Opera Through Other Eyes

This collection of eight essays introduces literary and cultural theorists into the domain of operatic textual analysis, a domain that until very recently has been a bastion of astonishingly conservative theory penned largely by musicologists. A notable feature of this volume is the first English translation of ‘Burgerliche Oper’ (‘Bourgeois Opera’), a major work of interdisciplinary operatic analysis by Theodor Adorno. Beginning with Adorno’s piece, the essays offer a broad variety of contemporary critical approaches ranging from the Frankfurt School through Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism to discourse analysis. The essays vary in focus from readings of individual operas (from Monteverdi and Striggio’s Orfeo [1607] to John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Nixon in China [1987]) to problems of the canon and operatic textuality per se.