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Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces in film, effects which differ from other types of soundtrack music, such as jazz or symphony. These effects are examined from three perspectives: peculiar qualities of the operatic voice; various properties commonly associated with opera, such as excess, otherness or death; and multifaceted tensions between opera and cinema - for instance, opera as live, embodied, high art and cinema as technologic...
Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.
The contributors discuss films ranging from the 1913 biopic of Wagner to Ridley Scott's Gladiator, with essays on silent cinema, film scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, German cinema, and Wagner beyond the soundtrack.
Leading scholars of opera and film explore the many ways these two seemingly unrelated genres have come together from the silent-film era to today.
Opera for Everyone: The Industry’s Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age draws on seven years of multi-sited ethnography to examine the acclaimed experimental productions of Los Angeles-based opera company The Industry. Steigerwald Ille understands The Industry’s productions as part of an emerging wave of U.S. operas that integrate new media and interactive performance through means such as site-specificity and simulcast video, and then traces the company’s path from Crescent City (2012), the company’s first production, to Sweet Land (2020), the company’s final production before switching to a new production model. Steigerwald Ille argues that by moving opera outside o...
Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, t...
Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is taken for granted. Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the body-voice relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête, Writing to Vermeer, Three Tales, One, Homeland and La Commedia and dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies.
This revised edition of Garland's 1989 publication updates the core bibliography on Gustave Mahler (as well as his spouse and fellow composer Alma Mahler) by incorporating new research gathered over the past dozen years on his life and professional works. Gustave Mahler, renowned conductor and composer of symphonies and song cycles, is one of the foremost musical figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His symphonies continue to be widely performed and studied through the twenty-first century. Organized in sections according to subject matter, references are arranged alphabetically by the names of authors or editors. Filler’s research has produced sources for musicologists and students in nineteen languages, offering a resource that expands traditional English-language music scholarship.
Provides a fresh and global perspective on the works and influence of a nineteenth-century musical and theatrical phenomenon.
As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world's perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Céline et Julie vont en bateau--Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret défense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty. In this study of Rivette, Mary M. Wiles provides a thorough account of the director's career from the burgeoning French New Wave to the present day, focusing on the theatricality of Rivette's films and his explorations of the relationship between cinema and fine arts such as painting, literature, music, and dance. Wiles also explores the intellectual interests that shaped Rivette's approach to film, including Sartre's existentialism, Barthes's structuralism, and the radical theater of the 1960s. The volume concludes with Wiles's insightful interview with Rivette.