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 Clement,
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-siecle" 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."
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