Books by Gabriela Cruz
Oxford University Press, 2020
A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria i... more A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling in a way never before experienced in the opera house, asserting that the concept of "spectacle" was the defining cultural apparatus of the art form after the 1820s. Parisian audiences at the Académie Royale de Musique were struck by the novelty and power of grand opera upon the introduction of gaslight illumination, a technological innovation that quickly influenced productions across the Western operatic world. With this innovation, grand opera transformed into an audio-visual spectacle, delivering dream-like images and evoking the ghosts of its audiences' past.
Through case studies of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi, Cruz demonstrates how these works became an increasingly sophisticated medium by which audiences could conjure up the past and be transported away from the breakdown of modern life. A historically informed narrative that traverses far and wide, from dingy popular theatres in post-revolutionary Paris, to nautical shows in London, and finally to Egyptian mummies, Grand Illusion provides a fresh departure from previous scholarship, highlighting the often-neglected visual side of grand opera.
Journal Articles by Gabriela Cruz
Opera Quarterly, 2025
The man in evening clothes walks down a long, elegant corridor. Midway, he stops and hands his ca... more The man in evening clothes walks down a long, elegant corridor. Midway, he stops and hands his cape and top hat to the footman nearby. Meanwhile, the camera closes in on his face: it is inscrutable. This is how Sou-Chong, the fictional Chinese Ambassador to the Habsburg court circa 1912, is introduced to viewers in the 1961 televisual production of Franz Lehár’s operetta Das Land des Lächelns (1929), directed by Kurt Wilhelm. Sou-Chong is the protagonist in a doomed love story. He is on a diplomatic mission in Austria, and he will soon fall in love with and marry a Viennese Countess. Together, they will travel to China, where marital trouble will ensue. Ultimately, they will part ways, and Countess Lisa will return to Vienna accompanied by her former suitor, Count Gustl. The corridor scene takes place before all this happens. In Wilhelm’s televisual adaptation, Sou-Chong’s arrival at a Viennese palace draws attention to itself, partly because the film dispenses with the operetta’s polite greeting of the footman to the ambassador: “Bitte, einzutreten, Hohheit! [Please come in, Excellency].” The absence of words makes space for a different kind of attention.
Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, 2020
Entre 1934 e 1946, a atividade operática em Lisboa é residual e, em consequência, o futuro da art... more Entre 1934 e 1946, a atividade operática em Lisboa é residual e, em consequência, o futuro da arte lírica decide-se fora do Teatro de São Carlos. Esta é a história que nos ocupa aqui, pois enuncia um momento de viragem na vida da instituição. A vida operática em Lisboa a partir dos anos quarenta cristaliza uma nova ideia da arte que passa por ser de fidelidade à tradição da ópera e da casa, mas que prima por uma constelação de valores e comportamentos que são novos ao teatro e sedimentam nele o interesse totalitário. Este ensaio reflete sobre a história do teatro cantado em Lisboa e considera a forma como a ópera e a opereta se articulam no sentido de coadjuvar o projeto totalitário durante o período do Estado Novo. Em paralelo, o ensaio investiga também as vertentes irregulares da vida quotidiana e artística da cidade e considera o valor político que a teatralidade, elemento fundamental do arsenal técnico do ator e do cantor, acrescenta à vivência do teatro cantado regida pela regra e hábito autoritário. A centralidade do ator-cantor na história do teatro cantado no século XX e a importância da improvisação como elemento de resistência política investigam-se aqui com recurso ao espólio do tenor Tomás Alcaide, depositado no Museu Nacional da Música em Lisboa.
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2017
Richard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered 'up... more Richard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered 'upon a new path, that of Revolution against our modern Public Art', that is, grand opéra. Wagner's revolution has often been described in light of the poetics of return and homecoming that contributed a new sense of identity to (German) opera. The present article is written against the grain of this conviction, and highlights the cosmopolitan career of the phantom ship and of the vernacular art forms – the nautical theatre and the phantasma-goria – that maintained the seafaring image at the forefront of the liberal imagination, first in Britain, and then in Paris, where Wagner arguably seized on it. Specifically, it explores the significance of 'apparitional images' to mid-nineteenth-century opera and Wagner's turn to a regime of modern spectacle, inspired by the art of phantasmagoria, in Der fliegende Holländer.
19th-Century Music, 2016
Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is... more Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical
and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-
century Portugal.
Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, 2002
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2002
Book Chapters by Gabriela Cruz
The Phantom Ship in Der fliegende Holländer and L’Africaine
Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera, 2020
This chapter describes two instances of the re-mediation of grand opera by phantasmagoria, discus... more This chapter describes two instances of the re-mediation of grand opera by phantasmagoria, discussing side by side two deployments of the figure of the phantom ship—a seafaring image produced by phantasmagoria at the Adelphi Theatre in of Edward Fitzball’s nautical drama The Flying Dutchman (1826)—in Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843) and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865). Wagner’s music for the apparitional scenes, discussed in detail in the chapter, suggests a manner of composition adapted from the technical procedure of phantasmagoria and the nautical theatrics cultivated by Fitzball in London. L’Africaine’s nautical scene was also partially inspired by the English figure of the Flying Dutchman, exploring the same idea of magnification that was central to phantasmagorical procedure and to Wagner’s approach to the nautical.
Opera and Video: Technology and Spectatorship, 2012
This essay explores bel canto (re)formed by phonography and addresses lyrical apotheosis as an ef... more This essay explores bel canto (re)formed by phonography and addresses lyrical apotheosis as an effect of the materialities of recording, transmission, and reproduction.
Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegrad von Bingen to the Beatles, Dec 1, 2013
Bild und Bewegung im Musiktheater -- Interdisziplinäre Studien im Umfeld der Grand Opéra, 2018
Opera and Beauty
Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera
Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris afte... more Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris after the 1820s. Parisian mélomanes wrote imaginatively and at length about opera, leaving for posterity a treasure trove of “souvenirs.” When contemplating the idea of beauty in the contemporary opera stage, these recollections often revisited a single musical event led by Henriette Sontag and Maria Malibran in 1829, which, they claimed, bequeathed to them something extraordinary: a new lyrical mood, at once blissful and discontented, which ushered into opera the divided affect of modernity. Théophile Gautier elaborated on this divided affect a few times in his poetry and in the process, he invented the figure of the diva, the allegory of beauty.
Introduction: The Modernity of Grand Opera
The Diorama, Apparitions, and Dream Image in Robert le diable
The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated ... more The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead left their graves, and, phantom-like, haunted the stage. Those “ghosts” of deceased nuns clad in white ushered in a new genre, the ballet blanc, while another phantom—Robert’s mother—bestowed on grand opera the gift of lyric spectrality when Alice, in Act V, relayed the woman’s last words. Parisian mélomanes regarded this moment of song with special reverence after the 1830s and, arguably, its lyrical qualities guided efforts to reform singing in the 1830s and 40s. But, at the same time, Robert ushered in a new understanding in Paris of opera as an art of dream-like states: indeed, it was the visual procedures of phantasmagoria and diorama that inspired the radical change in Meyerbeer’s art of composition.
Aida, Egyptomania, and the After-life of Grand Opera
This chapter explores three related themes present in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida: the nexus between th... more This chapter explores three related themes present in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida: the nexus between the imaginative display of the flute and the wider nineteenth-century fascination with ancient Egypt; Verdi’s turn to the affective poetics of phantasmagoria—its focus on loss, mourning and consolation—as he mobilized grand opera for the project of empire in the 1870s; and finally, his timely consideration of the lyrical voice of Aida, which calls attention to the role of memory in listening to opera and comments on the spectral nature of grand opera, suggesting that it survives in operatic modernity as a musical after-image, that is, a trace of a past musicality that potentiates the critical awareness of opera today.
Book Reviews by Gabriela Cruz
CUADERNOS DE MÚSICA IBEROAMERICANA, 2024
Opera Quarterly, 2019
Scholarship Laurence Senelick. Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture. Cambridge: Cam... more Scholarship Laurence Senelick. Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 370 pages, $126.00.
Current Musicology, 2007
Sometime in 1852 Louis Bonaparte sat on the grand loge of the Academie Imperiale de Musique for a... more Sometime in 1852 Louis Bonaparte sat on the grand loge of the Academie Imperiale de Musique for a performance of Jacques Fromental Halevy's Charles VI (1843). The work, a grandiose national pageant, was a spectacle befitting an emperor forever campaigning for public opinion. In the theater, the man who wished to "appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes" (Marx 1996:125) was to be seen surveying the sight of le petit peuple as it rushed on stage to save a legitimate dauphin. He was also to lend an ear to the opera's chanson francaise, a crowd-pleaser significantly associated with republican patriotism close to the time of the 1848 revolution (Hallman 2003:246). The song, an old soldier's rallying cry against foreign invasion, was sung that night by a young bass-baritone with the right booming voice: Jean Baptiste Merly. The singer carried the first verse on French courage and abhorrence of oppression. Then, as expected, he pulled a prop dagger above his head and continued with the stirring refrain:
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Books by Gabriela Cruz
Through case studies of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi, Cruz demonstrates how these works became an increasingly sophisticated medium by which audiences could conjure up the past and be transported away from the breakdown of modern life. A historically informed narrative that traverses far and wide, from dingy popular theatres in post-revolutionary Paris, to nautical shows in London, and finally to Egyptian mummies, Grand Illusion provides a fresh departure from previous scholarship, highlighting the often-neglected visual side of grand opera.
Journal Articles by Gabriela Cruz
and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-
century Portugal.
Book Chapters by Gabriela Cruz
Book Reviews by Gabriela Cruz