Remaking the song : operatic visions and revisions from Handel to Berio

178 Pages·2006·5.278 MB·English

by  Parker, Roger

Remaking the Song
The Ernest Bloch Professorship
of Music and the Ernest Bloch Lectures
were established at the University of California
in 1962in order to bring distinguished figures
in music to the Berkeley campus from time to time.
Made possible by the Jacob and Rosa Stern
Musical Fund, the professorship was founded
in memory of Ernest Bloch (1880–1959),
Professor of Music at Berkeley
from 1940to 1959.
the ernest bloch professors
1964 Ralph Kirkpatrick
1965 Winton Dean
1966 Roger Sessions
1968 Gerald Abraham
1971 Leonard B. Meyer
1972 Edward T. Cone
1975 Donald Jay Grout
1976 Charles Rosen
1977 Alan Tyson
1980 William Malm
1981 Andrew Porter
1982 Ton De Leeuw
1983 James Haar
1985 Richard Crawford
1986 John Blacking
1987 Gunther Schuller
1988 George Perle
1989 László Somfai
1993 Susan McClary
1994 Wye J. Allanbrook
1995 Jonathan Harvey
1997 Lydia Goehr
1998 Izaly Zemtsovsky
1999 David Huron
2002 Roger Parker
Remaking the Song
Operatic Visions and Revisions
from Handel to Berio
Roger Parker
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book
provided by Edmund and Jeannie Kaufman as members of the Literati Circle
of the University of California Press Foundation.
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses
in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported
by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals
and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2006by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parker, Roger, 1951–.
Remaking the song : operatic visions and revisions from Handel to Berio /
Roger Parker.
p. cm. — (Ernest Bloch lectures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-520-24418-4(cloth : alk. paper).
1. Operas. 2. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. II. Ernest Bloch
lectures.
ML1700.P37 2006
782.1—dc22 2005020676
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/nisoz39.48–1992(r1997) (Permanence of Paper).
To Lynden
Take any literary work, preserve its semantic—even its doc-
umentary—identity as best you can, and then track its
changes of meaning as it passes through the attention of dif-
ferent places, times, circumstances....We still often seem
to think that art’s multiple meanings are a function of some-
thing they possess on their own, inherently or essentially as
it were. But the truth is that meanings multiply, like people,
through intercourse.
—Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism
It would be a travesty to say that Guy suspected Apthorpe of
lying. His claims to distinction—porpoise-skin boots, a
high-church aunt in Tunbridge Wells, a friend who was on
good terms with gorillas—were not what an imposter would
invent in order to impress. Yet there was about Apthorpe a
sort of fundamental implausibility. Unlike the typical figure
of the J[udging] D[istance] lesson, Apthorpe tended to
become faceless and tapering the closer he approached.
—Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms
The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.
—W.B. Yeats
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments
ix
1. Remaking the Song
1
2. Of Andalusian Maidens and Recognition Scenes:
Crossed Wires in Il trovatoreand La traviata
22
3. Ersatz Ditties: Adriana Ferrarese’s Susanna
42
4. In Search of Verdi
67
5. Berio’s Turandot:Once More the
Great Tradition
90
6. Sudden Charms: The Progress of an Aria
121
Notes
141
Index
161

PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These days one needs to be careful. The acknowledgments used to be a
safe haven: a place where matters both personal and professional could be
uncomplicated and mixed; in which—to paraphrase Nabokov—tributes
to Professor Advice, Professor Encouragement, and Professor Every
Assistance could mingle freely with humbler gestures of gratitude to sim-
ple friends and complicated sustainers. But now, quite possibly encour-
aged by the elaborate personal revelations some have been emboldened
to display within their writings, reviewers can enter the garden with
swords unsheathed. One of my predecessors as Ernest Bloch Lecturer
began her monograph with a generous preface that received this very
treatment at the hands of a critic: in my opinion one heavily laden with
unspoken agendas. The same might happen here. But what to do? I resist
turning these paragraphs into something entirely scholarly; something
that judges distance; something that could if necessary be defended.
I do so because, first of all, I want to record unambiguously that this
book owes its existence to an extraordinary institutional environment,
peopled by an extraordinary group of scholars. The entire project was in
this sense a collaborative venture from the start. I spent a total of four
months in Berkeley during the fall of 2002, and there I gave the six Bloch
lectures that became the six chapters of this book. Three of them (chap-
ix