Situating Opera : Period, Genre, Reception.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Prologue -- Why opera? Why (How, Where) situate? -- 1 Anatomy of a warhorse Il trovatore from A to Z -- About -- Brainworm -- c" -- Dream -- Endings -- Foursome -- Gesamtkunstwerk -- Heroics -- Intertextual -- Judgments -- Kultur -- Ladies -- Movies -- Narrating -- Ornamenting -- Parody -- Quoting -- Realistic -- Soul -- Thrust -- Upstaging -- Violence -- Warhorses -- X-rated -- Yawn -- Zingara -- 2 On opera and society (assuming a relationship) -- 3 Opera and the novel antithetical or complementary? -- 4 Opera by other means -- Ten recent instances -- Two Rodelindas -- Kentridge/Monteverdi, Il ritorno dUlisse in patria -- Kentridge/Mozart, Die Zauberflöte in the museum -- Wilson/Waits, The Black Rider The Casting of the Magic Bullets -- Cocteau/Glass, La Belle et le bête -- Mayer/Armstrong/Green Day, American Idiot -- Korot/Reich, Three Tales Hindenburg, Bikini, Dolly -- Fausts in the museum -- John Cage, Europeras 1 and 2 -- Opera in the head -- The Upshot -- 5 Opera and/as lyric -- 6 From separatism to union aesthetic theorizing from Reynolds to Wagner -- Disparities among the arts -- The arts as system treatises of aesthetics -- Interchanges and encroachments -- Music-drama, or the myth of union -- 7 Toward a characterization of modernist opera -- Modernist opera? -- Not-quite opera -- Modernism, hard and soft -- Modernist opera in historical perspective -- Postmodernist opera, perhaps? -- Operatic modernism in retrospect -- 8 Anti-theatricality in twentieth-century opera -- 9 A brief consumers' history of opera -- Monteverdi, La favola dOrfeo, Mantua, Ducal Palace, February 24, 1607 -- Cavalli, La Calisto, Venice, Teatro S. Aponal, November 28, 1651 -- Handel, Rinaldo, London, Queens Theater, February 24, 1711.

Rousseau, Le devin du village, Fontainebleau, October 18, 1752 -- Rossini, Tancredi, Venice, Teatro La Fenice, February 6, 1813 -- Wagner, Tannhäuser, Paris, Opéra, March 13, 1861 -- Strauss, Salome, Graz, Stadt-Theater, May 16, 1906 -- Berg, Wozzeck, Vienna, Theater an der Wien, June 16, 1953 -- Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, New York, Metropolitan Opera, March 28, 2008 -- Epilogue -- Why (What, How, If) opera studies? -- Works cited -- Index.