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Adventures in Opera
by Matthew Aucoin
A user's guide to opera - Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera.
From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera's greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms―music, drama, poetry, dance―into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music―opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals.
The Impossible Art is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. Aucoin writes of the rare works―ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin―that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera's greatest figures and those of literature. Aucoin also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera's iconic stage. The Impossible Art opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world.
"[E]xceptional...Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating...An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Aucoin speaks eloquently from his own experience as composer, conductor, writer, and pianist...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." - Booklist
"Triple threat Matthew Aucoin: conductor, librettist, and composer, and now writer and thought leader. The Impossible Art sheds new light on the musicology, history, and personalities that bring opera to life, with a poet's appreciation of the importance of the libretto, often overlooked. Personal, witty, and well-researched, it will have you rushing to recordings of works you know well, and ones you have never heard, to listen with Aucoin's provocative insights in mind." - Renée Fleming
"Matthew Aucoin's The Impossible Art shines with unforced generosity; his generation's perceptiveness, honesty, and frank address; and the personally felt urgency of moving history forward. Writing with uncanny wisdom and a modesty that is equal parts nerdy and heroic, here is a musician who is as insightful about Auden as about Stravinsky and who blows your mind with psychedelic and synesthetic descriptions of Birtwistle. This is a book infused with first love, and first vows of clear-eyed, lifelong devotion." - Peter Sellars
"I could not put this book down. To read such cogent insights from such an important composer is pure joy from beginning to end. I thought I knew a fair amount about opera, but I learned a lot. If you are new to opera, this book will draw you in―if you are already among the converted, this book will open your eyes to new vistas about this greatest of arts." - Patrick Summers, Artistic & Music Director of the Houston Grand Opera
This information about The Impossible Art was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and pianist, and a MacArthur Fellow. He has worked as a composer and conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, American Repertory Theater, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Music Academy of the West. He was the Los Angeles Opera's Artist in Residence from 2016 to 2020, and is a cofounder of the American Modern Opera Company.
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