From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging by Evan Baker (review)

Evan Baker’s study of operatic staging practice, From the Score to the Stage, is a book of considerable but circumscribed ambition. The book’s subtitle, An Illustrated History, is backed up by its large format and admirable production values, as well as its nonacademic mission. Baker states his purpose as providing a “concise, lucid exposition of operatic production” to satisfy the “fascination with ‘backstage at the opera’” of the common operagoer or performer (p. xvi). The book’s chronological scope, clear descriptions, and above all, the thoughtfully assembled and beautifully-reproduced illustrations are a valuable contribution for academics and dilettantes alike. As Baker writes in his preface, opera staging has often fallen through the cracks between theater history and musicology; this is arguably the first English-language study to attempt a comprehensive history of operatic staging. Baker’s ambition and scope, while not comprehensive, make his work important and notable in itself.

Baker does limit his territory. Geographically, his jurisdiction consists of Austria, France, Germany, and Italy, thus excluding England, everywhere Slavic, Iberia, Scandinavia, and anywhere beyond Europe. Thematically, he rather surprisingly excludes costume design as well as dance, all of music, and, for the most part, specific singers and singing technique. His first priority—both in the text and illustrations—is set design and technology (and, later in the book, lighting design). The art of Personenregie—that is, the moving-about of people on the stage—is explored in detail in some sections and largely absent from others. Baker’s other major topics, woven more consistently throughout the book, are theater architecture, management and finance, the practical aspects of production (such as rehearsals and staging manuals), and publishing. Audiences, critics, and singers occasionally make appearances.

The shape of Baker’s narrative is often determined by the nature of the sources available—many of which are pictured in the book’s copious photographs. The book is organized both chronologically and geographically. A short “Overture” sets the scene with late-sixteenth-century Italian festivities and early court opera, including a discussion of the treatise Il corago (pp. 8–9). Chapter 1 deals primarily with Venice as well as German courts and Lully, and similarly is drawn primarily from treatises. For Baker’s target audience of casual opera fans, many of the composers and works in this section will be novel, and his explanations are clear and accurate, though, as in the rest of the book, his prose is broken into so many short sections that the narrative can become rather disjointed.

Chapter 2 covers the period from 1700 to 1750 and is largely focused on Pietro Metastasio. (Baker’s exclusion of England is a disappointment here.) The chapter also contains a fascinating section on Ferdinando Galli Bibiena’s “revolution in perspective” in scene painting (pp. 49–52), as well as descriptions of French baroque which include many uses of the word “spectacular.” Chapter 3 deals with “reform opera” and the late-eighteenth-century theater construction boom. The Munich premiere of Mozart’s Idomeneo is analyzed in some detail (pp. 86–88), as well as the expansion of theaters in Vienna and advancements in theatrical lighting.

Chapter 4 discusses romantic opera in Germany, introduced by Baker with a brief discussion of German literature. In a discussion of Count Karl Moritz von Brühl’s theatrical work in Berlin, the work of drama is, as in the previous chapter, framed as the reform of deficient practices—Brühl saw opera as “more than entertainment” after an era of “sloppy” and “lazy” staging (p. 106). Chapter 5, one of the book’s weightiest, considers the behemoth of French grand opera, a style Baker introduces as having “great possibilities for abuse.” By now we sense that Baker’s ideal is a Gluckian—later, Wagnerian—concentration and unity of style and that spectacle is to be regarded with...