{"title":"Opera","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"wagner-androgyne","title":"Wagner Androgyne","description":"\u003cp\u003eThat Wagner conceived of himself creatively as both man and woman is central to an understanding of his life and art. So argues Jean-Jacques Nattiez in this richly insightful work, where he draws from semiology, music criticism, and psychoanalysis to explore such topics as Wagner's theories of music drama, his anti-Semitism, and his psyche.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWagner, who wrote the libretti for the operas he composed, maintained that art is the union of the feminine principle, music, and the masculine principle, poetry. In light of this androgynous model, Nattiez reinterprets the Wagnerian canon, especially the Ring of the Nibelung, which is shown to contain a metaphorical transposition of Wagner's conception of the history of music: Siegfried appears as the poet, Brunnhilde, as music, and their union is an androgynous one in which individual identity fades and the lovers revert to a preconflictual, presexual state.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNattiez traces the androgynous symbol in Wagner's theoretical writings throughout his career. Looking to explain how this idea, so closely bound up with sexuality, took root in Wagner's mind, the author considers the possibility of Freudian and Jungian interpretations. In particular he explores the composer's relationship with his mother, a distant woman who discouraged his interest in the theater, and his stepfather, a loving man whom Wagner suspected was not only his real father but also a Jew. Along with psychoanalysis, Nattiez critically applies various structuralist and feminist theories to Wagner's creative enterprise to demonstrate how the nature of twentieth-century hermeneutics is itself androgynous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1993.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \u003cb\u003ePrinceton Legacy Library\u003c\/b\u003e uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. 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To examine, and to challenge, the long-standing prejudice against libretti and the scholarly tradition that has, until recently, reiterated it, Groos and Roger Parker have commissioned thirteen stimulating essays by musicologists, literary critics, and historians. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates that libretti are now very much within the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship. Libretti pose questions of intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history. They invite a broad spectrum of contemporary reading strategies ranging from the formalistic to the feminist. And as texts for music they raise issues in the relation between the two mediums and their respective traditions. Reading Opera will be of value to anyone with a serious interest in opera and contemporary opera criticism. The essays cover the period from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on works of the later nineteenth century. The contributors are Carolyn Abbate, William Ashbrook, Katherine Bergeron, Caryl Emerson, Nelly Furman, Sander L. Gilman, Arthur Groos, James A. Hepokoski, Jurgen Maehder, Roger Parker, Paul Robinson, Christopher Wintle, and Susan Youens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1988.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \u003cb\u003ePrinceton Legacy Library\u003c\/b\u003e uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. 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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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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 Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. 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The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that \"sings\" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that \"de-center\" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"None","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46155292442801,"sku":"9780691026084","price":79.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0655\/8980\/5233\/files\/1_095a15fc-4e00-4dc5-93fe-bd344a751492.jpg?v=1764391774"},{"product_id":"ballet-and-opera-in-the-age-of-giselle","title":"Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. 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The \"divorce\" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score for \u003ci\u003eGiselle.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"None","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46155312529585,"sku":"9780691146492","price":61.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0655\/8980\/5233\/files\/1_e181c41a-b73c-4b26-970a-c34ae707980f.jpg?v=1763717733"},{"product_id":"opera-in-the-development-of-german-critical-thought","title":"Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought","description":"\u003cp\u003eAlthough opera figured importantly in the French quarrel of the Ancients versus the Moderns and in the English discussions of heroic tragedy, it was in Germany that its role in the development of criticism and aesthetics was most pronounced. Beginning with this observation, Gloria Flaherty tries to show how, from its very inception and through most of its history, opera was related not only to the revival of ancient drama and the evolution of modern theater, but also to the development of modern critical thought.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The author provides a comprehensive treatment of the writings both for and against the operatic forms that dominated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German theater. Included in her focus are the academic critics who denounced the failure of opera to comply with universally valid standards of beauty and the rules of drama; the various sermonizers who condemned opera's excessive emphasis on the senses and preached total abstinence; and the theatrical artists and patrons as well as the innumerable poets, philosophers, and writers who upheld the freedom to experiment and defended opera as a modern theatrical form with nearly unlimited artistic possibilities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As a result of these controversies, the defense of opera helped to shape a distinctively German version of the classical ideal, enriched German criticism with new vocabulary, promoted the study of the performing arts, and emphasized music and spectacle as essential components of theater.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1979.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \u003cb\u003ePrinceton Legacy Library\u003c\/b\u003e uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. 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In this fresh exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music. Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with the public. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of Rameau as a musical innovator.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his compositions, Rameau tried to highlight music's potential for dramatic meanings. But his listeners, who understood lyric tragedy to be a poetic rather than musical genre, were generally frustrated by these attempts. In fact, some described Rameau's music as monstrous--using an image of deformity to represent the failure of reason and communication. Dill shows how Rameau answered his critics with rational, theoretical arguments about the role of music in lyric tragedy. At the same time, however, the composer sought to placate his audiences by substantially revising his musical texts in later performances, sometimes abandoning his most creative ideas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMonstrous Opera\u003c\/i\u003e illuminates the complexity of Rameau's vision, revealing not only the tensions within the music but also the conflicting desires that drove the man--himself caricatured by his contemporaries as a monster.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1998.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \u003cb\u003ePrinceton Legacy Library\u003c\/b\u003e uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. 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But opera, that grand cauldron of the arts, demands that scholars, too, share the stage with one another.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eModernism and Opera\u003c\/i\u003e, Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith bring together musicologists, literary critics, and theater scholars for the first time in a mutual endeavor to trace certain key moments in the history of modernism and opera. 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