The impossible art : adventures in opera / Matthew Aucoin.
| Author/creator | Aucoin, Matthew, 1990- |
| Format | Book |
| Edition | First edition. |
| Publication Info | New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. |
| Description | xvi, 299 pages : music ; 22 cm |
| Subjects |
| Portion of title | Adventures in opera |
| Contents | A field guide to the impossible -- Primal loss: Orpheus and Eurydice in opera. A guide to four hundred years of Orphic operas ; The impossible moment: Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo ; Music as consolation: Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfers ; Supersaturation: Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus -- The firewood and the fire: words, music, and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress -- Verdi's Shakespeare operas: Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff. Verdi's warmth ; Raw material: Macbeth ; The overreacher: the singular career of Arrigo Boito ; Expansion and contraction: Otello ; A last step, a first step: Falstaff -- Walt Whitman's impossible optimism -- Inner rooms: two recent impossibilities. Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel ; Chaya Czernowin's Heart Chamber -- Finding Eurydice. A conversation with Sara Ruhl -- Music as forgiveness: Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. |
| Abstract | From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera's greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms--music, drama, poetry, dance--into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer and author posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music--opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals. This book is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. The author writes of the rare works--ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin--that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera's greatest figures and those of literature. He also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera's iconic stage. This book opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-292). |
| LCCN | 2021032228 |
| ISBN | 9780374175382 hardcover |
| ISBN | 0374175381 hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781250858818 paperback |
| ISBN | 125085881X paperback |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Music | Music Stacks | ML1700 .A9 2021 | ✔ Available | Place Hold |