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The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and Jungian archetypes to structure the operas. It also examines Nørgård's use of dialectical polarities, including creation and death, the human and the divine, and self and others. In particular, it ..read more

In 2017, on the debut of the soprano Hui He in the role of Aida at the Hong Kong Opera, a Japanese finance and business website published a short article to introduce its readers to Verdi's monumental opera and more general issues of cultural appropriation and whitewashing related to it. What caught my attention, however, was the headline. Short and concise, it grasped an aspect that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: ‘Opera Hong Kong's new production of “Aida” in October will feature a Chinese soprano playing an African princess singing in Italian’. The headline writer was probably more in ..read more

This article explores contemporary representations of wartime sexual violence on the operatic stage. Rape and the threat of rape loom over many operas in the canon, but even those operas that do not thematise rape may have sexual violence introduced to them in performance. Through analysis of four twenty-first century productions, I consider how the idea of sexual violence works in these wartime stories. Staging the implicit or explicit sexual violence in canonic operas can, in the best cases, allow for nuanced commentary on the subject in our cultural moment. But putting sexual violence on s ..read more

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Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance that sought to bring opera into various communities in Los Angeles, many of which were economically disadvantaged. In the process, this opera set off a firestorm of protests that ultimately resulted in confrontations with community members, protests that would test the very premise of the dissemination of opera and performance outside spaces of privilege and in communities of colour. Informed by the concept of transit-oriented performance, this article analyses some ways in which neoliberalism is ..read more

In this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations tha ..read more

Sergei Prokofiev's operatic career exhibits a multitude of exceptional successes and failures, political and cultural idiosyncrasies and compromises, and bold convictions and uncertainties. Prokofiev considered himself an opera composer and showed his affinity for it from an early age, completing his first opera by age nine and continuing his work in the art form for the remainder of his life and career. Each opera takes on vastly different subjects, topics and time periods, evidence of his diverse selection of libretto sources. For his mature works, Prokofiev adapted literary works from Russ ..read more