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Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions From Handel to Berio.

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Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions From Handel to Berio. By Roger Parker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xii, 165 p. ISBN 10: 0520244184; ISBN 13: 9780520244184. $29.95.] Music examples, index.

The esteemed opera scholar Roger Parker delivered a collection of talks as part of the Bloch Lectures Series in 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. They were, according to the author, "a series of meditations on (also I hope celebrations of) operatic texts, in particular ways in which operas long known to us have been, and might in the future be, subject to change of one sort or another" (pp. 11-12). Simple enough. Or is it? What constitutes "one sort or another" ranges from a single aria to an entire scene, and it is the argument and rationale that preoccupies Parker. The resultant publication, Remaking the Song, deals in those sorts of changes one might consider argumentative minutiae, but are fiercely important to the operatic world. Consider, for example, the fit opera producer Jonathan Miller threw over Cecilia Bartoli choosing to use two substitute arias in his 1998 production of Le nozze di Figaro. Mozart composed the arias for a production of Figaro in 1789, three years after the premiere. Miller saw them as evidence of a diva pressuring Mozart...

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