Curtain, Gong, Steam
Regular price
€71.99
19th century
19th century art
19th century music
19th century opera
20th century
A01=Gundula Kreuzer
acoustics
architecture
art history
artistic
audiovisual
Author_Gundula Kreuzer
Category=AVLF
composer
composition
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eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_non-fiction
french opera
german opera
inventor
music history
musical composition
opera
performance art
pop culture
popular culture
popular music
stage crew
technology
theatre
wagner
wagnerian technology
Product details
- ISBN 9780520279681
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2018
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses changed through the twentieth century, sometimes still resonating in stagings, performance art, and popular culture today. Focusing on devices (which she dubs “Wagnerian technologies”) intended to amalgamate opera’s various media while veiling their mechanics, Kreuzer offers a practical counternarrative to Wagner’s idealist theories of total illusionism. At the same time, Curtain, Gong, Steam’s multifaceted exploration of the three titular technologies repositions Wagner as catalyst more than inventor in the history of operatic production. With its broad chronological and geographical scope, this book deepens our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of historical operatic practice as well as of individual works, both well known and obscure.
Gundula Kreuzer is Associate Professor of Music at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich and editor of Verdi’s instrumental chamber music for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi.
