A feminist examination of the role of women and their musical and narrative treatments in the opera 'Central Park'

In 1999 Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera and WNET commissioned the opera, Central Park, three one-act operas, written and composed by three separate composer/librettist teams. Wendy Wasserstein, A. R. Gurney and Terrence McNally were contracted to write librettos that take place in Central Park in New York City. Three up-and-coming composers contributed the music for the operas; Deborah Drattell, Michael Torke and Robert Beaser. Each opera has an important female character at its core, representing a unique social construction of a feminine reality. The compositional choices made by the composers and the literary choices of the librettists, shape those feminist realities. Closely examining their choices deepens our understanding of the operas individually and compositely, cultivates challenging discussions in gender and music, and enhances future performances of those roles. Therefore, my purpose is to examine the representation of the main female characters in Central Park as they are created by their dramatic/narrative and musical treatments, discuss them in the tradition of feminist analysis and create informed performance suggestions for the director and singer based on my interpretation.;An adaptation of Galician's Seven-Step Dis-illusioning Process of media literacy supplied a systematic methodology that was thorough and flexible when applied to each opera. Galician's steps are divided into two major analytic activities; deconstruction and reconstruction. Choosing Central Park as the subject fulfilled Galician's first step, Identifying. Galician's Steps 2-4, Description, Deconstruction and Diagnosis, comprise the bulk of the analytic examinations of the operas, and aim to generate data regarding the musical and narrative treatments of the women characters and topics for feminist discussion. Musical and narrative overviews and a feminist diagnosis accompany a linear/dramatic analysis inspired by Edward David Latham that considers musical analysis in conjunction with a dramatic objective analysis. Galician's Reconstruction Steps were transformed into Implications for Performance and Debriefing sections and completed with the Dissemination of this publication. The reconstruction of the operas provides informed interpretations of the three one-acts for future performances with specific suggestions for new productions, and the written methodology and examination chapters serve as an example for future explorations of feminist inquiry into contemporary opera.