Princeton Studies in Opera

Unfinished at Puccini's death in 1924, Turandot was not only his most ambitious work, but it became the last Italian opera to enter the international repertory. In this colorful study two renowned music scholars demonstrate that this work, despite the modern climate in which it was written, was a fitting finale for the centuries-old Great Tradition of Italian opera. Here they provide concrete instances of how a listener might encounter the dramatic and musical structures of Turandot in light of the Italian melodramma, and firmly establish Puccini's last work within the tradition of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. In a summary of the sounds, sights, and symbolism of Turandot, the authors touch on earlier treatments of the subject, outline the conception, birth, and reception of the work, and analyze its coordinated dramatic and musical design. Showing how the evolution of the libretto documents Puccini's reversion to large musical forms typical of the Great Tradition in the late nineteenth century, they give particular attention to his use of contrasting Romantic, modernist, and two kinds of orientalist coloration in the general musical structure. They suggest that Puccini's inability to complete the opera resulted mainly from inadequate dramatic buildup for Turandot's last-minute change of heart combined with an overly successful treatment of the secondary character.

Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Stanford University. In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject. Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opéra-comiques. Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself. "While Hadlock's reading of Hoffman against its sources affords many keen insights, her reading of the opera against itself is even more revealing. . . . A work of scintillating intelligence and endlessly intriguing possibilities."---M. Lignana Rosenberg, Opera News "In keeping with Offenbach's hybrid work, this book moves freely across academic borders--alongside the opera's literary origins sit historical and biographical contexts, and intertwined with straightforward musicology is feminist theory and philosophy. . . . If you love the opera, and are not frightened of some solid intellectual abstractions, here is something for your bookshelves."---Julia Hollander, Opera Now "[An] attractive study of Offenbach's most enduring opera. . . . [L]overs of Offenbach's masterpiece will enjoy the ride . . . garnering insights into one of the most enjoyable and problematic operas in the central repertory."---Byron Nelson, Opera Quarterly "Mad Loves offers us a prolonged meditation on Offenbach's final masterpiece, one in which we are often reminded, both elegantly and persuasively, of the diversity of cultural messages an opera can carry. This is one of the most impressive examples of operatic criticism to have appeared in the past decade, and a book that will definitely appeal to a broad range of opera enthusiasts."-Roger Parker, St. John's College, Cambridge "Heather Hadlock has produced a charming book on one of the central operas of the standard repertory. Mad Loves engages with the pleasures afforded by Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, that is, it does not ignore the basis for the piece's popularity in an attempt at salvaging it for the sake of formalist music theory. Yet it also interrogates key aspects of the opera in ways that open it up to serious cultural criticism. The book should attract, stimulate, and delight both scholars from across the humanities and the many opera enthusiasts who love to read about their favorite works."-Susan McClary, University of California, Los Angeles

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics-from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender-in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture of fin-de-siècle Paris, the phenomenon of opera seria's "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in Verdi's Don Carlos, and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock. Mary Ann Smart is professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the critical edition of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien and, with Roger Parker, of Reading Critics Reading: Criticism of French Opera from the Revolution to 1848. She is also a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and the Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera. "This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music-and opera in particular-from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book."-Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University "Siren Songs is provocative and engaging. As a whole, the collection should become required reading among musicologists, and many of the individual contributions will interest scholars in other fields, as well as the opera-going public."-Ruth Solie, Smith College "Clearly part of the next generation of gender studies in opera, this book will be of interest to scholars and informed amateurs alike."