AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 97
scholarship. How is the “liveness” of staged spectacle shaped by the mediation of the camera’s
eye and the new conditions of viewing it affords?
I begin by examining the different media through which live opera has been disseminated
on screen: television, VHS, DVD, and the recent so-called “HD live simulcast” to movie
theaters. After comparing their modes of consumption, I focus on DVD as by far the most
popular medium at the present time. Drawing on the work of theater scholars, I reflect on
the “textualization” of live performance effected by the digital medium, and the impact of this
textualization on the interaction between spectator and recorded performance. To name just
one significant aspect, the segmentation into “chapters” of a DVD is bound to influence the
structural perception of the opera in question.
In the second part of the paper I discuss video recordings of live performances in the context
of what are usually considered the other categories of opera on screen, opera films and
studio production. Examination of the criteria according to which these categories have been
established reveals how the type of medium (film, TV, video) usually constitutes the starting
point, followed by mode and process of production. I suggest possible additional and
perhaps alternative criteria, first among them the degree to which any given video recording
acknowledges the conditions of performance. Next, I examine the different modes of perception
encouraged by different directorial and commercial strategies in this respect. In the case
of live performances, their liveness emerges, perhaps surprisingly, as a by no means undisputed
value, some video recordings ignoring it altogether.
Finally, I explore how the consumption of live opera on screen is shaped by the different
visual, cultural, and social contexts in which video recordings are produced, distributed, and
viewed. My hypotheses are tested through a comparative look at the DVDs of two productions
of Rossini’s La pietra del paragone, both released in 2008: Pier Luigi Pizzi’s for the Teatro
Real, Madrid, and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti and Yannick Sorin’s for the Théâtre du Châtelet,
Paris. Different productions of the same opera are seen through—or, better, shaped by—
videos that invoke diverging filmic traditions, thus pointing toward different aesthetic and
interpretive directions.
WorlD WAr ii AnD its AfterMAth
Danielle fosler-lussier, ohio state university, chair
“MORE MUSIC FOR THE KINOHALLE!”: JóZEF KROPIńSKI’S
COMPOSITIONS FROM BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP
Barbara Milewski
Swarthmore College
Josef Kropiński was one of the most prolific composers in the Nazi concentration camps.
From the time of his transport to Buchenwald in March 1943, until his last days there in April
1945, Kropiński —a violinist, music teacher, and choral conductor before World War II—
composed over a hundred original works in a wide range of styles and genres, including songs,
marches, character pieces, dances, orchestral and chamber works, operetta, and an opera. (He
also created nearly four hundred arrangements of previously composed music.) Most of these
works were intended for performances staged by camp inmates in the Kinohalle (the camp
cinema) between the end of 1943 and the spring of 1945, with approval from the SS command.