
Contents
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What Makes an Opera an Opera? What Makes an Opera an Opera?
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Form, Style, and Status: Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd Form, Style, and Status: Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd
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The Megamusical and the Meganovel: Les Misérables The Megamusical and the Meganovel: Les Misérables
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Operatic Phantoms: Lloyd Weber and Hart’s The Phantom of the Opera Operatic Phantoms: Lloyd Weber and Hart’s The Phantom of the Opera
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Conclusion: Idiomatic Distinctions Conclusion: Idiomatic Distinctions
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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Recordings Recordings
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Film Film
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3 Musical Theater(s)
Get accessDerek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and former Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. He has a special interest in the historical sociology of popular music and music for the stage, and is also a composer of theater music, symphonies for brass band, and a concerto for Highland Bagpipe. He has worked professionally as a singer and pianist on radio and TV, and in concert hall and theater. His books include The Singing Bourgeois (Ashgate 1989, 2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford, 2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford, 2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (Ashgate, 2010). He is the editor of Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (Oxford, 2000) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009), General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series, and Associate Editor of Popular Musicology Online.
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Published:07 April 2015
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Abstract
It is not structural features, but the presence of styles associated with commerce or entertainment that play the crucial role in separating musical theater from opera. In this chapter, three stage works from the late twentieth century are examined in order to compare what distinguishes opera from musical in finer detail. Each of these works, Sweeney Todd, Les Misérables, and Phantom of the Opera, may be regarded as having operatic aspirations, yet it is argued that they remain firmly within a musical-theatrical tradition that has embraced popular styles of music, characterized by features and techniques that frequently jar with those of the operatic tradition.
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