Opera
XIV. Analysis
- Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. “On Analyzing Opera.” In Analyzing
Opera (#416), 1–24.
A valuable review of the problems and approaches to opera analysis. Special
attention to macrostructure, unity, and Alfred Lorenz—with writers who fol-
lowed or despised him. With 51 footnotes to mainstream analytical writing.
- Dahlhaus, Carl. “Some Models of Unity in Musical Form.” Trans. Charlotte
Carroll Prather. Journal of Music Theory19 (1975): 2–31.
An indispensable assessment of the place of “form theory” in contemporary
thinking. In musical analysis it is now viewed as an optional tool, to be
“rejected at any time if it does not prove useful.” Schemata are “expedient
means for a first conceptual approach to a work.” Analysis is being modeled
less on architecture than on literary theory (New Criticism), which finds form
in an interplay among parts. Dahlhaus reviews the ideas of Ernst Kurth
(“dynamics”), Alfred Lorenz (“rhythm in the large”), and Rudolph Réti
(“developing variations”), but he is not sympathetic to any “search for a pri-
mary constituent which guarantees the unity and inner coherence of a work
through its uninterrupted presence.” Friedrich Blume’s Fortspinnungtheory
looks at the process of joining unrelated independent elements “which become
related through their placement/connection with one another.”
- Dahlhaus, Carl. “Zeitstrukturen in der Oper.” Musikforschung34–1 (1981):
2–11.
Time in opera differs from time in spoken drama: it is discontinuous, outside
of real time—Darstellungszeit—(although recitative may resemble real time).
In drama it is continuous, but tempo is more variable than in opera, more
under the control of the actors. The counterpoint between real time and opera
time creates a tension not present in spoken drama, and opera has another
dimension of time in the running commentary made by the music (which is in
present time). Drama is future-driven action; opera is present driven, focused
on feelings of the moment, detached from future and past. Existing in the
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