The work of opera : genre, nationhood, and sexual difference / Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dellamora, Richard.

Fischlin, Daniel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Opera.

Nationalism in music.

Sex in opera.

Gender identity in music.

Physical Description:

xi, 350 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [1997]

Summary:

In This Provocative Collection, literary and cultural critics, musicologists, and queer theorists explore the interplay between representations of the body politic and the construction of genders and sexualities in opera, from the subversive aesthetics of seventeenth-century opera to the nation-building fantasies of nineteenth-century grand opera and on to AIDS-inflected performance art of the late twentieth century. The contributors--who include Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Ruth Solie, Kevin Kopelson, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, among others--present seminal re-readings, refracting ideology, national self-interest, and sexual difference in new and disturbing ways that will reinvent how operatic spectacles are read, perceived, and performed.

Contents:

Part I Constituting Opera

1 Kapsberger's Apotheosis ... of Francis Xavier (1622) and the Conquering of India / Victor Anand Coelho 27

2 The Italian (Castrato) in London / Todd S. Gilman 49

Part II Nationhood and Sexual Difference

3 Farinelli's Electronic Hermaphrodite and the Contralto Tradition / Felicia Miller 73

4 "O Patria Mia": Female Homosociality and the Gendered Nation in Bellini's Norma and Verdi's Aida / Patricia Juliana Smith 93

5 Structures of Identity and Difference in Bizet's Carmen / Susan McClary 115

6 The Waters of Prometheus: Nationalism and Sexuality in Wagner's Ring / Lawrence Kramer 131

7 Constructing the Oriental "Other": Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila / Ralph P. Locke 161

8 Fictions of the Opera Box / Ruth A. Solie 185

9 "Eros Is in the Word": Music, Homoerotic Desire, and the Psychopathologies of Fascism, or The "Strangely Fruitful Intercourse" of Thomas Mann and Benjamin Britten / Daniel Fischlin 209

10 Imagined Communities: Postnational Canadian Opera / Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon 235

Part III Genre, Performance, and the Cultural Politics of AIDS

11 Mozart and the Politics of Intimacy: The Marriage of Figaro in Toronto, Paris, and New York / Richard Dellamora 255

12 Strange Meeting: Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, Derek Jarman, and the War Requiem / Jim Ellis 277

13 Metropolitan Opera / Suburban Identity / Kevin Kopelson 297

14 Divas and Disease, Mourning and Militancy: Diamanda Galas's Operatic Plague Mass / Rebecca A. Pope, Susan J. Leonardi 315.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0231109458

OCLC:

36930713