Opera's Second Death

[Dave Monroe]

Pedanticism?  At the Pynchon List?  Quelle horreur! 
Like being guilty of speeding at a drag race ...

No, any and all such clarifications appreciated, I'm
already enough of a clod around my opera-goin' friends
(among others ...).  And I think my youngest brother
actually asked for that Feldman piece last Christmas
(though now he seems to have moved on to classic West
Coast and D.C. punk ...).  Familiar with Luciano
Berio's Sinfonia?  With the Swingle Singers (whose
sixties classical stuff I love dearly)?  One movement
features lines from Beckett's The Unnamable (in
another, various sung sounds coalesce into the name
"Martin Luther King, Jr.") ...  

But, hey, that Zizek & Dolar book is okay, so far,
yeah, pretty much just Mozart and Wagner and that's
it, and you no doubt will disagree with a staement
like Dolar's "I share the view held by many that the
opera is emphatically finished" (giving Erwartung as
one of sevral possible "candidates for the date of its
death"), but ... but it seems the book then goes on to
be about its "stubborn, zombielike existence after its
demise."   And not only is there a lot of interesting
stuff about opera, philosophy, history, literature,
what have you, but this is by far the most
straightforward thing I've seen come out of that U of
Ljulbjana Slovenian Lacanian crew, so ...

--- The Great Quail <quail at libyrinth.com> wrote:
> 
> If you are a "Nixon in China" fan, and given your
> other tangential interests, may I suggest Adams'
> second (and lesser known) opera, "The Death of
> Klinghoffer." I have been listening to it a lot
> recently, being as it is about Middle Eastern
> terrorism and its effects on people.
> 
> Oh, and if I can be completely pedantic here -- and
> yes, I know I am about to come off as a total
> classical weenie -- Schoenberg's 
> brilliant "Erwartung" is not technically considered
> opera, but a "Monodram," meaning a short staged work
> for a single vocalist.  However, the term does get
> blurred these days.... for instance, one 
> of my favorite modern "Monodrams" is Feldman's
> "Neither," a setting of a Beckett poem, which is
> usually called an "opera" on account of its
> commission.

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