Professor Alexandra Wilson

Exploring the many dimensions of Giacomo Puccini's historical legacy and significance, this book provides new perspectives on the life and work of a much-loved opera composer and demonstrates how political concerns shape the way we approach and perform his works in the present day. Accessibly written chapters by a range of international experts explore Puccini's interests, attitudes, and relationships, and examine how his works reflected the cultural, political, and social zeitgeist of their time. The essays first map Puccini's personal and professional networks, the regions and cities that meant so much to him, and his travels for both work and leisure. They go on to probe the composer's attitudes towards contemporary developments in music, literature, film, and drama and investigate his collaboration with librettists, publishers, singers, and conductors. The book closes with chapters on Puccini's compositional legacy, performance history, relationship with popular culture, and place in the international operatic canon. -- Provided by publisher.

Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? In this book, author Alexandra Wilson traces La Bohème's rise to fame and demonstrates that its success grew steadily through stage performances, recordings, filmed versions and the endorsements of star singers. More recently, popular songs, film soundtracks and musicals that draw on the opera's music and themes added further to its immense cultural impact.

This cultural history offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. Wilson argues that La Bohème's approach to realism and its flouting of conventions of the Italian operatic tradition made it strikingly modern for the 1890s. She explores how Puccini and his librettists engaged with gender, urban poverty and nostalgia—themes that grew out of the work's own time and continue to resonate with audiences more than 120 years later. Her analysis of the opera's depiction of Paris reveals that La Bohème was not only influenced by the romantic mythologies surrounding the city to this day but also helped shape them. Wilson's consideration of how directors have reinvented this opera for a new age completes this fascinating history of La Bohème, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this opera and the works it inspired. -- Supplied by publisher.

Opera in the Jazz Age examines the place of opera in the contemporary ‘battle of the brows’: a debate, prompted by the growth of the mass entertainment industry, about the extent to which art forms ought to be labelled ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, or ‘lowbrow’. The book considers this question from a number of viewpoints, examining topics including: the audience for opera during the period; opera’s interactions with forms of popular culture including jazz, film, and middlebrow novels; and the ways in which different types and nationalities of opera were categorised differently. A number of significant figures in the highbrow–lowbrow debate are scrutinised, among them highbrow and middlebrow critics, the mythical figure of the ‘man in the street’, and the much reviled celebrity singer. The book explains how modern technological dissemination methods such as gramophone recordings and broadcasting came to bear upon questions of cultural categorisation, as did contemporary anxieties about national identity. The book concludes that opera was very difficult to categorise according to the new terms: for some commentators it was too highbrow; for others not highbrow enough. Examining the battle of the brows through an operatic lens challenges received wisdom by revealing the fault lines in this supposedly definitive system of cultural categorisation, undermining any simplistic binary between the high and the low. More broadly, the book also gives a detailed account of British operatic culture of the 1920s from the perspectives of performance, staging, opera-going, and criticism.

Opera is often dismissed as outdated and excessive, and perceived to be characterised by excessive passions, sumptuous costumes, and ill-mannered divas. In reality, however, operas address the most fundamental and universal of human concerns – love, death, jealousy, greed, and power. Revealing the diverse reasons behind opera’s lasting appeal, opera champion and expert Alexandra Wilson provides a lucid and engaging introduction to the agendas that have governed its composition, production and reception over the last four centuries, and explains the reasons behind its enduring appeal.

This chapter examines Puccini’s early life in the Tuscan town of Lucca. Puccini came from a long line of church musicians and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers as maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino. The chapter briefly outlines the careers of these musical forebears and their influence upon the young Puccini, whose musical career would ultimately take a very different course. It examines Puccini’s musical training and the family members and other figures who provided funding for his education. The composer’s move to study at the Conservatorio in Milan is briefly considered, with a particular emphasis on the composers and critics who were his teachers and mentors. These figures played a vital role in helping him gain a foothold in the Italian operatic world of the 1880s, setting him on the path to musical greatness.

This chapter considers Puccini complicated relationship with the musical canon, or rather with two canons. The author argues that while Puccini’s works stand at the apex of the performing canon, they have been denied entry to the scholarly canon, a body of works deemed historically significant and of high artistic worth. The chapter traces how Puccini’s operas established their place in the international operatic repertory (observing different regional patterns), via stage performances, publisher promotion, and recordings, to the point where they became pre-eminent. The author then turns to examining Puccini’s critical fortunes and evolving reputation among music historians across the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. She explains how Puccini has been castigated as a derivative, overly sentimental composer who appealed to ‘the wrong people’ and did not deserve a place in the history books, though his reputation was to some extent rehabilitated by the end of the twentieth century, finally regarded as worthy of serious scholarly analysis. In recent years, however, Puccini has become the target of calls to dismantle the canon and his works have been criticised for their treatment of gender, sexual violence, race, and class.

Throughout the 1920s a heated debate took place in Britain around the codification of “high” and “low” culture. The so-called battle of the brows involved categorizing not only different types of music but also different types of listeners, and the “man in the street” became the key player in discussions about a new phenomenon known as the “middlebrow.” Simultaneously a much-derided and much-mythologized figure, he was typically posited as the opposite number of the also widely stereotyped “highbrow.” This chapter examines who the fabled “man in the street” really was and considers his many and varied encounters with opera—via live performances, broadcasting, recordings, and other forms of dissemination—as part of an eclectic cultural diet. It analyzes the different operatic repertories the man in the street would have heard, his tastes, and his modes of listening at a time when opera was very much seen as accessible to all.

Historical films are complex and intriguing entities that lend themselves perfectly to postmodern interpretation. Ostensibly, such films propose to depict the past in an “authentic” manner-and are often marketed, received and critiqued in such terms-yet what they actually offer is a vision of the past fashioned in the spirit of the decade of their making. The present is inevitably present in historical films; this much is obvious from the speed with which they date and take on a look “of their time.”1 Furthermore, historical films are replete with inter-textual references: to the pre-existing literary texts from which they are usually adapted; to previous adaptations of the same source; to other films within the same genre; and to interpretations of the historical period in question via multifarious different cultural genres. Such films are, in effect, historiographical documents, which interact in complex ways with other artifacts in order to fashion the past according to the aesthetic tastes of a particular, fleeting moment.

This chapter considers recent approaches to gender in opera studies, with a particular emphasis on the historical gendering of the operatic genre. It takes as a central case study Sir Thomas Beecham’s attempts to popularize and politicize opera in 1920s Britain by “masculinizing” the art form. The article analyzes and contextualizes the highly charged rhetoric used by Beecham’s Imperial League of Opera (ILO) and in its symbolically titled journal, MILO, which evoked Milo of Croton, the great athlete of the ancient world. The promotion of opera by the ILO was framed as a military campaign being waged on two fronts: against Britain’s foreign cultural rivals and against perceived British philistinism. The ILO’s appropriation of heroic classicism demonstrates how opera intersected in surprising ways with interwar debates about masculinity, imperialism, and national identity.

This chapter investigates how the advent of commercial recordings detached voices from singers, and it explores the profound impact of this new technology on the ways in which the arts of the prima donna were conceived, evaluated, and consumed. Amelita Galli-Curci was one of the new breed of sopranos whose celebrity derived from having a good “microphone voice,” so much so that her performances in the flesh disappointed British listeners whose expectations had been formed by the recordings she had made in the early 1920s. Intriguing, here, is the sense of new criteria in the making, the cultural ramifications of converting the disembodied human voice into a material artifact and the increasingly powerful role of the “middle-man,” the promoter, agent, recording-company manager, as star-maker and taste-shaper.