A Field Guide to the Impossible -- Primal Loss : Orpheus and Eurydice in Opera -- The Firewood and the Fire : Words, Music, and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress -- Verdi's Shakespeare Operas : MacBeth, Otello, Falstaff -- Walt Whitman's Impossible Optimism -- Inner Rooms : Two Recent Impossibilities -- Finding Eurydice -- Music as Forgiveness : Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.
Summary:
From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Operas greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms -- music, drama, poetry, dance -- into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music -- opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals.
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