OPERA AFTER THE ZERO HOUR C

During the reconstruction of West Germany's cultural life after World War II, opera resumed its central place in civic life, but German cultural traditions were tainted by the horrors of National Socialism. Emily Richmond Pollock's Opera After the Zero Hour explores composers' experiments to find expressive strategies and traditional reference points could still work for new opera, and promotes a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between opera and modernism.

Emily Richmond Pollock is a member of the faculty in the Music and Theater Arts Section of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in music history and literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly, and Notes. Her research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Paul Sacher Stiftung, and the Class of 1947 at MIT.

Introduction
Chapter One: Placement and Displacement
Rank and File: Opera's Everyday Biographies
The Situation of New Opera in the Post-War Repertoire
Chapter Two: The Significance of Nonsense: Boris Blacher's Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1
Why Abstract an Opera?
Linguistic Abstraction in the Libretto
Making Music from Nonsense
Hearing Controversy and Politics in Abstraction
Chapter Three: Italy, Atonally: Hans Werner Henze's König Hirsch
The Bondage of bel canto
The Magic of König Hirsch
From Sketches to Songs
Melody, the "Renegade's Hara-kiri"
Chapter Four: The Opera Underneath: Carl Orff's Oedipus der Tyrann
Origin Stories I: Ancient Greece in Germany
Origin Stories II: Ancient Greece against the Opera
An Opera without Music?
Traces of the Opera Underneath
Chapter Five: Explosive Pluralisms: Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten
Wagner and Berg: Zimmermann's Operatic Pasts
A Spaceship of the Mind: Zimmermann's Operatic Futures
From Lenz to Literaturoper
The Structure of Pluralism
Serialism and Expression(ism)
In the End
Chapter Six: Rebuilding and Retrenchment: The Munich Nationaltheater and Werner Egk's Die Verlobung in San Domingo
Ideas of Reconstruction
The Reconstruction of the Munich Nationaltheater
November 1963: The Gala Reopening
Who Was Werner Egk?
Operaticism and Racial Stereotypes in Die Verlobung in San Domingo
Epilogue
Bibliography