Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (review)

Herbert Lindenberger's Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception, his third book on opera, is part of the ongoing series Cambridge Studies in Opera. The chapters are a series of interdisciplinary, related essays that are both erudite and accessible. His previous books on opera are Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984) and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (1998). Lindenberger is the Avalon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Stanford University.

Opera attracts scholarship and opinion from many disciplines; Prof. Lindenberger is a prime example, having been a professor of English, German, and Comparative Literature at various stages of his career. As Lindenberger states in his Prologue, written in interview format with interchanges between Author and Interlocuter, ". . . it transcends the usual intellectual categories. Opera extends its tentacles into all manner of territory" (2). This Prologue, in which the author justifies the multiplicity of approaches he will use through two personnae, operates much like a recitative where two characters express ideas of the creator(s), much like the Prologue to Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea, wherein the virtues Fortune, Virtue, and Love present the "moral" of the opera in allegory. The explanations in the Prologue elucidate such peculiarities as the alphabetically ordered subtitles in Chapter 1 on Il Trovatore. Here the author admits that there is no unifying argument among the chapters. Within the "c" section are nine questions, all exploring the tradition(s) of artistic license with Trovatore. The Dream section presents a dream-poem that Verdi originally wanted for Manrico, contemplating how audiences might conceive of Manrico and the work had Verdi prevailed.

It is often personal in style: Lindenberger reflects upon three tenors he heard sing Manrico; asks "what if " questions; describes a Leontyne Price performance of Leonora; imagines how he would produce Trovatore if the goal were to "unsettle" the audience, using filmed dreams. The chapter on Trovatore is a potpourri of probing observations, ideas, and questions, much like those a professor might deliver in a course on Trovatore. It never attempts to go deeply into any particular topic. For example, in the section where Lindenberger discusses the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera his ideas are good; however, a different kind of book might have engaged Michal Grover-Friedlander's scholarship.

Chapter 2, "On opera and society," uses Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio to ask questions and suggest answers with respect to relationships between opera and the external world. Lindenberger briefly describes some of the interdisciplinary approaches of recent books: Paul Robinson's Opera and Ideas; Linda and Michael Hutcheon's Opera: Desire, Disease, Death; John Bokina's Opera and Politics; Gary Tomlinson's Metaphysical Song; Carolyn Abbate's In Search of Opera. Pierre Bourdieu's work leads Lindenberger to examine the importance of audience. Chapter 3, "Opera and the novel: antithetical or complimentary?" brings to bear Lindenberger's career in comparative literature. Critics of both the novel and opera are used to construct an argument that links their problems and shifting statuses, ending with a quasi-coming together in narrative and musical drama. Chapter 4 presents commentary on unusual productions Lindenberger has attended: Handel's Rodelinda; Monteverdi's Ulisse; striking uses of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte; The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, an opera-based movement-oriented version of Der Freischütz with book by William Burroughs, lyrics by Tom Waits, direction by Robert Wilson; La Belle et la bête by Cocteau/Glass (opera plus film); the rock-opera American Idiot by Mayer, Armstrong, and Green Day, ninety minutes of intensity without break that challenges the separation between traditional opera and rock; Three Tales: Hindenburg, Bikini, Dolly by Korot/Reich, a high-tech music theater work that uses video; "The Faust Project," a museum show with spoken interviews, visual prints and painting, video, literature, and six simultaneous musical representations of the Faust story, a Gesamtkunstwerk that destroys concepts of genre; Europeras 1 & 2 by John Cage, the most radical of these works, an assault upon traditional opera which combines...