Mad Loves : Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann / Heather Hadlock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hadlock, Heather, author.

Series:

Princeton studies in opera.

Princeton Studies in Opera ; 35

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Offenbach, Jacques, 1819-1880. Contes d'Hoffmann.

Women in opera.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (176 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject. Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opéra-comiques. Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. Telling the Tales

CHAPTER TWO. Mesmerizing Voices

CHAPTER THREE. Song as Symptom

CHAPTER FOUR. Offenbach, for Posterity

CHAPTER FIVE. Reflections on the Venetian Act

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references, discography (p. 158), videography (p. 159), and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780691170855

0691170851

9781400866724

1400866723

OCLC:

898476937