Timothée Chalamet May Not Care about Opera or Ballet . . . but UC Press Does
We're jumping on the bandwagon to defend the contemporary relevance of opera and ballet in the wake of Oscar-nominee Timothée Chalamet's recent comments stating that "no one cares" about these art forms anymore. Speaking about the film industry and the struggle to keep movie theaters alive, Chalamet told interviewer (and fellow actor) Matthew McConaughey,
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like ‘hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore—all respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”
Chalamet's comments quickly circulated online, prompting criticism, as well as reflection about the place of opera and ballet in contemporary culture. Here at UC Press, our journals publish scholarship that demonstrates how the performing arts remain vital subjects of artistic, historical, and contemporary inquiry. In the selections below, we highlight a range of recent research on opera, ballet, and performance culture, demonstrating that these art forms continue to inspire rich scholarly conversation. We invite you to read these selections for free online for a limited time.
Swan Lake Horror
Kirill Smolkin
19th-Century Music (2024) 48 (1-2): 66–75.
Reality TV? Leontyne Price, the NBC Tosca, and the Civil Rights Movement
Danielle Ward-Griffin
Journal of Musicology (2024) 41 (3): 367–401.
Opera Diplomacy: Performers from the People’s Republic of China on a 1960 Canada Tour
Josh Stenberg
Pacific Historical Review (2022) 91 (3): 361–388.
The Castrato Remains—or, Galvanizing the Corpse of Musical Style
Jessica Gabriel Peritz
Journal of Musicology (2022) 39 (3): 371–403.
The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera, Part 1: Locales and Peoples
Ralph P. Locke
19th-Century Music (2021) 45 (2): 93–118.
The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera, Part 2: Plots, Characters, and Musical Devices
Ralph P. Locke
19th-Century Music (2022) 45 (3): 185–203.
Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Production as Resistance
Suzanne G. Cusick, Monica A. Hershberger, Richard Will, Micaela Baranello, Bonnie Gordon, Ellie M. Hisama
Journal of the American Musicological Society (2018) 71 (1): 213–253.
Balanchine’s “Bach Ballet” and the Dances of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes
James Steichen
Journal of Musicology (2018) 35 (2): 267–293.
Dance Moves: An African American Ballet Company in Postwar Los Angeles
Kenneth H. Marcus
Pacific Historical Review (2014) 83 (3): 487–527.
Narrative Ballet as Multimedial Art: John Neumeier's The Seagull
Emily Alane Erken
19th-Century Music (2012) 36 (2): 159–171.