Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Music
  4. Opera
  5. Content Listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

3661 results in Opera

Page 97 of 184

  • OPR volume 23 issue 3 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 23 / Issue 3 / November 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 July 2012, pp. b1-b2
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

  • Photo-Opera: La fanciulla del West and the staging souvenir

  • ELLEN LOCKHART
  • Journal:
    Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 23 / Issue 3 / November 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 July 2012, pp. 145-166

  • Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, its mise-en-scène was given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play, The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staging livret ensured that La fanciulla looked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. Both The Girl and La fanciulla bear the marks of their mediated nature: The Girl suggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunset La fanciulla moves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, the fonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.

Page 97 of 184