Pliable, readers of your comment, may -- or may no...

2007-02-08T16:28:00.000Z

Pliable, readers of your comment, may -- or may not -- be interested in reading opera specialist Roger Parker's "Remaking the Song
Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio", which is his set of collected University of California Berkeley's Ernest Bloch lectures from two or three years ago. In it, Parker, an American who I believe still is teaching at Cambridge University (UK), apparently argues for radical deconstruction and reinterpretation of the Western operatic canon: "Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers' revisions, singers' improvisations, and stage directors' re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? ... Roger Parker, considering examples ranging from Cecilia Bartoli's much-criticized insistence on using Mozart's alternative arias in the Marriage of Figaro to Luciano Berio's new ending to Puccini's unfinished Turandot, argues that opera is an inherently mutable form, and that all of us--performers, listeners, scholars--should celebrate operatic revisions as a way of opening works to contemporary needs and new pleasures [emphasis added]."

I looked at a mint condition, half-price copy of the book last week, but decided to direct my limited disposable income to other corners of the humanities marketplace of ideas.

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Pliable, readers of your comment, may -- or may no...