The contents page of the Oxford Handbook reveals an impressive list of topics authored by writers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. It is not an opera guide; it does not provide summaries of opera plots, or even provide a concise historical and linear overview of the subject. There have been several recent books with a similar agenda to the Oxford Handbook, including The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (edited by Nicholas Till, 2012), and the Cambridge Introduction to Music: Opera (edited by Robert Cannon, 2012), but the Oxford Handbook is by far the most ambitious, providing the broadest range of topics.

Part One, ‘What is Opera’, investigates the nature of the art form and includes topics such as genre, musical theatre, and ‘operatorio’. Part Two, ‘Words, Music, and Meaning’, gets down and dirty and examines the nuts and bolts of the making of opera. Daniel Colas’s chapter, ‘Musical Dramaturgy’, deals with the fundamental issue concerning where the dramatic impetus in opera lies. Two schools of thought prevail: the first finds that opera’s dramaturgy corresponds with the structure of the libretto; the second that the drama is found in the larger musical structures. Opera is sometimes seen through the prism of spoken theatre, which largely ignores the music, but Colas argues that much of this ‘confusion’ arises from a ‘three-fold premise whereby (a) the function of the music is to illustrate the text; (b) the text antedates the music; and (c) in the dramatic genre, the music has no raison d’être’. Fascinating essays in this section include the concept of ‘voice’, in both an abstract and concrete sense, a topic which has engaged many scholars in recent years.

‘Opera’s history is dogged by its own death wish; the art form has been pronounced dying, or even dead almost from its inception, yet zombie-like it refuses to die, and like Orpheus’s head, its song continues’

The third section, ‘Performance and Production’, takes us into the theatre itself with a range of chapters from ‘Divas and Divos’; ‘Castrato Acts’; ‘Rehearsal Practices’; ‘Acting’; ‘The Chorus’; ‘The Orchestra’; ‘Dance’; ‘Costumes’; and ‘Historically Informed Performance’, as well as one of the most contentious areas of operatic performance in recent years, ‘Regietheatre/Director’s Theatre’. The fourth part moves outside the theatre to ‘Opera and Society’. Here, issues such as ‘Opera Composition and Cultural Environment’; ‘Patronage’; ‘Audiences’; ‘Politics’; ‘Religion’; ‘Race and Racism’; ‘Gender’; and ‘Censorship’ jostle for attention – the scope is wide. The fifth part, ‘Transmission and Reception’, ranges widely from the spread of opera, to the creation of an operatic canon, to editing and reconstructing operas. The role of the opera critic is examined, as is the role of the new media of film. The highly successful advent of HD broadcasts perhaps is doing more to change the nature of the art form than any technological innovation since the development of recording technology.

Pierre Boulez at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2008 with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg (photograph by Sonja via Wikimedia Commons)

The final section of the book sounds a somewhat pessimistic note: ‘Opera on the edge’. Here at last opera moves into the twentieth century, with Joy H. Calico’s chapter, ‘Wagner, Modernism, and Politics: 1900–1945’. The word ‘modernism’ is a crucial one here; one might argue that, despite some great twentieth-century works such as Moses and Aaron (Arnold Schoenberg) and Wozzeck (Alban Berg) emerging from the Modernist impulse, opera essentially sounded its own death-knell through these and similar works. Opera ceased to be the popular, although often elitist, art form that it had been for more than three hundred years, and was appropriated by the academy. Robert Fink, in the penultimate chapter, ‘After the Canon’, has as an epitaph, Pierre Boulez’s comment:

But opera, with its traditional audience, has cut itself off from time and change. It lives in a ghetto. Opera can only be compared to a church where the parishioners’ highest desire is to keep on singing their 18^th-century cantatas. I have no desire to liberate people who voluntarily suffocate themselves in the ghetto – I have no objection to that kind of suicide.

This is Boulez who famously called on society to ‘blow up the opera houses’, but went on to conduct Wagner, of all composers, at Bayreuth, in probably the most highly-regarded, centenary production of The Ring in 1976. Fink amusingly describes how Boulez was detained by Swiss authorities in November, 2001 for suspected ‘terrorist activities’ arising out of this statement. Boulez is rumoured to be working on an operatic version of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – perhaps a perfect match? Fink presents a fairly gloomy picture of the current state of opera, with a lengthy analysis of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (2005), quoting composer Mark Adamo’s comment: ‘a libretto is not a program note’, which criticises Peter Sellars’s verbal concoction for this opera.

One of the few gaps in the book is the lack of engagement with non-traditional forms of contemporary ‘operatic’ performance. Often grouped together under epithets such as ‘music theatre’, or ‘postopera’ – the term ‘opera’ itself is under great pressure – these are performances that generally take place outside the opera house in a variety of venues, usually incorporating the latest in multimedia technology. Although covered tangentially, a dedicated chapter dealing with this topic would have been fascinating. Some might argue that this is where opera is heading, and this omission is significant.

The final word as ‘Epilogue’, is that of American composer Jake Heggie, credited with two of the most successful recent operas: Dead Man Walking (2000) and Moby-Dick (2010). Heggie mournfully notes: ‘Opera has become so marginalized that it has almost no presence in popular culture except as a parody in television commercials.’ He eloquently elaborates on the trials and tribulations of writing and staging opera in the twenty-first century, quoting comments by fellow composers including Adamo, Adams, and Philip Glass (incidentally, the most prolific of all living opera composers).

So if one is looking for a simple opera guide, this is not the book for you. However, if one wishes to engage broadly and in-depth with this infuriating but addictive art form, I unreservedly suggest investing in this large book. There are many hours of fascinating reading therein.