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Strongly influencing European musical life from the 1880s through the First World War and remaining highly productive into the 1940s, Richard Strauss enjoyed a remarkable career in a constantly changing artistic and political climate. This volume presents six original essays on Strauss's musical works--including tone poems, lieder, and operas--and brings together letters, memoirs, and criticism from various periods of the composer's life. Many of these materials appear in English for the first time. In the essays Leon Botstein contradicts the notion of the composer's stylistic "about face" after Elektra; Derrick Puffett reinforces the argument for Strauss's artistic consistency by tracing in...
A richly interdisciplinary study of Strauss's contributions to ballet, his collaboration with prominent dance artists of his time, and his explorations of musical modernism.
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In occupied Belgium during World War II, Paul de Man (1919-1983) wrote music, lecture, and exhibition reviews, a regular book column, interviews, and articles on cultural politics for the Brussels daily newspaper Le Soir. From December 1940 until he resigned in November 1942, de Man contributed almost 200 articles to this and another newspaper, both then controlled by Nazi sympathizers and vocal advocates of the "new order." Later to become one of the most respected and influential literary theorists in America, de Man, then 21 and 22 years old, wrote primarily as the chief literary critic for Le Soir. His weekly column reviewed the latest novels and poetry from Belgium, France, Germany, and...
The common theme of these essays is the emergence of the modern state in late medieval and renaissance France. They examine, on the one hand, how the image of the king was enhanced in a variety of royal ceremonials as well as in the political writings of Jean Bodin and Cardin le Bret. The limits of the sovereign's authority, on the other hand, were forcefully enunciated in the works of François Hotman and Théodore de Bèze. The stability of the monarchy was maintained by the noblesse de robe, a new form of hereditary nobility that virtually owned the high judicial and administrative offices they held. The last two articles are devoted, first to the author's view of the concept of the French king's "two bodies" and second to the life of his mentor, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, who wrote the seminal work, The King's Two Bodies.
On an April evening in Florence in 1934, before twenty thousand spectators, the mass spectacle 18BL was presented, involving two thousand amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. However titantic its scale, 18BL's ambitions were even greater: to institute a revolutionary fascist theater of the future, a modern theatre of and for the masses that would end the crisis of the bourgeois theatre. This is the complete story of the event, a colossal failure to critics and spectators alike, which the fascist government took pains to expunge from the annals of the regime. The detailed reconstruction of these various aspects of 18BL serves as a springboard for a larger inquiry into the place of media, technology, and machinery in the fascist imagination, particularly in its links to fascist models of narrative, historiography, spectacle, and subjectivity.
This book contemplates the relationship between opera and anthropology. It rests on the following central arguments: on the one hand, opera is quite a new and “exotic” topic for anthropologists, while, on the other, anthropology is still perceived as an unusual approach to opera. Both initial arguments are indicative of the current situation of the relationship between anthropological discipline and opera research. The book introduces the work of anthropologists and ethnographers whose personal and professional affinity for opera has been explicated in their academic and biographical accounts. Anthropological, ethnological, ethnographic, and semiotic accounts of opera by Claude Lévi-Str...
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