Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010

In the newly popularized genre of opera during the seventeenth century, the allegorical prologue was commonly used as a preface from about 1600 to 1670, with no fewer than 98 opera prologues composed throughout Venice during this period. These prologues, often sung by allegories and/or characters from myth, set the stage for the proceeding drama. In the prologue to Francesco Cavalli's 1640 opera Gli Amori d'Apollo e di Dafne, its characters, the gods of sleep and dreams, set the stage for an opera that revolves around a dream. This article explores the act of wishing the audience peaceful and pleasant dreams by using oratory as a method that the allegorical figures use to sing the audience a lullaby. The purpose of this lullaby is to instigate the suspension of disbelief required to allow the story to gain the audience's credibility. This article will show how Cavalli's opera does so uniquely by spatially extending its effects outwards onto the audience rather than only onto the characters onstage.

The seventeenth-century English mad song reached a pinnacle with the work of Henry Purcell (16591695), whose compositional innovations within that genre continued to be employed long after his death. The intention of this essay is to explore the development of the Baroque mad song, as well as the musical expression of madness contained within, by deconstructing three songs composed within 50 years of one another: Henry Purcell's Bess of Bedlam (1682), and two mad songs by Henry Carey I go to the Elisian Shade (1724) and Gods! I can never this endure (1732). Though much is known of Henry Purcell, little-known composer, poet and satirist Henry Carey (16891743) was one of the few composers of mad songs during the 1720s and 1730s. Carey's exciting and engaging mad songs stand as superlative representatives of period solo vocal literature. Yet, progressive though they are, direct antecedents to Carey's work can be found in the earlier work of Purcell. By studying excerpts from Purcell's Bess of Bedlam and each of Carey's mad songs, this essay explores the genre of the English mad song, focusing primarily on its development in the hands of Carey during the early part of the eighteenth century. Consideration is also given to non-musical elements, including period and contemporary reflections on madness, facilitating an understanding of how madness in literature and drama was reflected in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century mad songs of Purcell and Carey.

The two male sopranos Carlo Broschi Farinelli (17051782) and Gaetano Majorano Caffarelli (17101783) shared many similarities: the two most prominent exponents of the new, virtuosic Neapolitan style of singing were close in age, had a very similar educational background having studied with Nicolo Porpora in Naples, and quickly climbed the career ladder to take only primo uomo roles. However, the singers were at very different points in their respective careers at the time of the productions in which they appeared together on stage, namely Siroe (Metastasio-Hasse) at the Teatro Malvezzi in Bologna in 1733 and Merope (Zeno-Giacomelli), Artaserse (Metastasio, pasticcio) and Berenice (Salvi-Araja) at the Teatro San Grisostomo in Venice in 1734. Farinelli had already achieved international fame and was generally held to be the greatest singer in Italy, whereas the slightly younger Caffarelli was still in the process of establishing himself at the very top, but loath to take secondary roles any more. As a result, their relationship was strained, according to Farinelli's correspondance with Count Sicinio Pepoli. The measures Caffarelli took in Venice to challenge Farinelli's superiority apparently backfired, and contributed to the disastrous premiere of the first opera of the carnival Merope, which consequently was replaced at short notice with an Artaserse pasticcio with music by Hasse and Vinci. An analysis of the two singers' roles in the operas in which they collaborated gives insights into mid-eighteenth-century opera production, and reveals both the dramatic and musical reasons for Farinelli's impact and popularity with the audience and Caffarelli's failure to outshine his older colleague.

One of the basic aims of The Vocal and Acting Faculty of the Academy of Music in Gdask is to prepare students to perform in opera. During the academic year 20052006, the Faculty undertook work on an unusual enterprise, the previously unperformed opera by Kassern (19041957), Comedy of the Dumb Wife, written in 1953. The proposal that this opera be performed was made by the author of this article, who was engaged in research on this neglected Polish emigrant composer. The performance took place on 19 May 2006, and was recorded. The director chose to present the action in the silent movie convention of the 1930s, with plain scenery and characteristic black-and-white costumes, with the pianist playing at the side of the stage. Although the main purpose of the production was didactic, it went much beyond this original aim, helping to erase one of the blank spots in the history of Polish music. This article looks more closely at this forgotten work and analyses salient features of the composer's craft.

Robert Hatten's work on musical meaning and the classical style has become widely respected amongst music scholars. Hatten has applied theories of markedness and correlation almost exclusively to instrumental music, and one of the primary aims of this article is to investigate the usefulness of his analytical approach in the context of opera by way of an analysis of the opening section of the first duet in Act 3 of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. Further to this aim, this article looks to explore the relationship of Hatten's work with the tradition of music analysis, thereby engaging with Scott Burnham's assertion that Hatten's work can be related to a wider shift in musicology away from the Formenlehre tradition, which increasingly tended to treat [sonata] form ahistorically towards treatments of form that highlight a play of conventions (Burnham 2002: 903). This engagement will be carried out, in part, by reflecting on the analytical findings below with particular reference to the relationship they open up between libretto and music. This will, in turn, offer insight into wider musicological questions concerning the usefulness and limitations of formalist analysis in general. The article begins with a brief introduction to Hatten's application of markedness theory.

Antonin Artaud's last radio recording from 1948 is one of his final projects of corporeal transformation: where the visual body is completely absent in radio broadcasting, Artaud's body without organs puts together words, music, screams, glossolalia and laughter as visual attacks where sound is recognized as the real mark of the body. Even if the recordings were not broadcast by the radio station, they are a rare experiment to actively end the process of representation through sound. The scream becomes the means to transmit the body without organs by destroying meaning and representation.

Lehmann's paradigm of postdramatic theatre has mainly been criticized on two levels: its flexibility and its alleged putting to death of drama. I wish to highlight to what extent flexible paradigms like the postdramatic one are necessary to study the numerous performances that are characterized by their in-between-ness between dramatic and postdramatic codes. The study of postdramatic jazz musicality that we observe in Jaz by Koffi Kwahul or in Isabella's Room by Jan Lauwers demonstrates the need for such flexibility.

Lehmann's notion of independent auditory semiotics could be a relevant tool to study the exploitation of text as music (and not only in music). As Lehmann does not develop this concept but only mentions it in his general postdramatic theory, I wish to propose an introductory model of postdramatic auditory semiotics, based on the opacity of the theatrical sign and on the Peircian notion of iconic thought. The latter makes it possible to study performativity per se via semiotic theories. Consequently, in contrast to the opinion of many researchers, among whom is the semiotician Erika Fischer-Lichte, theatrical semiotics does not only provide tools to study what the signs of the performance mean. It can also deal with autonomous performativity, which is particularly necessary with regard to postdramatic theatre.

Using a production of Euripides' Phoenissae I supervised and directed at the Universitt Hildesheim in 2004 as a main example, this article seeks to explore in which ways making music (or better, in Christopher Small's term, musicking) can become a central dramaturgical, narrative and performative driver of the mise-en-scne. In the given case it resulted in a hybrid of performative genres and contained elements of a concert, an installation, a story-telling event, straight theatre and chorus recitation. Through this hybridization the production questioned the nature of the following relationships: (1) Music/stage: the production stretched the notion of music on stage to music with the stage. The stage was equally a performative space, a sound box and sonic space. (2) Performer/character: the production questioned the role of the performers who continually oscillated between being actors, narrators, chorus and musicians. Musicking became performative action and vice versa. (3) Performance/narrative: musicking, spatial design, visual imagery and the audience's interpretative reception intertwined to introduce forms of theatrical narrative that I will argue to be emergent.

Large-cast, spectacular musical theatre productions require long runs to offset their high production and running costs. Even as the so-called Golden Age of the Musical was peaking in the late 1950s in the United States, musicals in smaller forms were emerging. Changes in American society in the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to changes in both the form and content of what the author calls Intimate Musicals. The author proposes a definition of the Intimate Musical and then analyses a sample of smaller shows from the last 50 years. A brief discourse on certain aspects of performing small-scale shows is interspersed.

In 1923 Germaine Tailleferre, the only female member of the group of French composers known as Les Six, completed Le Marchand d'oiseaux for the Ballet Sudois, with a scenario, costumes and set designs by the woman artist and poetess Hlne Perdriat. Interestingly, a number of the contemporary critics interpreted the work (mainly the product of two women) as a feminist manifestation. This article examines the justification for labelling Le Marchand d'oiseaux a feminist work, and posits the theory that it may be more apt, especially within the context of the development of inter-war musical modernism, to understand it as a neoclassical ballet.

Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, David Savran (2009) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, (x+326 pp.), ISBN 978-0-472-11692-8 (hbk), $35.00

Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 16951705, Kathryn Lowerre (2009) [Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in Theatre, Music, Dance], Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, xvi + 412 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-6614-1 (hbk), 60.00

America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (2006) New York: Routledge, (328 pp.), ISBN 978-0-415-99052-3, (pbk), $21.95.

Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story, Nigel Simeone (2009) [Landmarks in Music Since 1950], Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate (177 pp.), ISBN 978-0-7546-6484-0 (hbk), 35.00