Michael Hampe 
The Crafty Art of Opera 
For those who make it, love it or hate it

Insights into an opera stage director’s work from an internationally acclaimed director and teacher.


Opera is nowadays performed worldwide. But as an art form it is little understood by performers and audiences alike.
The Crafty Art of Opera wants to change that. Here, Michael Hampe brings glimpses of the director’s work to a wider audience, uncovering the many techniques and rules that should inform an opera’s staging: the need for singers to know their orchestra, the importance of space around singers, the gestures of languages, what we all can learn from Mozart, and the primacy of sense over effect, to name but a few. He shows how stories, through music, become tangible and real.

Packed with many anecdotes from the author’s luminous career, this book is dedicatedto opera-lovers who want to understand ‘how it is done’; to opera-makers who want to better understand their craft; and, last but not least, to those who loathe opera, in order to prove them wrong. Eminently readable, it brings both insight and wit from a life spent in opera as director and teacher.


MICHAEL HAMPE is an internationally acclaimed opera stage director.
The Crafty Art of Opera was published in German as
Opernschule.

Table of Content

Preface

What is opera?

The heart

The seven ‘W’s

Sense and sensuality

Bodies in space

Movement

Le physique du rôle

Discomfort and inconvenience

Bank robbers

Pretend theatre

The ‘trizophrenic’ upbeat

The complete music-actor

Mozart

Recitative

Being comic

‘Too many notes…’

Dramaturgy

Breaking the rules

The harmony of the spheres

In place of an epilogue: my teachers

Appendix 1: All the ‘useful rules’ in overview, for those who make opera

Appendix 2: A masterclass in opera, for those who love it or hate it

Index of names and works

About the author

CHRIS WALTON is the author of many works on Central European music.