“Imagine you are auditioning for the Viennese opera”: masterclasses and the assessment of operatic habitus

ABSTRACT

Being neither one-to-one classes nor concerts, masterclasses for opera singers are considered locales that provide young singers with an opportunity to perform for a highly esteemed figure in the hopes that the master’s feedback will improve their future performances. However, masterclasses can also be looked at as social texts that read through the means of assessing young trainees on the basis of their potential acceptance into the international culture of opera. Intertwining a linguistic perspective as suggested by de Saussere, which distinguishes between “language” and “speech,” with a Bourdieuian perspective that focuses on habitus and cultural capital enables looking at master classes as arenas for assessing young professionals’ operatic habitus and pointing to the components which constitute cultural capital either cumulative or innate. As such, masterclasses become institutions that reinforce Western supremacy of the operatic world and limit the access of individuals of non-European origin.

KEYWORDS:

• Opera
• cultural capital
• master classes
• habitus
• language
• speech

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Liora Gvion is a qualitative sociologist whose major areas of expertise are the sociology of food and the sociology of the body. She has published over 50 articles in major journals and as book chapters and her latest book came out in 2012 in University of California Press.