Houston Grand Opera

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Josiah Fisk
Keyword(s):  
Houston Grand Opera ◽  
Grand Opera

Joshua Luty, Music Librarian, Houston Grand Opera

2022 ◽  
pp. 69-80
Author(s):  
Patrick Lo ◽  
Robert Sutherland ◽  
Wei-En Hsu ◽  
Russ Girsberger
Keyword(s):  
Houston Grand Opera ◽  
Grand Opera

A Quiet Place

Dearest Lenny ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 118-127
Author(s):  
Mari Yoshihara
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Real Life ◽  
New Right ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
American Opera ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Life Issues ◽  
Houston Grand Opera ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Grand Opera

With a joint commission by the Houston Grand Opera, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Teatro alla Scala, Leonard Bernstein undertook a serious new endeavor he had long wished for: the composition of a serious opera. By collaborating with librettist Stephen Wadsworth, Bernstein sought to create an “American opera” that took on real-life issues of the contemporary United States and expressed them in a distinctly American language. He centered the opera A Quiet Place on the issues of gender, sexuality, and family, which drove American politics during this period. The rising New Right turned “family values” into an ideology, the battle over which was further fueled by the AIDS epidemic. In the highly charged political environment of Houston, where the opera premiered, Bernstein challenged the prevailing social mores and eloquently advocated for AIDS research and support.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Grand Illusion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

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