
Contents
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Blow Up the Opera Houses! Blow Up the Opera Houses!
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Opera and Drama at the Twilight of the Canon Opera and Drama at the Twilight of the Canon
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A Faustian Bargain A Faustian Bargain
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A Three-Hour Symphony of Dread A Three-Hour Symphony of Dread
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A Libretto Is Not a Program Note A Libretto Is Not a Program Note
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The Spinal Tap of Opera The Spinal Tap of Opera
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Go Ask Alice Go Ask Alice
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(They Do Not Move) (They Do Not Move)
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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Reporting on and Critical Reception of Doctor Atomic, 2002–2009 Reporting on and Critical Reception of Doctor Atomic, 2002–2009
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49 After the Canon
Get accessRobert Fink is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely on contemporary music (both art and popular), most notably Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (California, 2005). His current projects include an edited collection on tone and timbre in popular music, and Declassified, a study of the politics of art music in a post-classical world. He currently serves on the steering committee of the Society for Minimalist Music.
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Published:07 April 2015
Cite
Abstract
Can opera as drama save classical music? Pierre Boulez famously proposed “blowing up all the opera houses” in 1967, and the relationship between the avant-garde and opera has been adversarial for most of the twentieth century. But in recent years interest in contemporary opera has exploded, leading critics like Joseph Kerman to proclaim that music drama proves the continuing vitality of the classical music canon. A study of the two major US productions of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic shows the pitfalls of relying on literature and drama to “sell” twenty-first-century opera as classical music: weaknesses in the libretto and staging led many intellectuals who attended the opera to dismiss it—and opera as a genre—in the harshest possible terms, reopening questions about the propriety of setting dramatic texts to music that composers had thought settled in their favor by the end of the seventeenth century.
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