Joy H. Calico - Böcker

Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 addresses a stark reality: Opera Studies has neglected its children. Opera scholarship has been complicit in othering children and childhoods, disregarding repertoire for, by, and about children as well as its creators. This volume tilts Opera Studies off its adult-centric axis by focusing on children as characters, creators, performers, and audiences. The gender biases that have plagued children's literature and its related study as inherently feminine and thus subordinate are also evident in the historical appraisal of children's operas and its imbalanced representation in scholarship. Similarly, Opera Studies has primarily focused on white, Eurocentric traditions from the Global North. This volume models an inclusive Opera Studies, exploring the myriad relationships between children, childhood, and opera to address two fundamental questions: 1. What functions do children serve for opera?2. What functions does opera serve for children? These questions are answered primarily by bringing Opera Studies into dialogue with Childhood Studies, but numerous other fields are engaged throughout the volume such as Education, Ethnomusicology, Voice Studies, African American Studies, History, English and Comparative Literature, and Musicology. Editors Joy H. Calico and Justin Vickers, together with the roster of contributors, examine repertoire in a broad range of sociohistorical contexts, across four continents, to theorize a new line of inquiry for Opera Studies: the confluence of childhood and the operatic imaginary.

"Brecht at the Opera" looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw--a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis' prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht’s writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.