Opera in Performance

What are the arresting, striking, and decisive moments in opera performances? Why do we respond so strongly to Regietheater stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices that go beyond what seems humanly possible, but also to missed notes, ill-disposed voices, and to boring or exciting stretches where minutes seem like an hour or vice versa? How can we adequately describe and understand such moments? Drawing on theories of performance, performativity, and phenomenology, Clemens Risi elaborates these moments as arising out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, between representation and presence, between the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in engaging, critical descriptions of his own experiences in performances of opera classics. Analyzing stagings by numerous directors, performances by various singers, and productions at many different opera houses and festivals, Risi provides the reader with a unique and informative impression of what has happened in operatic performance in Germany and Austria in the last twenty years. As the first book to make performance as such its focus, Opera in Performance not only shows us how we could shift our critical attention to moments that have until now eluded articulation; it rather shows us how and why our attention has always been arrested by these moments and gives us the means to describe our own experiences when we go the opera--