Arne Stollberg, Stephan Ahrens, Jörg Königsdorf, Stefan Willer (ed./eds.)

Oper und Film
Geschichten einer Beziehung
[Opera and Film. (Hi)Stories of a Relation]

edition text+kritik, München 2019, 254 pages
ISBN 978-3-86916-707-7

Since its beginnings, cinema has been productively competing with the opera. Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss reacted artistically to cinema as a new mass medium, which in turn directly built on the aesthetics and pathos formulas of the great opera stage. In the form of newer genres such as the television opera, but also through the increasingly common use of cinematic elements on the opera stage, this fruitful interplay continues to this day. A particularly prominent example is Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who was not only one of the most celebrated opera composers of the 1920s, but who also made Hollywood history as the “father of film music.” In March 2018, the new production of Korngold’s opera “Das Wunder der Heliane” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin gave occasion to organize a symposium in which the complex liaison between opera and film was illuminated in its various facets in lectures and discussions as well as in a panel discussion.

This volume collects historical case studies while also addressing both the “opera-like” elements of cinema as well as the “cinematic” elements of the opera respectively as general phenomena. Also, the volume links these findings with insights into practical aspects: from modern-day opera direction to the aesthetic specifics of filming stage productions, specifically in relation to the recording of the “Heliane” production in Berlin for DVD (published in 2019).

The volume features contributions by Norbert Abels, Stephan Ahrens, Immacolata Amodeo, Paul-Georg Dittrich, Uta Felten, Götz Filenius, Uwe Friedrich, Jörg Königsdorf, Volker Mertens, Panja Mücke, Janina Müller, Dirk Naguschewski, David Roesner, Volker Schlöndorff, and Arne Stollberg.

Event

Veranstaltungsreihe mit Oper, Symposion und begleitender Filmreihe
09 Mar 2018 – 11 Mar 2018

Oper und Film

Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bismarckstraße 35, 10627 Berlin, Foyer

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