A rebours
Aida
Allegory
Allemande
Atonality
Baritone
Bel canto
Cabaletta
Carolyn Abbate
Castrato
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Cicisbeo
Coloratura
Composer
Contralto
Dance of the Seven Veils
Der Rosenkavalier
Don Giovanni
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Ernani
Ernst Krenek
Feminism
For Example
Genre
Georges Bizet
Grand opera
Grimes (musician)
Hector Berlioz
Hyperbole
I due Foscari
Jean-Nicolas Bouilly
Jonny
Jouissance
Jules Massenet
Kitsch
La traviata
Leitmotif
Lesbian
Libido
Libretto
Literature
Ludwig van Beethoven
Mad scene
Masturbation
Melodrama
Music Is
Musicology
Nabucco
Narcissism
Narrative
Opera
Opera seria
Parody
Pelleas
Peter Grimes
Peter Sellars
Phrase (music)
Poetry
Psychoanalysis
Pun
Richard Strauss
Richard Wagner
Semiramide
Singing
Soliloquy
Susan McClary
The Erotic
The Other Hand
University of California Press
Unsung (TV series)
Vittorio Alfieri
Zaira (opera)
Product details
- ISBN 9780691058139
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 Clement, 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-siecle 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.
Mary Ann Smart is professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the critical edition of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien and, with Roger Parker, of Reading Critics Reading: Criticism of French Opera from the Revolution to 1848. She is also a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and the Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera.
