Michael Ewans provides an innovative approach to the study of opera performance by centring many of his discussions around YouTube clips of prominent productions, which he uses to guide readers through analyses of acting and directorial choices. However, Performing Opera is less practical than its subtitle suggests.
The book consists of three parts. The first part is aimed at both student singers and directors, and groups opera scenes in a series of chapters dedicated to analysing specific musico-dramatic forms: arias and monologues, duets, confrontations and ensembles. Part Two, aimed at would-be directors, consists of two chapters on the staging of reactions to offstage action, and relationships between humans and various otherworldly aspects. Part Three is aimed again at both student singers and directors, and analyses characterization over an entire opera, and the creation of a sense of inevitability in tragic operas.
For most scenes considered in Parts One and Two, Ewans has obtained permission to place clips of the scenes in production on YouTube. The easy access to these clips is what makes the book stand out, especially when Ewans compares different productions of the same scene. For the remaining scenes and the productions in Part Three, readers will need access to six commercially available DVDs. The book provides the original-language libretto text for each scene alongside literal translations. Although Ewans provides short in-text musical examples, readers will need access to full orchestral scores for the twenty-four operas discussed, and sufficient musical literacy to follow his analyses of them.
In the individual chapters, selected scenes are subjected to a musico-dramatic analysis of the score and libretto and a performance analysis of one or more video examples of the scene in production. Each scene analysis is followed by short discussion questions, suitable more for provoking classroom debate than for stimulating rehearsal-room experimentation. This tension between aim and methods occurs also at the level of the book as a whole. What is surprisingly lacking in a work with the subtitle A Practical Guide are discussions of how readers might make the leap from analysis to creative work. For would-be directors, there is no exploration of the ways that opera house architecture and the specific needs of singing performers, conductors and instrumentalists make opera directing different from directing for the spoken stage. For student singers, there is no discussion of practical techniques to harness the physical, facial and emotional demands of operatic vocal production to the creation of dramatic character. There is therefore no overlap with practice-based books such as Mark Ross Clark's Singing, Acting and Movement in Opera (2009), David Ostwald's Acting for Singers (2005) and Tracey Moore and Alison Bergman's Acting the Song (2008). This is disappointing, as Ewans's use of YouTube clips seems a promising element of opera performance pedagogy if combined with practice-based methodologies in a truly practical guide.
There is certainly room for an introduction to the dramaturgical analysis of opera performance. However, Ewans's performance discussions are often more evaluative than concerned with dramatic meaning. While he admits that his approach to performance analysis is subjective, he couches his observations in quasi-objective terms: expressions such as ‘A correctly does B’, ‘C rightly does D’, ‘X was very wrong to do Y’ appear frequently. Ewans disdains the ‘unfettered creativity’ of the ‘arrogant director’ of Regietheater, a movement he characterizes as ‘a disease’ (p. 5), but never quite clarifies why some changes to setting and stage directions are apparently correct and others wrong. For example, we are told not to waste our time on a production ‘which appears to be set in a Soviet-era housing block (!)’ (p. 56), but it is left unclear why this change of setting is so ridiculous. For would-be directors working through the book without a teacher, this is likely to confuse rather than help.
Nonetheless, if Performing Opera is not the practical pedagogical tool for artists that it could be, its discussions of YouTube clips may well find appreciative readers among opera-goers looking for a guide to opera appreciation, more than among its ostensible primary readership of students and teachers of opera singing and directing.
