Mimomania : Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera / Mary Ann Smart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smart, Mary Ann, Author.

Series:

California studies in 19th century music ; 13.

California Studies in 19th-Century Music ; 13

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gesture in opera.

Opera--Europe--19th century.

Opera.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (259 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2004]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 1820's 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.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter one. In Praise of Overstatement

Chapter two. Wagner's Cancan, Fenella's Leap

Chapter three. Bellini's Unseen Voices

Chapter four. "Every Word Made Flesh"

Chapter five. Uneasy Bodies

Chapter six. Mimomania

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786612358548

9781282358546

1282358545

9780520939875

0520939875

9781597347532

1597347531

OCLC:

475926747