AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

96 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
sharpening of opera-production theory has formed around such extraordinary re-stagings.
This focus on performance is a welcome one, particularly for opera, where the visual component
is of no less importance than the aural. Yet the nearly exclusive attention on extraordinary
productions and a concomitant valorization of the provocative is troubling. Such selectivity,
particularly when founded on loaded criteria such as “strong” and “innovative” runs the risk
of creating more “great works” or “great men” narratives.
This paper will seek to redress some of the problems with current methodologies for studying
opera productions, illustrated by examples drawn from productions of Leoš Janáček’s Káťa
Kabanová. My thinking on this subject has been filtered through work on Janáček’s operas
which, I have found, fit uneasily into existing models of opera studies. Unlike the Italian, German,
and French operas that form the canon of opera criticism, Janáček’s were notoriously
slow starters. Only the premieres of his last few operas could be considered important musical
events and even then only within the Czech Republic. Works such as The Makropulos Case
and From the House of the dead have acquired significance in international opera houses only
relatively recently. The unusual relationship these pieces have with the operatic performance
canon required developing new approaches to their study. First, I propose supplementing
any examination of opera production with the very different information reception history
provides. Alone, neither production nor reception can completely represent the impact of
performance: on the one hand, the visual traces of productions, particularly those pre-dating
video recording, are frustratingly ephemeral; on the other, the written texts that usually
comprise reception history tell only part of the story. Bringing the two together can fill in
some of the pieces missing in either alone. Second, the myopic effect caused by focusing on
single productions should be countered: as Gundula Kreuzer has recently argued, studies of
newer productions often lack historical perspective. Thus I suggest along with Kreuzer that
the chronological purview of any such study be radically expanded to include stagings from
the premiere up to recent years. Lastly, I suggest a shift in focus from difference to sameness.
Reception histories in music have typically concentrated on changes in a work’s meaning
as indicators of shifts in broader historical, social, or political contexts. The problem with
looking exclusively for difference is that a work’s meanings may become so unstable as to
render them meaningless. Tracing sameness or, to borrow from Jan Broeckx, “residual layers
of receptional insight” through the history of an opera’s production and reception not only
reintroduces stability through continuously regenerated meanings of the work, but also provides
us with new insights.
LIVE OPERA ON SCREEN: TEXTUALIZATION
AND LIVENESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Emanuele Senici
University of Rome La Sapienza
About thirty years after the arrival of VHS and ten after DVD, the consumption of opera
now takes place mostly on screen. In some ways, we can see this as a democratizing move:
many more spectators have access to a production on video than could see the same production
live. But this recontextualization also affords new modes of viewing and consumption
that deserve to be considered by contemporary scholarship. In this paper, I ask how the perception
and reception of “live” performance can be reconfigured by video, and in what ways
it is distinct from the opera films and studio recordings that have been the subject of previous