Category: CDs

Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello — Recordings and Books

Corrina

Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Violoncello (BWV1007-1012) form one of his greatest musical monuments.  The suites, and their constituent preludes and dances are essential to every cellist, and the moment when a cello student learns their first Minuet, Gigue, or Allemande, is the start of a long, challenging journey. In his biography of Bach from 1802 Johann Nikolaus Forkel noted that:

There are few instruments for which Bach has not composed something. In his time, it was usual to play in the church, during communion, a concerto or solo upon some instrument. He often wrote such pieces himself, and always contrived them so that his performers could, by their means, improve upon their instruments. Most of these pieces, however, are lost. But, on the other hand, two principal works of another kind have been preserved, which, in all probability, richly indemnify us for the loss of the others. For a long series of years, the Violin Solos were universally considered by the greatest performers on the violin as the best means to make an ambitious student a perfect master of his instrument. The solos of the violoncello are, in this respect, of equal value.”  Nikolaus Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach: his life, art, and work 

It is unclear when Bach wrote the cello suites; there is much debate about whether they pre- or post-date the solo violin sonatas and partitas. Similarly, we do not know whether he composed all six suites consecutively, or whether they were a project Bach completed over time. The same uncertainty applies to the solo violin works, although in their case there exists a fair copy in Bach’s hand, dated 1720.  Bach’s second wife, Anne Magdelene made another copy between 1727 and 1731, for which Bach’s pupil Schwanenberg wrote the frontispieces. It appears that Anne Magdelene’s copy of the suites for cello dates from the same time, possibly intended to be one volume with the violin solos, but Schwanenberg later wrote another frontispiece for them: 6 Suites, a Violoncello Solo senza Basso composes par Sr. J. S. Bach, Maitre de Chapelle. Other copies of the violin and cello solos were made by Bach’s associate, Johann Peter Kellner. 

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Staff picks: CDs

Mark

Here are some music titles that library staff have recently been listening to and enjoying.

Martin P’s Picks:
Sunshine hit me / Bees (Musical group)
Debut album by a British band, came out in 2002, described by Wikipedia as “eclectic and summery, with a range of influences that include psychedelia, Jamaican dub, reggae, indie, 1960s rock and others”. It’s a lovely, melodic bunch of pop songs. They made several further albums, but none as good as this. Great summer record.

 

Miss America / O’Hara, Mary Margaret
Came out in 1988. The debut (and so far only) album by this Canadian artist. Came and went almost without trace at the time, but subsequently lavished with praise by musicians such as Michael Stipe and Tanya Donelly, as well as having its songs covered by bands from Cowboy Junkies to Perfume Genius. Her idiosyncratic vocals are unlike anyone else, and the album sounds like it could have been made last week rather than 35 years ago. Try Body’s In Trouble for a taste.

Heavy heavy / Young Fathers
Released Feb ’23, this new album from the Scottish trio sees them further developing their unique mix of tribal music, rap and singalong choruses. The production is a little less raw now perhaps, than on their early releases, but their ear for hooks and thought-provoking lyrics is better than ever.

 

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July’s New Music for Te Awe

Mark


via GIPHY

Statler: Well, it was good.
Waldorf: Ah, it was very bad.
Statler: Well, it was average.
Waldorf: Ah, it was in the middle there.
Statler: Ah, it wasn’t that great.
Waldorf: I kind of liked it.”
-‘The Muppet Show’.

I’m Mark, the Music & Film Specialist at Wellington City Libraries. I buy music for the CD & Vinyl collections, and also run the Libraries’ Wellington Music Facebook page). My Music Specialist colleague Sam, and Fiction Specialist (and avid music fan) Neil, join me every month to cast an eye over the new material we have been buying for the Music collection at our CBD Te Awe library. We pick out some interesting titles across a range of music genres, and try to limit our reviews to a few lines only. Can we encapsulate an entire album in just a couple of lines? [Ed. This is probably unlikely at this point]. Do we actually know anything about new music? Or, are we just too old to understand what most of this is banging on about? [Ed. This is more than likely]. Read on to find out…

Careful of your keepers / This is the Kit
Mark says: Essentially the moniker of UK folkie Kate Stable, This Is The Kit are a band with an ever evolving series of musicians, and ‘Careful of your keepers’ is their 6th album overall & 3rd on the Rough Trade label. Produced by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, this has no problems in dispensing with the musical boundaries usually associated around the term ‘folk’, and instead uses the low key acoustic guitar and banjo sound as a mere jumping of point, mixing in skittery drums, Jazz horns and rhythms, free-form playing and impressionistic lyrics, yet impressively manages to keep all of it together in a classicist song form.

Neil says: Throughout her career This is the kit, AKA Kate Stables, has constantly reinvented herself. Her work can very loosely be described as alternative folk-rock, but is always so much more than those rigid labels. And so it is with ‘Careful of your Keepers’ her latest album, written and constructed very much from Kate’s own unique perspective. The music feels loose and free, but contains a tightness that she seemingly effortlessly imposes on the song’s forms and structures. The album is meditative and trance like in feel, sentimental in parts, and flows in a beautiful and occasionally brooding fashion.

Everyone’s crushed / Water From Your Eyes
Mark says: Water from Your Eyes are an experimental-pop duo from Brooklyn, and ‘Everyone’s crushed’ is their 5th full length album, and first on major label Matador. They very much put the ‘art’ in Art-pop, with this album of experimental tracks, that balance noise and melody on a fine edge. Full of squally guitars, harsh digital noise, 80s pop stylings and quirky prosaic lyrics, they come off as a glitch-pop noise version of Liz Phair in places. Worth checking out if you enjoy more leftfield pop, like last year’s I love you Jennifer B from Jockstrap.

Neil says: Everyone’s crushed is an intriguing release. The album is very deliberately ramshackle and detached in structure and form, both within single tracks and overall. Reportedly the duo didn’t do anything on this release without getting thoroughly stoned first. And you can tell that while the album contains its own fuzzy logic, it also boasts loads of catchy loops and has melodic elements sprinkled throughout. The lyrics are a kind of personal and global state of the nation summary, and display a deep undercurrent of murky fatalism. This combination of glitchy samples, art pop aesthetic lyrics, loose structure and experimental and melodic components makes for a mesmerizing and potent mix. Well worth checking out.

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Songs and colours of water and earth: Mahler, Schoenberg, and Orchestra Wellington

Corrina

Continuing the series of posts that explore links between the WCL music collection and Orchestra Wellington’s 2023 Inner Visions season, today’s blog investigates the connections between their July concert ‘Three Colours‘ and books about Arnold Schoenberg (Five Pieces for Orchestra) and Gustav Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde) whose music frames the programme. In between these pieces, sits Richard Strauss’s Burleske for piano and orchestra, an exuberant work of the composer’s youth.

Burleske, which will feature Jian Liu playing the mercurial solo part, dates from 1885-1886 when Strauss was 21 years old. At the time of Burleske‘s genesis, Strauss had completed his tenure as Hans von Bülow’s assistant with the Meiningen Court Orchestra, and was deep in the phase of his ‘Brahms Adoration’. Burleske offers some unabashedly Brahmsian moments, but Strauss’s musical identity — which would be realized more fully in a few years, with Don Juan — is entirely clear. In fact, by the time Burleske had its premiere in Eisenach in 1890, the public had already been introduced to Don Juan in Weimar, a performance that cemented Strauss’s reputation as a leader of the avant-garde.

Strauss wrote Burleske for Hans von Bülow to perform as soloist, but the veteran pianist and conductor did not warm to the piece, writing to Brahms in January 1891 that ‘Strauss’s Burleske decidedly has some genius in it, but in other respects, it is horrifying.’ Strauss himself came to view the piece as something of an aberration, but despite his doubts, Burleske endured: in 1947, a festival dedicated to Strauss and his music was held in London, and the 83-year-old composer conducted a performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra, the programme consisting of Burleske, Don Juan, and Symphonia Domestica. You can read more about Strauss’s life and music in an earlier blog post.

The first performance of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra also took place in London, at one of Sir Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts in the Queen’s Hall. The orchestra had never encountered such music, and Wood devoted an almost unprecedented amount of rehearsal to the Five Pieces, ‘three consecutive rehearsals of an hour each,’ as Eugene Goossens (then a violinist in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra) remembered:

Wood, cutting, thrusting, parrying, and dissecting with that long white baton, fighting down the thing that all conductors have to fight sooner or later in varying degrees – the hostility of an orchestra that has fatally prejudged a novelty – eventually secured order out of chaos.” Eugene Goossens, The New York Times, 3 September 1944

Despite Wood’s meticulous preparation, the audience at the premiere on 3 September 1912 was hostile, derisive, and baffled. Undeterred, Wood  invited Schoenberg to come to London in January 1914 to conduct a second performance, and this received a far better reception: a note included in the programme stated that ‘Herr ARNOLD SCHOENBERG has promised his cooperation at today’s concert on condition that during the performance of his Orchestral Pieces perfect silence is maintained.’ Any hostile elements in the audience were drowned out by substantial applause.

It is from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces that the title for this week’s concert, ‘Colours’ is at least partially derived. The third of the pieces, unnamed at the time of composition in 1909, and even in the first edition of the score in 1912, later acquired the title ‘Farben’, possibly shortened from Akkordfaerbungen (‘chord hues’). When Schoenberg conducted a performance of the Five Pieces at Salzburg in 1920, this central piece was subtitled ‘Der Traunsee am Morgen,’ reflecting Schoenberg’s initial idea for the piece, seeing the colours of dawn on the waters of the Traunsee through the eye of an accomplished painter.

Evocations of light, liquid, and colour are also central to the poetic texts in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). This symphony or song cycle was completed in 1909, making the work contemporaneous with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces. After Mahler read Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), a collection of free translations (‘Nachdichtungen’) by Hans Bethge of existing translations of Tang dynasty poetry into German and French, he was moved by their expression and imagery, choosing  poems by Li Bai, Quian Qui, Men Haoran, and Wang Wei to set to music.  In the first poem, ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ (‘The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow’), we hear of cellars full of golden wines (‘Dein Keller birgt die Fülle des goldenen Weins!’) and the eternal blue of the heavens (‘Das Firmament blaut ewig’). The second movement, ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ (‘The Solitary One in Autumn’ begins with images of bluish mists creeping over a lake,  while the frosty grass seems sprinkled with jade dust.’ Another image of colour and water occurs in the fourth movement, ‘Von der Schönheit’ (‘Of beauty’) where the poet describes girls picking lotus flowers at a river bank, as ‘Golden sun plays about their form/Reflecting them in the clear water.’ (Gold’ne Sonne webt um die Gestalten/Spiegelt sie im blanken Wasser wider’). 

Detailed discussion and contextualization of Das Lied von der Erde can be found in three excellent books in the Wellington City Libraries collection, each written from a different perspective, and with a different intention in the author’s mind:

Gustav Mahler : songs and symphonies of life and death : interpretations and annotations / Mitchell, Donald
Donald Mitchell (1925-2017) was a pioneering Mahler scholar, his research and writing on his subject spanned many decades, and was frequently revised and updated. Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985) followed on the heels of two groundbreaking studies, Gustav Mahler: the Early Years (1958) and Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (1975). Mitchell’s Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death focuses on Mahler’s vocal music, with a deep discussion of Das Lied von der Erde that illuminates the composer’s sketches and process, his interpretation of the poetic texts, and the personal significance of this monumental work.

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June’s New Music for Te Awe: Part 2

Mark

Here is part two of our new music picks for June. You can catch up with Part 1 here. Do we actually know anything about new music? Or, are we just too old to understand what most of this is banging on about? Read on to find out.

[Note: We welcome a new addition to our review team, with Sam who is the new other half of the WCL Music Customer Specialist team].

Tubular bells : 50th anniversary edition / Oldfield, Mike
Sam says: When ‘Tubular Bells’ was released in 1973, it left a sizeable impact on the field of popular music. It was a tremendous artistic achievement, with the entirety of the writing process and majority of the vast instrumental performances undertaken by Oldfield himself, who was a mere teenager at the time! The compositions are colourful and endlessly inventive, driven by an epic, odyssey-like structure weaving through many varied musical movements. Over the decades since its release, it has played a significant role within numerous pieces of media (such as its iconic usage in the legendary horror film ‘The Exorcist’). It has also seen numerous reissues, and it has even garnered a number of musical sequels created by Mike Oldfield himself. Needless to say, 50 years later, the impact of this monumental piece of music is still clearly apparent.

Neil says: ‘Tubular bells’ was the first ever release on the Virgin label. It’s creator, the then, 19-year-old musician Mike Oldfield, incredibly plays every instrument on the album. Much of Virgin’s fate depended on the success or otherwise of the release, as no expense had been spared on the recording, and at the time Virgin enterprises was in its infancy. Initially the albums sales were sluggish, but the use of music from the album in William Friedkin’s visceral horror classic The Exorcist changed that and propelled it high into the charts. The rest, as they say, is history. It is a pastoral, progressive rock album with folk and classical elements, and one of the most iconic and popular albums of the 70’s. This 50th anniversary release features a new master of the original album “the gem in this rerelease” plus music recorded by Oldfield for the London Olympics and excerpts from an abandoned Tubular Bells 4 project. Arguably Oldfield would never quite reach the heights he reached in his first outing.

O monolith / Squid (Musical group)
Mark says: More post-punk, Krautrock, and post-rock aesthetics from this London based band, following on from 2021’s acclaimed Bright Green Field. Squid are definitely a band at the forefront of the ‘post genre’ style of music that is the template for many young bands now. Cool grooves and intense tracks, where it seems that anything could happen at any musical moment. Produced by Dan Carey (who also produced everyone from Black Midi to Fontaines D.C, Wet Leg and Goat Girl). There’s a maximalist/Minimalist juxtaposition at play, as tracks surge with a synthy, distorted noise before collapsing back into softer aesthetics. Radiohead seem a stronger influence than on their debut album, with more obtuse melodies and esoteric lyrics.

Neil says: Squid’s second album sees them building, and carefully expanding, on their critically acclaimed first album Bright Green Field. There is a new spectral, spacey opened ended sound to much of this latest release. Their core sound is still present, but they let the structure of the songs slowly evolve, rather than go for the previous ‘short-sharp-shock’ angular approach of Bright Green Field. The lyrics again are dense and multi-layered touching on many themes, and it is sure to win them even more fans and, one suspects, a lot of attention and nominations to feature on best of 2023 lists. I, for one, can’t wait to hear where they head to next.

Sam says: Hailing from Brighton, England, Squid burst onto the scene a couple of years back with Bright Green Field, which of itself was an impressive debut that, while not particularly original, displayed a highly developed level of musicianship for such a young act. With their sophomore effort ‘O Monolith’, they have stepped their game up notably. All the aspects that were so impressive on the previous album have been articulated in a stronger and more compelling way. The progressive elements that creeped through before are now much more fully-formed and confidently executed, whereas the more aggressive post-punk tendencies, whilst perhaps a little more sparse in their utilisation, are just as powerful as ever when they do come through. Most notably, the songs themselves feel more potent and memorable, making for a consistently engaging and rewarding listen. Similarly-minded new British groups such as Black Midi and Black Country, New Road really hit their stride with their respective follow-up albums over the past couple of years, with O Monolith it feels like Squid’s turn to show the world what they are really capable of.

Continue reading “June’s New Music for Te Awe: Part 2” →

Operatic Highlights at WCL

Corrina

NZ Opera’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the St James Theatre (14—18 June) seemed like the perfect time to display some of WCL’s collection of operatic treasurers at Te Awe Library.  Across our branches, and at Te Pātaka, there are many books, CDs, and DVDs concerned with the art form that Samuel Johnson famously called an ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’.  This blog introduces some well-known, and some less familiar, highlights that formed part of the Te Awe display.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393313956/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 Mozart and the enlightenment : truth, virtue, and beauty in Mozart’s operas / Till, Nicholas
Nicholas Till examines Mozart’s operas through the lens of Enlightenment sensibility, drawing together the strands of history, theology, sociology, literary theory, and even some psychology to anatomize the motivation and vision behind Mozart’s operas. Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte —Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790) — each receive detailed contextual and musical analysis that considers Mozart’s own intellectual stance on philosophy and politics in that revolutionary decade. Till’s provocative hypotheses and detailed reasoning, combined with his clear fascination with Mozart’s operas, result in a stimulating and highly satisfying exploration of the significance of Mozart’s operas in the eighteenth century and in society today.

The young Kiri : the early recordings, 1964-70 / Te Kanawa, Kirihttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000E4LX/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 A colour photograph of Kiri te Kanawa when young. She is looking to the left. Her hair is shoulder length, and she is wearing a red stole with a striped pattern, and smiling gently.
This two-disc set of Dame Kiri te Kanawa’s early recordings offers a compelling aural portrait of the young singer, at the start of an extraordinary career.  CD 1 is devoted to arias and art song, with Puccini especially well-represented in extracts from La bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, as well as showpiece arias from Johann Strauss’s Die Federmaus and Gounoud’s Faust among other treasures. CD 2 turns to musical theatre and popular song, demonstrating te Kanawa’s versatility in different styles of singing. A number of ensembles and collaborating musicians also make an appearance: the NZBC Orchestra, organist Peter Averi, singer Hohepa Mutu, and harpist Dorothea Franchi.

Fashion designers at the opera / Matheopoulos, Helena
Gianni Versace created a stunning dress for Kiri te Kanawa in Strauss’s Capriccio at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1990; Zandra Rhodes has designed costumes for Verdi’s Aida, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Bizet’s Pearl Fishers; the bejeweled gown worn by Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt transformed the character into a source of golden light in a world of sinister, oppressive darkness. These are just a few examples of the work that leading fashion designers have produced for opera productions around the world, responding to the challenge of creating costumes in which performers can move and sing. Helena Matheopoulos profiles many many figures from the world in this collection of interviews, sketches, and resplendent full-color illustrations of the costumes in production.

Hänsel und Gretel : opera in three acts
When Richard Strauss conducted the premiere of Engelbert Humperdinck’s  Hänsel und Gretel at Weimar in 1893, he declared the piece a ‘masterpiece of the highest quality’. This 2011 production is a musical and visual feast, the action shifted from the terror-ridden Ilsenstein forest to a modern urban setting. Gretel and her brother live in a house of cardboard boxes, which they share with their loving but poverty-stricken parents. Rather than finding a gingerbread cottage, the habitation of  Rosine Leckermaul (the witch) is amid the aisles of a supermarket offering every alluring and mass-produced confection. This production is superbly cast, every singer inhabiting the style with energy. Of special note is Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s turn as a matriarchal yet terrifying witch. Humperdink’s music is a captivating fusion of orchestral opulence and gemütlich spirit that draws on more than a century of German Romanticism, from Schubert and Weber to Wagner and Mahler.

The only way is up : reflections on a life in opera / McIntyre, Donald
It is impossible to summarise the career of Donald McIntyre in a paragraph, but fortunately The Only Way is Up more than compensates. A page-turning memoir of life as an aspirant All Black, and then as one of the foremost exponents of Wagner’s music, The Only Way is Up charts the successes and surprises of working on the stages of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. McIntyre’s stories include appearances by leading conductors, directors, and fellow singers too numerous to mention here, but a particular highlight is McIntyre’s role in Patrice Chereau’s extraordinary ‘Centennial’ Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, a series of productions that revolutionized the staging of Wagner’s music dramas.

Dido and Aeneas : opera in three acts
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas brings together opera and dance in a collaboration between the Royal Opera, and Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. A musical and visual spectacle, Wayne McGregor’s contemporary choreography fuses with Purcell’s music, realising in the dancers’ movement many of the intricacies in the score. Sarah Connolly (Dido) and Lucas Meachum (Aeneas) imbue their roles with magnificence befitting their royal status, Dido’s descent into despair truly wrenches the heart as she is undone by the witches’ cruelty. Although this production met with mixed responses in 2009, mainly to do with the size of the stage in relation to the intimacy of Purcell’s opera, McGregor’s seems vision is more successful on screen, where the cameras bring us closer to the action.

The partnership : Brecht, Weill, three women, and Germany on the brink / Katz, Pamela
Although the partnership between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is well-documented, Pamela Katz is the first author to bring to the fore the roles played by Lotte Lenya, Helene Weigel, and Elizabeth Hauptmann in the creation and performance of Weill and Brecht’s operas. Brech and Weill’s deconstruction and subversion of operatic conventions in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera have been the subject of much research and discussion, but the significant involvement and influence of Weigel, Hauptmann, and Lenya in the creative process have never been adequately examined. This book does so, charting the development and early performance history of the operas in the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, as well as their creators’ flight from Germany in 1933.

Southern voices : international opera singers of New Zealand / Simpson, Adrienne
Adriennehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0790002256 /ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 Simpson and Peter Downes dedicated this book to the singers it profiles. Southern Voices is a trove of insights into the careers and reflections of a succession of truly great artists. The singers reflect on their early training and the formative experiences in local choirs and competitions that set them on the path to the most august heights of their profession.  Malvina Major’s recollections of her triumph as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at the 1968 Salzburg Festival, working with Claudio Abbado; Inia te Wiata’s creation of roles in operas by Benjamin Britten; Patricia Payne overcame homesickness and uncertainty at the Opera Centre in London to find musical fulfilment on the concert platform before becoming a soloist with Covent Garden’s permanent company, and a guest soloist in productions all over Europe and the USA; Barry Mora’s successes in many roles over several seasons at Gelsenkirchen, before joining the permanent ensemble at the Frankfurt Opera, where experimental and provocative productions made the company a provocative centre of Regietheater in the 1980s. These stories, and many more, make Southern Voices a fascinating source of history, reinforcing the remarkable achievements of New Zealand singers on the international scene.

The birth of an opera : fifteen masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck / Rose, Michael
Michael Rose slices through centuries of myth-making and romanticising to document the creation of fifteen operas, from Monteverdi’s Poppea (first performed in 1643) to Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). Rose examines the manifold complexities of making operas, including the composers’ selection of libretti and collaboration with librettists (for example, the partnerships between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, and Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal), the challenges and benefits of aristocratic patronage, grappling with censors, and parrying hostile critics and cabals. A rich array of primary sources, including exchanges of letters between composers and their collaborators, treatise extracts, and aesthetic manifesti, illuminate the making of Fidelio, Otello, Turandot among other works.

Pene Pati
Tenor Pene Pati is equally well-known here as an outstanding operatic tenor, and one-third of  Sol3Mio.In the last five years, Pati’s career has been spectacularly ascendent. Currently performing the role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris — a role he will reprise in Toronto with the Canadian Opera Company later this year — Pati’s recent schedule has seen him perform in Monte Carlo, Naples, Prague, and Berlin. In 2021, Pati signed an exclusive recording contract with Warner Classics, and this, his debut album, includes extracts from some of the operas in which his recent performances have earned particular acclaim: Verdi’s Rigoletto, Gounoud’s Romeo et Juliette, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. 

Opera, or, The undoing of women / Clement, Catherine
A foundational text in feminist musicology, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women (originally published in French as L’Opéra ou la Défaite des femmes in 1979) was contentious when it was first published in French 1979, and remains controversial today. As one of the first critical studies to apply feminist theory to the plots and texts of operas, considering specifically the situation of opera’s female characters, Clément unpicks the fates of Turandot, Cio-Cio San, Lucia, Tatiana, Violetta, Tosca, Isolde. Her analysis identifies several plot and character archetypes, to demonstrate how ’19th-century opera perpetuates a social order which requires either the death or the domestication of the female protagonist.’ Although Clément’s musical analyses are unsophisticated, her poetic language remains compelling, while her arguments remain relevant and provocative nearly 45 years after the book’s first appearance.