Download or read book Opera Or The Undoing of Women written by Catherine Clement and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was the first work to have applied a systematised feminist theory to opera. It concentrates on the stories & text of opera, that perhaps have more relevence today in a growing literature than it had when it was the "sacrilegious" pioneering work.
Download or read book Women Writing Opera written by Jacqueline Letzter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-08-12 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time it demonstrates how the Revolution fostered many dreams and ambitions for women that would be doomed to disappointment in the repressive post-Revolutionary era.".
Download or read book Verdi Opera Women written by Susan Rutherford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue : Verdi and his audience -- War -- Prayer -- Romance -- Sexuality -- Marriage -- Death -- Laughter.
Download or read book Musicology and Difference written by Ruth A. Solie and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most challenging voices in musicology today on a question of importance to all the humanistic disciplines.
Download or read book Understanding the Women of Mozart s Operas written by Kristi Brown-Montesano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Download or read book Sarah Caldwell written by Daniel Kessler and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first biography of the musician, conductor, and director Sarah Caldwell, an indomitable force for opera in America, and the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera.
Download or read book Siren Songs written by Mary Ann Smart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-25 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Clément, 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-siècle 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.
Download or read book En Travesti written by Corinne E. Blackmer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: En Travesti addresses the ways in which opera empowers women by challenging conventional gender hierarchies. Terry Castle, Helene Cixous, Lowell Gallagher and Elizabeth Wood are among the contributors. Includes 20 musical examples.
Download or read book Opera Or The Undoing of Women written by Catherine Clément and published by . This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of thirty operas reveals a negative portrayal of women that reflects the nineteenth century patriarchal social order
Download or read book Opera Muliebria written by David Herlihy and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early Middle Ages, until as late as the thirteenth century, women were active and independent participants in many sectors of economic life. Even apart from agriculture, they were prominent in all phases of cloth making, in brewing, medicine, education, administration, and in the dispensation of religious counsel. In the late Middle Ages, clearly so by the fifteenth century, women lost that prominence as well as their economic independence. Using a great variety of original sources, both literary and statistical, David Herlihy vividly demonstrates that the subordination of women within a household economy was specifically the product of the late Middle Ages. Opera Muliebria, the medieval Latin term for "women's labors," is the first comprehensive survey of women's participation in economic activities throughout Europe from ancient times to about 1500. Herlihy illustrates how medieval women lived and worked, and how their lives were transformed as the Middle Ages ended. He traces the dramatic change in their participation in productive enterprise to the establishment of guild monopolies and reveals that the virtual confinement of women's labors to work within the home was not an ancient arrangement, but rather the heritage of the late Middle Ages. Covering the entire continent of Europe for over a millennium of its history, Herlihy's work contributes to a better understanding not only of medieval women but of the entire social world of the Middle Ages. Author note: David Herlihy is Mary Critchfield and Barnaby Keeney Professor of History at Brown University and President of the American Historical Association in 1990. He is the author of several books including Medieval Households.
Download or read book Women Playing Men written by Jin Jiang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai's most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women's struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.
Download or read book Emblems of Eloquence written by Wendy Heller and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-01-12 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).
Download or read book Women and Soap Opera written by Christine Geraghty and published by Blackwell Publishing. This book was released on 1991-08-26 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major study of the roles of women in prime time soap operas. In a comparative analysis of British and North American television soaps, Christine Geraghty examines the relationship between the narratives on the screen and the women viewers who make up the traditional soap audience. Within the structure of many of the most popular soaps, such as Dallas, Dynasty, Coronation Street and EastEnders, the split between public and personal life, reason and emotion, work and leisure is turned into a lynchpin of the plot. The author argues that these themes are also linked to broader social divisions between men and women, divisions which soap operas both question and develop as a source of pleasure. Geraghty analyses the critical role of women characters in the families and communities of soaps and suggests that the utopian possibilities of soaps can be used not just to maintain the status quo, but to promote change and influence attitudes and prejudices. She examines the way in which soaps have been transformed in the last decade, looking at how issues of class, race, sexual orientation and feminism have been handled in the programmes. She argues that in pursuing new audiences more recent soaps such as Brookside may have put at risk the pleasures they have traditionally offered their women viewers. Women and Soap Opera is a detailed, thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis which will become a central work in women’s studies and media and cultural studies courses.
Download or read book Voicing Gender written by Naomi Adele André and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the changes in approaches to gender in opera in the early 19th century.
Download or read book Vocal Victories written by Nila Parly and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vocal Victories is the first musicological comparison of all of Richard Wagner's great female characters, from Senta in The Flying Dutchman to Kundry in Parsifal. It has long been customary to view these and other opera heroines as victims, because these women, as a rule, perish during the plot of the opera. A closer study of the music of the women - their singing and the orchestral voices that surround them - reveals, however, that it is in the female characters that the new and groundbreaking musical material comes into being, and that the women are far more in command of the development of the works. Vocal Victories claims that Wagner was far ahead of his time in terms of equality between the sexes, and the musicological analyses are supported by quotations from the composer's own writings, so that a picture of Wagner as a radical critic of the oppressive patriarchal society emerges clearly and unmistakably. The feminist approach to the material also provides an opportunity for new
Download or read book Her Stories written by Elana Levine and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.
Download or read book Black Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemmings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
