Review by Booklist Review
Aucoin speaks eloquently from his own experience as composer, conductor, writer, and pianist. Opera, he writes, is impossible because its vision of being a synthesis of all the arts is itself an impossible goal. Yet what drives opera's artists is the pursuit of "this permanently elusive alchemy." Aucoin looks at opera history, traces the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in opera through the ages, and discusses Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress as well as Verdi's Shakespeare operas and two contemporary operas, Thomas Adès' The Exterminating Angel and Chaya Czernowin's Heart Chamber. He offers the composer's viewpoint by telling the stories of two of his own operas: Crossing, which features the words of Walt Whitman, and Eurydice, written with playwright Sarah Ruhl, with whom he is in conversation here. Eurydice premiered at the Los Angeles Opera in 2020 and is scheduled for a future production at the Metropolitan Opera. With substantial lists of works cited and recommended recordings, Aucoin's insightful and informative opera history will engage everyone interested in music, including students and opera fans.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Composer Aucoin's personal reflection on and guide to opera has the perfect title; in the book's preface, he writes that opera's (arguably) impossible feat is capturing human ideas and emotions. The book's chapters can be read out of order, but each has a distinct relationship to the penultimate chapter, which explores Aucoin's key operatic work, Eurydice (commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 2020). In an earlier chapter, Aucoin analyzes other works inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; he also examines the Verdi operas that were based on plays by Shakespeare (Otello; Falstaff). Aucoin's expressive language conveys his passion for opera and its influence on his life. For each composer, librettist, or composition the book discusses, he explains what made them groundbreaking and new and what made them similar to their operatic predecessors. VERDICT Opera lovers will be delighted by this conversational, memoir-style book from an author who has spent years studying and writing in the art form.--Elizabeth Berndt-Morris, Loeb Music Lib., Harvard Univ., Cambridge
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An opera composer shares his love for "this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form." Aucoin, a MacArthur fellow and the composer of operas about Walt Whitman and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, fell in love with the art form while growing up in suburban Boston during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this exceptional book, he describes what he calls opera's impossibility, "the unattainability of its attempt to gather every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience." He offers "a practitioner's view" of opera in essays that "draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach." His passion is evident in every chapter, starting with an introduction on opera's basic ingredients, including "the most primal human needs: song and narrative." From there, he offers learned readings of earlier works about the Orpheus myth; Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress; Verdi's three Shakespeare operas; and two contemporary operas that give him hope for the genre's future: Thomas Adès' The Exterminating Angeland Chaya Czernowin's Heart Chamber. Also included are chapters on the inspirations for his own operas, including Walt Whitman's Civil War diaries and the Eurydice play by Sarah Ruhl that "retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through the eyes of its heroine." Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating, as when he approvingly notes W.H. Auden's "ready-for-RuPaul's-Drag-Race affronts to good taste" in his libretto for The Rake's Progressor when he writes that Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfershas harmonies that "might have struck a seventeenth-century audience as twangingly dissonant, but to modern ears the whole thing sounds positively groovy…the Beach Boys on the shores of Hell." The author is often clever, as when he justifies barely mentioning Wagner in this book: "That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere." An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
