A Concise History of Opera by Leslie Orrey (review)

Reviews 89 Very possibly the Choruses of Greek Tragedy can not be rendered in English for a modern American audience; that Roche strives to do so merits commendation. The translation is accompanied by explanatory notes which usually identify the gods and goddesses named in the text with their Latin counterparts. Only one serious error appears: Apollo is not the god of the sun in Euripidean drama (Note 7, p. 89). The practice suggests that Roche is an optimist in that he believes Latin is more familiar to his audience than Greek. If this condition is true, it probably won’t be shortly, for Latin is rapidly going the way of Greek. The cruces of The B acchae and of The M edea Roche handles well. His notes reveal not only his indebtedness to Dodds but also his own good sense, e.g., the attribution of 901 ft to Jason {M edea, p. 60, note 4). These are praise­ worthy matters. At the crucial lacuna at B acchae 1329 Roche inserts a dramatic reconstruction which is as satisfactory as any, and one which might solve the problem for a modern production. In sum, then, Roche’s translation is adequate if not definitive for this generation. ROGER HORNSBY The U n iversity o f Iow a Leslie Orrey. A C oncise H isto ry o f O pera. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Pp. 252. $4.95. Leslie Orrey, in his C oncise H istory o f O pera, approaches opera as a branch of the theater, making this book especially interesting to people who are involved with drama. But there is yet another and better reason for drama and theater persons to read this book, and that is the abund­ ance of illustrations (254 in all, 32 in color) which accompany the text. The pictures include those of scenery and costume designs, drawings and photos of stages and opera houses, portraits and photos of singers and composers, and representations of actual productions. The massive dis­ play of visual materials helps the reader to visualize many aspects of early productions of operas now infrequently or never performed. Leafing through a typical chapter, such as the one headed “PostRevolution Opera in France, Italy and Germany,” one finds juxtaposed such items as a photo of Maria Callas as Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, costume designs by Comelli for the 1893 London pro­ duction of Halevy’s L a Juive, a stage design for the 1816 production of Hoffmann’s U ndine, portraits of composers Donizetti and Bellini and the singer Jenny Lind, a playbill announcing the first performance of Bee­ thoven’s F idelio, and drawings of “three of the world’s most illustrious opera houses,” La Scala in Milan, San Carlo in Naples, and the Vienna State Opera. This richness (almost a surfeit) continues unabated through­ out the book. The amount of visual documentation serves to buttress Mr. 90 Comparative Drama Orrey’s argument in favor of opera as lyric stage rather than as dramatic singing. Mr. Orrey, who is well known for his book on Bellini, is understand­ ably at his best when discussing later developments in opera, those which occurred in the late eighteenth century, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His treatment of earlier opera and its possible antecedents is less satisfactory. Here his evolutionary bias leads him to assertions that cannot very well be supported—i.e., that liturgical drama constitutes the roots of opera and that it leads inexorably to Mystery plays, the conti­ nental Sacre R appresen tazion i, and ultimately to opera. It is not necessary to prove that the liturgical drama leads anywhere, in spite of the “Shrews­ bury Fragments” which would seem to indicate that there was some inter­ action between Latin sung drama and vernacular spoken drama (see W. L. Smoldon, “Liturgical Drama,” The N e w O x fo rd H isto ry o f M u sic, II, 189). As Leo Schrade has pointed out, “If the history of art has strangely been said to be the history of revivals, at least with equal right it can also be said that it is the history...