Operatic Modernism Essay -- Opera Modernism Music Essays

Operatic Modernism The profound modernist ruptures of the 20th Century questioned, displaced, and reconfigured the way earthly concern regards itself. Within the fine arts, literature, architecture, and music, artistic revolutions occurred at an unprecedented rate and, inwardly the rubric of modernism, deliberately broke with the bases of Western art, culture and society. While workings within the operatic institution, Strauss Salome, Weills grumble Dreigroschenoper, and Bergs Wozzeck profoundly challenge the generic conventions of the operatic tradition. Through their careful combination of innovation in music, text, structure, and staging, their questioning of tralatitious morality, and pointed social and historical commentaries, these three operas facilitate criticism of the traditional operatic institution as well as society they are exemplary of the tensions--painfully evident within operatic modernism--between the will to modernity, innovation, and progress a nd the past. Opera falls, disdain efforts to the contrary, away from the tremendous potential of innovation and rupture back to its unprogressive tradition. As the classical tradition all too often relies on, glorifies, and mythologises its past, the mischance of modernism in opera is a result of the distance--projected, assumed, and interpolated--between the often moribund classical and operatic institutions and innovative and modernist contemporaries. Too reified to permit the flourishing of innovation, dissent, and/or rupture, the operatic institution is weighed down by its past (as well as its patrons), remaining steadfastly resistant to the revolutionary influences of modernism. While it is clear an try on opera and modernism (or, indeed, a cou... .... Modernism and Postmodernism. In A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. M.H. Abrams, Ed. refreshful York Harcourt, 1999. 167-168.Clements, Andrew. Wozzeck. Volume IV. Stanley Sadie, Ed. London MacMillan, 19 92. 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 Dictionary of Music. Third edition. Michael Kennedy, Ed. Oxford Oxford UP, 1980. 463-64.Morris, Mark. A Brief Introduction to the 20th Century report 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.