, presenting Florentine audiences and influential visitors with numerous examples of virtuous and powerful female leaders.

For example, in Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina, commissioned and produced by the archduchess Maria Maddalena (above) for a diplomatic celebration, the benevolent sorceress Melissa single-handedly defeats the evil enchantress Alcina, freeing the heroic Ruggerio from the bonds of illicit sensuality. Alcina’s fatal excesses are depicted in musical passages that surpass the normal harmonic vocabulary of early 17th-century Florentine opera, demonstrating her defiance of the boundaries of acceptable behavior; Melissa’s superior power is portrayed in music that avoids harmonic and melodic extremes, indicating her rationality and control as she restores the hero’s sanity. Such heroines symbolically asserted both women’s political rights and the moral and spiritual basis for their legitimacy.

This according to Echoes of women’s voices: Music, art, and female patronage in early modern Florence by Kelley Harness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2006-4451).

You’ll find Harness at this year’s Boston Early Music Festival on Friday, 9 June, 10–1pm EDT, where she will participate alongside several other leading women scholars in Women at Work: Composers, Musicians, and Scholars, a discussion session dedicated to the history of women making music.

Below, excerpts from La liberazione di Ruggiero’s Australian premiere in 2012.

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by | April 20, 2023 · 6:00 am

Cleopatra and the Oriental menace

In canonical French Orientalist discourse of the 19th century, the Orient is cast as effeminate, weak, and in need of rehabilitation by Western civilization. However, the dramatic arts of late 16th- and early 17th-century France constructed a different picture, one in which the Orient as temptress was a deadly threat to the West.

During the late Valois and early Bourbon monarchies, the queen regents Catherine de Médicis (1519–89), Marie de Médicis (1575–1642), and Anne d’Autriche (1601–66) were associated with political turmoil and civil war that threatened to destroy the kingdom. Within this troubled political context, fatal women of the Orient sought to entice their prey on the French stage. Most deadly among them was Cleopatra, embodiment of Egypt, incarnation of women’s malignant sexual seduction, exposed in her subjugation of Marcus Antonius, the fallen, conquered, and emasculated Roman.

With the rise of Louis XIV (1638–1715) and his imposition of a purportedly indomitable and masculine monarchy, women were to be vanquished outright. Reigning women, including those in the tragedies of Philippe Quinault (1635–88), were the victims of self-destructive passions ending in defeat, death, or abandonment by the heroes whom they sought to enslave. An emblematic example of such a crushed woman is the sorceress Armide in the tragédie en musique by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the libretto of which is by Quinault.

This according to “Regnorum ruina: Cleopatra and the Oriental menace in early French tragedy” by Desmond Hosford, an essay included in French Orientalism: Culture, politics, and the imagined Other (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010, 23–47; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2010-6408).

Above, a 17th-century depiction of Cleopatra by Claude Vignon; below, Stéphanie d’Oustrac portrays Armide’s downfall.

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