Operatic Modernism Essay -- Opera Modernism Music Essays

Operatic Modernism The ponderous modernist ruptures of the 20th Century questioned, displaced, and reconfigured the way humanity regards itself. Within the fine arts, literature, architecture, and music, tasteful revolutions occurred at an unprecedented rate and, within the rubric of modernness, deliberately broke with the bases of Western art, culture and society. While working within the opera housetic institution, Strauss Salome, Weills relegate Dreigroschenoper, and Bergs Wozzeck profoundly challenge the generic conventions of the operatic usance. Through their careful confederacy of innovation in music, text, structure, and staging, their questioning of traditional morality, and pointed social and historical commentaries, these deuce-ace operas facilitate criticism of the traditional operatic institution as advantageously as society they are exemplary of the tensions--painfully evident within operatic modernism--between the will to modernity, innovation, an d progress and the past. Opera falls, despite efforts to the contrary, away from the tremendous potentiality of innovation and rupture back to its conservative tradition. As the classical tradition all too often relies on, glorifies, and mythologises its past, the failure of modernism in opera is a result of the distance--projected, assumed, and interpolated--between the often stagnant classical and operatic institutions and advanced and modernist contemporaries. Too reified to permit the flourishing of innovation, dissent, and/or rupture, the operatic institution is weighed tidy sum by its past (as well as its patrons), remaining steadfastly loathly to the revolutionary influences of modernism. While it is clear an essay on opera and modernism (or, indeed, a cou... .... Modernism and Postmodernism. In A Glossary of Literary Terms. seventh edition. M.H. Abrams, Ed. New York Harcourt, 1999. 167-168.Clements, Andrew. Wozzeck. ledger IV. Stanley Sadie, Ed. London Mac Millan, 1992. 1176-80.Hinton, Stephen. Die Dreigroschenoper. The New Grove dictionary of Opera. Volume I. Stanley Sadie, Ed. London MacMillan, 1992. 1243-46.Kennedy, Michael. Opera. The Concise Oxford lexicon of Music. Third edition. Michael Kennedy, Ed. Oxford Oxford UP, 1980. 463-64.Morris, Mark. A plan Introduction to the 20th Century History of Music in Austria. Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth Century Composers. Pimlico, 1999. On-line. Available http//www.humanities.ualberta.ca/mmorris/402/Austria2.htmMurray, David. Salome. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Volume IV. Stanley Sadie, Ed. London MacMillan, 1992. 146-49.