Book reviews! For your reviewing-reviews pleasure!

Understanding Italian Opera by Tim Carter, 2015

This came out in October 2015, so it’s the newest entry to the “Opera 4 Dummies” type of book, which is usually all you get in the local bookstore for opera history reading. This is a slightly more academic (and slightly more expensive) option than others, sort of a cross-over academic/popular level book. It would be a good text for a lower-level undergrad class. Now what sets this book apart from other older options is two key things:

One, this book represents a much more up-to-date approach to the modern global Italian opera scene, which has greatly expanded from the previous dark ages (like ...the 90s) when Italian opera was considered to have properly started with Mozart and neatly ended with Puccini; to now include two whole pre-Classical operas out of five total. 40% of the operas in a popular-level book is an unprecedented level of coverage, and speaks to early and baroque opera’s amazing recovery from obscurity. (To be specific the book covers one opera each for Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini.)

Two, the book is almost entirely focused on poetry, and only discusses music to show how it fits and reflects the poetry, which is pretty wild, and I have not seen that outside of deep dark academic books on opera. It’s a solid approach, and one which pays respect to the understanding of Italian opera as it was consumed in its “natural” lifetime.

The poetry content is extremely solid, rhyme structures are well explained, poetry is provided in original and English translation, and I totally got schooled on Italian poetry. It also, on a simpler level, just reminds people librettists EXISTED, and why we should give an opera with the names of its librettist+composer and not just the composer, even though we customarily do not.

The social and musical history content was certainly acceptable but not incredible, in particular I thought the castrati history was kinda bad (mostly because he INSULTED MORESCHI, ring the shame bell), however, considering past castrati coverage in intro-level opera books, wherein the author usually decides it’s best to keep opera respectable for the new converts by not mentioning this bit of awkwardness (easy enough if you skip baroque opera entirely), really it’s much better than it has been. At this point we’re just happy to be invited to the party at all.

I wouldn’t recommend this as a beginning opera history book though, since it’s quite dry and doesn’t conveny a scrap of the “fun factor” around modern opera and opera history - and opera is very fun! People had and continue to have fun at the opera. But as a 3rd or 4th opera history book for an advanced-casual opera reader, quite solid reading.

My copy of this book was free from publisher for the purposes of review.

This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake and Its Aftermath by Mark Molesky, 2015

I’ve had a casual research interest in the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 since I first read that Caffarelli somehow lived through it. While I haven’t found much information about his personal story, I’ve still been working on some background reading on the event. This new book on the topic came out in November 2015 (around the 260th anniversary of the event I later noticed), and as I was first in line for my public library system’s 1 copy, after the library processed it, I got to promptly read it...as my first book of 2016. Womp womp. I’m cheap though.

But it was well worth the wait! This is good, solid, popular-level history, written in an engaging and page-turning style, I read all 300ish pages in two days. It’s a bit emotionally heavy, but I feel the author’s emotional investment in the history is sincere, and he wasn’t writing emotionally just to peddle schmaltz, so I was accepting of my heart-strings being constantly tugged with first-person narratives of death and injury. The author also makes a good argument for why this particular natural disaster was both a transformative event to religion and philosophy in Europe, and yet, why it has also been almost completely forgotten outside of Portugal.

Recommended especially if you’re into environmental history.

Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David E. Coke and Alan Borg, 2011

I got this book because it was recommended on a historical romance novel blog. That’s I guess how I pick out academic books these days.

Vauxhall Gardens was 18th century London’s Disneyworld, and therefore it does appear in many books of Ladies Special Interest Reading. It had wide promenades, music, food, art, and later on, Novelty Acts like tightrope walking, balloon flights, and fireworks. It also cost a mere shilling to get in for most of its life, making it accessible to a fair amount of London. It was the sort of place you could both take your kids for some wholesome family entertainment, and also the sort of place you could go to pick up some mollies and have sex in the bushes. The author makes this seeming impossibility coherent, and has also collected the largest set of images of the art and documentary maps on Vauxhall yet published. (Though to be fair, no one has published a book at all on Vauxhall since the 50s.) Did you know there are only 2 known photographs of Vauxhall, taken right before it was torn down in 1859? It is extremely strange to see a picture of Vauxhall if you already know it from it’s main legacy: a perpetual, peripheral ghost of 18th-19th century social life.

Vauxhall also was one of the few places in the 18th century presenting solid English music, as it were: the composers were overwhelmingly native (except Handel, who is honorarily English anyway), the musicians were English, and the singers were English. If you want to understand English resistance to Italian and French culture, as well nativization of other European music styles, you have to look at Vauxhall.

Is it acceptable to knock a book down for being just WAY TOO LARGE? This book is too large. I found it physically punishing to read. I read it with a pillow in my lap. I know it’s an Art Book (™), but I mean really. It’s still majority text. According to Amazon it weighs six pounds. It does not come in e-book. I slightly suspect no one was expected to actually READ this book, just buy it, look at a few of the pictures, and put it on a shelf, so probably I am the one in the wrong here. But this book is widely appealing and well-researched, so I do recommend it, if you have strong forearms.