Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera by Smart, Mary Ann

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780691058139)

Vendor: Mary Ann Smart
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$42.00
$42.00
$42.00
Subtotal: $42.00
Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera by Smart, Mary Ann

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

$42.00
Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera by Smart, Mary Ann

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

$42.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x

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 Cl駑ent, 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-si鐵le 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.

Author: Mary Ann Smart
ISBN-10: 069105813X
ISBN-13: 9780691058139
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/05/2000
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.11w x 0.79d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/15/2000 pg. 72
By Mary Ann Smart
By Mary Ann Smart
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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 S饕astien (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).

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