Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

Published by Princeton University Press 2001

Siren Songs

Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera

Edited by: Mary Ann Smart

Volume 15 in the series Princeton Studies in Opera

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400866717

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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 Sébastien (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).

Reviews

"Siren Songs is provocative and engaging. As a whole, the collection should become required reading among musicologists, and many of the individual contributions will interest scholars in other fields, as well as the opera-going public."—Ruth Solie, Smith College

Clearly part of the next generation of gender studies in opera, this book will be of interest to scholars and informed amateurs alike.

"This collection will join a select and widely read group of books from the past decade dealing with classical music—and opera in particular—from the perspective of feminist and gender studies, sexuality, subject formation, and related cultural theory. Siren Songs will be a valuable book."—Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Introduction Mary Ann Smart Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Through Voices, History Catherine Clement Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
The Absent Mother in Opera Seria Martha Feldman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
Staging Mozart's Women Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Mary Hunter and Gretchen A. Wheelock Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up Heather Hadlock Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
Elisabeth's Last Act Roger Parker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera Peter Brooks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
Ulterior Motives: Verdi's Recurring Themes Revisited Mary Ann Smart Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Melisande's Hair, or the Trouble in Allemande: A Postmodern Allegory at the Opera-Comique Katherine Bergeron Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
Opera: Two or Three Things I Know about Her Lawrence Kramer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's Salome Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
"Soulless Machines" and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating Masculinity in Krenek's Jonny spielt auf Joseph Henry Auner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	222
"Grimes Is at His Exercise": Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes Philip Brett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295