Roberta Montemorra Marvin

Verdi's Falstaff in Letters and Contemporary Reviews

Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Editorial Notes Introduction List of Letters and Telegrams LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS with six Chronological Sketches to 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894 APPENDICES: I. Giulio Ricordi: OHow Verdi Writes and RehearsesO II. Eduard Hanslich: Falstaff in Rome 1893 III. Camille Bellaigue: Falstaff in Paris 1894 IV. G. B. Shaw: Falstaff in London 1894 V. Camille Bellaigue: OThe Lessons of FalstaffO 1924 Verdi and Boito Chronologies Biographical Sketches Select Bibliography Index

Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera

A lively chronicle of opera’s greatest hits and great men, A History of Opera is unlike previous histories of opera. Keenly aware of the difficulty of writing about opera’s history and of doing so ...

Introduction to Special Issue on Opera Reception

Traditional approaches to studying the reception of opera (both as a genre and with regard to individual works) have revealed, and continue to reveal, a great deal about ways in which opera means and ways in which it has been or might be made to mean something different. In the past these valuable studies often focused on music criticism, in particular on the public, critical debates that played out in journalistic commentary around the time of an opera’s premiere. The existing scholarship is exceedingly rich in the ways it has helped us to understand the context and the historical trajectories of operatic works. (Many of the contributors to the present issue have made significant contributions in this regard.) In recent years, scholars have opened their studies to an even broader array of resources. Taking into consideration a variety of materials, media and audiences not routinely investigated earlier,1 they have begun probing into hitherto neglected ways in which opera made its way in the world, including the role of parody, caricature, parlour songs, burlesque, film, fictional depictions in literature, and revisionist stagings, among other topics. New models for evaluating the significance and meanings of operas as artistic, cultural, social and even political and economic objects have begun to emerge; evidence of some of these models, as well as of some new ones, can be found in the articles here. With the evolving technology of the twenty-first century come new modes of accessing operatic performances, new possibilities for staging productions of operatic works and new means for communicating about those works and/or their performances; these ever-changing experiences and activities seem to demand continuing flexibility, resourcefulness and inventiveness in the study of opera reception. This issue of Cambridge Opera Journal adds to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand more broadly and more deeply the reception histories of operatic works. The complexes of infinitely changing variables in what an operatic work comprises and how an operatic work is presented and perceived make the genre of opera an especially appropriate one for the types of expanded concepts of ‘reception’ reflected here. The authors of these five articles adopt diverse approaches and apply them to varied topics pertaining to the perception, interpretation, adaptation, presentation and appropriation of opera to illustrate some of the ways in which the parameters of opera reception studies are expanding. It is especially important to embark in earnest on such approaches at this time, for the

Introduction to the Special Issue on Ottocento Opera

In the early 1960s a PhD candidate at Princeton University informed his professors that he wished to write a dissertation on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. He was pointedly discouraged from doing so and told that, if he wished to be taken seriously in musicology, he should focus on worthwhile repertory such as Renaissance music or works by nineteenth-century German composers. The student persisted in his purpose and, with his groundbreaking dissertation, set the study of ottocento opera on a solid trajectory. That student was Philip Gossett. Recently, at a gala event celebrating Philips ‘retirement’, many of us who have focused our scholarship on this repertory were reminded about the evolution of the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera during the past 50 years.

Vincenzo Bellini nel secondo centenario della nascita. Atti del Convegno internazionale (Catania, 8–11 novembre 2001)

Marie spent much time in Dresden doing errands for Clara, who sent clothes and household items to her to be laundered, and fabric for dresses, hats, coats, etc. to be taken to garment makers and seamstresses, and requested sausages and other favourite foods-–all to be mailed back to Düsseldorf. This was because everything was much cheaper in Dresden, making it clear that money was a major concern in the Schumann family, even when Robert had a salaried post. Lindeman seemed to be very proud to be doing these tasks for the Schumanns and continued with them for many years until, as with her piano teaching, her eyesight became too bad. By then she was living with her lifetime companion Louise Wiessner, who wrote letters for her and helped with the tasks for the Schumanns. Louise, who, Brunner tells us, was listed in the Dresden address book as a teacher of women’s work, also wrote out the essays, poems, and stories that Lindeman created and which began a new career for her, beginning in 1869 and continuing until her death. Alltag und Künstlertum includes a bibliography of her works. Clara Schumann’s letters reveal a woman who had a need for women friends. She did not write to Lindemann in the intimate fashion she used in letters to friends such as Emilie List, a girlhood friend (‘Das Band der Ewigen Liebe’: Clara Schumanns Briefwechsel mit Emilie und Elise List, ed. Eugen Wendler (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1996)), but even in writing to a former student, she mentioned her fervent love for her husband and her despair when he was ill. After his death, she rejected financial help from old friends in Leipzig, and wrote about the tours she arranged on the European mainland and in England so that she could earn a living for her family, while depending on friends and relatives to help with the children. She described the young Brahms as a ‘dear friend’ and a great help to her during Robert’s illness and after his death. Occasionally she mentioned her father, Frederick Wieck, who had never recovered from his fury at her marriage and often made disparaging comments about her playing. She had clearly lost respect for him but always reminded Marie that any remarks she made about him and her half-sister, Marie Wieck, were confidential and were not to be repeated. Brunner’s bibliography is an excellent guide to books and articles on the Schumanns and contemporary musical life but includes only works in German. A guide to books in other languages— and a number do exist—would have been useful. The index includes brief, informative biographies, not always to be found in collections of correspondence. The sixty-nine illustrations present both familiar and unfamiliar portraits of the Schumann family and their friends but most effective are the photographs of the programmes of sixty concerts given by Clara Schumann between 1848 to 1889. When her children were growing up, Clara had time to write or to practice because of her obligations as mother and wife. She was so involved with domestic life that she had almost forgotten what artistic life meant to her. But on her return from a concert tour to Holland that lasted from 24 November to 22 December 1853 and during which both she and Robert were greatly honoured and she played twelve times in twenty-four days, she described her reawakened emotions in a letter to Marie von Lindeman of 3 January 1854: ‘We are all very well, except for some domestic concerns (I mean household problems of which I have an endless number now) which I dislike and which are especially difficult after the beautiful musical life in Holland’ (p. 203). From the letters to Marie von Lindeman and Emilie Steffens it is clear that, as a young mother, Clara Schumann’s priorities were her family and Alltag—everyday life. When Robert Schumann fell ill, attempted suicide in February 1854, and asked to be sent to an institution at Endenich near Bonn, Clara, well into her eighth pregnancy, was almost beside herself and wrote to Marie describing her sufferings and her ‘broken heart’. She continued teaching and playing until the birth of her last child, Felix, on 11 June 1854 but did not undertake any concert tours until the following autumn. From then on, the children were sent to schools or placed in the care of friends and relatives, and Clara Schumann devoted herself to Künstlertum—an artistic life. NANCY B. REICH doi:10.1093/ml/gcl065