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Franz Schreker and the End of Opera
Sherry D. Lee, University of Toronto, Canada
Like many others, I first encountered the music of Franz Schreker
through Der ferne Klang. I have discussed it at some length elsewhere1,
and although there is a great deal more that could be said about it, for
now I will focus on just one of its features, one which caught my
attention from the beginning and has troubled me ever since : that is,
the dire character of Schreker’s dramatic gesture of self-denial within
the work. The opera is, of course, an early manifestation of
Schreker’s preoccupation with operas about artistry and artist-figures.
Here, near the outset of his career, a still-young composer writes an
opera about an opera composer, and notably, one who is a failure.
Bits and snatches of this character’s doomed opera are heard as part
of the larger work in which it is embedded and, apart from their
relatively advanced exploitation of the technologies of sound within
theatrical space, the main point of their audibility is to create the
opportunity for an instance of reflexivity. For some of the sounds of
the embedded opera that drift through to us in the audience are
unmistakably familiar as those from the opening scenes of the larger
opera we have been listening to. And in the end, yes, the fictional
composer Fritz dies without having realised a success, but more to the
point, Schreker’s own opera closes with the same cadence as did
Fritz’s second act, thus throwing us back into the middle of the plot
of an operatic fiasco. It is a potent signal that can be deciphered even
if we do not know about that other, autobiographical detail, that
Schreker had initially planned to title his work not Der ferne Klang, but
« Die Harfe », the same title that Fritz’s doomed opera bears. This
negative gesture – which is not subtle, not an undercurrent, but is
remarkably bald – comes to seem ironic in light of the tremendous
See LEE (Sherry), « A Minstrel in a World without Minstrels : Adorno and the
Case of Schreker, » Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3, 2005, p. 637-94.
1
success of Der ferne Klang in 1912 and thereafter. But despite that
success Schreker did not relinquish the motif of operatic failure, and
it returns at its most blatant at the moment when the composer was,
quite suddenly, facing real operatic failures of his own.
Of course, Schreker’s penchant for creating artworks about art and
artists, especially musicians and composers, is a proclivity that has
been discussed time and time again. But one type of musician seems
to have interested him in particular, and that was the minstrel. This
fascination was manifest from the very beginning of his operatic
endeavour : the nearly-forgotten Flammen, his first opera that predated
Der ferne Klang but was never staged during the his lifetime, has a
medieval setting and features a minstrel who, with the aid of his song
and his lute, wins the love of a princess away from her absent
husband who is fighting in the crusades. That the results are fatal can
probably be guessed, but even so, only one person dies – yes, the
princess herself – and there is every indication in the wake of this
fatality that the social order has returned to normal and that things
will go on as before : the prince shakes off the tragedy, the stage
directions tell us, as though it were a bad dream. In Schreker’s last
successful opera, Der Schatzgräber, the minstrel and his treasureseeking lute cause enough disruption at the highest social levels that
he is nearly punished by death. But he escapes and in the end the only
casualty is, again, a single woman, the woman he loved. Schreker’s
first minstrel, then, and also his most popular one, both turn out to
be relatively harmless when compared with some of the others that
populate his operatic oeuvre.
Now, the minstrel is a lower class character. He is suspect, for
many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he wanders. The
minstrel is always rootless. Further, his profession as entertainer gains
him admission to environs where other members of his class might
not typically be permitted, and his music enables him at times to
transgress social boundaries, with dramatic and sometimes drastic
results. Schreker’s minstrels – who are typically recognizable even
when they are not explicitly designated as such – are often
troublemakers. There are two of these characters in Das Spielwerk und
die Prinzessin : the first one is dying as the opera opens, and we never
hear directly from him, but he is the one whose violin playing was the
only sound to which the magical Spielwerk would respond. It has been
silent ever since his father drove him from home out onto the road,
into a wandering existence, as a punishment for his immoral and
excessive behaviour with the princess who is seduced by the carillon’s
tones. The second is described only as « a wandering fellow » and is
never given a name, but he plays a flute and it, too, magically evokes a
response from the music box that has been locked in silence for so
long. But in both cases the music called forth causes widespread
dissolution and ruin for the entire town – in the words of Meister
Florian, the carillon’s creator, « it drives to death the living and tears
the dead from their rest » – and it turns out that the only way to right
all this corruption is through a great conflagration that will destroy
the evil musical instrument, a fire in which the princess, too, will
burn. Das Spielwerk’s lack of critical success did not dissuade Schreker
from exploring a theme with similar resonances nearly a decade later.
There is a whole troupe of troublesome minstrel figures in Irrelohe,
wherein a band of traveling musicians doubles as a roving team of
arsonists. They are joined near the start of the opera by an old
violinist who is convinced that the only way to purge the sins
committed in the story’s past is through fire, and sure enough, the
work ends with Irrelohe castle in flames. Despite its critical failure,
Irrelohe’s embers continued to smoulder, and Schreker reignited them
for the incendiary conclusion of Der singende Teufel, sending up a
whole monastery and its diabolical pipe organ into smoke.
The minstrel figure and the disastrous outcome, then, seem to go
together : indeed, there is an intriguing intersection in Schreker’s
works between such catastrophic elements and the repeated
occurrence of artistic failure. Alongside his apparent pyromaniac
streak – all those flickering, crackling fires that reduce the mysterious
carillon, Alviano’s elysium in Die Gezeichneten, Irrelohe castle and the
devilish medieval organ to so many ashes – failure is equally an idée
fixe for him. From the early days of heady success with Der ferne Klang
all the way through to the late struggles with Christophorus that was
ultimately never heard during his lifetime, Schreker staged artistic
failure from the very outset and reiterated it with remarkable
consistency towards the very end. Further, he repeatedly used the
operatic genre as a vehicle in which the very viability of opera itself
could be called into question. His musician-figures are defeated and
their creations prove all too combustible. Sadly, the bells tolling from
the burning tower at the end of Irrelohe sounded an early knell for the
death of Schreker’s operatic career as well, making his earlier motifs
of failure appear prophetic. But on the other hand, in the wake of
Wagner, a concluding conflagration or catastrophe should probably
be considered, in fact, an operatic success. Perhaps the distance
between Wagner’s masterful singers and Schreker’s unruly minstrels,
or that between Brünnhilde and the princess of Das Spielwerk, is also
in a sense the distance opera itself traveled – wandered, perhaps –
from Wagner’s age to Schreker’s moment when so many things were
uncertain, including the modern status and potential future of opera
itself.
As it happened, the latter part of Schreker’s operatic career
coincided with the period of the greatest production of new opera in
Austria and Germany in all of the genre’s history. For a few years,
German stages saw a quantity of premières that seems astonishing
today. At the same time, there was a growing worry and widespread
debate about the future of opera in a post-war and post-Wagner age.
Especially in the 1920s, the age of Zeitoper when Schreker’s career
fortunes turned and his operas began to fail, there was talk
everywhere of a crisis of opera. It was a frequent topic in the
newspapers – for example, the new music journal Anbruch devoted no
fewer than five special issues to the state of modern opera between
1926 and 1930 – but on a certain level it wasn’t news to Schreker, who
had been facing the conundrum of « opera after Wagner » since the
start of his career, and dealing with it in part by staging artistic and
operatic crises and catastrophes, one after another.
Schreker and his friend and colleague Arnold Schoenberg were
among the many figures whose public statements of their views on
the state of the genre of opera and its likely fate appeared in the press
in the latter 1920s. When asked in 1926 by the Berliner Tageblatt
whether there was an « Opernkrise », Schoenberg’s response was, in a
nutshell, « yes », while Schreker’s was, essentially, « no » 2 . Now, part
of Schreker’s response was essentially quantitative : the newspaper
article relates his assertion that « the ratio of operas, which are
continuously successful, to new works that are put on is no different
today than in earlier times. Wagner, of whose eleven stage creations
ten are constantly put on, is an exception. There have always been
good and bad operas . . . »3 . The state of the genre was essentially
steady, which did not, in his opinion, indicate a crisis. Speaking of
operatic ratios, Michael Walter has shown that in that same 1926-27
season in Germany, new works accounted for 20 percent of opera
productions, but only for about 4.5 percent of performances, while
the repertoire of older operas remained relatively stable and was
hardly different in 1927 than it had been in 1917, or in 1907 for that
matter4. Such statistics do verify the sense of continuity Schreker
alludes to. But they also highlight the fact that the ratio of new works,
and their success as measured by the performances they received, was
not exactly favourable.
Schreker, who was at work on his opera Christophorus at this time,
reveals himself in this brief blurb for the press as a practical man of
the theatre. Part of his seeming nonchalance in 1926 may stem from
the fact that the then-current Opernkrise was simply old news to him.
He came of age as a composer during a time when there was already
a widely-acknowledged challenge for the future of operatic
composition, and that was, as Arnold Whittall puts it, « keeping afloat
Schoenberg’s and Schreker’s statements appear within an article entitled « Gibt es
eine Krise der Oper? », Berliner Tageblatt, 6 March 1926.
2
3
Ibid.
WALTER (Michael), Hitler in der Oper. Deutsches Musikleben 1919-1945 (Stuttgart :
Metzler, 2000), p. 103-4.
4
in the immediate aftermath of the Wagnerian hurricane. 5 » As John
Deathridge suggests in the closing pages of his monograph Wagner
Beyond Good and Evil,
For composers working in a post-Wagnerian environment,
negotiating between Wagner’s example and a radical rejection of it
was often more important than adhering rigorously to the one or the
other . . . Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1912) and Ernst Krenek’s
Jonny spielt auf (1927) veer awkwardly between idealized musical spaces
and realistic scenes of petty bourgeois life . . . It is doubtless this
uncertainty of dramatic aim that has helped to consign these works,
and others of the same ilk, to the limbo of Fascinating Operas of
the Past (FOPS), operas that are occasionally revived but stubbornly
grounded on the remoter borders of the repertoire 6.
This passage may be somewhat unexpected in its juxtaposition of
these two works as though they were part of the same historicalaesthetic phenomenon, when many of us would draw a sharp line
between the eras in which they were composed. But Deathridge
characteristically puts his finger directly onto something quite tangible
when he folds these radically different operas, separated by over
fifteen years and a world war, into a single era, one that corresponds
almost exactly to the period of Schreker’s operatic career : what
Deathridge describes as the post-Wagner era we could just as well
characterise as the Schreker era.
In 1919, of course, Paul Bekker had essentially done just that : as is
well known, his was the principal critical voice to declare Schreker as
Wagner’s heir, when there was as yet no sign of decline in Schreker’s
WHITTALL (Arnold), « Opera in Transition », in COOKE (Mervyn), ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p.
8.
5
DEATHRIDGE (John), Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 2008, p. 238.
6
career trajectory7. A little over a decade later, when things looked very
different for Schreker and for opera in general, Bekker published a
brief piece in which he considered the contemporary opera question :
Tell me whatever you want; about reforms, about pervasion of
the operatic gesture by dramatic movement, about reconfigurations
of stage designs, about adapting old operas to the requirements of
the contemporary audience – tell me about that and about a hundred
thousand similar reform stories; let it be printed by every newspaper
in the world by official decree, and every day at that . . . as long as
you do not understand that opera is the manifestation of voices, and
that these singing voices, as sound-incarnated human forms, are as
much a measure for the opera as is man himself for the theater – as
long as that is so, every single one of your reforms is just blind
noise . . .8
Bekker does not mention Schreker in this essay, but I think it is
notable that his highlighting of the central importance of the singing
voice to opera resonates with comments he made in 1919 concerning
Schreker’s art. Unlike other critics at the time, he had very deliberately
singled out the uniquely sensitive and expressive qualities of
Schreker’s melodic writing for the voice. This point provides a link to
return to the remainder of Schreker’s own 1926 statement about the
Opernkrise, which also places a similar focus on operatic voice. The
following quotation is from Schreker’s entry in the Berliner Tageblatt
article, which concludes with comments that, somewhat surprisingly,
resonate with those made by Schoenberg in the same forum :
Paul Bekker, « Franz Schreker, Studie zur Kritik der modernen Oper » (1918),
reprinted in Bekker, Neue Musik (Stuttgart and Berlin : Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1923). For a thorough discussion of Bekker’s writings on Schreker and his role in
helping to shape the reception of Schreker’s works, see HAILEY (Christopher),
Franz Schreker, 1878-1934 : A Cultural Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1993,
Chapter 4, « A Critical Champion : Paul Bekker and the Schreker Question », p.
79-111.
7
BEKKER (Paul), « To the Mirror Image » (1932), trans. MORGENSTERN
(Martin) and NIELSEN (Nanette) with STEICHEN (James), Opera Quarterly
23/2-3, 2008, p. 315-16.
8
The orchestra’s dominance, which most recently has not seldom
turned opera into a symphony with obligatory singing, will gradually
come to an end. Along with an orchestra that has been «
dematerialized » in favour of the human voice, one should expect a
more careful treatment of the singing voice [Gesangstimme]; the pure,
melodic singing line [Gesangslinie] would regain its rightful position. It
will furthermore be useful for operatic writing to avoid psychological
and philosophical profundity, since, as experience has taught us, it is
not beneficial to the immediate effect of an opera or of any theater
piece. However, opera itself – again and again said to be dead . . . will
always have a special place in the audience’s heart, since it allows the
listener – even more so than spoken drama – to be completely
carried away and to be totally detached from everyday reality.
Schreker, then, was convinced that opera would hold the stage
because it offered listeners a uniquely immersive experience through
which they could be removed from reality, rather than confronted by
an ostensibly realistic reflection of their everyday lives in staged form.
In this respect his views intersect with Schoenberg’s. Although their
overall conclusions about the existence of a « crisis » were opposed,
they also intersect, particularly with regard to this vexed problem of
opera’s perceived relationship to « reality ». Schoenberg, who viewed
the question in contemporary cultural terms, affirmed the existence
of a crisis, specifically giving weight to the new predominance of film
as a medium that had shifted audience expectation toward a realism
antithetical to opera :
The crisis of theatre is partly brought about by film, and it is
because of film that opera is in the same situation : it can no longer
compete with the kind of realism offered by film. Film has spoiled
the audience’s eyes : not only does one see truth and reality, but that
pretense, which used to be reserved for the stage, and which wanted
to be nothing but pretense, presents itself as reality in a fantastic
manner. In order to avoid the comparison, opera will therefore have
to turn its back on realism, or will have to find another appropriate
way.
Schoenberg is of course in very good company in pointing the
finger toward film as having created a major problem for opera and
its relationship to its audiences. Yet both he and Schreker, perhaps
not coincidentally, had contemplated the possibility of including the
apparently antagonistic medium of film in their own musical-dramatic
works. In comparison with Schoenberg9, scholars have thus far paid
less attention to the question of Schreker and film music, although we
know that he was an avid filmgoer during his residence in Berlin and
that he was actively interested in the possibilities of the new medium,
and the potential of writing music for it, not to mention the filming
of concert performances. But the most significant point for the
current discussion is that the type of film Schoenberg was responding
to at the time of the Opernkrise opinion-articles capitalised on very
different characteristics than the ones both he and Schreker were
surely interested in when they considered the possibilities for filmic
inclusions in their operas. The pseudo-documentary nature of the
Lumière Brothers’ films notwithstanding, early film was not
conceived only or primarily as a realist medium, as the fantastic filmic
oeuvre of a figure such as the prolific Georges Méliès clearly shows.
The potential for illusion and fantasy that filmic special effects
explored so richly from very early on, via the substitution stop trick
and other techniques including dissolves and multiple exposures, was
undoubtedly what Schoenberg had in mind for Die glückliche Hand, for
example. And special effects, rather than realism, would surely have
been what Schreker was hoping for when he suggested the possibility
for a filmic realisation of a scene he drafted in 1926 – but later
discarded – for Christophorus, one in which a flame shooting out of a
dark wood heralds the appearance of the devil.
But even while he asserted that there was no crisis for opera as a
genre, Schreker was certainly facing his own operatic difficulties in
1926. The numerous revisions Christophorus went through testify to his
struggles with both dramatic and musical conceptions during this
time. And some of its features evidence a distinct tension with the
content of Schreker’s comments about the opera crisis made at
See for example FEISST (Sabine), « Arnold Schoenberg and the Cinematic Art
Musical Quarterly 83/1, 1999, p. 93-113.
9
»,
around the same time. For the sketchy figure of the minstrel as
popular musician and fallen artist appears again here; and further, the
concluding moments of Christophorus present another unusually blunt
dramatic statement of operatic failure that resonates with that in Der
ferne Klang. It is difficult to decide whether it is less or more surprising
to consider that Schreker made such similar gestures at such widelyseparated moments in his career, but it would seem to imply some
kind of pattern of critical self-questioning at the very least.
In pointing up this element of continuity I do not mean to
contradict Christopher Hailey’s characterisation of Christophorus as
Schreker’s deliberate response to the Zeitoper trend of the 1920s, with
its contemporary setting and its range of references – at times ironic
– to diverse, sometimes popular, musical styles10 . These include
evocations of jazz and cabaret songs, but also pointed allusions to
contemporary modernist styles of linear and dissonant contrapuntal
writing. But clearly, although some of Schreker’s musical-stylistic
forays in Christophorus are satirical, even outright comic, and despite its
freedom of formal structure and moments of discontinuity, the goal
of this opera is not the cultivation of ironic distance, but the
absorption Schreker described when he spoke to the press about the
opera crisis. He still seeks an essentially Wagnerian immersion in the
musical-dramatic experience. Not only the survival of an enveloping
sound world, but the textual apparatus surrounding the work, point to
a restorative streak persisting in the midst of those ‘contemporary’
features that constitute, in Hailey’s words, « a major departure » from
« established operatic genres. »11 The score contains, before the
opening of the Vorspiel, Schreker’s carefully detailed instructions to
the director for setting the scene, including dimming the house lights
halfway and directing that a quasi-ritualistic gong stroke and a
sequence of bell tones be played backstage, creating the sense of the
music-dramatic illusion moments before the work begins. These tones
10
HAILEY, p. 245.
11
Ibid.
invoke the entrance to another realm. Against those aspects of plot
and musical-stylistic reference that tap into contemporary trends, this
immersive intent of the music and/as drama is a resistant remnant,
antithetical to the contemporary spirit of Zeitoper that often sought to
fracture the totality of experience fostered by the Wagnerian «
intoxication » of continuous music.
Christophorus immerses its audience in multiple layers of that «
detach[ment] from everyday reality » that Schreker had highlighted, in
the Berliner Tageblatt, as the unique and enduring quality of opera. The
work dramatises an opposition between opera and instrumental music
in the personal and musical journey of a young composer, Anselm,
who is assigned by his composition teacher Meister Johann to write a
string quartet on the legend of St. Christopher. Anselm determines
instead to write an opera, in which his fellow composer Christoph,
and Christoph’s love Lisa – with whom Anselm is also enamored –
play central roles. The main portion of the work is the ‘vision’ of
Anselm’s opera, in which dramatic plot and reality become
increasingly and disturbingly intertwined. The second act finds
Anselm and Christoph, on the run after the murder of Lisa,
performing in a dubious hotel dance bar, and this setting, including
the popular music they play, reveals them as late incarnations of those
troublesome minstrel figures that crowded Schreker’s creative
imagination. At last the young composer, finding that he has lost
control of his work, realises he is unable to complete it. Christophorus
ends with his turn away from opera to the genre of the string quartet.
Its embedded vision of an opera within an opera goes much further
than Fritz’s failed effort in Der ferne Klang in its frame-breaching
capacity, the layers in Christophorus becoming inextricably entangled.
During the Epilogue, Anselm’s creative vision continues to play out
near the back of the stage, and the audience joins Lisa and Meister
Johann in witnessing Anselm’s compositional struggle to end his
opera, while Anselm himself listens, transfixed, to the imagined
voices he has composed. When the character of Christoph turns out
a light-switch, the lights are extinguished also in the theatre and even
in the orchestra pit – the experience is totally integral, and Meister
Johann’s voice intones out of the darkness the end of the world of
opera. Despite Schreker’s assertion that Christophorus points toward «
redemption through absolute music », the conclusion suggests more
of a condemnation to absolute music, as a chastened Anselm «
mechanically » goes to the blackboard and takes up his chalk to begin
composing the quartet movement assigned by Meister Johann.
This ending goes beyond that of Der ferne Klang in its realization
not only of creative crisis and operatic failure, but of the dissolution
– in Schreker’s terms, the « dematerialization« – of opera. The
Epilogue opens with « A Voice », otherwise unnamed, that emanates,
according to Schreker’s stage directions, « at a great distance, out of
nothing, sounding from somewhere or other. »12 But the distant
singing voices that Lisa and Anselm claim to hear in the work’s final
moments remain inaudible to us – they have receded even further
than the alluring sounds that seduced and ruined Grete and Fritz in
Der ferne Klang. Only their resonance filters through in the form of
sustained chords, disconnected triads and sevenths forming no
progression, played on a harmonium situated backstage. As Anselm
forsakes his operatic ideal for absolute music, distant singing becomes
instrumental sound. Not only the Schrekerian orchestra but the voice
itself is dematerialised, as opera finds its « redemption » in the string
quartet that closes Schreker’s most problematic work.
There is little to be heard in these closing moments that might
counter an immersive aesthetic, and mostly for this reason I detect no
audible trace of irony in the ending. It seems as depressing in its
finality as the end of Der ferne Klang was devastating so many years
before. Christophorus exists in distinct tension with Schreker’s declared
view of the « opera crisis » : it certainly does not follow his own
recommendation to steer clear of psychological and philosophical
profundity, and against his earlier statement about the primacy of the
singing voice, it enacts the eclipsing of voice by instrumental sound.
Meanwhile, even some of the gestures toward the new in
Christophorus, including the onstage ensemble in Act II and the
12
« Sehr entfernt, aus dem Nichts, von irgendwoher tönend. »
incorporations of mixed and popular styles, echo the strikingly
modern innovations of Der ferne Klang. This is a vision of an operatic
future that gazes back toward a Schrekerian past, and at the same time
stages a move away from opera.
Schoenberg’s negative remarks about the state of opera fall
between his essay on creativity in the quasi-filmic Die glückliche Hand,
wherein the artist is plagued by doubt and anxiety but succeeds in
inspired creation nonetheless, and the outright crisis of the
incomplete Moses whose final utterance is one of failure and lack. But
Schreker started his whole operatic career by staging artistic failure,
and then echoed it repeatedly until nearly the end of his creative life.
What lies in the gap between his stated optimism about opera and its
future, at a moment when such optimism seems unwarranted, and the
pessimism about its possibilities that rears its head within his own
operas themselves? This apparent disjunction can give rise to the
impression that Schreker was either naïve or disingenuous. Neither
explanation is satisfactory, even if he could be forgiven for making a
public statement that attempts more by way of showing a brave face
than confessing real anxieties. It could be that he was fundamentally
uncertain, that he wavered between genuine sanguinity and doubt
about the viability of his own oeuvre and of the genre altogether.
After all, in the year just before the Opernkrise article in the Berliner
Tageblatt, he published an essay in the same journal on the radio
medium that sounds a note of real anxiety and even cultural
pessimism13. But it could also be true that Schreker had a sense that
the future of his art depended not only on the qualities of fantasy
and escape that he emphasised, but also on its further capacity for
self-awareness and self-critique. The devastating but purging infernos
of his dramas may have hearkened back to an elevated Wagnerian
past but, in his moment of cultural uncertainty on the brink of real
disaster, the music of his minstrel’s harps and lutes sounded the tones
of an unstable operatic present and future. Today, while opera itself
survives as an institution but the market share for new operas has
13
HAILEY, p. 237.
shrunk to a ratio well below that of 1926, or 1912 for that matter,
Schreker’s uncertainty regarding opera’s prospects for survival
reechoes from within his own works even as they are being
resurrected.
Bibliography :
BEKKER (Paul), « To the Mirror Image » (1932), trans.
MORGENSTERN (Martin) and NIELSEN (Nanette) with
STEICHEN (James), Opera Quarterly 23/2-3, 2008, p. 311-17.
DEATHRIDGE (John), Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, Berkeley and
Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2008.
FEISST (Sabine), « Arnold Schoenberg and the Cinematic Art »,
Musical Quarterly 83/1, 1999.
HAILEY (Christopher), Franz Schreker, 1878-1934 : A Cultural
Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
WALTER (Michael), Hitler in der Oper. Deutsches Musikleben 1919-1945,
Stuttgart, Metzler, 2000.
WHITTALL (Arnold), « Opera in Transition », in COOKE (Mervyn),
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
List of previous publications :
LEE (Sherry), « Narrative, Performance, and Impossible Voice in
Mahler’s Das klagende Lied », 19th-Century Music 35/1, 2011, p.
72-89.
LEE (Sherry), « Alles was ist, endet : On Dramatic Text, Absolute
Music, Adorno and Wagner’s Ring », University of Toronto Quarterly
79/3, 2010, p. 922-940.
LEE (Sherry), « Deinen Wuchs wie Musik : Portraits and the
dynamics of seeing in Berg’s operatic sphere », in HAILEY
(Christopher), Alban Berg and His World, Princeton University
Press, 2010, p. 63-94.
LEE (Sherry), « The Other in the Mirror, or Recognizing the Self :
Wilde’s and Zemlinsky’s Dwarf », Music & Letters 91/2, 2009, p.
198-223.
LEE (Sherry), « A Florentine Tragedy, or Woman as Mirror »,
Cambridge Opera Journal 18/1, March 2006, p. 33-58.
LEE (Sherry), « A Minstrel in a World Without Minstrels : Adorno
and the Case of Schreker », Journal of the American Musicological
Society 58/3, 2005, p. 637-94.