This book examines in new ways opera and ballet criticism in early nineteenth-century France, taking seriously the motivations and beliefs of journalist critics. Rather than seeing their work as useful primarily for its raw factual information, the essays collected here look carefully at the historical, cultural, and aesthetic background that led critics to write as they did.
This book examines in new ways opera and ballet criticism in early nineteenth-century France, taking seriously the motivations and beliefs of journali...
When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac" ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. Mary Ann Smart suspects that Nietzsche may have seen and heard more than he realized. In Mimomania she takes his accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music--and that of several of his near-contemporaries--for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. As Smart demonstrates, this productive fusion of music and movement...
When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac" ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowdi...
It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes...
It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this...
Wye Jamison Allanbrook s The Secular Commedia is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, Allanbrook shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa. Allanbrook mines a rich trove of writings by eighteenth-century philosophers and music theorists to show that vocal music was considered aesthetically superior to...
Wye Jamison Allanbrook s The Secular Commedia is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the...
