I caught the V & A’s exhibition Opera: Power, Passion and Politics<\/i> 10 days or so before it closed (which it has done now – sorry), and found it thought-provoking though not in the ‘unmissable’ category.<\/p>\n
The exhibitions centres on seven ‘first nights’ of operas in seven different cities. As it turns out, I’ve only seen one of these works – Le Nozze di Figaro<\/i> – on stage. They were cleverly chosen to illustrate major developments in the history of opera; for example, the Paris premiè of Tannhäuser<\/i> did duty both for Wagner and for French grand opera. Inevitably this resulted in quite a bit of compression and the exhibition didn’t pretend to cover the entire history of this art form. This was brought up to date with clips of 20th and 21st-century operas shown at the end.<\/p>\n
The focus was very much on social context rather than musical technicalities, although there were a lot of instruments and scores on view. Many items had been loaned, including 18th-century costumes from a former private theatre in Italy and a lot of material from Russia relating to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk<\/i>.<\/p>\n
A potential problem was the varying amount of documentation for each opera and its contemporary reception. There’s really not much relating to Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea<\/i>, certainly not from Monteverdi himself, or even reactions from his contemporaries, and for different reasons we don’t get much insight into Shostakovich’s own observations on his opera, while Nabucco<\/i> and Salome<\/i> are much better documented.<\/p>\n
What intrigued me the most were the items which related to the practicalities of staging opera. There was a reconstruction of a Handelian stage set with billowing waves, a moving ship and a mermaid which bobbed up and down. A later visual extract from the Met’s L’Amour de loin<\/i> showed that nothing much has changed when it comes to wowing people with staging. There was a very detailed diagram showing the blocking for the final scene of an early production of Lady Macbeth<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Probably I wasn’t the intended audience for this exhibition because I was familiar with a lot of the background to these operas, but I found myself spending a generous amount of time in the exhibition which is always a good sign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I caught the V & A’s exhibition Opera: Power, Passion and Politics 10 days or so before it closed (which it has done now – sorry), and found it thought-provoking though not in the ‘unmissable’ category. The exhibitions centres on … Continue reading