Opera And The Politics Of Tragedy

Author : Katharina Clausius
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781648250491

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Opera and the Politics of Tragedy by Katharina Clausius Pdf

A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

Author : Anthony Arblaster
Publisher : Verso
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Music
ISBN : 0860916189

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Viva La Liberta! by Anthony Arblaster Pdf

An impassioned guide to opera's political dimension. Taking us on a tour of 200 years of great opera, from "The Marriage of Figaro" to "Nixon in China", Anthony Arblaster uncovers the political dimension of an art form all too often considered as purely aesthetic and reveals opera's full vitality and passion for liberty.

Author : Blair Hoxby
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2024-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781487518097

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Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi by Blair Hoxby Pdf

Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.

Author : Mitchell Cohen
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 510 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780691211510

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The Politics of Opera by Mitchell Cohen Pdf

A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.

Author : Jehoash Hirshberg
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Opera
ISBN : 2503586422

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Tragedy and Lieto Fine in Romantic Opera Seria by Jehoash Hirshberg Pdf

In a seminal essay Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out that "often it is possible to turn the ending in a different direction without making any difference to the substance of the tragic course of events leading to it". Dahlhaus' statement is especially relevant to Italian Romantic opera seria. Whereas Lieto fine was central to the ethics of eighteenth-century Enlightenment opera, Romantic opera turned to heartbreaking tragic endings, often as means of social and political criticism. Yet the ending of a Romantic opera was not inevitable, and a significant proportion of Romantic operas have Lieto fine. An example is Rossini's "Tancredi" that was premiered in 1813 first with Lieto fine (Venice), then with a tragic ending (Ferrara), and again with Lieto fine (Milan), suggesting that the ending was not essential to the opera. The book analyzes the processes leading to Lieto fine in 23 operas from "Tancredi" to Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West". This includes mixed endings, such as in Verdi's "Macbeth" that ends with a hymn of victory, yet centers on the human tragedy of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The book discusses both canonic and unjustly neglected operas, such as the socialist "Papa Martin" by Antonio Cagnoni.

Author : Jan Bloemendal,Nigel Smith
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2016-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004323421

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Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy by Jan Bloemendal,Nigel Smith Pdf

Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and several other vernacular tragedians, together with consideration of neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and other playwrights. To what extent were similar themes, plots, structures and styles elaborated? How is difference as well as similarity to be accounted for? European drama is beginning to be considered outside of the singular vernacular frameworks in which it has been largely confined (as instanced in the conferences and volumes of essays held in the Universities of Munich and Berlin 2010-12), but up-to-date secondary material is sparse and difficult to obtain. This volume intends to help remedy that deficit by addressing the drama in a full political, religious, legal and social context, and by considering the plays as interventions in those contexts. Contributors are: Christian Biet, Jan Bloemendal, Helmer J. Helmers, Blair Hoxby, Sarah M. Knight, Tatiana Korneeva, Frans-Willem Korsten, Joel B. Lande, Russell J. Leo, Howard B. Norland, Kirill Ospovat, James A. Parente, Jr., Freya Sierhuis, Nienke Tjoelker and Emily Vasiliauskas.

Author : Peter Brown,Suzana Suzana OgrajenŠek
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2010-09-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191610943

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Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage by Peter Brown,Suzana Suzana OgrajenŠek Pdf

Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Author : John Bokina
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1997-01-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0300101236

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Opera and Politics by John Bokina Pdf

To what extent do operas express the political and cultural ideas of their age? How do they reflect the composer's view of the changing relations among art, politics, and society? In this book John Bokina focuses on political aspects and meanings of operas from the baroque to postmodern period, showing the varied ways that operas become sensuous vehicles for the articulation of political ideas. Bokina begins with an analysis of Monteverdi's three extant operas, which address in an oblique way the political and ideological dualities of aristocratic rule in the seventeenth-century Italy. He then moves to Mozart's "Don Giovanni", which he views as a celebration of the demise of a predatory aristocracy. He presents Beethoven's "Fidelio" as an example of the political spirit of a revolution based on republican virtue, and Wagner's "Parsifal" as a utopian music drama that projects romantic anticapitalist ideals onto an imagined past. He shows that Strauss's "Elektra" and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" transform the traditional operatic depiction of madness by reflecting the emerging Freudian psychoanalysis of that era. And he argues that operas by Pfitzner, Hindemith, and Schoenberg explore the political roles of art and the artists, each couching contemporary conditions in an allegory about the fate of art in a historical period of transition. Finally, Bokina offers a reappraisal of Henze's "The Bassarids" as a political opera that confronts the promise and limits of the sensual-sexual revolt of the twentieth-century.

Author : Michael Ewans
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351555753

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Opera From the Greek by Michael Ewans Pdf

Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. These range from Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, drawn from Homer's Odyssey, to Mark-Antony Turnage's Greek, based on Sophocles's Oedipus the King. Choices have been based on an understanding that the relationship between each of the operas and their Greek source texts raise significant issues, involving an examination of the process by which the librettist creates a new text for the opera, and the crucial insights into the nature of the drama that are bestowed by the composer's musical setting. Ewans examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.

Author : Sean Carney
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2013-02-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781442663510

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The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy by Sean Carney Pdf

The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy is a detailed study of the idea of the tragic in the political plays of David Hare, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Jez Butterworth. Through an in-depth analysis of over sixty of their works, Sean Carney argues that their dramatic exploration of tragic experience is an integral part of their ongoing politics. This approach allows for a comprehensive rather than selective study of both the politics and poetics of their work. Carney’s attention to the tragic enables him to find a common discourse among the canonical English playwrights of an older generation and representatives of the nineties generation, challenging the idea that there is a sharp generational break between these groups. Finally, Carney demonstrates that tragic experience is often denied by the social discourse of Englishness, and that these playwrights make a crucial critical intervention by dramatizing the tragic.

Author : Ebenezer Cobham Brewer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 1884
Category : American literature
ISBN : UOM:39015058573042

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Authors and Their Works with Dates by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer Pdf

Author : Mary Ann Frese Witt
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0801438373

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The Search for Modern Tragedy by Mary Ann Frese Witt Pdf

The attempt to apply an aesthetic or literary approach to fascism remains controversial. In The Search for Modern Tragedy, Mary Ann Frese Witt explores the work of a group of European writers and artists who came to fascism by way of aesthetics. In Italy and France, she maintains, an ideological aesthetic of "Mediterranean" fascism developed to a large extent independently of German Nazism. Witt's study of the relationship between fascism and modern tragedy encompasses theoretical writing on tragedy and tragedies by key authors, including Luigi Pirandello, Henry de Montherlant, and Jean Anouilh. She looks at these tragedies in the context of their reception under fascism in Italy and in Vichy France. Fascism, in the minds of many of its supporters, was an aesthetic or spiritual movement, although its aesthetic and political elements were often intertwined. The Search for Modern Tragedy is not concerned primarily with drama written as a means of conveying fascist propaganda. Rather, Witt is concerned with the influence of aesthetic fascism on the theory and practice of modern tragedy.

Author : Olivia Bloechl
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226522753

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Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France by Olivia Bloechl Pdf

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.

Author : Robert C. Pirro
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2011-03-31
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781441189462

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The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship by Robert C. Pirro Pdf

This study of the political significance of theories of tragedy and ordinary language uses of "tragedy" offers a fresh perspective on democracy in contemporary times.

Author : Thomas R. Cleary
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1984-05-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780889201316

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Henry Fielding, Political Writer by Thomas R. Cleary Pdf

An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding’s art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding’s work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding’s political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow a satisfactory understanding of Fielding’s political writing. Political writing in Fielding’s day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding’s political context and extricates from the context Fielding’s own political endeavours. Cleary’s work will make many of Felding’s previously unstudied work accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.