In 1598, Jacopo Peri's lost Dafne premiered in Florence. it is widely considered to be the first opera, that genre of classical music in which a dramatic work is set to music. Over the last 400 years, it has evolved into numerous different art forms, from the ballad opera of the eighteenth century, to the ragtime music of the early 20th century, to the musical theatre of today.
The post The history of European opera appeared first on OUPblog.
How do you write a smash first novel? Author (and OUP Law Editor) Matthew Gallaway comes to Oxford book club to discuss his book The Metropolis Case. Topics include: Pittsburgh, advice for writers…and what’s up with the incest scene?
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Featured in this Episode:
Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case and this tumblr (featuring some of the best personification we’ve seen in ages!)
“So well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.” -The New York Times on The Metropolis Case
and
Book club members Michelle Lipinski, Grace Labatt, Michelle Rafferty and Justyna Zajac.
To accompany this podcast, we also present the following excerpt from the The Metropolis Case:
Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos
NEW YORK CITY, 1960. Anna Prus stepped out of her apartment building onto Seventy-fourth Street, where she paused to glance back at Central Park, which looked opaque and grainy like an old newsreel. It had been snowing for days, but a sallow, expectant glow emanating from the crenellated perimeter of the park told her the storm was nearing an end. While she did not relish the idea of negotiating a trip downtown, the transformation of the city into a tundra, with squalls of powder and amorphous mounds where there had once been cars, mailboxes, and shrubs, struck her as the perfect accompaniment to the magic, improbable turn the day had taken, now that she was about to make her Isolde debut at the Metropolitan Opera.
Though Anna was not an unknown, she had to this point in her career been relegated to smaller houses and (except for some minor roles) hired by the Met as an alternate to the type of leading soprano she had always wanted to be. But as sometimes happened with singers her age—Anna was forty—her voice, after six years at the conservatory and over fifteen more of training, auditioning, and performing, had at last blossomed, giving her reason to believe that she had found her calling in the Wagnerian repertory. Which is not to say her future had been unfurled like a red carpet; if anything, her reputation as a dependable but hardly breathtaking talent still preceded her, and for this current production, she had been brought in only to “cover” the Isolde and so had expected—as she had always done in the past—to spend her nights in the wings, anxiously hoping and not hoping (because she was not one to wish ill health or
Wagner’s The Ring is one of the world’s most famous operas. In this excerpt from Who Married Figaro? A Book of Opera Characters (by Joyce Bourne), the internationally renowned soprano Dame Anne Evans talks about her experience of the character Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde is one of the nine Valkyries who appear in the opera, and the daughter of Erda and Wotan, and is the character who ultimately returns The Ring to the Rhine.
It is doubtful 
if any other role in the operatic repertory demands as much of a singer as does Brünnhilde in The Ring. For a start it has an extraordinarily wide tessitura. Apart from the opening ‘Hojotohos’, with their high Cs, much of the Walküre Brünnhilde lies easily within a mezzo-soprano’s compass. Siegfried, on the other hand, is a true soprano role, particularly in the final, joyous pages where the phrases lead inexorably to the sustained, climactic C. The Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde embraces elements of both the other two operas and calls for huge vocal and physical stamina. Few, if any, sopranos find all three Brünnhildes equally easy to sing; every singer of this role that I know finds the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde the most rewarding, both dramatically and vocally. (On one occasion at least, Bayreuth employed a different Brünnhilde for each opera, but it did not prove satisfactory from a dramatic point of view.)
Not only must a Brünnhilde be master of the actual notes, she must also be master of the text – written by Wagner himself – so that she can use it to make the character live, because in Wagner the drama must come out of the words as well as the music: the two are inseparable. A Brünnhilde must be able to colour her voice to match the changes of mood and situation, which are often reflected in the change of harmonies. For example, when in the Todesverkündigung [’prophecy of death’] from Act 2 of Die Walküre Brünnhilde comes to tell Siegmund of his impending death, she must adopt a grave, dark tone. Then, as she begins to understand the nature of Siegmund and Sieglinde’s great love for each other – an emotion she has never known before – she has to sing with the utmost tenderness and warmth. In Siegfried, Brünnhilde experiences love herself, though, strictly speaking, the long Act 3 scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde is not a love duet as such, but rather a falling-in-love duet, in which the two characters gradually discover one another.
At the end of Götterdämmerung Act 1, Brünnhilde has to switch almost instantly from sheer joy to whispered terror as she beholds not the expected Siegfried, but a complete stranger – Siegfried disguised as Gunther. Once Siegfried/Gunther has snatched the Ring from her hand, she feels raped – she has assumed, wrongly, that the Ring would protect her from a mere mortal. At the beginning of the next act, Brünnhilde is drained of all life. Harry Kupfer, in his Bayreuth production [first seen in 1988], underlined her humiliation by having her carried on in a net, like an animal that had been hunted down and captured. Only when Gunther announces the impending marriage of Siegfried and Gutrune does she burst into life. Her first reaction is one of alarm, which turns into terrible rage. By the end of the cycle, Brünnhilde has changed from the immortal hoyden of Walküre Act 2 to the wisest of mortal women as she leaps on to the funeral pyre to join Siegfried in death. Together, the music and text are infallible in guiding the singer through the twists and turns of the plot.
I have sung Brünnhilde now in nine productions, all of them very different. If I had to choose just one it would have to be Kupfer’s. His characters were not cardboard cutouts, but real people involved in real situations. Not everyone liked the result, but I was stimulated and excited by it. Such was the strength of the production dramatically that I always felt that if the music were to stop suddenly the play would continue unhindered, so believable were the relationships between the characters. For me the role of Brünnhilde is the Everest of the soprano repertoire. It never fails to fill me with awe.
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