Butler, Isaac: The Method/How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. Bloomsbury Publishing, NY, 2022. As described in the main text.

Felsenstein, Walter: The Music Theatre of Walter Felsenstein, Peter Paul Fuchs, trans. and ed., W. W. Norton & Co., NY, 1975. Felsenstein’s Komische Oper in (then) East Berlin undoubtedly came the closest of any effort since the TMD (and therefore, to any effort we feel we can touch as living work) to making the modern acting sensibility the basis for operatic interpretation. This collection of articles, speeches, and interviews by (and, in a few instances, about) Felsenstein is, along with the magnificently produced and annotated Arthaus Musik set of seven films of his productions, the best representation we have of his thought and work. Fuchs, an active director and conductor who also acted as MC and translator at the workshop and demonstration sessions Felsenstein led in Boston in 1971, was exactly the man for this book. His foreword is as trenchant a statement of modern ideals and working principles in opera as any by our subject luminaries. In its course, though, following a quite expansive embrace of what some called Felsenstein’s “magical realism” (intended in not quite the same way as more recent literary usages), we find Fuchs allowing that not all operas will respond to his methods. He cites “certain Italian operas of the early nineteenth century in which the display of vocal bravura is the paramount purpose,” but evades the broader question of large-scaled masterworks raised above. So even apart from the matter of to what extent we feel that this or that production of Felsenstein’s achieved its aims, we are left well short of viability for much of the canon. (If interested, you will find much more on Felsenstein’s work and the films in Opera as Opera, pp. 544 ff. and pp. 595-605.)

Levik, Sergei: The Levik Memoirs: An Opera Singer’s Notes. Symposium Records, London, 1995, Edward Morgan, trans. As described in the main text. If possible, obtain the accompanying CD, Symposium 1151, a compilation of sides recorded by many of the Russian-culture singers Levik writes about. Among them is Levik himself, with two excerpts from Rubinstein’s The Demon. Not a great voice, we must conclude, but a fine one, under expert technical and interpretive guidance.

Lewis, Robert: Method—or Madness? Samuel French, NY, 1958. This is the “Bobby Lewis” of my COS panel. He was a prominent member of The Group Theatre in the ’30s and a co-founder of the Actors Studio in 1947, but soon departed from the latter because of disagreements with Lee Strasberg over the interpretation of Stanislavski’s teachings. This book, based on a series of eight lectures to a packed Playhouse Theatre in 1957, remains the clearest, most sensible, and most concise explanation of the American adaptations of Stanislavski’s System.

Magarshack, David: Stanislavsky: A Life. Faber and Faber, London, 1986 (first published in 1950). Still the standard biography of the subject, and a well-researched, well-written one. Its skimming-over of some aspects of KS’s later years, mentioned in Irving Wardle’s foreword, parallel those of My Life in Art (see entry below). But this is a good telling.