ABSTRACT
Erich Korngold’s youthful one-act opera Violanta (1916) is usually presented as just another fashionable Italian Renaissance-set opera of the early twentieth century. Yet, beyond its Renaissance period, the Venetian carnival setting of Korngold’s opera is both specific and significant—and, as such, offers us a chance to read various contemporary Viennese cultural and social identities reflected in its Venetian waters. In opening my critical ears to the opera’s carnivalesque doubleness, though, this chapter not only seeks to explain the conflicted motivations of Violanta’s eponymous heroine, but also examines the opera as a lens through which to focus discussions of Korngold’s own identity and career trajectory. I suggest that Korngold may be productively examined as a composer who continued to engage with the conditions of modernity even after his move to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, and in whom a modernism mediated and shaped by the possibilities of mass culture may be apparent.
