Opera in Performance

Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.

Clemens Risi is professor of theater studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Opera and the Performative Part 1 Theoretical Foundations Chapter 1 Beyond Interpretation Chapter 2 Beyond Semiotics: The Interplay of Representation and Presence Chapter 3 Theories of Performance and the Performative Chapter 4 The Entanglement of the Senses: Premises from Perception Theory Part 2 Analytical Approaches Chapter 5 Symbioses and Contestations: The Interaction of Auditory and Visual Elements Chapter 6 The Interplay of Representation and Presence in Performance Chapter 7 The Voice and the Body in Opera Performances Chapter 8 Rhythm and Experiences of Time in Opera Chapter 9 The Future of Opera? On the Mediated Experience and Distribution of Opera Performances Conclusion List of Performances Discussed Bibliography Index