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OVERTURE

MOST OPERAS AND MUSICALS CONVEY STORIES. THE QUESTION of who is doing the telling has not been of particular concern to musicologists, and perhaps understandably so, as most operas lack fictional narrators. For this reason, many scholars have doubted that they ought to be considered narratives. Yet some works of sung drama do have narrators. Even in those that do not, the orchestra often seems to take on a narrator-like role, providing access to characters’ inner thoughts and feelings, even suggesting which of them are most deserving of our sympathies.

An example of an opera with especially self-conscious narrative framing is Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s The Turn of the Screw (1954). It begins with a man addressing the audience directly. “It is a curious story,” he tells us. “I have it written in faded ink—a woman’s hand, governess to two children—long ago.”¹ After providing some backstory, he exits the stage and we see the Governess on her way to her new post at Bly. The prologue implies that the rest of the opera is a representation of the Governess’s written account. If so, she would be its narrator. Yet her role in the opera is not entirely analogous to that of her counterpart in Henry James’s novella. Readers’ access to the happenings at Bly are entirely mediated by the Governess in James’s story. There are no interjections from an external observer to provide evidence for or against the Governess’s assertions that the estate is haunted. In the opera, by contrast, Britten’s music draws connections that exceed the protagonist’s level of self-awareness. Most troubling are the musical similarities between the Governess’s interactions with the children and those of the (real or imagined) ghost Quint. The question of who is telling the story is not trivial in this case. The prologue suggests that it is the Governess, but it is not reasonable to imagine that she is drawing comparisons between herself and her ghostly opponent. Rather, this musical commentary seems to stem from an external source, whether a fictional commentator or the real or implied Benjamin Britten.

The issue of narrative agency becomes even more tangled when one considers performances that depart from the stage directions. In Tom Diamond’s production for Opera McGill (2011), the tenor did not exit the stage at the end of the prologue but turned to greet the Governess. After taking a seat on a divan, she proceeded to relive her experiences at Bly with him, her therapist, as part of her “talking cure.” Clearly our potential list of tellers ought to also include directors and performers.

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater explores how sung forms of drama convey stories. The reader may reasonably wonder at the impulse to revisit this topic in the second decade of the twenty-first century, long after the heyday of music and narrative studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Musicology’s narrative turn roughly corresponded to the emergence of New Musicology, which sought to reorient the discipline away from philology and formalism and toward history and hermeneutics. However, deriving meaning from works of purely instrumental music is not as straightforward as it is with novels or plays. Pioneers in narrative-based approaches to instrumental music, such as Fred Maus and Anthony Newcomb, drew on methods from structuralist narratology (e.g., those of Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gérard Genette) regarding musical themes, instruments, and pitches as the agents of their narratives.²

In opera studies, one of the most influential contributions has been Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices (1991). Although predominantly concerned with Wagner, Abbate also criticized initial forays into narrative-based analyses of instrumental music. She argued that narratives consist of more than agents and events; they require tellers and listeners. Yet she rejected Edward T. Cone’s suggestion, in The Composer’s Voice (1974), that the teller may be regarded as the composer. The “voices” of which she speaks are also not those of real-life performers but, rather, consist of elements of the music itself, personified into fictional narrating agents.³

Philip Rupprecht’s Britten’s Musical Language (2001) brought narrative and speech-act theory to bear on the work of a twentieth-century composer. His investigation of the ways in which Britten used his orchestra both to comment on the characters and to express their points of view was an inspiration for this study.

Over the past three decades, there have been many applications of narrative theory to the interpretation of individual works. What we lack is a theory of storytelling in the musical theater comparable to Byron Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), concerning instrumental music, or the dozens of theories of narration in the novel or the cinema. What a theoretically focused study offers that the collection of close readings does not is a more critical and rigorous investigation of concepts such as narrative and point of view. By exploring their application to a wider range of repertoire, I develop terms and approaches that can illuminate works not examined in this study.

I revisit some topics that have been addressed by the first wave of music and narrative studies, offering, for example, a different answer to the question of what a narrative is. I also ask some new questions concerning performance. More recently, musicology has shifted attention from composers and their works to performers and performances.⁴ Most prior studies of narrative in opera and musical theater confine their inquiry to the contents of the score and libretto, overlooking the realities of what happens to these texts in the rehearsal room.⁵ Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers the first sustained meditation on how the performers’ choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told.

Another reason to revisit the topic of opera and narrative is to respond to the rich body of scholarship on narrative and fiction that has emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the last fifteen years.⁶ This work remains virtually unknown in musicology in spite of the discipline’s increasing engagement with philosophy during this same period. That music is largely absent from existing philosophical discussions of narrative is surely one reason. Another lies in wider disciplinary allegiances within the academy.

Two discernable traditions emerged within Western philosophy during the twentieth century. Anglophone musicology has developed robust connections with the continental tradition while remaining rather separate from work in anglophone philosophy, most of which is in the analytic tradition.⁷ The typical approach to differentiating these traditions is through methodological contrasts. For instance, Stephen Davies has characterized continental philosophy as “subjectively focused,” involving “the creation of all-encompassing, elaborate metaphysical systems, or . . . elucidating and comparing the theories of the ‘great men’ of the tradition.” By contrast, he describes analytic philosophy as committed to “objective, clear argument and to an interpersonal, empirically oriented approach,” one that “eschews grand theories in favor of treating specific philosophical issues and problems in a piecemeal or cumulative fashion.”⁸

Today, many philosophers on both sides of this divide are working toward a reconciliation. As David Davies has observed, focusing on methodological differences hinders a productive exchange of ideas between these traditions.⁹ He recommends parsing the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy in terms of the body of work with which scholars are predominantly engaging. For continental philosophy, that body of work includes writings by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. Accordingly, continental philosophy has focused on phenomenological questions about the experience of music, music and identity, and music’s relationship to politics.

The analytic tradition descends from work in the philosophy of language by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Saul Kripke. With the exception of Wittgenstein, none of these thinkers had much interest in art. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that aesthetics became a significant concern for analytic philosophers. Peter Kivy (1934–2017) was one of the first philosophers in this tradition to write predominantly about music. Other analytic philosophers who have made substantial contributions to the philosophy of music include Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, Jenefer Robinson, Stephen Davies, David Davies, and Theodore Gracyk. Central concerns of these philosophers have included the nature of musical works and their relationship to performances, musical expression and meaning, and music’s relationship to the emotions.

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater illustrates what musicology stands to gain from taking a greater interest in analytic philosophy. I show how recent work on narrative, the nature of musical works, and musical and theatrical performance can help us understand how operas and musicals tell stories. More unusually, this book also shows how philosophy could benefit from musicology. Historically, work in the area of music and philosophy by music scholars has proceeded in two directions. There are many studies about the historical influence of philosophers on composers and vice versa. For example, much has been written about Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, particularly on Tristan und Isolde (1865), and on Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche’s early writings, such as The Birth of Tragedy (1872).¹⁰ There are also many studies that use philosophical theories to interpret a work or corpus, where the theory may not have influenced the production of the works under consideration. A recent example in this vein is J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s use of Alain Badiou’s concept of an event in Ideology in Britten’s Operas (2018).

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater takes a different approach. I survey existing theories of narrative and performance that have been developed to describe other art forms (literature, cinema, spoken theater, instrumental music) and examine how well these theories describe opera and musical theater. When I encounter incongruities, I propose revisions to existing models or explore alternatives. This study, thus, involves two kinds of analysis employed in tandem. The first is the kind of analysis for which analytic philosophy is named: the analysis of concepts such as narrative, point of view, work, and performance. The second is the sort of analysis more familiar to music scholarship: the analysis of operas, musicals, and performances thereof.

The influence of analytic philosophy also extends to the book’s structure. As an argument-driven book, it will be most accessible if read in sequence. Arguments build from uncontroversial observations, developing complexity and nuance gradually through the consideration of counterexamples. My choice and use of examples mirrors philosophical or theoretical studies more closely than it does historical or hermeneutic ones by musicologists. Rather than focusing on a few closely related case studies, I illustrate my theory of operatic storytelling with illustrations from works from many different periods, styles, and genres. In most cases, I have included multiple shorter examples of a single phenomenon rather than one lengthier one, to make the book accessible to readers with diverse areas of interest and expertise.

The writing style has also been influenced by current work in analytic philosophy, which aims at clarity and precision without resorting to jargon. I have consciously avoided the pseudo-Greek neologisms and mysterious diagrams that plagued narratology of the 1970s and 1980s. Gregory Currie’s Narratives and Narrators (2010) demonstrated that something substantive could be said about narrative that is also a pleasure to read. This book is my attempt to offer something analogous about opera and musical theater that would be accessible to scholars and practitioners without backgrounds in narrative theory or philosophy.

As its title suggests, this study bridges another gap between two discourses that have, historically, had little to do with one another. The separation of opera and musical theater may be sensible in some domains, such as the economics and logistics of how performances are produced. Yet in terms of the materials that librettists, composers, and directors are working with, operas and musicals are broadly comparable. The main differences in medium stem from the different types of voices required to perform them. Since live performances of opera still proceed largely without the assistance of electronic amplification, singers require some degree of classical training to be heard over a full orchestra. By contrast, most roles in musicals are accessible to a wider range of vocal techniques and abilities.¹¹ These differences in personnel often translate into differences in musical idiom, with operas drawing more heavily on European high art traditions and musicals being more closely aligned with the popular music of the period.¹²

Spoken dialogue plays a more important role in musical theater than it does in opera, but there are many exceptions. Singspiel (e.g., Die Zauberflöte [1791]) and opéra comique (e.g., Carmen [1875]) are genres of opera that contain spoken dialogue instead of recitative, and in the past few decades, an increasing number of musical-theater composers have opted for through-composed formats. Most rock operas (e.g., Rent [1996]) and megamusicals (e.g., Les Misérables [1980]) contain a minimum of spoken dialogue, as does the hip-hop sensation Hamilton (2015). Dance also plays a more important role in musicals than it does in operas, though Carmen (and, indeed, much French opera) provides an exception to this rule as well. In light of such exceptions, my initial attempts to define what separates operatic storytelling from other forms that involve singing (chap. 2) were unable to differentiate operas from musicals. Initially regarding this as a problem, I eventually decided to consider it as an opportunity to explore what might be gained from studying these art forms side by side.

In the performance-focused chapters, I discuss productions that I have seen live and those I have experienced only through video recordings. I also mention a few film adaptations of operas and musicals, works that were shot in a film studio or on location, without a live audience, typically with the actors lip-synching to a recording of themselves or their voice doubles. Although opera began as a medium for live performance, twenty-first-century enthusiasts are just as likely to engage with this art form in the cinema or on their televisions or computer screens. Concerns about the fundamental differences between the experience of live versus mediated forms of opera can be addressed through a sensitivity to the medium-specific features of these various ways of presenting and consuming sung drama.¹³ Furthermore, limiting myself to performances that I have seen live would have hindered my ability to place the productions I discuss in a performing tradition. Another advantage of recordings is the potential for repeat engagement, essential to detailed analysis. Discussing productions that are available on DVD or for online streaming also allows readers the ability to view these works themselves and thus to evaluate my assertions against their own experiences.

In the first wave of writings on music and narrative, there was a tendency to apply existing theories of narrative to music without considering the ways in which those theories have been shaped by the author’s target medium.¹⁴ For instance, the relative ubiquity of narrators in literary narratives led some scholars to doubt that works of theater, including operas and musicals, are properly understood as narratives. I dispel such doubts in chapter 1, which argues that narratives are utterances intentionally made to convey a story, whether through telling or through showing. In considering what a story is, I focus on the limit case of instrumental music.

Readers uninterested in whether the category of narrative includes Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony may wish to proceed directly to chapter 2, where I explore the medium-specific features of opera and musical theater through comparisons with other narrative art forms that involve singing, such as songs, oratorios, and cantatas. To differentiate sung drama from spoken plays and nonmusical films, I argue that singing is a normal mode of communication and expression in the fictional worlds of operas and musicals. In so doing, I argue against Abbate’s suggestion that if one entered the world of an opera, one would predominantly hear speech, not song.¹⁵

Although fictional narrators are not essential to narration, as I define it, some works of sung drama do have such narrators. Chapter 3 concerns the roles character-narrators play in operas and musicals, defining several common storytelling situations. Another important medium-specific feature of musical theater emerges from this discussion: Whereas novels often invite readers to imagine that there is a fictional source for the entire text we are reading, few works of sung drama support analogous imaginings. Even in operas that have character-narrators, such as The Turn of the Screw, one is not encouraged to regard those characters as being responsible for the orchestral music. Indeed, the orchestra often seems to know more than any character in the story.

For this reason, the orchestra’s role is often likened to that of a narrator. Despite the prevalence of these sorts of comparisons, the concept of the orchestral narrator has been subject to little theoretical investigation. How far should we take comparisons to literary narrators? Is it appropriate to imagine that the orchestra is responsible for presenting the opera to us, or is its role more akin to that of the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy, which merely comments on the action and guides the audience’s attention? Does the orchestra always function in a narrator-like capacity, or does it do so only at certain moments? Chapter 4 addresses these and other questions concerning orchestral commentary in operas and musicals. Although most scholars view the orchestral narrator as a fictional entity, I argue that at least some acts of orchestral narration are more coherently understood as authorial commentary.

The orchestra can also be used to express characters’ points of view. Chapter 5 exposes several commonplace but faulty assumptions about point of view: the tendency to conflate the focal character with the narrator; the assumption that character-focused narration invariably leads to identification, sympathy, or empathy; and the suspicion that harboring such feelings for characters who commit morally reprehensible acts has a deleterious effect on one’s moral character.

In chapter 6, my focus shifts from the work of librettists and composers to that of directors, conductors, and singers. Readers with more practical concerns may wish to begin the book at this point. Since my interest is in productions that depart significantly from the score and libretto, operatic examples outweigh those from musical theater. Such departures are more common in the opera house, which relies more heavily on historical repertory. The impulse to rework an opera’s libretto or score arises not only from concerns of monotony but, in many of the examples I discuss, from a need to rectify aspects of the work—sexism, racism, colonialist attitudes—that may be offensive to audiences today. Many musicals are plagued by similar problems, but until recently, few directors working in commercial musical theater have attempted more than minor revisions to address them.¹⁶ However, given that Broadway and the West End are increasingly relying on revivals of musicals from the so-called Golden Age (from roughly Show Boat [1927] to the end of 1950s), and audiences are expecting these shows to reflect current attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality, it is reasonable to expect more revisionist approaches in the future.

Chapter 6 identifies some problems with the prevailing way of understanding the work-performance relationship in opera studies, the two-text model. This account is unable to explain how seeing a performance of an opera is to see the opera itself. It also has difficulty explaining the motivations behind productions that deviate from the score or libretto. Such productions also constitute exceptions to the standard philosophical account of performance in the Western art music tradition, the classical paradigm. I argue that the philosopher James Hamilton’s ingredients model, developed for spoken theater, does a better job of describing productions containing substantial revisions to the score or libretto or that use these texts to tell different stories or convey different artistic or political points.¹⁷

Yet Hamilton’s suggestion that theater performances are never performances of preexisting works is untrue of opera and musical theater. Amid recent experiments at revising the score and adding new ingredients, many directors are still guided by the ideology of Werktreue (fidelity to the work). I propose that there are two paradigms of opera and musical theater performance today. Some productions can be understood according to the classical paradigm: The production is primarily intended to offer perceptual experiences of a preexisting work. Accordingly, the performers pursue a high degree of fidelity to its score and libretto. Other productions are better understood along the lines Hamilton proposes: The performers regard libretti and scores as merely optional ingredients. Rather than focusing on conveying the artistic statements of the composer and librettist, the performers are primarily concerned with making a statement of their own.

Throughout this book, I use the classical paradigm and ingredients model as the primary means of categorizing opera and musical-theater productions. Although these categories may seem analogous to the more familiar opposition between traditional or Werktreue productions and radical or Regieoper ones, they are not precisely equivalent. There are several reasons why I have appropriated these terms from philosophy rather than employing the ones common to opera criticism. First, the term Regieoper (director’s opera) implies that this directorial approach is primarily found in German-speaking countries, which is no longer the case. It is also predominantly used by critics in a pejorative or honorific sense (depending on the critic’s predilections), rather than as a means of identifying productions that are guided by a coherent set of artistic practices. To the extent that there is anything in common among productions that are commonly classified as Regieoper, it is their “look” (nonnaturalistic, set in the “wrong” period), as opposed to their “sound,” which is usually indistinguishable from more “traditional” productions. By contrast, the classical paradigm and the ingredients model describe the performance’s visual and sonic components.

The final two chapters explore what happens to an opera or musical’s narrative when the performers decide not to follow the performing directions. The examples in chapter 7 involve deviations from the stage directions that are designed to bring spectators to a deeper understanding of the work being performed. Through his use of lighting and placement of musicians, Peter Sellars enhanced Wagner’s musical strategies of character-focused narration in his production of Tristan und Isolde (Opéra national de Paris, 2006). Tim Albery’s Billy Budd (English National Opera, 1988) and Tom Diamond’s Turn of the Screw drew attention to the narrative framing of these works and the way their frames raise questions of narrative reliability. All of these productions involved research into the historical influences on the creation of the work being performed and helped bring these influences to the attention of their audiences.

Chapter 8 considers directors whose work is motivated less by concerns of fidelity than by a desire to present performances that accord with the interests and concerns of their audience. I discuss productions that remove character-narrators and insert new ones as well as those that reframe a portion of the dramatic action as a character’s dream or hallucination, such as Joachim Herz’s 1964 film adaptation of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer. Another way of contending with the offensive political content of many of Wagner’s works is to alter his recommended lines of sympathy. Inspired by an essay by the philosopher Ernst Bloch, Katharina Wagner’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Bayreuth, 2007) upheld Beckmesser as the true artist of the future while linking Sachs’s and Walther’s increasing artistic conservatism with the rise of fascism. Finally, I consider the issue of how to attract new audiences to opera and musical theater by examining Deaf West Theatre’s success at bringing musical theater to a community commonly assumed to be excluded from the appreciation of this art form.

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories in comparison to novels, plays, and films. I expose problematic assumptions underlying prevailing accounts of narrative and point of view in music scholarship and develop alternatives. I also make fine-grained distinctions between types of narrators and the roles of the orchestra and introduce terminology with which to talk about them.

By considering two art forms that have, historically, been ignored in theories of narrative, this book also contributes to philosophy and literary theory. Bringing opera and musical theater to debates about the necessity of narrators reveals additional exceptions to the claim that all narratives have fictional narrators. This book also offers the first detailed examination of musical means of aligning spectators with characters’ points of view.

Debates about the nature of musical works and musical performance have also proceeded without a serious consideration of opera and musical theater. Drawing attention both to historical practices, such as aria substitution, and to more recent directorial interventions, I show how opera and musical theater constitute exceptions to the prevailing philosophical account of performance in the Western art music tradition.

I also consider problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner’s Jewish caricatures or the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, I reflect on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, I offer suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of audiences in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. Myfanwy Piper, The Turn of the Screw (libretto), in The Operas of Benjamin Britten: The Complete Librettos, ed. David Herbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 233.

2. Fred E. Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 1–41; Anthony Newcomb, “Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118–36.

3. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28, 13.

4. In opera studies, much of this work has been on historical singers: Suzanne Aspden, The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Patricia Howard, The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Susan Rutherford, Verdi Opera, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kimberly White, Female Singers on the French Stage, 1830–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Most treatments of opera staging focus on continental Europe: Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); John A. Rice, Mozart on the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

5. Exceptions include Mauro Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera: Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

6. See, for example, Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 5; Andrew Kania, “Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 1 (2005): 47–54; Derek Matravers, Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); George M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7. Music is not alone: A similar tale may be told about theater studies and cinema studies prior to the 1980s. On theater studies, refer to David Z. Saltz, “Why Performance Theory Needs Philosophy,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16, no. 1 (2001): 149–54.

8. Stephen Davies, “Analytic Philosophy and Music,” in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (London: Routledge, 2011), 294–95.

9. David Davies, “Analytic Philosophy of Music,” in Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomas McAuley, Jerrold Levinson, and Nanette Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

10. On Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, see Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche, see Katherine Fry, “Nietzsche, Tristan und Isolde, and the Analysis of Wagnerian Rhythm,” Opera Quarterly 29, no. 3–4 (2014): 253–76.

11. Some roles in musicals do require classical technique; for example, the high tessitura and elaborate coloratura of Cunégonde’s “Glitter and Be Gay” from Candide (1956) and Johanna’s “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” from Sweeney Todd (1979). However, most of the other roles in these works were intended for singers who are not classically trained.

12. Derek B. Scott, “Musical Theater(s),” in Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53–72, discusses stylistic differences between opera and musical theater in more depth.

13. Opera scholars who have expressed concerns about the reliance on recordings include Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505–36; James Treadwell, “Reading and Staging Again,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 2 (1998): 205, 209. Like Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 327–29, I see at least as many benefits as drawbacks.

14. Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 11–13, makes a similar point.

15. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 123. This line of thinking has also influenced writing on the musical; for example, Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 126.

16. Exceptions include Diane Paulus’s deceptively titled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (American Repertory Theater, 2011), which attempted to rectify the work’s racial stereotypes through textual revisions by Suzan-Lori Parks and a new musical arrangement by Diedre L. Murray. Sam Mendes’s Cabaret (Donmar Warehouse, 1993), pulled Cliff out of the closet by revising the script and adding the songs Kander and Ebb composed for Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation. James Leve, Kander and Ebb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 72–76.

17. The first application of the two-text model to opera was Levin, Unsettling Opera, 11. David Davies coined the term classical paradigm in his Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). James Hamilton presented the ingredients model in The Art of Theater (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 31–33.