Misunderstanding Opera

Misunderstanding Opera is a collection of opera reviews and essays by Yang Yandi, a musicologist and professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. It gathers his writings on opera published in newspapers and magazines over many years, with the 2018 expanded edition adding pieces written after 2014. The book revolves around the "misunderstanding" signaled by its title: opera is often regarded as esoteric, difficult, and accessible only to connoisseurs, while the author seeks to show that opera is in fact a composite genre interweaving music, literature, drama, spectacle, and dance, and that its threshold is not as high as imagined. The texts fall roughly into three categories: informal essays on the principles of opera, discussing what opera is, how to view the relationship between singing and drama, and the operatic ideas of Dahlhaus and others; guided introductions and analyses of specific works, covering composers such as Monteverdi, Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, Bizet, Puccini, Berg, Kurt Weill, and Poulenc, and works including La traviata, Aida, Das Rheingold, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Faust, Carmen, The Queen of Spades, and Turandot; and reviews written after performances, touching also on the development and problems of opera in China. Most of the works discussed are mainstream pieces staged in China, with a few modern operas not yet seen there also introduced. From a perspective of "musical humanities," the author addresses both sound and structure and human, political, and cultural meaning, giving the reviews a professional analytical basis while opening them to ordinary music lovers.