Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (review)

Reviewed by: Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception Samuel Dwinell Herbert Lindenberger. Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 313. $95 (Hb). What roles has opera played in the history of European and North American culture? How can we best characterize the processes of change and continuity in opera performance and composition today? To what extent does the academic study of opera demand new modes of interdisciplinarity? These are the broad questions about opera and culture – then and now – that animate Herbert Lindenberger’s collection of essays in Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception. The volume represents the culmination of over a decade of research by an acclaimed cultural historian, literary scholar, and author of two previous book-length studies of opera. Fully six of the eleven chapters in this collection have already been published elsewhere, including one in this journal. “I prefer to pursue variety rather than unity,” Lindenberger states in the prologue (4). Indeed, the essays exhibit a wide range of styles, repertories under consideration, and methodological approaches. Their collocation in this volume has the distinct advantage not of making any overarching argument about opera but of revealing the ways in which Lindenberger makes a case for opera studies as an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavour in the humanities. Opera is a form that “transcends the usual intellectual categories,” he asserts (2). This claim leads him to propose the institutionalization in the academy of interdisciplinary opera studies programs (263–79). Turning to some of the individual chapters, essay one is, perhaps, the most successful. It approaches Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore (1853) from many different angles in an engaging and enjoyable manner that would make it useful on the syllabus of an undergraduate course on opera. The [End Page 274] essay touches on the work’s genesis, revisions, performance, and reception history, musical and dramatic aesthetics, and afterlife in Regieoper and film. It is in essays two and three that Lindenberger’s working definition of opera emerges. He does not draw upon the historical record, where a wide variety of terms has circulated to refer to some of the works under consideration (including favola, dramma per musica, tragédie en musique, Singspiel, and drama), nor does he postulate any shared aesthetic ontology. Instead, he borrows a definition of opera from the institutional framework of the twentieth-century opera house in the United States and western Europe. Thus, unlike scholarship that prizes the “anti-institutional” avantgarde in genres such as new-music theatre or performance art, essays seven and eight, concerning the twentieth century, make the case persuasively for the ways in which artistic innovation has taken place within the highly regulated and prestigious institutional context of the opera house. More work remains to be done on how individual institutions, such as opera houses and state funding bodies, shape and reflect operatic texts, repertories, and reception. For example, Lindenberger’s suggestion that substantial state subsidies of opera in Europe allow for a “high degree of innovation” (58) in comparison with opera in the United States leaves unexamined what we might see as the carefully constructed discourses of nationalism that subtend many such public-funding programs (in Britain in the late 1940s or Australia in the 1990s, for example). However, Lindenberger’s analogy between opera houses and museums (111) perhaps suggests a promising avenue for developing this line of inquiry through the insights of the field of museology. Given the iconic status of buildings such as the Sydney Opera House, not to mention the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, a consideration of architecture, too, could be included in fuller examinations of the opera house as institution. The wide range of material discussed throughout the essays in this volume typically provides a refreshing change from scholarship that is, perhaps, all too often cautious about making connections and drawing analogies between historical periods, geographical locales, and different genres of cultural production. Nevertheless, this same strategy occasionally leads Lindenberger into unnecessary laxity. For example, his use of Ibsen as a straw man for “realistic” representational practices not only ignores Toril Moi’s recent work on the dramatist’s modernism but also adds nothing to a paragraph on Verdi (34). Moreover...

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