Dr. Mary Ann Smart, Deptartment of Music, University of California, Berkeley – Wagner’s Ring in the 21st Century.  In her talk, Dr. Smart will recap the Wagner Ring sessions held at the Modern Language Association Symposia which took place in Seattle, January 2012.  To this Smart will add her own observations on 21st Century Ring productions – title and synopsis to follow.

Personal statement of Professor Smart:

My work focuses on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. Through various repertoires and critical approaches, the constant in my research is a desire to make sense out of concrete musical elements, by building a lively sense of the settings and mentalities within which the music was originally heard. In articles on two famous sopranos of the 1830s and 40s, Erminia Frezzolini and Rosine Stoltz, I used letters, publicity pamphlets, newspaper articles, and sketches and scores by Donizetti and Verdi to measure the influence these divas may have had on the conception of the roles they created. My book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, draws equally on textual sources (treatises on acting, staging manuals) and musical evidence to suggest close ties between musical patterns and physical gesture in repertory stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Ring. Both of these inquiries were stimulated partly by archival finds made while I was researching the sources for my critical edition of Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal (published in 2004, recorded in 2006 by Opera Rara).
    My most recent work tackles the old question of the political meanings of Italian opera in Verdi’s lifetime, during the fight for Italian unification known as the “risorgimento.” The book I am currently writing, Risorgimento Fantasies: Italian Opera and Italian Politics to 1848, locates the debate about opera’s political significance not in the symbolism of plots or musical structures, nor in the personal opinions of the composers involved, but in networks of political activism and opinion formation that granted a central place to opera. Chapters of the book focus on clusters of cultural activity such as journalists and educators in Milan just after the defeat of Napoleon who also penned libretti, reviewed performances at La Scala, and published polemical articles about romanticism, or the political exiles in 1830s Paris who crafted libretti for operas by Bellini and Donizetti. Risorgimento Fantasies treats opera as one, highly prestigious and influential, strand of the multi-faceted cultural engagement of these men in defining a voice for Italy.
An important secondary area is performance studies, specifically the interpretation of movement and gesture in contemporary stagings of nineteenth-century opera. Some initial thoughts on this appear in “Defrosting Instructions” (in the Cambridge Opera Journal’s special issue on opera and performance theory, 2003). A longer essay, to appear next year in Opera Quarterly, traces trends in blocking and stage movement in productions of Rossini’s comic operas and interrogates the powerful affinity for Rossini’s comic works of Italian activist playwright and director Dario Fo. Other new and in-progress projects include an essay on Schumann’s opera Genoveva and his quasi-operatic compositions of the 1840s that reads the composer’s difficulties with the operatic genre in relation to both the crisis of German-language opera and Goethe’s aesthetics of the theater.

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