Mimomania

Author : Mary Ann Smart
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520939875
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mimomania written by Mary Ann Smart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-03-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Verdi baritone. Mimomania tracks such effects through readings of operas by Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, we find resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber’s La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. Mimomania shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.

Author : Joy H. Calico
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520942817
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brecht at the Opera written by Joy H. Calico and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht’s writings. Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Author : David Imhoof
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 178533185X
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Total Work of Art written by David Imhoof and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

Author : Davinia Caddy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107379008
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ballets Russes and Beyond written by Davinia Caddy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belle-époque Paris witnessed the emergence of a vibrant and diverse dance scene, one that crystallized around the Ballets Russes, the Russian dance company formed by impresario Sergey Diaghilev. The company has long served as a convenient turning point in the history of dance, celebrated for its revolutionary choreography and innovative productions. This book presents a fresh slant on this much-told history. Focusing on the relation between music and dance, Davinia Caddy approaches the Ballets Russes with a wide-angled lens that embraces not just the choreographic, but also the cultural, political, theatrical and aesthetic contexts in which the company made its name. In addition, Caddy examines and interprets contemporary French dance practices, throwing new light on some of the most important debates and discourses of the day.

Author : Gail Marshall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521518245
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century written by Gail Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated collection of new essays with valuable reference material on the performance and reception of Shakespeare's plays.

Author : Gary Tomlinson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351557777
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Music and Historical Critique written by Gary Tomlinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music and Historical Critique provides a definitive collection of Gary Tomlinson's influential studies on critical musicology, with the watchword throughout being history. This collection gathers his most innovative essays and lectures, some of them published here for the first time, along with an introduction outlining the context of the contributions and commenting on their aims and significance. Music and Historical Critique provides a retrospective view of the author's achievements in bringing to the heart of musicological discourse both deep-seated experiences of the past and meditations on the historian's ways of understanding them.

Author : Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521889987
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera written by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars investigate the ways in which operas by nineteenth-century Italian composers have been reshaped and revived over time.

Author : Austin Clarkson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Current Musicology written by Austin Clarkson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Clare Pettitt
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198830424
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Serial Forms written by Clare Pettitt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.

Author : Gabriela Cruz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190915072
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Grand Illusion written by Gabriela Cruz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Renowned opera scholar Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling in a way never before experienced in the opera house, asserting that the concept of "spectacle" was the defining cultural apparatus of the art form after the 1820s. Parisian audiences at the Académie Royale de Musique were struck by the novelty and power of grand opera upon the introduction of gaslight illumination, a technological innovation that quickly influenced productions across the Western operatic world. With this innovation, grand opera transformed into an audio-visual spectacle, delivering dream-like images and evoking the ghosts of its audiences' past. Through case studies of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi, Cruz demonstrates how these works became an increasingly sophisticated medium by which audiences could conjure up the past and be transported away from the breakdown of modern life. A historically informed narrative that traverses far and wide, from dingy popular theatres in post-revolutionary Paris, to nautical shows in London, and finally to Egyptian mummies, Grand Illusion provides a fresh departure from previous scholarship, highlighting the often-neglected visual side of grand opera.