Documentary opera examined for upcoming book
By Randy Fitzgerald
Senior Writer, University Communications
Many people have heard of the critically acclaimed film Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. Fewer have heard of the also acclaimed opera by the same name and based on the same book by Catholic nun, Sister Helen Prejean.
 |
|
A 2003 production of The Death of Klinghoffer by the Brooklyn Academy of Music pits terrorists against the ship's captain.
|
Ruth Longobardi, assistant professor of music, knows both works and a host of other texts that confront issues of death penalty and social class in 20th-century America. The 2000 opera by composer Jake Heggie and playwright Terrence McNally is one of four she is examining intensely for a book she is writing titled The Documentary Opera: Representing and Re-producing the Real in Turn-of-the-Millennium America.
What is a documentary opera? Docu-mentary opera stages contemporary events and public figures-a very recent past that most of us have lived through- and often confronts pressing political and social issues.
Documentary opera also often "provides an urgent point of focus on issues of race, class, ethnicity and sexuality in a contemporary American context," Longobardi says.
Her study of the documentary opera encompasses not just single works or individual composers but collaborations among several artists and connections with numerous other works. She is especially interested, she says, in "intersections and distinctions among clusters of works on the same topics and often with the same titles-a kind of transtextual collaboration." Intersections and divergences among works are often keys to understanding the construction of cultural and national narratives on important topics like the death penalty, she adds.
The other three documentary operas she is looking at for her book also were taken from current events: X, the Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986), about the black nationalist leader who was assassinated in New York in 1965; The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), about the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by four Palestinians; and Harvey Milk (1995), about the first openly gay person elected to San Francisco's board of supervisors. Milk was murdered within a year of his election along with Mayor George Moscone by former city supervisor Danny White.
Longobardi will also explore the idea that opera as a collaborative process has "high conflict potential: each medium represents its subject by different means and from unique perspectives." Because of this potential, she says, "issues of power and ideology-of politics-are inevitably introduced."
Longobardi's methodologies will include, she says, "multi-media analysis, archival research and historical study of events and people that significantly shaped late-century America." The book also will "be grounded in representation and identity studies and in American cultural studies."
One example of intermedial conflict is addressed in her chapter on John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, titled "Re-producing Klinghoffer: Before and After 9/11." In it, she examines two very different productions of the opera, the 1991 United States premiere directed by Peter Sellars in which Palestinian and Western characters are intricately blended and a 2003 film produced by the documentarian Penny Woolcock, which makes a sharp distinction between the Palestinians and Westerners.
The chapter examines shifts in the opera's representation of Palestinians across a production history that surrounds (and that Longobardi argues) is deeply affected by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. "Is a dialogic approach to terrorism possible after 2001?" she asks.
Another of the chapters will be called "The Production of Race, the Politics of Voice." It will look at Anthony Davis's X "in relation to the means by which voice in opera and other media has been made to signify African-American identity across the 20th century."
"Is the African-American voice used in opera as a means to delimit identity?" she asks. "Or do different operas and different media such as film, radio and cartoons negotiate race through voice in different ways?"
Longobardi says her discussion of X "will confront a history of exclusion: the paucity of operas about African Americans; the confinement of the African-American voice to a restricted musical space; the dearth of African-American singers, composers and audiences."
"The Production of Race" addresses changes in the composition of the African-American voice in relation to broader social and political transactions taking place outside the opera proper.
Longobardi hopes her book "will establish the multifaceted work of opera as a vital component of American cultural studies."
Longobardi is the 2004 recipient of the Philip Brett Award from the American Musicology Society for outstanding work in gay, lesbian and bisexual studies and has been nominated by the University for an NEH summer stipend. Also, the Ahmanson Foundation awarded $10,000 to the University for the acquisition of materials for the Parsons Music Library on the history, staging and performance of opera.
|
