Word and Music Studies: Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Fields (Word and Music Studies 7) (v. 17)

401 Pages·2005·2.52 MB·English

by  Suzanne M. Lodato

Word and Music Studies
Selected Essays on Opera
by Ulrich Weisstein
WORD AND
MUSIC STUDIES
8
Series Editors
Walter Bernhart
Michael Halliwell
Lawrence Kramer
Suzanne M. Lodato
Steven Paul Scher†
Werner Wolf
The book series WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES (WMS) is the central organ
of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), an
association founded in 1997 to promote transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry
devoted to the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music.
WMA aims to provide an international forum for musicologists and literary
scholars with an interest in interart/intermedial studies and in crossing cultural
as well as disciplinary boundaries.
WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES will publish, generally on an annual basis,
theme-oriented volumes, documenting and critically assessing the scope, theory,
methodology, and the disciplinary and institutional dimensions and prospects
of the field on an international scale: conference proceedings, collections of
scholarly essays, and, occasionally, monographs on pertinent individual topics
as well as research reports and bibliographical and lexicographical work.
Word and Music Studies
Selected Essays on Opera
by Ulrich Weisstein
Edited by
Walter Bernhart
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-10: 90-420-2111-X
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2111-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Preface .............................................................................................. vii
Selected Essays on Opera by Ulrich Weisstein
The Libretto as Literature (1961) ....................................................... 3
Cocteau, Stravinsky, Brecht, and the Birth of Epic Opera (1962) .... 17
Introduction to The Essence of Opera (1964) ................................... 33
Reflections on a Golden Style:
W. H. Auden’s Theory of Opera (1970) ........................................... 43
“Per porle in lista”: Da Ponte/Leporello’s Amorous Inventory
and its Literary and Operatic Antecedents from Tirso de Molina
to Giovanni Bertati (1981) ................................................................ 65
Educating Siegfried (1984) ............................................................... 91
(Pariser) Farce oder wienerische Maskerade?
Die französischen Quellen des Rosenkavalier (1987)..................... 105
The Little Word und: Tristan und Isolde
as Verbal Construct (1987) ............................................................. 141
Benedetto Marcellos Il Teatro alla moda:
Scherz, Satire, Parodie oder tiefere Bedeutung? (1989) ................. 171
Von Ballhorn ins Bockshorn gejagt:
Unwillkürliche Parodie und unfreiwillige Komik
in Ambroise Thomas’ Mignon (1989) ............................................ 201
“Die letzte Häutung”. Two German Künstleropern of the
Twentieth Century: Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina and
Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (1992) ................................... 229
Between Progress and Regression:
The Text of Stravinsky’s Opera The Rake’s Progress
in the Light of its Evolution (1992) ................................................ 273
What is Romantic Opera?
Toward a Musico-Literary Definition (1994) ................................. 301
Böse Menschen singen keine Arien: Prolegomena zu einer
ungeschriebenen Geschichte der Opernzensur (1996) .................... 337
Sources ............................................................................................ 369
Acknowledgments .......................................................................... 371
Register of Persons and Operas
Mentioned in the Text ..................................................................... 373
Preface
Ulrich Weisstein, well-known as an international authority in the
fields of comparative literature and comparative arts, is one of those
scholars of worldwide distinction who have paved the way for the
now flourishing field of intermedia studies. His most extensive inter-
medial concerns have always been with the relations of literature to
the visual arts and to music. Already his dissertation was devoted to
opera, which is a form that has become his life-time obsession. It is in
the operatic field that Professor Weisstein has most significantly con-
tributed to the area of Word and Music Studies, which sufficiently
explains why his work on opera is now naturally finding its way into
the book series of that name.
What is here presented is a collection of essays which reflect fifty
years of Ulrich Weisstein’s involvement with opera and which re-
present thirty-five years of his publishing activity in the field. The
necessarily restrictive selection of essays from his impressively large
output on opera is primarily governed by the wish to present to an
interested scholarly readership texts that are representative of their
author’s work and, at the same time, are unlikely to be readily avail-
able through other channels. Further selection considerations, con-
cerning limits of space and the avoidance of occasional thematic
duplications, have led to the sequence of fourteen essays collected in
this volume, which are arranged in chronological order and – follow-
ing the publisher’s policy – are predominantly written in English.
Only four – of a substantial number in that language – are in German,
but the volume would have been sadly diminished without them as
they address essential and particularly suggestive issues.
The title of the first essay here reprinted, “The Libretto as Litera-
ture”, has the character of a motto for much of what follows, as it
points to a central concern of Weisstein’s work on opera. He intro-
duced the serious study of libretti in their own right and, thus, can be
seen as an early initiator of librettology as an independent branch of
viii Preface
literary and intermedial studies. His keenest interest is in the genesis
of dramaturgically successful operas, tracing adaptive processes from
textual sources to final products and investigating the collaborative
efforts of writers and composers in creating effective operas. A further
innovative focus is on the social ambience of operas as, for example,
reflected in Marcello’s Il Teatro alla moda with its brilliant satire on
operatic activities in early-eighteenth-century Italy, or in the surpris-
ingly widespread practices of opera censorship, on which the most
recent essay included in this selection throws a strong first light.
Generally, the essays show a tendency to discuss works which are not
necessarily the most popular and most frequently studied ones, which
results in a welcome widening of perspective and offers opportunities
for unexpected discoveries, such as a number of so-called artist
operas, which reflect Ulrich Weisstein’s most personal interests as an
indefatigable art-lover. His wide range of experience allows for a
bird’s-eye overview of the various types of opera that have emerged
over the centuries, an overview that he has given in his seminal earlier
volume, The Essence of Opera, and which led to his attempts at defin-
ing the specific properties of such forms as the romantic opera or the
epic opera, to be found in this selection. It is to be hoped that the
essays here collected, written as they are in an accessible, essentially
non-technical language, make not only a profitable reading, but a
pleasurable one as well.
Thanks are due to Professor Weisstein himself for his untiring
commitment and enthusiasm in collaborating on letting this book see
the light of day, and to Ingrid Hable, who has once again been a most
conscientious help in bringing a volume of Word and Music Studies
into the printable shape as required by current publishing standards.
All essays have been reset, but bibliographical documentation has not
been unified and basically follows the principles of the original
publications. Yet it has been carefully checked and, where necessary,
made consistent and occasionally corrected. The sources of the essays
and the acknowledgments of permissions for reprint are found at the
end of the volume.
Graz, June 2006 Walter Bernhart
Selected Essays on Opera
by Ulrich Weisstein