Product Description

"Brilliant. . . The Queen's Throat is a dazzling performance."-New York Times Book Review This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates mysteries of fandom and obsession, and has created an exuberant work of personal meditation and cultural history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #433524 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-10
• Released on: 2001-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
Why do so many gay men love opera? What makes an "opera queen"? What is the connection between gay sexuality and the full-throated longing that emerges from the diva's mouth? In The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, self-proclaimed opera queen Wayne Koestenbaum investigates the hidden--and unexpected--mysteries that opera and sexuality produce. At once a personal meditation and an iconoclastic, highly entertaining survey of divas, The Queen's Throat is ultimately a profoundly moving, and at times curiously disturbing, investigation of the intricate interplay between art and sexuality, between beauty and eroticism. Koestenbaum is not afraid to challenge, and he more or less grabs readers by the hand to drag them, with nonstop exuberance, through the ornate, highly stylized world of diva worship. Traipsing through descriptions of classic performances, musical autobiographies, personal recollections, historical notations, and the music itself, Koestenbaum creates for us the daring, frenzied, disordered, highly sexual--and ultimately ecstatic--world of the opera queen. --Michael Bronski

From Publishers Weekly
Koestenbaum, who is gay and teaches English at Yale, calls himself an "opera queen" because he is addicted to opera, fetishizes records, tries to befriend divas and keeps lists of his opera "highs." A literate amalgam of speculation, gossip, reminiscences and historical lore, his confessions are one fan's passionate love letter to the opera, illustrated with photographs and memorabilia. But Koestenbaum ( Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems ) strains to find reasons for the reputed affinity of gay men for opera. He views singing as analogous to gays' coming out of the closet and relates the diva's body movements, vocal attack and public persona to "a style that gay people, particularly queens, have found essential . . . a camp style of resistance and protection." He presents 12 psychosocial explanations for the "gay cult" of Maria Callas. One chapter, "A Pocket Guide to Queer Moments in Opera," analyzes 28 opera highlights from a gay perspective.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Initially, The Queen's Throat reminded this reviewer of the author's earlier work, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems ( LJ 9/15/90), which also had an operatic theme. Here, everything from opera trivia to serious analysis is blended in the context of the author's personal experience, with results that are at times humorous. Koestenbaum's innovative ideas reflect a gay point of view that will be startlingly different and refreshing for some readers. As an example, the author reads the autobiographies of long-gone divas looking for the words queer or gay and then interprets each diva's words from his personal perspective. An appropriate book for the 1990s. Recommended for collections in opera or gay studies.
- James E. Ross, Seattle P.L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Too much gay culture, too little opera
This book is well-written, which is why I give it 3 stars; but much of it is well-written nonsense, which is why I give it only 3 stars.

First, it is mis-titled. It is not about opera so much as about opera singers, in particular female opera singers who allegedly appeal especially to gay men, such as Maria Callas (there is a whole section (pp. 134-53) on "the gay cult of Callas") - what must my wife think when I play her records?

Second, where it leaves off the gays-as-super-aesthetes stuff, and attempts to discuss testable hypotheses, it often gets the facts backwards. For example: "Records helped kill opera by limiting the repertoire to a handful of repeated and repeatable chestnuts." (p. 47) The truth is of course the exact opposite. Before records, a handful of operas were performed in a season and every season would include at least a Bohème, a Butterfly, and/or a Carmen - one would be lucky to hear a couple of hundred operas in an entire lifetime even if one lived in one of the few world cities with an opera company. Today I can, as I do, live in the desert and choose from thousands of recorded operas whenever I feel like it, an unprecedented cornucopia of operatic riches. Similarly, Koestenbaum states that "opera virtually died with Puccini" (p. 74). That is true only if you don't count Richard Strauss's Arabella (1933) and Capriccio (1942), Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937), or all or most of the operas of Hindemith, Weill, Krenek, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Poulenc, Menotti, Barber and Benjamin Britten. Puccini may represent the end, even the Indian summer, of romantic Italian opera, but scarcely of opera.

Tediously whimsical
There's no denying that Wayne Koestenbaum is a very smart man, but that still doesn't make THE QUEEN'S THROAT very worthwhile. The narratorial persona he adopts (which he's stuck to ever since the book was published ten years ago) is of a slight hysterical, over-the-top aesthete who takes to impossibly grandiose and silly declamations (such as when he pretends to dream he is Thaïs: "Wayne, Thaïs must have pearls!"). The book really belongs to that peculiar moment in academia when writers could claim whatever trivial thing they did in daily life was politically important, with regard to identity politics, simply because they claimed it to be "subversive"; if you give even two seconds worth of thought to the strictures and actual repressive measures gay men and women must face on a daily basis all over the world, you'll see how trivial Koestenbaum's claims that his trivialities are politically important really are.

There is some fun to be had in the reading of this work, but the narrator's giddy narcissism does get very wearisome after a while. This new edition comes with a new and especially pompous preface from Tony Kushner.

Opera Fans, Take Note
Koestenbaum has crafted an insightful if sometimes academic work in "The Queen's Throat." He charts the peculiar affinity between gay men and the opera, a relationship he believes begins with an "outsider" sensibility that the sexuality and the musical genre share, and along with that a love of artifice.

So far so good, but the book hits rough going about two thirds of the way through when Koestenbaum enters that stream of thought loosely housed under the heading of "deconstruction." Central to the decon. canon is the impossiblity of separating art and politics, and opera as well as gayness are for the author "subversive." I read a lot of gender studies/ feminist thought and even so, I found his line of reasoning rough going. "The Queen's Throat" is worthwhile, but a carefree night at the opera, it ain't.