When Opera Meets Film

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

Introduction; Part I. Style: 1. Operatic style in Coppola's Godfather trilogy; 2. Opera as fragment: 'Liebestod' and 'Nessun dorma' in Aria; Part II. Subjectivity: 3. Subjectivity in the opera-films of Jean-Pierre Ponelle; 4. Don Giovanni and subjectivity in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie; Part III. Desire: 5. 'An honest contrivance': opera and desire in Moonstruck; 6. The sound of desire: Così's 'Soave sia il vento' in Sunday, Bloody Sunday and Closer; Epilogue; Bibliography; Filmography and videography.

An important contribution to understanding the relationship between opera and film, this 2010 book argues that opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and vice versa. Drawing on diverse cinematic traditions, the study explores landmark repertoire including Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Jewison's Moonstruck, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

Marcia J. Citron is Lovett Distinguished Service Professor of Musicology at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. She is the author of Opera on Screen (2000), as well as numerous articles on the topic of opera and film, in journals including Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, and the Journal of Musicology. Her other area of interest is women and gender in music, and she has written three books on this topic: Gender and the Musical Canon (1993), which won an award from the International Alliance for Women in Music; Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn (1987), which was awarded 'Outstanding Academic Book' by Choice magazine; and Cécile Chaminde: A Bio-Bibliography (1988).