When Opera Meets Film

When Opera Meets Film. By Marcia J. Citron. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xviii, 324 p. ISBN 970521895750. $95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, filmography and videography, index.

Over the course of the last six years, the Cambridge Studies in Opera series has presented a stimulating range of monographs that have greatly enlivened and strengthened the field. One of its most recent offerings, Marcia J. Citron's When Opera Meets Film, continues the series' tradition of expanding study of operatic influence in various aspects of culture, in this case proposing that "the more ways we can approach [the opera/film encounter] the better will be our sense of opera's place in contemporary society" (p. 249). Citron, who has published widely on the relationships between film and opera, is well positioned to take on this task. In this volume, three previously published essays on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy (1972-90), Norman Jewison's 1987 Moonstruck, and the filmed operas of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1972-88), are interspersed with three chapters of new material focused on Don Boyd's 1987 Aria, Claude Chabrol's 1995 La Cérémonie, John Schlesinger's 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Mike Nichols's 2004 Closer (for the earlier essays, see "Operatic Style and Structure in Coppola's Godfather Trilogy," Musical Quarterly 87, no. 3 [Fall 2004]: 423-467; "Subjectivity in the Opera Films of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle," Journal of Musicology 22, no. 2 [Spring 2005]: 203-240; and " 'An Honest Con - trivance': Opera and Desire in Moonstruck," Music and Letters 89, no. 1 [February 2008]: 56-83).

As Citron is well aware, this range of repertory dictates an ambitious scope for her investigations, taking into its purview not only "mainstream film" but also fulllength opera film and "postmodernist pastiche" (p. 4), several national traditions, and a number of extremely diverse film directors, film composers, and opera composers, over a thirty-year historical span. Citron's project in this book, however, is not to emphasize historical similarities, but rather to study the "factors that produce meaning" when opera is present in film (p. 13), in order to show, through a range...