A01=Heather Hadlock
Animal magnetism
Antihero
Author_Heather Hadlock
Beautiful Song
Bel canto
Burlesque
Castration
Castrato
Category=AVLA
Category=AVLF
Charivari
Charles Gounod
Coloratura
Composer
Critical edition (opera)
Die Rheinnixen
Dieu
Don Giovanni
Eduard Hanslick
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Ernest Guiraud
Fantastique
Farce
For Example
French opera
Georges Bizet
Giselle
Hortense Schneider
Impresario
Jacques Offenbach
Johannes Kreisler
Jules Massenet
Kitsch
La Morte Amoureuse
La vie parisienne
Le Figaro
Leitmotif
Leonardo Leo
Libretto
Literaturoper
Lohengrin (opera)
Lotte Lehmann
Mad scene
Mad scientist
Medusa's Head
Melodrama
Music criticism
Music Is
Narrative
Opera and Drama
Operetta
Parody
Patter song
Phrase (music)
Physiognomy
Revue
Richard Wagner
Rigoletto
Romanticism
Romantische Oper
Sexual inversion (sexology)
Singing
Song and Dance
Soubrette
Superiority (short story)
Symptom
The Magic Flute
The Tales of Hoffmann
This is Opera
Un ballo in maschera
Unreliable narrator
Unsung (TV series)
V.
Wagnerism
Product details
- ISBN 9780691058023
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 opera-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.
Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Stanford University.
