The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies

Reviewed by Matthew Franke

“Once opera was studied only as ‘a stepchild of musicology,’” proclaims the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies. Indeed, most opera scholarship in English has been, and continues to be, produced by musicologists. After all, music has long dominated public and scholarly perceptions of opera: how many would refer to Don Giovanni as being chiefly created by its librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, rather than by Mozart?

Yet opera does fuse many diverse media, and, further, has long played a role in public ceremonies and in dramatizing social issues; thus the fields of drama, dance, music, and poetry, as well as history, theater, sociology, and other disciplines all have much to contribute to the discussion. And, recently, they have begun to. The appearance of the new journals Opera Quarterly (1983) and the Cambridge Opera Journal (1989) gave the field a burst of new interdisciplinary energy, and the 1980s also saw new monographs on opera from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: 1988 alone saw the appearance of the English translation of Catherine Clement’s L’opéra, ou, La défaite des femmes, one of the first monographs to examine opera through a feminist lens; and the essay collection Reading Opera (edited by literary scholar Arthur Groos and musicologist Roger Parker), which brought a new depth to textual analysis of operatic librettos. Since then, this trend has only accelerated.

The present volume claims this heritage of interdisciplinary work on opera as its antecedent. Nicholas Till, in his introduction, acknowledges as much, describing the rapid growth of interdisciplinary approaches to opera in the 1990s as the emergence of opera studies as an independent discipline. This narrative, however, downplays musicology’s increasing inclusion of interdisciplinary approaches throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, musicology, in Till’s reading, emerges as a narrow-minded, old-fashioned discipline from which opera studies has been set free. The present volume celebrates, and attempts to reinforce, that independence.

Despite recent developments towards an independent field of opera studies, the academy has yet to evolve accordingly. There are, in fact, practically no Departments of Opera Studies which engage in academic research on the history, culture, performance, analysis, or reception of opera; rather, the label “opera studies” is used by conservatories, such as the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, to describe programs which train operatic performers for the stage. (Mr. Till, one should note, holds one of the only existing posts in the academic study of opera, at the University of Sussex). Most scholars who study opera are still trained in musicology programs, and it seems unlikely that universities will begin funding new Departments of Opera Studies built from scratch, especially in these tense economic times. The juxtaposition of these facts with Till’s multidisciplinary leanings lends the whole book an implicitly polemical and prescriptive edge.

Most generally, The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies pursues two aims: to provide an up-to-date portrait of contemporary scholarship on opera, and to celebrate opera studies’ growing independence from musicology. The volume is divided into four parts, which, true to the multi-disciplinary spirit of the volume, rarely address music in technical detail. Most of these essays provide admirable summaries of contemporary literature, and are not argumentative by nature. Part One, “Institutions,” addresses opera as a social phenomenon: opera’s history of state patronage, opera as a business, and (notably) Nicholas Till’s chapter “The Operatic Event,” which crystallizes much recent work on operatic performance as a social phenomenon, an interaction between audiences and performers. Part Two, “Constituents,” views opera through its creators: composers, performers, staging, and technology, the last analyzed admirably by Nicholas Ridout. Part Three, “Forms,” summarizes current thinking on operatic dramaturgy, the genres and poetics of opera, and the operatic work. Part Four, “Issues,” places opera in context as a lens through which gender and national identities can play out, and analyzes opera’s fraught relationship with mainstream Western popular culture today.

The Cambridge Companion’s portrait of opera studies as an independent discipline contains several interesting omissions. There are no full chapters devoted to text and music relationships, even though the topic is mentioned in passing throughout the volume. Chapters devoted to the development of poetic forms in opera over time, or the analysis of literary adaptations of novels or plays for the operatic stage would have seemed appropriate; neither are present. Verdi alone, for example, created three operas after Shakespeare (Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff) as well as a setting of Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel La dame aux camélias (La Traviata). Similarly, there is little attempt to address opera’s fraught relationship with film and television, so admirably explored by scholars such as Marcia Citron (2000, 2010), despite film’s central role in mediating opera for the public at large and the recent appearance of the operatic music video. Further, there is little attention to opera as part of history or politics, or philosophy (Kierkegaard, Adorno, and Žižek being only a few of the philosophers to reflect on opera).

These issues aside, The Cambridge Companion provides a useful portrait of opera studies as it stands in 2013, and should be especially illuminating to those unfamiliar with the present state of scholarly inquiry in the field. Whether “opera studies” will truly emerge as an independent discipline or remain a highly interdisciplinary subfield of musicology remains to be seen. Certainly The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies has struck a blow for the continued diversification of scholarly approaches to opera.