References
1. INTRODUCTION
1. Paul Robinson, ‘A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera’, in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 328–46; here 345.
2. Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago, 1994), 209.
3. Richard Wagner, ‘Der Freischütz: To the Paris Public’, in William Ashton Ellis, trans., Richard Wagner’s Prose Works vol. 1: The Art Work of the Future, and Other Works (1895; repr. Lincoln, 1993), 169–82; original in French in Gazette musicale de Paris, 23 and 30 May 1841.
4. Robert Bailey, ‘Siegfried or Tristan?’, in Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan und Isolde: The Norton Critical Score (New York, 1986), 5–6.
5. Karl Gustav Fellerer, ‘Mozarts Zauberflöte als Efenoper’, in Symbolae Historiae Musicae, eds. Friedrich Wilhelm Riedel and Hubert Unverricht (Mainz, 1976), 229–47.
6. Philip Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006), 124.
7. Michael Barron, Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design (London, 1993), 318.
8. The New York Times, 14 October 1883.
9. Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 1 January 2007.
10. Denis Forman, The Good Opera Guide (London, 1996), 264.
11. Alessandro Luzio, ed., Carteggi verdiani, vol. 1 (Rome, 1935), 111.
12. Francesco Milizia, Complete Formal and Material Treatise on the Theatre (1794); cited in Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 255.
13. Max Winkler, A Penny from Heaven (New York, 1951), 238.
14. Richard Osborne, Rossini, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2007), 152.
15. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 26.
2. OPERA’S FIRST CENTENNIAL
1. For a classic iteration, see Donald Jay Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947; 4th edn, with Hermine Weigel Williams, New York, 2003).
2. Henry Maty, A New Review, with Literary Curiosities and Literary Intelligence (London, 1783), 133.
3. Waldo Selden Pratt, The History of Music: A Handbook and Guide for Students (New York, 1927), 151–2.
4. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama (1851), trans. William Ashton Ellis (repr. New York, 1995), 26.
5. Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, Wesen und Geschichte der Oper (Leipzig, 1838), 89, 98.
6. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), 35.
7. F. W. Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera (Oxford, 1995), 87–8.
8. Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven, 2000), 49.
9. Cristoforo Ivanovich, Minerva al tavolino (1681), cited in Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 39.
10. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 223–5
11. Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776–89), Vol. III, 790.
12. John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge, 1992), 12.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 232.
15. Denis Stevens, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi (Cambridge, 1980), 117.
16. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 22.
17. Ibid., 45.
18. Saint-Évremond, letter to the Duke of Buckingham (1669 or 1670), quoted in Weiss, Opera, 53.
19. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 133–5.
20. Giasone is discussed by Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 346–8 and 358–9; also by Susan McClary, ‘Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera’, in Mark Franko and Annette Richards, eds., Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (Hanover, NH, 2000), 177–200; and by Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato (Cambridge, 2009), 143.
21. Memoirs of Jean-Jacques Bouchard, cited in Weiss, Opera, 33.
22. See Bettina Varwig, ‘Schütz’s Dafne and the German Imagination’, in Nikolaus Bacht, ed., Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich (Aldershot, 2006), 115–35.
23. See the entry on ‘Masque’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992), vol. 3, 253.
3. OPERA SERIA
1. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), 22.
2. John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge, 1992), 56.
3. Ibid., 122–3.
4. Charles de Brosses, quoted in Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 85.
5. Suzanne Aspden, ‘ “An Infinity of Factions”: Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Undoing of Society’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9/1 (1997), pp. 1–19; here 8.
6. Charles de Brosses, quoted in Weiss, Opera, 85.
7. Aspden, ‘An Infinity of Factions’, 11–13.
8. Moreschi’s 1904 version of the Bach/Gounod ‘Ave Maria’ is available on http://www.archive.org/details/AlessandroMoreschi.
9. Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera, 39.
10. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 400 (translation adapted slightly).
11. Ibid., 275 (translation adapted slightly).
12. Weiss, Opera, 53.
13. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (1956; rev. edn, Berkeley, 1988), 39–57.
14. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera on Stage (Chicago, 2002), 71.
15. Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (New York, 1955), 33.
16. Mark W. Stahura, ‘Handel’s Haymarket Theater’, in Mark A. Radice, ed., Opera in Context: Essays on Historical Staging from the Late Renaissance to the Time of Puccini (Portland, Ore., 1998), 103.
17. Ibid., 104.
18. Christopher Hogwood, Handel (London, 2007), 63–4.
19. The Spectator, 6 March 1710.
20. Entry on ‘Orlando’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992), vol. 3, 757.
4. DISCIPLINE
1. Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London, 1773), 225.
2. John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge, 1992), 83.
3. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, iv.111–12.
4. John Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), 110.
5. Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 98–9.
6. Ibid., 102.
7. Ibid., 73.
8. Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago, 1994), 203.
9. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources (Chicago, 1998), 247.
10. Ibid., 249
11. Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776–89), vol. 4, 547.
12. Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances … in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785), 33.
13. Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 209–10
14. Ibid., 215.
15. Weiss, Opera, 108.
16. Julie Ann Sadie, ed., Companion to Baroque Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 138.
17. Weiss, Opera, 119.
18. Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 238.
19. Ibid., 249.
20. Weiss, Opera, 98.
21. Burney, A General History, vol. 4, 495.
22. Simon Goldhill, ‘Who Killed Chevalier Gluck?’, in Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (Princeton, 2011), 92.
23. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Gluck und die Oper (Berlin, 1863), 313.
24. Charles Burney, Music in Germany (1775), cited in Patricia Howard, C. W. Gluck: Orfeo (Cambridge, 1981), 57.
25. Jean-François Marmontel, Essay on the Progress of Music in France (1777), cited in Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 370.
26. Goldhill, ‘Who Killed Chevalier Gluck?’, 87.
27. Ibid., 98.
28. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Ritter Gluck’, in Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, eds. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago, 1969), 9–10.
29. Letter to Leopold Mozart, 8 November 1780; in Eric Blom, ed., Mozart’s Letters (Harmondsworth, 1968), 148.
30. Ibid., 147.
31. Alfred Einstein, Gluck, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1936), 151.
5. OPERA BUFFA AND MOZART’S LINE OF BEAUTY
1. Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 89.
2. Thomas Busby, A General History of Music from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 2 (London, 1819), 447–8. The specific sentence about the ‘merit’ of Galuppi’s opera surpassing any other ‘burletta in England’ is plagiarized from Charles Burney’s General History of Music from the Early Ages to the Present, vol. 4 (London, 1776), 474.
3. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert H. Heitner, in Goethe’s Collected Works, ed. Victor Lange, Eric A. Blackall and Cyrus Hamlin, vol. 6 (Boston, 1989), 64; discussed in Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (Princeton, 1999), 44.
4. 7 May 1783; in Eric Blom, ed., Mozart’s Letters (Harmondsworth, 1956), 208.
5. Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment (London, 1992).
6. 17 December 1781; in Blom, Mozart’s Letters, 186–7.
7. This is one of the theses of Joseph Kerman’s treatment of operatic history in his Opera as Drama (1956; rev. edn, Berkeley, 1988).
8. Mark Everist, ‘Enshrining Mozart: Don Giovanni and the Viardot Circle’, in 19th-Century Music, 25/2–3 (2001), 165–89; here 176.
9. For an extensive account of Don Giovanni fervour from the 1780s to the 1850s, see Otto Jahn, Life of Mozart (1856–9), trans. Pauline D. Townsend, vol. 3 (London, 1882), 134–45. For more recent fervour, see Bernard Williams, ‘Don Giovanni as an Idea’, in Julian Rushton, ed., W. A. Mozart: Don Giovanni (Cambridge, 1981), 81–91.
10. Cited in Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago, 1994), 388.
11. Excerpt from Either/Or cited in Weiss, 151.
12. Jahn, Life of Mozart, vol. 3, 134–45.
13. Hermann Abert, W. A. Mozart ([1923–4] New Haven, 2007), 632.
6. SINGING AND SPEAKING BEFORE 1800
1. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama (1851), trans. William Ashton Ellis (repr. New York, 1995), 112–13.
2. Cited in Thomas Betzwieser, Sprechen und Singen: Ästhetik und Erscheiningsformen der Dialogoper (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2002), 1. The source is an 1816 review by Hoffmann of Méhul’s Ariodant (1799).
3. Thomas Baumann, ed., Mozart: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Cambridge, 1987), 77.
4. Royal Opera House production, directed by Elijah Moshinsky; first seen in May 2001.
5. Betzwieser, Sprechen und Singen, 75.
6. Letter dated 26 September 1781; in Eric Blom, ed., Mozart’s Letters (Harmondsworth, 1968), 181.
7. Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 137–8.
8. John T. Scott, ed., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Essay on the Origin of Language and Writings Related to Music (Dartmouth, 1999), 497.
9. Emily Anderson, Letters of Mozart and His Family (London, 1985), 631.
7. THE GERMAN PROBLEM
1. Howard Bushnell, Maria Malibran: A Biography of the Singer (University Park and London, 1979), 196.
2. Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (repr. New York, 1994), 36.
3. Herbert Weinstock, Rossini: A Biography (New York, 1968), 118.
4. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley, 1989), 8–15.
5. Edmond Michotte, Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini (Paris, 1860), trans. and ed. Herbert Weinstock (Chicago, 1968), 98.
6. Mark Everist, ‘Enshrining Mozart: Don Giovanni and the Viardot Circle’, in 19th-Century Music, 25/2–3 (2001), 165–89; here 178.
7. Peter Mercer-Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn (Cambridge, 2004), 19.
8. Richard Wagner, Prose Works, Vol. 7, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1898), 179.
9. John Warrack, ed., Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music (Cambridge, 1981), 338.
10. Entry on ‘Der Freischütz’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992), vol. 2, 299.
8. ROSSINI AND TRANSITION
1. Stendhal [Henri Beyle], Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London, 1956), 1.
2. Giovanni Pacini, Le mie memorie artistiche (Florence, 1865), 64.
3. Richard Osborne, Rossini, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2007), 126.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. Giuseppe Mazzini, Filosofia della musica (1836), ed. Marcello de Angelis (Florence, 1977), 53–4.
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Ibid., 56.
8. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 65.
9. Philip Gossett, ‘Introduction’, Critical Edition of Vocal Score of Tancredi (Pesaro, 1984), xix.
10. Gossett, Tancredi, xvii.
11. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 396.
12. Herbert Weinstock, Rossini: A Biography (New York, 1968), 345–7.
13. Paolo Fabbri, ‘Rossini the Aesthetician’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 6 (1994), 19–29; here 27.
14. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 452.
15. Ibid., 239–40.
16. Ibid., 252.
17. Ibid., 237.
18. Ibid., 239.
19. Ibid., 251.
9. THE TENOR COMES OF AGE
1. Raymond Edward Priestley, Antarctic Adventure: Scott’s Northern Party (New York, 1915), 93–4.
2. James Davies, ‘ “Veluti in speculum”: The Twilight of the Castrato’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 17/3 (2005), 271–301; here 276.
3. Ibid., 271.
4. Ibid., 271.
5. Heather Hadlock, ‘On the Cusp between the Past and the Future: The Mezzo-Soprano Romeo of Bellini’s I Capuleti’, Opera Quarterly, 17/3 (2001), 399–422; here 400.
6. Gilbert-Louis Duprez, Souvenirs d’un chanteur (Paris, 1880), 75.
7. Entry on ‘Duprez’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992), vol. 1, 1281.
8. This and all subsequent quotations in the paragraph are from Annalisa Bini and Jeremy Commons, eds., Le prime rappresentazioni delle opere di Donizetti nella stampa coeva (Rome, 1997), 344–55.
9. Carmelo Neri, ed., Lettere di Vincenzo Bellini (1819–1835) (Palermo, 1991), 287.
10. Ursula Kramer (with Peter Branscombe), entry on ‘Unger, Caroline’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (London, 2001), vol. 26, 72–3.
11. Guido Zavadini, Donizetti: vita, musiche, epistolario (Bergamo, 1948), 379.
12. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), 93–9.
13. Mary Ann Smart, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4/2 (1992), 119–41.
14. Romana Margherita Pugliese, ‘The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor’s Cadenza’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 16/1 (2004), 23–42.
15. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter 15, trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling (New York, 2007), 292–3.
16. Herbert Weinstock, Donizetti (London, 1964), 200.
17. Smart, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, 34.
18. Weinstock, Donizetti, 262.
19. Heinrich Heine, ‘Heinrich Heine’s Musical Feuilletons (Concluded)’, eds. O. G. Sonneck and Frederick H. Martens, The Musical Quarterly, 8/3 (1922), 435–68; here 468.
20. Stendhal [Henri Beyle], Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London, 1956), 378.
21. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 416.
22. Ibid., 416.
23. David Kimbell, Vincenzo Bellini: Norma (Cambridge, 1998), 63.
24. Ibid., 93.
25. John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge, 1996), 43.
26. Ibid., 54–5.
27. Kimbell, Vincenzo Bellini: Norma, 92.
10. YOUNG VERDI
1. Most standard histories of the early twentieth century follow this line; see for example Donald Jay Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947; 4th edn, with Hermine Weigel Williams, New York, 2003), 401–2. It is largely repeated, albeit with a great deal more sophistication, in Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (1956; rev. edn, Berkeley, 1988), 144–8.
2. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. 2, 61.
3. Ibid., vol. 1, 111.
4. Pierluigi Petrobelli, Music in the Theater (Princeton, 1994), 33.
5. William Weaver, Verdi: A Documentary Study (London, n.d.), 13 (translation adapted).
6. Carlo Gatti, Verdi nelle immagini (Milan, 1941), 236.
7. Charles Reid, The Music Monster: A Biography of James William Davison (London, 1984), 181.
8. Gabriele Baldini, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi (Cambridge, 1980), 74.
9. Marcello Conati, Interviews and Encounters with Verdi (London, 1984), 109.
10. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 1, 270.
11. David Rosen and Andrew Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook (New York, 1984), 7.
12. Ibid., 67.
13. Ibid., 71.
14. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 1, 477.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 479.
17. Abramo Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859), 197.
11. GRAND OPERA
1. Susanna Pasticci, ‘La traviata en travestie: Rivisitazioni del testo verdiano nella musica strumentale ottocentesca’, Studi verdiani, 14 (1999), 118–87.
2. Hervé Lacombe, ‘The “Machine” and the State’, in David Charlton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge, 2003), 21–42, here 29; other unattributed details in this paragraph come from the same source.
3. Marian Smith, ‘Dance and Dancers’, in Charlton, Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, 93–107; here 106.
4. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. 3, 22.
5. John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: in Familiar Letters to His Friends (Philadelphia, 1838), 30.
6. Joseph d’Ortigue, La Balcon de l’Opéra (Paris, 1833), 122–3.
7. Heinrich Heine, ‘Über die französische Bühne’; quoted in Jürgen Maehder, ‘Historienmalerei und Grand Opéra: zur Raumvorstellung in den Bildern Géricaults und Delacroix und auf der Bühne der Académie royale de Musique’, in Sieghardt Döhring and Arnold Jacobshagen, eds., Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater (Laaber, 1999), 58–87.
8. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama (1850); in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (repr. Lincoln, Neb., 1993–95), vol. 2, 95.
9. Simon Williams, ‘The Spectacle of the Past in Grand Opera’, in Charlton, Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, 58–75; here 61.
10. Ibid., 64.
11. Bayreuth, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Gesellschaft, Ms B II a 5, 55: ‘Ein Traum (Paris). Mit Herwegh. Menschen umringen und singen uns an. H. verwundert. Ich: hat sich das nicht auch Gessler im Tell gefallen lassen müssen?’ (A dream. Paris. With Herwegh. People surround us and sing at us. H. is amazed. I: didn’t Gessler in Tell also have to put up with that?)
12. Edmond Michotte, Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini (Paris, 1860), trans. and ed. Herbert Weinstock (Chicago, 1968), 69.
13. Frederick Niecks, Frederick Chopin as Man and Musician, vol. 1 (London, 1890), 226, 227.
14. David Charlton, ‘The Nineteenth Century: France’, in Roger Parker, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (Oxford, 1994), 122–68; here 138.
15. Sandy Petrey, ‘Robert le diable and Louis-Philippe the King’, in Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart, eds., Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (Oxford, 2001), 137–54; here 143.
16. Cormac Newark, ‘Ceremony, Celebration, and Spectacle in La Juive’, in Parker and Smart, Reading Critics Reading, 155–87; here 185.
17. A classic iteration comes in the discussion of French Grand Opera in Donald Jay Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947; 4th edition, with Hermine Weigel Williams, 2003), 354: ‘Musical forms and idioms were mingled in a luxuriant eclecticism, the object being to dazzle popular audiences who demanded thrills and for whom the aristocratic restraints of the eighteenth century had no meaning. The inevitable consequence was an inflated style … of striking and brilliant musical numbers inadequately motivated by the dramatic situation.’
18. Heinrich Heine, ‘Über die französische Bühne’; quoted in Tom Sutcliffe, The Faber Book of Opera (London, 2000), 303.
19. David Cairns, Berlioz, 2 vols. (London, 1989, 1999), vol. 2, 239.
20. Stuart Spencer, Wagner Remembered (London, 2000), 31.
21. Thomas S. Grey, Wagner and His World (Princeton, 2009), 335.
22. Guido Zavadini, Donizetti: vita, musiche, epistolario (Bergamo, 1948), 494–5.
23. Andrew Porter, ‘Les Vêpres siciliennes: New Letters from Verdi to Scribe’, 19th-Century Music, 2 (1978–9), 95–109; here 97 (translation amended).
24. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2, 171.
25. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 578.
26. Ibid., 220.
27. J. Moynet, L’Envers du théâtre, machines et décorations (1875; 3rd edn, Paris, 1888), 282.
12. YOUNG WAGNER
1. Eberhardt’s Allgemeiner Polizei-Anzeiger, vol. 23, no. 47 (July 1853), 280.
2. A copy of the original arrest warrant poster of 1849 is in the Deutsches Theatermuseum Munich.
3. Rosemary Lloyd, ed., Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire (Chicago, 1986), 145.
4. Catulle Mendès, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886), ii. On medical diagnoses of Wagner’s uninterruptible speech, which circulated even during his lifetime, see Nicholas Vazsonyi, Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge, 2010), 2.
5. Thomas S. Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (Cambridge, 2008), 25.
6. Thomas S. Grey, Wagner and His World (Princeton, 2009), 342.
7. Richard Wagner, ‘A Communication to My Friends’, in Prose Works, vol. 1, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1892), 370 (translation adapted).
8. Grey, Wagner and His World, 252.
9. ‘Das Liebesverbot: Report on a First Performance’ (1871), in Richard Wagner Prose Works, vol. 7, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1898), 8.
10. Ibid., vol. 8 (London, 1899), 67–8.
11. Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge, 1989), 193.
12. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 7, 81.
13. Musical Review and Gazette (16 April 1859), 116.
14. The Aeolian Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 7.
15. The authors’ names are pseudonyms for The Honourable Julian Henry Charles Fane and Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, first Earl of Lytton, not to be confused with Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton, author of the novel Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835).
16. Samuel Holland Rous, The Victrola Book of the Opera (4th rev. edn, New York, 1917), 478
17. Marcel Proust: Selected Letters 1880–1903, ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1983), 91.
18. Hugh Reginald Haweis, reporting on the first London performances of the opera in 1876, in My Musical Life, vol. 2 (London, 1884), 547.
19. Review of Tannhäuser, London, 14 February 1882, in The Theatre. A Monthly Review of the Drama, Music, and the Fine Arts, vol. 5 (Jan–June 1882), 166.
20. ‘The Destiny of Opera’, in Richard Wagner Prose Works, vol. 5, trans. Ellis, 141.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (London, 2005), 2.
13. OPÉRA COMIQUE, THE CRUCIBLE
1. Mark Everist, ‘Jacques Offenbach: The Music of the Past and the Image of the Present’, in Everist and Annegret Fauser, eds., Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer, Paris 1830–1914 (Chicago, 2009), 72–98.
2. Heinrich Heine, ‘The Musical Season of 1844’, in The Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. 4 (New York, 1906), 442 (translation slightly adapted).
3. Galignani’s New Paris Guide (Paris, 1839), 462.
4. Monika Hennemann, ‘ “So kann ich es nicht componiren”: Mendelssohn, Opera, and the Libretto Problem’, in John Michael Cooper and Julie D. Prandi, eds., The Mendelssohns: The Music in History (Oxford, 2002), 181–202; here 185.
5. Hector Berlioz, Critique musicale 1823–1863, ed. Yves Gérard (Paris, 1998), 551–5.
6. David Charlton, ‘Opéra Comique: Identity and Manipulation’, in Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart, eds., Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (Oxford, 2001), 13–45; here 23.
7. Delphine Mordey, ‘Auber’s Horses: L’Année terrible and Apocalyptic Narratives’, 19th-Century Music 30/3 (2007), 213–29.
8. The Victrola Book of the Opera (Camden, NJ, 1915), 329; this statistic appears only in the 1915 edition; it is not in the 1912 and 1913 editions, and was omitted in later (post-First World War) editions.
9. Statistics at www.operabase.com.
10. Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (New York, 2002), 206–7.
11. Ibid., 211.
12. Édouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique, Première année 1875 (Paris, 1876), 108, ‘Madame Galli-Marié fait du personage effronté de Carmen l’une de ses meilleures creations. Il est impossible de render avec plus de talent cette étrange figure de bohémienne: voyez-la se balançant sur ses hanches comme une pouliche des haras de Cordoue … Quelle vérité, mais quel scandale!’
13. This tale seems to have spread widely after being repeated in an article by Charles Tenroc in Le Courrier musical (1 March 1925); for the history of the anecdote see Winton Dean, Bizet (London, 1975), 117.
14. The Case of Wagner: Turin Letter of May 1888, in Walter Kaufman, trans. and ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York, 1968), 613.
15. Cited in Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge, 2006), 286.
16. Saturday Evening Post, vol. 195 (5 August 1922), 36.
14. OLD WAGNER
1. John Deathridge, Wagner beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2008), 119.
2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 143.
3. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne (Princeton, 1993), 163–72.
4. Charles Reid, The Music Monster: A Biography of James William Davison (London, 1984), 210.
5. Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, 134.
6. Diary entry of December 1875; cited in Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 203.
7. Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck (Berlin, 1904), 20.
8. The Theater, vol. 5 (January–June 1882), 293–4.
9. Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theater, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford, 1991), 13.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (London, 2005), 142.
11. Richard Wagner Prose Works, Vol. 6, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1897), 184.
12. Ibid., Vol. 2 (Opera and Drama) (London, 1900), 96.
13. ‘The Destiny of Opera’, in ibid., Vol. 5 (London, 1896), 134.
14. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera as Symphony, a Wagnerian Myth’, in Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, eds., Analyzing Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 122–3.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 22–5.
16. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 127.
17. Mark Twain, ‘At the Shrine of St. Wagner’, in What is Man and Other Essays (London, 1919), 226.
18. Saul Friedländer, ‘Hitler und Wagner’, in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, eds. Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (Munich, 2000), 165–78.
19. Friedrich Kittler, ‘World Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology’, in David Levin, ed., Opera through Other Eyes (Stanford, 1994), 224.
15. VERDI – OLDER STILL
1. Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Andrea Maffei’s “Ugly Sin”: The Libretto for Verdi’s I masnadieri’, in Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, eds., Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretation (Rochester, NY, 2004), 280–301; 296–7
2. Ibid., 232.
3. John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends (Philadelphia, 1838), 151–2.
4. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 220.
5. Hans Busch, Verdi’s ‘Aida’: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis, 1978), 34.
6. Edward Said, ‘The Empire at Work’, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), 133–59; here 156.
7. Cesari and Luzio, I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 572.
8. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. 2, 112.
9. Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London, 1962), 449.
10. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, 307.
11. Ibid., 309.
12. Ibid., 328.
13. Hans Busch, Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’ in Letters and Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1988), vol. 1, 310–11.
14. James Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff (Cambridge, 1983), 34.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. Ibid., 140.
17. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, 299.
18. Cesari and Luzio, I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 323.
19. Ibid., 702.
20. Ibid., 633.
21. Ibid., 629–30.
22. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, 470–71.
23. Karen Henson, ‘Verdi, Victor Maurel and Fin-de-siècle Operatic Performance’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19/1 (2007), 59–84.
24. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford, 1993), 756.
16. REALISM AND CLAMOUR
1. Linda Nochlin, Realism (London, 1971), 13.
2. Letter to Matilde Wesendonck, 29 October 1859, in Barry Millington, ed., Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (London, 1987), 475.
3. Robert William Oldani, ‘Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 2001), vol. 17, 541–55; here 544.
4. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, 1997), 531.
5. Constantin Stanislavski and Pavel Rumyantsev, Stanislavski on Opera (New York, 1998), 334.
6. Astrid Varnay, with Donald Arthur, Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera (Boston, 2000), 309.
7. The New Quarterly Musical Review, Vol. 1 (May 1893), 126.
8. Léon Daudet reports on Massenet’s behaviour in his Souvenirs des milieux littéraires, politiques, artistiques et médicaux (6 vols., 1913–22), translated as Memoirs of Léon Daudet (New York, 1925), 14–16.
9. ‘Gallery of Players’, The Illustrated American, No. 3, ed. Austin Brereton (New York, 1894), 4.
10. The Musical Times (1 March 1884), 135.
11. Quoted in Ethan Mordden, Opera Anecdotes (Oxford, 1985), 244.
12. Philip Hale, ‘Of Realism in Opera’, in The Looker-On, vol. 3 (July–December 1896), 65–6.
13. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 624.
14. Michele Girardi, Puccini: His International Art (Chicago, 2000), 331.
15. Arman Schwartz, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music, 31/3 (2008), 228–44; here 235.
16. Ibid., 235.
17. The Athenaeum (July–December 1900), 96.
17. TURNING POINT
1. Letter of 12 May, in Henry Adams, Selected Letters, ed. Ernest Samuels (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 498.
2. Roger Nichols, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998), 106.
3. Jann Pasler, ‘Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress’, in Music and Society: The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson (London, 1991), 397–8.
4. Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (London, 1986), 315.
5. Richard Langham Smith, Debussy on Music (London, 1977), 224.
6. Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism (New Haven, 2007), 214 and 370 (n.92).
7. Lily Pons: A Centennial Portrait, ed. James R. Drake and Kristin Beall Ludecke (Portland, Ore., 1999), 34.
8. James Huneker, Bedouins (New York, 1920), 4.
9. Henry Charles Lahee, The Grand Opera Singers of Today (Boston, 1912), 181.
10. The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality, vol. 72 (December 1910), 396.
11. Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, 91.
12. Gil blas, 19 January 1903; cited in Langham Smith, Debussy on Music, 97.
13. Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge, 1982), 49.
14. Ibid., 52.
15. Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years 1864–1898 (Cambridge, 1982), 341.
16. Davinia Caddy, ‘Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 17/1 (2005), 37–58; here 54.
17. Derrick Puffett, Richard Strauss: Salome (Cambridge, 1989), 131–2.
18. Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography (New York, 1971), 25.
19. Henry T. Finck, 1923, cited in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (repr. New York, 2000), 159.
20. Review in the New York Evening Post, 1915, ibid., 159.
21. Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago, 2004), 170.
22. Ibid., 66–7.
23. Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge, 1999), 173.
24. Ibid., 173.
25. Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 273.
26. Ibid., 274.
27. Michele Girardi, Puccini: His International Art (Chicago, 2000), 265.
28. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London, 2008), 311 and 575.
29. Girardi, Puccini: His International Art, 267.
30. Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London, 1924), 240–41.
31. Ibid., 241.
18. MODERN
1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York, 1980), 416. The ‘her’ in the first sentence is Sarolta Vay, ‘Count Sándor’, a female cross-dresser discussed by Krafft-Ebbing.
2. Alan Jefferson, Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier (Cambridge, 1985), 90.
3. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Der Rosenkavalier: Zum Geleit’ (1927), in Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 149.
4. Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880–1918, ed. and trans. Laird Easton (New York, 2011), 578.
5. Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits: Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers (New York, 1920), 41–2.
6. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), aphorism 834 (p. 439).
7. Julius Korngold, quoted in Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss and His World (Princeton, 1992), 351.
8. Hans Hammelman and Ewald Osers, The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (London, 1961), 49.
9. Gilliam, Richard Strauss, 413.
10. Ibid., 414–15.
11. Walter Frisch, ed., Schoenberg and His World (Princeton, 1999), 259.
12. Paul Griffiths, Igor Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (Cambridge, 1982), 63.
13. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Berkeley, 1981), 158.
14. Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago, 2004), 124–6.
15. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 155.
16. W. H. Auden, ‘Some Reflections on Opera as a Medium’, Tempo (Summer, 1951), 6–10; here 10.
17. Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London, 2009), 75.
19. SPEECH
1. Dwight’s Journal of Music, vol. 39 (1879), 196.
2. Karl Reinhold von Köstlin, Richard Wagners Tondrama Der Ring des Nibelungen: seine Idee, Handlung, und Komposition (Tübingen, 1877), 86.
3. Hermann Gehrmann, Carl Maria von Weber (Berlin, 1899), 87.
4. Allgemeine musikalische Zeiting, vol. 12 (1877), 233.
5. A recording of her reciting from Edmond Rostand’s play La Samaritaine is available on YouTube.
6. David Trippett, ‘ “Bayreuth in Miniature”: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice’, Musical Quarterly, 95 (2012), pp. 71–138.
7. Cited in Madeleine Goss, Bolero: The Life of Maurice Ravel (New York, 1945), 197.
8. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel (Westport, Conn., 1976), 133.
9. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947; London, 2007), 24.
10. The Survey: A Journal of Constructive Philanthropy (December 1929), 634.
11. Susan Cook, Opera for a New Republic (Rochester, 1988), 201.
12. William H. Seltsam, Metropolitan Opera Annals: A Chronicle of Artists and Performances (New York, 1947), 500.
13. Ernst Krenek, Horizons Circled (Berkeley, 1974), 26.
14. David Grayson, ‘Debussy on Stage’, in Simon Trezise, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge, 2003), 81.
15. Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge, 1982), 118–19.
16. Claude Trevor, ‘Cant in Music’, The Musical Times, vol. 61 (1 August 1920), 530.
17. Entry on ‘Strauss’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 2001), vol. 24, 514.
18. Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss and His World (Princeton, 1992), 293.
19. Michael Kennedy, ‘From Casti to Capriccio: Strauss’s Theatrical Fugue’, in David Rosen and Claire Brook, eds., Words on Music: Essays in Honor of Andrew Porter (New York, 2003), 171–91; here 190.
20. Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (London 2002), 223.
21. Daniel Gregory Mason, The Art of Music, vol. 9 (New York, 1916), 439.
22. Bernard Stevens, ‘Czechoslovakia and Poland’, in Howard Hartog, ed., European Music in the Twentieth Century (London, 1957), 303.
23. Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism (New Haven, 2007), 212.
24. Ibid., 207.
25. Caryl Emerson, ‘Back to the Future: Shostakovich’s Revision of Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District” ’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 1/1 (1989), 59–78; here 69.
26. Ibid., 62.
27. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, 1997), 504.
28. Ibid., 500–501.
29. Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents (New York, 2002), 302.
30. Ibid., 303.
31. Julien Steinberg, ed., Verdict of Three Decades: From the Literature of Individual Revolt against Soviet Communism 1917–1950 (New York, 1950), 307–8.
20. REVENANTS IN THE MUSEUM
1. This was Napoleone Moriani (1806–78); identified as such in Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (1962; repr. Chicago, 1982), 88.
2. This speculation is made by Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. 3, 141.
3. Eugenio Gara, ed., Carteggi pucciniani (Milan, 1958), 563.
4. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, Vol.1, 3. (London, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. 1, 3.
5. Gara, Carteggi pucciniani, 563.
6. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2, 112.
7. For an extensive discussion of the Verdi ‘renaissance’, see Gundula Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans (Cambridge, 2010),138.
8. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (Oxford, 1995).
9. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten. Vol. 3 (1946–51) (Berkeley, 2004), 100.
10. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), 193–4.
11. For an account of the reception of the opera, see Philip Brett, Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes (Cambridge, 1983).
12. Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (Oxford, 2003), 50.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. The comparative popularity comes from operabase.com.
15. Richard Langham Smith, Debussy on Music (London, 1977), 164.
16. Statistics are from operabase.com.
17. Statistics are from operabase.com.
18. For these and many other details about Berio’s completion, see Marco Uvietta’s ‘ “È l’ora della prova”: Berio’s Finale for Puccini’s Turandot’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 16/2 (2004), 187–238.
19. György Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation (London, 1983), x.
20. For an account of this latest round of protests, which even spread to the entire season in which the opera was staged, see ‘Klinghoffer takes the stage to chorus of boos’, Guardian (22 October 2014), 20.
21. David Beverly, ‘Klinghoffer and the Art of Composing’, interview on 25 October 1995, printed on John Adams’s website, http://www.earbox.com/inter003.html (accessed 12.12.09).
22. Edward Said, Music at the Limits (New York, 2008), 136.
23. Alex Ross, ‘George Benjamin’s Long-Awaited Masterpiece’, in The New Yorker, 25 March 2013.
21. WE ARE ALONE IN THE FOREST
1. Mordaunt Hall, review of The Rogue Song, The New York Times, 29 January 1930.
2. Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, 20 September 1850, Richard Wagner’s Letters to His Dresden Friends, trans. J. S. Shedlock (London, 1890), 67–8.
3. Max Fehr, Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeit (Aarau, 1934–54), vol. 2, 21.
4. Richard Wagner to Franz Liszt, March 1855, in Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt. Zweiter Band: Vom Jahre 1854 bis 1861 (Leipzig, 1887), 60.
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/arts/music/critics-weigh-in-on-standout-operas-of-recent-decades.html.
6. David Pountney, ‘The Future of Opera’ (lecture given at the Royal Opera House, 13 February 2000); published at http://www.rodoni.ch/OPERNHAUS/novembre/intervistapountney.html.
7. From a 1967 interview with the composer in Der Spiegel, quoted in David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago, 2007), 18, n.38.
8. http://www.artlyriquefr.fr/dicos/Theatre-Lyrique%20creations.htm.
9. Written on Skin’s DVD was released in 2013 on the Opus Arte label (OA 1125D). While the original stage director was Katie Mitchell, the DVD is billed as ‘produced and directed for the screen by Margaret Williams’.