Three Faces of Opera Study: Reception, Money, Performing Practice

Herbert Lindenberger
The Opera Quarterly, Volume 22, Number 3-4, Summer-Autumn 2006, pp. 546-556 (Review)
Published by Oxford University Press

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Three Faces of Opera Study: Reception, Money, Performing Practice

Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon: Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 424 pages, $50.00

Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds.: The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 260 pages, $40.00

Philip Gossett: Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 697 pages, $35.00

A review article raises expectations of a harvest of recent books on a circumscribed topicin most humanistic journals, for instance, books on a canonical figure or a historical period. This essay brings together books that might seem to have nothing in common: a reception study of one of the most revered works in the repertory, a piece of archival research surrounding the institutional framework of a brief period of early opera, and a history of the often controversial decisions involved in creating performing texts of early nineteenth-century Italian opera. What holds these books together is the fact that they are all exemplary texts within that burgeoning field we have come to call opera studies. For the last two decades or more, a significant number of volumes (not to speak of individual essays) have theorized on the nature of opera in relation to other genres or have applied insights from a variety of disciplines to illuminate particular periods, composers, or generic aspects of opera. The three books under considerationtwo by musicologists and one a group of essays largely by scholars outside musicall illustrate the variety of approaches available to those who seek to unlock the operatic past in unaccustomed ways. * * *

Goehr and Herwitzs collection of essays on Don Giovanni is no ordinary reception study of the sort one tends to find in the final chapter of handbooks on
The Opera Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 34, pp. 546 563 # The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

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particular operas. This opera occupies a unique place in the repertory, for it has left a mark on subsequent intellectual and cultural history like no other operatic work, with the possible exception of Tristan und Isolde. (A volume on Tristan based on the same principles as this volume would be most welcome.) What this book is centrally concerned with is how Don Giovanni has interacted activelyindeed, obtrusivelywith the work of some major thinkers and composers for nearly two centuries after its composition. Richard Eldridge and Hans Rudolf Vaget, for instance, look carefully at two major pieces of German prose fiction centered on the opera: respectively, E. T. A. Hoffmanns Don Juan and Eduard Morikes Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag. Eldridge presents Hoffmanns piece as an enactment of a wish to . . . surrender to the music, to feel with it (44, italics in original). The romanticization that Hoffmann enacts is concretized through the storys assertion that Donna Anna had actually surrendered physically to Giovanni, and that the soprano playing the part in a fictitious performance in the novella herself dies the night after her per formance. Vagets discussion of Morikes novella shows not so much a romanticization of the opera as a retrospective glorification of Vienna and Weimar classicism that was typical of nineteenth-century Germany (72). Don Giovannis relation to later drama occupies a major part of The Don Giovanni Moment. Ernst Osterkamp, for example, examines the interactions between Mozarts opera and the Faust story beginning with Goethe, who was aware of the analogies between those parts of his Faust written before he knew the opera and those later parts that showed the impact of the opera. Like a number of the volumes contributors, Osterkamp discusses the romanticizing of the two myths within one and the same work, in his case Christian Dietrich Grabbes Don Juan und Faust. A number of essays look at later dramatic works that rethink aspects of Don Giovanni. Boris Gasparov presents Pushkins dramatic poem The Stone Guest as refusing to choose between the romanticizing of the character in, say, Byron and Hoffmann and the unselfconsciousness of Mozarts hero. By contrast, the various plays and operas (as well as keyboard works by Chopin and Liszt, for example) that Thomas Grey discusses in an essay on the early nineteenth-century transformation of the Romantic libertine figure take the Giovanni character to extremes such as the titular hero of Marschners Der Vampyr. In George Bernard Shaws Man and Superman, as Agnes Heller argues, the Romantic elements that the nineteenth century sought to find in the opera have been removed in favor of ironically presented conflicting perspectives on a multitude of themes that go far beyond those we associate with the work that Shaw was ostensibly rewriting. Three essays are devoted to parallels and comparisons between Don Giovanni and later operas by Wagner and Strauss. Brian Soucek juxtaposes Mozarts opera with Ariadne auf Naxos to demonstrate some clear affinitiesfor example, their

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obsession with the notion of fidelity, or the fact that both works exist in two distinct versions that make the choice of an appropriate performing version difficult. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, in turn, juxtapose Don Giovanni with Wagners Ring des Nibelungen to show how characters in both works exercise authority and pronounce judgments about one another and about the world. And Lydia Goehr, in an especially searching essay, brings Mozarts opera together with Tristan und Isolde to apply Kierkegaards idea of Don Giovanni as an embodiment of the absolutely musical (141) to Tristans process of transfigurationboth in its subject matter and in its intended effect upon its audience. If Don Giovanni has intersected considerably with literature and music, its significance has been no less powerful in the responses that philosophical thinkers have recorded. The late Bernard Williamss essay of 1981, the only piece not written expressly for this volume, seeks to define the meaning of the character Giovanni in view of what later commentators have tried to make of him. Entitled Don Juan as an Idea, Williamss discussion distinguishes between Romantic readings and what he sees as the essential attribute of Mozarts figure, namely, his single-minded determination to live at the fullest energy, at the extreme edge of desire (116). Daniel Herwitz addresses the most influential of all philosophical readings of the opera, Kierkegaards use of Don Giovanni, to exemplify the aesthetic stage of existence in Either/Or. In an intricate and witty argument, Herwitz uncovers what he calls Kierkegaards undigested ambivalences (135), in which Mozarts music works to transfigure and canonize the hero while at the same time demonizing him and the aesthetic stance that he represents. One might note, incidentally, that Kierkegaards discussion of Don Giovanni plays a major role in a number of essaysnotably those of Eldridge, Grey, Williams, Goehr, and Nikolaus Bacht within the collection. The volume concludes with two essays on Theodor W. Adorno, who, though he wrote relatively little on Don Giovanni, in various short passages provided some often surprising perspectives on the opera. The first contribution, by Berthold Hoeckner, shows how, in his brief essay in praise of Zerlina, Adorno projects one of his typically utopian momentsa moment that also stands as an allegory of momentous social and historical change (216), for (to use Adornos own words) she is no longer a shepherdess, but not yet a citoyenne (21112). The second essay, by Bacht, shows how Adorno takes issue with Kierkegaard by approaching the hero as exemplifying a possible reconciliation of pleasure with freedom. Even though some essaysfor instance, those by the two editors as well as those by Williams, Grey, and Gasparovstand out, The Don Giovanni Moment maintains an uncommonly high level throughout. Only one essay, Ingrid Rowlands attempt to show how Giordano Brunos heresies anticipated the Don Juan tradition, does not comfortably fit within the books framework. Because a

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number of themes recur among the various essays, the absence of an index is disappointing. And I cite a minor element that this reader at least found irritating: several essays, like a number of writings on Don Quixote, insist on calling the titular hero the Don, a term for which there is no precedent in either Spanish or Italian. * * *

Beth and Jonathan Glixons book is a model of how one can shape the detailed information found in archives to create a thoroughly readable, indeed quite pleasurable study. In recent decades several fascinating narrativesnotably Carlo Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Daviss Fiction in the Archives (1987)have resulted from scholars finding obscure documents from several centuries ago. But unlike these two books, each of which recreates the lives of otherwise forgotten individuals, Inventing the Business of Opera focuses on the life of an institution, namely, Venetian opera from its beginnings during the late 1630s until the 1670s. Venice, as we know, hosted the first public opera houses, and through the imitation of Venetian modes of opera production in some widely scattered cities across Europe, innumerable aspects of a genre that had developed in a single locale during the mid-seventeenth century have persisted up to the present day. The authors have wisely chosen not to present their research chronologically but rather to organize it according to the distinct components out of which the operatic institution in Venice was made upfor instance, the libretto, the musical score, the singers, the orchestra, the scenery, the costumes, and finally the audience. It is most telling of the priorities that prevailed in Venice that the shortest chapter (ten pages) is devoted to the dancers and orchestra, while the longest (fifty pages) is on the scenery as well as on the machines by means of which it was manipulated. Venetian opera has been an active topic of musicological research for some timeboth in the form of articles and in two fine earlier books: Simon Towneley Worsthornes Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (1954) and Ellen Rosands Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (1991). Both books, though using archival materials, attempt to survey the whole phenomenon, with attention to both the aesthetic and material aspects of the genre. Rosands monograph is notable for its detailed discussions of the formal conventions of the libretti and the music, above all the changes from recitative to formal aria that took place in the course of operas development in its Venetian years. The Glixons book, as its title indicates, does not attempt any musical analysis. Indeed, what is fascinating about their inquiry is their immersion in the material culture of the time. This immersion was made possible through Jonathan Glixons discovery, early in their research, of three account books and a receipt book belonging to Marco Faustini,

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a prominent impresario who, successively, produced opera at three houses, S. Aponal (165157), S. Cassiano (165760), and SS. Giovanni e Paolo (166068). From these personal notebooks, the Glixons branched out to innumerable other papers stored in Venetian archives. The details emerging from Faustinis records offer considerable information that has been generally unavailable up to now. For example, little has survived about the role of dance in Venetian operawhich operas, for example, included dances and precisely at which spots, or who choreographed these dances, or what the dancers were paid in relation to other performers. According to the Glixons, most of what we now know about these matters derives from Faustinis account books (219 and the chart on 218). These books also tell us a good bit about the singers of the period. Faustini recorded the salaries he paid, and as a result we can note the salary distinctions not only between individual singers but also between the leading female sopranos, the second sopranos, and the castrati who sang primo uomo (203). We also learn the details surrounding the importation of singers from Rome. To save expenses, Faustini sometimes put up singers in his own house or in the houses of whatever noble family owned the opera house with which he had contracted. Using Faustinis documents as well as other archival papers, the Glixons present a detailed and tantalizing case study (2056, 20914) of how the Roman prima donna Giulia Masotti managed to negotiate her way to an unheard-of salary and to get Faustini to pay travel expenses from Rome not only for herself but for her mother, brother, and a servant. The various records consulted by the Glixons turn up a fair amount of information on the differing roles played by nobles and by those professionals and civil servants called cittadini within Venetian class structure. The opera houses were, for the most part, owned by nobles, who were entitled to the revenue from the rental of boxes. Impresarios like Faustini tended to be cittadini, and their revenue came from the sale of tickets (including the individual tickets to performances that box holders needed to buy in addition to the rental they paid on a seasonal basis to the theater owners) as well as from investors. Faustinis records, which show the names of box holders, confirm that noble families occupied the most desirable boxesalso that foreign ambassadors to the Venetian Republic enjoyed rights to these boxes, with occasional conflicts between an ambassador and a local nobleman (303). Such conflicts over boxes could sometimes take a violent form: the Glixons cite two instances in which theater personnel were stabbed (33). And Faustinis records show certain prominent boxes reserved per le donnenamely, for prominent courtesans whom it was desirable to display conspicuously to the public (3012). The financial precariousness with which opera has been traditionally associated goes back, as this book amply shows, to the beginnings of public opera. Opera as a business seems to have been doomed to financial failure, the

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authors say at one point (105). To be sure, the nobles who owned the opera houses generally stayed in the black through their collection of box rentals. But the impresarios and their investors took losses much of the time. It seems that investing in opera possessed some of the glamour that investing in Broadway shows or films has today. The Glixons relate the story of an unfortunate young man named Marco Mozzoni who lent money in the mid-1660s for productions at the San Luca opera house; not only was his money lost, but he died soon after, leaving a widow with a small child who had to fight to keep the company from drawing its other debts from his estate (1034). Librettists gained their revenue not from the productions but from the sale of libretti, which also were prized by collectors outside Venice. And they could seek additional income from the honoraria awarded by noblemen to whom they dedicated their libretti. Musical scores of operas were ordinarily not published; indeed, as the next book under review makes clear, it was not until the late nineteenth century that full scores of Italian operas made their way into print. Thus, it is the libretti that have left us the most permanent traces of the earlier operatic repertory. Inventing the Business of Opera is a trove of information about the intricacy of financial arrangements as well as about the whims of audiences in seventeenthcentury Venice. For instance, because audiences favored novelty, revivals were infrequent, and impresarios felt forced to come up with new works every season. Even scenery was expected to be newthough impresarios often found ways of quietly reusing some components of an earlier set. However, the authors argue convincingly against the long-held notion of a dotazione, or inventory of sets, that went from production to production (27376). Audiences demanded sumptuousness not only in the sets and the machinery that controlled them, but also in the costumes; and, like the scenery, these often stretched an impresarios budget. The authors tell of one singer who refused to return a dress of gold brocade as a result of her dispute with her impresarios (291 92). As one reads through this volume that is so rich in detail, one becomes aware of the continuities that have persisted in opera as an institution over the centuries. It was the most expensive of the performing arts at its beginnings, and it has continued to be so. For example, the Glixons present a table showing the distribution of costs and funding during Faustinis 165758 season at the S. Aponal opera house (321). One figure stands out: only 54 percent of the funding came from ticket sales (excluding the box rental income, to be sure). In current-day American opera houses, the percentage of revenue from tickets is fairly close to this figure. Faustini made up for his shortfall mainly through the investments of two noblemen; in our own time the deficits endemic to opera are met by a combination of corporate and private donations in the United States and by governmental subsidy in many European countries. Both in seventeenth-century Venice

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and in twenty-first-century America, audiences are divided between avid fans and those for whom attendance at the opera is primarily a social occasion. The prerogatives that the prima donna assumed to be her due in Venetian opera have remained in place throughout this timeto the point that the term prima donna is most frequently used in contemporary English to signify a difficult personality who doesnt even sing. And, as in seventeenth-century Venice, impresarios still run the opera house, though in our more democratic time they have learned to delegate certain powers to specialists such as music and stage directors. Although the details presented in this book have an intrinsic interest for anybody concerned with the early history of the performing arts, their relevance to the later development of opera remains evident throughout. * * *

Philip Gossetts wonderful book could be described as a nonchronologically organized professional autobiography, for it uses his expertise as general editor of the monumental critical editions of Rossini and Verdi, together with his experience as adviser to a multitude of operatic productions, to provide a detailed analysis of the problems encountered by editors, impresarios, musicians, and stage directors in dealing with Italian opera from Rossini through middle Verdi. His study is relevant not only to opera professionals but also to audiences, whose expectations about performers and performances are all too often colored by uninformed biases. In view of Gossetts editorial achievements, one might assume that his attitude toward operatic performance favors a rigorous return to what was likely the original musical text, and perhaps even to conditions similar to those of the first performance. But Gossett is anything but rigid on these matters. For one thing, most of the operas central to his book do not exist in a single original text but in multiple versions or with variants that the composer inserted for specific performances. Moreover, as a result of his active participation inin fact, leadership ofthe movement to edit operatic scores to approximate most closely what came from their composers own hands, Gossett has a special awareness of the limits of the knowledge we can achieve. What is more, his editorial activity has necessarily been accompanied by a central role in the revival of Rossinis works on the operatic stage: without performance even the most skillfully reconstructed scores would languish in obscurity. (Thus, the resurgence of Rossinis great serious operas written for San Carlo in Naples was dependent not only on Gossetts edition but on their active revival at the annual Rossini festival in Pesaro.) And in regard to the compromises necessary to make performance possible, Gossett reminds us of the practical decisions that were made at the time of an operas origins and that remain determinant in our present-day operatic culture. These decisions were based on such contingencies as local theatrical custom, the

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abilities of singers, the changing taste of audiences, union wage regulations, train or bus schedules, and restaurant opening and closing hours (216). But Gossetts awareness of the limitations of our knowledge and of what can realistically be expected in the world of performance by no means leads him to a laissez-faire attitude toward how opera from Rossini through Verdi should be realized. After all, together with the many scholars and musicians associated with his endeavors, Gossett has, in the course of a generation, accomplished a veritable revolution both in the understanding and presentation of the operatic past. One might label him a pragmatic revolutionist, one who has learned how to make only those compromises that do not violate what he sees as the composers style and aesthetic premises. For example, in a long intermezzo entitled Scholars and Performers: The Case of Semiramide, he describes the problems of finding aesthetically and historically justifiable cuts for the Metropolitan Operas first modern production, in 1990, of a Rossini serious opera. Cutting was necessary not only because of such matters, listed above, as union wage rules and train schedules, but also because of the basss vanity and the fact that the tenors contract guaranteed him both his arias. Both in this section (19196) and in a later discussion of cuts in general (24189), Gossett lays out a detailed rationale for cutting that others can build on as many long-forgotten operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and the early Verdi become part of the international repertory. But the compromises that Gossett sees as realistic are also limited. As editor and performance adviser, he has repeatedly confronted what was long the dominant tradition in the realization of the so-called bel canto operas. This tradition is symbolized for him by the ideas and the practice of the late conductor Tullio Serafin, coauthor (and actually main instigator) of Stile, tradizioni e convenzioni del melodramma italiana del Settecento e dellOttocento (1958), a book justifying his own performing practices of these operas. Although Serafin claimed to be following tradition, what he meant by this term were the particular traditions he was familiar with, that is, the ways these operas were performed (what few there were that actually were performed) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Serafins conception of tradition allowed, for instance, the perpetuation of the changes (some of them fraudulent) made by copyists, later additions of brass instruments, and cuts that reflect the musical biases of the verismo age. What Gossett demands above all of impresarios, directors, and performers is a knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the historical conditions, including the social milieu, in which Italian opera of the early nineteenth century was created and staged. And he fully recognizes that we cannot replicate the original performances of these works. Indeed, he has no objections as such to productions that employ settings other than the original ones, as long as these productions respect both the text and the music.

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The organization of Gossetts rich and compendious book reflects its authors dual role as editor and performance adviser. Thus, the opening third treats problems of editing the scores, while the remaining section is devoted to performing. Since the book is addressed to the general reader (above all the opera fan) as well as to musicians and scholars, he is generous with concrete examples drawn from the editorial workshop and from the productions he has witnessed and, as often as not, helped realize. In the introductory chapter, the general reader receives detailed information about such matters as the socioeconomic context of early nineteenth-century opera, the relevant theatrical conventions (the so-called convenienze that Donizetti satirized in a short opera), and the various meters that librettists supplied to suit particular types of musical numbers. At the end Gossett explains in a detailed glossary the many technical terms, literary as well as musical, used throughout the book. The chapters on the editorial process cover a whole spectrum of problems that editors have facedand often solved successfullyin the little more than three decades since serious musicological work on the period began. We learn, for example, how the long-lost tragic ending of Tancredi was discovered in the family papers of a Brescia nobleman, and how Il viaggio a Reims, the whole of which had been lost (though partially recycled in Le Comte Ory), was reconstructed after Gossett found an unordered pile of its original manuscript pages in the library of the Rome Conservatory. And since full scores of primo ottocento operas were not customarily published, one also learns how innumerable errors crept into scores through the work of copyists. Recovering Rossinis orchestration has sometimes proved difficult, Gossett explains, by dint of the fact that he wrote his scores on oblong sheets that did not leave room for certain instruments such as trumpets and percussion in the larger ensembles. As a result the parts for these instruments were written on separate sheets called spartitini that sometimes became isolated from the rest of the score. The skills that editors must possess go considerably beyond musical and historical matters: they also have to gain access to otherwise unavailable manuscripts. This is particularly evident in the negotiations involving the Verdi edition, for the composers heirs own the sketches for his operas. As Gossett describes it, the family has not yet allowed access to all the sketches but has issued permission to scholars in stages. Indeed, the order in which the various works were edited has to some degree been determined by the familys decisions on which sketches to make available. What is especially striking here is the extreme tact Gossett is forced to assume in discussing the editors dealings with the Verdi heirs. One can only express surprise that the manuscript materials of a composer born nearly two centuries ago should not yet be readily accessible to qualified scholars. In fact, it seems remarkable that the heirs of the two most formidable nineteenth-century opera composers are still able to exercise

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considerable power (in Wagners case, this power emanates from control of the Bayreuth Festival). The hundreds of pages of Divas and Scholars devoted to performance practice are notable for presenting a detailed history of practices as a means of determining what solutions are relevant for current-day performance. A printed edition, no matter how critical, Gossett writes, is a point of departure for a performance, not a blueprint to be followed with architectural precision (292). Thus it is no surprise that performance occupies considerably more space in this book than editing. One of the performance chapters, for instance, deals with transpositions to suit the needs (or desires) of individual singers; in discussing the common lowering of the Lucia Mad Scene to E flat major from the original F, Gossett shows that after singing the interpolated flute cadenza (not even written by Donizetti but introduced much later by Nellie Melba), most singers would find it risky to end on the original f. Creating a historical context for practices of this sort can challenge singers to return to the original text, though perhaps at the risk of being booed by audiences familiar with long-established interpolations. Indeed, at one point Gossett objects to what he calls the cynical price (353) audiences are willing to pay for high notesabove all, the tenors high c in Di quella pira or his sustained high b in La donna ` mobilefor Verdi is known not to e have called for these notes in the first place. Another chapter is devoted to ornamentation. Here Gossett researches a number of matters of which performers apparently are not always aware. For example, Rossini and Donizetti did not write out their appoggiaturas but simply expected performers to insert them; by contrast Bellini indicated them with grace notes, while Verdi wrote them out. The chapter is loaded with detail on the history of cadenzas and variations past and presentfor instance, on the ornamentations that Rossini wrote for singers long after he had ceased composing opera, and on the degree of ornamentation appropriate to particular Verdi works. The only thing I should also have welcomed here is an example of ornamentations that Gossett himself helped prepare for one of the many singers whom he has instructed on what would be historically appropriate. In his chapter on the relation of words and music, Gossett argues forcefully against the still prevailing practice of presenting the French operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi in Italian translation, for the differing metrical forms of the two languages do not allow the music composed for the French text to fit the Italian lines. In this chapter he also defends Rossinis recycling of melodies from one opera into another (usually in a different city that was unfamiliar with the earlier work): within Rossinis aesthetic, his music does not express the emotions voiced by the poetry; instead, words provide semantic suggestions, rhythmic relationships and stresses to which the composer responds (377). And in fact the relation of words and music, as he shows in detail, differs among the four composers central to this book; whereas Bellini, for example, sometimes

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drafted melodies before he had received words for them, Rossini, despite his recycling proclivities, did not create tunes in the absence of text (37071). Another chapter surveys the instruments of the orchestra to explore how modern productions can reproduce sounds appropriate to operas conceived for quite different instruments. After all, opera companies do not ordinarily employ period-instrument players. How, for example, does one find an equivalent for brass instruments variously referred to in scores as cimbasso, serpentone, or ophicleide (428)? And how to determine which instrumentharpsichord, fortepiano, or double bassto use for continuo (440)? Gossett here addresses a wide variety of problems that are of interest not only to performers but also to audiences curious to know how a particular artistic decision was made in the performance they are witnessing. A final chapter of the section on performance practices considers both how we recapture knowledge of early stagings of these operas and what their relevance is to contemporary productions. Gossett makes an interesting distinction between what he calls displaced stagingsthat is, those in which the original setting is displaced to another time and placeand radical ones, in which the director makes far more fundamental changes (47684). It is significant that displaced stagings go back to Verdi himself, who, because of censorship problems, shifted Rigoletto from France to Mantua and Un ballo in maschera from Sweden to Boston. As for controversial contemporary displacements and radicalizations, it is significant that Gossett carefully avoids taking either-or stands; he cites David J. Levin to claim that one can find both convincing and original traditional stagings and convincing and original radical stagings (484). Gossett brings his long book to an entertaining conclusion in a coda entitled Two Kings Head North, in which he provides detailed descriptions of two quite different reconstructions of operas about royalty in which he participated. The north refers to the sites of these productions, one in Gothenburg in 20022003, the other in Helsinki in 2003. The first production attempted to recapture as closely as possible the score of the original Swedish setting of Un ballo in maschera that had been intended for Naples but had never been staged because of censorship. (What we usually hear today, of course, is the version that Verdi allowed to be displaced to colonial Boston.) The Swedish version, entitled Una ` vendetta in domino, was reconstituted by means of shrewd guesswork, and Gossett recounts this process in detail. The other production is a version of Un viaggio a Reims with a text rewritten by its director, the comic dramatist Dario Fo, to undercut the original texts Restoration ideology with sharp antiroyalist satire. Among the many pleasures of this book is the disarming honesty Gossett displays in his judgments. Opera fans will relish his sometimes biting anecdotes about individual performers. The once-great Montserrat Caballe is chided for undertaking the title role in Ermione at Pesaro in 1987 when she could [no longer] sing the music and did not seem to understand that it mattered (7). The

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first performance from the Verdi critical edition, Riccardo Mutis 1983 Rigoletto, was marred by its replacement tenor, the late Franco Bonisolli, described by Gossett as vocally coarse, dramatically vulgar, and indifferent to this productions efforts to rediscover and interpret Verdis original text and music (12). Even Samuel Ramey, whom Gossett has worked with closely and whom he much admires, takes a brief beating for his insistence on holding a high f at the end of Assurs mad scene in the Metropolitan Operas 1990 Semiramidewith the result that the orchestra could not alternate tonic and dominant, as the score specified. But at one performance, the composer had his revenge, or as Gossett puts it, I like to think . . . that Gioachino was watching these shenanigans: after two bars of high f, Rameys voice cracked, leaving the orchestra to repeat the tonic chord in solitary splendor (19596). It should be clear, as the books title indicates, that divas (not to speak of divos) and scholars are inextricably tied to one another. The three books I have here brought together, diverse though they may be in the periods they focus on and the methods of investigation they employ, are models for what can be done within opera scholarship today. In the course of reading them, one recognizes that the study of opera shares some of the continuing vitality of the genre to which it is addressed. Indeed, it may not be coincidental that the growth of opera studies during the past quarter century has been contemporary with a worldwide boom in opera production.
doi:10.1093/oq/kbn013
Advance Access publication June 7, 2008

Herbert Lindenberger

notes Herbert Lindenberger is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of two books on opera, Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984) and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to

Cage (1998), as well as many essays on the genre. He has also published books on Wordsworth, Buchner, Trakl, historical drama, and critical theory. Currently he is engaged in a project on the interrelationship of the arts.

Jessica Waldoff: Recognition in Mozarts Operas

New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 352 Pages, $45.00

David Cairns: Mozart and His Operas

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006 301 Pages, $29.95

Prima la musica, dopo le parole: this memorable saying bespeaks a conviction that operatic texts are at best pre-texts, that the librettist is the serva (the Susanna) and not the consorte (the Countess) of the composer. As Charles Rosen declares