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'Powerful spirit': notes on some practice as research

This chapter is the final chapter of an edited collection, 'The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance', edited by Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis. This edited collection reflects the discussions of the International Federation for Theatre Research's Music Theatre working group from 2006-2010. During this time a central concern of the group was a consideration of what field / practices / perspectives were encompassed by the term 'music theatre', and how this focus differed from established fields of enquiry in Opera Studies and Musicology. The book serves three purposes: firstly, through the methodological and thematic approaches of its contributors it establishes a broad-based field of enquiry for music theatre studies that reflects the concerns of theatre studies / performance studies; secondly, it locates this field of enquiry and its subject as responsive to the prominence of opera in cultural and musicological discourse; thirdly, it offers a number of interesting new ways of bringing critical performance scholarship to the area of music theatre. This chapter explores how methodologies from Practice as Research might be appropriated as critical perspectives to provide new insight into music theatre's dynamic development. The chapter takes as a case study Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607), and considers how its development (and by extension the development of the musical stage) was informed by a research enquiry, was explored in a series of iterative experiments and was articulated in its own expressive language, features which have all been key methodological approaches within recent practice as research based scholarship. Symonds and Karantonis also co-wrote the book's introduction as a contextualising essay for the collected chapters.