Accordingly, the salient features of teaching opera and opera history in music history courses are often the summarized facts of the lives of composers, lists of their operatic works, and illustrations of recorded “highlights” – overtures and popular arias that are used to demonstrate the musical style of a particular composer or opera. Despite the expanding diversity of perspectives in contemporary musicology, the older “methodolatry” of music history, as James Vincent Maiello ( 2013) puts it, is still “emphasizing form, structure, biography, the so-called ‘great works’ of music belonging to the canon, ‘great’ composers” and “the formal and stylistic elements of music and their historical ‘development’”(pp. 71–108 Unkari-Virtanen, 2009), the organization of the content of music history curricula tends to be deeply rooted in the Western music canon (Dahlhaus, 1983, 1989 McClary, 1991 Goehr, 1992). As is already recognized by some scholars (Maiello, 2013, pp. Moreover, if existing music history text books reflect current teaching practices in conservatories, colleges and universities, then opera is taught in the same way – or at least with similar perspectives as to what counts as knowledge – as other musical practices, a way which does not take into account the uniquely multi-artistic nature of opera. 61–66) bibliographical review in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy shows. The study argues that by analyzing and illustrating the architecture of temporal narrativization as one form of the “operatic of opera” in Western operatic practice, students will gain a better understanding of the special nature of the pluri-medial nature of opera.Īlthough interest in Western opera as a topic of music history research has increased over the last twenty years, opera history pedagogy is still a relatively unexplored scholarly field, as C. While most of the examples are drawn from the classical-romantic repertoire, the analysis also shows that new pluri-medial ways of dealing with temporality and narration have been emerged in contemporary opera. The study demonstrates this temporal narrativization through examples grouped into three main categories: “temporal sameness”, “temporal incongruence” and “non-linear temporality”. By breaking with the canonized forms of music history pedagogy, the subject content of opera history can be explored for instance through the architecture of temporal narrativization, as made possible by the multiple media types incorporated into opera. This study suggests that the pedagogy of music history for the professional training of musicians – including opera singers and future opera composers – could benefit from applying narratology to operatic analysis and acknowledging the “operatic of opera” in the organization of the artistic materials as one possible pedagogical approach.
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