The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera

By David Littlejohn

Book Overview

Anyone who cares about opera will find The Ultimate Art a thoroughly engaging book. David Littlejohn's essays are exciting, provocative, sometimes even outrageous. They reflect his deep love of opera--that exotic, extravagant, and perpetually popular hybrid performing art form--and his fascination with the many worlds from which it sprang.

From its seventeenth-century beginnings, opera has been decried by its detractors for its elitism, its artifice, its absurd costliness, and its social irrelevance. But Littlejohn makes us see that opera embraces an extraordinary amount of intense human emotion and experience, Western culture, and individual psychology. It is also the most complex, challenging, and demanding form of public performance ever developed--at its most spectacular it pulls together in one evening a play, a concert, a ballet, and a pageant, not to mention an exhibition of painting and sculpture. Every opera is a veritable piece of cultural history.

The book begins with "The Difference Is They Sing," a potentially controversial essay on the nature of opera and its place in modern culture. From there Littlejohn goes on to consider everything from "Sex and Religion in French Opera" to "What Peter Sellars Did to Mozart." He tells us about every major staging of Wagner's Ring cycle since 1876, the troubled fate (in legend, history, and opera) of the city of Nuremberg, and the volatile collaboration of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Littlejohn presents these and many other fascinating moments in the history of opera with conviction and flair. By the end of the book the reader may very well be persuaded that opera is indeed the ultimate art.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520076087
• ISBN13: 9780520076082
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.5" x 1.0" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

An excellent, occasionally inconsistent book by a true fan.

This is a very well-written and highly engaging work which covers many facets of opera, from performance histories and traditions, to singing and staging techniques- a little of everything. The author is obviously a devoted and knowledgeable opera lover of many years' experience. In the excellent introduction, which is longer than most of the subsequent chapters, Littlejohn makes generally successful attempts to codify such elusive concepts as "good" versus "bad" opera. If there is any fault whatsoever, it is the fact that, in his enthusiastic discussions of a subject he obviously loves, the author contradicts himself at times. He declares himself willing to place his faith in the hands of stage directors to enliven and re-invigorate the tired old classics through ingenious staging concepts, yet he condemns the likes of Peter Sellars and other directors who attempt to do the exact thing Littlejohn was urging just a few pages before. If he considers i! t incumbent upon these directors to do something new with opera's classic works, he must also accept the results, however misguided. But he is an unusually open-minded critic, and can even include some (mostly) impartial analysis of Richard Strauss' "Elektra" in a chapter on Greek-derived operas, for example, despite the fact that he acknowledges disliking the work tremendously. A lesser critic might have ignored "Elektra" altogether, but as it is one of the most prominent and successful operas based on a Greek source, Littlejohn dutifully includes it and gives the opera much sharp analysis. His tastes are quite broad, and while I do not personally care much at all for the likes of Handelian opera, to take one example, I found every essay thoroughly readable and enjoyable, and learned much that I did not previously know. This is probably the most wide-ranging single book on opera on my bookshelf, and any opera fan will find much to enjoy within its pages.