Siren Songs : Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera / Mary Ann Smart.

Format:

Book

Conference/Event

Contributor:

Smart, Mary Ann, editor.

Conference Name:

Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (1995 : Stony Brook, N.Y.)

Series:

Princeton studies in opera.

Princeton Studies in Opera ; 34

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminism and music--Congresses.

Feminism and music.

Sex in opera--Congresses.

Sex in opera.

Women in opera--Congresses.

Women in opera.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture of fin-de-siècle Paris, the phenomenon of opera seria's "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in Verdi's Don Carlos, and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Smart, Mary Ann

Through Voices, History / Clement, Catherine

The Absent Mother in Opera Seria / Feldman, Martha

Staging Mozart's Women / Allanbrook, Wye Jamison / Hunter, Mary / Wheelock, Gretchen A.

The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up / Hadlock, Heather

Elisabeth's Last Act / Parker, Roger

Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera / Brooks, Peter

Ulterior Motives: Verdi's Recurring Themes Revisited / Smart, Mary Ann

Melisande's Hair, or the Trouble in Allemande: A Postmodern Allegory at the Opera-Comique / Bergeron, Katherine

Opera: Two or Three Things I Know about Her / Kramer, Lawrence

Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's Salome / Hutcheon, Linda / Hutcheon, Michael

"Soulless Machines" and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating Masculinity in Krenek's Jonny spielt auf / Auner, Joseph Henry

"Grimes Is at His Exercise": Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes / Brett, Philip

Notes

Index

Notes:

Selected papers from Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, a conference held Sept. 1995 at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [251]-294) and index.

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

ISBN:

0-691-29174-8

0-691-05814-8

1-4008-6671-5

OCLC:

899264851