Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women

Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women PDF Author: Catherine Clement
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635269
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This was the first work to have applied a systematised feminist theory to opera. It concentrates on the stories & text of opera, that perhaps have more relevence today in a growing literature than it had when it was the "sacrilegious" pioneering work.

Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women

Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women PDF Author: Catherine Clement
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635269
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This was the first work to have applied a systematised feminist theory to opera. It concentrates on the stories & text of opera, that perhaps have more relevence today in a growing literature than it had when it was the "sacrilegious" pioneering work.

Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women

Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women PDF Author: Catherine Clément
Publisher: Tauris Transformations
ISBN: 9781860641138
Category : Feminism and music
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This work concentrates on the texts and narratives of more than 30 major operas, analyzing their cultural implications in demonstrating how they have contributed to the construction of a popularized feminine identity. It shows, for example, how 19th-century opera perpetuates a social order which requires either the death or the domestication of the female protagonist."

En Travesti

En Travesti PDF Author: Corinne E. Blackmer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231102690
Category : Lesbianism in opera
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
En Travesti addresses the ways in which opera empowers women by challenging conventional gender hierarchies. Terry Castle, Helene Cixous, Lowell Gallagher and Elizabeth Wood are among the contributors. Includes 20 musical examples.

Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas PDF Author: Kristi Brown-Montesano
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385799
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

Opera and Modern Culture

Opera and Modern Culture PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520251601
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"Outstanding. Kramer's scholarship is as impeccable as his insights are at once original and consistently brilliant. The presentation is thorough, and the argument is well anchored in theory, history and musical detail. Kramer's discourse is crystalline and jargon free. The connections from one chapter to another are seamless. The story is, simply stated, a page-turner."—Richard Leppert, editor of Theodor W. Adorno's Essays on Music "Lawrence Kramer's Opera and Modern Culture is remarkable both for its imaginative exploration of important issues and for the rich array of the author's engagements with other thinkers. In particular, by decentering without dismissing the composer (who could dismiss Wagner?), he makes works of reception—productions of Salome on video, uses of the Lohengrin Prelude by Charlie Chaplin and W.E.B. Du Bois—central texts in the process of understanding the phenomenon of opera, rather than footnotes to an idea that he really does dismiss: 'the work itself.'"—James Parakilas, author of Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano and Introduction to Opera (forthcoming)

The Newly Born Woman

The Newly Born Woman PDF Author: Hélène Cixous
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816614660
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Published in France as La jeune nee in 1975, and now translated for the first time into English, The Newly Born Woman seeks to uncover the veiled structures of language and society that have situated women in the position called 'woman's place.'

Women in American Operas of The 1950s

Women in American Operas of The 1950s PDF Author: Monica A. Hershberger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250610
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clément's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.

The Angel's Cry

The Angel's Cry PDF Author: Michel Poizat
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801423888
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
French in 1986, is now available in Arthur Denner's fluid and sensitive English translation. Predictably, Poizat's route is not at all a conventional one. Rather than taking as his point of departure the intentions of composers and librettists, he is primarily concerned with the expectations and desires of the audience. He reports on an informal group interview with overnight standees on the Paris Opera House steps as they compare notes on how opera became an addiction.

Martin and Hannah

Martin and Hannah PDF Author: Catherine Clément
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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Opera in a Multicultural World

Opera in a Multicultural World PDF Author: Mary Ingraham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317444825
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Through historical and contemporary examples, this book critically explores the relevance and expressions of multicultural representation in western European operatic genres in the modern world. It reveals their approaches to reflecting identity, transmitting meaning, and inspiring creation, as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that occur across the time and place(s) of their performance. This collection brings academic researchers in opera studies into conversation with previously unheard voices of performers, critics, and creators to speak to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the genre. Together, they deliver a powerful critique of the perpetuation of the values and practices of dominant cultures in operatic representations of intercultural encounters. Essays accordingly cross methodological boundaries in order to focus on a central issue in the emerging field of coloniality: the hierarchies of social and political power that include the legacy of racialized practices. In theorizing coloniality through intercultural exchange in opera, authors explore a range of topics and case studies that involve immigrant, indigenous, exoticist, and other cultural representations and consider a broad repertoire that includes lesser-known Canadian operas, Chinese- and African-American performances, as well as works by Haydn, Strauss, Puccini, and Wagner, and in performances spanning three continents and over two centuries. In these ways, the collection contributes to the development of a more integrated understanding of the interdisciplinary fields inherent in opera, including musicology, sociology, anthropology, and others connected to Theatre, Gender, and Cultural Studies.