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New Opera, Old Opera: Perspectives on Critical Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2010

ARNOLD WHITTALL
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Abstract

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 181 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Arnold Whittall, ‘A War and a Wedding: Two Modern British Operas’, Music & Letters, 55 (1974), 299.

2 Arnold Whittall, ‘“Twisted Relations”: Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd’, this journal, 2 (1990), 169.

3 Music Review, 24 (1963), 201–4.

4 Björn Heile, review of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge University Press, 2005), in Music & Letters, 88 (2007), 347–53, with citations from Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991) and Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999).

5 John Richardson, Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass's ‘Akhnaten’ (Hanover, NH, and London, 1999), 246–7.

6 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Analysis’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (London, 1992), I, 116–20.

7 Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifth: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (London, 1998), 384.

8 For additional discussion, see Arnold Whittall, ‘Boulez at 80: The Path from the New Music’, Tempo, 233 (2005), 3–15.

9 This process is charted in depth in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge, 2002).

10 Abbate, ‘Analysis’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, I, 120.

11 Patricia Hall, A View of Berg's Lulu Through the Autograph Sources (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996).

12 Carl S. Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard's Castle: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók's Opera (New York, 1999).

13 See in particular Stephen McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology (Rochester, 1998).

14 Warren Darcy, Wagner's Das Rheingold (Oxford, 1993).

15 Janet Schmalfeldt, Berg's Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design (New Haven, 1983); Pamela White, Schoenberg and the God-idea: The Opera Moses und Aron (Ann Arbor, 1985).

16 Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (New York, 2005).

17 Matthew Brown, ‘Isolde's Narrative: From Hauptmotiv to Tonal Model’, in Analyzing Opera. Verdi and Wagner, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1989), 180–201.

18 John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York, 1993).

19 Arnold Whittall, ‘Stravinsky in Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge, 2003), 46.

20 Wilfrid Mellers, The Masks of Orpheus: Seven Stages in the Story of European Music (Manchester, 1987).

21 Michael Tippett, Tippett on Music, ed. Meirion Bowen (Oxford, 1995), 51.

22 For the most important study not directly cited here, see David Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2001).

23 Tippett, Tippett on Music, 56.

24 Tippett, 50–1.

25 Michael Tippett, The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, ed. Thomas Schuttenhelm (London, 2005), 292.

26 Tippett, 258.

27 M. L. Rosenthal, Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art (Oxford, 1994), 347–8.

28 Michael Tippett, ‘The Relation of Autobiographical Experience to the Created Work of Art’, in Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, ed. Suzanne Robinson (Aldershot, 2002), 26.

29 Tippett, Selected Letters, 242.

30 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, 1997), 391.

31 Ian Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and His Music (Oxford, 1984), 275.

32 Kemp, 277.

33 Kemp, 323.

34 David Clarke, ‘“Only Half Rebelling”: Tonal Strategies, Folk Song and “Englishness” in Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra’, in Tippett Studies, ed. David Clarke (Cambridge, 1999), 25.

35 Clarke, 9.

36 Tippett, Tippett on Music, 200.

37 Tippett, 200.

38 Tippett, 201.

39 Tippett, 203.

40 Tippett, 204.

41 Tippett, 200.

42 Tippett, Selected Letters, 131.

43 Tippett, 144.

44 Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth-Century Blues: An Autobiography (London, 1991), 49.

45 Kemp, Tippett, 38.

46 Tippett, Tippett on Music, 206.