Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater

by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Philip Rupprecht and Cathy Shuman made me feel welcome at Duke and in Durham. Phil helped me navigate the tricky transition from student to scholar through many long conversations at Whole Foods and careful readings of drafts of several chapters of this book. I benefited from conversations with many members of the music faculty, staff, and students, particularly Bryan Gilliam and Karen Messina.

This book’s inclusion of more popular forms of musical theater is a product of the seminars I taught at Duke. I am especially grateful to the students of Adaptation and Musical Theatre for reading an early draft of chapter 3 and for suggesting examples for the section on ambiguous cases. That this book contains any musicals from the twenty-first century is largely due to conversations I had with Adam Beskind, Alexus Wells, Chandler Richards, Brennan Zook, C. J. Cruz, and other dedicated members of my classes and Duke’s student-run musical theater company Hoof ’n’ Horn.

My arguments have matured through sharing this work with audiences at McGill, Duke, the University of Western Ontario, the College of Charleston Aesthetic Work Group, the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group, the Canadian University Music Society, the Modern Language Association, and the American Society for Aesthetics. Tomas McAuley’s tireless stewardship of the RMA MPSG has done much to facilitate productive exchanges between musicology and analytic philosophy.

When I attended my first ASA in 2018, I was overwhelmed by the welcome I received and impressed by the society’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity. I thank James Hamilton for his formal response to my paper and for our conversations during the course of the conference. At the business luncheon, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Andrew Kania, who was generous enough to read the entire manuscript. His comments and our exchanges over email have helped me to clarify my arguments, particularly on ontological matters.

One of the challenges of studying a live performance medium is that one is typically able to experience works only a single time. My ability to comment in detail on many of the works I discuss has been made possible by the composers, librettists, and directors who have shared unpublished materials with me. Joel Ivany and Aria Umezawa shared their libretti to A Little Too Cozy and The Barber of Cowtown. Kevin March generously provided me with the score and an archival video recording of his and Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les feluettes, granted me permission to reproduce musical examples in this book, and caught several mistakes in chapter 3.

I am grateful to Robert Hatten for understanding what this study is about and for suggesting that, like any good story, it needs an ending. Thanks are also due to my editors at Indiana University Press, Janice Frisch and Allison Chaplin, to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions, and to Jennifer Crane for her careful copyediting.

The completion of this book has also depended on the support of many people outside of the academy, particularly my parents, Alvin Penner and Ewa Franks, and my partner in opera appreciation and in life, Kevin Bragg. The difference they have made is as great as it is difficult to enumerate. Kevin has spent more time than anyone else discussing the ideas in this book with me. Thank you for the post-opera postmortems and for teaching me that there is more to life than work. I look forward to bringing this story to a close and to starting a new one very soon.

Excerpts from the following works are reprinted by permission of the copyright holders:

“Another National Anthem” and “The Ballad of Booth (Part 1)” from Assassins

Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim

All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“Opening” from Assassins

Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim

All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“Scene 16” from Assassins

Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim

All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten

Les feluettes

Gloriana by Benjamin Britten

Owen Wingrave

Music by Benjamin Britten

Libretto by Myfanwy Piper

Reproduced by permission of the publishers.

The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten

“No Place Like London,” “Poor Thing,” and “Epiphany” from Sweeney Todd

Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim

All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten

“Tonight” from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim

Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, Publisher. Boosey &

Hawkes, Agent for Rental. International Copyright Secured. Reprinted by

OVERTURE

MOST OPERAS AND MUSICALS CONVEY STORIES. THE QUESTION of who is doing the telling has not been of particular concern to musicologists, and perhaps understandably so, as most operas lack fictional narrators. For this reason, many scholars have doubted that they ought to be considered narratives. Yet some works of sung drama do have narrators. Even in those that do not, the orchestra often seems to take on a narrator-like role, providing access to characters’

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