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Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions.
What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera.
This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.
Report
''I find the book not only important and revealing but also downright exciting in how it points out connections and perspectives. An impressive work that I felt to be both brilliantly written and pioneering.'' Hans Neuenfels
''With the present volume, Clemens Risi fills a serious desideratum. The discussion in theater studies has so far engaged too little with the repertory system of opera-viewed statistically, still the most common-from the perspective of performance analysis. [...] The book will certainly soon develop into a standard reference and hopefully also contribute to conferring more visibility to opera in discussions in theater studies.'' Forum Modernes Theater
"As the book's subtitle suggests, Risi puts the performative dimension at the centre of his study. [...] For Risi, the task at hand when analysing a performance from the realm of Regietheater is not rigorously to relate the event to the score in order to evaluate the production as well or badly done. Rather, 'the focus is on the question of why and how a certain performance was able to affect the audience in a certain way' (11). [...] After a concise first part on the theoretical framework, situated against the backdrop of the performative turn, Risi goes on to approach opera in performance in its ephemerality and uniqueness as a bodily experience that is as subjective as it is intimate. Methodologically, he approaches the performative dimension through a phenomenological framework, arguing that phenomenology does not 'describe any event independently from one's own corporeal experience' (114). Central to this study is the 'phenomenal body in its materiality' (95). Not only are the sound and voice produced by the performer's body of importance, but also each body that belongs to the audience. Consequently, performances experienced by Risi himself take up most of the analysis. The author describes what he observed and felt, how other members in the audience reacted and what the overall atmosphere in the theatre was like. By doing so, he sheds light on experiences that regular opera-goers all have at some point. The quality of his approach lies in their promotion as objects of research and the establishment of an analytical toolbox to tackle them.
[...] It is a joy to listen with Risi to the many performances he describes so vividly. The longer one engages with his arguments, the more the author becomes the reader's very own opera buddy. Risi's descriptions of stage settings, singers' bodily exertions and their vocal effects, his own impressions and physical tensions, and the atmosphere in the audience, are engaging and comprehensive. By almost 'resurrecting' the performance, the author creates the conditions for the performer-audience relation to incorporate the circle of readers too. All in all, Risi's text proposes an important shift of perspective towards the performative dimension of opera, as well as a methodological approach that has already proved its urgency and applicability in opera studies." Elisabeth van Treeck, (Cambridge Opera Journal 34/2022)
''With the present volume, Clemens Risi fills a serious desideratum. The discussion in theater studies has so far engaged too little with the repertory system of opera-viewed statistically, still the most common-from the perspective of performance analysis. [...] The book will certainly soon develop into a standard reference and hopefully also contribute to conferring more visibility to opera in discussions in theater studies.'' T. Sofie Taubert, Forum Modernes Theater
