Many of the canonical operas are spectacles of female degradation, in which powerless, marginalized women grow ever more powerless and marginalized.
(And, really, have you ever worked your way through a canonical Italian opera libretto, line by line?) In any case the music is thrilling: charged with urgency, rich in memorable melody and propulsive rhythms that sometimes evolve midsong.
Wagner based all but one of his canonical 10 operas on that ideal ("Die Meistersinger" being a comedy, Eva is a person, not an archetype).
These writers move beyond the well-intentioned but inadequate notion of "color-blind casting," or the theory that race should be irrelevant to casting decisions; they ask how opera can approach canonical works in ways that illuminate and critique their racial biases rather than eliding and implicitly condoning them.
More than in the other canonical Mozart works there is a too-muchness to the opera's cycles of transgression and forgiveness, power defined solely as the constant exercise of clemency.
In his new recording of "Agrippina" (Harmonia Mundi HMC 952088.90; three CDs with a bonus DVD), for instance, he presents what he calls the " 'original,' Ur-version of Handel's youthful opera," though no such version exists in a canonical score.
According to Bankes-Jones, something similar is happening with large opera houses today: "All this technology goes to endlessly trying and preserve [the canonical operas]," he says.
According to the canonical rationality assumption, this game has two pure strategy Nash equilibria: both watching soccer or both watching opera.
If much of his output has fallen into disuse, certain pieces — the Symphony No. 3, with organ; the opera "Samson et Dalila"; "Danse Macabre"; and, above all, "The Carnival of the Animals" — have attained ironbound canonical status.
Peter Sellars, the avant-garde director known for staging classical plays and operas in joltingly contemporary settings, has once again aroused controversy with an unorthodox production of a canonical work.
