Opera cross-section
An opera cross-section is a form of marketing for works from the music theater repertoire by recording companies in the era of long-playing record production .
While until well into the 20th century there were mostly only instrumental arrangements of the most popular melodies from operas and operettas on sound carriers , from 1930 onwards the producers of shellac records developed the format of the so-called opera cross-section as an alternative to the then still very rare complete recording of an opera.
Initially, a colorful series of melodies was often put together, which did not always consist of complete numbers, and in some cases were played by very different teams of singers and orchestras. The order of the compilation did not always have to do with the original dramaturgy of the work, but was partly based on the idea of an arrangement that was as varied as possible or even a sequence of keys that was coordinated with one another. The required brevity of the presentation (in the second post-war period, when the cross-section of operas was particularly popular, the length was still limited to a maximum of 20-25 minutes per page) made it necessary to choose predominantly closed numbers from operas, a practice that the Italian and French number opera of bel canto ( Rossini , Verdi , Gounod , Offenbach , Bizet ) was far more accommodating than the well- composed musical drama by Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss .
Up until the 1960s, opera cross-sections were also produced separately, but there was also the overall recording reduced to a single cross-section, which many companies marketed more successfully than the integral versions.
Cross -cuts were also produced from oratorios (e.g. the Johannes Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach ).
literature
- Martin Elste : Small record lexicon. Bärenreiter , Kassel 1989. ISBN 3-7618-0966-2
- Martin Elste: The cross-section of the opera. A media-specific form of musical theater? In: Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen / Klaus Pietschmann (eds.): Beyond the Stage: Forms of Arrangement and Reception of Opera in the 19th and 20th Centuries ( Swiss Contributions to Music Research ; Vol. 15), Kassel 2011, pp. 172–194 .