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Smart - Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera - 9780691058139 - V9780691058139
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Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

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Description for Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera Paperback. It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. This work explores the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. It combines readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within the observed historical contexts. Editor(s): Smart, Mary Ann. Series: Princeton Studies in Opera. Num Pages: 288 pages, 32 illus, 7 halftones. BIC Classification: 3JF; 3JH; 3JJ; AVGC9; JFSJ. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 233 x 156 x 19. Weight in Grams: 448.
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.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2000
Publisher
Princeton University Press United States
Number of pages
310
Condition
New
Series
Princeton Studies in Opera
Number of Pages
288
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691058139
SKU
V9780691058139
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Smart
Mary Ann Smart is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the critical edition of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien (to appear in L'edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti) 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 (forthcoming).

Reviews for Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera
"Clearly part of the next generation of gender studies in opera, this book will be of interest to scholars and informed amateurs alike."
Library Journal

Goodreads reviews for Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera


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